Leninmir: an Early Twentieth Century Timeline

On one hand, Panzram's earlier death is good riddance and has prevented him from going on his murderous, child-raping spree. On the other hand, holy shit, this is going to be bad for race relations.
 
The New Horsemen and the Earth that Followed
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"Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison."
--Heinrich Heine, 1842*
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Petrograd
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3 December 1920
I shall describe my day — not because the minor details are of interest in themselves but because they are typical of the lives of nearly everyone — with the exception of a few bosses.

Today I got up at 9 a.m. There is no point getting up before since it is dark and the house lights are not working. There is a shortage of fuel. I have no servant (why is another story) and have to do the samovar, care for my sick wife (down with Spanish ’flu) and fetch the wood for the stove alone. I drank some coffee (made from oats) without milk or sugar, of course, and ate a piece of bread from a loaf bought two weeks ago for 1,500 roubles. There was even a little butter and in this respect, I am better off than most. By eleven I was ready to go out. But after such a breakfast I was still hungry and decided to eat in the vegetarian canteen. It is frightfully expensive but the only place in Petrograd I know where one can eat with relative ease and without registration or the permission of some commissar. It turned out that even this canteen was closed, and would not be open for another hour, so I went on to the Third Petrograd University, in fact now closed as a university but where there is still a cafeteria in which I am registered to eat. There I hoped to get something to eat for myself, my wife and our friends, the Vvedenskys, who are also registered to eat there. But here too I had no luck: there was a long queue of hopeful eaters, tedium and vexation written on their faces; the queue was not moving at all. What was the problem? The boiler had broken down and there would be a delay of at least an hour.

Anyone reading this in the distant future may suppose that these people were expecting a banquet. But the whole meal was a single dish — usually a thin soup with a potato or cabbage in it. There is no question of any meat. Only the privileged few ever get that — i.e. the people who work in the kitchens.

I decided to leave and put off eating until after work. By 1 p.m. the tram had still not come so I returned to the canteen: there was still no food and no prospect of it for at least another half an hour. There was no choice but to go to work hungry.

At the Nikolaev Bridge I finally caught up with a No. 4 tram. There was no current on the line and the tram was stationary. I still don’t understand this. All the trams had stopped but why had they started out if they knew that there was not enough fuel to complete their journeys? People remained seated — some at last gave up and got off to walk towards their destinations, while others sat there with Sisyphean patience. Two hours later I saw the trams were running but by 5 p.m. they had all stopped again.

By 2 p.m. I had reached the archive by foot. I stayed for half an hour and then went on to the University, where there was supposed to be a ration of cabbage handed out at 3 p.m. To whom I did not know. Perhaps to professors — it was worth the chance. But again I was out of luck: it turned out that the cabbage had not been delivered and would be given out tomorrow. And not to professors but only to students.

I also found out that there would be no bread ration for a week: some people said that all the bread had already been given out to the Communists who run all the committees.

From the University I went home, saw to my wife, did what was needed and went back to the vegetarian canteen with the hope of eating. Again out of luck: all the food was gone and there would be no more for at least an hour. I decided not to wait but went to the Vvedenskys to ask them if they could queue there later.

From there I went back home at 5 p.m. And there I had my first piece of luck of the day: the lights in our sector were switched on. That gave me one precious hour to read — the first hour of the day free from running around for meals, bread, or cabbage, or fetching wood. At six I went to the Vvedenskys to eat (at last!), and came back to write these lines. At nine it went dark. Luckily a friend of ours came to look after my wife for a couple of hours in the evening and that gave me more precious time. After nine I lit a candle, put on the samovar, drank tea with my wife, and at eleven went to bed.

--the diary of Petrograd professor, Vasilii Vodovozov, a leading liberal of the 1900s and a friend of Lenin’s in his youth, entirely OTL
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The Red Square
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More than any land in the world, Russia in 1921 was a post-apocalyptic land. Seven years of war, disease, scarcity, and terror have created a land where death was commonplace, but the burial was a premium. Acting in their good scientific manner, funeral services were nationalized by the state which meant everyone had to apply for burial first. And there was an acute shortage of timber, including those for coffins. Coffin rental services emerged just to carry the deceased to their graves. Those who could not afford to rent them wrapped them in mats or whatever they had. There were even shortages of graves for various reasons; no one available to dig them or approve them. The morgue in Moscow was ripe with the vile smell from the hundreds of rotting corpses. The Party could not solve the problem. Free cremations required crematoriums, and the country was already barely running. And the promise of the world's most modern and greatest crematorium meant little to the still religious population at large.

Deaths did not come out of disease, cold, and starvation alone. Crime rates vent up. People killed each other out of necessity, for roubles or food, but also out of spite or grievances. A husband would murder his wife for nagging. A family would kill their elderly to save themselves from the burden of caring for them. Gorky noted once that veterans of the Great War told him it is easier to kill a compatriot than a foreigner - "Our people are many, our economy is poor; well, if hamlet is burnt, what's the loss? It would have burnt down itself in due course."*

War had encouraged the worst in people, creating sociopathy everywhere. Maxim Gorky wrote that during the Antonov uprising, peasants nailed communists with railway spikes by their left hand and left foot to trees a meter above the ground and then enjoy watching them suffer. They would slice open their stomachs, pull out the intestines and nail it to a tree of a telegraph pole before forcing the man to run around the tree or pull him while they cheered the intestines unwinding through the wound. They would carve off the skin from the shoulders of a captured officer in form of straps and force nails in place of pips; skins would be pulled off along the lines of the sword belt and trouser stripes. This torture was called "to dress in uniform" and required time to perfect it.*

By the end of 1921, there were nearly seven million orphaned children living in the streets, sewers, empty factories, abandoned houses, and elsewhere.* They flocked like birds or swarmed like rats, depending on your metaphor. Scores of them would rush into stores and rob them or pickpocket adults. On train stations, they would scoop scraps of food thrown at them from the trains. Prostitution was rampant and happened on the streets and halls. Various citizens rented corners of their rooms for paedophiliac activities in return for a portion of their earnings. Twelve-year-olds, many of them were already fathers and mothers, murderers, alcoholics, and even heroin addicts. Drugs were easier to procure than bread in cities.

Bolsheviks were overwhelmed with the millions of animal-like children and abandoned their 1918 principle of „no courts or prisons for children.“ Many of them were sent to prisons and labor camps. Even more fothem were sent to factories to replace adult workers. They would work for a portion of the wages for up to 12 or 14 hours every day and there were always more children desperate for work. Adults found themselves laid off in favor of replaceable children.* The public called for humanity, for the child labor to be reduced to six hours with two hours devoted to their education. But who would enforce that? Police had less crime on the street and how would they deal with employers who would not play teacher?

Orphan teenagers found themselves embraced by the Red Army. Having lived half of their lives surrounded by violence, they had little inhibitions towards killing. Their commanders were their surrogate fathers who manipulated them into believing they were avenging their parents or other injustices. Only red child soldiers had access to education, clothing, heating, and food. [...]

The grave crisis would soon have an utterly worse remedy.

The great famine of 1921 and 1922 was spurred by extreme weather in the Volga region. Severe droughts in summer and severe frost in winter were a natural recurrence. Before 1921, there were harvest failures in 1911, and before that in 1906, and before that in 1891... Peasants were used to this and stored grain in communal barns. Unfortunately, whatever reserves existed during the previous years were confiscated by the Bolsheviks and carried off to the cities and the military. Peasants withdrew into subsistence production and even then, Bolsheviks tried to forcefully requisition the same amount of grain as in the years before. They took even the seed and hay. The already significant crop failure of 1920 was followed by heavy frost and then scorching summer. Strong winds blew away the topsoil and dustbowls were reported. Whatever seed was not destroyed by frost or blown away by the wind, barely grew before being devoured by locusts and rats.

Famine spread through Volga, Urals, Ukraine, Siberia, Central Asia, all the way to Moscow. Approximately one in four Russians was starving. They ate clay, acorn flour, leaves, weeds, grass, moss, bark, sawdust, and manure. They caught any animal they could get - cats, dogs, and rodents were slaughtered en masse. The dead would have meager strips of flesh cut off and there were rumors of cannibalism. As flu mowed down the sick and the elderly one Cheka report claimed that people are eating their grandparents. Investigators found skeletal people, children with bloated bellies, just lying around in settlements. Sometimes remains of caravans headed to towns would be found, belongings intact except the remains of livestock.

The situation worsened as the winter of 1921 began and whatever grub there was, froze itself. Guards had to be posted at graveyards to prevent the hungry from excavating the dead. Doctors sent to survey the crisis found themselves eating the corpses. A man was accused of eating several children in Bashkiria and he confessed. „In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village – and all of them serve up young children.“* In the village of Ivanovka (near Pugachev) a woman was discovered to be eating the remains of her dead husband along with her child. When authorities came for the remains she attacked him: „We will not give him up, we need him for food, he is our own family, and no one has the right to take him away from us.“* In the town of Pugachev children would be at risk of kidnapping by the organized bands of cannibals and cannibal traders.* Yet elsewhere, in the Novouzensk region, there was a band of children that hunted down adults.*

The Party initially quashed all rumors of famine even if the truth was widely known. Stalin, Drzhezinsky, and others forcefully confiscated harvests in Poland and carried them off to cities in a harebrained idea to bring the population in Poland down through the revolutionary experience. Hunger would weaken their resolve and awaken the class consciousness. Ukraine continued to export its grain to other regions. Even Russia continued to export various cereals (through whatever trading channels were open) to pay for various industrial equipment.*

Not until July of 1921 did the Party cave in. The situation forced the Party to call for international help out of humanitarian reasons. Lenin barely approved the All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry (Pomgol), the first independent public body under communism.* Various bourgeoise suspects were released from prisons or detention upon the urging of Maxim Gorky. Ex-tsarist politicians (N. N. Kulter), agronomists (Krondatev), engineers (Palchinsky), doctors, liberals (Prokopovich, Kuskova), artists and writers (Stanislavsky, Korolenko) and even the daughter of Tolstoy were all made members of the Pomgol along with a cell of twelve communist-led by Kamenev. Lenin was deeply paranoid that the famine crisis should not give the rise of opposition just as it had in 1891.

The Pomgol appealed on the basis of humanism and sympathy for Russia. Expatriates collected money and sent off food supplies from Paris. But the real goal of the Politburo was the American Relief Administration. It had grown out of Herber Hoover's Great war aid dictatorship and continued after the Great war to help supply food and medicines. Hoover had become the Secretary of Treasury under president Wood but still practically ran the organization. Hoover had two conditions: independence for the relief workers in Russia and the release of all US citizens from Bolshevik jails. Lenin was absolutely furious: „One must punish Hoover, one must publicly slap his face so that the whole world sees.“* But he had to cave in.

As soon as ARA agreed to help Russia Lenin ordered it to be closed down despite protests from Gorsky and Kamenev who believed it could be further useful. Less than a month after its creation all of its members were arrested by the Cheka, accused of counterrevolutionary activities, and imprisoned or exiled. [1] The ARA workers were frequently harassed, searched, robbed, arrested, and exiled. They were suspected of trying to overthrow the government. Their supplies were often taken over by the Bolsheviks who redistributed them themselves.

The operation was discontinued after Summer of 1922 [2] after warnings by president Wood were ignored by Lenin. The ARA had delivered medicine, clothes, tools, and seed, and fed nearly ten million people. Lenin refused to release Americans and Wood publicly accused the Bolshevik regime of selling millions of tons of cereals while America was feeding its population. ARA became unpopular and Wood imposed a sanction under the provisions of the revised Sedition act, cutting it off from funding. Furious Lenin had it banned in October, after the last supplies were delivered. [...]

Epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, typhus, and cholera were already common during the previous years but now reaped a bountiful harvest with the population starving. The Samara province was nearly depopulated by 1921 after two-thirds of the population (1,7 million people) died from hunger and disease. Not coincidentally, the amount of grain requisitioned during 1919-20 exceeded the actual surplus by 30%, and in one district of the neighboring Saratov province, the requisitions exceeded the total harvest. The Bolsheviks believed the peasants would hide at least a third of their surplus so they set the targets accordingly. If peasants resisted, then they would be shot as „kulaks.“ The peasants who rebelled were usually the poorest ones who would die of hunger and disease if they were not shot.

People would flee larger settlements due to disease or flock to them for grain rations, frequently carrying disease with them. In many settlements, huge crowds converged on the railway stations in hope of forcefully boarding a train leading elsewhere. But to no avail. Bolsheviks have ordered the few working trains to stop transporting in order to contain the epidemic. Sometimes investigators would find mass rotting corpses on the stations. Other times they would be scared away by the locals who would fight for the right to eat the corpses.
--Apocalypse on Earth: Early Bolshevik Russia, 1965
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The working class is for a Lenin what ore is a for a metalworker.“
--Maxim Gorky, 1917*
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After years of war, the country was in ruins. There were graveyards for broken-down steam engines. Over 3000 miles of railway tracks were destroyed. Engineers have been killed, imprisoned, or fled the country. The country had a miracle to resuscitate the infrastructure and the economy.

One of the solutions came from Trotsky. He had created the First Labour Army from the remnants of the Third Red Army in January 1920, following Kolchak's destruction.* The Bolsheviks were faced with the problem of what to do with the soldiers. They could not be demobilized amidst the catastrophic breakdown of the country. On one hand, they could need them for fighting again. On the other hand, they would like to find themselves unemployed and with free time to forment rebellion in cities and settlements.

Trotsky suggested that an economic war is fought – the labor armies would repair tracks, procure food, fell timber, manufacture simple goods, and generally ensure the logistics of existing units while repairing the infrastructure. Trotsky was especially worried about railways. Not only they have been destroyed or lacked working engines, but many stations had also divided into feuding authorities and committees who extracted bribes and fought to diminish neighboring ones. Rather than lose their locomotives they would often sabotage them or uncouple them within their own borders so the other authority would have to send their own locomotive to pick up the train. The situation was dismal. It could take faster to travel via horse from one station to another despite working railways.

It is telling that the first post that Trotsky ever requested was that of Commissar for Transport in January of 1920.* He immediately set upon fixing the railway system which had nearly collapsed. He had focused his efforts on repairing rail near the major military fronts, like the one with Poland, while purging officials and working out the militarization of the economy. He strove to make a national general transport union (Tsektran) subordinated to the state apparatus.

This prompted a nationwide revolt of the trade unions which correctly guessed this would lead to an end of all trade unions. In January of 1920 the Party's proposal to impose one-man management at the Third Trade Union Congress was defeated. Several months later, at the Ninth Party Congress in April they forced leadership to share a portion of managerial appointments in return for not calling a general strike. They found common ground with Trotsky's rivals.

Trotsky believed that his experiments were a prelude to the complete militarization of the economy. Unlike capitalist societies, communists could mobilize the entire population towards a single goal. The coercive power of the bureaucratic state would compensate for the lack of economic development. The state would be run with military-like discipline and precision, bypassing the need for accumulation of wealth and surplus. It was a form of command economy by decree, only it was decisively militaristic with laborers divided into regiments and brigades and orders issued like commands via telegraph from the command center. There would be no strikes or chaos, only a single unifying purpose allowing Bolsheviks to skip steps towards the development of socialism. There would be no need to develop Russia into an industrial state first.

Trotsky was not alone in this view, stemming mostly from the prejudices of the Bolsheviks. The Red Army was the only non-tarnished successful institution since it had obviously delivered victories against numerous forces. The army way (Po voennomy) became a synonym with efficiency.* Since many Bolsheviks came from cities, they shared the cultural influence of viewing peasantry as sort of subhuman serfs. Trotsky saw in his plans a direct continuation of the old successes of serfdom.

„Barracks communism“ became a controversial contender for the development of the Bolshevik state. Even if many criticized the total reliance on forced conscription of labor, they themselves started to speak no longer of the working class but of the working force. While the class was an active subject, the force was a passive object of the state. Mass, not individuals. Trotsky called labor armies as made from „peasant raw material“ (muzhitskoe syríe) turning the creative human labor of Marx into the raw resource of the state.

The Bolshevik aversion to markets meant that the only tool they could conceive of influencing was state repression. Strikers were arrested or shot, officials and technicians were imprisoned, all on the suspicions of them being Mensheviks, capitalist agitators, agents for foreign powers, and so on. There were attempts at giving wage bonuses to quality workers but with the economy in downfall and rampant inflation, paper money was worthless. Workers demanded to be paid in food or in-kind through a share of their production which they could use then to barter for other goods.

The valued and underdeveloped working class in Russia had moved away from the Marxist ideals. Shortages of food turned workers into part-time peasants and traders who had to grow their own food. Instead of being based around factories, they became nomadic, moving between farms and the settlements, following armies, or surviving in the countryside while looking for employment. Skilled technicians abandoned their posts, seeking to find better conditions. Workers traded their goods with peasants for food. Productivity fell and shortages stopped production. Less than a year after peace with the Central Powers, the country was plagued by strikes, mostly motivated by food.

