It was unfortunate New Years Eve in Kreml. Our beloved comrade Joseph Djugasvili "man of steel" or "Stalin" as he preferred to call himself had maybe a few vodkas too many, and died in a sad accident.
This unfortunate event left the Soviet Union without a leader. The General Secretary did not waste time - to avoid confusion and disorder I was selected to replace the great man. I had always been loyal to the Party and World Revolution, but obviously I was a novice in this demanding task. Luckily these loyal comrades were there to support me.
My first command in January 1st 1936 was to redo all the statues, books and posters so that my face was put in to replace comrade Djugasvili's face. Somebody might have considered that wasting our valuable resources for vanity, but you can never be too careful with this kind of issues...
So there I was in the controls of this great country - what should I do next?
I immediately noticed that we had no lack of the natural resources - Rubber trees do not grow this far north, but there was plenty of oil to compensate that. Our industrial capacity could have been better though. And too much of that little IC was spent in keeping the population content. For a while we did consider building up our industries as comrade Djugasvili had projected in his 5 year plans. Soon it became evident that it would be too slow process for my liking. There was plenty of industrial capacity in Europe already - we just had to relive those factory workers from burden of capitalism. It was time to spread the revolution all over the continent!
I made a quick plan to spend any excess industrial capacity to military research. I knew our current technology was way behind our archenemy the Nazi Germany. That would have to be fixed before the inevitable clash waiting somewhere in our future. Luckily the Germans were far from ready too. The fastest way to increase our IC would be the Baltic States. Instead of wasting time in diplomacy or building new divisions we would send our existing armies to spread the ideology among the proletariat of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in that order. The General Secretary cheered on my plan. My half a year plan would provide almost as much desired IC as the original 5-year plan...
It was not considered necessary to leave many troops in garrison - after all we were the Soviet Union and those minor nations would not be foolish enough to attack us. Besides many of those were democratic so they would not be able pass the declaration of war issue in their parliament anyhow.
I collected all my armies west of Ural Mountains, except one infantry division in Leningrad and one of the armies by the Rumanian border, and send them to the Estonian border. As soon as they got there I declared War on Estonia and send the armies in. It was just matter of days when we had annexed our first country. The plan seemed to working even better than I had dreamed of - the Red army had proved itself and our spirit was high. I felt confident to purge some traitors out of our cabinet and military despite there was some more fighting to happen soon. Obviously we were too strong to be stopped now. Latvian and Lithuania gave a bit more resistance, but they too had been annexed by end of July 1936. After such a marvellous completion of my half a year plan the comrades were really respecting my ideas now. Not a bad start at all!
Our research was getting on nicely and the increase in our capacity was showing already. Besides our people was not that hungry for luxury goods any more so that relieved some capacity too. The Red Army would have liked to use some of that capacity to build brand new divisions to protect the country, but the Central Committee decided to against it. It would not be worth it to build any more of those pre-war tanks. We should concentrate on research until the new T-34 and KV-1 tank designs were ready for production. Until then we certainly would manage with this victorious army we had at hand.
All the divisions used to liberate the Baltic States were re-entrenched into full strength.
Making new plans for rest of the year started August. Or should I say inspecting countries to be annexed next. Poland and Rumania seemed too strong just now - we would have to build up a bit before spreading the revolution there. Finland was next logical alternative - it was close by so it would not take many months to transfer the troops there. We did realize the winter was coming and it would probably be harsh that far in the north, but if we were really fast we could finish the campaign before November. Besides I remembered the stories late comrade Lenin used to tell about the foxy factory worker ladies he used to see at Tampere when he was hiding there. That was before the Revolution of course, back when Finland was autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Czar. For some reason the IC of Tampere region was stated to be just one, despite Finns themselves referred to the city as "Manchester of Finland" - Tampere was where the industrialization really got off in Finland. The General Secretary considered this must have been a deliberate error put in to confuse us by the Swedish Capitalist we purchased the map from – was it Paradox Entertainment or some such? We had made our mind now - Finland would be liberated next! Too bad the syphilis got the better of comrade Lenin. He sure would have been great guide to the joys Finland had waiting for us!
