Welcome aboard and hopefully you will learn more about Russia and the actors of this time period
- 1
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Teaser #03.
"Comrades, just as the earth, after a long drought, pants for rain, so the workers of the world pant for the end of the accursed war, for unification. This striving of the workers for unification is the greatest factor in world history."
"Party comrades! It is not without a feeling of deep inner stirring and emotion that today I step onto this stage - the stage of the party congress of the class-conscious German proletariat, of that proletariat from which we have learned so much and from which we will learn even more. Indeed, we have not come here merely to provide you with news of the experiences of our proletarian revolution, but also to learn something from the German proletariat and its great struggles.
We will not forget that the German proletariat has gained much experience in the two years of revolution it has been through; that there is not a single town in this country where proletarian blood has not been shed for the proletarian revolution. We will not forget that proletarian fighters like August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and others have struggled in the ranks of the German proletariat. We will not forget that the German working class includes real heroes of the world revolution: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg."
"To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated."
"Comrades, just as the earth, after a long drought, pants for rain, so the workers of the world pant for the end of the accursed war, for unification. This striving of the workers for unification is the greatest factor in world history."
"Party comrades! It is not without a feeling of deep inner stirring and emotion that today I step onto this stage - the stage of the party congress of the class-conscious German proletariat, of that proletariat from which we have learned so much and from which we will learn even more. Indeed, we have not come here merely to provide you with news of the experiences of our proletarian revolution, but also to learn something from the German proletariat and its great struggles.
We will not forget that the German proletariat has gained much experience in the two years of revolution it has been through; that there is not a single town in this country where proletarian blood has not been shed for the proletarian revolution. We will not forget that proletarian fighters like August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and others have struggled in the ranks of the German proletariat. We will not forget that the German working class includes real heroes of the world revolution: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg."
"To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated."
- 4
This sets the scene: it will be grim, and much blood will be spilt.
Last edited:
Didn't he say they only wanted peace?
But indeed, war, either in form of civil war, world war, revolutionary war is always a gritty affair.
- 1
Zinoviev's words are chilling and prescient. It reminds me of the words of another Russian, who also seemed to have some idea of it all... Dostoevsky! From his novel, Demons, an exchange between Pyotr Stepanovich and Karmazinov:
Teaser #04
Great War Admiral Shot!
Chaos in the capital as the Admiral was gunned down by a lone wolf after leaving parliament!
Further information is scant as martial law was declared by the Royal Army, while railway and telegraph lines leading out of the capital were cut by unknown belligerents No further information on the condition of the Admiral other than him being rushed to hospital with utmost haste.
Sporadic and conflicting reports of gunfights in the capital, storming of vital infrastructure, and the assailant have been executed. Unknown if military coup or popular revolt, or if the gunman acted alone.
Berlin, Paris, and Moscow remain silent with no comments.
Unvalidated rumors of former Foreign Minister and his emigres have returned to flee justice in their host country and resume terror at home. Other rumors of right-wing plot.
Anomalous Entente sources report heightened readiness. Troop movements to their common border to prevent another conflict.
London and Rome said to put out feelers for mediation, hopeful to calm down the situation.
Stand by for more news as the developing situation in the capital clears up.
Entente troops muster along the border.
Great War Admiral Shot!
Chaos in the capital as the Admiral was gunned down by a lone wolf after leaving parliament!
Further information is scant as martial law was declared by the Royal Army, while railway and telegraph lines leading out of the capital were cut by unknown belligerents No further information on the condition of the Admiral other than him being rushed to hospital with utmost haste.
Sporadic and conflicting reports of gunfights in the capital, storming of vital infrastructure, and the assailant have been executed. Unknown if military coup or popular revolt, or if the gunman acted alone.
Berlin, Paris, and Moscow remain silent with no comments.
Unvalidated rumors of former Foreign Minister and his emigres have returned to flee justice in their host country and resume terror at home. Other rumors of right-wing plot.
Anomalous Entente sources report heightened readiness. Troop movements to their common border to prevent another conflict.
London and Rome said to put out feelers for mediation, hopeful to calm down the situation.
Stand by for more news as the developing situation in the capital clears up.
Entente troops muster along the border.
- 3
Interesting quote indeed. There will be a hard and long struggle, and it will be interesting to see how it will go down and if our prophecies thus far comes true. But it is chilling quotes nevertheless, and indeed prescient. It remain to be seen how it all goes down once Stalin is proven his paranoia is justified, and to see what the other side, or even sides, will do and what methods they will resort to.
The next chapter should come tomorrow, Wednesday at the latest. Again, we will focus on events up to 1905 - and perhaps also the revolution of 1905 itself. For teasers, I like the format and will continue to experiment with them. I intend to have one or more teasers between each chapter as the AAR proper rolls out to give hints about the coming chapter or simply mislead you.
Thanks for letting me know you’d “restarted” your Trotskyist project, @ThaHoward. I’ve enjoyed the first few chapters and teasers, and I’ll be interested to see what the world looks like by the time we get into the action for the gameplay period. Plenty of different directions open to travel in…
Good luck!
Good luck!
Thank you and welcome, indeed there are so many possibilities. Perhaps the greatest question is if Trotsky will endure and if he will prove himself to become more democratic or perhaps even more totalitarian than his predecessor. Or perhaps he will not prove to be a strongman capable of holding his many rivals and allies together. In many ways he may be seen as a better option, simply because he is not Stalin, but there is something else once he is in power.
I know I said the next chapter would come out today at the latest, and it is ready, but I chose to postpone it tomorrow. That is in order to merge it with another chapter, to experiment with the lengths of the chapters and see if it becomes too long or not.
- 1
- 1
Book One, Chapter Three
Chapter Three: In Hoc Signes Vinces
Part One: From Levin to Lenin
Russian factory workers during the industrialization of Russia. Vital to expand the Russian Empire, modernize the nation; and for a Marxist revolution
It was not one of the revolutionary, neither an anarchist; nor a Marxist, but an Adjutant general who one time during the 1880s come with the following astute observation regarding the Russian sovereigns: they all suffered, he ascertained, from "tsar-sickness". Paul 1. had been a deranged poor soul, Alexander 1. an unbalanced mysticist. Nikolai 1. considered himself a demi-god, and Alexander 2. was simply put a neurotic. Alexander 3. was through and through a "kind and obedient child". However, his feeling of omnipotence created a total indifference in his person. "He believes he can give a damn in everything". In his mind, everything would turn out a-okay, simply because he existed.
Indeed everything turned out okay - until further notice. It was not only among the revolutionary an energetic activity reigned. Fiction and literature flourished to a degree where there was barely a counterpart to be found in any country. And in the field of economics the development rapidly - if you turn a blind eye to the ever stagnating rural sector - made progress. Factories sprung up, mines were built, and a very extensive rail-line network covered Russia. During the latter part of the 19th century, industrialism would finally make its breakthrough in old Russia, and modern capitalism won its admittance. By the turn of the century, Russia was one of the major industrial powers of the world, with a substantial production of metals and textiles in particular. The coal mines of Donetsk were also of vital national importance. In 1865 the total number of factory workers numbered up to 607 000. In 1890 it was nearly doubled.
Old Russia was starting to fade away, Russia was on the verge of great change, Levin concluded, Tolstojs alter ego in "Anna Karenina", sad, but not without protest. Levin is, like Tolstoj in real life, a spokesperson for agriculture's interests. Levin asserted that Russia's poverty not only as a result of an inconsequential distribution of the soil and failed reforms, but also the circumstance that a foreign civilization was inoculated into Russia, railways that resulted in excessive centralization in the cities, an increasing desire for luxury that again led to the growth of new industry and credit systems with their stock market speculators - everything to the detriment of the rural farmer.
