Easy--just have Kaiser Bill listen to Ludendorff instead of to the German Foreign Office in the summer of 1918 and thus try to overthrow the Bolsheviks then. Even if they don't succeed, this would bring the Bolsheviks back into the war on the side of the Entente.
I'm reading Adam Tooze's Deluge, which is a fascinating look at Europe in the interwar period, as well as the least years of WW1, and he has an interesting discussion of the Russian Civil War. In a June memo prepared for Ludendorff's staff, "The Aims of German Policy," Ludendroff proposed...
www.alternatehistory.com
A post from David T on AH.com:
I don't know if that link actually still works, though. You can try and see for yourself.
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 June, July, August the German military in Russia still should have the capability to advance to, and take Petrograd and Moscow by blasting away any opposing Russian armies. 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? Would there temporarily be a Red-White-Green 'United Front'
People rightly say that for the Germans, occupying, administering, and feeding Petrograd's civilian populace would be a logistical and administrative nightmare. Let alone occupying Moscow beyond that. One could say that means the German Army 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 introducing 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?
