Here's the first few parts of a much longer timeline that I've been working on for the past few months (while juggling my college work). Right now its incomplete, but will eventually be finished. Updates, due my heavy work load at school, will be forthcoming and probably won't be timely so be patient.
Otherwise, read, enjoy, and comment!
BTW, I've rewritten the entire thing as to recreate a realistic German Civil War and Soviet power struggle.
I'm looking forward to your feedback.
Beneath The Crimson Banner: An Alternate History Timeline
Warsaw’s fall
“The decision by Colonel Kamenev to move the bulk of the Southwestern Army Group northwards towards Brest, instead of continuing the march on Lvov, allowed the main Western Army Group under Tukhachevsky to overwhelm the Polish defenders of Warsaw and to seize the capital. The fall of Warsaw meant the spreading of Soviet power to Poland, with the ensuing Peace of Minsk held in 1921 forging a pro-Soviet puppet regime grouped around the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee and, later, the Polish Communist Workers’ Party. Polish society was turned upside down as land was collectivized and as factories were nationalized by decree. The Polish army was halved, with any extra arms going to a newly-formed Polish Red Guard.”
“The national question assumed undue importance in a vanquished and Sovietized Poland, a nation which was now part of the much larger Soviet state encompassing most of the former Russian Empire. Stalin, as People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs, used Soviet Ukraine as a model for how best to incorporate Poland into the federal structure as a new socialist republic. Poland’s overall size was greatly reduced, all territory past the Curzon Line being absorbed into Soviet Russia. The Poles lost Upper Silesia and the wide swath of territory making up the Polish Corridor to the Germans, with the remaining central most portions of the humiliated country ending up in the Polish Soviet Socialist Republic.”
“Despite the clamor by leading Bolsheviks to send the victorious Red Army into Germany, Lenin and his party shied away from a full-scale invasion. Trotsky knew as well as Lenin that the Red Army wasn’t strong enough to fight, let alone conquer, Germany. For the time being, the Red Army was held back and was used to strengthen Soviet rule in Poland. The rapid conquest of the proud Polish nation had brought the Red Army’s logistics to a breaking point. It could go no further.”
-Excerpted from Robert Keller’s The Bolsheviks and Civil War: A History of the Russian Civil War
The German October Revolution’s First Steps
At the present moment, our German comrades stand at a crossroads. The Russian Communist Party must- Lenin stopped writing, setting the pen back onto his desk. He stood up and placed two hands onto the surface of the desk, sighing. “I’m getting too old for this.” He muttered. Honestly, he was only fifty-two. Still, he felt older by a decade. The years of leading first Russia, then that ungainly amalgam of nations making up the Soviet Union, had been strenuous. Grumbling, he collapsed back down into his desk chair and started once again to write.
As he wrote neatly, slowly, he thought of nothing but Germany. To think, it had only been a few years since he had arrived in a sealed train at the Finland Station to take lead of Russia’s revolution. The irony was never more prevalent now, now that the German Empire was no more and revolution was knocking at the nation’s door. Empires, he thought, die. The year 1923 had not been kind to the Germans. The county was in shambles, wracked by rapid inflation and foreign meddling. The Treaty of Versailles was indeed a slave treaty, a treaty forced on a defeated nation by the victors. Yet Germany now stood at a turning point, as a society ripe for revolution. The former imperialist state could join the socialist brotherhood of nations embodied in the USSR. If only, figured Lenin, the German communists could keep up the nationwide insurrection’s momentum, if only. He sighed once again as he finished his writing, just as he put the final punctuation mark onto the paper.
He placed the writings off to one side before rising back up from his desk and prepared to open the door to his office and exit through it. He walked over to the door, but didn’t open it. He placed a thin hand over his chest. His heart was troubling him again. Sighing, he opened the door and left his office. He had a long day ahead of him, and wouldn’t mind a walk.
