This is the new discussion thread for my renamed timeline Cowards, Traitors, And Dungeons Dark (originally the AH was known as Petrograd, The Red Flame Of Russia)
The title change is due to the fact that as I had written more and as the AH became more involved, IMHO the old title didn't work anymore and had lost its meaning.
Below is everything that I have done so far; read, enjoy, and comment:
Cowards, Traitors, And Dungeons Dark: An Alternate History
Part One
Section One
In 1918, the nascent Soviet government which was formed following the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets faced a dire situation; the spring and early summer of that year had brought with it the prospect of total annihilation by the counterrevolution, as the civil war raged across the former Russian Empire without ceasing. To make matters worse, a cholera outbreak in a Petrograd beset by supply problems, reaction both foreign and domestic, and rebellion only served to quicken the crisis as the city was evacuated and the capital moved to Nizhny Novgorod. [1]
The Sovnarkom having departed hastily from Petrograd to the new capital, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet formed in it's absence the Council of Commissars of the Petrograd Labor Commune (SK PTK). Furthermore, the Executive Committee would also form a local Cheka in Petrograd (PCheka) on March 9th, to be headed by the Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky.
The government of the SK PTK was initially composed as follows, with the Bolshevik Zinoviev as chairperson: Lunacharskii (enlightenment); Viacheslav Menzhinskii (finance); Mikhail Lashevich (food supply); Petr Stuchka (justice); Viacheslav Molotov (economy); Adolf Ioffe (social welfare); Miron Vladimirov (transportation); and Ivar Smilga (Petrograd Military District).
The newly created SK PTK government soon found itself struggling to maintain order in Petrograd wherein dissent was strong amongst the workers, whom along with moderate socialists would found the Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates from Petrograd Factories and Plants (EAD). The EAD found widespread support in industrial areas due to the advent of food supply shortages in the city which were brought on by the loss of the Ukraine to the Germans after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which cut grain reserves in half by almost 350 million puds. The EAD was further strengthened as a result of mass unemployment and inflation which inversely affected grain production in the countryside, causing only more unrest in the city.
The counterrevolution in Petrograd during the spring and summer of 1918 thrived under such tenuous conditions and, supported by the Allied powers, would take advantage of general disenchantment with the Soviet government as the crisis deepened. The PCheka, a clandestine organization created with the intent of safeguarding the emerging revolutionary order in Petrograd, operated independently of the national VCheka which had set itself up in the new capital at Nizhny Novgorod. The two organizations, separate but similar in function, soon diverged in methods when it came to fighting counterrevolution.
The VCheka, formed on December 7th in place of the Military Revolutionary Committee and led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, sanctioned the shooting of alleged reactionaries-'counterrevolutionaries, speculators, thugs, hooligans, saboteurs, and other parasites'-on the spot. Fears of a German attack deeper into Russia shook the ruling Bolshevik-Left SR coalition, prompting an excessive increase in the VCheka's powers virtually overnight.
The PCheka on the other hand was more moderate under the leadership of Uritsky, whom was against arbitrary executions and tried to prevent shootings of prisoners wherever possible. This did not stop Uritsky from being derisively named the 'Robespierre of Petrograd' despite his aversion towards the harsher tactics being utilized by the VCheka.
Regardless, Uritsky's attempts to lessen the impact of the PCheka's preemptive actions towards perceived counterrevolutionaries would soon be challenged following the assassination of Volodarsky. A commissar for the press, agitation, and propaganda in the SK PTK government, Volodarsky's sudden death ushered in a surge of popular violence from below in Petrograd. Zinoviev was against immediate repression despite urgings by workers and Krasnaia gazeta colleagues of Volodarsky to seek revenge. Lenin would recommend mass terror and was furious that so far leading Bolsheviks operating in Petrograd had refused to respond to the vengeful mood of workers.
Unbeknownst to the Bolsheviks, the Left SR Party had approved as a contingency option the assassination of leading German officials following the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets at their own Third All-Russian Left SR Party Congress. The Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, largely expected to having been vote rigged by the Bolsheviks, produced a Bolshevik majority of 678 delegates to the Left SR's 269 delegates. Unable to challenge the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk through electoral means, the Left SR's central committee considered the proposal for assassinations.
Grigorii Smolianskii, as secretary of the CEC and as a member of the Left SR's Battle Organization, would go in secret to Berlin in an attempt to entangle German Social-Democrats into a conspiratorial plan to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm II. Other key figures designated for assassination were General Eikhord, the commander of German occupation forces in the Ukraine and Count Mirbach, the German ambassador to Soviet Russia.
When the Social-Democrats refused to join the Left SR plot to murder the Kaiser, the Left SR's central committee made a final decision: General Eikhord was to be assassinated, whose death was meant to provoke Germany into resuming hostilities against Soviet Russia's budding revolutionary forces. [2] General Eikhord would be killed by Left SR Chekists in July, after several days of preparation occurring after the opening session of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets held in Nizhny Novgorod.
Unfortunately for the Left SR Party, no German retaliation took place. Unofficial telephone and telegraph communications were cut from within Nizhny Novgorod, while motor traffic to and from the city was tightly regulated. The VCheka headquarters was combed for the Left SR's leadership (the VCheka headquarters having become the command center for the Left SR Party) as the Left SR Fifth Congress fraction was simultaneously found and arrested by the Soviet authorities.
