That's going to cement Japanese militarism.
Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline
- Thread starter Aelita
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That's going to cement Japanese militarism.
- Location
- 2038
"[...] men who cannot give their children bread cannot be expected to remain civil." Is a fantastic quote.
Why American Memelland? Why the 'option' to sell to Lithuania? What's the alternative to this option? I get the sense this is an anti-Soviet insurance policy, so if Lithuania were to go red the US would maintain its occupation, and while doing so maintain a small military presence through which anti-Soviet, anti-German nationalists can be supplied.
Speaking of Kronstadt, there hasn't yet been a break between the Bolsheviks and the real socialists (
) in the anarchists and (divergently) Left-SRs yet it seems, the former at least weren't fully Cheka'd until after 1921/22 OTL. If these milder, more libertine, more democratic elements can survive semi-openly in the USSR up until 1933, then the abortion of High Stalinism caused by the American Revolution is bound to make their presence permanent, with a resurgence after Stalin's death being possible.
After the Palmer Raids, were Goldman, Berkman, Galleani, and other a anarchists deported to Russia?
Why American Memelland? Why the 'option' to sell to Lithuania? What's the alternative to this option? I get the sense this is an anti-Soviet insurance policy, so if Lithuania were to go red the US would maintain its occupation, and while doing so maintain a small military presence through which anti-Soviet, anti-German nationalists can be supplied.
I don't think "The Butcher of Kronstadt" was a nice guy.
Speaking of Kronstadt, there hasn't yet been a break between the Bolsheviks and the real socialists (
) in the anarchists and (divergently) Left-SRs yet it seems, the former at least weren't fully Cheka'd until after 1921/22 OTL. If these milder, more libertine, more democratic elements can survive semi-openly in the USSR up until 1933, then the abortion of High Stalinism caused by the American Revolution is bound to make their presence permanent, with a resurgence after Stalin's death being possible.After the Palmer Raids, were Goldman, Berkman, Galleani, and other a anarchists deported to Russia?
It wasn't called the Rape of Belgium for nothing.
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- Location
- The Old Dominion
Galleani and eight of his followers were deported back to Italy not Russia after it had been found he was a foreign alien that had authored a bomb making book and advocated the overthrow of the government though that he followers had launched a bombing campaign of the US would have been a good reason a well though it ended. This Bombing campaign almost killed FDR by accident because he and his wife just happened to be walking by a house where one of the bombs had been sent to.
That Galleai's followers did a rather good job killing, injuring and almost harming people other than the intended targets likely helped fuel and feed into the greater backlash against anarchism whose violent adherents manged to rightfully alienate a lot of people with their actions.
Still obviously this time around they don't drag socialism down with them.
That Galleai's followers did a rather good job killing, injuring and almost harming people other than the intended targets likely helped fuel and feed into the greater backlash against anarchism whose violent adherents manged to rightfully alienate a lot of people with their actions.
Still obviously this time around they don't drag socialism down with them.
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- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
Belgium was the sticking point I think. But yes, Versailles was very high handed, and making Germany bear all the guilt for a what that was at its core caused by all of Europe's alliance system caused a lot of resentment. The Germans were clearly beaten and the allies felt the suffering through the war entitled them to dictate whatever they wanted.
Speaking of Kronstadt, there hasn't yet been a break between the Bolsheviks and the real socialists (
Probably too late for the left SR and anarchists, with the American revolution timeline. The workers' opposition may survive though.
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- Location
- UK
A lot of this Russian Civil War stuff seems new to me, am I just misremembering or has this version developed some of the butterflies a little more? It's this paragraph which interests me the most:
Certainly with a differing Brest-Litovsk and a lack of a proper Bolshevik/Left-SR split, there would be changes to a whole lot about the political situation. Until the Left-SR attempted coup, the soviets remained essentially multi-party organs and the Bolshevik party itself was a party with internal democracy and differing views. You've also mentioned that the Bolsheviks and Left-SRs gain a decisive majority in the Constituent Assembly before dissolving it in favour of Soviet power - the only way to have achieved this would have been by a much stronger, and clearly delineated, Left-SR organisation which would have resisted the absorption into the Bolsheviks.
This greater legitimacy of the Bolshevik-led Soviet Alliance, and the clearer strength of their primary allies in the Left-SRs, could have effected the political landscape drastically. Lenin obviously didn't much care for multi-party parliamentarianisms but there were many, Kamenev and Zinoviev the most pronounced but also the railway workers' union, who wanted the Soviet Alliance to remain entirely multi-party and not just of organisations prepared for insurrection in late 1917. Potentially, capturing the CA elections gives a lot of legitimacy and strength to Bolshevik leadership but also keeps a lot of those who decried them from abandoning the centres of power. There are even some, such as Vladimir Brovkin, who assert that during the spring/summer of 1918, after the Brest-Litovsk treaty had been signed but before the Civil War had started in earnest, that the Mensheviks had a strong opportunity to capture many urban soviets if the organs had remained fully democratic and multi-party.
Also, in the early period after October you have a weird situation of a disorganised mess of trade unions, factory committees, economic Commissars, and soviets, local and national, all with differing views on how the economy should be organised and developed. The Bolsheviks won out due to their discipline and influence but a different political situation could see other influences on the economy and workers control. You had anarcho-syndicalists, Mensheviks and SRs all involved in these processes and without any reason to purge them, a lack of Left-SR assassinations and coup attempt, there could be different economic approaches to the various crises that affected early Bolshevik rule which in turn could lead to a reduction, or increase if you want to swing it that way, of anti-Bolshevik rebellion (such as Tambov).
Essentially, I'm noting that there are some butterflies but there also seems to be butterfly nets. The Russian Revolution and Civil War were incredibly complex situations, as were the politics of the era, so it's understandable... Either way, as I'm rereading this it certainly seems more polished and I'm enjoying it just as much as when I first started reading it in... it must have been in 2009/10 when you first started - which is crazy to think about.
Certainly with a differing Brest-Litovsk and a lack of a proper Bolshevik/Left-SR split, there would be changes to a whole lot about the political situation. Until the Left-SR attempted coup, the soviets remained essentially multi-party organs and the Bolshevik party itself was a party with internal democracy and differing views. You've also mentioned that the Bolsheviks and Left-SRs gain a decisive majority in the Constituent Assembly before dissolving it in favour of Soviet power - the only way to have achieved this would have been by a much stronger, and clearly delineated, Left-SR organisation which would have resisted the absorption into the Bolsheviks.
This greater legitimacy of the Bolshevik-led Soviet Alliance, and the clearer strength of their primary allies in the Left-SRs, could have effected the political landscape drastically. Lenin obviously didn't much care for multi-party parliamentarianisms but there were many, Kamenev and Zinoviev the most pronounced but also the railway workers' union, who wanted the Soviet Alliance to remain entirely multi-party and not just of organisations prepared for insurrection in late 1917. Potentially, capturing the CA elections gives a lot of legitimacy and strength to Bolshevik leadership but also keeps a lot of those who decried them from abandoning the centres of power. There are even some, such as Vladimir Brovkin, who assert that during the spring/summer of 1918, after the Brest-Litovsk treaty had been signed but before the Civil War had started in earnest, that the Mensheviks had a strong opportunity to capture many urban soviets if the organs had remained fully democratic and multi-party.
Also, in the early period after October you have a weird situation of a disorganised mess of trade unions, factory committees, economic Commissars, and soviets, local and national, all with differing views on how the economy should be organised and developed. The Bolsheviks won out due to their discipline and influence but a different political situation could see other influences on the economy and workers control. You had anarcho-syndicalists, Mensheviks and SRs all involved in these processes and without any reason to purge them, a lack of Left-SR assassinations and coup attempt, there could be different economic approaches to the various crises that affected early Bolshevik rule which in turn could lead to a reduction, or increase if you want to swing it that way, of anti-Bolshevik rebellion (such as Tambov).
Essentially, I'm noting that there are some butterflies but there also seems to be butterfly nets. The Russian Revolution and Civil War were incredibly complex situations, as were the politics of the era, so it's understandable... Either way, as I'm rereading this it certainly seems more polished and I'm enjoying it just as much as when I first started reading it in... it must have been in 2009/10 when you first started - which is crazy to think about.
Interlude: Every Fascism is the Index of a Failed Revolution
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Interlude: Every Fascism is the Index of a Failed Revolution
Spartakusaufstand
In the winter of 1918/19, Germany is a failed state. The armistice signed in the fall set the falling dominoes into motion, and the Reich crumbled around it. German sailors mutinied in Kiel against suicidal orders for the fleet to die with honor rather than be interred, and by late October most of the country had seen the towns and cities play host to "Workers' and Soldiers Councils" joining in solidarity with the Kiel sailors.
In spite of nominative similarities to the "workers' and soldiers' soviets" of the Russian Revolution, these organs are instruments of a liberal democratic revolution, not a communist one. Not yet, at least. The councils did not interfere with the normal civil administrations, nor did they direct factory occupations or the seizure of property except on limited levels. Their agenda is primarily peace, anti-militarism, and democracy, and to that end the councils enforce the abdication of the entirety of Germany's monarchs, from the kings down to the grand dukes. The Russian Revolution had started no less innocently, and figures in the establishment Social Democrats, the imperial bureaucracy and the remnants of the Imperial Heer would be brought into conspiracy to arrest the brewing social revolution.
On 25 November 1918, with the future of the monarchy and the German Reich still in limbo, the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League) promulgated its revolutionary demands, inspired by the Bolsheviks: direct control of production by the workers' councils and factory committees, expropriation of the landlords, abolition of the secret police and other instruments of repression, and the establishment of democratic socialist state. That afternoon, Karl Liebknecht declared the formation of a "Free Socialist Republic" to crowds outside the Reichstag.
The revolutionaries had seized the initiative from Friedrich Ebert and the Majority Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany), whose own declaration of a republic had been pre-empted. The working masses of Berlin began occupying the factories and the buildings of the imperial government. The Berlin sections of the Prussian Police are quickly swept aside by the workers' and soldiers councils' own Red Guards.
By nightfall of the 26th, the city streets are largely in the hands of the workers. Believing this to be the hour of triumph, the Berlin council of people's deputies admits representatives of the majority SPD, alongside the Spartakusbund and Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) that had been the backbone of this revolution.
Ebert, however, denounces the councils as a lawless revolution, though his own republic is from the standpoint of Imperial law an equally lawless revolution. But the Kaiser is gone, and Ebert is what is left, his hopes of a constitutional monarchy now ashes. The dual power situation sits uneasily over the city of Berlin, with neither side making maneuvers. To the Entente, Ebert's government is Germany, and remnants of the Reich are grudgingly at his disposal. 12 December's formation of the Kommunistische Partie Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany) ups the ante. With the KPD mobilizing, and absorbing more of the membership of the USPD with each passing day, and the reactionaries continuing with their thinly veiled threats, Ebert must make a decision: reaction or revolution.
Ebert begins his first overtures by firing the USPD's Emil Eichorn, the Berlin police chief who refused to the order to fire on striking workers during the days of red in November, and replacing him with a toadie of the army. On 4 January, the workers take to the streets in Berlin in protest, effectively shutting down the city. The KPD led Revolution Committee's overtures to the military units stationed in the city bear fruit when the crack Volksmarinedivision agrees to take the side of the KPD/USPD alliance. With the other units at least for now neutral, the situation develops in the favor of the revolutionists. The Red Guards are now bolstered by a disciplined navy detachment, but the guns are still silent.
Berlin is not alone in social revolution. It is however, geographically isolated. And while the revolutionists nominally control the largest concentration of urban workers and industry in Germany, the city is surrounded by the deeply reactionary Prussian hinterland, with few available allies. Other risings elsewhere are might as well be on the moon.
On 7 January, the Majority SPD and Ebert quit Berlin for Potsdam, the "second capital" and former residence of the Kaiser, as well as the seat of much of the Imperial bureaucracy. Out of the direct line of fire, and still in nominal control of the German Reich, Ebert begins mobilising paramilitary units, the infamous Freikorps (Free Corps). While he might be paying these volunteers, the officers and men are handpicked from the cream of the crop of the German military's reactionaries, and are only slightly less hostile to the republic and the SPD compared to the KPD.
On 9 February, the Revolutionary Committee splits when the USPD invites Ebert for talks. The KPD aligned-committee begins mobilizing a Red Army from volunteers, while the the USPD committee hopes to strike a compromise with Ebert. Sporadic streetfighting breaks out in Berlin, as the Red Army clashes with Freikorps infiltrators and recruiters. Ebert denies knowledge of these efforts, and continues to play for time. The Battle of Berlin proper commences on 18 February, as Freikorps Pabst began its assault on the city with almost six thousand men. Stiffened by the Berlin police and other units loyal to the government, they outnumbered the trained fighting men of the Red Army 2:1. Coupled with the Freikorps access to machine guns and light artillery, and the disorganized state of the Berlin revolutionaries, this resulted in a rout.
The city is largely retaken in two days time. Many of the local leaders of the KPD and USPD are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps, including Liebknecht.
Bayerische Räterepublik
While the much beleaguered establishment was preoccupied with the Greater Poland Uprising in the east, or the situation in Berlin, revolution was brewing within Bavaria. Workers in Munich took to the streets with the announcement of the armistice. Demanding justice for the martyred anti-war leader Kurt Eisner, a crowd 100,000 strong marched on the Residenz Palace. Abandoned by the army, King Ludwig III made an announcement releasing civil servants and police from their oaths.
Ernst Toller, a decorated veteran of the German Army, declared the formation of the Bayerische Räterepublik (Bavarian Council Republic) on 12 November 1918. Under Toller's leadership, the nascent KPD/USPD coalition would brook no half-measures. The war had emaciated the workers in the towns and cities, and the demands of the war economy had left by the economy of rural Bavara in shambles by 1918. Organizing soldiers and factory workers into a Bavarian Red Army, Toller struck quickly at centers of reaction, imprisoning "class-enemies" ruthlessly.
In the "liberal period" of November to January, Toller's government focused its efforts on land reform, agricultural relief and bringing basic services back into order. Getting struggling smallholders on the side of the new government is paramount if the cities are to survive, as the BRA fights a hundred small battles over the control of the towns and cities.
Fundamentally, the fight against reactionaries in this period meant the revolutionaries were playing at liberalism. Toller's government invited members of the Bavarian section of Zentrum, and the Bayerischer Bauernbund (Bavarian Peasant's League) into positions. Toller played the part of the liberal playwright well.
But Toller had been hardened and embittered by years spent at war. In the private councils of the KPD, he confided his frustration with cooperating with small minded burghers and land-hungry peasants. But they needed to bide time, either for favorable events in Berlin or for the KPD's plans for a rising in the Ruhr to bear fruit.
