A Day in July: An Early 20th Century Timeline
- Thread starter Zulfurium
- Start date
The thing that was shocking to me was exactly how bad the situation both military and political were on the Western Front - and almost everything I covered in this update is OTL - the divergence happening when the Germans don't attack in early March.
The problem I have with a lot of CP victory scenarios is that they often lack a good deal of plausibility, both regarding how the CP win and what the consequences of such a victory are. There is this obsession with the Germans suddenly developing a full-blown love of tanks out of the blue, investing in it to a greater degree than all others and then winning the war like it is the Beta version of Blitz Krieg - this despite the relatively minor impact of tanks throughout the period, the fact artillery was king during the Great War and that it was advance on foot that won and lost the war.There is also a tendency to either go completely grim-dark with it, basically turning the German Empire into an early version of the Nazi Reich with mass murder and ethnic cleansing galore, or the complete opposite where Germany emerges as this benign superpower and everything is rosy in the world. I mean, don't get me wrong - I love both A Shift in Priorities or Stupid Luck and Happenstance, but I have serious reservations about how they turn the war in Germany's favor, and they are among the best CP victory TLs on the site.
I mean, wasn't Home Rule about as close to an Irish Dominion as you are going to get? Here the agreement has been made and plans for elections and a parliament are in the works, so if all goes as planned then there shouldn't be any reason they wouldn't secure Home Rule.
Update Eight: The White Fight
The White Fight
Soviet Delegation Met By German Officers
A Final Attempt
Soviet Delegation Met By German Officers
A Final Attempt
From Narva and Pskov, the Germans debated the merits of continuing their drive all the way to Petrograd itself. On one hand, the Germans were hopeful that they could force the war to an end in either late March or early April, but given the failures to bring home a treaty in September 1917, November 1917 and January 1918, there was a significant contingent who believed that the Russians would only surrender with their hands forced to paper at the Tauride itself. For the time being, Max Hoffmann decided on a compromise between the two, ordering the Eighth Army to continue their advance from Narva towards Petrograd while the Baltic Fleet was to enter the Gulf of Finland and threaten a naval invasion of the Russian capital. At the same time emissaries were dispatched with clear terms of surrender for the Russian government. The German advance would meet only limited and disorganised resistance when they restarted their advance on the 2nd of April 1918, brushing aside or capturing the disparate elements of what remained of the Russian Northern Front - which had seen over a hundred thousand desertions since mid-March.
At the same time, the Germans were busily drawing troops away from across the rest of the Eastern Front, relying heavily on Austro-Hungarian forces to make up for the transfers. The Austro-Hungarian troops would prove significantly less effective, and experienced an embarrassing number of desertions given how quiet the front they were hold was, but they would hold it. By the 5th of April, the Germans had reached Gatchina 45 kilometres south of Petrograd - the heavier guns of the Germans being heard all the way in Petrograd like the rumblings of a thunderous god. It was here that messengers from the Tauride arrived to signal their surrender and that negotiations for an end to the war should be held. While the Germans extended their control to the countryside around Gatchina, they invited the Russians to send their delegation to negotiate at the Great Gatchina Palace, once the home of Russia's autocrats, while the German lines were pillaged for as many men as possible to reinforce the German armies on the Western Front.
Following the execution of the Romanovs on the 31st of March, Trotsky had expected the Armies of the Republic to stand firm against the Germans. However, when news arrived of the Germans' uncontested advance on the 2nd of April and German emissaries followed, he quickly realised that a crisis was about to erupt when the undoubtedly harsh German demands came. The German demands covered the garrisoning of Petrograd by German soldiers, the widespread disarmament and demobilisation of troops across the entire Eastern Front and a preliminary agreement to acknowledge Ukrainian and Georgian independence, to which the Constituent Assembly was initially resistant. However, as more and more bad news flooded the Tauride and the sound of artillery fire began to be heard in the distance, the delegates to the Assembly grew increasingly dispirited. Trotsky had, by this point, realized that a surrender was imminent and did what he could to extract himself and his closest allies from the mess, insisting that a matter of such great consequence must be decided by the Constituent Assembly in a bid to pass responsibility for surrender onto the Assembly. At the same time he began the covert transfer of arms, supplies and, most importantly, the contents of the Central Bank to a series of trains and wagons which made their way out of Petrograd, with the secret agreement of the RSDLP inner circle, to the safety Veliky Novgorod.
The debate in the Constituent Assembly raged back and forth, as the previously dominant political leaders of the RSDLP suddenly turned silent and distanced themselves from the matter as much as possible. This meant that the debate in the Constituent Assembly became a free-for-all between the remaining delegates and quickly dissolved into absolute chaos. In the end, it would require the intervention of the Right SR politician Vladimir Volsky, who had previously served in the Tver Soviet and had been elected to the Constituent Assembly in November, to finally bring the Constituent Assembly to the realisation that there was little more they could do than agree to the preliminary terms and hope for the best. This was what led to the dispatch of the initial messengers surrendering to the Germans at Gatchina. Accepting the wishes of the Constituent Assembly, Trotsky decided to dispatch a man of stature but unconnected to him personally to lead the negotiations in order to avoid actually signing the treaty himself - seeking to pass this blemish on to another. As such, it would be the Marxist historian Mikhail Pokrovsky who would preside over the Russian side of the negotiations at Gatchina (1).
Pokrovsky would not serve particularly well in his role as plenipotentiary and was completely outmanoeuvred by the German diplomatic team which had been dispatched on behalf of the Chief of the Imperial Staff Hoffmann and Foreign Minister Kühlmann, neither of them able to participate personally in the negotiations due to the great demands of the western front. By mid-April the Russians were making immense concessions, including the transfer of a wide band of land in Russian Poland to Germany proper, greatly strengthening Germany's borders, while conceding the independence of the Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Courland and the Baltic provinces. The German leadership had initially planned for far more reasonable demands and only presented these extreme demands as a starting position to the bargaining, but the German negotiators were surprised when Pokrovsky caved with barely a fight. The negotiators, completely forgetting the reasoning behind the reasonable demands that had been determined beforehand, could not resist the lure this presented and would continue to tack on indemnities, garrisoning rights, further land transfers, oversight and control of all trade and half a dozen other demands, all of which Pokrovsky caved to. The negotiators could hardly believe their own luck and began considering Kaiser Wilhelm's pipedream of splintering Russia proper into three separate parts might be viable.
