The Imperious Chairman-A TL

Moscow, March 2nd 1919​
Despite being utterly exhausted Yakov Sverdlov could not sleep. Even as he lay in bed his mind was trying to solve dozens of problems, from the current civil war to who the best person for a particular bureaucratic position was. Around 5 am he finally fell asleep, only to be awakened by a knocking on the door. “Comrade Sverdlov, the car is here for you.” “I'm coming, I'm coming” he answered. Sverdlov stood up, put on his trademark leather jacket, and was in the car within 5 minutes.​

As he sat in the car Sverdlov read aloud the speech he was supposed to give in Kharkov next week. “Although we have created the first worker's state in the world our struggle is not yet over. The Tsarists and their foreign supporters will crush us, but with your support we shall liberate the workers of Russia and then the world.” He thought for a minute and muttered “This won't work. The average Ukrainian doesn't care about the fate of Russian workers, must less the workers...” He never got a chance to finish that thought. In the dark the driver had failed to see a patch of black ice on the narrow road. The car ran over the patch and was thrown out of control. Before he even knew what was going on Sverdlov felt a sharp pain across his body and the world went black.​
-
Vladimir Lenin was in his office when the telephone rang. On the other end of the line Lev Kamenev said “Yakov Mikhailovich was in a car crash. They're still working on him but from what I've heard he is going to make it.” Lenin responded “I will be there in a few minutes. By the way, what happened to the driver?” Kamenev answered “The same.” After hanging up Lenin called Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka. “Comrade Sverdlov was in a car accident. He's probably fine but I need you to check the driver, see if it was an accident or if the man was an assassin.”​

In the end Sverdlov's wounds, while painful were far from fatal. He suffered 3 broken ribs, a broken leg, a broken wrist, and some cuts and bruises. Lenin sat in the hospital for about an hour before he was allowed to see Sverdlov. Upon seeing his friend the first thing Lenin said was “The doctor told me that you refused the drugs and are insisting on getting out of here immediately.” Through gritted teeth Sverdlov muttered “Ilyich I'm fine. More than anyone you should know that now is not the time for rest.” “Mikhailovich you are no use to the Party or me if you are dead. Don't worry, the Party will survive without you for a little while.” After a few more minutes of argument Sverdlov relented. The trip to Kharkov was canceled and, with the drugs coursing through his veins, Sverdlov slept better than he had in months.​
 
Last edited:
I'll be honest, I had to look up Sverdlov, but having read about him, this seems interesting. I presume that this wreck butterflies whichever demise you believe Sverdlov had OTL, which will positition him to sideline Stalin, possibly through an unhappy alliance with Trotsky. He's younger than Stalin as well, so the USSR could have a more practical leader for a very long time.
 
Note: Since the POD wasn't the kind of thing that would be in a book I opted to do a vignette. Now I am switching to book style.
Excerpt from The Bolshevik Revolution: 1917-1924 by H.N. Turteltaub​
-​
Around December 1921 the Bolshevik Party was in the midst of another major dispute. The various Communist revolutions across Europe had ended in failure and repression and the Soviet Union remained just as isolated it was in November 1917. In Politburo meetings the leaders of the Party debated what to do next. The main faction, led by Lenin, wanted to shift focus to liberating colonies from oppression as a gateway to Communism, another, led by Nikolai Bukharin, wanted to focus on “Socialism in One Country,” and a final faction wanted to continue revolution in Europe. This in and of itself was not surprising. What was surprising was that the latter faction was led by Sverdlov, who until then had been Lenin's staunchest ally. In a letter to Alexey Rykov Sverdlov explained that he broke with Lenin because “The workers of Europe have been seduced by the false promises of the Labor and Social Democratic movements, while the peasants of Africa and the Orient have not yet been corrupted and are thus in the perfect mental state for Socialism.” Lenin was shocked at Sverdlov's perceived betrayal. “I cannot believe that Mikhailovich would betray me like that” he told Leon Trotsky.​

For Grigory Zinoviev this was an opportunity. He had long feared Sverdlov's closeness to Lenin and the power base he had built as Chairman of the Secretariat[1]. As he put it in a letter to Joseph Stalin “Comrade Sverdlov is rivaled only by Trotsky in his cunning and duplicity. He is perhaps our main threat once Ilyich is gone. (Emphasis Original) To counteract Sverdlov's power Zinoviev proposed that the Rabkhrin (the Workers and Peasant's Inspectorate, responsible for overseeing the civil service) and the Central Auditing Commission (responsible for the auditing the treasury and supervising the affairs of the other central bodies) be merged. This organization, called the Tsenkomnaby (Central Commission for Supervision and Bureaucratic Affairs), would supervise the affairs of the other central bodies and the civil service. Since the Party Control Commission was under its purview it would also effectively control party discipline. To head this body Zinoviev nominated Joseph Stalin, one of his top allies. It helped that Stalin, along with Trotsky and Sverdlov, was one of Lenin's most trusted advisers. They were the only ones who could meet with Lenin without appointment. As the Revolution Debate grew more and more heated Zinoviev's idea gained traction with Lenin. Finally on January 2nd Lenin agreed to create the Tsenkomnaby and appoint Stalin as its head (he was formally appointed at the 11th Party Congress). Lenin's faction won the debate shortly thereafter. Sverdlov's influence declined to the point where he had to get an appointment to meet Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin replaced him as head of the Russian RFSR.​

Excerpt from Sverdlov by Robert Service​
-​
At the 11th Party Congress Lenin launched an attack on Sverdlov. “Comrade Sverdlov's position on revolution shows a blatant disregard for Marxist theory. As long as the imperialist powers have colonies the bourgeois will be able to trick the workers into supporting the capitalist system. Additionally, our experience and that of the Hungarians, Finns, and Germans has shown that even when weakened the capitalists will fight to the death to hold on to power. Thus, a Great Power like Britain must be broken in the extremities before striking the heart. To believe otherwise is pure foolishness.” As the conference went on more delegates attacked Sverdlov, he was forced to recant his beliefs, and many of his supporters were dismissed or sent to unimportant posts. Sverdlov himself only avoided being dismissed as Chairman of the Secretariat due to his strong​
organizational skills and work ethic.​
-​
It was around this time that Sverdlov became friends with Mikhail Frunze. A hard, fearless, and brilliant, if somewhat unorthodox man Frunze had a storied career. He had been one of the original Bolsheviks, siding with Lenin during the Social Democratic Parties split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. After the 1905 Revolution Frunze had been sentenced to death for leading striking textile workers (the sentence was commuted, but he did serve 10 years of hard labor in Siberia). During the Russian Revolution and Civil War Frunze had gained the nickname “the Russian Clausewitz” for his brilliant reorganization of the Red Army and his military victories over Kolchak in Siberia, Wrangle in Crimea, and the anarchist and nationalist​
movements in Ukraine.​
-​
The two men had met before, but only in Central Committee meetings and other Party functions. Their friendship started by accident. Frunze suffered from chronic ulceration and in September 1922 he was admitted to the hospital after suffering extreme pain and vomiting blood. Sverdlov was also in the hospital with severe strep throat. As top Bolsheviks they were moved to an isolated part of the hospital to prevent assassination attempts. They got to talking and Frunze mentioned that, although the doctors recommended it, he didn't want to go through surgery. In a letter to his wife Frunze mentioned that “Comrade Sverdlov responded that he had been in a car crash in 1919 and had wanted to get back to work immediately. He told me what Lenin had told him then: that I'm no use to the Party if I die.” Shortly thereafter Frunze decided to get the surgery and began to recover and get back on his feet. The two men grew fond of each other while in the hospital, and after he was released Sverdlov would visit the recovering Frunze every few days. Their friendship grew as Sverdlov's rivalry with Zinoviev reached new heights; this resulted in Frunze's relationship with Zinoviev becoming strained. A new alliance was forming that would change the Soviet Union forever.​
-​
[1] IOTL the position was renamed General Secretary, but ITTL Sverdlov preferred the title of Chairman and persuaded the Politburo to keep the title.​
 

sprite

Donor
I'm looking forward to seeing where this will go. Considering how volatile everything was in this period, it's not hard to imagine Sverdlov upsetting power bases and alliances.

