For the Introduction to this topic, and a table of contents to other major threads of the topic, CLICK HERE (http://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=24392.0).
This is the first main thread, so the ToC/Intro is also the prior thread sequentially.
Note that this thread especially involves the background political and ideological context presented by Suvorov for understanding the choices of Stalin and his government during his reign. This macro-thread will take the chronology up to the start of Stalin's consolidation of power as Lenin is dying, and so tends to focus on World War I and its preceding and subsequent connections to Lenin's geopolitical strategy.
But the story starts with a quick and dirty overview of Marxian revolutionary philosophy, so I will have to beg some indulgence: the ideological context is important to Suvorov's thesis. Any extrapolations to any current or prior events by the reader, are yours to make and should be considered beyond the scope of commenting for this thread!
In other words, please don't drag this thread into RPFW -- I'm only trying to report about how post-Marxian revolutionary ideology, at least as presented by Suvorov, fits into the Suvorov's thesis for Stalin's plans and rationales, including those accepted by his government. (Critiques of Suvorov's representation of Marxism and post-Marxian revolutionary socialism, would be fair game for this thread I suppose.)
On to the chronological notes...
To The Ultimate War
-----------------------
Late 19th century: German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles predict that determinative historical processes shall bring forth one final revolutionary world war lasting from ten to fifty years, as the workers rise up against the property owners. Engles writes (unsourced by Suvorov) that "The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest people have ever waged." Marx and Engles don't exactly try to cause revolution, expecting rather that the workers shall rise up themselves under instinctive pressures (these natural instincts being what makes the conclusion supposedly inevitable); but they definitely look forward to the uprising which they regard as the only way to establish first socialism and then, from socialism, communism.
Socialism, the gathering of all authority, over all property and over all means of production, under the management and resource distribution of a few elite people, is regarded by Marx as a necessary transitional phase from "late-stage capitalism" to full "communism" where no more authority needs to exist and everyone shares and gives by trained habit: from everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their need. Socialism needs to exist for the purpose of training all people to be good communists, and also for managing the final revolutionary war period, which includes imprisoning and/or killing all people unwilling or unable to accept communism (and its necessary socialist prelude), since such people must (on this theory) necessarily be enemies of the coming peace for all humanity.
June 12, 1883: letter from Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein: "All these various sorts of ne'er-do-wells must first tear one another apart, grind one another to dust and compromise one another, thus paving the way for us." This is Suvorov's earliest quoted source for the idea that the workers' final world-war uprising against the property owners, will only be able to happen after the collapse of society into anarchy after a catastrophic war.
Early 1900s, Russia becomes the first nation in the world to produce (not merely test) twin engine airplanes.
1913: absolute legend Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky builds the first four-engine heavy bomber, known as the Ilya Murometz. It is unrivaled for several years (throughout most or all of the coming Great War) for armament, bomb capacity, range, navigation system, and bomb-sight. It uses the first electrical bomb release mechanism in the world. For defense it has eight machine guns! -- with an attempt at installing a 76-mm cannon (though probably not for defense)!
Fortunately for Sikorky, his family, and the Western nations, he will go into exile upon the Communist takeover of Russia, where he will continue designing aircraft -- including the new coming helicopters. (That's beyond the scope of this work, but tracking Russian accomplishments and doctrines in air power up through the start of WW2? -- very much within the scope. Suvorov is justly proud of his people for such accomplishments; if not sometimes too proud perhaps. ;) )
pre-1914: Marxist theorists are perplexed and disappointed that Marx's (supposedly) scientific inevitability, which he had predicted about what he called "late-stage capitalism", has not yet happened. So they begin revising the theory. The more radical revolutionaries come to agree that the property owners have too thoroughly seduced the workers, with the benefits and pleasures of the market system, to expect a natural revolution; and so leading thinkers (such as themselves) must take active command to awaken, prod, and lead the workers into the predicted revolutionary world war against property owners. Of course, this means that they themselves should surely be the post-revolutionary leaders in charge of managing all the resources produced by the people during the transitional socialist era after the revolutionary war. This naturally leads to friction among the radical post-Marxian leaders, over which of them should be the ultimate controllers of all human and natural resources in the socialist age to come.
One group of these leaders, the Bolsheviks, are Lenin; Trotsky; Zinoviev; Kamenev; Molotov; and Kirov. These are all aliases -- their group is an organized secret society crime gang, although representatives from Lenin's "party" sit in the Imperial Russian parliament (the Duma). They literally rob banks (with violent casualties) to keep their "party" cashbox full. The most famous man of this gang has several nicknames, among them Vasiliev, Chizhikov, Ivanovich, and "son of the devil" (i.e. Besoshvili)! His closest comrades will have the right to use the nickname "Koba" for him during his many years as a bank robber, borrowed from the bandit protagonist of Kazbegi's "The Patricide". His name is Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvilli (a patronymic from his father Besarion Jughashvilli). He shall eventually rename himself as "steeler" or "the man of steel", Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (i.e. son of Besarionis).
1914: Imperial Russia becomes the first nation in the world to create a squadron (or any unit at all) of heavy bombers.
July 26, 1914, during an emergency session of the Duma, Lenin's Bolshevik party, an offshoot of another branch of the Russian Social Democrats, the Mensheviks, leave the meeting hall as "a protest against the current military insanity".
Autumn of 1914: the next general European war has started, soon to be the largest war in human history so far.
However, this is clearly not the revolutionary war of the workers against the property owners. Lenin is unsure if this world war shall usher in the revolutionary world war, but he strategizes (in his thesis on the slogan "United States of Europe") that socialists should take this opportunity to reduce at least one of the Great Powers to civil war, to be won by the socialists, who should then use this nation as a base for starting a second world war -- or else converting the current world war to the predicted and desired revolutionary socialist war, which to Lenin at this time seems doubtful.
"The victorious proletariat of that country [to be conquered by the socialist uprising using the opportunity of the Great War] will rise up against the whole rest of the world." (Presumably Suvorov is quoting from Lenin's "United States of Europe", but he isn't clear about the source.) Lenin expects that this takeover shall by itself spark unrest and uprisings in other nations, but Lenin says that if necessary the first socialist nation shall "resort to outright use of armed force" against non-socialist, and improperly socialist, nations.
The Butcher of Blood
------------------------
Early 1915: Mikhail Tukhachevsky graduated six months ago from (quick) training at a military school for junior officers (preceded by another military school equivalent to boot camp), and was assigned as the deputy commander to a company. Early this year he is taken prisoner. After four escape attempts, and then a successful fifth attempt from Ingolstadt fortress (where he shared a cell with none other than Charles de Gaulle!), he returns to a company in a reserve battalion of his old regiment, where the company troops elect him as the company commander, in accord with Tsarist Russian military doctrine. Naturally, troops in the Russian army at this time tend to elect commanders who will let them be lazy and do whatever they want; the soldiers liked Tukhachevsky.
He will not command for long, because an army with such a command system will soon fall apart. But don't worry! -- Tukhachevsky will soon become the top-ranked military officer in all of Russia, a legend in his own time and afterward, and the architect of the basic strategic policy of Russia's new government going into the Second World War!
De Gaulle later reported that Tukhachevsky played the violin, spouted nihilistic beliefs, and spoke against Jews whom he called dogs who "spread their fleas throughout the world".
September 1916: the Great World War still rages with no end in sight. Lenin, in his "War Program of the Proletariat Revolution", makes a theoretical case that a "second imperialist war" will be necessary before the revolutionary world war against property owners can be triggered.
