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Viscount of Sunderland
Apr 6, 2003
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A Soviet Union AAR by Lord British


Hi everyone. This AAR will cover the rise of the Soviet Union, and the internal struggles, conflicts and wars that will plague the young Socialist state. The AAR starts in 1917, following the fall of Nicholas II and will hopefully last until 1948. I hope you all enjoy it. :)
 
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Introduction:
The Dying Dynasty

THE ROMANOV DYNASTY had ruled Russia for nearly three hundred years when, in 1894, Nicholas II ascended to the Imperial Throne. As the empire entered the twentieth century, the decades of fear and respect enveloping the Imperial House of Romanov had eroded, replaced with antipathy, anger and open hostility. The great dynasty, which had united the lands of Rus under the single imperial crown of Moscovy, languished on an ethereal plane, subsumed in its own Byzantine opulence and sense of impending doom. Shortly after the young Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov came to the throne, the young Russian writer Dimitri Merezhovskii noted, “In the House of the Romanovs a mysterious curse descends from generation to generation. Murders and adultery, blood and mud…Peter I killed his own son, Alexander I killed his father, Katerina killed her husband. And besides these well known victims there are the mean, unknown and unhappy abortions of the autocracy, suffocated like mice in dark corners, in the cells of the Schlusselburg Fortress. The block, the rope and poison - these are the true emblems of the Russian imperial monarchy. God’s unction on the brows of the Tsars has become the brand of Cain.”

In their three centuries of rule, the Romanovs had wavered between disastrous reforms and brutal oppression. Though rich in cultural and artistic wealth, the great Russian Empire bore little resemblance to a modern industrial state, like those of Germany, Britain, France and the United States in the thriving and West. The vast majority of the Tsar’s 140 million subjects were illiterate and ignorant peasants, their meagre existence governed by the centuries-old struggle for survival. A handful of Russians, those who belonged to the small yet immensely privileged and wealthy aristocracy, lived in splendid isolation in their baroque and neoclassical palaces in Moscow and St. Petersburg, spoke French and spent holidays gambling their fortunes in Nice and Monte-Carlo. Yet between these two extremes of Russian society stretched a growing class of urbanised peasants seeking a better life as factory workers, only to discover poverty and despair; and the small intelligentsia of merchants, lawyers and students who devoured philosophical works and questioned the ancient and hitherto unquestioned autocracy of the Romanovs.

The Russian Empire entered the twentieth century poised on the edge of an abyss, in desperate need of a firm and to guide it through the perilous waters of the modern world. It was the empire’s misfortune, and Nicholas II’s personal tragedy, that he took the throne at this crucial moment in history. The new Tsar was hopelessly ill equipped to deal with the burdens of his exalted position, and incapable of decisive action in the face of impending disaster. He presided over the last troubled years of his dynasty as nothing more than an impotent spectator, unwilling and unable to navigate his country around the wave of horrors that swept over the beleaguered Motherland during his turbulent reign. Even his birth on May 6, 1968, seemed like a hint at the tragedy to come. In the liturgical calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church, it was the feast of St. Job, an ill omen to the impressionable Nicholas. With his characteristic fatalism, the last Tsar passively ascribed every catastrophe that befell his country and every unfortunate drama suffered in his private life, to “God’s Will.”


* * *

Part I:
The Revolution of 1917

The end of the old regime had been long predicted, yet it came very suddenly, when few people were expecting it. The discrediting of the Romanov autocracy was compounded by disastrous military incompetence, low wages, food shortages, blatant corruption and inflation. In January 1917, Imperial Police arrested the worker members of the War Industry Committee, suspecting them of subversive activity, and thereby removed from the scene the only spokesmen able to put forward the workers’ demands legitimately. Angry workers spilled onto the streets of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow to protest ration cuts and wage decreases. Anxious queues of women outside shops merged with the workers and took to the streets.

The movement quickly swelled into a widespread general strike, and placards appeared calling for the end of the war and the removal of the Tsar. The shaken regime responded with force. Cossacks and police were deployed to restrain the hostile crowds. The regime’s security forces carried out orders only half-heartedly, then as sympathy for the demonstrators spread through police ranks like wild fire, the regime’s own policemen defected en masse. The insurgents set fire to the Petrograd Police Headquarters. Government buildings were stormed and pillaged. Events quickly spiralled out of control and the old regime collapsed, replaced by a Provisional Government.

