To cut Mr Taft in two

Part 26 – Coup and Counter-coup (1926-7)

Michael II surveyed the telegrams of condolence laid out before him on the vast, ornate desk in the emperor’s study at the Alexander Palace. Wishes of support and sympathy both to him and his people had been sent from across the world: from his cousin George V and George’s prime minister, Austen Chamberlain, in Britain; from his cousin Wilhelm II and Wilhelm’s chancellor, Otto Gessler, in Germany; from King Otto via his mother, the regent in Austria; from President Cox in America; from President Briand in France, and from innumerable other monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. The content of many suggested more than the routine dispatch of a diplomatic expectation.

What were noticeable by their absence were the messages from within Russia. Even by the standards of the Romanovs, Michael II was singularly unpopular. It wasn’t so much the intensity of hatred that was the problem - his brother and, even more, his sister-in-law had been far more despised – but the fact that he had virtually no natural supporters. No sooner had he ascended the throne than the whispering started that he shouldn’t even be there. And his critics had a point. Michael had chosen to forego any right to succession when he married his mistress, Natalie Wulfert, against the strict orders of his outraged brother. But by 1920, Nicholas was dead and Alexei both ill and in his minority, and Michael took the opportunity to restore himself as heir. Although Michael’s co-regent, his own mother the Dowager Empress Marie, had consented to that move, it remained highly controversial within the Romanov family, within Petrograd society and among the country at large. For the moment, that didn’t matter. Russia’s financial system remained perilously close to collapse and the country had no choice to put its trust in whoever ran it.

Alexei’s funeral came and went and as the country settled back into some kind of normality, it began to realise the scale of the economic devastation that the Crash had wrought. No group escaped. Virtually the entire middle class saw their savings and investments wiped out, whether directly from investment losses or from the collapse of so many of the banks. Those who’d borrowed to invest and couldn’t get out in time were simply bankrupt; proud families reduced to living off friends and relatives or to leaving everything behind and heading off to make a new life elsewhere. But many who’d never been involved in the investment frenzy were little better off: job losses weren’t restricted to manual and agricultural workers and losses from the bank collapses hit savers as well as borrowers. Further up the social scale, aristocrats and landowners saw the value of their land, and the value of what it produced, plummet. They too had borrowed to invest and to speculate and they too now suffered the consequences. But it was those at the bottom which the Crash hit hardest with workers laid off in their millions as estates, factories, shipyards, mines and other manners of employment tried to make ends meet. The number of men, women and children employed in domestic service fell by three million in a year. Furthermore, those who did keep their jobs saw pay cut drastically.

The protests which sprung up during the initial phase of the crisis took on a more serious form as it deepened. Strikes over pay frequently turned violent and in rural areas dozens of manor houses were looted and burned by impoverished and starving peasants. In at least four known cases as early as 1926, peasants seized their now-deceased master’s entire estate and tried to run it as a collective before being driven out by troops and executed for their efforts.

Two days and nights of particularly bad rioting during October in Moscow prompted Michael to seize the initiative. For the past two months, as the crisis steadily worsened, he’d been caught between the advice of two opposing groups of courtiers, officials and generals, and after much soul-searching had finally come off the fence. His wartime experiences had given him a sympathy for the troops under his command and a contempt for many of those in positions of privilege. He’d been notorious (again) among his family for wearing only plain uniforms while in the field, as a conscious snub to them and symbol of solidarity with the men under his command. Unlike many in power, he refused to see the rioting solely as an unlawful uprising against authority. “What else can they do? What would you do in their position?”, he demanded of his interior minister in one meeting.

And so against the advice of most of his ministers and many of his family, who argued for much tighter security laws passed and put into effect, Michael adopted precisely the opposite solution: the people would be given their voice. A new Duma would be called, to be popularly elected across the country the following February. Furthermore, Michael agreed to have regard to it in appointing his ministers. To guarantee that those elections would be fair, free speech would be guaranteed and advisors invited from Britain, France and America. All political parties, including communists and regionalists (or nationalists as they described themselves in their native areas), would be allowed to stand, organise and campaign. Not for the first time, the emperor had scandalized and outraged many at his own Court.

That declaration came as a thunderbolt almost as much to those opposed to Michael’s regime from the left as from the right but the left was far quicker to organise. As one wag in the Okhrana noted, “now they’re all out in the open, we can find out how accurate our intelligence was”. But it wasn’t a laughing matter for conservatives, who had no grass-roots organisation and couldn’t be at all confident about having the numbers to counter their opponents at the ballot box. Nor did they feel that once the non-Russian regions – Poland, Finland, the Ukraine and the Caucasus in particular - had been allowed to vent their nationalisms could those feelings be easily again contained.

What was worse, the election campaign actually worsened the economic and political crisis. Massed opposing rallies frequently ended in riots while strikes and protests took on a deliberately political edge, trapping innocent bystanders as much as activists and agitators. Meanwhile, the economy continued to worsen as the ripples from the banking collapse spread wider and wider. Many previously profitable businesses struggled and went to the wall as banks called in loans to shore up their own accounts even while their borrowers were making good on their payments. And as more people lost jobs or saw pay cut, so there was less money to go round.

It couldn’t go on and it didn’t go on. Deep in the freezing night of January 26, two weeks before the election was due to take place, two full brigades of soldiers surrounded the Winter Palace, where Michael II was sleeping. The first he knew that something was amiss was being woken by the sound of the exchange of gunfire. Within a minute, his private secretary burst in to inform him that the army had mutinied, that the Palace was under attack and that he should prepare to leave. His first instinct was that it couldn’t be possible and that the noise must be another protest but an inner voice told him something was indeed very wrong. Protests didn’t just happen and certainly didn’t start firing on the Guards. Michael instructed his secretary to rouse his wife and son to be readied to leave as well before attempting to phone first his ministers and then his family. Neither could be reached: the lines had been cut.

Across the city, a second, more dignified and higher-ranking delegation approached another royal residence and demanded entry. The elderly figure of Nicholas Nikolaevich shouted to his servants to tell them to go but his servants made the mistake of opening the door to do so. Two minutes later, fifteen men – ministers, generals, an admiral and several Romanovs – were crowded into Nicholas’ bedroom.

“Your Royal Highness,” General Kaledin began, “revolution is breaking out. As I speak, the emperor is being taken under guard for his protection.” Kaledin paused so that Nicholas could take in the import of what he was saying, before adding “and for Russia’s,” to avoid any doubt.