Leon Trotksy (date unclear, from his "Against National Communism"), "For us, Germany's 'national liberation' lies not in a war with the West, but in a proletarian [i.e. workers'] revolution encompassing both Central and Western Europe for unification with Eastern Europe in the form of the Soviet United States."
September 1917: the Central Powers are nearly beaten. Russian troops with many sacrifices and bloody toil have played their part in bringing an oncoming allied victory
By this time the Bolshevik party (the crime gang which split off from the Menshavik party) has seventy-five newspapers and magazines, with a total daily run estimated as high as 600,000 copies. Each one advocates for immediate peace, on top of millions of party books, brochures, pamphlets, and poster-proclamations, distributed free of charge in city streets, factories, military barracks, and trenches at the front. Soldiers are encouraged to try to establish friendly relations with the enemy.
How charitable! Who is paying for the production of all this material? -- aside from various banks by involuntary donations? ;) What do you know! -- Germany is making significant voluntary contributions to the party! ::)
Communist sloagns include "Put down your rifles!" "Go home!" Another peace-loving appeal to ending the horrific slaughter and ongoing casualties is, "Let's transform the Imperialist War into a Civil War!" \m/
....oh. So... the gang of bank robbers aren't non-violent pacifists after all?
October 1917, the "Red October": revolution and civil war break out in Russia. (Note: this actually happened way back in March, but Lenin's group was barely involved, if at all. Suvorov skips over the important preliminary months of the revolution, focusing on Lenin's efforts instead. For summarizing Suvorov's arguments chronologically, I've chosen to abruptly shift forward in the chronology like this.) In October, Lenin's party manages to seize power over the capital (Petrograd, i.e St. Petersburg) and its functions, although soon they will flee (with all government functions) to Moscow.
For the first time in world history, a group of people living and working under fake names, has gained control of a Great Power nation. The only nations which recognize the new authorities as legitimate, are Russia's war enemies: Germany and Austria-Hungary. In case you're wondering, Germany continues sending money secretly to the Bolshevik 'party'.
Trotsky, and Lenin (returning from exile), create and sign their first official document: the Peace Decree. They publicly call for all Russian workers to throw down their arms and return home.
Millions of Russian soldiers return home without throwing down their arms, supercharging the many factions of the Russian Civil War, allowing none of them to become strong enough (in fighting against all others) to retake the central power from Lenin's Communist party.
Trotsky creates the Red Army of the Workers and Peasants, and acts as its first supreme commander. Lenin turtles without launching many attacks, careful to gain small bits of Russia solidly under his control while he watches his enemies fight to the "universal exhaustion" that Marx predicted -- at least on the relatively small scale of one large nation. (Suvorov regards the destabilizing influx of these armed soldiers from the Central Powers' Eastern Front, as the first "icebreaker" move: Lenin and his party publicly called for a peaceful return, but expected and planned for an armed return to sow chaos among their enemies.)
In his "Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution", published this year, Lenin writes, "The victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all wars in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars." He means that with one socialist nation now in existence, the socialists (at least the Marxist ones) and the capitalists must war against each other to the death of one or the other economic system. (Or both, but Lenin per Marx teaches that one will surely win: pre-communist socialism.)
October 26, 1917, Leon Trotsky, delivering the Third Speech at the Second All-Russian Conference of Soviets (during the seizure of power), "We rely entirely on the hope that our revolution will unleash a European revolution. If the rising people of Europe do not crush capitalism, we will undoubtedly be crushed ourselves. Either the Russian revolution creates a whirlwind of struggle in the West, or the capitalists of all nations will strangle our revolution."
The Butcher of Blood Begins!
--------------------------------
Company officer 2nd Lieutenant Mikhail Tukhachevsky meets with Lenin and Trotsky after his own return (in September), and according to Suvorov he is immediately assigned by Trotsky (as the creator and commander of the Red Army) to command of the 1st Army of the Eastern Front of the Red Army: traditionally the longest running continuous army henceforward.
Suvorov skips over specifics of Tukhachevsky's Russian Civil War military record; although on the other hand www.military.wikia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tukhachevsky skips over his command of the 1st Army (which might have been only nominal) to briefly relate his deep penetration (i.e. proto-blitzkrieg) tactics while in command of the 5th and then the 9th Armies during the Civil War. Suvorov (rightly or wrongly) is very explicit that company commander Tukhachevsky never commanded anything larger than a company (not a corps, not a division, not a brigade, not a regiment nor even a battalion) before being promoted to Army Commander. Military.wikia.org says that after becoming "an officer in the newly established Red Army" he "rapidly advanced in rank due to his great ability", but gives no details beyond that.
Tukhachevsky declares (in agreement with Lenin's gang) all those who oppose the illegal Communist leadership, to be "bandits", to be viciously exterminated, along with their relatives, their neighbors, and anyone happening to be nearby. Tukhachevsky phrased the main objective of the Civil War, and of any war, as "With an iron hand, crush the local enemy classes." (uncited by Suvorov).
Early 1918: as Lenin's Soviets seize and secure power, they redistribute the land among the peasants -- rather fairly sized (per Suvorov) according to the number of members in a peasant's family. Now the dream of millions of Russian peasants for centuries has finally come true!
Of course, the peasants themselves don't own this property; the property is owned by all the people as an abstract gestalt, and managed for all the people by Lenin's gang and a few selected overlords. Also, no particular peasant owns any of the production grown on the land: all of it must be given to all the people, meaning it must all be given to the Soviet government to be distributed as the government sees best.
Once the peasants realize they are being swindled, despite propaganda otherwise, they naturally try to resist giving all their production to "the people", which under the socialist regime makes these people immediately the enemy of "the people".
Lenin's government therefore creates "food regulation" brigades and even entire armies: armed men to take away from the peasants all their production, and to put down all resistance.
1918: this year, Lenin creates an academy for training commanders for a future German Red Army. Originally called the "Special School for German Red Commanders", its first rector was Oskar Obert.
The school will go through name changes, turning covert, then overt, then covert again. It will graduate many commanders, but because no German Red Army exists they have to serve in the Soviet Red Army. Some will rise to general's rank.
Later, in early 1941, the bulk of its graduates and those from similar schools will be assigned to the Soviet airborne forces: offensive troops intended for one or more preliminary invasions somewhere, ideally somewhere needing large numbers of commanders for a future German Red army.
January 1918: in Petrograd, Russian Communists create the German Communist "Spartakus" group, and the German Communist newspapers "Die Weltrevolution" (the World Revolution), and "Die Rote Fahne" (the Red Flag). Soon half a million German copies of the revolutionary manifesto "Die Fackel" (The Torch) are published and distributed.
March 6-8, 1918: at the 7th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Pary (later known as the 7th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks)), specially called for this purpose, Lenin announces the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and the Central Powers (arranged by Trotsky, the first Soviet diplomatic leader, acting as the Soviet representative at Brest).
This frees Germany to focus on fighting the Western Front instead of against Russian territory, and also hands Germany significant resources and reserves for continuing to fight against Western Europe: paying tribute in gold (per an August 27th financial agreement for Russia to pay war reparations of value equivalent to six billion Deutschmarks), and ceding around one million square kilometers of Russia's richest industrial and most fertile agricultural areas, more than a quarter of Russia's arable land in total. Fifty-six million people, about a third of Russia's entire population, live in this territory. 73% of Russia's iron and steel are cast here, connected by 26% of Russia's rail network. All of that needs coal of course; good news, 89% of Russia's coal is mined here, too!
