The Imperious Chairman-A TL
- Thread starter Napoleon IV
- Start date
I'll talk about this more later, but both the Allies and the Soviets have only really just started their atomic bomb programs. It's going to be a really tight race.
guinazacity
Banned
And the nazis are done.
Now time to rebuild, regroup, rest and then focus on the real enemy.
Mini-Update: New Borders
All border changes in the 1930s are nullified, so Danzig goes back to Poland, Czechoslovakia is reconstituted, etc.
The Baltic States, East Prussia, and Poland are all added to the Soviet Union. The borders of the new Polish SSR are its pre-war border with Germany in the west, while in the east the border between the Polish SSR and the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs start at the Sniardwy lake and flows south through the Pisa and Narew rivers until it reaches Warsaw. The border shifts eastward to avoid Warsaw, then flows south through the Vistula and San rivers. Most notably this means the city of Lublin is now part of Ukraine. As compensation for this loss of territory East Prussia is made an autonomous oblast within the Polish SSR.
The part of Carpathian Ruthenia the USSR took IOTL is added to the USSR ITTL, and the Siret River forms the Soviet-Romanian border. None of Dobruja is taken by the Soviets.
The border between Allied and Soviet occupied Germany is the Elbe River, although from the Baltic Sea to the Elbe the border is the same as OTL's occupation zone border. Austria is also divided like OTL's occupation zones. Finally all of Czechoslovakia is in Soviet hands except for the area from Karlsbad to Pilsen to the southern tip of the Vltava River.
If someone could make a map of these borders that would be great. Thanks.
China and India are certainly going to be important theaters, amongst other areas.
Define lenient. Hungary doesn't lose any territory except for the stuff they stole from Slovakia (which is more than can be said for Romania, Poland, and Germany), but they are going to be stuck with a Communist government and become part of the Soviet sphere of influence.
Lenient
Lenient as in: no heavy Soviet presence other than intelligence/technical advisers. No loss of territory and some internal autonomy.
Lenient as in: no heavy Soviet presence other than intelligence/technical advisers. No loss of territory and some internal autonomy.
As I'll show in the next update all the countries in the Soviet sphere will get a much greater degree of autonomy than they did IOTL (provided of course that they remain Communist). Soviet troops will probably be in Hungary, if only because that's the easiest way to get to Austria (which is on the front lines). It's too strategic an area to risk falling to counterrevolution.
I'm really curious as to the Middle Eastern theatre.
Due to the lack of Stalin's vicious anti-antisemitism and purges, there are still a large number of prominent Jews in positions of power in the Soviet government, including Sverdlov himself. How does this combination of a more Jewish-friendly Soviet state, strong Bolshevik campaigns against antisemitism at home ITTL, and the Shoah itself, affect the Soviet Union's stance towards the Palestine Mandate? Are the Soviets more supportive - including providing arms and funding - of the movement to found Israel? The Israeli national movement is mostly dominated by Jewish socialist groups (Haganah, Mapai) which Sverdlov could be very friendly with, and they are another thorn in the side of the British.
(Or perhaps the Soviets would prefer that socialist Jews and survivors of the Shoah immigrate en masse to the Soviet Union itself. If instead Israel is founded, I could see it being a pro-Soviet bastion in the Mid East. Of course, this will also provoke a backlash from the British, French and Arabs).
Also, are the Soviets potentially meddling in Iran and Turkey, particularly wrt to the Kurds? The Shah of Iran flirted with Nazism IOTL (which caused him to be deposed by the British and Stalin); has he taken any similar steps towards fascism due to increased paranoia about the Soviets to his north and their international revolutionary ideology ITTL? I can't see the British deposing a fascist Shah now, if anything they would support such a regime. The Turkish government will have seen how thoroughly the Axis was smashed, and should be feeling extremely nervous about it.
The Arab monarchies are universally Anglo-French puppets and hostile to the Soviets. Are there any underground Arab socialist (or even communist) movements that would be supported by the Soviets? Or would this be completely undermined due to the concurrent Soviet support of Jews in Palestine? Many Arab nationalist movements took inspiration from both fascism and the Soviets IOTL due to both being anti-British, what happens to them now?
Soviet policy towards Israel is complicated. On the one hand the Soviets definitely are in favor of anything that hurts the British, and things like the kibbutzes and the socialistic character of many of the Zionist groups is popular with them. However Zionism conflicts with Soviet ideas of nationalism, since it's essentially ethnic nationalism. Plus the Soviets are hostile to religion, and even though a lot of Israeli leaders were relatively secular the religious undercurrents of Zionism are troubling for Sverdlov. They haven't really been providing arms and such yet, but that policy may change during the Third Great War.