Immediately branded as 'scoundrels' and 'new servants of the white guards', hundreds of Left SR cadre were soon arrested while many were summarily executed as well. Gradually, surely, all traces of the Left SR Party would be cast out from the soviets by extraordinary military-revolutionary troikas.
An immediate consequence of the Left SR's sudden ouster from the soviets and other governmental bodies countrywide would be the heightening of Red Terror. Despite Uritsky's best attempts to thwart the advent of Red Terror, his actions only served to delay its outbreak. The Red Terror, when combined with the removal of all other socialist, left-wing parties from participation in the Soviet government, would bring about the creation of the single-party state model.
With the Bolsheviks' rear effectively secured against further internal opposition, the fight against the Whites in the Russian Civil War took top priority throughout the remainder of the year.
Section Two
As 1918 gave way to 1919, the civil war continued fiercer still. The Red Guard workers' militia served as the nucleus for a new 'proletarian army,' the Red Army. Mass conscription of the peasantry was enacted to further the goal of forging a million-man force. Gradually the inefficiencies of the Red Guard were superseded by the formation of an All-Russian Main Staff and an All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars, ex-Tsarist officers having been forced into the fledgling Red Army. Local soviets' control over the military was replaced by provincial Military Commissars, their authority extending outwards from Nizhny Novgorod. Six new military districts would be created, with a Northern screen covering Petrograd and a Western screen covering Nizhny Novgorod.
The Red Guard had faced a series of initial defeats in Finland and Estonia, having been forced out from both regions by 1919. The White Finns had been better led and possessed superior troops which included the elite Finnish nationalist soldiers known as Jagers. The Soviet regime begrudgingly recognized the newly-won independence of Finland and the Baltic states. Another region under the Reds' control, Bessarabia, would fall to Romanian troops. The Moldavian People's Republic which temporarily governed Bessarabia ended just three months after it was created, with Bessarabia merging with Romania in April 1918. In the Caucasus mountains region, a Transcaucasus Democratic Federative Republic was established on April 22, 1918 which was dominated by local Georgian Mensheviks and the Azerbaidzhani Musavat Party, nationalists having won fifty-eight percent of the vote in the Assembly elections. Power passed to a Transcaucasian Commissariat based in Tbilisi.
Elsewhere the Reds were more fortunate. On December 4th, 1917 an ultimatum was issued to the Central Rada which ruled the Ukraine from Kiev. Shortly thereafter the Ukraine would be invaded, The Bolsheviks having formed a Ukrainian Republic of Soviets in Kharkov. Forces were diverted from the railway war which was being waged against the Cossacks, with an army several-thousand strong led by Lieutenant Colonel Muraviev headed towards Kiev. Towns along the way welcomed the advancing troops and came out in support of Soviet power. Kiev was bombarded by artillery, the city having been seized shortly after the Rada's retreat. A reign of terror would be initiated against officers and Ukrainian nationalists, marking the end of Ukrainian independence and the start of Soviet rule in the region.
As the fighting continued throughout 1919 across far-flung fronts stretching along the Volga, the Don, and in the Urals, the year 1920 saw a Polish attack into Soviet Ukraine on April 25, 1920. The attack was swift and, led by the Polish head of state and commander-in-chief Jozef Pilsudski, succeeded in taking control of Kiev in May 1920. Luckily for the Reds, The Twelfth and Fourteenth Armies escaped unharmed. The Southwestern Army Group under the Bolshevik colonel Egorov counterattacked, retaking Kiev on June 12th.
From Belorussia the Western Army Group under Tukhachevsky chased the retreating Polish army four-hundred miles to the Vistula River. Backed by the Sixteenth, Third, Fifteenth, and Fourth Armies as well as the Third Cavalry Corps, Tukhachevsky's forces moved against the Polish forces defending the River Vistula along a front stretching for two-hundred miles.
Bolstering Tukhachevsky was the Southwestern Army Group under Colonel Kamenev, which had moved northwards towards Brest to support the Western Army Group. [1] The First Calvary Army and the Twelfth Army linked up with Tukhachevsky's men and after an intense fight the Battle of the Vistula was won by the Reds. Having Swallowed in their pride, the Southwestern Army Group commanders' assistance proved decisive. Warsaw soon fell.
The ensuing Peace of Minsk held in 1921 within Belorussia decimated Poland. The army was cut down from 740,000 men to a mere 50,000, with extra arms having gone to a newly-created Polish Red Guard. A Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (PolRevCom) was established in Warsaw, which quickly went about destroying the old order. Land was redistributed while industry was nationalized, with the PolRevCom eventually making way for a Polish Communist Workers' Party which would control the Polish Soviet Socialist Republic.
Section Three
If the failed Kapp Putsch of March 1920 was viewed as a German Kornilov Affair, then the dramatic events of 1923 were seen as the German equivalent to the October Revolution. The country had been bled dry through years of economic hardship brought on by the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 following the close of hostilities on the Western Front.
Lenin had earlier urged a political alliance between the far-right and the German Communist Party (KPD), the Soviet leader having viewed such an alliance as necessary due to the KPD's lack of influence over the German working-class. A war of national liberation against Anglo-French domination was promoted, with the allies in mind for the KPD being the Free Corps and other right-wing military units hostile to the Versailles Treaty.
By January 1923 Germany defaulted on its payments to the Allies and was facing hyperinflation. The occupation of the Ruhr followed, sixty-thousand French troops having marched across the border into Germany. Strikes, sabotage, and various other measures of 'passive resistance' were taken up by the government in coordination with the workers in the Ruhr.