“How dare you act against the throne like this! This is treason!”, Nicholas thundered, though even as he did so, he knew that there was no point. It was too late to change what had already been set in motion. Yes, he thought, you were right not to tell me beforehand. Damn you for putting me in this position!

“Why me?”, he asked, understanding what they were asking. “I am an old man: a soldier, not a tsar.”

The Interior Minister answered. “The army will follow you like no other man. The country also has faith in you. Russia needs strong leadership and only you can give it right now. Were there another way ...” his voice trailed off, not wishing to imply that Nicholas was their second preference to some other plan.

“And if I refuse?”

“You have always served your country in its need before, sir.”

“This is different. I have always served my emperor before. You wish that I dethrone him.”

“Many said he had no right to be emperor in the first place, sir. More still say that now. Nor has he been crowned. He is a usurper every bit as much as ...”

Almost every man in the room winced at the minister’s gaffe.

“Go on, say it.” Nicholas said. “Every bit as much as me.”

“As much as Catherine the Great”, one of the lesser Grand Dukes suggested, trying to rescue the situation.

“And what happened to Peter III in that instance? Should I connive in Michael’s death? I won’t do it, you know, crowned or not.”

Kaledin responded for the committee: “as I said, it is our intention to place Michael under guard and request his abdication.”

Nicholas’ cousin, Grand Duke George Michaelovich, previously watching quietly from the side decided enough was enough. “Nicholasha. We can’t be too squeamish about this. Michael was taking this country into disaster. Civil war perhaps. Revolution maybe. Who knows what. We cannot simply stand by and let everything Russia stands for be washed away – we have a duty to act. You have a duty to act. It’s too late now to do anything else, I’m afraid: if Michael is still on the throne tomorrow, we are all dead men. Besides, orders have already been given to proclaim your reign tomorrow.”

Nicholas had worked most of that out for himself and guessed the rest long before George said it but he was grateful that someone had finally had the guts to give voice to the reality. Finally, he relented. “Hmph. Do what you must. God knows what I have done to deserve such a fate.”

News of the coup had come too late for the morning newspapers but additional editions of those papers the new regime trusted were rushed out under close supervision, announcing not only the abdication of Michael II and the accession of Nicholas III but also cancellation of the elections, the imposition of much stricter censorship, freedom of association, of organisation and of speech, and the banning of a long list of organisations.

Despite what the papers said, Michael had not in fact abdicated. He, his wife and son were, however, on a train to Tallinn disguised as domestic servants to Michael’s former secretary. That technicality was beside the point for now, though: what mattered was that the coup had succeeded in gaining control of Petrograd, the army, the secret police and the majority of the country, while Michael was offering no resistance.

The former tsar wasn’t the only one to suffer a serious reversal of fortune that night. Alexander Kerensky had been planning for assuming the reins of the government he expected to lead within a month. Now, he was locked in a police cell, charged with inciting riot. Kerensky’s fate was at least better than that of the Communist leader, Leon Trotsky, who after being arrested had accidently fallen backwards onto an ice-pick embedded in the frozen street, according to the police report.
 
So Trotsky still gets an ice-pick in him.

Indeed he does. OK, the detail's an indulgence on my part but an irresistible (and hopefully entertaining) one. But I do think the Okhrana might well have used the turmoil of a coup to rid themselves of a few of the more troublesome subversives permanently.
 
MESS!!!!!

I just found and read this timeline; nice stuff.

This is turning into a potentially worse mess than OTL's depression. In OTL, there was no massive nationwide insurrection--and here, there's real potential. To counter that, a "short victorious war" is often seen as a good way to rally a nation and bring unity...might someone start considering one sometime soon?

Keep it coming!
 
Part 27 – A Time of Troubles (1927-29)

Why Nicholas III never named an heir is a question that has kept historians busy ever since he died in 1929. Several schools of thought exist but short of some previously unknown private paper being found, none can ever become definitive.

The most widely accepted answer is that whoever he named would have exposed the weakness of his own claim. If he’d opted for an heir from the senior Romanov line then it would have underscored how distantly related he was to Nicholas, Alexis and Michael. If, on the other hand, he’d named a close relative of his own then it would have confirmed that the dozens of Grand Dukes with better claims by bloodline had been passed over not just for a few years, while he sat on the throne, but forever. Furthermore, he was seventy years old; to have named anyone would have invited those with power (and those seeking power) to look to a probably none-too-distant future and set up a rival court around his heir. Some said that he would have appointed a successor had he outlived the troubles and had established his position beyond doubt; others, that he never really wanted to be emperor in the first place and his (in their eyes) refusal to determine how his crown would be passed on was symbolic of that – though such qualms, if they existed, hadn’t stopped his coronation. But it was true that the plotters who’d removed Michael had favoured Nicholas not just because of his standing, wartime service and leadership abilities but precisely because he had no sons and as such, the question of the succession was left sufficiently open for those who disagreed about it to postpone the question for the time being.

If they’d known in 1927 how little time they’d bought themselves, they may have acted differently. As it was, just under two years after being thrust onto the throne of Russia, Nicholas’ health gave out and he died in his bed.

Those two years were marked by a succession of false dawns. The restored autocracy had contained the chaos of Michael’s reign but only to a degree and the passions which resulted in the near-collapse of the country were smothered rather than eliminated. Unemployment in the cities continued to rise to such an extent that after half a century of migration from the countryside to the towns, the flow of humanity was now reversed. Wages might be poor in the villages but a family still had a better chance of feeding itself where it could grow crops and keep chickens than trying to scratch a living in the cities. Even so, hundreds of thousands died from hunger-related illnesses and conditions in those two years alone.

Violence against the regime and large organisations simmered down, if only because of the harshness of the measures brought against those perpetrating it – more than eight hundred were hanged in 1928 alone – but that just diverted it to targets with less capacity to fight back. The Jews suffered in particular, as a wave of antisemitism swept the country; the failings of the banks mixing with an ever-present prejudice to create a potent brew of anger and resentment among many in all classes. Some seventeen thousand Jews died in the pogrom while well over half a million were driven from their homes. One of the iconic images of the period was the Jewish Trail: entire (former) village trudging westwards in the hope of somewhere safer. To the extent that that hope was real – antisemitism was not a solely Russian preserve - it was also a chimera: no country was letting more than a handful in by choice. But for Russia’s leaders, it was at least a distraction for those seeking blame for their misfortune.