The militarization of the economy was introduced into strategic and heavy industry. Factories were under martial law with absentees being equated with deserters and shot. The factory floor was to have iron discipline. In return, workers would be provided military rations. Over 3000 enterprises in mining and munitions were run by the military by the end of 1920. Elsewhere, the worker soviets, collegiate management boards, and other innovations of the revolutions were replaced by managers being appointed by the Party. Trotsky directly claimed this was the same as removing soldier soviets in favor of appointed military commanders who had saved the Red Army in the civil wars. The next natural step would be the nationwide removal of trade unions which were superfluous when the entire state was already in the hands of the workers.

Trotsky's „barracks communism“ strove to turn soldiers into workers and workers into soldiers. Trotsky hoped to turn the entire population into a rational standing combination of army and militia, making the country not a state with an army, not an army with a state, but a self-sustaining army. It was the end result of administrative utopian ideas of Tsarist Russia since the time of Peter the Great. Utilizing the vast number of people in Russia, forced conscription of labor drafted millions of peasants into teams that harvested basic goods like timber, grain, and ore. They repaired and built roads and railways.

Of course, it was a bureaucratic dream. Every modern army dreads conscripts since they neither want to fight nor are trained for their tasks. Conscription eschewed specialization. The work done by labor armies was horrible. Fifty conscripts would take an entire day to cut and chop down a single tree. The roads built were late and so uneven that traveling on them was compared to an amusement ride at best and a hazard at worst.* Conscripts deserted on such a level that soon more conscripts were chasing the deserters than performing their jobs*. Peasants were shot, soviet leaders shot, punitive camps established and villages occupied. The labor armies were waging war and occupation of their own land.

The Saturday labor campaigns organized in cities were worthless. Students and workers would be „volunteered“ into clearing rubbish from the streets of their cities in so-called „festivals of labour“ working thankless unpaid jobs. Their work goals were token – more often than not rubble would just be piled into one corner. And too many people volunteered for tasks that required fewer people so many of them milled around looking for a task to look busy. Sometimes they would even carry away rubble to the same place it was originally. [...]

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Lottery ads in Petrograd in 1921. The main prize - 20 billion rubles.

Unlike inflation in the rest of Europe, Russia had an entire additional ideological burden with inflation. Money was needed as exchange tender for good of services but Bolsheviks knew they could not maintain the value of the money. Many radical Bolsheviks wanted to increase inflation to such a level that money is rendered worthless and obsolete. There can be no accumulation of wealth or capitalism without money. By 1920 the Russian Mint had 13 000 workers and spent its gold not on guaranteeing the value of the rouble but to import dyes and paper needed to print it. It was more costly to print the rouble than it was actually worth. The rampant inflation forced many of the communist achievements out of necessity – public services were made free to decrease the need for printing money.*

Radicals extolled ration coupons as the founding principle of the new communist order. Rations were awarded according to their worth to society. Vital workers, bureaucrats, and soldiers were first-class rations (meager), workers with second-class rations (not enough), and the rest with third-class rations (in the words of Zinoviev: „just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it“). The rationing was catastrophically inefficient in its distribution with more time spent on exchanging coupons than the product was worth. Factories lost hours or even entire days to workers standing in lines.
--The People's Commissar: Portrait of Trotsky, 1966

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"By carrying out the October Revolution the working class had hoped to achieve its emancipation. But the result has been an even greater enslavement of human beings. The power of the monarchy, with its police and its gendarmerie, has passed into the hands of the Communist usurpers, who have given the people not freedom but the constant fear of torture by the Cheka, the horrors of which far exceed the rule of the gendarmerie under tsarism … The glorious emblem of the toilers’ state — the sickle and the hammer — has in fact been replaced by the Communists with the bayonet and the barred window, which they use to maintain the calm and carefree life of the new bureaucracy, the Communist commissars and functionaries.

But the worst and most criminal of all is the moral servitude which the Communists have also introduced: they have laid their hands on the inner world of the toiling people, forcing them to think in the way that they want. Through the state control of the trade unions they have chained the workers to their machines so that labour is no longer a source of joy but a new form of slavery. To the protests of the peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings, and those of the workers, whose living conditions have compelled them to strike, they have answered with mass executions and a bloodletting that exceeds even the tsarist generals. The Russia of the toilers, the first to raise the red banner of liberation, is drenched in blood
."

--What we are fighting for, Kronstadt rebellion proclamation, March 1921*
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The Bolsheviks caused the peasant wars of 1921 through their brutal policy towards the alien peasantry. The many smallholding farms felt betrayed by the Revolution when in 1919 the Statute on Socialist Land Organization declared peasant farming obsolescent. The confiscated unfarmed land of the gentry was not redistributed to the peasantry but turned over to the future of farming. Massive collective farms, kolkhozy, and sovkhozy were to replace the useless peasant system of the hostile and independent peasantry with agricultural factories. By the end of 1920, there were over 16 000 collective and state farms with over ten million acres of land and a million employees. Most of them had prime land confiscated from the gentry.

The collective farms were a disaster. Their members were migrants from towns, unemployed workers, landless laborers, poorest, laziest, drunken peasants, and various other outsiders who knew nothing about agriculture. Peasant congresses were full of complaints about collective farms being run catastrophically bad. Bolsheviks had to admit that slackers from towns and villages fled to collective farms.* Peasants were furious since farms were supported by the state awarding them tools, clothes, and livestock. Yet less than a third of their income came from their production and they were massively subsidized by the state.* Peasants from local communities had to be conscripted to do the work on collective farms which was a massive slap in their face. Not only it was humiliating, they saw this as a new form of serfdom in favor of colonies of atheist immoral factory workers. The peasants believed that communal dining rooms and dormitories extended into private life with polyamory and sexual perversion, which was not surprising given confusion over Kollontai's activities in the emancipation of the women.

Peasants initially used passive resistance and subterfuge. Knowing their grain would be taken, they would rather feed it to the livestock, brew it into moonshine or bury it deep beneath the ground. But attacks on Bolshevik officials were common before the rebellions. In 1918, 2000 members of the requisitioning brigades were murdered. That figure rose to 5000 in 1919, and 8000 in 1920.* When peasant rebellions began, Russia was full of roaming peasant armies. Wrangel's forces were crushed in Ukraine, but Makhno's peasant army was still 15 000 strong and roamed Ukraine until the summer of 1921. Ukraine could not be subdued or controlled until it was dealt with. Antonov's rebellion in Tambov began to synergize with the rebellions in Voronezh, Saratov, Samar, Simbirsk, and Samara, creating a lawless countryside in central Russia. Bandits armies broke apart the steppe lands into lawless lands. Cossacks and peasants united in the Caucasus and numbered over 30 000 men, while in Belorussia the troops had to be moved from Poland to liberate Minsk and Smolensk from the hands of nationalistic peasants.* Half the country was effectively lost when western Siberia was lost to the rebellions, this time including major towns. The first half of 1921 saw Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg, Tyumen and Tomsk in the hand of 60 000 rebels with infrastructure brought to a standstill.* Bolsheviks in 1921 could end up in dangerous lands only at an hour or two of distance from Moscow.*

The Antonov Uprising showed the weakness of the Bolshevik control outside towns. The fight over requisitions spiraled extremely quickly into a well-organized peasant army that fought under the red flag and was led by local revolutionary heroes. Lenin himself later claimed that it was the actual greatest threat to the Bolshevik government, not White armies or foreign interventions. * Bolsheviks deserted to the army while garrisons were overrun. The district of Kirsanov had only one machine gun and there were barely 3000 troops due to the war in Poland. Propaganda claimed that the rioters were kulaks although they were mostly ordinary peasants armed with axes, pikes, pitchforks, and other tools. Kulaks actually helped the rebellion but rarely got involved. The peasant army ballooned with over 110 000 deserters, and the massive mass started to assimilate criminals, madmen, and various other discontents. By 1921 the army was no longer waging war on Bolsheviks but burning villages and raping women, just as the propaganda claimed.

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Members of the Antonov Uprising

Bolsheviks could not quell the rebellion since it eschewed large-scale engagements. The army moved constantly and was divided on a village basis. Village communes, the Church, and leftists unhappy with the Party helped them organize. Bolsheviks could not distinguish peasants from the army and massive armies were moved from the West to quell the rebellion through occupation. Tukachevsky and his veterans were reinforced and refurbished before being sent to chase the rebel armies. The Red Army found a land with destroyed bridges, cut down telegraph poles, and dismantled railway tracks. It completely baffled the army which could not understand why the peasants would harm themselves yet not march on Moscow. First small units were soundly defeated in ambushes and Tukhachevsky lamented that „they served only to arm the enemy.“* Army units started to join the rebels prompting Bolsheviks to force large-scale army involvement instead of haphazardly sending units to root out the peasants.

The aim of the rebellion was a return to the 1917-1918 conditions – peasant self-rule. Their slogan was „Soviet Power without the Communists.“ The ideology was confused – they would chant death to Trotsky and praise Lenin, praise Bolsheviks but demonize Communists. The villagers thought the Bolsheviks and the Communists were two different parties, not having learned of the party name change in 1918.* Therefore, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks brought them civil war, banned trade, and took away land for collective farms while Lenin and the Bolsheviks brought them peace, trade, and land.

The peasants called their uprising a revolution but it was a war of vengeance against the state regime. Communists were tortured and mutilated with public support and spectation. Peasants supported the uprising since looters were stealing back from the thieves and giving back that which was stolen. Where trains ran, peasant fighters would hold up passing trains on a daily basis. Towns were raided for provisions and anything seen valuable, including gramophones, vodka, and various entertainment props. Where larger scale armies could be observed, they seemed to be long trains of machine guns carried by horses interspersed with livestock carrying beer, grain, and vodka, while bandits sang.

Tukhachevsky finally arrived in the summer personally with 100 000 troops supported with hundreds of heavy guns, armored cars, airplanes, poison gas, Communist security units, veterans from Poland, Komsomol units, and others to swamp the rebellion with troops. Tukhachevsky managed to crush Antonov within the first month but guerilla fighting made the countryside lawless. The massive military crushed all formations larger than bandit groups within two months, but could not root out the thousands of smaller bands.

Peasants were being imprisoned en masse in concentration camps with entire villages interned. By the end of the first month, Tukhachevsky had imprisoned 50 000 villagers. The number would double before the rebellion ended. If the rebels would not surrender, the populations would be shot or sent to the Arctic circle. Of course, sometimes interments would be too difficult so the villages would be just burned to the ground. Those villages that turned on bandits would be rewarded with salt and manufactured goods. The Bolsheviks did not count on bribery as a tool to gain their loyalty but to induce the rebels to punish the traitor villages with the violence of their own. Officially, the villages turned on rebels due to opportunities promised by the NEP. In reality, the rebels turned into an increasingly ruthless looting army amid harvest failure and starvation.

The Red Army destroyed all opposition in Central Russia and Western Siberia with pockets of more organized chaos remaining in Ukraine for up to several years. It had to immediately return to Poland to quell similar banditry which had erupted in central Poland and TJAK. The revolts in Poland were serious enough that Lenin feared an Entente backed liberation of Poland. Elsewhere, in Caucasus, Sverdlovs project of the extermination of the Cossacks had resulted in yet another lawless zone and they too had to be brought down by swamping them with Red Army troops. [...]

In the towns that Bolsheviks controlled, strikes flourished, and protests were daily, helped by many the many unemployed. This happened despite strikes being a severe offense punishable by death. Lenin and the Party became concerned when strikers no longer wanted to barter with the Party but demanded it rescind its power. The collapsing transport infrastructure, severe storms, prioritization of the Red Army, and the falling grain requisitions meant that rations had to be cut in major cities in the January of 1921. Moscow was first to erupt as the workers (many of them without jobs since factories were closed due to lack of fuel) held meetings. The printers took the lead (Mensheviks and SRs being traditionally strong within their union).* Attempts to negotiate with them were a failure as Bolshevik emissaries were heckled and strike spread through the cities.

Lenin himself tried to speak to metalworkers asking them if they would prefer Whites to return, but to his surprise, they angrily replied they want the Bolsheviks to clear out just so anyone else can come, „white, black or devil.“* Soldiers refused to fire on protesters in demonstrations and special Communist detachments had to be called to disperse protests. By the end of February, martial law had to be declared in the capital. In Petrograd, the city was nearly under siege due to a de facto general strike. Kronstadt soldiers and sailors joined the demonstrations. Panicked Bolsheviks took shoes and clothes from barracks, allegedly to replace them, but actually to prevent them from leaving the garrison.* Petrograd went into martial law days after Moscow and Zinoviev ruled the city through a Committee of Defence. Desperate promises were given while Cheka arrested hundreds of people and locked thousands inside factories they occupied.

Finally, a proclamation appeared on the streets, calling for a new revolution, demanding the liberation of all arrested socialists and non-party working men, abolition of martial law, freedom of speech, press, assembly (for laborers), free election of trade unions, soviets and factory committees. In Moscow, people called for the restoration of free trade, civil liberties, and the reestablishment of the Constituent Assembly.

The population of the Kronstadt naval base rebelled, not surprising as they were always the most radical ones. The sailors went to establish an island version of the commune and had little loyalty to the Bolsheviks other than seeing them as a lesser evil than the Whites.* With the White forces being on the retreat they were furious with the situation in Tambov and Ukraine. Despite censorship, they learned of the situation on their home leaves since many of them hailed from those poorer regions.

Half the Kronstadt Bolsheviks tore up their party cards during the latter half of 1920 and watched the strikes in Petrograd with great interest. They soon raised their own flag of revolt and demanded freedom of speech, press, and assembly (for workers and socialists), equal rations, and freedom for peasants. They basically supported all demands except a reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly which they themselves forcibly closed in January 1918. They did support a return to the multi-party Soviet of 1918.

The Krondstadt rebellion alarmed the Party not only due to its strategic and symbolic importance but due to a facet of the demands. The Kronstadters did not oppose Bolsheviks like other rioters but welcomed them provided they accepted the provisions of Soviet democracy. This led to over half the Party in Kronstadt joining the rebels instead of fleeing or opposing them. The Party moved to delegitimize the rebels as „peasants lads in sailors' suits“ who brought petty-bourgeois attitudes with them.* Yet the rioters of 1921 were the same as those of 1917, from leaders down to members. About 90 to 95% of the sailors were recruited before 1918.*

Fears spread through the Party as their power was now limited to the loyal Red Army and party organizations. Could they wait for the rebellion to peter out? Kalinin was heckled when he tried to negotiate with the Kronstadt population and the day after that a new Soviet was elected by the sailors, with most of the delegates coming from the mutinous Bolsheviks. Revolts spread to Kazan and Nizhnyi Novgorod. It seemed that Bolsheviks were turning against the upper echelons. Trotsky had to return to defend Petrograd to capture the island before the ice thawed.

Trotsky was ruthless and had the head of local Cheka dismissed when he claimed the mutiny was spontaneous and not in fact a planned counter-revolutionary plot.* He took families of the sailors hostage and massed artillery threatening them to shoot them down to bits. As this did not work, the shelling began. Tukhachevky prepared troops for the storming and had to place Communist security troops to take charge of the operation due to low morale. Cheka machine guns would be behind the troops to ensure the troops charged. The assault was a disaster as the mutineers used machine guns to riddle the ice with bullets. The troops charged in poor conditions to surprise the mutineers but ended up drowning in the water.* Two thousand soldiers that reached the fort were mowed by machine guns. In the following days, Krondstadt was surrounded by ice stained with corpses.

The strikes in Petrograd and Moscow would start to peter out as Zinoviev first and then Tenth Congress approved the restoration of free trade. Simultaneously with the end of the Congress, Trotsky approved the final assault on the fortress. Heavy artillery and aerial bombardment lasted for several days after which 50 000 troops assembled from all available sources advanced over the ice. The battle lasted for nearly an entire day and resulted in over 10 000 Red army deaths. Corpses would wash up on the coast in the following days and the Finnish government requested their clearing since the thawing of the ice risked spreading disease.*

Over 500 surrendered rebels would be soon shot without trial on Zinovievs orders. He had to bring teenage Komsomols to shoot the sailors as the regular executioners refused to do so.* In the following months, additional 2000 troops would be shot without trial while others would be sent to Solovki, the first concentration camp on an island in the White sea, where they were left to die out of illness and hunger. Over 8000 rebels fled to Finland where they were interned and put to public works. This led to some of them being lured by promises of amnesty to Russia, only to be shot or imprisoned on return.

This fate was shared by the peasant rioters lured in by promises of amnesty and other rebels. During 1921 Bolsheviks used the Red Army to destroy the Mensheviks and the SRs who had allegedly been behind counter-revolutionary uprisings. This was no mere political opportunism. Many Bolsheviks truly believed that peasants and workers could not spontaneously rebel against the proletariat. By 1922, coupled with the secret resolution on the Tenth Party Congress, Bolsheviks destroyed all leftist opposition. No other leftists would be tolerated, no matter how loyal they appeared to be.

