With Iron and Fire (A Reboot of Superpower Empire: China 1912)
- Thread starter MrP
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MrP
Banned
All I've done is repost H's work from the WIAF forum, old boy
But yes, it's a nice touch. The bomb's detonator was set slightly differently in TTL, so the plotters got the Archduke on their first attempt. Gavrilo Princip is a name only known to history buffs, as one of Cabrinovic's co-conspirators.
MrP
Banned
A Test for Men from Europe (II)
As though humans weren’t killing each others in high enough numbers in that year 1918, nature itself joined the mayhem in the form of the Spanish Flu pandemic. The H1N1 strain of swine flu—which had already crossed the species barrier several times on earlier occasions—had undergone a spontaneous hybridization process by recombining its genes with two other strains. The first recorded outbreak of this mutated variant had taken place in March 1918 at Camp Funston, a US Army recruitment center in Kansas. With the large-scale movement of soldiers caused by America’s involvement in the Great War, the virus quickly spread throughout the US military, turning hundreds of thousands of servicemen into unwitting vectors who contaminated belligerents and civilians alike throughout Europe between April and August. A disturbing pattern was soon identified: unlike normal flu outbreaks, this one was most dangerous to healthy adults between 20 and 45 years of age, as the effects of the virus were paradoxically compounded by a strong immune system—and most soldiers fell into that demographic. But the worst would come in August when, somewhere in western France (Brest was later tentatively identified as Ground Zero of the new outbreak), the virus underwent another sudden mutation, acquiring an even deadlier form. All attempts at containment failed, and within weeks, it had spread around the globe, infecting one-fifth of the world’s population; Russia was penetrated from two directions simultaneously, the British-held port of Arkhangelsk and Chinese-held Siberia, and by the end of the year 7% of its population had died of the disease. As exposure to earlier influenza strains provided a degree of immunity, people living in cities (where germs are routinely shared around) or coming from places where influenza is endemic (like China) died in noticeably lower numbers than more isolated country-dwellers, but conversely, hundreds of rural communities throughout Siberia were virtually depopulated.
Yet as Spanish Flu felled people by the millions (the pandemic’s total body count is variously estimated between 50 and 100 million), the fighting continued both on the Western Front and in revolution-torn Russia. Each for their own reasons, the Entente powers were stepping up their intervention on the edges of the former empire: the British to safeguard the supplies they had delivered at Vladivostok, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk; the French to help evacuate the Czech Legion; the Americans to keep the Transsiberian Railway in operation; the Chinese (ostensibly) to protect themselves from revolutionary spillover and (unofficially) to carve a sphere of influence in Siberia; the Japanese (ostensibly) to comply with the wishes of Washington and (unofficially) to grab a slice of the Siberian cake for themselves. The Entente’s one common goal, namely the reopening of the Eastern Front, became moot after the Central Powers’ surrender on November 11, yet most of the foreign troops did not depart until nearly two years later, and in the case of the Chinese would stay on indefinitely. None, officially, were there to fight the Bolsheviks, though mission creep would ensure that they all ended up taking sides with varying amounts of reluctance. American involvement had started with the Russian Railway Service Corps, created in mid-1917 to assist with the maintenance of the Transsiberian’s infrastructure and equipment (but whose effective deployment would be delayed until August 1918), and increased with the sending of the Russian Expeditionary Force Siberia in August 1918. Britain could only spare 1,500 men for the Siberian theater, but the shortfall was made up by the Canadian Expedionary Corps, which arrived in October 1918. France, which already had a military mission in Russia, sent an ad hoc composite force of some 1,400 colonial infantry and some aviation (including the young pilot Joseph Kessel) in August 1918. Even Italy got on the act with an Alpini unit sent to take charge of some 2,400 former Italian POWs which had ended up in Siberia by way of Austria-Hungary. But the largest contingent after the Chinese one was obviously the Japanese one: the very day after the arrival of China’s Eighth Division in Vladivostok, a detachment of Japanese marines from the Mikasa marched in the city as a show of strength; then more reinforcements poured in, brought in from neighboring Korea, until by the end of July Japan had some 12,000 men in the city, under the command of Major General Ono Makoto. More Chinese troops had in the meantime arrived in Vladivostok (Sixth Division, Major General Wang Ruqin), and after their liberation by the Czechs, in Verkhneudinsk (Tenth Division, Major General Wang Ruqian, brother of the former)—which thanks to its rail link with Urga way was accessible by railway from Beijing—, Chita (Fourteenth Division, Major General Zhang Shuyuan) and Irkutsk (Ninth Division, Major General Yuan Zuming, and Twelfth Division, Major General Zhu Shouguan, plus a Mongol cavalry regiment commanded by Colonel Li Shouxin, himself an ethnic Mongol): all together, by the end of August, seven infantry divisions and three cavalry regiments arranged in two army corps, not counting five Chinese Air Force groups, and several bands of honghuzi recruited as irregular cavalry just as they had been during the Russo-Japanese War (they were put under the command of Brigadier General Feng Delin, himself a former honghuzi who had belatedly joined the formal military).*
Troops from the Chinese Sixth Division in Vladivostok.