News of the negotiations at Gatchina became fodder for the masses in Petrograd, where the continually growing demands from the Germans prompted incredible horror and despair at what looked increasingly to be the butchering of Russia as though it were a carcass. This was what finally created the opening Vasili Zavoiko and his massive spiderweb of conspiracy had been waiting for. Over the course of the mid-April the conspiracies coalesced around a plan to free the White Martyrs still imprisoned in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, coupling it with an assault on the Tauride where the delegates to the Constituent Assembly would be placed under arrest and the ministers of the RSDLP-Left SR government would be put against a wall and shot. The decision to expel the Kadets from the Constituent Assembly had played directly into Zavoiko's hands and had allowed him to strengthen several of the conspiracies he was involved in with these politicians who brought an air of legitimacy to the entire endeavour, though most of the Kadets had already made their escape from the city in the weeks since their expulsion - many of them turning south to the Don where a White force had coalesced.
On the 19th of April, Zavoiko invited the leaders of the various cells and conspiracies dotted across Petrograd together in a secret meeting on the second floor of the Literaturnoye Kafe in order to bring everyone onto the same page in preparation for the planned operation. This meeting would become the central point of hundreds of novels and poems written in White political circles during the following decades, as well as featuring prominently in Red propaganda and literature - often used to underline the perfidy and untrustworthiness of the Whites, and marked a crucial turning point in the Russian Revolution. Over the course of a short hour-long meeting, Zavoiko was able to bring everyone into agreement with his plans, having largely made all the preliminary efforts over the previous months. and set the date of the coming White Rising for the 24th of April 1918.
Footnotes:
(1) Mikhail Pokrovsky has the interesting distinction of being a Russian Marxist who was neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik in leanings at this point. He was part of the Vpered group, with Alexander Bogdanov, Maxim Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky, which sought to promote the education and edification of the working class, building the future worker leaders through education. In order to do this, he and a close friend and Bolshevik Bogdanov set up a school on Capri and spent ungodly sums of money transporting Russian workers there to give them a "worker's" education. We will deal more with the Vperedists in the future, but in this case we are dealing with Pokrovsky who is signally unsuited to the delicate negotiations going on at Gatchina. This is probably Trotsky at his most irresponsible, valuing his own name and image more than securing an acceptable peace.
Aleksei Brusilov, General of the Cavalry
The Great White Hope
Since the September Rising, though arguably since the February Revolution, there had been a slow but steady movement of people fleeing southward in search of safety - concentrated primarily in the various groups and populations that were unaccepted by the increasingly left-wing governments of Russia. These people began to congregate on the Don, where the Don Cossacks, thought by the Whites to be stalwarts of the old regime, had recently elected General Alexey Kaledin as the Ataman of their traditional assembly, the Krug. Taciturn and gloomy, Kaledin was a typical Cossack general of the old school. During 1917 he had sided with Kornilov against the Soviet and at the Moscow Conference in August had called for the abolition of all the democratic army organisations, before being chased south to his peoples following the September Rising, where the Don Krug declared its independence on the 20th (3 December N.S.) November. General Mikhail Alexeev arrived in the Don in early November 1917 (O.S.) and soon began forming a volunteer force out of White supporters in the region, mustering them at the city of Novocherkassk.
The basic concern of the Don Cossack leaders at this time was to defend their newly declared independence, but the Volunteers had persuaded them that this could only be achieved by joining forces with them against the Bolsheviks, who had been making inroads further up the Don themselves. The latter had mobilised the support of much of the non-Cossack population in the Don, among the Russian peasants, the industrial workers and the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet, for an effort aimed at capturing Rostov, a major city of the Don. Hence, to begin with, Kaledin welcomed the arrival of the Volunteers, a mere forty officers, calling themselves Alexeev's Organization, on the 17th (30 N.S.) November 1917. His own forces had been fast disintegrating, as the younger and more radical Cossacks, who were in no mood to fight the Reds, returned from the Front and began to campaign against his leadership.
Many local Cossacks were afraid that the presence of the Volunteers might make Novocherkassk, the Don capital, a target for the Bolsheviks or even the Republican Government which at this point seemed unlikely to brook White challenges to its authority. Because of this Cossack mistrust of the Whites, Alexeev's officers had to be hidden away in a hospital in Novocherkassk at first. But as the Bolsheviks approached, and it became clear that the Don could not be defended without their support, Kaledin was able to deploy the Volunteers without serious Cossack objections. At the beginning of December the Bolshevik Red Guards captured Rostov. Kaledin imposed martial law and called on the Volunteers to retake the city, his own Cossacks having refused to fight. Alexeev's army, which by this stage had grown to a force of some 500 officers, was quite sufficient to defeat the more numerous but hopelessly undisciplined Red Guards who were sent skittering northward. The six-day battle began on 9th (22nd N.S.) of December — St George's Day, the patron saint of Russia. It was the first major battle of the incipient civil war.
In Moscow, Aleksei Brusilov and his family found themselves increasingly under pressure from the Bolshevik regime, which looked on him with significant animus - believing him to be yet another reactionary general and a threat to their control of Moscow. As such, over the course of October and November, the Brusilov family had experienced an ever-growing degree of harassment, culminating in the attempted firebombing of their apartment in early December (O.S.). The threat to not only his own but also his family's lives finally spurred Brusilov into action. The Brusilov family would quietly begin making preparations a week into December (O.S.) and decided, following the news of the White victory at Rostov-on-Don, to go south to join Brusilov's old friend Alexeev. The Brusilov family would make their escape from Moscow by posing as a poor elderly couple fleeing the revolutionary violence of the north, as so many others, and made their way to Rostov successfully - arriving a couple days into the New Year (O.S.).