By contrast, for some of the persecutors, it was a preparation. Nicholas and his ministers had been able to keep a lid on the violence because the state was able to act and had kept control of its own forces. With his passing, all that changed. What followed was far worse than the late years of Nicholas II, when government just went on without him; it was even worse than the collapse under Michael II, where at least there was a government trying to act, if incompetently. Suddenly, there was no effective government at all.

Or alternatively, there were several competing governments that sprung up into the void. First to make his claim was Nicholas’ younger brother, Peter Nikolaevich, who was present at the death and who immediately sought the allegiance of those others present, with mixed success.

The next day, as the news of the old tsar’s death was made public, Michael II emerged from his exile in Stockholm to formally declare his abdication in favour of his son George, and to refute the claim that he’d done so earlier. That Michael and George were even alive was a shock to many given that the public had been told nothing of them since the coup, though the authorities knew. How they’d slipped past ten thousand soldiers to escape would become the stuff of legend in its own right.

As often in these situations, quick thinking had saved the day. While soldiers were searching room-by-room, the personal attendants of Michael, George and Natalie cut their masters’ or mistress’ hair short and dressed them in servants’ uniforms – Michael as a footman, George as a motor engineer and Natalie as a maid – before the imperial family split up and joined the flow of actual servants being evacuated from the palace. In the dark of the night, illuminated only by the yellow light of gas- and paraffin-lamps, their changed faces went unnoticed among so many others. Aided by their experience of having lived an unusually ordinary life (by Romanov standards) before the war and before events thrust them to the apex of Russian society, they made their way independently to the house of a friend of Michael’s private secretary, where they changed clothes again and set out in the morning dressed as ordinary servants to a middle-class family, taking a train first to Revel and then south via Riga to Windau, where they boarded a boat for Sweden. Guards at Russia’s borders and its docks had been instructed to watch for the fleeing family but again they’d slipped through; the loophole that allowed servants to travel on their master’s passport proving critical.

George was not the only other claimant to challenge Peter though: Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich, the eldest surviving son of Alexander III’s younger brother, also proclaimed himself emperor. Unlike the exiled George, Cyril was in Russia – in the Crimea, in fact - and able to call on Russians to rally directly to him, which he duly did and which many of them duly did. Furthermore, unlike the sixty-four year-old Peter and the eighteen year-old George, Cyril, at fifty-three, held out the prospect of giving some stability to the country over the coming years – if he could consolidate his position first.

For the moment, Peter held the advantage. Nicholas III’s death placed the country in official mourning and meant a state funeral to arrange, which itself meant that the officials in Petrograd – who hadn’t settled on an agreed solution amongst themselves prior to the old tsar’s death, despite many misgivings and whispered conversations – had little option but to go with the flow and recognise Peter IV. Two days into his reign, he was officially proclaimed emperor from the gates of the Palace. Over the next week, he received foreign and domestic visitors and issued orders as if his was the only government, which it wasn’t. It was, however, the only government in Petrograd.

But Peter wasn’t popular and nor was his wife, Anastasia, who between them were seen as responsible for introducing Rasputin to Nicholas II and for having intrigued for many years – and, given their current position, successfully so. Ministers and soldiers might be following orders but only with reluctance and an eye to events elsewhere. The public outpouring of grief among the population for the dead tsar was real enough; he had been to many if not quite a saviour of the nation then at least a father to it in a time of need, on top of his wartime service. By contrast, the mood towards his still-living brother was cold. Court gossip percolated down through society despite the best efforts of the security services to enforce their censorship laws.

While Cyril couldn’t come to the funeral – where he would undoubtedly have been arrested – he could pre-empt Peter by staging a rival coronation of sorts. And that he did: on January 18, in the ancient Russian capital of Kiev, he demonstrated the momentum behind his own claim by staging a hastily improvised Council of Allegiance ceremony at St Sophia’s cathedral, at which not only the majority of governors serving in south Russian districts but several members of the Romanov family, many aristocrats and, most ominously for Peter, the commanding generals in the region and the admirals of the Black Sea fleet pledged their loyalty to him. However, while he’d successfully gained the support of the leading figures from the south and west of the country, he’d been far less successful in gaining popular backing. Indeed, if the parade of carriages through Kiev back from the ceremony to the governor’s mansion was notable for anything, it was for the lack of interest or enthusiasm from the people of the city. They had other concerns and in many cases they also had a different candidate.

If Peter represented continuity and Cyril represented tradition and authority, George represented modernity – an image he (and his father) cultivated when he flew into Poland and published an ‘accession’ manifesto that declared his respect for the autonomy of the Polish kingdom and the Finnish Grand Duchy, as well as promising a restoration of civil liberties and political reform. Economic reform, though vitally needed, was left unmentioned. Inevitably, the declaration was met with widespread acclamation in Poland, whose official autonomy had been increasingly violated in the decade since the end of the war.

As news of George’s promises spread through the network of nationalist groups, protests demanding recognition of their own national status spread onto the streets of cities in the Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania and many other areas of the empire where non-Russian nationalities were in the minority (it was George’s manifesto that lay behind the cool reception Kiev granted Cyril). Others went further, demanding independence itself although no group tried to make this a physical reality. There was, however, a fourth power waiting to join the fight, though not yet quite ready to do so.

As central government control broke down, regional governors, police chiefs and army commanders took matters into their hands as best they could but as the crisis wore on, the disruption to daily life (in the cities and larger towns at least) got worse. At the root of the problem, again, was money: tax collection dried up as officials were unsure who to pay it to, concerned more about the risk to themselves of handing it to the wrong side than the penalty for withholding it from the right one. First government salaries and contractual payments stopped but the knock-on effect of both the cash shortage and the wider crisis severely hampered transport, the import and export of raw materials and of food. Markets ran short and prices soared. By contrast, village life – except where disrupted by troop movements – carried on much as normal.

