Prologue
My bones be bruised from malcontent,
My blood be boiled through.
For no change can disarrange
The evils that men do.
If a villain can become a footnote, then it stands to reason that a footnote might become a villain.
Adolf Hitler was, on January 16th, 1921, the victim of an assassination by an unidentified assailant. With two bullet holes in his chest, he fell onto the hard pavement of a Munich street with a gasp. Held by a party aide as he struggled to breathe, with several stormtroopers sprinting after the mysterious attacker, it was said that his eyes lit up as if a sudden realisation had befallen him. “What a world it could have been,” he whispered, before his eyes closed forever.
In the aftermath, the Nazi Party was thrown into difficulty with no leader who could adequately galvanise the party. In August of that year, the National Socialist German Workers' Party merged with the far-right German Socialist Party to create the National German Party. Led by Ernst Röhm, it remained small and increasingly became little more than a gathering place for hooliganism. Many more respectable members were driven away towards equally more respectable right-wing parties. Ernst Rohm was himself inevitably arrested in August 1923, after it was found that he planned to stage an armed uprising in Munich. He was sentenced to nine years in prison and the National German Party was banned. Amid the upswing in the economy and the lack of serious leadership among the far-right, by this point the German far-right became distinctly less influential across the country.
It was not until 1930, when the effects of the Great Depression took hold in Germany, that the far-right had a chance at wielding influence but it was challenged by the Communist Party of Germany under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann. The Communist Party was the primary threat to the ruling Social Democratic Party, directing its energy against the SDP rather than the splintered fascist movements. It all came to a head when Ernst Thälmann was murdered by a far-right hooligan, triggering street fighting across Berlin while leadership of the KPD shifted to Hans Beimler. Beimler called for an armed struggle against the Weimar Republic; this finally erupted in 1932, with the German military fragmenting and Communist uprisings taking place across the country.
The German Civil War pitted conservatives against a broad spectrum of the left, primarily led by the Communists. It attracted varying opinions and support from across Europe; Italy, Portugal, and Romania – after the fascistic Iron Guard took power in a 1934 coup – were the most significant sources of support against the Communists. France, led by a leftist government, pursued strict neutrality fearing that supporting either side could trigger its own civil war and rupture its foreign relations. Nonetheless there was widespread support for the Communists within France, and the government’s failure to support them did indeed trigger extensive unrest. The same was true in Spain, where the military government faced concerted popular revolts and was forced to return Spain to democracy in 1934. Though the Kingdom of Spain remained, it was restored to a moderate democracy. The subsequent refusal of this democracy to support the German communists triggered renewed, but unsuccessful, unrest.
The Soviet Union provided plentiful and constant assistance to the Communist cause in the war despite an eventual League of Nations embargo. Much of its assistance was very direct, with the Baltic Fleet at times directly engaging the German Navy while Soviet troops and aircraft also participated. When shipments of supplies were intercepted in the Baltic by the Polish Navy, it triggered the Second Polish-Soviet War from 1933 to 1934, which left the Poles defeated and the Soviet Union annexing all Polish territory east of the Curzon Line. The territories east of this line were incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR after staged referendums and hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported eastwards into the Soviet Union. This war further heightened the mood that communism was on the march across Europe, and volunteers from many countries across the world fought for both sides.
Eventually the war ended with the victory of the Communists in 1938 and the proclamation of the German People’s Republic led by Hans Beimler. The new Communist government faced the dual issues of a society torn to shreds by the civil war as well as the requirements of repairing the damage from the conflict. Hans Beimler made concerted efforts to establish friendships with neighbouring powers, especially France and Italy, to avoid conflict before Germany was ready. However, his efforts to reduce Soviet influence cost him dearly and in 1940 – two years into the new German People’s Republic – he was poisoned by a Soviet agent. Made to look like a heart attack, though the West suspected otherwise, it was only confirmed after the Second World War that Stalin had ordered his death. Beimler’s successor was Willi Nowak, a Potsdam native and celebrated half-Polish veteran of the First World War.