The peasants remained a constant fear in Bolshevik mind as their immense masses were the main threat against the new Russia. The years of war left the country in ruins, cities depopulated, industry in need of repair, yet there were millions of disobedient uppity peasants who still thought the Earth was flat, sun revolved around the Earth and paid no difference between citizens. For them every one of them was a degenerate bourgeois or a Jew.
--The War of Lenin and Marx, 3rd ed., 1970

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Lenin, Trotsky and Voroshilov surrounder by soldiers and delegates of the Tenth Party Congress

1920 saw the beginning of the long intra-Bolshevik political war. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and others favored centralization of power, a rule by decree, in one way or another. Hierarchical bureaucratism was making a return. This clashed with the self-proclaimed Marxist creativity of the working class but also with the practical issues of power. Unions hated factory managers and called them the new ruling class and the new bourgeoisie. Unions supported Democratic Centralists, a group of devoted intellectual Bolsheviks who were familiar with Marxist theory and opposed the demise of the direct worker rule. In Moscow, they coined the term glasnost for promoting openness in local government* and invited Bolsheviks of all rank and file to participate in the daily working of the government.

At the Special Party Conference in September 1920 the two factions united against the centralization of power and forced a series of resolutions. All party meetings had to be open doors, lower party organs had to have more say in the appointment of their superiors and higher organs were to be accountable to the rank and file membership. Trotsky strengthened by the victory over Poland [4] proposed at the Fifth Trade Union Congress that all union officials are appointed by the state.* After all, since state was controlled by the workers, why was there need for independent unions? There could be no compromise and unions should be immediately and forcefully merged with the state apparatus. This provoked a bitter revolt of the opposition.

Lenin supported Trotsky's vision of a top-down rule by decree but thought his methods to be too heavy-handed and risked an internal war within the party. „If the party quarrels with the trade unions then this will certainly be the end of the Soviet power.“* Lenin hoped that the debate will resolve itself in his favor, but the Central Committee was bitterly divided and there was no progress as each faction mobilized support expecting a major showdown in March of 1921 at the Tenth Party Congress. The industrial cities would be engulfed in riots in the months preceding it.

This concerned Lenin who believed Russia is on the verge of a new revolution. Sverdlov's report On the Economic Issues pointed out the catastrophic state of the collective farms, conscripted labor, lack of grain and fuel, and nonproductive factories. What is more concerning, it charted out a collapse of agronomic production. The year 1921 began with uprisings everywhere. The Red Army could not root out the Antonov Uprising. The soldiers in Krondstadt island rebelled against Petrograd. The Party had split over two over the issue of centralization and there were implicit questions about the role of Politburo and even Lenin's primacy.

When the Tenth Party Congress met in March of 1921, in Moscow under martial law, the chaos in the country was paradoxically great enough that Lenin was not only not removed but bolstered due to his constant demands that unity must be maintained since Bolsheviks could be overthrown at any moment. Lenin was mad at the workers' opposition and mocked them as a „syndicalist deviation.“* He deliberately conflated the calls for Bolshevik removal with those for the reform of the Bolshevik government. The fear-mongering campaign silenced the Democratic Centralists and the Unions and they approved Lenin's resolutions condemning the worker's opposition. Less than 5 percent of the delegates voted against the resolutions.*

Lenin followed with a monumental secret resolution banning all factions. Political groupings independent of the Central Committee would be banned. If two-thirds of the Central Committee and the Control Commission voted in favor, such a faction would be excluded from the Party.* Lenin was driven by revenge against the workers' opposition and was not actually concerned about power jockeying in the Central Committee and other bodies.* Before this resolution, Party ruled the country as a dictatorship. After this resolution, the Central Committee ruled the party as a dictatorship. The post of the General Secretary of the Party was created to carry out the purges of the workers' opposition with Sverdlov becoming the first General Secretary of the Party in 1922.

While strengthening the hold on the Party Lenin recognized he would need to loosen it on the national front. A new party platform was formed which was a move away from super-centralism favored by Trotsky and Lenin and a return to the previous position. The state would continue to run the industry through managers and consult the unions on their appointments. All this was in preparation for the massive upheaval necessitated by the collapsing economy.

Waiting until the penultimate day of the Congress, Lenin proposed the resolution that abandoned war communism and restored tax in place of food requisitioning. The peasants would be allowed to sell any surplus left after taxes to the state or others. Tax and requisitions were not converted on a one-on-one basis and the proposed ratio was instead 55% of the levy raised the previous year.* Peasants who increased their productivity would be stimulated with rebates, and eligible to trade for consumer goods and agricultural tools through special funds. Hidden within this seeming caving to the peasant demands was the removal of the collective responsibility of the village commune in an effort to break them apart from within.

Although the Party was aware that food requisitioning was impossible, Lenin feared that delegates would denounce the fait accompli as a restoration of capitalism. This is why he introduced it two days before the end of the Congress once many of the delegates started to leave the Congress believing all the important matters have been settled. Trotsky's description of the Kronstadt front led to roughly 40% of the delegates volunteering to immediately leave for the front to fight.* Lenin spoke for three hours, left little to no time for discussion or other speakers after holding a lengthy lecture on the „New Economic Policy.“ Whereas other issues would have up to 250 speakers, this would have only four besides Lenin, all limited to ten minutes, and all preapproved by the presidium.

Lenin emphasized the new policy was needed to stop rebellions and build a new alliance with the peasants based on markets. Outside of Poland Russia had no allies and Poland itself was plagued by revolts after Tukhachevsky and Trotsky left the country to defend Petrograd. Lenin described the policies of the Civil war as an utopian dream unsuited for a backward country like Russia. The market was the only way to rebuild the country. This was not a return to capitalism, but a necessary measure. The new socialized market would have no capitalists, no bankers, no kulaks. The Party controlled heavy industry, transport, banking and would control foreign trade. The market would be used to encourage peasants towards collective farms and co-operatives.

Lenin succeeded. Bukharin and Trotsky, the biggest opponents of markets were silent as were other past critics. The Party Congress was a great success, the first stage-managed congress of the new state. Lenin tasked Sverdlov with arranging future Congresses in a such way while others like Stalin offered their help with the stage-managing. [5]

However, there were still serious concerns about how long the New Economic Policy would last. Bukharin promised the Comintern that summer that NEP is meant only as a „temporary solution“ to save the regime.* Zinoviev later added that this was a „tactical retreat.“ Lenin called it a „peasant Brest-Litovsk.“* However, how long would this retreat last? It was the question that made Bolsheviks nervous. Lenin notably differed from the rest of the Party on the issue. He believed that it will not last „less than a decade and probably more.“* Furthermore, Lenin saw the NEP as less than a pure concession and more as a fundamental effort to adapt socialism towards the needs of a backward peasant country. Since Russia did not have „developed capitalism“ it was not possible to transition to socialism immediately. Lenin told the Tenth Party Congress that they had to build „communism with bourgeois hands.“*

Many Bolsheviks believed the NEP would last only a few years, until the country recovered, and the market would be removed. Lenin privately had a lot of doubts. He was certain that Russia needed at least a decade and a half to rebuild, and had to avoid being diluted in the peasant capitalism. The regulated socialist market was the only way forward through slow socialization through co-operatives. Instead of „the less markets the more socialism“ the new principle was „the more markets the more socialism.“ Lenin was seriously worried that it would in fact take double the time, thirty years, before internal markets would be stamped out.* That would mean waiting until 1950, a date that would horrify many of his colleagues.

Foreign observers were baffled by the transformation of the country. The streets of cities were littered with orphans, rubble, long lines for rations, and closed factories in 1920 and 1921. By 1922 the cities flourished with private cafes, shops, restaurants, brothels, night clubs, clinics, credit associations, even some small private manufactories. Graveyard cities became vibrant trading cities somewhat reminiscent of Paris or Berlin. The banned workers opposition turned against the NEP, believing that it made the entire revolution and suffering pointless. With money, capitalism and class divides would appear. The Bolsheviks had sacrificed class interests to the backward peasants. Kulaks were now growing rich at the workers' expense. Workers deemed NEP the "New Exploitation of the Proletariat."* Tens of thousands of workers tore up their party cards each year in disgust.*

The „kulaks“ were actually Nepmen, the opportunist private traders who quickly adapted to the new market. Wheeler-dealers of previously illegal black markets and bartering now operated legally with preexisting connections. The Nepmen became the favored buyers of peasants since they could pay more and had a greater variety of goods than the state which could offer cheap manufactured goods at best. The Nepmen sold everything – from tools to women, from foreign liquor to heroin and cocaine. Their mistresses wore diamonds and furs, drove in foreign cars, visited operas and restaurants, and boasted loudly of their wealth in hotels, casinos, and race tracks. The new rich were vulgar, unashamed, and vocal, while most of Russia was recovering from the brink of starvation. Hundreds of thousands continued to die in 1922 from diseases and famine as inequality reappeared in the cities. The Nepmen were richer than many Bolshevik party members and that brew discontent.

Resentment fomented among the party and among the population at large. A new, second revolution was needed to wage the war against the new enemies of the people and the new bourgeoisie. Romanticized views of uncompromising Bolsheviks flourished although in reality such Bolsheviks were blown apart to pieces under Trotsky's cannons and Tukhachevsky's bayonets. The Nepmen, Jews, kulaks, bourgeois, and foreigners were conflated into a single category. A peasant might call them Jews, a worker kulak, a Bolshevik bourgeois, a nationalist foreigner traitors, but they were the same category - the new elite. Many felt betrayed at the return of bourgeois specialists and commanders, followed by Nepmen. A new revolution was needed to purge them and open the places for young Bolsheviks.

Yet the greatest shock would come outside of Russia in 1923 with a samizdat spreading in Central Europe. Lenin's greatest ideological fear had been confirmed as a voice thought to be dead spoke to the communist and socialist parties around the world, criticizing the degenerate Bolshevik state.
--The Battle for Red Supremacy, 1988
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Propaganda on the Red Square in the favor of the Third Comintern, 1919
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I have come to the unequivocal conclusion that we must now wage the most decisive and merciless war against the Black Hundred clergy and suppress its resistance with such cruelty that they will not forget it for decades to come … The more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we manage to shoot the better.
--Lenin, secret memorandum, 1922*
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While at the same time the Party reversed its ideological stances on the economy, it finally advanced them on societal issues, creating a paradox within the party. Lenin was cosmopolitan and universalist in his outlooks, although he wanted to make Russians dominant in socialism. He had endorsed anything that could be described as modern almost without thinking since progress and modernism is undoubtedly good.

Lenin strongly endorsed the efforts of women's liberation as one of the methods through which revolution would transform Russia into a socialist state. Leading feminists in the party such as Kollontai, Armand and Balabanoff were protected and their effort promoted. In 1919 The Women's Department of the Central Committee Secretariat (Zhenotdel) was established in order to mobilize the women into politics and education. Kollontai advocated a sexual revolution to emancipate women which included divorce, abortions, polygamy, and the abandonment of marriage. At the same time measures were taken to help women. Prostitution was combated, child-care was promoted along with communal dining halls, laundries, and nurseries in order to save women from the drudgery of the traditional roles.

As with every Bolshevik effort, it had little resources in the main cities and was completely perverted outside of them. Local Bolsheviks dismissed women and saw other forms of Bolshevising women. The provincial welfare department in Saratov issued a „Decree on the Nationalization of Women“ which abolished marriage and chartered state brothels for men to release their urges.* In Vladimir Zhenotdel officers issued a proclamation declaring all women over eighteen to be „state property,“ ordered all unmarried women between eighteen and fifty to register with it the Bureau of Free Love for the state selection of sexual mates and breeding partners.* Elsewhere, the efforts of Zhenotdel were ignored, heckled, or mocked.

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Alexandra Kollontai

Lenin refused to get involved in trivial matters of women's liberation since he was a traditional prude and had enough difficulties with more serious matters. Kollontai was widely seen to promote moral anarchy and promiscuity even by her own subordinates. Outside towns peasants actively fought against the deplorable perversions of the cities and the feared requisitioning of children.* The peasants believed that state nurseries would follow the state farms and state grain requisitions. The emancipated women in cities and villages rose against the divorce law since men easily escaped their families and children leaving many single mothers.

Kollontai continued to favor leftists unity, public discourse, and worker and peasant self-rule, as it removed traditional hierarchical roles. This would come to bite her in the back in 1921 when Lenin publicly destroyed her at the Tenth Party Congress for supporting worker's opposition amidst revolts.* [...]

The third anniversary of the October Revolution was marked by a mass reenactment of the alleged insurrection. Some of the avantgarde artists, propagandists and other interested parties pioneered moving the theater outside of its bourgeois settings and placing it among the masses. Interesting to note is that it was once again a form of the unlikely German-Russian partnership with the techniques of Max Reinhardt and Bertol Brecht being directly applied to a didactic cause. Arouse the hatred of the masses and rally them to support the new regime by creating a false history where Bolsheviks were always the vanguard of the oppressed majority. The Storming of the Winter Palace had 10 000 actors participating in the reenactment along with several huge stages on the Palace Square, and Winter Palace being strategically lit to showcase various scenes through the windows. The Aurora fired its heavy guns again to mark the start of the reenactment watched by 100 000 spectators. Stills of the reenactment would be later reproduced as the actual photographs of the revolution.*

This was one of the rare successes of the avant-garde artistic projects. Lenin was a cultural conservative who was more sympathetic to the intellectuals than to the modern art they seemed to favor. Most of the party actually came from traditional environments and the odd attempts of art only increased their distrust towards the intellectuals and sons of the bourgeoisie in the party. Due to party preoccupation with naked survival, the more intellectual strains of the party came to be dominated by the Forwardists, especially after Proletkult organization (established in 1917) grew to 80 000 members in 1919. Lunacharsky became the new Commissar of Enlightenment and got to work.

Gorky, Bogdanov, and Lunacharsky had previously established a school for Russian workers in 1909 on the island of Capri, and in Naples in 1910 with the objective of creating a working-class intelligentsia. They called themselves the Forward (Vpered) school and not surprisingly came into conflict with Lenin. They believed that the organic development of worker-class culture would precede the revolution and that knowledge and especially technology were the moving forces of history in ways unknown to Marx. Liberation would ensue not by seizing the means of production but by seizing the power of knowledge. Most concerningly of all for the Bolsheviks, Forwardists wanted to make Marxism into a form of secular religion with collectivism as the Holy Spirit and humanity as the Divine Being.

Outside of Moscow, which was being transformed into a living museum of revolution, various attempts to bring the art to the common man were disastrous. The tour of the Bolshoi Ballet during 1920 scandalized the peasants who were deeply disturbed by the bare arms and legs of the performers.* Avantgarde literature was a failure with most Russians still reading detective and romantic stories of the past.* Even Lenin called their fruits utter rubbish. An attempt to play music through sirens, hooters, and other sounds of the factory resulted in workers not recognizing the Internationale.* Many Russians shared the belief that if art was not literal or classical, then it was not art.

Existing art had to be made socialist so the existing works would be slightly altered and renamed. Glinka's Life for the Tsar was rewritten into The Hammer and the Sickle; Les Hugenots became The Decembrists; Tosca became The Battle for the Commune. * The obelisk outside Kremlin erected by the Romanovs to celebrate their three centuries in 1913 was preserved on Lenin's orders and altered. The tsarist inscription became the socialist inscription and traced a „socialist“ ancestry to the sixteenth century, including Thomas Moore.* On the other end of the struggle, Lenin and the Party had to restrain Futurists who had taken up extreme iconoclasm and nihilism and wanted to destroy existing art in order to make way for the new.

As the Civil war wound down Lenin started to deal harshly with all sources of anarchy, including the cultural avant-garde. Proletkult was drastically cut short at the time of the Bolshevik counter-offensive in 1920 and Bogdanov was removed from its leadership.* Lenin strongly criticized all efforts to destroy or devalue the past and placed an imperative to build upon the achievements of the past. As in politics, there would be an unbroken chain from the bottom to the top with experimentation seen as a waste of resources and mockery of the worker's struggle. Proletkult was soon shut down as it also fueled attacks on bourgeoisie specialists and was thus an existential threat to the much-needed technocratic capital Bolsheviks needed.

Lenin's position was somewhat nuanced as he believed a cultural shortcut to socialism was impossible and it was important to create conditions for the long transition. The intellectuals preoccupied themselves with proletarian art and literature instead of proletarian science and technology. The state would need to be modernized, even made familiar with the culture of capitalism to make them better workers and engineers. At the same time, Lenin wanted to continue building on old achievements not tear them down or replace them.

This was in turn supported by a number of Bolshevik and trade union leaders who wanted to narrow the general education into vocational training from an early age. This was a positional amenable to Lenin and Trotsky – education should serve the economy and the economy needed skilled technicians and workers. The two united in support of this, and with the assistance of Sverdlov started to push reform of education into a strictly technical. [6] This provoked a sharp reaction in the party as this would renew the old class divisions under a technocratic principle. Children as young as nine or ten would be prepared or sent to factory apprenticeships just as they would read the basics of mathematics, reading, and writing.

