Also based on David Tenner and Ilya Somin, and never much explored.
The course of action described here would have been somewhat analgous to US attempts to tip the scales of the post world war two situation in favor of the nationalists against the communists in China.
The choices before the Allies in 1919 with respect to Russia are often
reduced to (a) not backing the Whites at all, (b) giving the Whites the
half-hearted assistance given in OTL, and (c) all-out intervention with
large numbers of Allied troops. However, Ilya Somin (*Stillborn Crusade:
The Tragic Failure of Western Intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-
1920*) has argued that there were many ways the Allies could have helped
the Whites to win without sending any more Allied troops to Russia (though
Somin does think sending some Allied volunteers to help the Whites was both
politically possible and desirable):
(1) In April 1919 the Allies decided to repatriate those Russian prisoners
of war captured before the February Revolution and still held in Germany to
Bolshevik-held Russia, instead of sending them to the Whites, as Churchill
and Foch had advocated. Soon after he heard of this decision, Churchill
wrote a memorandum to top British military oficials expressing his fears:
"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."
Somin (p. 53) comments that
"even given the fact that the Whites would probably not have been able to
fully integrate so large a force into their armies, their potential
significance was surely great. To give some idea of its possible
magnitude, it is worth pointing out that, at the height of its strength in
October 1919, Denikin's Armed Forces of Southern Russia could commit just
111,000 troops to its penultimate effort to take Moscow, while the
Bolsheviks opposed it with some 186,000. On both sides, particularly that
of the Reds, most of the troops were poorly trained. The Reds also
suffered from a shortage of reliable, trained officers. In these
circumstances, given that Denikin almost captured Moscow even without them,
it is fair to suggest that the outcome of thre Russian Civil War might well
have been different if even one-tenth of the '500,000 trained men'
Churchill referred to had been incorporated into Denikin's army, the White
force to which they were geogrpahically closest and the one with the best
chance of dealing the Bolsheviks a decisive defeat."
(2) Churchill also pointed out (on March 14) that the precipitous Allied
decision to order the Germans to "withdraw from the Ukraine without any
provision being made to stop the Bolshevik advance, has enabled large
portions of this rich territory full of new supplies of food to be
overrun." This was to make Denikin's later effort to capture Moscow from
the south far more difficult than it otherwise would have been--he had to
fight his way through the Ukraine first instead of having it handed it over
to him by the Allies or by German troops, as Churchill would have wanted.
(3) In the spring of 1919 Britain and the other Allies rejected offers from
several nations to send troops to help the Whites if the former were
willing to equip the necessary troops. For example, Prince Alexander of
Serbia offered to send 30,000 men to help Denikin, if the Allies provided
the necessary equipment and transportation; Bulgaria made a similar offer.
Both were turned down. Also, despite requests from the White
representatives in Paris, the Allies failed to put sufficient pressure on
Romania to release the huge quantities of Russian-owned supplies stored
there--enough to equip as many as forty-three divisions, by some estimates.
(4) Finally, there was the failure to encourage Mannerheim and Pilsudski to
help defeat the Bolsheviks. Somin argues that despite White unwilingness
to rescue Finland's de jure independence, Finland might well have entered
the war in earnest anyway, had it gotten suitable guarantees and military
support from the Allies. Instead, Curzon privately discouraged the Finns
from taking Petrograd. Even Pilsudski, who was deeply suspicious of the
Whites, nevertheless expressed a willingness to fight the Reds in exchange
for Allied assistance. (Pilsudski did of course fight the Reds at various
times but not during the crucial weeks in the autumn of 1919 when it looked
like the Whites were on the verge of victory.)
Somin clearly regards a White victory as better than (or at least a lesser
evil than) the victory of the Bolsheviks. There is certainly a good case
for this, provided that a White victory would result in nothing worse than
what one might call an "ordinary" right-wing authoritarian regime, one not
too dissimilar to Russia under the last few tsars.* I do think there is a
possibility he neglects--that such a regime, instead of being liberalized
over time, as he suggests, might give way (in case of a future depression
or war) to something much worse. ("Why have we, the Russian people been
denied the fruits of our great victory over the Bolsheviks? You know who
is to blame--read the Protocols!") In any event, whether one regards a
White victory as desirable or not, it is hard to justify the policy the
Allies actually followed--helping the Whites, but not enough to enable them
to prevail. (Although there is a case even for this--Churchill argued that
Allied aid to the Whites tied up the Bolsheviks long enough to enable the
new eastern European countries to gain the needed strength to defend
themselves against Soviet Russia.)
*Somin even suggests an outright democratic regime might have been
possible, that Denikin and Kolchak were sincere in wanting a popularly
elected Constituent Assembly to determine the future of Russia, and that,
assisted by Western pressure, they might have prevailed on their
reactionary colleagues to accept this.
--