When news reached Munich of Ebert's thermidor in Berlin, Toller put aside such niceties. He publicly condemned Ebert as a traitor, and charged him of conspiring to return the monarchy and military-aristocracy to power. A wave of arrests followed, charging leading members of Zentrum and the Majority SPD of conspiring with the military to suppress the republic, introduce martial law, and restart the war. Certainly exaggerated, but contained enough of a kernel of truth.
The KPD rallied nationalists by condemning the Versailles Diktat, which its propaganda charged would leave the country in hock to foreign capitalists; the only solution was social revolution. Zentrum's participation in Ebert's government, leaked drafts of the treaty, and communiques expressing an intent to sign it, were used as pretext to suppress the party as traitors. By late February, the KPD seemed triumphant.
Ebert's government was busily organizing Freikorps suppress the Bavarian revolutionaries. But with the return of soldiers from interventions in Poland and Lithuania, the Friekorps turned against the SPD. Incensed by the looming Diktat and the incompetence of the liberal parties in fighting the revolution, on 18 March 1919 Generalleutnant Walther von Lüttwitz begins attempts to overthrow the fledgling Weimar Republic, taking control of the Berlin, and installing Wolfgang Kapp as Chancellor.
Ebert's cabinet quits to Weimar, Freikorps on its heels, and in front of the convened National Assembly calls a general strike in opposition. In Bavaria, Toller shifts priorities: in a speech before the Munich-based Rätekongress, he declared "After Kapp, then Ebert." Emergency measures to safeguard the revolution are enacted, intensifying the pace of agricultural collectivization and industrial mobilization.
With the Ruhraufstand dizzy with success, it seems like social revolution is in sight. In the East, the Russian Red Army is driving to the western frontier, the next stop: Poland. But the first setbacks come in late March, when the French Army extends its occupation to the Bavarian Palatinate exclave, breaking the KPD's tenuous hold. With the looming threat of a cancelled armistice, the German civil service refuses to support Kapp.
On 1 April 1919, the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch ends. Ebert's period of playing nice with the Ruhr Red Army and Bavaria is over. Forces of the provisional Reichsheer arrest only the most notable of conspirators from the Putsch, and then turn their sites on Bavaria and the Ruhr.
In the opening battles on 6 April, the Bavarian Red Army defeats the initial thrusts led by Generalmajor Ludwig Maercker. But the Red Army is outmatched, and in subsequent engagements the better equipped and supported Reichsheer and Freikorps gain the upper hand.
On 7 May 1919, with defeat imminent, the KPD evacuates Munich. Its partisans and soldiers go underground to evade repression. Toller and others on the Central Committee negotiate surrender, accepting responsibility. Unfortunately, the advancing Freikorps renege on the surrender agreement, beginning a bloody scourging across the cities, towns and countryside of Bavaria.
Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság
The Party of Communists in Hungary had been founded in a Moscow hotel in October 1918 by former Hungarian prisoners of war. Amidst the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new party grew rapidly among disaffected Social Democrats, former soldiers and the unemployed, gaining nearly fifty thousand members in mere months.
The party was so named as a deliberate rejection of ethnic nationalism. The existence of the post-imperial national states like the People's Republic of Hungary was a reality that was to be accepted, but the very nature of the empire meant that none of these new states were remotely ethnically or linguistically homogeneous, and nowhere was this more true than the urban working class.
Amidst the ongoing crisis in Hungary, the rapidly growing Communist Party developed strong ties with the Hungarian Social Democrats, against the wishes of the latter's titular leader and president of the fledgling republic, Mihály Károlyi. Co-operating with Social Democratic wishes for a unified party of the the working class, the Communists accepted invitation into government. As the Social Democrats continued to bleed members to the Communists amidst a country rocked by high inflation, bread riots and unemployment, seizure of power was a forgone conclusion
Béla Kun, ostensibly the new foreign minister, would be the real center of the new revolution through his direct acquaintance to Vladimir Lenin. Following the example in Bavaria, the Social Democrat/Communist coalition arrested Károlyi, and declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic on 27 March 1919.
The new revolutionary government abolished all aristocratic privileges and the special status of Catholic Church. Freedom of speech and religion were guaranteed. Industry and commercial holdings were nationalized. Housing and social services were brought under social control by the workers' councils. Large agricultural holdings were to be collectivized under social direction.
Simultaneously, the party began efforts to quell internal dissent. Balancing the desires of nationalists with the directives of the communist movement meant promising a restoration of Hungary's borders. This tactical concession was necessary to maintain the Hungarian Red Army as a cohesive fighting force. Similarly, resistance in the countryside from both remnants of the nobility and their attendants, as well as the peasantry frustrated the basic provisioning of services in the cities.
Harsh crackdowns and purges of "reactionaries" from the government began early in April. But the Russian Red Army was driving west, against the Byelorussian People's Republic and its Polish allies. Help would be coming soon, and to buy the necessary time, Kun's government directed the Hungarian Red Army into invading the fledgling Republic of Czechoslovakia to re-establish Hungary's pre-great war borders.
The initial battles ended in triumph for the Red Army. Slovakian communists welcomed the march of the Red Army. But Kun was in the impossible position of placating nationalists as well as the international workers' movement. With Lenin's approval, Kun attempted to split the difference to bide for time, establishing the Slovak Autonomous Soviet on 18 June 1919 as special zone in the HSR.
As the victorious Entente began to intensify pressure on the HSR, internal dissension within the Red Army began to fester. Slovak workers were not highly enthusiastic about the Autonomous Soviet, with many seeing it as a new coat of paint on "Upper Hungary". Communists questioned whether this violated the principles of proletarian internationalism. And Hungarian left-nationalists chafed at concessions to minority groups.
As the Czechoslovak military rallied, and the neighboring Kingdom of Rumania mobilized for intervention, Kun continued to argue that Russian aid was mere weeks away. At its high-tide, the HSR had nearly succeeded in controlling all of the former territory of the Kingdom of Hungary by September 1919, following a lightning campaign of spoiling and exploitation attacks against Rumanian forces.
But with Hungary isolated, and both Czechoslovakia and Rumania being supported by Entente arms and credit, these initial gains were ephemeral. The overstretched Red Army began to die by inches. During a lull in fighting just before Christmas, Chief of the General Staff Aurél Stromfeld resigned, and the Red Army began to disintegrate.
On 18 January 1920, the Politburo of the KMP voted to abandon the struggle as hopeless. Partisans were either to go underground and prepare for continued agitation until such time as the political winds shifted, or to go into exile. In the wake of the disintegrating Soviet Republic, a campaign of White Terror followed as the Rumanian Army filled the vacuum, cooperating with the resurgent remnants of Miklós Horthy's "National Army", which had nearly been snuffed out by the Red Army's fall offensives.
As would so often be the case in the 20th century, anti-communist nationalism became the fig-leaf for pogroms against Jews, other minorities, intellectuals, and trade unionists. The Kingdom of Hungary was proclaimed restored following the fall of Budapest on 30 May 1920. But all attempts to restore Charles IV as Apostolic King of Hungary were thwarted by the Entente, leaving the state under the regency of Horthy.
Horthy, the admiral without a navy, leader of a landlocked state, a kingdom without a king, had won a bitter victory. In spite of his moment of triumph the country would remain deeply divided internally, with some of the very same nationalists who deserted the Soviet Republic becoming latterday champions after Horthy acceded to the Treaty of Trianon, which restored peace but left the country with dominion over a primarily poor, rural agricultural state still ravaged by years of war and civil war.
Biennio Rosso in Italy
No country would be harmed by victory in the Great War as the Kingdom of Italy had been. When the disastrously costly war effort came to an end and the Royal Italian Army began demobilisation, the already ailing Italian economy was thrown into crisis. Italy had won the war but lost the peace. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was vanquished, but the territorial concessions Italy gained from its death were a pittance compared to the treasure sunk and blood spilled in the war.
The population was hit by a triple threat of high unemployment, high inflation (especially in basic goods), and stagnating wages. The Partido Socialista Italiano exploded in membership, as did many anarchist groups. Workers banded together for protection, forming factory councils to direct the struggle for living conditions that went beyond the narrow limits of the trade union's demands.
The industrial cities of northern Italy were writhing with strikes in 1919, with more than one million workers in total taking part in nearly two thousand strike actions. Rural strikes by peasants followed in their wake. In their attempts to restore order, the Italian bourgeoisie would increasingly rely on right-wing nationalist militias, especially the Fasci Italiani da Combattimento (Italian Fasci of Combat), to break strikes.
These street battles intensified in April 1920, when Turin metalworkers, led by core cadres from Fiat, launched factory occupations in response to lockouts by management. The workers issued revolutionary demands for factory councils to serve as the basis for a new socialist system of production, and not merely a tool to barter concessions from management. These revolutionary demands by workers aligning towards the general line of the Communist International, were rejected by the PSI and the General Confederation of Labor. The Turin Red Army would clash with police and fascist Blackshirts throughout the spring and summer.
In the face of a Socialist Party unwilling to direct revolutionary action outside of the halls of parliament, the workers turned increasingly to methods of direct action. Unfortunately they were isolated by the PSI's whiggery until the party split in January 1921. By the time the working class had a champion ready and willing to coordinate working class action against the Blackshirts, landlords and state violence, the high tide of revolutionary action had already passed.
The 8 May 1921 election occurred amidst the backdrop of increasing paramilitary violence and intimidation, resulting in a broad but totally ineffectual right-wing bloc winning a majority in parliament, including a significant number of deputies connected with the nascent Fascist movement.
Labor unrest continued, hampered by a divided political movement on the left, throughout 1921 and 22. The Fascists continued to gain support from right-wing military veterans, with crucial financial backing from Italian landlords and industrialists. The Blackshirts became the primary tool for breaking strikes and factory occupations.
Italy had stopped on the edge of revolution. And as the tide of working class strength receded, the Fascists grew ever bolder, culminating in a dramatic march on the capitol in Rome. Prime Minister Luigi Facta, of the Liberal Party, attempted to declare martial law and mobilize the army to crush Mussolini's insurrection against the state, but this required the countersignature of King Vittorio Emanuele III. The king refused, instead appointing Mussolini as his prime minister, surrendering to fascist intimidation.
Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik
When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, they did so with the expressed purpose of providing the first spark in a globalized proletarian revolution. The newly formed Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic would provide the beachhead for working-class revolutionaries across Europe amidst the systemic crisis coming in the wake of the Great War.
The Bolshevik-inspired revolutions that gripped Central and Eastern Europe following the armistice meant this strategy appeared to be bearing fruit. Soviet Russia, however, was still in the midst of its own civil war. Risings in Bavaria, the Ruhr, and Hungary encouraged the beleaguered Red Army to knuckle down and bear the hardships it faced in the field, for all the revolution needed to do was survive.
Due to their central position controlling the major centers of industrial production and support from the working class, the Bolshevik/Left SR alliance held the position of strength against a divided White movement with no clear aims uniting it besides overthrowing the current polesitter. Lenin maintained this position through calculated use of terror, and iron discipline within the revolutionary government.
The "All Russian Extraordinary Commission", commonly abbreviated as Cheka, wielded the sword of the Party for crushing reactionary dissent and enforcing discipline within the revolutionary movement. Led by the former Polish aristocrat turned communist Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka conducted the mass arrest of suspected "class enemies". Officially, this meant agents of the former Imperial government, saboteurs, members of the Orthodox clergy, landlords and bourgeoisie, and defeatists within the party. In practice the wide latitude that Chekists operated with, the lack of formal procedures of due process, and the wartime chaos meant abuse of power was widespread.
During the crisis days following armistice on the Western front, when the Entente intensified its military intervention, this often meant the summary execution of suspected collaborators, dispensing with the required revolutionary tribunals. As incorruptible as "Iron Felix" had proven, he was one man in the bureaucratic machine, and the Cheka itself was filled with its own opportunists.
As the Red Army built disciplined cadres and turned the tide against the whites, the intensity of the Red Terror relaxed. Many of the former Imperials in the White Army proved to be loathsome allies to the Entente. Far from home, fighting a war with dubious aims against a movement with more noble pretenses than the likes of the Black Hundreds ensured that morale among Entente intervention forces was dismal. Mutiny and defection were rampant.
Following General Mikhail Frunze's crushing of the Don Cossack host and the Ukrainian Hetmanate, the French fleet assisting the Whites and the Franco-American intervention force in the Crimea mutinied. The "Black Sea Mutiny" resulted in the seizure of two dreadnoughts, Jean Bart and France by their crews. Airing grievances about the immorality of the intervention, the slow state of demobilisation, and the atrocious quality of rations and poor health among the crews, the mutineers under the loose leadership of future SFIC prominents like André Marty, Charles Tillon and Alphonse Cannone also seized control of a number of other support ships.
While some among the strikers believed the best course was to defect to the Bolsheviks, most wished to avoid the resulting bloodshed of their countrymen. The French admiralty would accede to their immediate demands before the crew found any more time to fester, pardoning most of the crews and trying the ringleaders by courts-martial. But the Black Sea Mutiny did not end troubles for the intervention. Mutinies and surrenders among intervention forces intensified. Particularly for the French and American militaries, continued intervention became politically impossible. The abandonment crushed the morale of the White movement. The steady crawl towards victory by the Bolshevik governments of Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia would culminate in the Polish-Soviet War.
Reactionaries had defeated the various risings in Germany. But in August of 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was still in the fight, and Germany herself seemed to be a fragile house of cards. The Second Polish Republic, under Chief of State Jozef Piludski, had been in a de facto state of war with the Soviet alliance since its establishment. The new state had rapidly taken control of the machinery of state left behind by the dying Russian and German empires, and had taken up the dream of an Intermarium and now extended its influence into the Byelorussian and Ukrainian rump states on its borders.
Total war was inevitable. Following a wave of strikes against rationing and corruption in Warsaw, which had provoked a bloody crackdown and waves of additional sympathy strikes across the country, the Soviets began a major build up of forces adjacent to Polish-occupied Byelorussia and Ukraine. Piludski, sensing the danger, struck first on April 1920, issuing a declaration of war against Russia, and launching a major offensive towards Kiev, with the aim of liberating Ukraine from the Bolshevism.
The initial offensive broke through border troops. The Polish Third Army advanced quickly in the initial days, expecting to be greeted as liberators. But tales of Polish atrocities against "Russians", scarcely being able to tell the difference between Ukrainians and Russians, galvanized support for the Bolshevik regime. Coupled with the former Tsarist General Brusilov's appeal to support the Soviet regime, the Soviet forces rallied, and cut off the Polish spearheads east of Ukraine on 5 May 1920.