A core of Lenin's plans for the future state was embracing the scientific management of the American F. W. Taylor. Workers factories were to be subdivided into automatic tasks where workers would become disciplined beings. The communist society would have to be mechanized. Lenin praised the scientific methods of Taylor and Ford and his enthusiasm carried through the Party and all institutions. The name of Ford was mistaken for some sort of Marxist god guiding Lenin and Trotsky by villagers in isolated settlements.* The ABC of Communism, written by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in 1919 claimed that a new world is just around the corner where everything was „precisely calculated.“*

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Experiments at the Central Institute of Labor, 1924

The Central Institute of Labor was established in 1920 to carry out experiments in training the workers to end up acting like machines. Its head was Alexei Gastev, Bolshevik engineer and poet who embraced Taylorism to the extreme. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, orders given out by buzzes from machines, and workers would have to hold the hammers attached to machines in order to perfectly internalize its mechanical rhythm. This was eugenical reasoning – machines were superior to humans so by training humans to become like machines Gastev believed he would improve humanity as a whole. People would become „proletarian units“ deeply enmeshed in „mechanical communism“ and individual identity would be replaced by ciphers of numbers and letters.* The human automatons would be „incapable of individual thought“ and subservient to their controllers. The human soul would no longer be measured „by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer.“*

There was a League of Time which had 25 000 members that operated in 800 branches by 1923.* Its members recorded how they spent each minute of their day on a chronocard. They started wearing oversized wristwatches, went around offices and factory floors, and tried to eliminate procrastination and wasted time. This wastage of time was known as Oblomovism in Russia. One of their efforts, which was lauded by the workers, was their policy to shorten words, reduce the length of official titles, promote the use of acronyms and make speeches short and to the point.* This vision of the communist future was satirized by Zamyatin in his novel We (published in New York in 1924 after having been smuggled out ) which led to its banning as first-class counterrevolutionary material.

The main rival against the scientization of society was religion. With the winding down of civil war, the Party could turn into a more active role against the religion. Until 1921 the war was mostly fought through two means. The first was propaganda, the second were laws. The Decree on the Separation of Church and State in 1918 took away the church's right to own property forcing the Church to rent their buildings from the institutions or to charge for religious services. Religious instructions were banished from the schools and Cheka regularly arrested priests for alleged counter-revolutionary activity.

The propaganda efforts intensified as the Party turned towards enlightening the people and freeing them from backwardness. Christian miracles were exposed as myths. Relics were opened and debunked. "God's acres" were treated along with "godless acres" – one farmed with chemical fertilizers, the other with holy water.* Peasants were to be offered plane rides to see there are no angels in the clouds.* Religious art and literature were banned along with everything that seemed to support it which led to Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Plato being banned. Selected works of Mozart, Bach, and Rachmaninov became counter-revolutionary.

A Union of Militant Godless was established in 1921 with its own newspaper and branches which mostly staged predetermined debates. On stage, priests would suddenly realize the God did not exist and ask for the authorities and the people to forgive them. Priests were procured from Cheka jails. Even then they were known to be failures in the staged debates. In one of them, the priest asked the Godless who had made the natural world, and when the Godless explained the nature made itself through evolution the peasant audience erupted into derisive laughter, forcing a victory for the priest.*

A new communist, bolshevik, soviet identity was being created. New holidays were scheduled on the same days as old religious holidays, based on science or the revolution. Forest Day was to replace Trinity Sunday, Electric Day to replace Elijah Day. Komsomol Christmas and Easter were established. Lenin was disturbed by his veneration in the nascent cult of Lenin and favored the cult of the Red Star as a lesser evil and the veneration of the State . Baptizing became „Octoberizing“ with children being given portraits of the infant Lenin and the baptizing names were chosen from a pool of the names of the revolution. These included not only names of the communists but names such as Molot (Hamer), Serpina (sickle), Dazmir (Long Live the World Revolution), Pravda, Barrikada, Fevral (February), Oktiabrina (October), Parizhkommuna (Paris Commune), Terrora (Terror), Diktatura (Dictatorship), Melor (Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution) and so on. It was not uncommon to give names such as Embryo, Markiza, or Electricity since they sounded scientific or revolutionary. The Komsomol Youth took to the Red weddings complete with the appropriate wows named in Lenin's name. However, such fads took little hold outside of Bolshevik youth and older Party members mocked them as pointless pandering.*

The famine of 1921 and 1922 proved to be an opportunity for Lenin to launch a more direct war against religion. The Church was ordered to hand over its consecrated valuables to be sold for the relief of the people. Lenin and the Party knew the still popular Church would have to disobey since it would be sacrilegious. This enabled the Bolsheviks to rally the people against the Church. Despite offers of the Church to raise money through other means, a Decree was sent in 1922 instructing local Soviets to pillage Churches of all precious items*. Although the official excuse was to sell them for famine relief, money never reached the victims. Armed bands gutted the churches, sometimes fighting the angry crowds, sometimes restraining them. Bolshevik records note about 1500 armed clashes in 1922 and 1923 with over 7000 priests and half that amount of nuns being killed.* Tens of thousands of priests and a hundred bishops fled the country while rumors circulated of thousands killed.

A month after the Decree, Lenin signed a secret order to exterminate the clergy, acting against the instructions of the Politburo.* After an armed incident resulted in deaths, the Politburo voted to suspend confiscations but Lenin countermanded the orders with secret ones. The Clergy would be exterminated whether the Party at large knew or approved of it. The Clergy was to be associated with the Black Hundreds and to be destroyed „for many decades“ now that in the context of famine peasants could be „either for us or at any rate neutral.“* Delaying the war would not work. The fight against the clergy and tradition soon turned into a war against the peasants, melding with the fight against embers of the peasant rebellions.

Bolsheviks instrumentalized the Jews in their ranks to carry out the confiscations to muddy the water with anti-Semitism. Confiscations indeed caused progroms such in towns as Smolensk and Viatka* while at the same time Bolsheviks started to close down synagogues, ostensibly to convert them into Yiddish schools. When the local Jews resisted closures, troops would forcefully remove the Jews often shouting antisemitic slogans and using guns. None of the synagogues became a school, although one became a communist university.*

It is no surprise that antisemitism started to boom in 1921. When small-scale trading returned during the famine, the local Jews were traditionally dominant. Bolsheviks cried of „Jews“ taking over Moscow. While Jews were disproportionately represented in the upper echelons of the party, lower echelons were dominated by people with backward outlooks. The middle echelons believed that the Jews as a social group were synonymous with capitalism. Cries of war profiteering during the war were levied. Every second Russian was unemployed while the Jews once again lived better than the Party members. The militant campaign of Bolshevism attacked Judaism in 1921 including a trial of Judaism on the Jewish New Year. Stalin was presented with a stream of proposals to deport all suspected and public Jews to the TJIK or a new autonomous oblast somewhere in Siberia. Several of Stalin's proposals were explored but put on hold mostly due to adoption of New Economic Policy.

Sverdlov would institutionalize the combat against the religion in 1922, following Lenin's lead. He ensured increasing amounts of money flowed to various institutional chapters promoting taylorist principles while coordinating with Cheka on the extermination of the clergy. In 1923 Sverdlov persuaded Lenin to switch from a nationwide strategy of fighting the clergy to that of a strong focus on several provinces at the time under the guise of punishing the famine profiteers.

Through Sverdlov's machinations, Gastev, his rivals, and others were united in a new Department of Societal Engineering and Mechanics (Desim) which had a wide mandate to ensure the enlightenment of the workers through modernization, technical education, and training. The new Department was highly dependent on support from Sverdlov and Lenin since its portfolio clashed with that of education, labor and others. The interdepartmental fighting led to a series of six objectives which included a state supported fight against oblomovism and support for expansion of the League of Time, oversight of the apprenticeship programme and integration into labor and even an effort to rewrite classical works to emphasize natural laws instead of individual actors.

By 1925 the membership of the League of Time started to rise and even surge, and the dreaded chasmuzhi (hour men) started to be a presence in every major organization and factory, reporting procrastination or laziness to the senior officials. Some saw in them a force akin to a bureaucratic secret police but without any authority to arrest, only politically condemn. As a result, the workers were annoyed by them but managers started to fear them and court them, wanting to preserve their own political future.

It emerged that the Party started to offer different tiers of approach to different classes of Russians. Since workers were already present in Russia, Lenin believed they could be uplifted faster into a new obedient communist man compared to the backward peasants. This would start to create tension as some believed peasants were given favorable treatment (greater freedom).

Various factories embraced automatization and specialization of labor. The American government discovered in 1923 and 1924 several alleged attempts of espionage and agitations which were in fact Bolshevik contacts trying to learn more about fordism and taylorism. Ford himself was confused when he learned that he was idolized in Bolshevik Russia but was quickly intrigued by the possibility of investing or trading with the communist state.*

The "mechanization officials" took notes of German-run factories in Russia and carried them to the Desim. Old centralist tendencies resurfaced in the mechanization movement with considerable interest and allies in Lenin, Trotsky, and others. They tried to recruit Pavlov (whom they revered despite his disgust) to help the process with the conditioning of the workers but had to settle for having Comintern procure them works of Burrhus Skinner and Hugo Munsterberg.

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Parade on the Red Square, celebrating the United Labor School

The main problem of the new Bolshevik state were peasants. They could not be brought to heel by force as they nearly caused a collapse of the regime in 1921. Lenin after careful deliberation steered the Party towards some sort of enlightened peasant appeasement. The feudal-religious conscience was too strong in them and had to be diminished first.

The Village would be brought into the fold through market and technology. Lenin famously coined that "Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification of the entire country."* Villagers called electric light bulbs as "Ilich lamps" and the state propaganda extolled the light bulbs as a modern torch of enlightenment. Technology and the light of the industry would break down the class divisions in the village, Lenin believed. Yet he was wrong.

After peasant rebellions ended, the peasants withdrew from the Soviets altogether and empowered the village communes. The old division between the gentry and the village resurfaced. The commune controlled the villages and the Bolsheviks soviets' seats of power. The peace was fragile but without authority no large-scale conflicts reemerged. The Bolshevik soviets in the countryside were filled with members who did not even live in the villages, farmed or had any contact with the peasantry outside the mandatory ones. Less then ten percent of Bolsheviks came from the region to which they were assigned and cared little about practical matters. The rural soviets debated state policy, international events, ethics but almost never agricultural matters which were entirely left to the village commune. They lived and existed parallel one to another.

Village communes would elect fools or poor peasants to rural Soviets which were completely pointless and dependent on the village communes. Bolsheviks aimed to combat this by making rural soviets irrelevant which led to their cutting back and centralization. This would lead to one soviet "ruling" several separate villages without telephone connections, transport, or policemen. Even after the rebellion, the vast majority of the countryside had yet to engage with the Bolshevik state. The few newly educated villagers were isolated in their communes.

Where Bolsheviks were wrong was that the Russian villages were split, but along generational lines and not along the lines of wealth and class. The efforts of the communist enlightenment bore accidental fruit not through technology or propaganda but more utilitarian goals. Service in the army introduced young peasants to the world outside of their village. By learning to read, they could stop being dependent on the village elders for basic knowledge. Peasant households started to partition themselves and sons broke away from their fathers. The young did not want to work the fields - they looked on anything else as more interesting, including factory work.

The young flocked to rural organizations in an effort to establish themselves. Komsomol and not the Party became its destination. The number of its rural members quintupled between 1922 and 1925.* There were three Komsomolers for each Bolshevik in the countryside. They were led by peasants who had served in the army and Trotsky had to take notice of that.[7] Half a million Komsomolers in 1925 would be an ample recruitment source for the Red Army and further experiments with the militarization of the society. They wanted to crush the old village order and to carve a reputation for themselves. Many proudly wore semi-military uniforms with little pressure from above. * They, as much as the Bolsheviks, were willing to launch a campaign against their own fathers and villages.

--The Two Communist Russias, 1995

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"The negative aspect of Taylorism was that it was applied in conditions of capitalist slavery and served as a means of squeezing double and triple the amount of labor out of the workers at the old rates of pay regardless of whether the hired workers were capable of giving this double and triple amount of labor in the same number of working hours without detriment to the human organism. The Socialist Soviet Republic is faced with a task which can be briefly formulated thus: we must introduce the Taylor system and scientific American efficiency of labor throughout Russia by combining this system with a reduction in working time, with the application of new methods of production and work organization undetrimental to the labor power of the working population. On the contrary, the Taylor system, properly controlled and intelligently applied by the working people themselves, will serve as a reliable means of further greatly reducing the obligatory working day for the entire working population, will serve as an effective means of dealing, in a fairly short space of time, with a task that could roughly be expressed as follows: six hours of physical work daily for every adult citizen and four hours of work in running the state."
--Lenin, 1918*
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* denotes OTL quotes or events.
This update largely draws from the material and examples provided from A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes.
[1] OTL Gorky and Korolenko were spared although Lenin basically told Gorky to leave Russia on his own volition "for his health. "
[2] OTL it continued until the summer of 1923. Lenin, feeling stronger, angrier and more accomplished has little patience and cannot be restrained by the Politburo, millions of lives potentially lost be damned.
[3] OTL only 700 000, but disease outbreaks push many of the starving through the death door. In universe there is also debate if everyone really died in 1921 as the Bolshevik records claimed and may hide later population changes.
[4] OTL he had done the same since a defeat in Poland was a victory for Bolsheviks
[5] Sverdlov gains yet another important post which OTL went to Stalin. Stalin remains one of the prominent Bolsheviks, somewhere on the rim of the inner circle looking for an opportunity to claw his way up to the top.
[6] OTL Lunacharsky prevents calls for stripping down general education but with victory in Poland, Lenin and Trotsky have more political capital and more clout to prove Trotskyte ideas are basically right. This results of more administrative tehnocractic approach to the education where practical skills are emphasized. Amusingly, the nuances of Marxism are in the process abridged and shortened, as workers only need to know that it is right and the Party and the State work for the common good. The vagaries of the political debates about communism are left for proper Party officials. This will not have immediate effect.
[7] OTL Trotsky is ousted before he could take notice of the Komsomol rise. Trotsky had continuously returned to ideas of militarization, administration and had a distaste for upper and middle class socialism so he would likely see an excellent opportunity in the new self-made and army-made peasant leadership as a possible political cadre of the future.
 
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Embitterment and Loathing in Charlemagne - part one
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"The Great War pushed Russia down the cliff and brought Germany to the edge of it."
--Winston Churchill
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"I remember when the train came with German marks and we hurried to the station to exchange the dreaded Polish marks for them. We found a line of people waiting in the cold for an office where an official calculated the value of both currencies against the dollar to the disappointment of many. I've seen the new denominations being issued in Germany, apparently fresh from the printer.

Gunther leaned to me and whispered that the inflation in Germany is approaching that of Poland. Surely that cannot be, I opined, the polish marks are useless since the country fell apart due to the war. Gunther reminded me that the French are in the Ruhr and the mark was weakening even more. I disagreed with him then, after all the German mark is not some worthless Slavic currency. He just reminded me that Jadwiga and Kosciuszko used to be only on 500 and 1000 notes and pointed to the freshly issued 100 million German mark bills.

We looked for a store to buy some food which had supposedly arrived but the first one we encountered was closed and the second one in Langfuhr had been looted by the Freikorps. A body of a woman and two men hanged in front of it along with the sign reading "Pole Lovers." The name of the store was crossed out from Grass to K(l)ein. I've thought about removing the bodies but Gunther advised me against it. We eventually found a store that took German marks, having a line to the goods arriving by railways. Gunther was not surprised and mentioned that Ludwig who works at the station changed his surname from Kalacinski to Kalden.

We returned to the factory then, still closed but burning wood to keep warm. Reichenau's thugs stopped terrorizing us after being called to the Vistula and we just sat around and shared stories. Ships with food stopped docking due to Freikorps looting the cargo for themselves although some still came. A loud noise was heard in the distance, probably thunder.

One of us, Hans Jünge, quickly rose to announce that the Red Army is on its way to help their comrades prompting the rest of us to tell him to shut up. The damned Slavs cared little of our strikes, and did he really want the damned Slavs in our city? Jünge started to spin theories of the international revolution before someone hit him with a patch of frozen dirt. Thinking back on it, I realize I was not so different than him. I foolishly trusted the Motherland would save us, he trusted the Internationale. Even Jakub, who was banished along with the other Poles, trusted Poland would help the Poles in the city.

But nothing comes of it for us, the little people. Armies and politicians only care about victories, not human lives.
--My Life, 1966
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Fit for Active Service, 1917-1917 caricature
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During the last German major offensive in the Great War, the military encountered an unpleasant problem: soldiers would capture Entente front lines and then refuse to vacate them and move onward until they ate all the captured provisions.* The Spring offensive lasted for several weeks wasting an enormous amount of resources for meager gains. Six months later, the war was over.

