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AHC: Bolshevik Russians end up as co-belligerents of the Entente, fighting the Germans again

@Death's Companion, @BBadolato, @Nyvis, @Japhy and anyone else who thinks the Bolsheviks cannot survive any more fighting with the Germans:

Are you thinking strictly in terms of the Bolesheviks rejecting or of trying to delay the Brest-Litovsk peace in March 1918? And then anticipating the Germans can keep pushing then, take Petrograd, the Bolsheviks face desertions and crumbling, the Germans can take Moscow, sooner or later somebody Russian makes a deal with the Germans and the Bolsheviks don't have anybody willing to fight for them . And if they try the Germans could overpower and take anything in European Russia for a few months (or no more than a month as @Japhy said)?

Or have you considered other potential scenarios?

What if there *is* a Brest-Litovsk peace in March for example. But continued peace requires two consenting parties. A fight only requires one side to get belligerent.
So what if the fighting starts again in summer 1918, not because the Bolsheviks chose it, but because the Germans just decided to turn against the Bolsheviks in June, July or August 1918? Then the Bolsheviks don't have a choice. They've also had a little time to start pulling together a Red Army.

Faeelin said:
In a June memo prepared for Ludendorff's staff, "The Aims of German Policy," Ludendroff proposed intervening in the Russian Civil War to create a conservative Russian State who would "not only pose[] no danger to Germany's political future," but would be "politically, militarily, and economically dependent on Germany."

Despite the crisis facing Germany in the summer and fall of 1918, Ludendorff continued to fantasize about intervening in Russia. In August, the Russian government asked the Germans to intervene to stabilize the Murmansk front, where the British were creating an anti-Soviet base. Ludendorff leapt to intervene, but he proposed occupying Petrogad and Ronstadt, which would require a mere six divisions. This would form the basis for a new, revitalized conservative regime under German "supervision."
Click to expand...

If Ludendorff gets his way and launches off an anti-Bolshevik offensive starting in August 1918, I imagine the German army would still be tactically superior to any Bolshevik opposition. But the Germans are really, really sucking wind on the western front and the home front by this time.. The Germans are also running out of time. They only have all of August, September, October, and November 1 through 11 to keep fighting. Is that sufficient time for them to defeat or scatter all Red Army formations, occupy all Bolshevik held territories or cities, and arrest/execute the critical mass of Bolshevik cadre and supporters?

If the Germans do this kind of attack, how does the Bolshevik leadership, Red Army rank and file, and populace of the the Bolshevik controlled zone react? Stand-up fighting, Urban barricading, rural partisaning, orderly-retreating/Long-Marching, deserting, scattering, surrendering, turning coat - (if so- irrevocably, or just waiting for the chance to turn coat again?).

How do the Allies react? How do the various White factions react, with two forces they claim to hate about equally, fighting each other?
 
raharris1973 said:
Or have you considered other potential scenarios?
Click to expand...

Yes.

There is no way short of creating an entirely different revolution where you can have an army capable of even standing up to the Germans. They couldn't even beat German proxies until quite a bit into the Civil War.
 
And on the German side, the desire to declare Russia beaten and shift focus west was pretty strong. So if they get a peace there's no way they'd turn the war back to a two fronts one.
 
How hard or easy is it for the Germans to find White Allies in Russia? Among non-Russian ethnicities, like the Finns, it should be pretty easy. What about among ethnic Russians? I suspect many Russian officers and people will put class interests and anti-Bolshevik, anti-peasant vengefulness above ethno-national patriotism and collaborate with the Germans. Others will have a hard time doing that and hold their nose and work with or under the Bolsheviks to resist the Germans, or resist the Germans independently.

But as everybody was saying, war-weariness is real. The Bolsheviks have a serious problem and erode one of their main achievements and promises by getting back into war again. It hurts them with their most natural supporters and the people they need, the soldiers Soviets and Red Army. [Although how concentrated were these guys anymore and how dispersed were they back to home villages trying to claim land in the division of estates?]. Being resistant to the Germans helps the Bolsheviks some with people who are *not* their natural allies, leaders/intellectuals of other Socialist parties, bourgeois and officers professing patriotism, the Allied powers who were all offended by Brest-Litovsk and its humiliating cessions. But the everyday people needed to fight the war are less impressed.

The Bolshevik Central Committee has to figure out how to manage that, while the Germans need to figure out what it wants to get out of the use of military force in the east, and its cost-benefit in terms of grain collection, beyond simply wrecking any force that stands up to oppose the German forces.

In May-June the German military still should have the capability to advance to, and take Petrograd and Moscow by blasting away any opposing armies. But it can't administer or feed the populations. It could have that capability, compared to the Bolsheviks, possibly as late as August of September. Would advancing Germans just run over all Bolshevik territories until they encountered Allied backed White territories to the east, or would retreating Red Army forces themselves be able to shove opposing White and Green and Black forces out of their way to make room for themselves?

One could say that means it cannot seize those cities, but that is not strictly true. The Germans can seize the cities, refuse to feed them seize food and shelter for themselves, and deal with people's unrest and rioting that affects their forces by killing civilian populations or chasing them away from German cantonments on pain of death - thereby introduce WWII-level mass genocidal atrocities in 1918. It wouldn't be because of a premeditated Generalplan Ost, it would just be because surliness about being dominant over terrain, and a ruthless approach to managing scarcity.

Back to the Bolsheviks' problems - I imagine the Bolsheviks will hope to keep their government intact, even if it has to retreat, and keep a loyal armed force going, hardly ever risking large shares of it in pitched battle, and it would try to manipulate the situation to derive maximum military labor against the Germans from others like the Czech Legion and intervening allies. That is going to leave the resistance to the Germans very fragmented and inefficient and sub-optimal.

OK- say it all breaks in desertions, the Germans, being the strongest force at least through the summer of 1918 months coerce the people who want to live to be their mercenaries and camp followers and puppets, and to all public appearances, it looks like the Bolshevik government has disappeared from European Russia. Ex-Red Army forces have scattered and are just doing what it takes to survive.

Under these circumstances, how thoroughly are the Germans and any Russian hirelings going to be able to comb the Russian countryside to arrest and execute the Bolshevik leaders, and any other leaders of any stripe of anti-German resistance? How effective a puppet administration will the Germans set up in occupied European Russia? What parts will the Allies be able to hold against the Germans? Given all the doubts we should have about German logistical, and thus administrative capacity and care, as we move from May to June to July on through November 1918, what will things look like then? It would probably be an environment of mass death, so that in itself should kill off many Bolshevik leaders and supporters (and other anti-German resisters), but would Bolshevik leaders survival chances really be below average for Russian urban dwellers?

The Germans will lose eventually. Do the the Allies just send a General MacArthur-like figure to issue orders to the German-occupiers to hand over the strings to the Russian puppet government, and assume control themselves? Or does Russia break down into a military-politcal free-for-all once more?

If the latter, will former puppets of the Germans be particularly liked? If living, what's to stop Bolshevik leaders from resurfacing and competing against other Russians for political power, successfully, against other factions who all seemed politically inept by comparison. Why should we assume reactionary warlords or old-style strongmen would have a particular advantage? Are rightists more durable and evergreen while left movements burn themselves out more?
 
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