We can expect the Capitalists to double down on their racism, for starters. The KKK will likely explode in membership.
(TL) Rosa’s Reich (Re-Write in Progress)
- Thread starter GlobalHumanism
- Start date
- Status
Germany, Italy, Hungary, and the USSR going communist means you'll have a pretty big power bloc and a lot of different viewpoints preventing Comintern from being an appendage of the USSR as it was OTL. All of that is only good for communism especially since Italy will probably follow a similar path to Germany in terms of post-revolutionary structure. One outside chance (which would be really hard to do without making TTL an over the top wankfest) would be if the British General Strike kicks up on schedule or sooner and more militantly this time.
Also Entente military intervention has a strong chance of backfiring on them. British longshoremen held up cargoes bound for assisting interventions in the USSR and French troops landed in the Crimea mutinied rather than assist the Whites as ordered. Entente intervention would give Rosa and the revolution a chance to stand as the defenders of Germany and rally veterans to their cause.
Also Entente military intervention has a strong chance of backfiring on them. British longshoremen held up cargoes bound for assisting interventions in the USSR and French troops landed in the Crimea mutinied rather than assist the Whites as ordered. Entente intervention would give Rosa and the revolution a chance to stand as the defenders of Germany and rally veterans to their cause.
Chapter V (1919) | Expansion
Chapter V: Expansion
______________
Time Period: May 4th - September 1st, 1919
Several days after the end of the Berlin Congress, the armed forces of the Republic, boosted by a impromptu paramilitary levy of able-body citizens, made preparations for the expansionist campaign.
As per the congressional approval, and planned extensively by the leadership of the Committee for City Security, the campaign was to be enacted in three stages.
Most important to Rosa, once the directive reached her desk to sign, was that it be seen as a defensive measure to better secure the position of the RKP regime.
"The people demand an end to chauvinism and years of war. Let's take care to make the inevitable detractors understand that these movements are in the defense of our revolution." she said during a leadership meeting.
On May 10th, the German Red Army launched their advance.
Success was immediate as the defeat of the Freikorps had emptied most of the local Reicharmee barracks surrounding the capital.
By May 12th, a vast majority of the towns had risen the flag of the Worker's Republic.
News of the initial success of the Brandenburg campaign was met with adulation within Berlin. Even as ownership groups still resisted against the nationalization, and councilization process of their industrial centers, most of the attention was focused solely on the men and women fighting on the front lines.
And by May 15th, Brandenburg province was fully in the hands of the Republic.
Surrender terms were quickly sent to each of the acting provincial leaders and after negotiation they all have way to the revolution.
As the troops returned to Berlin, a rally was held to commemorate the speed and bloodlessness of the campaign.
Between May 20th to June 1st, the German Red Army refitted itself with any all seized armaments from the initial thrust while economic advisors and political officers were dispatched to the provincial countryside.
As per the ratified constitution, agricultural councils begin to form, from which elected delegates could join the Congress.
However, several Junker landowners fiercely resisted all initial attempts at reorganizing their land into labor council and quickly joined with the dissenting industrialists from the capital.
As the final stage of the Red Army campaign was launched on June 2nd, the cabal of the displaced German elite agreed to fund a massive attempt to crush the Luxemburgist regime.
Taking inspiration from the reactionaries in the Russian Civil War, while also distancing themselves from the failure of SPD's Freikorps, they clandestinely formed the first unit of the White German Army began to entice troops and officers from Prussian lands to the east to join.
On June 4th, on which the Red Army had seen some early success with the capturing several towns within Bamberg Province,
Eric Ludendorf and several junior officers publicly declared the creation of the German White Army from the Junker-controlled city of Konigsberg.
The German Civil War Had begun
______________
Time Period: May 4th - September 1st, 1919
Several days after the end of the Berlin Congress, the armed forces of the Republic, boosted by a impromptu paramilitary levy of able-body citizens, made preparations for the expansionist campaign.
As per the congressional approval, and planned extensively by the leadership of the Committee for City Security, the campaign was to be enacted in three stages.
Defense Directive 1
Stage 1:
Secure all outstanding territory within the provincial district of Brandenburg
Stage 2:
Obtain through peaceful co-option, the surrender orders of all outstanding local leaders within the Brandenburg
Stage 3:
Launch a southern axis of advance to link the territories between held by the Luxemburgist Republic and the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
Stage 1:
Secure all outstanding territory within the provincial district of Brandenburg
Stage 2:
Obtain through peaceful co-option, the surrender orders of all outstanding local leaders within the Brandenburg
Stage 3:
Launch a southern axis of advance to link the territories between held by the Luxemburgist Republic and the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
Most important to Rosa, once the directive reached her desk to sign, was that it be seen as a defensive measure to better secure the position of the RKP regime.
