WI: No Kerensky offensive: Russia's provisional government makes peace and survives 1917

RousseauX

Donor
Alexander Kerensky was one of the most pivotal historical figures of the 20th century and proved to be utterly unable to live up to his responsibilities. The February revolution had overthrown the Tsar and a provisional government came to power...sort of. He came lead Russia's provisional government in mid-1917 and needed to manage the balance of power between the left (the Soviets/SR/Menshevik/Bolsheviks etc), the center (i.e Kadets) and the right (black hundreds, monarchists) within revolutionary Russia. It would have being hard even for a genius statesman to stabilize the revolution and Kerensky very unwisely chose to gamble everything on a big offensive against Germany hoping it would unite the country behind him.

The offensive failed and Russia lost over 400,000 men in an already war weary country and demoralized army. This failure, along with almost comical incompetence in the aftermath such as Kornilov affair sealed the fate of the provisional government and the Bolsheviks overthrew it with relatively little effort in October 1917. One of the key reasons why the government fell was because of its refusal to make peace in a country demanding it.

What if Kerensky is simply a better politician and comes to the insight that peace is the only way to stay in power? The situation for Russia was dire in May 1917 but far less so than a year later. Let's say the PG successfully arranges a ceasefire and a peace where Russia gives up Poland and much of the Baltics and some guarantee of delivering Ukrainian grain to Germany. Let's say the peace stabilizes the government for the time being and take the winds out of the Bolshevik's sails for 6-12 month or so.

Does the government survive into the 20s and 30s? Is it a left-wing or right-wing government? Does pre-emptying the Bolshevik mean no Nazi takeover in Germany? Does Germany win WWI given an earlier peace on the eastern front? Is there still a WWII? What does Russia look like by 1937?
 
Hmm what does "provisional" mean? "Something provisional is temporary, in the sense that it's only valid for a while. " from https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/provisional

So what was supposed to replace the provisional government? Why it is the Russian Constituent Assembly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constituent_Assembly

With Kerensky making peace and no Bolshevik Revolution I would see the SR's doing even better at the expense of the Bolsheviks. The government will then be led by Chernov not Kerensky though there is a good chance he might get offered a ministry. What we will have is a SR dominated Pink Russia
 

trajen777

Banned
Interesting. Well a guess :
1. Feb 2nd new gov in place - Kerensky calls for peace
2. Germany does not send Lenin and the other 31 communists back to Russia.
3. Cease fire on the Russian front March 1 - Germany sends 1/3 of their troops west.
4. Treaty signed March 15th - Germany gets Cortland and Poland and food. Rest of Baltics and Finland less under German control.
5. New gov must do something very radical. Most likely they announce Peace, Russia for Russians, and land distribution for the people,(perhaps 25% the rest stays with magnets who align with the Gov.) the people want peace and land. Give them that and you would gain stability.
6. IN the 20's 30s' you would have an agrarian growth in food production and export dollars. You would increase or renew the rail expansions and chart a neutral position in global affairs. I would see the government as a Dictatorial democracy (like Turkey today). As wealth grows you would see more it spin more and more to a democracy.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Interesting. Well a guess :
1. Feb 2nd new gov in place - Kerensky calls for peace
2. Germany does not send Lenin and the other 31 communists back to Russia.
3. Cease fire on the Russian front March 1 - Germany sends 1/3 of their troops west.
4. Treaty signed March 15th - Germany gets Cortland and Poland and food. Rest of Baltics and Finland less under German control.
5. New gov must do something very radical. Most likely they announce Peace, Russia for Russians, and land distribution for the people,(perhaps 25% the rest stays with magnets who align with the Gov.) the people want peace and land. Give them that and you would gain stability.
6. IN the 20's 30s' you would have an agrarian growth in food production and export dollars. You would increase or renew the rail expansions and chart a neutral position in global affairs. I would see the government as a Dictatorial democracy (like Turkey today). As wealth grows you would see more it spin more and more to a democracy.
Kerensky wasn't leading the government in Feb, he started leading it in May when he was appointed minister of war, so Lenin would still be in Russia (he got there in april)

that being said though, if Kerensky is more ruthless, or if the Russian military/police has a bit more luck they could have arrested Lenin like they did Trotsky otl (they came pretty damn close too otl, missing him by a few minutes at one point)

but hey, with a PoD it's possible he leads the government in Feb too

also, how does Germany get troops into Finland?
 
