Balkan Century

[The Kiat]

Let me try this again. It's an offshoot of An Alternate History of the Netherlands and as the title suggest, it is about the Balkans. It's about the Balkan Revolution, the Balkan Union and the wars that plagued the Balkans in the later half of the 20th Century. As with much of my writing, the Before/After 1900 isn't so clear. The ultimate PoD to create the world occured before, however all of the action takes place after 1900 and that's why it's in that section.





I) Revolution
(19th Century - 1919)

The Great War (1913-16), the bloodiest war in the history of man, saw the deaths of millions of able bodied men as well as pushed two decrepit empires to their breaking points and beyond. It is highly unlikely the Balkan Revolution would have met with the same level of success had the Austrian and Ottoman Empires not bled themselves white. Both sides lost well over one million soldiers each to the bloodshed and gridlock that was the Balkan Front. The Revolution forever altered the face of Europe, presented the most drastic shift of borders in centuries. Out of the ashes of two decaying empires came the grand experiment in communism.

The causes of the Balkan Revolution were many and spanned the decades preceding the Great War. Chief among the causes was the partition of the Balkan Peninsula and all of its nationalities between the Austrians and Ottoman Turks. Nationalism and Pan-Slavic sentiments alone would have inevitably led towards a round of uprising in the 20th Century to match those that struck both empires in the mid-19th. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the failed rebellions and millions more fled as the Habsburgs and Osmanis enacted a terrible retribution.

In the 1820s, revolution struck at the Spanish Empire. In the course of a year, the Spanish monarchy was abolished and the Iberian Peninsula transformed into a republic, not that different from the petty states of Italy. Liberal revolution spread north of the Pyrenees into France, forcing the Bourbons to flee to Quebec while the short-lived French Republic tried to remake France in Spain’s image. The Republic ultimately reverted to a Constitutional Monarchy on the Dutch and British design, with a new royal family sitting in Versailles.

The first such rebellion attempting to emulate the success of the Spanish Revolution struck in Greece in 1845. For the summer of that year, cities such as Athens and Thebes basked in the glow of liberty. So successful for the initial rebellion that delegates met in Athens to declare their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Their declaration proved to be premature. By October 1845, the Ottoman Army crushed the rebellions, apprehended the leaders and put the city of Thebes to the torch.

A similar rebellion struck Serbia in 1878, with a less lofty goal. They sought for autonomy, the final say in their internal affairs. Their rebellion as less well organized than the Greeks and failed to capture any important city. The small towns the rebels held were quickly recaptured, the rebels executed and towns depopulated either through massacres or forced relocations to distant corners of the empire, namely throughout the Islamic portion of the Ottoman Empire and forcefully converted to Islam.

Several more, smaller bush fires infected the Christian portion of the Ottoman Empire. For three centuries, the bulk of Orthodox Christianity was held under the boot of the Turks. Though some people, namely the Bosniaks and Albanians did convert, the majority clung to their old ways. These people were subject to the Jizya as well as other discriminatory practices. Their sons were subject to conscription into the Ottoman Army and some were seized outright, enslaved by the Sultan and placed in the Turk’s elite corps, the Janissaries.

Austria faced its share of ethnic rebellions. The largest of these occurred in Hungary during the 1860s. From 1861-64, the Austrians and Hungarians waged a protracted war, displacing more than a million Hungarians. The uprisings could not have occurred at a worst time for the Hungarians. After years of negotiation in Vienna, the Emperor was poised to make Hungary a separate kingdom with a Habsburg sitting on its throne. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, as it would have been called, was quickly aborted in the Hungarians’ attempt at full independence.

Following the uprisings, the Ottomans sought to spread uniformity across their empire. Oddly enough, and despite Serbian claims, the Ottomans largely left the Orthodox, and smaller Catholic communities to their own devices. They were still obligated to pay taxes and surrender their sons to the army but they retained their own customs and language. The goal of the reforms was to standardize the set of laws spanning the empire as well as imposing Turkish as the sole official language. Public schools, where they existed, were forbidden to teach in any other language. It was hoped that a common language would unite the various ethnicities into a single whole. Attempts to reform the army were not as successful as the Turkish Army and its various local militias resisted the Sultan’s attempts at change.

North of the Danube, the Austrian Empire found itself even less united than the Turks. Its cohesion was so low that units in the Austrian Army were formed along ethnic lines. Regiments were raised in the provinces and the soldiers within often had more loyalty to the regiment and their homelands than to Vienna. There was no equivalent of the Janissaries in this fractious state. The lack of unity plagued Austrian during the wars of the 19th Century. The problem grew worse when the Great War started.

Outside of German Austria the majority of the empire’s population were impoverished non-Germans, ruined by high taxation rates. In almost all aspects of life, non-German ethnicities were treated decidedly as subject populations subordinate to the ruling race. Only ethnic Germans could acts as civil servants or hold high ranks within the armed forces. Most of the land outside of Austria Proper was owned by German settlers who used the Magyars, Croats and Slovaks as serf labor.

When Marx and Valois first developed their political and economic theory, they predicted revolution would strike in the industrial west. At the time when each lived, the plight of the industrial worker was quite miserable. Over the decades it changed, especially in the Dutch and English speaking words. The working class eventually managed to elevate themselves to the property owning middle-class, especially in the Brazilian Empire, and were less inclined to surrender their hard-earned gains in the cause of worker solidarity.

Though industrialization barely took hold in the Balkans by the turn of the 20th Century, ruthless suppression of the peasantry caused many took look longingly at the doctrine of social and economic equality. Most ethnicities in the Balkans suffered from mass inequality with the plight only marginally more bearable for thus under the Sultan. They at least could act as civil servants within their own communities. The doctrine of equality and a classless society appealed to many people in the Balkans, though it was only widely read in the small cadre of educated middle-class.

During the Great War, these subject populations found themselves forced to take up arms to fight and die for their rulers in Vienna and Constantinople, occasionally against their fellow ethnicities on the opposite side of the Danube. For the first year of the war, the Ottoman Empire sat on the sidelines, watching and waiting. As Austrian and Russo-Sweden fought each other, the Sultan bided his time while his foes weakened each other.

The Turks entered the fry on September 7, 1914, against both combatants, turning the Balkan Front into a three-way struggle with the natives caught in the middle. The peasants under Austrian and Turkish rule were swept up in conscription, fighting in their homeland to decide which foreigner would rule over them. The Serbs suffered the greatest. With populations on both side of the Danube, Serb often fought Serb in the name of Habsburg or Osmani. The suffering was not in vain, for through training and combat, future revolutionaries gained valuable skills.

Austria wasted little time in overrunning much of Serbia by the start of 1915. The Ottoman Empire was poorly equipped and unready for war. Aside from the Janissary Corps, the Turks had little in the way of modern weaponry. A few units, raised in Albania and Macedonia, still used muzzle-loading rifles. Machine guns were few and far between. Most in use by the Turkish Army were captured from the Austrians. As they fought against the Entente and Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire found itself relying upon its own limited industrial base to supply its armies.

Its entry into the Great War was caused by an absolutist ruler who believed his two battered and weakened foes would be easy targets for land grabs. They were far from pushovers, especially the Swedes. Much of the Caucasus ended the war in Russo-Swedish control. The Turks had more success against Austria. The city of Belgrade found itself fought over three times during the war. The Ottomans exploited a Swedish offensive in Galicia, using the diversion to push back to the Danube, retaking a battered Belgrade.

The bloodletting along the Danube did neither empire any good. Yet it proved ultimately beneficial to the future rulers of the Balkans. Like the Spanish Revolution nearly ninety years before, the Balkan Revolution was not formulated by the masses of peasantry but rather by the well-educated middle class. In many of the educated circles, the doctrines of Marx and Valois were all the rage. It was seen as fashionable for a Serb doctor or Slovene lawyer to read Das Kapital. It led many to envision transforming the two empires into a socialist federation of equal.

Some of the nationalities preferred to break away, striking out to re-establish the old ways. They were in the minority. If history taught them anything it was that when Balkan peoples stood alone, they were targets for empires looking for easy conquest. Separate underground societies kept in touch with each other, tracking each others movements as well as planning a joint effort. Dominating most of these societies were Marxists.

 

[The Kiat]

The founding father of the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics was a Serb named Peter Karadordevic. Born in Belgrade on June 29, 1844, into a minor functionary family, Karadordevic actually lived a quality of life far superior to the oppressed peasants. He always slept in a warm bed and never spent a day going hungry in his youth. He knew nothing about the realities of the lives for he claimed to stand up. After a decent education in the Serb school system in Belgrade, he departed the Ottoman Empire for studying abroad.