"The people demand an end to chauvinism and years of war. Let's take care to make the inevitable detractors understand that these movements are in the defense of our revolution." she said during a leadership meeting.
On May 10th, the German Red Army launched their advance.
Success was immediate as the defeat of the Freikorps had emptied most of the local Reicharmee barracks surrounding the capital.
By May 12th, a vast majority of the towns had risen the flag of the Worker's Republic.
News of the initial success of the Brandenburg campaign was met with adulation within Berlin. Even as ownership groups still resisted against the nationalization, and councilization process of their industrial centers, most of the attention was focused solely on the men and women fighting on the front lines.
And by May 15th, Brandenburg province was fully in the hands of the Republic.
Surrender terms were quickly sent to each of the acting provincial leaders and after negotiation they all have way to the revolution.
As the troops returned to Berlin, a rally was held to commemorate the speed and bloodlessness of the campaign.
Between May 20th to June 1st, the German Red Army refitted itself with any all seized armaments from the initial thrust while economic advisors and political officers were dispatched to the provincial countryside.
As per the ratified constitution, agricultural councils begin to form, from which elected delegates could join the Congress.
However, several Junker landowners fiercely resisted all initial attempts at reorganizing their land into labor council and quickly joined with the dissenting industrialists from the capital.
As the final stage of the Red Army campaign was launched on June 2nd, the cabal of the displaced German elite agreed to fund a massive attempt to crush the Luxemburgist regime.
Taking inspiration from the reactionaries in the Russian Civil War, while also distancing themselves from the failure of SPD's Freikorps, they clandestinely formed the first unit of the White German Army began to entice troops and officers from Prussian lands to the east to join.
On June 4th, on which the Red Army had seen some early success with the capturing several towns within Bamberg Province,
Eric Ludendorf and several junior officers publicly declared the creation of the German White Army from the Junker-controlled city of Konigsberg.
The German Civil War Had begun
Last edited:
Let the Revolution spread! May the burguoise reactionaries burn in the flames of the Proletariat wrath!
One factor which will act in her favor once the respective communist parties win in Russia and Germany (as I presume they will) is that imports of raw materials won't be as big of a problem as in OTL. Historically, the necessity of importing commodities from overseas severely strained Germany's foreign currency reserves and the shortages acted as a significant constraint on rearmament. Here, something like the Molotov-Ribbentrop trade arrangements, which were direct exchanges of technology for materials, will probably be worked out as soon as possible. Contacts between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht will also be retained without the OTL break after 1933 and better intelligence on the USSR likely gathered as a result.
I just realized... If the communists have Berlin and Bavaria only... the rest of the country must be in a state of anarchy. The German towns will probably be glad to have any decent government, but the Poles are probably going to use the earlier absence of a functioning government to revolt with much more eagerness and success.
Alternatively, there may be rightists in control instead. I foresee a full-blown civil war before the Luxemburgists take full control.
Yeah, I was thinking about this. Just because SPD is gone in Berlin and Bavaria doesn't mean they've collapsed elsewhere. Plus there's probably still plenty of monarchists and other right-wingers still hanging around. They won't take a Red revolution lying down. This is gonna get bloody.
I wonder, in continuing with the two revolutions, how much Luxemburgism Lenin will pick up seeing its success but also conversely how much Leninism Luxemburg will pick up considering the arbitary measures of authority that she's rightfully taken so far to secure the revolution and will most likely need to expound on further for the almost surely coming civil war? Maybe they'll reach a point of synthesis on many broad points of state-building. Especially considering the NEP won't be necessary, unless somehow Germany's industrial capacity gets obliterated in the securing of socialism across the entirety of the German nation-state.
I don't think an alliance with Germany will make the NEP unnecessary, as it was a reaction on the ruin created by the civilwar and War Communism.
If anything I suspect help from an industrialized Germany (which I don't believe will happen at all due to the tendency of communist countries to accuse each other of being revisionists/imperialists/capitalist-roaders.) will prolong the NEP as it might prevent the Scissors Crisis and will make forced industrialization possible without a forced collectivization of agriculture.
If anything I suspect help from an industrialized Germany (which I don't believe will happen at all due to the tendency of communist countries to accuse each other of being revisionists/imperialists/capitalist-roaders.) will prolong the NEP as it might prevent the Scissors Crisis and will make forced industrialization possible without a forced collectivization of agriculture.
I doubt the ruin created by War Communism in Russia will be reduced. The peasants still hate it, and more importantly the Civil war will not be shortened by a massive amount. Germany cannot help much, it is hardly in a position to blitzkrieg through Poland and link up with the Bolsheviks, not when the rest f the country must be reclaimed first.
The particular OTL NEP was created due to extensive ruin, complete isolation, and most likely in reaction to Kronstadt. With a Räterepublik, unless it's severely under civil war itself they are not isolated and, regardless of that, there is another model to look upon.
