Re: SV: Saving Germany and liberating Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania 1918-<

["Umberto Rossi" <urossi@programatic.it>]

> With the
> result in hand (the Soviet collapse in 1991 and the record of a communist
> regime on German soil, the GDR) one wonders what might have happened to
> Germany if it hadn't been for the Free Corps. On the other hand I don't
> think the Allies would have accepted a Soviet takeover of Germany
> 1918-1923. 

Ahem, the Allies did not accept even the Soviet takeover in Russia.  Remember 
their support of the White Army during the Russian civil war.  Some Western 
nations sent also troops in Russia, and I wonder if the isolationist trends of the 
Soviet Union do not derive from that episode.  After having fought a war which 
ended with an inglorious defeat, Russia was attacked and surrounded by enemies.  
You can say thta the purpose of the expeditionry corps was to "liberate" Russia, 
but try to explain that to Russians.  In moment of crisis Russians tend to stick 
together, to forget internal divisions and to fight with all their forces against the 
invasors.  Remember what happened to Napoleon and later to Hitler.  Stalin was a 
monster, everybody knows that, but when Russian had to choose betwee the 
menace from outside (racial warfare and scientifically planned extermination) and 
their bloodthirsty Red Czar, they chose Stalin.  Can you blame them for that?

(At the beginning they didn't dislike the idea of a repetition of what had happened in 
1914-1917, i.e. military defeat followed by the collapse of the Bolshevik 
government;  they believed that the German army could rid them of Stalin, as id had 
set them free from the Czars--but Sonderkommandos, scientifically planned 
starvation and extermination camps made them change their mind.)

Maybe, had the Reds, that is the Communists won in 1918, both the Russian and 
the German Bolshevik governments could hae been less violent and totalitarian.  
Who knows.  Maybe, given some basic tenets of the Bolshevik ideology you had to 
build a totalitarian regime, maybe not.  Lenin started the NEP, you know.  And built 
the first Gulag camps.  There's a lot of contradictions in what he did.  While surely 
there's a deadly coherence in Stalin's actions--much like what you can find in 
Hitler's deeds.

In the end, after the counter-revolution in Germany and Stalin's "trials" in the USSR, 
what you have is two totalitarian, militarist, Wille-zur-Macht-oriented, ruthless 
machines, which will eventually fight each other.  Do we have to be grateful to the 
Free Corps for this?  Ok, thank you!

(Maybe, maybe, maybe... there's plenty of stuff here for any alternate history 
writer... we'd need a team of Philip K. Dicks to use it all!)

Umberto Rossi

"...io vedea la virtute esser spenta, e i vizi sollevati"
                                      Gerolamo Savonarola