The leadership of the Whites were
not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”.
Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.
All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