With more Old Bolsheviks floating about maybe the USSR will not loose the flexibility it had in those early years.
 
Subscribed! I am eager for more! Hoping this will result in a better soviet union as alluded in the thread about an economically sane Stalin replacement.
However I don't think revolutionary attempts in w.Europe can bring anything good tu the USSR.
 
Excerpt from Sverdlov by Robert Service​
Although by December 1922 Vladimir Lenin had mostly recovered from his first stroke, but he was not a well man. He had some difficulty moving his right side and suffered from severe headaches and fatigue, the latter two probably due to his heavy workload and the mental strains he subjected himself to. Despite all of this he continued to work and on December 8th he even traveled to Kiev to give a speech. His doctors worried that this would be too much but Lenin decided to ignore them. The speech was about world revolution; a fitting topic for Lenin's last speech. On the train back to Moscow Lenin mentioned Nikolai Gorbunov, his secretary, that he needed to lay down due to a massive headache. About an hour later, near Chernigov, Gorbunov went to check on Lenin and found him lying face down on the floor. As soon as the train got to Chernigov Lenin was taken to the hospital.​
-​
For 15 days Lenin lay in a coma while the Soviet government tried to figure out what to do. In Lenin's absence a troika of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev took command of the government. Kiev became the de facto capital for those two weeks. When Lenin awoke it was clear that his career was over. Although he had suffered no brain damage and could speak, albeit with difficulty, he was completely paralyzed from the waist down and partially paralyzed in his right arm. Even the most basic work left him exhausted. Nadezhda Krupska, Lenin's wife, went to the Politburo on December 27th to deliver the news that Lenin had withdrawn from politics. At that point the ruling trokia decided to move back to Moscow, leaving Lenin in Kiev. He was now leader in name only. The Politburo only contacted him 4 times and forbade him from working more than 10 minutes a day. Soon Lenin recovered enough to be moved to a small estate near Nizhyn, where he spent the rest of his life.
-​
Excerpt from The Chairman by H.N. Turteltaub​
By late March 1923 Lenin's health was rapidly failing. He had lost 40 pounds and had deteriorated to the point where he couldn't eat solid food and could barely speak. Ukrainian Communist Stanislav Kosior, who was his last visitor, described him as “a mere skeleton, unable to even sit up in bed. I talked to him, well he didn't really say anything, for a few minutes and spent the rest of the time talking to Nadezhda, hoping that she would pass the information on to him.” Finally on March 21st Lenin died. Shortly after he woke up Nadezhda Krupskaya wheeled him to the table for breakfast. As she put the food on his plate he slumped over and didn't respond to anything she said. The doctors were called in but he was pronounced dead shortly after they arrived.​
-​
The news hit the Soviet Union like a thunderbolt. “It took all my strength to hold back tears” Sverdlov remembered. Although his relationship with Lenin had been strained Sverdlov still considered Lenin and great leader and a former friend. A week of mourning was declared across the Soviet Union and on March 24th dozens of top Communists came to Lenin's wake. At noon the wake ended and Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and Yakov Sverdlov carried Lenin's red coffin to the train station where it was transported to Moscow. Three days later the funeral was held in Red Square, with crowds singing revolutionary hymns and speeches by Stalin, Zinoviev, Kalinin, and others, but notably Sverdlov and Trotsky were not invited. Lenin's body was embalmed and displayed in a mausoleum.​
-​
After the funeral Nadezhda Krupskaya presented the Central Committee with a Lenin's Last Testament. After his first stroke Lenin had written a document that he intended to present at the 12th Party Congress in May 1923. What was in the document shocked the Central Committee. Lenin was critical of the 6 men that he considered the most likely to succeed him. These men were Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Trotsky, and Nikolai Bukharin. On Zinoviev and Kamenev Lenin wrote “In October 1917 both Zinoviev and Kamenev showed hesitation and a lack of faith, but it is hard to blame this on them personally but must be considered a part of the political atmosphere of that era.” On Bukharin: “Bukharin is a genius and a major theorist in the Party” however “his views can only be classified as Marxist with great hesitation and he is more of a scholar than a leader.” On Trotsky: “He is clearly the most qualified man in the CC, but he often shows excessive self-assurance bordering on arrogance.” On Sverdlov “A man of outstanding ability but he has shown a disturbing tendency to abandon theory when it would be more practical to take another option. He is also excessively concerned with the administrative side of work.” But Lenin's most vehement criticism focused on Stalin, calling him “A coarse and intolerant man, and while these traits are fine when dealing with our enemies they are inexcusable in the head of the Tsenkomnaby. In this position Comrade Stalin has amassed almost unlimited power and I would recommend removing him from this position and replacing him with someone more loyal, polite, and trusting.” This presented a problem for the ruling troika and they decided to allow the document to be shown only to separate regional delegations and it would not be referred to the general Congress. Although Sverdlov and Trotsky disagreed they didn't want to seen as divisive and went along with the decision.​
 
I do like the idea of a surviving Sverdlov. Whenever the frequent 'who would be leader apart from Stalin?' threads pop up I usually mention him. He's sort of a blank slate in that we know he was a diligent administrator but not much else about his ideas although I don't think he would deviate from Lenin's positions, frankly, as the two were close collaborators in every way that mattered.
 
Excerpt from The Chairman by H.N. Turteltaub​
Yakov Sverdlov realized that he needed allies if he would ever have any hope of overcoming the Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev alliance. His two options were Bukharin and Trotsky, neither of whom were a great choice. Bukharin was very close with Joseph Stalin, to the point were he called Stalin "Koba" (his revolutionary pseudonym). To get Bukharin to break with Stalin would be a Herculean task. Meanwhile Trotsky and Sverdlov hated each other. The two men had been friends during the Revolution but Trotsky's disagreements with Lenin during the Trade Union Debate had brought them into conflict. Trotsky later said that Sverdlov's criticisms “were the most savage and stinging things I have ever heard a fellow Bolshevik say.” In turn Sverdlov never forgave Trotsky for trying to get him banned for factionalism after the Revolution Debate. But they were united in their hatred of Stalin and decided to form an alliance.​
-​
Every faction used the 12th Party Congress as a platform to attack their enemies. Zinoviev felt that Sverdlov should be crushed but Stalin, who hated Trotsky more than anyone in the leadership, decided to move against Trotsky instead. Meanwhile Sverdlov and Trotsky agreed that “that paper pusher” (as Trotsky called Stalin) was a lesser threat than Zinoviev. Zinoviev gave the opening speech at the Congress, something Lenin had done before his death. Once Zinoviev was done Trotsky got up to speak. In his speech he reminded the delegates of the October Incident (Zinoviev and Kamenev's disagreement with Lenin over seizing power on the eve of the Revolution). Neither Zinoviev or Kamenev wanted this to come back to light and they began launching attacks on Trotksy.​
-​
Trotsky had made a crucial mistake. By mentioning Zinoviev and Kamenev's disagreements with Lenin he opened himself up the criticism. When the Russian Social Democratic Party split in 1905 Trotsky had sided with the Mensheviks, even going so far as to criticize Lenin for being to dictatorial. Stalin seized the opportunity and attacked Trotsky for this. Other speakers called out Trotsky for his alleged brutality and incompetence as head of the Red Army. Trotsky was so savaged by these attacks that he was forced to resign as Commissioner for Military and Naval Affairs.​
-​
In the end the Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev alliance simply had too many votes. Despite all of their effort Sverdlov and Trotksy were unable to bring Zinoviev down. In fact their only success at the Congress was getting Mikhail Frunze on the Poliburo as a candidate member. Many of Trotsky and Sverdlov's supporters were demoted or removed and Trotsky lost was removed from the Central Committee (but was reelected to the Politburo by the slimmest of margins. Although Sverdlov didn't lose any positions Stalinists Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich were placed on the Secretariat to limit his power.​
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Below are some quotes from Sverdlov. There are some hints in there as to what will come next;)
-​
For too long the Kulaks have been like ticks sucking the blood of the peasants. It is time that we burn them off and destroy their young so that their tyranny may be broken forever!​
-Speech in Kharkov, 1929​
-​
People have been trying to explain Hitler's rise to power since he became Chancellor. It is simple: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party are the spawn of the capitalists and their conservative allies. They realize that the workers are close to overthrowing them, so they release their mad dog Hitler to rip the working class from limb to limb.​
- Letter to CPUSA leader Earl Browder, 1934​
-​
Socialism cannot exist in one country alone. If we allow the capitalists to crush other revolutions then our own will wither and die like a flower in winter.​
-Speech to the Central Committee, 1928​
-​
The midwife of revolution is warfare and slaughter.​
-Keynote address on the 10th Anniversary of the Revolution, 1927.​
 