The KPD's leadership traveled to Petrograd to discuss the rapidly unfolding situation, which had escalated into a nationwide general strike against the government of Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno.
Trotsky possessed high hopes for the KPD. He embraced the KPD's leader Heinrich Brandler during his visit to Petrograd, who upon arriving back into Germany started planning for an insurrection.
The KPD soon entered into local governments in Saxony and Thuringia by October, something which the Social-Democrats wouldn't tolerate. President Friedrich Ebert sent in the Reichswehr in a concerted effort to oust the KPD from the two provinces. The Proletarian Hundreds were banned in Saxony, which was swiftly ignored by the KPD.
The call for a nationwide revolutionary insurrection was relayed to members of the KPD throughout Germany, which quickly engulfed Hamburg, Berlin, and other major German cities. [1]
Initial attempts by KPD militants to seize power in Hamburg prevailed, when in October they took control of police stations and fortified working-class districts of the city. Barricades were hastily thrown up in Berlin.
Trotsky meanwhile contacted the KPD and, after much debate, it was agreed to allow the Red Army entry into Germany.
---
“The German people were effectively trapped into a perpetual cycle of violence and butchery which had only served to further divide the country and to shatter its economy, already ailing prior to the civil war. The year 1924 opened with the promise of only more bloodshed and devastation on both sides of the rapidly-expanding conflict.”
“As the Red Army intervened in the growing civil war on the KPD's behalf, grain stockpiled high in warehouses throughout Soviet territory kept German workers fed. Long since having prepared for the task of feeding the German nation back in 1919, grain was imported into Germany throughout the civil war on a mass scale by the Soviet state.“
“All that remained was for Germany to be rebuilt. The constant fighting had reduced much of industrial Germany to ruin, and it would take a long while for the economy to fully recover.”
“Following Lenin's untimely death in 1924, Trotsky prepared to vie for a leadership position backed by the prestige that he had gained as People's Commissar for Military Affairs. He had claimed much of the credit for the crushing victories achieved over 'White Poland' and 'White Germany,' and was considered both a capable leader and a first rate orator. It was Trotsky who more so then anyone else flourished as a powerful leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which stretched from Vladivostok in the east to Berlin in the west.”
Quoted from Germany In Revolution And Civil War by Alexander Hayes
Section Four
As Lenin grew weaker and eventually died from a heart attack on January 21st 1924, he dictated a series of articles and letters prior to the Thirteenth Party Congress. Upon his death a funeral would be held with Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Molotov, Tomsky, Rudzutak, the party General Secretary Valerian Kuybyshev [1], and other leading Bolsheviks present.
Trotsky had recently traveled back to the capital, leaving Red Army officers to handle affairs in Germany when he got word of Lenin's worsening condition. Once there, he would keep himself updated on the situation in Germany while he stayed in contact with the KPD's leadership. After Lenin's death, Trotsky would arrive at the funeral and was given the opportunity to make a speech at the somber event. He emphasized Lenin's legacy, ending his short speech by pledging that the Bolsheviks would remain faithful to the cause set forth by the Third International (Comintern).
A great leader was dead, his body to be preserved for all to see inside a specially-built mausoleum constructed in Volodarsky Square at the capital (which was renamed from Petrograd to Leningrad in his honor). [2]
Section Five
France was at the height of its power, having become the preeminent military leader on the European continent following the Central Powers' defeat and breakup after the Great War's end. Colonies were taken over across Africa, the Middle East, and in the Pacific which served to greatly expand France's colonial territories. In all France ruled over one-hundred million people around the world, with Paris standing proudly as the cultural center of Europe.
The war had nonetheless scarred the nation despite the Allies' triumph; at the war's conclusion, a million-and-a-half were left dead with an additional 4,260,000 wounded on the French side. Badly bloodied by the war, the French nation swiftly acquired Alsace-Lorraine from a vanquished Germany along with the defeated nation's overseas colonies as mandates authorized through France's participation in the newly-formed League of Nations. In the ensuing years after France's victory in the Great War the nation's mines, factories, public buildings, shops, homes, railways, roads and canals would be repaired to the sum of eight million francs to be funded mostly by Germany's reparation payments.
The Treaty of Versailles had stipulated that the new republican government of Germany would have to pay twenty million gold marks in reparations, with the number being fixed at 132 million gold marks by the Reparations Commission on April 28th 1921. France was to receive the largest share of the reparations payments, totaled at fifty-two percent, with two-fifths of the money allotted to Belgium.
It's economy shattered by the war, the Wiemar Republic started to default on its payments to the Allies as 1921 slipped into 1922.
French forces moved to occupy the Ruhr on January 1923, putting the French nation in control of seventy-three percent of Germany's coal and eighty-three percent of the battered nation's steel and iron. Having responded with 'passive resistance,' the German government organized a general strike across the Ruhr which shut down the Ruhr's mines and factories. With the railways having been shut down as well the German government in Berlin moved to devalue the country's currency as a final act of resistance, which soon made the Reichsmark worthless.
French and Belgian workers and engineers poured into the Ruhr, partially restoring the region's economy. As the railways, mines, and factories were reactivated and, as the German government faced a concerted national uprising by the country's communists in October, the Premier Poincare listened increasingly to President of the Republic Alexandre Millerand and Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the aging military commander having considered the controversial occupation of the Ruhr 'the greatest event since the Armistice.' Hoping for a deal between the French government and German industrialists, the sudden communist uprisings across Germany only increased the pressure piling up on Poincare's administration to take full control of the Ruhr.
