Wrong economic crisis. The German Hyperinflation ended in 1923 when the Weimar government (with some US assistance) got its act together. Between then and the 1929 stock market crash the German economy actually did pretty well.
White Army Victory in Russian Civil War
- Thread starter Xasper H.
- Start date
Neither Russia nor Japan want a common border. So, a buffer state.
Also, FER is not White. It's the last resort of the lost cause. A shelter for beaten Red troops, for political emigres. And it's a base for Red partisans operations against Kolchak.
I'd expect several years of chaos, infighting and negotiations (with added backstabbing) followed by a weak 'Russia' and several quasi-independent statelets. With ongoing chaos, violence and small scale wars. Plus ethnic violence and pogroms.
Russia was also experiencing labour and peasant unrest on a vast scale in 1914, and facing a second revolution. After a White victory the victors would be in no position to attempt large scale mechanisation and industrialisation; too many factions, loo much corruption, too much resistance to their government et cetera.
Exactly. I don't understand why the People believe that White Russia victory means a restoration of the Tsardom into a constitutional Monarch or a Democratic Country, cause no matter how horrifying it may sound, the USSR winning the Civil War was much better for the people living in Eurasia. At least the USSR did not directly sponsor ethnic genocides unlike some White Army factions which openly stated they wished for the ethnic genocide of many non-slavs or -sub-slavs. Yeah the USSR was horrible with all that Gulag and famines, but White Russia would have been even more horrible, which is quite frankly shuddering to think about.
In many cases that I've seen because they want that and don't think beyond that into the potential realities of a White victory.
On the one side there is speculation on just how bastardly what ever faction of White Russians manages to wrest control would be. Which is only speculation. On the other side there is the historical fact of how murderous and crippling Communist rule, especially but not limited to Stalin's rule was to Russia and her neighbours. And this includes Stalin's criminal stupidity in his dealings with Hitler and rendering the Soviet Union vulnerable to attack from the Nazis due to his lunatic purges.
I find it very unconvincing that any White Russian faction or any other governing body could possibly be worse then what actually happened to Russia.
I find it very unconvincing that any White Russian faction or any other governing body could possibly be worse then what actually happened to Russia.
Riiiiiiiiiiiight. So:
is 100% aligned with the spirit of AH.com and such a positive contribution to the thread it doesn’t even draw a mention? Good to know which direction I am expected to slant my posts in future.
Which is pretty much the mindset which even in recent times has led to kicking out the incumbent dictators in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen etc. After all, how could things possibly be worse?
The answer is, horrifyingly, that it can almost always be worse, just as it could almost always be better. So unless there is a clear, logical and robust chain of reasoning to suggest things really will be better, the safest approach is to assume things will be roughly the same. With a strong possibility of significantly better or significantly worse.
My reasoning is pretty basic - the Whites lost to the Reds because at the end of the day they were more incompetent, more corrupt, more factionally divided than the Reds. Which is really saying something considering what a shitshow the red side was. So sticking them in government instead of the reds isn’t likely to give a significantly better result than OTL. Could turn out well but that seems a very -Russian outcome, tbh.
Are they guaranteed to produce a monster like Stalin? Of course not. But then you don’t necessarily need a monster to totally screw the pooch for a country, ordinary ineptitude and petty malice can do the job as well.
The best Red Russia timelines can definitely be better for Russia than the worst White Russia timelines, but I think that on average the White Russia timelines will be better.
For one thing, a White Russia won't have an ideological drive to create a planned economy. In OTL the first attempt was recognized even by the Reds to be impossible to do and led to the NEP. In the second attempt, the reorganization "succeeded" at the cost of the Ukrainian Holodomor and less famous famines elsewhere.
Would White repressions be as bad as in OTL? I contend that the burden of proof that it would be so lies with those who propose that it would have been similarly bad to OTL. The typical authoritarian regime does not kill a comparable part of its population as the famous 20th century exceptions like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Ethnic cleansing? Very likely. But Russia being Red in OTL did not prevent it from specifically targetting distinct nationalities. Such as the deportation of the entire Tartar population of Crimea, with a mortality rate which was typical of Soviet mass deportation operations, whoever they targetted. Or the operations specifically targetted against the Soviet Union's Polish minority in the late 1930s because it was expected that they would be a fifth column in a future war.
Some say that a White Russia would be anti-intellectual, anti-education and backwards, as opposed to the modernizing and progressive Reds. This is definitely what the Reds wanted everyone to believe, which does not mean it was true. For one thing, the expansion of the education system was well underway in pre-1914 Russia and I see no reason why the Whites would not have wanted to continue this. Scientists and engineers are generally very useful. The Whites also won't have an ideological drive to target people who gained education and experience as suspicious bourgeois. Sure, many of them were reused, but Russia deprived itself of the contributions of those who died or emigrated. And of course the Reds' core views of economics were demonstrated to be inferior to the supposedly backwards capitalism.
Finally, a White Russia would lack the ideological drive to work towards conquering the world and painting it red.
For one thing, a White Russia won't have an ideological drive to create a planned economy. In OTL the first attempt was recognized even by the Reds to be impossible to do and led to the NEP. In the second attempt, the reorganization "succeeded" at the cost of the Ukrainian Holodomor and less famous famines elsewhere.
Would White repressions be as bad as in OTL? I contend that the burden of proof that it would be so lies with those who propose that it would have been similarly bad to OTL. The typical authoritarian regime does not kill a comparable part of its population as the famous 20th century exceptions like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Ethnic cleansing? Very likely. But Russia being Red in OTL did not prevent it from specifically targetting distinct nationalities. Such as the deportation of the entire Tartar population of Crimea, with a mortality rate which was typical of Soviet mass deportation operations, whoever they targetted. Or the operations specifically targetted against the Soviet Union's Polish minority in the late 1930s because it was expected that they would be a fifth column in a future war.
Some say that a White Russia would be anti-intellectual, anti-education and backwards, as opposed to the modernizing and progressive Reds. This is definitely what the Reds wanted everyone to believe, which does not mean it was true. For one thing, the expansion of the education system was well underway in pre-1914 Russia and I see no reason why the Whites would not have wanted to continue this. Scientists and engineers are generally very useful. The Whites also won't have an ideological drive to target people who gained education and experience as suspicious bourgeois. Sure, many of them were reused, but Russia deprived itself of the contributions of those who died or emigrated. And of course the Reds' core views of economics were demonstrated to be inferior to the supposedly backwards capitalism.
Finally, a White Russia would lack the ideological drive to work towards conquering the world and painting it red.
I agree with this post pretty much word for word. The OTL Soviet Union managed to kill a lot more people in the 20s and 30s than any other nation in Europe. The level of death caused by the Soviet state and leadership was extraordinary in period terms, and, at the time, no non-Nazi right wing dictatorship got close to those numbers, absolutely or even comparatively. For all its evil, it took even Nazi Germany itself several years of a world war and committing industrialized murder to reach (and then surpass) the USSR's pre-1941 death toll.