By mid-February, with Russia in the midst of a bitter winter, the three regimes had entrenched themselves in Petrograd, Warsaw and Odessa respectively, though each was doing its best to reach out to the country beyond. The biggest prize that none had managed to bring under their control was Moscow, and it would be Moscow where the food and fuel shortage would make itself most felt. Already beset by strikes, riots and violence beyond the ability of the police to cope with, the army moved in on the initiative of the general commanding the district to restore order by force. However, while some units advanced, took position and drove the insurgents back, other troops - unpaid in weeks and on half-rations themselves - refused to move. Within hours the balance of power had swung dramatically as the officers in the city recognised that they were outnumbered, exposed and unsure of their own men’s loyalty, never mind that of the troops who’d refused to leave their barracks. As news of the mutiny fed up the chain of command, the general took the decision to withdraw from the city. On the evening of February 17, the united workers proclaimed the Moscow Commune.
 
Ah the Russian Revolution finally happening. Bout a decade or so late but still its happened.

A Russian revolution is happening but the nature of what it will produce is still up in the air. After all, the Paris Commune (and Franco-Prussian War) ended the Second Empire but was midwife to the Third Republic.
 
Part 28 – Russia Splintered (February – May 1929)

Moscow burned that night. The pent-up frustrations of workers and servants and the oppressed and downtrodden of centuries unleashed itself in an orgy of violence, looting, vandalism and arson. Armed gangs roamed the streets, meting justice with a vengeance as they saw fit. For all that the Central Committee of Workers and Unions claimed to be the authority in the city, the reality was that there was little means of enforcing any kind of order. Many policemen had fled with the retreating troops and those who hadn’t hunkered down in what they hoped was anonymity. Frightened homeowners might arm themselves against break-ins and in some cases, communities united to protect their streets or neighbourhoods but no-one was willing or able to go beyond that.

So the lawlessness went unchecked and fires spread from house to house and business to business. The Kremlin itself was only spared because its thick red walls meant that it was the one place in the city where Skoropadski felt it safe enough to maintain a garrison, even if they were besieged. Repeated volleys into the mob had been enough to send them drunkenly back in search of easier targets. Other government buildings were not so lucky: the interior ministry and policy headquarters were charred shells, as were hundreds of other buildings, public and private alike. Nor was it just property that suffered: more than three hundred people lay dead at the hands of lynch mobs alone, while hundreds more died in the fires, the shootings, the vigilante defence actions and from one of any number of other causes, great or petty. Dawn broke over Moscow under a pall of expensive smoke and over blood-stained streets, through which an exodus of cold, frightened, hungry citizens was already heading for the country.

The Commune leaders knew that unless they could take control of the situation, they too would be swept aside, one way or another; whether from a further uprising or from the army returning in force. They were also painfully aware that the proclamation of the Commune had done nothing to resolve the central problem that led to its creation in the first place: the shortage of food and fuel. On the contrary: although warehouses and granaries had been raided, the city’s butchers, bakers, grocers and other manufacturers and retailers weren’t around to turn the raw materials into something useful. On top of which, roads into the city were clogged with refugees, so even had suppliers wanted to trade they’d have found it difficult – and the violence, lawlessness and thefts meant that they weren’t keen to trade. Not that it mattered because they weren’t they allowed to. The army might have withdrawn from Moscow but Skoropadski sought to control it (and the countryside around it) all the same. In his despatch to Petrograd that morning, he’d informed Peter that he had already invested an effective siege of the city. This wasn’t entirely true: the unreliability of the troops meant that many units were simply billeted in safe locations rather than doing anything useful. All the same, the army controlled all the routes in and out of Moscow, was constructing and clearing to protect and defend their position, and had taken command of the food that should have been going to the city so that soldiers were now back on full rations. It didn’t need to completely encircle the place: the snow and ice that covered the fields and woods lying beyond Moscow’s outer reaches made that task too difficult for the army also made it impassable for supplies in any meaningful measure to get in.

The snow wouldn’t have stopped an army from breaking out but as yet there wasn’t such an army, though one of the first tasks the Commune leaders had set themselves was that of organising the armed gangs into a militia, both to defend their city and to bring some kind of order to the streets. It proved easier than they’d feared, in part because many of the men who’d indulged in the rampage knew themselves that it was needed and in part because the unions and political parties – banned under Nicholas but which continued to meet in secret anyway - provided a natural structure to begin with. All men between the ages of seventeen and fifty not in jobs deemed essential were drafted in as quickly as the organisation could cope. Getting the violence under control was only one of the many tasks facing the Central Committee. They had a city to run and to feed. Ironically, the shortages that had been such a prompt to the overthrow of the old regime were even worse now, and unless the army’s siege could be broken, would become worse yet. Rationing was instituted for all citizens irrespective of wealth or rank (not that rank mattered any more and wealth was best kept hidden). Meanwhile, Skoropadski was content to wait, believing with some justification that while discipline and morale in his own ranks was improving, that on the other side would not hold.

But Moscow was the site of only one of the convulsions the country was suffering. News of the ancient capital’s fall came as a shock to Cyril in Odessa but strengthened his view that the momentum was running against Peter’s regime and that if he could take the initiative, events may snowball in his favour. That view was shared by General Anton Denikin, the army’s commander-in-chief in the South, whose support had been critical in establishing Cyril’s claim. However, unlike Cyril, who cautiously favoured waiting for better weather before making a move, Denikin, demanded action now. For him, the Commune in Moscow was more than an insult to Russia, it was more than a warning of what was to come if the divisions and crisis could not be resolved: the despoiling of the ancient and noble heart of the country while Romanovs squabbled among themselves – a family that had delivered disaster after failure after scandal over the last twenty years - was the event that clarified everything in his mind. The Communards were right in a sense: another scandal-ridden, extravagant, incompetent emperor would not and could not be the solution to Russia’s problems. A Peter the Great, yes; a Catherine the Great, yes; even an Ivan the Terrible, perhaps – but no such candidate was on offer. Instead, there was a boy, a mystic and a dullard. Even if one of them won, as one of them probably would in the end, were any of them remotely up to the challenge now in hand? No, he thought to himself. The fight must be taken on to prevent the revolutionaries from winning but only a strong man can pull the country back together and into the twentieth century; a man who can command respect, who has seen action first-hand, has stared death in the face and not flinched; a man for whom Russia is in the heart – unlike the half-breed Germano-Danish-whatever mongrels now bickering over who should get to wear the most sparkly fancy dress. In short, Denikin concluded, a man like him. But before that was possible, he needed a victorious army behind him. Summoning a staff officer, he dictated an order to his junior generals to have the army ready to march in 48 hours. “Send a copy to His Majesty for information”, he added.

