“We the undersigned hereby commit ourselves to the noble principles and sensible aims of this charter. Only through strength at home and cooperation abroad can the light of Syndicalism be preserved and expanded.”

– Closing of the “Totalist Charter” drafted by Eric Blair, and signed by the attendees of the Birmingham Conference





“Totalism is a brutal and cruel ideology for brutal and cruel people.”

– Jack Reed





London, Union of Britain, February 3rd, 1936



First there was silence.



Oswald Mosley was breathing heavily, although years of training and practice helped to mask it from his audience. He had just given the greatest speech of his life; a dramatic ode to the revolution of the past, the achievements of the present, and what would be needed to secure the future. The answer, naturally, was his faction’s version of Syndicalism, Maximism, or Totalism as it was now being commonly referred to. He surveyed the stunned faces of the other delegates to the Trade Union Congress with barely contained glee. The old guard had just had their appeals to moderation taken and stripped away by the perfect combination of logic and passion. Their ways were dead or dying, the only way forward for the Union was Totalism. Of course, that meant that the position of chairman should go to the man most in touch with the spirit of the age, namely Mosley. Any second now, one of his loyal followers would call for a “spontaneous” motion to draft Mosley to lead the Union of Britain right there on the spot. He would accept naturally, but would make all of the requisite statements of how honored and humbled he was to be offered what he had worked so hard for and what he deserved. But that peculiar quiet stillness that only Britons can produce was not to be broken by a Totalist.



Because then there was laughter.



Barbara Betts, a dumpy little woman from northern England, was behaving with all of the dignity and grace of her tender age of twenty-six and was laughing, a high and mocking laugh that made Mosley’s blood boil. All of the eyes that had been fixed on their next chairman were drawn to this woman as she rose to her feet, wiping away a tear as she did so. “Comrade Mosley and my fellow delegates,” she said in a cheerful voice, “you will have to forgive my outburst, but I found that I simply could not contain myself! Comrade Mosley has weaved such a fantastical spell that for a second I myself began longing for the steady hand of the state to correct the ‘excesses of the popular will’, as you put it.” Betts’ smile turned impish. “Then I remembered that I am an Englishwoman, and that all of my countrymen, English, Scottish, and Welsh, have never settled for tyranny and coercion by a ruling elite!” Her words were acquiring new force now. “That was what our whole revolution was about!”



Great, thought Mosley idly, she’s a damned Autonomist.



Indeed, already there were some nods coming from Nicholas y Glais and his collection of imbeciles, agreement that became more fervent as Betts continued speaking. “Maybe Comrade Mosley would be aware of this fact had he spent more time talking with his fellow revolutionaries here rather than hobnobbing with that brute Mussolini in Birmingham. I concede to Comrade Mosley that Beria might be bringing Georgia into the present, but the Georgian people still have a long ways to go before they join us in the peaceful and democratic future!” That remark earned some applause and cheers from the Autonomists and even some Federationists. The somber mood that Mosley’s speech had crafted was being deteriorated into the kind of rabble that he had explicitly warned these fools about, and the worst part was that his Maximists weren’t matching these outbursts in kind! The fools were taking it on the chin, looking to all the Congress like chastised little schoolboys!



Mosley stepped down from the podium even before Betts finished her impromptu denunciation of him. He could see which way the wind was blowing. There was a fate worse than death, just as he had said in his speech, but it was not slavery to the capitalists and monarchists. It was being laughed at.





“The American people might not love me but at least no one’s gunning for me.”

– President Herbert Hoover to an aide upon hearing news of Aleksandr Kerensky’s assassination





“The pardoning of many White generals may have stemmed the tide of separatist movements but also outraged those on the left, while the indulging the strikers who periodically crippled the Russian Republic’s economy eroded support for the Kerensky government on the right. The increasingly authoritarian measures undertaken in order to preserve the SR-Kadet coalition’s seats offended the sensibilities of the middle-class liberals and intellectuals that were supposed to be the government’s bedrock of support, and, to complete the circle, Kerensky’s Jewish heritage and secular reforms undertaken since the revolution earned the ire of the clergy and made him unacceptable to rabid ultranationalists, greatly damaging his reputation among the peasants who were more susceptible to those attitudes. To see how this offending of every group and class in Russia made Kerensky’s assassination all-but-inevitable, one only has to look at a popular German political cartoon published shortly after his death, depicting six caricatures representing different strata of Russian society each holding a gun, each explaining their reasons for hating the President, but each also proclaiming their innocence…



“This climate of loathing has continued to hinder efforts by historians to determine a definite assassin and motive, leaving room for wild conspiracy claims ranging from a deliberate military coup to a foreign plot by an outside actor such as Georgia or Japan. When it comes to knowing who shot Aleksandr Kerensky, the sad truth is that the world may never know.”