In the weeks since Alexeev and his men had captured Rostov they had moved swiftly to secure the city and set up military rule in Rostov. While Brusilov was greeted with open arms by Alexeev on his arrival some of the other, more reactionary, generals who had themselves only recently arrived expressed significant misgivings and uncertainty about Brusilov's commitment to the White cause (2). At the same time, the Volunteers had experienced significant difficulties expanding their numbers, neither Alexeev or any of the lesser commanders really possessing the charisma needed to draw men to their cause. This was where Brusilov immediately proved himself worth his weight in gold. News that the great General Brusilov, the only victorious general of the war, had joined the Whites on the Don went through Russia like a bolt of lightning. Within weeks, volunteers were swarming into Rostov to join up in hopes of fighting under the ever-victorious Brusilov as he fought to retake Russia from the mad revolutionaries.
Rostov was a microcosm of the old Russia in exile. The fallen high and mighty thronged its streets. There were generals, with their stripes and epaulettes, dashing cavalry officers in their colourful tunics, the white kerchiefs of nurses, and the huge Caucasian fur hats of the Turkomen warriors. Numerous Duma politicians, mostly Kadets and disparate right-wingers who believed that Constituent Assembly little more than a sham set up to legitimise the actions of the RSDLP, had come to try and direct the White movement. However they would soon be joined by a flood of former Constituent Assembly delegates following Trotsky's expulsion of the liberal and right-wing parties in the Constituent Assembly. Over the course of early 1918, Brusilov emerged as the dominant figure on the Don, working closely with Alexeev, but with it undoubted who was in charge. Throughout this period, even as Brusilov extended White control across the Donbas region in the face of disorganized and fragmented Bolshevik opposition, he faced incredibly tense challenges from both political and military exiles, who felt that Brusilov's unwillingness to follow a hardline reactionary policy meant he was not fit to command them. These men and women worked to undermine Brusilov's command and conspired against his successes, but were for the moment left bereft of a figurehead with which to replace Brusilov. That all changed when Mikhail Romanov arrived in Rostov alongside his family in mid-April.
Since the February Revolution, the Don had become a haven for increasingly liberal and moderate refugees, but the majority, and the most established, of the refugees tended towards the reactionary wing of the Whites. In fact, in Novocherkassk the official clock ran on St Petersburg time, an hour behind local Don time, as if in readiness to resume the work of government in the Tsarist capital. Nothing better symbolized the nostalgic attitudes of the reactionary wing of the Whites. They were, quite literally, trying to put back the clock. Everything about them, from their tsarist uniforms to their formal morning dress, signaled a longing to restore the old regime. While Brusilov had some sympathy towards the reactionary position, he was convinced that their cause "was doomed to fail, because the Russian people, for better or worse, have chosen to oppose the monarchy". There was no point, as he explained in late April, in trying to put the clock back. "I consider the old regime as having been abolished for a very long time."
The Volunteer Army, however, was largely an officers' army and was dominated by reactionaries. This was one of the major problems that Brusilov hoped to resolve: it had not succeeded in attracting the support of the civilian population, nor even that of private soldiers. Of the first 3,000 volunteers, no more than a dozen were rank-and-file troops. There had never been such a top-heavy army in the history of warfare. Captains and colonels were forced to serve as privates. Major-generals had to make do with the command of a squadron. Constant squabbling over the command posts caused terrible headaches for the General Staff. Senior generals refused to serve under younger officers promoted strictly on merit; monarchists refused to obey commanders opposed to the Tsar. Some refused to serve below the rank they had held in the imperial army, thinking it beneath their dignity. The cafes were full of these idle officers. They dubbed the Volunteers 'toy soldiers'. Pride in their previous rank and status overcame their desire to fight.
It was this explosive situation into which Mikhail Romanov entered in April, bringing these underlying tensions to an open boil. Several of the most reactionary of the generals in Rostov and Novocherkassk now demanded that Mikhail Romanov be crowned Tsar and that rule be handed over to him - in turn expecting that Mikhail would turn over actual command to them. Brusilov fiercely opposed this, and over the course of April and early May fought an intense internal struggle over this issue. However, Brusilov's partnership with Alexeev and the fundamental unwillingness of Mikhail to become a puppet to the reactionaries on the Don turned the issue steadily in favoor of the Liberals. During this period, the Don Whites were joined by a number of Kadet party stalwarts, foremost among them Milyukov and the former Marxist-turned-liberal Kadet Pyotr Struve, who would form the political backbone of the Liberal wing of the Don Whites (3). For the time being, the Liberals were in control on the Don.
Footline:
(2) We now see one of the effects of an early and more successful capture of Moscow by the Bolsheviks and Brusilov being healthy. IOTL Brusilov came very close to joining the Don forces in early 1918, but decided against it due to the crippling leg injury he had sustained and his complete disdain for Kornilov, who had joined Alexeev in early 1918. IOTL Alexeev and Kornilov ended up at loggerheads with each other constantly and the Don Whites were initially incredibly riven by factionalism. ITTL Brusilov accomplishes much of what Kornilov did, bringing a surge in recruitment, but he is also largely in agreement with Alexeev on military strategy and as such the two White leaders cooperate rather than fight each other. This means that they are significantly more successful ITTL than IOTL, but it does leave the more reactionary of the Don Whites in something of a quandary.
(3) The Don Whites are still filled with countless reactionaries, but the ball is firmly in the liberals' court. IOTL, Alexeev and Kornilov were at each other's throats until Alexeev died, which was followed by a series of military commands with little cooperation or participation from the politicians in the region - until the ascendance of Pyotr Wrangel, by which time it was far too little far too late. By contrast, at least for the time being, you have two politically aware generals in Brusilov and Alexeev leading the Don Whites, partnering with capable politicians like Milyukov and Struve who were in the region IOTL but were largely sidelined. The Don Whites are thus more clearly split between reactionary and liberal wings, but are led better and have a higher likelihood of developing an actual base of support. The presence of Mikhail Romanov is quite simply a ticking time bomb waiting to go off, but for the time being the monarchists have been sidelined.
