History of the Soviet Union (from the Breach onward)

Baseline

Until April 30th, 1919, identical to our timeline, with one exception that no historian noticed. The Bolsheviks have held Petrograd and Moscow since November 1917; the Civil War against the White armies, the Allied intervention, and the Poles is in its second year; Lenin governs, Trotsky commands the Red Army from an armored train, and Stalin is a Commissar for Nationalities whom nobody outside the Party has heard of. The Romanovs were shot at Yekaterinburg in July 1918. All of them, so far as anyone knows.

The exception is Rasputin's hoard. Before his murder in December 1916, the mystic obtained an imperial decree to assemble Russia's arcane relics in one place, nominally to cure the Tsarevich, actually to secure the dynasty: Byzantine ward-plates, Scythian sun-gold, the Novgorod icons, the Kazan books, and a thousand things with no names, in the crypts under the Feodorovsky Cathedral at Tsarskoye Selo. When the Red Guards swept the palaces in 1917–18 they took the whole of it in an afternoon, and did not know what they had until the Breach taught them.

1910s

• April 30th, 1919: the Breach. Trotsky's westward offensive against the Poles is three weeks old when the sky changes over Germany. Within days he has signed a truce on the Vistula with the Polish army and the Freikorps, loaded his armored trains onto the Berlin trunk line, and gone to fight the end of the world beside the Reichswehr. Commissar Larissa Reissner, twenty-four, veteran of the Volga flotilla, goes with him.
• May 29, 1919: the Battle of the Rift. Red Army rifle units hold the eastern perimeter at the summit; Reissner is in the vanguard and inside the Zone for eleven days. She comes out Touched (the Rift leaves her with a sensitivity to other minds that she does not, at first, recognize as anything but a journalist's instinct) and comes home a hero to a country that has not had one since 1812.
• Summer 1919: the Commissariat of Special Requisitions. Trotsky, now understanding what Rasputin's hoard is, has the ward-plates torn from their frames and bolted to the cowcatchers of the armored trains and the hulls of the Volga gunboats. They turn White artillery aside at fifty meters. The Civil War, which the Breach had paused, resumes in the autumn with the Red Army the only side on earth fielding arcane weapons, and the White armies, who had the mystics and never used them, lose Omsk by November.
• November 1919: the Soviet republic is not invited to Versailles and signs nothing. It recognizes the Harz Exclusion Zone and keeps a Red Army liaison at its eastern wall until 1934.

1920s

• 1920–1921: the Civil War ends. The Whites are driven into the sea at Vladivostok; the Poles accept the Vistula line the 1919 truce drew. The country is a ruin and the Party owns it.
• 1921: the Winter Court. The first Soviet arcanists, trained on the hoard, discover that the Romanov line is not quite extinct: a pact Rasputin negotiated with the fey courts of the Russian north carried the Grand Duchess Anastasia out of Yekaterinburg as her family died, into a realm where years are not years. The Cheka cannot reach her. The Party decides not to mention it.
• 1922: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is proclaimed. The Special Requisitions Commissariat becomes a permanent organ of state: the arcane, in the Soviet view, is a natural resource, and like every natural resource it belongs to the people, which is to say the Party.
• 1923–1924: Lenin's strokes, and his death in January 1924. The succession struggle begins as it did: Stalin, as General Secretary, against Trotsky and the Left. But Larissa Reissner is alive. In our timeline she died of typhoid in 1926; in this one, an arcane cure from the Requisitions laboratories saves her, and she remains the Party's most famous writer, the Red Army's most famous commissar, and an outspoken critic of the apparatus Stalin is building.
• 1925: the teacher. Reissner is approached by a witch, name unrecorded, who had worked for the Revolution since before 1917 and who does not intend to see it inherited by a Georgian bureaucrat. Under this instruction, what the Rift left in Reissner becomes an art. By 1927 she can change minds: not persuade them, change them.
• 1927–1928: the fall of Stalin. The Party turns against its General Secretary in the space of a year, in a sequence of Central Committee votes that nobody present can afterward explain. He is expelled from the Party in January 1928 and exiled to Tbilisi; his closest confidants (Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov) follow him into obscurity by the summer. Trotsky is restored as Commissar for War. Reissner becomes General Secretary.
• 1928–1929: the First Five-Year Plan, with an arcane directorate. The Requisitions Commissariat's laboratories become the Institute of Pavlovian Psionics in Leningrad and the Xenographic Institute in Kharkov; the hoard is catalogued, and the first Soviet expeditions go out to Tunguska and Baikal to find more.
• October 1929: the Crash. The Soviet Union, with no stock market, no American loans, and a planned economy, is untouched, and says so loudly for a decade.