But no matter what the conservative oppositional and speculative Levin-Tolstoj had to say, one thing was certain - the industrial expansion was a necessity for the outer expansion in the sign of nationalism and imperialism that Russia so eagerly went all in for during the closing years of the 1800s. It was also - ironically - a condition for the advanced plans of the Social-Revolutionaries, Plekanov's plans, could be finalized. Because, without major industries, there could be no industrial proletariat. And without such a proletariat, according to Marxist principles, a campaign against the current society could not be done.
While laborers toiled in the factories, while new banks flourished, while the prosperity among bourgeois business circles grew, a dream lived on about the Great Nation, the undying Russian dream that played with the idea of the Holy Russia's Mission in Europe and the world at large. Especially among the Slavophiles were these dreams popular. The Slavophiles envisioned a selfless and noble Russia that would lead all Slavic peoples, to prove the West the superiority of the Slavic spirit. A step from the camp of the Slavophiles to the Pans-Slavists was not a major one. Pan-Slavism can be said to be a political design in an imperialist spirit of Slavophilic ideas, a deliberate struggle to overmaster the many Slavic peoples with diplomatic and military means alike, and unite them in one Russian Empire. Pan-Slavism, whose greatest vanguard in the press was a most famous and influential journalist by the name of Mikhail Katkov, belongs to the characteristics of Russia during the closing years of the 19th century. Katkov could count on celebrities as Tolstoj and Dostojevskij among his associates. And the movement he so eloquently and passionately propagated for was not only expressed in words but also in action: Its greatest victory was against the war against the Ottomans in 1877. The Pan-Slavists wanted as quick of a fashion as possible to subjugate all the Slavic peoples of the Balkans under Russian dominion. If that was not attainable, they had to - to use modern terminology - create satellite states.
Pan-Slavism was also aggressively nationalistic in the sense that it firmly distanced itself from Western Europe. It was hostile to growing Germany, and it despised Great Britain. In bitter turns, Dostojevskij expressed these sentiments: "In Europe, they complain always over Russian desire for conquest. Russia is in our way, they say. Russia must be pushed back to its own borders. Russia is blamed for everything, simply for being Russia. Russians are guilty of the crime of being Russians - in other words, slavs. The Slavic people are hated in Europe; in the European's perception they are only servants". To continue to quote him: "In Europe, we have been beggars, in Europe, we have been eating mercy's bread. But to Asia, we come as lords. In Asia we are European".
Russian troops advanced into Asia - in the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, and the 1890s - to Tashkent and Samarkand, to Bukhara, to Khiva and Merv in the south, and carved an empire straight through Central-Asia, that Russia mostly had subjugated by the onset of the 20th century. As early as the 1850s Russia had - with an unequal treaty - got the Amur province east as east can go and founded the port city of Vladivostok. During the formative years of the 1890s, the greatest Russian project of its time was commenced - laying down the Siberian railway from the Ural Mountains all the way to Vladivostok. It would make the Asian possessions more profitable than ever. And thus Russia was ready to make its grande entree into the great political drama between the squabbling great powers in the Far East.
And the price that was especially tempting, that was China.
The approach to the famine that ravaged the countryside of Central- and South Russia in the years of 1891-92, may serve as an illustration of the atmosphere and conditions of the final years of Alexander 3.'s reign. Amidst suffering, the government declared stubbornly that there was no famine to speak of. The official line was that the harvest had failed in some places. The suffering was to be silenced out of existence.
It was in this situation Leo Tolstoj sounded the alarm. With his deep love for the Russian peasant he had engaged in a private action to take off the tops of the suffering - he organized soup kitchens where the hungry could get some food. However, he soon witnessed how limited his great efforts were. He saw pauperism grow by the day, he saw suffering branch out. He understood he had to wake up the entire nation to action. With great difficulty, he published an article in one of the greatest circulations. There he demanded cereals be bought in from abroad, so the farmers could have an opportunity to make ends meet until the next autumn. The article resonated in the silence decreed by the Tsar. Then he took a step further: he wrote yet another article and managed to get it out of the country. In January 1892 it was published in the Daily Telegraph based in London.
The masses are starving, Tolstoj argued, because the upper class repleted. All the palaces, all the theaters, and museums, all their riches they could thank their starving people for - they create them quite simply because they make their living in that way. They needed help, he said. All aid had to be self-sacrificing and out of love, in the opinion of Tolstoj.
The silence was finally broken. The world was made aware of what went down in Russia. But the government did not remain silent, instead, they counterattacked. They printed several poisonous articles on Tolstoj in the papers. He was accused of open socialist propaganda, he was labeled a revolutionary. The Minister of the Interior went even further: the Tsar emphasized it could be favorable to consider "other precautions" against him. Tsar Alexander 3., on the other hand, would hear no such thing. He had no need, as he said, to make Tolstoj a martyr, and subsequently wake the wrath of the whole world against himself.
When the crisis passed by, Tolstoj estimated he helped 13 000 people every day.
In February 1901 Tolstoj was excommunicated from the Russian Church by the Most Holy Synod. A year later he wrote another letter to the Tsar, with a stern warning: Autocracy was an obsolete form of governance. It is not for the civilized Russian people. With forced and coercive measures, you may suppress a people but never rule a people. In their days a government could only lead by going in the front of its development from evil to good, from darkness to the light.
Alexander 3. died a natural death of a kidney illness in 1894. His legacy is generally said that he was the last true absolute ruler occupying the Tsarist throne.
Nikolai 2., the last Tsar of Russia, during their coronation with Alexandra in 1894. Nikolai rose to the throne in 1894, and ten days after his father's funeral he married the German Princess Alix of Hessen, who took the name, Alexandra. Under the revolution of 1917 Nikolai was forced to abdicate, and in July 1918, the Tsar, his wife, and their five children - four daughters and one son - was murdered in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk)
That is a legacy that might as well be that of his successor, his 26-year-old son Nikolai 2. - that very Tsar, Tolstoj addressed his letter of 1902 to. Just like his father, he started his reign by proclaiming that he fully intended to remain true to the principles of the absolute sovereign. The people must therefore not confide themself to "foolish dreams" and added that he made himself clear and was open about it. But soon the opposition would too openly and clearly argue against the new Tsar.
Nikolai 2. was no impressive personality. He was kind and modest, shy, and in general quite nervous. He was, however, an excellent family father. But what transpired in his own country, he knew little of. He was a weak and faltering ruler, and in his insecurity, he clung to arrogant phrases to show his almighty power. His dependence was notable from the start on. The one who took the lead at the court was the Tsarina, Princess Alexandra Hesse-Darmstadt, a strong-willed woman, which Nikolai more than willingly listened to when she elaborated on the Tsar's divine rights and mission.
There is a deep melancholy to Tsar Nikolai's joyless rule - it started with the harsh and rasping social dissonances sign and ended with the catastrophe whose equal had not been seen since Louis 16.'and Maria Antoinette had to climb the scaffold under the great French Revolution. The Minister of Finance, the able, flexible, and vigorous Sergej Witte, did whatever he could to master the situation. His greatest ambition was to modernize Russia, liberate it from the stiff bureaucracy that had ruled the foundation was so long, and give it a time-appropriate financial system. He borrowed what he could from France - that was the price the French had to pay for their Entente Cordiale - in part to stabilize the ruble and in part to jumpstart the railway construction in Siberia, which he welcomed to be finished both to economical and political considerations. Undoubtedly he made great achievements. Still, disaffection started to resurface in, a mildly put, discomforting way. The Narodniks again awakened; it spread like a rash across society, only with renewed waves of assassinations. It was especially students in this concrete way would demonstrate their views and displeasure. And in 1899 a man emerged in St. Petersburg who would become one of the greatest, most powerful, and strongest men in Russin history. Vladimir Ulyanov, also known as just Lenin. He came from Siberia, where he recently had spent three years in prison and exile. He had with him the manuscript of one of his main works "Development of Capitalism in Russia" and he was accompanied by his wife, Nadjesjda Krupskaja, who he married during his trip in Siberia.