Nicholas, isolated from the capital and bombarded by contradictory and often false reports, at first dissolved the Duma, refused to recognise the Provisional Government and attempted to institute military rule. As the situation grew worse, he left his HQ at Mogilev and tried to return to Petrograd but his train was blocked by rebel garrisons just outside the city. He was then taken to Pskov, where he discovered that the Provisional Government, supported by his generals, insisted on immediate abdication. The bewildered Tsar decided, on the advice of the Imperial High Command, to abdicate “in order to restore internal peace for the sake of the war effort”. In the early afternoon of 2 March 1917, Nicholas officially abdicated the Imperial Throne in favour of his son, the young Tsarevitch Alexei. Contrary to Nicholas’s expectations, however, he was told that he would be separated from his son and forced into some sort of external exile.

Indecisive to the last, Nicholas changed his mind and abdicated the throne for a second time, in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. Although this was illegal, no one challenged him. The Abdication Manifesto, for whose patriotism and dignity Nicholas II was praised, was in fact written by Prince Nicholas Basily. The original document written up by Nicholas himself was destroyed, as it was beset with hostility, arrogance and anger. Although Prince Nicholas Basily’s final draft was signed just before midnight on March 2, it was given a time of 3.00 PM March 3, to preserve the illusion that the former Tsar had not acted under pressure from the new Provisional Government. The following day, Michael refused to accept the throne, ending the 304-year-old rule of the Romanov Dynasty. The Imperial Double Eagle was torn down from public buildings in Petrograd, and in the Duma Chamber in the Tauride Palace, Repin’s famous portrait of Nicholas II was ripped from the wall.

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Nicholas II, the last Tsar
 
Excellent, another Lord British AAR! Can't wait to read what machinations evolve!
 
This should be interesting. Will the whole world end up Red, or just Eurasia? I'm gonna get some popcorn and a comfy chair for this one. :cool:
 
Great handling of language bro, however it hurts me I wish to see commie rule over the world ;) I feel compelled to comment on the historical facts, you have summed it up pretty nice but I as a history student (that has studied this period in detail) would like more detail, on the other hand, too much detail would make it boring. Good job :D
 
Wow, this is very well written. :) You actually seem to *like* Russians :eek:
 
Thankyou very much everyone. I appreciate the kind words and comments. :)


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Part II:
The Rise of the Bolsheviks

It was the nature of Russian society that, when the Romanov autocracy fell, it was replaced not by one successor, but two. The Provisional Government drew its members mostly from the Duma. The aim of the Provisional Government was to establish Russia as a true parliamentary democracy. From the very outset, the democratic minded Provisional Government was shadowed by the soviets (councils), repositories of the workers’ dreams and aspirations since the heady days of the 1905 revolution. As soon as the end of the monarchy appeared immanent, workers and soldiers carried out hasty elections in their factories and regiments, and sent delegates to the Tauride Palace. What they were there to do there was not obvious. None of them thought they should try to rule the nation. On the other hand, they were an unmistakeable token that the opinions of the people could no longer be ignored. Soon, soviets were being set up across the great Russian nation, in towns of all sizes and often in villages too.

For all that it was “provisional,” the new government did have an agenda of its own, which was to repudiate the heritage of the old Romanov regime. It dissolved the tsarist security police and purged the ordinary police of all high ranking officers who had served the old regime. At the same time, the Provisional Government announced that Russian citizens would enjoy civil rights, while non-Russian nationalities within the borders of the old Russian Empire would decide how the rule themselves, under the guidance of a decentralised federal government. Russia was to become the “freest nation in the world.”

Prince Lvov, the Premier of the Provisional Government, realised that his new regime desperately required the support of the soviets, and one of his first steps was to reach an understanding with them. Its cardinal element was an agreement to continue the war against Germany on a new basis, a defensive operation until a peace agreement could be settled without annexations or indemnities. Both Prince Lvov and Alexander Kerenskii, (who replaced Lvov as Premier in July) hoped that this agreement between the government and the soviets would facilitate the emergence of a new style of Russian patriotism which would unite the norad (the “ordinary” people; peasants, workers and soldiers) and the obshchestvenmost (the middle classes). The two, however, proved to be too far apart in outlook and mentality . In defending the new alliance with the obshchestvenmost, the two most powerful Socialist parties, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) alienated themselves from their popular base and split internally, paving the way for the Bolsheviks, who took on the aspirations of the norad, acknowledging no responsibility for law and order.

