Here Dwells God - A Jewish Poland AAR, Part Four

[Tommy4ever]

A Brief History of Late Modern Poland

Modernity Knocks 1821-1858

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Poland lurched forward into the modern world. Having fallen behind the rapidly developing societies of Central Europe from the end of the previous century, there was a clear effort to catch up. Poland became involved in the Great Game, facing down the Papacy for influence and territory across Central Asia and Iran, while also locking horns with its old enemy in the Holy Roman Empire. Poland initially strained under competition from the more advanced nations of the west, yet by the 1850s the seeds of its own industrial revolution were being planted as the first factories and railroads began to appear across the empire and efforts were made to spread education to the masses. Politically too, the empire looked towards the new world. Aping the style of the Europeans, the Tsar surrendered his absolute power to civilian government – appointing the first Prime Minister, Mikhail Brusilov, in 1831. Brusilov oversaw the transition towards constitutional government – establishing an elected Duma in 1840, albeit under a very tightly controlled franchise and, infamously, limiting representation to the predominately Jewish and ethnically Russian European portion of the empire. By the late 1850s political life in the empire was truly beginning to take off with the formation of its first political parties – with the liberal Constitutionalists in 1856 and the clerical-conservative Agudah Yisrael in 1857.

Reform and Reaction 1858-1881

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After the 1858 shook the staid conservative dominance of the Duma, robbing them of their majority for the first time, a decade of liberal ascendancy took hold as the Constitutionalists pushed forward with the first extensive attempt to reform the constitution since 1840. The slavery of the Moldavian gypsies was abolished, soon to be followed by serfdom, a degree of local autonomy was granted to minority communities while the franchise was extended to the upper middle classes in 1867. Through this time the Polish right coalesced into the National Alliance that united conservatives and reactionaries into a powerful coalition that swept the liberals from power in 1872 and proceeded to put religion at the heart of education, and Judaism in the soul of the state, at the expense of the empire’s vast minority populations. At the same time, they set off a social revolution in the countryside by establishing a Land Bank that, over the course of decades, allowed millions of former serfs to rise to become peasant smallholders in their own right. Internationally, Poland continued its great rivalry with the Papacy – expanding deeper into Asia and then decisively defeating an alliance between the Pope and Serbs in 1873-74. All the while, it was during this period that the industrial revolution truly took hold – transforming society in a core territory around Moscow, Minsk and Kiev and having feinter echoes across much of European Poland, driven above all by a thriving textile industry.

Rise of the Masses 1881-1901

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The final two decades of the century witnessed the arrival of the masses into the forefront of Polish history with the advent of mass politics, communication, labour and conflict. After the fall of the right from power in 1881, Poland entered into a period of political instability in which it alternated between weaker liberal and conservative administrations, each dependent on strained parliamentary coalition. The ability to negotiate these alliances was held back by the increasing assertiveness of minority political leaders – most pertinently Belegunutists, Tatar-Mongol reformists, who pushed the issues of minority rights and the abolition of the Brusilov Line to the centre of national affairs, a movement soon followed by the separatist Turanists. At the same time the rapidly growing urban working class the ongoing industrial revolution had created offered a new challenge to the existing order in the form of organised labour and the socialist movement. Warfare acted as a further catalyst for Poland’s ongoing transformation as the Beijing War of 1883-1886, that pitted Poland against first the Papacy and later the Holy Roman Empire as well, saw mass mobilisation and death on a scale not seen in Europe since at least the Fifty Years War of the eighteenth century, if ever. It was in the aftermath of the war that the 1886 Reform Act dramatically expanded the vote to the majority of the adult male population before a further Act in 1892 extended it to universal manhood suffrage. While economic growth slowed in the 1890s, the decade was overshadowed by the angry politics of identity arising from the Brusilov Crisis. Conservatives harnessed the powers of the crowd, mass media and traditional parliamentary manoeuvre to scupper liberal attempts of abolition in 1893, only to lose power to a socialist-led government in 1896 sworn to reform. Only the outbreak of the Great War in 1897 suspended the struggle. The conflict, that pitched a Holy Roman Empire at the pinnacle of its power against a broad European coalition led by Poland left millions dead, much of the continent devastated and definitively broke the might of Kiev’s ancestral German enemy.

The Golden Decade 1901-1912

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Poland emerged from the Great War as the world’s hegemonic power, militarily, economically and diplomatically. At home, this period was dominated by coalitions of progressive parties that governed continuously between 1902 and 1912, with an interlude of liberal-conservative cooperation between 1906 and 1908. These parties drastically changed Polish society – establishing a welfare state, introducing secularising reforms to education, granting woman the right to vote on the same basis as men, supporting the rights of ethnic minorities and, most prominently of all, abolishing the Brusilov Line to offer representation to all subjects of the empire equally. For all these grand reforms, economics overshadowed the period. The decade after the Great War was defined by a tremendous economic boom that drastically improved living standards across Poland. Already beginning to taper off by the last years of the 1900, the period of expansion was cut painfully short by the 1909 crash – as a rural financial crisis brought the wider economy crashing into recession. In the hard years after 1909, the progressive postwar consensus came under concerted attack from a right wing movement committed to destroying it.

The Radical State 1912-1931

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In the 1910s Poland’s vibrant democracy fell into the abyss. In 1912 a radicalised conservative government came to power committed to tearing up the changes of the postwar era and closely allied to the far right Radical Republican Party and their leader Boris Makarov – most importantly by reinstating the Brusilov Line. Over the course the next two years the Radicals overtook the conservatives to become the leading force behind the political right – winning a plurality of votes and seats in the 1914 election. With the Radicals alongside an increasingly extreme Trudovik party achieving a majority in the Duma, the Tsar attempted to organise a coup d'etat to install a moderate government. This effort collapsed as the Radicals seized power following the March on Kiev, as blackshirts descended on the capital, the Tsar was captured and Poland fell into a civil war pitting the Radicals against recalcitrant Tsarists and revolutionary socialists. After achieving victory, the Radicals consolidated a dictatorship moulded in their own image – abolishing the Tsardom and establishing the Russian Republic of Poland in 1917. Over the next decade and a half they strived to construct a totalitarian regime in which the state dominated society, and Russian supremacy was guaranteed. The most overt expression of state and ethnic power was the Felaket of 1926-1929 that saw the regime forcibly expel around 15,000,000 Tatars and Mongols from the European portion of the Republic, attempting to resolve centuries of struggle between Slaves and the peoples of the Steppe over these lands. Growing internationally isolated, the regime was badly shaken by a new economic crash in 1929 that was followed by widespread industrial dissent and a major Tatar rebellion – gravely undermining faith in Makarov’s dictatorship.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Great Men of Late Modern Poland

Mikhail Brusilov 1787-1869

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Brusilov had his feet in the pre-modern traditions of the Polish aristocracy – resentful of centralisation and monarchical power, devout in his Jewish faith and Slavic roots, distrustful of foreign influences and grounded in ancient tradition. He came from a family that had long been at odds with the absolutist monarch of eighteenth century Poland – his father being involved in a major anti-Zvenislava revolt in the 1790s. His selection as the Poland’s first Prime Minister in 1831 by Tsar Vasiliy IV was part of an effort to heal a longstanding divide in the Polish elite between secular, centralising, modernists on one side and pious, localist, traditionalists on the other. It was through an effort to build a permanent structure through this peace among the elite could be maintained that the Duma was established in 1840, and with it, Polish democracy was born.

Brusilov’s left a long shadow over Polish history not only through the creation of her seedling democratic institutions, but also through his decision to limit access to this representation to millions of minorities living in the non-European parts of the empire through the implementation of the Brusilov Line. Ironically, after the creation of his greatest achievement, his fortunes began to flag as in the mid-1840s he lost the confidence of his parliamentary supporters through his support for the abolition of Roma slavery and then court after the death of his patron Vasiliy IV. After another change in sovereign, he was granted the opportunity to make a comeback in 1850 and duly served for another six years before an unlikely sex scandal brought an end to his political career. Unfortunately for Brusilov, during his retirement he saw the conservative movement he had led for so long fall into infighting and division, and his vision of moderate Slavophilism fall out of favour.

Boris Zhakov 1802-1884

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Zhakov was the founder of Polish liberalism, moving it away from its origins as the inheritor of a modernist absolutist tradition towards a set of ideals based upon democracy, secularism, the free market and the rule of law. Becoming the first leader of the Constitutional Party after its foundation in 1856, he brought an end to Slavophile dominance by robbing them of their majority for the first time in 1858 and then forcing them into an uncomfortable liberal-conservative alliance. This coalition achieved long sought after liberal goals with the abolition of Roma slavery and, in 1863, the emancipation of the Polish peasantry from serfdom. The question of serfdom served a valuable political end as well, splitting the conservative movement and sending it into existential crisis – allowing Zhakov to rise to the premiership in 1863 and achieve the first ever liberal Duma majority in 1866. With even greater political capital, he broaden the franchise to the middle classes with the 1867 Reform Act, and won a further majority in 1868.

The resurgence of the right under the banner of the National Alliance ended his first spell as Prime Minister in 1872, and after a particularly stinging defeat in 1875 he stepped away from the leadership of the Constitutionalists in favour of younger heads. He made a short lived come back at the end of the decade – intervening to prevent liberals from coming to an arrangement with that would keep the conservatives in power in 1880, and returning to the premiership after winning a liberal plurality in the 1881 election. Sadly for the ageing liberal hero, his second spell in office was extremely short lived as, following a spate of violent industrial unrest his preference for a harsh line involving a ban on trade union and socialist organisations led to his own party forcing him out of power. Zhakov chose not to stand again in 1883, and went to his family estate to live out the last year of his life.

Yildilz Kazimzade 1829-1919

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In many ways the flip side of Zhakov, Yildilz Kazimzade was the grand old man of Polish conservatism, dominating Polish political life for a generation. Prime Minister three times in 1875-1881, 1893-1896 and, if only for a matter of days, in 1914, Deputy Prime Minister in the wartime coalition of 1897-1902 and a key minister and political player Israel and Vlasov ministries of 1872-1875 and 1887-1892 respectively. Incredibly, he played served in government for 22 of the 30 years between his election to the Duma in 1872 and the electoral defeat of 1902 that sent him into semi-retirement. In doing so, he forged a conservative movement in his own image and indelibly shaped late nineteenth century Poland.

Born into the comfort of the upper middle classes in the ethnically-mixed Don Valley, the son of a Rabbi, Kazimzade’s first passions were faith and business. Unusually for a member of the Polish elite of the nineteenth century, he was neither Russian nor Ashkenazi but hailed from the third Jewish ethnicity in the empire – the Khazars. He made his fortune in the 1860s in coal mining, but was drawn to politics through outrage at the liberal reforms of the era that gave Muslim Tatars in his home region a significant say over local administration for the first time. He joined the Agudah Yisrael and played a crucial role in pushing it away from being little more than a Hasidic pressure group, developing a more ideologically focussed philosophy that sought to imbue Judaism throughout Polish life and the state. In time, this ideology would consume the wider conservative movement as well.

Immediately upon being elected to the Duma in 1872, Kazimzade was thrust into government and made responsible for extensive reforms of education that both expanded coverage and placed Poland’s schools in the hands of religious institutions – Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Hindu. After moving from education to the foreign ministry, he led negotiations that ended the war with the Serbs and Papacy in 1874, but it was the following year that he was thrust into the centre of national politics as following the assassination of sitting Prime Minister David Israel, he secured the premiership for himself. Under his stewardship, Polish conservatism reached its electoral peak – securing its largest ever vote share at the 1875 election, and coming agonisingly close to repeating the feat in 1880. His government was active and sharply ideological – centring all of its activities around faith and nation. The alienation of the minority parties was his ultimate undoing, as they aligned closely with the liberals – making governing after 1880 impossible and leading to an electoral defeat in 1881 that sent him into opposition.

The following decade were Kazimzade’s wilderness years. Losing favour within conservativism to moderates, he idled in opposition until 1887, and served as a minister in, rather than leader of, the Vlasov ministry of 1887-1892, even as the conservative grassroots continued to idolise him. His brand of politics was brought back to the fore by the Brusilov Crisis of the 1890s. Skillfully marshalling a mass movement in defence of the Brusilov Line, he pressured the Duma and facilitated the National Liberal split in the Constitutionalist Party to scupper Prime Minister Orlov’s attempts at abolition in 1893 and secure his return to power with a narrow majority. Faced with a tempestuous political situation, his second ministry was not as effective as his first, and he lost power after just three years. That might have been the end of his political career had the Great War not intervened – with the Trudoviks inviting the right to join them in a national coalition in late 1897 as the conflict grew more dangerous and entrenched, giving Kazimzade the role of Deputy Prime Minister. After dutifully and ably serving the war effort, he had a final shot at averting the abolition of the Brusilov Line in the postwar vote of 1902 but fell to a clear defeat at the hands of the progressive parties. Now in his 70s, he fell back into the ranks of the Agudat Yisrael backbenches while a new generation sought to define conservativism in a post-Brusilov world. In his dotage he was drawn back into the fray by one last act, criticising the right wing premier Igor Gaidar for his cooperation with the Radicals after 1912, as a Khazar being rankled by their racial ideology, before agreeing to be the figurehead of the Tsar’s post-election 1914 coup. After the putsch collapsed, he was arrested by blackshirts, spared from execution owing to his age and respect on the right, he was sent to live out his in internal exile in a Siberian village, where he penned a seven-volume memoir recounting his remarkable life.

Tsar Nikolai 1823-1907

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Through an era in which Poland and the world transformed so thoroughly and at such great speed, Tsar Nikolai was a constant source of calm and stability. He perhaps most valued in what he didn’t do rather than what he did, taking a less activist approach to the governing of his empire than his predecessors. He generally favoured cooperation between conservative and liberals over the involvement of minority and leftist parties, but was happy to appoint Tatar and Christian ministers and the world’s first socialist Prime Minister. Perhaps his only truly divisive political decision was overruling Petr Orlov’s effort to abolish the Brusilov Line in 1893, after the Prime Minister secured a plurality of Duma votes but failed to muster even half of the chamber in favour of his proposal. Nonetheless, the Tsar lived long enough to ratify the Line’s eventual abolition in the last years of his life. Over the course of his reign, Nikolai fostered an imperial cult that revelled in the Tsar as the embodiment of the empire’s imperial splendour, democratic constitution and righteous ideals. This respect helped to hold the realm together in testing times and, to the great misfortune of the Poles, was not successfully transmitted to his successor.

Daniil Chernov 1855-1927

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Considering the breadth of his influence on Polish history, outside the confines of the political left at the very least, Daniil Chernov can often seem to be the forgotten man. Coming from a middle class provincial background, he was an early adopted of the new socialist movement – entering the Duma alongside the first cohort of Trudovik Deputies in 1887. Able in front of crowds, in the press and on the floor of the parliamentary chamber, Chernov became the leading figure within the socialist movement and oversaw its explosive growth through the 1890s that saw the party shoot to its electoral peak in 1896 with a plurality in the Duma, almost a third of the popular vote and the chance to form a government. With grand ambitions to reform society, no least by abolishing the Brusilov Line, Chernov was instead destined to become his country’s wartime leader – inviting the conservatives he had spent his career battling against to join him in a wartime national coalition.

After four steely years at the helm, following victory over the Germans, Chernov sought to reignite the left’s grand vision for the future – winning a second plurality in 1902, albeit with reduced support. Heading a progressive coalition with liberals and minority parties, the Chernov ministry gave birth to the Polish welfare state and, finally, did away with the Brusilov Line. Although falling behind the conservatives in support in the first post-Brusilov election in 1906, Chernov had every reason to expect to remain in power only for the Constitutionalist leader Ivan Tymoshenko to betray him and form a centre-right government – leading to a long personal feud between the two men.

After liberal-conservative cooperation broke down in 1908, Chernov led his Trudoviks – a party by then in clear decline in the face of far right competition – into an unstable progressive alliance under Poland’s first Christian premier Leonas Mironas. This coalition was deeply unpopular within his own party, and under pressure from the left Chernov broke with the government in 1911, eventually surrendering the leadership of his party entirely after another disappointing election in 1912. As Polish democracy entered its death throws, Chernov went into exile in the early days of the 1914 civil war – spending the rest of his life among various left wing groups of exiles across Europe and North America, always dreaming of one day returning to his homeland. Sadly, this was an ambition he would never have the chance to fulfil.

Boris Makarov 1872-X

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From humble origins would grow a monster. Boris Makarov hailed from the idiosyncratic province of Pomerania – a heavily industrialised Jewish and Russian enclave surrounded by Germanic and Baltic Christian lands, on the very edge of the Polish empire, and proud of its status as the only Samaritan-majority region on earth. As a young man Makarov worked as a shipbuilder in his home region, before travelling to the coal fields of the Don Valley – becoming involved in trade unionism and joining the Trudovik Party. In 1897 he was conscripted to fight in the Great War, earning decoration for his bravery over four years of service. After the return to peacetime he threw himself into politics and was elected to the Duma in 1902 as a Trudovik. He quickly found himself at odds with his party leadership over the issue of the Brusilov Line, and his party’s positive stance towards ethnic minorities, yet retained immense popularity with the rank and file.

After being expelled from the party in 1905 he formed the Radical Labour Party – securing re-election and 1.5 million votes in 1906, but failing to trouble the major parties. This changed after a merger with the Veterans League, a rightwing populist association lobbying for Great War veterans, to form the Radical Republic Party, and his movement’s embrace of violent street politics. Thereafter, powered by ethnic grievance at the reforms of the Golden Decade, effective organisation and his own charismatic leadership, the party gained ground rapidly. Between 1912 and 1914 the Radicals propped up a rightwing conservative government, and maintained pressure on it to ensure that it carried through on its extreme promises included the reimposition of the Brusilov Line. After winning a plurality in the 1914 election, Makarov seized power in the aftermath of the Tsar’s botched coup attempt and, following a bloody year-long civil war, established a brutal dictatorship. Over the following decade and a half the Vozhd would go about constructing a totalitarian regime built around his leadership – committing numerous violations of basic humanity. However, with the Russian Republic wrought by instability in the aftermath of the 1929 crash his position appeared less stable than ever before.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1931-1933 – Let Them Tremble

Vozhd Boris Makarov alongside Field Marshall Sergei Baranova​

After the troubles of the late 1920s, faith in the direction of Russia under Boris Makarov’s leadership had been badly shaken. Within the regime, the conservative elements that had buttressed the Radicals since 1914 were unhappy and seeking alternatives. These malcontents grouped themselves around the figure of Field Marshall Sergei Baranova. A veteran of the Great War, the civil war and countless campaigns against Tatar rebellions and insurgencies, Baranova was one of the most senior figures in the Russian army and had significant governmental influence in Kiev. Like many of the military old guard, he was, in his heart, a traditionalist who might have preferred a right wing nationalist Tsarist regime over the futurist dystopia of the Radical movement. By the beginning of 1931 the Baranova faction was building strength and laying the ground for an attempted seizure of power that would place Russia under the control of a conservative military dictatorship.

As the plot grew in strength, one of its members lost heart and tipped off the secret police. MGB agents made arrests raided the homes and offices of several members of the Baranova faction and soon uncovered a shocking conspiracy of high profile members of the Russian elite against the Vozhd and his regime. While Baranova and those most clearly involved were quickly executed, there were fears that rebel sentiment was far more widespread that the old Field Marshall and his confidantes. With so many conservatives implicated, traditionalists were quickly purged from positions of power and influence in government, the military, state administration and society. Makarov himself placed heavy pressure on the MGB to root out any and every hint of disloyalty and conspiracy.

For this task, the Vozhd appointed a new head of the MGB – the firebrand Radical Feodor Golikov. Having risen through the ranks of the Radical Republican Party from the status of a blackshirt street thug in the 1910s, to take on a major organisational role in the Felaket in Muscovy, Golikov was seen as ideologically reliable, utterly ruthless and extremely effective. Under his direction, the secret police would massively expand their operation – conducting arbitrary arrests in the hope of uncovering evidence of plotting and pressuring prisoners into forced confessions. Unsurprisingly, the army was particularly badly hit – almost the entire general staff and the majority of officers of ranks being purged from its numbers over the course of the terror that followed. Golikov’s suspicions were not solely directed at conservatives, but also looked to the Radical Party itself, where it was feared that traitors and opportunists had embedded themselves.