This continuance of World War One naturally exhausts not only Germany but also the Entente. Lenin acknowledges that he engineered the Brest Treaty with a view to establishing communism (or at least socialism) in Russia, aiming at world revolution after the Great War. Later, in the Central Committee Report of the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks (distinct from those Menshaviks), Lenin will declare that he "placed worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat and world revolution ahead of any national sacrifices..." He's saying that achieving worldwide authority over workers and their production was more important than the casualties lost by Russia in fighting to defeat the Central Powers, and the even-more bloody and brutal casualties lost by Russia in the subsequent civil war.
Note that Lenin's strategy was to give resources to Germany to empower them to keep fighting other nations in Europe. Russia, through its flanking pressure, and its uncountable (though mismanaged) natural resources, had been about to help the Allies defeat the Powers in 1917. Lenin actively took steps, starting with the mass recall of troops in 1917, to prolong the world war, while removing Russia from their own forthcoming victory with the Entente. But that victory would not have been a communist victory, so the Russian casualties in gaining that victory had to be set aside. Also set aside: the casualties from the widespread never-ending famine instigated in the remaining Russian territories. Without bread, meat, gold, steel, iron, and coal, Russia cannot exist! -- not unless Russia manages to survive long enough to take it back.
Also from a resolution of the same 7th Party Congress, "The Congress stresses in particular that the Central Committee is being given full power to move at any moment to dissolve all alliances and peace treaties with imperialist and bourgeois states as well as to declare war on them." The Brest Treaty will last not one moment longer than the Party's leaders care for it.
This Communist Party decision (Suvorov reports) has never been repealed to this day (i.e. at least down to the mid 90s).
November 11, 11 am local time on the western front, 1918: World War One ends.
Lenin immediately dissolves the Brest Treaty. Communist governments similar to the Leninist-Bolshevist regime will arise next year to create socialist states. When they start arising, they will form their own Red Armies and "extraordinary commissions in the struggle against counter-revolution", i.e. secret police death squads. These "extraordinary commissions" will immediately instigate a reign of terror against all layers of society, and the Red Armies will throw themselves into revolutionary wars to "liberate" the surrounding nations. However, this doesn't happen immediately upon the end of World War I. Communist states don't instantly rise up in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), for example. Ohhhh, well, maybe later. :-"
France has no motive to start a new European war: despite being a main victor, their manpower and infrastructure have been wrecked, and politically the nation is unstable. The main concern of the French government, naturally, is to maintain the new existing situation in Europe as long as possible. French generals will choose strictly defensive strategies, including the Maginot Line along their border (designed to emulate the Great Wall of China).
Great Britain, the other major European victor, has no European territories, so aside from some zeppelin terror raids its infrastructure remains in good shape -- except for the strain. The production strain and manpower/casualty strains make their government somewhat unstable but not as much as France. Britain remains at the center of the greatest colonial empire in history, and its main interests are to preserve its colonies. The British government reduces back to a relatively small home army (also for use in fending off raids in its colonies), but they keep and expand a powerful navy to defend their colonies and trade routes.
Lenin and his gang in the Kremlin have an ongoing civil war across the world's largest nation to manage, but could otherwise devote themselves to the building of a peacetime economy -- which they desperately need to do, since Lenin gave away so much of Russia's key infrastructure to Germany, as to guarantee mass starvation!
All Lenin's gang has to do to avert war in Europe is make sure Germany stays weak. Also, obviously, they should not invade other nations!
:-" :-" :-"
The First Second World War :o
-------------------------------------------
November 13, 1918: less than 48 hours after World War One ends, Lenin and his party try to start World War Two! -- or a little more specifically, they aim to start the ultimate and final revolutionary world war predicted by Marx. The government of Russia issues an order for the Red Army to begin offensive operations against Europe. First targets? -- those Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) which didn't immediately set up communist governments.
November 29, 1918: the Communist government of Estonia is formed.
December 4, 1918: the Communist government of Latvia is formed.
December 8, 1918: the Communist government of Lithuania is formed, becoming a Soviet Socialist Republic on the 16th.
December 15, 1918, Josef Stalin at a speech in Moscow, "The West, full of imperialist cannibals, has turned into the hearth [?] of darkness and slavery. Our task lies in destroying this hearth [heart?], and bringing happiness and consolation to all worker nations."
December 17, 1918, the Communist government in Riga publishes a manifesto naming Germany as the next objective of the Red Army's offensive. The overall goal is a final worldwide revolutionary war bringing all workers, materials, and property, under management of Lenin's Bolshevik Party. Civil war is still raging in Russia itself, tying up the Russian Red Army on internal fronts fighting against those who oppose Communism.
End of 1918: the Finnish army has won its independence first from the Russian Empire, and then from local Bolshevik troops during the Russian civil war. Those were led by Otto Kuusinen, who created the Communist Party of Finland this year and tried to stage a coup, including himself among the new government of course. The Finnish commander-in-chief Mannerheim put a stop to that, but Kuusinen escaped to the criminal underground in Finland (such as it is). More on him later.
This year Finland starts an extensive buildup of traditional Slavic motte defenses on the Karelian Isthmus, forestalling any further more organized invasions by Lenin's gangs. They do have nearby examples to be worried about, after all.
January 1, 1919, Bolsheviks (run by Lenin) declare the creation of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic in far eastern Polish territory; a non-communist Republic of Byelorussia will emerge north of it.
January 10, 1919, a Soviet republic is declared in Bremen. It will last for 25 days. Lenin will instigate a communist military revolution in Berlin, too, this month, but it will be put down more quickly.
February 14, 1919, the Red Army doesn't have enough on its plate yet, so it invades its largest target yet: Poland! At this time, Poland holds much Ukrainian territory, which is where the Red Army will focus this year, but Poland will also launch counter-offensives to help root the Red Army out of the Baltic states. The Red Army will thereby create the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. (To be fair, Poland has been fighting a lot of people around its borders in setting up the 2nd Polish Republic. To be fair to Poland, they've been shuttled around like an American football for about two hundred years as one or another superpower dominates them.)
February 15, 1919, Lithuanian forces (with German volunteers) have been fighting an operation since Feb 8th against the Red Army, and today they finish halting the Red Army's advance. Lithuania will consequently declare independence from Soviet Russia tomorrow.
February 27, 1919, to strengthen remnants of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, after Lithuania declared independence on February 16th, and after Germans start an offensive in Latvia and northern Lithuania, the remnants are merged with the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia.
March 2, 1919, The Red Army is still tied up dealing with internal civil war, and cannot advance farther than the overrun Baltic States, when Lenin and Trotsky host the First Congress of the Communist International (aka the ComIntern); self-defined as the Worldwide Communist Party and "the Headquarters of World Revolution", with the goal of establishing a World Soviet Socialist Republic. (The Byelorussian SSR is a founding member.)
At this time Lenin no longer speaks of expecting to need a Second Imperialist War, a World War Two, to ignite the world revolutionary war; instead he hopes he is igniting the final world revolutionary war right now through strategic invasions.