* * *​

The incipient alliance between the norad and the obshchestvenmost broke down from pressure from below. The parties involved in the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet were discredited for supporting the alliance and trying to make it work. The Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin, were well placed to take advantage of this breakdown. Contrary to popular belief, the Bolsheviks played only a marginal role in the development of the revolution before August 1917. On the eve of the fall of Nicholas II, the party’s membership numbered less than 30, 000. Although membership soon expanded, the Bolsheviks continued to fall behind their influential rivals, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the two parties which dominated the soviets. Nonetheless, there was a difference between the Bolshevik’s position in 1905, when they played a similar marginal role, and their position in 1917. The difference was Lenin’s conviction that this time he could see how to harness the revolutionary flood and prevent it from running in to the sand.

Neither Lenin and the Bolsheviks, nor the other socialist parties ‘made’ the revolution; they did not create the grievances of the peasants, the more recent anger of the workers against exploitation, or the war-weariness of the soldiers and the nation. But, where the other parties failed to respond decisively to these mass discontents, Lenin showed a genius for finding slogans - peace, land, bread, worker’s control - “to catalyse the grievances of the people into revolutionary energy capable of changing the face of the nation for the better.” Lenin’s original idea that the revolution would be carried out by a tightly disciplined party of intellectuals directing the workers was pushed aside by events. Instead the Bolsheviks rode to power on the crest of a groundswell generated by the mass of the people; full time party members took over and steered as best they could the institutions created by the peasants, workers and people. Within just a few months, the Bolsheviks had become the most influential of the socialist parties. Support for the Mensheviks and SRs eroded as the Bolsheviks cunningly attacked and discredited their cooperation with the obshchestvenmost. In the people’s minds, the Bolsheviks became the protectors of the revolution, while the others had betrayed them by allying with the liberals and the “greedy, profiteering bourgeois.”

The instrument of seizure of power in Petrograd, the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), was created not by the Bolsheviks, but by the Petrograd Soviet as a whole, to organise the defence of the capital against a military coup or a German attack. From 20 October the MRC began taking control of strategic points in the city in order to ensure that the Provisional Government did not prevent the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets from meeting. The final operation was launched when Premier Kerenskii tried to close Bolshevik newspapers and arrest leading Bolsheviks. Most participants in the rising thought that they were fighting for “All Power to the Soviets,” to be embodied in the form of a socialist coalition government which would endorse the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ assemblies across the country. In dramatic fashion, the Winter Palace was stormed by passionate revolutionaries, propelled forward by Bolshevik propaganda. Premier Kerenskii was imprisoned, along with leading members of the obshchestvenmost.

With the Provisional Government pushed aside, the Congress of Soviets was able to take place unhindered. At the Congress, Lenin was unexpectedly able to set up a single party Bolshevik government (the “Council of People’s Commissars,” or Sovnarkom) because by then, the Bolsheviks had secured the support of a sizeable contingent of SR delegates, who had revolted against their leadership. This group of SR delegates formed the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and gave Lenin their vital support during the Congress. By contrast, the remaining SRs along with the Mensheviks, walked out of the Congress, declaring that the Bolsheviks had usurped power which belonged to the people and to all the socialist parties.

In most localities the Bolsheviks were able to seize power in similar ways. Where they were popular, they used their majority to dominate local soviets; where they were less popular, they set up armed militia to coerce or replace the local soviet and enforced “All power to the Soviets” on their own terms. Within a few months, wherever they held power, the Bolsheviks consolidated their control by closing down anti-Bolshevik and non-socialist newspapers. Furthermore, Lenin established a highly organised and ruthless police force known as the Cheka, or Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Speculation and Counterrevolution. The Bolsheviks allowed popular elections to the Constituent Assembly, but when it became clear that the SR would be the single largest party with the assembly, Lenin simply dissolved it. With its destruction, the form of a democratisation that the obshchestvenmost and most other socialist parties had worked towards for decades was in ruins under the Bolshevik boot. The feeble but emerging civil institutions of late Imperial Russia were ruthlessly destroyed, and the way was clear for the Bolsheviks to impose their own blueprint on society.


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Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks
 
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Vivid description. Brilliant, only the best vintage LB.
 
Lord British said:
...Bolsheviks rode to power on the crest of a groundswell generated by the mass of the people...
that is all I would dare write when condensing the huge and sometimes conflicting volumes written on that period. And then, as you, a little more. It is going to be interesting how this fine start translates into an AAR and hopefully some screenshots. As some here still are left wanting a swing at this game. :D
 
Great style, Lord British. Feels like it comes straight from the pages of history (or from the programs of the history channel). I hope we see the fulfillment of the global revolution.