Still weary from the aftermath of the Great War and, despite calls on the right for an intervention in Germany's civil war, Premier Poincare made a point to dig in along the Ruhr rather then risk getting involved in what was increasingly becoming a bloody and terrible affair. The Ruhr gave the French control over most of Germany's coal, iron, and steel production and created an industrial monopoly on the continent. The new Soviet regime established in Germany was hurt by the loss of the Ruhr, which served to cripple the regime's economy. Poincare left office feeling-knowing-that he had made a tough but correct decision.
Section Six
The Soviet Union's people had known war, or the threat of war, prior to the outbreak of the European War. Between Leningrad and Moscow onwards to Berlin, training camps had been set up in which citizens of the USSR could go on forced marches, learn how to dig foxholes, and would practice parachuting.
Youth across the Soviet Union learned in schools about the civil war-era fronts once gracing Russia and Germany, of the heroic fights for 'Red Petrograd' and 'Red Berlin.' They played games, such as 'Reds and Whites.' And even as their powerful union of nations geared up for a war they knew was coming, as the monarchical fascists of France's ruling French Action party planned how best to vanquish 'Jewish Bolshevism,' young recruits swelled the ranks of the Red Army whose commanders-military officers hailing from Russia, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere-served to cultivate the image of a final war which would surely smash fascism's assembled forces swiftly and decisively. Red Army troops would march within weeks into Paris and through a Triumphal Arch draped with red banners bearing the gold hammer-and-sickle emblem. The war was to be won quickly, the Red Army its triumphant victor.
Underneath the surface the Red Army had been weakened by a series of purges throughout the Soviet Union following the attempt on Heinrich Brandler's life in Berlin and the successful assassination of the longtime Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky in Leningrad, coinciding a few months apart from each other in 1935. [1]
The End
The Red Army did enter Paris and would go on to march through a Triumphal Arch draped in red flags. The victory came at a cost. After nearly two years of soldering, at participating in bloody battles for villages, towns, and cities and after having lost large swaths of territory and thousands of Red Army fighters who had initially expected what Trotsky had called on the eve of war a 'brusque conflict,' the eager boys striving for adventure who had once played childish games of 'Reds and Whites' had become tired veterans by the war's conclusion.
'To think,' wrote Rommel years later as a retired army officer living a quiet life in Bavaria, 'what was said to be a brusque conflict would turn into a most terrible and vicious affair.'
Rommel was there in Paris as his Seventh Panzer Division rolled through the Triumphal Arch and down the street; his men and their panzer tanks had faced near annihilation during the war's opening moves, and would play a decisive role during the Battle of Hamburg in the ensuing months after the Red Army's total rout.
Landing at Le Bourget airfield sometime after the Battle For Paris had been won, Trotsky and his entourage visited the occupying Red Army troops to raise morale as they toured the majestic city. 'Paris,' Trotsky had begun as he posed for a photo with the massive Eiffel Tower standing behind him, 'Paris-' He stopped abruptly mid-sentence while the now-famous picture was taken. He never finished his sentence, and did not mention it later on in life when he was supreme ruler over much of Europe Perhaps he had meant to lament the damage done to such a great city, or to point out the splendid beauty of the French capital even in the aftermath of a brutal fight for it's control.
'The importance of today's victory,' he had said later in a speech below the Eiffel Tower to a huge mass of assembled Red Army soldiers, 'cannot be overstated due to its relevance to the continuing worldwide proletarian struggle and to the peace-loving peoples of Europe and the Soviet Union.'
As Trotsky's powerful voice boomed over the crowd of soldiers and the smattering of civilians who had come to listen in on what would come to be his victory speech, word had gotten through the ranks that the British were willing to negotiate a cease-fire. Perhaps excited political officers had leaked information on the secretive negotiations that were raging in London to their troops, or perhaps the low-level grunts had known deep in their hearts that the war was finally won 'In the end, does it truly matter? The point still remains that this hellish nightmare is finally over, and that the awful crimes of the fascists have been shockingly exposed to the entire world.' Wrote Guderian in his private journal.
Trotsky ended his speech with the words 'war, war hardly changes and yet through the hell of combat we have persevered. Long live the Red Army, long live our great Soviet Union!'
The soldiers repeated his last few words in one boisterous voice. The war was over, and they could at long last go back to leading normal and peaceful lives.
Footnotes:
Section One
[1]: The capital was moved from Petrograd to Moscow in OTL, a decision which was protested by the Bolshevik Zinoviev on the grounds that the new capital should be placed instead in a less crucial city as this would increase the likelihood of the capital moving back to Petrograd.
[2]: In OTL Count Mirbach was assassinated by the Left SR Chekists Iakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreev in Moscow.
Section Two
[1]: ITTL the Southwestern Army Group's forces headed towards Brest instead of Lvov, allowing them to aid the Western Army Group.
Section Three
[1]: Heinrich Brandler in OTL backed down, resulting in the failed Hamburg Rising. ITTL the KPD's leadership decides to launch a coordinated national insurrection.
Section Four
[1]: In OTL Stalin became General Secretary, with Molotov and Kuybyshev as his assistant secretaries. ITTL, Stalin dies from appendicitis which leads to Kuybyshev becoming General Secretary.
[2]: Known as Uritsky Square in OTL. Uritsky ITTL survives the attempt on his life by the military cadet Leonid Kannegisser, while consequently Palace Square becomes Volodarsky Square.