Currently in Germany, due to a commitment to free association, a private sector under thoroughgoing conditions is allowed and there's also forms of syndicalism about. Lenin in the 10th Congress of the CPSU wherein the the NEP was forged also sidelined Workers' Opposition and the Group of Democratic Centralists for such syndicalism.
In this timeline, for the USSR, with the existence of the Räte-model, with its free association, and the need for a new economic program beyond War Communism, there is high potentiality of the adoption of a lot of Germany's structures. Which equals to a different economic paradigm which has components of OTL NEP but is all together different.
(Now on the Soviet side, there might be disagreements about the philosophical imparative of free association with regards to markets but it conveniently allows for the liberalization that's needed post-War Communism without much of a retreat narrative.)
After all, Lenin wasn't a dogmatist, he'll correspond more with Luxemburg as colleagues in successful revolution (instead of as an ultra-leftist — in fact the pamphlet from which the term comes may not even be made or it'll be highly altered), and the politicial agents behind Worker's Opposition and Group of Democratic Centralists will have more to go off of than just polemic alone.
Also, at this moment in time such things as capitalist-roader, social-imperialist, and revisionist (in a Hoxha/Mao sense) weren't in fruition yet. It also doesn't make sense for Lenin of all people to self-isolate the USSR, especially when he and his contemporaries, Trotsky most notably, were hoping and (atheistically) praying that revolution would break out in imperial centers and support them in building international socialism.
Further as an aside, notions like primitive socialist accumulation and Socialism In One Country weren't borne out until it became clear they were alone in this, which now isn't the case. And Marxism-Leninism didn't yet exist, the proper practice of which is the major contention of later century socialist states IOTL and at that, contention from a point of comfort of having a socialist bloc secured, which hasn't yet happened — the 1920s will be very precarious for the Räterepublik and the USSR together, let alone seperated and alone.
Currently in Germany, due to a commitment to free association, a private sector under thoroughgoing conditions is allowed and there's also forms of syndicalism about. Lenin in the 10th Congress of the CPSU wherein the the NEP was forged also sidelined Workers' Opposition and the Group of Democratic Centralists for such syndicalism.
In this timeline, for the USSR, with the existence of the Räte-model, with its free association, and the need for a new economic program beyond War Communism, there is high potentiality of the adoption of a lot of Germany's structures. Which equals to a different economic paradigm which has components of OTL NEP but is all together different.
(Now on the Soviet side, there might be disagreements about the philosophical imparative of free association with regards to markets but it conveniently allows for the liberalization that's needed post-War Communism without much of a retreat narrative.)
After all, Lenin wasn't a dogmatist, he'll correspond more with Luxemburg as colleagues in successful revolution (instead of as an ultra-leftist — in fact the pamphlet from which the term comes may not even be made or it'll be highly altered), and the politicial agents behind Worker's Opposition and Group of Democratic Centralists will have more to go off of than just polemic alone.
Also, at this moment in time such things as capitalist-roader, social-imperialist, and revisionist (in a Hoxha/Mao sense) weren't in fruition yet. It also doesn't make sense for Lenin of all people to self-isolate the USSR, especially when he and his contemporaries, Trotsky most notably, were hoping and (atheistically) praying that revolution would break out in imperial centers and support them in building international socialism.
Further as an aside, notions like primitive socialist accumulation and Socialism In One Country weren't borne out until it became clear they were alone in this, which now isn't the case. And Marxism-Leninism didn't yet exist, the proper practice of which is the major contention of later century socialist states IOTL and at that, contention from a point of comfort of having a socialist bloc secured, which hasn't yet happened — the 1920s will be very precarious for the Räterepublik and the USSR together, let alone seperated and alone.
Last edited:
Chapter V (1919) | Expansion • Part II
Chapter V: The March • Part VIII
As the 1st Battalion of the Berlin Red Army marched into the provincial districts, hamlets, and hinterlands of Brandenburg Province, the economic situation in Berlin remained unstable. Though the call for harsher penalties for resisters of the Congress' economic plan was the origin point of protests by the bourgeoisie against expropriation of their factories and plants, hundreds of middle class city dewellers began to organize seperate political action groups directed with the purpose of forming a consolidated voting bloc through which their interests could be represented at proceeding congressional sessions.
The bloc soon became to be known as the Social Liberty Front (Soziale Freiheit Vorder / SFV) comprising mainly of disaffected middle class shop owners and low middle class clerks rendered jobless by the continued re-organization policies of the CCP-USPD regime. In order to better deal with internal strife Rosa called and emergency CCP-USPD inner party meeting.
“This economic resistance is to be expected,” said Rosa as she opened up the meeting.
“And while I abhor the silencing of any mass political movement, much like those impromptu protests, something has to be done to deal with this SFV front.”