The German Civil War started with a communist-led insurrection in Hamburg. The German Communist Party (KPD) issued a circular to regional party committees. The instructions were clear: A nationwide insurrection was on the KPD’s immediate agenda, in lieu of rising discontent towards the bourgeois order that was the Weimar Republic. Party militants in Hamburg energetically went through with an insurrection, seizing police stations and building barricades. For a few brief hours, when it seemed that the government might regain the upper hand and restore order to the streets, a feverish tension gripped the city. When the chaotic street battles ended however, the communists were in control. Taking a cue from the Russian Revolution, they christened Hamburg a labor commune and prepared to defend Red Hamburg against counterrevolution.
The proclamation of the Hamburg Labor Commune, championed by KPD stalwarts Hugo Urbahns and Hans Kippenberger who had led the insurrection, sent shock waves throughout Germany. Parties and individuals from across the political spectrum reacted swiftly to the KPD’s violet seizure of power in Hamburg. Action would be taken even as the leaders of the Hamburg Insurrection, flush with their rapid victory over the state’s forces, had begun to form a Red Army. In Hamburg red flags now flew, displayed proudly by dock workers and radicals alike, which only served to shatter the Weimar Republic’s tenuous hold on stability at a time when the economy was in free fall. Tracing the myriad reactions to the revolutionary insurrection in Hamburg is the key to understanding the prolongation of Germany’s bloody civil war.
Attempts by communists to seize power elsewhere were met with determined repression. In Berlin, soldiers loyal to the Weimar Republic clamped down on the capital which was swiftly put under martial law. As had been done in 1919 during the Spartacist Uprising, the government relied to an extent on resurgent rightist militias as reinforcements to contain the unrest rocking the beleaguered capital. For the time being, concerted efforts by the KPD at seizing control over Berlin through an urban insurrection and linking the capital up with Red Hamburg proved illusory. Berlin was soon put under the government’s control, the communists there ending up either imprisoned or dead. Ruth Fischer, who along with the two principle leaders of the Hamburg Insurrection represented the left-wing of the KPD, fought valiantly until she was forced to surrender while taking lead of a daring attack on a Berlin police station which ended in a resounding defeat for the communist insurgents. Unlike Rosa Luxemburg, who was executed by members of the Free Corps movement, she wound up in the hands of the government's forces. Locked up in prison, she nonetheless became a symbol of the German communist movement, as a revolutionary writer and leader.
The German border experienced a flurry of activity from communists which proved hard to suppress. The Russian reds, following their push into central Poland, now bordered the Weimar Republic. It was inevitable, then, that revolutionary propaganda espousing Bolshevism filtered across Germany’s border regions unimpeded. The Bolsheviks were continuing their attempts to spread propaganda, German soldiers and POW’s ending up as key targets for radical material prior to Germany’s defeat in the Great War. This policy was renewed after the Peace of Minsk was concluded. The German Empire had long since collapsed, but Lenin was eager to push the Weimar Republic towards revolution. The Weimar Republic’s conservative right, which had treated the conquest and subsequent division of Poland as a partial revival of the beaten German nation, found new cause for alarm after Bolshevik ideals inevitably found their way into Germany. Whether spread by troublesome KPD diehards or fraternizing Red Army soldiers who had met up with the Reichswehr after the fall of Warsaw, insidious Bolshevik propaganda passed through many hands both German and Russian.
The Hamburg Insurrection had plunged the German republic into chaos, its descent into anarchy eagerly welcomed by the Soviet leadership. Still, relations with the Weimar Republic were high. Tukhachevsky’s triumphant forces had linked up with the Reichswehr along the German-Polish border, resulting in the Weimar Republic moving to annex Polish territories which had been taken away from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. The Polish Corridor was once again in German hands, reconnecting East and West Prussia. While central Poland was firmly under Soviet domination, the territories of Poland bordering the Weimar Republic which had originally been part of the Reich were annexed to Germany. Both states harbored hostility towards the Versailles Treaty and the Allied powers, thus managing to find common ground with each other regardless of their differences. However, it could not have been far from the minds of Germany’s Social-Democratic leaders that Lenin was seeking to promote revolution in their battered country.
---
Note: It tapers off from here, with a not included unfinished section on an earlier Beer Hall Putsch. Mostly, it can be said, research and writing block has prevented me from continuing it past its current unfinished state. Don't forget to read, enjoy, and comment.
