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WI: No Kerensky Offensive.

Creekmench

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The Kerensky Offensive was supposed to be a morale booster for Provisional Government, but it fell apart at the seams to a German counter-offensive which led to the July Days, the Kornilov Affair, and finally the October Revolution later that year, but what if Russia stayed on the defensive as long as possible. While the chain of events leading to Lenin is disrupted I doubt the Government will last until 1919. I'm not saying that the Bolsheviks are inevitable, but I doubt the nascent Russian Republic can build liberal democracy in this environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerensky_Offensive
 
Russia was losing the war badly even before the offensive, and Germany was going to force their hand. It's going to be a lot less bloody and give them a better fighting chance, but can they really last until the Germans break in the west?

The main impediment remain Kerensky. The best hope Russia has is the right SR and Mensheviks giving up a bit on their hard stageist stance and support for a bourgeois government no one wanted in favour of a socialist unity one. There was quite a call for it within the party ranks. If they can offer that before they bleed support to the Bolsheviks and negotiate a better peace due to the lack of offensive, they would be doing pretty decently. You still have to resolve tension between the SR and Menshevik party heads who will want a parliamentary republic, and the soviets who have they own model. And unlike Weimar, I'm not sure the parliamentary forces will emerge victorious.

Of course, this really depends on how you prevent the offensive and if Kerensky try to remain in power.
 
Russia was losing the war badly even before the offensive, and Germany was going to force their hand. It's going to be a lot less bloody and give them a better fighting chance, but can they really last until the Germans break in the west?

The main impediment remain Kerensky. The best hope Russia has is the right SR and Mensheviks giving up a bit on their hard stageist stance and support for a bourgeois government no one wanted in favour of a socialist unity one. There was quite a call for it within the party ranks. If they can offer that before they bleed support to the Bolsheviks and negotiate a better peace due to the lack of offensive, they would be doing pretty decently. You still have to resolve tension between the SR and Menshevik party heads who will want a parliamentary republic, and the soviets who have they own model. And unlike Weimar, I'm not sure the parliamentary forces will emerge victorious.

Of course, this really depends on how you prevent the offensive and if Kerensky try to remain in power.

No offensive was necessary. The Germans were not planning one of their own and were already transfering troops to the west. The Russians could have held the line.
 
I never implied it was necessary, it was a stupid move. But Russia was in a very bad state even before the offensive.

Yes, but I do think the Russians could have held the line until the end of the war. Many soldiers were willing to fight to defend their positions but not to launch offensives.
 
The Kerensky offensive had some early successes due to fighting AH, which was even more spent than Russia, but collapsed once faced with German troops who still had a fight in them. I don't think they could dig in after fighting AH, because by then they were really spent, and their logistic was flaming garbage.
 
So, the problem here seems to be Kerensky thinks he needs a big victory to bolster the government (and he's likely right about this) and Russia is incapable of having one at this point. A defensive plan needs someone to overrule Kerensky and will still probably end with a Bolshevik revolt unless it's delayed until American troops shows up - and I'd assume would have to show up in the East as well.
 
So, the problem here seems to be Kerensky thinks he needs a big victory to bolster the government (and he's likely right about this) and Russia is incapable of having one at this point. A defensive plan needs someone to overrule Kerensky and will still probably end with a Bolshevik revolt unless it's delayed until American troops shows up - and I'd assume would have to show up in the East as well.

Well, the most likely alternative to Kerensky is a socialist unity government, something the Bolsheviks did in fact call for at the beginning. It also echoes Weimar in that the far left did call from the same and only turned hard against the SPD when they decided to go in coalition with the bourgeois democratic parties. In Weimar, there was no electoral majority for it so it was quite natural for a parliamentary leaning SPD leadership to go that way despite their base being more ambivalent or outright supportive of a full socialist government. But in Russia? There hasn't been elections, and if they were, the overtly bourgeois parties would get utterly destroyed, as they were during the constituent assembly.

A socialist unity government seeking peace on its terms (easier with no disastrous offensive and German push) and doing the land reform it promised as well as working on a constituent assembly would blunt the radicalization for a while. There's still a lot of elements on the right of these parties who will insist on including the bourgeoisie in the constituent assembly despite its anemic numbers, and that's still likely to create a lot of tensions especially once it becomes obvious the leadership does want to use the constitutional assembly as an outright parliament to displace the soviets. Depending on how the assembly is organized, you may have a situation with the pro/anti soviets lines among the socialists are explicit, which could lead to some form of democratic resolution, or like OTL, an awkward one where the pro soviets part of the SR are excluded due to the leadership retaining control of the party lists.
 
I guess this is possible. Though to get a non micromanager, you basically need to oust Kerensky anyway.

A socialist-ish coalition that limps along until Versailles to make Russia the winners would be an interesting circumstance to explore. Suddenly, they would be the ones getting reparations to develop the industry they're lacking.

One problem is that Kerensky was pretty popular before the failed offensive.
 
Who would be the leading contender to be in charge instead of Kerensky? I've always struggled to understand how he took a leading role when there were better candidates available.
 
So, the problem here seems to be Kerensky thinks he needs a big victory to bolster the government (and he's likely right about this) and Russia is incapable of having one at this point. A defensive plan needs someone to overrule Kerensky and will still probably end with a Bolshevik revolt unless it's delayed until American troops shows up - and I'd assume would have to show up in the East as well.

Maybe have Brusilov convince Kerensky that because of General Order No.1 that an offensive is impossible?
 