Iran is certainly nervous and moving closer into the British camp. However Turkish-Soviet relations are complicated. The Kemalist government was supported by the Soviets and relations throughout the '20s and early '30s were very friendly (IOTL there's actually a statue of Mikhail Frunze behind a statute of Ataturk in Istanbul's Monument to the Republic). However relations cooled after the Montreux Convention, which gave Turkey control over the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits. This essentially means that the Turks can cut off the Soviet Navy in the Black Sea, which many Soviet politicians fear that the British could pressure the Turks into doing (the fact that Britain and France supported Turkey at the Montreux Convention doesn't help).
The Iraqi Communist Party is actually in a decent position, although they still need some building up. There aren't really any other Communist parties in the Mideast that are a significant threat to Anglo-French control.
Mini-Update II: How Warsaw Became Sverdlovograd
As part of the Soviet occupation several cities in Poland, the Baltic States, and Bessarabia were renamed. Most of these were renamed to their Russian forms. Under the korenizatsiya system (refresher on that here) cities technically had two names. The name in the local language was the one used in the city and the surrounding areas, while outside areas (such as other parts of the USSR and foreign countries) knew it by the Russianized name. So for instance a Ukrainian would know the city formerly called Lwow as Lviv, while everyone else would call it Lvov. Some of the cities whose names were Russianized include:
Galati: now Galat
Lwow: now Lvov
Danzig: now Gdansk
Lublin: now Lyublinsky
Krakow: now Krakov
Some cities however were completely renamed. This was the case of Warsaw. Originally it was Russianized as Varshava, however that changed in 1945. June 3rd, 1945 was Sverdlov's 60th birthday, and in honor of this the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Poland voted to rename the city Sverdlovograd. Sverdlov was somewhat uncomfortable with the name, but eventually Polish First Secretary Julian Leszczynski (more on him later) persuaded him to accept the honor. The name became a political issue in the Polish community abroad. Right-wingers and those who fled Soviet Poland refused to use the name, while left-wingers used it (there are stories of Polish-American immigrants getting into fights over the name). Another city that was renamed was Koenigsburg, which in 1946 was renamed Rykovsk in honor of Premier Alexi Rykov (the circumstances behind this will be discussed in more detail later).
Other Communist countries did similar things, particularly with regards to street and building names. For instance Adolf Hitler Platz in Berlin became Ernst Thalmann Platz almost immediately after liberation, and the Skoda Works of Czechoslovakia was renamed the Klement Gottwald Works after the Chairman of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
Huh... were there any of the ethnic expulsions of Germans like IOTL? How did the Soviet revenge spree through Eastern Germany go?
There really were only expulsions from the Sudetenland. Many of the Polish and East Prussian Germans fled the Red Army, but those that didn't were allowed to stay. However the situation for Germans and Poles in the pre-war Soviet Union is different, since they are viewed as collaborators.
The Soviet revenge spree was milder compared to IOTL, but still violent. Sverdlov took the view that it was a war to liberate the German/Eastern European proletariat, and thus things like mass rapes were unbecoming of a liberating army. However enforcement against looting, murder, and rape (while stricter than IOTL) was fairly lax. Often if a German complained against a Soviet soldier the complaint was ignored, either because it was thought they deserved it (this is particularly true when the officer taking the reports is Ukrainian or Byelorussian, since they suffered terribly) or because the German was dismissed as a liar.
The biggest reason is the advancement of the cult of Sverdlov. Like Lenin Sverdlov is the center of a cult of personality, even though he isn't always comfortable with it. The Polish Communists are trying to bring the cult to Poland, and also to honor their leader (and more cynically, to gain his favor to help advance their careers). Once Sverdlov comes out against it the Polish Communists decide to try and persuade him, rather than back down and lose face (plus having Sverdlov come out against your idea, and the fact that you could reasonably be accused of promoting an individual over the Party, would be ammunition for your enemies). Their main argument to Sverdlov that he should accept the change is that the cult of personality is a necessary evil. Sverdlov is a strong believer in the idea that the Soviet people need a strong figure to believe in, and since the Tsar is gone the Soviet leader has to take his place. He hopes that they can transition out of this, but it's a slow process. Plus renaming the city is a symbol of Soviet (and by extension Communist) triumph over the forces of the reactionaries and fascists.