The ensuing Soviet counteroffensive dogged Polish forces as they retreated. But Tukhachevsky's forces may now have outnumbered the Poles, they were hampered by the poor conditions of the spring rasputitsa. When the quagmires dried by early June, the Soviets resumed the counteroffensive, beginning to strike into Poland. Both sides were short of food, useable weapons, and ammunition, but the Polish forces manning formerly German fortifications were able to blunt Tukhachevsky's spearheads. Additional forces under the command of Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin and Semyon Budyonny attempted to pile on in July to break the defense lines, to limited success.
The attack into Poland was slow going but methodical. But it raised a new spectre of renewed Entente intervention everyday. The once beleaguered Weimar Republic was stiffened by the encroaching threat to the east, as former reactionaries grudgingly accepted the present situation.
Soviet forces neared Warsaw by September 1920. But Polish counteroffensives on the Southern flank and Galica threatened to collapse the whole endeavor. Successful action by Stalin's Lviv Front thwarted the immediate danger, but the whole situation remained overextended. The extension of military aid by the United Kingdom buoyed Polish morale. Strikes by dockworkers had been suppressed successfully, and the war surplus materiel gave enough teeth to the Polish Army to begin limited counteroffensives. The Red Army could not advance, and began to bleed itself white in Poland. In November 1920, while still occupying much of Polish territory, Lenin's government made the first overtures for peace amidst growing fears of a resurgent White movement at home, and Rumanian intervention in Galicia.
The resulting Treaty of Riga set the Polish-Soviet Border at the eastern border of the Bialystok Voivodeship, continuing south bisecting the Polesie Voivodeship on the eastern borders of the Prużana and Kobryń Powiatys, bisecting the Kowel Powiaty at its narrowest point, and then continuing along the eastern borders of Horochów Powiaty and the Tarnopol Voivodeship.
Unconsciously, the Bolshevik government began the retreat away from proletarian internationalism. Devastated by the Great War, and the ensuing civil war, the battered states of the former Russian Empire settled accounts internally. Blaming dissension and defeatism from within, the Bolsheviks completed their absorption of the Left-SRs, imprisoning many of the dissenters from the forced merger. Simultaneously, Lenin loosened control of the economy, promulgating the New Economic Policy which returned private control of small enterprises, and ended the direct requisition of grain.
In March 1921, the Red soldiers and sailors of the Kronstadt fortress, near Petrograd, took strike action, protesting what the leaders saw as the abandonment of proletarian internationalism, the surrender to capitalist profiteering, and the miserable peace with Poland. Other demands included free elections to the soviets from among left socialist parties, free speech and assembly, worker commissions to supervise the end of forced prison labor, and fair trials for the accused,
Kronstadt had struck a chord with workers. In spite of official secrecy, sympathy actions were beginning to spread. Fearing disaster if the revolutionary movement were to be divided at this critical time, the Sovnarkom debated action. Dissidents to the Polish peace, such as Mikhail Frunze, wished to ensure a negotiated surrender by of the Kronstadt mutineers. Lenin and Trotsky favored a rapid suppression.
Suppression would ultimately be ordered on 14 March 1921. Loyal combat sections of the party, crack Red Army veterans whose loyalty could be assured, and military academy cadets formed the core of the 60,000 man force. The uprising was suppressed at bitter cost, and most of the leadership would be tried and executed by revolutionary tribunal.
The civil war would end in the coming years. By December 1922, the governments of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Byelorussian Socialist Soviet Republic, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic would federate into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, under the leadership of the merged All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). But the rot had already began to set in.
Spartakusaufstand
In the winter of 1918/19, Germany is a failed state. The armistice signed in the fall set the falling dominoes into motion, and the Reich crumbled around it. German sailors mutinied in Kiel against suicidal orders for the fleet to die with honor rather than be interred, and by late October most of the country had seen the towns and cities play host to "Workers' and Soldiers Councils" joining in solidarity with the Kiel sailors.
In spite of nominative similarities to the "workers' and soldiers' soviets" of the Russian Revolution, these organs are instruments of a liberal democratic revolution, not a communist one. Not yet, at least. The councils did not interfere with the normal civil administrations, nor did they direct factory occupations or the seizure of property except on limited levels. Their agenda is primarily peace, anti-militarism, and democracy, and to that end the councils enforce the abdication of the entirety of Germany's monarchs, from the kings down to the grand dukes. The Russian Revolution had started no less innocently, and figures in the establishment Social Democrats, the imperial bureaucracy and the remnants of the Imperial Heer would be brought into conspiracy to arrest the brewing social revolution.
On 25 November 1918, with the future of the monarchy and the German Reich still in limbo, the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League) promulgated its revolutionary demands, inspired by the Bolsheviks: direct control of production by the workers' councils and factory committees, expropriation of the landlords, abolition of the secret police and other instruments of repression, and the establishment of democratic socialist state. That afternoon, Karl Liebknecht declared the formation of a "Free Socialist Republic" to crowds outside the Reichstag.
The revolutionaries had seized the initiative from Friedrich Ebert and the Majority Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany), whose own declaration of a republic had been pre-empted. The working masses of Berlin began occupying the factories and the buildings of the imperial government. The Berlin sections of the Prussian Police are quickly swept aside by the workers' and soldiers councils' own Red Guards.
By nightfall of the 26th, the city streets are largely in the hands of the workers. Believing this to be the hour of triumph, the Berlin council of people's deputies admits representatives of the majority SPD, alongside the Spartakusbund and Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) that had been the backbone of this revolution.
Ebert, however, denounces the councils as a lawless revolution, though his own republic is from the standpoint of Imperial law an equally lawless revolution. But the Kaiser is gone, and Ebert is what is left, his hopes of a constitutional monarchy now ashes. The dual power situation sits uneasily over the city of Berlin, with neither side making maneuvers. To the Entente, Ebert's government is Germany, and remnants of the Reich are grudgingly at his disposal. 12 December's formation of the Kommunistische Partie Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany) ups the ante. With the KPD mobilizing, and absorbing more of the membership of the USPD with each passing day, and the reactionaries continuing with their thinly veiled threats, Ebert must make a decision: reaction or revolution.
Ebert begins his first overtures by firing the USPD's Emil Eichorn, the Berlin police chief who refused to the order to fire on striking workers during the days of red in November, and replacing him with a toadie of the army. On 4 January, the workers take to the streets in Berlin in protest, effectively shutting down the city. The KPD led Revolution Committee's overtures to the military units stationed in the city bear fruit when the crack Volksmarinedivision agrees to take the side of the KPD/USPD alliance. With the other units at least for now neutral, the situation develops in the favor of the revolutionists. The Red Guards are now bolstered by a disciplined navy detachment, but the guns are still silent.
Berlin is not alone in social revolution. It is however, geographically isolated. And while the revolutionists nominally control the largest concentration of urban workers and industry in Germany, the city is surrounded by the deeply reactionary Prussian hinterland, with few available allies. Other risings elsewhere are might as well be on the moon.
On 7 January, the Majority SPD and Ebert quit Berlin for Potsdam, the "second capital" and former residence of the Kaiser, as well as the seat of much of the Imperial bureaucracy. Out of the direct line of fire, and still in nominal control of the German Reich, Ebert begins mobilising paramilitary units, the infamous Freikorps (Free Corps). While he might be paying these volunteers, the officers and men are handpicked from the cream of the crop of the German military's reactionaries, and are only slightly less hostile to the republic and the SPD compared to the KPD.
On 9 February, the Revolutionary Committee splits when the USPD invites Ebert for talks. The KPD aligned-committee begins mobilizing a Red Army from volunteers, while the the USPD committee hopes to strike a compromise with Ebert. Sporadic streetfighting breaks out in Berlin, as the Red Army clashes with Freikorps infiltrators and recruiters. Ebert denies knowledge of these efforts, and continues to play for time. The Battle of Berlin proper commences on 18 February, as Freikorps Pabst began its assault on the city with almost six thousand men. Stiffened by the Berlin police and other units loyal to the government, they outnumbered the trained fighting men of the Red Army 2:1. Coupled with the Freikorps access to machine guns and light artillery, and the disorganized state of the Berlin revolutionaries, this resulted in a rout.
The city is largely retaken in two days time. Many of the local leaders of the KPD and USPD are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps, including Liebknecht.
Bayerische Räterepublik
While the much beleaguered establishment was preoccupied with the Greater Poland Uprising in the east, or the situation in Berlin, revolution was brewing within Bavaria. Workers in Munich took to the streets with the announcement of the armistice. Demanding justice for the martyred anti-war leader Kurt Eisner, a crowd 100,000 strong marched on the Residenz Palace. Abandoned by the army, King Ludwig III made an announcement releasing civil servants and police from their oaths.
Ernst Toller, a decorated veteran of the German Army, declared the formation of the Bayerische Räterepublik (Bavarian Council Republic) on 12 November 1918. Under Toller's leadership, the nascent KPD/USPD coalition would brook no half-measures. The war had emaciated the workers in the towns and cities, and the demands of the war economy had left by the economy of rural Bavara in shambles by 1918. Organizing soldiers and factory workers into a Bavarian Red Army, Toller struck quickly at centers of reaction, imprisoning "class-enemies" ruthlessly.
In the "liberal period" of November to January, Toller's government focused its efforts on land reform, agricultural relief and bringing basic services back into order. Getting struggling smallholders on the side of the new government is paramount if the cities are to survive, as the BRA fights a hundred small battles over the control of the towns and cities.
Fundamentally, the fight against reactionaries in this period meant the revolutionaries were playing at liberalism. Toller's government invited members of the Bavarian section of Zentrum, and the Bayerischer Bauernbund (Bavarian Peasant's League) into positions. Toller played the part of the liberal playwright well.
But Toller had been hardened and embittered by years spent at war. In the private councils of the KPD, he confided his frustration with cooperating with small minded burghers and land-hungry peasants. But they needed to bide time, either for favorable events in Berlin or for the KPD's plans for a rising in the Ruhr to bear fruit.
When news reached Munich of Ebert's thermidor in Berlin, Toller put aside such niceties. He publicly condemned Ebert as a traitor, and charged him of conspiring to return the monarchy and military-aristocracy to power. A wave of arrests followed, charging leading members of Zentrum and the Majority SPD of conspiring with the military to suppress the republic, introduce martial law, and restart the war. Certainly exaggerated, but contained enough of a kernel of truth.
The KPD rallied nationalists by condemning the Versailles Diktat, which its propaganda charged would leave the country in hock to foreign capitalists; the only solution was social revolution. Zentrum's participation in Ebert's government, leaked drafts of the treaty, and communiques expressing an intent to sign it, were used as pretext to suppress the party as traitors. By late February, the KPD seemed triumphant.
Ebert's government was busily organizing Freikorps suppress the Bavarian revolutionaries. But with the return of soldiers from interventions in Poland and Lithuania, the Friekorps turned against the SPD. Incensed by the looming Diktat and the incompetence of the liberal parties in fighting the revolution, on 18 March 1919 Generalleutnant Walther von Lüttwitz begins attempts to overthrow the fledgling Weimar Republic, taking control of the Berlin, and installing Wolfgang Kapp as Chancellor.
Ebert's cabinet quits to Weimar, Freikorps on its heels, and in front of the convened National Assembly calls a general strike in opposition. In Bavaria, Toller shifts priorities: in a speech before the Munich-based Rätekongress, he declared "After Kapp, then Ebert." Emergency measures to safeguard the revolution are enacted, intensifying the pace of agricultural collectivization and industrial mobilization.
With the Ruhraufstand dizzy with success, it seems like social revolution is in sight. In the East, the Russian Red Army is driving to the western frontier, the next stop: Poland. But the first setbacks come in late March, when the French Army extends its occupation to the Bavarian Palatinate exclave, breaking the KPD's tenuous hold. With the looming threat of a cancelled armistice, the German civil service refuses to support Kapp.
On 1 April 1919, the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch ends. Ebert's period of playing nice with the Ruhr Red Army and Bavaria is over. Forces of the provisional Reichsheer arrest only the most notable of conspirators from the Putsch, and then turn their sites on Bavaria and the Ruhr.
In the opening battles on 6 April, the Bavarian Red Army defeats the initial thrusts led by Generalmajor Ludwig Maercker. But the Red Army is outmatched, and in subsequent engagements the better equipped and supported Reichsheer and Freikorps gain the upper hand.
On 7 May 1919, with defeat imminent, the KPD evacuates Munich. Its partisans and soldiers go underground to evade repression. Toller and others on the Central Committee negotiate surrender, accepting responsibility. Unfortunately, the advancing Freikorps renege on the surrender agreement, beginning a bloody scourging across the cities, towns and countryside of Bavaria.
Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság
The Party of Communists in Hungary had been founded in a Moscow hotel in October 1918 by former Hungarian prisoners of war. Amidst the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new party grew rapidly among disaffected Social Democrats, former soldiers and the unemployed, gaining nearly fifty thousand members in mere months.
The party was so named as a deliberate rejection of ethnic nationalism. The existence of the post-imperial national states like the People's Republic of Hungary was a reality that was to be accepted, but the very nature of the empire meant that none of these new states were remotely ethnically or linguistically homogeneous, and nowhere was this more true than the urban working class.
Amidst the ongoing crisis in Hungary, the rapidly growing Communist Party developed strong ties with the Hungarian Social Democrats, against the wishes of the latter's titular leader and president of the fledgling republic, Mihály Károlyi. Co-operating with Social Democratic wishes for a unified party of the the working class, the Communists accepted invitation into government. As the Social Democrats continued to bleed members to the Communists amidst a country rocked by high inflation, bread riots and unemployment, seizure of power was a forgone conclusion
Béla Kun, ostensibly the new foreign minister, would be the real center of the new revolution through his direct acquaintance to Vladimir Lenin. Following the example in Bavaria, the Social Democrat/Communist coalition arrested Károlyi, and declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic on 27 March 1919.
The new revolutionary government abolished all aristocratic privileges and the special status of Catholic Church. Freedom of speech and religion were guaranteed. Industry and commercial holdings were nationalized. Housing and social services were brought under social control by the workers' councils. Large agricultural holdings were to be collectivized under social direction.
Simultaneously, the party began efforts to quell internal dissent. Balancing the desires of nationalists with the directives of the communist movement meant promising a restoration of Hungary's borders. This tactical concession was necessary to maintain the Hungarian Red Army as a cohesive fighting force. Similarly, resistance in the countryside from both remnants of the nobility and their attendants, as well as the peasantry frustrated the basic provisioning of services in the cities.
Harsh crackdowns and purges of "reactionaries" from the government began early in April. But the Russian Red Army was driving west, against the Byelorussian People's Republic and its Polish allies. Help would be coming soon, and to buy the necessary time, Kun's government directed the Hungarian Red Army into invading the fledgling Republic of Czechoslovakia to re-establish Hungary's pre-great war borders.