Yet, many people here seem to think that the OTL level of death in the USSR would be something like a par for the course for a White regime in Russia, something it would likely reach anyway, if not preside over even more state-controlled murder. This is a pretty tall claim, IMO, in the light of any real history examples of reactionary right wing states we can bring up for comparison. For all the faults of the possible White leaders of Russia, I just can't in all honesty see it being likely that things got as bad as in Stalin's USSR or even worse. The civil war era would cause a lot of death and suffering in Russia, but it is not likely that there would be a significantly longer civil war - not for many years, at least. As soon as a White faction controls the "heartland" around and between Petrograd and Moscow, it can use its resources to beat its lesser rivals comfortably, sort of like the Bolsheviks did IOTL. After that, a period of consolidation would follow, and then a reconstruction era would start.
A White Russia has some weaknesses in comparison to a Red Russia, but then like you said it would have many strengths, too. One thing to add to your post would be that a White Russia would be seen as a more "ordinary" state than the revolutionary Soviet Union was. Right wing states, even authoritarian or dictatorial ones, were not treated with the same amount of suspicion as the USSR in 20s and 30s Europe, for obvious reasons (not preaching world revolution being one of them), and thus in terms of foreign cooperation and trade, a White Russia might see quicker recovery than the USSR did. It would not take many years after the civil war ends for the new powers that be to start opening trade links to France, Britain and the US, etc, Russia's prewar trade partners, and also to start attracting investment from these nations to develop the Russian industry and infrastructure. This would pretty much mirror prewar developments, and pick up from where Tsarist Russia left off before the revolution. From European and American point of view, a White Russia would necessarily be a more open country than the OTL "land of the red mist" was, and this fact would in general help in connecting the country to international cooperation and also help mitigate, to some degree, the worst tendencies of the new White leaders of Russia.
One thing to remember, here, too would be that Russia obviously lost WWI, to lose a significant part of its western territories as newly independent states. While some would prefer a "stab in the back" myth and blame the Russian revolutionary left for the loss in the Great War, many among the White elite would also realize that Russia had weaknesses already before the revolution its enemies could exploit, and that to survive any future European wars, the nation would need reforms and development in many fields. Economic and industrial reforms, and military reforms, too, would be advocated in the 20s and 30s. So while the White Russian state would be reactionary in many things, there would also be tendencies for reform and development, much like there was in Tsarist Russia before 1914, and much like there was also in the European authoritarian right wing states in the interwar era, too. And here the losses of the Great War would also push especially the younger generations of Russian bureaucrats, soldiers, engineers and scientists, etc, to develop the nation in different ways - for the future, defence and greater glory of Russia.
I believe that there is the possibility that the White Russian state we would see to enter the 30s would not be significantly worse than, say, Franco's Spain - which itself was a state born out of a bloody, prolonged civil war. Things could of course turn out worse for Russia, even significantly so. But as bad as in Stalin's Soviet Union IOTL, with millions dead through artificial famine, mass purges and widespread forced labour? On balance, I find that unlikely.
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Agree on the latter part, however for all intents and purposes none of the White leaders had the drive or zeal to pursue Industrialization that Bukharin, Trostsky and (somewhat controversially) Stalin had so you can see Industrialization begin hampered, especially when the former Russian Empire's prime industries were in the Baltics and Poland.
And about Soviet Russia.....the thing is their faction of the Russian Civil War was atleast united and had a coherent plan for after the Civil War. White Russia? No. They were divided along Monarchists, Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, Conservatives and Radical Nationalists and Radical religious Zealots. There is a reason why people say that a White Russia victory would lead to another Civil War you know which would have been extremely counter productive. Beside the Whites made no pretense that the only reason they allied with each other was only because of the Reds. You would have seen another millions killed in a second war.
Besides, the economic mindset of most of the White economists was set in the late 19th century and had no place in the 20th century. Yes however i do concur that Stalin killed millions to reach his goal of industrialization and most probably Trotsky or Bukharin if they took power would have done so in a more peaceful and less violent manner, however the point remains, some of the best economists were on the Red side, and the whites were woefully backward in terms of Economics and was one of the factors why they failed to garner enough economic assistance from the international committee.
White Russia would have a civil war after civil war after civil war which would have led to a even more devastated Russia, whose capability to resist Nazi Germany in WW2 would have been very questionable looking at White Economic policies and the amount of deaths and destruction the renewed civil wars would bring.
Well since this seems to just be a slightly more visceral rehashing of that 30-page thread on the same subject we had last month, I'll just go ahead and paste my response here again since it should clear up some notions about the realities of a White victory...
"
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS:
The White Movement in Russia, by nature a large and unwieldy coalition of anti-Bolshevik forces, suffered consistently from a vagueness of political aims. The governments of White held areas could not effectively craft a political vision because any policy statements outside of the most general vague claims would alienate one group or another. In effect, this led to many undesirable and unpopular policies coming into effect in White held territories that alienated the local inhabitants. A conquering White army would probably leave the peasantry alone (provided they didn't have any specific Bolshevik, Menshevik, Left SR, or revolutionary tendencies), although the urban working class in Western Russia would face particular political persecution in the aftermath of a White victory. White armies would likely continue to launch wide scale pogroms on captured Red territory, particularly in the cities. White leaders like Denikin and Wrangel were not particularly anti-semitic (for an Imperial Russian aristocrat anyway...), but organized White armies were perhaps the worst perpetrators of pogroms and the White commands was was unwilling and/or unable to control them - this would likely not change. The nationalism and Great Russian chauvinism demonstrated by the leaders of the movement would make cooperation and peaceful existence difficult with the bordering nationalities on the periphery of the Russian Empire. Some of the more liberal minded of the movement were willing to adopt ideas of a federation and accept autonomous status within a possible federation, but almost none of them pragmatically agreed to recognize these newly independent states. Perhaps this would change when the reality of the political situation set in, but conflict with states like Poland are likely. A White Terror to rival the Bolsheviks is certainly not out of the question, considering the values espoused by White leaders in regards to the value of terror in the war and the increasingly bitter state of the conflict between participants. I don't think a form of proto-fascism arising in Russia is out of the question, but I think it is probably not likely at least in the short term following the conflict.
THE QUESTION OF LAND REFORM:
I’ll start with the question of land reform in the event of a White victory since I have already made a post about it. I will be citing the following text: [Kenez, Peter. “The Ideology of the White Movement.” Soviet Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, 1980, pp. 58–83]
“ In the first and crucial year of its existence, the Volunteer Army offered nothing to the majority of the Russian people, the peasants. The issue which concerned the peasants most was the great social issue of the day, land reform. In the course of 1917 and 1918 the poor illegally occupied the land of their landlords. The Bolsheviks, in a crucial compromise, acquiesced in this development, though it meant the strengthening of private-property consciousness and therefore a step away from the goal of socialism. The Whites were in a much more difficult position. On the one hand the more far-sighted among them realized that it was necessary to give the peasants what they most wanted, on the other, the movement drew its social support from landowners whose views could not be lightly disregarded. The Whites' strategy was procrastination. At first they assumed that the Civil War would be short and such issues as land reform and much else could simply be postponed until final victory. They argued that a difficult and complex problem could be resolved only after the re-establishment of order. They further maintained that only a Constituent Assembly or a legally constituted government had the right to make crucial decisions for the Russian people. As a theoretical position these arguments might have made sense; however, inaction had disastrous political consequences. What the peasants experienced was that in the wake of the White Army appeared landowners who reclaimed their land and punished them for having dared to occupy it. It is hardly surprising under the circumstances that the peasants' hostility to the landlords was extended to the White soldiers.”