As a wider climate of fear took hold, it quickly became apparent the best way to avoid implicating yourself was to point the finger at another, while others also saw opportunities to settle old scores. With the smallest hint of suspicion enough to guarantee arrest, and possibly execution, terror ran through the Russian elite as the scope of MGB operations escalated beyond all reason. Soon, the whole of Russian society was under suspicion, with common people in their millions taking part in the same insane logic of hurling fatal accusations at their neighbours and friends in a desperate effort to save themselves.

Through the purges of 1931 and 1932, it is estimated hundreds of thousands lost their lives and perhaps as many as two million forfeited their freedom to the MGB’s sprawling empire of prisons. The most famous victim of the purges of all was none other than one Radoslav Zvenislava – the deposed former Tsar who had spent that previous decade and a half living a quiet life at his ancestral seat in Prussia. Despite having virtually no communication with the outside world, the former sovereign was seen as a potential focal point for opposition and faced Golikov’s firing squads alongside his entire family. Only his young grandson, Yaroslav, was able to escape – reaching the safety of the Danish border with the aid of sympathisers.

By late 1932, the purges were starting to come to an end. Having pleased the Vozhd, Golikov himself had received a major promotion for his fine work – rising the control a wider Ministry for Home Affairs, while retaining his control over the MGB. This drew one of the major catalytic forces behind the terror away from the heat of the action. More importantly, the crippling effects they were having on the Republic had convinced many in the leadership that the time had come to wind them down. The military in particular was in a chaotic state. With its leadership and officer core utterly decimated, the Radical Party had instituted a strict vetting process that demanded ideological commitment from new officers and generals – effectively giving former blackshirt street leaders and Party toadies the most effect route to leadership. The economy and state administration had likewise been badly hit by the loss of key personnel whose skills could not be so easily replaces, while the horrors inflicted on wider society had left the people of the Republic exhausted with fear. The dictatorship had stamped out all hints of dissent, but at incredible cost.

While the eyes of the Russian state had been fixed upon its own people, troubling was brewing on its south eastern frontier. The Mongol Khanate had been a close dependency of the Polish state since the mid-nineteenth century, and had grown immensely in size under Kiev’s protection. However, since the 1920s an increasingly assertive Chinese regime in the south had been cultivating a strong anti-Russian current within the state – making effective use of its links to the economically important Chinese populations living around Mongol-ruled Beijing. When ruling Khagan Baraq III died in February 1932, the Beijing faction found its chance to strike as the pro-Chinese second son of the Khagan, Gegeen, seized power in Ulanbaatar and moved to remove Russian advisors, achieving a more independent position. Gegeen’s assumption of power did not go unchallenge, as his older brother Toghan fled to the western city of Urumqi and rose the banner of revolt among the Uighur tribes of the region – beginning the Mongol civil war.

Of greater world historical significance that events in Mongolia were changes underway in Europe. The Depression that began in 1929 had hit the region very hard, causing massive unemployment and social dislocation – leaving the elites, and indeed the existing forms of social organisation, badly discredited. Many looked towards alternatives, casting admiring eyes at Normandy, where a socialist regime had banished poverty and inequality while avoiding the economic woes being suffered across the rest of the continent. The ideals of revolutionary socialism had their strongest attraction among those peoples that still ached under the national humiliations of the Treaty of Lucca that ended the Great War three decades ago – the French, living under foreign domination, and the Germans, diminished and divided since their defeat. In both nations, the revolutionary left had unified under militant Socialist Workers Parties that were enjoying explosive growth with their promises of social change, national restoration and world revolution.

In the early 1930s the once stable societies of Central and Western Europe were showing signs of decay. Across the region, labour militancy spiralled out of control as ideologically motivated socialist union leaders whipped up vicious industrial conflict. In France, armed anti-imperialist groups swearing fealty to the red flag were growing more confident and aggressive in their attacks on the regimes ruling over the different corners of the nation. To the west in Germany, the social order was in disarray – on the left, militant socialists formed violent revolutionary groups who support industrial and political struggles, while in the right counter revolutionaries attempted to hold them down. The continent was heading for a reckoning.

That reckoning arrived in the autumn of 1932. Following a long summer of fierce strikes in coal country, in October the Ruhr, a territory under the control of the Archbishopric of Hesse, exploded into violent upheaval. After an ill-fated attempt to use the army to defend blackleg workers going to the pits, the Socialist Workers Party distributed arms among striking miners and party cadres alike. After handily defeated the weak armed forces of the Archbishopric, the revolutionary saw the power of the Hessian state melt away before their eyes. They therefore continued to push – occupying the mighty industrial cities of the region and expanding from there through the rest of the Rhineland and Hesse. As the mass uprising gathered steam it carried the air of a Jacquerie, as bands of revolutionary workers driven by red-hot class anger launched themselves at the church, bourgeoisie and state with all their fury – cutting a swathe of destruction in their wake and sweeping the old order before them. During these hectic weeks the Archbishop himself was killed by a mortar, ironically fired by one of his own soldiers, as he attempted to flee from his collapsing state.

By late October governmental authority in Hesse had completely collapsed and the insurrection was bleeding over into the Holy Roman Empire, with socialist militias rising up across the realm. As the crisis spiralled out of control, the Imperial government appeared powerless to act. Vienna had a clear lack of faith in the army – with reports of rank and file soldiers deserting and even attacking their officers and defecting to the revolution. Furthermore, the conservative elites in government, having a deep familiarity with the rise of Radicalism in Poland, had no stomach for close cooperation with the far right, whose militias were perhaps the most effective counter revolutionary force in the Empire by this stage.

On November 3rd, the Imperial elites’ decision was made for them as the Socialist Workers Party executed an expertly organised coup in Vienna under the command of their charismatic leader Ludwig Weidermann. After seizing control of key government buildings, strategic infrastructure and means of communication, Weidermann announced the proclamation of the Vereinigte Sozialistische Volksrepublik, the VSVR, on the steeps of the Imperial Parliament. With red revolutionaries sweeping across the country, this was the death knell for a millennium of German Imperial history, and the last surviving empire tracing its heritage back to the glories of ancient Rome. Yet it also marked the birth of a new world.

Just had been the case in the Rhineland, the socialist revolution across the German lands was accompanied by a brutal red terror. Uncontrolled violence and killings were targetted against the middle and upper classes, who fled the country in their hundreds of thousands, while in the countryside the socialists encouraged poor peasants to ransack manorial estates and even target wealthier independent farmers – dividing their lands and possessions among themselves. Yet even in the context of the anarchic state of open class warfare, the Party was already establishing its grip – rapidly creating the organs of a proletarian dictatorship and solidifying political power around a small clique of party loyalists around Weidermann himself.

While the world looked on, transfixed in awe and horror by events in Germany, revolutionaries around the world saw a shining beacon of hope. In France, this inspiration drove the anti-imperial resistance movement to rebellion, and by late November much of the country we in the midst of the largest national uprising in decades. The leaders of the VSVR saw socialist revolution in France as imperative not only to the security of their own nascent state, but as the next logical step towards the world revolution. They therefore sought to aggressively involve themselves in the rising – sending their armies over the border into Italian and Skottish ruled territories. Desperate to ensure success, and avoid being seen as another invader, they looked to legitimise their intervention by sending a delegation to Normandy – the small French socialist state on the Channel Coast. Pledging an independent French state, and ample assistance from the VSVR, the Germans secured the support of Caen and on December 16th Normandy declared war on France’s occupying powers and sent its armies into enemy territory. The Franco-German revolutionary axis was born.

By the end of December, VSVR troops were already pushing into the German-populated provinces of Skotland and Denmark along the Baltic and North Sea shorelines, and launching probing attacks into the Netherlands. By this stage, the Socialist International had opened hostilities against Skotland, Italy and Andalucia in France and Denmark and the Netherlands in the north. None of these states had traditionally been premier military powers, and there were concerns that the reds might well be able to overwhelm them without support. For this reason, His Holiness the Pope put himself forward as the man to lead Christian civilisation and the decency of the old order to victory against the Godless heathens of the International – declaring war on January 2nd, cajoling Sardinia and Algiers to join the fight shortly later, and sending her armies to the continent to fight. The Second World War, the Great Revolutionary War, had begun.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1933-1936 – Workers of the World Unite!

With Europe falling into war, observers looked to the great capitals of Kiev and New Cordoba for signs of how the world’s premier totalitarian state and its largest democracy would involve themselves. Both parties were internally divided on this question. The Russian regime had little love for the liberal states of West-Central Europe being swept away by the revolution, yet the socialists were undoubtedly a more hated and threatening opponent. However, in the immediate aftermath of the purges the Republic was in no fit state for a major war. Although warhawks like Golikov, the architect of the purges, still pushed for intervention, it was clear that time would be needed to restructure the decimated armed forces and promote a new officer and leadership core before war could seriously be contemplated. The Russians therefore settled for a position of armed neutrality – placing large numbers of soldiers on the Russo-German border, and deploying troops to Panonnia to guarantee its independence but leaving the socialist and western states to fight among themselves.

For the United States, the war present different questions. Traditionally, the Americans had not been a major military power. Its armies had never stepped foot outside of North America and its largest military conflicts since independence had been fought against indigenous tribal confederations. As such, in 1933 it was little more than a third rate military power – even if its immense economic and human resources gave it the potential for much more. Politically, the nation’s politicians hewed close to their traditional isolationism, with distaste for the Christian European imperialists in general and the Papacy – with its centuries long oppression of Muslims in the Middle East – particular strengthening this sentiment. However, there was a strong opposing minority current. These interventionists were motivated firstly by a spiritual bond with the Andalucian motherland that had given birth to their nation and was now threatened with invasion on one hand; and a visceral hatred of the revolutionary socialists, whose anti-capitalist, militantly atheist, anti-democratic and expansionist ideals horrified mainstream opinion across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, any American entry into the war was a long way off.

On the front, the opening manoeuvres of the Revolutionary War were a resounding success for the International. Joining with German forces pouring into France from the west and domestic rebels, the Norman French captured Paris – the greatest of all Francophone cities, in mid-January having barely fired a shot in anger as the Skots withdrew to more defensible coastal redoubts in a disorganised rout. From then, the rising in France only intensified – with the armies of the revolution sweeping across the land. The fiercest resistance in the Gallic lands came from the Italians in the Rhone Valley – where the Italians had taken the time to heavily dig in to fortified positions. As such, the last Italian territories west of the Alps were not captured until the late summer of 1933. To the north, the Netherlands collapsed just days into the German invasion – with the attack on their borders being coordinated with a socialist rising in Amsterdam itself. In northern Germany, the Danes found their Baltic territories untenable – but were able to halt the Germans in their tracks alongside Skottish troops in Holstein. By the end of 1933 the Allies had halted the socialists’ progress, at least temporarily, around the natural boundaries of the Pyrenees, the Alps and the river lines guarding the approaches to the Jutland Peninsula.

While the armies of the Socialist International clashed with the western allies across Europe, much radical leftists around the world stirred fervently as they awaited the coming world revolution. This enthusiasm would bring Russia and the VSVR to the brink of a war both parties hoped to avoid in the spring of 1934 over the issue of the Zagreb Commune. The Croat city of Zagreb had been a source of unrest within Pannonia for well over a century. Energised by events in Europe, in April 1934 a coalition of nationalist and socialist groups launched an uprising in the city – forcing the Pannonian garrison to withdraw from the city and proclaiming an independent Croat Socialist Republic, their state being known to the outside world as the Zagreb Commune. Pledging allegiance to the International, the Commune pleaded for the VSVR to send assistance to protect their revolution. As Kiev warned that any interference in their southern ally would result in war, for several weeks both parties collectively held their breath in a tense stand off. In the end, the VSVR was forced to relent upon their revolutionary idealism, and leave the Croats to be mercilessly crushed by Pannonian army in May.

The Croat Crisis came at a critically important moment in the war in Europe. As the snows melted in the spring of 1934, the International launched largescale offensives over the Alps and Pyrenees – facing intense resistance in both theatres. The breakthrough in Iberia arrived after leftist sleeper cells in Barcelona launched a rebellion – severely disrupting Andalucian supply lines and facilitating the collapse of their Catalan front. Once they had pushed over the mountains, the socialists soon rampaged over the country – the Iberian elites desperately taking to the ports in an effort to flee to sanctuary across the Atlantic. The fighting in Italy was rather fiercer, where the Papacy had deployed its expeditionary forces to reinforce their allies and, crucially, maintain the security of Rome. The Alpine battles last through the majority of the year, costing the socialists hundreds of thousands of lives as the Allies held firm against their advances. However, their lines finally broke east of Grenoble in August 1934 and by the autumn the reds were pouring into Piedmont and Lombardy. Thereafter, Italian and Papal forces withdrew towards Tuscany and began a long, bloody, fighting retreat further down the peninsula as the International slowly ground them towards submission.

This era was a time of global rather than merely European upheaval. Since the early nineteenth century India had been divided between the powerful Rattas empire, the smaller coalition of princely states named the Vengi Chalukyas and the Papacy’s imperial provinces. The ambition to unify India and restore the historic greatness of Hindu civilisation had been a growing inspiration for nationalists for decades. As the beginnings of industrialisation produced a large and literate middle class from the turn of the century, this national movement gained organisation and direction with the formation of the Revolutionary League of India – a left-leaning anti-imperialist party.

When Rattas held its first democratic elections in 1923 the RLI secured an overwhelming victory and quickly went about dismantling the power of the imperial monarchy and embarking on their revolutionary nationalist project. In 1929 they succeeded in coaxing the Vengi Chalukyas into unification – creating the Empire of India. As the 1930s arrived their attentions turned to the Papal colonial empire. Nationalist revolutionaries sought to make Papal provinces in the Punjab and Indus valley ungovernable with all manner of resistance, both peaceful and violent, while mother India gave their ideological and material support. Maintaining order in such densely populated and restive lands proved exceeding costly for the Papacy, and after the outbreak of war in Europe, increasingly difficult to sustain. In 1934 the Papacy decided to partition its Indian provinces – granting independence to the Punjab, but retaining control of the more strategically valuable territories along the Indus. The new Punjabi state lasted for less than a year before RLI militants overthrew the government and petitioned for annexation by India.

Asia had a new great power, and one with grand geopolitical ambitions. The RLI political project was clearly not yet complete. Not only were millions of Indians still under Papal rule in the Indus Valley, the lands of wider Hindu civilisation across Iran and Central Asia remained under Papal and Russian domination. Both imperial powers were viscerally despised in the subcontinent – the Papacy for its more direct colonialism in India, and Russia for its unspeakable inhumanity against its Hindus. While the Felaket and the Radical repression of the Steppe peoples was more often told as a story of Muslim abuse, it should not be forgotten that the victims included millions of Hindu Mongols as well. Tver and Moscow had been home to great Hindu temples and centres of religious learning just as it had been Mosques and Madrasas. With this anti-western and anti-Russian mindset, there were fears in many quarters that the Indians might be susceptible to the advances of the Socialist International if they were not guarded against.

Within Russia, the period after 1933 was one of recovery and preparation. Having seen war break out in Europe, it was recognised by Kiev that Russia’s entry into the conflict would become inevitable at some stage and that both the armed forces and wider society would have to be prepared. This involved a mass propaganda campaign popularising fear of socialist revolution occurring across the border, that galvanised popular opinion behind the regime – particularly among the conservatively-minded who had been horrified by the terror of the purges and the excesses of the Felaket. Moves were made to reorientate the entire Russian economy towards war production, with factories involved in producing civilian goods repurposed for a new war economy. The military itself was reorganised from the bottom up and expanded an unprecedented speed. With the leadership destroyed by the purges, a new class of ideologically trained officers – with strong Radical connections, and often histories in the blackshirts – soon found themselves leading one of the largest armies ever assembles. This grand expansion of the military served to ease some of the worst effects of the Great Depression as well. Military demand buttressed a significant growth in heavy industry. The new factories and the need to fill the ranks of the growing army helped to reduce unemployment to its pre-1929 level by the middle of the decade, with the poverty of the early 1930s fading away.

From late 1934 and 1935 the western Allies struggled in the face of two major socialist-aligned revolutions. The first of these occurred in North Africa, with a largescale Berber revolt beginning in late 1934 against the ethnically Italian rulers of the Duchy of Algiers, who had formed a minority ruling class in the region for centuries. The Berbers met with huge success – gaining control over most of the region’s major cities by the spring of 1935. Despite largely defeating the Algerian armed forces, the revolutionaries were far from victory as crack reinforcement began to arrive from the Papacy – forcing the Berber rebels from urban areas and into a rural insurgency. Another restive region rose up in the summer of 1935 on Ireland, where the culturally Celtic western provinces had long resented Skottish rule from the British mainland. With the island only lightly garrisoned, the rebels were able to take control over most of the rural parts of Ireland – forcing the Skots to hole themselves up around Dublin and Belfast on the east coast by the winter. They subsequently pledged themselves to the International, inviting French marines to conduct a risky crossing to Ireland and successfully capturing Dublin just before Christmas.

On the front, progress slowed significantly. In Italy, the Allies gradually lost ground until they were finally forced to evacuate the peninsula in the summer of 1935. To the north, quite remarkably, it took until June 1935 for the reds to finally break through the Allies’ defensive lines in Holstein and occupy Jutland. Thereafter, the war entire a period of suspended animation. Although the International was furiously constructing the ships and planes it would need to advance on other fronts, the fleets of Skotland, the Papacy and Denmark were able to keep them at bay. This was until the mutiny of the Danish navy in Stockholm in November 1935. With the sailors rising against the admiralty and state, the took their ships out to sea and then defected to the VSVR in Lubeck. The International reacted to its sudden acquisition of naval supremacy in the Baltic by launching an invasion across the sea in southern Sweden in December. By March, the Kingdom of Denmark had surrendered.

By the spring of 1936 the International appeared on the cusp of victory. Denmark, Italy, Andalucia and the Netherlands had all capitulated and socialist republics established in their stead. The Skots lived in fear of an invasion of their homeland, barely holding on to a toehold on the neighbouring island of Ireland. In the south, the Papacy had shored up their Algerian ally, yet remained isolated and insecure, with much of its own colonial empire restive.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1936-1940 – Weltkrieg

In the second half of the 1930s the new age of conflict arrived in Asia in earnest. In May 1936 the two greatest powers of the Far East went to war as Japan invaded on China. The Japanese had controlled a small toehold on continental Asia since the 1900 with the city of Shanghai. However, they had watched with great alarm as the Xi Republic slowly defeated most of the remaining warlords to unify almost the entirety of Han-speaking core of the Chinese nation. Fearing that, given time, China would undoubtedly become the dominant force in the region, the Japanese looked to strike while they still held a technological advantage. Over the course of 1936 and 1937 they launched a series of ambitious invasions around coastal China, occupying large parts of her richest lands. However, as they attempted to drive inland their progress stalled and a war of attrition began to settle in that pitched the superior firepower of the Japanese against the sheer manpower at China’s disposal.

The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War only worsened the breakdown of all semblance of order across the eastern Steppe and Central Asia. In the west, 1936 two major broke out in Papal Central Asia. In the north, the Kyrgz, a Muslim Tatar people, established a small state around Dushanbe. Influenced by the socialists of Europe and Turanist thought within Russia, their state had a clear left-leaning character and offered a safe haven to dissident Tatars escaping Radical tyranny across the border. Further south, another Altaic group – the Hindu Kashgarians – took control of the eponymous city of Kashgar before riding south into Kashmir. The Kashgarians had less ideological pretensions that their Kyrgz neighbours and, with close cultural links to the Uighur faction in the Mongol civil war, looked to involve themselves in the conflict raging to the north east. Struggling in the fight against the International, and facing disquiet across much of its empire, the Papacy found itself unable to spare the resources to quash these rebellions – leaving only a small garrison in Kabul to warn off further revolts.