Little more than a lackey to Stalin, from 1940 Nowak oversaw a purge of opponents as well as a mass rebuilding and rearmament program. By this point, Europe was aligning itself into two armed camps once again with the Communist world on one side and the anti-Communists on the other. In Britain, the 1940 general election had brought hard-line Conservatives under John Gretton to power and this government aligned with a new right-leaning French government to rearm and form the Allied Council Treaty Association, or ACTA, a clear-cut military alliance which intended to “contain” communist advances in the world. Britain, France, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Japan all signed up for ACTA but its implementation proved shaky at best.
Throughout the early 1940s, a series of events took place to discredit both ACTA and the League of Nations. French membership had always been controversial internally, and successive governments bickered over how far to implement its accords. Meanwhile ACTA was discredited by the Japanese conquest in China and the excesses of Italy and France in their own colonies. These actions served as significant propaganda victories for the Communist bloc, though repression and even mass murder were all too common on this side of Europe, it was far better hidden. A growing desire emerged in Britain for a stricter neutrality, which gained ground across the political spectrum. The deployment of a British Army of the Seine numbering two corps of some 85,000 men – intended to supplement French defensive forces – in 1941 was especially controversial and led to outright protests on the streets as well as mutiny among some Army units to the point where its deployment was cancelled.
France soon gave way to a populist left-wing government in 1943, which within days unilaterally terminated its membership of ACTA amid an intent to pursue a non-aggression pact with Germany. The French withdrawal from ACTA spelled its likely death, and this was confirmed when just two months later German forces rolled into Austria on June 7, 1943 without a shot being fired after local communists seized Vienna. Germany and Austria were unified, and an ACTA member had been conquered without any of its members lifting a finger to stop it. Only Italy made any serious movements, and was prevented by Britain and France, causing Italy to withdraw soon afterwards.
Overseas, the United States had maintained its strict isolationist neutrality but was vocally supportive of anti-communist efforts. Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency had, by and large, pulled the U.S. out of the worst of the Great Depression and his successor Robert Taft – a Republican – had intended to reduce U.S. involvement in European affairs. This all changed in 1943, when the Armstrong spy scandal erupted. On May 25th, 1943 Ralph Armstrong was arrested at the Department of War on charges of spying on behalf of the German intelligence services. Armstrong soon revealed the identities of his handlers, leading to a massive FBI operation nationwide which over the next three years largely dismantled much of the communist spying apparatus in the United States. The 1943-46 investigations stunned the public, created extensive suspicion nationwide, and bred an increased climate of fear and anxiety as a Red Scare swept the nation. These feelings were further intensified in May 1944, when the Luftwaffe unveiled the Heinkel-121 ‘Condor’ strategic bomber; developed in tandem with the Soviet Union, it could theoretically reach the United States from bases in Germany. Suddenly the United States was no longer beyond the reach of European arms. President Taft was forced by all of these revelations to undertake a policy U-turn and publicly back the anti-communist governments in Europe and Asia. Nonetheless he remained committed to non-interventionism.
John Gretton resigned as British Prime Minister in 1946 amid ill health, and died on the same day that a general election was called. The result was a surprise victory, though small, for Labour under Herbert Morrison. This initiated an effort at the so-called federalisation of the British Empire; the Morrison government ceased to use the very term, instead referring to the British Commonwealth, while the Bombay Declaration ascended India to the status of a dominion alongside Canada or Australia. South Africa’s outright withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1949, in opposition to British efforts to halt its slide towards racial apartheid, also demonstrated Britain no longer intended to force its colonies to remain under the Union Flag. Anything less would only give further ammunition to the communist bloc. The Morrison government also extended greater autonomy to its smaller colonies, under principles laid out in 1948 by the Statute of Kingston.
The French had already done something similar, with the populist leftist government in 1944 having rebranded its colonial empire into the French Federation with all colonial policies approved by a new Federation Assembly based in Marseille, with all colonies represented by elected senators. It was a remarkably progressive action on the part of the French, but it was also a failure; the Marseille Assembly proved to be a chaotic frenzy of competing voices with little to no ability to come to agreements. When it did, it was agreements against the French state; much of France’s African possessions elected representatives who actively sought the dissolution of French control on the continent, and their actions galvanised public support for independence across the African colonies. As a result, while claiming to be moderating colonialism, the left-wing French government was soon finding itself by the late 1940s fighting bitter insurrections in Algeria and the Chad Basin.