The initial battles ended in triumph for the Red Army. Slovakian communists welcomed the march of the Red Army. But Kun was in the impossible position of placating nationalists as well as the international workers' movement. With Lenin's approval, Kun attempted to split the difference to bide for time, establishing the Slovak Autonomous Soviet on 18 June 1919 as special zone in the HSR.
As the victorious Entente began to intensify pressure on the HSR, internal dissension within the Red Army began to fester. Slovak workers were not highly enthusiastic about the Autonomous Soviet, with many seeing it as a new coat of paint on "Upper Hungary". Communists questioned whether this violated the principles of proletarian internationalism. And Hungarian left-nationalists chafed at concessions to minority groups.
As the Czechoslovak military rallied, and the neighboring Kingdom of Rumania mobilized for intervention, Kun continued to argue that Russian aid was mere weeks away. At its high-tide, the HSR had nearly succeeded in controlling all of the former territory of the Kingdom of Hungary by September 1919, following a lightning campaign of spoiling and exploitation attacks against Rumanian forces.
But with Hungary isolated, and both Czechoslovakia and Rumania being supported by Entente arms and credit, these initial gains were ephemeral. The overstretched Red Army began to die by inches. During a lull in fighting just before Christmas, Chief of the General Staff Aurél Stromfeld resigned, and the Red Army began to disintegrate.
On 18 January 1920, the Politburo of the KMP voted to abandon the struggle as hopeless. Partisans were either to go underground and prepare for continued agitation until such time as the political winds shifted, or to go into exile. In the wake of the disintegrating Soviet Republic, a campaign of White Terror followed as the Rumanian Army filled the vacuum, cooperating with the resurgent remnants of Miklós Horthy's "National Army", which had nearly been snuffed out by the Red Army's fall offensives.
As would so often be the case in the 20th century, anti-communist nationalism became the fig-leaf for pogroms against Jews, other minorities, intellectuals, and trade unionists. The Kingdom of Hungary was proclaimed restored following the fall of Budapest on 30 May 1920. But all attempts to restore Charles IV as Apostolic King of Hungary were thwarted by the Entente, leaving the state under the regency of Horthy.
Horthy, the admiral without a navy, leader of a landlocked state, a kingdom without a king, had won a bitter victory. In spite of his moment of triumph the country would remain deeply divided internally, with some of the very same nationalists who deserted the Soviet Republic becoming latterday champions after Horthy acceded to the Treaty of Trianon, which restored peace but left the country with dominion over a primarily poor, rural agricultural state still ravaged by years of war and civil war.
Biennio Rosso in Italy
No country would be harmed by victory in the Great War as the Kingdom of Italy had been. When the disastrously costly war effort came to an end and the Royal Italian Army began demobilisation, the already ailing Italian economy was thrown into crisis. Italy had won the war but lost the peace. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was vanquished, but the territorial concessions Italy gained from its death were a pittance compared to the treasure sunk and blood spilled in the war.
The population was hit by a triple threat of high unemployment, high inflation (especially in basic goods), and stagnating wages. The Partido Socialista Italiano exploded in membership, as did many anarchist groups. Workers banded together for protection, forming factory councils to direct the struggle for living conditions that went beyond the narrow limits of the trade union's demands.
The industrial cities of northern Italy were writhing with strikes in 1919, with more than one million workers in total taking part in nearly two thousand strike actions. Rural strikes by peasants followed in their wake. In their attempts to restore order, the Italian bourgeoisie would increasingly rely on right-wing nationalist militias, especially the Fasci Italiani da Combattimento (Italian Fasci of Combat), to break strikes.
These street battles intensified in April 1920, when Turin metalworkers, led by core cadres from Fiat, launched factory occupations in response to lockouts by management. The workers issued revolutionary demands for factory councils to serve as the basis for a new socialist system of production, and not merely a tool to barter concessions from management. These revolutionary demands by workers aligning towards the general line of the Communist International, were rejected by the PSI and the General Confederation of Labor. The Turin Red Army would clash with police and fascist Blackshirts throughout the spring and summer.
In the face of a Socialist Party unwilling to direct revolutionary action outside of the halls of parliament, the workers turned increasingly to methods of direct action. Unfortunately they were isolated by the PSI's whiggery until the party split in January 1921. By the time the working class had a champion ready and willing to coordinate working class action against the Blackshirts, landlords and state violence, the high tide of revolutionary action had already passed.
The 8 May 1921 election occurred amidst the backdrop of increasing paramilitary violence and intimidation, resulting in a broad but totally ineffectual right-wing bloc winning a majority in parliament, including a significant number of deputies connected with the nascent Fascist movement.
Labor unrest continued, hampered by a divided political movement on the left, throughout 1921 and 22. The Fascists continued to gain support from right-wing military veterans, with crucial financial backing from Italian landlords and industrialists. The Blackshirts became the primary tool for breaking strikes and factory occupations.
Italy had stopped on the edge of revolution. And as the tide of working class strength receded, the Fascists grew ever bolder, culminating in a dramatic march on the capitol in Rome. Prime Minister Luigi Facta, of the Liberal Party, attempted to declare martial law and mobilize the army to crush Mussolini's insurrection against the state, but this required the countersignature of King Vittorio Emanuele III. The king refused, instead appointing Mussolini as his prime minister, surrendering to fascist intimidation.
Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik
When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, they did so with the expressed purpose of providing the first spark in a globalized proletarian revolution. The newly formed Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic would provide the beachhead for working-class revolutionaries across Europe amidst the systemic crisis coming in the wake of the Great War.
The Bolshevik-inspired revolutions that gripped Central and Eastern Europe following the armistice meant this strategy appeared to be bearing fruit. Soviet Russia, however, was still in the midst of its own civil war. Risings in Bavaria, the Ruhr, and Hungary encouraged the beleaguered Red Army to knuckle down and bear the hardships it faced in the field, for all the revolution needed to do was survive.
Due to their central position controlling the major centers of industrial production and support from the working class, the Bolshevik/Left SR alliance held the position of strength against a divided White movement with no clear aims uniting it besides overthrowing the current polesitter. Lenin maintained this position through calculated use of terror, and iron discipline within the revolutionary government.
The "All Russian Extraordinary Commission", commonly abbreviated as Cheka, wielded the sword of the Party for crushing reactionary dissent and enforcing discipline within the revolutionary movement. Led by the former Polish aristocrat turned communist Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka conducted the mass arrest of suspected "class enemies". Officially, this meant agents of the former Imperial government, saboteurs, members of the Orthodox clergy, landlords and bourgeoisie, and defeatists within the party. In practice the wide latitude that Chekists operated with, the lack of formal procedures of due process, and the wartime chaos meant abuse of power was widespread.
During the crisis days following armistice on the Western front, when the Entente intensified its military intervention, this often meant the summary execution of suspected collaborators, dispensing with the required revolutionary tribunals. As incorruptible as "Iron Felix" had proven, he was one man in the bureaucratic machine, and the Cheka itself was filled with its own opportunists.
As the Red Army built disciplined cadres and turned the tide against the whites, the intensity of the Red Terror relaxed. Many of the former Imperials in the White Army proved to be loathsome allies to the Entente. Far from home, fighting a war with dubious aims against a movement with more noble pretenses than the likes of the Black Hundreds ensured that morale among Entente intervention forces was dismal. Mutiny and defection were rampant.
Following General Mikhail Frunze's crushing of the Don Cossack host and the Ukrainian Hetmanate, the French fleet assisting the Whites and the Franco-American intervention force in the Crimea mutinied. The "Black Sea Mutiny" resulted in the seizure of two dreadnoughts, Jean Bart and France by their crews. Airing grievances about the immorality of the intervention, the slow state of demobilisation, and the atrocious quality of rations and poor health among the crews, the mutineers under the loose leadership of future SFIC prominents like André Marty, Charles Tillon and Alphonse Cannone also seized control of a number of other support ships.
While some among the strikers believed the best course was to defect to the Bolsheviks, most wished to avoid the resulting bloodshed of their countrymen. The French admiralty would accede to their immediate demands before the crew found any more time to fester, pardoning most of the crews and trying the ringleaders by courts-martial. But the Black Sea Mutiny did not end troubles for the intervention. Mutinies and surrenders among intervention forces intensified. Particularly for the French and American militaries, continued intervention became politically impossible. The abandonment crushed the morale of the White movement. The steady crawl towards victory by the Bolshevik governments of Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia would culminate in the Polish-Soviet War.
Reactionaries had defeated the various risings in Germany. But in August of 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was still in the fight, and Germany herself seemed to be a fragile house of cards. The Second Polish Republic, under Chief of State Jozef Piludski, had been in a de facto state of war with the Soviet alliance since its establishment. The new state had rapidly taken control of the machinery of state left behind by the dying Russian and German empires, and had taken up the dream of an Intermarium and now extended its influence into the Byelorussian and Ukrainian rump states on its borders.
Total war was inevitable. Following a wave of strikes against rationing and corruption in Warsaw, which had provoked a bloody crackdown and waves of additional sympathy strikes across the country, the Soviets began a major build up of forces adjacent to Polish-occupied Byelorussia and Ukraine. Piludski, sensing the danger, struck first on April 1920, issuing a declaration of war against Russia, and launching a major offensive towards Kiev, with the aim of liberating Ukraine from the Bolshevism.
The initial offensive broke through border troops. The Polish Third Army advanced quickly in the initial days, expecting to be greeted as liberators. But tales of Polish atrocities against "Russians", scarcely being able to tell the difference between Ukrainians and Russians, galvanized support for the Bolshevik regime. Coupled with the former Tsarist General Brusilov's appeal to support the Soviet regime, the Soviet forces rallied, and cut off the Polish spearheads east of Ukraine on 5 May 1920.
The ensuing Soviet counteroffensive dogged Polish forces as they retreated. But Tukhachevsky's forces may now have outnumbered the Poles, they were hampered by the poor conditions of the spring rasputitsa. When the quagmires dried by early June, the Soviets resumed the counteroffensive, beginning to strike into Poland. Both sides were short of food, useable weapons, and ammunition, but the Polish forces manning formerly German fortifications were able to blunt Tukhachevsky's spearheads. Additional forces under the command of Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin and Semyon Budyonny attempted to pile on in July to break the defense lines, to limited success.
The attack into Poland was slow going but methodical. But it raised a new spectre of renewed Entente intervention everyday. The once beleaguered Weimar Republic was stiffened by the encroaching threat to the east, as former reactionaries grudgingly accepted the present situation.
Soviet forces neared Warsaw by September 1920. But Polish counteroffensives on the Southern flank and Galica threatened to collapse the whole endeavor. Successful action by Stalin's Lviv Front thwarted the immediate danger, but the whole situation remained overextended. The extension of military aid by the United Kingdom buoyed Polish morale. Strikes by dockworkers had been suppressed successfully, and the war surplus materiel gave enough teeth to the Polish Army to begin limited counteroffensives. The Red Army could not advance, and began to bleed itself white in Poland. In November 1920, while still occupying much of Polish territory, Lenin's government made the first overtures for peace amidst growing fears of a resurgent White movement at home, and Rumanian intervention in Galicia.
The resulting Treaty of Riga set the Polish-Soviet Border at the eastern border of the Bialystok Voivodeship, continuing south bisecting the Polesie Voivodeship on the eastern borders of the Prużana and Kobryń Powiatys, bisecting the Kowel Powiaty at its narrowest point, and then continuing along the eastern borders of Horochów Powiaty and the Tarnopol Voivodeship.
Unconsciously, the Bolshevik government began the retreat away from proletarian internationalism. Devastated by the Great War, and the ensuing civil war, the battered states of the former Russian Empire settled accounts internally. Blaming dissension and defeatism from within, the Bolsheviks completed their absorption of the Left-SRs, imprisoning many of the dissenters from the forced merger. Simultaneously, Lenin loosened control of the economy, promulgating the New Economic Policy which returned private control of small enterprises, and ended the direct requisition of grain.
In March 1921, the Red soldiers and sailors of the Kronstadt fortress, near Petrograd, took strike action, protesting what the leaders saw as the abandonment of proletarian internationalism, the surrender to capitalist profiteering, and the miserable peace with Poland. Other demands included free elections to the soviets from among left socialist parties, free speech and assembly, worker commissions to supervise the end of forced prison labor, and fair trials for the accused,
Kronstadt had struck a chord with workers. In spite of official secrecy, sympathy actions were beginning to spread. Fearing disaster if the revolutionary movement were to be divided at this critical time, the Sovnarkom debated action. Dissidents to the Polish peace, such as Mikhail Frunze, wished to ensure a negotiated surrender by of the Kronstadt mutineers. Lenin and Trotsky favored a rapid suppression.
Suppression would ultimately be ordered on 14 March 1921. Loyal combat sections of the party, crack Red Army veterans whose loyalty could be assured, and military academy cadets formed the core of the 60,000 man force. The uprising was suppressed at bitter cost, and most of the leadership would be tried and executed by revolutionary tribunal.
The civil war would end in the coming years. By December 1922, the governments of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Byelorussian Socialist Soviet Republic, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic would federate into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, under the leadership of the merged All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). But the rot had already began to set in.
- Location
- 2038
I don't have much to say about this one. Fantastic as usual, of course. I particularly like the divergences in Bavaria - they'll make poignant martyrs. Liebknecht is dead which, to be callous, is arguably lesser loss than if Luxemburg had been killed. Luxemburg survives and ends up in America, but where is she in the meantime? Where's everyones favourite socialist grandma, Clara Zetkin, in all this? The counter-revolutionary violence and related political and economic instabilities will prompt lots of emigration to the USA in the short term.
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Rosa manages to evade the Freikorps crackdown in Berlin and rallies the battered KPD during the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch. She and Zetkin will both be among the KPD deputies elected to the Reichstag in 1920.
Naturally problems aren't quite done for Germany. They've gone through a shorter, more intense episode of civil war than they did IOTL, largely because wartime conditions are that much worse, and they couldn't mass plunder occupied territories in the East to feed the home population. One of the later viewpoint characters that shows up later is a German emigre because of the prolongued political/economic instability.
Nineteen-Twenty: The High Tide
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Nineteen-Twenty: The High Tide
Excerpts from Albert E. Kahn, Storming the Gates of Heaven: A History of the Comintern, (Cambridge, MA: Progress Publishers, 1962).
The Second World Congress of the Comintern laid out the basic doctrine of the international communist movement from early July to late August of 1920. To the modern eye, the decisions made at the Second Congress seem frightfully premature. While Lenin sent his 21 Conditions for approval by the Congress, he and his comrades were still bitterly engaged in the Soviet Revolutionary War. Yet the delegates prefaced their speeches with talk of the imminent world revolution, while all of the major capitalist powers had encircled Russia with bayonets, and threatened to strangle that very revolution in the cradle. Still, the deputies at the Congress maintained sufficient foresight to at least tackle the issues of the future of the movement.