These quotes are interesting, to say the least! We can assume forced land collectivisation as otl, with liquidation of Kulaks and I am afraid, famine. (Sincerely O didn't expect this)
In foreign policy, basically Trotskyism so commitment to support foreign revolutionary movements and probably no Molotov ribbentrop pact. Who knows how western countries will react? Probably not well at all...
 

Excerpt from Sverdlov by Robert Service​
After their defeat at the 12th Party Congress Sverdlov and Leon Trotsky retreated and prepared for war. It was agreed that the Machiavellian Stalin was their main rival. Sverdlov recognized that Stalin's biggest weak point was Lenin's Testament. Unfortunately it would be difficult for their weakened faction to push a reading through. The only person who both had the influence and the hostility to Stalin was Nadezhda Krupskaya. However she hated Sverdlov due to his disagreements with Lenin and she wouldn't help him. Instead Trotsky went to convince her. Although it was Sverdlov's idea Trotsky had to present it as his own and convince Krupskaya that it would break Stalin's power and then Trotsky would have enough power to split with Sverdlov. After several hours of convincing Krupskaya agreed to talk about the Testament. Meanwhile Sverdlov convinced the Politburo that since it was close to the one year anniversary of Lenin's death Krupskaya should give the opening speech at the 13th Congress. Stalin was initially suspicious but Zinoviev and Bukharin brought him around.​
-​
On May 23rd, 1924 the Congress started. Krupskaya got to the podium and said “About 1 year ago Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the USSR and a man committed to revolution, passed away from a stroke. Everyone knows this but only a few know about the document he left behind.” At this point Stalin's face turned white and a visible gasp could be heard from Kamenev. “Ilyich had me transcribe a last testament for him to deliver at the last Party Congress. When he passed I gave it to the Central Committee, but a faction in the Committee decided to bury it, fearing what Ilyich had to say.” Shocked muttering could be heard all around. Krupskaya spoke for a few more minutes; after she walked off the Congress was adjourned and an emergency meeting of the Central Committee was called. The troika was in a tough position. They couldn't denounce Krupskaya and they were looking at being forced to read the document in front of the Congress. After several hours of debate the Committee took an hour long break. Sverdlov used that time to take care of some other business. He met with Bukharin and Alexey Rykov. According to Rykov Sverdlov offered to make Bukharin a full member of the Politburo and Rykov could stay as Premier in exchange for them voting to read Lenin's Testament. Bukharin was initially opposed but Rykov changed his mind.​
-​
After the Committee closed up Sverdlov went to visit Mikhail Kalinin. Kalinin was a weak and craven man, perfect for what Sverdlov had in mind. According to Kalinin Sverdlov told him “Mikhail, I know you are a friend of Joseph Stalin. I also know that you have some skeletons in your closet.” Sverdlov was bluffing, but Kalinin was embezzling state funds and spending them on his mistress. “I need you to do one thing, denounce Stalin. After Stalin is taken care of, and we both know he probably won't survive the Congress, I will make certain that you keep your position. But if you refuse I will reveal all of your secrets and make certain that you end up being shot in the cellars of Lubyanka [Prison].” A terrified Kalinin took the offer.​
-​
The next day it was announced that Lenin's Testament would be read. Kalinin also managed to convince the troika to allow him to speak after it was read. Grigory Zinoviev read the Testament. The criticisms were shocking, but as Zinoviev reached the part about replacing Stalin there were audible gasps and murmurs. Then Kalinin gave his speech. “In addition to the criticisms of Comrade Stalin that Lenin had I would like to add my own.” He then told the Congress that Stalin often made anti-Semitic comments, including calling Trotsky “A sick Kike” and describing Zinoviev as “a liar, a condition that most of his people suffer from.” In addition to slandering Stalin these accusations also made the Jewish Zinoviev and Kamenev look like rubes. Except for a few loyal Stalinists the Congress voted to remove Stalin from all of his positions and break the Tsenkomnaby into the Rabkhrin and Central Auditing Commission. Sverdlov made sure that Stalin was expelled from the Party and that Frunze replaced Voroshilov as Commissioner of Military and Naval Affairs. Trotsky, Bukharin, and Frunze were made full members of the Politburo and a new troika of Sverdlov, Trotsky, and Frunze took power.​
-​
With the fall of Stalin came a purge his supporters. Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Kaganovich were stripped of all of their positions, Voroshilov and Budyonny were sent to Siberia and Central Asia respectively to command troops, and Vyacheslav Molotov was given the dubious honor of being named Ambassador to Mongolia [1]. Of Stalin's closest supporters only Anastas Mikoyan kept his positions, mainly for voting to read Lenin's Testament at the Central Committee. After his humiliation Stalin moved to France, where he had a chance meeting with Anton Denikin, one of the leaders of the Whites. They only talked for about a minute and never saw each other again, but when Stalin returned to the Soviet Union in July 1928 this meeting was used to convict him of "conspiracy against the Soviet Union." [2] Stalin spent the next 10 years in the Solovki prison camp on the remote Solovestky Islands.​
-​
[1] IOTL this was his fate after unsuccessfully trying to remove Khrushchev.​
[2] When Stalin left the USSR he was placed under OGPU surveillance.
 