Any hopes the Chinese might have entertained that Japan could be preempted out of Siberia had proved overly optimistic, and Nanjing knew it didn’t have the leverage, whether diplomatic or military, to press the issue: despite its temporary edge in boots on the ground, there was no doubt that Japan could match it man for man if it intended to. Japanese appetites had to be sated if China was to accomplish its longer-term objectives in Siberia without having its efforts sabotaged every step of the way by its nominal ally. In order to work out a mutually agreeable solution, Tang Shaoyi, Liang Qichao’s high-profile foreign affairs minister, sailed to Tokyo in March 1919 and, over the course of several meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Hara Takashi, painstakingly negotiated a compromise. On March 31 the document known as the Tang-Hara Agreement was disclosed to the international press. The price that Japan had exacted for renouncing privileges in the Siberian mainland was: full sovereignty over the entirety of Sakhalin; an extraterritorial enclave in Petropavlovsk; a 50-year lease on the Kamchatka peninsula; a monopoly on fishing in the Sea of Okhotsk and on all natural resources in Siberia east of the 150° longitude; and for good measure a 25-year extension on its lease on the Liaodong peninsula. At the stroke of a paintbrush, the Japanese had trebled the size of their sphere of influence, and even though those territories were quite sparsely populated, their interest lay elsewhere, in their plentiful natural resources and above all gold: a rich vein of the precious metal had been accidentally discovered by an escaped convict in 1910, and since then the gold industry expert Eduard Ahnert had confirmed the presence of large recoverable deposits throughout the Kolyma valley.
If the period from May to August 1918 had seen an uninterrupted string of White victories, the reorganization of the Red Army allowed the Bolsheviks to start pushing back in September: by the end of the year the front line had moved some 500 kilometers to the east, seesawing back and forth across the plain west of the Urals. An anecdote has it that General Janin, the nominal commander of the Allied forces in Russia, was shown the body of Vasily Blücher, Red commander of the South Urals Partisan Army, whose forces had been routed in a recent engagement and who had fallen to Chinese bullets, and gloated “Grouchy is avenged at last!” Perm had fallen to a joint Sino-Czech force in December, but the Bolsheviks had evened out the score four days later by taking Ufa—as for Samara, the seat of the short-lived KOMUCH government, it was once again in Red hands since October and would never again be claimed by the Whites. General Alekseev, the nominal supreme leader of the White movement, had died in November, but now his successor, General Sergey Markov, urged Horvath to launch an offensive in the Volga region in order both to complete the encirclement of the Red-held territories to the south, and enable the linking up of the Southern and Siberian Whites. Markov also considered, rightly, that the Bolsheviks were growing in strength and had to be attacked before they were too solidly entrenched; and he counted on another major victory to convince France and Britain to increase their military assistance. Horvath, who quietly feared—and his Chinese patrons with him—that a continuous front from the Don to Siberia would make the PSG redundant, dithered for a few months, pretexting logistical problems and difficulties in raising the requisite number of troops from the sparse Siberian population; but he finally agreed and, in March, the offensive was launched, under the command of General Mikhail Khanzhin. It involved the Siberian Army (General Mikhail Diterikhs) and the Western Army (General Vasily Boldyrev), four Cossack divisions from the Ural, Orenburg, Siberian and Baikal Hosts (General Aleksandr Dutov), as well as the Chinese Ninth Division (Major General Yuan Zuming). It was decided not to engage the Czech Legion, whose size was rapidly decreasing as more and more of its men reached Vladivostok and embarked for the journey to their newly independent homeland, though a minority was enticed to stay on, including General Radola Gajda.
