A White victory - a better Russia(and world)?

[cex]

Same famine wouldn't occur. Some other will. Russian Empire suffered from the famines every 10 to 15 years on average. 1932-33 Famine was the largest one but also the last one

Even the 1891-1892 famine, which Orlando Figes credits with grievously weakening the Tsarist state, was far smaller in scale than Stalin's genocides int he 1930s.

Yes, land was privately owned. By a majority of holders having less than 5 hectares of land (even less if you adjust for viability). Russian peasantry was dominated by very small landholders which prevented any possibility of widespread improvement in agricultural practices because subsistence farmers cannot afford 'to upgrade'. They were too busy surviving from harvest to harvest.

So if you remove collectivization then the-revolution tendency of transformation of small peasant land-holders to either hired workforce to kulaks or to predominately unemployed urban dwellers will continue. Bolsheviks arrested this tendency for a bit by distributing the land but it didn't solve the problem, so less than a decade later they had to collectivize the land back.

Hypothetical White government would either have a urban famine because of the demographic shift between urban and rural population was not supported by the increase of agricultural production or they will still have to collectivize the land if under slightly different label of taking the land away from the small landholders to sell it to the large landholders.

Which will have exactly the same general effect. Peasant resistance. Which Whites would have to deal with exactly the same way as Reds did.

The *Russia must need a Stalin* mentality is nonsensical. Enclosures of land, which had been going on for *centuries* before the Tsar even called himself Emperor, did not kill millions in the way that Stalin did through dekulakisation and the Holodomor.

 

[Leonidas]

The French Communist Party wasn't founded until 1920 and the Italian and Czechoslovak ones until 1921, which was after the Comintern's "21 Conditions" actively called for revolutioanry sedition.

Yes, and many parties would obviously have different origins and history, but that doesn't mean all the factors that led to the splits would be irrelevant ITTL.

A stronger Poland at the expense of a weaker Russia would have been a good thing for Eastern Europe overall: Belarus and Ukraine west of the Dnieper would have gone independent. True, any government installed by Pilsudski would have been similar to Skoropadskyi's, but Pislduski would certainly have offered Belarus and Ukraine more national autonomy than Stalin, who was opposed to the creation of the SSRs in the first place.

It isn't a high bar to clear at all for the Whites to murder less people than Stalin.

"Murdering less people than Stalin" might not be a high bar to clear in general, but the White movement was riddled on a fundamental level with antisemitic and Great-Russian chauvinist ideology, so they would have given him a run for his money. The political violence and pogroms of the Russian Civil War would never truly end under such a regime, and if they successfully invade Ukraine and Belarus, they would try to erase the leaders and intelligentsia of those nations to better integrate the "Little Russians."

 

[kham_coc]

Similarly to Mussolini's Italy, the new Russian regime probably could have re-negotiated the debt settlement: considering how the West viewed Mussolini as a counterweight against European Communism, Russia was arguably even more important in ensuring that the Versailles Settlement in Europe was being enforced.

But the new order was inherently antithetical to Russia - they wouldn't be interested in maintaining it, they would be just as interested as Germany in rupturing it.
So the negotiation would be, "we are re-annexing all that's ours" - "What do you mean 14 points? "
No we aren't paying anything.

 

[Deleted member 163405]

The critical factor in Mussolini's rise to power were the factory occupations during Biennio Rosso. Considering that they were inspired word-for-word by the Bolsheviks, obviously the Communists in Italy would have been far more cautious if they saw that such violence only ended in political defeat.

Honestly I kinda disagree with this assessment as it seems kinda like you are misreading the situation. Biennio Rosso would still happen. Many of the factory occupations were led by Anarcho-Syndicalists many of whom would later despise the Bolsheviks anyways. Anarchist organizations would probably be likely to gain even more support with the failure of more vanguardist movements.

 

[Greg Grant]

Even if the Whites win, then some stuff is let loose they cannot ignore or set aside. Not just the Bolshevik Revolution, but the February one happened ITTL. No one will be able to simply wind back the clock. The Civil War, curtailed as it is ITTL has also set loose some demons. I do not agree with the scenario of three generals dividing Russia as warlords, given who these men were. I can see some studiously ignoring the existence of others, for as long as they can, but Wrangel is not The Guy. He's the guy you get when all other guys walked away from the job, or were killed, but even then he is not the guy. Denikin is a bit stronger, but he's also not The Man. Yudenich is lovely in the foothills of the Caucasus, but he's not a Chinese warlord and he does not think like one. And Kolchak in death gained a reverence and a reputation he did not have within his lifetime. Just because you stuck around Chicago during Prohibition did not mean you could make it as Capone.