The Carelian Isthmus in the Viipuri region was heavily fortified. It would have been wasting our precious resources to attack there. Instead a plan was made to drive our spearhead trough Sortavala, Mikkeli and Tampere to Helsinki. This swift thrust should crush a large portion of the Finnish forces and collapse the backbone of their economy. This would probably not be enough to annex them, but this way we could spend the winter months defending in Helsinki against remaining Finnish armies, who certainly would leave their fortresses and try to recapture the capital. The whole cabinet agreed this was a great plan. Possibly even better than my previous one - well actually a few generals did some nitpicking about the plan, but the whining stopped when we did another round of purge the traitors.
In the September 1936 the war broke out. Actually we didn't need to declare the war because according to the most reliable sources the Finns initiated the conflict themselves by firing their artillery against us in the Mainila village. Our thrust trough Sortavala region started out pretty well and the Finnish troops in there were thrown out pretty fast. Unfortunately things did not go quite as planned on some other areas. Those warmonging fascists did not respect our borders but send the troops to invade Murmansk and Kandalaksja! Luckily the Northern fleet in Murmansk managed to sail out before we lost the city. Orders were given for then to sail to Archangelsk.
It was getting obvious that concentrating all the forces into one spearhead was not working as well as it did in the Baltic states. The thousand kilometres long border was left unguarded which the Finns took advantage of with great vigour. Two divisions were separated from the spearhead group and send to Petrozavodsk where they would stop the fascists from going any further while the spearhead would continue the drive towards Helsinki.
More bad news was to come as the Finnish armies in Viipuri area launched a surprise attack against Leningrad! Nobody had even thought that the Finns might try to defame the home and birthplace of the Revolution! Only a single infantry division and two air-divisions defended the city - the Finnish military intelligence must have spotted this weakness.
Leningrad fell all too fast, the Central Committee really expected the loyal comrades in there to put up better resistance. What a shameful day it was!
Shocked by this dramatically changed situation we realized it was time to alter the plans big time. Panic was in the air when the General Secretary was informed that there was nothing but one fighter squadron between the Finnish troops and Moscow! Some generals were executed for neglecting the defences and concentrating on research only. The official records showed that it was those generals who favoured research over building the army - not the other way around as those traitors tried to claim.
To avoid the panic from spreading we stopped for a moment to think and then came out with a brilliant emergency plan. We pulled all the resources out from research and commissioned 20 militia divisions to be formed. The Finns might have gained some initial success, but this would certainly stop them cold and drain their feeble manpower pool dry!
Off the records it was decided to form these new divisions from members of minority nationalities and intelligenzia. Should these troops be lost in fight against the Finns it wouldn't hurt too much - proper Russian proletariat would be saved for bigger and better purposes in the future. Panic was avoided but I did send my family and personal property by train to Vladivostok anyhow - just in case you know...
The winter was full of pain and agony! Not only did it get on our nerves to wait for those emergency divisions to form, but the forward thrust trough Finland was running out of steam too. The fight in Mikkeli was taking longer than initially expected - it was getting obvious that we would not reach Helsinki before winter. To complete the disaster there were individual Finnish divisions running all around the back area of the spearhead and thus causing havoc in our supply formations. All this led to yet another disaster - In February the surrounded army ran out of supplies and was forced to surrender!
Total collapse was avoided when those militia divisions finally started to complete. After the surrender in Mikkeli the two divisions in Petrozavodsk were way underpowered for their designated mission - trying to keep the Finns from taking full advantage of the breakthrough they had achieved. The armies who crushed Leningrad had time to freely conquer several provinces in Baltic and SE from Leningrad, which made the frontier very long and brought the enemy dangerously close to Moscow. The Militia divisions were quickly deployed in front of the advancing fascists to protect the Rodina. Unfortunately the defensive line was still extremely thin - 20 divisions deployed into about dozen frontier provinces was just one division per province except for the provinces just outside Moscow. This relieved the immediate danger on losing Moscow. Another 20 militia divisions were commissioned actually stabilize the front.