– From “The Death of Aleksandr Kerensky: Still a Mystery Seventy Years Later” by Mark Hershberg in The Advocate.





“COMMENCE OPERATION DEEP SLEEP STOP”

– Telegram from Tokyo to the Japanese consulate in Vladivostok.





"Mark my words, that bastard Savinkov will never be in government for as long as I live."

– Lavr Kornilov





"At first glance, the decision of the Kornilov government to concentrate all of its forces and energy on crushing the Syndicalist Revolution that broke out in 1936 is a puzzling one. With all of the external threats that were picking off Russian territory, why did the generals that made up the post-Kerensky cabinet opt to let the Alash Orda or the Don Kuban Union get away with blatant territorial seizures even given their much weaker militaries? Furthermore, why did Kornilov seek an outright alliance with one of these powers, Finland, in order to garner an ally in his attempt to strangle the revolution in its cradle? With the benefit of hindsight, this all appears to speak to a baffling ignorance about Russia's strategic interests and capabilities.



“But the figures of the time period did not have that luxury. Instead they had to make decisions shaped by their own experiences and skill sets. By 1936, Lenin and his Bolshevik's form of Marxism was so thoroughly looked down upon in leftist circles that the Commune of France deemed it necessary only to send a few brigades and shipments of weapons as a token gesture to Russia during the entirety of the admittedly brief conflict. That the French contribution of guns was matched in absolute terms by the Georgian government speaks to how little the Communard government regarded the prospects of revolution in a country that was still primarily organized around its peasantry and its aristocracy.



“If the French Syndicalists and their ideological allies had discounted the likelihood of a leftist revolution in Russia, Kornilov and his officers most certainly had not. Given the long hard years spent fighting Lenin’s revolutionary army, it is unsurprising that the military of the Republic would ascribe to the rabble of 1936 a similar level of threat to the forces of the last Civil War. Furthermore, despite the laughable states of the armies of Finland, the Alash Orda, and, to a lesser extent, the Don Kuban Union, the state of the Russian armed forces was in many ways more pathetic. Hobbled by economic strife, corruption, and a thorough lack of imagination, the Russian military retained the size of 1914, but also roughly the same equipment, doctrines, and motivation. Even the magnitude of the Russian army in 1936 was an illusion, with many of the alleged soldiers remaining on the rolls despite desertion, imprisonment, or death in order to let their commanders access what funds were still being funneled toward the army. While most Russians from the village to the Senate may have been fooled by the occasional parade or glorified accounts of skirmishes with raiders from Mongolia or Turkestan, the men who took charge of Russia after the death of her president knew the true situation and thus had to do their best to conserve the army’s energy not only for the purposes of saving what they could of Russia but also with the aim of providing the people with a foe that was menacing enough to be prompt loyalty to the new state but also weak enough that it could actually be defeated in a prestigious display of the righteousness of the new military government. It was not an easy tightrope to walk.”

– Excerpt from “Aggressive Isolation: How Kornilov’s Foreign Policy Doomed Russia” by Vladimir Abrarinov





“Many observers point to the Spanish Civil War as the paramount example of Georgian arms sales in the pre-Syndicalist War era, but the genesis of the niche that Beria carved out for his isolated country was in an earlier conflict. Even while Totalists across Western Europe were attempting to convince their fellow Leftists that they were part of the same revolutionary movement, the Georgian government decided not to give or “lease” arms to Bukharin and his rebels, but rather to sell them. Beriites and their apologists are quick to point to the dire financial straits that Georgia was in as a justification for that instance of war profiteering, but the brazen realpolitik employed during the Second Russian Civil War would become the rule, not the exception, up to the present day Syndicalist government of the Transcaucasian Union.”