When the armistice was signed in November of 1918, nearly every fifth German served in the Army. And of them, eight million were still armed. The proud Germany of intellectual and cultural achievements, of hard work and growing industry, of science and literature, had gone to the war with a total war mentality. The Germans were made to sacrifice everything to defend themselves against the barbarian Slavs, against the coveting designs of French and Belgians, against the jealous British and Americans. Now the country was at the edge of the precipice.

Nearly every fifth adult man was a casualty. About 2 million were killed and 4,2 million were wounded. The Flu, tuberculosis, and typhus circulated, food was still scarce and the blockade was still in place. Many of the invalids had crude crutches or covered their scarred faces with self-made masks and bandages. Bread and milk were closely rationed. As in other countries, bread was enhanced with additives such as bean flour and even sawdust.*

The women, once plentiful in German plants as cleaners and kitchen staff were now working in them as exhausted laborers replacing the men. Many women had suffered grievous conditions, being poisoned from the work conditions or frequently forced to have sex with factory bosses. Those not fortunate enough to work in factories spent days queueing for bread rations or scavenging coal that fell out of speeding trains. The returning soldiers were angry because their wives and sisters were skeletons and preferred by plant owners as they could pay them less than male workers.

The Germany the armed soldiers were to return was not broken but only by a hair’s breadth.

Amazingly, the high military command hid the extent of the German weakness from the public and the civilian government. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff forced Kaiser Wilhelm II to request the armistice from the Americans as soon as possible. Wilson had just died and the Fourteen points were Germany’s best hope to be considered as an equal party in the future peace conference. The German military was actually preparing to avoid the blame for the conflict by forwarding the burden of the peace on the new government. The army at large proceeded to work as before, still drafting new recruits mere days before the armistice.*

Kaiser Wilhelm II., in one of his last major acts before his abdication and subsequent death, called liberal Prince Max von Baden to form a new government that would seek peace under the auspice of fundamental change. A futile, foolish attempt was made to demonstrate that Germany had learned and democratized. The Social Democrats were finally admitted to the government and the councils of state; censorship was relaxed, antiwar activists were released; new laws were passed that aimed to transform the German monarchy from an absolute to a constitutional one. The government would finally answer to the Reichstag, not the Kaiser. As admirable as those goals were they were futile. Neither the late Wilson nor the new Marshall had the slightest inkling to treat Germany as anything but the losers in the most destructive war in history. Throughout October, newspapers grew illusions of peace by equals that would soon be crushed.

The end for Germany came as a rebellion against an intent by the navy officers to sally out of Kiel in one last foolish sortie, possibly to sink the negotiations and the democratic reforms or to preserve honor in some sort of interservice rivalry with the ar,y. The port city of Kiel revolted starting with the sailors that refused to stoke the boilers and spread to other military personnel. Workers, garrisons, soldiers, and police joined in a haphazard protest demanding the abdication of the Kaiser and an immediate end of the war. They even established councils like the Russians did a year ago. The spirit of the soviet revolution was very much alive in Europe.

The revolution spread by rail as Kiel revolters traveled by train unimpeded to spread the word of their revolution. Bremen, Hamburg, Essen, Braunschweig, Berlin, even Munich. Workers laid down their tools and joined spontaneous protests. A general strike was in the works. Councils were formed everywhere: soldier, sailor, worker, farmer, even artist ones. The chancellor, Prince Max, aware that Kaiser was admitted to hospital for the Flu on the one hand, and that the soldiers were vacating the barracks on another, handed over the chancellorship to the head of the Social-Democrats, Friedrich Ebert. The largest party since the turn of the century finally controlled the government at the moment of its defeat.

In November of 1918, the German Empire ended. From one balcony, that of the Reichstag building, a German republic was proclaimed by Phillipp Scheidemann of SPD. Several hundred meters away, at the balcony of the royal palace, the recently released radical socialist Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a socialist republic.

The new German republic was an exercise in futility. The much-dreaded tier citizenship/voting system of Prussia was gone. Freedom of speech, religion, and press was proclaimed along with universal suffrage and amnesty for political prisoners. Yet the question of surrender remained. When it came to signing the armistice, the prominent antiwar politician, Matthias Erzberger of the Catholic Zentrum was sent to Compiègne. The army was quick to spread the myth of the stab in the back, by a radical government that had used the sickness of the Kaiser to remove him (Kaiser had willingly abdicated three days before he fell into a coma).

The signing of the armistice was but one „easy“ hard task to accomplish. The government had to quickly demobilize and disarm millions of returning soldiers. Within a month it managed to demobilize seven million of them, but another million remained, stubbornly armed and unhappy. The factory owners did not want to rehire the more expensive male workers and the soldiers did not want to work the heavy or dirty tasks. The women also wanted to remain working in factories. They both thought their suffering had earned them a reward.

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The Germany of 1919 was not the famed Germany of order but of chaotic disorder.

The streets of the German cities were filled with idle soldiers shuffling along their streets, many of them still carrying their weapons. Many of them were attracted by speeches, strikes, demonstrations, and other political activism. Civilians, fearing violence, started to form their own protective paramilitary organizations while unhappy soldiers joined various militias or were attracted by newly formed Freikorps.

The violence was haphazard – fights, officials being thrown off bridges, but the tensions were high. Soldiers deliberately defied the authority, blasting trumpets, racing cars, forcibly occupying cafes and restaurants. The conservative German writer Oswald Spengler complained of the unruly lower class (Pöbel) having its day and prophesized the downfall of the civilization.* German liberals also found little common with the new revolutionary spirit. The men hated everything yet cavorted in the Weimar excesses of prostitution, drinking, and unrestrained behavior. They cared little for liberty unless it is their own freedom to do what they want to do. Socialists feared a Russian-style revolution that had turned to disaster.

The newly ascendant Social Democrats never held national power nor were they the majority party, just the largest. They were a party of agitators and party organizers, not of technocrats, bureaucrats, or of any specialists. Ebert had to strike deals with the army to reign in the soldiers, with the state to ensure the economy does not collapse, with the capitalists to preserve the wartime social gains. The Social Democrats in essence gave immunity to the capitalists, the civil servants, and the army from any changes that might come while promising to crush any sign of radical left.

At the General Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils in Berlin in December of 1918, Social Democrat Max Cohen drew ire from the majority of delegates and ridicule from a minority of them. He spoke of the need for calm and order to save Germany which might be dismembered and whose population might starve and freeze if production ceases. A member of the more radical left Independent Socialists, Ernst Däumig, proclaimed that the poet of the revolution, Ferdinand Freiligrath announced that „the proletatirat is called to destroy the old world and build the new one“ seventy years ago. This was not accomplished in his time, but that is the demand "of the hour and the day".* The rotten state should not be saved to be reformed but destroyed to make way for the new. The revolutionary spirit was real.

The General Congress confirmed the government's powers and voted in favor of convening a constitutional convention while extracting numerous concessions in the realm of wages and working conditions. This made the radical socialists unhappy who believed the socialist moment was being sold for baubles and trinkets. Why trade political power for benefits they could set themselves when they are the political power? A chaotic, half-organized, Spartacist revolt followed the next month in Berlin. Radicalized workers and radical socialists staged an armed revolt hoping to spur the already protesting worker and soldiers councils to join them instead of waiting for the army to suppress them one by one. The whole affair was chaotic as the government had to depend on the Freikorps for the rebellion to be crushed. The rebellion was crushed, but some of the communist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were nowhere to be found. A nationwide hunt was pronounced and then quickly forgotten as they failed to reemerge in the following months. They were officially declared dead by courts in 1923.

The Spartacist uprising hoped to preempt both the Paris conference and the elections for the Constitutional Convention. The elections returned results that were not a victory nor a defeat for anyone. The SPD still remained the largest party without a majority. Faced with rising radicalism, a Weimar coalition was formed with the liberal German People's Party (DDP) and the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum). The new coalition sought to blame the problems on the war, and the war on the old elites. Yet the new government had a history of supporting the war effort.

In order to preserve itself from a radical left revolution, the Weimar coalition had to cave in and pander to everyone, especially right. To the citizens, Entente was the big bad. To the foreigners, the Bolsheviks were the big bad. The War was the result of Germany being tricked into conflict. The German civil corps, bureaucrats, and most of the state were apparently blameless. The German people were fooled and suffered just as much.

As the Paris conference opened followed by the Constitutional Convention in Germany, Ebert complained of German Alsace being treated as a French territory and proudly pronounced that their opponents were as exhausted if not more by war.* The Wilson Peace would be had. The peace terms would be worked out before the Constitutional Convention in Weimar finished its work. The new Weimar Constitution seemingly rejected the Prussian past and extolled the classical humanism of Germany. Universal suffrage, freedom of expression, collective bargaining, state responsibility for the unemployed, sick, and the infirm were hallmarks of the new democracy.

Yet the new Germany was far from the democratic utopia it was meant to be. The Weimar Constitution was the dream of liberals and socialists. But liberals and socialists of 1848, not 1918.

It had been ironically modeled and inspired by the most prestigious and reputable democracy of the time - the French one. France was the epitome of the struggle for equality and liberty, but also of contradictions and viciously labile political alliances. The legislative structure was both too powerful and too weak, as it depended on empowering a strong executive by consensus of quarreling political parties and factions. France has been teetering on cycles of domestic institutional paralysis which would periodically erupt into uprisings and authoritarianism to "correct" the system.

The new German federal system actually expanded the power of the central state compared to the Reich it replaced. Many of the Prussian and Junker privileges remained. The president replaced the idea of a constitutional monarch as a figure that was to act as a moderator with vast powers to be tapped only in the case of an emergency.

Ironically, the progressive proportional voting system would soon strangle the political evolution of Germany as it enabled continuous fragmentation of the political landscape. Where a first-past-the-post system might have forced consolidation into major parties, the new idealistic system ensured that everyone continued to be a player as long as it had more than 60 000 votes.

--The Endless Cycle, 1955
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"Now the spirit of Weimar, the spirit of the great philosophers and poets, will govern our lives again."
--Friedrich Ebert, opening speech at the National Assembly, February 1919
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A rational person might have believed that the postwar order would benefit from a strong, stable Germany. Yet no one really believed in it. The public in Entente was out for revenge and France wanted to permanently hobble Germany while making it pay for all the incurred economic costs. Marshall had no interest in forcing Wilsonian ideals on Europe and he allegedly laughed at the German claims that he is indebted to unverified promises and overtures made by his predecessor.

The German delegation arrived at Paris with a reference library and maps for negotiations. Instead, they waited to be presented with an ultimatum. The aristocratic monocle waring count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau expected a compromise peace and vociferously attacked the Entente of wanting to pointlessly prolong the sea blockade and prolong the peace treaty in a rambling unending speech. The American president Marshall quipped that the Germans have mistaken „the city, the year and the side of the table."

Although it was not the original plan of the Entente, as months sped by the first draft for negotiations were hastily assembled into an ultimatum. This was not a peace negotiation but a peace dictation. The German press had not focused on the dismal performance of their delegation but the terms. Panic ensued as they tried to entice Marshall to force the alteration of the treaty not understanding his previous quarrel with Clemenceau. Marshall had no intention of saving Germany because it was unjust but complained the treaty was assembled haphazardly and contradictory. If Germany wanted to complain, they had two weeks to reply. And they did but all the pleas, arguments, and others failed on deaf ears as the Entente wanted to know if Germany wants to resume the war or not.

Germany lost one-seventh of its territory with a possibility for future losses depending on the results of referenda. It was treated as a second-class country, barred from entire military branches such as the air force or close agreements with Austria. The government had claimed for months that Germany was tricked into war yet an article in the treaty assigned the sole responsibility to Germany.

Politicians openly called to call the bluff and refuse the Entente ultimatum. The same Scheidemann that had proclaimed the Republic, now the first chancellor of the new Germany, spoke of enslavement, dismemberment, and the creation of helots.* The treaty made Germany into a prison camp of sixty million, a prison camp they would have to build and maintain. „The foot on the neck and the thumbs in the eye.“*

The Right went even further and complained of every single article of the Treaty calling the refusal of the treaty a „temporary evil“ to save its honor. Accepting would lead to „misery for untold numbers of generations“ and „death would lead to resurrection.“ The interned German fleet at Scapa Flow was scuttled by its crews in a grand show of defiance.

The Entente was only enraged and replied to the Germans that if the current terms were not acceptable, they can be made harsher. They had five days to sign it or prepare for an invasion. The entire government resigned and Ebert scrambled to form a new one that would sign the treaty before the deadline of 28th June 1919. With the Treaty signed, finally, the old Germany ended.

The signing of the Versailles peace did little to lift the morale of the Germans. Although it led to the immediate lifting of the blockade and the return of trade, the Germans were still weak and enraged. Rationing and martial law continued into 1920 in many places, nearly seamlessly joined by new problems of inflation, strikes, and unrest.

Germany stubbornly refused to accept that the Versailles order was a done deal. Politicians feared the number of reparations and hoped to ensure the military size could be increased lest the country be unable to defend itself against domestic unrest let alone a foreign invasion. Every single decision was contested, from confiscation of telegraphs, colonies or equipment, to territorial concessions. The previously little known John Maynard Keynes became a national hero in Germany since publishers jumped to translate and reprint his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace.*

The new Germany depended on the paramilitary squads that assassinated and killed strikers, workers, radical socialists, and criminals. Freikorps were tolerated or seen as a core to quickly rebuild the army if need be. Their loyalty was a question of concern. The allied powers thought they were controlled by the government, yet many of them were only loyal to the Reichswehr through informal contact and personal loyalty. Many German soldiers continued to be stranded abroad and paramilitaries sought their luck in Central and Eastern Europe fighting revolutionaries elsewhere and exacting their tolls and pay in return.

They were a hazard at home. Every politician was attacked as a traitor, stock-market hyena, or a Jew. Prussian generals and priests were only slightly less safe. Matthias Erzberger was but one of the first politicians to be assassinated, blamed for signing the armistice.[1] It is a continuing question today if the Freikorps continued to truly believe the war could be waged on as they claimed.

Citizens did not trust the government and the government did not trust its citizens. The newly free press soon devolved into a cacophony of contradictory claims, competing to have its voice heard. Opposition riled up the population despite having no real alternatives. The foreign reporters claimed that Germans were denying reality, some because they were lied to, others because they did not want to accept it. Even upper technocrats who knew the truth seemed to believe Germany will come up on top of everything, eventually.

The new Democratic Germany was both a state of deep denial and where everyone lied to each other and themselves. The only unsullied ideal was that of wartime solidarity. Even the later Wilhem II., whose name was spoken with derision only a year ago was now made a martyr, who had abdicated only because of a suspicious death. Germany had been stabbed in the back, its wise leader poisoned, all while not a single meter of continental Germany was occupied. Yet the same militarists forgot that soldiers called for immediate peace at any cost and were starving.

--Reflections on the First Republic, 1988

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War is the primary politics of everything that lives, … battle and life are one, and being and will-to-battle expire together.”*
--Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918
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The New Whore of Babylon was the name many called postwar Berlin. The city was already the second largest in Europe and hosted many of the great national institutions. Operas and theaters, museums, and philharmonics clustered in the center. One could not find a cafe that was not filled with artists.

A more progressive scene, that of nightclubs and homosexual bars flourished in Berlin. Many of the new clubs focused on the exploration of free love, sex, and the body. Scantly clad women - those revealing their legs and arms - enjoyed the nightlife and new forms of music.

Yet further away from the center, the vast institutions of the civil servants and their homes bolstered the city, followed by factories of modern goods. The city was surrounded by tenement blocks overpopulated by residents, poorly maintained, and full of diseases and crime. The poor were joined by Russians and Poles fleeing both from political and economical oppression in their countries.

One could walk from the upper-class internationalism and cosmopolitanism of the center to the naked capitalist survival of the worker neighborhoods inside a medium-length walk. It seemed that Berlin represented the whole of Germany. The whole of urban Germany that is. [...]

The Berlin spirit that captured the imaginations of foreigners was demonized by the Germans. The city was a mess, a hotbed for everything wrong with the Germany of today, from politicians to immigrants. The freedom of speech and press meant that a dam had burst and every single political thought now competed for attention. Even the smallest party would print its newspapers and it often scrambled to capture the new media in order to rival the establishment. Public soapboxing, pamphlets, radios were filled with political drudgery. Nowhere was politics as mass as in Germany as a tide of political cacophony besieged the fragile coalitions at every corner.

Germany had both a political suficit of political expression and a political deficit of democratic tradition.

The new establishment tried to change Germany only enough to be accepted by the new order and to preserve the existing blocks of power. It was deeply suspicious of any new party. Reichswehr spied on any social or worker party, concerned with hundreds of thousands of unemployed veterans being radicalized.

Various political points were actually shared among the old and new parties, but Germans became distrustful of elites. Political loyalty was a problem. If the elites were not seen as their patrons, Germans would prefer a new, populist party with the same goals. The political system seemed irrevocably fragmented but that only encouraged competition instead of collaboration. One party would dream of attaining plurality and leading its own coalition. After all, it was easy to capture some seats and the voters became increasingly fickle.