The initiative was still held by the Finns - those lone militia division were so fragile that most of the time they seemed to run for it when ever they saw the enemy without even putting up a decent fight. One reason for this bad performance was lack of organization and leadership. These militia divisions were hastily thrown in front of the enemy and they never really got to organize themselves before the fight was on. Needles to say we didn’t send any of our more experienced generals in there either. Maybe it was not such a good idea to use troops of such a low quality - then again those were the only kind we were able to pull together in short notice. Twenty proper infantry division were commissioned as soon as the 2nd batch of militias would be complete. As more militia divisions were completed and deployed the front finally started to stabilize, but Baltic, Archangelsk and even Uchta were already lost and the fighting was going on in suburbs of Moscow. Not quite as we had planned...
At this desperate moment we got the idea that turned the momentum of this war! The Finns had not bothered to invade all of the Kola Peninsula, but the tip was still in our hands - and no Finnish troops had been seen anywhere there for months. The two last militia divisions were deployed there! The idea was to steal the initiative by forcing the enemy to send some divisions to defend their home provinces. Kandalaksja and Rovaniemi were quickly liberated without any sight of enemy troops.
We were starting to realize that this small distraction operation might actually become something much bigger and better. The proletariat rejoiced as our gallant heroes liberated province after province. Ideologically it suited us well – the Revolution in Finland was not started by advancing tank armies, but by bunch of disordered militias.
Those two divisions were both sent towards Helsinki along separate routes. Not only to spread the news about Revolution as fast as possible, but also to improve the changes that one of those divisions would make it to Helsinki without running into fascist forces.
Indeed, one of those divisions made the long march trough Finland without meeting any resistance. As soon as Helsinki was in our hands my good old friend Otto Wille Kuusinen took the command of Finland and formed a Soviet minded government. Once the Finnish troops advancing at Kurks heard this news they revolted and killed their fascist officers. The border between Finland and Soviet Union returned back where it had been before the Mainila incident.
In the end our campaign in Finland reached most of its original targets - the country was not annexed, but the real power in Finland was now in our hands. Unfortunately huge amount of manpower had been wasted and all research had been halted for almost 2 years. All this had quite negative effect on my reputation amongst the comrades. After a quick evaluation of the situation I realized it was time to step aside. A quick bullet in the head seemed less painful than rest of my life in Siberia...
Lets see if these lessons learned will help me should I soon get reincarnated as one of the world leaders in January 1st 1936 once again...
This unfortunate event left the Soviet Union without a leader. The General Secretary did not waste time - to avoid confusion and disorder I was selected to replace the great man. I had always been loyal to the Party and World Revolution, but obviously I was a novice in this demanding task. Luckily these loyal comrades were there to support me.
My first command in January 1st 1936 was to redo all the statues, books and posters so that my face was put in to replace comrade Djugasvili's face. Somebody might have considered that wasting our valuable resources for vanity, but you can never be too careful with this kind of issues...
So there I was in the controls of this great country - what should I do next?
I immediately noticed that we had no lack of the natural resources - Rubber trees do not grow this far north, but there was plenty of oil to compensate that. Our industrial capacity could have been better though. And too much of that little IC was spent in keeping the population content. For a while we did consider building up our industries as comrade Djugasvili had projected in his 5 year plans. Soon it became evident that it would be too slow process for my liking. There was plenty of industrial capacity in Europe already - we just had to relive those factory workers from burden of capitalism. It was time to spread the revolution all over the continent!
I made a quick plan to spend any excess industrial capacity to military research. I knew our current technology was way behind our archenemy the Nazi Germany. That would have to be fixed before the inevitable clash waiting somewhere in our future. Luckily the Germans were far from ready too. The fastest way to increase our IC would be the Baltic States. Instead of wasting time in diplomacy or building new divisions we would send our existing armies to spread the ideology among the proletariat of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in that order. The General Secretary cheered on my plan. My half a year plan would provide almost as much desired IC as the original 5-year plan...
It was not considered necessary to leave many troops in garrison - after all we were the Soviet Union and those minor nations would not be foolish enough to attack us. Besides many of those were democratic so they would not be able pass the declaration of war issue in their parliament anyhow.