Essentially, the inability to form a coherent political programme regarding land reform (some White leaders did in fact recognize the usefulness of ratifying peasant redistribution) led to Tsarist landowners marching in on the heels of the White Guard and restoring former land relations. Peasants were punished or killed for violently occupying the land previously belonging to the landowners, and this hurt the popularity of the White armies significantly in huge agrarian regions like the Ukraine and the Don.
"The 'constitution' of the Volunteer Army, prepared in October 1918, contained a paragraph which called property rights inviolable and allowed compulsory expropriation of property only with compensation. This paragraph was inserted in a section dealing with guarantees of civil liberties. It certainly did not seem to Denikin and his comrades that by adopting it they were taking sides in the class struggle. However, this defence of property rights anticipated later discussions of land reform. By April 1919 it was clear to Denikin that the Civil War would not end soon, and his agents reported from everywhere that in order to win the support of the people it was imperative to offer them something concrete. As a result of these urgings, Denikin issued his only manifesto on land reform.The corner-stone of the document was the proclamation of the principle of the compulsory alienation of land with compensation. Although this was hardly a radical measure and from the point of view of the peasants it certainly did not compete with Lenin's much simpler and decisive decree on land, obviously no White leader, dependent on the support of the propertied classes, could do more."
Denikin, limited in action by his support base among the formerly landed gentry and officer class, could hardly do more than a moderate land redistribution programme. This seems relatively reasonable provided it could be enforced - the only problem is that it wasn’t.
"The trouble was that the manifesto was not followed by action. Instead the Headquarters formed a committee made up of conservative bureaucrats, and then discussions became bogged down. The conservative politicians sabotaged Denikin's plans and the Commander-in-Chief had neither the foresight nor the will to insist. After months of fruitless argument the committee produced a plan so reactionary that Denikin had to reject it. This project called for an immediate return of land taken illegally by the peasants at the time of the Revolution and the beginning of a mild reform only three years after the conclusion of hostilities. Furthermore, the maximum size of holdings was set so high that only a relatively few landlords would have been forced to sell their property. But the most reactionary paragraphs concerned payment. They enabled the landlord to set the price for his own land and then to require one half of the payment immediately. Had the plans been carried out, it is clear that only an insignificant portion of the land would have been offered for sale and only the richest peasants could have bought it. Denikin allowed another commission to waste several months on working out more progressive plans. Work progressed slowly because conservative officers and politicians objected to the principle of compulsory alienation. They believed that any reform would undermine the respect for private property, which, in their opinion, and to their sorrow, was only poorly developed in Russia. The conservatives were well represented in the commission, which, perhaps as a result, completed its task only at a time when the military fortunes of the army were so low that it was impossible even to promulgate the plans."
A lot of the government officials and advisors working for Denikin and other White forces, taking a firmly rightist position, tried their best to sabotage any attempts at land reform for fear of unleashing the spectre of “supporting” the economic revolution in the countryside. In the end, all plans proposed were outright unworkable and the end result was the aforementioned landowners returning to their estates with the army to back them up.
"The second draft was not much more advanced than the first. It too envisaged distribution of land only after the restoration of order and set a high maximum on size of holdings. Finally, in the summer of 1920, Wrangel published a land law. It is worthwhile to point out that in the course of the previous year Wrangel had opposed reform plans as had his conservative political friends. But during the last phase of the Civil War when the survival of the movement seemed in question, and victory remote, most White leaders understood that it was essential to try to win over the peasantry. Wrangel, an energetic and decisive man, made his decision and saw to it that his subordinates worked out the details. His land reform plans were extremely complex. The law allowed some richer peasants to buy land from landlords, who were to be generously compensated. Thereby the Whites accepted the principle of compulsory alienation, though, once again, they set high land-holding maximums. At a time of very low land prices the owners were to be compensated not on the basis of depressed land values, but on the basis of the value of products grown in previous years. One may argue that, because of this method of calculation of land price, the lords benefited more than the peasants. Wrangel wisely made every effort to avoid procrastination and to start the process of distribution. However, the machinery was complex and there was little time. Little, if any, land actually changed hands as a result of months of planning and talk. Krivoshein, an associate of the great statesman of Imperial Russia, Stolypin, consciously tried to introduce the same principles as the ex- Premier. He and Wrangel believed that the White movement must create a social base among the richer peasants. As a consequence, White legislation in the case of land reform, and also in other instances, favoured the rich peasants against the poor. For example, local government regulations published by the Whites restricted the right to vote in village elections to those who owned property..."
Even the nominally progressive forces within the southern White movement at best could only produce a political programme that would disenfranchise much of the peasantry and introduce harsh measures to return the landowning gentry to their estates. If the White Movement was victorious in subduing the Bolsheviks, it is very likely these land issues would plague the new state for quite a while. Land reform to the ante-bellum period would likely cause much unrest among the peasantry, although the White movement (despite seeing itself as above class politics) would try and cultivate a supporter base among the richer peasants. The peasants were seen, as opposed to the urbanites, as the heart and soul of Russia and so the return to old land relations would seemingly put these two ideas at odds. I do not know how the inevitable White “Denikinschina” or junta would deal with these issues, but it certainly would be difficult as they must placate the peasantry to maintain some semblance of popular support but must also cater to the aspirations of its rightist base.
FASCISM?:
[Still quoting from Peter Kenez’s work on White Ideology]
“ It is hard to make out a case for describing the Volunteer Army as fascist. Modern methods of communication, so necessary for a fascist style of mass mobilization, did not exist. Dislocation and profound cultural despair, characteristic of recently industrialized societies which prepare willing recruits for radical movements, were also absent. However, there was an important segment of the counter-revolutionary movement to which fascism might have had an appeal. This segment was the Cossacks, whose contribution to the White cause has never been pro- perly appreciated by historians. [...] but Russia had only a few million Cossacks. It is hard to see how Krasnov's type of vengeful rightist radicalism would have found a large enough social base among the peasants to come to power. Generals Alekseev and Denikin, the two men who did most to develop a political programme for the Volunteer Army were conservatives. Compared with the vast majority of their followers, they possessed a degree of political sophistication and tolerance. Consequently, if we form a judgement on the basis of the public statements of the Army, we must conclude that it was a conservative organization."
"However, the officers who joined the movement in the beginning of 1918 and continued to play a dominant role in it until its final defeat, were young, profoundly embittered by their recent experiences in the Revolution and drawn to radical solutions. Especially after Alekseev's death in the autumn of 1918, Denikin was constantly under attack from the right; his followers wanted him to pursue reactionary policies. In April 1920 Denikin had to go into exile and his successor, General Wrangel, was a candidate of the right. To be sure, Denikin lost out in the power struggle largely because his armies had suffered defeats; nevertheless it is clear that his position had been greatly weakened by political disagreements. If we judge by the sentiments of the majority of the officers, and on the basis of the policies which the peasants actually experienced at the hands of the Volunteer Army, we should consider the White movement a reactionary phenomenon. The majority of the peasantry was right to distrust the promises and public statements of the Whites.”