As soon as Cyril heard about Denikin’s order he summoned him to his presence and countermanded the order. “No, sir”, Denikin responded. “It cannot be reversed. The order has gone out in your name and you will lose face if you do that. The troops are in good spirits and now is the time to strike, while Peter is losing support and George is marooned. A show of force is necessary to rally the country to you.”

Cyril didn’t like it and contemplated sacking Denikin but just as he’d lose face reversing the order, nor was he sure how the army would react if he did dismiss its head. More than one tsar had been unmade in palace coups and there were at least two alternatives alive at the present. So he prevaricated, stayed his hand and set off with everyone else. Besides, what Denikin said was not without merit.

What really made the difference was not the show of force, although that was impressive enough; it was the propaganda that went with it. No doubt Denikin’s army could have been transported by train to the northern limits of those provinces that had sworn allegiance to Cyril, but that would not have suited his purpose. He needed his men to be seen and he needed his message to be heard; a message which mixed blame and renewal equally. Foreigners were to blame above all: foreign countries denying Russia her due; Jewish bankers at the top and Jewish peasants at the bottom, both blamed for sucking money out of honest Russians; German landowners and French and British capitalists; the false religion of the Roman church, never mind heathen religions; communists and others who brought anarchy and claimed it as freedom. All were to blame and all were dangerously threatening to Russia’s lifeblood. By contrast, he eulogized the good, solid Russian worker and peasant. It didn’t escape attention that Cyril was himself married to a German, was the son of a German and the grandson of three Germans. Slowly, as the army marched north, less and less publicity was given to the tsar-claimant and more and more to the general commanding. It was, after all, he who controlled the publicity machine and who sent riders and propagandists on ahead of the main force. Not that all was marching. The army was the law and the law was the message. In its wake lay the bodies of thousands upon thousands of executions and killings. Some probably were revolutionaries, others simply the victims of local vendettas and feuds. Once again though, Jews suffered harder than any: in some cases, whole villages were wiped out and the lands granted to the rural Russian poor instead. Others avoided physical punishment on paying extortionate ‘taxes’.

Why did Peter not respond more effectively to the threat from the south? The answer is that for all historians have blamed Peter’s arrogance, his complacence, his timidity, his excess of reverence for supernatural explanations, his unpopularity, court and governmental failings (or deliberate obstruction), the state of the army, the need to keep troops in Petrograd to avoid another Moscow, and any number of other reasons – many of which have merit to some extent - the primary cause is simpler: Peter saw no need to put an unreliable army in the field during the depths of winter when the surrounding provinces remained loyal and he had control of the railways. What that thinking missed was how his inaction looked to those watching – and all Russia was watching.

Peter seized the throne on Nicholas’ death primarily because he was in the right place at the right time and took the initiative but ever since then, power had been gradually slipping. Orders were not acted upon, many provinces either governed themselves or had actively defected, aristocrats made excuses for avoiding social events. And the more he waited, the more people looked at him as a poor excuse for Nicholas III’s brother. Nicholasha would not have cowered in Petrograd, courtiers, ministers and officers whispered to each other. Urban and rural poor, soldiers and shopkeepers, factory workers and farmers came to the same conclusion and weren’t so shy about voicing their opinion, whether or not the Okhrana were listening.

George was also hemmed in in his rival court in Warsaw, though he had at least taken the effort to be seen around the kingdom, to some popular enthusiasm. His position within Russia, however, was becoming increasingly marginalised. Without his hands on any of the levers of power and with Denikin’s nationalism finding ever more adherents – and ever more passionate ones at that – George’s manifesto of an empire of the nations was running against the tide.

Recognising that his position was untenable without a dramatic move, George sent a secret message to Cyril offering to acknowledge him as emperor and to form an alliance against Peter. In return, he wanted Cyril to recognise him as Regent in Poland – an offer to which the older man was happy to agree not just because it strengthened his claim but also because he needed the boost it gave his authority within his own movement. The reverse was true for George. Denikin recognised the petition for what it was actually worth and for that reason was more than happy to go along with it. The two men jointly issued a proclamation that same evening.

If the mood in Cyril’s camp was euphoric at the turn of events, opinion in Poland was shocked and horrified. Demonstrations spontaneously took to the streets in protest at the apparent sell-out of their freedoms and autonomy and at George’s reneging of his pledges: they has seen what the restoration of Poland’s autonomy had come to after Versailles and were not ready to have it snatched away from them again. Not without a fight, anyway. Poland’s nationalists, under the leadership of Roman Dmowski, demanded that George call a Sejm and when the new Regent refused, established their own anyway. Its first act was to demand that all public officials – police and military as well as civil and political - take a pledge of loyalty to the kingdom. Many issued such oaths voluntarily and only George’s deployment of the secret police – many of whom were Russian and all the more unpopular for it – enabled the ringleaders to be rounded up.

George’s declaration for Cyril combined with the dynamism of the Great March North turned the tide across most of the rest of the country. Provinces that had wavered or had studiously avoided making any contact with any of the rivals where possible now began to join the fold.

By mid-March, Peter began to realise how precarious his position was and finally issued the order for the army under his control to muster and to prepare to march. Had his general staff really been determined on winning, plans would already have been ready to assemble and transport men, guns, ammunition, food, tents, horses and all the paraphernalia of war
(indeed, Peter should have insisted on their preparation). But the general staff were in two minds and so delay followed delay.

In the meantime, Denikin had wheeled west and was marching not towards St Petersburg or Peter’s army but towards Poland, crossing the border on March 28 with his sights on Warsaw. It had been a curious feature of what some had called the Russian Civil War that there’d been little fighting (Moscow apart – and that was in many ways a sideshow). That finally changed with Denikin’s Polish campaign. Again, as through southern and western Russia, he left behind a trail of executed ‘criminals’ but this time a more organised opposition stood in his way. The Sejm won the allegiance of several of the Polish brigades which now blocked Denikin’s path, though heavily outnumbered. Dmowski, staring a massacre in the face, made a desperate appeal to Peter to join him against both his rival claimants. Given that Peter now had his own army in the field, a tactical alliance might have made sense but Peter was completely unprepared to make agreements with rebels, even if they were fighting another rebel themselves. Cynically, he could well see the advantage in letting them draw each other’s blood. Besides, Peter’s army was heading south-east with the aim of hitting Denikin’s flank.