The offensive went off to a good start, taking the Red Army by surprise; Khanzhin’s men used horse-drawn sleds to advance quickly on the snow-bound ground, covering up to 60 kilometers in a single day, but in mid-April the White armies were bogged down—literally—in the notorious rasputitsa, giving the enemy enough time to recover. As the ground hardened again in early May, the Red Army began its counter-offensive, and within two months had pushed the Whites back to their starting point. The Chinese Ninth Division fared especially poorly, and General Jiang realized how dramatically overextended his supply lines were when he tried and failed to send Yuan desperately-needed ammunition in time. This sobering lesson was the main reason why the Chinese decided from that point on not to contribute to any operations beyond the Urals, to the frustration of some of the more offensive-minded White officers. Saratov, taken on April 11, had remained under White control for less than a month, allowing only a tenuous link-up with the Southern Whites coming from the southwest. Markov, who needed reinforcements, ordered Dutov (over Khanzhin’s head) to allow volunteers from his Cossack forces to join his own base in the Don; the majority of Dutov’s four divisions accepted, including most of their officers, convinced that Russia would be more surely be liberated from the south than the east, and increasingly frustrated with Horvath’s equivocation.
Only the timely deployment of three more Chinese divisions (the Tenth, Twelfth and Fourteenth) and the judicious leadership of the Izhevsk-Votkinsk Division by Major General Viktorin Molchanov (comprised of workers from the industrial towns of Izhevsk and Votkinsk in the Urals who had revolted against Bolshevik rule the previous year, and now formed one of the fiercest “shock” units of the Siberian White army) prevented the White retreat from turning into a rout: already many of the men locally recruited during the previous winter were deserting and going home. With the cohesiveness of the Western and Siberian Armies preserved, but no way to stop the Red Army’s advance, Khanzhin entrusted Diterikhs with the creation of an entrenched defensive position along the Tobol. Fortunately for the Siberian Whites, the Bolsheviks were simultaneously facing a crisis on their southern front: an attempt to destroy Nestor Makhno’s Ukrainian Anarchists had backfired when many Red Army troops instead started defecting to the Anarchist side, forcing Lenin to call a temporary truce against his ideological enemy. The ensuing reorganization of Bolshevik forces in southern Russia bought the Siberian Whites critically needed time to proceed with their entrenchment on the Tobol. At that point both the Red and the Whites agreed that the civil war would be won or lost in the South rather than the East: with the victories achieved in the course of the summer while the Red Army focused its attention on the counteroffensive to the East, Markov’s forces, recently reinforced with British tanks and aircraft, held a line from Kharkov to Saratov, and had captured Tsaritsyn in July. Adding to the Bolsheviks’ woes, the Poles were making steady progress into Western Russia; Minsk had been taken in early August and the Polish advance showed no sign of slowing down. The Siberian front was now quiet, allowing the Siberian Whites to dig themselves in. The only incident was the mutiny of Major General Anatoly Pepelyaev, the Siberian Whites’ youngest senior officer and the brother of Viktor Pepelyaev, Horvath’s chief of police: disgusted by Khanzhin’s defensive strategy, which he considered a tacit submission to Chinese interests, he led his division (named after himself) on a desperate dash to the Urals, hoping to convince the rest of the two armies to go on the offensive again. But the example of the Pepelyaev Division wasn’t followed, and its sacrifice in battle a short distance to Chelyabinsk only reinforced the Siberian Whites’ leadership in their conviction that they had chosen the more sensible strategy; the “Pepelyaevshchina” would go down in history as a romantic example of doomed bravery. The Chinese had come to a similar conclusion to Khanzhin’s: now that White victory seemed elusive, their objective henceforth was the consolidation of their control in Eastern Siberia, while establishing a series of defensive lines to wear out the Bolsheviks, or as Jiang phrased it, “trade space for strength”. Indeed, as the end of 1919 neared, the conditions appeared increasingly favorable to making the Chinese sphere of influence in Eastern Siberia a country in its own right, with Horvath as its leader.