A mugshot of Lenin before his exile in Siberia.
Lenin, born in 1870, was the son of a teacher and public schooling administrator and member of Russian lower nobility, in the city of Simbirsk by the Volga. He attended to law-school, became a lawyer, and worked first in Samara and later on in St. Petersburg. He was early on introduced in the revolutionary movement - his older brother was executed in 1887 for his part in a failed assassination on Alexander 3. - and soon rose to prominence and a leading position within it. Though he returned to the capital from Siberia, he did not linger for long in Russia. He found it safest and most practical to leave his motherland in 1900 and continue his revolutionary activity there. In Munich, he founded "Iskra" (the Spark). There the purest and orthodox tenets of Marxism were preached, and there he put forward his view on what was to come.
Lenin's conception was clear and trenchant from the first moment on. He maintained - an association with Plekhanov which he first cooperated with, men, later on, brushed aside - that the goal had to be one thing: nothing short of an upheaval of society. Compromise with the bourgeoisie was excluded altogether and completely unthinkable for him. Like Plekhanov, he found terrorist bomb-throwing most unsatisfactory. It resulted in no attainable results, it had to be viewed as a failure. Should they achieve anything, they needed to look upon the broader picture. What Lenin dreamt of was to see an enormous proletariat grow in Russia. He is claimed to have said that if Russia has no proletariat then they would need to make sure they got one. In other words, he wanted the great capitalist industrial barons to expand their business as much as possible - and then a day when it was matured, when the proletariats were sufficiently processed in socialist propaganda and when the conditions were ripe, the ax would fall. Then the working man's battalions would march into the crucial struggle. Then the decisive battle would take place. It is not astonishing to be informed that Lenin had an interest in military science. He had a field marshal's instincts. He felt that he was the prospective proletariat's Napoleon. The thought of Empire steeped the air at this time. And it was not only Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, Wilhelm 2., and the Russian Tsars that had it on their platforms. In his own way, so had Lenin.
The blatant conflicts within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, founded in 1898, that Lenin's dictatorial methods soon led to, became all too apparent in a party congress in 1903. There the party was split into two factions - the supports of Lenin, Bolsheviks, and his adversaries the Mensheviks.
While Lenin, his supporters, and his rivals within the Russian revolutionary movement educated their troops and formulated their battle plans, apprehension started to grow among the Russian ruling class. They were full of dreary predictions. Minister of the Interior Vjatsjevslav Plehve tried to crack down on the terrorist with force. But that modi operandi did not get him far - it resulted in his murder in 1904. But first, he had tried other methods to deflect attention. After several failed attempts he saw no other option that would result in a policy of great catastrophe. He sat the course for war. It was the situation in China and the Far East that created the possibility for armed conflict.
Vjatsjeslav Plehve, Russia's Minister of the Interior from 1902 to his death in 1904. Underway to a meeting with the Tsar, a bomb was thrown under his carriage and the minister was literally blown to pieces.
Part Two: The Russo-Japanese War
"A dangerous bravura". Japan delivers its ultimatum to Russia in January 1904. Contemporary French caricature.
Harold Nicolson has described the decades around the change of a century as some of the most shameful years in modern history (granted he wrote that in 1920). What he had in mind, was the completely unbridled and unabashed desire for power the great powers when it came to partitioning out land that would make do for fitting colonial objects. Treaties were made to partition lands between the nations, as they did in Africa and many other places. In the 1890s they siphoned their claws into one of the oldest and finest of civilizations. They were favorable to the partition of China.
Strange events occurred in the Far East by the end of the 1800s. Ancient China showed all the signs of severe political decay. The Qing Dynasty's position was eroded. The regime barely held itself together with the help of a string of concessions to external and internal enemies alike. At the same time, Japan had started to remind the decadent power of its existence. In a couple of decades, Japan had gone through something of a metamorphosis. It had become a modern industrial- and military power in a European sense. With this new Japan, a new great power de facto entered the stage. The sensationalist was that for the first time an Asian state had adopted the imperialist politics the Europeans thus far enjoyed a monopoly on.
Japan, which was excellently armed, made it first strike - to prevent Korea from falling in the hands of the Russians - in 1894 threw itself over China and caused a devastating defeat. The year after peace was made in Shimonoseki. The conditions were that Korea would become independent and that Formosa would become a Japanese concession.
This was Japan's debut on the world's stage. It is also been said that this was the prelude to Japanese expansion in the Pacific that would shake the world some fifty years later.
The war against Japan made China's weakness all too obvious for all parties. The European powers stretched out their tentacles. In 1898 Germany confiscated Jiazhou. Russia took Port Arthur as her part. And England forced upon itself Weihaiwei.
Next scene: the Boxer Rebellion.
From the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing 1900. Europeans flee the Chinese rebels. Contemporary woodcut in a Chinese newspaper.
In August of 1900, the Tsar agree that a German general, former chief of staff Count Waldersee should be appointed the superior commander of an international brigade to be deployed to China. Kaiser Wilhelm was violently agitated during these years. He telegraphed to his Chancellor that Beijing had to be razed, and he made a farewell speech to his troops where he told them to show no mercy, and continued "Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Atilla made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German!" What inspired the Kaiser to this infamous speech was that the German Minister in Beijing had been murdered. Come Spring of 1900 it was something was brewing among the Chinese population. They lost patience. They had enough of the Europeans' prying interest in their country. The government faltered as ever. But an organization was founded that saw it as their task to simply put murder Europeans - and foremost missionaries - and Chinese that were converted to Christianity. One of those organizations called themselves the Righteous and Harmonious Fists. In Europe, they were known as "Boxers".
In June the situation in China became dire. Boxers attack at large. The terrified Europeans experienced two months of sheer horror and terror. They sought refuge in the legations that were under regular siege.
Come mid-August an international expeditionary force arrived in Beijing - not Graf Waldersee's soldiers, the count was too late - that aided the legations and strangled the Boxer Rebellion. It was a costly affair for China. The Qing was obliged to punish the guilty and pay the European powers reparations at almost two million gold francs.
Wounded Russian soldiers, a common sight during the many humiliating defeats of the Russo-Japanese War. Contemporary drawing by R. Caton Woodville. Used non commercially.
13th of January 1904 the Russian government received a note with a request if Russia had any intention to respect Chinese territorial integrity.
The question concerned Manchuria, where Russia had got its right to station military forces after the Boxer Rebellion. Japan was most displeased with this and decided to outmaneuver Russia in Manchuria.
The question also concerned Korea, which Russia showed great interest for. Something that also caused great disapproval from the Japanese. For Japan, it was equally important to hold Russia away from Korea as it was for Great Britain to keep European great powers out of Belgium and Netherlands it has been claimed.
The Japanese note was not answered.
5th of February the Japanese government broke its diplomatic contact with Russia. 8th of February the Japanese navy assaulted a Russian escadre in Port Arthur. This happened without any previous declaration of war - the Japanese declaration of war came two days later. Port Arthur was blockaded by the seaside. Around a month later Japanese land forces surrounded the city. The Russo-Japanese War would become a disastrous affair for Russia. Minister of War Kuropatkin had personally assured the Tsar that it had to be war, the Russian Armed Forces would easily best Japan. And at the court, there was enough of those who advised Nikolai 2. to plunge himself into an active and bold foreign policy. He followed their advice. He commanded to put the squeeze on Japan. He would come to bitterly regret that.
Battle of Tsushima. The Russian Baltic Fleet that was composed of some 40 smaller and bigger warships departed Kronstand in October 1904 in the Baltic Sea, sailed around Africa and arrived in the Tsushima-straits between Japan and Korea in May 1905. There the Russians were welcomed by the Japanese Fleet under Admiral Togo, which in 45 minutes battle got the upper hand, and after two full days and nights had almost obliterated the entire Russian Fleet.