This story was passed to me in my senior year at LSU by the late Dr. Mark Carleton...(a wonderful man we lost much too soon to cancer)

Dr. Carleton earned his doctorate at Stanford, and at that time Kerensky was living in Palo Alto and agreed to come into one of his History classes.

As I recall the story, one of the students asked Kerensky what he would have done differently. Kerensky answered, "First I would have made peace, then I would have killed Lenin."
 
Newspaper from 1917 in the alternate timeline:
Russia officially is officially out of the war
Reports say that Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine, and some food is going to German army in exchange for peace
Provisional government in pursuit of Lenin and the communists
 

RousseauX

Donor
Newspaper from 1917 in the alternate timeline:
Russia officially is officially out of the war
Reports say that Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine, and some food is going to German army in exchange for peace
Provisional government in pursuit of Lenin and the communists
At this point I doubt Russia loses the whole of Ukraine the military situations is way better than 1918, the peace terms Germany offered even in 1918 was pretty generous initially.

They might lose kars to Ottoman and maybe some of western ukraine to Austria-Hungary though
 
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Newspaper from 1917 in the alternate timeline:
Russia officially is officially out of the war
Reports say that Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine, and some food is going to German army in exchange for peace
Provisional government in pursuit of Lenin and the communists
No way would Russia agree to such an agreement in 1917. Unlike in 1918, the army is not yet in state of collapse nor is there a separatist Ukrainian government. The German peace treaty, based on what they demanded in OTL would at most be for all the territory they had already captured. The Austrians and Ottomans would probably not get anything since they don't control any Russian territory.
 
The PG should have avoided the July Offensive, but leaving the war at that point was almost out of the question. Everyone assumed that it would lead to a German victory (the Yanks weren't coming for many months) and a victorious Germany, it was thought, would proceed to dismember Russia and destroy everything won by the Revolution. If Kerensky had attempted a Brest-Litovsk in the summer of 1917, the Bolsheviks would be the first to cry "Treason!" and "sell-out to German imperialism!" (Of course they were in favor of peace, they would explain, but one with the German workers and soldiers, not with the Kaiser; and if reminded that the German workers and soldiers were not in power, the Bolsheviks would reply that if Russia would just get a *real* socialist government, a German revolution would be sure to follow...)

To see the political impossibility of Kerensky making peace, one just has to look at the moderate socialist parties on which he depended for his support. I'll recycle something I wrote some time ago about the extraordinary tenacity of Russia's moderate socialists on the war:

In December 1917 the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries held its Fourth Congress. The extreme left of the party had already defected to form the Left SR Party but there were still people of quite left-wing views at the Congress. One of them, Kogan-Bernstein, proposed that the forthcoming Constituent Assembly summon the Allies to begin peace talks without delay, and in the event of their refusal or failure to reply within a specified time limit, Russia would have a free hand. The resolution did not say how this freedom would be used, but it did at least imply separate action if not a separate peace. The resolution was voted down 72-52 with 32 abstentions. (Oliver Radkey, *The Sickle under the Hammer: the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule*, p. 192.) And this was after not only the disastrous summer offensive but the October insurrection! Yet *even then*, only one-third of the mainstream SRs were willing to demand tangible progress toward peace, even at the cost of breaking with the Allies. So how likely were they (or their similarly-minded Menshevik comrades) to do so several months earlier?