After half a decade of fighting, the Mongol civil war showed no signs of slowing. The anti-Russian Gegeen faction had faired rather poorly. Not only had they failed to crush Toghan in the west, the pretender and his Uighur horde had struck forth to capture Ulaanbaatar and Beijing. He had undoubtedly been aided in this success by the withdrawal of all Chinese assistance to the Mongolian government after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war. However, neither side had the strength to land a knockout blow. Indeed, after exhausting his armies with their eastward advance, Toghan himself was murdered by group of his Uighur generals in February 1937 after he refused to bow to their demands to return to their homeland rather than push on into Manchuria. Although both sides were exhausted by years of fighting, there was still no end in sight.

With the Papacy and China withdrawing to deal with existential threats closer to home, there was an emerging power vacuum in the heart of Asia. Into this two states sought to insert themselves – India and Russia. Since unification, Indian interest in Central Asia had grown immensely, and they were quick to grant official recognition to Kyrgyzstan and establish relations with the Kashgar Khan – seeking to negotiate a transfer of authority in Kashmir to themselves in exchange for aid and protection. These manoeuvrers were deeply alarming to the Russians, who feared Indian encroachment on their frontier. They therefore made the first move, invading and occupying Kyrgyzstan in December 1936. The occupation of Kyrgyzstan was a shocking act of aggression. Although Papal authority on the ground had been absent for months, they had not surrendered their legal authority in the region and therefore considered Kiev’s actions to be a violation of their territory. The Pope denounced Russia’s actions yet, ultimately, found himself unable to contemplate opening up a new front that would undoubtedly doom his regime to destruction. The Papacy therefore did nothing actively to resist Russia’s move, even as it condemned it and refused to recognise it.

Success in Dushanbe emboldened Makarov, who set his sights on a grander prize – Mongolia. The chaos on the southern frontier was an unwanted source of instability in the region that could only be ended by the involvement of troops on the ground. In May 1937, Russia negotiated an alliance with the Uighurs, whose fortunes had faded significantly since the murder of Toghan, with the promise of independence and aggrandisement. The involvement of Russian troops, albeit in modest numbers with very few division being able to be spared from the European frontier, ensured an inevitable defeat for anti-Russian forces in Mongolia. Nonetheless, in the vast expanses of this restive region it would take some time before all opposing forces were brought to heal – with the Mongol Khagan fighting on all the way until January 1938 when he was captured near the Korean border. In the west, the Russians were lured into a second violation of Papal sovereignty as their Uighur allies crossed the border into the nominally Papal territories occupied by the Khashgarians. With their hands on the matter forces, the Russians supported this invasion that created a lengthy border between the Uighurs and the Indians through the high mountains of the Himalayas.

By the spring of 1938 order had been restored across the lands of the old Mongol Khanate, which was split into a series of smaller Khanates under close Russian supervision and with permanent garrisons. In the west, the Uighurs were rewards with territories stretching from Kashmir and Kashgar in the south-west to Yichuan in the east – assuming the role as the most powerful of the Mongol successor states. To the north, a rump Mongol state ruled the historic homeland. In the far east, the resource rich Manchu lands gained their independence, while a Mongol-Chinese Beijing Khanate was established along the border with the Xi. Russian dominion over the eastern Steppe had been secured once more.

The two years after the surrender of Denmark in April 1936 are often described as the ‘Phony War’. After three years of gruelling fighting across Europe, the conflict reached a calmer point with relatively few major battles or campaigns. The most important fighting was in the air and on the high seas where the initial advantage of the Allies in both fields slowly started to weaken as the incredible industrial might of the Socialist International churned out the planes and warships needed to break out of the European fortress. That said, key battles did take place during these years. Through 1936 the Skots were able to turn the tide in Ireland, establishing an effective blockade of the island that prevented any further assistance reaching the rebels and slowly reconquering all of Ireland by early the following year. In the Mediterranean, the International achieved their own insular success on Sardinia. The Kingdom of Sardinia was an ancient state tracing its roots all the way back to the ninth century, and was one of Christendom’s greatest powers for much of the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern era. That proud history was brought to an end in 1937 by a successful Italian-led invasion that saw the strategic island fall with shocking ease, in what proved to be a practise run for larger operations.

While the land war between the Allies and International had died down, the VSVR began to deploy the large majority of its armed forces away from any active front and to its eastern boundaries with Russia, Pannonia and Serbia. As both parties sized one another up, the Russians became concerned that the VSVR might outflank in the Balkans by overrunning a weak Serbia before striking into their heartlands. Mutual fear of socialist attack therefore drove a détente between Belgrade and Kiev – two traditional enemies that had fought countless wars over the centuries. This began with a Russian guarantee of Serbian independence in early 1936 – with Makarov threatening war should the reds attack then-neutral Serbia. Over the next years a series of diplomatic initiatives by the two states saw Russia and Serbia bind closer and closer together, although the Serbs remained stubbornly opposed to Makarov’s calls for the deployment of Russian troops onto their territory – and were reluctant to shut off their relations with the Allies by adopting the anti-western stance pushed for by Kiev. Despite these misgivings, the need for a formal alliance in the face of the red threat pushed the Serbs into becoming a founding member of the Eurasian League – a Russian-led military defence including Serbia, Pannonia, Greek Crusader Anatolia and Israel.

In June 1938 the false sense of calm that had come over war was halted as a multinational invasion force of Germans, French, Italians and Andalucians brought the red flag to Africa. With the Skots focussed on their home islands, particularly after having wrestled Ireland back under control, the naval war in the Mediterranean had become the responsibility of the Papacy. While the Papal navy had been able to hold the whole sea under a tight grip in the mid-1930s, its Egyptian shipyards had little capacity to replenish losses in comparison to their continental rivals. As time went by, it become increasingly focussed on defending Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean over the west. This provided the opening for a hugely ambition International invasion of Algiers – a state that had never truly recovered from the Berber revolt. Red troops landed in Morocco, Algeria-proper and Tunis – pushing on to destroy to Duchy and overwhelm the Maghreb. Although stiff Papal resistance held back an invasion of Egypt itself – a largely Italian army suffering a heavy defeat just over 100 miles west of Alexandria – socialist units drove deep into the continent, crossing over the Sahara in an effort to threaten colonial West Africa, and stoke anti-imperialist revolution. The International ultimately found popular support in the region weaker than they had hoped, and the logistics of campaigning across vast deserts difficult to overcome. However, despite their offensives beginning to stall by 1939, they remained in control of Africa north of the Sahel and west of Egypt through to the following year.

While the International had struggled to rouse an anti-imperialist revolution in West Africa, they found much greater, and unexpected, opportunities in the Middle East. Ever since the conquest of their homelands by the Papacy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Caliphate, the Arabs had chaffed under theocratic Christian rule. Yet, the region was of incredible economic and political importance to the Pope – and therefore kept on a tight leash. Furthermore, the left had historically been very weak in the region – where American and Australian inspired democratic movements, or more conservative Islamist currents, tended to dominate anti-imperialist circles. For these reasons the International had held little hopes of finding the sort of sympathetic revolutionary fervour here that had supported them in Europe and the Maghreb. The Arab Revolt of 1939 therefore took all sides by surprise, as a nationalist revolution broke out in Iraq that quickly swept over much of the Papal Middle East and swore its allegiance to the International. The western Allies appeared on the verge of collapse.

In Russia, the fear of war and invasion had become the unifying current running throughout society. As the regime provided gruesome details of the revolutions occurring in Europe, and the shocking successes the red war machine, the Radical Party defined itself as the guardian of civilisation against the advance of godless barbarism. Makarov himself began to speak of the need for a palingenetic national rebirth through a civilisation struggle against the socialist hordes that would cure the ills that had befallen the Radical’s own revolutionary project during the 1920s and 1930s. That said, many regime insiders were terrified of the coming conflict. Despite nearly a decade of rebuilding from the purges, the military command remained novices and the Russian army had struggle to keep up with the rapid development of military technology and ideas that the war years had produced. On June 21st 1940 the moment finally came as Russian troops launched a surprise attack across the frontier into Germany. The Second World War had reached its largest and bloodiest frontline. In the ensuing struggle, the fate of world history would hang in the balance.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1940 – Alle Waffen Gegen Makarov!

When the Russian army began its attack on the VSVR in late June 1940 they set in motion the largest battle in human history. The Russian offensive proved to be inept to a shocking degree. Working with inferior equipment, under inexperienced and incapable officers and with a conscript army featuring millions of non-Russians, the Republic’s armies not only failed to capitalise on the element of surprise to make any serious breakthroughs, within days they had already started to fall back from the pre-war border. The socialists had been assiduously preparing for this war for years, and had the men, resources and plans in place to instantly put themselves on the front foot. For the Russians, the area of greatest concern was in the Baltic, where they were sent in headlong retreat from Pomerania, Makarov’s homeland and the birthplace of the Radical Party, after less than a week, with red troops attacking the outskirts of Gdansk just two weeks after the outbreak of war. Right across the line there were a string of defeats, with the Germans pushing the Russians from the heavily fortified region of Silesia over the course of a gruelling two month battle between June and August. To the south, they captured Bratislava and probed the Pannonian frontier. Their most spectacular progress was reserved for the Balkan portion of the front. Having denied Makarov’s offers of sending a Russian expeditionary force before the outbreak of the war, the Serbs were completely out of their depth when faced with the full fight of the International – seeing all their western provinces fall by early August, as the socialists reached the vicinity of Belgrade after six weeks.

After their early losses, the late summer saw a concerted fightback by the forces on the Eurasian League. In Old Poland, the Russians focussed their energies in two major battles – defending the cities of Gdansk and Krakow from huge German assaults by land, sea and air. In both cities the Russians held firm, dealing the International its first major battlefield defeats of the war. However, victories in these two great cities of Old Poland had come at a cost – diverting troops away from other fronts and leaving gaps that the socialists were happy to exploit. In Slovakia, the VSVR developed a sizeable salient as mountaineer troops pushed into the Slovak highlands – creating a large salient cutting into Russian territory. This advance ultimately forced a reorganisation of the front as Russian troops scrambled eastward from Old Poland and Pannonians moved north. South of Gdansk, the Germans made modest but strategically significant progress that brought them within sight of Warsaw – the first of the great ethnically Russian cities to come under direct threat. As German dive bombers strafed the great centre of Old Polish Judaism, Makarov demanded that the city could not be surrendered even if it took 100,000s of lives to defend it.

As war broke out, Kiev had expected to face minority trouble – and retained large garrisons throughout its many non-Russian provinces. However, contrary to expectations that had looked for trouble primarily among the ever tempestuous Tatar lands, the regime’s greatest issues were in the Christian provinces in the west. For the final two centuries of the Polish Tsardom’s history, the Christians had enjoyed a relatively secure and happy role within the empire. They suffered little discrimination, were left free to practise their religion and enjoyed a sizeable degree of influence – enfranchised under the Brusilov Line, possessing a close historic connection the Zvenislava dynasty, having a large amount of economic influence and even producing two Prime Ministers in the last days of Polish democracy. The shock of their sudden loss of status after the advent of the Radical Republic was therefore much greater than for the Tatars who had always suffered an unhappy relationship with the Polish state. Since 1914, the Christians had been demoted to effective second class citizens, had seen their national integrity threatened by a wave of Russian migration to the Baltic in the 1920s and 1930s and were now at the frontline of a war against an alliance that promised them freedom. Across the western lands Christians of all ethnicities greeted the International’s armies as liberators, at times offered them support – with Greek Christians in Slovakia guiding the VSVR’s troops through the highland passes – and in the industrial cities of the Baltic led pro-socialist uprisings that had to be bloodily put down.

On the Middle Eastern Front, Eurasian forces performed far more strongly that they had in Europe. The disorganised Arab revolutionary bands that had swept through the Papacy were little match for a modern war machine, and were further hampered by the hostility of Greek, Kurdish and Armenian populations in Anatolia to Arab rule. It took only a couple of months for the Russians to push the Arabs out of the highland territories near their border, while Israeli forces to secure all of Transjordan. The battle for Iraq and Syria took much longer – and was still raging deep into 1941. Nonetheless, the Russians were able to largely destroy the revolutionary movement and implant their dominance in the region. In another act of flagrant aggression against the western Allies, following their activity in Central Asia in the 1930s, the Russians made clear they had no intention of returning the lands to the Papacy – establishing client states in Eastern Anatolia and Iraq, the latter based on the territory of the medieval Jewish Kingdom of Iraq that briefly controlled Mesopotamia during the Jewish Wars of Religion, while Syria was divided between Israel and Greece.

The Finnish front was another area of success for the Russians. In the early exchanges of the war the Scandinavians had secured key victories in the far north – capturing three entire Russian divisions at the Arctic port of Alta and briefly occupying Murmansk. However, the Russians won the battle in the more populous south, pushing into southern Finland through the summer months and gradually advancing northwards. By the winter they had arrived at a frozen frontline in the Arctic circle, while thousands of soldiers were being redeployed from the area to the battles in Old Poland and the Balkans.

On the Eastern Front, has the weather turned during the autumnal months the International and Eurasians were locked in a series of staggeringly destructive urban battles from the Baltic to the Danube. Ominously, across the front the socialists won ever single one of them as their vastly superior firepower and aerial supremacy having a telling impact. In the south, Belgrade fell after a three week long battle. So sapped were the Serbians after their failed defence of their capital that much of their frontline broke allowing the VSVR to occupy most of the Kingdom’s ethnically-Serbian heartland while threatening to drive all the way to Constantinople. In the open grasslands of the Carpathian basin, the Germans’ panzer formations were given the freedom to launch striking offensive manoeuvres against the Pannonian army – surrounding and capturing tens of thousands of them as they sent their forces into a route towards the mountains, capturing Budapest in the process.

The heaviest fighting occurred in Old Poland, where the Russians desperately tried to hold their ground along the Gdansk-Warsaw-Krakow line. In this, they failed utterly. After devastating fighting the Russians fell back from both Gdansk and Warsaw in late October. Yet their forces had been so drained in the fighting that the Germans were able to continue their push – crossing into Prussia in the north and moving deep into the south of Old Poland. Only Warsaw, where the Germans held back from a full throated offensive while the made gains to both the north and south, held firm. It is difficult to emphasis the scale of the battle between the International and Eurasians. In the six months after the outbreak of war the two sides had suffered almost two million casualties – between two thirds and three quarters of those coming on the Russian side. This was a level of destruction that had never been seen before in human history. The Russian army and her Serbian and Pannonian allies in particular appeared close to breaking. After months of military defeats and hard fighting, the losses had taken their toll, while the mighty war machine of the International appeared to have been barely scathed.

In the half year since the outbreak of hostilities between the Eurasian League and the International, the position of the Western Allies remained relentlessly bleak. In a rare sign of light resources redirected to Europe, the International’s progress in Africa had been halted. In the Sahel, minor progress had been made while in Egypt’s Western Desert stalemate had ensued. On the high seas, Russia’s entry into the war had similarly pulled socialist naval might from direct confrontation with the Allies, providing vital respite after years of losing ground. In Asia, the situation was less positive. While the Arab revolutionaries were defeated in the Middle East by the Eurasian League, these economically valuable territories merely exchanged a red occupier for a black one as the Russians had installed subservient local governments in the former Papal territories. The other parts of the Papal colonial empire were similarly under threat. Despite the Papacy’s surrender of the Punjab earlier in the 1930s, the Indians were continuing to agitate over the Indus Valley – sponsoring dissident groups, and deploying dozens of divisions to their borders with the Papacy and Russia. Further east, the Japanese, straining under their endless land war in China, had spied an opportunity to gain access to valuable resources and outflank their Chinese enemy in poorly defended Papal South East Asia. They therefore launched a predatory invasion beginning on December 1st 1940.

For all these worries, the end of 1940 saw a new hope arise for the Western Allies. While they struggled on the field of battle, the Allies sought salvation through diplomatic engagement with the Western Hemisphere’s sleeping giant – the United States. The Americans had been inclined towards the Allies since the beginning of their war with the International seven years before, yet throughout the 1930s isolationism held sway in the corridors of power. With their military situation desperate, and now a very real prospect that the International might assert a genuinely global dominance, Allied lobbying in New Cordoba had achieved an opening. Through November and December Skottish, Papal and Andalucian diplomats met with the President and American officials in tense and lengthy negotiations over a possible American entry into the war. American support had clear conditions – America would not fight for the restoration of European colonialism but demanded a commitment that the Islamic and other oppressed peoples of their empires would achieve self determination after victory, the Skots would have to surrender their last remaining North American colony – Louisiana – to the United States, the Allies would submit to a joint military command structure under American direction. When these conditions were finally agreed to, the United States formally entered into the Western Alliance on December 15th. The geopolitical balance of the Second World War had shifted once more.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1940-1941 – Over Here, Over There

From December, the Eastern Front was largely static for several months. In the Balkans, the Greeks, Serbs, Pannonians and Russians had stabilised after a series of reverses in 1940 – using the rough terrain of the Carpathians and southern Balkans to halt the reds from driving any deeper. Through most of Old Poland the same sense of quiet held. There was one exception – Warsaw. Starting in December the VSVR embarked on a huge effort to capture the great city, focussing all their energies at a single point. Having vowed to defend it to the last man when the red had first approached it earlier in 1940, Boris Makarov demanded that his generals hold on to Warsaw at whatever the cost. The Russians therefore poured troops into the city, weakening the rest of the frontline in a desperate effort to hold of the VSVR’s attack. Naturally, the socialists took advantage of this short sightedness - breaking through the Russian lines to the south of the city and swing north to encircle it in late January, cutting around 300,000 men off. Having invested so heavily in defending Warsaw, the exhausted Russians lacked the energy to relieve the men trapped in the city. Isolated and under constant bombardment and attack, the Russian army in Warsaw surrendered on March 23rd 1941. It was the worst military defeat in Polish history.

Victory in the Battle of Warsaw was the prelude to a much International spring offensive. With their enemies in disarray, the Germans struck north and east from Warsaw in April, forcing the Russians into a chaotic withdrawal from Prussia in order to avoid another encirclement and driving more slowly into Western Ruthenia, coming within striking distance of the key city of Minsk before their advance was halted by renewed Russian resistance in June. Further south, German infantry was spearheading methodical progress through Galicia, where the Russians fought hard but were ultimately kept on the back foot.

The socialists’ largest gains came in the Balkans. Unleashing a powerful armoured offensive along the lower Danube in May, the Germans swept the Serbs aside to reach the Black Sea coastline before swinging southwards into Thrace and Rumelia – securing a toehold on the Aegean in late June. The Eurasian League’s territory was now split into three parts – Greece, Anatolia and Constantinople and Russia. In the Carpathians, the Pannonian army had been holding on under intense pressure through the end of 1940. However in a long string of battles in the mountains through the first half of 1941 their will to carry on was broken down. In May 1941 the Pannonian government and military leadership announced their surrender to the International. Much of the Pannonian army stood down, turning itself over to the Germans with the promise of amnesty and a return to their homes. However, a sizeable number of anti-socialists defected to the Russians to continue the fight at the head of a Pannonian Legion.

In Scandinavia, the reds were on the run. After a period of stagnation during the winter months in the Arctic, the Russians began an offensive in the spring of 1941 – sending the Scandinavian army into a long retreat to the south. With little support offered from the VSVR, even in terms of aircraft, the northern republic was largely left to fend for itself and found itself over powered by the Russians, who pushed forward with a slow but continuous advance. By August, the Scandinavian had been pushed all the way back to the far south west of their home peninsula and were barely hanging on.

In Kiev, the Russian regime was under pressure as never before. Makarov had been personally humiliated by the loss of Warsaw in February, having placed such excessive emphasis on its defence. Indeed, his refusal to allow for a withdrawal had led to the capture of an entire army group and the collapse of the front. With much of the west already occupied, the Republic’s industrial heartlands in Ruthenia were now on the frontline – the great hub of the arms industry at Minsk already in range of International artillery in June. In an admission of defeat, the government had begun a mass evacuation of people and industrial materials eastward to escape immediate danger. In this climate, many within the Radical Republican Party pushed for a more collegiate leadership with a more prominent position allowed for the military – so that the war effort might be more effectively coordinated. The Vozhd’s response to these palace intrigues was to go beyond the party elites to appeal to the grass roots and wider populace – calling upon the Russian people to rise up in a war of national salvation to save Russia and the Jewish faith, a notable straying from traditionally secular Radical nationalism, from destruction at the hands of the socialists.

