WI Russian Prisoners of War Repatriated to White-Held Territory

One of the arguments made by those who claim that the Western Allies did not do enough to help the Whites during the Russian Civil War is that Russian prisoners of war held by the Germans should after the Armistice have been repatriated to areas under White control. Ilya Somin makes this argument in his *Stillborn Crusade*, p. 53 https://books.google.com/books?id=X7ZHIVhazHUC&pg=PA53 quoting Churchill to the effect that 'Whereas we could have made out of these an army of loyal men who would have been available to sustain the defence of Archangel and Murmansk or to aid General Denikin and Kolchak, we are now I presume simply sending a reinforcement of 500,000 trained men to join the armies of Lenin and Trotsky. This appears to me to be one of the capital blunders in the history of the world.'"

Richard Pipes, while not as optmistic about the Whites' chances as Somin, writes in *Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime* "The Allies had in Germany several million Russian prisoners of war whom they could have sent to Denikin, Iudenich, and Kolchak. In fact, they left their fate in the hands of the Germans, who exchanged them for their own war prisoners in Russia. A few took part in anti-Red operations in the Baltic; more sought refuge in Western Europe; but the majority were repatriated." https://books.google.com/books?id=pfNEY931UzYC&pg=PA71

For a contrary view, see Carl J. Richard, *When the United States Invaded Russia: Woodrow Wilson's Siberian Disaster,* p. 109:

"Foch also proposed repatriating the 1.2 million Russian prisoners of war in Germany to Denikin's territory. Foch oddly assumed that Russian soldiers who had surrendered to the Germans would wish to fight for the Whites rather than make trouble for them, forgetting that one of the principal causes of the Bolshevik Revolution was large-scale desertion and mutiny by common soldiers, many of whom had then joined the revolutionaries.." https://books.google.com/books?id=Hsxca9P8D6IC&pg=PA109

Any thoughts? BTW, the actual policy followed by the Allies was typical of their vacillation on the Russian question. In January when Foch put forth his proposal to repatriate the prisoners to White territory, the Allies rejected it but "instead...decreed that these unfortunate souls, homesick, destitute, and of questionable military value, should not be repatriated at all, in order to prevent their falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks." John M. Thompson, *Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace,* https://books.google.com/books?id=ukfWCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA328 It was only some months later, probably too late to change the outcome of the Civil War, that they decided to let the Germans themselves decide on repatriation...
 
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From what I remember reading somewhere, whilst the American and Russian Red Cross organisations were trying to get food supplies to the Russian prisoners (of which around 250,000 were considered badly wounded or suffering from malnutrition), the US State Department rather cynically decided to postpone any relief efforts in case the Germans used the supplies sent as a means of overcoming the blockade and by the time they had negotiated something the revolution happened which prevented the deal going ahead. The Russian prisoners weren't highly regarded amongst the allies, a large minority of them had willingly given themselves up to the Germans after they had been promised cash rewards in exchange for their rifles, and likely the majority would have deserted once more either to join the bolsheviks or to just try and reach home.

The Russians struggled even more than the Germans under a blockade to feed their prisoners properly and so, perhaps, one thing that might have a greater effect in the case of Russian prisoners being sent back without any sort of equivalent exchange would have been the extra mouths to feed that could have exacerbated the famines (or, a bit more optimistically, the extra manpower might have assisted in the collection and distribution of the harvest as both sides basically used prisoners of war as cheap labour). Dunno though, I don't really see the allies gaining much traction except perhaps in the form of various nationalists who perhaps would have feuded just as much with the Russian Whites as they would have the Reds. It'd be interesting to know the dispositions of the prisoners: nationality, class origin, political preferences and such.
 
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