In 1870, he lived for several years in Paris where he first was introduced to Marx’s doctrine. He cared little for the economics of Marxism. What really peeked his interest was the ideal of a classless society and the political ramifications of Marxism. Equality for all ethnicities was unheard of on either side of the Danube. He was one of many middle class Balkan youths who found themselves enthralled by the idea. Karadordevic spent many nights in Paris coffee houses discussing a world where all ethnicities were equal with his fellow Balkan elite.

After spending three years in France, he soon found himself drafted into the French Army. When the call came to other Balkan students, most found it most convenient to return home. Not Karadordevic. He endured the four year term, serving in various colonial engagements. Though he loathed the French Army, he later credited his time serving in it as an excellent training ground that turned him into a revolutionary leader.

Once released from service, he returned home with the dream of a Serbia were all men were equal. He used the skills learned in the French Army to help organize the 1878 rebellion. He designed the revolutionary army along the lines of the French Army, allowing for advancement for any soldier who showed promise. Karadordevic ended his four year term in the service of France as a noncommissioned officer, a rank earned. He wanted the new Serbian Army to be based on merit, not on one’s social status.

His participation in the 1878 Uprising saw his family striped of its estate and position and himself exiled. He spent twenty-five years exiled, making his home first in Vienna before moving on to Liege, London and ultimately Milan. He eventually returned from exile in 1903, under the alias of Mkronjic, where he founded the Serbian Peoples’ Party. From 1904 to 1916, the Party was outlawed by the ruling Turks, with suspected members facing imprisonment and even the prospect of being sold into slavery. The Turks placed huge bounties on Party leaders, with a one hundred thousand lira on Karadordevic’s head. He eluded capture by retaining his residence in Milan.

Milan proved to be vital for the establishment of the Balkan Union, though it sat in the heart of the Italian Federation. Italy was one of the few places in Europe where Marxism was not outlawed. Marxists from across the continent convened there, discussing and coordinating plans for the world revolution. In 1908, a general congress of Communist Parties, legal and underground, was convened with Italian Marxist, Giovanni Paveli presiding. The congress was host to Balkan revolutionaries such as Karadordevic, Simovic, Trumbric and Venizalis. Despite the claim of equality of ethnicities, much of the early power base of the Balkan Union was a strongly Serbo-Croat affair.

The discussions during the two week long congress ranged from better organization and communication within the Party to the finer details of Marxism and Valoism. The delegates tended to favor Marx’s writings over that of the French socialist. It was a bit of an irony that a German political theorist would be so favored in a congress oddly devoid of Germans. Few people from Northern Europe attended the congress for communism was never as strong in the Germanic regions as it was in the Latin and Balkan south. There were more Arabs attending the congress than Englanders and the only Dutch delegates came from Abyssinia.

In the last week of the congress, Karadordevic proposed a larger apparatus to link all communist parties and organizations into a great whole. Through this International Brotherhood of Workers, it was hoped that the world revolution could be organized. Since 1900, he and other Balkan revolutionaries began to plot out the overthrow of the Ottoman and Austrian regimes. The IBW was seen as a useful tool in coordinating the numerous underground societies. It would build upon what Karadordevic and others had already constructed.

Though the spirit of communism was supposed to be internationalist in nature, there were national organizations that viewed the Serb’s propose with suspicion. They were not ready to surrender their sovereignty to anyone. The most obstructionist of all the opposition were the French communists, who insisted the new world capital be Paris and refused to bow to any foreign influence when it came to all matters French.

With so many revolutionaries in one place at one time, Milan made a tempting target for regimes who would do good by ridding themselves of the pests. Lombardia was one of the few members of the Italian Federation that placed no restrictions on political affiliation. With its sizable industrial base, its regional government had more than a few communists and socialists with seats in their assembly. The Balkan revolutionaries decided not to count on French support when their hour finally arrived.

The Serbian Peoples’ Party was the first of many communist parties and underground societies to align in the IBW. It was quickly followed by Marxist organizations out of Croatia, Bosnia, Bulgaria and Greece. The Lombard Communist Party signed the IBW charter, promising aid both overt and covert to oppressed people anywhere in the world. It came as a relief to Karadordevic as the Ottoman Balkans had a long road of progress to follow before hoping to match the level of industrialization that existed in northern Italy.

Lombardia support did not equate into general Italian support. While Leftist politics enjoyed a moderate amount of success in the industrial north, it was generally shunned in the agrarian, conservative south as well as on Sardinia and Corsica. The Italian Constitution granted the right to its constituent states a degree of autonomy in internal affairs. It did not mean they were liked. At most, the few delegates sent to the National Assembly of any socialist philosophy were tolerated. They represented less than ten percent of the total seats in the assembly. When the Revolution came, Karadordevic expected no help from Italy as a whole. He even expected the reactionaries to attempt to quash the Revolution.

 

[The Kiat]

With the Great War sending millions of young Europeans to an early grave, the IBW began to take action. Their propaganda storm brought more members into their various ranks and sparked anger among the lower classes. It was their goal to open wider the class division across Europe, a division strongest in the Balkans. In some cases, the attempts backfired. Nationalism in Britain, Germany, Poland-Lithuania and Russo-Sweden outweighed any class distinction. The bulk of each nation’s enlisted ranks comprised of society’s lower classes. The IBW thought it was logical to point out that these misfortunate were out fighting and dying for the elite.

That was not how the enlisted man saw it. They viewed the IBW and everything communist as an attack against their way of life. Not many of the men wished to be in the trenches and even fewer had a desire to lay dead, face down in the mud. They fought for their nations because they believed in them. When communist recruiters claimed they were “mystified by the bourgeoisie”, the soldiers took it as an insult, an implication that they were being fooled. Nobody liked to think of themselves as fooled. In truth, they were not. The causes and continuation of the Great War went far beyond ‘industrialists lining their pockets’. It was a concept that eluded native born communists.

The idea that industrialists and arms manufactures pushed corrupt governments to wage war in order to increase the shareholders’ profits did not seem that out of place in the Balkans. The people there were accustomed to corruption in the imperial capitals. Since the start of the war, each non-German and non-Turkish soldiers asked the same question’ why are we fighting? It certainly was not for liberty or their way of life, not like in Northern Europe.

For the Slavs of the Balkans the question was why brother was fighting brother in the name of non-Slavic peoples. The image of the Revolution as a Pan-Slavic device would play into the future of the Balkan Union, its demise and some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th Century, all of this despite large non-Slavic populations within the Union. Revolutionaries struggled to balance internationalism with ethnicity in an effort to not alienate the Greeks or Magyars. Nonetheless, the bulk of the fighting was done by Slavs, starting with the first shots fired on the old border between empires.

By February of 1916, both the Ottoman and Austrian Empires battled to the point of exhaustion. Since its fall in 1914, the Turks made a number of attempts to retake Belgrade, with one such attempt temporarily successful. From late 1915 to the start of 1916, Belgrade was back in Turkish hands, only to have it retaken by the Austrians in a surprise New Years’ offensive. The city’s situation on the Danube River, which served as the natural barrier between the two dilapidated empires, made it contested a number of times in the past. The land around Belgrade was long since hopelessly divided, forcing Serb to fight Serb in the countless wars between Vienna and Constantinople.

With both empires war weary, the leader of the Serbian Peoples’ Party and chairman of the IBW, sensed an opportunity to through out the hated Austrian for good and secure for the “peace-loving peasants and workers” of Serbia their liberty. Karadordevic and his fellow Serb revolutionary, Dusan Simovic spent the last months of 1915, smuggling arm and caching ammunition in the neighborhoods of Belgrade. For every one of these depots discovered four more remained undetected.

The two revolutionaries hastily organized the Serbian Workers’ Liberation Army, with several thousand veteran soldiers in each division. These soldiers learned the art of war while in service of either the Ottomans or Austrians. A bulk of the fighters deserted from the Ottoman Army while others were escaped captives from both side’s POW camps. They were battle-hardened and determined to win back their ancient homeland.

On February 12, 1916, the first blow of the Balkan Revolution struck in the Darcal neighborhood, when a company led by Gravilo Princip launched a grenade attack on Austrian Field Marshall Okar Potiorek, killing him and the other occupants of his staff car. The explosion was a single to the rest of the SWLA to stark the attack. Within an hour, bombs struck at barracks, Austrian patrols and the post office, killing the Post Master and much of his staff.