The opportunistic Horvath had not waited for Chinese enticements to come to the same idea: as time went by, his Provisional Siberian Government felt less and less like a placeholder for a hypothetical post-Bolshevik united Russia, and more and more like an independent state in all but name. While there were a number of pressing challenges to address, he felt he had the necessary means to overcome them. The two most pressing non-military issues were rampant unemployment on the one hand, and an impending currency crisis on the other: the former was primarily caused by the influx of cheap Chinese labor which priced out local workers, and the latter was a result of rapid inflation, compounded by the hoarding of what trustworthy currencies were in circulation (especially by Chinese merchants). Although the Chinese had appropriated half of the Tsar’s gold, that still left enough of a windfall to solve both problems. The gold, indeed, allowed the PSG to set up labor-intensive public works projects whether civilian (much-needed repairs on the Transsiberian’s infrastructure) or military (defensive earthworks around the larger cities); it also made it possible to subsidize the Sickness Fund and other collective insurance schemes created in 1917 by factory workers, and, going one step further, to create a Bismarck-style Workers’ Unemployment Fund—as Horvath had summed it up, “Let the workers see that, while the Bolsheviks starve them, I on the other hand keep them fed.” The peasants, in turn, were placated with a return to the pre-1917 policy of government purchase of grain at market rates, also made possible with the influx of hard coin in the public treasury, in stark contrast with the confiscations at gunpoint that had been the norm during the months of Bolshevik rule from late 1917 to mid-1918; in any case, as Lenin himself acknowledged, Siberian peasants were in a different situation from their European counterparts, as most of them owned the land they tilled and were therefore indifferent to calls for land redistribution—they were, in Lenin’s own words, “well-fed, solid and successful farmers, not at all inclined towards Socialism”. Luckily for the PSG, Siberia had known several bumper harvests in the years before 1917, and since the sclerosis of the transportation infrastructure had not allowed the transfer of grain to the hungry cities of European Russia, local granaries were still largely full, to the point where Siberia was paradoxically facing a situation of overproduction at the time of the Bolshevik coup; now these stores could be bought for good money and used to feed the PSG’s armies. Which brings us to monetary reform: Horvath’s finance minister, a bright young university graduate named Ivan Mikhailov, implemented a far-reaching monetary reform which gradually standardized Siberia’s several de facto currencies (some 30 of them, from Romanov rubles and Kerensky tokens to Chinese yuans and even labels from a popular brand of cigarettes), removing the incentive for speculation and currency hoarding, and restoring public trust in the official monetary system; this, too, was only possible thanks to the availability of sufficient gold reserves. In short, Horvath’s stroke of luck had been to find himself at the confluence of three near-simultaneous windfalls: full stores of grain to keep the population fed; a treasure in gold to buy social peace and underwrite the necessary monetary reforms; and of course the mountains of military supplies which he could avail himself of in order to equip his armies. When to these three factors was added the catalyst of Chinese intervention, Siberian independence became a very real possibility, and all Horvath had to do was allow his power-hungry instincts follow the opportunity offered by history.
Ivan Mikhailov.