Rejected by Peter and heavily outnumbered, Dmowski’s troops retreated initially into more defensible villages, as civilians evacuated ahead of the advancing Russians: a human bow-wave of the attack. Denikin responded with still higher levels of revenge and brutality. Towns and villages in his way were burned unless they surrendered in advance and provided as much shelter and food as demanded.

Dmowski and the Sejm now had to decide whether to risk all on a general uprising or whether to quit. There was no middle course. Already three thousand Polish troops lay dead (against a few hundred of Denikin’s), and without external support, the capture of Warsaw was but a matter of time unless the population at large was prepared to repel the invaders. For eight hours the Sejm argued the case but a country that has been occupied for over a century can wait a little longer. The decision was not so much to surrender as to melt away. Instructions were posted to the army to disband. Members of the Sejm almost universally went into exile (fourteen who didn’t were later executed); Dmowski turned up in France.

To a heavy military presence and a sullen local population, Cyril and Denikin rode into Warsaw on April 8, where later that day George would acknowledge Cyril as his emperor and Cyril would formally appoint George his regent in Poland. It would not be the Poland George had promised, nor that either he or his father had hoped for. For the time being, fifty thousand of Denikin’s troops would be staying in the capital as an assurance of security.

But if Denikin’s re-conquest of Poland was a matter of despair for Poles, for most Russians it represented the first time they could be proud of their country, or a representative of it, for many a year. Public opinion swelled further behind Denikin and as soon as he’d crossed back into Russia proper, he responded by issuing his own manifesto: he asserted the integral unity of the empire and of the inherent superiority of Russians. Much, much more controversially, he also proclaimed reform for town and country alike: land reform would parcel out the estates that so many had ploughed so much into. Many of these were bankrupt but the aristocracy and gentry who still dominated the countryside were told to accept the reforms with some compensation or face penal taxes. The connection between the peasant and the soil was the backbone of the country. Nor did it end there. Land reform was the heart of the manifesto but it was simply the centrepiece of an outright attack on the power of the aristocracy who, given their losses in the Crash, were vulnerable now as never before. The civil service would become a true meritocracy and the establishment of his party – the Russian Peoples’ Movement (RND) – would give the middle classes a route to political power independent of money, land or the patronage of the tsar. But in reality, the unspoken but more than adequately demonstrated truth was that true power lay with whoever controlled the army. That, bolstered by a steady tax base and an industrial and agricultural working class who the state looked after the interests of, would be the power in the land. And Denikin would be the head of it.

All this was far too much for Cyril, who had not even been asked for his opinion, and who summoned him to the mansion he was occupying and promptly told his commanding general that he was dismissed. Denikin looked at him contemptuously. “If that is your will”, he replied, and left.

“Place him under arrest,” Cyril instructed his Chief of Staff, Lt General Maslovsky, as his former commander got into his open-topped car outside, to the enthusiastic cheers of his soldiers.

“On what charge, sir?”

“Treason,” Cyril replied calmly. “His manifesto is a call to revolution and a gross breach of his powers and his orders.”

Maslovsky was torn. He’d worked with Denikin for several years but through all the troubles had remained loyal to his country. What was he to do now? To carry out the order would be to betray his friend and perhaps his cause; to refuse it would be to betray his emperor. And did not Cyril have a point? Strictly speaking, what Denikin had done was treason – against someone. But there lay the other side of the coin. Who was to say who was the legitimate authority in the country? Up until the last few days there’d been three emperors claiming supremacy and two still did. According to succession law, none of the three had a legal claim - but then neither had Michael, or Nicholas, or anyone since Alexei. If they could effectively commit treason to consolidate their rule, why shouldn’t Anton? After all, the rapid turnover of Romanovs had hardly left the country in a fine state.

He was still wrestling with his conscience as he left Cyril’s office. Ordering three of his staff officers with him, he instructed that they drive him to Denikin’s quarters.

“General Denikin. I am instructed by His Imperial Majesty to arrest you on a charge of treason,” he began formally. Denikin began to speak but Maslovsky cut him off with a gesture. “But I cannot do that to an old friend, nor can I do it to the one man who can save Russia in her present peril. Will you accompany me back to headquarters?”

Denikin viewed his colleague suspiciously. “What do you have in mind?”

“If I were serious about arresting you, I would have brought a whole company with me to enforce it. As you can see, I haven’t. In all honesty, I doubt I could find one that would do the job. We will return to Cyril and reject his order. The march on Petrograd must continue, with or without him. If he will back down, then let him continue as a figurehead; if not then we will have to arrest him. They follow you now,” Maslovsky swept his arm towards the window, “it’s your vision they want, not his.”

So Maslovsky returned to an apoplectic Cyril, with Denikin beside him, raging at the two men for the perfidy. For a while, Maslovsky thought that they were going to have to follow through on their plan to arrest Cyril (and then do what with him?!), but the shock of Denikin’s return combined with his evident popularity, set against Cyril’s ability to command even his own staff drew his energy and the tempest blew itself out.

That afternoon, the temporary Imperial Office attached to Cyril issued a short proclamation: “desirous as We are of a united empire, and mindful of the need for decisive action in the present emergency, We appoint General Anton Denikin supreme commander of Our armed forces and Chairman of Our Council of Ministers.” Henceforth, an increasingly depressed Cyril would be seen little in public and heard from even less.

By the time Denikin was marching east back out of Poland, Peter’s army – the ‘legitimist’ one as his supporters were calling it - was finally in the field. Although numerically inferior after leaving some eighty thousand troops in Poland, on top of the three thousand he’d lost in the fighting, Denikin’s men were in high spirits. That was more than could be said for Peter’s, whose stop-start progress had been marred by disagreement and dissent at all ranks, and from a cold and at times hostile reception from the peasantry and townsfolk of the areas they’d passed through. The regions might have been Peter’s but Denikin’s manifesto was having its effect and though not yet able to organise there, it was clear where their loyalty lay.

The two armies finally met near Vilkomir and as is often the case, a differential in the respective desire to fight ultimately proved critical. After three days’ fighting, Peter’s lines broke. Having broken through, Denikin’s offer of an amnesty to any soldier of any rank opposing him who laid down his arms was rapidly accepted by so many that the Legitimist army was ungovernable. To Denikin’s disappointment, he was denied a PR coup when Peter’s senior officers refused to join him, preferring to be taken prisoner than either run from the field or join their foe. No matter: the road to Petrograd now lay open.