Excerpt from Sverdlov by Robert Service​
-​
Almost as soon as Stalin was removed from power Sverdlov and Trotsky's alliance began to fall apart. Without any organized resistance their hatred was allowed to fester and their rivalry grew. What finally broke this fragile alliance was the death of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Despite being a strong supporter of Stalin Sverdlov respected Dzerzhinsky too much to throw him out. However late 1925 Dzerzhinsky was clearly in failing health. Finally on July 3rd 1926 Dzerzhinsky collapsed after addressing a group of OGPU recruits. When the doctors arrived they pronounced him dead of a heart attack. His funeral was a massive event. For 3 days his body lay in state in the Kremlin then his body was cremated. Sverdlov led the funeral procession carrying his ashes, which were then placed in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.​
-​
After the funeral Sverdlov invited Trotsky and Vyacheslav Menzhinsky to his office. Menzhinsky was Dzerzhinsky's successor, but a severe heart problem left him unable to exert himself; in fact he conducted OGPU business while lying on his office couch. Thus the most important position was that of his deputy. According to Trotsky at the meeting Sverdlov told him “Comrade Trotsky I realize that we have had our differences in the past, but now it is time to put our differences aside and start governing. To show my sincerity I will let you choose Comrade Menzhinsky's deputy.” At the next Central Committee meeting Trotsky nominated his ally Victor Serge. “To my surprise,” Trotsky later said, “Sverdlov stood up and nominated Genrikh Yagoda.” Yagoda was a close ally of Sverdlov. Yagoda had worked at Mikhail Sverdlov's [1] shop and married Yakov Sverdlov's niece.​
-​
Until recently Sverdlov's motivations had been a mystery. Most scholars felt that Sverdlov had made the offer in good faith, but reconsidered giving such a powerful position to a man he hated. However a letter from Sverdlov to Frunze was discovered in which he stated “Once I nominate Comrade Yagoda Trotsky will feel betrayed. No doubt his pride and arrogance will get the best of him and he will try to attack us.” This also explains a passage in Rykov's memoir where he mentions that Sverdlov met with him and Bukharin just before the Central Committee meeting. He requested Bukharin and Rykov's support if any problems with Trotsky should arise. In exchange he promised to keep Rykov as Premier until at least 1933 and keep the NEP until 1929, despite Sverdlov's opposition to it.​
-​
Trotsky took the bait. He planned to denounce Sverdlov at the 15th Party Congress in 1927 (there was no Congress in 1926). His only available allies were Zinoviev and Kamenev. The 3 formed what they called the United Opposition and staged several protests before the Congress. They never even got to the Congress. In November the Central Committee met one last time before the Congress. Mikhail Frunze opened with a speech denouncing Trotsky for his “shameless opportunism” even saying that “Comrade Trotsky cares not for the well being of the Soviet Union. Whatever views he used to hold have been subsumed by his arrogance and boundless ambition. To this end he formed a faction with Zinoviev and Kamenev- men who sided with an anti-Semite despite being Jewish.” This gave Zinoviev and Kamenev the chance to claim that Trotsky, like Stalin, had fooled them. When it came time to vote on whether to expel Trotsky Kamenev voted to remove him, citing this very reason. Even though he lost most of his posts after the 15th Party Congress Kamenev was allowed stay on the Central Committee until his death in 1940. Zinoviev sided with Trotsky and as a result was also expelled after the Congress. He retired from public life and wrote a memoir that was only published in 2005, 60 years after his death. Meanwhile Trotsky fled to Mexico after Stalin's arrest and became one of Sverdlov's leading critics.​

[1] Yakov Sverdlov's father​
 
Last edited:
Excerpt from Sverdlov by Robert Service​
Having won the power struggles of the '20s Sverdlov now turned to consolidate his power. The Politburo was expanded to 10 full members and 5 candidate members. Several Sverdlov loyalists were brought in (such as new Comintern head Volodymyr Zatonsky) but the most important was Sergei Kirov. Kirvo had joined the Bolsheviks shortly after the Revolution of 1905 and spent the next several years in and out of jail. He and Sverdlov first met in 1919, when Kirov traveled to Moscow to deliver a report on his activities in the Caucasian city of Astrakhan, where he unleashed a wave of terror to break the counterrevolutionary spirit of the workers. Seeing the usefulness of such an ambitious and ruthless man Sverdlov became Kirov's patron. After the fall of Kiev in December 1919 Kirov took command of the city, and in July 1920 Sverdlov managed to get Kirov appointed as First Secretary of the Azerbaijani Communist Party. Kirov had reciprocated this patronage with unconditional loyalty and after the fall of Stalin he was appointed Party boss of Leningrad, where he purges Zinovievites. He was now awarded with command of the People's Commissariat of Justice.​
-​
With the rise of Kirov the Soviet leadership entered a new era. The Third Troika, as it was called[1], consisted of the calm and brilliant Sverdlov, the fearless and hardened Frunze, and the ruthless but genial Kirov. The three men met virtually every day to formulate policy, functioning almost like a miniature Politburo. In the actual Politburo or Central Committee meetings they acted as one; by the informal rules of the Troika once 2 of the 3 decided on a policy the third also had to endorse it. Their working relationship was helped by their friendship. In their conversations and letters they refer to each other by the diminutives Yasha, Misha, and Seryoga or the familiar ty. All of them lived on the grounds of the Kremlin and often visited. Kirov's daughter Evgeniya recalled “Sverdlov and Frunze were always coming around, sometimes to chat or just to borrow a cup of sugar. My mother and Sverdlov even had their own little tradition: whenever he would come over she would say 'Yakov come sit and have dinner. You work too much and are far too thin.' To which he would usually respond 'If I ate all of your delicious food I would end up as fat as a porker.'”​
-
Excerpt from The Chairman by H.N. Turteltaub​
For the Soviet Union the years between the rise of Sverdlov and the outbreak of the Second Great War were a time of joy and success, as well as hardship and tragedy. Much is known about what happened and why it happened but until now the personal lives of the men who directed these events has been a mystery. However, the recent opening of the Soviet archives has given us a wealth of information about the way these magnates worked, relaxed, and their quirks and personal rivalries.​
-​
Fittingly for a group of men trying to usher in a new era of history the top Soviet leaders were all workaholics. Sverdlov worked about 15-16 hours a day, while Kirov and Frunze worked a slightly more reasonable 12-14 hours. Often Politburo meetings would drag on for hours and the Kremlin staff would have to bring the magnates dinner. Bukharin remembered that Sverdlov always had a massive pile of papers on his desk and “when someone came in he would continue reading while listening. If he needed to speak he would take a short break then go back to his papers.” Despite this he absorbed everything. “Once he handed me a signed paper,” Andrei Zhdanov recalled, “he then said 'Here is the authorization for Eisenstein to start shooting his Alexander Nevsky film.' I only vaguely recall having a conversation about that movie with him.” Sverdlov was also a micromanager, sending letter to Party bureaucrats on everything from the collectivization of Ukraine to shoe production in Baku.​
-​
Even these extreme workaholics had to take a break. After the Revolution many large estates (called dachas) had been divided up amongst the people, but top Party officials were allowed to choose their own private estates. Sverdlov's favorite dacha was in the spa town of Pyatigorsk in the Caucuses. He was there roughly 3 months of the year, spread out over periods of 1 or 2 weeks. Several other Politburo members, including Bukharin and Frunze, also had dachas there and they would travel together. Sverdlov often went hunting or hiking up the mountains while others chose to do things such as skiing or fishing. Any business was conducted in one of the town's mineral springs. At night the magnates were often invited to Sverdlov's dacha for dinner. No matter how little food the peasants had the dinners were always feasts with dishes such as fine steak, roast duck, and various soups and cakes. Alcohol also flowed freely and everyone but Frunze, whose doctor ordered him not to, drank heavily. In particular Kirov and, after his admission to the Politburo in 1937, Zhdanov were notorious for their heavy drinking, even by Russian standards. At one dinner Kirov bet Zhdanov that he could out drink him, even putting his gold watch on the table as a wager. Sverdlov, at Bukharin's behest, upped the ante, offering to get the winner a Model 77 Ford. As the others watched Kirov and Zhdanov drank shot after shot of vodka. After a short while the Ukrainian First Secretary Stanislav Kosior gave them both a shot of pepper vodka. Upon drinking it both men turned bright red and a shocked and drunken Zhdanov even fell out of his chair. The bet was called off and Kirov and Zhdanov were carried aloft by their inebriated colleagues.​
-​
[1] The First Troika being Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev and the Second Troika being Trotsky-Sverdlov-Frunze.​
 
I just started reading this yesterday, having stumbled across your link in your signature.

