Try this one out - bigger intervention in Russia

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
Originally from David Tenner, but it never got much attention:

Recently I have been reading Ilya Somin, *Stillborn Crusade: The Tragic
Failure of Western Intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-1920* (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers 1996). (Thanks to Garid for
bringing this book to my attention.) Somin, unlike many other historians
of the Allied intervention, thinks that the intervention, if it had been
less half-hearted, could and should have worked--he points out how close
the Whites came to winning in 1919 in OTL.

In a later post, I'll consider his arguments about successful intervention
in 1919. This post will deal with July 1918. Richard Ullman, the leading
historian of British intervention policy, acknowledged that "If the initial
landings at Archangel could have been carried out by two or three
divisions...instead of the 1200 troops who actually occupied the port at
the end of July, there is little doubt they could have forced their way to
Moscow and overthrown the Bolshevik regime." However, Ullman thought that
such a great diversion of resources from the western front was
"unthinkable." Somin's response is:


(1) Two or three divisions was an insignificant force by Western Front
standards, since each side deployed well over 150 divisions there by the
summer of 1918.


(2) The intervention could have been justified on anti-German grounds--it
was impossible to re-establish an Eastern Front as long as the Bolsheviks
controlled the heart of Russia, with its industries and manpower reserves.
(Somin also argues that the Allies should have sought overthrow of the
Bolsheviks as a goal in its own right, but the point is that before
November 1918, for those unwilling to accept this as a goal, the anti-
German justification was available and might have been easier to sell to
the public.)


(3) The Red Army was in its infancy, and the Bolsheviks were ridiculously
weak in a military sense at this time--note the ease with which the Czech
Legion took over huge areas of Siberia and the Urals. In all Russia, the
only military force on which the Bolsheviks could rely were the Latvian
Rifles, 35,000 strong. And even most of *them* had been shifted to the
Volga-Ural front to fight the Czechs and their anti-Bolshevik Russian
allies. Apart from this, the Bolsheviks had only poorly trained recent
conscripts who were simply not capable of facing down serious opposition,
as the Czechs had shown. Moscow and Petrograd were wide open to any even
moderately sized Allied force.


(4) One of the objections to intervention in 1919 was how bad the Whites
were. Somin argues that they were not as monolithically reactionary as
sometimes portrayed, but in any event, objections to the Whites were
irrelevant for July 1918 because at that time the leading anti-Bolshevik
governments in Russia were led by Socialist-Revolutionaries (S-Rs) and
other moderate socialists. In fact, they had the best claim to be the
legitimate government of Russia, having far outpolled the Bolsheviks in the
Constituent Assembly elections.


So suppose the Allies overthrow the Bolsheviks in July 1918, and establish
a government led by the "patriotic socialists" (mostly S-Rs, but some
Popular Socialists and Right Mensheviks as well, and probably with some
liberal participation). The war ends in a few months and Russia is one of
the victors at the peace table. OTOH, the Allies presumably cannot keep
their troops in Russia forever. The S-R's and other Russian moderate
socialists had a rather bad record of quarreling among themselves, and with
the liberals. They would be faced with enormous problems (e.g., the
"national question"--even those national minorities who claimed they only
wanted autonomy would be forever dismissing the government's offers as
inadequate). Inefficiency and divisiveness among them could eventually
lead to a right-wing coup and/or to a resurgence of the Bolsheviks. (True,
the latter would be discredited and temporarily driven underground, but if
things got bad enough under their successors, nostalgia for them, belief
that "they were never really given a fair chance" etc. might grow.
Remember that in this scenario, they had been overthrown at a time when
some of their least popular policies, like all-out Red Terror, had only
begun to be implemented.)


--
David Tenner
dten...@ameritech.net
 

Hnau

Banned
Ooooh... I really like this idea. I need to grab that book. Subscribed to the thread, but I'll have to get back to this later. In the meantime: *bump*!
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
Indeed -

the British may have an immediate advantage in force, but spreading over that wide space could cause problems sustaining a presence for any length of time.


Alot depends on how much the cost of trying to contain or deal with the British uncovers other Boleshevik weaknesses.

This particular PoD mentions the summer of 1918, but the Allies would actually have an easier time beefing up their effort at the point of German surrender, when they could have pressed the Germans to surrender territory and yield territory to the Whites and not the Reds, and equipped Balkan volunteers. To be sure the Reds would have been stronger by this time as well.
 
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