While allegedly all Communist parties in the world have an equal status, all parties are supposed to constitute sections of the Comintern, and so are subject to its leadership: Lenin and his gang. Not incidentally, all Communist parties across the world are supposed to contribute to the communal bank of the Comintern. At the moment, however, all funds in the Comintern budget come from the gold reserves of Soviet Russia; and all Communist Parties of the world (plus the Comintern itself) are paid for by Lenin's Moscow government and exist only through financing from the Kremlin.
Any elected leaders of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (overseeing all the Communists of the world, developing strategies and tactics), live and work in Moscow under tight control of Russian Soviet secret police. All Executive Committee directives come from the Kremlin; and only representatives who agree with Lenin's gang in the Kremlin and who carry out the gang's orders without dissent, are 'elected' to the Committee. In practically all nations of the world, from Japan to Uruguay and Chile, communist parties created by the Comintern (and thus by Lenin and his gang) will conduct a line of politics dictated by Lenin's group.
The Comintern's ideology, thus the ideology of each constituent Communist Party, is that the old world must be destroyed and a new one built in its place. To do this it is necessary to gain political power, which requires using all measures, not only open and peaceful but also violent and secret; and not only on a national scale but on a world scale. The interests of the World Revolution are more important than the interests of individual nations.
March 21, 1919, a Soviet republic forms in Hungary. It will last 133 days.
April 12, 1919, a Soviet Republic forms in Bavaria, based in Munich. It will last until May 3rd.
April 1919, the Poles, counter-advancing against the Soviet Russian invasion, take Vilnius.
June 20, 1919, a part of the Hungarian Red Army has marched into Slovakia, and today proclaims the Slovak Soviet Republic. A communist government forms immediately, and (as elsewhere) declares a policy of nationalization of all private lands and annulment of private property. It nationalizes all commercial enterprises, all banks, and all transportation systems. The Slovak Soviet Republic forms the typical Slovak Red Army and Slovak Extraordinary Commission (i.e. secret police death squads to wage war on class oppressors).
During this time, Soviet Ukraine declares war on Romania, and starts preparations to advance west to connect with Soviet Hungary.
June 28, 1919, Germany (primarily meaning the Weimar Republic) signs the Treaty of Versailles, radically abolishing and curtailing its military power. Germany loses one-eighth of its territory, with a population of 5,138,000, and all her colonies.
All merchant ships with over 1600 tons displacement are confiscated, as well as half of the remaining merchants over 1000 tons, plus a quarter of the fishing fleet, and one-fifth of the river fleet. This was part of the punishment for Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare, and relatedly for the next five years Germany must build the Allies a total of 200,000 tons of merchant ships -- per year.
Germany must supply France 140 million tons of coal, Belgium 80 million tons, and Italy 77 million tons. Plus it must transfer half its paints and other non-military chemicals, plus a quarter of its future production of these through 1925. This is aside from the astronomic financial retribution.
German people will experience hunger, poverty, runaway inflation, and constant misfortune.
August 5, 1919: Trotsky writes a secret memorandum arguing that "the road to Paris and London lies through the cities of Afghanistan, Punjab, and Bengal," proposing therefore "preparations for a march on India, to help the Indian revolution." To help achieve this goal, Trotsky advises forming "a political and military command center of Asian revolution, and a revolution academy" in the Urals or Turkestan; its purpose being to form a special corps of thirty to forty thousand cavalry horsemen and "unleash them on India" to help the "native revolutionaries".
However, the first second world war is sputtering out across all its fronts, such as they are. In August, the Poles will take Minsk, dissolving the Lithuanian portion of Soviet "Litbel". The Romanian invasion fails; the Slovakian Soviet Republic falls, integrating into wider Czechoslovakia; Hungary's Soviet Republic fails. Estonia has already ejected the Red Army. The German Landswehr took Latvia (itself to be ejected by the Estonian army, too), and despite a hard push by the Red Army in 1919 Soviet Russia will have to pledge on February 20, 1920, to permanently give up all sovereign claims to Estonia.
Don't worry, though. There will be a second second world war. :hide:
Beware the Butchers of Blood
---------------------------------
September 1919, member 007 joins the German Workers' Party, and starts what he later calls "my war" against the Versailles Treaty. A failed artist and housepainter, a wounded and gassed soldier (whose mask didn't quite fit), returned from the front, he marched under the slogan of Gottfried Feder, calling for world revolution with the words, "Proletariat of all nations, unite!" (i.e. "Workers of the world, unite!")
Member 007, Adolf Hitler, will adopt this program as the foundation for a movement he will soon come to lead, taking over the German Workers' Party: banning private ownership, nationalizing industry, and putting workers (under tight workers-party administrative oversight) in control of factories.
1919, after being given command of the 1st Soviet Army to protect Moscow, Tukhachevsky was assigned the 5th Army this year by Bolshevik Defense Commissar Leon Trotsky, in order to campaign against the anti-communist "White" forces of Alexsandr Kolchak. Suvorov doesn't mention this campaign specifically, and certainly not Tukhachevsky's concentrated attacks to exploit the enemy's open flanks and threaten them with envelopment. (Perhaps this operational tactic came from a subordinate?)
1920: Otto Kuusinen, who created the Finnish Communist Party (funded by Lenin's government) and tried to stage a coup with local Bolsheviks, declaring himself part of the new Communist government, has been working for over a year in the Finnish criminal underground since Finnish commander-in-chief Mannerheim stopped the coup, conducting intensive terrorist activity against Finland (in the interest of World Revolution of course). His cover is eventually blown, and he flees the country.
Don't worry, though, he has a bright future ahead of him! Really! Yes, really!
January 1920, General (or rather Army Commander) Tukhachevsky helps defeat General Anton Denikin in the Crimea in 1920, conducting the final operations (per mil.wik, no further details, and unreported by Suvorov).
February 1920, General Tukhachevsky (per mil.wik, not Suvorov) launches an offensive into the Kuban, using cavalry to disrupt the enemy's rear. In the retreat that follows, Deniken's force disintegrates.
March 1920: Germany, still naturally enveloped in a harsh economic crisis, experiences its largest yet general strike, estimating more than twelve million participants.
July 2, 1920: Lenin starts his next attempt at igniting a revolutionary world war without a Second Imperialist War (per se), by launching the ruthless General (or "Army Commander") Mikhail Tukhachevsky into Poland's main territory, heading for Warsaw. (The distinction between "General" and "Commander" will be important much later, during Soviet Russia's entry into World War II.)
The official Red Army Marching Song ("Budyonny's March") includes the words, "Give us Warsaw! Next, Berlin!" (Or "We're getting Warsaw / give us Berlin!" depending on translation.) A contender for the unofficial march of the Red Army is a song called "White Army, Black Baron", including this verse. "Fanning the world fire / we will level churches and prisons / since from the vast taiga to the British seas / no one is more powerful than the Red Army."
Soviet Communist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin trumps this, in Pravda (the Party newspaper), with "Straight to the walls of Paris and London!"
From Order #1423, given to the Soviet Western Front on this day, "Fighters of the Workers' Revolution! The fate of the World Revolution will be decided in the West. The path to the world fire lies over the dead body of White [i.e. anti-communist] Poland. We will carry happiness and peace on our bayonets to the working people of the world. To the West! To decisive battles and thundering victories!" (found among other places in Kakurin and Melikov's "Civil War in Russia: War with the White Poles", 2002, p.670.)