During the first hours of utter confusion, Simovic led his division of seven thousand in a direct assault on the Austrian 3rd Army’s headquarters. The Austrians, taken by surprise and in disarray, put up a valiant fight, trading casualty for casualty. Being understaffed, the HQ inevitably lost the game of numbers, falling to Simovic after two hours of fighting. Those Austrians not killed in the conquest of the centuries old Belgrade Fortress. Immediately after capturing the building, Simovic ordered the execution of all Austrian survivors.

In three days of fighting, the SWLA drove the Austrians out of Belgrade, liberating the city for the first time since the Ottomans conquered it in 1521. February 15, saw the beginnings of what the Balkan Union would call revolutionary justice. Any person in Belgrade suspecting of collaborating with the Austrians faced summary execution. In some estimates, more than five thousand Serbs were victims of this justice during the few days Belgrade remained free.

The revolutionary army quickly degraded into an uncontrollable mob as centuries of anger and resentment boiled to the surface of the otherwise disciplined units. They attacked any institution, business or even building that represented the old order of Sultans and Habsburgs. The biggest loss in that week of February was the Ottoman built University of Belgrade. The university was razed, its libraries burned and its professors executed as collaborators and traitors.

Karadordevic struggled to rein in the anger. He knew that Belgrade’s free status remained much in dispute. They drove the Austrians out but for how long? As mob justice ruled, the Austrians regrouped. For a short time, the leader of the Revolution had serious doubts as to whether or not he would succeed. He had no doubt Austria and the Turks were destined for the ash heap of history. He did have doubts to whether or not he would be the man to consign them.

After hearing of the uprising and the assassination of one of the army’s field marshals, Austrian General Chief of Staff Count Franz Conrad von Hözendorf released reserves from the Balkan Front for immediate redeployment to Belgrade. By February 20, fifty thousand Austrian soldiers, including Croat, Slovak and Bosniak units, had the city encircled. After a brief siege that further reduced the city on the Danube to ruins, the Austrians stormed Belgrade.

Knowing immediately that holding off the attack was impossible, Karadordevic ordered the SWLA to scatter, continuing the struggle from the countryside. Of the estimated thirteen thousand revolutionaries on three thousand two hundred twelve are known to have escaped. The tow leaders of the uprising were among those to reach safety. Simovic escaped across the border into Sarejavo while Karadordevic escaped across the rather porous front lines, smuggled in a coffin, down the Danube towards Sofia. It was from these two cities that revolutionary flamed were fanned.

 

[The Kiat]

The seeds of two, more successful, uprisings germinated on March 15. When Karadordevic and Simovic reached their respected destinations, they contacted local organizations affiliated with the IBW. These units were supposed to be poised to strike one Belgrade was free. In Sofia, no news of the uprising ever reached them while in Sarejavo, Bosniak and Croat leaders argued over who should have over all command. By the time the pieces were all in place, the Belgrade Uprising was totally crushed.

Two days before, on March 13, Karadordevic contacted the leader of the Bulgarian Peoples’ Army, Honza Bohatec, ordering the uprising to commence immediately. Bohatec was one of the many revolutionaries who attended the Milan Congress and one of the few who remained in his home country. He resented Karadordevic entering his country and ordering him about, especially since the IBW Chairman spent much of his life safely abroad and just fled the fighting in Belgrade.

Simovic had better luck with his counterparts in Bosnia. Though he was immediately looked on with suspicion by the Bosniak revolutionaries, the Serbs and Croats generally welcomed him and cooperated. They were as eager as he to see the hated Habsburgs destroyed. Almost as eager as they were for their comrades in the Austrian Army to join them. Local cells were not the only institutions infiltrated by the IBW. Junior officers of the various ethnic units within both Imperial Armies were members of the IBW and their respected national communist parties. For more than a year, they plotted and organized mutinies and uprisings from within the enemy armies.

In the early hours of March 15, the Bulgarian Peoples’ Army and Bosnian Liberation Front, led by Bosniak Ahmed Cihlar, launched attacks against the garrisons of Sarejavo and Sofia. The Turkish garrison in Sofia, manned by older Turkish soldiers and less reliable subject minorities, was quickly overran. Their fall resulted from the attack from within rather than the prowess of the Bulgarians. During the brief battle, the Albanian contingent of the garrison switched sides, eagerly turning their weapons on their co-religionist and long-time overlords.

The stunning success for the Sofia Uprising was a signal to other revolutionaries to rise up against the Turks. A number of smaller rebellions swept across Bulgaria and across the provincial border into Wallachia. In many towns, the Turks were taken completely off guard. The Sultan’s security apparatus knew about the IBW, though not its extent. The order to push back against the rebels was slow in coming as none in the Ottoman Court wished to tell the Sultan, a man given to arbitrary rages, the bad news.

In the streets of major towns in both provinces, Ottoman governors and mayors were victims of revolutionary justice, as well virtually all civil servants. The only bureaucrats immune from death were those who were secret Marxists, plants used to keep the IBW informed of the machinations within the Ottoman government. Such spies were not readily available in the Austrian Empire. The Habsburgs never fully trusted any of its subject nationalities, leaving the civil service open exclusively to ethnic Germans.

It came as no surprise, after the fall of Sarejavo, that thousands of city officials were put to death. Karadordevic used the hatred of Bosnia’s multi-ethnic population towards the German speakers as a tool to keep control. He feared that without an outside threat, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks might turn on each other and bring the Revolution in Bosnia crashing in flames. His experiences in Bosnia convinced him that a strong-arm policy would be necessary if the dictatorship of the proletariat was to survive. Even the slightest glimmer of nationalism must be crushed if the planned world revolution was to succeed.

The BLF struck out from Sarejavo, attacking the Austrian fortification in Zenica and Tuzla. Tuzla faced the same fate as Sofia, falling from within when Croat and Magyar units mutinied. The battle was short and nearly bloodless, with the Austrian colonel surrendering without much resistance. The two mutinying units argued over the fate of their prisoners. Croat Major Ciril Braut wanted to execute them immediately, while Magyar Major Artúr János wished to keep them hostage in the event it became necessary to barter their escape.

The prisoners remained alive until the BLF arrived in the city. Once on sight, Cihlar gave the order to execute them, an order immediately countermanded by Karadordevic. He saw the wisdom in keeping them alive, though not as hostages. He wanted to indoctrinate them into Marxism and eventually use them as administrators in Austria Proper. A few from the lower ranks took to Marxism while the highest ranking officers resisted. Those who resisted, instead of being shot would be used as forced labor after the revolution.

 

[The Kiat]

By March 19, the lower Danube was completely under the control of the Revolutionaries. The BPA and Wallachian Liberation Army turned west to challenge the Ottoman Army based at Servein, near the Wallachian-Serbian border. Though the Ottomans were in bad shape after years of fighting, the Revolutionaries were not as well armed as they would like. They lacked the armored vehicles and artillery required by modern warfare. They received artillery only after a Wallachian regiment mutinied and turned Turkish guns against Turkish soldiers.

The Ottoman Army found itself trapped between two hostile forces at Servein. As their casualties mounted, their pocket shrank. It shrank still further when not-Turkish soldiers turned on their officers, refusing to take up arms against their fellow nationals. The losses for the Ottoman Army in the city were near absolute. Between defection and capture, only a handful of Turks managed to escape. The mutineers were welcomed into the growing ranks of the BPA and WLA. Unable to spare the soldiers that would rob the Revolution of its growing momentum, Simovic ordered the captive Turks put the sword.

Attempts by the Austrian Army to exploit the uprisings fell flat when Bosnia exploded into flames. The Austrian General Staff could see no quick way to put down the rebellion. They feared, and justly so, that any non-German units that invaded Bosnia would switch sides once they made contact with the rebels. With Russo-Sweden and Poland-Lithuania in the east, Austria could not afford to spare any German reserves to retake Bosnia. The moment word of the uprising reached Entente lines, the Swedes would be quick to exploit it.

The Austrian Foreign Minister contacted the Italian Federation, an Austrian ally, asking for aid against the rebels. In the west, the relatively short border with France gave Italy a large reserve pool than stretched thin Austria. As allies, it would be logical to conclude Italy would be more than willing to send what soldiers it could spare to prop up Vienna. Not so. The Italian government turned the request into protracted negotiations concerning the concessions along the Dalmatian Coast as well as returning Irredeemed Italy to its rightful owner.