I admire this work quite a lot. I don't feel competent to comment on the likelihood of the particular Kremlin sort-out that's happened to this point; heck, even having taken a few Masters level classes on Soviet history I had never even heard of Sverdlov!:p:eek:

I'm pretty sure if I attempted something like this, I'd sentimentalize and romanticize the hell out of it; I'd make Sverdlov, who is to an extent apparently a blank slate we can write whatever we like on, a great uniter and mediator and have all the rivals shaking hands and partying together and stop knifing each other in the back.

At the very least, I'd have had Sv and Trotsky form an alliance of sincerity and trust and never ever break it, running the USSR as Best Buds Forever.

And all of that would clearly be wrong as well as soppy and stupid.:eek: Trotsky had a way of pissing people off. To be sure I suppose I can be forgiven some sentimentality for him when you consider that hitherto, this eulogy of Sverdlov is most of what I know as of this moment of Sverdlov OTL. That eulogy is not the work of a monster of blind vanity. Perhaps Trotsky only knew a good thing when it was dead and gone. I still think it's a tragic waste that men of his level of talent could not all work together in the Politburo for a superior outcome.

But there it is. These guys did lay these high-stakes games and I have to admire a timeline which does not flinch from that reality.

Some other grim realities, some of which have actually solicited comment from other readers (this TL deserves a lot more comment dang it!:mad:)--the only issue of substance you've had the rival revolving-door troikaites take stands on is the matter of foreign policy of the revolutionary worker's state--to push for mature Red revolution in the developed world (that is, Europe--for contingent reasons they aren't even talking about the USA) versus to push for a more general revolutionary upheaval in the colonial world (ie pretty much most of the planet) versus finally leaving overseas alone and focusing on building revolution in one country. You have Sverdlov going crosswise with Lenin over this issue, each taking a position the other considers unforgivable.

And yet it is not clear to me which side Sverdlov actually takes in the ATL!:p If I had to attribute just one of these views to Lenin and freeze him for all times in conceptual amber, I'd say Lenin favored the Big Bang of European revolution. Presumably therefore Sverdlov is on one of the other two sides, and since we are distinguishing him from Stalin who infamously (or famously, depending on who one is and what one wants) took the "socialism in one country" banner, Sv is left to advocate colonial revolution.

So several comments have worried--"OMG, what terrible consequences will that bring vis a vis European diplomacy?"

Well, actually--I'd venture to offer--none!

These three positions, it seems to me, are not really policy choices at all--they are courses of action that the Bolsheviks can take depending on the situation, a situation they don't control. If an opportunity arises to support a suitably socialistic, suitably Marxist, close enough to Leninist, revolution in either the developed nations or their colonies, clearly Leninists should take it! But what can they do, exactly? The closest thing to spreading revolution by armed force the Bolsheviks ever envisioned was their attempt at conquering Poland which had the aim pretty much entirely of opening up contact directly with Germany--in the hope that the German working classes would then rise up, overthrow their bourgeois rulers (both native German and their foreign occupiers) and throw in with Lenin. Since Poland would not voluntarily join this revolution and since they were in the way, that country would have to be held down by armed force from outside.

But that was an extreme situation, and it did not work--the Germans did not rise; the Poles could not be held.

Generally speaking any good Bolshevik should be prepared to back all three of these "alternatives" at the same time. It is clearly necessary that the territory the Bolsheviks have liberated should be developed, both for the sake of the people liberated there and for the benefit of the larger world revolution. Therefore they are all "socialism in one country" types. Clearly if a revolutionary opportunity arises anywhere, the Bolsheviks should support it--as much as they are able, which given the balance of power and the USSR's limited power projection, is not much. In the end, Leninism holds that the working classes of each nation must rise up on their own and overthrow their own oppressors.

So, first of all I wonder if it is fair to have either Lenin or Sverdlov taking "one" of these three lines and denouncing the other three for all time in quite undialectical fashion. OTL Lenin can be seen emphasizing each of them from moment to moment--"colonial" revolution being the October Revolution itself, with the Russian rising being the act of a peripheral weak proletariat breaking the chains of an even weaker, more peripheral bourgeois--that's the position that Lenin and his followers uniquely held among Marxist Social Democrats, that the Third World did count--otherwise of course Russia would be out of the revolutionary picture. But even before winning the Civil War and securing the Red revolution in that peripheral project he was already agitating for revolution in Germany and France. Finally, the years before he dies both OTL and here are the years of NEP, a period where the Soviet state presents a smiling face (a tight smile to be sure given that the Western powers had been trying to kill them!) to the West and capitalists, and permits all manner of unmanaged or weakly governed entrepreneurs to build up private fortunes.

Clearly, the imperial powers that might seek to crush the Worker's State are not really going to lose a lot of sleep over whether the Premier in the Kremlin is spewing out rhetoric about their inevitable downfall at the hands of their own workers or not. The Entente powers picked up where the now-defeated Germans had left off, supporting Whites against the Reds. Perhaps they did fear Red revolution in London and Paris as well as Berlin and therefore were in an existential fight, as they saw it; perhaps they merely wanted to put down a rabble in arms that had ousted an ally (a shaky and expensive one, to be sure, still, an ally) from power. They fought and the Civil War was terrible for the Bolsheviks (and anyone else left in Russia)--but they did not escalate to full on WWI level deployments; they did not counterattack a second time into Soviet territory even when the Red Army had invaded Poland, nearly took it, then were sent on the run eastward again.

None of these ebbs and flows of Entente intervention had much to do with what Lenin, Trotsky and other Red leaders were saying; it had to do with what forces the Entente had at its disposal. Lenin did not adopt NEP in capitulation to Entente demands; the Reds defeated the Whites entirely (in a Phyric victory to be sure) and then the Bolsheviks realized on their own they'd better do something like NEP if they wanted an economy to command. The fact that for the better part of a decade the Soviets were committed to a semi-privatized economy and seeking normalized relations with other nations cut no ice with anti-Communists who hated them regardless of whatever line they currently adopted.

So I don't think very much of consequence hinges on which of the three foreign/revolutionary policy modes a particular Bolshevik leader might be pinned down to favoring in a particular debate at a particular time; in reality all of them were flexible about moving from one to the other and back; in reality the foreign powers will do with the USSR what they will regardless of what words are coming out of the Kremlin.
----
Of more consequence would be another debate that was held in OTL where Bolshevik leaders took positions, and that would be the answer to the so-called "scissors" crisis. Basically no Bolsheviks loved NEP as a permanent policy, all of them wanted to turn on the newly developing private sector and re-appropriate it into a command economy as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the essential primary recovery NEP was needed for involved recovery on the land; the peasants of the countryside had lost their bid for political power (their party had been the Social Revolutionaries; the Left SR's caucused with the Bolsheviks in October 1917 but soon after the parties split) but now enjoyed peace and prosperity--which made it difficult for the Bolsheviks to prioritize industrial build-up. The "Scissors" was that the Bolshevik-favored industrial sector needed resources from the land (mainly food for the workers) but could not produce enough to simply barter to the farmers for it--Russia was recovering, but it was recovering in the wrong way, and Bolsheviks wanted to figure out how to convert wealth trickling to a million peasant farms into wealth flowing into a hundred super-factories.

