bm2617@eve.albany.edu kirjoitti:
> In some TLs, Warsaw falls to the Bolsheviks in 1920. What happens next ha=
s been open to
> interpretation.
[zap]
> However, what is the likeliest outcome? Will the Soviets, drunk with succ=
ess, actually try to
> spread the revolution to Germany, where the Spartacists have already been=
squashed?
Nothing has to happen in the German-Bolshevik relations. At the height
of the Vistula campaign, the Germans and the Bolsheviks were already
negotiating of their future accommodation and the restoration of the
status quo on the eastern frontier after the Soviet takeover of Poland.
The negotiations were held between the representatives of the Russian
Department of the Ausw=E4rtiges Amt and the Bolshevik agents in Berlin
in the last week of July 1920. Karol Radek was one of the participants,
and it's noteworthy that Viktor Kopp, who was Trotski's close
confident, assured the Germans that the Red Army would not cross the
German border at any event, regardless of Tukhachevski's declarations.
The Germans were by no means averse to the idea of modus vivendi with
the Russian Bolsheviks, in spite of being simultaneously intent on
supressing revolution at home. There was no contradiction in these
sentiments; general Seeckt's famous words have been quoted so much that
I presumably won't have to do it again here. As far as the German
interests were considered, the destruction of Poland by the Bolsheviks
and the restoration of the Russo-German border were necessary preludes
to the eventual escape of the Reich from the grip of the Entente.
So, if we're looking for the _likeliest_ outcome, the default
assumption should be that after the endgame in Poland, the Bolshevik
Russia and the Weimar Germany would cozy up together and turn their
backs to the West. The past Bolshevik rhetoric of exporting the
revolution to Germany would remain exactly that, just rhetoric. The
spirit of Rapallo would set in, even stronger than in our timeline. The
German position vis-=E1-vis the Western Powers would be significantly
enhanced, with the destruction of Poland breaking the encirclement of
the Reich.
> Does Poland become a Soviet SSR in this TL? I would think so: the situati=
on is different
> than in 1945.
Not necessarily. Just as in 1945, this decision would be up to Stalin,
who served as the Commissar of Nationalities at the time. And from what
we can tell, Stalin seems to have been quite clear that the future
Poland should not be incorporated into the existing Federation of the
Soviet Republics (such as it existed in 1920), but instead into a
larger, future "confederation" of socialist states. Basically, this
would seem more or less similar to the arrangement that eventually took
place forty-five years later in our timeline.
Of course, one should remember that in 1920, even the structure of the
future Soviet Union still existed pretty much only on the Bolshevik
drawing-board, and the succesful Soviet occupation of Poland could have
probably caused a serious reshuffle in these administrative plans. The
result could have been a very different Soviet Union from what we knew,
perhaps more along the lines of Stalin's "Confederation of Soviet
Socialist Republics". So, Poland _might_ have been incorporated into
the framework of the Soviet state, but this state would not have been
similar to the one that we were familiar with in our timeline; CSSR
instead of the USSR, if you will.
(This settlement is not really that far from our timeline, by the way;
it's easy to forget that during the 1920s of our timeline, even the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic still accredited its own diplomatic
representatives abroad.)
The Polrevkom - the Polish Revolutionary Committee, the famous
marionette government set up by Felix Dzierzynski - did make references
to the "future Polish Soviet Socialist Republic", but whether this
would have meant an actual incorporation to the subsequent Soviet Union
is questionable. The "Outer Mongolian solution" would have in all
likelihood appeared more attractive to the Polish communists. Julian
Marchlewski, the chairman of the Committee, and his colleagues tended
to follow their own brand of communism and scorned the idea of
imitating the Russian Bolshevik policies. Ironically enough, this meant
that the Polish communists were actually even _more_ rigid, doctrinaire
and prone to unworkable and disastrous resolutions than the Russian
Bolsheviks ever were.
(Incidentally, there was also a separate Galician Revolutionary
Committee. The _Galrevkom_ was headed by a Ukrainian communist
Volodimir Zatonski, and it was intended to be the first stage in the
establishment of the future Galician SSR, separate both from Poland as
well as from the Soviet Ukraine. Given the recent brief history of
Western Ukraine as an independent state, this arrangement could have
probably remained permanent.)
Cheers,
Jalonen
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