The Morrison government remained committed to the official anti-communist stance, but oversaw an effort to ‘reset’ relations with the communist bloc. Two significant pan-European summits took place; in 1947 in Berlin and in 1949 in Edinburgh. The 1947 conference failed when, the day before proceedings were to begin, the Soviet Union suddenly invaded what remained of Poland.
Alleging that Poland had been funding anti-Soviet elements within its former boundaries that now belonged to the USSR – which was almost certainly true – the Red Army had invaded on June 6th, 1947. It proved not to be the swift victory that Stalin might have hoped for; the Poles defeated the poorly led and organised Red Army in critical engagements at Lublin and Bialystok, and were soon on the offensive themselves. There was excited talk in Warsaw of Polish forces marching on Moscow itself. Only German intervention from the west in August broke the Polish back. The subsequent Treaty of Warsaw, signed on August 30th, 1947, obliterated Poland; Germany regained all territory lost from the Treaty of Versailles while the remainder of Poland was incorporated into the Soviet Union itself as the Polish SSR. Despite being a victory, the war was desperately humiliating for the Soviet Union for the incompetence displayed, not to mention the need to be bailed out by the Germans, and it triggered numerous long-needed reforms to fix the damage done to the armed forces by the Great Purge of the 1930s.
The 1949 conference in Edinburgh produced far better results. A mutual non-aggression treaty was signed between the great powers of Europe, and the attendance of the new U.S. President Huey Long – though only as an observer – helped entrench its legitimacy. 1949 would prove a decisive year generally; the Edinburgh Conference provided a serious spark of hope that peace could be maintained, while showing that the state of affairs in Europe might have finally begun to stabilise. Further, following a referendum India finally gained its independence after a brief – and unsatisfactory – spell as a dominion. India remained, nonetheless, a Commonwealth member with the Crown continuing to be the decisive authority in the land.
Mussolini’s death in 1949 triggered a political realignment in Italy. The fascist council which took over proved inadequate, and under extensive pressure from the King and Italy’s allies a general election was called in which a coalition of liberal-left elements – though fervently anti-communist – took power. The new Prime Minister of Italy was Nello Rosselli, who became a key figure in attempting to further bridge the gap between East and West. But this hopeful look towards the future was immediately threatened.
In the spring of 1950, the optimism endangered by the so-called Spirit of Edinburgh was shattered when, at dawn on April 1st, Soviet forces poured into Manchuria. Border disputes between the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan had been taking place for years, and it was at this point that the Soviet Union finally took decisive action. Undertaking what it called Operation Kratos, the Red Army numbered some 1.3 million troops against the 800,000 of the Kwantung Army, which had been steadily reduced over the last few years. The Japanese suffered from the dual effects of being taken almost completely by surprise as well as the simple inferiority of much of their equipment in comparison to the Red Army. The T-55 tank and the MiG-18 jet fighter – both in their combat debut – outclassed anything the Japanese could hope to throw at the Soviets, and the result was an inexorable retreat by the Japanese.
The Soviet-Japanese War represented a colossal shock for the Western world; the United States even heightened its military alert level, certain that the Soviet invasion was the first step towards the imposition of communism across all of East Asia. The Chinese Communist Party gleefully partook in assaults against the Japanese, while reopening the civil war against the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai Shek. Japan had not been present at the Edinburgh Summit, and was not covered by the non-aggression pact, so the Soviet Union had not technically breached any points of the charter. This proved largely irrelevant to Western observers, who saw in the Soviet onslaught not just a hungry empire ready to devour half the world but an empire perfectly capable of doing so. Observers watched in equal parts horror and fascination as the Red Army performed so excellently against what was supposed to be the best corps in the Imperial Japanese Army; three years after the Polish debacle, it appeared that the Soviet Union had finally become the military giant it had always claimed to be. Within two months, Harbin had fallen and soon the Japanese were in headlong retreat. Some went deeper into China while others fled across the Yalu River and into Korea. Yet after just four months of fighting, the last Japanese units evacuated from the Korean peninsula. A new Korean People’s Democratic Republic was formed, based in Seoul, and governed by the puppet ruler Kim Kyung-cheon.