“Exactly,” responded Director of Industry Fritz Mehring.
“Several of their operatives have already attempted to infiltrate some of our state-run factories, and spread discord among the ranks of workers. We either need to come to some sort of accord with these petite bourgeoisie or disenfranchise them completely.”
“Disenfranchisement will have long-reaching consequences for the revolution,” said Director of Finance Ernst Meyer.
“Both USPD-leader Hugo Hasse and I believe our best course of action to mirror the co-operation found within the policies of our comrades in Munich.”
Pulling out an excerpt from a Bavarian Parliament speech delivered by Kurt Eisner in early February, Ernst Meyer pointed out a statement in which he called upon the co-operation of all exploited classes in achieving a true social revolution in Germany.
“The petite are traitors plain and simple,” said recently appoint Deputy Director of City Security Karl Radek.
“If my time in Petrograd taught me nothing it’s that at some point a line must be draw ln between allies of the revolution and those that oppose it; there can be no middle ground.”
“Enough,” said Rosa as she pounded her fist on the table.
“Clearly we lack a concise way forward, and my goal as party leader is to provide that where none exists; our success in the Reichstag proves this point.”
“Agreed,” said Vice Party Chairman Klara Zetkin.
“And moreover, it seems part of this muddled backlash is due to the inconsistent nature through which our central economic policy has been presented; we need a single moniker to focus the argument towards.”
It was decided.
Wishing to act swiftly, much like her order to seize the Reichsbank, Rosa called upon Fritz Mehring and his departmental staff to effect literary changes to the party’s economic policy, imparting additional detail into what the city government planned to do.
In addition, Rosa called for better integration between the joint-coalition regime of the CCP-USPD.
“The people need to understand that a single voice exists among the elected leadership.” She said as she pointed to Hugo-Hasse; I therefore propose that the CCP party completely absorb the USPD-leadership contingent without delay.
After a momentary pause of silence among the leaders, Hugo responded.
“I must confer with Munich before I can agree to anything, of course,” he said with a sober look across his face. “But I understand the purpose behind this plan.”
Hugo knew the coalition-type arrangement of the Berlin government was nothing more than tacit political marriage, resulting from pledges made between Eisner and Rosa; the real power was with the victorious CCP; and with Erich Musham securing the Brandenburg, the Communists were in control.
Time Period: March 10th, 1919 – March 30th, 1919
At the conclusion of the CCP-USPD inner party leadership meeting, everything was decided.
The Council Communist Party fully absorbed the Berlin chapter of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) party, with full fledged membership being extended to all defunct USPD members. Hugo Hasse was appointed to Deputy Vice Chairman of the CCP.
The muddled clauses and imperatives of Rosa’s economic plan, voted upon and approved by the 1stBerlin Congress, was both re-codified; with it given the consolidated title of the “Revolutionary Economic Program” (REP). In addition, its many clauses were unified into five clear guidelines through which the people, the bureaucracy and the newly expanded party could understand its policies. Using August Thalheimmer’s burgeoning propaganda network, written copies detailing the REP was distributed directly to the Berlin people.
Clarity and a propagandized title for the economic policy of the CCP immediately quelled some sections of dissent from among the Berlin people; however it did not extinguish the continued rise of the bourgeois-SFV.
Outside of the city, Erich’s campaign to seize the hinterlands of Brandenburg, in order to establish strategic depth for the fledgling republic met with quick success. Hamlet after hamlet offered zero resistance in the face of the battalion’s armored cars and drilled troops. However, the advance of the red flag of the CCP, forced reactionary sentiment to both the east and the west of Brandenburg to immediately organize forces to combat their expansion.
By the end of March, two additional Freikorps militia had been organized by demobilized Imperial Armed forces in the west part of Germany and the wealthy Prussian Junkers in the East.
By the time Erich had successfully presented and then received commitments to surrender from the Brandenburg Upper President and Land Director, two separate reactionary forces were marching on Berlin.
I take this civil war will lead to an earlier Silesian Uprising, I heard there were Silesians who wanted to create an independent bilingual Silesia. I assume it would be optimal if they end up running the uprising, as it would allow to anschluss or coop Silesia, without ending up at war with Poland.
Hopefully the local Slavic population will be too distracted with the end of the forced Germanization policies and the land reform program to bother still ending up as cannonfodder for Berlin.
Hopefully the local Slavic population will be too distracted with the end of the forced Germanization policies and the land reform program to bother still ending up as cannonfodder for Berlin.
All of your musings are spot on with the one exception being that Rosa became exactly what you correctly say Lenin wont be in this ATL. A detractor on the ultra-left.
Lenin’s War Communism and Red Terror left a bad taste in her mouth from my reading of her works and therefore it was her inclination to rise above such dictatorial trappings if the KPD were to ever gain real power in Germany.
Last edited:
- Status