On March 21, in Sofia and Bucharest Revolutionaries declared independence from the Ottoman Empire, establishing the Bulgarian and the Wallachian Peoples’ Republics. On the following day, the fractious Bosnia declared independence, forming the provisional government of the Bosnian Socialist Republic. The three states wasted no time in signing a formal alliance and launching a joint invasion of Serbia. By now, the Revolutionaries had fallen back on backup plans. These were nowhere near as well designed as the initial plans for the Revolution, plans that were in development as early back as 1910.

The reaction of Constantinople was swift. In the Sultan’s mind, there was no doubt that this rebellion was caused by traitorous elements within his armies. He was right, for the IBW invested a great effort into infiltrating enemy armies and organizing the plans for mutinies and rebellions. He declared the Bulgarian and ‘Romanian’ elements in his army were no longer reliable and should be swiftly cashiered. The bravest of his generals dared to suggest such a plan would leave the Ottoman Army weakened as the two groups consisted of more than a quarter of a million soldiers.

Once Wallachia declared independence, Wallachian soldiers in the Ottoman Army mutinied and deserted en masse. A few of them served in armored units and managed to take control of a number of tanks and armored cars. The armored cars escaped with greater success than the tanks. With a speed no faster than a soldier on the march, the defecting tanks were easy enough targets for the Ottoman Air Force.

The Wallachian, Bulgarian, Croat, Serb and Bosniak elements of the Ottoman and Austrian Armies trapped in Serbia turned on their old masters with revolutionary zeal. The defection was not total as the IBW was unable to infiltrated every unit in either army. Those Bosniak and Croat units that lacked IBW approved officers threw their lot in with their nationalities rather than protect the Austrians. The mutinies did more than liberate Serbia. They also liberated a great deal of enemies arms in the form of much needed artillery pieces.

While fighting raged in Serbia, Ante Trumbric busied himself in neighboring Croatia. The leader of the Croatian Liberation Army kept a lower profile during March than his fellow attendees to the Milan Congress. His actions were more covert, acting as a middleman for weapons smuggled in from northern Italy. Even with Italy and Austria as nominal allies, getting machine guns across the border during time of war proved much more difficult. It helped that Trumbric was a colonel in the Austrian Army and the commanding officer of the 14th Croat Guard.

He lived a far more luxurious life than his fellow Croats. Never once did he labor on the land for the Austrians. In fact, a few Croats labored on Trumbric’s land. Though he could never exceed the rank of Colonel, that rank brought with him privileges and wealth. For years of service, he was rewarded with land grants, including a villa along the Adriatic Coast. He used this villa as safe harbor for smugglers and for revolutionaries who sought easy ways in and out of the Austrian Empire.

When Bosnia declared independence, Trumbric saw it as a sign for his division to switch sides. The original plan called for Croat and Bosniak units to rise up as soon as Serbia declared independence. As Serb dreams were temporary crushed, he was uncertain how to react. At first he thought all those years of planning had just went up in smoke. It was only when Karadordevic appeared in Bosnia did he learn of the back up plan.

With Bosnia now free, the 14th Croat Guard abandoned its part of the line near Montenegro and marched on Croatia. Along with thousands of soldiers and machine guns as well as hundreds of artillery pieces, Trumbric brought to the Revolution’s cause a squadron of Croat piloted Petrel D. IVs into the fight. The CLA’s air corp did not prove as useful as Trumbric hoped. Despite the many post-revolution propaganda films lionizing the actions of the flying revolutionaries, the squadron spent much of the Revolution on the ground.

While ethnic units were defecting and mutinying in piece meal, on April 12, Greek Revolutionary Constatine Venizalis gave the order to start a mass uprising more than two years in the planning. It called not for regiments or divisions but rather the entire Greek contingent of the Ottoman Armed Forces to rise up against the Turks. More than two hundred thousand soldiers and a hundred thousand sailors comprised the Greek-speaking part of the Ottoman war machine. In those two years of planning, every unit was infiltrated, each promising revolutionary spotted and all reactionary forces identified for later disposal.

While all Greeks longed for freedom, only a fraction believed in the Revolution. The majority sought only to regain their long lost liberty. There was even a small cadre that called for the restoration of the Byzantium Empire. These individuals were watched carefully, their liquidation planned as soon as their usefulness to the Revolution ceased. Assuming they survived that long. The less politically reliable were often placed at the tip of the spear, insuring they took the greatest casualties.

In the first half of April, Revolutionaries in Athens, Thessalonika and Constantinople rose up, forcing the Turks out of the cities. Athens was easily taken as few Turks lived there. Thessalonika put up more resistance, falling after a few days of fighting. Constantinople fell only after two week of brutal street fighting that saw entire city blocks leveled and tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides face down in the street. Ultimately, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, fell to the Revolutionaries, forcing the Sultan across the Bosporus. The common foot soldier considered the Greek Liberation a resounding victory. The peers of Venizalis were not so generous in their assessment. Capturing the Sultan would have been an unmatched propaganda coup.

Soon after the stunning and swift victory, outmatched only by a few instances in history, the Greeks once again declared themselves an independent people. The Revolutionaries established the Hellenistic Socialist Republic with Venizalis as their Premier. Greece joined the growing alliance in the Balkans. The action did little more than secure the southern flank of the Balkans. As soon as the Turkish Army was defeated in Greece, the Greeks wasted no time in riding the Balkans of its largest concentration of ethnic Turks.

Assisted by the Bulgarian allies, the Greeks began a three year blood letting that has since become known as the Turkish Genocide. It is of some debate among historians as to the true goal of the ethnic cleansing. The ultimate goal was to cleanse Greece of all Turks but whether or not that meant deport them or kill them is not as clear. Venizalis left his soldiers with a simple order; get rid of the Turks. Local commanders interpreted the command differently.

In the Peloponnese, ethnic Turks were round up, put on boats and ordered to sail to Anatolia and not look back. In Thrace, matters were different. The episode was to become known as Bloody Thrace, a three year period that saw the death of over a hundred thousand Turks and the removal of the survivors. In Constantinople alone, twenty thousand Turks were killed in the first month of Greek independence.

Bulgarian Turks were not shown the same level of ruthlessness as their Greek counterparts. The Bulgarian government gave them two weeks to vacate the lands claimed by Bulgaria. Most took to the Black Sea, clogging it with refugee traffic, in hopes of reaching Anatolia. Most of them arrived though not without incident. Greek torpedo boats dove into the mass of refugees, attacking and sinking dozens of freighters crammed full of human cargo. They were the lucky ones for no matter how many ships the Greeks sank, twenty more escaped to safety. Those Turks who tried to flee from Bulgaria into Thrace encountered Greek mobs.

In the Ottoman Navy, Greek officers and sailors seized control of a number of warships, including the battleship Sultan Selim (renamed Leonidas). Ottoman loyalists, under the command of Turkish Grand Admiral Musha Seydi Ali moved to intercept the mutineers at their assembly point off Rhodes. They journey was not without incident. The Ottoman Navy was made of all subject nationalities, however the Greeks formed a disproportionally large fraction of the navy. Ali ordered the ships under his command purged of any revolutionaries. This often meant of all Greeks, leaving each ship undermanned. Unfortunately for the Grand Admiral, he neglected to keep his eyes on other nationalities.

Under the command of self-proclaimed Admiral Pavlos Konstantinos, a secret member of the Greek Communist Party, two Revolutionary battleships, four cruisers and an escort of seven destroys engaged a much larger Loyalist fleet. Ali raised the signal flags over his fleet, calling for the rebels to surrender. All who complied would be shown mercy while those who resisted would be shown no quarter. Konstantinos was a student of ancient history, and when the Ottoman fleet demanded he surrender his ships he could not resist the Laconic reply “Com and take them”.

Konstantinos credited the defection of several ships during the fight for his victory. The key to defeating the Turks came when the Crimean executive officer of the Turgut Reis seized control of the battlecruiser during the fight. With the aid of Crimean, Bulgarian and even Arab sailors, he turned the ship’s two hundred fifty millimeter guns on Ali’s flagship, killing the admiral and effectively shattering the organization of the Ottoman fleet. The IBW played the battle as a tremendous victory. Navies around the world saw it more of a fluke, one that would not be repeated. After news of the disaster reached the Sultan, he ordered his ships to remain in port while their ranks were purged.

 

[The Kiat]

By May 1, the armies of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires were in an advanced state of decay. Their reserves were all but depleted and soldiers pulled away from the front line to combat the uprisings. The Russo-Swedish Empire held back its forces, uncertain how to react. With the Slavic flavor the uprisings, there was some concern the Revolution might spread to Sweden’s Slavic populations, namely the Russians. Instead of advancing unchecked into enemy lands, they consolidated their gains in Moldova and Crimea while moving up reinforcements.