The new White Russia is unlikely to adopt any explicitly fascistic programmes following the Civil War - the movement was largely reactionary in its base and the infrastructure and connection with the masses of peasantry did not exist for it. The possibility down the line does certainly exist among the younger officer class that would emerge from the Civil War - especially considering the main internal opposition leaders of the Volunteer Army had was from the right wing and elements of baseline fascism did exist. I think the possibility remains there, but that's strictly hypothetical and we don’t know what kind of political events would have occurred.
WHITE TERROR AND SECURITY ORGANS:
Citations from [Bortnevski, Viktor G. “White Administration and White Terror (The Denikin Period).” The Russian Review, vol. 52, no. 3, 1993, pp. 354–366]
The Red Army and Bolshevik state organs were notorious for their use of violence (both by the Cheka and Red Army) during the Civil War - the Whites were fundamentally no different:
“The "triumphal rise of Soviet power" (October 1917-March 1918) was due not so much to military victories as to the savage reprisals against the vanquished. The atmosphere was one of increasing violence and savagery on both sides. "Do not take prisoners!" Gen. L. G. Kornilov, Gen. S. L. Markov and other commanders regularly exhorted the Volunteer Army participants of the "Ice" march: "The more terror, the more victories!" The "Ice" march through the Kuban was a signal event in the White movement in southern Russia, and like the march of M. G. Drozdovskii's detachment at the same time, it was marked by terror and violence.”
Terror was commonplace, although as opposed to the Reds who often used security forces behind the line to implement their terror and it was directed against “class enemies” - the White terror was often implemented by White forces themselves against political enemies, Jews, and specific nationalities. At the same time though, it would be a mistake to assume that the White Terror was a result only of unruly soldiers and commanders who lacked restraint: it was similarly a direct and concerted effort to politically “cleanse” the country and instill terror in their enemies.
“ White terror must not be explained by the mistakes of White officials or the policies of ordinary officials. It was logically produced by a White political system of military dictatorship which tried to compete with the Bolshevik "proletarian dictatorship." A detailed history of this competition of different administrative systems in various regions during the Russian Civil War is a very promising topic for future research.”
A White Terror would certainly focus it’s aim on left-wing elements throughout the nation and territories. This would include members and supporters of the Bolsheviks, Red Army soldiers, officers, and commissars, as well as members of the Mensheviks and Left SR’s. Taking the spirit of laws implemented in the Terror by the Volunteer Army and White Guards of Southern Russia during the summer of 1919, even members of ostensibly liberal-left organizations were subject to the death penalty for the toppling of the Tsar:
“That same month the Special Council decided to increase the severity of punishment for offenses specified in the laws of 22 July 1919. The death penalty was henceforth imposed for "membership in the Bolshevik/Communist parties, Soviets of workers, soldiers and peasant deputies, or other similar organizations which participated in the grab for power by the Soviets, or persons who supported the policies of this power." Similarly, the death penalty was specified for ordinary mem- bers of the Bolshevik party, as well as for members of the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom. According to the letter of this law, members of the Socialist- Revolutionary, Menshevik and the People's Socialist parties were also subject to the death penalty since, as was well known, these parties had collaborated in the grab for power during the February Revolution.”
While White Armies were the perpetrators of much of what we call the White Terror due to the dysfunctional courts within Southern Russia and lack of formal security organs, it is likely an embryo of potential state security in the aftermath of the Civil War can be found in the uezd militias authorized in the fall of 1919:
“In November 1919 the Special Council granted extraordinary authority to the cities to collect funds for reinforcing measures against robberies and to organize local self-defense units. The chiefs of uezda were empowered to organize special units (consisting of up to four hundred members) to fight against "banditism" and to form uezd state-security reserves, consisting of mounted and infantry units, to combat gangsterism.”
These elements, officially placed under the jurisdiction of the Volunteer Army State Security ministry, were empowered with extra-judicial authority to combat “gangsterism”. “Banditism” and to carry out the aforementioned punishments mandated by the state for collaboration. They would likely end up a deal less centralized than the Soviet VChK, NKVD, KGB, etc. But the ideology and structures existed in the captured territories to implement state directed terror if and when the need arose.
ANTI-SEMITISM:
Here, I am citing from [Budnitsky, Oleg "Russian Jews between the Red and the Whites: 1917-1920"] and again from Peter Kenez's work on White Ideology. I don't have too much commentary here I will just let the citations speak for themselves because the infamous pogroms might be... absolutely horrific as the Civil War turns to favor the Whites. One would think that "organized" armies like the Volunteer Army were less prone to committing pogroms, but apparently the opposite is true and organized White armies committed most of the pogroms themselves.
" [...] was the first time ever antisemitic acts of violence were being carried out by the authorities, or, to be more precise, by those actors who had staked a claim to eventually become the ruling power of the country. They may not have organized the pogroms, but they declined to adopt sufficiently decisive measures to prevent them. Instead, they yielded to the prejudices prevalent among their troops and implicitly sanctioned their actions. At first the pogroms were carried out by military forces that were more (the Whites) or less (the Directorate) organized and disciplined. Taken together, the soldiers of the White movement and of the Directorate account for more than 50 percent of those killed. As it turned out, well- organized troops were “better equipped” to engage in indiscriminate bloodshed. When the White forces were involved, the pogroms were often the most bloody. It is possible to fight off or hide from a group of vagabonds, but it is nearly impossible to do so against an army. I believe that P. Kenez is absolutely correct in considering the slaughter of Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 to have a particularly “modern” character. It could easily serve as the starting point for the “tradition” of the twentieth century. The massive carnage was prepared by ideology; an aggressive nationalism, whose most striking aspect 274 chapter 6 was antisemitism, became a surrogate for the ideology of the White movement.V. P. Buldakov is correct in contending that “the most horrifying aspect of the White Terror, and of all the reciprocal violence committed during the Civil War period, was the Jewish pogroms.” One cannot help agreeing with another of his claims, namely that even if one- tenth of the information we have concerning the pogroms carried out by the Whites in Ukraine in 1919 is true, then the Whites “had no chance of ever achieving victory in the fight for the Russian state.”
"It is difficult to agree with Richard Pipes, who, repeating the ideas of I. M. Bikerman, writes that from a broader historical perspective the pogroms against the Jews “were part and parcel of the pogroms perpetrated at the time throughout Russia.” Actually, a “broader historical perspective” shows something quite different. During the Civil War, Jews were killed precisely because they were Jewish, regardless of their age, sex, or political convictions. This is why, in my opinion, one must consider the pogroms of the Russian Civil War as precedents for the Holocaust."
"The murder of Jews ceased to be considered a crime. For many members of the White movement it was either a matter of a simple reflex, or an inseparable element of the struggle against Bolshevism. Shulgin demonstrates this point clearly in the following anecdote [...]"
In some cases, commanders did indeed punish pogromists, but in most cases they didn't and even ones who tried were not guaranteed success in actually prosecuting the criminals:
"Commanding officers did not always turn a blind eye to the actions of the pogromists. On a few occasions, the perpetrators were properly punished. In a handful of cases, the punishments went to extremes. In Kiev on October 8, a military fi eld court passed a series of sentences against a number of soldiers for stealing 40,000 rubles worth of goods and “beating the Jew Kapler.” Staff captains Auster and Levitskii, along with the praporshchik Bogalev, were given indefi nite prison sentences, while the praporshchik Galchevskii and “the civilian Terchinskii” were executed by fi ring squad. Dragomirov reported to Denikin the events that had taken place in Kiev. “A number of gangs started going into the Jewish quarters and demanding money. Some of the scoundrels were caught at the scene of the crime, and were acquitted by the military court . . . I summoned the court and gave them a tongue- lashing the likes of which they had never heard before . . . the court then started handing out death sentences, all of which were carried out . . .