I collected all my armies west of Ural Mountains, except one infantry division in Leningrad and one of the armies by the Rumanian border, and send them to the Estonian border. As soon as they got there I declared War on Estonia and send the armies in. It was just matter of days when we had annexed our first country. The plan seemed to working even better than I had dreamed of - the Red army had proved itself and our spirit was high. I felt confident to purge some traitors out of our cabinet and military despite there was some more fighting to happen soon. Obviously we were too strong to be stopped now. Latvian and Lithuania gave a bit more resistance, but they too had been annexed by end of July 1936. After such a marvellous completion of my half a year plan the comrades were really respecting my ideas now. Not a bad start at all!
Our research was getting on nicely and the increase in our capacity was showing already. Besides our people was not that hungry for luxury goods any more so that relieved some capacity too. The Red Army would have liked to use some of that capacity to build brand new divisions to protect the country, but the Central Committee decided to against it. It would not be worth it to build any more of those pre-war tanks. We should concentrate on research until the new T-34 and KV-1 tank designs were ready for production. Until then we certainly would manage with this victorious army we had at hand.
All the divisions used to liberate the Baltic States were re-entrenched into full strength.
Making new plans for rest of the year started August. Or should I say inspecting countries to be annexed next. Poland and Rumania seemed too strong just now - we would have to build up a bit before spreading the revolution there. Finland was next logical alternative - it was close by so it would not take many months to transfer the troops there. We did realize the winter was coming and it would probably be harsh that far in the north, but if we were really fast we could finish the campaign before November. Besides I remembered the stories late comrade Lenin used to tell about the foxy factory worker ladies he used to see at Tampere when he was hiding there. That was before the Revolution of course, back when Finland was autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Czar. For some reason the IC of Tampere region was stated to be just one, despite Finns themselves referred to the city as "Manchester of Finland" - Tampere was where the industrialization really got off in Finland. The General Secretary considered this must have been a deliberate error put in to confuse us by the Swedish Capitalist we purchased the map from – was it Paradox Entertainment or some such? We had made our mind now - Finland would be liberated next! Too bad the syphilis got the better of comrade Lenin. He sure would have been great guide to the joys Finland had waiting for us!
The Carelian Isthmus in the Viipuri region was heavily fortified. It would have been wasting our precious resources to attack there. Instead a plan was made to drive our spearhead trough Sortavala, Mikkeli and Tampere to Helsinki. This swift thrust should crush a large portion of the Finnish forces and collapse the backbone of their economy. This would probably not be enough to annex them, but this way we could spend the winter months defending in Helsinki against remaining Finnish armies, who certainly would leave their fortresses and try to recapture the capital. The whole cabinet agreed this was a great plan. Possibly even better than my previous one - well actually a few generals did some nitpicking about the plan, but the whining stopped when we did another round of purge the traitors.
In the September 1936 the war broke out. Actually we didn't need to declare the war because according to the most reliable sources the Finns initiated the conflict themselves by firing their artillery against us in the Mainila village. Our thrust trough Sortavala region started out pretty well and the Finnish troops in there were thrown out pretty fast. Unfortunately things did not go quite as planned on some other areas. Those warmonging fascists did not respect our borders but send the troops to invade Murmansk and Kandalaksja! Luckily the Northern fleet in Murmansk managed to sail out before we lost the city. Orders were given for then to sail to Archangelsk.
It was getting obvious that concentrating all the forces into one spearhead was not working as well as it did in the Baltic states. The thousand kilometres long border was left unguarded which the Finns took advantage of with great vigour. Two divisions were separated from the spearhead group and send to Petrozavodsk where they would stop the fascists from going any further while the spearhead would continue the drive towards Helsinki.
More bad news was to come as the Finnish armies in Viipuri area launched a surprise attack against Leningrad! Nobody had even thought that the Finns might try to defame the home and birthplace of the Revolution! Only a single infantry division and two air-divisions defended the city - the Finnish military intelligence must have spotted this weakness.
Leningrad fell all too fast, the Central Committee really expected the loyal comrades in there to put up better resistance. What a shameful day it was!
Shocked by this dramatically changed situation we realized it was time to alter the plans big time. Panic was in the air when the General Secretary was informed that there was nothing but one fighter squadron between the Finnish troops and Moscow! Some generals were executed for neglecting the defences and concentrating on research only. The official records showed that it was those generals who favoured research over building the army - not the other way around as those traitors tried to claim.