1930s

• 1930: Reissner becomes Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars: Premier, in the Western press, which also gives her the name it keeps using, the Red Valkyrie. She is thirty-five. She keeps the red leather trenchcoat she wore on the Volga and is photographed in it on every front for the next twelve years.
• 1930–1934: collectivization, as in our timeline, and the famine, as in our timeline, though the Xenographic Institute's crop-work shortens it by a year and the Party's historians have never agreed on whether that is to its credit. There is no Great Terror. There is the Cheka's successor, the NKVD, with a Special Department for the arcane, and a General Secretary who can read the Politburo and does not need show trials to know who is lying.
• 1932: Falkenhorst elected in Germany. Reissner, who was on the Brocken with him, says in a Pravda editorial that the Reich has found the one general in Europe who will not make a mistake, and that this is the worst possible news.
• 1934: Stalin dies in exile in Tbilisi, officially of heart failure. The Red Army liaison is withdrawn from the Harz wall when the IAACC leaves.
• 1935: the United States breaks diplomatic relations over the "export of revolution." The Comintern is reorganized as an arm of the Special Department. The Soviet Union does not restrict the arcane; it nationalizes it, trains it, and uniforms it. The first practitioner regiments, the Night Witches, are raised from Touched women of the Civil War generation and quartered at Leningrad.
• 1936–1938: the Eurasian expeditions. With the Reich digging in the Levant and the British holding the Hindu Kush and Tibet, Reissner sends the Special Requisitions teams everywhere else: Xinjiang under the puppet warlord Sheng Shicai; Outer Mongolia and Tannu Tuva as client states; the Altai kurgans; northern Persia under the 1907 sphere; and, through Kurdish channels, the pre-biblical sites of Nineveh and Mosul under the noses of the British in Baghdad. Private "adventurers" cross into British India "outside her knowledge."
• 1937: the Reich invades the Ottoman Empire. Reissner tells the Politburo the Little War has started and the big one is now a matter of years.
• May–September 1939: Khalkhin Gol. The Japanese Kwantung Army crosses the Mongolian border and is destroyed by Zhukov in four months, the first battle in which Soviet practitioner regiments are used in the open. Japan does not try again.
• August 23, 1939: the Reissner–Ribbentrop Pact. Non-aggression, a trade in grain and oil for machine tools, and a secret protocol dividing not Poland but the world's dig sites: the Reich takes the Abrahamic lands; the Soviet Union takes eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Finland, northern Persia, Mesopotamia east of the Tigris, and all of Central Asia. Reissner signs it to buy time and says so to the Politburo the same evening.
• September 1939: eastern Poland occupied. Cracow's library, which the protocol gave to Germany, is found to have been three-quarters emptied the week before by persons unknown; the Reich blames the Soviets, the Soviets blame the Free Poles, and the Free Poles are not saying.
• November 30, 1939: the Winter War. The Red Army invades Finland, and Finland does not fall. In the spring of 1942 the war is in its third year, the Mannerheim Line has been breached twice and rebuilt twice, and a German "Swedish-Finnish Volunteer Corps" with cryo-gear holds the Karelian flank. Reissner cannot end it without a victory and cannot win it without the divisions she is saving for the Reich.

1940s

• 1940: the Baltic states annexed under the protocol. France falls; Reissner, watching the Wehrmacht's arcane units go through the Maginot Line in newsreels, triples the Night Witches' establishment and orders every Red Army division a practitioner company.
• 1940–1941: the Chinese commitment. The Soviet Union has never relented against Japan; it has simply stopped fighting it directly. Reissner publicly backs the Chinese Communist revolution with weapons, funds, advisers, and, by the autumn of 1941, two "expeditionary" rifle corps in Yan'an. The plan, which she does not hide, is Soviet technology and Chinese manpower: the world's most populous nation, modernized in a decade, as the ally the West will never be.
• April 1941: the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact. A tentative truce on the Mongolian border, signed by both sides to free their hands elsewhere, and broken by proxy in China the following week.
• June 1941: the Reich seizes Kuwait. Soviet expeditions in northern Persia and Mesopotamia are reinforced with regular troops, and Reissner's Mosul dig becomes a Red Army garrison.
• December 1941: Pearl Harbor, and the Pacific Accord two months after. Moscow reads the white peace as the end of any hope that the United States will fight the Reich, and the Japanese truce as proof that Japan is now free to turn north. Reissner tells the Supreme Soviet that the Soviet Union is alone, as it has always been, and that this is the position from which it has won every war it ever fought.
• Spring 1942: now. The Red Army is 9,000,000 strong and growing. The Night Witches are a corps. The Special Requisitions teams are in the Tarim Basin, the Gobi, the Zagros, and the Altai. The Finnish war grinds on. And in Moscow, the General Secretary who was on the Brocken in 1919 is waiting for the man who was there with her to do what she knows he is going to do.