Excerpt from Sverdlov's Europe by Gennady Serpov
June 15th was a chilling morning, but members of the Soviet leadership (namely the Troika, Narkom of Foreign Affairs Shirinsho Shotemur, and newly promoted General Secretary of the Comintern Nikolai Bulganin) braved the cold to greet the new leaders of Eastern Europe. There was German leader Ernst Thalmann, who caused a minor scandal by giving Sverdlov a great bear hug, Austrians Ruth Fischer[1] and Spanish Civil War hero Manfred Stern, a group of Hungarians led by Bela Kun (who by that point had spent almost a third of his life in Soviet exile), Romanian leader Gheorghe Gheorgiu-Dej, and Czechoslovak 1st Secretary Rudolf Slansky (KSC chairman Klement Gottwald was recuperating from an illness and thus couldn't attend). They met to discuss the future of Eastern Europe and bring about a new order. After a week of talks they emerged with the Treaty of Moscow. At first glance the treaty was quite generous. The USSR agreed to help rebuild the countries it occupied, and hand off power to the local Communists. The Soviets pledged “strict nonintervention” in the internal affairs of these new states, as long as the countries “followed the principles of Leninism.” However the treaty also created a military alliance “against counterrevolution and capitalism” and granted the Soviets the right to station troops and build military bases without requesting the consent of the country involved. The provision that “all foreign affairs undertaken shall align with the decisions of the Comintern” meant that in Sverdlov's Europe foreign policy was directed by Moscow. In effect Eastern Europe was left in the strange gray area between puppet states and independent countries.
Between July 1942 and the start of the Third Great War in December Soviet occupation was formally ended and power transferred to the local Communists[2]. There were no elections to legitimize the new order; as Sverdlov put it “The reactionaries are too strong in these countries, and thus an election would only serve to move us backwards.”[3] The governing structures of the new states was almost a perfect copy of the Soviet structure. Like the USSR power rested in the Central Committee and the Politburo, which were elected by a party Congress. While in every state except for Czechoslovakia the leader was the Chairman of the Secretariat (known as the 1st Secretary in Czechoslovakia and Romania) they didn't rule alone. The tradition of collective leadership was to Sverdlov a fundamental principle of Leninism, and he ensured that the other states followed the same model[4]. The other principle of Leninism the new rulers followed was that of the vanguard party. The parties were not mass movements, but rather comprised a small percentage of the population (from a low of 4% in Romania to a high of 15% in Germany).
The next step was to cement Communist rule. As in the Soviet Union terror played a key role. The case of Germany in particular illustrates the emergence of this system. The Soviets took special interest in Germany, following Lenin's dictum that “the principle link in the chain of revolution is the German link, and the success of world revolution depends more on Germany than upon any other country.” Thus no expense was spared when it came to building the Volkspolizei (People's Police, also known as the Vopo)[5]. As historian Robert Conquest writes the Soviets “combined the infrastructure of the Gestapo with the cruelties of the NKVB to create one of the most brutal secret police agencies in history.” From January 1943 (when the KPD Central Committee issued a decree ordering the use of mass terror) to August 1949 the Vopo was unleashed upon the German population. Given the nature of Hitler's regime almost every German had some connection to the Nazi Party, a fact the Vopo used to justify what amounted to random acts of terror. The prisons quickly overflowed with people; for example in Spandau Prison it wasn't uncommon to see 50 people stuffed into a cell. One prisoner, a former Reichstag Deputy for the Social Democrats, remember Spandau Prison as “the worst place in the world. Us prisoners were stuffed into filthy cells with barely room to breathe the fetid air. The screaming of men in the torture chambers formed the soundtrack to this misery.” To obtain confessions prisoners were put on the Conveyor, a system of constant torment developed by the Cheka. Once on the Conveyor a person could be tortured for days at a time, often while being forced to stand or sit in one spot without moving. The pain was agonizing, and all but the strongest men were reduced to gibbering wrecks after a few days on the Conveyor. Once they confessed the prisoners faced two fates: they were either executed (typically by guillotine, another legacy of the Nazi regime. More people were executed by this method in Communist Germany than during the entire Reign of Terror) or they were sent to prison camps. Concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen and Sobibor were reopened to hold the waves of detainees, while many others were sent to the Siberian Gulags. 700,000 Germans were imprisoned during the time period, and similar waves of terror gripped all the countries under Soviet domination.