Lenin holds the 2nd Congress of the Comintern (aka the 2nd Party Congress) during this invasion, issuing this call, "Brothers! -- Red Army Fighters! You should know your fight against the Polish slave drivers is the most just war in history. You are fighting not only for the interests of Soviet Russia, but for the interests of the whole of working mankind, for the interest of the Communist International... Soviet Germany, united with Soviet Russia, will immediately become more powerful than all the capitalist powers combined! The Communist International declared that Soviet Russia's goal is its own goal, too. The international proletariat will not sheath its sword until Soviet Russia joins the Federation of the Soviet Republics of the World as an integral link." (ibid, p.556)
To get to the powder keg of Berlin (and then to Paris and London), first the Red Army must get through a free Polish state -- one which by now has created a traditional Slavic defensive belt with Motte tactics (later also used by Finland in the Winter War against Russia's invasion). The Red Army does push through the motte defense (this having been only recently erected). In its first occupied city, the Red Army declares the creation of the Polish Soviet Socialist Republic, led by Felix Dzerzhinski, an ethnic Pole and currently head of the Russian Soviet secret police.
July 23, 1920, Lenin telegraphs to Stalin, at the Polish front, directly from the 2nd Congress, "Situation in Comintern is outstanding. Zinoviev, Bukharin, and I, think that it would be proper to encourage a revolution in Italy. My personal opinion is that, to do so, Hungary has to be sovietized [again!], possibly along with Czechoslovakia and Romania."
Around this time, in a conversation with French communist delegates to the Congress, he declares, "Yes, the Soviet troops are in Warsaw. Soon, Germany will be ours. We will conquer Hungary again; the Balkans will rise against capitalism. Italy will tremble. Bourgeois Europe is cracking at the seams in the storm." (from Frossard's 1930 memoirs of "De Jaures a Lenine", p.137)
This is sort-of true; by the end of the 2nd Congress, Warsaw is half-surrounded by units of the Red Army, which crosses the Vistula River near the town of Wloclawek -- about ten marching days from Berlin. The Red Army will be here longer than ten days, though. Tukhachevsky will later lament, "There can be no doubt that if we had been victorious on the Vistula, the revolutionary fires would have reached the entire continent." (Cited by mil.wik from "A century's journey: how the great powers shape the world", 1999, p.175)
September 22, 1920, Lenin is speaking to the 9th Conference of the Russian Communist Party: "The defensive war against capitalism is over, we have won..." He's talking about the war against anti-communists in Russia. "We are now going to try to attack them [i.e. attack the capitalists], to help the sovietization of Poland..." The Russian Red Army has been attacking 'capitalists' since less than 48 hours after the end of World War I, but Lenin loves his rhetoric. Wait, he told French delegates back in July that Soviet troops are in Warsaw; so where is he planning to attack the capitalists now to help the sovietization of Poland? "We have set ourselves a task: to seize Warsaw..." Oh. Huh. "It turned out that not just the fate of Warsaw is being decided, but the fate of the whole Versailles Treaty." Lenin means that just as Warsaw will be conquered, so will the nations who signed the Treaty -- principally Britain, France, and Germany.
October 15, 1920, Lenin declares, "The order held by the Versailles peace treaty lies over a volcano, since the seventy percent of the world's people who are enslaved [i.e. by property owners] are anxiously awaiting someone to come and start a struggle for their liberation, and to rock the foundation of their countries." (Lenin's Complete Collected works, 5th edition, 41:353)
But at the crucial moment, at the gates of Warsaw, Red Army General Tukhachevsky comes up short on strategic reserves, and Poland wins their epic defense, driving the Red Army from Poland in disgrace and defeat!
This sparks a new anti-communist revolution in Russia. General Tukhachevsky launches (more) mass murder reprisals to quell the (counter-)revolution, legendary afterward in the Soviet Union as an example of what to expect from resistance to the Socialist "Soviets" (the Russian term for the ruling councils).
December 22, 1920, Lenin delivers a "Report on Foreign and Domestic Policy" at the 8th Congress of Soviets. How does he regard his disastrous failure to start a second world war over the past two years? "We ended one line of wars, we must prepare ourselves for the second." Ah. Good idea!
At around the same time (from his Complete Collected Works, p.358, apparently not at the same Congress though? -- Suvorov is unclear), Lenin explains the current situation of Soviet Russia, "We are severely lacking in everything, yet we are no poorer than Viennese workers. Viennese workers die, starve -- their children also die, starve -- but they do not have the most important thing that we possess: hope! They die, oppressed by capitalism, so they find themselves in a position to make sacrifices. But their sacrifices are not like ours. We sacrifice for the sake of the war that we are waging against the entire capitalist world!"
There is a subtle shift here. Lenin gives up trying to spark the revolutionary world war in the wake of the Great War, and starts talking again of the historical inevitability of a Second Imperialist War being necessary to trigger the revolutionary world war into international socialism (itself the necessary precursor to worldwide communism). By this (from the same 8th Congress) he means he intends to "create a Communist society with the hands of our enemies."
Stalin will continue following this basic tactic, of using his own enemies to gather all authority over resources and means of production under his control, at every level of his personal strategies. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, quoted in "Portrait of a Tyrant", 1980, p.296, once said "Nobody could make his competitors knock heads like Stalin, always staying on the side and coming out superior to all." Robert Conquest, when analyzing "The Great Terror" (cited from the Russian translation of 1974, page unreported), will write, "Stalin could always find monkeys to bring him nuts from the hottest fire."
After the (second!) failed Polish invasion, Lenin stops trying to invade westward for a while, and orders the creation of the Soviet version of defensive security borders.
Russia has traditionally been the masters of this technology for centuries, creating the largest known such defensive pockets, hundreds of miles deep, in the medieval period. As pre-Soviet Russia expanded its borders, these old "security corridors" had been breached for convenience but, where feasible, not removed, and only rare roads were laid down. Nor during the industrial era were factories commonly set up in these areas, which was a prime cause of Russia's industrial failures going into the twentieth century and World War One.
Stalin will later institute his Five-Year Plans partly to overcome this problem; but the Soviet Revolution still protected itself from reactionary bourgeois forces by creating new and more modernized security corridors, including the mining of all bridges in the nation's western areas, with guard training to detonate the bridges within two and a half minutes (per Starinov's "Mines Awaiting Their Moment", p.24.) Also rigged: major pipelines, depots, pumping stations, water towers, high earthen dams, deep pits (ibid p.18.)
This is the earliest chronological reference to Starinov, by the way, discussing the earlier defensive habits of the Russians going into the early twentieth century. Suvorov seems to admire Starinov, at least in some ways, and quotes from him a lot. More about Starinov as we go...
1920 through 1921: as might be expected, taking away all the people's production for "the people" -- all a peasant's bread, all his potatoes, all his cows and pigs -- reduces the motivation of Russian peasants to produce anything on "the people"'s property, owned by all the people on paper, but managed by Lenin and his gang. This results in horrible famines for these two years.
1921: this year, Otto Kuusinen, the terrorist operative who tried to stage a coup in Finland to take over the government for Lenin back in 1918, enters the ranks of the highest officials of the Comintern, becoming one of the leaders of the World Revolution. He'll also become a deputy of the pre-GRU military intelligence service by the time we hear of him again.
March 1921, St. Petersburg (Petrograd), the "cradle of the revolution" has been experiencing one workers' strike after another. The workers demand bread and freedom -- not world domination!