[...]
The severity of the 21 Conditions would prove too much for most delegations. While the inability to compromise on certain areas of doctrine, such as the strict adoption of democratic centralism, or the requirement for the complete expulsion of members deemed to be reformist, would deepen the already disastrous rift in the international Left, the splits caused by the question of reform or revolution revealed ultimately how degenerated the workers' international had become. The conceits made by the reformist parties of the Second International had put them within reach of taking office in the bourgeois states of Europe, yet these ostensibly socialist parties would find themselves managing the instruments of a capitalist state to alleviate the crises of capital. This short-sighted Faustian gambit demonstrated the barely skin-deep penetration of Marx's class analysis and historical materialism among the self-described Marxist intellectuals.
The Lassallean vulgar conceit had attained a tactical victory over Marxian social science. The unfortunate nature of reality, though, is that it does not care whether you agree with it or not. The Social Democrats' failure to seize the moment in the decay of the capitalist world system following the First World War would prove to be ruinous in the long run. When Ebert ended his dithering and turned the guns of Freikorps reactionaries on the revolutionary workers of Berlin, and the parties of the dead Second International moved to expel their revolutionary sections, the Social Democrats would unwittingly condemn Europe to the worst bloodletting in known history in the coming decades. Every fascism is an index of a failed revolution, and in shoring up liberal capitalism with reactionary guns, the Social Democrats had in effect signed their own death warrants.
This is not to say that the parties of the Comintern were at all blameless. The failure of the revolutionary upsurge left the Bolsheviks hung out to dry. In the period immediately after, the consolidation of the Bolshevik state caused almost irreparable harm to the international communist movement. The Comintern itself was increasingly an arm of Stalinist foreign policy, using Lenin's conditions to create insidious weapons for internal witch-hunts and factional squabbles.
[...]
The American delegation to the Comintern faced the same unenviable choice as the French Section. While the use of state terror during the war years and the massive revolutionary surge during the Biennio Rosso had destroyed much of the Socialist Labor Party's moderate faction, either by pushing them to the Left or out of the movement altogether, even many on the Left were hesitant to completely endorse the 21 Conditions. While many conditions were rather agreeable, the second, seventh and seventeenth conditions proved particularly worrisome. The party was simply in no shape for the internal purge necessary to put "tested communists" in every important decision. Similarly, a drastic restyling of the party was most unsavory at a time when the existing party name was finally gaining strength among the proletariat.
[Comintern Chairman] Zinoviev, and Lenin himself if Zinoviev is to be believed, argued these fears to be moot. The decisive actions of the Biennio Rosso, and the ongoing revolt of 1920's "Red Summer" had proven to him that the SLP had already proven itself to be filled with tested communist. The masses were in a revolutionary mood, and the experience of struggle had tempered the party into a proper vanguard. The seizure of power by the working class could be mere months away at this rate.
[...]
In the end, the American delegation gave their unanimous recommendation to adopt the 21 Conditions and join the Comintern as a full member. However, that decision would ultimately be put to the test at the Socialist Labor Party National Convention, to be held in the Chicago Commune in January of 1921. The debate would be heated, and threatened to split the party in two. The rump of the reformist faction, severely depleted of delegates and speakers, clustered around president of the former Typographical Union Max S. Hayes, and vehemently opposed joining the Comintern.
The Left, which comprised of the vast majority of the party, was divided as well. The past year had seen a split among the pro-Bolshevik membership into groups usually referred to as the Left and Ultra-Left. The growing Ultra-Left faction instead attacked the state of the Comintern and the Bolshevik Revolution from the left, and was arguably more committed to revolutionary socialism than the Bolsheviks. Hence their many reservations with the 21 Conditions. They centered on the leadership of famed academician Walter Lippmann, and the young and brilliant son of Daniel DeLeon, Solon.
[...]
John Reed, the boyish face of the future, personally presented Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin's personal remarks to the American proletariat, offering their reasons in favor of the Comintern and the conditions it imposed. He ended his speech with his own reflections of his time in Russia during the revolution, and the decisive moment the question of whether to strike in Petrograd was considered. "This decision," he argued, "will be no less momentous than that fateful decision by the workers of the Putilov Plant, in Petrograd, to consider their shivering and starving children's plight, throw caution to the winds and a spanner in the Putilov works. That one decision […] set off the chain of events that toppled an Emperor, ended a war, and established the first workers' republic. Fortune favors the bold, my comrades."
[...]
Solon DeLeon spoke after Big Bill Haywood, delivering his rebuttal to the Reed-Haywood platform. While he congratulated the stout Wobbly on his work organizing the industrial unions and fighting against the imperialist game of the Great War, he offered his own annotations to Anton Pannekoek's criticism of the of the Bolsheviks, relating them directly to the matter of the Comintern's conditions. DeLeon accused the Bolsheviks of an errant, right-wing deviation from the fundamentals of Marxism.
In his critique, DeLeon accused the Bolsheviks of playing an adventurist gamble, supported not by dialectical materialism, but the "fiction of the utopian society supplanting the capitalist nation." This old fiction, long held by maligned petit-bourgeois, had simply found its latest form in Bolshevism. Bolshevism had merely militarized the Lasallean "People's State" and Kautskyan "educational dictatorship" modes of parliamentary party organization:
"Leninist-Kautskyist staatsozialismus has produced, instead of the taking of political power by the workers in the dictatorship of the proletariat, a self-perpetuating political autocracy of a self-declared 'communist' party over a state capitalist monopoly. Lenin's red bureaucracy is just as sinister, and just as opposed to the political rule of the working class, as the old bourgeois bureaucracy."
[...]
Ultimately, what stole the show and sealed the decision were some fashionably late arrivals, and a speech by the most unlikely of party members. Both Eugene Debs and Former Senator LaFollette arrived at the convention fashionably late, excusably so. Having both been recently pardoned on the recommendation of the Cabinet and President-elect Wood for conviction under the Sedition Act, the former Republican and moderate fellow traveler of socialism came to the convention barely in time for the close of the debate.
Debs hadn't let his stint in federal prison hold him back, and had headed the party's presidential ticket while in prison in an act of revolutionary defiance. While he sympathized with the Ultra-Left's critique, he countered by arguing the necessity of an international working class movement in opposition to international capitalism. The Comintern, while imperfect, was the best tool for that job.
Freshly divorced, penniless, and emaciated from his stay in federal prison, LaFollette proved to be another strange convert to the Left. He spoke of how his trust in the American dream had been shattered by the events of the last six years, half-cursing the naivete of his past. As a pariah now, he accepted his fate handed down from on high, but did not shrink from fighting against it. Shocking everyone, he spoke in favor of the Comintern and endorsed the 21 Conditions. In the end, the Left prevailed. The Ultra-Left agreed to ratify the conditions, though they urged solidarity and fairness in their application. And the majority of the Right, though they voted against acceptance of the 21 Conditions, agreed to abide by them and to not quit the party. On 15 February 1921, the newly rechristened Workers' Party of America formally joined the Communist International.
Some excerpts from the alternatehistory.com thread titled "Revolution in the Biennio Rosso?"
SpessCowboy: Hey guys, I'm new here and this is my first post, so I don't know if this has been done yet. But I was wondering if it would be possible for the American Revolution to occur right after WWI, during the Biennio Rosso. Have any good timelines been done on that subject? What kind of change would be needed for the labor militancy of the period to break out into full blown revolution?
AdmiralSanders: An act of god
DamnedTory: Be nice to the noob, Sanders.
To expand, basically the consensus we've reached here on the board is that it just won't be possible without a POD going so far back that the history of the early 20th century is unrecognizable. It's basically like Operation Sea Lion but for politics (another thread that's been done to death).
Domestically, the American government had done just about everything possible to fuck up. The rationing system was heavily abused, and the rich basically ended up having their luxury consumption untouched as well as their sons effectively undraftable. Heavy handed attempts to contain labor fifth columns in war industry most often just ended up pushing everyone into the trade unions, even those who had previously been patriots and opposed to war resistance. It is difficult to imagine a government that could possibly have screwed up the home front more.
Certainly, they had a unique problem with the fact that the First World War really wasn't you Yank's fight to begin with. But properly managed, they could have at least not driven half the working class into revolutionary socialism.
The main reason for the big uprisings after WWI is that the wartime controls could no longer be maintained post-armistice. So the pent-up rage exploded into some real Jacobin shit across America. But while the workers were angry, and taking it out on everyone else in a giant temper-tantrum, they really didn't have a concrete idea of where to go. Neither did the party leaders, who were by-and-large behind the uprisings, not leading them.
AdmiralSanders: As much as I am inclined to agree with your politics, DT, calling the Biennio Rosso period a "temper-tantrum" is baseless and ahistorical. The masses involved in the trade unions, the various labourist groups and even the Spartacists were fighting for their liberty against a tyrannical regime and its cronies.
Said regime was at least smart enough to back away from the precipice after the Armistice, and worked to placate its people, rather than degenerate into autocracy, something you've advocated on more than one occasion.
You call yourself a liberal conservative just as I did, but you seem to have forgotten important parts of the "liberal" part of that equation. Supporting autocracy as a means to suppress leftists is just plain barbaric and counterproductive.
Demographics in the Nineteen-Teens
America's entrance into the Great spurred a series of immense demographic changes. America's conscript army was raised primarily from city dwellers, including recent immigrants. With millions of young hands removed from the factories to be sent to France, the manpower shortages in America's cities spurred the beginning of a great exodus of young men from the farmlands of the West and Midwest back to the very cities their fathers and grandfathers had fled from.
In part, this exodus was made possible by relatively good harvests in the period from 1912 to 1918. The high farm prices spurred on by war mobilization spurred on mechanization in farms, assisted by a variety of cooperative associations. The high demand for labor in the cities encouraged many farm laborers and farmer's sons to seek their fortune in the cites. Young men, used to the self-managed rhythms of farm labor, unaccustomed to collective solidarity, and often xenophobic, threatened to break the urban labor movement in the early years of the War.
The arrival of a tide of rural workers to the industrial cities was absolutely crucial to breaking the February-March 1915 general strikes organized by Solidarity in opposition to the declaration of war and subsequent mobilization.
Simultaneously, reforms in federal immigration law allowed several million Chinese persons to immigrate in the 1910s. Predominantly young unmarried men, but also a large number of families, these immigrants tended to come from the urban classes of a China rocked by revolution and civil war. Many were educated, and had already been learning English or other European languages, forming a nucleus of ethnic solidarity affinity groups to assist integration into their new homes.
Alongside a million immigrants from Latin America, these recent immigrant groups would face hostile conditions in their new homes. While fears of taking the jobs of natives were dampened by the unusually high labor demand driven by the war, the spike in unemployment that began with demobilization would stoke the fires of nativist resentment. Even the unions and the Socialist Labor Party, which ostensibly sought to unite all workers in their common interest, faced difficulties overcoming mutual resentment in presenting a united front.
But no group faced more difficulties than the blacks leaving the South in the "Great Migration", pulled by the prospect of industrial jobs and pushed by the omnipresent fear of Jim Crow terror. Prior to the Great War, the Socialist Labor Party had made notable inroads in building cross-racial unions, even in the South. But this was put to the test by the migration of nearly two million blacks to the industrial centers of the Midwest and Northeast, predominantly in the period of 1914 to 1919.
In the steel mills, meatpacking plants, and arsenals they would butt heads with similar numbers of poor Southern whites leaving agricultural poverty for the promise of jobs in northern cities. It would take years of dedicated organizing and the harsh wartime conditions to build the transracial working class coalitions that took the streets and occupied the factories in the Biennio Rosso, protesting everything from falling rations of bread, meat and other essentials, to the widespread appearance of corruption available to the wealthier classes.
By 1919, recent migrants from the rural areas of the United States, black or white, were more highly represented in the labor movement than immigrants. The very reason that made them the best scabs available in 1915 was also the very reason why they would make the quickest converts to communism.
The régime of industrial management was entirely alien to them. Having been raised with the expectation of self-regulated labor, which they would benefit from the fruit of, industrial capitalism became quickly intolerable. Working under a sadistic foreman for long days for very little gain, a slave to the tempo of the machines and the pattern of the clock, these young men (and women too, though in smaller numbers), found their way into the labor movement, heading to the hard left with greater propensity and frequency than other groups.
Some notable events, 1920
January 12: The governments of the Russian Federative Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Republic, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic sign a treaty establishing a unified command structure for their allied armed forces, as well as important economic cooperation measures.
January 16: The League of Nations Covenant is promulgated. The inaugural meeting will begin in Geneva, Switzerland.
January 20: Faced with collapsing demand due to demobilization, the Amalgamated Coal Corporation (a trust controlling 88% of American coal production) announces harsh pay cuts for its workforce as well as mass terminations.
January 24: The State of South Carolina becomes the first to ratify an amendment to the US Constitution to ban the production, sale and consumption of alcohol, having become a dry state the previous year.
January 30: The Netherlands refuses requests by the Entente to extradite the former Kaiser Wilhelm II for war crimes trials.
February 5: The Republican Party, now the second place party in the House thanks to a slew of resignations, and a few untimely deaths, votes to leave the national coalition. The Democratic minority government places Champ Clark in the First Secretary chair.
February 12: In Mingo County, West Virginia, a group of coal miners associated with the fledgling SLP local call a wildcat strike. The powder keg explodes, and soon the strike is spreading like wildfire across West Virginia coal country.
February 15: The Conference of London opens, as representatives meet to discuss the fate of the Ottoman Empire.
February 18: British troops withdraw from Murmansk and Central Asia, ending major foreign intervention in the Soviet Revolutionary War.
February 21: The first meeting of the League of Nations begins in Great Britain.
February 24: State police and hired goons attempting to put down strikers in Matewan, West Virginia are routed by armed miners led by Great War veterans. The tragic death of several of the miners' families in the pitched battle shocks even the bourgeois press.
March 3: The United Mineworkers announce a general strike in Appalachian coal country, in sympathy with their comrades in West Virginia. Intended to be a peaceful downing of tools, a combination of revolutionary fervor and anger at management result in occupations at most major mines.
March 9: General Leonard Wood takes over the Massachusetts Republican Party, beginning negotiations with the SLP and union locals to restore the rule of law. As part of his bid to stem the class war, he promises the introduction of new reforms, including workplace safety and powersharing with unions.
March 15: British forces occupy Constantinople, beginning the chain of events leading to the Turkish Liberation War.
March 18: Under diplomatic pressure from the UK, the US government re-invokes the Sedition Act to block the raising of funds or the provision of aid in kind to Irish nationalist rebels.
April 4: Amidst protests by Irish-Americans, the US Marshals arrange the extradition of Éamon de Valera to Great Britain to face trial for his role in ongoing war of independence in Ireland.
April 17: The Communist Party of Great Britain is founded, following a secret conference of revolutionary socialist groups.