The Japanese proved to be brilliant strategists. They conducted their operations masterfully, and the Japanese soldiers showed an unbelievable contempt of death. In battle after battle, they defeated the Russians; the greatest battle on land was by Mukden in the days from the 28th of February to the 7th of March 1905. But the decisive action was when the Japanese fleet under Heihachiro Togo punched so hard that it caused ripples across the globe. The Russian government decided to send their Baltic Fleet to the theater of war. Under command of Admiral Rozjestvenskij, they steamed out in October of 1904. They had to take the long way around Cape the Good Hope and did not reach Chinese waters until May the year after. The once-proud Baltic Fleet was then in an abysmal state. The warships needed reparations and the sailors and officers sorely needed respite. When it was met by Admiral Togos escadre by Tsushima, they had no chance, and most of the ships were sunk. Out of the 8 battleships, six were sunk and two were captured. The three coastal battleships, one sunk and two captured. Over 5000 Russians would lose be killed, over 6000 captured, and over 800 wounded. The Japanese suffered 117 killed, some 580 injured three sunk torpedo boats at the sum of 450 tons. The Russians, on the other hand, lost 126 792 tons.
A week later - 6th of June 1905 - the Tsar accepted an offer from President Roosevelt where he would be a mediator. The peace negotiations were conducted in the small town of Portsmouth in New Hampshire in the United States. It resulted in Russian concessions in the form of Port Arthur and South Sakhalin to Japan. Manchuria was, in addition, to be evacuated of Russians.
For the second time in ten years, the new Japan had shaken a mighty and old Empire to its very core.
Part One: From Levin to Lenin
Russian factory workers during the industrialization of Russia. Vital to expand the Russian Empire, modernize the nation; and for a Marxist revolution
It was not one of the revolutionary, neither an anarchist; nor a Marxist, but an Adjutant general who one time during the 1880s come with the following astute observation regarding the Russian sovereigns: they all suffered, he ascertained, from "tsar-sickness". Paul 1. had been a deranged poor soul, Alexander 1. an unbalanced mysticist. Nikolai 1. considered himself a demi-god, and Alexander 2. was simply put a neurotic. Alexander 3. was through and through a "kind and obedient child". However, his feeling of omnipotence created a total indifference in his person. "He believes he can give a damn in everything". In his mind, everything would turn out a-okay, simply because he existed.
Indeed everything turned out okay - until further notice. It was not only among the revolutionary an energetic activity reigned. Fiction and literature flourished to a degree where there was barely a counterpart to be found in any country. And in the field of economics the development rapidly - if you turn a blind eye to the ever stagnating rural sector - made progress. Factories sprung up, mines were built, and a very extensive rail-line network covered Russia. During the latter part of the 19th century, industrialism would finally make its breakthrough in old Russia, and modern capitalism won its admittance. By the turn of the century, Russia was one of the major industrial powers of the world, with a substantial production of metals and textiles in particular. The coal mines of Donetsk were also of vital national importance. In 1865 the total number of factory workers numbered up to 607 000. In 1890 it was nearly doubled.
Old Russia was starting to fade away, Russia was on the verge of great change, Levin concluded, Tolstojs alter ego in "Anna Karenina", sad, but not without protest. Levin is, like Tolstoj in real life, a spokesperson for agriculture's interests. Levin asserted that Russia's poverty not only as a result of an inconsequential distribution of the soil and failed reforms, but also the circumstance that a foreign civilization was inoculated into Russia, railways that resulted in excessive centralization in the cities, an increasing desire for luxury that again led to the growth of new industry and credit systems with their stock market speculators - everything to the detriment of the rural farmer.
But no matter what the conservative oppositional and speculative Levin-Tolstoj had to say, one thing was certain - the industrial expansion was a necessity for the outer expansion in the sign of nationalism and imperialism that Russia so eagerly went all in for during the closing years of the 1800s. It was also - ironically - a condition for the advanced plans of the Social-Revolutionaries, Plekanov's plans, could be finalized. Because, without major industries, there could be no industrial proletariat. And without such a proletariat, according to Marxist principles, a campaign against the current society could not be done.
While laborers toiled in the factories, while new banks flourished, while the prosperity among bourgeois business circles grew, a dream lived on about the Great Nation, the undying Russian dream that played with the idea of the Holy Russia's Mission in Europe and the world at large. Especially among the Slavophiles were these dreams popular. The Slavophiles envisioned a selfless and noble Russia that would lead all Slavic peoples, to prove the West the superiority of the Slavic spirit. A step from the camp of the Slavophiles to the Pans-Slavists was not a major one. Pan-Slavism can be said to be a political design in an imperialist spirit of Slavophilic ideas, a deliberate struggle to overmaster the many Slavic peoples with diplomatic and military means alike, and unite them in one Russian Empire. Pan-Slavism, whose greatest vanguard in the press was a most famous and influential journalist by the name of Mikhail Katkov, belongs to the characteristics of Russia during the closing years of the 19th century. Katkov could count on celebrities as Tolstoj and Dostojevskij among his associates. And the movement he so eloquently and passionately propagated for was not only expressed in words but also in action: Its greatest victory was against the war against the Ottomans in 1877. The Pan-Slavists wanted as quick of a fashion as possible to subjugate all the Slavic peoples of the Balkans under Russian dominion. If that was not attainable, they had to - to use modern terminology - create satellite states.
Pan-Slavism was also aggressively nationalistic in the sense that it firmly distanced itself from Western Europe. It was hostile to growing Germany, and it despised Great Britain. In bitter turns, Dostojevskij expressed these sentiments: "In Europe, they complain always over Russian desire for conquest. Russia is in our way, they say. Russia must be pushed back to its own borders. Russia is blamed for everything, simply for being Russia. Russians are guilty of the crime of being Russians - in other words, slavs. The Slavic people are hated in Europe; in the European's perception they are only servants". To continue to quote him: "In Europe, we have been beggars, in Europe, we have been eating mercy's bread. But to Asia, we come as lords. In Asia we are European".
Russian troops advanced into Asia - in the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, and the 1890s - to Tashkent and Samarkand, to Bukhara, to Khiva and Merv in the south, and carved an empire straight through Central-Asia, that Russia mostly had subjugated by the onset of the 20th century. As early as the 1850s Russia had - with an unequal treaty - got the Amur province east as east can go and founded the port city of Vladivostok. During the formative years of the 1890s, the greatest Russian project of its time was commenced - laying down the Siberian railway from the Ural Mountains all the way to Vladivostok. It would make the Asian possessions more profitable than ever. And thus Russia was ready to make its grande entree into the great political drama between the squabbling great powers in the Far East.
And the price that was especially tempting, that was China.
The approach to the famine that ravaged the countryside of Central- and South Russia in the years of 1891-92, may serve as an illustration of the atmosphere and conditions of the final years of Alexander 3.'s reign. Amidst suffering, the government declared stubbornly that there was no famine to speak of. The official line was that the harvest had failed in some places. The suffering was to be silenced out of existence.
It was in this situation Leo Tolstoj sounded the alarm. With his deep love for the Russian peasant he had engaged in a private action to take off the tops of the suffering - he organized soup kitchens where the hungry could get some food. However, he soon witnessed how limited his great efforts were. He saw pauperism grow by the day, he saw suffering branch out. He understood he had to wake up the entire nation to action. With great difficulty, he published an article in one of the greatest circulations. There he demanded cereals be bought in from abroad, so the farmers could have an opportunity to make ends meet until the next autumn. The article resonated in the silence decreed by the Tsar. Then he took a step further: he wrote yet another article and managed to get it out of the country. In January 1892 it was published in the Daily Telegraph based in London.
The masses are starving, Tolstoj argued, because the upper class repleted. All the palaces, all the theaters, and museums, all their riches they could thank their starving people for - they create them quite simply because they make their living in that way. They needed help, he said. All aid had to be self-sacrificing and out of love, in the opinion of Tolstoj.