The presence of large numbers of Chinese in Siberia predated China’s intervention in the Russian civil war. Already by the turn of the century Chinese migrants to Siberia had become economically indispensible, as the inhabitants of Blagoveshchensk had realized to their dismay after killing off the local Chinese community in the aforementioned 1900 pogrom. In the Russian Far East 70% of the employees of private businesses were Chinese, and in the Transbaikal’s main industry, gold mining, the proportion of Chinese workers had increased from 48% in 1895 to 86% in 1915. Before the beginning of the war some 400,000 Chinese lived in Russia, 300,000 of them in Siberia, and to this number were added after 1914 around 150,000 huagong (contract laborers) hired by the Russian government to assist with the war effort. This large Chinese presence on its soil was one reason why Russia had declined China’s offer of military assistance against the Central Powers. At Nanjing’s insistent urgings, the Provisional Government had in March 1917 reluctantly allowed China to send police detachments (and these only armed with pistols and truncheons) to oversee the orderly repatriation of the now mostly idle huagong (along with any regular Chinese migrants unwilling to stay), which Kerensky was quietly thankful for as he already had enough problems to deal with. Unfortunately, the disorganization of the transportation infrastructure was such that by November most were still stuck in Siberia, with large groups left behind in industrial cities and transit stations in European Russia. When the Russian civil war broke out, an estimated 380,000 Chinese were in Siberia, whether permanent residents, economic migrants, or contract laborers inching their way back on the saturated Transsiberian railway. They now amounted to a sizeable reservoir of manpower for the PSG and the Chinese Expeditionary Corps to Siberia alike, and, if necessary, a source of easily available auxiliaries.
Insofar as there was a time in the course of the Russian civil war when the Bolsheviks were most at risk of losing, and a different decision in the White camp might have tilted the balance, it came in October 1919. The war had always been for the Bolsheviks to lose, thanks to the structural advantages they enjoyed over their foes: a unified territory centered around Russia’s main industrial regions and comprising the bulk of its population, whereas the Whites were relegated at the periphery; a single command structure, whereas the Whites, despite Markov’s status as supreme leader, in practice did not meaningfully coordinate their efforts; and a well-defined political objective, whereas the Whites remained ideologically divided and their various factions could agree on little beyond returning to the pre-November 1917 status quo (and not even that in the case of the Poles, the Finns and other breakaway nationalities). Yet in October 1919 the Bolsheviks momentarily found themselves on the ropes, being forced to yield ground on three sides even as their hold on some core regions was slipping. In the West the Poles were advancing beyond Minsk into Russia’s historical heartland; in the South Markov’s “Moscow Offensive” was underway, and after Kiev, Kursk and Kharkov, Orel had fallen as well, bringing the Whites a mere 360 kilometers to the Bolshevik capital; and in the Northwest General Nikolai Yudenich launched an attack that actually brought his forces into the very suburbs of Petrograd, which the Reds had to retake in vicious house-to-house battles. (General Evgeny Miller, for his part, held a slice of territory around Arkhangelsk, but he was never in a position to seriously threaten the Bolsheviks). To make matters even worse, rebellions were breaking out in several rural regions, and the largest one, led by Aleksandr Antonov, a Socialist-Revolutionary, in the Tambov region wouldn’t be subdued for two years, at the cost of a massive deployment of troops. It remains a matter of debate among historians whether a determined offensive coming from the East at that moment might have brought the overextended Red Army to the breaking point. But the Sino-Whites would launch no such offensive after Pepelyaev’s valiant but hopeless go-it-alone attack, and by November, as the second anniversary of their coup had passed, the Bolsheviks had weathered the worst of the White onslaught.