Further east, the roads to Moscow remained closed but there too the stalemate was coming to an end. Twice during March the Commune had tried to break the siege and twice Skoropadski had repelled them. Now, with his troops paid and fed, and with the snows of winter almost gone, he decided it was time once again to take the initiative.

The result was not so much a battle as a massacre. Orders were given, and followed, to execute anyone offering resistance. Skoropadski had used the period of the siege well to reequip his troops and the army entered Moscow spearheaded by tanks and armoured cars boasting machine guns. The Commune militia could only return fire with rifles, handguns and a few Great War-era grenades, and when they did so the army responded by torching the buildings from which the resistance came. Slowly but surely, the army cleared one district after another; new clouds of smoke creeping ever closer to Red Square. As night fell, the Commune rallied what remained of the militia but it was soon evident to the leaders that numbers were so depleted by desertion and illness that the game was up: word went out to disband and melt away. Not everyone did. Whether because they hadn’t received the message or because they wanted to fight to the bitter end, the army continued to face resistance through the night but by morning it was all over. During the period of the Commune – slightly over two months – over eighty thousand had died from starvation, illness or violence. Whole swathes of the city lay in ruins but Skoropadski was able to report to Peter that the ‘so-called’ Moscow Commune had been crushed. What Peter didn’t know was that Skoropadski sent a near-identical telegram to Cyril and Denikin as well.

In fact, Petrograd was almost in something of a state of siege itself. Defeat at Vilkomir sent the city into a new panic, the intensity of which rose still further as reports of Moscow’s fate began to emerge (one extraordinary feature of the Crisis was how newspapers not only continued to be printed but how well informed they were – many suspected that officers in the army intelligence and secret police had a sideline in selling the latest updates).

Whether Denikin and Cyril would have fought their way into Petrograd – and whether Peter would have been able to offer resistance – will never be known. Instead, on April 28, the death of Peter IV was publicly announced and publicly celebrated as relief swept the city. The official report stated that he suffered a heart attack, which was technically true. What the report didn’t say was that it had been brought on by poison – but then few knew that and because he was buried indecently quickly, no-one would find out for decades.

Instead, Russia had a new emperor, a new ruler and a new regime. Cyril might wear the crown but Denikin pulled the strings, a fact he consolidated by declaring his RND the only legal party in the country. In so doing, he was merely following the example set across the continent by his fellow populist dictators.
 
Part 29 – An Iron Broom for a New Republic: France (1926-7)

The Petrograd Crash, much like its geological cousins, was a volcano of financial, political and social turmoil that erupted in Russia, and Russia was most severely affected, but whose affects were felt around the world. The dust and ash spewed out dimmed the sunlight of democracy and trade, ushering in a darker era.

France was hit particularly hard. French banks underwritten much of the growth in the Russian banking system and, relatedly, in Russia’s international trade. French investors had been as keen as anyone outside the empire to invest in Russian land and new industry. Within months, institutions and individuals were nursing horrendous losses. Although relatively few banks went to the wall - and of those that did, not were of any great size – the era of easy credit gave way to one of excessive caution as loans were called and new ones issued on only the strongest collateral. Unemployment soared, factories, mines and shipyards lay idle and discontent rose.

The government fell in late July, only a few weeks after the crisis began and well before its effects had become severe, but that was nothing unusual for the Third Republic: most didn’t last a year even in healthy times, and in fact the reason it fell had little to do with the chill winds from the east. The new prime minister, Anatole de Monzie, headed a precarious coalition whose duty it became to tackle the looming crisis. They failed dismally.

The first mistake was that like many other governments around the world, they were slow off the mark to recognise the scale of the problem. The worldwide boom of the last decade hadn’t ended localised crashes and insolvencies. Wise old heads declared that Russia was simply going through a correction; that prices were indeed overvalued and needed to come down somewhat; that any immature economy was prone to these imbalances and that although France had substantial interests in Russia, it was nothing too serious to worry about.

August changed all that but August in France, as across the world, is a holiday month and although the government was beginning to grasp how bad things were, the levers of power didn’t connect very well when so many necessary people weren’t around. By the time the workforce was back, many of their jobs were already dissolving.

The other mistake was that when the government did react, it followed the wrong policies, though it was far from alone in that. Indeed, its response – to cut expenditure in order to balance the books, to maintain the Franc on the Gold Standard, and to increase import tariffs in order to raise taxation from a source which wouldn’t complain at the ballot box – was largely in line with the economic orthodoxy of the day. Most economists did disagree with tightening trade rules but the outcry from trade unions, employees, owners and MPs against unfair competition from abroad was impossible to resist.

As the crisis deepened, so talk turned to blame. By November, three hundred thousand had become unemployed and such measures as the government had taken – many of which of themselves made people worse off – were viewed by many as at best ineffective. Banks were blamed, the government was blamed, foreigners were blamed, and of the ‘foreigners’, Russians, Germans and Jews were particularly blamed; Russia for obvious reasons, Germany for having put France in financial straights in the war and then for having evaded a proper punishment, and Jews as representative of international banking as well as being a traditionally convenient target.

Strikes and political agitation increased with the unemployment count and in December, once again the government fell, this time prompting fresh elections. The result was a polarized parliament, with big increases in Marxists and hard-line Socialists on one side, and social conservative nationalists on the other, and it was the nationalists who had the edge. Three days before Christmas, Auguste Isaac became prime minister as the moderate face of a conservative-nationalist coalition.

For all the ministerial musical chairs, the government’s economic policy remained much the same – those lending money to an increasingly cash-strapped government demanded it – but was much more militant in demanding that Germany keep up its indemnity payments, as well as more aggressive in foreign policy generally; policies which met widespread approval.

As the crisis deepened, and indeed while the election campaign raged, one voice from the past re-emerged with a triumphant ‘I told you so!’. Ferdinand Foch had railed against the leniency of Versailles and although the economic slump had little to do with that in reality, the general blame assigned to Germany chimed with his own critique. All of a sudden, from out of a dignified and venerated retirement, Foch had thrown himself back into the fray. Already widely credited with having saved France several times during the Great War, voices now increasingly called on him to do so again. And as fortune would have it, the opportunity was there for his supporters to realise that ambition: Aristide Briand’s seven- year presidential was due to end in February 1927. In a remarkable avalanche of momentum, his comments capturing the national mood and the result of the election propelled him from nowhere to an unopposable candidate for the presidency (though of course he was opposed by the left), and on February 18 he duly succeeded Briand in the role.