The Russo-Swedish Army found itself engaging not only Austrian and Ottoman units stranded in their respective territories, but Revolutionary armies as well. The Wallachian and Transylvania armies crossed into Moldova to aid their fellow Romanians against ‘imperial aggression’. Bulgarian and a few Greek soldiers landed in Crimea. Their goal was not only to keep the peninsula out of Swedish hands but to force Crimea into the revolutionary pocket.

The Crimean Tartars were lukewarm at best when it came to revolutionary zeal. They sought to gain independence for themselves and nobody else. Of all the future members of the Balkan Union, the IBW had the lowest holding in Crimea. As Muslims they were not subject to the same discrimination as other Balkan nationalities. They were devout in their religion and had no room for an institution that actively sought to suppress faith. A few naval officers aside, the Crimeans aided the Revolution very little.

Austria Proper entered a state of crisis on May 4, when a combined force of the Hungarian Revolutionary Army and the CLA crossed the frontier. Two events prevented Vienna from falling to the Revolutionaries. One was the fact that discipline within the Magyar and Croat national armies proved poor. Soldiers took to pillaging towns and seeking revenge upon ethnic Germans for centuries of oppression. They never marched within the fabled walls of Vienna. Even had they managed to maintain order, the would have faced the second factor.

The Kaiser saw the writing on the wall and quickly ordered units from the German Army to occupy German Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, as well as prevent this revolution from spreading into Bavaria. At this point in history, there was no plans for reconquering the Austrian Empire. Instead, the Germans sought to contain the growing rot in the southeastern corner of Europe and protect ethnic Germans from the oncoming horde. German forces clashed with Croats under the command of Ivan Mestrovic, just across the Slovene border.

Mestrovic was born in Split in 1883, to a middle class family of shopkeepers. He had little talent for the family business. Instead, he spent much of his early years dabbling in art. He manage to make a brief career out of sculpting. It all ended in 1905, when Mestrovic found himself conscripted into the Austrian Army. Like so many Croats, he resented serving masters in distant Vienna, though he would not have minded studying at one of the city’s prestigious art academies.

It was while serving in the army that he met Ante Trumbric. From him, he learned of the teaching of Marx and grew excited about the idea of a classless world. Mestrovic was a latecomer to the Revolution. He was one of the few future leaders of the Balkan Union to not have attended the Milan Congress. Even as his zeal grew stronger during the course of the Great War, the Party’s old guard always looked on him with suspicion. They grew alarmed as his influence increased and he attracted more and more followers.

When the Revolution arrived, Mestrovic found himself thrust into a position of authority. It was not a position he sought, though once he had a taste of power he refused to let go. What made him dangerous was that he was a power-hungry man who excelled at his job. He was not so much a brilliant tactician as a leader of men. He led by example and his fellow Croats never hesitated to follow him into battle. He also had sense enough to listen his inferiors in ranks. He was no so wrapped up in ideology that he forgot about the peasants and workers the IBW claimed to represent.

With charisma to lead and sense to listen, Mestrovic gained the reputation as the greatest of the Revolutionaries, much to the anger of the old guard. Karadordevic frowned upon the adulation. He knew Mestrovic was a potentially dangerous man yet left him in place for the time being. He was more useful alive, leading the Revolution than dead. The chairman briefly reconsidered his previous position when Mestrovic held off a German assault against Croat-occupied Graz. Mestrovic captured enough of the previous Austrian defenders’ weapons to turn back a division of the Kaiser’s infantry. For the time being, German advances south were at an end.

 

[The Kiat]

By July, the situation on both sides of the Danube was utter chaos. No longer did the Ottomans or Austrian have an army to call their own. Surviving units within their respective armies abandoned the front line, retreating to defend their homelands from the spreading Revolution. The Turks had further problems along their eastern and southern border when Arabs, Kurds and Armenians took advantage of the bloodshed in the Balkans to break away from the Ottomans. Their actions forced the Ottomans to all but abandon their holdings in Europe.

The HRA, under the command of Revolutionary Zoltan Tildy, stepped beyond the Balkans, making incursions into Poland-Lithuania, against the wishes of the IBW. Tildy was eager to jump start the global revolution, even if such a feat remained beyond his ability. The IBW reined him in and sent Tildy and part of his HRA southwards into Macedonia to confront the last Turkish holdout in Europe. It was there, the Ottoman Empire received the final nail in its coffin.

The only ethnically Slavs not to desert the Turks were those soldiers who were taken as young boys and given over to the Janissaries. They were the Sultan’s elite, the shock troops of the Ottoman Empire. Where normal soldiers failed, the Janissaries were sent in to rectify the problem. At least that was their status before the machine gun and poison gas changed the nature of warfare. They remained a formidable foe, holding off Revolutionaries armies for more than a month.

They made their final stand at Skopje on July 28. After a week of fighting block-to-block and occasionally room-to-room, the surviving Janissaries held up in Skopje Fortress. The Revolutionaries imposed a savage two hour long bombardment of the ancient Byzantium fortress, breaching its walls and storming the fortress shortly after sunrise. Quarter was neither asked or offered and the Janissaries fought to the last man, taking many Revolutionaries with them. Even the wounded Janissaries did their best to fight back only to be in turned bayoneted in their beds. When the last of them fell, the Ottoman Empire effectively ceased to exist.

On August 2, German, Swedish and Polish delegates agreed on a cease-fire to in order to combat potential revolutions within their own borders. Austria ceased to exist by the start of the month, it’s finality formally recognized by the Treaty of Versailles, permitting the Germans to annex the lands they occupied. With the signing of the treaty, a momentous event that no Balkan leader attended, Croat soldiers retreated into their own borders to fight any remaining Austrian holdout. Once those were defeated, Croat and Serb began to turn their weapons on each other.

The Balkan Revolution precipitated the end of the Great War by forcing combatants to look within for possible traitors, yet they did not enjoy the peace. Long forgotten feuds began to return to the surface as various factions fought for control of their countries. The Marxists were willing enough to join forces with other factions when a common enemy existed. They refused to share power or allow the peace to arrive until they were firmly in control.

 

[The Kiat]

II) Unity
(1916-1940)
Destroying the two great and old empires was only half the battle. Once the enemy without was defeated, the IBW turned its attention towards the enemy within. Before 1916 ended, more than half of the newly independent Balkan states were locked in brutal civil wars. As the center of the growing communist order, Serbia enjoyed a degree of stability the rest of the region would not experience for years to come. Behind Serbia in terms of stability was Macedonia, Wallachia and Bulgaria. Albania, Moldova, Montenegro and Slovakia enjoyed moderate stability.

The worst off state was, unsurprisingly, Bosnia. The Bosnian Socialist Republic was home to three feuding ethnicities, the Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks. Feuds between these three people ran deep. Karadordevic, as a Serb, knew it would take more than workers’ solidarity to bring peace to Bosnia. It would take overwhelming force. The obvious move would be for the SWLA and the CLA to invade Bosnia and forcefully separate the feuding sides. Afterwards, if there was an afterwards, a system must be installed to prevent nationalistic tendencies of the three peoples from rising again.

The later half would be enacted eventually. As for the former, Karadordevic and Trumbric both agreed that if Croat and Serb armies invaded Bosnia it would be like throwing petrol on a fire. Instead, the IBW tapped the Macedonian Peoples’ Army and the BPA to move in an act as “peacekeepers”. Neither Macedonian or Bulgarian had stake in taking sides in the feud, whereas Croat and Serb might. The two armies entered Bosnia from the south and east and preceded to crack skulls.

Before they could keep the peace, they had to establish the peace. Sixty thousand soldiers entered the war zone in January 1917, encountering the first Serb Nationalists on the morning after a snowstorm made the roads out of Trebinje neigh impassable. The Nationalists offered stiff resistance, not hesitating to fire upon the invaders. The handful of loyal communists in the city, both Serb and Bosniak, flocked to the MPA’s banner. Their added strength helped tip the balance in favor of the Macedonians, who used weapons ranging from a two hundred millimeter railroad gun to four engine bombers in their battle against the reactionaries. The latter proved worse than useless as it dropped its payload on Macedonian lines.

Once the city was in Macedonian hands, the surviving reactionaries were put to labor in clearing the roads. Trumbric wanted to have all of them executed outright but the hand of Karadordevic stayed him. The chairman believed it a waste to kill the prisoners outright. Better to make an attempt of rehabilitation through corrective labor first. Who knows, they might eventually turn out to be good communists. They were the first of many victims of the Balkan Union’s system of forced labor.