At the end of October 1919, the Red Army breached the Tobol line, and the Sino-White forces retreated to the Ishim where a second line had been set up. This was going to be the Sino-White strategy from then on: to attrite Red forces by facing them in well-prepared defensive positions, then fall back when they broke through and do it again at the next line of defense. Central Siberia, a huge plain crossed with wide rivers flowing to the North, was well-suited for this purpose, and even as the fighting went on at the Ishim line, General Kappel (formerly of KOMUCH) was already preparing the next one at Omsk. Even then the strategy was not without its cost, as the slow retreat eroded White morale, resulting in a number of desertions, while the bitter Siberian winter caused more losses to hypothermia and frostbite (Diterikhs himself had died of septicemia from an infected wound on the way to Omsk, and been replaced with General Konstantin Sakharov). With the main Red Army forces engaged against the Poles and the Southern Whites throughout 1920, the Osmk line would not be breached until January 1921; by then another line was ready at Novonikolayevsk, and work was underway on a fifth one on the Yenisei, under the direction of military engineer Alexei Shoshin, one of Russia’s foremost experts in defensive fortifications. In 1912 he had been sent to Vladivostok to upgrade its defenses, and that was where the civil war had found him six years later; in 1920 he was hired by Horvath to build the Yenisei Line, which unlike the other four was not meant to be temporary: it was where the PSG hoped to finally break the gradually weakened momentum of the Red Army. Indeed, the Yenisei, which marks the natural boundary between the marshy flatlands of Central Siberia and the plateaus of Eastern Siberia, is closer to Beijing than to Moscow by 1,600 kilometers, meaning that in sheer logistical terms the advantage would be on the Sino-White side. Shoshin was given 18 months and—dovetailing nicely with Horvath’s policy of investment in public works projects—all the men and money he needed, to erect the best defensive complex Siberia would ever see.
It would be late into 1921 before the Bolsheviks could again turn their attention on the Sino-Whites. The war against Poland had ended on a costly stalemate that had left both sides exhausted; an insurgency had broken out in Central Asia (with the Basmachi rebels receiving supplies and advisers from the PSG, which had sent Molchanov to provide training in modern military methods); the Southern Whites had not been pushed out of their last Crimean stronghold until March; the Tambov rebellion had taken until September to be successfully repressed (entire forests had to be air-sprayed with poison gas and then burned down for good measure); the Anarchists were fighting tooth and nail to retain control of the Ukraine; and—worst of all from a symbolic perspective—the Kronstadt sailors themselves, the battle-hardened vanguards of the Revolution who had fought under the red flag on every battlefield since 1917, had mutinied in April and, holed up in their nigh-impregnable island fortress, would resist all Red Army assaults until forced to surrender in June by the exhaustion of their supplies. This last event had shaken the Bolshevik leadership to its very core, for if the Kronstadt sailors had lost faith, then the Revolution truly was in trouble. Economically even more than politically, the situation was catastrophic: between war, territorial loss, starvation and disease, the country’s population had shrunk by 20 million; industrial output was one-fifth of its prewar total (in the case of iron, production was a tiny 5% of what it was in 1914); and harvest yields had fallen by a third. Keeping the regime on a war footing would not be possible much longer: some breathing room was desperately needed, even if that meant compromising on basic economic principles by implementing the New Economic Policy, and leaving for the foreseeable future Eastern Siberia in the hands of counter-revolutionary lackeys of Chinese despotism. Lenin gave himself until the end of the year to win the civil war once and for all, as any more fighting beyond that date would bring the nascent Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to its knees before it had even had a chance to stand up.
The bridge on the Yenisei before its destruction in November 1921.
The Novonikolayevsk line had been breached in August, and at the beginning of November the Red Second, Third and Fifth Armies were on the western shore of the Yenisei. They had got a foretaste of what the fight would be like this time when a number of Sino-White stay-behind teams had repeatedly sabotaged the railroad, bringing the Red advance to a frustrating crawl; on several occasions, heavy mines buried deeply beneath the ballast had been detonated right under a locomotive, one of which had been sent flying 30 meters into the air before landing upside-down on its tender; together with constant harassing runs by light bomber aircraft, this tactic of “forward attrition” was slowly wearing down the Bolshevik forces and seriously complicated their supply problem. As for the last 50 kilometers of tracks before Krasnoyarsk, they had been removed altogether, crossties and all; and the bridge on the Yenisei—the only one ever built—had been completely dismantled, with the piers blown up: nothing remained of it but small heaps of rubble. Krasnoyarsk itself had been evacuated, stripped of anything remotely useful to an army on the march, and then put to the torch for good measure, much as Moscow in 1812; only the main houses of worship were spared.
