Lenin Lives! by Philip Cunliffe

Author:Philip Cunliffe [Cunliffe, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-698-8
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2017-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

The End of the Versailles System

The collapse of the GDR and Social Republic coincides with a putsch by the Bulgarian military. Following the 1920 electoral victory of the populist agrarian party of Aleksandar Stambolinski allied with the Bulgarian communists, the repeated failure of bourgeois parties to make electoral breakthroughs prompt them to turn to a nationalistic military. In the historical world, the June coup succeeds against disorganized rural resistance due to the passivity of the Communists, the only ones who had the necessary organization and discipline to withstand the mutinous army. A belated Communist-led insurrection in September would be crushed by the military and thousands killed. In this timeline, the well-organized Communists intercede in favour of the popular Stambolinski’s beleaguered agrarians. Better organized and disciplined, and well-armed by sympathisers in the military, the coup is crushed by Communists. Reactionary generals die in the struggle or are arrested, the Bulgarian Tsar overthrown and a republic declared.

Arms and advice flow to Sofia from Red Europe, allowing the new republic to consolidate itself, renouncing the post-war treaty system and the League of Nations. The great Bulgarian revolutionary Christian Rakovsky joins the new republic from Russia. Rakovsky was the quintessential socialist revolutionary of this earlier, blocked timeline. A brilliant polymath, highly intelligent, cosmopolitan and polyglot, he exemplifies an entirely different era compared to our more straitened, monolingual and nationalistic historical world – a crime for which he would die in the 1940s for his opposition to Stalin. Having trained as a physician, it was his experience as a socialist journalist across several European empires that ensured he was well versed in the internal politics of many new countries’ socialist parties. In this world, his internationalist vision helps to solidify the emerging Balkan Federation.

With the Bulgarian Revolution joining the German, Hungarian, Austrian and Russian, the destruction of the Versailles treaty-system is complete. It would take much longer to shatter in the historical world, and at much greater human cost. One of the first Balkan states to achieve independence in the nineteenth century, Bulgarian socialists looked to a pan-Balkan federation as way of sublimating the ethnic and national rivalries that had consumed the region, stoked by imperial meddling, grasping monarchies, sinister secret societies, nationalistic militaries and bourgeoisies. Bulgaria becomes the hub of these federative efforts, their magnetic appeal helping to disintegrate the neighbouring kingdom of the South Slavs. Known as the “Versailles state” this ramshackle forerunner of the ill-fated Yugoslavia will elude the grasp of an expansionist Serbian monarchy, which will in turn fall to the Serbian Social Democrats. Although Bulgaria will suffer a civil war in the face of opposition from the fearsome nationalist terrorists of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, a process of regional federation and fusion will undercut the appeal of irredentism and separatism, as dispersed ethnic and religious groups can claim rights within the same set of political institutions in a slowly growing federation in which borders are administrative divisions rather than sovereign dividing lines.

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