The Bolshevik Red Army has been crushing these demonstrations, along with other anti-communist uprisings since the failure to take Warsaw; but the same sailors of the seaport naval base of Kronstadt who famously kicked off the October Revolution to give power to Lenin and Trotsky, now intervene to demand that the workers' and peasants' councils, the "Soviets", the basic organizing units of society created by the Communists, be purged of all Communists!
This creates another national wave of peasant uprisings against Lenin and his gang, such as the peasant anti-communist army organized in the forests of the Tambov region. General Mikhail Tukhachevsky shows inhuman cruelty and disregard of all international rules of law and human rights, stomping his anti-counter-revolutionary operations into a yet higher gear. Under his leadership, thousands of hostages are executed by firing squad; peasants are shelled with poison gas; villagers are drowned in swamps while their villages burned; the sailors are pushed into holes cut into the ice at sea.
Still, matters look dire for the Comintern and Lenin's gang. They decide the only thing that can save Bolshevism is a revolution in Germany!
So Grigorii Zinoviev, head of the Comintern (under Lenin) sends his loyal follower Bela Kun, who had been the actual head of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, to seize power in Berlin.
March 22, 1921, under Kun's (and Lenin's) instigation, a general strike is declared in the industrial regions of central Germany.
March 24, 1921, the Communists take control of government buildings in Hamburg. In Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, and other central German cities, the Communists organize a takeover of courts, municipal buildings, banks, and police headquarters. The German Communist publication (created and distributed from Petrograd under Lenin's oversight), "the Red Flag", openly calls for revolution.
Walter Krivitsky, one of the most highly positioned chiefs of Soviet intelligence, took part in these (and many other) events. From his memoir "I Was An Agent of Stalin", 1991, pp.97-98, "We were sent to Germany for reconnaissance, mobilization of dissident elements in the Ruhr region, and preparation of workers for an opportune moment to start an uprising. We immediately formed three types of organizations in the German Communist party: an intelligence and reconnaissance service, acting under the supervision of the Fourth Directorate of the Red Army; military formations to serve as the core of the future Red Army of Germany; [and] small fighter squads, whose orders included lowering the morale of the Reichswehr [the German army]."
The intelligence officers of the German and all other Communist parties worked under the leadership of the Fourth Directorate of the Red Army. This Directorate, after changing its name many times, will come to be known in 1942 by its designation through into the 1990s: the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces -- or, in an English acronym of its Russian name, the GRU.
This attempt to take control of Germany by armed uprising will fail; but on the other hand, the mass atrocities being inflicted by Tukhachevsky will eventually succeed at quelling anti-communist counter-revolutions -- with a few carrots thrown out grudgingly by Lenin. More on this soon.
Behold the Butcher of Blood
-------------------------------
June 23, 1921: Suvorov writes (in "Chief Culprit") that "Many of Tukhachevsky's combat orders are not about how to use a clever maneuver to bypass the enemy and hit him in the flank and rear, but about how many hostages are to be taken and when they are to be executed."
In the context of Suvorov's rhetorical goal, this seems like he's denying Tukhochevsky ever did any such things, which appears to be untrue; and Suvorov himself (when it is more convenient to his thesis) will insist upon Tukhachevsky's strategic theories being constantly influential upon Stalin's Soviet Union -- theories which involve just this type of "deep penetration" Suvorov seems to be denying Tukhachevsky had much experience doing!
In any case, Suvorov quotes in full the Order from (more like a recommendation from Tukhachevsky sanctioned by) the Plenipotentiary Commission of All-Russia, Central Executive Committee, June 23, 1921,
Quote"The experience of the first combat area shows a high predisposition for quick cleansing from banditry through the following measures. Some localities with particular strong bandit tendencies are noted, and representatives of the region's Political Commission, of a Special Section, Sections of the Military Tribunal and Command, together with units designed to conduct purges, are [to be] sent there. Upon their arrival, they [are to] surround the area, take hostage 60-100 of the most prominent persons, and introduce a siege. Entering and exiting the area must be forbidden during the course of the operation. After this, the entire population of the area is gathered, and the orders #130 and #171 of the Commission of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee, and the signed sentence for this area, are [to be] read aloud. The residents are given two hours to give up the bandits and their weapons, as well as the bandits' families, and the population is told that in the event of refsual the above-mentioned hostages will be shot in two hours. If the population does not give up the bandits and weapons within the two-hour time limit, they are once again rounded up and the hostages are shot before their eyes, after which new hostages are taken and those gathered are told once again to give up the bandits and their weapons. Those who wish to comply with the demands are separated, divided into groups of a hundred, and each hundred is put through a questioning commission (consisting of representatives of the Special Sector and the Military Tribunal.) Each person must give a testimony, and not be allowed to claim ignorance. In the event of stubbornness, new executions are enacted, etc. From the material obtained through the questioning, expeditionary units are formed with the compulsory inclusion of the persons who gave the testimony, and they venture to capture the bandits. Upon the end of the purge, the siege is ended, and a revolutionary committee and militia are established to rule the area. The current Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee commands to execute this order fully. Chairman of the Commission Antonov-Ovseenko. Troops Commander Tukhachevsky."
In criminal gangs, this is known as forced snitching -- and the Russian mafia will learn to refine their own techniques from such examples! Twenty years and one day later, the National Socialists' Workers' Party of Germany will start doing the same thing to Russians as they conquer and occupy Russian towns and cities.
Tukhachevky and all other participants of this murderous war against their own people, will meanwhile declare themselves heroes of the Civil War, by introducing such universal betrayal -- not unlike the secret police of the former Tsarist regimes, but even more ruthlessly. The explicit strategy is to use fear to crush and destroy the centuries-old Russian village morale, replacing all moral codes with fear for one's own skin, making each person accountable unto torture and death for the deeds of any other person.
July 8, 1921, Tukhachevsky sends this order to his Chief of Staff Kakurin, by the Political Commission of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th Districts,
Quote"Defeated bandits are hiding in the forests and taking out their impotent rage on the local population, burning bridges [and] damaging dams and other government property. In the interest of securing the bridges the Commission of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee orders: immediately take from the population of villages located near important bridges no less than five hostages, who in the event of damage done to the bridge are to be immediately executed. Under supervision of the Revolutionary Committees, the local residents are to organize the defense of the bridges from bandit attacks. The local residents are also to take on the responsibility of repairing the damaged bridges no later than within a 24-hour deadline."
To fight bandits hiding in the forests and supposedly attacking the local population, Tukhachevsky (and Lenin's gang generally) orders the execution of hostages from the same local population! Hostage taking (per Suvorov) has always been regarded as the most serious war crime, and at Nuremburg and all subsequent trials of Nazis the practice of taking hostages carried a sentence of death by hanging.
Suvorov somewhat inaccurately says that, aside from fighting Poland, all of Tukhachevsky's experience can be narrowed down to hostages and executions. That may be false strictly speaking, but it must be acknowledged that Lenin and his gang used Tukhachevsky as their personal enforcer of terror operations against Russian civilians during their early years, in what they called their Civil War.
Suvorov judges Tukhachevsky's own "March Beyond Vistula" memoir as demonstrating that "[he] was incapable of relating his own thoughts," and in his attempts at "scientific" military theory, Tukhachevsky intentionally used incomprehensible terms and long phrases, the meaning of which could be interpreted any way anyone wanted.
"Marshal Joseph Pilsudsky [continues Suvorov] crushed Tukhachevsky, first on the battlefields and later in the pages of his [own] book "The Year 1920". Pilsudsky exposed both Tukhachevsky's incapability to fight and his incapability to relate past events. Pilsudsky did not leave any part of Tukhachevsky's book standing."