But back to what does the post-Bolshevik 1920s Russian state looks like, with White generals hanging about. First, everyone has just been taught might makes right. Yezhov, Stalin's other twisted goblin torturer, was a worker in the Putilov factory when the Revolution came, and the first major act he witnessed of said happening was when management were hanged from the factory gates. It taught him a valuable lesson about what state he was helping to bring about. The bleeding remains of the Russian Empire has just went through the agony of at least one year of civil war (1918 scenario), following four years of the Great War. Mass casualties are the new normal. Destruction of 300 years Imperial House, a historical fact. Hostage taking and revenge killings, a management technique. Pogroms, how we let the lads in the South get some anger out of their system. And in the end rule came to the Russian state not via a constitution and lads in three-piece suits with tails and painfully earnest faces but via bayonets, sabers, and the Cossack whip. Before United States came into being, it was a colonial extension of a nation with centuries of parliamentary tradition. Russia just had a dozen years of the Duma, interrupted by the whims of an awkward tsar, a revolution, and an armed uprising. This is not ending with a parliamentary democracy or a constitutional monarchy. You're getting Caesar, Napoleon, or a confused dictatorship by a committee.

Also, the Great War has made an utter idiot out of anyone in a position of any national authority in Russia. All those pro-War voices look like fools. All those talking a short-war, fools again. All those says it will end with a victory, damned fools. Think Italy. Russia is not emerging from the Great War happy and free, it's crawling out from the wreckage, with broken bones, shattered front teeth, and a missing a limb. Monarchism means nothing, for the Tsar had been painted by the brush of failure of the war and the subsequent chaos. Political parties who were running about prior to the Great War and were for the War, mean even less. There is no consensus, only pain and misery. And there is no coherent ideology either. The anti-Bolsheviks won, yes, but anti-Bolshevism is an umbrella term. The rain is gone. Now what? What do these winners of the Russian Civil Wars stand for exactly? The confused reforms of Wrangel? The garbled screeds of Kolchak? Yudenich's mustache? Socialism is a dirty, dirty word, associated with Bolshevism, as are the Social Democrats. But on the right, there is still chaos.

What exactly will the new Caesar offer to the masses and the officer corps? Meandering paean to exceptionalism, nationalist and chauvinism? It may tide over, as would the traditional blaming of the Jews, but then what? The land is sick, the farms are aflame, the land owners are terrified of their peasants, the harvests are meager, the corpses of factory managers hang from their gates, adn the cities are boiling with rage of a revolution suppressed. What can these four fellas with gold braid do exactly? Try to keep a lid? Muddle on? How long until it all collapses once more? Bolshevism offered a dynamic, simple, and easy to grasp ideology to the masses. As did monarchism, but the House of Romanov is destroyed, and even if a senior Romanov is dusted off and presented with a plastered over orb, it will require everyone to squint their eyes really, really hard to pretend all is at once was. Napoleon did not make himself the King of France, recall. He made himself Consul and then Emperor. New titles for new times. The Tsar is not going to cut it. So what will Russia get then, along with the new Caesar? Some sort of proto-fascist Vozhd, perhaps? A dumb new name plastered on aforementioned paean to exceptionalism, nationalist and chauvinism, maybe? But it will not be easy. The Spirit of 1917 is out there. More then a few mansions will go up a fire in the night. More than a few battleships will sink to the bottom. More than a few generals will be found floating face down in the fountains. It will take a long time. Old Bolsheviks, before Stalin rid himself of them, would routinely walk about with revolvers, long after the Russian Civil War. Memories of chaos die hard.

As to the rest of the Europe and the world at large, it depends on when this goes - 1918 vs. 1919 would change a lot, and I see others put out good scenarios on it.

 

[Scorpius72]

In this scenario here's something else that just occurred to me, without the rise of the Bolsheviks and Bolshevism in the former Russian-Empire and hence no communism there'd be no rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

I don't like to quote myself however what about this butterfly effect in this scenario? I suspect we wouldn't see the CCP being formed.

 

[cex]

Yes, and many parties would obviously have different origins and history, but that doesn't mean all the factors that led to the splits would be irrelevant ITTL.

