98,000 men were captured at Tannenberg when General Samsonov's army disintegrated. Over a hundred thousand fell. Few made it back to Russia. One was Ivan Federov.
Ivan was a young Muscovite, lucky enough to have an army officer uncle, who procured a captain's commission for him. It was thus that Ivan had found himself leading a company in the swamps of Masuria, but now that he had escaped the debacle, and had the misfortune to have too-loudly questioned the competence of the war leaders, he was out of luck. Drafted again into a new unit, he was once more forced to flee across the Polish plains with the remains of his unit, as the German offensive of 1915 routed the Russians once again. During the pell-mell dash east, he found it impossible to maintain aloof distance between himself and his troops. Indeed, he forged close friendships with many of his soldiers. But when they once more reached the rear, he swore never to fight again for the incompetent Russian generals, and got a commission as a bodyguard for the Ambassador to Switzerland, the least dangerous post he could imagine.
It was in Geneva, however, that he got a message from one of his old comrades containing merely an address and a five-letter word: LENIN. The soldier who it came from had become one of Ivan's most trusted friends, and had revealed to him his membership in a subversive organization. Ivan had declined to join, but also had not turned him in to the Tsar's police. Now he went and visited the address. LENIN proved to be an intellectual, given to speaking at length about revolution and Marxism. Ivan read everything LENIN suggested, becoming an instant convert to the cause. He even wrote a few pamphlets of his own.
One day, however, LENIN told him to return to Russia and organize among the soldiers, for the day would soon come when it would be time to put their principles into practice. Ivan returned to Russia and, in the desperate climate of the fall of 1916, had no trouble obtaining an appointment. When the revolutions began a year later, he was ready, and many troops he had commanded followed him into rebellion. Ivan won himself a seat at the table with the prime movers of the Bolshevik revolution, and he was one of the delegation sent to negotiate with the Germans. "We want no part of their Imperialist war," Lenin told him. Ivan replied, "A war to drive the capitalists from our richest lands is not imperialist," and convinced his mentor to reject the treaty the Germans attempted to cram down their throats at Brest-Litovsk. Instead, he launched the Federov Offensive, a last gambit to hold onto as much of Russia as he could before the peace. His efforts were crowned with success when in spring 1918 Franchet D'Esperey's corps, advancing from Salonika, threw the Austrians out of Belgrade and the massive American-British offensive drove the Germans from their trenches. "500,000 more me could have stemmed the tide," Ludendorff raged, but 500,000 men were fighting Federov's guerillas in Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania. The Great Imperialist War ended on June 11, 1918 when Germany asked for an armistice from the West, and the First Patriotic War ended five months later when Federov's forces chased the last Germans back across the border with Poland.
The Russian representatives at the Versailles negotiations joined with France to demand the harshest possible penalties for Germany. Poland was created, consisting of Warsaw, Posnania, eastern Pomerania, Silesia, and Galicia. Russia immediately signed treaties of defense with the new Polish state, as well as the new, larger Rumania, which gained Transylvania and southern Dobruja.
The Western Allies were well pleased with their Soviet allies, whose persistence in 1917-18 shortened the war by at least a year. However, the Bolsheviks' insistence on continued advocacy of socialism caused worry, especially when Poland, Rumania, and Hungary all fell under socialist governments in 1919-20. Even Germany was the site of socialist upheaval. This upheaval was put down brutally by the Freikorps, fanatical right-wing organizations of German veterans. In 1922, after two years of this one-sided civil war, the Soviet Union declared that "German Imperialist Militarism" was still alive, and demanded a mandate by the League of Nations to attack and defeat the Freikorps. Britain and France, with the defeat of Germany, had gone back to fearing Russia, and the insinuation that the Allied forces in the Rhineland, where much of the fighting was, were not doing their job infuriated them, but the small nations of eastern Europe were mainly Russian allies, so in spring 1923 Russian and Polish forces, under Marshal Federov, invaded Germany, ruthlessly suppressing the Freikorps, executing many. When they pulled out, in 1925, Germany was quiet, docile, and near-Socialist, but the Atlantic Powers saw their worst fears confirmed.