If there was anyone who just might have filled this role, it could have been Victor Chernov, leader of the left-center of the SRs, a man who had resigned from the PG protesting its dilatoriness on the issues of peace and land reform, and a man who was very popular in the Russian village. If only Chernov's faction of the SRs had either gained control of the party or formed their own party; if the Constituent Assembly elections had been held months earlier; if Chernov's backers had won; and if the Assembly had made Chernov Prime Minister of Russia, the country would at least have had a leader of greater legitimacy than Kerensky and perhaps more willing to confront the Allies. Chernov later claimed that while he had opposed a separate peace in 1917 he would have been willing to consider one as a last resort if the struggle for a general settlement had meant the immolation of Russia on the altar of the Allied cause. Unfortunately, Chernov's actual conduct during 1917--including during the Fourth Congress--was marked by constant compromising with the pro-war right-center of his party, and as Radkey remarks "if he could not see signs of immolation in the situation of December, 1917, then he would never see them." (p. 190)
 
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THe Kerensky government is made up of complete incompetents who have no real understanding of Russia. Even if they cut a deal, there is little chance that they would ever get control over the countryside.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Not at all. The Imperial Bureaucrats had kept the country together for 300 years under the Romanovs and the supposedly inept Nicholas lasted 23 years. The incompetent traitors of the Duma couldn't last 23 weeks.
imperial bureaucrats never controlled the countryside more than superficially: the number of imperial bureaucrats in the countryside were in the 10ks, there were over 100 million+ people living there by the late 1800s/early 1900s

the weakness of the tsarist system was precisely that it never had real control over the countryside but rather relied on the squires and landed aristocracy to govern it for them
 
Well, given the whole point is to discuss what would happen rather than plausability, here are my thoughts:

If Russia does indeed try to sue for peace, they could try and take out one side while doing so... the Ottoman Empire. And I don't mean from an offensive standpoint, but from the fact that the Ottomans were also trying to retain order in the Arabian peninsula and I figured that Russia could give up some land, but still try and keep enough of it. If nothing else, they could release some of the lands as sovereign nations to try and make things more difficult for Germany.

Now, I figure the Germans would be happy to get some form of victory out of this though the thing with the Ottomans would be a big discussion point. If nothing else, it could force the Germans to allocate more troops to Arabia to fight the British and other forces there, otherwise, the Ottomans may need to leave. Let's say the Ottomans do decide to do the ceasefire. Besides ending the blockade of Russia, they'd probably force the British to quit arming the Arabian forces. Most likely scenario is the Ottoman and Rishid forces crush the Sauds there and the Ottomans then try and maintain order. The Ottomans may still try and get help from some other allies, such as Darfur and the Dervish in the Arabian front.

This leaves the Western front and the sudden allocation of soldiers along with the peace-talks could provide enough time for the Americans to join the war. However, this is all assuming the Germans would keep wanting to wage war. Russia bowing out earlier along with possibly the Ottomans may cause a chain reaction that would lead to an armistice. Russia's sudden revolution would be a cause of it as it might incentivize the folks at home to where things are needed to be calmed down.

Now, if this would be how the war would end (pretty unlikely given how desperate the folks were, but the chain reaction could provide the spark needed since they fear the sides dropping off could give the other an advantage), it would lead to a war-weary Europe. There might be some gains (the Germans due to get some of East Europe for example and perhaps they'll keave the Belgiums alone in exchange for Kongo), but not much would change from prior to. Though once the Ottomans put down the Arabia uprisings, they could rise to a Great Power status once they discover the oil in the regions of Iraq and Kuwait and others. The Rishids woild most likely be the ones to unite the Arabian peninsula and have access to the oil there. This means no Wahhabism since it was tied quite close to the Sauds. Though Hedjaz would be a mystery. One idea could be is that it becomes the Switzerland of the Middle East while also allowing for any follower of Islam to go to it without having to deal with political problems.

The war ending in a stalemate like this would mean Nazism and communism would not rise into power. Russia would at most be an agarian socialist federation with democratic elective officals. They'd probably want to avoid European affairs for a while and might even get clsoer to the US.

Now, if the Americans do get involved, then Germany becoming Nazi is still low. The war would keep dragging on and by the time the Germans lose, morality would be too low for fascism to rise and blame the leadership. Though this could be the Spartakist uprising could be more powerful and Germany becomes a socialist state.

Though regardless, I still figure the Sino-Japanese war would still happen. Though without the Communists, it'd be Japanese imperialists against Chinese nationalists and other warlords. Granted, i could see other nations, especially the US getting involed once resources are threatened.
 
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