The defeat of Bolshevism would have utterly vindicated the minimalist socialists: see, the fate of the maximalists in Russia tells us that the forces of capital are still too strong. Realistically speaking, violent revolution cannot be achieved yet...

"Murdering less people than Stalin" might not be a high bar to clear in general, but the White movement was riddled on a fundamental level with antisemitic and Great-Russian chauvinist ideology, so they would have given him a run for his money. The political violence and pogroms of the Russian Civil War would never truly end under such a regime, and if they successfully invade Ukraine and Belarus, they would try to erase the leaders and intelligentsia of those nations to better integrate the "Little Russians."

Nonsense. As Richard Pipes wrote, the idea that the Whites could have matched the scale of the Stalinist genocides is absurd at best.

But the new order was inherently antithetical to Russia - they wouldn't be interested in maintaining it, they would be just as interested as Germany in rupturing it.
So the negotiation would be, "we are re-annexing all that's ours" - "What do you mean 14 points? "
No we aren't paying anything.

1. Denikin recognised an independent Poland and Finland
2. The Allies were more than willing to accomodate the anti-14 Points Mussolini after the war, and even renegotiated Italy's debt settlement with him.

Honestly I kinda disagree with this assessment as it seems kinda like you are misreading the situation. Biennio Rosso would still happen. Many of the factory occupations were led by Anarcho-Syndicalists many of whom would later despise the Bolsheviks anyways. Anarchist organizations would probably be likely to gain even more support with the failure of more vanguardist movements.

(3) In any event, while the NSDAP grew dramatically during the 1930's, it did not come out of nowhere. The party did first have to exist in 1919-29 and Hitler become a well-known figure for it to grow in the 1930's. And the early history of the NSDAP simply cannot be separated from the fear of Bolshevism. In fact, anti-Bolshevik emigres from Russia (including Baltic Germans) played a critical role in formulating the NSDAP's ideology linking Jews to Bolshevism. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/groups/scr/kellogg.pdf There are also indirect effects. For example, it is quite likely that without the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler would never have come to power, both because of the publicity he got at his trial, and because the failure of the Putsch convinced him that the NSDAP must seek a "legal" path to power. Now the Putsch was modeled after Mussolini's March on Rome (or a misunderstood version of it). So without Mussolini's success, Hitler's eventual success might have been impossible. And what made Mussolini's success possible was in part his role in opposing the factory occupations that were largely inspired by the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.

 

[cex]

I don't like to quote myself however what about this butterfly effect in this scenario? I suspect we wouldn't see the CCP being formed.

Given that Mao murdered even more people than *Stalin*, obviously the non-existence of the CCP is even better for China.

 

[Deleted member 163405]

You didn’t really address me besides waffling about the Nazi’s

 

[Crazy Boris]

I figure a white Russia would most likely be a run-of-the-mill military dictatorship for the most part. Probably not as bad as the Bolsheviks were, but certainly not a benevolent regime either. I don't think they'd be quite as strong as the Soviets either, at least not for a while. The lack of a USSR makes things going forward harder to predict, in regards of WWII, etc.

 

[CHKeeley]

*snip*

Beautifully put

 

[Scorpius72]

Given that Mao murdered even more people than *Stalin*, obviously the non-existence of the CCP is even better for China.

Good point as without Mao and the CCP being around there'd be no Big Leap Backwards (Which killed about 40-50 million peasants) and the destructive Cultural Revolution (Which did irreparable damage to mainland Chinese society and culture).

 

[kham_coc]

1. Denikin recognised an independent Poland and Finland

sure, the Russian conception on their borders were very much in conflict with Poland and Finland however, and then there is the Baltics and Ukraine.

2. The Allies were more than willing to accomodate the anti-14 Points Mussolini after the war, and even renegotiated Italy's debt settlement with him.

Sure but the situations aren't really comparable - Russia would have been in no position to pay anything, and the very point of paying anything would have been to restart normal economic and diplomatic exchange, something that would have been rendered pointless if that was made imposible by the forcible re-annexation of Russian lands.

 

[cex]

You didn’t really address me besides waffling about the Nazi’s

Assuming that fascism will rise as it did IOTL in a scenario where the Comintern and the prospects of Bolshevism spreading is non-existent is similar to assuming that a Soviet Union *as we know it* will exist without World War I or that Communism will come to Eastern Europe without World War II: it is hardly likely to presume that the political conditions in Central Europe will be exactly identical with such a massive event as the non-existence of the Soviet Union.