Section Six
[1]: IOTL Sergey Kirov's assassination on December 1st, 1934 in Leningrad sparked the Great Purge in the USSR.
The title change is due to the fact that as I had written more and as the AH became more involved, IMHO the old title didn't work anymore and had lost its meaning.
Below is everything that I have done so far; read, enjoy, and comment:
Cowards, Traitors, And Dungeons Dark: An Alternate History
Part One
Section One
In 1918, the nascent Soviet government which was formed following the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets faced a dire situation; the spring and early summer of that year had brought with it the prospect of total annihilation by the counterrevolution, as the civil war raged across the former Russian Empire without ceasing. To make matters worse, a cholera outbreak in a Petrograd beset by supply problems, reaction both foreign and domestic, and rebellion only served to quicken the crisis as the city was evacuated and the capital moved to Nizhny Novgorod. [1]
The Sovnarkom having departed hastily from Petrograd to the new capital, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet formed in it's absence the Council of Commissars of the Petrograd Labor Commune (SK PTK). Furthermore, the Executive Committee would also form a local Cheka in Petrograd (PCheka) on March 9th, to be headed by the Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky.
The government of the SK PTK was initially composed as follows, with the Bolshevik Zinoviev as chairperson: Lunacharskii (enlightenment); Viacheslav Menzhinskii (finance); Mikhail Lashevich (food supply); Petr Stuchka (justice); Viacheslav Molotov (economy); Adolf Ioffe (social welfare); Miron Vladimirov (transportation); and Ivar Smilga (Petrograd Military District).
The newly created SK PTK government soon found itself struggling to maintain order in Petrograd wherein dissent was strong amongst the workers, whom along with moderate socialists would found the Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates from Petrograd Factories and Plants (EAD). The EAD found widespread support in industrial areas due to the advent of food supply shortages in the city which were brought on by the loss of the Ukraine to the Germans after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which cut grain reserves in half by almost 350 million puds. The EAD was further strengthened as a result of mass unemployment and inflation which inversely affected grain production in the countryside, causing only more unrest in the city.
The counterrevolution in Petrograd during the spring and summer of 1918 thrived under such tenuous conditions and, supported by the Allied powers, would take advantage of general disenchantment with the Soviet government as the crisis deepened. The PCheka, a clandestine organization created with the intent of safeguarding the emerging revolutionary order in Petrograd, operated independently of the national VCheka which had set itself up in the new capital at Nizhny Novgorod. The two organizations, separate but similar in function, soon diverged in methods when it came to fighting counterrevolution.
The VCheka, formed on December 7th in place of the Military Revolutionary Committee and led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, sanctioned the shooting of alleged reactionaries-'counterrevolutionaries, speculators, thugs, hooligans, saboteurs, and other parasites'-on the spot. Fears of a German attack deeper into Russia shook the ruling Bolshevik-Left SR coalition, prompting an excessive increase in the VCheka's powers virtually overnight.
The PCheka on the other hand was more moderate under the leadership of Uritsky, whom was against arbitrary executions and tried to prevent shootings of prisoners wherever possible. This did not stop Uritsky from being derisively named the 'Robespierre of Petrograd' despite his aversion towards the harsher tactics being utilized by the VCheka.
Regardless, Uritsky's attempts to lessen the impact of the PCheka's preemptive actions towards perceived counterrevolutionaries would soon be challenged following the assassination of Volodarsky. A commissar for the press, agitation, and propaganda in the SK PTK government, Volodarsky's sudden death ushered in a surge of popular violence from below in Petrograd. Zinoviev was against immediate repression despite urgings by workers and Krasnaia gazeta colleagues of Volodarsky to seek revenge. Lenin would recommend mass terror and was furious that so far leading Bolsheviks operating in Petrograd had refused to respond to the vengeful mood of workers.
Unbeknownst to the Bolsheviks, the Left SR Party had approved as a contingency option the assassination of leading German officials following the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets at their own Third All-Russian Left SR Party Congress. The Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, largely expected to having been vote rigged by the Bolsheviks, produced a Bolshevik majority of 678 delegates to the Left SR's 269 delegates. Unable to challenge the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk through electoral means, the Left SR's central committee considered the proposal for assassinations.
Grigorii Smolianskii, as secretary of the CEC and as a member of the Left SR's Battle Organization, would go in secret to Berlin in an attempt to entangle German Social-Democrats into a conspiratorial plan to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm II. Other key figures designated for assassination were General Eikhord, the commander of German occupation forces in the Ukraine and Count Mirbach, the German ambassador to Soviet Russia.
When the Social-Democrats refused to join the Left SR plot to murder the Kaiser, the Left SR's central committee made a final decision: General Eikhord was to be assassinated, whose death was meant to provoke Germany into resuming hostilities against Soviet Russia's budding revolutionary forces. [2] General Eikhord would be killed by Left SR Chekists in July, after several days of preparation occurring after the opening session of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets held in Nizhny Novgorod.
Unfortunately for the Left SR Party, no German retaliation took place. Unofficial telephone and telegraph communications were cut from within Nizhny Novgorod, while motor traffic to and from the city was tightly regulated. The VCheka headquarters was combed for the Left SR's leadership (the VCheka headquarters having become the command center for the Left SR Party) as the Left SR Fifth Congress fraction was simultaneously found and arrested by the Soviet authorities.
Immediately branded as 'scoundrels' and 'new servants of the white guards', hundreds of Left SR cadre were soon arrested while many were summarily executed as well. Gradually, surely, all traces of the Left SR Party would be cast out from the soviets by extraordinary military-revolutionary troikas.