When you put the problem that way, the solution seems obvious if one is not burdened by sentiment or bourgeois notions of justice and fair play. Sverdlov has already been shown taking a hard verbal line against the "kulaks," I'm just pointing out his attitude would be typical of all Bolsheviks--Trotsky and Stalin were in agreement on this point too. The Kulaks were doomed if the Bolsheviks were to stay in power.

Now, having said that I want to suggest that maybe there is more latitude for variation in detail. The Kulaks have no friends in the Kremlin, but on what model should industry be developed, assuming the funds are squeezed out of the land and NEP private sector somehow?

I've got a book which is admittedly slow and dull reading for me :eek: that is about the choices the Soviet system faced OTL in the late 20s and early 30s; about how a strategy of highly centralized, top-down industrial commands was imposed for entirely political reasons when a distinctly nonprivate, still state-owned and controllable system of "syndicates" that marketed products to final consumers had evolved that were in the process of taking control of the production facilities, doing design work for them, and directing their production decisions toward filling demands the syndics knew existed. The book clearly disapproves of the clumsy Stalinist system that did evolve--not so much evolve in fact as was vigorously and violently imposed by the state and Party. The Party chose it because it seemed more advanced and post-capitalist, to "simply" command factories into being and send their products where needed according to the five-year Plan.

It isn't clear to me just what the troika of Sverdlov, Kirov and Rykov would do with these options. I was writing some wrong stuff because I had Rykov mixed up with Tomsky, the trade-unionist. Broadly speaking Rykov was sort of the conservative flavor of Bolshevism. Kirov like Sverdlov is someone who was much loved and lauded after he was dead; OTL he ran Leningrad and was considered promising and bright; then he was suddenly murdered in the mid-30s--modern scholars are pretty sure it was Stalin who had it done, but then Stalin immediately used Kirov's death as the justification for the Great Purges.

Yagoda by the way was involved in the latter--if I recall correctly the head of the security organs (OGPU at that point? It will have different initials here anyway!) when the first wave of Purges began was Yezhov, hence the term "yezovchina;" Stalin abruptly jailed Yezhov himself putting Yagoda in charge of the purge of the purgers, only to turn on Yagoda in turn (I think this is the point where Lavrenti Beria rose to the top of security, rebranded "NKVD" if I'm not mistaken, by then).

I suppose we have to assume the times made the men what they were and not the men the times; if the new Troika, or some reshuffled version of it, feels the need for the Purges, we know Yagoda could run that show for them; vice versa if they can hit upon a less crude and brutal way to get the results they need, perhaps nothing like that ever needs to happen here.

In my classes on the Stalin era, it seemed that what Stalin achieved in the 1930s was to produce an expanding "supply" as it were of enthusiastic if only marginally trained new Party members recruited from the factory floors and newly collectivized farms; these recruits were filtered "upward" through plant and sector management--then, at some level or other, the waves of purges would find fault with them sooner or later; at one level or another on their way up, they'd be brutally removed and some up-and-coming enthusiast would take their places, blithe and serene that since they were neither disloyal nor fools, they needn't worry the axe would fall on them. Until it did.

So with this conveyor belt raising up managers from the masses and then terminating them before they gain too much power combined with too much worldly wisdom and cynicism, Stalin got a compliant and at least serviceably competent layer of middle management that would seek to implement his priorities without questioning them.

Will Sverdlov, Kirov and Rykov find it necessary or anyway desirable to hit upon the same wasteful and brutal method, or will they find a way to promote, identify and sustain loyal and competent managers who will use the resources they are allocated efficiently and not plot to break off little kingdoms of their own? Can this stable Bolshevik managerial level have leverage and persuasion with the actual workforce to inspire them to produce diligently without pilferage or excessive slacking off?

In general, can any complex integrated industrial system exist without some sort of terror in the background to compel workers and managers to behave? Can it be done by positive means, with everyone persuaded that teamwork now will lead to improved lives for everyone in the near future?

If not the Troika has the OTL Stalinist model available.:rolleyes: And perhaps some other brutal alternatives not explored OTL.
---
Despite political positions in the Politburo on questions of revolutionary foreign policy being the only concrete policy issues discussed here yet, we haven't been told what has been going on in the larger world outside.

Presumably the world is broadly similar to OTL--we have to assume the end of WWI and the Versailles Treaty went as OTL, and indeed it would be some time before a different face in the Kremlin would lead to any noticeable changes. Germany (and other former Central Powers lands) would still be wracked by turmoil and revolution--no reason to think any of them are more likely to prevail than OTL though. Presumably Hitler still lives and is being cultivated by Army Intelligence to go into politics--he could be butterflied away if you like, but I'd say the likely thing is that he's out there, and the conditions that eventually let him take power still exist in Germany. The Entente powers are still exhausted in their victory and society and politics still bitter, mainly sweetened by the hope of a post-war world beyond war where technology and economic development will heal all wounds and be a tide raising all boats--the spirit of Locarno (which OTL also led to diplomatic doors opening to the USSR as well).

One systematic difference that may arise from shuffling Stalin out of the deck--perhaps the Troika will manage the Communist International with a lighter hand, and with more focus on progress and success by the local Parties and less on compliance, obedience to Moscow and flattery of the supreme power there. Stalin remained a Bolshevik and revolutionary, and looked forward to successful revolutions overseas--if and only if their new regimes would be obedient to himself, thus expanding his reach. However, "revolutionary" leaders who are suitably obedient to a foreign master like that are generally not very effective. OTL outside of the reach of a conquering Red Army (which only went a-conquering to retaliate against a rival imperial power that tried to invade them) the only Leninist countries that ever arose were led by loose cannon leadership the Kremlin did not control at all--Mao in China, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Castro in Cuba. If in this ATL the Troika are not so concerned with being able to control the foreign comrades but are interested in helping them get revolutionary results, will we see more successful revolutions in the 1930s, and still more unsuccessful attempts as well? In places like India, China, South Africa, the more developed parts of South America? What if Communists are more popular in the USA and Britain themselves?

On one hand if this happens, positive alliances between the USSR and established Western powers like the USA and Britain might be more difficult or even impossible.

On the other hand, could a more flexible and intelligent German Communist Party that doesn't have to toe a line drawn in Moscow slavishly have more pull with Germans, perhaps even form an effective alliance with the Social Democrats, or alternatively undercutting them and taking most of their voters--could such a KPD pre-empt the rise of the Nazis, or anyway fight them effectively and honorably well enough that if a Second Great War comes (and you've already told us it would) the Soviets have earned a place on the Allied side, despite a few quarrels about revolutions in various spheres of influence.

We know the War will not be pre-empted. I'm of the belief that WWII of OTL in Europe was all about Hitler's ambitions. Had Hitler been butterflied perhaps some other German of similar sweeping desires would have taken his place. If not--I don't think there'd be a war in Europe at all; Mussolini is likely to come to power but is unlikely to wish to take on the Entente powers without someone else strong in his corner to beat them up for him.

As for the Troika itself (or some successor team or supreme honcho) starting the war on the Soviet side--I don't believe that is in the cards. It wasn't with Stalin OTL, it wasn't with his successors when he died. The Soviet system favors caution even if the rhetoric of the Party is inflammatory about raising revolutionary heck all around the world. The thing is, it is the people in those overseas countries who are supposed to rise up themselves; the Worker's Motherland will then stand ready to back them up and protect them from capitalist counterrevolution, but they are under no obligation to invade the reactionary nations of the world and try to force Communism on people who aren't ready for it yet. As Leninists they are supposed to be rational, and they will always calculate the strength of the capitalists to be pretty high while the Soviet Union is vulnerable.