Civil war in Bosnia raged on for two years. Each side was not content to simply seize all of the country for their own. For each town captured, the conquering army butchered a percentage of the population. While not quite medieval in their conquests, they still appalled the civilized world. Or rather the parts of the civilized world interested in the Balkans. After three years of bloody warfare, nobody was willing to step into the void created when Austria and the Turks fell to impose order upon a chaotic situation.

The Serbs in Bosnia petitioned Serbia for annexation, an offer that was instantly rejected by the Serbian Premier, who also happened to be the chairman on the IBW. Karadordevic would not see Bosnia partitioned. It would enter in union with all communists states as a whole. Its capital was another matter. Sarejavo remained contested throughout 1917, with one side or another laying siege to the city. During the first week of June, all three arms shelled various quarters of the city. By the time the Bulgarians arrived in the city, its defenses were all but destroyed and the three warring factions at near starvation level.

After Bosnia was subjugated and law restored, a great many of the nationalist militiamen joined the growing ranks of forced labor. It was fitting that the men who wrecked Bosnia were now tasked with cleaning up their mess. Not all of the fighters were sent to labor camps. For once, Karadordevic listened to Mestrovic and put the ringleaders on all three sides to death. He suggested the creation of a permanent security force, one that can stamp out the fires of nationalism while they were nothing more than sparks.

 

[The Kiat]

The civil war in Greece (1916-18) had little to do with warring ethnicities. All the combatants fighting in Boeotia were Greeks. Those along the northern front served the HSR while those fighting out of the Peloponnese and Boeotia were dubbed reactionary forces by the IBW. They ranged from Republicans along the Spanish model to Royalists who sought to restore the Crown of Constantinople. When the SWLA was sent into Greece to aid the Socialist Republic, the Royalists and Republicans were in a temporary alliance.

To them, the specter of communism was the greater enemy. After all, Republics and Monarchies could always come to an accommodation. Constitutional Monarchies rose from such compromises. They made additional inroads into Thrace while fighting in Boeotia, adding to the bloodshed known as Bloody Thrace. The Royalists were very interested in retaking the old imperial capital, currently under the governorship of the revolutionary commander Konstantinos and his fleet.

Athens fell to the Republicans on September 19, 1917. No sooner than they had the city under their control than did they proclaim the Hellenistic Republic, much to the ire of their Royalist allies. The Spanish Republic wasted no time in recognizing the new government. The recently established Republic of Poland-Lithuania followed four days later. The HSR feared that Spain would soon openly intervene in the civil war. Venizalis pushed for the Bulgarians to join his fighters in a mad dash through Boeotia towards Athens.

The fighting was every bit as intense as the Great War’s Western Front, albeit on a smaller scale. Desperate to take Athens, Venizalis resorted to launching human waves against the Republican strong points. They managed to break through their foe’s positions at a predictably high price. With so many dead, Karadordevic was forced to send Trumbric and the Croatian Army to replace the fallen Greek revolutionaries.

Athens fell by the end of October, though not before Spain managed to supply the Republicans with a great deal of weapons. Among the arms captured were machine guns, artillery pieces, ammunition and two squadrons of French made bombers. Venizalis put these weapons to good use, turning them on Republicans holding out in the Peloponnese. It took the better part of a year before the last of them were pushed into the sea and not until late 1919, after the civil war nominally ended, to root them out of the Ionian Islands.

In Thrace, the massacre of Turks continued, prompting the now insane Sultan to declare a jihad against the communists. Thousands of Turkish jihadis, joined by Arabs and Persians, crossed the sea and stormed the beaches of Thrace. Their attack lacked any coordination or deep planning. Most of the jihad consisted of Turks finding any Greeks and putting them to the sword. Most of their victims were Royalists or Greeks with Royalist Sympathy.

Venizalis wanted nothing more than to rush his forces into Thrace to aid Konstantinos, who was trapped in Constantinople. Only his fleet kept the Turks at bay. His reckless behavior was checked by Trumbric and Simovic. The commander of the Bulgarian Army insisted that they allow the Royalists and jihadis to kill each other off. What better way to secure victory than to have your enemies destroy each other?

Instead, the three generals broke up. Trumbric marched north to battle reactionaries in Epirus and southern Albania while Venizalis fumed in the Peloponnese, taking out his frustrations on Royalists and Republican hold outs. Simovic moved the Bulgarians back to Bulgaria, placing them on the southern border of the BRP, where he was joined by twenty thousand Wallachian soldiers. He spent the winter of 1917-18 planning a spring offensive. He believed both enemies should be greatly weakened by April.

What he failed to take into account was a continuous stream of Muslims across the Aegean. With the Greek Navy bottled up in Constantinople and Konstantinos refusing to release them until his besieged city was safe, the jihadis had little trouble reaching Thrace. The few Greek torpedo boats sank any freighter they encountered. Captured ships from the former Austrian Navy were slow to make their way out of the Adriatic. The jihad as not the only problem to plague the Aegean. Pirates appeared in the mist of lawlessness, preying on the few cargo ships rash enough to enter the war zone.

Thrace fell to the Revolutionaries in May 1918, effectively bringing the conflict in eastern Greece to an end. Once safe, the Greek Navy left port and attacked any vessel leaving Anatolia. It nearly precipitated a war with France when a French freighter was sunk off the coast of Rhodes. The French Navy deployed a cruiser squadron to the sea to protect its maritime assets. French intervention did aid the Revolution to an extent. They never engaged the Greek Navy but they were more than ready to combat pirates and burn pirate dens. They briefly occupied Crete, using it as a base against the pirates.

The two Greek revolutionary leaders began to worry that France might not leave Crete once their mission was accomplished. With the HSR nearly broke and warn down by civil war, they were not in the position to oust the occupiers if France had intent to keep the island. They began to realize that fighting amongst themselves did nothing but leave them weak for the vultures circling overhead. Konstantinos planned a blockade of the island, though he knew his small navy would stand little chance if France threw its total naval weight at him.

 

[The Kiat]

The war in Transylvania created a deep rift between two Balkan nationalities. The Magyars and Romanians calling the new peoples’ republic home could not come to an arrangement when it came to sharing power. The Magyars claimed Transylvania as part of Hungary from when they were under Austrian rule. The Romanians claimed it as their own since it lay in Romania’s “cultural sphere”. There term was vague as there was no Romania. The Romanian people remained divided into three republics; Transylvania, Moldova and Wallachia. By the time Transylvania erupted into civil war, there had been no attempt to politically unify the states.

The Transylvanian Civil War saw a great deal of outsiders in the conflict. The Hungarian Army supported the Magyars that lived there for centuries while the Moldovan Army lent its strength to prop up the faltering Transylvanian Army. In 1917, the Serbian Army arrived and placed itself between the two warring parties. Unable to fight each other, the Magyars and Romanians entered negotiations. On August 8, 1916, they hammered out a treaty partitioning Transylvania. Hungary would annex the predominately Magyar western third of Transylvania while the rest would remain under the rule of the Peoples’ Republic of Transylvania.

The treaty was rejected by the IBW. Karadordevic refused to have any of the new states partitioned. As with Bosnia, he refused to accept lands divided among ethnic lines. His refusal caused the civil war to continue, despite Serbian peacekeepers, until 1919. More than half of the Magyar population left Transylvania, settling in the more accepting land of their cousins in Hungary. Or so they believed; the arrive of hundreds of thousands of refugees through the Hungarian economy into a tailspin.

What finally ended the civil war was not a new peace treaty or reconciliation between warring parties. What ended it was Italy. The threat of violence continued into 1919, when the Italian Federation invaded the Peoples’ Republic of Slovenia, crushing the Slovenes and annexing the state. For Italy it was a buffer zone between itself and the communist menace. For the Balkans, it was seen as a grand betrayal. The IBW had considered Lombardia to be a friend and supplier of weapons from an otherwise blockading outside world.

When protests in Milan turned into riots, the Italian Army marched into Lombardia with intent of rooting out communist elements. Under their constitution, the central government had no right to interfere with internal politics of any of its provinces. However, the army was allowed to take extraordinary measures during martial law to preserve the peace. Using the riot as an excuse, they crushed the communists of Milan, sending many into exile. Paveli narrowly escaped arrest, fleeing first to Split and then to Belgrade.