 

[cex]

sure, the Russian conception on their borders were very much in conflict with Poland and Finland however, and then there is the Baltics and Ukraine.

Skoropadskyi's and Petliura's regimes were unrecognised outside Germany and Pilsudski's Poland respectively even when the latter was clearly backed by an "Allied" power: Lloyd George and Clemenceau shared Denikin's view of the Ukraine being a "part of Russia". As evident by the Sudetenland, Wilson did not push such matters far.

Sure but the situations aren't really comparable - Russia would have been in no position to pay anything, and the very point of paying anything would have been to restart normal economic and diplomatic exchange, something that would have been rendered pointless if that was made imposible by the forcible re-annexation of Russian lands.

Again, who says it will be Denikin who starts the fighting? The Poles and Petliura conquered Kiev, "the mother of Russian cities" first, not Denikin.

 

[Raferty]

What exactly will the new Caesar offer to the masses and the officer corps? Meandering paean to exceptionalism, nationalist and chauvinism? It may tide over, as would the traditional blaming of the Jews, but then what? The land is sick, the farms are aflame, the land owners are terrified of their peasants, the harvests are meager, the corpses of factory managers hang from their gates, adn the cities are boiling with rage of a revolution suppressed. What can these four fellas with gold braid do exactly? Try to keep a lid? Muddle on? How long until it all collapses once more? Bolshevism offered a dynamic, simple, and easy to grasp ideology to the masses. As did monarchism, but the House of Romanov is destroyed, and even if a senior Romanov is dusted off and presented with a plastered over orb, it will require everyone to squint their eyes really, really hard to pretend all is at once was. Napoleon did not make himself the King of France, recall. He made himself Consul and then Emperor. New titles for new times. The Tsar is not going to cut it. So what will Russia get then, along with the new Caesar? Some sort of proto-fascist Vozhd, perhaps? A dumb new name plastered on aforementioned paean to exceptionalism, nationalist and chauvinism, maybe? But it will not be easy. The Spirit of 1917 is out there. More then a few mansions will go up a fire in the night. More than a few battleships will sink to the bottom. More than a few generals will be found floating face down in the fountains. It will take a long time. Old Bolsheviks, before Stalin rid himself of them, would routinely walk about with revolvers, long after the Russian Civil War. Memories of chaos die hard.

As to the rest of the Europe and the world at large, it depends on when this goes - 1918 vs. 1919 would change a lot, and I see others put out good scenarios on it.

I think proto-fascism is the most promising option in terms of being able to get some kind of mobilization capacity for a modernization project, which would be inevitable (as it was before the war). Remember, there were organizations like the Union of Russian Peoples that formed after 1905 and were forcibly put down by the Tsarist authorities because they were too boisterously political for the authorities taste (a modern example would be something like what the Russian gvt does to people in the orbit of Dugin and other crazies). Other than the SRs, there was no other resonant ideology in peasant Russia that could have worked besides some kind of appeal to Russian tradition but merged with acceptance of new freeholders and a form of mass politics for the industrialization challenge. The land question is a real problem because the core military support of this force would be from junior officers and Cossacks, at least at first, who would look askance at this - so this is dependent on the leader being able to build a fractious coalition.

The themes this gvt would unify on would include anti-Semitism (just about everywhere in Central/Eastern Europe post WW1 saw this, and Russia had quite the tradition of it), a cult of personality for the leader (I would guess Wrangel, or a surviving Kornilov), and perhaps, like in Italy, some kind of symbolic role for a Romanov family member to appease traditionalists, but only if it was a figure who was not very unpopular. They would embark in territorial revanchism basically wherever they could get away with it and not draw in intervention from Britain and France, or Japan, all of which would be thoroughly more powerful in a clash.

Also, it may seem remote as a possibilty, but if the reason the Whites win the war is because Kolchak is victorious and assumes command of the movement, while the southern wing is hemmed into Crimea and the Kuban, and Yudenich goes nowhere, then its possible there would be an attempt to restore the legitimate gvt in name, that being the Provisional Duma. Obviously Kolchak himself was no democrat, he was probably the most reactionary of any of the White leaders, but his base of support would have been very much dependent on the Czechoslovak Legion, various SR affiliated militants in the Ural regions, and cavalry forces from Central Asia. This wouldn't be something he'd do willingly so much as being forced to by coalitional demands.