In the west, the entry of the United States into the war in December 1940 had an impact that was both immediate and spectacular. On the seas, the Americans’ grand fleet easily tipped the balance in the naval war. Before December, the socialists had firm control over the Western Mediterranean and the coastlines of Europe, while pressuring their enemies on other fronts. By the early months of 1941 their abilities to project power overseas had been effectively eliminated. Unable to effectively support their African campaigns, the International was already beginning to withdraw troops from the continent by March 1941 when the Americans launched a naval invasion of Morocco alongside Skottish troops that coincided with a Papal offensive out of Egypt. The socialist front swiftly collapsed.

The Americans were not satisfied to rest after their victory in Africa, driven by the desire to liberate their Andalucian mother country. In June American forces began a series of lands across several coastal locations around the Iberian peninsula. With a paltry garrison, and significant domestic support from conservative Muslims for the American arrivals, the Allies had largely secured Iberia within a month. From there, they struck over the Pyrenees into France. Here they were able to make rapid initial gains, with the International still scrambling to redeploy troops from the Eastern Front, rushing up the Atlantic coastline in a dash for Paris and eastward towards the Alps and Rhone Valley. In this heady atmosphere, some in the Allied camp dreamed of an imminent battlefield victory and the inauguration of a new European order based on democracy and the rule of law. By the time thirty divisions arrived in France to combat the Allied advance, the better part of the country was occupied. Yet the battle for western Europe was far from over.

For all the American-led Allied successes in Africa and Western Europe, the position of the International’s enemies remained bleak across most of the rest of the world. In the Far East, the Japanese made quick work of the Papal garrison in South East Asia – sending them into retreat into Burma within months of their entry into the war. Notably, American power had little interest in Asia, nor the ability to project their power beyond the North Atlantic, leaving the Papacy largely isolated in the region. With the Russians suffering on the Eastern Front, and the Papal colonial empire continuing to fall apart, India saw its moment to strike and in June 1940 threw its lot in with the International by embarking on invasions of Papal-ruled Burma and the Punjab, and Russian controlled Kashmir.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1941-1942 – Long Live the Revolution​

When the Germans arrived on the Western Front in large numbers in the late summer of 1941 they found their French allies in a state of total collapse. Halting the Allied charge into the heart of Europe in the Alps and along the Seine, they looked to address the problems that had led to the failure to resist the Allied invasion. Unable to rely upon their French allies, the VSVR’s army seized direct control over the remains of the French state and her collapsing army in an effort to restore a semblance of order to the frontline. This marked the effective dissolution of the International as a joint Franco-German partnership, henceforth the revolution would be a Teutonic affair. Their authority cemented, the VSVR military leadership planned a bold mechanised offensive to sweep the American back. This attack exploded into life in late September 1941 – panzer tanks leading the way in ranging attacks that pushed all the way to Bordeaux and Marseilles, dividing the Allies armies into many small pockets scattered across France’s shores and forcing them into a series of chaotic evacuations.

The Americans were able to gain some respite in the winter months when they fended off a number of German attempts to force the Pyrennes in November and December. Yet when they did finally push over the mountains in January, the Allied position in Iberia soon became untenable – the Germans racing across Andalucia as the Allies scrambled to rescue what forces they could from the European continent before it was too late. By February all that was left of the Allied landings were a few enclaves in Portugal – where local partisans and American commandos held firm even as after the large majority of the Allied army had fled. In just a few months the International had completely reversed all of the Allied continental gains of 1941.

Globally, this was a period of unrelenting successes for the International. In Africa, a series of major anti-colonial revolts originating in the Great Lakes, Rift Valley and Horn of Africa broke out beginning in mid-1941 that quickly escalated to threaten European power throughout the East African region. Receiving aid from India and the International, these rebels were well armed and caused terror in Alexandria after Ethiopian troops invaded Sudan, threatening Egypt itself.

A continent away in South America, socialists seized power in Brazil in a coup in November 1941 and cast themselves into the war by proclaiming their loyalty to the International – opening hostilities with the Allies. As South America’s leading power, Brazil’s entry into the war held back many states that might otherwise have joined the Allies in sympathy with the Americans, fearing a direct confrontation close to home. The Brazilians would also make the South Atlantic a more dangerous place for the Allies, with their fleet praying on vessels sailing through the area. With losses mounting from their botched campaigns in Europe, the Allies lacked the resources to do little more than campaign this new threat.

In Asia, the arrival of India into the war had a sizeable impact on the balance of power. In South East Asia, the Indians reached an accord with the Japanese that divided the Papal colonies in the region between them – along a line of control in central Burma. To the west, the Indian army overwhelmed Papal defences in the Indus Valley in the summer of 1941, where they were greeted as liberators. They found the advance into the Pashtun lands beyond the Khyber Pass far more challenging, were tough terrain, suspicious natives, the lack of the element of surprise and better organised Papal resistance slowed their advance to a crawl. A full year into their participation in the conflict, Kabul and Herat remained in Papal control – ironically their last strongholds east of Arabia. The battle with the Russians told a similar story. After routing the Russians and Uighurs from Kashmir in the opening months of the war, progress stalled. The Russians already had a vast garrison in Central Asia, where it had been deployed to ward over the rebellious Tatars and Mongols, and these were rushed to the front. In the impossibly tough conditions of the Hindu Kush, these troops locked the Indians in a slow war of attrition among the highest peaks of the world. Further north, the Indians notably looked to stir disquiet among the large Hindu populations of Central Asia and the Steppe. Most of Central Asia’s cities had large populations of Hindu Persians and ethnic Indians, while the Mongols were numerous throughout the region – all were generally hostile to the Russian regime, none more so than those Mongols who had been expelled from their homes in Muscovy during the 1920s Felaket, and proved easy recruiting grounds Indian agents seeking to organise rebel bands.

In the Balkans, period between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1942 was crucial. Having suffered tremendous losses in the first half of 1941, the Eurasian League sought to dig in around two goals – holding on to Constantinople, and preserving a fortified line across the upland terrain of northern Greece. Around both key objectives a mixture of Greek, Serbian and Russian troops were heavily dug in and were able to halt the advancing socialists in their tracks. What followed was a slow effort to break the will of the defends through the rest of 1941 through massive aerial and artillery bombardment and constant probing attacks. The International breakthrough would not arrive until February 1942 when German mountaineers pierced through Greek lines the western coastline and advanced rapidly southwards. In danger of being cut off and under concerted pressure, the Eurasians withdrew from their defensive line and the key city of Thessalonica towards Attica. While they succeeded in saving Athens from falling, most of Greece had been lost.

The siege of Constantinople was a more protracted process. With Eurasian forces heavy concentrated in the city and able to keep it in good supply through their control of the waterways in the Bosporus, it was a formidable prospect. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to storm the great city in the summer months, the International set in for a lengthy siege. They focussed their energies in using their air power to disrupt the city’s supply over the Bosporus – pushing the 100,000 defenders, and millions of civilian residents, towards desperation. This tactic began to make its impact felt over the winter months, when hunger started to set in as the Eurasians struggled to keep sufficient resources flowing across the water. After months under siege, the Serbs and Russians carried out an impressively orderly withdrawal in March 1942, abandoning Constantinople to the revolution but keeping their army intact.

It the far north, while Scandinavia had appeared to be at the brink of surrender in mid-1941 after a long retreat from Finland and the far north, their situation improved markedly in the second half of the year. Conducting an orderly withdrawal from Norway, they inflicted a number of defeats on the Russians in Skane – securing their control over the southern tip of Sweden despite constant Russian attacks through to the summer months of 1942. Crucially, while the Russians had been gradually drawing troops from the area to bolster their armies on other fronts, Scandinavia’s continued resistance kept a large army tied down in the region.

On the most important of all fronts, the Germans carried forward their momentum from the first half of the year on the Eastern Front, albeit at a slower pace. In July and August they pushed the Russians out of Lithuania and Courland – only being halted by the Daugava River. Their gains in other sectors were more modest. In Ruthenia, the Russians fought back fiercely, attempting a series of counterattacks and fighting for every bald of grass. These battles kept the reds away from the immediate vicinity of Kiev, but failed to protect Minsk, which fell in November. In the south, the International’s armies made gradual gains, capturing the last Russian holding on the Carpathians and advancing through Moldavia to secure the key Black Sea port of Odessa.

The capture of Minsk in November marked the last major socialist victory of the year. As the ground froze for winter, major offensive operations were suspended, even as probing attacks continued throughout the cold months. One notable success through the winter came at Smolensk, which was captured in February after a portion of the Russian front in Ruthenia lost ground amid mutinies by Tatar soldiers.

During this time the International had been preparing for a major summer offensive that, it was hoped, would strike a decisive blow against the Russians. Across the open fields of southern Ukraine, the German panzer armies pierced Russian lines and raced as far east an Mariupol. In the north, the socialists advanced on a broad front eastward from North Ruthenia, pushing significantly beyond the Dnieper. Crucially, the placed a choke hold around the city of Kiev – the Russian capital isolated as the last major Russian bastion west of the Dnieper river. These advances had come at huge cost in terms of life and material, stretching supply lines and the strength of the German army to its limit. But, with the gates of Kiev in sight, a tangible chance of victory was in hand.

With the encirclement of Kiev now a likelihood, and its capture a strong possibility many elements of the Russian government were seeking to evacuate themselves from the capital in chaotic fashion. When Makarov himself was called upon to leave the city he furiously dismissed the suggestion, enigmatically remarking “I shall go out with a dagger between my teeth, a bomb in my hand and infinite scorn in my heart”. The Vozhd would go down with his ship. In Kiev, beset by the hellfire of an entire continent and under assault from a seemingly invincible army, an almost apocalyptic atmosphere took hold. The regime mobolised every able bodied soul who could hold a rifle, old men and boys alike, to man the lines while Radical propaganda blared out across the city exhorting the Russians to battle on to the last and the great dictator himself was seen parading the street in an effort to rally his people for the fight.

In October the Germans crossed the Dnieper to the south east of Kiev and linked up with their comrades to the north of the Russian capital at Chernigov. Kiev was now cut off entirely from the rest of the Republic. The fate of the world would rest of the outcome of the battle to come.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1942-1943 – Twilight of the Gods

Following the completion of their encirclement of Kiev in mid-October 1942, the Germans embarked on their effort to take the Russian capital and purge the evil of the Radical regime once and for all. The city was beset by attackers from all sides, the Reds painstakingly fighting battles for every street, factory and housing block while the weapons of warfare reduced what was once one of the world’s proudest cities to rubble. Makarov himself, having vowed to stay put to the bitter end, alternated between an underground bunker in the heart of the city – where the pounding of the German artillery was still audible – and trips to the surface to rally the Russian fighting man to resist. As the noose slowly tightened in the capital, the socialists steadily closing in on the city centre, just a short drive to the east an equally significant battle was raging as the Russian army sought to break the encirclement and relieve the city at Nizhin.

The winter of 1942 was another dark one, with both armies suffering the effects of extreme cold and shortage thousands were dying every day in the fight for Kiev. With food stocks extremely low, starvation hit the Russian forces in the capital and the civilians unfortunate enough not to have been evacuated. Further disheartening news would arrive in December as Crusader Anatolia capitulated following the loss of Athens to the International alongside some 60,000 Russian soldiers. Despite this, in Kiev the flicker of resistance held out, the Russians stubbornly refusing to give in and surrender their capital to the invaders. Then, deliverance. On January 23rd Russian armoured units punched through the German lines east of Kiev and the next day reinforcements and supplies began to pour into the capital. Worn out by the long fight, the socialists soon began to withdraw from Kiev in total disarray. Taking on an uncharacteristically evangelising tone, Makarov celebrated “God has granted us salvation. Soon the entire world shall shake”.

Defeat in Kiev was more damaging to the cause of the International than can easily be quantified. Through their offensives of 1942 that had brought them to the brink of victory, the socialists had stretched their supply lines and military to the very limit. Their army was beaten, exhausted and severely depleted from the fighting. After enduring millions further casualties in these attacks, the total dead from the VSVR alone since the outbreak of war in 1933 had surpassed 10,000,000 – an extraordinary number. In the skies, the balance of power had clearly shifted over the course of 1942. With the Western Allies growing ever stronger with the backing of American industry, a growing portion of the International’s air forces had been drawn away from the Eastern Front – allowing the socialists’ control of the skies to slip away by the end of the year. Henceforth, the Russians would be in a position to use their aircraft in offensive bombing campaigns in significant numbers for the first time in the war.

While attentions had been focussed on the Battle of Kiev, the wider Russian military had taken the opportunity over the winter months to regroup, gather their strength and begin planning. Taking note from the tactics and technology of the International over the past years of fighting, the Russians had equipped themselves for a great counterattack in February. Operation Bloodhound, named after the Medieval hero Illiya the Bloodhound who had saved Polish civilisation from European conquest, was to be the largest military operation in the nation’s history. Combined arms attacks were to be launched across every sector of the front with four key objectives – cutting off the German forces east of the Dnieper in southern Ukraine, insuring Kiev’s security, reclaiming the Smolensk region and establishing a beachhead south of the Daugava near Riga.

The Russians shocked even their own planners with the scale of their successes over the ensuing months. In the south, a dozen divisions were cut off along the shores of the Sea of Azov, a further ten found themselves encircled north east of Smolensk and another half dozen at Mogilev south of the city – all within the first week of the attack. Russian tanks then drove with lightening speed across Northern Ruthenia to liberate Minks and even push into Lithuania – isolating 100,000s of thousands of International troops along the Daugava River who had been unable to reposition themselves to compensate for the speed of the Russians’ movement. In March these Russian tanks pushed through Lithuania to reach the boundaries of Prussia and cut off the last rout of escape for the socialist troops on the Daugava through Courland. In the south, the Russian capitalised on the disarray in their enemies lines to drive the Germans back from central Ukraine towards Galicia and Moldavia.

All told, by the time the pockets of International troops caught between enemy lines had been closed in mid-April around three quarters of a million men had been captured, and the back of the revolution broken. In just a couple of months the Russians had wiped out all of the International’s gains of the previous year and inflicted losses that would be impossible to replace after so many years of warfare.

In Western Europe, after the defeat of the Skots and Americans on the Western Front in 1942, fighting had never entirely ceased. Instead, groups of Andalucian partisans back by American commandos, funds and aerial support had engaged their socialists occupiers in a guerilla war. With the battles in Eastern Europe demanding every available resource, Iberia was left with a badly overstretched garrison that struggled to maintain order across the region. Losing ground to the Muslim partisans, the Reds responded with harsh reprisals against communities believed to be in league with the rebels and took a militant stance against the mosques that were seen as the ideological foundations of the movement. This brutality only acted to embolden the partisans and win new recruits to their cause. As events turned against the International in the east, the partisans began to capture major cities – including Valencia, Seville, Porto and La Coruna.

The International’s desperate situation grew fatal at the end of April 1943 when the Americans launched a large invasion of the Low Countries – opening up a third front in continental Europe and pouring hundreds of thousands into the fight to destroy the revolution once and for all.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1943-1944 – Death of a Dream​

While the power of the International waned in Europe, fighting continued across Africa and Asia. In East Africa, the initial successes of the anti-imperialist rebellions in the region when the Papacy began to move the bulk of its army to counter their advance. From the end of 1942 the area under their control would slowly dwindle until the rebels were left isolated in the mountains and jungles that their European masters could not reach. In South Asia, the Indians succeeded in capturing Kabul and bringing an end to Papal rule in Asia in late 1942, but found their frontline with the Russians almost completely stagnant as both sides found offensive operations almost impossible in the Hindu Kush mountains. The one area where there was notable fighting was around Kashgar – with the city trading hands five times between mid 1942 and the end of 1943.

Of greater world-historic significance were events in China. After invading South East Asia in the winter of 1940-41, the Japanese had hoped to turn their war with China in their favour. Yet the deadlock that had held for years by that point, with the Japanese holding the coast but unable to push into the interior, remained stubbornly unmoved. This situation caused immense frustration and hardship in both Japan and China alike. In China, anger at the foreign invader accelerated the development of a militant ethnic nationalism that modelled itself on Russian Radicalism – pursuing a future of Chinese freedom from foreign oppression and Han domination of China’s myriad minority populations. These nationalists were well organised under the banner of the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Party, or CPRP.

With the popularity growing among the masses and the military in particular, the nationalists seized power in January 1943 and proceeded to unleash a wave of revolutionary fury against minorities and symbols of the old liberal elite that had failed in the war with Japan. The Revolutionary Party rallied millions from the villages into vast militia armies and embarked on a great offensive along the Yangtze River. To the shock of observers, the Japanese army broke in the face of this fervent assault and in June the Chinese flag was restored to its rightful place over Shanghai while upwards of 200,000 Japanese prisoners were taken. After years of attritional warfare, these losses were devastating for the Japanese and through the rest of the year they lost control over all of their enclaves in mainland China – although the Chinese failed in their attempts to push southwards into South East Asia as well.

On the Eastern Front, the capturing of dozens of International divisions in the early months of 1943 had left huge haps in the socialists’ lines in the southern and northern sectors of the frontline – although they retained a great deal of strength in the centre. Seeking to maintain the momentum of their previous victories, the Russians resumed their attacks in May after a short pause of a few weeks. In the north, Russian armour punched through the depleted German lines along the Baltic and reoccupied Prussia, Gdansk and the Vozhd’s home region in Pomerania – reaching as far west as Rugen by the end of the month before the Germans were finally able to slow their progress to a crawl as they grew disconcertingly close to Berlin, the greatest city of northern Germany.

In the south, the offensive proceeded more slowly, with infantry capturing the mountainous eastern Carpathian region to clear the way from more mobile units to advance rapidly along the Black Sea coast towards the Danube. Only reaching Bucharest in early June, the Russians then rushed with lightening speed to cut Constantinople off from the rest of the front and make progress towards northern Greece. The ancient city was then placed under siege for the second time in the war. In the centre of the front, the International’s strength proved to be something of a curse. Fending off Russians attacks, much of the Russian army being by this stage wearied from months on the front foot, Old Poland and Warsaw remained firmly in their grip. However, the collapse of their lines in other areas left the last sizeable battle ready army group in the International had in the field in Eastern Europe at risk of a grand encirclement as Russian forces made progress all around them.

In late June 1943 something extraordinary happened along the Elbe, south of Berlin near the city of Cottbus and on the North Sea near Hamburg, Russian and American came into contract with one another on German soil. Since their landings in the Low Countries in April the Allies had made incredible rapid progress across Western Europe – capturing the birthplace of the revolution in the Ruhr and sweeping across much of northern Germany and pushing deep into France as far as Lyon and the Rhone Valley and the suburbs of Paris. The International was not yet wholly beaten. The reds had regained a number of the cities that the Andalucian Partisans had captured in the spring, while although their authority was falling apart in much of Europe several strong fighting armies remained in the field – notably in Old Poland and in Italy, where the local socialist regime had made an effort to fortify themselves against invasion. Nonetheless, the final outcome of the war was now inevitable for all to see. Europe would soon come under the domination of the Russians in the east and the Americans in the west.

Although they shared a socialist enemy, the relationship between east and west was deeply hostile. The Americans in particular despised Russia and the dark, totalitarian and racialist ideology that it represented. Not only was this the antithesis of the New World’s democratic ideals, the Russian Radicals horrific crimes against the Tatars haunted the millions of Americans with Turkic ancestry, many of them first generation migrants and refugees from the old Polish empire. This community formed a powerful lobby in New Cordoba committed to implacable hostility to Kiev. As such, the United States did not even recognise the Radicals as Poland’s legitimate government – supporting a Tsarist government in exile.

The Papacy too was anti-Russian – with their having occupied much of their colonial empire in Central Asia in the 1930s, lands now a battleground between Russia and India with the Asian power having taken over the rest of the Papal empire in the region, and large parts of the Papal Middle East during the 1940s. The Danes, a major player in the coalition that had gone to war with the International in 1933 and one of several Allied governments in exile, were also infuriated by Makarov’s move to establish Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish client states across the Scandinavia in lands that had been ruled directly from Copenhagen for centuries. Of the major players in the western alliance, only the Skots had a working relationship with Kiev. With these enmities seething, there were very real concerns that war between the Allies and Eurasian League could break out before the International was even defeated. Indeed, after the initial friendly meetings on the Elbe, American and Russian troops traded fire in a number of locations in northern Germany in late June and early July. In truth, this was an escalation both parties hoped to avoid.