The silence was finally broken. The world was made aware of what went down in Russia. But the government did not remain silent, instead, they counterattacked. They printed several poisonous articles on Tolstoj in the papers. He was accused of open socialist propaganda, he was labeled a revolutionary. The Minister of the Interior went even further: the Tsar emphasized it could be favorable to consider "other precautions" against him. Tsar Alexander 3., on the other hand, would hear no such thing. He had no need, as he said, to make Tolstoj a martyr, and subsequently wake the wrath of the whole world against himself.
When the crisis passed by, Tolstoj estimated he helped 13 000 people every day.
In February 1901 Tolstoj was excommunicated from the Russian Church by the Most Holy Synod. A year later he wrote another letter to the Tsar, with a stern warning: Autocracy was an obsolete form of governance. It is not for the civilized Russian people. With forced and coercive measures, you may suppress a people but never rule a people. In their days a government could only lead by going in the front of its development from evil to good, from darkness to the light.
Alexander 3. died a natural death of a kidney illness in 1894. His legacy is generally said that he was the last true absolute ruler occupying the Tsarist throne.
Nikolai 2., the last Tsar of Russia, during their coronation with Alexandra in 1894. Nikolai rose to the throne in 1894, and ten days after his father's funeral he married the German Princess Alix of Hessen, who took the name, Alexandra. Under the revolution of 1917 Nikolai was forced to abdicate, and in July 1918, the Tsar, his wife, and their five children - four daughters and one son - was murdered in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk)
That is a legacy that might as well be that of his successor, his 26-year-old son Nikolai 2. - that very Tsar, Tolstoj addressed his letter of 1902 to. Just like his father, he started his reign by proclaiming that he fully intended to remain true to the principles of the absolute sovereign. The people must therefore not confide themself to "foolish dreams" and added that he made himself clear and was open about it. But soon the opposition would too openly and clearly argue against the new Tsar.
Nikolai 2. was no impressive personality. He was kind and modest, shy, and in general quite nervous. He was, however, an excellent family father. But what transpired in his own country, he knew little of. He was a weak and faltering ruler, and in his insecurity, he clung to arrogant phrases to show his almighty power. His dependence was notable from the start on. The one who took the lead at the court was the Tsarina, Princess Alexandra Hesse-Darmstadt, a strong-willed woman, which Nikolai more than willingly listened to when she elaborated on the Tsar's divine rights and mission.
There is a deep melancholy to Tsar Nikolai's joyless rule - it started with the harsh and rasping social dissonances sign and ended with the catastrophe whose equal had not been seen since Louis 16.'and Maria Antoinette had to climb the scaffold under the great French Revolution. The Minister of Finance, the able, flexible, and vigorous Sergej Witte, did whatever he could to master the situation. His greatest ambition was to modernize Russia, liberate it from the stiff bureaucracy that had ruled the foundation was so long, and give it a time-appropriate financial system. He borrowed what he could from France - that was the price the French had to pay for their Entente Cordiale - in part to stabilize the ruble and in part to jumpstart the railway construction in Siberia, which he welcomed to be finished both to economical and political considerations. Undoubtedly he made great achievements. Still, disaffection started to resurface in, a mildly put, discomforting way. The Narodniks again awakened; it spread like a rash across society, only with renewed waves of assassinations. It was especially students in this concrete way would demonstrate their views and displeasure. And in 1899 a man emerged in St. Petersburg who would become one of the greatest, most powerful, and strongest men in Russin history. Vladimir Ulyanov, also known as just Lenin. He came from Siberia, where he recently had spent three years in prison and exile. He had with him the manuscript of one of his main works "Development of Capitalism in Russia" and he was accompanied by his wife, Nadjesjda Krupskaja, who he married during his trip in Siberia.
A mugshot of Lenin before his exile in Siberia.
Lenin, born in 1870, was the son of a teacher and public schooling administrator and member of Russian lower nobility, in the city of Simbirsk by the Volga. He attended to law-school, became a lawyer, and worked first in Samara and later on in St. Petersburg. He was early on introduced in the revolutionary movement - his older brother was executed in 1887 for his part in a failed assassination on Alexander 3. - and soon rose to prominence and a leading position within it. Though he returned to the capital from Siberia, he did not linger for long in Russia. He found it safest and most practical to leave his motherland in 1900 and continue his revolutionary activity there. In Munich, he founded "Iskra" (the Spark). There the purest and orthodox tenets of Marxism were preached, and there he put forward his view on what was to come.
Lenin's conception was clear and trenchant from the first moment on. He maintained - an association with Plekhanov which he first cooperated with, men, later on, brushed aside - that the goal had to be one thing: nothing short of an upheaval of society. Compromise with the bourgeoisie was excluded altogether and completely unthinkable for him. Like Plekhanov, he found terrorist bomb-throwing most unsatisfactory. It resulted in no attainable results, it had to be viewed as a failure. Should they achieve anything, they needed to look upon the broader picture. What Lenin dreamt of was to see an enormous proletariat grow in Russia. He is claimed to have said that if Russia has no proletariat then they would need to make sure they got one. In other words, he wanted the great capitalist industrial barons to expand their business as much as possible - and then a day when it was matured, when the proletariats were sufficiently processed in socialist propaganda and when the conditions were ripe, the ax would fall. Then the working man's battalions would march into the crucial struggle. Then the decisive battle would take place. It is not astonishing to be informed that Lenin had an interest in military science. He had a field marshal's instincts. He felt that he was the prospective proletariat's Napoleon. The thought of Empire steeped the air at this time. And it was not only Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, Wilhelm 2., and the Russian Tsars that had it on their platforms. In his own way, so had Lenin.
The blatant conflicts within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, founded in 1898, that Lenin's dictatorial methods soon led to, became all too apparent in a party congress in 1903. There the party was split into two factions - the supports of Lenin, Bolsheviks, and his adversaries the Mensheviks.
While Lenin, his supporters, and his rivals within the Russian revolutionary movement educated their troops and formulated their battle plans, apprehension started to grow among the Russian ruling class. They were full of dreary predictions. Minister of the Interior Vjatsjevslav Plehve tried to crack down on the terrorist with force. But that modi operandi did not get him far - it resulted in his murder in 1904. But first, he had tried other methods to deflect attention. After several failed attempts he saw no other option that would result in a policy of great catastrophe. He sat the course for war. It was the situation in China and the Far East that created the possibility for armed conflict.
Vjatsjeslav Plehve, Russia's Minister of the Interior from 1902 to his death in 1904. Underway to a meeting with the Tsar, a bomb was thrown under his carriage and the minister was literally blown to pieces.
Part Two: The Russo-Japanese War
"A dangerous bravura". Japan delivers its ultimatum to Russia in January 1904. Contemporary French caricature.
Harold Nicolson has described the decades around the change of a century as some of the most shameful years in modern history (granted he wrote that in 1920). What he had in mind, was the completely unbridled and unabashed desire for power the great powers when it came to partitioning out land that would make do for fitting colonial objects. Treaties were made to partition lands between the nations, as they did in Africa and many other places. In the 1890s they siphoned their claws into one of the oldest and finest of civilizations. They were favorable to the partition of China.
Strange events occurred in the Far East by the end of the 1800s. Ancient China showed all the signs of severe political decay. The Qing Dynasty's position was eroded. The regime barely held itself together with the help of a string of concessions to external and internal enemies alike. At the same time, Japan had started to remind the decadent power of its existence. In a couple of decades, Japan had gone through something of a metamorphosis. It had become a modern industrial- and military power in a European sense. With this new Japan, a new great power de facto entered the stage. The sensationalist was that for the first time an Asian state had adopted the imperialist politics the Europeans thus far enjoyed a monopoly on.
Japan, which was excellently armed, made it first strike - to prevent Korea from falling in the hands of the Russians - in 1894 threw itself over China and caused a devastating defeat. The year after peace was made in Shimonoseki. The conditions were that Korea would become independent and that Formosa would become a Japanese concession.