White Forces During the White Rising
The Treaty Crisis
The 24th of April 1918 dawned red. In private homes and clubs, salons and secret meeting points throughout the city, men armed themselves in preparation for the coming strike. The White Rising began with a surprise assault on the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where White conspirators had infiltrated the supply deliveries - one of them owning the company transporting food into it. Two dozen men, armed and hidden in produce wagons, were admitted through a side gate and quickly overcame the tired guards. Creeping silently through the fortress after opening the gates to further reinforcements, the Whites soon captured the fortress commandant alongside most of the garrison - who were only just waking in their barracks. The conspirators now moved to the prison cells, where they found the four prisoners in good health if bored out of their minds, and released them. With Kornilov and his compatriots free and the fortress in hand, messages were sent out initiating the next phase of the coup.
In a series of coordinated strikes, ministries and governmental offices across the city were attacked, with most of them falling without a fight. However, the most important of these attacks, that on the Tauride itself, would end in disaster when guardsmen opened fire on the conspirators with a machine-gun. With the morning quiet pierced by the bursts of fire from the machine-gun, the government became aware of the ongoing coup. The RSDLP military organisation ordered the mobilisation of the Red Guard while Constituent Assembly delegates hid themselves away and sought to make contact with any source of authority in the city they could find. It was at this point that a series of targeted assassinations was attempted, having been delayed for several hours due to a lack of coordination and dislike between the different coup leaders responsible. This was why Trotsky, Kamenev and Martov all survived the assassination attempts on them, often having left hours before the assassins turned up. Zinoviev was less lucky, finding himself caught on his doorstep as he responded to messengers bringing word of the coup, and was left to bleed out in the street.
A second assault on the Tauride was attempted a few hours after the first, this time with proper backing, and the seat of the Constituent Assembly fell to the Whites. This was what prompted Trotsky to dispatch secret messengers to his closest allies in the city, suggesting that they abandon the city and make their escape eastward on the trains that Trotsky had been quietly preparing over the previous weeks. As more and more of Petrograd awoke to the sound of gunfire, fighting spread through the city. However, to the shock of many in the RSDLP they found their support amongst the workers of Petrograd negligible, with barely one-in-five Red Guards turning up at their arranged postings and half that number refusing to fight.
Historians would question this incredible fall in popularity by the RSDLP, and the Constituent Assembly as a whole, in Petrograd and would commonly trace it to the decisions made in January which culminated in the restarting of the war with the Parsky Offensive. During that offensive, many of the most stalwart supporters of the Assembly, and particularly the RSDLP, had flocked to the front and died ignominiously. The great losses experienced by the Petrograd Red Guards, who had been dispatched to the front in response to the German counter offensive, had in turn both killed off the most fervent and left the remainder bitter at the deaths of their friends. The end result was that what desultory fighting the Red Guards did on behalf of the Constituent Assembly and the RSDLP soon collapsed in on itself, particularly once the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress began firing on them.
During the days of the White Rising, hundreds of student leaders, Marxist intellectuals, union bosses and various other left-wing figures were pulled from their beds and shot in the street. They were joined by as many as a hundred delegates to the Assembly, who were killed during the events of 24th and 25th April, while many more scattered in all directions. Some went south to the Ukraine or the Don, others to Moscow, while more followed Trotsky on his march east or went into exile. At the same time, the small core of reactionaries who had been expelled by Trotsky from the Assembly were paraded into the Tauride and declared the legitimate Constituent Assembly. They in turn decided the appoint Lavr Kornilov as Vozhd of Russia - in effect naming him military dictator. Boris Savinkov was appointed Chairman of the Constituent Assembly, despite not being an elected member of the body, and in effect would come to function as a prime minister to Kornilov, managing the political side of governing while Kornilov busied himself with military matters. Krymov and Denikin were given prominent positions in Kornilov's Military General Staff, with the former named as Chief of Staff and the latter given control of whatever field forces would be available to them. By the 26th, Kornilov and his Whites had secured control of Petrograd itself (4).
The German reaction to the White Rising was confused and uncertain at first, with dispatches back to Berlin asking for clarification on what to do. At the same time, the Germans sent messengers demanding that Kornilov sign the treaty on the table. Before a message could arrive from Berlin, Kornilov had rejected the treaty and the German diplomats had given the order to take Petrograd. While a message from Külhmann rushed eastward - ordering a halt to proceedings while the Foreign Minister tried to figure out what had been going on at Gatchina and in Petrograd, German heavy artillery began bombarding the Fortress of Peter and Paul while naval forces sailed deeper into the Gulf of Finland.
In response to artillery fire from the Kronstadt Naval Base, the German navy launched an incredible bombardment which shattered all resistance before sending in their marines, who would mop up what resistance remained behind - among the few who escaped were an anarchist faction around Stepan Petrichenko, who would arrive in Moscow to mass acclaim. At the same time, elements of the Eighth Army moved through the suburbs of Petrograd, securing one part of the city after another and putting down resistance with extreme prejudice wherever they encountered it. Kornilov, realizing that the situation was beginning to collapse around him, declared a unilateral surrender to the Germans. The White forces around the city handed over arms to the Germans and directed them towards "trouble spots" across the city - the Germans coming to function in effect as a final boot to the face for what remained of the Red resistance in the city. Kornilov was incredibly lucky, in that Kühlmann's message arrived soon after his surrender, followed by news that the Foreign Minister was on his way to Petrograd to take personal hand in the completely out-of-control situation.