Therefore if there is going to be a Second Great War, I suppose it means another power strikes at Russia first, and that power seems just about certain to be Germany and no other.

Therefore the Troika may have had some greater success compared to Stalin's heavy hand in fostering the Third International, but clearly are not so good at it as to prevent Hitler or someone as bad from taking control in Germany. With a hit or miss record like that I suppose Western diplomats will treat with them without demanding they recant all revolutionary ambitions.

Will the Troika have more honor than Stalin, and refuse to make deals with Hitler? Or will the Entente as OTL betray Czechoslovakia, frightening the Kremlin with the impression that there is no power left to help them stand against the Reich, and that cutting a deal with them will be no worse than the faithless behavior of Czechoslovakia's false friends?

I suppose we'll see.

Looking forward to the Space Race!:D
 
In the words of Elvis "Thank you, thank you very much."

I personally think that Trotsky's evaluation of a fellow revolutionary was based in a large part on his personal feelings for a person. For example Stalin was not just some pencil pushing bureaucrat but a politically savvy man who was well read and could be both ruthless and incredibly kind at the same time. So I think that ITTL Trotsky wouldn't focus on Sverdlov's competence and iron will but on his treacherous nature, his coldness, and his disagreement with Lenin (which proves he doesn't have ideological credibility).

I'm thinking that in the future collectivization and dekulakization is going to go forward, however collectivization will be less brutal and directed on a more local level. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is completely butterflied away, not just because Molotov is going to spend the rest of his ATL life in obscurity. Sverdlov is Jewish and thus would be even more hated by Hitler than Stalin was. Also Sverdlov won't be able to trust Hitler since he considers Hitler to be a puppet of the capitalist powers. In terms of the Comintern Sverdlov isn't going to demand the sort of unconditional obedience that Stalin required, he just isn't that paranoid.
 
In the words of Elvis "Thank you, thank you very much."

I personally think that Trotsky's evaluation of a fellow revolutionary was based in a large part on his personal feelings for a person. For example Stalin was not just some pencil pushing bureaucrat but a politically savvy man who was well read and could be both ruthless and incredibly kind at the same time. So I think that ITTL Trotsky wouldn't focus on Sverdlov's competence and iron will but on his treacherous nature, his coldness, and his disagreement with Lenin (which proves he doesn't have ideological credibility).
Sure, never mind Trotsky's own disagreements with Lenin--he knows that later on, he came around to following Lenin, when it counted, between the February Revolution and Lenin's death, so Trotsky ought to be forgiven, he figures.:rolleyes: That's not unreasonable actually, and OTL and here I do think Trotsky does suffer because he was on the Menshevik team for a while. But of course the Old Bolsheviks do have a point--they disagreed with Lenin less you see.

Also of course surely Trotsky had later disagreements with Lenin, while both were still in power, when it mattered a lot. It seems clear enough to me that Lenin's principle of "democratic centralism" was quite mistaken and one thing the Bolsheviks needed was the ability to agree to disagree with each other--and to extend that to non-Bolsheviks too, to try to get along with as many people as possible instead of demanding ideological lockstep. But of course from Lenin's point of view that would be mere toleration of error, and not even random error but allowing mentalities systematically skewed by their adaptation to a rival world-view that must be eradicated for progress to go forward to instead derail the programs and policies of people who took the trouble to think things through clearly. The fallacy here is the assumption that ideally all people should always arrive at the same conclusions all the time or they must be simply "incorrect."

A fallacy Trotsky is as guilty of as anyone he skewers critically.
I'm thinking that in the future collectivization and dekulakization is going to go forward, however collectivization will be less brutal and directed on a more local level. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is completely butterflied away, not just because Molotov is going to spend the rest of his ATL life in obscurity. Sverdlov is Jewish and thus would be even more hated by Hitler than Stalin was. Also Sverdlov won't be able to trust Hitler since he considers Hitler to be a puppet of the capitalist powers. In terms of the Comintern Sverdlov isn't going to demand the sort of unconditional obedience that Stalin required, he just isn't that paranoid.

Well, the freer the overseas comrades are to judge their own circumstances and not be obliged to optimize their actions in the light of what currently benefits the Soviet Union, the more rowdy we can expect Reds the world over to be. What are the odds that for instance the Chinese Communists would have judged, on their own, that they needed to ally with the Kuomintang against Japan in the 1930s? Well, when you think about it in that context, not zero actually! But one would think they'd insist on safeguards for themselves as a condition of uniting forces with Chiang Kai-Shek, and probably that they have a say in the governing council of the nation under the KMT, and that Chiang could not simply rule unilaterally as he saw fit. Probably their asking price, or even minimal conditions they absolutely could not close the deal without, would be too high for Chiang to accept--but if he could be persuaded, the outcome would be a different government for China. One perhaps more capable of taking control of numerous regions from the warlords, at the cost to be sure of further strengthening the Communist component.

Alternatively if Chiang rejected the deal, or if the Communists decided that despite their weakness while in a factional fight with him, he just wasn't worth making a deal with, then a lot of people Chiang killed under the arrangement Stalin mandated the Chinese Party accept OTL would not be killed off so easily; the Chinese Party would be bigger and perhaps stronger (depending on how essential one supposes it was for Mao to get control and run the remnant party his way, pursuing the path that OTL got him in complete control over most of China by 1950).

China is one example. You've already precluded the possibility of better Communist success in Germany. Indeed it does not seem that far-fetched to me that the hard-line Spartacists of Germany would never be able to work with the Social Democrats, nor would they have enough traction to amass a force of their own that could suppress the Nazis, not to mention their upper-class patrons. I suppose that Stalin tended to neuter effective Communist activism in the International, turning it entirely toward agitation toward what benefited the USSR and also toward spying for the Kremlin, but perhaps that doesn't mean that uncoordinated loose cannon Communist extremists in the various nations would enjoy a lot more success than OTL. I'd think there ought to be some notable case somewhere where they do better.

But perhaps most or all of these are Pyrrhic victories. They manage a coup in Latin America or even a European colony (Indonesia, some part of India, South Africa, Nigeria or the West Indies, an insurgency in Indochina, etc) and it even turns out to have a lot of solid popular support, but the imperial powers come back and suppress it good and hard. Or, the Party is indeed more successful in Germany--Hitler has a harder time taking over despite the cooperation of the conservative elements that dominate traditional society (all the more so because of their fear of the Communists) and the Reds manage a brief holding action, spiriting likely victims of Nazi terror out of Germany, establishing long-lasting underground cells that spread dissent, generally making themselves significantly annoying to the Reich and saving some good people from terrible fates. But they never come anywhere near power, other good people who were all right for a little while anyway OTL suffer for their temerity, the Gestapo still manages to catch and kill or otherwise mistreat a lot of them--and after all they aren't exactly welcome overseas except in the USSR itself, or on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War...

Hey, there's a butterfly! According to people like Orwell anyway, the ragtag bunch of lefties who supported the Spanish Republic might have done better if the Stalinist Soviet forces had not been ruining their initiative and too busy settling scores with ideological deviants to keep the total forces adequate and motivated.

I'm no expert on that, but how much justice was there in Orwell's charges in Homage to Catalona? What if instead of trying to enforce ideological uniformity and servicability to the Soviet interest, the Soviet expeditionary "volunteers" had been there to maximize cooperation and the effective force at the Republic's disposal, in order to win over sympathy in the "Common Front" capitalist liberal nations--Britain, France, the smaller European kingdoms and republics, the USA? How likely then would a victory by Franco be, even if the Italians and Nazis went all out to aid him, skirting risking open warfare? (OTL Hitler was not ready to get into a head-on fight with France as late as 1938 and he knew it--very probably he was already supporting Franco to the maximum degree he safely could).