April 24: Polish forces launch an offensive into Soviet Ukraine.
May 12: The Bolshevik campaign to take the Caucasus ends after long, grueling months of fighting. The Menshevik governments of the area capitulate against the overwhelming might of the Red Army.
May 14: In response to spreading rumors of a renewed federal and state crackdown on the forces of organized labor, workers and farmers begin a new wave of en masse strikes. The ranks of the armed paramilitary Spartacus League swell, as many yeoman farmers and proletarians take up arms. Inspired by developments in Russia, soviet councils and congresses begin to form across the areas in uprising.
May 24: Irish nationalist leader Michael Collins is killed by a Royal Irish Constabulary hit squad while organizing for the National Loan in Cork City.
June 1: As police and National Guard sporadically clash with Spartacists across the Midwest and Midatlantic regions, the Clark government declares martial law on the home front. Invocation of the Posse Comitatus Act fails due to united Republican opposition.
June 9: The revolutionary wave reaches the West coast, as insurrectionary soviets take control of the cities of Seattle, San Francisco and Portland. In the Mountain West, the revolutionary fervor is dampened by Republican reform governments.
June 17: The Socialist Labor Party's National Congress meets in the union-controlled city of Chicago. In spite of being behind the bandwagon, the Party decisively adopts a revolutionary platform, supporting the wave of uprisings.
June 25: While soviets and factory committees form begin forming in New England, compared to revolutionary insurrections of much of the industrial heart of America, the local Socialist Labor groups decide to pursue more modest reform programs. Compared to the rest of the country, New England is surprisingly passive.
July 4: While the American Railway Union's general strike has stopped many efforts to restore order in insurrectionary centers, they lack the strength or the will to decisively seize control. Consequently, most revolutionary centers are isolated, and while rural areas have supported insurrectionary actions in some places, they are considerably less organized, motivated and supported compared to urban counterparts. In Chicago, the heart of the revolutionary surge, the mayor and other city leaders return to negotiate an end to the uprising.
July 5: The First National Congress of Soviets meets, with considerable difficulty, in the high tide of the Red Summer. Even as the delegations are meeting in Chicago, many groups across the country are losing steam and turning to the negotiation table.
July 11: Congress officially censures President Marshall and First Secretary Clark for their disastrous handling of the national crisis. The Democratic Party is in shambles, and the minority government is sustained only due to the imminence of the election and the need for someone to hold the reins until then.
July 15: The Second World Congress of the Communist International takes place in Petrograd.
July 30: Amidst the crumbling of the revolutionary wave, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party begins its national convention. They adopt a program mixing the tradition of American populism with reformist socialism.
August 2: The Republican National Convention meets much later than expected. Leonard Wood, having become somewhat of a hero to both the establishment and reformers, wins the nomination on the first ballot. The more conservative Calvin Coolidge is nominated as his running mate.
August 10: Order is restored in New York. By the end of the week, the guns mostly fall silent. As part of the agreement, the trials of Italian immigrant labor organizers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are allowed to proceed. With the guarantees made by the New York state government, and the personal contributions of even some establishment figures to their defense, Sacco and Vanzetti are likely to be the first Italians to ever get a fair trial in the United States.
August 18: Talks to form an American professional football association end in failure, thanks to insufficient commitment from investors. The unreformed sport is perceived to be too savage to make a commercial endeavor in violent times.
August 30: Following the end of the ARU's strike campaigns, most of the Midwest has returned to normalcy, marking the end of the Red Summer.
September 5: In the VII Olympiad, the US rugby union team takes home the gold medal amidst much fanfare.
September 18: Through a combination of superior organization, subterfuge, and outright chicanery, Ukrainian Bolsheviks take total control of the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic following soviet elections. Nestor Makhno is placed under house arrest while the Black Army is disarmed.
October 1: With Irish nationalist forces exhausted on one hand, and the British unionists facing tremendous pressure from both the public as well as diplomatic pressure from the United States, a truce is made between the Irish Republican Army and Great Britain. Negotiations to end the ongoing civil war begin.
October 10: Carinthian Plebiscite: Under the terms of the Treaty of St. Germaine, Carinthia, a largely Slovenian district in southern Austria, votes narrowly to join the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), in a vote largely determined by the political-economic instability in Austria.
November 2: General Leonard Wood is elected President of the United States in the first national election broadcast by radio.
November 18: The Russian SFSR and the Second Polish Republic agree to an armistice for talks to end the Polish-Soviet War.
November 29: Rationing ends in the United Kingdom.
December 14: The Interallied Commission meets in London to begin determining the total value of reparations owed by Germany, to be divided at a ratio of 45 percent to France, 25 percent to the UK, 15 percent to the US, Italy 8 percent, Belgium 8 percent, and the rest divided among the other Entente members and associates.
1920 General Election Results
Wikibox courtesy of @Asami
Presidential
|
Presidential Candidate |
Party |
Home State |
Pop vote |
pct |
Electoral vote |
|
Leonard Wood |
Republican |
Massachusetts |
12,234,885
|
44.05%
|
293 |
|
Eugene V. Debs |
Socialist Labor |
Indiana |
9,213,154
|
33.17%
|
124 |
|
John W. Davis |
Democratic |
W. Virginia |
2,956,156
|
10.64%
|
114 |
|
James M. Cox |
DFL |
Ohio |
3,228,153
|
11.62%
|
0 |
|
Aaron S. Watkins |
Prohibition |
Indiana |
115,423
|
0.42%
|
0 |
|
Other |
27,056
|
0.10%
|
|||
|
Total |
27,774,827
|
100.00%
|
531 |
||
|
Needed to Win |
266 |
House of Representatives
|
Party |
Leader |
Home State |
Seats |
Last |
Net |
|
Republican |
James Mann |
Illinois |
222
|
190
|
32 |
|
Socialist Labor |
Upton Sinclair |
New Jersey |
136
|
63
|
73 |
|
Democratic |
Claude Kitchin |
North Carolina |
70
|
182
|
-112 |
|
DFL |
Burton K. Wheeler |
Montana |
5
|
0
|
5 |
|
Independents |
2
|
0
|
2 |
||
|
Total |
435
|
||||
|
Needed to Win |
218
|
|
Party |
Seats |
Change |
|
Republican |
54
|
4
|
|
Democratic |
18
|
-7
|
|
Socialist Labor |
16
|
2
|
|
DFL |
8
|
1
|
|
Total |
96
|
0
|
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeesh, the Irish are getting fucked over here. De Valera extradited, Collins killed early, and the US blocking support from the Irish-American diaspora? That's not a healthy recipe.
Oh, and apparently American Rugby is going to be a thing. Well, at least they'll be less concussions going around.
Oh, and apparently American Rugby is going to be a thing. Well, at least they'll be less concussions going around.
- Location
- 2038
I think that the bulk of the OTL American aid to the Irish was post-WWII anyway. There's a lot of Irish veterans with no work and a bone to pick and war matériel is bound to be floating around.
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
You know that the American electoral system is bonkers when the Democratic Party can get almost as many electors as the Socialist Labor Party despite having less than a third of the votes just because the ex-confederate states dogmatically voted Democrat until Goldwater.
- Location
- 2038
I'm surprised there are no faithless electors!
- Location
- The Old Dominion
I am not, the deep south and the upper south were deeply conservative societies with good old boy systems where who you were related to and how long your family lived in a area could be just as important if not more so than how much money you had in how much influence you have, what parties you got invited to and where you might find employment.
Thats withoutgetting into the system of sharecropping that by the 1930s had bound up 5.5 million whites and 3 million blacks were caught up and both of whom often subjected to terror from the Klan if they dared speak out against the system which got even worse when they formed share cropping unions in the 1930s.
Thats withoutgetting into the system of sharecropping that by the 1930s had bound up 5.5 million whites and 3 million blacks were caught up and both of whom often subjected to terror from the Klan if they dared speak out against the system which got even worse when they formed share cropping unions in the 1930s.
- Location
- 2038
I meant in New York and Illinois.
the atom
Anarcho-Kemalist Thought Leader
- Location
- Comfortably numb
It could be because I've slept for 4 hours in the last two days, but I haven't noticed much mention of revolutionary activity in the southern states beyond that in the Appalachians. Will this region prove to be something of an establishment holdout?
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Good eye. Outside of the upper south, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, they haven't had much inroads...yet.
But theres a whole bunch of radicalized southerners coming back, both black and white. And many of these white young men bled beside black comrades in France and are profoundly changed by the experience.
Lots gonna happen from that knock on effect
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
The Canadian labor movement tended to follow the example set by the US labor movement, and at least IOTL, they were more successful at it. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was built off the example set by the Farmer-Labor Party and various Nonpartisan Leagues in the US midwest, and LaFollette's 1924 Progressive Party campaign.
ITTL, Canadian Labourists are trying to stick to a strategy similar to the pre-war Socialist Labor Party, to mixed success. They have a Socialist Labour Party that has managed to unite most provincial labourists and trade unionists, but they're stuck in the minor leagues, and the party split, with one part supporting the war and another opposed. Matters like the Winnipeg General Strike occur and meed similar crackdowns, and Canadian trade unions face tension between a much more militant rank and file, and the leadership which is more conciliatory.
So in the 20s you'll have a small, reformist Socialist Labor Party of Canada, and an underground Communist Party of Canada existing in a legal gray zone.
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
What do you mean? Canadians socialists getting support from their counterparts?
If that's the case, there are a couple of issues. The first is that all their resources from 1914 to 1920 are tied down domestically. They are effectively limited to leading by example. Which brings up the next one: social movements are products of their material conditions, and outside forces have a very limited effect on them. Canada, especially in this period, is much more sparsely populated, agrarian society. They also have a tradition of one-nation conservatism inherited from Great Britain, which valued nobless oblige and social cohesion more than the US, especially in the Lochner era, during which the US was afflicted with a kind of liberalism gone mad from the courts that made it all but impossible for governments to mediate class conflict (not all that dissimilar from IOTL).
As we'll see, the 1920s are sort of like the opening phase of chess game. Everyone keeps moving and removing pieces, threatening, placing the other player in check, but there's little bite. Canada is a piece on that board so, we'll see what that brings
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
American and British conservatism, while often conflated due to both being anglophonic rightist traditions, have very different origins. American conservatism is something born and bred from the bourgeoisie while British conservatism is distinctly more aristocratic. Up until about Thatcher where British conservatism shifted more towards the American liberal-conservative model for good; and even then British conservatism is not quite so market liberal; British conservatism was rather separate from the liberal ideal of the self made man building his own destiny with the sweat of his own brow that predominates American rightist traditions. Indeed for quite a while the British Conservatives were on better terms with Labour than the British Liberals who skewed more towards that American ideal of the self made atomised individual and were rather hostile to the idea of societal paternalism.
Canada's well known for being caught between American and British influence, but the Canadian political form has generally leaned a bit closer to the mother country than the southern brother.
Canada's well known for being caught between American and British influence, but the Canadian political form has generally leaned a bit closer to the mother country than the southern brother.
the atom
Anarcho-Kemalist Thought Leader
- Location
- Comfortably numb
Historically the Canadian socialist movement waxed and waned right alongside its American counterpart, usually as a direct result of financial and in some cases organizational support. The Canadian government was absolutely scared shitless of communism during this period and this was definitely the heyday of socialist agitation.What do you mean? Canadians socialists getting support from their counterparts?
If that's the case, there are a couple of issues. The first is that all their resources from 1914 to 1920 are tied down domestically. They are effectively limited to leading by example. Which brings up the next one: social movements are products of their material conditions, and outside forces have a very limited effect on them. Canada, especially in this period, is much more sparsely populated, agrarian society. They also have a tradition of one-nation conservatism inherited from Great Britain, which valued nobless oblige and social cohesion more than the US, especially in the Lochner era, during which the US was afflicted with a kind of liberalism gone mad from the courts that made it all but impossible for governments to mediate class conflict (not all that dissimilar from IOTL).
As we'll see, the 1920s are sort of like the opening phase of chess game. Everyone keeps moving and removing pieces, threatening, placing the other player in check, but there's little bite. Canada is a piece on that board so, we'll see what that brings
New Decade, New Problems
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
International Labor Defense Committee (By @Mr.E )
With the continual violations of civil liberties committed by the government during the First World War, especially the rulings of Schenck v. United States and Debs v. United States against the defendants, there was a need for an organization to defend the rights of Americans and free speech. With this principle in the mind, as the two cases were moving through the courts, the Civil Rights Bureau was founded in 1917. Lead by anti-war activists Roger Nash Baldwin and Crystal Eastman, it had significant ties to the Socialist Labor Party, though no official connection existed between the two at the time.
The nascent organization would find itself busy during the Biennio Rosso, defending the right to strike and protest, and battling the government repression in the courtrooms. They would work in the conjunction with the SLP's General Defense Committee in these efforts. As the Biennio Rosso died down, Baldwin was inspired to commit to direct action for the organization. The SLP (now the Workers' Party) agreed, especially with the new wave following the Biennio Rosso.
On January 15th, 1920, the CRB and GDC agreed to merge into the International Labor Defense Committee. Whilst officially a legal aid and defense organization for the Workers' Party and other socialist activists, it would also defend any others whose civil liberties were violated by the government. On the Executive Committee included Baldwin, Eastman, Joseph Brodsky, Helen Keller, CE Ruthenberg, Felix Frankfurter, and LE Katterfeld. Their immediate test case came in the form of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. The two organizers were given assurances of a fair trial, and the ILDC were brought on as their legal defense. However, despite these assurances and the defense of the ILDC, the two were still convicted on circumstantial evidence, and sentenced to death.
In 1922, the ILDC would be sublimated into Comintern's newly formed International Red Aid network, which was to give material aid to imprisoned radical activists around the world. However, Baldwin, over the objections of some on his further left, wanted to expand that focus (at least in the United States) to those who were the victims of bourgeois laws and government attacks, even if they didn't politically align with the WPA.
In this spirit, the Committee would expand its purview from just protecting WPA activists from persecution. In the South, they would attempt to protect African Americans falsely accused of crimes, to very limited success. They would also try to defend various authors charged under obscenity laws,such as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even reactionary HL Mencken.
One of their highest profile cases was in 1925, when a teacher was charged with the teaching of the theory of evolution, in defiance of state law. Clarence Darrow, an ILDC lawyer who had represented both Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood over the course of his career, represented the teacher, and used the trial to fight for the repeal the law, fighting against former Populist nominee William Jennings Bryan representing the prosecution. The case had been a test case for the group, to highlight the anti-evolution laws across the country. The teacher had purposely taught it as an act of protest. The case would ruled in favor of Iowa (though Bryan would pay the fine imposed).
