What if prior to/during WW2, the Soviets had something like the French Foreign Legion, but Soviet?
AHC: Soviet Foreign Legion
ben0628
Banned
So non-Soviets joining a military unit that is led by the Soviet Union?
Seems fairly simple, have communists across the globe go the Soviet Union and fight under them to initiate a global revolution. The only problem is that the Soviet Union was actually fighting ongoing wars during this time or anything. Pre WW2, they were pretty isolationist for the most part. I could see a Soviet Foreign Legion fighting in Spain possibly, but at that point you'd think that non Soviet communists would rather fight in other Republican units instead of the Soviet One?
Seems fairly simple, have communists across the globe go the Soviet Union and fight under them to initiate a global revolution. The only problem is that the Soviet Union was actually fighting ongoing wars during this time or anything. Pre WW2, they were pretty isolationist for the most part. I could see a Soviet Foreign Legion fighting in Spain possibly, but at that point you'd think that non Soviet communists would rather fight in other Republican units instead of the Soviet One?
There were plenty of then during Revolution and even during WWII you can find plenty of foreign nationals fighting in Soviet Army.
For example many Spaniards fought in Soviet Army and Air Force against Nazis.
There was Czechoslovak battalion in USSR, later Brigade and later Army corps under Ludviks Svoboda, future Czechoslovak president, Polish Army corps around Anders, after his evacuation Soviets built another Polish Army. Pro forma they were independent but equipped by Soviets and basically completely under their operational control. There was even Romanian Infantry division Tudor Vladimirescu. French had their Normandy-Nemen fighter regiment in USSR flying Jak-3s. Czechoslovaks had first fighter regiment using La-5FN later whole division flying combat missions in 1945 La-5FNs, La-7s, Il-2s and Pe-2s. Same can be said for 1st Polish Army unde Zygmunt Berling in Soviet Union. Polish 1st Infanty Division, 2nd Howitzer Brigade and 1st Independent Mortar Brigade even fought in Berlin in April 1945. Czechoslovaks took part in liberation of Kiev in November 1943.
It is not exactly Foreign Legion but well, close enough. Many nationalities served in Soviet army or Soviet partisan units before their own National and quasi independent units were created.
This. Sort-of like a standing series of International Brigades. Potentially a source of personnel for deniable operations and interventions in colonial wars.
The Red Menace
Banned
In WW2 Soviet Air Force had the Normandie-Niemen Squadron/Regiment which was comprised of French pilots. So... OP already fulfilled?
Tsarist Russia had a long tradition of recruiting regiments along its frontier, then using the new recruits to invade the next tribe.
A good POD for a Russian Foreign Legion would be 1919. At the end of the Finnish Civil War, Finnish Communists were defeated and the Russian Army retreated behind historic borders. If Finnish-speaking communists had warning - of post war massacres - they would have retreated with the Red Army.
Many of those Finnish communists moved to Canada where they dug mines and chopped trees. During the Great Depression, some of those unemployed men volunteered for the MacKenzie-Paineau and Lincoln Brigades supporting the communist side of the Spanish Civil War. Communist political commissars frequently complained the Canadian and American volunteers "lacked indoctrination." That meant volunteers from NA were anti-fascist, maybe even Marxist, but rarely Leninist.
Along a similar vein, OTL the United Fruit Company ...... er ....... CIA crushed numerous "communist" uprisings in Latin America. Few of those "communist" uprisings were Leninist or Stalinist in nature. Rather they were poor peasant farmers banding together to demand a share of the agricultural wealth of their countries.
So the challenge is finding ways for Russia to sneak Foreign Legionaires into Latin America and support native revolutionaries in the long run.
A good POD for a Russian Foreign Legion would be 1919. At the end of the Finnish Civil War, Finnish Communists were defeated and the Russian Army retreated behind historic borders. If Finnish-speaking communists had warning - of post war massacres - they would have retreated with the Red Army.
Many of those Finnish communists moved to Canada where they dug mines and chopped trees. During the Great Depression, some of those unemployed men volunteered for the MacKenzie-Paineau and Lincoln Brigades supporting the communist side of the Spanish Civil War. Communist political commissars frequently complained the Canadian and American volunteers "lacked indoctrination." That meant volunteers from NA were anti-fascist, maybe even Marxist, but rarely Leninist.
Along a similar vein, OTL the United Fruit Company ...... er ....... CIA crushed numerous "communist" uprisings in Latin America. Few of those "communist" uprisings were Leninist or Stalinist in nature. Rather they were poor peasant farmers banding together to demand a share of the agricultural wealth of their countries.
So the challenge is finding ways for Russia to sneak Foreign Legionaires into Latin America and support native revolutionaries in the long run.
They did have plenty of warning as both sides in the war spread stories of atrocities of other side, many of them unfortunately true. In that sense it didn't probably surprise that many people what happened after the Whites won. (Their "cleaning operations" in conquered areas were already well-known by then.) Many Reds did actually retreat to Soviet Russia. While many of them were executed after the war and did suffer horrible conditions in prison camps in Finland, those who escaped to Russia might have actually suffered even more later on as they were one of the targets during Stalin's purges. Interestingly, one common complaint among Soviets was that Finnish Communists were too nationalist. Many of them couldn't speak Russian even after spending almost two decades in the Soviet Union for example.
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Despite the horrors of the White Finnish prison camps after the Civil War, those Reds that fled to Soviet Russia would have definitely fared better if they had stayed in Finland. Despite the long grudges that followed, after the initial mass killings and imprisonment in horrid prison camp conditions, people seen as taking part in the "revolt" were in the 20s quickly pardoned and re-integrated into a functional society. Suspicion and surveillance by the bourgeois state persisted but overt oppression did not. In the Soviet areas things were different, especially in Stalin's time. It has been recently estimated that up to half of all of the Finnish Red refugees of 1918 died in Stalin's purges.
Finnish Reds had a bigger role in the early years of the Soviet state than they are given credit for, partly just because so many of them were lost in the purges and declared enemies of the Soviet state. Many of them fought for the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Most of these people were ardent Socialists and loyal builders of the Soviet state, to boot. Their stories are often pretty interesting, and if I ever get to writing one of my long-gestating timelines, it will include somewhat happier lives for some of these people - like Verner Lehtimäki, whose OTL life already reads like a rather contrived AH story. The biggest problem for them becoming the beginning of a Soviet "Foreign Legion" might be that they were not considered "foreign" - in 1917-1920 and in the 20s Finland was seen as a rightful eventual part of the Soviet Union and not some foreign country. In St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad Finns were a commonplace sight in the Tsarist times (it was the second biggest Finnish town after Helsinki in the 1880s) and in the early years of the USSR the Finnish presence in the city was even more pronounced due to the Finnish Red exodus to escape White retribution.
In fact in general the contribution Finns have made into the development of the city (and thus all of Russia) should IMHO be more well-known and appreciated in Russia itself. The thing is, though, that giving such a spotlight to national minorities (be it Finnish, Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic, Baltic German, Jewish etc) has never been an appreciated theme for Russian-Soviet-Russian historiography which has inflated the position of the ethnic Russians at the expence of everyone else. This is of course part and parcel of any country's history as written for the majority population by nationalists.
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Assuming that it was raised pre-WW2, it probably gets gutted/encircled during the first few weeks of Barbarossa.