When the attack finally began, the Sino-Whites, under the command of General Grigory Verzhbitsky, were ready; and “the yawning gates of Hell opened” in the testimony of Fifth Army commander Aleksandr Yegorov. In the past year, the PSG had acquired some ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet after the evacuation of the Southern White remnants from Crimea, including the battleship Alekseev, formerly the Imperator Aleksandr III, and brought them to Vladivostok where they had been stripped of their artillery, which had then been hauled by rail to the Yenisei Line. More heavy artillery had been purchased from France, so that the Line boasted six 305-mm naval guns in hardened emplacements, ten 400-mm railway-mounted howitzers, and hundreds of guns of lesser calibers, with the open space in front of it heavily mined and carefully marked for range. Never until then had such heavy guns been brought to bear on the Siberian front, where even 203-mm artillery was a rarity reserved for the best-equipped armored trains, and the Red forces were caught completely by surprise by the strength of the artillery barrage; nothing they had painstakingly transported all this distance came even close. The frozen Yenisei, a vast expanse of open space on which charging troops could be picked off at leisure by machine gun fire, suddenly burst open when a string of previously immerged naval mines were detonated, shattering the ice cover on a length of more than a kilometer, and plunging thousands of men in icy waters that killed within minutes those who didn’t drown outright. Hundreds of aircraft from both the Chinese and PSG air forces joined the fight, running the gamut from obsolete Voisin III refitted for ground attack to brand-new Vickers and Anatra bombers, which ravaged the Red Army’s supply train all the way to Novonikolayevsk, while light bombers rained upon the exposed troops a deadly combination of explosive ordnance and steel flechettes. Platoons of Renault FT-17 and Whippet tanks with motorized field artillery units stood ready to plug any gap in the Line, and regiments of Cossack and Buryat cavalry were kept in reserve at both ends to stop any attempt at turning the main fortifications, which extended on the eastern bank of the Yenisei from about 15 km upriver across from Krasnoyarsk to slightly beyond the mouth of the Angara.
For two weeks, the Red forces tried every tactic to break through the Sino-White defenses, having got used from previous engagements to expect an enemy retreat once a breach was achieved, but once the Red Fifth Army, which spearheaded the attack, had lost 30% of its men, the understanding came that this time was different. Eastern Army Group commander Vasily Shorin telegraphed Moscow for instructions, prompting Trotsky in person to come and assess the situation on December 2. He concluded that only with the addition of at least three more Armies would the attack have any chance of succeeding, and was issuing the requisite orders when Lenin, upon reading his report, called off any further offensives. “Let the Chinese and their secessionist puppets keep that frozen wasteland for now,” he declared to the Central Committee. “The Socialist revolution can proceed without Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and likewise it can proceed without Eastern Siberia.” Armistice negotiations began on December 18, and would end on March 21, 1922, with the signing of the Treaty of Krasnoyarsk, which restored China's borders to the pre-Treaty of Aigun status quo (with some adjustments in Central Asia to account for the de facto Soviet and Chinese areas of control), and recognized the independence of the new country of Yakutia.
* The borderlands between Manchuria and Russia had long been home to roving bands of horse-riding outlaws called honghuzi ("red beards", possibly because the first ones were ethnic Russians, though by the early 20th century most were Sinicized Manchus, Han Chinese, or sometimes Mongols). These enjoyed a complex relationship with the Chinese military: some were former soldiers who had turned to banditry, some who tired of being on the wrong side of the law applied for positions in the army. They preyed on isolated settlements in the Russian Far East and Manchuria alike, and hired themselves out as mercenaries in times of war. Thousands were recruited by the Chinese in 1918, and mostly assigned to anti-partisan operations throughout Eastern Siberia; after the war they were offered formal positions in the army or generous bonuses to settle down to law-abiding civilian life. Others, however, would remain a lingering nuisance for years to come.
Good update.I always liked this timeline.Hendryk's original was the first timeline I found here on this site.
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MrP
Banned
And soon on Kindle!
There's no more material from the main narrative to repost, but I encourage fellow fans of the TL to read Maverick's "The Sun and the Mirror", which depicts events from the Japanese perspective.
And for aviation enthusiasts, "Reaching for the Eternal Blue Sky" is about the Yakutian conquest of the air.