Otherwise, read, enjoy, and comment!
BTW, I've rewritten the entire thing as to recreate a realistic German Civil War and Soviet power struggle.
I'm looking forward to your feedback.
Beneath The Crimson Banner: An Alternate History Timeline
Warsaw’s fall
“The decision by Colonel Kamenev to move the bulk of the Southwestern Army Group northwards towards Brest, instead of continuing the march on Lvov, allowed the main Western Army Group under Tukhachevsky to overwhelm the Polish defenders of Warsaw and to seize the capital. The fall of Warsaw meant the spreading of Soviet power to Poland, with the ensuing Peace of Minsk held in 1921 forging a pro-Soviet puppet regime grouped around the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee and, later, the Polish Communist Workers’ Party. Polish society was turned upside down as land was collectivized and as factories were nationalized by decree. The Polish army was halved, with any extra arms going to a newly-formed Polish Red Guard.”
“The national question assumed undue importance in a vanquished and Sovietized Poland, a nation which was now part of the much larger Soviet state encompassing most of the former Russian Empire. Stalin, as People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs, used Soviet Ukraine as a model for how best to incorporate Poland into the federal structure as a new socialist republic. Poland’s overall size was greatly reduced, all territory past the Curzon Line being absorbed into Soviet Russia. The Poles lost Upper Silesia and the wide swath of territory making up the Polish Corridor to the Germans, with the remaining central most portions of the humiliated country ending up in the Polish Soviet Socialist Republic.”
“Despite the clamor by leading Bolsheviks to send the victorious Red Army into Germany, Lenin and his party shied away from a full-scale invasion. Trotsky knew as well as Lenin that the Red Army wasn’t strong enough to fight, let alone conquer, Germany. For the time being, the Red Army was held back and was used to strengthen Soviet rule in Poland. The rapid conquest of the proud Polish nation had brought the Red Army’s logistics to a breaking point. It could go no further.”
-Excerpted from Robert Keller’s The Bolsheviks and Civil War: A History of the Russian Civil War
The German October Revolution’s First Steps
At the present moment, our German comrades stand at a crossroads. The Russian Communist Party must- Lenin stopped writing, setting the pen back onto his desk. He stood up and placed two hands onto the surface of the desk, sighing. “I’m getting too old for this.” He muttered. Honestly, he was only fifty-two. Still, he felt older by a decade. The years of leading first Russia, then that ungainly amalgam of nations making up the Soviet Union, had been strenuous. Grumbling, he collapsed back down into his desk chair and started once again to write.
As he wrote neatly, slowly, he thought of nothing but Germany. To think, it had only been a few years since he had arrived in a sealed train at the Finland Station to take lead of Russia’s revolution. The irony was never more prevalent now, now that the German Empire was no more and revolution was knocking at the nation’s door. Empires, he thought, die. The year 1923 had not been kind to the Germans. The county was in shambles, wracked by rapid inflation and foreign meddling. The Treaty of Versailles was indeed a slave treaty, a treaty forced on a defeated nation by the victors. Yet Germany now stood at a turning point, as a society ripe for revolution. The former imperialist state could join the socialist brotherhood of nations embodied in the USSR. If only, figured Lenin, the German communists could keep up the nationwide insurrection’s momentum, if only. He sighed once again as he finished his writing, just as he put the final punctuation mark onto the paper.
He placed the writings off to one side before rising back up from his desk and prepared to open the door to his office and exit through it. He walked over to the door, but didn’t open it. He placed a thin hand over his chest. His heart was troubling him again. Sighing, he opened the door and left his office. He had a long day ahead of him, and wouldn’t mind a walk.