This led me to many possible speculations on how "The Second Great War" might go--including some that would make it unlikely to bear such a name.

I deleted them out of respect for the authors privilege and presumed plan to have it go a certain way.

I can just see lots of ways this can go; the trick is to guarantee a fight long and broad and bitter enough to get the name "Great War II".
 
And what happens to Sverdlov's brother, that Zinovy Peshkov who served in the French Army and had accomplished support missions for Whites during the civil war? That is pretty embarrassing.
 
And what happens to Sverdlov's brother, that Zinovy Peshkov who served in the French Army and had accomplished support missions for Whites during the civil war? That is pretty embarrassing.

His family had disowned him already so he almost certainly becomes the Billy Carter of the Soviet Union. He is ignored as much as possible (and given the lack of free media in the Soviet Union that means he is a virtual unperson) but if the subject absolutely has to come up Sverdlov is embarrassed and tries to change the conversation as quickly as possible.
 
Excerpt from Sverdlov by Robert Service​
1928 was a terrible time for Soviet, particularly Ukrainian agriculture. Both the 1927 and 1928 harvest seasons were struck by drought and after the 1927 season several areas were left unsown. The government was forced to ration food. The other step they took was grain requisition, which led to conflicts with the peasants. Those peasants in unaffected areas stored their grain in case the famine hit them. When government agents came to requisition the grain the peasants would hide it, often burying it. In desperation the agents would bring clubs and beat the peasants until they were led to hidden stashes of grain. To the Third Troika this proved that collectivization was the way forward. The majority of farmers were private, indeed only 5.6% of Ukrainian peasants were collectivized. This system was seen by many top Bolsheviks as not only capitalist but inefficient. Farmers worked on small, isolated plots of land that they had to tend themselves, leading to wasted space and time. In addition collectivization would make it easier to requisition grain, helping future famines. The final reason to collectivize was that its success would politically isolate Bukharin and the Rightists. Sverdlov felt that isolating them would be politically useful, but it was unnecessary to expel them from the Party. Bukharin lacked Trotsky's caustic wit or Stalin's ruthless amorality. He was much more of a theorist than an actual leader. Besides, if the Rightists became too much trouble they could easily be labeled a faction.​
-​
Before the 17th Party Congress in 1929 the Third Troika formulated the collectivization plan. Called the Breadbasket Plan the plan called for the Ukraine and Byelorussian SSRs to be 80% collectivized by 1935, as well as raise grain production to 500 poods. The grain would be able to feed the workers needed for future industrialization programs and grain exports would fund other projects. The other part of the Breadbasket Policy was more sinister. The Bolsheviks considered better off peasants, called kulaks, class enemies; Sverdlov even referred to them as “ticks.” They had been tolerated under the NEP but now they were to be destroyed. Under the Breadbasket Policy they would all be arrested and anyone over 70 (it was felt that most of them would be too old to do hard labor) or disabled would be shot. The rest would be send to special camps were a mixture of hard work, starvation level rations, and the elements would kill every last one of them. When the plan was explained to the Congress several delegates were shocked, questioning if the world and the Soviet people would allow it to happen. Kirov responded “Do not worry. After all, who objected to Ivan the Terrible killing the boyars?”​
-
Excerpt from Hell's Harvest by Robert Conquest​
In the aftermath of the 17th Party Congress the government set about determining how many kulaks were in Ukraine and Byelorussia. On May 5th 1929 Sovnarkom issued a set of guidelines defining a kulak. Under these new guidelines a kulak was someone who owned more than 6 acres of land per male member of the household, rented land or tools, owned machines such as mills, hired other peasants as laborers, or engages in trade or brokerage. Under the last point virtually every peasant who sold surplus grain could be considered a kulak. Using these broad definitions the government of the Ukraine and Byelorussian SSRs determined that there was a combined total of 1.5-3 million kulaks.​
-​
Terror gripped the countryside. OGPU agents were sent into the countryside with strict quotas and they would do anything to meet these quotas. An exchange between Ukrainian Second Secretary Vlas Chubar and a regional Party boss was quite revealing. When the Party boss mentioned that he was having trouble meeting his quota of 55,000 kulaks Chubar responded “So round up some random peasants. Who cares if a few innocents die as long as we get who we are looking for.” Some peasants took the opportunity to denounce their rivals or neighbors they envied. Dekulakization was also used as a tool of social control. Those who were politically unreliable (such as former White soldiers or Trotskyists) or social outcasts (such as homosexuals or the mentally ill) and their families were sent to the camps. As areas became more and more collectivized private farmers were often rounded up to scare others into collectivizing. After the arrested were taken to jail those over 70 or disabled were separated from the others and shot. In some areas there were over 75 executions a day, so many that some of the doomed would slip on the blood of those who had gone before. The rest rotted in jail until a train came. They would then be loaded into cattle cars, 150 to a car, with a small bucket for waste and small amounts of food and water. Perhaps 1 in 20 people who were forced on this journey died in these cars; the first job of many prisoners was to bury those who had died.​
-​
Under orders from Sovnarkom to “squeeze every last ounce of labor from the kulaks” the camp administrators put the kulaks to work on a variety of projects. Prisoners mined gold and metals, cleared forest, and built roads and railroads. The typical workday started before dawn and didn't stop until long after sunset, and prisoners worked every day. Unless it was below -50 degrees Celsius the prisoners had to work. Accidents were incredibly common; those who suffered these accidents were forced to work through the agonizing pain or be shot.​
-​
The prisoners lived in abject horror. They slept in large concrete barracks on rough wooden beds or on the cold floor. The only light came from a small barred window near the ceiling. In these cramped barracks disease spread quickly. But the medical care for the prisoners was primitive. To stop the spread of disease the guards would simply shoot all of the infected. Any other medical problems had to be treated by the prisoners. Men died of infections or blood loss from botched surgeries. Punishment was severe. People could be shot for the smallest thing. However one camp created a truly horrific punishment: the victim was taken just outside of the camp and their legs were broken. There some excess barbed wire had been laid out and held down with stakes. The prisoner was forced to drag themselves across the barbed wire; if they refused their family was killed. The prisoner was then forced to repeat this process until they died. The worst thing about the camp was the starvation. A person needs about 2000-4000 calories a day (depending on several factors including exercise level) to stay healthy. The prisoners were supposed to be fed 1000-1500 calories a day, but many were actually given 600 calories or less. In this environment men did anything to survive. One of the few who escaped recalled “People were reduced to eating grass or dirt. Inside the barracks small traps were laid out for rats or other small animals.” Some prisoner's stomachs swelled with hunger while others became skeletal creatures resembling survivors of Hitler's Final Solution. As their starved comrades died all around them some turned to the last, most desperate measure. One guard remembered “We opened the barrack doors and several prisoners stumbled out. Their mouths were ringed with blood. When several guards went in to investigate they found a dead man lying on the ground. He was ripped open and his blood was all over the place. Chunks of half eaten flesh lay around him.” [1]​
-​
[1] The Ukrainian and Byelorrusian SSRs were declared "kulak free" in March 1934. After this the camps were slowly closed as their inmates died off, until by 1938 there were only 2 camps left and 25,000 inmates in total. These camps were integrated into the Gulag system and the 25,000 kulaks were shipped to the Katyn Forest and shot; an event known as the Katyn Massacre. By most estimates 2-3 million kulaks died, however some scholars (such as Robert Conquest) claim that the total was higher.​
 
Last edited:
Top