An immediate consequence of the Left SR's sudden ouster from the soviets and other governmental bodies countrywide would be the heightening of Red Terror. Despite Uritsky's best attempts to thwart the advent of Red Terror, his actions only served to delay its outbreak. The Red Terror, when combined with the removal of all other socialist, left-wing parties from participation in the Soviet government, would bring about the creation of the single-party state model.
With the Bolsheviks' rear effectively secured against further internal opposition, the fight against the Whites in the Russian Civil War took top priority throughout the remainder of the year.
Section Two
As 1918 gave way to 1919, the civil war continued fiercer still. The Red Guard workers' militia served as the nucleus for a new 'proletarian army,' the Red Army. Mass conscription of the peasantry was enacted to further the goal of forging a million-man force. Gradually the inefficiencies of the Red Guard were superseded by the formation of an All-Russian Main Staff and an All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars, ex-Tsarist officers having been forced into the fledgling Red Army. Local soviets' control over the military was replaced by provincial Military Commissars, their authority extending outwards from Nizhny Novgorod. Six new military districts would be created, with a Northern screen covering Petrograd and a Western screen covering Nizhny Novgorod.
The Red Guard had faced a series of initial defeats in Finland and Estonia, having been forced out from both regions by 1919. The White Finns had been better led and possessed superior troops which included the elite Finnish nationalist soldiers known as Jagers. The Soviet regime begrudgingly recognized the newly-won independence of Finland and the Baltic states. Another region under the Reds' control, Bessarabia, would fall to Romanian troops. The Moldavian People's Republic which temporarily governed Bessarabia ended just three months after it was created, with Bessarabia merging with Romania in April 1918. In the Caucasus mountains region, a Transcaucasus Democratic Federative Republic was established on April 22, 1918 which was dominated by local Georgian Mensheviks and the Azerbaidzhani Musavat Party, nationalists having won fifty-eight percent of the vote in the Assembly elections. Power passed to a Transcaucasian Commissariat based in Tbilisi.
Elsewhere the Reds were more fortunate. On December 4th, 1917 an ultimatum was issued to the Central Rada which ruled the Ukraine from Kiev. Shortly thereafter the Ukraine would be invaded, The Bolsheviks having formed a Ukrainian Republic of Soviets in Kharkov. Forces were diverted from the railway war which was being waged against the Cossacks, with an army several-thousand strong led by Lieutenant Colonel Muraviev headed towards Kiev. Towns along the way welcomed the advancing troops and came out in support of Soviet power. Kiev was bombarded by artillery, the city having been seized shortly after the Rada's retreat. A reign of terror would be initiated against officers and Ukrainian nationalists, marking the end of Ukrainian independence and the start of Soviet rule in the region.
As the fighting continued throughout 1919 across far-flung fronts stretching along the Volga, the Don, and in the Urals, the year 1920 saw a Polish attack into Soviet Ukraine on April 25, 1920. The attack was swift and, led by the Polish head of state and commander-in-chief Jozef Pilsudski, succeeded in taking control of Kiev in May 1920. Luckily for the Reds, The Twelfth and Fourteenth Armies escaped unharmed. The Southwestern Army Group under the Bolshevik colonel Egorov counterattacked, retaking Kiev on June 12th.
From Belorussia the Western Army Group under Tukhachevsky chased the retreating Polish army four-hundred miles to the Vistula River. Backed by the Sixteenth, Third, Fifteenth, and Fourth Armies as well as the Third Cavalry Corps, Tukhachevsky's forces moved against the Polish forces defending the River Vistula along a front stretching for two-hundred miles.
Bolstering Tukhachevsky was the Southwestern Army Group under Colonel Kamenev, which had moved northwards towards Brest to support the Western Army Group. [1] The First Calvary Army and the Twelfth Army linked up with Tukhachevsky's men and after an intense fight the Battle of the Vistula was won by the Reds. Having Swallowed in their pride, the Southwestern Army Group commanders' assistance proved decisive. Warsaw soon fell.
The ensuing Peace of Minsk held in 1921 within Belorussia decimated Poland. The army was cut down from 740,000 men to a mere 50,000, with extra arms having gone to a newly-created Polish Red Guard. A Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (PolRevCom) was established in Warsaw, which quickly went about destroying the old order. Land was redistributed while industry was nationalized, with the PolRevCom eventually making way for a Polish Communist Workers' Party which would control the Polish Soviet Socialist Republic.
Section Three
If the failed Kapp Putsch of March 1920 was viewed as a German Kornilov Affair, then the dramatic events of 1923 were seen as the German equivalent to the October Revolution. The country had been bled dry through years of economic hardship brought on by the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 following the close of hostilities on the Western Front.
Lenin had earlier urged a political alliance between the far-right and the German Communist Party (KPD), the Soviet leader having viewed such an alliance as necessary due to the KPD's lack of influence over the German working-class. A war of national liberation against Anglo-French domination was promoted, with the allies in mind for the KPD being the Free Corps and other right-wing military units hostile to the Versailles Treaty.
By January 1923 Germany defaulted on its payments to the Allies and was facing hyperinflation. The occupation of the Ruhr followed, sixty-thousand French troops having marched across the border into Germany. Strikes, sabotage, and various other measures of 'passive resistance' were taken up by the government in coordination with the workers in the Ruhr.
The KPD's leadership traveled to Petrograd to discuss the rapidly unfolding situation, which had escalated into a nationwide general strike against the government of Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno.