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The largest German party, the SPD (known as MSPD between 1917 and 1921), was truly socialist and democratic in its outlook, has ensured that the new constitution recognized existing social welfare along with trade unions and eight-hour working days. But its main voting bloc were the workers in metal industries, the famed industrial workers that the socialists spoke of as if they composed the entirety of the modern countries.

SPD catered to the proletariat, speaking often of “class struggle” (which was to be resolved through democracy and reforms), “transformation from capitalism into socialism” (ensured through gradual marker reforms aimed mostly at social welfare), and of eventual international socialist unity (while isolated them politically). Germans remained deeply suspicious of the Social Democrats, the greatest bulwark of democracy, as a hotbed of radical socialism. The actual radical socialists despised them for preserving Germany and preventing a revolution. It would not be able to expand its base even if it somehow reversed Versailles. The party embraced the red of the workers' struggle and the flame of enlightenment but it soon found itself saddled with the image of a servant or establishment party.

SPD had failed to capture the will of many of its nominal demographic both before and after the war. The spectacular Berlin munition workers strike during the spring of 1917. blindsided both SPD and its aligned unions. Only with the end of the war was SPD able to extract recognition of unions by the heavy industry and with great difficulty. At the same time, the German economy had discriminated against middle-size firms. All the attention was devoted to them during the war and after it, due to their detriment.

The political parties in general vastly underestimated the impact of the war on their spread. Since SPD supported the war, it had accidentally supported the weakening of unions as its members were mobilized for the front. Unmobilized members were moved around the country to fill plant vacancies in the heavy industry creating nationwide footholds. During the first Republic era, unions wanted to expand the rights given to the heavy metal and chemical industry to the entire economy and SPD carefully tried to chart an ambiguous policy on that.
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The liberal DDP was the prominent progressive liberal party which was mostly the choice of the middle-class technocrats, and the most prominent Jewish and female party, attracting nearly all of their better-off demographic. It fought for a balance in politics and society and decried extremes of all kinds. It would come out against monopolies, it would come out against nationalization. It would support social welfare, it would support private enterprise. It affirmed the law, yet it called for a new national militia.

After the Constitutional Assembly completed its duty, the DDP started to quickly fade away as it opposed and supported everything, not being able to carve an identity for itself. They seemed to be right-wing liberals that embraced minorities but hated immigrants, who opposed and supported big business. Only a few bright stars in the party saved it from obscurity.

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The remaining coalition party, the Catholic Zentrum party, was naturally limited by its religion. Even among Catholics, many were uneasy at the prominent role of priests and bishops in its affairs. They were catholic in a country that considered itself protestant. Even their obvious demographic considered them too concerned with culture and tradition instead of the economy, despite them providing many of the finance and economic technocrats.

One commentator noted they were a party that still believed to fight the Bismarckian Kulturkampf. Actually, they tried to expand their appeal, reaching out to all sides of the political spectrum and positioning themselves as the party of expertise and backbone. They hoped to gather support as a party that fought against the moral degeneration, uniting them under the church. But whose church and to what extent? The party was itself bitterly divided between the ruling liberal faction and the conservative-authoritarian one, the disagreements put aside by capable politicians but not forgotten.

The actual German political dynamo came from the jockeying for the various blocks of unhappy and overlooked workers, farmers, and veterans.

Germany never lost sight of the fact that it was the birthplace of Marx and significant potential for a revolution existed. Radical agitators sought to push every protest into an open rebellion, hoping to ignite a revolution. Any worker killed by the state would embolden ten more to take arms against the state. But worker strikes between 1916 and 1922 were mostly aimed at securing better conditions and achieving peace. Despite the proliferation of councils, communist agitators followed the strikes and tried to steer them in vain with revolutionary slogans. The workers were inspired by Russia, but not by the October Revolution but by the withdrawal from the war.

Te left-field was bitterly divided with any socialist party wanting to gain the open or silent support of the worker. The splinter USPD (independent social democrats) hoped to gather every left voter that disliked the SPD under its umbrella. It was a big tent party that was weaker than it appeared on the national level but with a fantastic potential for local organizations. Yet it teetered on the edge of collapse and other parties recognized that an alliance of discontents will devour itself. They had their moments when they instigated strikes in 1917, but it soon became obvious that they were merely informed of worker councils, not the party of worker councils, no matter how they tried to represent themselves as their party.

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Another prominent player was KPD. KPD from its start was devoted to mass action and the confrontation with the republic and extolled a vision of a prosperous, egalitarian future where workers would be free to explore their talents. It emerged hastily from the USPD and nearly dwindled during 1919 after the ban following the Spartacist uprising.

KPD and USPD would find themselves under the strong influence of foreign communist interests. Lenin forced a split between socialists and communists in 1919, mandated emulating vanguard party and politics for Comintern members in 1920 yet in 1921 communist parties were instructed to form a united front with socialist ones. This would have strong ramifications on German politics and history. Lenin had always hoped to control the KPD for the inevitable moment when Germany would go communist, ushering a continental communist alliance and changing the course of history. [...]

The revolutionary spirit also stemmed from the right-wing forces. German People's Party (DVP) claimed to fight for the German worker while conditionally cooperating with the ruling government. They wanted a reassertion of the „spiritual and moral values“ that defined the „national particularities of Germans.“*

They fought against destructive attempts to replace the devotion to the national state with cosmopolitanism. German interests were to stand against worldly, foreign convictions. Germany was to be reconstructed according to the old principles of honor, loyalty, and incorruptibility. In practice, DVP had a pro-business policy that espoused property rights, revision of Versailles, rollback of social welfare, and limited taxation while claiming it value the independent middle class. It was semi openly against foreigners and Jews.

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Unlike DVP which cooperated conditionally with the government, German National People's Party (DNVP) did not. It was the party of the old elite: Prussian nobility, monarchists, high-level state officials, army officials, everyone who despised democracy. It had moved away from monarchism during the war and moved towards a credible authoritarian alternative. The party espoused tradition and Protestantism while embracing many radical new right ideas. Its members were behind the March 1920 Kapp putsch and the party looked for an opportunity to crush the German republic and replace it with an orderly, expansionist, protectionist Germany divided along hierarchical lines and mandatory military service.

DNVP was fiercely xenophobic and aggressive, embodying every negative militarist stereotype about Germany while too powerful in numbers and Reichswehr support to be stamped out. It opposed every international treaty, suspected all foreigners from Jews to Poles to Africans of plotting against Germany, and claimed Germany was enslaved. It attacked and attacked the republic in speeches, newspapers, and parliaments. It courted the emergent radical Right. However, the Germans immensely distrusted its leadership since it was led by second-stringers of the old elite while being semicovertly supported by the old elite. They admired their rhetoric but despised the leadership. Their greatest influence was as the strongest national megaphone in the Reichstag.

The emergence of the powerful extreme right was a complex process with many independent and dependent causes which lead not to a common goal, but a plethora of aligned ones. Some Freikorps were spontaneous, some were organized by army officials. Some were mercenary, some were desperate and some were purely patriotic. They were aligned with DNVP and Reichswehr at least nominally and were supported by the government only during 1919 and 1920 when strikes and uprisings dominated Germany.

Soon they became an issue of contention as Germany was supposed to disarm them. The earlier embrace of their salvation from the coup attempts only legitimized them in the eyes of the French while the government had little control of it. The Reichwehr controlled or steered some, but increasingly they acted opportunistically and followed public opinion. One marched on Berlin in 1920 after it refused to disarm according to government orders. Reichswehr previously lobbied with Ebert to keep it around and then refused to do anything when it tried to bring down the government. The government had to resort to union leader Carl Legien to organize a general strike. The Freikorps were a mess and Reichswehr could not be counted on to keep them in check.

Many citizens were horrified by their members who espoused the most base xenophobia and misogyny. They wanted the rule of the force, and many new parties saw in them a powerful target demographic. Unfortunately for DNVP, it was seen as too aristocratic for their sense. The Freikorps wanted some new, someone grassroots, popular and anti-establishment. They were funded by wealthy individuals and armed by army officials who distasted their existence but appreciated their usefulness. But the Freikorps and the extreme right also courted the welfare of the common German and radical reforms.

They spoke of the working man and working people, but not the Arbeiter of the left, but the Werkättige of the right. Oswald Spengler wrote of Prussian socialism, Ernst Jüner of front socialism.* Their concern was populist, improve the suffering honest German and reject the dictates of the foreigners. Bolshevism and Jews were conflated into one category and equated by disease. The Deutchvölkisches Schutz un Trutzbund (xenophobic political federation) claimed that „it sees in the oppressive and corrosive influence of Judaism the main reason for the collapse. Removing this influence is the precondition to the reconstruction of state and economy and the rescue of German culture.“*
-- A Political Glossary of the First Republic, 1986
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In June of 1920, the first federal elections for the German Republic were conducted. The new Reichstag was supposed to formally replace the National Assembly. The elections would be marked by a duel between the SPD and USPD. The SPD and USPD formed the first government that had proclaimed the Republic but it did not last long. The USPD left the government over the quelling of the soldier mutiny in Berlin in the November of 1918.

The left-wing USPD which formed as a more radical alternative to the SPD lost power in 1919 elections to the SPD as many saw it as too radical (lest inclined to parliamentary reformism but not as bad as Bolshevism). The Spartakusbund had formally separated from the USPD which had refused to convene a national conference before the January elections resulting in the formation of the KPD.

USPD dwindled in the 1919 elections, winning a meager 7.6% compared to 37.9% of the SPD but was in fact far more popular among the left than the SPD. USPD continued to support council democracy instead of parliamentary democracy, continuously drawing in dissatisfied SPD members and other leftists. It had sapped a large number of the SPD voting bloc in the summer 1920 elections, growing by 10% while the SPD dropped by 16%. The new USPD was the second-largest party in the Reichstag (17.9%), second only to the SPD (20.4%).*

The SPD dropped out of the ruling coalition leaving only Zentrum and progressive DDP in, but their government (bolstered by the German Workers Party, DAP) would be a short one. The collapse of Poland to the Red Army led to the Danzig crisis, with it being liberated into a Freistadt Danzig. The French renewed their previous threats over reparations and demilitarization and issued an ultimatum to the new government to return Danzig to free Polish control and increase the pace of coal shipments. The demand to return Danzig to the Polish government, now in exile in Paris, was incredibly humiliating and the new government (five months old) could not fulfill it without backlash.

The Fehrenbach government made of Zentrum, DDP, and DVP collectively resigned in the face of the ultimatum issued on 14th November 1920, two days before the expiry of the ultimatum. The president, Friedrich Ebert struggled to find a new coalition government or even a minority government but to no avail. The blame was not only on the Polish crisis as it is usually thought; Zentrum and DDP wanted to push for a new financial reform, continuing the work of the murdered Erzberger but left parties refused to support any new tax on the low and middle-class income citizens. Ebert had to dissolve the Reichstag on 26th November and announce new elections set for 5th January 1921.

The USPD looked to gain the most from the snap elections, but Bolshevik meddling destroyed the party as it was. At the same time, Red Army was entering the outskirts of Warsaw, the Second World Congress of the Comintern concluded. In it, Lenin had imposed over twenty conditions on any socialist party which wanted to participate in the Comintern. The demands would basically force the USPD to accede to Moscow supremacy and abandon its focus on council democracy. Many believed that without Comintern support, they could not count on international socialist support against possible reactionary elements. A party convention had to be called.

The October party convention in Halle saw representatives from various parties arrive, including SPD, Zinovies for the Russian Bolsheviks, Longuet for the French SFIO, and others. Ernst Däumig and Walter Stöcker opposed the Comintern while younger members such as Ernst Thälmann wanted to join it. The proposition to join the Comintern was approved by a mere 30 votes XXX compared to OTL 81 votes XX and the Party soon split into two, with both calling themselves the rightful USPD. The leftist USPD formed an informal alliance with the KPD.

In the January elections of 1921, the issues were confused as both parties claimed the USPD name, neither willing to concede the name issue before the elections. This most of all annoyed common Germans, as SPD was already called Mehrheitsozialdemokratsiche Partei (MSPD) owing to the SPD - USPD split of 1917, leading to three SPDs at the same elections.

Although Comintern encouraged the left USPD to join with KPD into a new communist party, they did not want to nor could do so before the elections due to multiple reasons - a fight on the local level for the voters and organizations, bureaucratic chaos, and fears they might prompt a repeat of 1919 if they seemed too willing to invite the Red Army. The USPD would merge with the KPD after the elections where it won 21% of the vote, becoming the second-largest party in the Reichstag again.

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The biggest winners the DNVP, virulently opposed to Versailles and Bolshevism. Their support rose from 10.3% vote in January 1919 to 15.3% in June 1920 to 23% in January 1921. Their support had doubled in over a year, mostly for themselves managing to position themselves as the main magnet for nationalistic anger. The party promised to refuse reparations, promised to "choose" new borders, and even spoke of withdrawing from the „unacceptable terms of the Peace Treaty“ whatever it meant.

This prompted panic, as it could mean a DNVP led government might invite war with the Entente or provoke a blockade. USPD, acting contrary to the wishes of Moscow, tried to form a government by offering a coalition to other socialist and left-leaning parties, but SPD and other parties refused to entertain a nation of an antirepublic, antidemocratic, bolshevik party in the government. As a result, with DNVP, USPD, and KPD being unacceptable for the government coalition, a deal had to be hashed only among half of the elected parties.

After much negotiation, the old alliances returned. A Zentrum-DVP-DDP government gained conditional support from the parliament hobbled with the mandate not to turn over Danzig or give up on the reparations issues along with a moratorium on some financial reforms and welfare reforms. The new German government refused to visit the Cannes conference as longs as France and Belgium were occupying German lands, and Poincáre refused to attend any conference to discuss things, only sign them.

--The Brief Political History of the First Republic, 1996
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"Order rules in Berlin!" You obtuse gendarmes! Your "order" is built on sand. Tomorrow the Revolution will "again climb the heights" and, to your horror, announce with trumpet blasts: I was, I am, I shall be."
--final pamphlet of Rosa Luxemburg during the Spartacists uprising, 1919*
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The KPD was hastily founded by the Spartacus League, itself hastily founded in November of 1918, mere days after the release of Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches from prison. Luxemburg had come to value the Russian revolution and believed the world history moment is now. She was dismissive of "Scheidermänner" (Social Democrats)* and urged the spread of council and mass self-organization in preparation for the revolution.

At the end of 1918, the KPD founding congress met in Berlin somewhat out of an accident. Luxemburg had called for a national conference of the Spartacus League, but other socialist parties refused to follow her calls for mass activism while strikes worsened. USPD also refused the calls for a conference. With other radicals founding their own International Communist of Germany party, Luxemburg reluctantly reversed her position and agreed that the founding of a formal party was necessary. They retroactively proclaimed the national conference to be the founding congress of the new party which, after surprisingly much debate, chose the name Communist Party of Germany. Over Luxemburg's objection, the KPD chose to ignore the upcoming elections to the Constitutional Assembly while nearly tearing itself apart on the issue of revolutionary terror.*

The new party did not have a great start. Liebknect and Luxember were thought to have died in the futile uprising that tried to steer the unrest in Berlin. Although thought to have been instigated by the Spartacists, Radical workers in Berlin rose against the government after the political fallout of the dismissal of the independent radical socialist police commissioner of Berlin, Emil Eichhorn. The new KPD had not instigated the uprising but felt compelled to support it. When their bodies could not be found, Leo Jogiches was murdered a week after [2] along with several other founding members. The new KPD was now rudderless and officially banned. While in the underground it further splintered over the issue of electoral participation and the dissidents who favored continued abstention formed the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). By the time of the Ruhr occupation, KPD had only 66 000 members* but that would soon change.

The Ruhr occupation proved to be immensely unpopular and embittered workers. They started to be more receptive to the radical left. A factor in this was the death of Erzberger who was immensely popular among the Catholic working classes in Rhineland, Westfalia, and other industrial regions through the support of catholic trade unions. With the murder of Erzberger and the chaos that ensued regarding further finance reforms, the workers started to turn to other parties, including USPD and DVP, but also KPD.

At the same time, due to Lenin's conditions imposed on the Third International, USPD fell apart rather than the model itself after the Russian Communist Party. The October 1920 Congress was bitter enough that SPD saw an opportunity to assimilate it. Zinoviev was sent from Petrograd to represent Russia and the Bolsheviks. Under intense pressure, the delegates voted to accept Lenin's conditions which led to a bitter struggle. Some members left the USPD for the SPD, others vied with KPD for control of local organizations. The KPD merged with the USPD by February of 1921 into the VKPD (United Communist Party of Germany).