Pilsudsky himself will write, "The extreme vagueness of the book gives us the image of a man who analyzes only his own brain or his heart, purposefully rejecting or simply not knowing how to tie his own thoughts with the everyday existence of troops, which not always corresponds to the plans and intentions of their commander, but often contradicts them... Many events in the operations of 1920 occurred as they did precisely because [of] Tukhachevsky's propensity to command the army with such an abstract method."
On this point, the mil-wik article (which uses "Chief Culprit" as one of its sources, by the way), presents uncited claims to the effect that Tukhachevsky could not choose his division commanders or even move his headquarters from Moscow for political reasons during the Polish War (which is still sputtering along in July 1921, after Tukhachevsky's failure and reassignment to quell consequential new anti-communist rebellions in Russia's interior.) Though uncited, this seems plausible.
He also complained that his orders were frequently disobeyed even by high ranking officers which led to his Polish campaign's failure. While uncited, this is also plausible, and can be harmonized with Suvorov's account and Pilsudsky's critiques: Tukhachevsky was demanding unrealistic theoretical expectations which his divisional commanders found impossible to meet, thus disobeyed either explicitly (unlikely in the lethal Soviet system watching for military rebellion) or by accusation when parceling blame away from themselves (very plausibly).
Tukhachevsky, unable to write clearly himself (on Suvorov's judgment at least), took it upon himself to edit the official three-volume Soviet history of the Revolutionary Civil War, where he rewrote parts to make himself its greatest hero. In his memoirs and elsewhere, the butcher of blood shamelessly praises and lauds himself, transforming his disgraceful defeat near Warsaw into a brilliant victory -- lost by those incompetent traitors over there who wouldn't follow his commands. Suvorov quips, "Everyone who has read Tukhachevsky's books clearly saw that they were written by a very strange man completely infatuated with himself, a man with impossible ambitions. Such a man is extremely dangerous in a position at the top of the military command."
In a Tukhachevsky paper (published in the 1965 collection "Questions of Strategy and Operational Art in Soviet Military Works 1917-1940", p.117), he describes World War I as "Multi-million [strong] armies deployed on the fronts stretching hundreds of thousands of kilometers." :o :wow: Suvorov presents this as an example of the man's wish to astound the reader and listener by providing unbelievable numbers. Suvorov notes that this essay among similar ones continued to be published not only in Tukhachevsky's selected works, but in compilations like the cited one which were trying to demonstrate the best accomplishments of strategic thought! (The cited volume seems to be taking its own title from Tukhachevsky's classic and highly influential "Questions of Modern Strategy"; more from which later...)
1921: the Soviet war against Poland formally ends. As part of their peace deal, Poland and Soviet Russia (not officially the USSR yet) divide up the Byelorussian territory among themselves. The region of the Republic of Byelorussia goes to Poland's control. Its senate or Rada go into exile; and as of 2019 they and their elected successors remain the world's longest running government in exile! Soviet Byelorussia remains part of the ComIntern and will be a founding member of the coming USSR.
1921: Lenin slightly relaxes his ideological socialism and imports some fragments of free market capitalism (promoted as the "New Economic Policy", in English abbreviation NEP) to keep the foundering Soviet state afloat in the wake of his disastrous invasion attempts and ongoing military reprisals against anti-communist resistance throughout Russia. The gold ruble is introduced. The nation needs some time, but revival starts immediately.
Among Lenin's followers, theories are split on how to create the Second World War which the faction (once again) agrees will be necessary for setting off the final "liberation": the worldwide revolutionary war of the workers against the property owners.
Trotsky recommends something like the eventual Cold War, with low-intensity but permanent hammering at the weakest links in capitalist societies while launching occasional small scale invasions against weak neighbors, supporting armed coups against weak states, and diplomatically stirring up the greater powers to fight each other.
Stalin recommends that while propaganda and diplomatic maneuvering should continue, the nation should stop frittering its strength on minor invasions and uprisings, and rest up, building "Socialism in One Nation": strengthening its military and industrial power for one massive push of overwhelming "liberation crusades" at the appropriate time.
While Trotsky agreed that the Soviet Union should be made into a military camp, for the sake of defending the home of world socialism (after Lenin's failure to export it by invading his neighbors), Stalin will take more radical military measures, including the "GULAG" system of labor camps, forced collectivization, and forced industrialization.
November 26, 1922: Lenin signs an agreement with the German aviation firm Junkers Flugzeugwerke, to produce metal airplanes and plane engines.
December 18, 1922: the Central Committee of the Communist Party issues a decree that (as Y. Felshtinsky puts it in his "Criminal Leaders", 1999, p.290) "charged Comrade Stalin with personal responsibility for the isolation of Vladimir Illych [Lenin] from both personal contacts with employees and correspondence." Stalin controls Lenin's security, feeding, and medical treatment (such as it is). Lenin is allowed to read only what Stalin permits. Everything Lenin writes is given to Stalin first, to decide whether to publish it; but in fact Lenin's Stalin-appointed physicians do not allow him to write much out of concern for his health.
December 30, 1922: Lenin and Stalin (but primarily Stalin with Lenin as a controlled figurehead) formally establish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. Stalin takes the position of General Secretary to the Communist Party, from which he shall raise his command above state and governmental oversight and accountability.
The "Declaration of the Founding of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics" announces the USSR as the first step toward achieving the worldwide Soviet Socialist Republic of the Communist International: in effect the Comintern works to bring new socialist republics into the USSR until the whole world has become part of the USSR. The diplomatic flag of the USSR until its dissolution in the 90s is never subtle about this! -- Soviet emblems cover the whole map of the world, with all land masses painted Soviet red! The Soviet declaration of war against the world, in its Founding Declaration, also remains in force until the dissolution.
On this day, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Sergei Kirov, proposes to build a "Palace of the Soviets", explaining, "This building must serve as the symbol of future might, the victory of communism not only here, but also there, in the West." The purpose of the palace is to hold the ceremonies of acceptance for republics into the Soviet Union. As such, it is (later) designed to be the largest building in the world: in effect a 400-meter-tall pedestal for a 100-meter-tall statue of Lenin. Friendly disputes will happen over which nation will be the final nation for the purpose of the palace: will it be the Argentine Soviet Republic? the Uruguay Soviet Republic? (Suvorov will pass over the Palace mostly in his works, aside from a photo to reference its final fate, so most references hereafter will be from wiki articles.)
1923: Tukhachevsky, in "War and Revolution" (in his collected works Vol.22, p. 188, original date unclear), explains how to have the freedom to control populations through "unfettered use of brute force", as he has done by mass-murdering civilians across Central Russia, the Northern Caucasus, the Urals, Siberia, and during his Poland invasion: "To guarantee yourself freedom to use brute force you must first and foremost annihilate the enemy's armed forces [...] butchering it [i.e. the enemy army] to the last man."
From "Questions of Modern Strategy", in Tukhachevsky's Selected Works, Vol.1, p. 196 (original date unreported by Suvorov): Soviet military headquarters need "to issue timely instructions to the political directorate and corresponding bodies on setting up Revolutionary Committees and other local administrative machinery for all the various areas," namely the areas to be invaded by the Soviet military. The strategy is to secretly set up a local government ready to go when the Red Army arrives to liberate the workers.