When Kühlmann realised how far beyond their remits the negotiators had gone, he had them detained and transferred while he took personal command of the negotiations with Kornilov. What followed was a series of meetings with Kornilov and his "cabinet" in which Kühlmann realised that if he played his cards right, he might just be able to remove the threat of Russia for at least a generation. What followed became known as the Treaty of the Tauride, named for where the negotiations took place. Working from the baseline of what Hoffmann and he had initially planned for the Gatchina negotiations, Kühlmann was able to secure an extension of Prussia along the Neman and Bug Rivers and expanded the Silesian border to the Warta River, while moving the borders between the two rivers further south, firmly securing Germany's eastern borders on a series of defensible rivers, while the remainder of Russian Poland would be turned into a puppet Kingdom of Poland. The Baltic Provinces of Courland and Livonia, in addition to the Moonsund Archipelago, would be formed into a second puppet state. Kornilov would accept the independence of Georgia and Lithuania, as well as the transfer of the remainder of the Transcaucasia to the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Kornilov would accept German occupation and exploitation of the Ukraine, though Kühlmann promised to support an eventual return of the region to Kornilov after the war in a secret paragraph to the treaty. In return, Germany waived indemnities and established favourable trade relations, returned Belarus, Estonia and Petrograd itself while pledging to support the Petrograd government and acknowledge it as the sole legitimate government of Russia (5).
Given the concessions that the Constituent Assembly had been making previously, according to the White press in Petrograd, Kornilov had seemingly pulled off little less than a miraculous master stroke in the diplomatic negotiations. While there were some who grumbled at the loss of Poland, the Baltic outside Estonia, Ukraine and the Transcaucasia - the vast majority were little less than ecstatic at how lightly they had seemingly had to pay when compared to how badly it could have gone. Kornilov would take full advantage of his role as successful peacemaker, making it a prominent part of his propaganda machine, while the Germans slowly transferred control back to the Petrograd government, handing over arms and supplies while leaving behind military advisors and a strong diplomatic presence in Petrograd itself with which to guide the new Russian government (6).
At the same time as the Germans took control of Petrograd, they also secured control of a wealth of documents which served to outline the various discussions, negotiations and treaties which had been undertaken by the Allies over the course of the war. This would prove to be a true treasure trove of propaganda material for the Central Powers, who immediately began incorporating them in their propaganda, with Kühlmann implementing them as a central part of his diplomatic strategy aimed at undermining the relationships between the various Allied powers while, while at the same time the secret treaties were used to help shore up public support for the war. The ability of the Germans to now provide originals and copies of allied treaties greatly strengthened their credibility and caused the Allies immense trouble.
The Germans were quick to hand over copies of the Treaty of London to the horrified Austro-Hungarian government - who set about incorporating its contents into their propaganda. The demands in the Treaty of London were an imperialist manifesto of the most damaging sort - promising extensive territorial aggrandisement for Italy, in the form of Tyrol, northern Dalmatia, the entire Austrian Littoral, large sections of the Duchy of Carniola and parts of Carinthia. In addition, the Italians had been promised the Dodecanese Islands, a protectorate in Albania, parts of the German colonies in Asia and Africa and, in the event of a Turkish partition, was promised extensive lands therefrom as well. Further Austro-Hungarian lands were promised to the Serbs and Montenegrins. In effect, the treaty promised the bloody dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire and the submission of its peoples to Serbs and Italians. This was joined by the similar Treaty of Bucharest, which had brought Romania into the war, where the Allies had promised extensive territorial aggrandisement in Transylvania, the Banat and Bukovina.
The effects were explosive, with massive pro-war demonstrations gripping many of the Habsburg Empire's major cities - with some support even given by the disparate nationalist movements who felt betrayed and lied to by the Allied powers. More than anything else, the revelation of the Secret Treaties, done in such an explosive manner so as to spread news as widely as possible across Austro-Hungarian media, boosted the popularity of the war in this crucial period. The message ran thus - while the Allies had threatened, and continued to threaten, the Empire with dismemberment in favour of their murderous neighbours, Austria-Hungary was victorious in the field. On three out of four fronts they were victorious, while the fourth was contained for the time being. Only internal turmoil and treason could now rob them of victory now.
The second set of treaties used by the Germans were the conflicting and confused Sykes-Picot Agreement, Balfour Declaration and McMahon-Hussein Correspondence. The Sykes-Picot agreement outlined the division of the Middle East between France and Britain, completely ignoring the concurrent agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who had been promised the establishment of an Arab Kingdom covering much of the same territories that the Allies claimed for themselves. The third agreement, the Balfour Declaration, had promised Jewish settlement of Palestine in spite of intense Arab resistance to the idea, and thus contradicted both the McMahon and Sykes-Picot treaties. While it would take time for the news of these contradictory treaties to spread to the Middle East, when they did so it was with explosive effect.
The revelations of the Secret Treaties caused President Woodrow Wilson of the United States a grievous political wound, contradicting as they did the very first point of his peace proposal for "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." The fallout from the treaty publications in Germany would stagger the Allied Home Fronts at precisely the moment where they needed popular support the most. While the national medias in the United States, Britain and France all fought to muddy the waters and obfuscate these revelations, their contents now began to sour the Allied public to the war effort and undermine their image as liberators of the disenfranchised peoples of the world (7).
Footnotes:
(4) There are a lot of reasons why this second coup proves so much more immediately successful than the first. They centre on three primary factors:
1) The Constituent Assembly and the RSDLP in particular having left the population of the city completely apathetic and dispirited in the wake of their numerous failures.
2) The planning behind this attempt being far more detailed, thought out and prepared - having been in the works since Zavoiko was released from prison.
3) The RSDLP was already halfway out the door, and as such what dispirited resistance that the Whites face soon collapse through a lack of numbers, support, supplies and direction on the part of the Constituent Assembly.
(5) This is a significantly smaller demand than IOTL and is highly reflective of the fact that it is Hoffmann and Kühlmann determining what they want out of events. The fact that it is a White government that they are treating with, rather than the Bolsheviks, significantly changes the entire dynamic of the negotiations. Particularly, it leaves the Germans with the conviction that if they make some adjustments to their demands (most significantly promising to return the Ukraine), then they might actually be able to transform Russia into a friendly power under what could easily become a puppet regime.