The VKPD now had 350 000 members, a nationwide array of newspapers, bases in industrial areas, yet barely functioned as a cohesive organization. The Party had no clear goals, no clear leaders, only that it adhered to the conditions of the membership in the Third Internationale. They would also fail to form a socialist-led coalition and thus remained in the opposition. If they could only find a way to appeal to the middle-class rapidly being impoverished by the inflation. This would be hard as many Germans believed if they were in power, they would have confiscated the very same household objects they were now bartering to survive.

--The German Political Lexicon, 1966
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"Her brain was the best mind produced after Marx. She had intelligence, will, passion and dedication like no one other. Every year taken from her life was a decade being taken from the world."

--Franz Mehring
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Within the ideological framework of communism, Lenin was extremely concerned with the ideological situation in Germany, perhaps even more than in his own Party. As long as the Bolsheviks were united they would barrel on, stamping out any opposition. But Germany, the birthplace of Marx, had so much potential yet an ideological strain repugnant to Lenin.

Lenin was conscious he had betrayed nearly all tenents of Marxism at one point or another but he believed that the end goal was just. The Bolshevik Party was the best hope for the creation of socialism. It was no secret that foreign leftists expressed abject horror with the excesses and terror of Bolshevik Russia. It had turned on everyone, instituted worse terror than the Tsarist ones, and openly massacred workers demanding a return to councils. However, only the German intellectual scene had a significant enough socialist megaphone that could rival the Bolsheviks.

Lenin moved quickly to constitute a Comintern in Russia before the Second Internationale could regain prominence through Germany. Germany had a tremendous potential to call for internationalist solidarity. The SPD was the great party of the Second Intentional and Lenin wanted to prevent it from returning to its hegemonizing position now when it led Germany, the archetype worker country. One of Luxemburg's students, Friedrich Ebert, was now the leader of SPD and the president of the new Germany.

However, the most puzzling accusation against Lenin lies in the possible role Bolsheviks had in the Spartacist revolt of 1919. A Bolshevik agent was sent to Germany, ostensibly to establish contact with receptive people, but with a real goal to ensure that Liebknecht and Luxemburg were killed. With Luxemburg gone, Lenin would lose his greatest ideological rival on the world stage. [3]

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 in Zamość in Poland, in a lower-middle-class Jewish family. From an early age, she was saddled with a disease that left her with permanent limp and lifelong pain which she compensated with an intense intellectual focus. She had joined to Polish Proletaiart Party where she quickly excelled at organizational activities forcing her to flee to Switzerland in 1887. There she earned her doctorate in law, one of the few women to do so. She also became a prominent fixture among the revolutionary exiles of the Russian empire.

When Luxemburg tried to resume the serious political work she had to abandon the Polish socialists. The Polish socialists cared about the independence of Poland and even less about the internationalist anticapitalist Marxian revolution. Luxemburg was an honest, radical internationalist who sought to realize a worldwide revolution. She even differed with Marx and Engels themselves who had favorably looked on Polish independence believing that nationalistic goals must never take prominence over absolute socialist internationalism. Together with Leo Jogiches, she found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland, expanding it later to add Lithuania. Jogiches organized it and Luxemburg was its voice.

She eventually moved to Berlin (through a sham marriage) in 1898 believing that Germany would be the heart of the global socialist struggle. She quickly gained fame as a workaholic who decried the parliamentary route of the Social Democrat Party of Germany. The SPD was „a stinking corpse“ unwilling to truly take the cause of socialism. She attacked Eduard Bernstein (a disciple of Engles) who in the eighties wrote a series of articles attacking Marxism. In Bernstein's Problems of Socialism, he endorsed reformism and gradual change, in line with the growing political strength of unions and socialists. The takeover of the government would be achieved inevitably through political growth.

Luxemburg disagreed, writing Reform or Revolution, the centerpiece work of the Second International. As long as capitalism existed, its contradictions would continue, crises repeat and any suggestion that the system could be worked with instead of torn down broke the objective base of Marxism. Although labor was to fight for reforms, the ultimate goal should not be parliament control but preparation for the seizure of power through revolution.

Luxemburg continued to chart an independent streak. She was one of the main contributors to the Marxist Die Neue Zeit, and frequently criticized its editor, Karl Kautsky, the „Pope of Marxism.“ She was devoted to building an international, antiimperialist movement of workers across Europe, mostly Central and Eastern Europe

Luxemburg and Lenin met in 1901. They were drawn to each other by each other's intellect and passion. Although they shared the circumstances of life and goals, their passion gradually translated into criticism and later disgust.[4] Luxemburg was a proponent of revolutionary democracy, holding fast to Marxist theory that revolution must constantly be open to debate and change. Spontaneity and organization were to be vital to any struggle by ensuring its wide popular appeal and true democratism. She even had the gall to intervene in a dispute between Lenin and the Mensheviks that started at the Congress of 1903.

Luxemburg scolded Lenin for his conception of a highly centralized party vanguard which Lenin claimed was necessary to put he working class under tutelage. She questioned the concept of „the omnipotent central pwoer with its unlimighted right of intervention and control.“* The Party should not be an organization of professional revolutionaries like Lenin believed but the organization of the working class as a whole. The Party should provide leadership, but not organize the stuggle or lead it. Luxemburg was not alone in this, as Trotsky at the time shared the same critique of Lenin.

Disagreements continued, in between her imprisonments in Germany and Russia, with her dismissing Lenin's calls for national self-determination, but the conflict abated after the Russian Revolution of 1905. The two had common goals and endorsed a revolution in Russia. Luxemburg believed that a successful revolution would stimulate the German Social Democracy from the far left and Lenin agreed. They entered a phase of collaboration for the benefit of European socialism. She became the voice of Russian and Polish parties at various internationalist outlets.

Lenin was faced with Luxemburg as the face and the voice of socialist internationalism. She preferred the general strike as the preferred form of the revolution – spontaneous, universal, democratic, and nonviolent. At the Second Congress of International Socialism in Stuttgart in 1907 she presented a resolution that all European workers' parties must unite to avoid war.

Luxemburg eventually forrayed into adding new theory to Marxism, taking interest in imperialism and colonialism, a matter Lenin gave little thought to. Luxemburg famously wrote in The Accumulation of Capital (1913) that capital „ransacks the whole world.“

At the same time, she finally broke with Kautsky. Kautsky disapproved of general strikes and the straw that broke the back was Kautsky continuing to defend a cautious electoral policy for the SPD. The SPD had divided into three wings. One favored reformists which found accommodation with imperialist tendencies of Germany, one espoused verbal radicalism while content with parliamentary struggle, and the last one was the true revolutionary wing. Luxemburg saw Kautsky's centralist approach as little different from the reformist wing as they both were content to work within parliamentary bounds.

The Great War came and of the SPD deputies, only Karl Liebknecht voted against SPD support of the war. All the fabled work of international solidarity went for nothing as many worker parties supported or remained neutral to war. Liebknect, Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and Clara Zetkin met together in the Spartacus League to discuss this betrayal, foremostly of the SPD, and started to issue Spartacist letters. With the outbreak of the Great War, Luxemburg was shuttered to prison where she continued to decry the conflict as a devastating war of capitalism waged in favor of the bourgeois and the elite.

Her 1918 essay, the Russian Revolution, widely published only after her disappearance, eventually rang out through the socialist circles. Although she supported the Russian revolution, in it she mercilessly attacked Lenin and the Bolsheviks, remarking that „Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.“ *

Luxemburg basically condemned Lenin and the Bolsheviks for destroying the socialist alliance in favor of a one-party dictatorship. Socialist democracy cannot be delayed until the conditions were right but created from the start. A more careful reading revealed that Luxemburg was willing to tolerate the Bolshevik excesses to a point as a result of circumstances but certainly not approve of them. She enumerated four issues where Bolsheviks made serious errors: the support for various nationalities, the Constituent Assembly, the democratic rights of the workers, and the agrarian question (she felt that the presumptive division of lands among peasants sealed off socialist reforms).

Various rebellions and uprisings between 1919 and 1921 in Russia frequently requested a return to a socialist plurality, mass action, and a national government, something which suspiciously coincided with Luxemburgian thought. In fact, she had predicted 15 years ago that if the party leads the revolution, socialism will be decreed by a dozen intellectuals from above with repression of political activity. The Party replaces party organizing, the Central Committee replaces the Party, and eventually, a dictator replaces the Committee. Luxemburg called the Russian path a path to the dictatorship of the Jacobins, a path which Lenin actually romanticized.

There are multiple contradictory testimonies about Lenin's response to the failure of the Spartacist uprising. They do agree that Lenin was immensely concerned with the whereabouts of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. He had wasted no time to decry the foolish and poorly organized uprising while lamenting the failure of the revolution for now. But he had lost his main internationalist rival enabling his dream to impose his vision internationally, ensuring Russia would be the center of socialism, something his closest allies thought unrealistic.

The enmity Lenin had for Luxemburg was private while he publicly extolled her. He had attacked German communists in 1922 for not publishing her complete works. He had praised her work on uniting the worker's parties and promoting internationalism. Yet privately he had wondered what became of her. During secret negotiations with the Reichswehr and Germany, Lenin requested to learn the truth about Luxemburg. Ironically, Germans wanted to know if Luxemburg fled to Poland and Russia.

During the war with Poland and immediately after, Lenin repeatedly inquired if there is any evidence of Luxemburg. Her birthplace was nearly dismantled under the direction of Drzhezinsky in a futile search of any information about her. The city would later nearly be burned down during the uprisings in 1921.

The German courts declared Luxemburg (and Liebknecht) dead in February of 1923, years after the government had done so. Less than two months later, a work authored by Luxemburg had appeared followed by new photographs of her and even recordings of the speech. It turned out that Luxemburg had survived the assassination attempt, although not unscathed. Liebknecht was not mentioned at all, only that he had separated from Luxemburg following their escape.

In January of 1919 Luxemburg and Liebknecht narrowly escaped capture and murder at the behest of their followers who urged them to leave Hotel Eden after learning of the Freikorps approaching. Allegedly they preferred an honorable death although that does not explain various details including apparent gunshot wounds. Luxemburg was hidden for weeks in the cellars of Berlin, while trusted doctors were brought in to treat her wounds. It is believed she had contracted the flu or typhus during this time and was rarely fully conscious throughout 1919. It seems that she was hidden in Bavaria for a time before being smuggled out of the country. It is unclear what was of her during 1920 and 1921 except that she was bedridden and had difficulty speaking. Liebknecht's fate was unknown.

She had recovered and slowly regained the ability to speak and write while continuing to be on the move with help of the sympathizers. They also controlled her whereabouts since she was now paralyzed and could not move on her own. Despite her protests, she was kept secluded from the world. The same people helped her to keep informed and transcribed her words.

By late 1922 she had written a monumental work aimed against SPD and Bolsheviks, but mostly Bolsheviks. In The Failed and the Forsworn Revolutions, she listed and attacked the crimes of SPD, VKPD, and the Bolsheviks point by point, with two-thirds of the book being devoted to the Bolsheviks.

Luxemburg had lauded SPD for espousing suffrage and social welfare but attacked it for its pointless and aimless rule centered to preserve a Germany against revolution and in favor of imperialist elites. KPD was attacked for the indecisive sin of parliamentarianism and listening to foreign dictates. Germany should have refused the Versailles treaty and established a council-run country that would resist any imperialist demand. Had it had been done so, in the subsequent years any prolonged occupation would only radicalize the enemy soldiers and resulted in a global economic crash which would induce an international socialist revolution. Germany had not ended up a constitutional republic but a mockery of one, a colony inside of Europe instead of Africa or Asia.

Luxemburg was truly disgusted with the Bolshevik revolution starting by criticizing her own earlier words. She admitted she was wrong when she used to claim that errors of any revolution are more beneficial than any parliamentary advance. [x] Russians had to deal with odds stacked against themselves but the Bolsheviks had shown that their end goal is power in itself, not a socialist revolution.

Luxemburg had seemingly devoted a chapter to each Russian error but she was frustrated the most with the New Economic Policy. According to her, the mere implementation of it permanently discredited any Bolshevik from being able to claim that they were acting in the interests of Marx. They had mercilessly crushed spontaneous organizations and councils that rose against them only to later reimplement capitalism under their auspices. Millions have died for nothing.

Luxemburg also denounced excesses of Russian puppet Poland, ridiculing the attempts to ethnically redraw Poland through national and ethnic self-determination and speaking of pointless massacres of workers, peasants, and non-Bolshevik allies including the dreadful terror campaign of Kamo.

Luxemburg lamented that one of the first moves of the Bolsheviks was to restrict freedom by seizing printers in favor of public ownership, prior to dissolving the Constituent Assembly through force. Within less than three years Bolsheviks formally banned even factions within their own party. The same country sentenced millions to die of hunger while it exported grain to purchase industrial equipment from imperialists.

Luxemburg concluded that the Bolshevik regime is an imperialist regime that aspires to be accepted by the capitalist ones but with no freedom even for elites, only a mindless, one-party mandate. Russia stopped being a communist country in 1918 with the downfall of the Constituent Assembly, and its path now was a dead end of socialism. Capitalist regimes would soon turn to devour each other as they redistribute colonies and lands to exploit. Future Great wars are possible if not likely with the result that after each war the number of imperialist powers is reduced. Bolshevik Russia hopes to join in this game, waiting to be the last survivor.

Luxemburg called for the socialist and communist parties to break with the Comintern. She accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of subordinating the workers' parties to bolster their own regime instead of international struggle. Surprisingly enough, Luxemburg opined that SRPL (Red Poland) was a mistake and a true communist revolution would establish a federation and usher in true self-determination. Nationality is unimportant, only class is. In this, Luxemburg accidentally agreed with Lenin that Poland should have been annexed, although the end goal federation would most certainly not be based in Moscow as Lenin hoped.

The first rumors of Luxemburgs The Foolish and the Forsworn Revolution reached Lenin before a German and Czech translated version appeared in Czechoslovakia and Austria. The Comintern moved to condemn the forgery while paradoxically praising the first third of the book and instructed the parties to suppress it. It was in vain as many communists were drawn to it out of mere curiosity. By the summer of 1923, it was translated into five languages, French, German, English, Polish, and Czech. Allegedly the Russian translations were seized and destroyed by Cheka, but contraband partial translations continued to pop out. Drzhezhinsky had at one point had the police track every shipment of ink in Poland in person to find the illegal printers producing pamphlets with excerpts.

It is often erroneously conflated the Lenin suffered his stroke after hearing of the book. Although incorrect, Lenin was greatly disturbed by the return of his main ideological rival. He had personally read in detail through the confiscated examples, forgoing all other activities and duties, avoiding sleep for days despite the protests of his carers. He had started to dictate a point-by-point response before realizing that this would only legitimize the book. Lenin soon took the official opinion that Luxemburg was dead and this was a forgery. The Comintern was to dismiss this as a work of ambitious unexperienced agitators, expanding on her genuine papers.

This would prove to be problematic as further evidence of Luxemburg appeared. Analysis of photos seemingly pointed to her being in the Alps. Analysts determined the language to be her own but the reports were buried. Bolsheviks initially believed she was in Czechoslovakia, due to the proximity of both Germany and Poland. As logistical lines of the book were reconstructed, confusion ensued as the book appeared to have been printed initially in Northern Italy. Had Luxemburg been hidden in Switzerland all this time?

Lenin had eventually responded with a much-trimmed-down essay where he opined that the Luxemburg of today was not the Luxemburg of 1919, one which had endorsed the Russian revolution and resorted to enticing an uprising of her own. Lenin listed numerous examples where he and she agreed and suggested that Luxemburg of today, if she is who claims to be, has strayed from the onus of the communist thought and is attacking her fellow comrades instead of the capitalists. One might wonder if this is not the result of a disease, or wounds inflicted by the bourgeoisie. Lenin actually praised the first third of the book, calling it a genuine critique of the German politics party yet claimed that it decisively proves that the VKPD is the only real socialist path. He concluded with a now well-rehearsed mantra calling for unwavering communist unity enumerating how all revolutions failed except in Russia where the strong hand of the party eliminated dissidence. Of course, the essay was initially only printed for foreign consumption.

That year (1923) was considered to have ushered a worldwide debate on the nature of communist thought with various supporters aligning along two axes. Many previous ideological conflicts, such as those between Bordiga and Lenin, came to fall into a new division. The exact positions of Lenin and Luxemburg were complicated and both seemed to contradict themselves.

Luxemburg exposed true internationalism without false national self-determination. Only class emancipation is important. Luxemburg also argued for centralization of coordinating character, not dictating one. The party was to support the eventual revolution and unite the plurality of mass action. Luxembourgians could call to their 1904 critique of Lenin's book „One Step Forward, Two Steps Back“ which turned out to accurately predict current Russia with the omnipotent Party controlling the state and crushing all mass movements with force.

Lenin, on the other hand, argued that class consciousness can only naturally progress to technounion stage and a party vanguard has to guide it to the communist stage, taking care of the specific national circumstances along the ladder of development. Marx had not predicted that there could be hybrid countries where worker conscience is undeveloped or where preindustrial conditions still exist. Communism might require pushing the country through stages of market economy and industrialization in order to be able to progress to true communism afterward, but this requires political dictatorship to ensure the country does not slide into capitalism.