This was Japan's debut on the world's stage. It is also been said that this was the prelude to Japanese expansion in the Pacific that would shake the world some fifty years later.
The war against Japan made China's weakness all too obvious for all parties. The European powers stretched out their tentacles. In 1898 Germany confiscated Jiazhou. Russia took Port Arthur as her part. And England forced upon itself Weihaiwei.
Next scene: the Boxer Rebellion.
From the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing 1900. Europeans flee the Chinese rebels. Contemporary woodcut in a Chinese newspaper.
In August of 1900, the Tsar agree that a German general, former chief of staff Count Waldersee should be appointed the superior commander of an international brigade to be deployed to China. Kaiser Wilhelm was violently agitated during these years. He telegraphed to his Chancellor that Beijing had to be razed, and he made a farewell speech to his troops where he told them to show no mercy, and continued "Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Atilla made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German!" What inspired the Kaiser to this infamous speech was that the German Minister in Beijing had been murdered. Come Spring of 1900 it was something was brewing among the Chinese population. They lost patience. They had enough of the Europeans' prying interest in their country. The government faltered as ever. But an organization was founded that saw it as their task to simply put murder Europeans - and foremost missionaries - and Chinese that were converted to Christianity. One of those organizations called themselves the Righteous and Harmonious Fists. In Europe, they were known as "Boxers".
In June the situation in China became dire. Boxers attack at large. The terrified Europeans experienced two months of sheer horror and terror. They sought refuge in the legations that were under regular siege.
Come mid-August an international expeditionary force arrived in Beijing - not Graf Waldersee's soldiers, the count was too late - that aided the legations and strangled the Boxer Rebellion. It was a costly affair for China. The Qing was obliged to punish the guilty and pay the European powers reparations at almost two million gold francs.
Wounded Russian soldiers, a common sight during the many humiliating defeats of the Russo-Japanese War. Contemporary drawing by R. Caton Woodville. Used non commercially.
13th of January 1904 the Russian government received a note with a request if Russia had any intention to respect Chinese territorial integrity.
The question concerned Manchuria, where Russia had got its right to station military forces after the Boxer Rebellion. Japan was most displeased with this and decided to outmaneuver Russia in Manchuria.
The question also concerned Korea, which Russia showed great interest for. Something that also caused great disapproval from the Japanese. For Japan, it was equally important to hold Russia away from Korea as it was for Great Britain to keep European great powers out of Belgium and Netherlands it has been claimed.
The Japanese note was not answered.
5th of February the Japanese government broke its diplomatic contact with Russia. 8th of February the Japanese navy assaulted a Russian escadre in Port Arthur. This happened without any previous declaration of war - the Japanese declaration of war came two days later. Port Arthur was blockaded by the seaside. Around a month later Japanese land forces surrounded the city. The Russo-Japanese War would become a disastrous affair for Russia. Minister of War Kuropatkin had personally assured the Tsar that it had to be war, the Russian Armed Forces would easily best Japan. And at the court, there was enough of those who advised Nikolai 2. to plunge himself into an active and bold foreign policy. He followed their advice. He commanded to put the squeeze on Japan. He would come to bitterly regret that.
Battle of Tsushima. The Russian Baltic Fleet that was composed of some 40 smaller and bigger warships departed Kronstand in October 1904 in the Baltic Sea, sailed around Africa and arrived in the Tsushima-straits between Japan and Korea in May 1905. There the Russians were welcomed by the Japanese Fleet under Admiral Togo, which in 45 minutes battle got the upper hand, and after two full days and nights had almost obliterated the entire Russian Fleet.
The Japanese proved to be brilliant strategists. They conducted their operations masterfully, and the Japanese soldiers showed an unbelievable contempt of death. In battle after battle, they defeated the Russians; the greatest battle on land was by Mukden in the days from the 28th of February to the 7th of March 1905. But the decisive action was when the Japanese fleet under Heihachiro Togo punched so hard that it caused ripples across the globe. The Russian government decided to send their Baltic Fleet to the theater of war. Under command of Admiral Rozjestvenskij, they steamed out in October of 1904. They had to take the long way around Cape the Good Hope and did not reach Chinese waters until May the year after. The once-proud Baltic Fleet was then in an abysmal state. The warships needed reparations and the sailors and officers sorely needed respite. When it was met by Admiral Togos escadre by Tsushima, they had no chance, and most of the ships were sunk. Out of the 8 battleships, six were sunk and two were captured. The three coastal battleships, one sunk and two captured. Over 5000 Russians would lose be killed, over 6000 captured, and over 800 wounded. The Japanese suffered 117 killed, some 580 injured three sunk torpedo boats at the sum of 450 tons. The Russians, on the other hand, lost 126 792 tons.
A week later - 6th of June 1905 - the Tsar accepted an offer from President Roosevelt where he would be a mediator. The peace negotiations were conducted in the small town of Portsmouth in New Hampshire in the United States. It resulted in Russian concessions in the form of Port Arthur and South Sakhalin to Japan. Manchuria was, in addition, to be evacuated of Russians.
For the second time in ten years, the new Japan had shaken a mighty and old Empire to its very core.
Last edited:
- 4
Here is the next chapter. I wonder if Manchuria, Japan, and China will continue to be important once Russia turns, spoiler warning, communist... And a quick peak at one figure that will become more important down the line, and one would not be wrong if he draws too many lines of similar foreign and internal politics along with attitude from Russia to the west and the west to Russia in the last chapter and in future ones.
The next chapter will be shorter, but then we will explore the rest of 1905 before we time-jump to 1917 for some reason.
The next chapter will be shorter, but then we will explore the rest of 1905 before we time-jump to 1917 for some reason.
- 2
That was a really interesting update! I appreciated getting some more insight into the early days of the Russian revolutionary movement, and I'll be curious when the divergences from OTL start to show up.
- 1
Thank you! Interesting to see in current history Russian revolution is often seen as something out of consequence during of WW1. Not oging to downplay what happened in the Great War, but it is so much more that is in the backround. Famines, rapid industriliation and population boom that led to a sudden flourishment of political and cultural development. And with after a Tsar that wanted to reform the system, instead he was murdered to death and Russia ended up with two neo-absolutists.
I will be so too, and they should start to show up in Book Two, which is right around the corner
Hmmm, I wonder what might have happened then ….
There was a tornado in Illinois from my extensive wikipedia research
Next chapter will, as said, cover 1905. However I might also add in one or two more parts, detailing what Trotsky was up to before 1905 and/or what he was up to between 1905 and 1917. Then future updates can be more focused and flexible, so we don't have to go through a biography chapter that will likely touch on many topics that will be covered in the coming chapters.
- 1
Teaser #05
The flags fluttered in the wind. The new flag taken up by the insurgents along with that of the cross.
The priest held his sermon, in front of him, beneath the cliff hundreds of soldiers knelt before him. Priests walked among their ranks, giving them blessings, painting the cross on their foreheads, whiel giving them the flesh and blood - perhaps for the very last time.
The Good Bishop listened to the zealous preach, and agreed to its content. For long he had supported the Republic and wanted to align the Church to the new institutions. To bridge the gap between state and more importantly, to remove the bitter animosity that lingered between catholics and leftists ever since the revolution.
"... 'tis not merely a struggle between parties and classes, this is a fight for the very fabric of our society and our culture" the priest preached as he made it clear this was not simply a civil war, this was a Crusade against Atheism, against socialism.
It pained the Archbishop to send so many men to live by the sword. But he had no choice. With the new government in power, this Republic was something new. This Republic was not another Soviet Republic, ruled by Old Bolsheviks all but in the name. By his side were several exiled generals, men that were more aligned with their Iberian brethren, and that of the Fascists of Italy. It was a shame he had to cooperate with them, but it was needed. It was indeed the lesser of two evils. He could control the right-wing generals once the war had ended, but he could not control, and not accept, the attacks that were perpetrated against the Church, and the endless and bloodsoaked wars that would result in this new illegal government.