To avoid the panic from spreading we stopped for a moment to think and then came out with a brilliant emergency plan. We pulled all the resources out from research and commissioned 20 militia divisions to be formed. The Finns might have gained some initial success, but this would certainly stop them cold and drain their feeble manpower pool dry!
Off the records it was decided to form these new divisions from members of minority nationalities and intelligenzia. Should these troops be lost in fight against the Finns it wouldn't hurt too much - proper Russian proletariat would be saved for bigger and better purposes in the future. Panic was avoided but I did send my family and personal property by train to Vladivostok anyhow - just in case you know...
The winter was full of pain and agony! Not only did it get on our nerves to wait for those emergency divisions to form, but the forward thrust trough Finland was running out of steam too. The fight in Mikkeli was taking longer than initially expected - it was getting obvious that we would not reach Helsinki before winter. To complete the disaster there were individual Finnish divisions running all around the back area of the spearhead and thus causing havoc in our supply formations. All this led to yet another disaster - In February the surrounded army ran out of supplies and was forced to surrender!
Total collapse was avoided when those militia divisions finally started to complete. After the surrender in Mikkeli the two divisions in Petrozavodsk were way underpowered for their designated mission - trying to keep the Finns from taking full advantage of the breakthrough they had achieved. The armies who crushed Leningrad had time to freely conquer several provinces in Baltic and SE from Leningrad, which made the frontier very long and brought the enemy dangerously close to Moscow. The Militia divisions were quickly deployed in front of the advancing fascists to protect the Rodina. Unfortunately the defensive line was still extremely thin - 20 divisions deployed into about dozen frontier provinces was just one division per province except for the provinces just outside Moscow. This relieved the immediate danger on losing Moscow. Another 20 militia divisions were commissioned actually stabilize the front.
The initiative was still held by the Finns - those lone militia division were so fragile that most of the time they seemed to run for it when ever they saw the enemy without even putting up a decent fight. One reason for this bad performance was lack of organization and leadership. These militia divisions were hastily thrown in front of the enemy and they never really got to organize themselves before the fight was on. Needles to say we didn’t send any of our more experienced generals in there either. Maybe it was not such a good idea to use troops of such a low quality - then again those were the only kind we were able to pull together in short notice. Twenty proper infantry division were commissioned as soon as the 2nd batch of militias would be complete. As more militia divisions were completed and deployed the front finally started to stabilize, but Baltic, Archangelsk and even Uchta were already lost and the fighting was going on in suburbs of Moscow. Not quite as we had planned...
At this desperate moment we got the idea that turned the momentum of this war! The Finns had not bothered to invade all of the Kola Peninsula, but the tip was still in our hands - and no Finnish troops had been seen anywhere there for months. The two last militia divisions were deployed there! The idea was to steal the initiative by forcing the enemy to send some divisions to defend their home provinces. Kandalaksja and Rovaniemi were quickly liberated without any sight of enemy troops.
We were starting to realize that this small distraction operation might actually become something much bigger and better. The proletariat rejoiced as our gallant heroes liberated province after province. Ideologically it suited us well – the Revolution in Finland was not started by advancing tank armies, but by bunch of disordered militias.
Those two divisions were both sent towards Helsinki along separate routes. Not only to spread the news about Revolution as fast as possible, but also to improve the changes that one of those divisions would make it to Helsinki without running into fascist forces.
Indeed, one of those divisions made the long march trough Finland without meeting any resistance. As soon as Helsinki was in our hands my good old friend Otto Wille Kuusinen took the command of Finland and formed a Soviet minded government. Once the Finnish troops advancing at Kurks heard this news they revolted and killed their fascist officers. The border between Finland and Soviet Union returned back where it had been before the Mainila incident.
In the end our campaign in Finland reached most of its original targets - the country was not annexed, but the real power in Finland was now in our hands. Unfortunately huge amount of manpower had been wasted and all research had been halted for almost 2 years. All this had quite negative effect on my reputation amongst the comrades. After a quick evaluation of the situation I realized it was time to step aside. A quick bullet in the head seemed less painful than rest of my life in Siberia...
Lets see if these lessons learned will help me should I soon get reincarnated as one of the world leaders in January 1st 1936 once again...