Some criticized the expanded focus on civil liberties and others on how legal means often never worked. Nevertheless, the leaders of the Committee, including Crystal Eastman, Samuel Leibowitz, and Roger Nash Baldwin (who would publish the book, Liberty under the Soviets after a visit there), would go on to help form the legal framework in post-revolution America.
Excerpts from Lenina Jackson*, Red Ravens: A History of the Pioneer League, (Umoja, New Afrika: Maypole Books, 1975)
The precursor to the modern Pioneer League was founded on 7 March 1913 as the Red Falcon Youth Movement. Modeled explicitly off Socialist Youth of German - The Falcons, the initial Red Falcons was chartered by parents and educators from the Socialist Labor Party to serve as an alternative to the parochial, middle class Boy Scouts of America.
In spite of this opposition, the nascent Red Falcons borrowed heavily on the organizational model of the Boy Scouts. They wore similar uniforms, taught similar skills, and merely replaced the "apolitical" conservative politics of the Boy Scouts with secular, socialist themes. The Red Falcons, however, were doomed to be a stillborn organization, squeezed by the wartime environment that rationalized away such luxuries, and the often underhanded competition from the BSA, which used a variety of tactics, including court injunctions utilizing their special Congressional charter, to try to edge out the competition.
Many of the older Red Falcons and their guides would be drafted into the war effort. Those that survived came home embittered and radicalized. While the organization itself would become defunct during the turmoil of the Biennio Rosso, local troops would continue operating in some areas.
For American workers, especially those trying to raise families through this period, the Boy Scouts went from being distastefully WASPy to being outright reactionary. The faces of the National Guardsmen and police corralling them back to work had been the faces of jeering Boy Scouts only a few years prior. The need for an alternative became more urgent than ever.
By 1920, the pillarisation of American society was fait accompli. Three broad camps had emerged with civil society, supported by a broad constellation of civic organizations. The so-called "mainstream", centered around the Republican Party, the proletarian organizations associated with the Workers' Party, and Southern organizations connected to the Democratic Party.
In March 1921, the Young People's Socialist League became the Young Communist League. At the first National Congress of the YCL, held in New York City between 6-12 June 1921, one of the many resolutions adopted by the organization was the re-establishment of a working-class Scouting movement. At the suggestion of the Russian Komsomol observer Semyon Petrov*, the name "Pioneer League" was adopted by the draft resolution, based on a similar organization being chartered in Russia.
[...]
In spite of the bitter rivalry between the Boy Scouts and the Pioneer League, in organizational terms the two were very similar in the period from 1921. This should be of little surprise, because many of its adult leaders were former Boy Scouts, and the rest made no secret of cribbing many basic concepts from their rivals.
The flagship organization was called the Pioneers, analogous to the flagship Boy Scouts of the BSA. Unlike the BSA, the Pioneers were coed, accepting all between the ages of 11 and 17. Younger children would be part of the Young Pioneers, analogous to the BSA's Wolf Cubs.
Pioneers are organized into local groups called cadres, analogous to a troops of the BSA. A cadre typically consists of between 12 and 50 pioneers, and typically would meet weekly. Larger cadres would be divided into cells for many activities. Each cadre is led by a uniformed adult member, called a Pioneer Leader. Multiple cadres would be organized into a group.
A particular cadre would be numbered, while a group would be associated with a geographical area. Groups would be collected into regional councils, and in turn those councils would form the National Councillar Congress.
Like the BSA, the main focus of the Pioneers was outdoor fieldcraft. Unlike the BSA, the Pioneers made no distinction between "men's work" and "women's work". It's stated mission was always one to make its members into "complete human beings." To this end, it offered a broader range of instruction, encompassing political and intellectual ideas, the skills of living in urban spaces, as well as nautical skills like sailing.
The early uniforms differed from the military-style uniforms of the BSA, exchanging the blue neckerchiefs for red ones.
[...]
The Pioneer League boomed in membership alongside the economy and birthrates of the so-called "Roaring Twenties". It provided a means for working-class youths to socialise together and experience life outside the cities. And because the organization was open to all, regardless of race or ethnicity, it played a crucial role in teaching tolerance and solidarity in the new generation.
Which is not to say this was an easy process. The Pioneer League's refusal, like all other organs and affiliates of the Workers' Party, to comply with Jim Crow segregation law in the South meant it was a de facto criminal organization there. When a Birmingham, Alabama rally was disrupted by the Alabama State Police on 26 May 1923, the sight of police beating boys and girls and trying to herd them into police vans made national news, and ignited a political firestorm.
Similarly, the rivalry with the Boy Scouts caused numerous public relations problems. During the "Second Period" policies ranging from 1924 to 1929, the instructions handed from Moscow dictated a turn away from radicalism towards more conciliatory positions during this period of working class retreat. The effect of this policy radiated through all parts of the WPA, including the Pioneer League. Olive branches were extended to the Boy Scouts, and attempts were made to heal the rift in the scouting movement through joint-events.
Some of these Joint Jamborees in the summer of 1926 went off well. Working class youths mingled with the children of landlords, shopkeepers, planters and businessmen. Good natured competition in athletic events were the spirit of the summer. And the presence of girls in these camping events proved extremely popular, shifting the tide of opinion in the BSA towards cooperation with or even integrating the Girl Scouts of America.
Naturally, political questions could not be avoided. Debates, some planned, others extemporaneous, were common. However, in several of these jamborees, notably the Illinois Jamboree, brawls broke out between Boy Scouts and Pioneers. Over the course of the three-day event outside Springfield, recriminations and resentment over disciplinary action festered, providing a powder keg waiting for the right spark. As camp was being broken down on the third day, tensions were high, and a scuffle broke out between a Boy Scout and a Pioneer over the affections of a Pioneer girl.
A very messy brawl broke out, as the battle lines were instantly drawn. The fight occasionally extended to the adult members, with each side's leaders mistrusting the others. While no one died, pictures of the brawl would be printed in the Chicago Tribune and turn into a national level embarrassment.
Excerpts from Agi Chen* "From the Ground Up: Reforms of the United States Army in the 1920s" in Military Review, Vol. 60, Issue 3, (July 1982)
The harrowing experience of the Great War shattered the institutional confidence of the United States Army. The intensity of combat had not only annihilated the officer corps, it revealed gaping flaws in the entire doctrinal-institutional system of the US Army.
The statistics are harrowing, even to the survivors of the apocalyptic conflict with Nazi-Fascism. The United States Military Academy's Class of 1915 comprised of 168 young men, were graduated early in January to meet the demand for officers for the war mobilization. Of these 168, 71 would die in action or from their wounds by 1919. Another 22 were discharged as severely wounded. And while they bore the heaviest burden, all the classes at West Point were haunted by reunions with halls filled with empty chairs.
They died because the Army had not prepared them. The soldiers, NCOs and officers of the American Expeditionary Forces would be forced to learn from cruel experience the modern art of military command, because all of the educational institutions of the US Army, from West Point on up, had been completely deficient.
[...]
There is no shame in learning from imitation. As its historians noted, the US Army was a shameless imitator of whoever had won the last major European war. And following the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, the US Army borrowed heavily from the aesthetics and institutions of the Prussian military tradition ascendant in the Imperial German military.(1) But this imitation was skin-deep.
While Germany in this period was an authoritarian, illiberal regime, the privileged military caste was internally liberal and meritocratic. From the children aged 10 to 18 of the Kadettenschule to the student officers of the Prussian Kriegsakademie, cadets in the German military system lived in a system of relatively collegial respect. Advancement was based on merit, especially in the vital military areas of tactics. Instructors treated cadets with adult-like respect, and rewarded the well-performing students with free-range privileges.
By contrast, the relatively liberal American society had created a barbaric and hidebound military educational system. Whether in the flagship academy at West Point, or state academies like the Virginia Military Institute, a rigid hierarchy based on seniority was enforced. A culture of hazing and abuse had developed for decades. Instructors rewarded orthodoxy, not innovation, and at the Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, deviation from the school approved solutions in exercises invited censure, often public.
The curriculum at West Point gave an unrelenting focus on mathematics and science, but very little instruction time for more direct military focuses. Worse, students had no access to modern equipment, very little instruction in practical field exercises or command, the instructors offered no insight into how to lead men in combat. Or to prepare them how to die.(2)
In the Great War, this resulted in disaster in the early years. Pre-war officers were largely unprepared, sadistic, or both. The diamonds in the rough that emerged from the baptism of fire, such as George Patton, George Marshall, David Eisenhower, or Douglas MacArthur, would go on to play an outsized role in the coming decades. Whether reactionary or revolutionary, the one thing that united their shared experience was almost quitting due to the experience of hazing at VMI or West Point.
The officers that gained the respect of the rank and file were either among the previous exceptions or had risen from the rank and file via "battlefield commission". Many had been picked for their leadership abilities following Infantry School and given rush courses in OCS stateside or directly elevated due to acumen on the battlefield. They learned on the job or they died. And while exact statistics are not known, the practice of enlisted men and NCOs "fragging" sadistic or incompetent officers was common enough to in the front of most field officer's minds.
[...]
Though in keeping with the American Cincinnatian tradition of resigning his officer commission upon election to civilian office, Lieutenant General Leonard Wood remained very much the military's man as president. Even to committed communists, in the fallout of the Great War and the Biennio Rosso, this was not a bad thing, for he had taken the National Army's grievances to heart, and due to the scale of the war effort, the military's grievances were very much the body-politic's grievances.
His tenure as Secretary of War had led to sobering realisations that the US military-industrial system was fundamentally broken. Victory had come through being fortunate enough to have time to learn the hard-way and build a battle-tested army through on-the-job apprenticeship. In a hypothetical future conflict, they would not be likely to be so lucky.
President Wood began his first term by cleaning out the officer corps of deadwood. These dismissals were centered around the instructors at West Point and Ft. Leavenworth. Younger, more dynamic officers were promoted to their place. Then Major General Douglas MacArthur would become the new Superintendent of the USMA, and through his personal connection to the President, he enjoyed influence that exceeded his rank.
The old system of seniority was abolished. Hazing was stamped out; it was now a breach of the cadet code of conduct to fail to inform of violations, especially hazing. The new curriculum focused heavily on war games and simulations. The new instructors, handpicked by MacArthur from the best leaders of the Great War, taught cadets leadership and camaraderie. Their wounds and amputated limbs carried an almost holy level of authority. As then Major Martin Abern said in his invocation to the new class of first-years in September 1924, "You are here to learn how to live. And to learn how to die."
The revolution in the USMA was not without controversy. But the Army's reformers were faced with a choice between building an effective army, or one politically reliable to bourgeois interests. In an interesting historical irony, MacArthur would prove to be one of the most passionate defenders of "letting communists into the Academy leadership" in the early 20s.
Many in Wood's party balked at this. But there was no alternative. The competent, dynamic young officers were either red or pink in the early 1920s. The previous efforts to stamp out communism violently had been worse than useless. Wood instead would attempt to be the healer to the divided country, and take steps to settle what he considered were the legitimate grievances they had about the country.
[...]
The Army's other chief problem was that the Congress was notoriously stingy, and always beat swords into ploughshares, often to an excessive degree. Much of the doctrinal-educational mistakes stemmed ultimately from a political system unwilling to meet even the basic funding requirements for the Army. Cadets often lacked firearms or ammunition to practice with, to say nothing of modern exercises.
Wood's 1921 Congressional agenda was dominated by his efforts to ensure that all of the hard work from the years of bloody struggle would not be undone. Many Congressional leaders across party lines had, for various reasons, hoped to return to the pre-war status quo of a tiny professional patronage army, which could not be countenanced.
Wood came to immediate loggerheads with First Secretary James Mann, who had put the popular backbencher proposal to repeal the Selective Service Act of 1915 on the agenda of the House of Representatives. After veto threats and government shutdown threats were issued, the two began to work towards the center.
The US Army needed soldiers, especially reservists. Voluntary enlistment had proven to be insufficient. Maintaining a large citizen-army was politically impossible. A compromise was struck, which preserved the Selective Service system but inactivated it in peacetime. Instead, the federal government asserted increased control over the state National Guards, directing them to adopt Selective Service in exchange for federal funding.
Under the Selective Service Act of 1921, the states would maintain draft boards, and would call up citizens to serve six months in the National Guard. Upon completion of this term, they would join the National Guard Reserve, and would owe a certain number of training days per year. Citizen-soldiers would receive decent pay and benefits for service. In the vent of war, the National Guard would come under federal control, and its reservists would be called up for service in the National Army.
The Regular Army would remain a core professional service, but coupled with the National Defense Act of 1921, the Army's primary role would shift towards being a professional officer and NCO cadre force to facilitate a rapid mobilization of the National Army.
The weak link in this chain would be the states. While targets would be provided by the US Army's General Staff, state governments had no political or benefit to meeting them. Most state National Guards would maintain only token level compliance. By 1925, the states combined would barely meet 600,000 Guardsmen (both professional and citizen-soldiers), half the desired strength.And this paper strength does not account for serious deficiencies in readiness, training and equipment that would plague many regiments.
What it did accomplish was to separate the National Guard from the country clubs. Putting ordinary citizens in the Guard took them out of play as a tool of labor management. National Guard officers and men could not be counted on to serve as the last ditch resort of management. During the 1920s, this shift in the political centre of gravity ensured strikes and lockouts would be settled largely by negotiation rather than violence.
(1) The various states of the German Empire maintained separate militaries, and each contributed to the German Army largely autonomous national contingents.
(2) If you would like to know more, check out Jörg Muth, Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901–1940, and the Consequences for World War II, (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2011)
With the continual violations of civil liberties committed by the government during the First World War, especially the rulings of Schenck v. United States and Debs v. United States against the defendants, there was a need for an organization to defend the rights of Americans and free speech. With this principle in the mind, as the two cases were moving through the courts, the Civil Rights Bureau was founded in 1917. Lead by anti-war activists Roger Nash Baldwin and Crystal Eastman, it had significant ties to the Socialist Labor Party, though no official connection existed between the two at the time.
The nascent organization would find itself busy during the Biennio Rosso, defending the right to strike and protest, and battling the government repression in the courtrooms. They would work in the conjunction with the SLP's General Defense Committee in these efforts. As the Biennio Rosso died down, Baldwin was inspired to commit to direct action for the organization. The SLP (now the Workers' Party) agreed, especially with the new wave following the Biennio Rosso.
On January 15th, 1920, the CRB and GDC agreed to merge into the International Labor Defense Committee. Whilst officially a legal aid and defense organization for the Workers' Party and other socialist activists, it would also defend any others whose civil liberties were violated by the government. On the Executive Committee included Baldwin, Eastman, Joseph Brodsky, Helen Keller, CE Ruthenberg, Felix Frankfurter, and LE Katterfeld. Their immediate test case came in the form of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. The two organizers were given assurances of a fair trial, and the ILDC were brought on as their legal defense. However, despite these assurances and the defense of the ILDC, the two were still convicted on circumstantial evidence, and sentenced to death.
