Revision #4
The towns of Novosibirsk and Tomsk fell immediately. The small chunks of Taymyrsky and Yakutia belonging to the Soviets also fell without a fight. The first major battle took place in Omsk where the Baron’s tanks battled the Red cavalry, still on horseback. Cossack divisions from further South helped reinforce the Baron’s armies, as they arrived on the 17th. Omsk fell on the 20th and the Baron met up with more rebel forces from Kazakhstan’s northern most towns. The newly supplied and replenished rebel armies marched south to Dzezhkhazgan, where the Red Army was defeated after two days, as the Baron’s armies marched toward Tyumen and Kurgan. Also, the Japanese Air Force, repeating tactics from the Manchurian war flew into the USSR and annihilated the barely existent and obsolete Soviet Air Force and started a grand bombing campaign that supported both the invading land forces in western Siberia and the rebel forces in Central Asia. Soon, all of Central Asia except a few coastal cities fell to the rebels, all other cities that remained in Soviet hands were bombed into submission by the effective Japanese bombing campaign. The Red Army POW’s were either imprisoned or recruited to fight their former government in the newly created Russian Liberation Army. Sepailoff and Prince Daichin, who commanded tank divisions in the westernmost parts of Siberia, succeeded in crossing into Archangelsk beginning a battle on the 17th.
In the west, Polish forces crossed a day after the war began in the east, creating two fronts, the Northern and Southern fronts. The Southern Front was characterized by initial success in battles in near Zhytomir and Vinnitsa, resulting in the Polish capture of those cities by the 26th. However, the Polish still had to consolidate those gains by winning a battle in Berdychov which lied in between. They did this by the 28th and soon moved on into Cherkasy and Yelisavetgrad were they were assisted heavily by the rebels. After these victories, Polish forces encircled Kiev which was already being besieged inside by the rebel mob. Kiev fell after a week of bloody siege. Kharkhov followed suit by the beginning the 5th of July. The Ukrainians had greeted the Poles as liberators, a sentiment which would be exploited with the creation of the Ukrainian Liberation Army, a puppet Ukrainian Army similar to its Russian counterpart. Cossacks were recruited into a special Cossack Cavalry Brigade of the ULA as was the case in the RLA. Ukrainians joined the Army with pride as they went to battle in the Northern Front. This front told a different story. Where in the South, it was a string of relative successes; the Northern Front began with the Siege of Minsk. The first phase of the siege saw Polish artillery and bombers pound Minks to the ground. The second phase saw blood urban warfare. The Polish Armies of the Northern and Southern fronts along with the ULA joined together in Novgorod, where the Soviet enemy was encircled and annihilated, and headed toward Stalingrad.
In the North, the Finns crossed into Murmansk, fighting a bloody eleven day battle ending on the 28th. Although, encountering many Naval defeats on their own cost, the Finns crossed Karelia into Archangelsk, aiding Sepaillof’s forces in taking it. The Soviets retaliated by invading the Finnish northern coast through the sea, but were repelled and defeated in Nautsi. The Finnish forces however who remained in Karelia were slaughtered by Red Army detachments from Leningrad as they made their way to capture Murmansk. The Siege of Murmanks began on the 5th of July. Epic battles were fought in Stalingrad, Archangelsk and Minsk, marking the second much bloodier phase of the Soviet War.
In Moscow, Stalin, in a paranoid frenzy, arrested Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Bukharin and all of his remaining political rivals under accusations of being part of an internal Polish-Finnish-Japanese sponsored Anti-PartyTerroristCenter. He summoned all of his marshals to a meeting where they convened to discuss a possible defense strategy using what was left of the Red Army. As the marshals talked amongst themselves and made busy with a large map on the table, Stalin disrupted them with the words “Lenin left us his legacy and we fucked it up”. They devised a defensive strategy of holding out and waiting for the Winter when they hoped they could makes some gains in driving out the invaders, but it was too late.
By early August, Arkhangelsk and Stalingrad had fallen and the march toward Moscow had begun. Murmansk had survived the siege and remained in Finnish hands. After the fall of Stalingrad, the Polish Southern Army split one again with one group, the Southwestern Army heading to reinforce Minsk while the other, the Southeastern Army headed deeper into the South, toward the Caucuses. In the east, the northern armies of Sepailoff coordinated with the Finns for an invasion of Leningrad which began on the 18th. A detachment of forces led by Prince Daichin, which included the Northern faction of the RLA met up with the Baron’s forces from farther south in Kirov, and started heading toward Groky. At this point, the numbers of the RLA where growing steadily with the capture of every city, reaching about 40,000 in the Battle of Gorky. The Polish Southeastern Army met up with Japanese and Rebel Cossack and Peasant forces in the Caucuses where the fall of Rostov and the invasion of Stalin’s native Georgia destroyed Soviet oil supply lines, demobilizing the Red Army. Although, the invading armies found that the Soviets had blown up their own oil wells to save it from being in their hands. Tbilisi and Yerevan fell by the 26th and 27th but Baku was heavily protected by the Red Navy and had to be bombarded from the air by a joint Japanese-Polish bombing campaign. The Baron captured Vornonezh on the 2nd of September, destroying the last trail of Red Army reinforcements into Central Asia. Minsk finally fell on the 7th and Leningrad on the 9th with captured POW’s recruited into the RLA, numbering about 50,000. Polish forces, along with the ULA and RLA under its command, attacked Moscow on the 13th and were soon reinforced by the Baron’s armies which included the now 70,000 strong RLA. Japanese bombers, from newly acquired bases in Central Asia flew with their Polish counterparts to bomb the Soviet capital. Stalin left Moscow for Pskov where he hoped to escape to the safety of the local Communist Party in neutral Latvia but it was the 48th Polish Bomber Squadron that destroyed Stalin’s armored train on its way out if Moscow, killing the dictator and his entourage and leaving the Soviet Union leaderless.
After holding out for more than twenty days, an internal revolt led by several Red Army cadets displaced their superiors and declared surrender. Moscow fell on the 4th of November and the Soviet Union signed its surrender under Marshall Timoshenko on the 25th. Poland occupied the Ukraine, Belarus, the westernmost part of Russia, the Eastern Russian Caucuses, Georgia and Armenia. Japan occupied Central Asia, Azerbaijan, southwestern Russia including a portion of the Russian Caucuses, Finland occupied everything north of Novgorod while the Baron’s forces occupied the rest of Russia, everything west of Moscow, including the city of Voronezh. The various Cossack hosts were also given their own occupation zones within the occupation zones of the victorious invaders. The fate of Russia was decided by the victors in the Moscow Conference.