Hitler will echo this plan later, after he takes control of Germany, to bring what he regards as true socialism (Nazi Party socialism) to his neighbors, including to Russia.
(Had to stop for the night, but not quite done with the pre-Stalin thread yet!)
July 1923, Lenin makes two new agreements with Germany: to construct a chemical plant (capable of making poison gas and more mundane war chemicals, forbidden under the Versallies Treaty), and to produce munitions and military equipment (ditto).
The develpoment and production of poisonous agents such as mustard gas, is set up on the premises of the firm Bersol in Ivashcenko (now Chapavsk), near the city of Samara. The daily output of mustard gas will reach 3.3 tons, and the daily output of the successor to mustard gas, phosgene, will reach 2.6 tons.
Joint testing of chemical weapons will be conducted on two training ranges: one called "Tomka" near the city of Volsk in the Saratov region, and another called "Podosinki", a district of Moscow itself, today called Kuzminki.
September 1923: after the Bulgarian Tsar Boris miraculously survives an assassination attempt, armed uprisings begin.
September 27, 1923: the Soviet Politburo orders ten Bulgarian Communists (officers and pilots) to the navy base in Sevastopol. If a nearby Bulgarian city close to the shore came into rebel hands, the pilots would establish a connection by airplane between the south of Russia and Bulgaria; then, "upon the establishment of the connection, to send out arms that have been in Sevastopol since last year, prepared for the Bulgarian revolution... and... send Bulgarian Communists currently in Moscow and other Russian cities to Bulgaria with arms." (The Russian Political Encyclopedia, 2001, p.21, in an article on "Decisions of the 'Special Folder'".)
This is part of a plot by Trotsky (as reported in "Rodina", 1990, #10, p.13) to start and support a Balkan revolution, to obtain (as Trotsky thought) a direct route from the Balkan region to the ports of France and Britain. The uprising is led by Georgy Dimitrov, a future head of the Comintern.
It is only one of dozens of attempts in different nations around the world to spark a militant Marxian uprising. As with the others, it fails -- but the most important attempt, and failure, shall soon be considered...
Autumn 1923: Stalin has started seizing control of most of the Party from behind the scenes, while Lenin is dying. He declares, "If a revolutionary shake-up of Europe starts anywhere, it will be in Germany... and victory for the Revolution in Germany will ensure its victory world-wide." By autumn, the reins of power will be almost completely in Stalin's hands, although neither Russia, nor the world, nor even his own rivals in the party, will know this -- yet.
Pre-Stalin Summary
------------------
During this period, Lenin and his heirs, including Stalin, start one of the three most important early 20th century post-Marxian succession movements, all dedicated to being more radically revolutionary than Marx.
Lenin's International Socialism, along with Mussolini's Italian Fascism, and then Hitler's National Socialism, sought to create Marx's predicted revolutionary war of the workers against the property owners, rather than waiting for a natural upsurge of the workers against what Marx called "late-stage capitalism". In all three movements, elite academics and charismatic leaders tried, with some important successes, to prod the workers into rising up to violently overthrow the property owners and to seize control of all means of production. In all three movements, a few men would end up consolidating their own ultimate effective authority over all means of production, while claiming to be fulfilling Marx's predicted socialist phase.
Unlike the other two, Germany's National Socialism would be built upon a claim of racial superiority (thence cultural superiority), over-against the rest of the world. This doesn't seem at first to make much sense as a foundation for "national socialism" -- until one accounts for the competition, between the "Nazis" and the Russian-led (therefore Slavic and secular Jewish-led) German Communist party, over who exactly will be using force to seize and control all property, resources, and means of production!
Lenin, and his faction, are from the beginning using Russia as a base to take control of all means of production in the world, through the creation of international socialism, the "Communist International" (the "Comintern"), which is working to create new "soviet" republics in other nations by revolutionary force and bring them into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
And from the beginning, Lenin and his gang, including Stalin, have had the control of Germany squarely in their sights. They have attempted to invade toward Germany (the "home of world socialism") no less than twice already since the end of the Great War.
Moreover, even before the end of the Great War, Lenin made an alliance with Germany which not only kept Germany off Russia's face while Russia made internal preparations to create an ultimate revolutionary world-wide war (per Lenin's plan), but which also gave Germany massive resources looted from Russia by Lenin's party, to continue the Great War.
Why would Lenin make his most dangerous and closest enemy stronger?! He explained his purpose: to use that enemy to further weaken Soviet Russia's political enemies who are farther away from Lenin, as long as Lenin could arrange to focus his chief enemy in that direction. Which he easily could, under the circumstances of the ongoing Great War.
Once the Great War is done, literally within two days of its completion, Lenin tries to launch a military strike westward, not directly at Germany yet, but on the way; while also revoking his treaty with Germany, and even directing a public announcement that the conquest of Germany is the first major goal for this second world war: a goal from which Lenin expects to succeed in taking over the world.
This attempt quickly whiffles out due to Russia's ongoing internal weakness and civil war, so why did Lenin even try? Because, as an ideological Marxist, but one who no longer believed that the workers would spontaneously rise up in armed revolution and would need galvanizing instead, Lenin believed he had philosophical and (by his standards) scientific reasons to expect that even a small example would inspire the workers of the world to unite together under his leadership. And indeed, some socialist revolutions did happen at this time (guided by Lenin and financed by Russian gold looted by Lenin's political gang), to overthrow governments in smaller European regions and nations. Such success could only have looked like confirming evidence to Lenin and his group!
But for various reasons -- including because exhausted revolutionary governments in nations exhausted by war will be born exhausted! -- no revolutionary world war happened in 1918, nor in 1919, and Lenin had to withdraw to focus on consolidating his own power better.
And yet Lenin tries again soon afterward by a much stronger invasion against newly independent Poland (nominally protected by the League of Nations), which comes much closer to succeeding. The goal, in Russian propaganda, is to extend this military strike into control of Germany and even France and England: nations that Lenin has exhausted more than they would have otherwise been, thanks to Lenin empowering Germany to continue the Great War from 1917 onward.
These facts establish a baseline going forward:
Russia loudly proclaims its intentions for world domination under Lenin and his party;
regards military power as the key way to achieve this domination (although there are disputes among his political heirs over exactly how to enact military revolution);
acts no less than twice with military power toward this goal before 1923;
with seizing control of Germany as their first prime target in each attempt;
and warring against other nations in the way between Lenin's military power and Germany.
And yet Lenin also gives Germany strategic military strength! -- as long as Germany uses that strength to fight and weaken other nations in Europe (whether actually, as in 1918, or potentially, as with poison gas manufacturing in 1923) -- with the intention that, being weakened from world war, they will fall more easily to military revolution from within and military invasion from without. Once Germany falls to Soviet invasion, Lenin and his gang expect Europe to fall to Soviet invasion; and once Europe falls to Soviet invasion, they believe the world will capitulate or fall to Soviet invasion. Moreover, they believe all this to be scientifically inevitable! -- the only question is exactly how it shall be accomplished, and how long it shall take.
Does Stalin continue along with such plans from 1923 forward? And what if a militant post-Marxian socialist group in Germany would rather take control of Germany themselves instead of handing that control over to Russian overlords? -- how will they compete, for allegiance of their fellow Germans, against the Comintern?
Avtorkhanov, writing later in "The Enigma of Stalin's Death", p.132: "every Stalin move, his every act and crime, served a purpose, made sense, was strictly in line with his own code."
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