His dream was that of democracy, but he had to cooperate with the nationalists in order to achieve so. The British adhered to neutrality, and for once their northern neighbor, who had ever since their independence from the meddling Bonapartes intervened in their country's politics, was too preoccupied with internal unrest to come to their aid.
Thus the good bishop had to make bedfellows with the exiled generals. Already they had risen up in the north, and taken control of the south. Their coup had failed, but it was promising. God was truly on their side, they had to march toward the capital. Or so he hoped, if God had abandoned them, he shuddered to think what would come next.
The Bishop shook hands with the generals and approved of their offensive. Hundreds of soldados, from dormant militias to Regulares who had defected to their cause, came and kissed their true tricolor and then the cross.
Then they marched, on their Holy Crusade Against Atheism. He prayed to God they would return, or that their sacrifice to God and Country would not be in vain against this Soviet monstrosity that reared its ugly head. They were all that stood between a true Republic and Anarchy.
The flags fluttered in the wind. The new flag taken up by the insurgents along with that of the cross.
The priest held his sermon, in front of him, beneath the cliff hundreds of soldiers knelt before him. Priests walked among their ranks, giving them blessings, painting the cross on their foreheads, whiel giving them the flesh and blood - perhaps for the very last time.
The Good Bishop listened to the zealous preach, and agreed to its content. For long he had supported the Republic and wanted to align the Church to the new institutions. To bridge the gap between state and more importantly, to remove the bitter animosity that lingered between catholics and leftists ever since the revolution.
"... 'tis not merely a struggle between parties and classes, this is a fight for the very fabric of our society and our culture" the priest preached as he made it clear this was not simply a civil war, this was a Crusade against Atheism, against socialism.
It pained the Archbishop to send so many men to live by the sword. But he had no choice. With the new government in power, this Republic was something new. This Republic was not another Soviet Republic, ruled by Old Bolsheviks all but in the name. By his side were several exiled generals, men that were more aligned with their Iberian brethren, and that of the Fascists of Italy. It was a shame he had to cooperate with them, but it was needed. It was indeed the lesser of two evils. He could control the right-wing generals once the war had ended, but he could not control, and not accept, the attacks that were perpetrated against the Church, and the endless and bloodsoaked wars that would result in this new illegal government.
His dream was that of democracy, but he had to cooperate with the nationalists in order to achieve so. The British adhered to neutrality, and for once their northern neighbor, who had ever since their independence from the meddling Bonapartes intervened in their country's politics, was too preoccupied with internal unrest to come to their aid.
Thus the good bishop had to make bedfellows with the exiled generals. Already they had risen up in the north, and taken control of the south. Their coup had failed, but it was promising. God was truly on their side, they had to march toward the capital. Or so he hoped, if God had abandoned them, he shuddered to think what would come next.
The Bishop shook hands with the generals and approved of their offensive. Hundreds of soldados, from dormant militias to Regulares who had defected to their cause, came and kissed their true tricolor and then the cross.
Then they marched, on their Holy Crusade Against Atheism. He prayed to God they would return, or that their sacrifice to God and Country would not be in vain against this Soviet monstrosity that reared its ugly head. They were all that stood between a true Republic and Anarchy.
- 3
An interesting fact - there were actually a few hundred White Russians on the Spanish Nationalists' side, and I imagine they were much like the priest in this teaser. I've always been fascinated by the White Russian exiles that continued to oppose the Soviets from across the world. I wonder how that will work with Trotsky in charge...
Interesting teaser, especially not knowing the date ...
Good to hear that you like it! Of course, you may speculate where and when this took place!
Indeed, the White Exiles will be relevant soon enough, just wait and see. And as a side note, where I took inspiration for this was before a battle during Napoleon's invasion of Russia (can't remember the name of the battle) where a Bishop held a sermon with a gigantic banner of the Virgin Mary that ended with the soldiers kissing the banner before going into battle.
- 1
Teaser #06
"I write with my heart broken – broken, torn, trampled on as if it had been stepped on with heavy boots – standing before the fresh grave where sixteen heads with bullet holes in them lay in a line: a house full of “agents provocateurs,” a team of old revolutionaries who were Lenin’s companions and friends. I knew some of those who were executed in Moscow quite well. Their sufferings will one day be measured, and people will be amazed that we could have gone so far, could have descended so low in the fear and hatred of political adversaries who, just the day before, were our comrades. Among these men there is one who, due to his extreme modesty, is little known in the West but who, for the generation of the October Revolution, was both a symbol and an example. He entered history with a tranquil heroism, disdainful of fine words, foreign to any ambition other than that of serving the working class: Ivan Nikitich Smirnov.
Tall, thin, with a rather small head, fine features, an unkempt moustache, his hair short and in a kind of crew cut, his pince-nez a bit crooked, a smiling, gray gaze that immediately revealed the old child full of illusions about life within the aging man. Good-humored, with a kind of sad gaiety at difficult moments, when he would cross his long hands across his legs and look into the void. At times like those his face would suddenly age. But Ivan Nikitch would shake off his torpor, would straighten his shoulders, would look you in the eye with his gentle gaze and would assure you with invincible reason that “the revolution is made up of highs and lows, of course. What matters is to stick with it. And we've stuck with it for quite a while, right?” For him, to “stick with it” meant serving it, giving of yourself with a total lack of self-interest.
A former worker, one of the founders of the Bolshevik Party, I don’t exactly know what road he followed to the prisons of the ancien regime. When in 1918 a Red Army had to be improvised in order to carry out the Civil War and resist the Czechoslovak intervention, Ivan Nikitich, who had never held a weapon in his life, hung a Nagan revolver on his belt and, along with Trotsky, took the train to Kazan. The Whites had just taken this city, the front had been pierced, the first Red troops were in rout before corps of intrepid officers. Panic was mixed with confusion; they were lacking in everything and the Republic appeared to have suffered a mortal wound. Moscow sent into that breach, that mortal wound in the Revolution’s flank, a train of volunteers taken from among the best. They arrived in the midst of the rout, allowed their path of retreat to be cut off to show that they wouldn’t withdraw, and, at the tiny station of Sviaysk, not far from Kazan, battled alone against the shock troops of Kapelle. The Red General Staff, with its typists, its sentries, its cooks, all its non-combatant personnel, held out for 24 hours before the machine guns. Trotsky had sent away the train’s locomotive: let there be no doubt about it, we will not leave here. Larissa Reisner, who fought there, dazzling with grace and passion, left some beautiful pages on this episode. “Ivan Nikitich Smirnov,” she wrote, “was the communist conscience of Sviaysk. Even among young soldiers and non-party members his uprightness and his absolute probity impressed everyone immediately. He doubtless didn’t know how he was feared, how afraid we were to be cowardly or weak before him, before this man who never raised his voice, who limited himself to being himself. Peaceful and brave?” “We felt that he would never weaken in the worst moments. We would be calm, our spirits clear; we would ourselves be standing alongside Smirnov, with his back to the wall, being interrogated by the Whites in the filthy ditch of a prison. We would tell ourselves this, lying in a pile on the wooden floor on already-cold autumn nights.” Sviaysk remains a capital date in the history of the Soviet republic; it is there that in 1918 the revolution was saved by a handful of men, and Ivan Nikitch was one of the leaders
When in 1920 the peasants of Siberia, formed in partisan detachments, made the situation untenable for Admiral Kolchak, Lenin recommended that the task of sovietizing and pacifying Siberia be confided to Ivan Nikitich. Smirnov became the Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Siberia; Smirnov founded the Republic of the Far East, a provisional rubber-stamp state that permitted the Soviets to avoid war with Japan. Thanks to him the sovietization of the north of Asia, where the Whites had shown themselves to be abominably cruel, was carried out almost without reprisals.