 

[Seandineen]

Denikin wanted to be a horthy type, A regent for a surviving romanov, or at the very least, for the miltary to assume a Turkish umpire of the democracy role.

 

[Seandineen]

They kinda did it. 1861 declaration abolished serfdom indeed but also lead to creation of a system that was in many respects as bad (if not worse) as the serfdom it supplanted. Because it a thing that is almost always missed when people talk about serfdom abolishment in Russia. It was not done for the peasantry benefit. It was done for the benefit of the Imperial state first and landed nobility second. No one really gave a single fuck about former serfs well-being. In that way it was eerily similar in how slavery abolishment was happening in the contemporary USA.

So what happened when serfdom was abolished? Well, nobility (and the crown) renounced their claim over serfs personal freedom but if freshly liberated serf wanted some land to till on he had to fork up some cash for it. And he was a serf before so barely any serfs had sufficient financial reserves to actually buy a plot of land for their families. And as a landless person you had nowhere to go in 1860s Russia, there was no ongoing bustling industrialization and urbanization yet that was ready to consume millions of working hands and people in charge of serfdom abolishment understood it well enough and they also didn't want to fuck their nobility brethren by robbing them of their free workforce for real. So what they did?

They instituted a land mortage program for liberated peasants. They got a land plot but they will have to pay for years to come for it. So far so good and seemingly fair, yeah? But nah, it was more devious in nature because these loans and mortage payments weren't tied to individual peasant or even a peasant family. It was tied to a peasant collective, a commune (so inhabitants of a single village or settlement in most cases) who had to divide the payment and the received land among themselves.

And as the result serfdom system was mostly retained in all practical respects. Peasants still had to work for the nobility (either by paying them directly or by working for them still to get the pay for the mortage if they had no other means to procure money) and still were mostly unable to leave because their debt was collective and because of that it was disadvantageous for the commune to loose members as their collective payment would have to be shared among fewer working people. So the only real way to get out was to pay up your whole share of mortage to the commune in one go (and where a peasant was supposed to get that kind of money as a one time payment?). And it was a significant sum of money. A lot of peasant families in Russia were still paying for their liberation by the time World War One happened, so 50 years after the fact.

There were attempts to offer peasants lines of credit to speed up this process over the years. Imperial family even established a special bank - Peasant bank - for that purpose. But the funniest thing about it was that like 4/5 of Peasant bank financial reserves were given out as credits to the nobility. So most of that money never ever reached peasantry.

So yeah, you can say that Tsardom abolished serfdom. But honestly it did not.

So the land mortgage, system, was a Russian version of sharecropping, semi enslavement through debt.

 

[Raferty]

So the land mortgage, system, was a Russian version of sharecropping, semi enslavement through debt.

Sharecropping as a system of agriculture was not necessarily doomed to failure - the system of leasing was not altogether that different from what modern high yield farming operations look like, which turn over a lot more in inventory and revenue, in terms of who owns and works the land itself, and what the arrangements of crop distribution are.

Rather, it failed at least in the United States because it was completely unable to deal with setbacks due to the insecurity of tenure and lack of easy access to farming equipment that would have put more pressure on a more equal bargaining relationship - and especially in the American South, basically the entirety of the 1860s-1930s was a giant setback in terms of seasonal epidemics that ravaged the most productive areas of agriculture, crop blights, significant periods of drought, the rise of endemic diseases like pellagra, significant rises in crime and vigilantism, lack of capital investment, freight rate discrimination from the federal government (which lasted well into the 1950s), and mostly uncompetitive and limited state political systems.

The Russian system was different in that other than in a few cities, there was not really much of an ongoing industrial growth period that would have diverted surplus agricultural labor, and legally speaking the population was far more restricted in terms of what they could do with the land they had access to and to what degree they could benefit from improvements to it. The population was frankly much poorer in material terms than the typical sharecropper in the US, which is saying something as sharecroppers were not wealthy at all, some of the poorest people in the US, but they were not generally speaking on the edge of famine, and the farming tools they used were far superior, as was their access to consumer products, and had significantly more property rights, which sometimes were even asserted successfully, even if not anywhere to the degree which they were legally entitled.

 

[Seandineen]

Did FInland and Poland have different outcomes as Russian protectorates?