Lenin's death set off a power struggle in the Soviet Union, between the faction of Stalin, who demanded swift modernization at the sacrifice of socialist principles, Trotsky, who demanded continual revolution, and Federov, who sought to create the Comintern as a bloc within the League of Nations that would spread Socialist principles. Trotsky was defeated and exiled, but Federov wisely surrendered to Stalin and kept a permanent watch for treachery. With fanatical support from the Red Army, Federov would be hard to dislodge.
The Great Depression, which occurred during the power struggle, further depressed the German economy and forced the Workers' Councils to demand further concessions from the Mittelstand. Instead, the Mittelstand rallied behind the outlaw Nazi Party and managed to paralyze the government. In 1932, the paralysis was overcome by a bare-majority coalition with the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, at their head. Stalin and Federov to no avail cried "German Imperialist Militarism," but the 1923-25 campaign had squandered their good will with the West, and neither Western power acted. France reaffirmed its alliances with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania, all of which were Soviet allies, but refused to make military arrangements with Russia itself.
As Germany rearmed, Stalin began purging the Red Army of "disloyal" officers. Federov's name appeared on the lists of denunciations, for seeking too hard to make alliance with the Capitalist West. That was Stalin's last mistake, for the Red Army was filled with fervent supporters of Federov, who turned the Army's guns on Stalin. By 1937, Stalin was exiled to Siberia, his coterie of supporters exiled with him or dead, and Federov was the Chairman of the Soviet Communist Party. Unbeholden to Lenin's original vision, he kept Stalin's organization intact, except with a greater role for the Army and a smaller for the various secret police organizations.
He still was unwilling to risk war with Germany without the Atlantic Powers' aid, so when only Italy stood against the annexation of Austria he stood by, but mobilized the Red Army. Later that year, when Hitler demanded the Sudetnland from Czechoslovakia, Federov put his foot down and threatened to declare war if the Western Powers gave in. Hitler went ahead and took the Sudetnland, England and France standing pat. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union declared war on Germany.
Behind Poland and Slovakia, Russia could do nothing, but when Hitler's armies occupied the Czech Republic, Federov prompted Poland to declare war and, supporting his ally, made Poland the battleground between Russia and Germany once again. The Blitzkrieg worked devastatingly against the Soviet forces, whose air force was sadly lacking, but Russian numbers and, this time, better generalship kept the front solid, and it was clear by the end of 1939 that numbers were beginning to weigh. Still, the Atlantic Powers saw no harm in Nazis and Communists killing one another. The Russians had been steadfast allies, but were barbarians just the same, even if they showed it by slaughtering Germans; the Germans were normally civilized, and were fighting for nationalist ends, even if Hitler was brutal. France, however, could not let a second ally go down to conquest, and once it was clear that the Soviets were being driven into Belarus the French army moved to the front. Hitler, caught in a two-front war, sent what forces he could spare west to delay the French while he tried to knock out the Russians in one blow.
He failed. Federov's Red Army stood fast, reinforced by vast new numbers. Although outclassed in technology and skill, it was a formidable war machine, stalling the Blitzkrieg and making Hitler pay for every mile he took. England entered the war as well, and convinced Belgium to let its troops march through the "Dyle Line" into Germany. By the summer of 1941, it was Federov who was on the offensive. This time, he swore, he would leave no stone unturned in Germany. Russian peasants could be Communist; All of Germany could be peasant communists. However, the Red Army was facing far superior defenses to what the English and French were facing, and when twenty German generals killed Hitler and took control of the government, it was to England and France that they surrendered. Federov reconquered the Baltic States, Poland, and East Prussia, but no more, and rather than face war against England and France he joined America in defeating Japan.
The alliance with America, though fraught with ideological difficulty, was an attractive one. American and Russian political spheres of influence tended not to overlap and America was exasperated with the belligerent Western Europeans. Where England and France wavered between strategic need for Russia and fear of Communism, between the memory of the Federov Line and that of the suppression of the Freikorps, America had escaped the Great Depression by means of its own socialistic policies and its Socialist and Communist parties had been roundly beaten in election after election. Each nation was a fruitful market for the other. Thus Federov rebuilt his Eastern European alliance structure, more formally this time, into a regional defense alliance signed at Warsaw, and retired Russia behind this "Iron Curtain," where it would be safe from further German incursions.
In 1949, Ivan Federov, Marshal of the Red Army and Chairman of the Russian Communist Party, died of a heart attack. He was 58. Although he did not live to see its results, he did more than any other politician to establish the postwar international order.