These cases were hardly typical, but most occasions were more similar to another series of events recounted by Dragomirov, when he once ordered the execution of seven soldiers guilty of the murder of three Jews. The execution was to take place in Slobodka, a suburb of Kiev, in the middle of the night. Originally, the judge had sentenced the murderers to hard labor, but the general increased the severity of the sentence. This caused such uproar in Russian circles that dozens of people came to intercede on behalf of the convicted, including the local metropolitan, Antonii. More importantly, rumors started to fl y that if the sentence were to be carried out, “not a stone would be left upright in Slobodka.” Dragomirov decided to reexamine the case, using the excuse that there was new testimony to be considered, even though he himself did not believe it had any bearing on the case. He later wrote Denikin, “without a doubt, the execution of those seven soldiers would have resulted in revenge being taken either in Slobodka, or in some other place. Th is is the main difficulty of this battle. It is impossible to employ capital punishment in such matters, and nobody fears hard labor; everyone is sure there is an amnesty on the way from Moscow.”
The next three quotes (from Peter Kenez) will close out this portion and sort of underline the rabidity of the anti-semitism and how it could escalate, in my opinion, to something far worse:
"The patient, child-like, monarchist and religious Russian peasants obviously did not initiate the Revolution. That must have been the work of alien and hostile conspirators who took advantage of the lack of sophistication of the peasants, for their own devious and evil purposes. Attributing the source of disintegration to 'outside agitators' was not, of course, a peculiarity of Russian conservatives. The times were confusing, and a realistic evaluation of the causes of the Revolution very painful. The officers' frustration turned into a bitter hatred against the mythical alien forces. The choice for this hostile and alien element was clear: it was the Jews. The officers' previous anti-Semitism, their association of Jews with non-Russian and 'modern' values, the Jews' participation in the revolutionary movement made them the obvious target. Therefore anti-Semitism was not an accidental and minor element in the ideology of the officers, but an essential centrepiece. The officers were men of the 19th century and as such did not think of gas chambers, but anti-Semitism was as strong and as crucial an explanatory force in their minds as it was for the Nazis. The historian reading the internal correspondence of the White movement cannot but be struck by the almost pathologically intense anti- Semitism. The officers described Jews as microbes and blamed them for all sorts of misfortunes, from military defeat to inflation and lack of foreign support. These men attributed almost magical powers to the Jews. In their fantasy Jews could corrupt the virtuous and destroy empires. On White-held territories hysterical priests denounced Jews as Christ-killers and called for a holy crusade against Jewish Bolshevism. The consequence of White propaganda was a series of pogroms in the Ukraine in 1919 which claimed approximately a hundred thousand victims. The Headquarters, of course, did not organize the pogroms and disclaimed responsibility for them. However, it was clear that the generals were not interested in stopping the murders. The Cossacks, soldiers and peasants well understood their superiors..."
"The anti-Semitism of the leaders varied according to their decency and intelligence. The brutal marauder General Shkuro, a future soldier under Hitler, himself organized massacres. Ataman Krasnov, another future Nazi collaborator, argued for the genuineness of the Protocols of Zion. To him, every Jew was a member of a vast conspiracy against Russia. General Mamontov, another marauder Cossack, issued proclamations such as 'Arm yourself and rise against the common enemy of our Russian land, against the Jewish Bolshevik Communists ... The evil force which lives in the hearts of Jew-Communists will be eliminated.' By contrast General Denikin appears as a moderate. He confessed to a Jewish delegation which asked for protection that he did not like Jews and he took various steps against Jewish economic interests. Most importantly, he did far too little to stop the pogroms. On the other hand he deplored mass violence because he believed that it spoiled the image of his Army abroad and undermined the discipline of the soldiers. The officers' anti-Semitism was expressed by a powerful and vicious metaphor, often used by them. They imagined Russia to be ill. The Jews were the bacilli which brought the disease. What was necessary obviously followed: the bacilli must be exterminated for the patient to recover. This explanation permitted them to avoid facing real problems and developing plans for a more just and attractive society. The fact that the White movement's anti-Semitism was full of paranoid delusions which clouded the leaders' judgement, preventing a realistic evaluation of their tasks and problems, did not mean that anti-Semitism was not politically beneficial. No aspect of White ideology found as fertile soil in the Russian, and particularly among the Ukrainian, peasants as this one. The successful identification of Jews and Bolsheviks, greatly emphasized by White propaganda, did a great deal of damage to both."
“In spite of the political benefits of anti-Semitism, the ideology motivating the generals led to defeat. It prevented them from confronting problems realistically and from seeing what the Russians really wanted. In spite of the feeble land reform attempts, the peasants continued to associate the White armies with returning landlords and tsarist bureaucrats. However unattractive many of the utopian schemes of the Bolsheviks were to the peasants, and however alienated they became as a result of brutal Bolshevik requisitioning, in the final analysis they did not want to see the restoration of the old order, and the Volunteer Army could offer them nothing else”
In short, anti-semitism was pervasive among both the rank and file and the most powerful men in the movement. While formerly pogroms were reactions from the bottom, the Civil War introduced state sanctioned violence against the Jews that would eerily echo the crimes committed by Hitler's Germany. With a White movement controlling all of the industrial heartland of Russia and the most populated cities held by the "Jewish-Bolsheviks" - one shudders to think what might have been unleashed.
"
Essentially, certainly not good although we could argue for hours how it would stack up to IOTL.
"
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS:
The White Movement in Russia, by nature a large and unwieldy coalition of anti-Bolshevik forces, suffered consistently from a vagueness of political aims. The governments of White held areas could not effectively craft a political vision because any policy statements outside of the most general vague claims would alienate one group or another. In effect, this led to many undesirable and unpopular policies coming into effect in White held territories that alienated the local inhabitants. A conquering White army would probably leave the peasantry alone (provided they didn't have any specific Bolshevik, Menshevik, Left SR, or revolutionary tendencies), although the urban working class in Western Russia would face particular political persecution in the aftermath of a White victory. White armies would likely continue to launch wide scale pogroms on captured Red territory, particularly in the cities. White leaders like Denikin and Wrangel were not particularly anti-semitic (for an Imperial Russian aristocrat anyway...), but organized White armies were perhaps the worst perpetrators of pogroms and the White commands was was unwilling and/or unable to control them - this would likely not change. The nationalism and Great Russian chauvinism demonstrated by the leaders of the movement would make cooperation and peaceful existence difficult with the bordering nationalities on the periphery of the Russian Empire. Some of the more liberal minded of the movement were willing to adopt ideas of a federation and accept autonomous status within a possible federation, but almost none of them pragmatically agreed to recognize these newly independent states. Perhaps this would change when the reality of the political situation set in, but conflict with states like Poland are likely. A White Terror to rival the Bolsheviks is certainly not out of the question, considering the values espoused by White leaders in regards to the value of terror in the war and the increasingly bitter state of the conflict between participants. I don't think a form of proto-fascism arising in Russia is out of the question, but I think it is probably not likely at least in the short term following the conflict.