From 1923 Ivan Nikitich belonged to the Opposition, which called, from within the party, for militants’ right to think and, and in the country, for the instituting of worker’s democracy and a fight against the growing, and increasingly arbitrary, power of the bureaucracy. When his expulsion from the party was announced in 1927, he was People’s Commissar for Post and Telegraph. Expelled, Ivan Nikitich passed his portfolio to the successor designated by the party and found himself penniless. An employee at the Labor Exchange of Moscow, the registration service for the unemployed, found before him an old man with pince-nez who made himself known as a precision mechanic and asked for work in one of the factories where he knew, from solid sources, that there was a lack of such qualified workers. The employee filled out a form. “Your last job?” he asked the unemployed worker. “People’s Commissar for Posts and Telegraph.”
The Central Committee didn’t allow Ivan Nikitich to take his place in the ranks in the factory. He was deported to that Siberia which he had contributed to conquering for the revolution. Deportation meant more to him than captivity: it meant inactivity. Ivan Nikitich capitulated in order to again become useful; according to the consecrated term, he made honorable amends before Stalin, and abjured – half-heartedly, for how could it be otherwise – his convictions as an oppositionist, and asked that he again be given the occasion to serve the revolution. “Our disagreements,” he said among intimates, “are serious and profound. But what is important above all is to construct new factories and set them in motion” He was given the leadership of the new automobile factories in Nizhny-Novgorod. It was there that they came to arrest him in December 1932 as “suspected” of heresy. Without a doubt, he thought, saw, and judged, and even if he said nothing he didn’t consent to what he saw. The conscience does not abdicate (though we sometimes do it violence). In order to execute him they attempted to impute who knows what responsibility in the assassination of Kirov. But the day Kirov fell Nikitich had already inhabited a prison cell in Souzdal for two years!
While at the other end of Europe a General Franco is sticking a knife in worker’s Spain, to spill the blood of such men, the blood of the founders of the USSR, is a strange, horrible aberration!"
-Victor Serge.
"I write with my heart broken – broken, torn, trampled on as if it had been stepped on with heavy boots – standing before the fresh grave where sixteen heads with bullet holes in them lay in a line: a house full of “agents provocateurs,” a team of old revolutionaries who were Lenin’s companions and friends. I knew some of those who were executed in Moscow quite well. Their sufferings will one day be measured, and people will be amazed that we could have gone so far, could have descended so low in the fear and hatred of political adversaries who, just the day before, were our comrades. Among these men there is one who, due to his extreme modesty, is little known in the West but who, for the generation of the October Revolution, was both a symbol and an example. He entered history with a tranquil heroism, disdainful of fine words, foreign to any ambition other than that of serving the working class: Ivan Nikitich Smirnov.
Tall, thin, with a rather small head, fine features, an unkempt moustache, his hair short and in a kind of crew cut, his pince-nez a bit crooked, a smiling, gray gaze that immediately revealed the old child full of illusions about life within the aging man. Good-humored, with a kind of sad gaiety at difficult moments, when he would cross his long hands across his legs and look into the void. At times like those his face would suddenly age. But Ivan Nikitch would shake off his torpor, would straighten his shoulders, would look you in the eye with his gentle gaze and would assure you with invincible reason that “the revolution is made up of highs and lows, of course. What matters is to stick with it. And we've stuck with it for quite a while, right?” For him, to “stick with it” meant serving it, giving of yourself with a total lack of self-interest.
A former worker, one of the founders of the Bolshevik Party, I don’t exactly know what road he followed to the prisons of the ancien regime. When in 1918 a Red Army had to be improvised in order to carry out the Civil War and resist the Czechoslovak intervention, Ivan Nikitich, who had never held a weapon in his life, hung a Nagan revolver on his belt and, along with Trotsky, took the train to Kazan. The Whites had just taken this city, the front had been pierced, the first Red troops were in rout before corps of intrepid officers. Panic was mixed with confusion; they were lacking in everything and the Republic appeared to have suffered a mortal wound. Moscow sent into that breach, that mortal wound in the Revolution’s flank, a train of volunteers taken from among the best. They arrived in the midst of the rout, allowed their path of retreat to be cut off to show that they wouldn’t withdraw, and, at the tiny station of Sviaysk, not far from Kazan, battled alone against the shock troops of Kapelle. The Red General Staff, with its typists, its sentries, its cooks, all its non-combatant personnel, held out for 24 hours before the machine guns. Trotsky had sent away the train’s locomotive: let there be no doubt about it, we will not leave here. Larissa Reisner, who fought there, dazzling with grace and passion, left some beautiful pages on this episode. “Ivan Nikitich Smirnov,” she wrote, “was the communist conscience of Sviaysk. Even among young soldiers and non-party members his uprightness and his absolute probity impressed everyone immediately. He doubtless didn’t know how he was feared, how afraid we were to be cowardly or weak before him, before this man who never raised his voice, who limited himself to being himself. Peaceful and brave?” “We felt that he would never weaken in the worst moments. We would be calm, our spirits clear; we would ourselves be standing alongside Smirnov, with his back to the wall, being interrogated by the Whites in the filthy ditch of a prison. We would tell ourselves this, lying in a pile on the wooden floor on already-cold autumn nights.” Sviaysk remains a capital date in the history of the Soviet republic; it is there that in 1918 the revolution was saved by a handful of men, and Ivan Nikitch was one of the leaders
When in 1920 the peasants of Siberia, formed in partisan detachments, made the situation untenable for Admiral Kolchak, Lenin recommended that the task of sovietizing and pacifying Siberia be confided to Ivan Nikitich. Smirnov became the Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Siberia; Smirnov founded the Republic of the Far East, a provisional rubber-stamp state that permitted the Soviets to avoid war with Japan. Thanks to him the sovietization of the north of Asia, where the Whites had shown themselves to be abominably cruel, was carried out almost without reprisals.
From 1923 Ivan Nikitich belonged to the Opposition, which called, from within the party, for militants’ right to think and, and in the country, for the instituting of worker’s democracy and a fight against the growing, and increasingly arbitrary, power of the bureaucracy. When his expulsion from the party was announced in 1927, he was People’s Commissar for Post and Telegraph. Expelled, Ivan Nikitich passed his portfolio to the successor designated by the party and found himself penniless. An employee at the Labor Exchange of Moscow, the registration service for the unemployed, found before him an old man with pince-nez who made himself known as a precision mechanic and asked for work in one of the factories where he knew, from solid sources, that there was a lack of such qualified workers. The employee filled out a form. “Your last job?” he asked the unemployed worker. “People’s Commissar for Posts and Telegraph.”
The Central Committee didn’t allow Ivan Nikitich to take his place in the ranks in the factory. He was deported to that Siberia which he had contributed to conquering for the revolution. Deportation meant more to him than captivity: it meant inactivity. Ivan Nikitich capitulated in order to again become useful; according to the consecrated term, he made honorable amends before Stalin, and abjured – half-heartedly, for how could it be otherwise – his convictions as an oppositionist, and asked that he again be given the occasion to serve the revolution. “Our disagreements,” he said among intimates, “are serious and profound. But what is important above all is to construct new factories and set them in motion” He was given the leadership of the new automobile factories in Nizhny-Novgorod. It was there that they came to arrest him in December 1932 as “suspected” of heresy. Without a doubt, he thought, saw, and judged, and even if he said nothing he didn’t consent to what he saw. The conscience does not abdicate (though we sometimes do it violence). In order to execute him they attempted to impute who knows what responsibility in the assassination of Kirov. But the day Kirov fell Nikitich had already inhabited a prison cell in Souzdal for two years!
While at the other end of Europe a General Franco is sticking a knife in worker’s Spain, to spill the blood of such men, the blood of the founders of the USSR, is a strange, horrible aberration!"
-Victor Serge.
Last edited:
- 2
- 1