Boris Makarov, having ascended to heroic status in his homeland after standing by Kiev during its darkest hour as the International surrounded the city in October 1942 and then overseen the crushing victories of 1943, took a proactive role in attempting to avert a clash with the West. Taking on the role of the international statesman, one he had largely shunned through his quarter century of goose-stepping aggression, Makarov had extended feelers to the Allied powers as victory over the International grew more inevitable in the late spring and summer. For much of America’s ethnic-Andalucian establishment, the issue of anti-Radicalism was less emotive and there was a desire for some sort of accord with Kiev. Yet, fearing the fury of working class Tatars, contact with Russia would have to come indirectly. At the beginning of July, Makarov flew in person to Damietta in Ascalon, a small Jewish state in the Nile Delta with close ties to Egypt, where he meet a team of Skottish diplomats in the Skottish Embassy. In farciful scenes, the American government expressed concern at their ally’s meeting with the great dictator and refused to allow any representative to attend the meeting. Yet at the same time the Skots passed secret communications between New Cordoba and Makarov. The tense negotiations in Damietta would do much to shape the postwar Europe. Such were their secretive and hostile nature, no formal agreements were created – but there was an acceptance of fact on the ground. The Allies would continue to condemn Russian occupations and its wider regime, but would not fight to overturn them. In return, Makarov committed Russia to only limited annexations and agreed to make no effort to push his armies into Western Europe – in particular leaving Italy to the Allies. Both parties agreed that Germany should be divided into multiple separate states so that it might never threaten European peace again.

The Damietta Agreement had an immediate effect on the ground, with both the Allies and Russians restraining their militaries to avoid conflict between one another. Notably, when the Russians arrived in Trieste in late July, with the Americans still fighting in Lombardy and Piedmont, they held back from the Veneto to allow the Allies to secure it. On the front, the fighting power of the International had been definitively broken in mid-July with the surrender of the German army in Old Poland. By early August, with all of France and Germany lost, the International fought on only in a handful of holdouts mostly in southern Europe – in Greece, the West Balkans, Italy and Andalucia, while in the north a mixture of Scandinavians and VSVR diehards had built a fortress in the Oresund centred on Copenhagen that had already repulsed numerous Russian attacks.

The last major Russian battle of the war was over the Danish island. Deploying more than thirty divisions, bringing to bear the power of the entire Russian air force and making largescale use of paratroopers for the first time in Russian military history, the fight for Copenhagen lasted almost a month from the middle of August until the final capitulation of the Scandinavians on September 9th. The loss of Copenhagen hastened the end for the remaining socialist armies. On September 21st the VSVR offered its unconditional surrender, although many revolutionary diehards continued the struggle for weeks to come. The Italians in particular remained a viable force even at this stage, slowly engaging the overwhelming power of the Allies in a battling retreat down the peninsula, only losing Rome in early October before surrendering after the loss of Naples in late November.

In an odd quirk of fate, the last men standing in the socialist alliance was the Brazilian expeditionary core and ragtag band of revolutionaries in southern Iberia who were not finally defeated until the end of January 1944 after a last stand in Malaga. The following month anti-socialist elements within the Brazilian military overthrew the government and sued for peace with the Allies – bringing an end to the Second World War in the west, a dozen years from the overthrow of the Archbishopric of Hesse. With that, the revolutionary dreams of the Socialist International were extinguished once and for all.

Although the war in Europe was over, the belligerent powers of India and Japan were far from beaten – with a combined population approaching half a billion and great military resources. However, having by the time of the surrender at Malaga, hundreds of thousands of Russian troops were already en route to Central Asia. Although the Americans kept true to their insistence that they would not fight to preserve European colonialism, the defeat of the International and freed up the Papacy and Skots to begin redeployments of their own to the Indian Ocean.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1944-1945 – Black Star In the East

In January 1944 the frontline between India and Russia was still in the same static position along the Hindu Kush that it had been in since 1941. However, as the Russians redeployed their veteran troops to the east in their millions and moved their aerial strength to the region, the deadlock would finally start to break. Between January and May the Russians fought a long campaign in these mountains that would meet with slow, hard fought, but steady progress. In April Kabul fell to the Russians and through the following month the Indians were pushed out of Kashmir – bringing their enemies within striking distance of the lowlands of the Indo-Gagnetic Plain. Reaching flat land finally gave the Russians an opportunity to make use of their armoured power – which had proved so decisive on the Eastern Front the previous year. In June, the Russian tanks were unleashed in a major offensive, capturing great swathes of densely populated territory including the capital city Delhi and Lahore. Nonetheless, the Indians had fallen back in good order, avoiding major encirclements and slowing the pace of the Russian advance by the end of the month.

While Russia achieved its breakthrough against India, the strategic balance of the world was upturned by that very thing despised by the Radicals – the grubby, unstable, world of democratic electoral politics. Across the ocean in America the nation was divided into two main political tribes – the Party of Liberty and Justice Party. The Party of Liberty was liberal, secular, wedded to free markets and the interests of the urban bourgeoisie. It was seen by many as a party of the elite and old money, as well as the interests of those of established Andalucian stock. It also enjoyed the support of America’s substantial Sephardic Jewish population, a community tracing its origins to the first Iberian settlers in the New World, Christian minorities, sizeable in the handful of states that had originally been colonised by other European powers, and African Americans – with the party having taken up the cause of their emancipation during the contests over slavery in the nineteenth century. For decades the liberals had been the dominant force in American politics, and had led the party to war in 1940.

The Justice Party was very different. Conservative, strictly Islamic, suspicious of unrestrained unrestrained capitalism in general and finance in particular, the party was based on an uneasy alliance between rural interests and new immigrants. The ancestors of American conservativism had been the defenders of slavery in the preceding century, an ultimately losing battle that had come to a close through peace compromise and compensation for slave-holders in exchange for emancipation. As America had grown more urban, conservatives had been forced to look beyond their strongholds in the countryside and the South towards new electorates. They had found one among the disaffected millions Arab and Tatar immigrants, many of them refugees fleeing violence in the Papacy and Polish empires, and their descendants who had drastically changed America’s demographic makeup since the mid-nineteenth century but largely been cut off from political power.

During the war the incumbent government had done all it could to keep its distance from Russia, denying any direct involvement in the Damietta Accords of 1943. This had not had the desired effect. Pamphlets and reports circulated around Tatar communities of a Corrupt Bargain between the sitting President Abdul Nasr, and his Party of Liberty, and Boris Makarov. This anger mixed with existing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and class resentments that targeted the power of Jewish Americans, who made up an outsize part of the leadership of the Party of Liberty, President’s Nasr’s cabinet and the industrial and financial elite, many of whom were prominent voices in favour of peaceful co-existence with Russia. This anger was channelled by the man who would win the presidential nomination of the Justice Party for the 1944 election. Mesut Beyraktar was born in Novgorod in 1891. At the age of 20 he had emigrated to America in search of a better life. Like many immigrants, he left his family behind in the old country, hoping to first become established in the New World. He would never see any of them every again. His wife and son were killed in a blackshirt pogrom in 1913, while both of his parents died during the Felaket in the late 1920s. This was a man who understood the rage and tragedy of the Tatar people like few others. In 1929 he had been elected to the National Assembly for a working class district in Ohio, gaining a substantial backing among the more proletarian and populist wing of his party.

Left to Right: Abdul Nasr and Mesut Beyraktar​

The 1944 election was an intensely emotional affair. The Party of Liberty called upon voters to rally around the flag and re-elect Nasr to finish the job of the war, secure a lasting peace and keep the extreme Beyraktar out of power. The Justice Party focussed heavily on the Corrupt Bargain with Kiev, with the occasional nod to the conspiracy theorists and re-emphasis of traditional conservative themes. Perhaps the most decisive moment of the election came in a public address by Beyraktar that was broadcast to millions by radio in which he spoke of his Russia policy “He killed my father, he killed my mother, he killed my son. A Godly man does not deal with the devil”. Benefiting from a surge in Tatar turnout and generally weak liberal enthusiasm for a tired administration, Mesut Beyraktar was elected President of the United State on September 3rd 1944.

The election of President Beyraktar had immediate consequences for the emerging political settlement in Europe. The outgoing American administration had already begun to bring its troops home from the continent in large numbers, but the new President moved to reverse this. Permanent American bases were established in Germany, France, Italy, Skotland and Andalucia with garrisons running into the 100,000s – providing the security from Russia that Western Europe could not provide on its own. Notably, the President took every opportunity to tangle with Kiev. In the Aegean, Allied forces had occupied a number of Greek islands in the closing months of the war including Crete and Rhodes. The Americans tore up previous negotiations towards a withdrawal in favour of a newly implanted, Kiev-aligned, Greek Republic, and made clear their intention to stay in the region – enraging the Russians.

Another area of agreement that was reneged on was Germany. At Damietta, it had been agreed that Germany would be divided into several smaller states. The Russians had upheld this accord in eastern Europe – establishing distinct Republics in Austria, Bohemia and Brandenburg by 1945, all under the heavy handed grip of Russian military occupation. It had been expected that the larger American-occupied portion of Germany would be divided along similar lines. However, believing a united Germany to be a necessary counterweight to the Russians, the Americans instead created a unified German Federal Republic (although its traditional appendages in the Low Countries were separated from it), even going to far as to allow them to rearm under close American supervision. This move in particular did not only anger the Russians, but caused a great deal of unease among America’s European allies.

Elsewhere on the continent, Europe’s borders were being redrawn. The most notable change from prewar Western Europe was the continued existence of France – the United States holding up the principle of self-determination and the need for the new Europe to be built on the principles of democracy and the consent of the governed to convince its allies to abandon any restoration of old claims over the country. In the east, the Russians made small annexations on its western frontier and in Lapland, while creating a network of small subservient Republics across Scandinavia, the old German lands, Greece and the Middle East. Notably, the re-establish Pannonia suffered significant territorial losses – Russia annexing Bratislava while Serbia, rewarded for fighting alongside Russia to the last and in a manoeuvre designed to bind it more permanently into the Russian sphere of influence, was given control over territories in Transylvania and Zagreb that it had coveted from generations. From the ashes of Crusader Anatolia a new Greek Republic was born with broadly the same boundaries as before, although its Syrian territories were divided between Israel and Serbia.

Back on the battlelines in Asia, after being halted in the late summer the Russians unleashed a renewed offensive in late August 1944 with three key aims – pushing down the Indus to Karachi, along the Ganges to Calcutta and deserts of Rajasthan towards the Bombay. If all three fell then Indian power would be completely broken. Although the Russians made great territorial progress, their attacks proved costly, with the Indian army proving itself to still be a formidable foe – having particular success in beating the Russians holding the Russians back from Bengal through a series of hardfought battles between September and November, before they finally cracked in December and the Russians entered Calcutta. On other fronts, they offered less resistance. The advance along the Indus was incredibly successful, leading to the fall of Karachi in late September. This, combined with the race across Rajasthan towards Ahmedabad, saw two dozen Indian divisions cut off from the rest of the country in Baluchistan and Gujarat – breaking their ability to effectively defend the west of the country. These successes gave the Russians free reign to swarm into southern India in the winter months with only token opposition, preventing the Indians from taking advantage of the harsh terrain of the Deccan Plateau. By the new year the mainstay of the Indian army was retreating into Burma, while most of their core territories were already lost. With little hope of victory, the Indians slowly retreated into the desolate Burmese jungles and Himalayan foothills while those lost enclaves in southern India fell. In South East Asia, the fight against the Japanese took a turn when the Papacy and Skots launched an ambitious operation in the Gulf of Thailand that saw the city of Bangkok fall in October 1944. However, thereafter the Japanese were able to regroup and hold the Allies back from breaking out and rapidly reconquering the region.

Although the Indians had been defeated on the mainland, save for those units still fighting out in the jungles and mountains of the borderlands with China, the government remained safely ensconced on the island of Sri Lanka. Lacking a navy in the Indian Ocean, the Russians had no obvious way to reach the island, while there was a high likelihood that the western Allies might seek to intervene. Eager to avoid seeing such a strategic site fall into the rivals hands, the Russians launched an ambitious airborne assault on in May 1945 – taking the Indians utterly by surprise with the landing of around 10,000 paratroopers in locations across the island while bombers blitzed their positions island-wide. With all defences in Sri Lanka facing out towards the sea, the Indians found it impossible to resist and would surrender the island and accept unconditional defeat in the war just days after the Russian landings.

At the time of the Russian invasion of Sri Lanka, the Japanese were still fighting hard in south east Asia. Although they had been expelled from China and had lost Bangkok and much of southern Burma to the Papacy, they retained control over much of mainland South East Asia from the key hub of Hanoi and had rebuffed all efforts to dislodge them from the Skottish colonies in the East Indies. The Americans had been unwilling to offer anything more than token support to the Europeans in their reconquest of their colonial empires, leaving the Skots and Papacy to fight Japan alone. However the Japanese were far closer to collapse than their strategic situation might have appeared. After almost a decade of fighting on the Asian mainland they had sustained incalculable losses while an effective economic embargo by the majority of the world’s nations was having a ruinous impact upon their economy. The fall of one of the few sympathetic powers in the world in the form of India was a blow they struggled to recover from. In the spring, the Papacy launched renewed offensives that saw the Japanese forced off of the Asian mainland for good by July 1945, while in the East Indies the Allies picked off many of their smaller outposts even as they held firm in Java. The following month, the Japanese made an approach to the Allies and the Chinese offering peace. With their enemies lacking the will and means to threaten the Home Islands, and Japan unable to bear the burden of war any longer, a peace with honour proved more achievable than any had expected. The Japanese withdrew all their forces back to their Home Island, agreed to extensive disarmanent that would drastically reduce the size of their armed forces and pay a heavy war indemnity to the Papacy, Skotland and most of all China for the destruction their armies had caused. After more than twelve years, the last front of the Second World War was closed.

With the war over, a new settlement left Asia dramatically reordered. The Papacy and Skots re-established uneasy control over their colonies in South East Asia, although the former had lost the majority of its colonies on the continent since the beginning of the war. Across their territories far right ethnic nationalist movements taking inspiration from Russia and China were already organising anti-colonial resistance. To the north, a resurgent nationalist China, victorious over Japan and united as never before asserted itself as a genuine great power, with the strength to project itself as Asia’s premier force. In Central Asia, Russia directly annexed significant formerly Papal colonies in Afghanistan and west of the Indus river – creating a finger of territory stretching all the way to Karachi on the Bay of Bengal, accomplishing a long held Polish ambition of achieving an outlet into the blue waters of the Indian Ocean. Elsewhere, hundreds of years of Indian domination over Tibet was brought to an end with the creation of an independent Republic and the parts of Burma occupied by Russian forces at the close of war were organised into another puppet state. Most important of all was the fate of India. Having suffered close to nine million combat losses over the course of the last half decade, and with new strategic responsibilities across Europe and Asia, Russia simply did not have the capacity to dominate the vastness of India as an adjunct of its expanding empire. Another solution had to be found. Makarov hoped to instead construct an Indian regime in the image of his own Radical Party – bringing together Hindu Nationalist groups into the Indian Radical People’s Party. This party was elevated to national leadership and tasked with rebuilding the Indian state along ideological lines, with the close support of Russian advisors, attaches and military support.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1945-1947 – Nothing Lasts Forever

In 1945, much of the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific, encompassing Europe, Africa and Asia had endured incredible levels of destruction over the course of the preceding decade. Infrastructure that had taken decades to construct had been wiped away, tens of millions of lives lost and societies completely upended in the pursuit of total war. For all parties, the focus turned to reconstruction. In Russia, there was a significant demobilisation of men, yet the armed forces remained vastly larger than they had been before the war. Huge resources were invested in rebuilding lost factories, railway lines, housing, and more. The state would take a leading role in redirecting the energies of Russian society to these ends – granting immense power to party bosses in charge of the reconstruction effort, with extensive networks of patronage developing around them. Nonetheless, taking advantage of a campaign of asset stripping in the old lands of the VSVR as well as the labour of around 2,000,000 European and Indian prisoners of war kept in the Republic to work on the reconstruction effort and access to a much larger market than its autarkic prewar economy had, the Russian economy rebounded from the horrors of war with unexpected speed and energy.

Although parties in both the east and the west were focussed on reconstruction in these immediate postwar years, tensions and the threat of war was never far away. One of the first serious flare ups that threatened an unthinkable descent into a Third World War occurred in Iceland in 1946. In the summer of that year a large popular revolt by the native Icelanders saw the island’s small Russian garrison overwhelmed and in July an independent Icelandic Republic proclaimed. The Icelanders attracted sympathy from their Norse brethren in Skotland and, naturally, the anti-Russians in New Cordoba – allowing them to quickly arm themselves with modern weaponry. However, the Russians did not sit idly by. In August an expedition was sent out to reconquer the island, with four heavily armed crack divisions. Heavy fighting around Reykjavik lasted for two weeks while the Icelandic nationalists in the interior fought on for several more months. Although the Allies had rattled their sabres in the name of Icelandic freedom, they ultimately stopped short of going to war for the small island nation.

Within the borders of the Russian Republic itself, even before the war had ended in Asia in 1945, a new wave of political terror was gripping the nation unlike anything seen since the early 1930s. This second round of purges was led by the rage of the Vozhd against those he had believed had undermined him and the war effort during the struggle against the International. Makarov was obsessed by the idea that there was a great conspiracy of traitors that had almost led Russia to destruction, and many elements within the regime took advantage of the opportunity to curry favour and personal advancement by playing into this paranoia by identifying ever more targets for retribution. There were three primary targets of these postwar purges. Firstly, the Radical Republican Party itself. Many within the regime had doubted Makarov and even organised against him during the dark days of 1941-1942, and the Vozhd personally ensured that those who did not stand alongside him during those testing times met their comeuppance. Collaborators and suspected sympathisers with the socialist invaders were also addressed. This brought suspicion across entire ethnic groups among the Republic’s western Christian periphery – with Krakowians, Lithuanians, Prussians and Carpathian Greeks believed to have been particularly guilty of collaboration. In Central Asia, the Hindu Mongols, Persians and Indians were seen in a similar light for their links, both real and imagined, to Delhi during the war. As such these areas suffered from heavy repression with community leaders arrested and executed, the military instituting a harsh occupation and tens of thousands disappearing without explanation of trace. The third prong to the purges was anti-Americanism, with those with connections or sympathies with Russia’s new enemy seen as strategic threat. This in turn led to the latest in a long series of Radical assaults on the Tatar community, with millions having family living in the United States. As ever, the Tatars faced the most brutal and intensive attacks on their community from the Russian government, terrorising the community as they had done repeatedly since the Radical seizure of power three decades before.

European colonialism had escaped the Second World War much diminished and barely intact. The Papacy had lost the better part of its once endless Asian appendages, while the Skots too were weakened. In South East Asia, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Japanese war effort in 1945 large depots of arms had been left behind by the withdrawing troops returning to the Home Islands. Much of this materiel had ended up in the hands of indigenous nationalist groups, many of whom had been formed to resist the Japanese occupation but were equally reluctant to see colonial rule re-imposed. The most effective of these groups across South East Asia shared a broadly similar ideology inspired by the far right populist nationalism of China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. The sought national revolution through independence, expulsion of the whites and dispossession of ethnic minorities in their respective countries who often occupied privileged positions of economic influence.

To the north, victory in the Second World War had radicalised China’s nationalist revolution. Since 1945 virtually the entire foreign born population had been forced out the country and their assets seized. The Papal State in particular protested these actions, as thousands of Christian missionaries and an extensive network of churches and monasteries were seized by the state without compensation, and many agents of the Church were killed in mob violence. Ethnic and religious minorities came under heavy handed censure by the state, and frequent attack from grassroots revolutionaries – with the government embarking on a programme to Sinicise these groups into Han culture. The Chinese would needle the scornful West with their support for anti-colonial movements elsewhere in Asia, yet there was one issue that animated the revolutionary Chinese masses more than anything else – Beijing. For two centuries Beijing had been the capital of the Ming Empire, the last Chinese state to successfully project itself as a unified global power. Yet, for decades now this great city had been subjected to foreign Mongol-Russian rule. For Chinese nationalists, their revolution could not be complete until the city was reclaimed and the Han people united once more. Up and down the country, mass demonstrations demanded the return of this most precious soil to its rightful masters.

