Gautam Mukunda wrote:
>
>> If they did invade Russia to restore the Czarist monarchy, then
>> I agree that it might be there "at the request of the legitimate
>> g*vernment of Russia". But the "White Russians" had the
>> same legitimacy of the Bolsheviks, i.e., none at all.
>>
>> It would be similar to France invading the South of the USA
>> to restore the CSA after the North had re-conquered it :-P
>>
>> Alberto Monteiro
>
>I'm afraid I don't agree with that. The Kerensky Government had been
>recognized by most of the major governments around the world as the
>legitimate government of Russia. This included all of the Allies,
>plus a bunch of neutral powers, IIRC. They were also at least
>ostensibly democratic, which gives them moral, as well as a legal,
>legitimacy. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, were none of these things.
>They had no legal status, and they had no moral status. Note that I
>did say that the White Russians were the legitimate government "to the
>extent that Russia had a legitimate government" - that extent,
>obviously, was not much.
>
All of these doesn't matter, IMHO. It was an internal crisis, and
*both* parties were fighting to grab the power. Any external
nation that intervened would be interfering in an internal
matter of a country, ergo, they would be _invading_.
>The better analogy, I think, would be France
>moving troops to assist the _North_ during the Civil War. In more
>ways than one, in fact. The central reason that the South's claim to
>being a just revolution like the American one is invalid is that the
>South was fighting to defend its right to hold slaves.
>
Oh, I am not a supporter of the South; I am not a supporter
of the North, either.
>At worst you can say that the Allied powers were
>intervening in an anarchic situation on behalf of the Russian faction
>that was probably most likely to provide Russia with a decent
>government (by Russian standards, which, again, isn't saying much).
>
I would say that Alien powers were invading Russia
to guarantee that a faction that was more to their liking
would win. If I were Russian, I would consider this
invasion immoral - of couse, there was no way that
a Russian, in 1919 or so, could predict the Evils of
Communism; and we can't know, now, that a winning Kerensky
wouldn't turn out to be worse than Hitler or Stalin
Alberto Monteiro
