WI - Tukhachevsky joins White Army?

What if Mikhail Tukhachevsky had joined the Whites upon escaping back to Russia in 1917? What effects could this have on the Russian Civil War and Russia in general?
 

RousseauX

Donor
What if Mikhail Tukhachevsky had joined the Whites upon escaping back to Russia in 1917? What effects could this have on the Russian Civil War and Russia in general?
he would have being a junior officer somewhere, either killed or forced into exile when the whites lose.
 
Would the Bolsheviks still have won without Tukhachevsky?

Was Tukhachevsky so vital that Bolsheviks would had lost without him? I think that more fatal thing for Whites was that they weren't very popular and they couldn't agree with many things and weren't unified army.
 
No offense to Tukhachevsky, but one of the stranger side effects of people unjustly killed by bloodthirsty tyrants is that they tend to become a bit mythologized, once it is safe to do so. Especially in Russian history, which has a tendency to kill lots and lots of people for terrible reasons and then the survivors feel a bit awkward about it a couple of generations later as they try to brush of the libel and rehab. Thus Tukhachevsky gets a posthumous bump on the strategic stats. I am not saying he was a bad general, I'm just saying he wasn't the second coming of Napoleon.

The Whites had quite a few decent generals on their roster, but the idea most likely to energize them: a monarchical unified Russia with pre-War borders was not the sort of thing to excite many folks, so you had awkward nonsense. The Whites also had a tendency to piss off their natural anti-Bolshevik allies by doing silly things, but that's hindsight.

To answer the original question: not much would change, in the Civil War. Trotsky is still there and he'd get things done.

But, without Tukhachevsky... well, a different commander might have done things different at the Battle of Warsaw come 1920, but those timelines have already been well documented on this site, to the best of my knowledge.
 
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