(6) Kornilov really reaps a ton of undeserved credit for this diplomatic success, but it does set him well on the way to securing his position as leader of the reactionary White faction - though not of the monarchist brand, at least for now. The Petrograd regime is basically a military dictatorship with a very thin veneer of nationalism patched on top and an extra helping of rubber-stamp democracy in the form of the neutered Petrograd Constituent Assembly. This is our second White faction of the incipient Russian Civil War.
(7) We are far from done examining the impact of the publication of the Secret Treaties, but it will take some time for their impact to truly be felt. The important thing to keep in mind is that the circumstances surrounding the publication of these secret treaties are quite different from IOTL, in that it is the German government itself sharing the contents of the Allied secret treaties, rather than the Bolsheviks. This has a number of consequences, not least that their impact in the Central Powers is significantly greater. This is partly because of Kühlmann's intervention to accomplish exactly that, but also due to the fact that Hoffmann works better with the civilian side of the German government than Ludendorff or Hindenburg did IOTL. However, the fact it is the Germans publishing the treaties means that the Allied populations are, at least initially, more untrusting of the what is published. However, the contents of the treaties is picked up by the anti-war factions in all three major Allied nations who begin chipping away at the Allied war fervour.
The Signing of the Tauride Treaty
The Bell Ringing Across All-Russia
When Trotsky fled Petrograd in late April he did so accompanied by almost 2,000 Red Guard loyalists, beginning their steady shift from a regional militia to the primary military force of the RSDLP, and almost 10,000 party officials, family members alongside various other miscellaneous figures who had been deemed important enough to bring along. Trotsky was well prepared and traveled in style, having stolen the Tsar's personal armoured train for the trip, and the caravan as a whole was both heavily armed and well supplied. While the rest of the RSDLP leadership tried to come to terms with their rapid fall from power, Trotsky was swift to exploit their distraction to emerge as the undoubted leader of the entire endeavour. This, in addition to Trotsky's careful choices of who to bring along, meant that from this point forward Trotsky successfully emerged as the undisputed leader of the RSDLP.
By the time the convoy reached the first transfer point at Bologoye, having been joined by the carts in Veliky Novgorod en route, the remaining leaders had recovered and the RSDLP Central Committee organised a meeting. Over the course of two hours the committee decided in favour of Trotsky's plan to make an attempt at capturing Yekaterinburg from the Bolsheviks and establishing their new centre at the heart of Russia. From Bologoye, the convoy would bypass Moscow to its north, taking rail to Yaroslav where they drove out the Bolshevik Soviet in control of the city. In Yaroslav they went of a looting spree, further expanding their already large mass of supplies, before continuing eastward. They next tore through Nizhny Novgorod, leaving more than a hundred White and Bolshevik supporters dead in their wake while they continued their efforts at resupplying and looting while recruiting from amongst the disaffected youth of the city. From city to city, they made their way eastward, taking Arzamas, Saransk, Penza and Syzran before capturing Samara in early June 1918.
Rather than loot Samara , the RSDLP decided to set up a rear guard on the Volga to shield them from a potential assault by the Bolsheviks, who so far had yet to challenge the RSDLP due to the fact that most of their forces had been focused in the south. From Samara, through Ufa and Chelyabinsk, before eventually on arrival at Yekaterinburg, the RSDLP took a far more popular approach to their conquests, with the focus being on securing popular support. The capture of Yekaterinburg, in particular, would demonstrate the positive impression that the RSDLP had been able to create in the region - contrasting sharply with the harsh regime under Filipp Goloshchyokin. Arriving in their armoured trains, the RSDLP Red Guards, who had grown to number almost 12,000 during the trip eastward, were able to storm the outskirts of the city in spite of intensive machine-gun fire. From there, they pressed ever further into the city, overrunning Bolshevik positions and bombarding key fortified buildings with the guns of their armoured trains to great success. Filipp Goloshchyokin was dragged from his office to safety by his bodyguard, kicking and screaming in rage, as he had planned to fight to the death. The Bolsheviks were forced to retreat from the city, surrendering control of the Ural mountains in the process.
The long march by the Bolsheviks from Yekaterinburg to Nizhny Novgorod would be sharply contested by the RSDLP forces, but they eventually made their escape across the Volga. The RSDLP was now controlled a vast segment of central Russia, cutting off the Bolsheviks from their Siberian holdings - which would largely fall into RSDLP hands or descend into anarchy as a result. Trotsky was next declared General Secretary of the RSDLP alongside an appointment as Chairman of the Peoples' Commissariats, as the new ministries of the RSDLP would come to be known. The relatively powerless post as Premier of the Russian Republic, the de jure Head of State, would be granted to Alexei Rykov in an effort to properly integrate his influential wing of the party into the leadership, while reducing his actual ability to impact the government - Rykov having grown into a thorn in Trotsky's side during the long march east. The government in Yekaterinburg would declare itself the rightful government of the Russian Republic on the basis of their reconstituted Constituent Assembly numbering 180 elected delegates on the 7th of July 1918. However, in sharp contrast to the former Constituent Assembly, the new Assembly was little more than a rubber stamp, agreeing to any proposal set forth by the new government. The Yekaterinburg Reds were effectively under the Single Party rule of the RSDLP, which in turn centralised power to a much greater extent in its central committee, and in Trotsky above everyone else (8).
On the Don, the Whites found themselves the target of a focused assault by the Bolsheviks during the first several months of 1918. After being expelled from Rostov in the last days of 1917, the Bolsheviks had shifted the weight of their arms further northward to Kharkov while significantly expanding their control of weapons production at the arsenal city of Tula. Here they appointed the first of a series of political officers, who would ensure the loyalty of the city and were granted extraordinary powers to do so. By March of 1918, the Bolsheviks were ready to attack and proceeded to sweep down on the Donbas and Don Host in the south.