The tensions between Russia and China attracted American interests to the Far East, a region long neglected by their diplomats. Any engagement with the Chinese radicals, with their extreme distrust of outsiders, was difficult, yet New Cordoba nonetheless attempted to offer a hand of friendship by support a referendum on the sovereignty of Beijing, and putting pressure on their European allies to offer their colonial subjects a path towards independence. A more welcoming partner was found in the Far East’s third great nation – Korea. While China and Japan had trade blows for the best part of a decade, Korea remained solidly neutral despite pressure from both sides. Korea was something of an unusual feature in the region as Asia’s only truly democratic nation – functioning as a liberal constitutional monarchy with a small colonial empire of its own in Taiwan and the Transamur region. With the Russians to the north and an aggressive Chinese state to the west, the Koreans were open to closer ties with America as a means of guaranteeing their independence while they, like the Chinese themselves, coveted territories under Russian domination – including areas of southern Manchuria with substantial Korean populations and the Kamchatka peninsula that was once a Korean colony and was still home to a Korean elite.

Far away from the world of day to day politics, a team of scientists led by the enigmatic Professor Moshe Leinitz, an Ashkenazi with a strained relationship with the Russian authorities, had been working on a new experimental weapon of war since the early 1940s. On January 11th 1947 they were finally able to conduct a live test of their new weapon in the dusty deserts of Central Asia. All observers were stunned. Their new atomic bomb was vastly more powerful and destructive than anything ever before seen in human history, having the potential to destroy an entire city with a single ordinance. Leinitz himself was terrified of the implications of what he had created, fearing what the Republican regime might do with such power. Within days of the test, as news reached Kiev of what had occurred, all the scientist involved in the project were placed under effective house arrest – all their movements tightly monitored and control, separated even from their own families as the Russian government sought to prevent any knowledge or information about their new secret weapon reaching the wider world.

While the development of the atom bomb was a tightly kept secret, on March 8th 1947 news arrived that would shake the world. One week before Boris Makarov, now an increasingly aged 74 year old, had travelled to the land of his birth in Pomerania from the capital after growing unwell. Whilst there he had taken a fishing trip just off the shore of the Baltic Sea, as he often had as a boy. While at sea he had suffered a massive heart attack and fallen into the water. It took more than an hour for his bodyguards to successfully recover his by then bloated and bluing body from the water. Boris Makarov was dead. For thirty two years he had appeared invincible, the master of all he had surveyed. An entire generation had no memory of life before his tyrannical dictatorship began and could not imagine a Russia without him. For the Radical ideal, he was simply irreplaceable.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1947-1948 – After Ozymandias

The death of the great Vozhd was followed by an outpouring of genuine mass grief across the Russian lands as scores broke down in tears, unable to contemplate a future without the man who had guided the nation for so long. At his funeral in Kiev more than three million streamed in from the provinces to see Boris Makarov’s body in state, while two million more would come to see it during a grand procession that took it through Minsk, Lvov, Warsaw and Gdansk on its way to its final resting place in Pomerania – where a private Samaritan religious ceremony was observed by his nonagenarian mother. Out of sight of the mourners, a power struggle was already under way behind the scenes before Makarov’s body had even turned cold.

Left to Right: Vladimir Petrov, Feodor Golikov and Aleksei Popov​

Throughout his rule, Boris Makarov had deliberately avoided anointing an undisputed successor. This left the future of the Republic an open question. There were three leading candidates to take the nation forward – Feodor Golikov, the veteran head of the secret police, Vladimir Petrov, a senior Field Marshall and hero from the war, and Aleksei Popov, a favourite of the fallen Vozhd and the popular figure among the party elite.

The eldest of the three, Golikov had the longest political history – having risen from a blackshirt street thug in the 1910s to a local organiser involved in atrocities like the Felaket in the 1920s before creating the MGB, Russia’s secret police, and directing the purges of the early 1930s. Thereafter, he served in a number of high ranking government roles, while never relinquishing control over the MGB – an organisation whose size and scope continuously grew, with control over significant elements of the economy, entire military divisions and the largest network of totalitarian surveillance and control in world history. His star had started to fade in the mid-1940s. As a Muscovite, Makarov had never fully trusted him as a part of his personal circle, while Golikov’s decision to withdraw from Kiev during the city’s siege in 1942 had stained him as a coward in the Vozhd’s eyes, unsuitable to rule. Although he had survived the postwar purges, never wavering from undying loyalty to the leader and being seen as a useful and effective brute, Makarov made no secret of his personal feelings towards him, in one cabinet meeting in 1946 putting him in his place by saying “your ambitions are grand, but they exceed your abilities, which are puny”. It was rumoured in some circles that Makarov’s death months later had not been an accident at all, but had the fingerprints of MGB agents upon it.

Ironically, Petrov owed his career to Golikov. During the purges of the early 1930s Russia had destroyed its entire military leadership, providing the space for ambitious, talented, and ideologically disciplined young men to rise rapidly through the ranks. The outbreak of the war had given him further opportunities to rise, with many of his contemporaries proving incapable when finally facing the heat of battle. By 1942 he was in command of the entire Ukrainian Front and oversaw both victory in the Battle of Kiev, and the successes of the 1943 offensives. In 1944 he was moved to Central Asia to command the eastern sector of the Russian army that captured Delhi and advanced along the Ganges into Bengal and Burma. The reorganisation of the armed forces along Radical ideological lines in the 1930s had made the military an inherently more political entity – closely intertwined with the Radical Party itself. As such, the army was heavily involved in internal debates within the party and Petrov was the most senior amongst them. Politically, he despised Golikov – seeing the MGB as an overmighty rival of the army and blaming him personally for escalating the destabilising postwar wave of purges – and feared that Russia was not yet prepared for another war with either China or America so soon after the last.

The final major rider for the leadership for Aleksei Popov, the man who was the closest to an handpicked successor that Makarov ever had. Throughout his political life Makarov’s closest circle had been dominated by Pomeranians and Samaritans. It was little surprise that over the decades of Radical rule this clique had come to dominate the upper ranks of the party – even if it had often borne the brunt of internal purges. Popov, just 42 in 1947, was the darling of the Samaritan Clique. Building a close personal bond with Makarov from a young age when he served as his personal aide during the late 1920s, the Vozhd doted on him as if he were his son. The purges of the early 1930s catapulted him into senior positions while still in his 20s, serving as party boss in Minsk and then making his way into ministerial positions within the government. During the war he gained prestige by remaining in Kiev alongside Makarov while many withdrew to the east. After the war his influence had greatly expanded after he was given overarching responsibility for overseeing much of the economic reconstruction effort – allowing him to develop rich lines of patronage throughout the party stretching down the grassroots. Popov was regarded as something of a conservative figure who would preserve the influence of Samaritan Clique and threat of further purges to the party elite.

As the battle to succeed Makarov got underway, Popov quickly emerged as the frontrunner. At the Vozhd’s public funeral in Kiev, Popov delivered a stunning speech that lionised the career of the fallen leader, achievements of his revolution and the sacrifices of the War, while outlining a thinly veiled manifesto of a future filled with economic prosperity and national greatness – receiving thunderous applause from both the public and party cadres alike. Behind closed doors, Popov’s charm and connections across the party elite ensured that he was able to rally their support behind his cause. Most importantly of all, he agreed an alliance with Marshall Petrov – granting him significant autonomy to control the armed forces in exchange for his political support. Golikov had been outmanoeuvred and isolated, his removal from government and control over the secret police now seemed inevitable.

Most dangerous when cornered, Golikov knew he would have to act, and quickly, if he was to avoid oblivion and likely death at the hands of his opponents. With little hope of winning a direct popularity contest with Popov, or wielding the loyalty of the party elite, he had spent some time cultivating alliances among the dissatisfied elements of the Russian elite – those shut out from the golden circle of the Samaritan Clique, with stalling careers and unexceptional future prospects. Most importantly, this included a faction of the armed forces that resented the influence of Marshall Petrov, and his pretensions to speak for the entire army. With this cabal of malcontents, the spider of Radical Russia would strike.

At 2am on March 22nd, weeks after Makarov’s death, MGB units shut down all road, rail, telephone and telegraph connections between Kiev and the rest of the Republic. In the following hours secret police agents launched a wave of assassinations with surgical precision. Popov, saw three heavily armoured men burst into his bedroom and riddle him with bullets. Marshall Petrov, initially evaded the killers who broke into his home in the dead of night after he spent the night at his mistress’ apartment but was found and killed there a little over an hour later. By the morning hundreds of allies of Popov and Petrov had been killed and the citizens of Kiev awoke to the site of tanks in the street as three divisions loyal to Golikov-aligned generals paraded down the streets and loudspeakers blasted out the demand that people stay in their homes. That evening Feodor Golikov spoke to the nation on the airwaves that Aleksei Popov had been conspiring with counter-revolutionary forces abroad to reinstate the Tsar and destroy the legacy of the national revolution, and that this disaster had been averted. Russia had a new master.

The dramatic ructions in Russia in the month after Boris Makarov’s death had great significance far beyond the Republic’s borders. While prior to the Second World War revolutionary far right nationalism in the Radical-mould had been a minority current beyond Russia, in the conflict’s aftermath its was a vibrant international force. Radical nationalism had a constellation of currents within it – with many small subservient Radical Party created along Kievian-lines to administer Russian satellite states across Europe and the Middle East, more traditional Khanates with strong ethno-nationalist currents in the Mongol lands, a more independent Indian Radical regime, a Serbian monarchy that had drifted towards the far right under Russian influence and to a lesser extent the distinct nationalist revolution in China that had inspired wider anti-colonialist movements. Within this world Boris Makarov had emerged as a figure of immense respect and stature – the eldest, first and most successful leader of national revolution. His demise, the unedifying scenes in Kiev and the rise of the less statesmanlike and popular Feodor Golikov removed much of Russia’s intangible influence over the wider movement.

Nowhere was this more apparent and significant than in India. In one of his last great political projects, Boris Makarov had attempted to build an indigenous Radical revolution in India in the aftermath of the country’s conquest by Russia in 1944-45. In this he had only ever truly been half successful. While an Indian Radical Party was forged from Hindu nationalists and Russophiles, it was never as closely aligned to Kiev as the Vozhd had hoped. Indeed, while the Indian Radicals eagerly adopted the Russian playbook of the terrorisation of minorities and political opponents, the adoption of generous welfare policies and economic interventionism, they had found it difficult to restrain voices demanding traditional Indian nationalist goals – independence from foreign influence, unification of all ethnic Indian lands and a central role for India in the wider Hindu world. All these goals rankled with Russian influence. Golikov’s coup in Kiev provided an opportunity for the Indian regime to distance itself from their masters – as Delhi expressed significant concern over the manner of the transfer of power and quietly gave asylum to Popovites fleeing from Russia.

While Golikov spent the months after his seizure of power consolidating his rule and imprinting his, somewhat unpopular, authority across his sprawling empire, he faced a tremendous geopolitical challenge in the Far East. The Beijing Question had become the central focus of Chinese politics since the end of the war with Japan, and now, perceiving weakness, Chinese nationalists ramped up their agitation. As Chinese troops probed the defences of Russia’s allied Khanates, insurgents slipped across the porous border – marking the beginning of what was in effect an undeclared war. In the Chinese populated lands in and around Beijing, the nationalist cause hit a cord among a people tired of foreign rule. The aggression of the Chinese and anger of Beijing culminated in a great insurrection in the city beginning in early September 1948. With Russian troops being required to restore order, images seeped out into the wider world of tanks rolling down the streets of Beijing firing upon civilians and meting out destruction. Powered by a wave of popular anger, China invaded on September 18th, launching a massive assault on the historic city.

The outbreak of fighting around Beijing sent the world hurtling towards another global conflict, just three years over the conclusion of the last. Although Russia’s diplomats desperately whirled around Europe and North America attempting to localise the conflict, in New Cordoba the momentum towards war had grown unstoppable as the Tatar lobby pushed relentlessly for a great Jihad against the evil of Russian Radicalism. On October 6th 1948 the United States announced a declaration of war against the Russian Republic and its allies. The Third World War had begun.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1948 – It Begins

From the Chinese invasion of Beijing on September 18th, the diplomats scurried around the world as the two sides in the new global conflict took shape. Although much of the world had already tied itself in networks of alliances prior to the outbreak of war, there was no guarantee that all parties would honour them. On the Allied side, it was undoubtedly the case that the Christian Europeans lacked the same enthusiasm for an anti-Russian Jihad of Liberty that the Americans were carrying the flag for. The Skots in particular had long been advocates of accommodation rather than confrontation with Kiev. Nonetheless, such was New Cordoba’s weight in the liberal democratic world – all its Second World War era European allies soon fell in line in the aftermath of America’s declaration of war on October 6th, with the Australians, a neutral party in the previous conflict, joining the war on the Americans’ side in an act of Muslim brotherhood against Russia’s great evil. For the Russians, the majority of their Eurasian League partners had little choice but to join the fight – being effective vassal states under complete or partial occupation – but a handful of their partners had a greater degree of independence. The Greeks enthusiastically went to war – eager to reclaim the Aegean islands under American occupations. The Serbs were much more reluctant – seeing little to gain from conflict and having much to lose. As such, while they joined the war they refused to deploy anything more than a token force beyond their own borders, with a large faction at home calling for neutrality. The most important country of all was India. The Indians had been distancing themselves from Russia for some time, particularly since the ascension of Golikov to power in Kiev. America’s declaration of war was their final opportunity to strike out alone – with the Indian government expelling Russian advisors and proclaiming their status as a neutral nation. Faced with so many threats elsewhere, there was little that Russian could do in retribution beyond angry words.

The Far East was the first front to fight in the war with the great Chinese assault of Beijing beginning in September. A ragtag garrison of Manchu, Mongol and Russian troops, surrounded by a hostile local population, achieved impressive success in holding back the Chinese’s relentless human wave attacks on the city through September and November. The Far East also saw one last belligerent throw their lot into the fray. Korea, neutral in the last war but with friendly ties to America and ambitions for Russian territory, was swept up in the enthusiastic belief that the evil empire across the border was heading for a quick collapse and hoped to gain their share of the victory. They declared war on October 20th, several weeks after most other parties, and proceeded to invade Manchuria – capturing the key city of Harbin. Their evolvement caught the Russians totally unawares and, with few troops guarding the border, they were forced to weaken the frontline across many of the border regions with China in order to scramble troops to prevent the collapse of the Manchu Khanate.

Although the Americans had been the ones to declare war, the Russian military had spent the years since the fall of the International developing detailed war plans for an impending conflict with the west. Even without accounting for the additional pressures of Chinese and Korean opposition and India’s betrayal, Russian planners believed that the nation needed to achieve victory on the key European front early in the war before America’s full industrial and demographic might could tip the scales against the Eurasian League. They therefore called for the largest combined arms offensive in world history – with thousands of tanks spearheading a primary prong of attack through Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemburg towards the Rhine and a secondary assault pushing into the flat plains of Northern Italy. It was hoped an initial breakthrough would allow for rapid advances behind enemy lines replete with encirclements and the collapse of the Allied front – aping the successes of the 1943 offensive against the VSVR.

The Russian plans were initially a notable success. Despite being lagging well behind the Allies in terms of overall airpower, by concentrated their forces the Eurasian League achieved localised supremacy in Southern Germany and Northern Italy – providing cover for major breaches of enemy lines. In Italy, a largely infantry-based force scattered the Italian defenders along the border with Russian Trieste over the course of the first ten days of the war and then made strong progress into the Veneto and Tyrol – capturing Venice and threatening to pour into the vital Po Valley. To the north, there was even greater success. The American, German and French army were concentrated across the German portion of the front and provided strong resistance from the North Sea to the Alps. Nonetheless, the Russian armoured offensive achieved its goal of breaching the Allied lines in Bavaria and swarming in behind. Munich fell after a little over a week and Russian troops reached as far as the outer reaches of Stuttgart before they stopped. What halted them was an Allied counterattack in eastern Bavaria that recaptured the border region and left two dozen of Russia’s most valuable divisions marooned around Munich and Augsburg. After less than a month of fighting, Kiev was on the brink of a catastrophe.

On the Middle Eastern Front, the Allies achieved momentous victories in the opening months of the war. In October the Israelis and Russians lost ground in the face of superior Papal and American numbers, but were able to halt the Allies around Jerusalem – where a string of 19th century forts allowed them to dig in. The front might have solidified around this line had the Americans not launched an unexpected landing in southern Lebanon. With American troops now rushing into this opening, the Allies troops in the south launched a renewed offensive while the Russians and Israelis attempted to readjust. Jerusalem soon feel alongside most of Israel’s Jewish heartland – precipitating its surrender on November 21st. This surrender left some seventy thousand Russian troops isolated in the Levant. These men embarked on a brave northern march to try to reach the relative safety of the frontlines beyond the Euphrates, but found themselves trapped in the mountains around Trablus in late December – to weak to push into Syria, but strong enough to hold back the Allies for now.

The fall of Israel was not just a strategic victory for the Allies but an invaluable political success as well. The religious heart of Judaism and a predominately Russian-speaking society, control over the holy land offered the west a chance to pose an alternate vision of twentieth century Judaism and Russian nationality. The first of these aims was perhaps easier than the first. The Orthodox Jewish hierarchy had been uncomfortable with Radical rule since the anti-conservative purges of the early 1930s, and the existing Kohen Gadol was only too happy to be freed from the shackles of Kiev’s iron fist, cooperating with the Allied occupiers and offering providing scathing denunciations of the worst excesses of Radicalism.

The Allies’ alternative to the allure of the Radical Party’s Russian nationalism was a return to the forgotten days of the Polish monarchy. The Tsardom had died a sorry death a generation before. Following a failed coup, designed to keep the socialists and Radicals out of power, the last Tsar, Radoslav IV, had first been imprisoned by Boris Makarov’s blackshirts in 1915, before being sent to live out his days under house arrest in his ancestral Prussian estates stripped of all his titles in 1917 and then finally being murdered alongside all of his family during purges in 1932. The only survivor of the main Zvenislava line was a ten year old boy named Yaroslav, who was smuggled away to the safety of the Danish border. Taken in by the community of Tsarist exiles, Yaroslav was soon on the run again – fleeing Europe in the face of the socialist revolutions of the 1930s. After cycling through Denmark, Skotland, Damietta and Egypt, he found his way to the United States in 1940 where he cultivated immense celebrity as Poland’s lost prince, remaining in the country for several years before returning to Damietta to take a more active role among the exile community. Young and pliable, reliably pro-American, and having many sympathisers within his grandfather’s former empire itself, Yaroslav was seen as a valuable asset with which to needle the Russian enemy. With this in mind, the Allies allowed Yaroslav to be crowned King of a restored Kingdom of Israel, albeit with very limited actual authority in the context of an Allied military occupation, providing significant authority to his Tsarist government in exile.

From the sun soaked sands of the Middle East, to the snow topped mountains of Scandinavia, in November the Skots and Americans opened up another front against the Eurasian menace with a series of landings in western Norway and south-west Sweden. The Russians had left a minimal force to garrison the region, relying mostly upon the militaries of its newly independent satellite states that had been born out of the ashes of socialist Scandinavia. The Swedes and Norwegians were quickly found to be woefully short of the task of defending their coastlines from concerted attack. By the new year, the better part of both countries, including Stockholm, had been lost – save for the far north and enclaves around Oslo and Malmo.

In Serbia, the alliance with Russian had never truly been a marriage of passion and the country’s entrance into the Third World War had been extremely unpopular at home – provoking anti-Russian rioting in a number of cities. With tensions bubbling, the government had tried to limit Serbian losses by keeping most of their armed forces at home, but nonetheless Allied bombing campaigns and coastal raids were already having a debilitating impact in the early months of the war. With popular anger rising, anti-Russian elements in the army launched a coup on December 1st which won enthusiastic backing in the streets. The the horror of their former allies, the Serbs then preceded to conclude a peace deal with the Allies – threatening to invite American troops into their territory if the Russians refused to respect their newfound neutrality.