As for Manchuria, the Interim People’s Manchurian Authority, intended to unify with a future communist China, was placed under the control – albeit in a puppet state – of Zhou Baozhong, a prominent anti-Japanese resistor. Stalin had previously hoped to potentially annex Manchuria as a Soviet republic, but soon become convinced that doing so would only exacerbate anti-communist turmoil in the region. Meanwhile, the Soviets positioned themselves for even greater actions. An amphibious landing in South Sakhalin seemed unthinkable – and it was. The army may have disgraced Japan, but the Imperial Japanese Navy was not yet ready to do the same. On December 5th, 1950, in the freezing waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, five Japanese battleships faced the Soviet invasion force, composed of a dozen troop carriers escorted by just two battleships and five destroyers. Like their forefathers forty-five years prior, the Japanese secured a grand victory. Only the battleship Nagato was sunk, lost to Soviet aircraft rather than shells, while the Soviet fleet was all but obliterated, mostly as it turned and fled into the path of a wolf-pack of Japanese submarines lying in wait. But this victory was only enough to safeguard the Home Islands. The overseas colonies were being shredded nonetheless, for battleships do not have feet.
By the time the war ended on Christmas Day, 1950 with a peace conference and Japan essentially accepting the loss of Manchuria and Korea, one of the world’s great powers had – in the space of less than a year – been shattered and communism had a clear, perhaps irreversible, foothold in East Asia. Japan still controlled much Chinese territory further south, but the defeat was a cataclysmic humiliation and, as rebellions erupted once more in the remaining Japanese holdings, it seemed there was not much time remaining before the empire crumbled altogether.
In the aftermath of the Soviet-Japanese War, it finally became clear to the West that the Soviet Union was a steamroller of a foe, and that it did not seem to have any desire to slow its advances. There was a widespread feeling that the non-aggression pact with the communist bloc was little more than a ruse on the part of Moscow, to bide time before finally striking in full. There were also whispers within the darker echelons of government that, somewhere deep in Siberia, the Soviets were in the process of fashioning a weapon which was said could alter the very nature of warfare forever.
The optimism that had been shattered in 1950 was further crushed when the inevitable finally occurred and civil war erupted in India in November of 1951. Indian independence had maintained the unity of Hindu and Muslim areas, but now said Muslim areas wished to separate. Delhi refused, and civil war was the result. This was a conflict that would dominate the minds of many in South Asia, but for the West it registered as one of the great proxy wars of history. The British and French dumped money and materials into the unionist factions while, as the conflict became increasingly complex and multifaceted with seemingly every substrata of Indian society taking up arms for its own pet cause, the Soviet Union introduced its malevolent tentacles with funding for various leftist groups that soon had their own influence on the progress of the conflict.
What changed everything, most assuredly, was Stalin’s death. Joseph Stalin died on January 7th, 1952 when suddenly felled by a stroke while taking a foreign trip to Korea. In the aftermath, two factions vied for power. On the one hand were reformers, led by military hero Georgy Zhukov, who hoped to de-escalate tensions with the West and potentially even liberalise the Soviet Union. On the other were the traditional Stalinists, who saw their role as to preserve the old order. For three months, the Soviet Union was ruled by committee in what seemed to be a decisive moment for international tensions which might finally open up the Soviet Union and bring a lasting peace. Perhaps it could have, but then Zhukov floated the idea of essentially cutting Germany loose and potentially allowing free elections, which could end the existence of the Soviet Union’s most powerful ally. The result was, perhaps, inevitable. On April 22nd, 1952, the KGB launched a coup with Ivan Zbirik leading its officers into the Kremlin itself. He shot Zhukov on the spot, as the KGB ran several running battles across Moscow with the Red Army. By nightfall, the traditionalists had seized full control of the largest country in the world. And at the helm was a man that, the day before, few people outside the Soviet Union had ever heard of. Ivan Zbirik.
Ivan Zbirik was part of what might be termed the New Guard; young, loyal Stalinists who had essentially grown up during the Soviet period. At 42 years old, his memories of the old Tsarist Empire were faded at best and thus Zbirik was a dyed in the wool Stalin loyalist. Looking back, some have thought this odd; Zbirik was a Ukrainian, and in his political youth his loyalties had often been divided. This was especially the case during the Holodomor when, as a junior trade minister, he faced a brief exile to Siberia in 1933 after protesting Soviet policies contributing to the engineered famine in Ukraine which killed some 7 million people. He spent eight months undertaking forced labour in a farm. Nearly starving to death, Stalin brought him back to Moscow in an act of mercy and, having been subjected to the grim reality of life in the Soviet Union, Zbirik came back an even greater convert to the Stalinist way. It was a bizarre spectacle of a person becoming even more dedicated to a way of life that had persecuted him, and the psychology behind it remains the subject of intense debate.