Trotsky possessed high hopes for the KPD. He embraced the KPD's leader Heinrich Brandler during his visit to Petrograd, who upon arriving back into Germany started planning for an insurrection.
The KPD soon entered into local governments in Saxony and Thuringia by October, something which the Social-Democrats wouldn't tolerate. President Friedrich Ebert sent in the Reichswehr in a concerted effort to oust the KPD from the two provinces. The Proletarian Hundreds were banned in Saxony, which was swiftly ignored by the KPD.
The call for a nationwide revolutionary insurrection was relayed to members of the KPD throughout Germany, which quickly engulfed Hamburg, Berlin, and other major German cities. [1]
Initial attempts by KPD militants to seize power in Hamburg prevailed, when in October they took control of police stations and fortified working-class districts of the city. Barricades were hastily thrown up in Berlin.
Trotsky meanwhile contacted the KPD and, after much debate, it was agreed to allow the Red Army entry into Germany.
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“The German people were effectively trapped into a perpetual cycle of violence and butchery which had only served to further divide the country and to shatter its economy, already ailing prior to the civil war. The year 1924 opened with the promise of only more bloodshed and devastation on both sides of the rapidly-expanding conflict.”
“As the Red Army intervened in the growing civil war on the KPD's behalf, grain stockpiled high in warehouses throughout Soviet territory kept German workers fed. Long since having prepared for the task of feeding the German nation back in 1919, grain was imported into Germany throughout the civil war on a mass scale by the Soviet state.“
“All that remained was for Germany to be rebuilt. The constant fighting had reduced much of industrial Germany to ruin, and it would take a long while for the economy to fully recover.”
“Following Lenin's untimely death in 1924, Trotsky prepared to vie for a leadership position backed by the prestige that he had gained as People's Commissar for Military Affairs. He had claimed much of the credit for the crushing victories achieved over 'White Poland' and 'White Germany,' and was considered both a capable leader and a first rate orator. It was Trotsky who more so then anyone else flourished as a powerful leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which stretched from Vladivostok in the east to Berlin in the west.”
Quoted from Germany In Revolution And Civil War by Alexander Hayes
Section Four
As Lenin grew weaker and eventually died from a heart attack on January 21st 1924, he dictated a series of articles and letters prior to the Thirteenth Party Congress. Upon his death a funeral would be held with Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Molotov, Tomsky, Rudzutak, the party General Secretary Valerian Kuybyshev [1], and other leading Bolsheviks present.
Trotsky had recently traveled back to the capital, leaving Red Army officers to handle affairs in Germany when he got word of Lenin's worsening condition. Once there, he would keep himself updated on the situation in Germany while he stayed in contact with the KPD's leadership. After Lenin's death, Trotsky would arrive at the funeral and was given the opportunity to make a speech at the somber event. He emphasized Lenin's legacy, ending his short speech by pledging that the Bolsheviks would remain faithful to the cause set forth by the Third International (Comintern).
A great leader was dead, his body to be preserved for all to see inside a specially-built mausoleum constructed in Volodarsky Square at the capital (which was renamed from Petrograd to Leningrad in his honor). [2]
Section Five
France was at the height of its power, having become the preeminent military leader on the European continent following the Central Powers' defeat and breakup after the Great War's end. Colonies were taken over across Africa, the Middle East, and in the Pacific which served to greatly expand France's colonial territories. In all France ruled over one-hundred million people around the world, with Paris standing proudly as the cultural center of Europe.
The war had nonetheless scarred the nation despite the Allies' triumph; at the war's conclusion, a million-and-a-half were left dead with an additional 4,260,000 wounded on the French side. Badly bloodied by the war, the French nation swiftly acquired Alsace-Lorraine from a vanquished Germany along with the defeated nation's overseas colonies as mandates authorized through France's participation in the newly-formed League of Nations. In the ensuing years after France's victory in the Great War the nation's mines, factories, public buildings, shops, homes, railways, roads and canals would be repaired to the sum of eight million francs to be funded mostly by Germany's reparation payments.
The Treaty of Versailles had stipulated that the new republican government of Germany would have to pay twenty million gold marks in reparations, with the number being fixed at 132 million gold marks by the Reparations Commission on April 28th 1921. France was to receive the largest share of the reparations payments, totaled at fifty-two percent, with two-fifths of the money allotted to Belgium.
It's economy shattered by the war, the Wiemar Republic started to default on its payments to the Allies as 1921 slipped into 1922.
French forces moved to occupy the Ruhr on January 1923, putting the French nation in control of seventy-three percent of Germany's coal and eighty-three percent of the battered nation's steel and iron. Having responded with 'passive resistance,' the German government organized a general strike across the Ruhr which shut down the Ruhr's mines and factories. With the railways having been shut down as well the German government in Berlin moved to devalue the country's currency as a final act of resistance, which soon made the Reichsmark worthless.
French and Belgian workers and engineers poured into the Ruhr, partially restoring the region's economy. As the railways, mines, and factories were reactivated and, as the German government faced a concerted national uprising by the country's communists in October, the Premier Poincare listened increasingly to President of the Republic Alexandre Millerand and Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the aging military commander having considered the controversial occupation of the Ruhr 'the greatest event since the Armistice.' Hoping for a deal between the French government and German industrialists, the sudden communist uprisings across Germany only increased the pressure piling up on Poincare's administration to take full control of the Ruhr.