It did not take long for the factious Balkans to realize their vulnerability. French occupation of Crete and the Italian annexation of Slovenia were just the beginning. If they did not put aside their differences and crush dissidents, they would soon find themselves picked off one by one by outside powers. Only united would they be able to stand against larger powers. Thus, at the end of 1919, Karadordevic sent out invitations to all of the republics to meet in Belgrade in early 1920 to work out a greater union of communist states to stand the reactionary tide.

 

[The Kiat]

During March and April of 1920, Belgrade hosted a convention of leaders from across the Balkans. The congress took place in the Cathedral of Saint Sava, renovated for just such an occasion. Presiding over the congress was the man who started the Revolution; Peter Karadordevic. Rapidly approaching eighty years of age, he was far from a young and vital man. The struggle to keep the Balkans from breaking down into complete anarchy further taxed his health. It was through sheer force of personality that he prevailed, living to see the Congress of Belgrade.

Even with the threat of outside invasion, the Balkan republics could not come to a consensus on what the Balkans should look like. Some factions, loosely populated with nationalists, wanted a loose confederation, or even an alliance. The IBW instantly saw the flaw in any alliance; members could repudiate it whenever it was most convenient. Most convenient was often when a neighbor faced an overwhelming and unstoppable invasion.

Karadordevic has his own ideas. He wanted to see full political unification of the Balkans into a federation of communist states bound together by a strong central government. In effect, he wished to create a hated empire to rule over them all under the guise of world communism. He had hoped the Balkan Union would act as the core of a world government, an achievement he knew he would never see.

His staunchest ally in the congress was the Croat Ante Trumbric. Near the end of the congress, he gave an impassioned speech that clearly outlined the fate of the IBW if they did not unite; the would live together or they would die separately. To illustrate the point, he brought to the podium a bundle of sticks. He pulled one free and snapped it with ease. He tried again with the thick bundle without success. They were stronger together than apart.

Furthermore he was a Croat and Karadordevic was a Serb. After the violence in Bosnia, if a Croat and Serb could put their historical differences aside in the cause of the progress of man, then any nationality in the Balkans could. It was his word and support that pushed a two-thirds majority in favor of union. The dissenting one-third, Trumbric assigned to his popular ally Mestrovic for tallying. If they dissented now, they would do so again in the future and he wanted to be prepared to deal with them.

On May 1, 1920, the delegates signed the Articles of Federation, a document that forged a union between the Balkan states. It should be noted that there was no effort to ratify the Articles on a national level. With each member under the firm control of their communists, and the local Party under the control of the IBW, the matter was decided without the legal technicalities that most nations would find uncomfortable. Whether the people liked it or not, they were now part of the Union of Balkan Socialists Republics.

A few members were absent at the signing ceremony, protesting the surrendering of their sovereignty to Belgrade. The fact that the capital was in Belgrade was enough to cause alarm to some Croat and Bosniak delegates. They believed it gave too much power to the Serbs. The choosing of Belgrade as the Union’s capital had more to do with it being the starting point of the Revolution than any ethnic politics. Their dissent was enough to cause the IBW to quickly purge the absentees from their ranks. They would not be the last to disappear.

At the Articles were signed, the new Politburo elected its first Premier, none other than the General-Secretary of the IBW, Peter Karadordevic. His reign was productive, even if short-lived. One of his first acts was the establishment of the Federal Directorate of Union Security, a fancy name for an anti-nationalist secret police. He did not know how long the external threat would remain. As soon as it vanished, he feared the return of nationalism, seeing it as a threat to the Union.

He tapped Ivan Mestrovic as the man to lead the never ending hunt for budding nationalism. His task was to stamp it out with whatever methods he deemed necessary before it erupted into an inferno. The only way the Balkan Union would survive is if nationalist was ruthlessly suppressed. Mestrovic was selected because he was one of the few Revolutionaries Karadordevic fully trusted. On the surface, the Croat had no ambition for more power. The Premier genuinely believed if Mestrovic could return to a life of sculpting, he would.

In truth, had he been offered that choice at the start of the Great War, he would have jumped on it. After leading men in the war and the Revolution, he found himself addicted to the thrill of power. His persona of a simple artist continued to serve him well for the rest of his life. Few within the IBW ever knew the full extent of his lust for power. Once he was given control of the FDUS, he would only leave office head first.

The Karadordevic legacy was more than uniting fractured people. His pet project, government control over the food supply, was credited with preventing famine in the 1920s. The plan called for the state to purchase all grains and distributing it to the people. It kept the excess grain during times of plenty, storing it in the event of the next crop being a failure. The state became the only purchaser to that any farmer could sell. They went as far as to outlaw agricultural exports. They kept bread and other food prices relatively low, even at the cost of shortages in produce such as greens, fruits and dairy.

To increase production of food, the state parceled out lands to all the peasants. Their policy of ‘those who work the land own the land’ proved popular among the former serfs, even if they did not legally own the land. They could not more decide what they want to grow under the UBSR as they could while working the lands when they were owned by German speakers. The Bureau of Agriculture set quotas for each farm to meet. Failure to meet them meant the eviction of the current occupants.

The former land owners not only lost their lands without compensation but were also arrested under the accusation of exploitation. The German-speaking land owners were almost always found guilty of crimes against the people and sentenced to the various labor camps sprouting in the more inaccessible locations in the Balkans.

Karadordevic’s reign was short lived. In late 1920, he suffered a dehabilitating stroke. He managed to survive into 1921, long enough to see France vacate Crete, turning it over to the Greek BSR, before dying. His death, like those of some many who built nations on personal charisma, left a vacuum that threatened to tear the Union apart. There was no obvious replacement for the first Premier. A brief struggle ensues where Trumbric managed to wind up on top.

 

[The Kiat]

Trumbric’s coup was not entirely bloodless. When many leaders of the Balkan Revolution vied for power and only a few supported Trumbric, the Croat was forced to use extreme measures. The obvious replacement for the premiership in some eyes was Karadordevic’s co-conspirator in the Belgrade Uprising. Trumbric moved fast to neutralize Simovic, arranging for his ally and head of the FDUS to arrest the revolutionary. Mestrovic apprehended Simovic on trumped up charges for fomenting a separatist movement in Bulgaria, despite the man not even being Bulgarian.

Mestrovic purged the upper ranks of the IBW of any member openly opposing Trumbric and always on the same charge. They were guilty of nationalism and either sentenced to hard labor, or if they proved to dangerous for Trumbric simply sentenced to death. Not all who died did so through legal means. The mysterious death of Alexander Karadordevic, the first premier’s son, during a freak derailment of a train leaving Belgrade. In 1921, the UBSR’s infrastructure ranged from poor to nonexistent, so derailments were not unheard of. However, when the premier’s son as well a dozen other high ranking officials die at the same time it is difficult not to suspect foul play.

Few supported Trumbric as he made his grab for power. His most powerful ally, Mestrovic, happened to be a fellow Croat. As more and more of his nationality began to rally to him, other Balkan nationalities looked on Trumbric with suspicion. They did not wish for the Union to become another empire ruled by one nationality. To appease the member states, Trumbric went out of his way to staff a diverse cabinet, installing one of each nationality into authority over the various Bureaus.

Once in power, Trumbric wasted no time in dealing with threats, real and perceived. He expanded the power of the FDUS to include in its mandate the tracking down of dissension and reactionary elements within the Union. In short, anyone Trumbric decided was an enemy. The 1922 Purge was one of his famous violent tantrums. In one case, where it was proven that a Hungarian in the government had ties to Vienna, the Hungarian was interrogated under the most extreme methods where he divulged a list of names of his alleged co-conspirators.

Trumbric believed the confession to be genuine and not the pleas of a man under torture saying anything to make the pain stop. He ordered Mestrovic to arrest everyone on the list and question them to learn of their contacts. Eventually, more than a hundred fifty thousand names were revealed in the year, with most listed put under arrest. It failed to draw much noticed when a few of the names belonged to people who died in the Great War or earlier, who happened to be old acquaintances of the accused.

Most of those found guilty were sentenced to corrective labor camps. For his first five year plan, Trumbric decreed the crash industrialization of the Balkans. In order to feed the growing factories and foundries, industry required raw material. Hundreds of thousands of laborers toiled to extract iron, coal and other raw materials for industry. In order to reach them, the laborers first had to improve and in some instances create infrastructure.

Since the Ottoman and Austrian Empires used different gages of rail, one set had to be completely uprooted and replaced with tens of thousands of kilometers of new gage. The Bureau of Transportation lobbied for the use of Austrian gage since the Austrian-laid rail stretched more than twice as long as the Ottoman rail. The man who made the suggestion was arrested on charges of plotting with foreigners to bring down the government. After he was sentenced, his plan was enacted.