As an army of Russian officers, the Volunteers were always bound to have a problem with their Cossack hosts. The White leaders had made the Don their base because they had presumed the Don Cossacks to be stalwart supporters of the old order, but this owed more to nineteenth-century myths than to twentieth-century realities. In fact, the Cossacks were themselves divided, both on regional and generational lines. In the northern districts the Cossacks were smallholders, like the local Russian peasants, and generally supported the ideas advanced by the younger and more democratic Cossack officers for a socialist republic that would unite them with the peasantry. The northerners resented the southern districts, both for their wealth and for the pretensions of their elders to speak for the territory as a whole. The younger, war-weary Cossacks from the Front, influenced by the officers risen from their ranks, were more inclined to find some accord with Bolshevik Russia than to fight against it. Thus it was really only in the southern Don, where the Cossacks were more wealthy and more determined to defend their historic landed privileges against the demands of the Russian peasants for land reform, that the Cossacks were prepared to fight the Bolsheviks.
Most of the Cossacks of the northern Don, by contrast, rallied behind the Military Revolutionary Council in Kamenskaia led by the officer Filipp Mironov, who had organised the Don Cossack revolt of 1905—6. Mironov's aim was an independent socialist republic uniting the Cossacks with the Russian peasants. But in effect his MRC was to serve as a fifth column for the Bolshevik troops as they invaded the Don from eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the Don's industrial cities the mainly Russian workers, who were generally supportive of the Bolsheviks, staged a number of protest strikes against the presence of the Volunteers. The workers massacred suspected supporters of the Whites, which in effect meant all the burzhooi they could get their hands on, while the Whites carried out equally savage reprisals, putting out the eyes and cutting off the noses of hundreds of strikers despite prohibitions on these exact acts sent out by the Don General Staff. In short, there was a spiral of increasing terror as the cities of the Don descended into civil war.
To a growing number of the local Cossacks, all this appeared to be an alien conflict imported from Russia. The younger Cossacks who had spent the past three years at the Front were especially hostile to the idea of fighting for the Whites. So there was a growing split between Cossack fathers and Cossack sons and Kaledin's forces steadily began to fall apart as the younger Cossacks turned their backs on war. The defense of the Don was thus left to the Volunteer Army and a dwindling number of mainly older Cossacks who remained loyal to Kaledin. Despite limited supplies and finance, the Rostov middle classes having significant reservations about supporting the Volunteers, the Volunteers were motivated and growing by the day. On the 8th March, ten days after a workers' uprising in the city, the Reds captured Taganrog. They were now less than fifty miles from Rostov. The Second Battle of Rostov, fought in the suburbs of the city, dwarfed the struggle that had led to the capture of the city by the Don Whites, with 4,000 Volunteers opposing the assault of almost 6,000 Bolsheviks under the command of Yuriy Sablin. The three-day battle that resulted would enter White mythology, as one in four of the defenders gave their lives and limbs in defense of the city while leaving a third of the Bolsheviks dead or wounded and sent them shattered in retreat. This victory would prove to be the foundation of Brusilov's leadership and boosted his popularity with the middle classes and the Volunteers immensely (9).
The news that inundated Moscow between March and June of 1918 forced the Bolshevik leadership to constantly shift and adapt to the developing situation. The failure of their Don-Donbas Offensive was outweighed by good news from the Ukraine, where the Bolsheviks under Mikhail Murayov had successfully wrested control of Kiev from the Rada, which they had promptly sacked. This had prompted the German troops occupying the region to counterattack, driving the Bolsheviks out of the city, however the relationship between the German occupation and the Rada was by then swiftly collapsing.
On the 25th of April, the administration of Army Group Kiev suspected the latest Rada government under Vsevolod Holubovych of kidnapping of Abram Dobry, the chairman of the Foreign Trade Bank in Kiev. Through that bank the German occupational forces were officially conducting all financial operations with the Reichsbank in Berlin and the Germans were convinced this was a move to end their exploitation of the Ukraine. The next day, German General Alexander von Linsingen, in command of the occupying Army Group Kiev, issued a decree according to which all criminal cases in the territory of Ukraine could selectively fall under the jurisdiction of the German field military court instead of the Ukrainian court system. While the Rada condemned German interference in their internal matters, Lieutenant General Pavlo Skoropadskyi used the ongoing congress of some 6,000 delegates from the various parts of the Ukraine to launch a coup, declaring himself Hetman of the Ukraine and stating his support for the German proposal. The Germans were swift to support this move, hoping for more stability in the region, but Skoropadskyi quickly found his popularity cratering in response to the ever fiercer depredations of the Austro-Hungarian and German occupiers.
Another bit of news to reach Moscow related to the White Rising in late April and the resultant collapse of the Russian State. The Bolsheviks were swift to exploit this development, declaring that a new series of elections would be held to reestablish a legitimate Constituent Assembly, this time in Moscow. The resultant elections, which were largely limited to Bolshevik-controlled regions and excluded 'rightist' parties like the Trudoviks and Kadets, gave the Bolshevik party a supermajority in the Moscow-based Constituent Assembly, but also saw largescale support for other far-left parties, including the Anarchists, Left SRs and a rare few RSDLP candidates. However, most of these RSDLP candidates would find themselves marginalised and eventually expelled following the RSDLP's rape of the Bolshevik-controlled cities on their long trek to Yekaterineburg.
At the same time, in response to significant food shortages and the practice of factory workers stealing from their work places to sell goods in the countryside, the Central Committee ordered the organisation of factory and village soviets under Bolshevik auspices, which were permitted to trade with each other under the guidance of Grigori Sokolnikov. It was here that the future architect of the Muscovite Red economy first began to experiment with the Bolshevik economic platform once it became clear that the Central Committee was open to his plans for introducing elements of syndicalist, anarchist and free market thought to the Bolshevik economic reforms (10). It would be the fall of Yekaterinburg which finally led the Bolsheviks to fully refocus their military forces northward from the Don and Donbas region, just as the Don Host descended into chaos and bloody civil war.