THE QUESTION OF LAND REFORM:
I’ll start with the question of land reform in the event of a White victory since I have already made a post about it. I will be citing the following text: [Kenez, Peter. “The Ideology of the White Movement.” Soviet Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, 1980, pp. 58–83]
“ In the first and crucial year of its existence, the Volunteer Army offered nothing to the majority of the Russian people, the peasants. The issue which concerned the peasants most was the great social issue of the day, land reform. In the course of 1917 and 1918 the poor illegally occupied the land of their landlords. The Bolsheviks, in a crucial compromise, acquiesced in this development, though it meant the strengthening of private-property consciousness and therefore a step away from the goal of socialism. The Whites were in a much more difficult position. On the one hand the more far-sighted among them realized that it was necessary to give the peasants what they most wanted, on the other, the movement drew its social support from landowners whose views could not be lightly disregarded. The Whites' strategy was procrastination. At first they assumed that the Civil War would be short and such issues as land reform and much else could simply be postponed until final victory. They argued that a difficult and complex problem could be resolved only after the re-establishment of order. They further maintained that only a Constituent Assembly or a legally constituted government had the right to make crucial decisions for the Russian people. As a theoretical position these arguments might have made sense; however, inaction had disastrous political consequences. What the peasants experienced was that in the wake of the White Army appeared landowners who reclaimed their land and punished them for having dared to occupy it. It is hardly surprising under the circumstances that the peasants' hostility to the landlords was extended to the White soldiers.”
Essentially, the inability to form a coherent political programme regarding land reform (some White leaders did in fact recognize the usefulness of ratifying peasant redistribution) led to Tsarist landowners marching in on the heels of the White Guard and restoring former land relations. Peasants were punished or killed for violently occupying the land previously belonging to the landowners, and this hurt the popularity of the White armies significantly in huge agrarian regions like the Ukraine and the Don.
"The 'constitution' of the Volunteer Army, prepared in October 1918, contained a paragraph which called property rights inviolable and allowed compulsory expropriation of property only with compensation. This paragraph was inserted in a section dealing with guarantees of civil liberties. It certainly did not seem to Denikin and his comrades that by adopting it they were taking sides in the class struggle. However, this defence of property rights anticipated later discussions of land reform. By April 1919 it was clear to Denikin that the Civil War would not end soon, and his agents reported from everywhere that in order to win the support of the people it was imperative to offer them something concrete. As a result of these urgings, Denikin issued his only manifesto on land reform.The corner-stone of the document was the proclamation of the principle of the compulsory alienation of land with compensation. Although this was hardly a radical measure and from the point of view of the peasants it certainly did not compete with Lenin's much simpler and decisive decree on land, obviously no White leader, dependent on the support of the propertied classes, could do more."
Denikin, limited in action by his support base among the formerly landed gentry and officer class, could hardly do more than a moderate land redistribution programme. This seems relatively reasonable provided it could be enforced - the only problem is that it wasn’t.
"The trouble was that the manifesto was not followed by action. Instead the Headquarters formed a committee made up of conservative bureaucrats, and then discussions became bogged down. The conservative politicians sabotaged Denikin's plans and the Commander-in-Chief had neither the foresight nor the will to insist. After months of fruitless argument the committee produced a plan so reactionary that Denikin had to reject it. This project called for an immediate return of land taken illegally by the peasants at the time of the Revolution and the beginning of a mild reform only three years after the conclusion of hostilities. Furthermore, the maximum size of holdings was set so high that only a relatively few landlords would have been forced to sell their property. But the most reactionary paragraphs concerned payment. They enabled the landlord to set the price for his own land and then to require one half of the payment immediately. Had the plans been carried out, it is clear that only an insignificant portion of the land would have been offered for sale and only the richest peasants could have bought it. Denikin allowed another commission to waste several months on working out more progressive plans. Work progressed slowly because conservative officers and politicians objected to the principle of compulsory alienation. They believed that any reform would undermine the respect for private property, which, in their opinion, and to their sorrow, was only poorly developed in Russia. The conservatives were well represented in the commission, which, perhaps as a result, completed its task only at a time when the military fortunes of the army were so low that it was impossible even to promulgate the plans."
A lot of the government officials and advisors working for Denikin and other White forces, taking a firmly rightist position, tried their best to sabotage any attempts at land reform for fear of unleashing the spectre of “supporting” the economic revolution in the countryside. In the end, all plans proposed were outright unworkable and the end result was the aforementioned landowners returning to their estates with the army to back them up.
"The second draft was not much more advanced than the first. It too envisaged distribution of land only after the restoration of order and set a high maximum on size of holdings. Finally, in the summer of 1920, Wrangel published a land law. It is worthwhile to point out that in the course of the previous year Wrangel had opposed reform plans as had his conservative political friends. But during the last phase of the Civil War when the survival of the movement seemed in question, and victory remote, most White leaders understood that it was essential to try to win over the peasantry. Wrangel, an energetic and decisive man, made his decision and saw to it that his subordinates worked out the details. His land reform plans were extremely complex. The law allowed some richer peasants to buy land from landlords, who were to be generously compensated. Thereby the Whites accepted the principle of compulsory alienation, though, once again, they set high land-holding maximums. At a time of very low land prices the owners were to be compensated not on the basis of depressed land values, but on the basis of the value of products grown in previous years. One may argue that, because of this method of calculation of land price, the lords benefited more than the peasants. Wrangel wisely made every effort to avoid procrastination and to start the process of distribution. However, the machinery was complex and there was little time. Little, if any, land actually changed hands as a result of months of planning and talk. Krivoshein, an associate of the great statesman of Imperial Russia, Stolypin, consciously tried to introduce the same principles as the ex- Premier. He and Wrangel believed that the White movement must create a social base among the richer peasants. As a consequence, White legislation in the case of land reform, and also in other instances, favoured the rich peasants against the poor. For example, local government regulations published by the Whites restricted the right to vote in village elections to those who owned property..."
Even the nominally progressive forces within the southern White movement at best could only produce a political programme that would disenfranchise much of the peasantry and introduce harsh measures to return the landowning gentry to their estates. If the White Movement was victorious in subduing the Bolsheviks, it is very likely these land issues would plague the new state for quite a while. Land reform to the ante-bellum period would likely cause much unrest among the peasantry, although the White movement (despite seeing itself as above class politics) would try and cultivate a supporter base among the richer peasants. The peasants were seen, as opposed to the urbanites, as the heart and soul of Russia and so the return to old land relations would seemingly put these two ideas at odds. I do not know how the inevitable White “Denikinschina” or junta would deal with these issues, but it certainly would be difficult as they must placate the peasantry to maintain some semblance of popular support but must also cater to the aspirations of its rightist base.