Also @David Flin the Russians assumed the Germans were on borrowed time OTL. It led to one of the most one sided treaties in history when their time marking armies got wiped out by a foe that didn't know it was supposed to lose the war due to the inevitable march of history. The waiting out the Germans plan was most popular amongst the people who opposed the offensive altogether.


It seems like it requires a Russian government with either enough popular support to prolong an unpopular war and fight limited unimpressive actions that will still come with a high cost in blood and treasure when its sole justification for existence was to end the war. Or a Russian government that has already collapsed to the socialists who believed that either peace was the overriding goal that needed to be achieved or that the Germans would just fall into socialist revolution themselves in a few months if left alone so no need for more worker blood to be shed.


I think with that attitude at the top and the somewhat shaky morale in the military (elements of which had just mutinied and toppled a government after all and other elements of which were viewed with deep suspicion by the new authorities) meaning the fear would be that settling into limited goals may well evolve into settling into achieving nothing and instead planning a coup. A level headed and limited offensive followed by defensive action seems to appeal to no one and the Western Allies wanted pressure relieved and the provisional government wanted their money and support so its going to want something showy.


I think basically the war being politics by other means issue comes into play. What makes military sense in the context of World War I doesn't really line up with what makes political sense for anyone in charge of Russia in late World War One, and those unlucky persons has to know if they make the wrong choice their days are numbered. Would you settle on a half measure if you thought only a major success would save your neck?
 
Although on the Western Front, the disaster and unsustainable losses were (a) predominantly in the first half of the war and (b) accompanied by unsustainable losses inflicted on the German forces during the German counter-attacks.

For example, both Britain and Germany sustained the best part of 500,000 casualties during the Somme; at around 250,000 each at Passchendaele, and so on.


I think that post war analysis showed that every army suffered most of its losses not taking ground but trying to hold it or take it back because both involved throwing men into the guns whilst your own are by necessity out of position. Those counter attacks often came at a horrific cost but just as often succeeded in blunting a potential breakthrough and inflicting heavy losses on the former attackers. The difference seeming to entirely coming down to luck of the draw over whose artillery was in the right spot at the right time.


I agree the Germans would be better off cutting their losses and focusing on more refined methods but they thought that offense was the best defence and it worked often and well enough and the problems were obvious enough that they figured they just had to get it right rather than drop the idea.


They had the same attitude in World War 2 and again it seemed to work well enough when it worked. It just fell flat when the enemy always has enough men and material to suck up losses and wear down your forces. But that's a strategic problem of fighting the entire world at once rather than the tactical one of counter attacks being a great way to wreck an enemy offensive. And the Germans always went tactical rather than strategic.
 
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(And snip most of a perfectly sensible analysis).

To be fair, the Germans were on borrowed time. The Turnip Winter, the likelihood that winter 1918 would be worse, starvation rampant in the German cities - Germany was on borrowed time.

The only problem was that so was Russia, and in the race to collapse first ...

The mirroring works even better when you consider a year later the Germans knew more or less they were screwed and should make peace whilst they still had armies in the field but the idea of instead using those armies on a long shot masterstoke to win the war was far more appealing.



Its almost like autocratic systems with powerful military run by small but arrogant and militant elites used to getting their own way in life have similar shortfalls when it comes to making tough choices in similar situations.


The Germans knew all they needed to know to deduce they were going to lose the war by 1916. Instead of doing something about that fact they focussed on tinkering with tactics and waiting for things to get better. You can tie a lot of their shortfalls in World War One with knowing that whether or not something worked it had to work.
 
I must admit, the strategic genius that came up with: "Let's fight the entire fucking world at once" in WWI learned its lesson in time for WWII - oh.

Hey this time he made sure to have a more competent ally with a modern army and a united population who really wanted to fig...I can't do it.
 
Horrible Histories summed up the world wars as machines going to war and men getting in the way. Its simple and obviously deeply flawed but has a lot of truth in it I think but applies to me at least a lot more to the societies involved than the armies.


The machinery of a modern twentieth century total war went to it and the societies still stuck in various points of the nineteenth century were shaken to pieces by the vibrations, even the winners would barely be recognizable. I think the powers that be were fundementally inadequate to dealing with the situation brought on by a century of diplomacy and massive strides in technology and tactics.


Russia, Turkey, Germany, A-H were fundementally not sound enough as states to handle the pressure placed on them. France simply didn't have enough Frenchmen to take the brunt of the war on home terf. Britain simply did not have enough of an aristocracy to get half of it slaughtered and put a population through hell and then just expect things to keep ticking away as if people would accept not being able to vote or not expecting the government to do anything about their problems nor had the finances to keep its Empire afterwards. All these countries should have been able to see all that in black white, that none of them were much interested in avoiding it says something deeply unpleasant about their governments.
 
Who would be the leading contender to be in charge instead of Kerensky? I've always struggled to understand how he took a leading role when there were better candidates available.

I think Chernov is a good bet if Kerensky is ousted from the left. He was the most influential figure in the right SR, who would still be the party of the left at the time, at least outside the small urban proletariat.
 
Russia was losing the war badly even before the offensive, and Germany was going to force their hand. It's going to be a lot less bloody and give them a better fighting chance, but can they really last until the Germans break in the west?
Russia was not losing the war badly before the Kerensky Offensive. The front lines in 1917 remained roughly where they were in late 1915, and while Russia no longer controlled Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, it still controlled most of Belarus and Ukraine as well as the Russian interior.
 
Russia was not losing the war badly before the Kerensky Offensive. The front lines in 1917 remained roughly where they were in late 1915, and while Russia no longer controlled Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, it still controlled most of Belarus and Ukraine as well as the Russian interior.

That's ignoring the situation at home entirely though.
 
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