The Communists also sought control of the cultural sphere. Control over the media had been easily established, and the waves of terror swept away many of the Communists' intellectual opponents (who in many cases had already been largely destroyed by the Fascists. In Germany for instance many intellectuals were described as having taken “The Sachsenhausen-Kolyma Express”). The Communists also began inserting themselves into every aspect of public life. In a similar process to the Nazi Gleichschaltung clubs and other social organizations were forced to register with the government, at which point Party members and informants joined (in addition only Party members were allowed to be club officers). Other social groups such as youth groups and unions were absorbed into the Party outright. In most cases this was done with little resistance, for the Eastern European populace's will had been broken by Fascism and war. The big exception to this was in the area of religion. For the Communists religious institutions were seen as the gravest threat. This was particularly true of the Catholic Church, with Sverdlov even going as far as to say “The Pope has a secret army, one that is in many ways more powerful than the forces of Hitler”[6]. A campaign to destroy religion was launched in every country. The secret police moved through the religious community like a scythe, killing priests, seizing church lands, and destroying Bibles and icons. Only a small number of churches were left standing. Derisively nicknamed “the Sverdlovist Church” these institutions were made up of priests who had sworn loyalty to the state (and often agreed to become informers). They cut all ties with their colleagues in non-Communist countries and taught a message of obedience to the new regimes. Even attending these churches was dangerous however. For Party members religious affiliation meant being removed from the Party, with the corresponding loss in privileges, while non-Party members risked being seen as politically unreliable and possibly arrested. Communist propaganda also played its part by portraying priests as agents of Fascism and being against reason and progress. As a result by the early 1950s religious practice had largely been driven underground.
[1] Unlike Stalin Sverdlov didn't kick Fischer out of the Comintern, so at this point ITTL she's still a Communist.
[2] Even in Germany and Romania, however due to need to root out Fascism the Soviets took a much greater role in these countries.
[3] This is in contrast to Stalin, who used democracy to disguise his rule in Eastern Europe. Sverdlov has no interest in doing such.
[4] The leadership was:
The Socialist Republic of Germany: Ernst Thalmann, Walter Ulbricht, and Wilhelm Zaisser
The People's Republic of Austria: Ruth Fischer and Manfred Stern
The Hungarian Soviet Republic: Bela Kun, Matyas Rakosi, and Laszlo Rajk
The People's Democratic Republic of Romania: Gheorghe Gheorgiu-Dej, Ana Pauker, and Vasile Luca
The Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia: Klement Gottwald and Rudolf Slansky
[5] IOTL the Volkspolizei was the national police force of East Germany, responsible for things such as criminal investigations.
[6] Again in contrast to Stalin, who famously said "The Pope? How many divisions has he got."
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Huh... turns out the great purges basically do happen ITTL after all, they are just inflicted by the Soviets upon Germany instead of by the Soviets upon themselves.
That leaves three possibilities for the Third Great War then:
1. The Soviets recognize their massive conventional superiority and decide to try paint the continent red while they still have this huge, battle hardened, well-led, and well-equipped army to do it with. Stalin would probably be cautious enough to put away this option and consolidate what he has got like IOTL but would the more internationally inclined Sverdlov?
2. The Soviets decide to use some of that massive military might to make further adjustments in Eastern Europe, Finland, and maybe against the Japanese in the Far East. The Anglo-French object violently.
3. Japan goes crazy, attacks the USSR in the Far East, and the Anglo-French follow their lead for some reason.
Possibilities 2 & 3 also raise the potential of the Red Army and the Anglo-French both being in partially demobilized states when the crisis that triggers the war breaks out.
*That's the 9 million in Central/Eastern Europe ITTL plus the presumably 6 million deployed elsewhere (the forces in the Far East) and for administrative duties which would largely be as per IOTL. Just as in their IOTL peak in 1944 the Red Army was some ~6.5 million in Eastern Europe plus another 6 million
Now that's an interesting tidbit. The Soviets, even given that they are stronger, can't remain mobilized with their 15 million man armed forces* forever without any war to justify it even if we ignore the strain of maintaining it upon the civilian economy. But even if they demobilize, they are still going to rather have transparently overwhelming force in Central Europe relative to the Anglo-French. That is going to make the Anglo-French (particularly the French, who don't have a channel to protect themselves if Germany gets overrun and their army there is smashed) very hesitant in starting the conflict without some form of Soviet provocation.
That leaves three possibilities for the Third Great War then:
1. The Soviets recognize their massive conventional superiority and decide to try paint the continent red while they still have this huge, battle hardened, well-led, and well-equipped army to do it with. Stalin would probably be cautious enough to put away this option and consolidate what he has got like IOTL but would the more internationally inclined Sverdlov?
2. The Soviets decide to use some of that massive military might to make further adjustments in Eastern Europe, Finland, and maybe against the Japanese in the Far East. The Anglo-French object violently.
3. Japan goes crazy, attacks the USSR in the Far East, and the Anglo-French follow their lead for some reason.
Possibilities 2 & 3 also raise the potential of the Red Army and the Anglo-French both being in partially demobilized states when the crisis that triggers the war breaks out.
*That's the 9 million in Central/Eastern Europe ITTL plus the presumably 6 million deployed elsewhere (the forces in the Far East) and for administrative duties which would largely be as per IOTL. Just as in their IOTL peak in 1944 the Red Army was some ~6.5 million in Eastern Europe plus another 6 million
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