In 1922, the ILDC would be sublimated into Comintern's newly formed International Red Aid network, which was to give material aid to imprisoned radical activists around the world. However, Baldwin, over the objections of some on his further left, wanted to expand that focus (at least in the United States) to those who were the victims of bourgeois laws and government attacks, even if they didn't politically align with the WPA.
In this spirit, the Committee would expand its purview from just protecting WPA activists from persecution. In the South, they would attempt to protect African Americans falsely accused of crimes, to very limited success. They would also try to defend various authors charged under obscenity laws,such as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even reactionary HL Mencken.
One of their highest profile cases was in 1925, when a teacher was charged with the teaching of the theory of evolution, in defiance of state law. Clarence Darrow, an ILDC lawyer who had represented both Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood over the course of his career, represented the teacher, and used the trial to fight for the repeal the law, fighting against former Populist nominee William Jennings Bryan representing the prosecution. The case had been a test case for the group, to highlight the anti-evolution laws across the country. The teacher had purposely taught it as an act of protest. The case would ruled in favor of Iowa (though Bryan would pay the fine imposed).
Some criticized the expanded focus on civil liberties and others on how legal means often never worked. Nevertheless, the leaders of the Committee, including Crystal Eastman, Samuel Leibowitz, and Roger Nash Baldwin (who would publish the book, Liberty under the Soviets after a visit there), would go on to help form the legal framework in post-revolution America.
Excerpts from Lenina Jackson*, Red Ravens: A History of the Pioneer League, (Umoja, New Afrika: Maypole Books, 1975)
The precursor to the modern Pioneer League was founded on 7 March 1913 as the Red Falcon Youth Movement. Modeled explicitly off Socialist Youth of German - The Falcons, the initial Red Falcons was chartered by parents and educators from the Socialist Labor Party to serve as an alternative to the parochial, middle class Boy Scouts of America.
In spite of this opposition, the nascent Red Falcons borrowed heavily on the organizational model of the Boy Scouts. They wore similar uniforms, taught similar skills, and merely replaced the "apolitical" conservative politics of the Boy Scouts with secular, socialist themes. The Red Falcons, however, were doomed to be a stillborn organization, squeezed by the wartime environment that rationalized away such luxuries, and the often underhanded competition from the BSA, which used a variety of tactics, including court injunctions utilizing their special Congressional charter, to try to edge out the competition.
Many of the older Red Falcons and their guides would be drafted into the war effort. Those that survived came home embittered and radicalized. While the organization itself would become defunct during the turmoil of the Biennio Rosso, local troops would continue operating in some areas.
For American workers, especially those trying to raise families through this period, the Boy Scouts went from being distastefully WASPy to being outright reactionary. The faces of the National Guardsmen and police corralling them back to work had been the faces of jeering Boy Scouts only a few years prior. The need for an alternative became more urgent than ever.
By 1920, the pillarisation of American society was fait accompli. Three broad camps had emerged with civil society, supported by a broad constellation of civic organizations. The so-called "mainstream", centered around the Republican Party, the proletarian organizations associated with the Workers' Party, and Southern organizations connected to the Democratic Party.
In March 1921, the Young People's Socialist League became the Young Communist League. At the first National Congress of the YCL, held in New York City between 6-12 June 1921, one of the many resolutions adopted by the organization was the re-establishment of a working-class Scouting movement. At the suggestion of the Russian Komsomol observer Semyon Petrov*, the name "Pioneer League" was adopted by the draft resolution, based on a similar organization being chartered in Russia.
[...]
In spite of the bitter rivalry between the Boy Scouts and the Pioneer League, in organizational terms the two were very similar in the period from 1921. This should be of little surprise, because many of its adult leaders were former Boy Scouts, and the rest made no secret of cribbing many basic concepts from their rivals.
The flagship organization was called the Pioneers, analogous to the flagship Boy Scouts of the BSA. Unlike the BSA, the Pioneers were coed, accepting all between the ages of 11 and 17. Younger children would be part of the Young Pioneers, analogous to the BSA's Wolf Cubs.
Pioneers are organized into local groups called cadres, analogous to a troops of the BSA. A cadre typically consists of between 12 and 50 pioneers, and typically would meet weekly. Larger cadres would be divided into cells for many activities. Each cadre is led by a uniformed adult member, called a Pioneer Leader. Multiple cadres would be organized into a group.
A particular cadre would be numbered, while a group would be associated with a geographical area. Groups would be collected into regional councils, and in turn those councils would form the National Councillar Congress.
Like the BSA, the main focus of the Pioneers was outdoor fieldcraft. Unlike the BSA, the Pioneers made no distinction between "men's work" and "women's work". It's stated mission was always one to make its members into "complete human beings." To this end, it offered a broader range of instruction, encompassing political and intellectual ideas, the skills of living in urban spaces, as well as nautical skills like sailing.
The early uniforms differed from the military-style uniforms of the BSA, exchanging the blue neckerchiefs for red ones.
[...]
The Pioneer League boomed in membership alongside the economy and birthrates of the so-called "Roaring Twenties". It provided a means for working-class youths to socialise together and experience life outside the cities. And because the organization was open to all, regardless of race or ethnicity, it played a crucial role in teaching tolerance and solidarity in the new generation.
Which is not to say this was an easy process. The Pioneer League's refusal, like all other organs and affiliates of the Workers' Party, to comply with Jim Crow segregation law in the South meant it was a de facto criminal organization there. When a Birmingham, Alabama rally was disrupted by the Alabama State Police on 26 May 1923, the sight of police beating boys and girls and trying to herd them into police vans made national news, and ignited a political firestorm.
Similarly, the rivalry with the Boy Scouts caused numerous public relations problems. During the "Second Period" policies ranging from 1924 to 1929, the instructions handed from Moscow dictated a turn away from radicalism towards more conciliatory positions during this period of working class retreat. The effect of this policy radiated through all parts of the WPA, including the Pioneer League. Olive branches were extended to the Boy Scouts, and attempts were made to heal the rift in the scouting movement through joint-events.
Some of these Joint Jamborees in the summer of 1926 went off well. Working class youths mingled with the children of landlords, shopkeepers, planters and businessmen. Good natured competition in athletic events were the spirit of the summer. And the presence of girls in these camping events proved extremely popular, shifting the tide of opinion in the BSA towards cooperation with or even integrating the Girl Scouts of America.
Naturally, political questions could not be avoided. Debates, some planned, others extemporaneous, were common. However, in several of these jamborees, notably the Illinois Jamboree, brawls broke out between Boy Scouts and Pioneers. Over the course of the three-day event outside Springfield, recriminations and resentment over disciplinary action festered, providing a powder keg waiting for the right spark. As camp was being broken down on the third day, tensions were high, and a scuffle broke out between a Boy Scout and a Pioneer over the affections of a Pioneer girl.
A very messy brawl broke out, as the battle lines were instantly drawn. The fight occasionally extended to the adult members, with each side's leaders mistrusting the others. While no one died, pictures of the brawl would be printed in the Chicago Tribune and turn into a national level embarrassment.
Excerpts from Agi Chen* "From the Ground Up: Reforms of the United States Army in the 1920s" in Military Review, Vol. 60, Issue 3, (July 1982)
The harrowing experience of the Great War shattered the institutional confidence of the United States Army. The intensity of combat had not only annihilated the officer corps, it revealed gaping flaws in the entire doctrinal-institutional system of the US Army.
The statistics are harrowing, even to the survivors of the apocalyptic conflict with Nazi-Fascism. The United States Military Academy's Class of 1915 comprised of 168 young men, were graduated early in January to meet the demand for officers for the war mobilization. Of these 168, 71 would die in action or from their wounds by 1919. Another 22 were discharged as severely wounded. And while they bore the heaviest burden, all the classes at West Point were haunted by reunions with halls filled with empty chairs.
They died because the Army had not prepared them. The soldiers, NCOs and officers of the American Expeditionary Forces would be forced to learn from cruel experience the modern art of military command, because all of the educational institutions of the US Army, from West Point on up, had been completely deficient.
[...]
There is no shame in learning from imitation. As its historians noted, the US Army was a shameless imitator of whoever had won the last major European war. And following the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, the US Army borrowed heavily from the aesthetics and institutions of the Prussian military tradition ascendant in the Imperial German military.(1) But this imitation was skin-deep.
While Germany in this period was an authoritarian, illiberal regime, the privileged military caste was internally liberal and meritocratic. From the children aged 10 to 18 of the Kadettenschule to the student officers of the Prussian Kriegsakademie, cadets in the German military system lived in a system of relatively collegial respect. Advancement was based on merit, especially in the vital military areas of tactics. Instructors treated cadets with adult-like respect, and rewarded the well-performing students with free-range privileges.
By contrast, the relatively liberal American society had created a barbaric and hidebound military educational system. Whether in the flagship academy at West Point, or state academies like the Virginia Military Institute, a rigid hierarchy based on seniority was enforced. A culture of hazing and abuse had developed for decades. Instructors rewarded orthodoxy, not innovation, and at the Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, deviation from the school approved solutions in exercises invited censure, often public.
The curriculum at West Point gave an unrelenting focus on mathematics and science, but very little instruction time for more direct military focuses. Worse, students had no access to modern equipment, very little instruction in practical field exercises or command, the instructors offered no insight into how to lead men in combat. Or to prepare them how to die.(2)
In the Great War, this resulted in disaster in the early years. Pre-war officers were largely unprepared, sadistic, or both. The diamonds in the rough that emerged from the baptism of fire, such as George Patton, George Marshall, David Eisenhower, or Douglas MacArthur, would go on to play an outsized role in the coming decades. Whether reactionary or revolutionary, the one thing that united their shared experience was almost quitting due to the experience of hazing at VMI or West Point.
The officers that gained the respect of the rank and file were either among the previous exceptions or had risen from the rank and file via "battlefield commission". Many had been picked for their leadership abilities following Infantry School and given rush courses in OCS stateside or directly elevated due to acumen on the battlefield. They learned on the job or they died. And while exact statistics are not known, the practice of enlisted men and NCOs "fragging" sadistic or incompetent officers was common enough to in the front of most field officer's minds.
[...]
Though in keeping with the American Cincinnatian tradition of resigning his officer commission upon election to civilian office, Lieutenant General Leonard Wood remained very much the military's man as president. Even to committed communists, in the fallout of the Great War and the Biennio Rosso, this was not a bad thing, for he had taken the National Army's grievances to heart, and due to the scale of the war effort, the military's grievances were very much the body-politic's grievances.
His tenure as Secretary of War had led to sobering realisations that the US military-industrial system was fundamentally broken. Victory had come through being fortunate enough to have time to learn the hard-way and build a battle-tested army through on-the-job apprenticeship. In a hypothetical future conflict, they would not be likely to be so lucky.
President Wood began his first term by cleaning out the officer corps of deadwood. These dismissals were centered around the instructors at West Point and Ft. Leavenworth. Younger, more dynamic officers were promoted to their place. Then Major General Douglas MacArthur would become the new Superintendent of the USMA, and through his personal connection to the President, he enjoyed influence that exceeded his rank.
The old system of seniority was abolished. Hazing was stamped out; it was now a breach of the cadet code of conduct to fail to inform of violations, especially hazing. The new curriculum focused heavily on war games and simulations. The new instructors, handpicked by MacArthur from the best leaders of the Great War, taught cadets leadership and camaraderie. Their wounds and amputated limbs carried an almost holy level of authority. As then Major Martin Abern said in his invocation to the new class of first-years in September 1924, "You are here to learn how to live. And to learn how to die."
The revolution in the USMA was not without controversy. But the Army's reformers were faced with a choice between building an effective army, or one politically reliable to bourgeois interests. In an interesting historical irony, MacArthur would prove to be one of the most passionate defenders of "letting communists into the Academy leadership" in the early 20s.
Many in Wood's party balked at this. But there was no alternative. The competent, dynamic young officers were either red or pink in the early 1920s. The previous efforts to stamp out communism violently had been worse than useless. Wood instead would attempt to be the healer to the divided country, and take steps to settle what he considered were the legitimate grievances they had about the country.
[...]
The Army's other chief problem was that the Congress was notoriously stingy, and always beat swords into ploughshares, often to an excessive degree. Much of the doctrinal-educational mistakes stemmed ultimately from a political system unwilling to meet even the basic funding requirements for the Army. Cadets often lacked firearms or ammunition to practice with, to say nothing of modern exercises.
Wood's 1921 Congressional agenda was dominated by his efforts to ensure that all of the hard work from the years of bloody struggle would not be undone. Many Congressional leaders across party lines had, for various reasons, hoped to return to the pre-war status quo of a tiny professional patronage army, which could not be countenanced.
Wood came to immediate loggerheads with First Secretary James Mann, who had put the popular backbencher proposal to repeal the Selective Service Act of 1915 on the agenda of the House of Representatives. After veto threats and government shutdown threats were issued, the two began to work towards the center.
The US Army needed soldiers, especially reservists. Voluntary enlistment had proven to be insufficient. Maintaining a large citizen-army was politically impossible. A compromise was struck, which preserved the Selective Service system but inactivated it in peacetime. Instead, the federal government asserted increased control over the state National Guards, directing them to adopt Selective Service in exchange for federal funding.
Under the Selective Service Act of 1921, the states would maintain draft boards, and would call up citizens to serve six months in the National Guard. Upon completion of this term, they would join the National Guard Reserve, and would owe a certain number of training days per year. Citizen-soldiers would receive decent pay and benefits for service. In the vent of war, the National Guard would come under federal control, and its reservists would be called up for service in the National Army.
The Regular Army would remain a core professional service, but coupled with the National Defense Act of 1921, the Army's primary role would shift towards being a professional officer and NCO cadre force to facilitate a rapid mobilization of the National Army.
The weak link in this chain would be the states. While targets would be provided by the US Army's General Staff, state governments had no political or benefit to meeting them. Most state National Guards would maintain only token level compliance. By 1925, the states combined would barely meet 600,000 Guardsmen (both professional and citizen-soldiers), half the desired strength.And this paper strength does not account for serious deficiencies in readiness, training and equipment that would plague many regiments.
What it did accomplish was to separate the National Guard from the country clubs. Putting ordinary citizens in the Guard took them out of play as a tool of labor management. National Guard officers and men could not be counted on to serve as the last ditch resort of management. During the 1920s, this shift in the political centre of gravity ensured strikes and lockouts would be settled largely by negotiation rather than violence.
(1) The various states of the German Empire maintained separate militaries, and each contributed to the German Army largely autonomous national contingents.
(2) If you would like to know more, check out Jörg Muth, Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901–1940, and the Consequences for World War II, (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2011)