There were also significant differences on other issues. Lenin gave no importance to colonial issues, opining that heartland industrial countries were important for the worldwide revolution. Luxemburg gave particular credence to the exploited countries and was thus more interesting to nascent colonial communist parties. Luxemburg also considered international trade more important as a crucial harmful economic problem while Lenin believed foreign credit and loans to be more of a problem for economies.

Although the fight for ideological supremacy was frequently described as a fight between Lenin and Luxemburg, this is a vast later oversimplification. Lenin's thought logically drew most of the communist critics and at best, other critics tolerated each other more. For example, Bordiga aligned with Luxemburg on some points (such as opposition to parliamentarism and united front) while with Lenin on others (dictatorship of the party).

The ideological conflict emerged in the years where Lenin had ensured the Bolshevik party would tolerate no dissidence and other schools of thought suffered problems of their own. The leading French thinkers have died while in Italy the native schools of thought divided bitterly on the pressure of Comintern and forayed into general sociological and cultural analysis. Syndicalists admired Luxemburg more since she obviously preferred mass action and discussion of the councils over central dictates. Even in Russia, secret dissidents admired Luxemburg for attacking the NEP and being out of reach of the secret police.

The ideological fight continued via other means. Germany and Russia secretly agreed to share any intelligence on where Luxemburg is. Since Luxemburg was to be sentenced to death, her extradition to Germany would give Lenin his victory and a martyr to communism. Various proxies challenged Rosa to a personal debate, but she declined or ignored all calls to meet with anyone in person, contrary to her established personality. Russian and German agents in Switzerland looked for her and contact was made with Italian communists. Yet Luxemburg was not there, she was hidden in a country she had previously paid little attention.

--The Battle for Red Supremacy, 1988
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"We can thus have no guarantee that [...] the Germans will not filter troops by degrees into this district. Even supposing they have not previously done so, how can we prevent them doing it at the moment when we intend to re-occupy on account of their default? It will be simple for them to leap to the Rhine in a night and to seize this natural military frontier well ahead of us."

--Raymond Poincare to Clemenceau, April 1919*
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The extreme right started its own campaign of terror against the domestic enemies. It had killed Mathias Erzberger, one of the leaders of the Zentrum, in late 1919 [1] horrifying the ruling coalition which thought only the communists had reason to be concerned about assassinations. One DNVP outlet celebrated the murder noting „only extremism can make Germany again what it was before the war.“*

Although the murder of Erzberger was traditionally viewed as a reaction against his role in the armistice (his name was synonymous with peace due to his consistent antiwar activism)* the real reason probably came out of his rivalry with one of the leaders of the DNVP, Karl Helfferich. Helfferich was a prominent wartime government member who was considered to be responsible for financing the war through loans instead of taxes. Erzberger had spent most of 1919 as a minister without a portfolio, finally assuming the post of finance minister and vice-chancellor in June of 1919 and prepared immediate taxation measures for the National Assembly.

The Erzberger reform was intended to give the federal government ultimate authority on taxation and spending, curtailing the dependence on the cooperation of the constituent states. Contingent on this, tax reform would follow, introducing war levies in income and wealth as well as the first inheritance tax. This made him extremely unpopular on the right which was supported by wealthy aristocrats and industrialists. In numerous disputes, he attacked the DNVP for the war and its poor handling. The DNVP leader, Helfferich published a brochure titled Fort mit Erzberger (Get rid of Erzberger). In September of 1919, one of the veterans shot Erzberger on the street claiming to have been inspired by the brochure.

The assassination was a prelude to the downfall of the initial coalition. The murder galvanized the Zentrum party but also lead to bitter strife among its liberal and conservative factions. In the January 1920 elections, SPD lost many voters with the threat of the communist revolution diminishing. The Social Democrats withdrew from the coalition, leaving progressive liberal DDP and Zentrum in the core coalition. A succession of discussions on the exact amount of reparations throughout 1919 and 1920 led only to further strife as German politicians refused "insane" ideas of reparations while at the same time, the French took an even more revanchist position with the ascension of Poincáre instead of Clemenceau.

The British and the French wrangled over the issue of reparations, especially total liability, pressured by their respective publics and the opposition. British anticipated a German offer while French pressed the British to reopen the question. Due to Germany failing to deliver the coal or acknowledge the devastation wrought to France, Poincáre had ordered the military to prepare for the possible Ruhr occupation, noting that it is not question of if but when.

Poincáre and Chamberlain found themselves in a situation after Chamberlain learned that Poincare considered the unilateral occupation of several Ruhr towns in the spring of 1920 „to ensure the withdrawal of German troops from the demilitarized zone[7] where they quelled unrest after the failed Kapp putsch. The act was averted due to Poincáre not wanting to upset the delicate relations more over the disaster in the Ottoman Empire.

The matter came to the front in July of 1920 at the Spa conference where the issue of reparations and disarmament (and some minor border adjustments between other countries) would be settled. The head of the German delegation Hugo Stinnes (then only a member of the Reichstag) called the Entente allies „our insane conquerors“* The question of coal deliveries was expected to be the least difficult question to settle but it came to dominate the discussion as Germans had fallen seriously on their deliveries. Poincáre and Foch threatened with the occupation of Ruhr to enforce compliance.

Chamberlains' government could not agree on the price of the coal mostly due to existing agreements between British and French coal exchange and their delegation floundered pointlessly. Poincáre dug his feet in the ground and ordered the French delegation to refuse coal being priced against a prospective reparation amount. As the British supported this proposal, more importantly at British export price, the negotiations collapsed. [5] Poincare did not want to „pay“ more for less coal especially since Germany failed to deliver it.

Germany managed to exploit the Entente divisions more of sheer luck than of its stated intent. This unfortunately strengthened the belief that the French threat of occupation could be called a bluff. The next crisis came sooner than anyone thought courtesy of Pilsudski and Tukhachevsky.

The collapse of Poland led to the spontaneous liberation of Gdansk which had proclaimed itself Frei Stadt Danzig, alluding to the medieval city, and requested a customs union with Germany in an obvious prelude to unification. The French called this a blatant (and repeat) disregard of the Versailles treaty. French newspapers screamed of Germany ignoring the Paris terms and claimed Germany is preparing to divide Poland with Bolsheviks along prewar borders.

Poincáre was ready to act alone (actually in concert with Belgium) and issued an ultimatum to Germany to disarm the Freikorps in Frei Stadt Danzig and return it to the free Polish government as well as close the border to the further incursions of Freikorps into Poland. Unsurprisingly, Reichswehr openly refused to move German units against Danzig or fire against the volunteer veterans "defending" Germans "trapped" in Poland. The government promised to refuse to acknowledge any offer of annexation without the approval of the interAllied commission but this was rejected by the French.

Faced with an ultimatum, the government resigned in protest two days before the date. Ebert scrambled to gain an extension to form a new government but to no avail. French and Belgian troops started to occupy key bridges in the Ruhr, aiming first to control a couple of cities, and then to gradually expand the occupation to the entire Ruhr. While the French presented this as gradual escalation, in reality, this was to hide difficulties with the army mobilization of the latest recruit class.

Chamberlain was appalled and refused to join the blockade but also to support the German side. In Poland, Red Army stalled in its track, and rumors of a negotiated settlement through the British appeared. The Red Army could not advance to the German border nor it wanted to. It was being resupplied and moved to quell the various uprisings in Petrograd, Samaria, Siberia, and Caucasus.

Although newspapers spoke of war brewing, both France and Germany were content to stare at each other until the Ruhr occupation proved to be untenable. After all, the German plan for the postwar settlement was to endure and outlast Entente pressure. The inflation that had begun in wartime though crediting continued after the war, further encouraged by the government. The depreciated currency made German goods attractive and the export industry recovered faster than anyone expected. This was of course noted by the French, still struggling to ensure coal.

John Maynard Keynes had predicted a collapse of Germany, but instead, Germany not only shared the postwar prosperity but for a time seemed poised to overtake the victors. Various small private investors infused billions of gold marks enabling factories to reconvert to peacetime production and modernize their firms. Goods were dumped abroad once the blockade was lifted while imports rose. The trade deficit was stabilized by small-scale foreign purchases of paper marks while industrial output rose. Inflation enabled not only cheap prices for export but eased new costs of new work conditions won by unions during wartime. Workers, for a time, benefitted from the rising inflation.

But the German trade surplus of 1919 was followed by a barely positive one in 1920.* The demand for imports grew in Germany faster than the volume of its exports and the favorable economic conjuncture of 1919-1920 was just a happenstance unlikely to continue. The weaponized inflation was a strategy that worked only under vastly circumstantial settings. Germany of 1920 still believed the trade surplus would continue in 1921 and prepared to demonstrate that the Ruhr occupation is pointless by encouraging passive resistance. Indeed, outside of France and Belgium, public opinion was mixed on the occupation, believing that it was pointlessly motivated by the issue of Danzig and Germans in Poland. Why punish Germany to reward Bolsheviks in Poland?

As the occupation of Ruhr developed, the government decided to pay any passive resistance by the workers by printing money. This would enable Germany to outlast the unpopular occupation and demonstrate that Germany could not meet its financial obligations, through economic difficulties of its own. Any misery would be blamed on the French while solidifying the support of the government through patriotism. On the other hand, France believed that occupation would scare Germany into accepting a higher amount of reparations of which France was to be the main beneficiary. The reparations were supposed to be paid in goldmarks anyway.

As 1921 was the year of misery and panic for Russia, so it was for Germany. Inflation grew, but suddenly accelerated during the summer and turned into the first postwar hyperinflation. Anyone dependent on state funds plunged into extreme poverty. The agricultural sector which had failed to prosper was now ruined by the rampant inflation. The various self-employed, shopkeepers, rentiers, and others dependent on fixed incomes or liquid assets lost their fortunes. At the same time, large businesses and organized workers continued to exploit inflation for short-term gains. The question of inflation was ruining whatever solidarity patriotism created.

The French gradually expanded their occupation to the entire Ruhr area, demanding Germany to accede to its proposals for settling industrial and financial reparations, as well as demilitarizing the Freikorps. Although the crisis was prompted by Danzig, the real crux of the negotiations was always coal and the amount of the reparations. French advanced several proposals including forced stock ownership of German industry, creation of joint German-French steel cartels, and introduction of reparation credits but they all fell on deaf ears.

Germany was once again undergoing elections and industrialists blocked any proposal of French influence. Germany did not need French iron ore nor their markets. The British government also refused to acknowledge bilateral attempts of settlement (which would exclude them), forcing the abandonment of economic issues in favor of resolving the political ones of Poland and the army. Germans tried to exploit the problems trying to tie reparations with revisions of territorial problems. on a one-for-one basis. The result was a political quagmire.

--The Precipice of Peace, 1966
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"If I do not yet see the light of day it is because the scaffolding of London still blocks my view of the rising sun. And what worries me the most is that this scaffolding rests upon quicksand: the good faith of Germany, the good faith, not only of the present government in Berlin, but of all those governments that will follow it."

--Raymond Poincare, speech in the Chamber of Deputies, 1921* [6]

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RMtdxED.png

Polish Jews segregated and in quarantine in Danzig, waiting for a line to Britain and Americ, 1920

As the government in Germany fell and a new one could not be formed, seemingly no party wanting to liberate the Danzig to the Polish, Danzig itself had turned into a catastrophe. With strikes spreading throughout the city, Reichenau had to consider the approaching bulk of the Polish refugees. Instead of securing his position, he had opted to send the Freikorps and other paramilitaries to turn away the Polish refugees. He had hoped that the approaching Freikops will help him banish the Poles and then turn to help him quash the strikes.

This was a miscalculation as many Polish refugees carried arms and believing in their own numerical superiority as well as alleged international help attacked the Freikorps positions in the outskirts. Some strikers abandoned the strike and rushed to reinforce the Freikorps while others wanted to continue on, believing they must not waver now. The issue turned to confusion as the newly arrived Freikorps demanded that Reichenau give up his authority to recently retired lieutenant colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Willisen.

Willisen was handpicked by the Reichswehr and conservative politicians to bring order to Danzig as he was in good repute and had ties to various associations aimed at securing the border and the welfare of Germans aboard. Reichenau however refused to cede his authority, allegedly claiming that their ranks mean nothing as they are neither in the army. Most of the Freikorps defected to the Willisen and Reichenau hid somewhere in Danzig.

It is believed he sabotaged the blockade of Danzig to allow the Poles to enter the perimeter of Danzig by sending contradictory orders. Possibly he was aiming to prove Willisen is not up to the task and have the Germans reject him which was incredibly shortsighted. The results were catastrophic as a massive firefight started around the 10th of December 1920 and continued for nine days leaving thousands of casualties. It only abated when fires started to spread through Danzig, both at the site of urban and on the docks.

The Polish refugees started to fortify themselves in the outskirts leading the Germans to cry out they were being besieged as in medieval times. The remaining urban Poles (mostly dock and factory workers) were banished to the outskirts by force. About 350 000 Germans were "besieged" by 70 000 Polish refugees in the outskirts and hamlets, with many more arriving, fleeing from the Bolshevik lines. Some even claimed the Red Army was deliberately expelling people towards Gdansk/Danzig in order to accentuate the crisis and bring down the Paris Treaty which was untrue. By January of 1921, there were 120 000 Poles around Danzig.

Observers from foreign countries were immensely confused about the situation and frequently asked their home offices about directions. Without Gdansk, Poles could not be easily resupplied and the city was given to Poland in the peace conference solely to ensure the Polish would have freedom of trade despite the majority German population.

The 13 000 to 14 000 Freikorps and volunteers in the city were armed and new arms constantly arrived from Germany from the demilitarization stockpiles. One local newspaper claimed the Danzig would become a "little Prussia" and boasted a claim that every adult male German was to be armed, bringing up the theoretical manpower to 150 000 (a deeply unrealistic number, but cited by the French).

The siege was really a standoff as the city fortification laid away from the docks. The Poles had followed the railways and the Vistula river to the city, and technically could reach the Nowy Port (Neufahrwasser) docks without the need to enter the city but the Germans wanted to deny the area to the Poles and feared encirclement. Poles had still hoped for the joint British-French intervention but it would not come. The British would not send anyone and the French had difficulties of their own although Poincáre voiced the threat.

Due to famine, a spontaneous riot ensued in late January aimed at a march towards the docks and the Germans responded from their fortified positions. A fire started at the docks due to unknown reasons but was blamed on the Polish again. Westwards of Danzig fortress, a fortified ammunition depot exploded and caused panic with some erroneously believing Poles had brought artillery. The situation was dire enough that the government in Berlin believed the city was to fall.

Although this was unlikely, it allowed a change of mood in Berlin where new elections had just concluded. DVNP warned of the "Red Asiatic Slavs" overrunning the city and urged all the Germans to help save the city since the traitor governments won't. One force indeed headed to Danzig by road since the Berlin government had grounded all the railways in Pomerania in an effort to deescalate the situation.

However, it turned out that this particular Freikorps were loyal to Hugo Stimmes who had issued it secret orders in a seeming betrayal of his public principles. The new force carried food and luxuries and distributed them among the soldiers before the commander announced an agreement was reached and the city of Danzig will become the autonomous city of Danzig under the free Polish government, becoming a state within a state until the "next elections".

There was no such agreement, but the Freikorps soldiers were happy at the sound of such victory and the population was happy with the luxury goods. Willisen realized this after consulting with Reichswehr but advised it to accept the situation. Many did not question which and whose elections were the supposed agreement referring to, German or Polish? Nor why the deal was apparently reached by Carl Liegen whose short tenure as caretaker vice-chancellor had ended. The crisis did not end as Germans refused to share supplies with the Poles and only reluctantly gave them access to the docks. A firefight over food erupted in mid-February and lasted for an entire day.

A further conference was held in Krakow at the beginning of March where it was decided that the Autonomous City of Danzig would have a joint German-Polish administration with a potentate appointed by neutral countries on League proposal. Italian diplomat Bernardo Attolico arrived in the city as the first potentate to find it bitterly divided but compliant.

--The League of Nations and the World: Vol. 1: 1920-1925, 1987
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*OTL
[1] OTL he is assassinated in 1921 by Operation Condor members.
[2] Ten weeks later OTL, but much sooner ITL since he resists a "patriotic" investigation.
[3] OTL there are conspiracy theories about Bolsheviks having a hand in it either through Alexander Parvus or Karl Radek. They are more prominent ITTL.
[4] This is ITTL romanticization of their struggle.
[5] OTL Millerand agrees to Lloyd George's demand that coal deliveries are priced according to British export price.
[6] OTL speech, but made in 1924.
[7] OTL this happened in April of 1920 unilaterally under Millerand and drew ire from Lloyd George. ITTL crisis in the Middle East forces a different calculation.
 
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So now the PoD is that a particularly infectious strain of coronavirus (COVID-1919?) infects all of Europe? Very interesting to see how diseases and the like affect history
 
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