Nevertheless, Zbirik was incredibly lucky. He somehow rose amid the Great Terror while so many around him were vaporised, and it is undeniable that Zbirik himself made plenty of accusations to clear the path to a higher position. By 1940, Zbirik had the ear of Stalin as Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and was described by some as the only man who could raise his voice to the supreme leader. If he did, however, it was sparingly and he certainly did not protest the disastrous invasion of Poland or the invasion of Manchuria. In fact, Zbirik was often found trying to goad Stalin towards even more aggressive actions. Had Stalin listened, war could surely have come by 1940. One contemporary described entering Zbirik’s office to find him, almost in a childlike trance, doodling a communist-themed flag for the United States. And now this petty little man with an axe to grind, who looked upon the entire world as little more than his own personal plaything, was in charge.
George Orwell later based his book The Stubborn Year in 1952, perfectly capturing the grim mood across Britain. As Zbirik took charge of the Soviet Union, a war scare was descending across all of Europe. Preparations for blackouts, for rationing, for mass mobilisation were all underway. Even the accession of a new, young queen in the form of Elizabeth II in 1952 didn’t seem enough to keep moods buoyant. “The last Elizabeth saw off a foreign armada,” wrote Orwell. “This one may fail to drive it off.” There seemed little interest in stopping the surge to war because there seemed so little point in attempting it. Zbirik’s rhetoric grew more bellicose by the day, as communist rearmament continued at breakneck pace, and he made no secret of his intentions. “World Revolution is inevitable,” he said. “With our direct assistance, if needs must.” And then, the final blow.
The proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on August 30th, 1952, came at the worst possible time, and could not have been less expected. Nationalist China had, over the previous two years, simply crumbled in the face of renewed Communist offences while the Soviet occupation in the north provided the perfect, ultimately secure headquarters for their operations. Led by the legendary Mao Zedong, the remnants of the Nationalist government soon fled to the United States while Mao Zedong was proclaimed Supreme Leader in Chungking. The Japanese still held large portions of China, including many of the major cities, but this mattered little because their hold was already becoming impossible to sustain in the face of Manchuria’s loss and the increasing severity of the anti-Japanese insurrection. A general Chinese offensive, supported by the Soviet Union, would surely expel them. British intelligence thought such an offensive could be weeks away.
In fact, Zbirik hoped it could be but Mao Zedong thought it necessary to wait at least a year before he could consider his forces replenished enough to launch a major assault. Zbirik was bitterly disappointed, and came away from an October summit with Mao in Mongolia feeling the new Chinese ruler to be “a shameful braggart.” Mao meanwhile thought Zbirik undeserving of the mantle of the world’s leading communist. Had it not been Mao, after all, who had fought for so many years while Zbirik was pushing pencils in Moscow? Mao also had grand ideas, which had festered in his mind over years of fighting from the bushes and in the darkness, of perhaps one day ruling a vast pan-Asian communist realm which could include the European colonies to the south as well as Japan and even India. Zbirik had no objections. Regardless, neither men came away liking each other but they knew they needed each other. The European powers in particular could surely only be defeated by a single strike on either side of the world. So it was that, at a second summit in December, something that did not bode well for the future of the world took place. At the Astana Summit in the Kazakh SSR on December 17th, 1952, the leaders of the Soviet Union, Red China, and Germany signed the Instrument of the People. This created the Mutual Cooperation and Defensive Agreement Council; known to the outside world as the Axis, after the name was coined by Winston Churchill shortly before his death. A single alliance now kept these three great powers bound together, ready to assist each other in the event of war. The great powers were now ready to carve up the world.
As spring came in 1953, with the warmer weather now drying the fields and making their traversal far easier, it was said that the days never quite felt like they stopped being dark. The sun rose, birds sang, and flowers bloomed but something seemed missing from those days. And then, on April 20th, it began.
What a world it could have been.
Thoughts?