FASCISM?:
[Still quoting from Peter Kenez’s work on White Ideology]
“ It is hard to make out a case for describing the Volunteer Army as fascist. Modern methods of communication, so necessary for a fascist style of mass mobilization, did not exist. Dislocation and profound cultural despair, characteristic of recently industrialized societies which prepare willing recruits for radical movements, were also absent. However, there was an important segment of the counter-revolutionary movement to which fascism might have had an appeal. This segment was the Cossacks, whose contribution to the White cause has never been pro- perly appreciated by historians. [...] but Russia had only a few million Cossacks. It is hard to see how Krasnov's type of vengeful rightist radicalism would have found a large enough social base among the peasants to come to power. Generals Alekseev and Denikin, the two men who did most to develop a political programme for the Volunteer Army were conservatives. Compared with the vast majority of their followers, they possessed a degree of political sophistication and tolerance. Consequently, if we form a judgement on the basis of the public statements of the Army, we must conclude that it was a conservative organization."
"However, the officers who joined the movement in the beginning of 1918 and continued to play a dominant role in it until its final defeat, were young, profoundly embittered by their recent experiences in the Revolution and drawn to radical solutions. Especially after Alekseev's death in the autumn of 1918, Denikin was constantly under attack from the right; his followers wanted him to pursue reactionary policies. In April 1920 Denikin had to go into exile and his successor, General Wrangel, was a candidate of the right. To be sure, Denikin lost out in the power struggle largely because his armies had suffered defeats; nevertheless it is clear that his position had been greatly weakened by political disagreements. If we judge by the sentiments of the majority of the officers, and on the basis of the policies which the peasants actually experienced at the hands of the Volunteer Army, we should consider the White movement a reactionary phenomenon. The majority of the peasantry was right to distrust the promises and public statements of the Whites.”
The new White Russia is unlikely to adopt any explicitly fascistic programmes following the Civil War - the movement was largely reactionary in its base and the infrastructure and connection with the masses of peasantry did not exist for it. The possibility down the line does certainly exist among the younger officer class that would emerge from the Civil War - especially considering the main internal opposition leaders of the Volunteer Army had was from the right wing and elements of baseline fascism did exist. I think the possibility remains there, but that's strictly hypothetical and we don’t know what kind of political events would have occurred.
WHITE TERROR AND SECURITY ORGANS:
Citations from [Bortnevski, Viktor G. “White Administration and White Terror (The Denikin Period).” The Russian Review, vol. 52, no. 3, 1993, pp. 354–366]
The Red Army and Bolshevik state organs were notorious for their use of violence (both by the Cheka and Red Army) during the Civil War - the Whites were fundamentally no different:
“The "triumphal rise of Soviet power" (October 1917-March 1918) was due not so much to military victories as to the savage reprisals against the vanquished. The atmosphere was one of increasing violence and savagery on both sides. "Do not take prisoners!" Gen. L. G. Kornilov, Gen. S. L. Markov and other commanders regularly exhorted the Volunteer Army participants of the "Ice" march: "The more terror, the more victories!" The "Ice" march through the Kuban was a signal event in the White movement in southern Russia, and like the march of M. G. Drozdovskii's detachment at the same time, it was marked by terror and violence.”
Terror was commonplace, although as opposed to the Reds who often used security forces behind the line to implement their terror and it was directed against “class enemies” - the White terror was often implemented by White forces themselves against political enemies, Jews, and specific nationalities. At the same time though, it would be a mistake to assume that the White Terror was a result only of unruly soldiers and commanders who lacked restraint: it was similarly a direct and concerted effort to politically “cleanse” the country and instill terror in their enemies.
“ White terror must not be explained by the mistakes of White officials or the policies of ordinary officials. It was logically produced by a White political system of military dictatorship which tried to compete with the Bolshevik "proletarian dictatorship." A detailed history of this competition of different administrative systems in various regions during the Russian Civil War is a very promising topic for future research.”
A White Terror would certainly focus it’s aim on left-wing elements throughout the nation and territories. This would include members and supporters of the Bolsheviks, Red Army soldiers, officers, and commissars, as well as members of the Mensheviks and Left SR’s. Taking the spirit of laws implemented in the Terror by the Volunteer Army and White Guards of Southern Russia during the summer of 1919, even members of ostensibly liberal-left organizations were subject to the death penalty for the toppling of the Tsar:
“That same month the Special Council decided to increase the severity of punishment for offenses specified in the laws of 22 July 1919. The death penalty was henceforth imposed for "membership in the Bolshevik/Communist parties, Soviets of workers, soldiers and peasant deputies, or other similar organizations which participated in the grab for power by the Soviets, or persons who supported the policies of this power." Similarly, the death penalty was specified for ordinary mem- bers of the Bolshevik party, as well as for members of the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom. According to the letter of this law, members of the Socialist- Revolutionary, Menshevik and the People's Socialist parties were also subject to the death penalty since, as was well known, these parties had collaborated in the grab for power during the February Revolution.”
While White Armies were the perpetrators of much of what we call the White Terror due to the dysfunctional courts within Southern Russia and lack of formal security organs, it is likely an embryo of potential state security in the aftermath of the Civil War can be found in the uezd militias authorized in the fall of 1919:
“In November 1919 the Special Council granted extraordinary authority to the cities to collect funds for reinforcing measures against robberies and to organize local self-defense units. The chiefs of uezda were empowered to organize special units (consisting of up to four hundred members) to fight against "banditism" and to form uezd state-security reserves, consisting of mounted and infantry units, to combat gangsterism.”
These elements, officially placed under the jurisdiction of the Volunteer Army State Security ministry, were empowered with extra-judicial authority to combat “gangsterism”. “Banditism” and to carry out the aforementioned punishments mandated by the state for collaboration. They would likely end up a deal less centralized than the Soviet VChK, NKVD, KGB, etc. But the ideology and structures existed in the captured territories to implement state directed terror if and when the need arose.
ANTI-SEMITISM:
Here, I am citing from [Budnitsky, Oleg "Russian Jews between the Red and the Whites: 1917-1920"] and again from Peter Kenez's work on White Ideology. I don't have too much commentary here I will just let the citations speak for themselves because the infamous pogroms might be... absolutely horrific as the Civil War turns to favor the Whites. One would think that "organized" armies like the Volunteer Army were less prone to committing pogroms, but apparently the opposite is true and organized White armies committed most of the pogroms themselves.
" [...] was the first time ever antisemitic acts of violence were being carried out by the authorities, or, to be more precise, by those actors who had staked a claim to eventually become the ruling power of the country. They may not have organized the pogroms, but they declined to adopt sufficiently decisive measures to prevent them. Instead, they yielded to the prejudices prevalent among their troops and implicitly sanctioned their actions. At first the pogroms were carried out by military forces that were more (the Whites) or less (the Directorate) organized and disciplined. Taken together, the soldiers of the White movement and of the Directorate account for more than 50 percent of those killed. As it turned out, well- organized troops were “better equipped” to engage in indiscriminate bloodshed. When the White forces were involved, the pogroms were often the most bloody. It is possible to fight off or hide from a group of vagabonds, but it is nearly impossible to do so against an army. I believe that P. Kenez is absolutely correct in considering the slaughter of Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 to have a particularly “modern” character. It could easily serve as the starting point for the “tradition” of the twentieth century. The massive carnage was prepared by ideology; an aggressive nationalism, whose most striking aspect 274 chapter 6 was antisemitism, became a surrogate for the ideology of the White movement.V. P. Buldakov is correct in contending that “the most horrifying aspect of the White Terror, and of all the reciprocal violence committed during the Civil War period, was the Jewish pogroms.” One cannot help agreeing with another of his claims, namely that even if one- tenth of the information we have concerning the pogroms carried out by the Whites in Ukraine in 1919 is true, then the Whites “had no chance of ever achieving victory in the fight for the Russian state.”