Still weary from the aftermath of the Great War and, despite calls on the right for an intervention in Germany's civil war, Premier Poincare made a point to dig in along the Ruhr rather then risk getting involved in what was increasingly becoming a bloody and terrible affair. The Ruhr gave the French control over most of Germany's coal, iron, and steel production and created an industrial monopoly on the continent. The new Soviet regime established in Germany was hurt by the loss of the Ruhr, which served to cripple the regime's economy. Poincare left office feeling-knowing-that he had made a tough but correct decision.
Section Six
The Soviet Union's people had known war, or the threat of war, prior to the outbreak of the European War. Between Leningrad and Moscow onwards to Berlin, training camps had been set up in which citizens of the USSR could go on forced marches, learn how to dig foxholes, and would practice parachuting.
Youth across the Soviet Union learned in schools about the civil war-era fronts once gracing Russia and Germany, of the heroic fights for 'Red Petrograd' and 'Red Berlin.' They played games, such as 'Reds and Whites.' And even as their powerful union of nations geared up for a war they knew was coming, as the monarchical fascists of France's ruling French Action party planned how best to vanquish 'Jewish Bolshevism,' young recruits swelled the ranks of the Red Army whose commanders-military officers hailing from Russia, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere-served to cultivate the image of a final war which would surely smash fascism's assembled forces swiftly and decisively. Red Army troops would march within weeks into Paris and through a Triumphal Arch draped with red banners bearing the gold hammer-and-sickle emblem. The war was to be won quickly, the Red Army its triumphant victor.
Underneath the surface the Red Army had been weakened by a series of purges throughout the Soviet Union following the attempt on Heinrich Brandler's life in Berlin and the successful assassination of the longtime Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky in Leningrad, coinciding a few months apart from each other in 1935. [1]
The End
The Red Army did enter Paris and would go on to march through a Triumphal Arch draped in red flags. The victory came at a cost. After nearly two years of soldering, at participating in bloody battles for villages, towns, and cities and after having lost large swaths of territory and thousands of Red Army fighters who had initially expected what Trotsky had called on the eve of war a 'brusque conflict,' the eager boys striving for adventure who had once played childish games of 'Reds and Whites' had become tired veterans by the war's conclusion.
'To think,' wrote Rommel years later as a retired army officer living a quiet life in Bavaria, 'what was said to be a brusque conflict would turn into a most terrible and vicious affair.'
Rommel was there in Paris as his Seventh Panzer Division rolled through the Triumphal Arch and down the street; his men and their panzer tanks had faced near annihilation during the war's opening moves, and would play a decisive role during the Battle of Hamburg in the ensuing months after the Red Army's total rout.
Landing at Le Bourget airfield sometime after the Battle For Paris had been won, Trotsky and his entourage visited the occupying Red Army troops to raise morale as they toured the majestic city. 'Paris,' Trotsky had begun as he posed for a photo with the massive Eiffel Tower standing behind him, 'Paris-' He stopped abruptly mid-sentence while the now-famous picture was taken. He never finished his sentence, and did not mention it later on in life when he was supreme ruler over much of Europe Perhaps he had meant to lament the damage done to such a great city, or to point out the splendid beauty of the French capital even in the aftermath of a brutal fight for it's control.
'The importance of today's victory,' he had said later in a speech below the Eiffel Tower to a huge mass of assembled Red Army soldiers, 'cannot be overstated due to its relevance to the continuing worldwide proletarian struggle and to the peace-loving peoples of Europe and the Soviet Union.'
As Trotsky's powerful voice boomed over the crowd of soldiers and the smattering of civilians who had come to listen in on what would come to be his victory speech, word had gotten through the ranks that the British were willing to negotiate a cease-fire. Perhaps excited political officers had leaked information on the secretive negotiations that were raging in London to their troops, or perhaps the low-level grunts had known deep in their hearts that the war was finally won 'In the end, does it truly matter? The point still remains that this hellish nightmare is finally over, and that the awful crimes of the fascists have been shockingly exposed to the entire world.' Wrote Guderian in his private journal.
Trotsky ended his speech with the words 'war, war hardly changes and yet through the hell of combat we have persevered. Long live the Red Army, long live our great Soviet Union!'
The soldiers repeated his last few words in one boisterous voice. The war was over, and they could at long last go back to leading normal and peaceful lives.
Footnotes:
Section One
[1]: The capital was moved from Petrograd to Moscow in OTL, a decision which was protested by the Bolshevik Zinoviev on the grounds that the new capital should be placed instead in a less crucial city as this would increase the likelihood of the capital moving back to Petrograd.
[2]: In OTL Count Mirbach was assassinated by the Left SR Chekists Iakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreev in Moscow.
Section Two
[1]: ITTL the Southwestern Army Group's forces headed towards Brest instead of Lvov, allowing them to aid the Western Army Group.
Section Three
[1]: Heinrich Brandler in OTL backed down, resulting in the failed Hamburg Rising. ITTL the KPD's leadership decides to launch a coordinated national insurrection.
Section Four
[1]: In OTL Stalin became General Secretary, with Molotov and Kuybyshev as his assistant secretaries. ITTL, Stalin dies from appendicitis which leads to Kuybyshev becoming General Secretary.
[2]: Known as Uritsky Square in OTL. Uritsky ITTL survives the attempt on his life by the military cadet Leonid Kannegisser, while consequently Palace Square becomes Volodarsky Square.
Section Six
[1]: IOTL Sergey Kirov's assassination on December 1st, 1934 in Leningrad sparked the Great Purge in the USSR.
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