Although little had gone to plan for Russia in the first exchanges on the European Front, things shifted in November. Firstly, the potential disaster of the Munich encirclement was averted as the Russian tanks caught in western Bavaria were able to break back through the Allied lines to return to the main part of the Eurasian front – albeit at the cost of Munich itself, huge expense in men, machines and materials and the wholesale abandonment of high command’s war plan. Ironically, what had been meant as diversionary attacks in northern Germany achieved more lasting gains than the main assault in Bavaria – with the frontline advancing steadily over the course of October and November and key cities falling including Bremen and Leipzig. Much greater success was found south of the Alps. In Italy, having broken through into the Veneto in October, the Russians saw the resistance of their Italian enemies collapse. As the Italian army collapsed and the Allies chaotically attempted to redirect troops from elsewhere to shore up their failing position, Russian forces captured Milan and Turin in the rich territories of northern Italy while a smaller forced sped across the Po Valley and Tuscancy to capture Rome on December 4th. A week after the fall of the eternal city, Italy capitulated to the Russians – switching sides in the war and shifting the balance of power in the Central European theatre.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1948-1949 – We Are Betrayed

The fall of Italy in December 1948 had given the Eurasian League a decided advantage on the Western front going into the new year. Through the first three months of 1949 the Russians embarked on a series of highly successful offensive operations – pushing the remaining Allied troops from Liguria in Italy, capturing Bavaria and the key city of Munich, advancing into the heavily defended Alpine passes and rapidly advancing across the German North Sea shoreline to reach into the Netherlands and cut off Amsterdam.

Just as the momentum of the war appeared to be firmly on Russia’s side, news reached Kiev of the most foul treachery from their former ally. Russians and Serbs had stood side by side in the face of the International during the Second World War a decade earlier, and had even entered the present conflict as allies. Political instability, and popular Russophobia, had driven the Serbs out of the conflict in December, but few had expected Serbia to throw its lot in the with western Allies. However, Serbia’s internal political ructions had continued to escalate in the preceding months, turning the country in an increasingly anti-Russian direction. This reached its ultimate conclusion on April 1st 1949 when the Serbs declared war on the Eurasian League and began to pour across the lightly defended souther frontier of Russia’s empire. Enraged, Golikov swore to utterly destroy the Serbian nation and condemn its empire to the dustbin of history.

Serbia’s treachery compounded upon a worsening situation for the Eurasian League on a number of other frontiers. In the early stages of the war, Russia’s Middle Eastern imperium had fallen apart as the Allies quickly brought about the collapse of Israel and isolated seven entire divisions at Trablus, trapped between the Lebanese mountains and the sea. The Allies followed this up with a devastating assault on Iraq in January 1949 spearheaded by American armour that saw Baghdad fall and the state surrender after just three weeks fighting. Shortly after this Persia joined the grand anti-Russian coalition – declaring war on the Eurasian League and invited Allied forces onto its territory in return for promises of annexations in Farsi-speaking lands. This left the Russians further exposed in a number of regions – South of the Caspian, Tabriz and Tehran appeared near indefensible, while there appeared little in the way of an Allies push towards the Caucuses. To the east, the Allies found an easy route of attack into the recently acquired Russian territories along the Indus that provided it with its connection to the Indian Ocean. Worse was to come in mid-February when the Russian army at Trablus, the best part of the troops assigned to defend the region at the outset of the war, surrendered. Russia’s southern flank was completely open.

From the most southerly front to the extreme north, the news was profoundly negative for Kiev. A number of successful Skottish and American landings in the autumn of 1948 had put the Eurasian League firmly on the retreat in Scandinavia from the outset of the war. While the Russians had, to a large extent, succeeded in halting the Allied advance along a solid defensive line in Lapland, their stabilisation of the frontline proved only temporary. In April 1949 the Skots and Americans launched two further naval lands near the cities of Murmansk and Archangel that completely outflanked the Russians – trapping six divisions in western Lapland, ultimately leading to their surrender – allowing for them to drive almost unchallenged towards the rich lands of Muscovy.

The spring of 1949 also saw the conclusion of fighting on one of the war’s least remembered fronts – in North America. There had been a Polish presence in North America since the late 17th century when intrepid explorers had established Grigoria in the Pacific North West, yet, aside from the occasional gold rush, the region had rarely attracted much attention. As such, Kiev had left a modest garrison of three divisions to defend the vast territory, who had little hope for victory when faced with the continental might of their enemies in North America. For the most part, the Americans had left the Danish Canadians to handle this theatre of war, battling small insurgent Russian detachments over an endless and inhospitable landscape in a slow advance towards the Ocean. In May 1949 this campaign would largely meet its end after the Canadians captured the most populous part of Russian North America around the Nootka Sound and accepted the formal surrender of Russia’s commanders in the region, although small military and paramilitary elements would carry on a guerrilla campaign in the wilds through to the end of the war.

By the spring of 1949 the Russian strategic situation, was sufficiently critical to gravely concern the regime’s elites. Golikov’s hopes of a decisive victory in the West would have to be abandoned. Following the Serbian invasion, the armoured and motorised troops that had spearheaded the victories in the region in the preceding months had to be hastily scrambled eastward to halt the Serbian advance into the League’s unprotected underbelly. Elsewhere, 100,000s of men would have to be redeployed from the main front to plug the emerging gaps in Russia’s defensive in the north and south. With any hope of a quick Russian battlefield victory through conventional means over, and fears that a long war could lead to starvation and economic catastrophe at home, Golikov contemplated drastic action to reverse his empire’s fortunes.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1949 – The Destroyer of Worlds​

In the six weeks after their declaration of war, the Serbs achieved huge successes against the Eurasian League – pouring across lightly defended borders and benefiting from the support of American air power. In Asia Minor, they moved to occupy the territories of Crusader Anatolia while supporting Allied offensives towards the Caucuses. In the Balkans they swarmed into Moldavia and were only halted at the key port of Odessa, where the Russians were able to scramble reinforcements to hold them back. In Pannonia, they captured Budapest and brought the long-time Russian satrapy to the brink of defeat. However, even during this period of general advance there were some setbacks. In their Balkan heartland, the Greeks held firm and resisted all attempts to push into their territory, while in west Russian tanks were already pushing past the pre-war boundary and were able to prevent the fall of Pannonia.

On the western front, the redeployment of troops to other frontiers made any Russian offensive operations in the spring of 1949 completely untenable. The momentum the Eurasian League had built up in the region over the preceding months was quickly sucked away and put into reverse. Over the course of April and May 1949 the Russians engaged in an orderly retreat from the Low Countries, the key Italian cities of Turin and Milan were lost after bitter battles and the Allies conducted a successful landing in northern Jutland to force a further redistribution of forces. Defeats in Europe concerned the Russian leadership far more than its reverses in other sectors, its military strategists having staked everything on achieving victory on this most important of battlefields. With this in mind, Feodor Golikov approved the deployment of Russia’s greatest secret weapon.

Since conducting the very first atomic bomb test in January 1947, the Russian regime had been considering the best way to harness the new power they had uncovered. With the military situation worsening on every frontier in spring 1949, it was decided that they could wait no longer. On the 28th of May 1949 Russian aircraft dropped a nuclear bomb over the city of Stuttgart, a strong point in the Allied line in Western Europe and a key industrial centre for German military production. This single bomb destroyed the city and wiped out tens of thousands of lives in an instant, bringing the world into a new and terrifying age of nuclear warfare.

The destruction of Stuttgart horrified millions around the world and hardened a growing anti-Russian international consensus. Indeed, the United States took the bold step of announcing that henceforth, it would reject any possibility of a negotiated peace with Russia – only unconditional surrender, the destruction of the Radical regime and dismantlement of its empire would be acceptable.

Nonetheless, nuclear warfare proved to be a tremendous military success. Having been on the back foot for the previous two months, the Russians regained the initiative and began to reverse Allied gains and push deeper into enemy territory – making use of nuclear strikes on two further occasion at Fulda and the Ruhr industrial hub of Essen to buttress their advance. Although they were able to secure key victories, and bring the German contingent of the Allied coalition in particular to the brink of breaking, their gains were somewhat underwhelming, with the Eurasians yet to cross the Rhine by October.

More rapid success was to be found in Eastern Europe. After the Serb invasion, the Russians had redirected many of their fastest moving and most effective units to counter their opponents. While the Serbs were able to make gains in the first weeks of their entry into the war, once these units reached the lines they quickly showed their superiority and began to roll back the Serbian invasion and drive deeply into their home territory. The situation was only worsened by the terror caused by the nuclear attacks in Germany – which shook civilian morale and military morale alike to the point of breaking and led to the Americans withdrawing the bulk of their aerial support in an effort to protect Western Europe from the threat of further nuclear attacks. Belgrade fell in mid June and Constantinople followed at the end of July with the Serbian empire surrendering in August.

Serbia was not the first country to be knocked out of the war in the aftermath of Stuttgart. In the Far East, Korea’s initial successes in pushing into Manchuria at the end of 1948 had very quickly become bogged down once Russian forces arrived to buttress their local allies in the region. Although they had failed to make the short work of the Koreans that they had expected, nonetheless through the first half of 1949 they made gradual progress – first recapturing their lost territory and then crossing into Korean Transamur. Confidence in Seoul was already buckling even before the Russian unleashed hellfire over Germany and within days a couple weeks of the destruction of Stuttgart the Koreans offered Russia a white peace, a deal Kiev quickly accepted.

Indeed, the Far East had emerged as a serious quagmire for the Eurasian League as Russia found China to be a formidable foe and its allied Khanates in the region utterly incapable of defending themselves from concerted attack. Although the Russians had celebrated their defence of Beijing through the autumn of 1948, the city fell in December that, proving to be a harbinger of a longer period of Russian retreat. On every part of the vast frontier between China and the Eurasian League, the Chinese held a decided numerical advantage. Invariably, the superior organisation and firepower of the Russians would allow them to initially repel attacks and hold the line, often for weeks and months, yet they lacked the resources to even contemplate offensive operations and were forced to consistently give up land – with the Chinese achieving particularly significant gains in Tibet and central Mongolia. The Russians could only hope that the fall of Korea would allow them to redeploy enough troops to stop the bleeding.

Back in Europe, the troublesome Northern and Middle Eastern fronts were consolidated through 1949. In the North, the arrival of reinforcements stopped the Allied advance in its tracks in early summer before counteroffensives in July and August recaptured Archangel and pushed the Allies all the way back to a stable front line in northern Finland and Karelia that held for several months. Indeed, by November 1949 the Eurasians were in a position to go on the offensive, with almost half a million soldiers concentrated on the Front they had achieved a clear numerical advantage.

To the south, Russian defeats in the Middle East, and Persian entry into the war, had led to a retreat towards a formidable Caucasian defensive line stretching from Baku to the Black Sea through Yerevan and Kars. This had proven impenetrable to the Allies for months, repulsing all attacks with ease and securing Russia from invasion from the south. After the defeat of the Serbian empire in August, both Russian and Allied forces had swarmed into the vacuum in Anatolia – dividing the territory between a Russian north and Allied south, with few major engagements between either side before the end of the year as both focussed on a battle of manoeuvre.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1949-1950 – Rocketman

With the troublesome Northern and Caucasian fronts having been calmed by the autumn of 1949, Russia’s energies turned back to the crucial Western Front over the course of the following six months. Although progress remained painfully slow, the armies of the Eurasian League made substantial gains through the cold winter months – pushing well beyond the Rhine into rich German, Dutch and French industrial territory. Importantly, these advances were made without the support of the tactical nuclear strikes that had buttressed their progress in the spring and summer of 1949, with the losses of the previous year having clearly taken their toll on the Allied armies and their continental European contingent in particular. The possibility of a Russian victory once again appeared to be a viable prospect.

Despite encouraging reports from the frontlines, on the home front the Russian Republic was creaking towards catastrophe. Completely isolated from global markets by war and blockade, the Eurasian League was dependent only what it could produce itself. Creaking under the strain of a decade total war, there shortages were a growing problem – of fuel, food, raw materials and, after millions of deaths and with a war machine demanding millions more, labour. These shortages contributed to an underwhelming harvest in 1949 that led to a winter of hardship over 1949-50. Indeed, by the spring of 1950 the average calorie intake of an ethnic Russian had fallen by between a fifth and a quarter from its pre-war level, while less favour groups – above all the Tatars – had seen their average calorie intake drop by a third. With an anxious and hungry populous, murmurings of widespread discontent with the government were growing into a greater concern.

From the spring of 1950 Russia’s progress on the Western Front was once again halted after key defeats in the siege of Amsterdam and a battle high in the mountains around Bern – the last redoubts of the Dutch and German states respectively, and therefore of tremendous importance in keeping their forces in the field of battle. In an effort to plug the gaps being created by the staggering death toll for Western European forces, the United States had been steadily increasing its contingent in this theatre for most of the preceding year, holding back the Russians from the decisive breakthrough they had long sought and steadying morale. Indeed, following the failed Eurasian assaults on Bern and Amsterdam, the Western Front fell into a state of almost complete stasis with neither side capable of breaking down the other’s defences despite long and terrible battles of attrition.

The exception to this was a breakthrough for the Allies in June 1950 spearheaded by American armour that saw them punch through Eurasian lines in Liguria and drive into Tuscany, coming within a dozen miles of Rome. Ultimately the Russians successfully counterattacked, cutting the Allied off in Tuscany and capturing a total of 8 divisions. An impressive victory, but one that failed to alter the balance of the conflict in any meaningful way.

While the Eurasians and Allies fought one another to a standstill in Europe, the western powers made significant progress in the Caucuses and Anatolia. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Serbian empire the late summer of 1949, Russian forces and occupied a substantial part of Anatolia. Fighting between Allied and Russian troops in the region only began in earnest in the last weeks of the year, but very quickly the superior numbers of the Papal and American forces on land and in the air sent the Russians into a hasty retreat back across the Bosporus – their last footholds in Asia Minor having been relinquished by February 1950.

The Caucuses were a different story. Here, the Russians had deployed a large army of around half a million men, and held an imposing defensive line across the mountain passes of the South Caucuses. To an even greater extent that the Western Front, the Caucasian Front would become the site of a slow moving battle of attrition – but one with great consequence towards the outcome of the war. Having been repeatedly repulsed along the Russian mountain line for months on end, in April 1950 the Allies began one of the bloodiest battles of the war at Baku. The area had incredible strategic importance to Kiev, not only as an important city and key choke point in its defensive, but above all as the home to the Eurasian League’s most established and productive oil producing province. Both sides were therefore willing to pour endless resources into the battle for Baku that would last through the end of May and claim 150,000 lives on both sides before the Russians were ultimately forced to beat a retreat northwards. While the Eurasian League was still home to a number centres of oil production, henceforth their war machine would never again benefit from guaranteed fuel security – with civilian rationing having to be implemented later in 1950 to ensure that the military was kept in supply. Meanwhile, defeat in Baku did not lead to an immediate Russian collapse in the region, but nonetheless the Allies followed up their victory with a series of similarly costly but successful offensives across Armenia and Georgia to claim most of the Southern Caucuses by the end of the year. With the Allies within striking distance of the Tatar lands, restive nationalist movements within Russia’s own borders would become increasingly emboldened in the months ahead, growing once more from a nuisance to a serious security threat.

Nowhere was Russia’s situation more dire that in Asia. Having been put on the back foot within the first year of the conflict, from mid-1949 the Chinese war machine palpably clicked into gear – making significant gains over the course of the following year. The Russians were pushed to the fringes of Manchuria, defeated in Burma, forced to the other side of the Gobi Desert and Hindu Kush – even losing territory in the Indus Valley to the Chinese. Most damagingly of all, as the swept across the Mongol land, the Chinese had captured large parts of Central Siberia – cutting off the Russian army in the Far East entirely and coming disconcertingly close to the crucial industrial and resource producing territories of Western Siberia that were crucial to Kiev’s war effort. Despite the vastness of the terrain being fought over, and the arrival of dozens of Russian divisions from Europe over the course of 1950, the Chinese were coming close to the sort of decisive victories that would risk a critical blow.

Once again, Kiev looked to its cutting-edge ‘wonder weapons’ for salvation. Rockets had been a major facet of Russia’s military arsenal since the early 1940s. After borrowing the technology from their socialist enemies during the previous war, Russia had used Rockets to attack military and civilian targets in Europe in both the Second and Third World Wars. As scientists constantly worked to improve the range and accuracy of these weapons, by 1950 Russian scientists believed they had developed a rocket that could strike at a distance of thousands, not hundreds, of miles away and deliver a nuclear, rather than conventional, payload.

Between October 1950 and January 1951 Russia would use these new long range missiles to launch their first two nuclear strikes against major Chinese cities in Shanghai and Chongqing, while rockets with more conventional ordinance rained down on other population centres – inflicting hundreds of thousands of causalities and causing chaos on the Chinese home front. Simultaneously, a major new ground offensive began pushing out of Western Siberia, aiming to retake the lands lost over the previous year and finding immediate success against the overstretched Chinese army.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1950-1951 – The End of the Beginning

In Asia, the Russian counterattack that began in the final months of 1950, accompanied by the meting out of fiery destruction on urban China with the Republic’s new missile arsenal, was a great success. Although fast progress in a territory so inhospitable and endless in size was not realistic, from the end of 1950 the Chinese were putting into a long retreat away from the industrial centres of Western Siberia, back towards the pre-war frontier. By the summer of 1951 the Russians had pushed back into the Mongol and Uighur lands. Importantly, a large number of China’s most experienced divisions, most skilled in Arctic combat, were cut off from the front north of Lake Baikal. Living off the land in these territories was already impossible in the summer, but when the weather turned later in the year the Chinese caught in the tundra quickly began to die in scores, with the Russians delaying their acceptance of their surrender for several weeks to allow the elements to reduce their enemies numbers.

Back in Europe, while the Northern Front had gained a great deal of attention from Allied and Eurasian strategists alike during the first year of the war when the Allies had threatened to push all the way to Muscovy, since the Russians had regained the upper hand in the second half of 1949 it had retreated from prominence. The battles tended to be smaller scale, less frequent and less bloody than other theatres of battle while the frontline remained relatively steady in the Lapland area, although the Russians made steady progress over the course of the next two years – pushing back into Scandinavia proper in 1951.

On the home front, the winter of 1950 to 1951 was extremely harsh in Russia. Civilian living conditions were seemingly in free fall with rations of food and fuel drastically reduced while the state made ever greater demands of the workforce for higher production in the name of total war. Worse, from the end of 1950 the Judaeo-Russian heartland of the empire witnessed the arrival of violence on its own doorstep for the first time since the invaders of the Internationale had been swept out of Russia during the previous war. Allied victories around the southern shores of the Black Sea had provided bases for bombing raids into Ukraine – reaching as far as Kiev itself – while a growing aerial advantage for the Allies limited Russia’s ability to keep the skies over its heartlands safe from bombing.

In Western Europe, after a year of static trench warfare across a front stretching from the North to the Ligurian Seas that had seen neither side land a decisive blow or make anything more that marginal territorial gains, the Russians in particular limited by the diversion of the Republic’s nuclear arsenal to Asia, the Eurasian League won a great victory. On July 1st 1951 the Dutch capital of Amsterdam finally fell after more than a year under siege and the entire Dutch army surrendered to the League. Just a week later thirty thousand Americans were captured following a failed landing behind Russian lines at Wilhelemshaven. These victories were believed to be of incredible significance to the outcome of the war – removing another European belligerent from the fight, freeing up large numbers of Russian troops that had been involved in the siege for attacks elsewhere on the front and striking a dispiriting psychological blow to the Allies. Golikov confidently celebrated the victory across the Russian airwaves, swearing that the enemy was near defeat, and that with one last push the Russian flag would be flying over Paris by Hanukah.

Kiev’s desperation for success in the West was growing as the situation its southern flank deteriorated. Following a number of gruesome battles in 1950, the Allies had captured most of the South Caucuses, however the Russians still held a strong line across the highest peaks of the mountain range. Troublingly, the Allies were able to overwhelm these positions too in early 1951, and with far fewer causalities than they had suffered the previous year, finally pushing beyond the difficult mountain terrain that the Russian defence had depended upon as they reached towards the open country of the Steppe. Despite pouring greater resources into the Front, the Russians now had few natural defensive lines to hold the Allies in check. Worse, as their enemies progressed into Tatar-populated provinces they found a friendly local population that was eager to aid them in every way possible and found new possibilities for cooperation with nationalist partisans behind enemy lines.