– Taken from "The Nexus of Terror: The Transcaucasian Union’s Sinister Foreign Policy" by Claire Sterling





April 7th, 1936, Tbilisi, Georgia



From outside of its heavy doors, the room Ge-3 appeared to be as unremarkable as any other inside of the fiercely utilitarian structure that served as the headquarters for the government of the Socialist Republic of Georgia. To journey down the nearly-identical hallways just to find such an unassuming portal in a building full of misnumbered or outright unmarked doors would be a fool’s errand, especially since it was in the ill-named rotunda of the building that one could witness the fiery speeches and denunciations made by Georgia’s flashiest politicians. Any citizen could bear witness to the drama of government, after a thorough pat down, of course, and hear from the ever-shifting cast of small-time politicians about how the Georgian model was becoming the envy of the world and arguing about little more than who could produce the most grandiose inflations of their sector’s economic and social statistics. In truth, the flash and theater of the Georgian Council of Worker’s Deputies was nothing more than a ruse. The real operators of the government were the faceless party officials and bureaucrats nested inside of their cocoons of power. None of them could hold a candle to the power contained within the walls of Ge-3, however. Inside Ge-3, flanked as it was by an unmarked door on its right and one just simply labeled “7”, a meeting of the minds was in process between the most powerful men in Georgia.



Grigol Ordzhonikidze, the nominal leader of Georgia, had to suppress a sigh as he looked around the table at the motley collection of men seated alongside with him. All of them were wearing bulky overcoats over their suits and uniforms (the building was still only heated intermittently due to the lingering rationing of coal), all of them were smoking, and all of them had a hunger in the eyes for more power. The thick haired man was the only one without the glint in his eyes. He did not feel particularly ambitious or conniving. All he felt was tired.



“Georgia is simply not strong enough to fight a war abroad! Our focus must be on defending ourselves and nurturing the revolution at home!” thundered General Abkhazi as his fellow military men, Cholokashvili and Begration, nodded in agreement.



“You would have us abandon the world revolution on the basis of cowardice?” sneered Kandid Charkviani, the President of the Council of Worker’s Deputies. Even though the bearded man did not possess any real institutional power, his status as tribune of the people, conferred by his being the closest thing to a democratically elected leader in the room, gave him a special kind of authority altogether.



That caused the man at Ordzhonikidze’s right to bark out, “That is enough, Comrade! We are not in your little debate society down the hall!” Then the figure who had interjected, Fillip Makharadze, gave his superior an exhausted look that mirrored that on the Georgian leader’s face. The Russian proletariat had begun another revolution a week ago and they were still arguing over whether or not to intervene. The same arguments had been trotted out again and again; either Georgia was too weak and needed to bide its time for a more opportune moment to strike or this was the perfect time to attack Russia and bring the whole rotten structure down. Those in favor of the latter argument pointed out that Russia was hardly going to get any weaker than it was right now while those in the former camp noted the lack of any actual border with Russia. That would prompt accusations about a failure to have a proper Marxist attitude, which would be met by charges of stupidity and blind fanaticism.



It had not been a productive way to spend the government’s time and energy and it seemed like day nine of the debate would not be any different.



Then Beria spoke.



“Comrades,” he said silkily, “you are both right.” He leaned back on his chair with rehearsed casualness and puffed idly on his cigarette before continuing, savoring the silence that had fallen over the room as soon as the head of the Supreme Economic Council had finally spoken. “We do not have the resources in men or material to wage an outright war at this point. Comrade Ramishvili can provide further explanation if you need it. At the same time, our security depends in large part on our being seen as contributing to the cause. Only if we are possessing of a significant degree of revolutionary fervor in our foreign policy will the French deepen their economic and security ties with us. Isn’t that correct, Comrade Lominadze?”



The addressed man gave a start in his chair and then said simply, “That is right, Comrade Beria.”



Lavrentiy Beria took another slow drag, letting the tension grow.



“Well, do you have a proposal or not?” griped Charkviani.



“How many firearms do we have in storage, Comrade Ramishvili?” asked Beria.



“The process we have begun of upgrading our men to the newer models and the consolidation of underpowered divisions left us with a surplus of several hundred, I believe.”



“Then we shall provide our fellow revolutionaries to the north with those weapons. Comrade Dzughashvili has already identified a few key parties on the Black Sea who could be used to funnel weapons to Bukharin’s forces.”



Small murmurs broke out around the table.



“Why didn’t you provide us with this plan earlier, Comrade Beria?” asked Makharadze, suspicion darkening his already fierce features.



Beria spread his hands wide. “It was only last night that I received notice that a warehouse was being commissioned to hold these out-of-date weapons.”



Now it was time for Charkviani to voice his own concerns. “And you are fine offering subpar arms to our allies to the north?”



“Bullets are bullets and will kill reactionaries all the same. Certainly with more efficiency than hoes and shovels.”



“And there will be no conditions attached to these shipments?” the younger man pressed.



“None whatsoever.”



“So, we are decided then?” asked Ordzhonikidze tentatively.



They were.