Footnotes:
(8) This is the story of Trotsky's rise to sole power in Yekaterinburg and sees him largely subordinate all other possible political leaders in the party to his wishes. The decision to use Rykov as Head of State has much the same reasoning as the decision to name Mikhail Kalinin as head of state had for Stalin - namely ensuring that it is a Russian head of state, rather than a Jew or Georgian. However, Trotsky is now in a clearly dominant position within the party, something that it took Stalin until the late 1920s to achieve, and he has no clear rival within the RSDLP. Martov has lost what taste he had for power and is largely relegated to chairing the powerless Constituent Assembly while Kamenev is the closest political ally his brother-in-law has at this point.
(9) This is based on the events of the OTL Don-Donbas Operation which IOTL saw the Whites swept away in disgrace and defeat, forcing them to undertake a nightmarish march across the ice and steppes to the Kuban. ITTL the larger levels of recruitment effected by Brusilov, coupled with more skilled leadership and greater cohesion amongst the armed forces result in a White victory, thus preserving the initial White control of the Don. However, support amongst the Don Cossacks is collapsing completely around them and without the presence of the Volunteers in the Kuban events there will play out quite differently.
(10) Yup, you read that right. The Moscow Bolsheviks are going to be rather more open-minded towards alternative leftist forms of organising the state. They still believe in party vanguardism and the power of a singular driving force for change, leaving them leery of a multi-party system, but they are happy to accept a very broad variety of views within their party. I look forward to experimenting alongside Sokolnikov.
End Note:
This marks the real beginning of the Russian Civil War and the splintering of the Russian Republic into half a dozen major factions - with more to come. The main thing to take away from this update is that the Reds are as fundamentally divided as the Whites and that the Germans can turn their attention firmly westward - finally. There is a lot of jumping back and forth in time in this update, for which I apologise, but it didn't make a lot of sense to keep it strictly chronological once we left Petrograd and its environs.
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I've got to say, this update completely blew away my expectations for the TL's future; I was previously expecting a RSDLP victory in Russia, and an Allied victory in the Great War. Now though, I'm completely unsure who will come out on top. You've certainly managed to change my view on a CP victory, so I'd like to see what a future (possibly White) Russia would look like in a CP victory scenario. On the Civil War: will it be bloodier or less so than the one IOTL? The Whites in Petrograd certainly seem to be in an excellent position, what with German support and Kornilov's diplomatic "victory", but the Bolsheviks seem the strongest faction at the moment; so far, there's been little suggestion that there's much dissent in their territory. Eager to see the next update!
It is not like they were the most likely of bedfellows to begin with, but I do find it fun to imagine Brusilov saying that with a valley girl accent.
The Green Armies were not a singular entity and were never an actual "faction" vying for ultimate power IOTL. They are present and I will discuss them when we get back around to Russia, but it will be a while before we do so. There is a ton of stuff coming up in the west that will take up most of the next several updates.
Fantastic to hear that it surprised you, the fact that you are uncertain of who will come out on top should give you a good idea of how much the various world powers are freaking out about Russia at this point. Everything is seemingly going to hell in a handbasket and they are left fretting about whether they will be next.
I was actually originally leaning towards the RSDLP being able to pull out of the war and hold onto power when I was mapping this out prior to actually writing on the TL, but it left them in too central a position and prevented me from going the direction I wanted to.
Interesting that I changed your mind about CP victory, though I will say that isn't necessarily happening ITTL either. The Civil War will be very different from IOTL, though it could well get even bloodier than IOTL. I think it is more a question of who (if anyone) wins out, how soon the fighting ends and how many of the factions are able to hold on for how long.
The Petrograd Whites are definitely in the best position out of the Whites at the moment (we will see Whites emerge in Siberia in the next Russian update and the Don Whites are going to be going through a lot of transformation to the south), but how long that remains the case is a different matter.
The Bolsheviks are threatened from three sides and are pressed on by quite significant internal revolutionary fervor - for better and worse as we will come to see.
I can't wait to share the next update, where we get to see what the Germans have been up to in the west. Going to be a lot of fun.
Events in Finland will be covered in the next Russian update - their proximity to the Petrograd Whites will play a role in events there. The whole leadup to and declaration of independence has also undergone considerable changes to account for events in Russia.
Well, when put that way it makes a lot more sense
Kolchak does figure into the TL, but as of right now he isn't really a person of any real importance - the British haven't decided if they want to send him to Siberia or not.
The thing is, a lot of the stuff in Central and Eastern Europe can change depending on what happens to the west. If the region becomes relevant any time soon I will deal with it, but otherwise it will have to wait until the end of the Great War and however it comes to an end.
Well, based on a comment about Lithuanian independence, I decided to exclude them from the Baltic Duchies ITTL, so they are going to be moving forward as one of the German puppet states in the region. Unless something drastic happens to bring them to the fore before the end of the Great War, I will only get to them at that point.
Lithuania was excluded from the Baltic duchies and planned as a separate satellite state in OTL, too, so that was a fairly redundant decision you made.
Looking forward to it though!
Honestly one of the best compliments I can imagine
Lithuania was excluded from the Baltic duchies and planned as a separate satellite state in OTL, too, so that was a fairly redundant decision you made.
Looking forward to it though!
God damnit! This is why I don't want to get into the absolute bloody nightmare that is Central-Eastern Europe just yet, I haven't had to research it properly yet beyond the bare outline so I still have dumb preconceptions like that. That said, when I get to it I will have taken the time to work through it. Right now I am dealing with the latter half of 1918 - hooo boy is that a shit show - and trying to read up on the Versailles Treaty period. Lithuania hasn't been mentioned much more than in brief in the more general books I am on right now, but I will have to take the time to get into it when the war ends.
I have a tendency to turn everything into a massive shit show with lots of backstabbery and assholery, but then again I think a lot of OTL history is like that as well.
With the reds in several pieces, the big plus they had over the whites, unity, is gone. With the overall war going the way it is the Germans are bigger players and will tend to be around longer - the odds have shifted in favor of the whites, but a divided Russia is a very likely outcome. If the caucasus is going to go to the Ottomans, God help the Armenians.