The German Civil War started with a communist-led insurrection in Hamburg. The German Communist Party (KPD) issued a circular to regional party committees. The instructions were clear: A nationwide insurrection was on the KPD’s immediate agenda, in lieu of rising discontent towards the bourgeois order that was the Weimar Republic. Party militants in Hamburg energetically went through with an insurrection, seizing police stations and building barricades. For a few brief hours, when it seemed that the government might regain the upper hand and restore order to the streets, a feverish tension gripped the city. When the chaotic street battles ended however, the communists were in control. Taking a cue from the Russian Revolution, they christened Hamburg a labor commune and prepared to defend Red Hamburg against counterrevolution.
The proclamation of the Hamburg Labor Commune, championed by KPD stalwarts Hugo Urbahns and Hans Kippenberger who had led the insurrection, sent shock waves throughout Germany. Parties and individuals from across the political spectrum reacted swiftly to the KPD’s violet seizure of power in Hamburg. Action would be taken even as the leaders of the Hamburg Insurrection, flush with their rapid victory over the state’s forces, had begun to form a Red Army. In Hamburg red flags now flew, displayed proudly by dock workers and radicals alike, which only served to shatter the Weimar Republic’s tenuous hold on stability at a time when the economy was in free fall. Tracing the myriad reactions to the revolutionary insurrection in Hamburg is the key to understanding the prolongation of Germany’s bloody civil war.
Attempts by communists to seize power elsewhere were met with determined repression. In Berlin, soldiers loyal to the Weimar Republic clamped down on the capital which was swiftly put under martial law. As had been done in 1919 during the Spartacist Uprising, the government relied to an extent on resurgent rightist militias as reinforcements to contain the unrest rocking the beleaguered capital. For the time being, concerted efforts by the KPD at seizing control over Berlin through an urban insurrection and linking the capital up with Red Hamburg proved illusory. Berlin was soon put under the government’s control, the communists there ending up either imprisoned or dead. Ruth Fischer, who along with the two principle leaders of the Hamburg Insurrection represented the left-wing of the KPD, fought valiantly until she was forced to surrender while taking lead of a daring attack on a Berlin police station which ended in a resounding defeat for the communist insurgents. Unlike Rosa Luxemburg, who was executed by members of the Free Corps movement, she wound up in the hands of the government's forces. Locked up in prison, she nonetheless became a symbol of the German communist movement, as a revolutionary writer and leader.
The German border experienced a flurry of activity from communists which proved hard to suppress. The Russian reds, following their push into central Poland, now bordered the Weimar Republic. It was inevitable, then, that revolutionary propaganda espousing Bolshevism filtered across Germany’s border regions unimpeded. The Bolsheviks were continuing their attempts to spread propaganda, German soldiers and POW’s ending up as key targets for radical material prior to Germany’s defeat in the Great War. This policy was renewed after the Peace of Minsk was concluded. The German Empire had long since collapsed, but Lenin was eager to push the Weimar Republic towards revolution. The Weimar Republic’s conservative right, which had treated the conquest and subsequent division of Poland as a partial revival of the beaten German nation, found new cause for alarm after Bolshevik ideals inevitably found their way into Germany. Whether spread by troublesome KPD diehards or fraternizing Red Army soldiers who had met up with the Reichswehr after the fall of Warsaw, insidious Bolshevik propaganda passed through many hands both German and Russian.
The Hamburg Insurrection had plunged the German republic into chaos, its descent into anarchy eagerly welcomed by the Soviet leadership. Still, relations with the Weimar Republic were high. Tukhachevsky’s triumphant forces had linked up with the Reichswehr along the German-Polish border, resulting in the Weimar Republic moving to annex Polish territories which had been taken away from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. The Polish Corridor was once again in German hands, reconnecting East and West Prussia. While central Poland was firmly under Soviet domination, the territories of Poland bordering the Weimar Republic which had originally been part of the Reich were annexed to Germany. Both states harbored hostility towards the Versailles Treaty and the Allied powers, thus managing to find common ground with each other regardless of their differences. However, it could not have been far from the minds of Germany’s Social-Democratic leaders that Lenin was seeking to promote revolution in their battered country.
---
Note: It tapers off from here, with a not included unfinished section on an earlier Beer Hall Putsch. Mostly, it can be said, research and writing block has prevented me from continuing it past its current unfinished state. Don't forget to read, enjoy, and comment.
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