"It is difficult to agree with Richard Pipes, who, repeating the ideas of I. M. Bikerman, writes that from a broader historical perspective the pogroms against the Jews “were part and parcel of the pogroms perpetrated at the time throughout Russia.” Actually, a “broader historical perspective” shows something quite different. During the Civil War, Jews were killed precisely because they were Jewish, regardless of their age, sex, or political convictions. This is why, in my opinion, one must consider the pogroms of the Russian Civil War as precedents for the Holocaust."
"The murder of Jews ceased to be considered a crime. For many members of the White movement it was either a matter of a simple reflex, or an inseparable element of the struggle against Bolshevism. Shulgin demonstrates this point clearly in the following anecdote [...]"
In some cases, commanders did indeed punish pogromists, but in most cases they didn't and even ones who tried were not guaranteed success in actually prosecuting the criminals:
"Commanding officers did not always turn a blind eye to the actions of the pogromists. On a few occasions, the perpetrators were properly punished. In a handful of cases, the punishments went to extremes. In Kiev on October 8, a military fi eld court passed a series of sentences against a number of soldiers for stealing 40,000 rubles worth of goods and “beating the Jew Kapler.” Staff captains Auster and Levitskii, along with the praporshchik Bogalev, were given indefi nite prison sentences, while the praporshchik Galchevskii and “the civilian Terchinskii” were executed by fi ring squad. Dragomirov reported to Denikin the events that had taken place in Kiev. “A number of gangs started going into the Jewish quarters and demanding money. Some of the scoundrels were caught at the scene of the crime, and were acquitted by the military court . . . I summoned the court and gave them a tongue- lashing the likes of which they had never heard before . . . the court then started handing out death sentences, all of which were carried out . . .
These cases were hardly typical, but most occasions were more similar to another series of events recounted by Dragomirov, when he once ordered the execution of seven soldiers guilty of the murder of three Jews. The execution was to take place in Slobodka, a suburb of Kiev, in the middle of the night. Originally, the judge had sentenced the murderers to hard labor, but the general increased the severity of the sentence. This caused such uproar in Russian circles that dozens of people came to intercede on behalf of the convicted, including the local metropolitan, Antonii. More importantly, rumors started to fl y that if the sentence were to be carried out, “not a stone would be left upright in Slobodka.” Dragomirov decided to reexamine the case, using the excuse that there was new testimony to be considered, even though he himself did not believe it had any bearing on the case. He later wrote Denikin, “without a doubt, the execution of those seven soldiers would have resulted in revenge being taken either in Slobodka, or in some other place. Th is is the main difficulty of this battle. It is impossible to employ capital punishment in such matters, and nobody fears hard labor; everyone is sure there is an amnesty on the way from Moscow.”
The next three quotes (from Peter Kenez) will close out this portion and sort of underline the rabidity of the anti-semitism and how it could escalate, in my opinion, to something far worse:
"The patient, child-like, monarchist and religious Russian peasants obviously did not initiate the Revolution. That must have been the work of alien and hostile conspirators who took advantage of the lack of sophistication of the peasants, for their own devious and evil purposes. Attributing the source of disintegration to 'outside agitators' was not, of course, a peculiarity of Russian conservatives. The times were confusing, and a realistic evaluation of the causes of the Revolution very painful. The officers' frustration turned into a bitter hatred against the mythical alien forces. The choice for this hostile and alien element was clear: it was the Jews. The officers' previous anti-Semitism, their association of Jews with non-Russian and 'modern' values, the Jews' participation in the revolutionary movement made them the obvious target. Therefore anti-Semitism was not an accidental and minor element in the ideology of the officers, but an essential centrepiece. The officers were men of the 19th century and as such did not think of gas chambers, but anti-Semitism was as strong and as crucial an explanatory force in their minds as it was for the Nazis. The historian reading the internal correspondence of the White movement cannot but be struck by the almost pathologically intense anti- Semitism. The officers described Jews as microbes and blamed them for all sorts of misfortunes, from military defeat to inflation and lack of foreign support. These men attributed almost magical powers to the Jews. In their fantasy Jews could corrupt the virtuous and destroy empires. On White-held territories hysterical priests denounced Jews as Christ-killers and called for a holy crusade against Jewish Bolshevism. The consequence of White propaganda was a series of pogroms in the Ukraine in 1919 which claimed approximately a hundred thousand victims. The Headquarters, of course, did not organize the pogroms and disclaimed responsibility for them. However, it was clear that the generals were not interested in stopping the murders. The Cossacks, soldiers and peasants well understood their superiors..."
"The anti-Semitism of the leaders varied according to their decency and intelligence. The brutal marauder General Shkuro, a future soldier under Hitler, himself organized massacres. Ataman Krasnov, another future Nazi collaborator, argued for the genuineness of the Protocols of Zion. To him, every Jew was a member of a vast conspiracy against Russia. General Mamontov, another marauder Cossack, issued proclamations such as 'Arm yourself and rise against the common enemy of our Russian land, against the Jewish Bolshevik Communists ... The evil force which lives in the hearts of Jew-Communists will be eliminated.' By contrast General Denikin appears as a moderate. He confessed to a Jewish delegation which asked for protection that he did not like Jews and he took various steps against Jewish economic interests. Most importantly, he did far too little to stop the pogroms. On the other hand he deplored mass violence because he believed that it spoiled the image of his Army abroad and undermined the discipline of the soldiers. The officers' anti-Semitism was expressed by a powerful and vicious metaphor, often used by them. They imagined Russia to be ill. The Jews were the bacilli which brought the disease. What was necessary obviously followed: the bacilli must be exterminated for the patient to recover. This explanation permitted them to avoid facing real problems and developing plans for a more just and attractive society. The fact that the White movement's anti-Semitism was full of paranoid delusions which clouded the leaders' judgement, preventing a realistic evaluation of their tasks and problems, did not mean that anti-Semitism was not politically beneficial. No aspect of White ideology found as fertile soil in the Russian, and particularly among the Ukrainian, peasants as this one. The successful identification of Jews and Bolsheviks, greatly emphasized by White propaganda, did a great deal of damage to both."
“In spite of the political benefits of anti-Semitism, the ideology motivating the generals led to defeat. It prevented them from confronting problems realistically and from seeing what the Russians really wanted. In spite of the feeble land reform attempts, the peasants continued to associate the White armies with returning landlords and tsarist bureaucrats. However unattractive many of the utopian schemes of the Bolsheviks were to the peasants, and however alienated they became as a result of brutal Bolshevik requisitioning, in the final analysis they did not want to see the restoration of the old order, and the Volunteer Army could offer them nothing else”
In short, anti-semitism was pervasive among both the rank and file and the most powerful men in the movement. While formerly pogroms were reactions from the bottom, the Civil War introduced state sanctioned violence against the Jews that would eerily echo the crimes committed by Hitler's Germany. With a White movement controlling all of the industrial heartland of Russia and the most populated cities held by the "Jewish-Bolsheviks" - one shudders to think what might have been unleashed.
"
Essentially, certainly not good although we could argue for hours how it would stack up to IOTL.