The resurgence in minority nationalist militancy within Russia would play its part in one of the most spectacular, and consequential, dramas of the war. Since first deploying them in 1949, Russia’s use of nuclear weapons had been successful in greatly altering the balance of power in the war. Having kept its secrets tightly under wraps, it enjoyed a monopoly on these weapons, despite the best efforts of Allied researchers to develop a bomb of their own. In the summer of 1951 American intelligence agencies made a crucial discovery – identifying the location of Russia’s only operational nuclear production facility, high in the Ural Mountains. Unable to reach this location themselves, the Americans turned to friendly partisans within Russia.

The Brotherhood of the Wolf, the famous Turanist rebel group, had been almost completely destroyed under the jackboot of Radical Party repression over the preceding decades. However, the wavering of Russian state authority under the weight of the present war had given it an opportunity for explosive resurgence. Working closely with American intelligence services, many of whom where of Tatar extraction themselves, the Brotherhood’s finest hour would come in September 1951. Gathering its hundreds of its best fighters to a single location, the Brotherhood launched an audacious raid on the secret nuclear facility – damaging it so badly with mortal fire and bombs to put it out of operation for months.

Just as importantly, the Turanists were able to capture three nuclear scientists alive, and within hours of their arrival, disappeared back into the mountains. In their dramatic adventure to smuggling these men out of Russia, two of the three scientists were killed as Russian security forces tracked down the bands of Brotherhood fighters one by one. However, one man, a Latvian named Valarian Broka, was brought to the shores of the Caspian, from where American agents were able to arrange a flight over the sea to Baku and, from there, the safety of North America. Broka would go on to supercharge the American nuclear programme, putting them on track to produce a bomb of their own. In a single raid, the Brotherhood of the Wolf had done more to damage the Russian state than in their decades of rebellions, insurgency, assassination and propaganda.

The Wolves’ remarkable raid came at the tail end of a summer during which the United States had seized the initiative in Europe to turn the balance of the war firmly against Russia. In truth, the United States, reluctant to fully abandon the liberties of normal life, had been more skittish than any other power in truly embracing total war. With a much lower rate of conscription than all other major belligerents both in the wars of the 1940s, much of its war making potential remained untapped. Only the nuclear bombings in Germany in 1949 had convinced New Cordoba of the need to embrace total warfare and rally every available man to the fight. The United States already had millions on men in the field in 1949, but within two years these numbers would almost double as America approached the levels of mobolisation seen across Europe. These resources would provide the Americans with the strategic freedom to change the shape of the war.

In early July 1951 the Americans embarked on a series of large-scale landings around the sun bleached beaches of Greece. Caught off guard, Crusader Anatolia quickly folded as its coastal defences proved completely inadequate. The surrender of the Greeks allowed fast moving American units to drive deep into the barely protected Balkans – reaching the Danube before the end of the month. Worse was to come, as the Russians moved troops out of Thrace to counter the Americans, Allied troops stationed in Asia Minor were able to force the Bosporus and capture the Queen of Cities itself, Constantinople.

With the Allies opening up a new front in the Balkans, and knocking out a key player in the Eurasian League out the war, another American naval invasion in Europe upturned the balance of power on the Western Front. With the Russians still beaming from their victory over the Dutch in Amsterdam, in August around a quarter of a million American troops flooded into the flat lands of Holland, capturing tens of thousands of Eurasian troops and sending the rest of their force in the region into flight back towards Germany. This naval invasion was accompanied by a surge in American commitment across the Western Front in the summer of 1951 to steady the line and prepare to roll back the Russian threat.

At home, unwelcome news from the front contributed to the growing dissident mood across the Republic. In late August shipyard workers in Gdansk began a major wildcat strike, protesting against a government push to extend their working day to nearly 14 hours. To the consternation of the regime, the strikers adopted an unthinkably political tone – chanting for peace and freedom. The Radicals responded in typical fashion, deploying armed police to break up the strike and punish the ring leaders. However, from here, events escalated with a violent industrial dispute transforming into an outright insurrection, with armed groups of workers from across the ethnically diverse city joining together in revolt against the regime – an act in itself something of a repudiation of Radicalism’s belief in the primacy of race and ethnicity above all else. For a period of three weeks through September 1951 the Free City of Danzig held sway over the important port city, with Allied aircraft flying in weapons and supplies to help the locals keep up the fight before order was restored. Increasingly, the enemy within was presenting itself as almost as great a threat as Russia’s myriad external foes.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1951-1952 – The Butcher Gets His Due

In Europe, the American landings in Greece and the Netherlands in the summer of 1951 had push the Eurasian League into a perilous position on all fronts. Making good on their momentum, the Allies launched two key offensive operations on the Western Front through August and September – first pushing the Russians out of Alsace, before a larger two-pronged attack into the Rhineland reconquered much of the richest occupied territory in Central Europe. The Allies attempted to follow these victories up with a push further into the heart of Germany but found themselves unexpectedly repulsed, with the regrouping Eurasian forces proving they still had fight left in them and preventing a general collapse on the Western Front. Reprieved, the Russians the settled into a stalemate through the winter months.

To the South East in the Balkans, the Eurasian League fought back strongly to recover from their rapid territorial losses in July and August 1951. Bringing reinforcements to the front, they successfully fended off several American attacks on Belgrade and pushed them back from the Danube – even recapturing Sofia. However, after failing to retake Constantinople following a fierce fight in October 1951, they too dug in to a stagnant front line. The invasion of the Balkans had been successfully contained, although not reversed.

The war of manoeuvre in Europe was only revived by an Allied offensive into Italy in February and March 1952. The attack had echoes of the Allied operations of the summer of 1950. As they had then, they breached the Eurasian line in Liguria and pushed into Tuscany with great force and speed. However, while two years previously the Eurasians had successfully counterattacked and captured tens of thousands of men, now they lacked the capacity to manage the situation. Instead, the Italian portion of the front went into meltdown. The Allies surged southwards to capture Rome, with supplementary landings leading to the capitulation of Kiev-aligned Italian military, while Eurasian forces attempted to fall back in disorderly fashion. Some foolishly retreated southwards, and would be captured before the end of spring, while others joined surviving Eurasian troops in a new defensive position along the Alps and Veneto.

Iceland had been the site of one of the most significant flashpoints between Russia and the West during the brief period between the Second and Third World Wars, as Kiev was forced to reconquer the island in the aftermath of a native rebellion. This revolt had led to a heavy handed militarisation of the island, that received an oversized garrison of nearly 40,000 military personnel – equivalent to a fifth of the civilian population. Iceland had obvious strategic value in a war against the Western powers, and was used as a base of operation from submarine warfare in the North Atlantic – with wolfpacks sailing from Reykjavik tormenting the shipping lanes between North America and Europe. As the Allies tightened their grip on the Eurasian League, they sought to remove this source of disruption with a large scale invasion by American marines, supported by overwhelming naval and airborne support, in the spring of 1952. The Russians, undermined by sabotage from the hostile locals, struggled to hold their enemy at bay. They abandoned Reykjavik after three weeks fighting to retreat into the interior, but surrendered shortly thereafter, finding it impossible to replace the supplies that had been abandoned in the capital city while in the barren reaches of the island.

By the start of 1952, the Russian Republic’s territory was veritably swarming with anti-Radical partisan groups – the majority of whom held leftist or separatist sympathies, or both. From the forests of the Baltic, through the jungle of heavy industries in Ruthenia to the Tatar Steppe, armed groups were popping up with varying degrees of strength to make war against their own government. From the very top of the regime, Golikov pushed for a heavy handed response to these groups – with whole villages being torched for real or suspected collaboration, the entire families of rebel fighters facing execution and pre-emptive arrests taking away those suspected of anti-regime politics.

Perhaps more ominously for the government, more peaceful anti-war groups were also coalescing, and on a broader ideological spectrum including conservatives, Tsarists, liberals and leftists. As they spread their tentacles through Russian society, winning over important elites and commonfolk alike behind closed doors, they were united by a shared repudiation of the past four decades of Radicalism, identifying themselves with Poland rather than Russia. The anti-war groups found a degree of organisational coherence in March 1952 when they joined together to form the National Council for Free Poland on a platform demanding peace without annexations, an end to the Russian Republic and the Radical regime and a restoration of democracy.

Through 1952, the South Eastern Front emerged as one of the most significant. With Allied forces now menacingly close to the Republic’s Ukrainian heartland, fierce battles were fought along the Don River – with the Russians fighting desperately to save their homeland. In this, they were successful in holding their line, but at the cost of leaving the Tatar lands to the east more lightly defended – allowing the Allies to liberate much of the Volga-Ural region over the course of 1952.

At the same time, the Skots and French joined together to launch amphibious attacks in a number of coastal locations in the Black Sea during May and June, in the hopes that they would be able to outflank their enemy and push directly into Ukraine. For the most part, these failed with several divisions being captured in Dobruja and near Odessa. However, the attack on the Crimea was a qualified success, as the Franco-Skottish army took Sevastopol while the Americans attacked from across the Kerch Strait. While this forced the Russians to abandon the peninsula, it failed into its wider goal of facilitating a larger northern push.

It is notable that millions of ethnic Russians lived in the Tatar territories the Allies were advancing into, particularly along the Lower Volga where the Russians actually outnumbered the Tatars by the 1950s, having settled there as part of successive waves of Slavic migrations into these parts ongoing since the late nineteenth century that had been strongly supported during the Radical era. In a cruel twist of fate, these communities, that had long been the benefactors of state support and perpetrators of violence against their neighbours, now faced a whirlwind of their own. Wherever the Russian army was forced back, huge trains of Russian refugees followed them. Those that remained were subject to wild pogroms and forced expulsions at the hands of Tatar partisans who saw their chance to reclaim their homelands and mete out vengeance for the horrors of Radicalism. Many within the Allied armies, most importantly the Americans, were sympathetic to the rage of the Tatars, and were happy to turn a blind eye to their violence within areas they controlled.

The one sector where the news was at least slightly positive was in the Far East. There, Russia made some minor gains between the summers of 1951 and 1952, yet these were marginal and had left the frontline comfortably distanced from the Han Chinese heartland, with the momentum of Russia’s earlier counteroffensive well and truly spent even before the autumn of 1951. Indeed, as the situation worsened elsewhere, by 1952 troops were being taken away from the campaign against China to try to stem the bleeding on the European battlelines. Russian hopes of salvaging their situation by forcing China to make peace were clearly now forlorn.

Even after the loss of Italy in early 1952, the Eurasian line in Western Europe did not collapse – repulsing several Allies attacks through the summer months and regaining a degree of stability. In the autumn, everything fell apart. Frustrated at their lack of progress, the Allied came together to formulate a plan for their largest single offensive of the war to date – deploying millions of soldiers for a push deep into Southern Germany in the hopes of breaking the will of the Russian army once and for all. The attack began in October 1952 and was instantly a huge success, breaching the Eurasian line east Frankfurt and then sweeping south into Bavaria while a second prong of the attack came north from the Alps, the Allies threatened to trap an entire sector of the front in a pincer. Seeing the danger of encirclement, the Russians boldly tried to hold the line while the evacuated troops eastward, but nonetheless failed to save more than 300,000 soldiers who were captured around Stuttgart and Nuremberg. These losses. Including many of the League’s most battle hardened and best equipped units, would ultimately be fatal to their war effort.

From their successful encirclements, the Allies pushed on to take Munich and threaten Vienna, although they were temporarily held back from the former Imperial capital after a stirring Russian counterattack. Yet by the winter it was clear that the war was lost and everywhere Russia’s military position was in free fall. In the Balkans, the League had started to lose ground around the same time as the Allied offensive in Southern Germany – losing Belgrade, Sofia and Sarajevo, while advanced American units had passed through a gap in the Eurasian line in Transylvania to reach as far as the Russian border. Elsewhere, Russia’s position in Northern Germany had been further threatened by a new Allied landing in Jutland alongside a slower moving infantry assault from the West. Even previously stable Northern Front, the Allies had pushed the Russians back across Lapland and were besieging Murmansk.

No theatres of war received less attention from military commands that the front on the Indian Ocean. Through most of the war, the Russians had held firm near the pre-war Persian border in Baluchistan. However, from 1951 they had slowly started to fall back towards the Hindu Kush – losing Herat, Kandahar, and most importantly of all, the sprawling port city of Karachi from where they had been able to harass Indian Ocean shipping with submarines and fast moving raiding vessels. Nonetheless, there appeared little threat that the Allies would be able to break through the mountain line and seriously threaten Central Asia. This stability was broken on November 25th 1952 when, sensing opportunity as the Russian war effort slumped from catastrophe to catastrophe, Russia’s former Indian allies, still governed by a far right Radical Party founded in Kiev’s image, declared war and sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Indus to claim the Indian-populated lands of the valley.

By late 1952 the heroics of the Turanist raid on Russia’s nuclear facilities, than had prevented them deploying any more bombs for over a year, bore further fruit as the Valarian Broka, the nuclear scientist smuggled away to the United States, had succeeded in aiding the Americans in developing a bomb of their own. For months the Americans, who had kept their new weapon a secret from their other Allies, had hesitated to make use of it – concerned that doing so might undermine their global moral authority and provide a veil of legitimacy to Russia’s own use of nuclear weapons. Ironically, it was the improvement of the military situation that convinced the Americans to act. As the Eurasian League’s armies went into retreat in late 1952 two concerns came to the forefront. Firstly, the Americans were conscious that the approach of Allied armies into the ethnic Russian heartland could potentially mobolise a patriotic Russian backlash and lead to a long and bloody campaign of conquest costing hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet they were aware that morale on the home front was wavering, and could potentially be pushed over the edge by a dramatic display that Russia’s nuclear monopoly was at an end. Secondly, if the war was approaching its conclusions the United States’ opportunity to make use of these weapons – and assert itself as the post-war global hegemon to both the friendly Christian Europeans and the hostile nationalist Asia states – was coming to an end. Convinced of the need to act, on December 8th 1952 the United States became the second state in history to use nuclear weapons when they dropped a bomb on the city of Odessa on the Black Sea coast – destroying an important industrial centre and military base, and wiping out tens of thousands of lives.

With the military position untenable, the home front stretched to breaking point and their enemies having unleashed the power of nuclear warfare against them, many in Russia were desperate for an end to war. This sentiment was not shared by the nation’s master, Feodor Golikov. He saw this moment as analogous to the position of his predecessor, Boris Makarov, at the darkest point of the previous war when the city of Kiev itself was surrounded on all sides by the armies of the Internationale. From that low point, Russia had arisen to sweep the invaders aside and conquer half of Europe. Although lacking the same charisma, Golikov aped Makarov’s actions by taking to the streets in an attempt to inspire the people – delivering a soap box speech in a traditionally Radical-supporting working class neighbourhood, which was broadcast live across the nation. There he warned of the consequences of defeat, of the expulsions of ethnic Russians already occurring on the Steppe, of the threat of Muslims and Christians holding the whip hand over Jews and Slavs, of the complete destruction of Russian society. Approaching a frothing rage, he swore that the Russians would “Never, never, never surrender. Never give in. We will burn down the entire world”. Rather than rapturous cheers of defiance, Golikov was met by eerie silence that was broken only when one brave member of the crowd cried the single word “Poland!” While the live broadcast was cut off at this point, and MGB agents forced their way into the crowd to apprehend the individual, Golikov was visible shaken by the steeling reception and quickly retreated away, back to government headquarters.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1952-1953 – Peace At Last​

The final weeks of 1952 were among the more extraordinary in Poland’s modern history. In the days after Feodor Golikov’s resistance speech on December 9th, troops on the Western Front were ordered to conduct a number of offensive operations in Germany. This demand led to mutiny in the ranks as the common soldiery, who refused to embark on what were seen as suicidal attacks. MGB agents and Radical Party enforcers were deployed to cajole the men into line, but this only led to mass desertions of entire units – both from the Republic itself and its European satrapies, from ethnic Russians and minorities. Noticing the chaos on the other side of the line, the Allies began to push in both the Balkans and Germany, and found themselves able to march forward almost unchallenged.

These events occurred in the shadow of the approaching festival of Hanukkah that began on December 12th. Jewish religious organisations were one of the few institutions to truly maintain a significant degree of independence from the Radical Party as late as the Third World War, and as such the regime always had a tempestuous relationship with them – depending upon their pious membership as one of the most important bedrocks of their national support, while never fully trusting them. In an effort to boost morale for the fight as the Allies approached the Motherland, the regime had allowed the Jewish Orthodox Church to organise a large celebration in Kiev on the first day of Hanukkah in which Rabbis and worshippers from across Russia would march down the city’s central boulevard and light a large menorah. Turnout for the event was far larger than had been expected, with tens of thousands of Rabbis, Hasids and other pious Jews gathering in the city. Furthermore, the demonstrations were ostentatiously political, with chants of “Peace and Poland” echoing around the streets of the city.

The day culminating in what amounted to a political rally after the lighting of the great menorah. Several senior members of the Rabbinate made nuanced statements of the incredible hardships facing Russia, and the evils of the present state of things – without going so far as to demand immediate regime change. That was until a small elderly man by the name of Tomas Sidorov stepped forward. He was an influential figure within religious organisations in Poland, was a statesmanly veteran of Polish conservativism whose career stretched back to the days of the Tsardom, and most importantly of all, was, in secret, the leader of the right flank of the National Council for Free Poland. Sidorov minced no words. calling upon the Russian people to rise up in revolution. He claimed that Golikov had asked his own people to commit ritual suicide only to save his own evil regime. Without peace, neither the nation nor the faith could survive. Sidorov said all these things in open defiance of a government whose usual response to dissent was a bullet. But surrounding by the faithful, he did so with confidence.

With word spreading through Kiev, and from there out into the provinces, of events at the Hanukkah demonstrations, the people responded to Sidorov’s call in emphatic fashion. Hundreds of thousands poured onto the streets of Kiev on December 13th, completely overwhelming the capacity of the MGB to handle them. The government attempted to call military troops into the capital to put down the unrest, by now already spreading across the country, but the generals ignored these requests entirely. With Kiev descending into anarchy, mobs attacking known Radical Party supporters and government offices, the National Council for Free Poland was organised enough to move with surgical precision. After days of rioting, on December 16th its militants stormed key buildings around the capital – the headquarters of the Radical Party, the Vozhd’s formal residence, the telephone exchange, national radio station and the high command of the military. Golikov himself was found in the basement of the party the party HQ, he had poisoned himself with a cyanide capsule less than an hour before after his guards had been overwhelmed in their defence of the building.

At 11pm that night, the National Council broadcast a message across the nation announcing that they had assumed power with immediate effect and would soon form a government committed to peace, bread and freedom – proclaiming the end of the Russian Republic of Poland and the formation of the Free Polish State. Capitalising upon his newfound status as a revolutionary hero, Tomas Sidorov, who had a National Council bigwhig behind closed doors for some time, was given the responsibility to form a new Provisional Government containing all factions of the opposition. Across the country, mass anger against the Radical Party exploded into an orgy of popular violence – local party chiefs were torn from their homes in the dead of night and lynched in public squares. Government agents abandoned their posts and fled into the forest or joined the streams of refugees criss-crossing the country. Symbols of Radicalism were torn down and destroyed.

Conducting a revolution the basis of securing peace proved to be somewhat simpler than actually achieving it. The position of the National Council for Free Poland had always been that, once the regime was overthrown, the Allies could be convinced to look more kindly on Poland and agree to a negotiated peace deal. Yet, while the West welcomed the fall of Golikov and the Radicals, they were in no mood to compromise with an enemy in total collapse and with dubious control over its own territory and armed forces. As Sidorov and his government initially resist the demand for unconditional surrender and sought to go make diplomatic entreaties, the Allies went on an all out attack. From the last week of December, through January, Allied troops overwhelmed Pannonia and swarmed into Old Poland, reaching as far as the Baltic Sea and cutting off the Eurasian troops of the Western and Balkan fronts that remained in the field from the rest of Poland. In the north, they crashed through Karelia and pushed into Muscovy, while in the east they forced their way further into the Tatar lands.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Poland submitted to the inevitable and surrendered unconditionally to the Allies on February 3rd 1953.