But unlike Briande, Poincaré and the other presidents, Foch was not content to be a figurehead. Seventy-five years old he might be but he was once again a man on a mission. Furthermore, the ever-worsening situation demanded a government that could act, as he had acted as a general. Speaking to parliament, he accepted France’s commission on condition that the constitutional laws be revised to vest much greater executive power in the presidency. In truth, though the crisis reasserted the need for such revision, the Third Republic had never really been stable and Foch’s demand met with general approval. Parliament appointed a commission, heavy with nationalists and Fochites, to propose a new constitution and to report back after two months.

The plans the commission laid out were nothing if not radical. The president was to be directly elected for a seven year term, though not until the incumbent’s own term had expired. He would appoint the government, which would not be directly accountable to parliament. The president could promulgate legislation, including tax-raising powers, which parliament would need a three-fifths majority to block, whereas the president would have an absolute veto against legislation instigated by the parliament. In short, he was to become the closest thing France had had to a dictator since Napoleon III (a parallel Foch dismissed on the grounds that the younger Napoleon had been a failure on the battlefield). The national referendum on the new constitution was held, symbolically, on July 14, and passed by 62-38.

It might well have been closer had not violence and intimidation from veterans passionately supporting the Old Man prevented large numbers of presumed opponents from voting. That intimidation sparked hundreds of riots across the country and the Fourth Republic was born – as had been the First, Second and third – in fire and blood. Not that any good politician lets a crisis go to waste. One of the first acts of the new government was to clamp down on the trade unions’ political activities, to increase funding for the police and to give the sweeping powers against dissidents, subversives and other individuals acting contrary to the good of the country. It was a sign of things to come. It was typical of the trend of the world.
 
This is wonderful work.

The Russia part feels like a strange personality transplant to me, though. OTL's Cyril was a megalomaniac with no regard for human life - faced with such rebellion from Daniken, he might have shot him on the spot, personally. And one could not ask for more hidebound, slavish, blinkered devotion to the throne than Anton Daniken - his refusal to press the offensive without direct orders from a Tsar is the primary reason the Whites lost the southern theatre. Of course, replace Daniken with some general beloved to Nicholasha and largely unknown to OTL and the general arrangement works well.

Thank you and please continue.

Someone I confess to being curious about is Nikita Sergeievich Khruschev, never exiled or fully radicalized, serving as the head of the metal fitter's union in Kiev by this point most likely. Admittedly, he's the head of a union in a country where unions are illegal, and he has access to many kilos of mining explosives...perhaps the impasse between Cyril and Daniken is resolved by Khruschev, unhappy about the archreactionary in his city, and letting Daniken work with one of Cyril's more pliable brothers...
 
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This is wonderful work.

The Russia part feels like a strange personality transplant to me, though. OTL's Cyril was a megalomaniac with no regard for human life - faced with such rebellion from Daniken, he might have shot him on the spot, personally. And one could not ask for more hidebound, slavish, blinkered devotion to the throne than Anton Daniken - his refusal to press the offensive without direct orders from a Tsar is the primary reason the Whites lost the southern theatre. Of course, replace Daniken with some general beloved to Nicholasha and largely unknown to OTL and the general arrangement works well.

Thank you and please continue.

Someone I confess to being curious about is Nikita Sergeievich Khruschev, never exiled or fully radicalized, serving as the head of the metal fitter's union in Kiev by this point most likely. Admittedly, he's the head of a union in a country where unions are illegal, and he has access to many kilos of mining explosives...perhaps the impasse between Cyril and Daniken is resolved by Khruschev, unhappy about the archreactionary in his city, and letting Daniken work with one of Cyril's more pliable brothers...

Cheers for the kind comment.

I did find that as I moved further from the point of departure and particularly the explosive points in 1916, it became harder to write real characters in. On the one hand, I don't want to end up with an analogue timeline where everything just happens in reverse, or in a different order, or somewhere else; on the other, I don't want to end up in pure fiction either. Of the two, I've probably erred a good deal more to the former. Some events would have happened - all booms end in busts, somewhere - and others are sufficiently common somewhere to be pretty likely, such as civil wars and revolutions. Similarly, the great forces of humanity provide only so much scope for leaders and hence, conveniently, root an ATL in something with which we're at least familiar.

However, Russia did pose a particular problem as you rightly observe. Ten years after the OTL revolution, the number of characters I had to play with was quite few. Some who did die would have lived but even there, many of the senior figures of the 1914-6 war would be retired by 1929. Brusilov, for example, died in 1926 but even if he'd lived he'd have been well into his seventies by 1929 and in any case, while a war hero he was too much of a legitimist for him to lead a pseudo-coup in the way I have Denikin doing.

On which point, the reason I chose Denikin, apart from the lack of obvious alternatives of the right age and seniority, was his aggressive nationalism (which will become more relevant soon). While accepting that he loyally served the tsars, he later served the Provisional Government and also of course, the White Army. Some reports suggest that he refused to allow GD Nicholas (Nicholas III in my TL) be appointed above him in the White Army, which would indicate a not wholly subservient attitude to the Romanovs.

Turning to the Romanovs, one thing I found when researching the Russian section of the TL was just how many senior Grand Dukes were excluded from the succession. Nicholas II was setting up an almighty crisis had the revolution not come, given that Alexis was unlikely to live long. The problem with legitimacy with all the contenders is one motivating factor for Denikin in the TL deciding to bid for power himself, beyond the twelve years of corruption and ineptitude since the war.

Would Cyril have accepted the loss of power as portrayed? I don't know. Perhaps it would have taken an overt show of force - being told to his face that he would not make it out of the building if he tried anything stupid - to have forced him to back down. If so, he might have decided to play for time (he still might - there is a building parallel with Mussolini here - I'm not saying anything!), in the hope and expectation of being able to regain control later.

Re Khrushchev, yes, good point. He may well be a senior union activist. As you say, the unions would have been illegal at the time but they were legalised during Michael's brief reign only a few years earlier, so the structures could well have survived informally, and the breakdown in control during the Troubles might have allowed them to flex their muscles again.
 
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