Trumbric was viewed by all as a ruthless tyrant who would save the Balkan people even if he had to enslave him. His right-hand man, Mestrovic managed to cast himself in the shroud of a benevolent guardian, protecting the peasants and workers from reactionary and counter-revolutionary threats. The Premier’s cruelty only improved the image of the head of the Union’s secret police. He managed to convince everyone around him to trust him, even the paranoid Premier.

In 1925, Trumbric again expanded the FDUS and granted Mestrovic virtual autonomy in dealing with traitors. Mestrovic abandoned the dark age practice of beating a confession out of the accused and sought more scientific methods for extracting information. So-called truth serums were tested on inmates, with some success. The drugs, combined with well planned questions sessions, often forced out the truth without leaving a scratch on the man under question.

Mestrovic used part of the growing industrialization project to advance police work into the 20th Century. In a ten year period, from 1925 to 1934, nearly eighty thousand kilometers of telephone cable snaked out across the Balkans, connecting all of the FDUS offices as well as local civil police. The local police’s autonomy ended with the telephone network. In 1935, Mestrovic convinced Trumbric, who in turn ordered the Politburo to turn all law enforcement over to the FDUS, giving the Director great power. With the introduction of electronic listening devices, Mestrovic virtually became the man behind the scene, pulling the strings of the puppet ruler.

Mining and cable laying turned out to be light sentences when compared with road and rail building. Conditions on these road gangs were brutal even for the healthiest of individuals. As the first people sentenced to these gangs were aged civil servants who worked for the old regime, the Union was soon in need of replacements. For all his growing paranoia, Trumbric was no fool. He knew an attack could come at any moment and that the key for defending the Union was the ability to transport soldiers and supplies to where they were needed most.

The most feared sentence during his reign was the construction of a highway through the Carpathian Mountains known as the Road of Skulls. Over the course of its construction, twenty-five percent of those sentenced never lived to see freedom. During the Winter of 1925, on a road that would connect the Transylvanian BSR with the Wallachian BSR, twenty thousand workers died of exposure alone. Others died of hunger and exhaustion as the quota for kilometers per day lain were impossible to obtain. When they failed to meet their quotas, their rations were cut in half.

Not all of the alleged enemies of state were sentenced to hard labor in the mines or on the roads. A number of dissidents in the various republics found themselves deported to the lightly populated Crimean BSR. The Crimean Tartars always proved to be the least enthusiastic communists. Trumbric believed they might try to breakaway. To prevent this, he decided to transplant a large number of Balkan nationalities to Crimea, turning it into a model for multinational cooperation under the communist banner.

Former land owners in the southern Balkans, along with evicted Germans in the north, were sent to Crimea to turn the land into a breadbasket. As with the rest of the Union, nobody legally owned the land. Balkan nationalities tended their small farms, selling only to the state. The Germans, and other people found guilty of lesser crimes against the people, were put to work on collective farms. In 21st Century terms, these farms were the forced labor equivalent of minimums-security prisons for white collar criminals.

By 1927, steel mills sprung up across the Balkans like mushrooms. Workers who toiled in these mills lived long and received better treatment than the forced laborers, though they tended to be just as hazardous as the coal mines of the Bulgarian BSR. They expanded at a rate faster than skilled ironworkers could be found. Many were put on the job with minimal training with the predictable result of frequent injuries. When wounded, the worker was taken out and replaced by another. In the Novi Sad Iron Works an average of one worker per week was killing in 1928.

Trumbric’s first Five Year Plan called for the full scale industrialization of the Balkan Union. Before the Union was founded, more than ninety percent of its population labored in agriculture. The Five Year plan called for the number to be reduced to fifty percent by 1932. To combat the loss of labor and potential loss of yield, his second Five Year Plan called for the mass production of agricultural machinery to replace the workers lost to the cities. The increase in production called for the steel output to double by 1932.

Coal and oil production were also slated to double over the next five years. Trumbric wanted half of the homes in the Balkans to have access to electricity. Of all the goals for the second plan, this was the only one to fall short. As a result, the Premier ordered a purge of the Bureau of Energy, thinning its ranks of skilled administrators only to have them replaced by people who told Trumbric what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear.

The increase of electricity had the side-effect of displacing a great many of people and flooding agricultural land with the completion of a dam. Hydroelectricity was favored by the BoE over that of coal and oil. Minerals extracted from the earth would always have a finite quantity whereas the rivers never grew exhausted. They also had a secondary effect of creating reservoirs to feed the farms and growing cities.

Displaced farmers were often sent to training camps where they were hastily trained in the industrial fields. Most of them were shipped of to factories scattered across the Union into republics where they did not speak the language. There was no official language of the Balkan Union and each republic retained its old tongue. This proved no problem for those in the IBW as every high ranking member spoke Serbo-Croat passably. The factories were another matter. A steel mill in Macedonia might have workers who only know how to speak Hungarian, Greek or Romanian, leaving them unable to communicate with their coworkers.

Not all of the displaced were relocated to the distant corners of the Balkan Union. Nearly a quarter of them remained on the high grounds, living along the banks of new lakes. These artificial lakes were put to an additional use as aquacultural centers. Fish were farmed in large numbers, reducing the need for large, ocean-going trawlers. Fish production grew faster than poultry or pork, soon replacing both on the dinner tables of many homes.

 

[The Kiat]

When it came time for the third Five Year Plan, Trumbric was so pleased by the previous quotas being exceeded that he planned for a five hundred percent increase in the output of industrial machinery. Not only would it be used in the Union but it would be exported as a cheap alternative to other European manufacturers. The reduced price came at the cost of low wages in the Balkan Union as well as corners cut in production. When errors occurred it tended to throw off the well planned schedules. Upon learning of a design flaw in 1931, Trumbric ordered the entire design board of Mikail-Grosniv Industrial Bureau purged.

It was not enough to simply build the tractors and combines. Peasants had to know how to operate and repair these unreliable machines. State-employed mechanics were kept busy running from one farm to another, repairing engines and replacing broken parts. The latter proved a challenge as the Five Year Plan called for production of whole machines and not spare parts. Hopelessly broken tractors were cannibalized for their parts.

The same problems in maintenance occurred in the automobile industry. Seeing automobiles take off in the capitalist countries, Trumbric was determined that the Balkan Union would match and then exceed their production. For much of his reign, he was under the delusion that the communist system would inevitably outproduce the capitalists. In principle, he as correct. However, the higher output came at the cost of lower quality. A Balkan automobile produced in 1935 proved inferior to its Dutch or German counterpart in every way, including price. Import tarriffs negated the lower production cost in most countries while others slapped an embargo on the Balkan Union.

In the same Five Year Plan, Trumbric called for the establishment of a native military-industrial complex. Before 1932, the Balkan Union had no armor beyond the few remaining captured tanks of Great War vintage. The Red Air Force consisted of other Great War relics while the Red Navy had in its possession a fleet of thirty year old, rapidly rusting vessels based in the Greek BSR. Small arms production in the Balkan Union remained under one hundred thousand bolt-action rifles a year, of a thirty year old Austrian design.

To address this weakness, tens of new Bureaus were opened, chief among them the Belgrade Arsenal and Macedonian Tank Works. The Arsenal was expected to produce fifty thousand artillery piece by 1937. It managed to exceed its quota by one-pint-three percent. Trumbric hailed it a triumph of the communist system. What was not brought to the public attention was that the production of ammunition for the seventy-five millimeters guns was so low that they could only guarantee the Red Army eight rounds for each gun for the whole of 1938.

Trumbric’s sudden death in 1938 disrupted the fourth Five Year Plan. The transformation from healthy, vital elder statesman to sick old man was so rapid that foul play remains suspected. Many of the symptoms displayed in the ailing Trumbric matched those of arsenic poisoning. Who poisoned him is not known. Who had cause to see him dead form a list longer than this book. His iron fisted reign made him a number of enemies from all of the republics.

During the months of July and August, the leaders of the IBW vied for the Premiership. A number of the higher ranking Party officials tried to convince Mestrovic to seize power. He was popular, effective and thanks to his propaganda machine, seen as the kind, yet firm guiding hand of the Union. He refused to take power, preferring the quietude of running the FDUS over the openness of running the IBW and the UBSR. He would remain in the shadows, silently defending the peasants and workers of the Union.

By September, the Premiership fell into the hands of Ivan Milhailou from the Macedonian BSR. His reign prove the shortest, ranging from late 1938 until the crusade against communism was launched in 1940. He was a capable leader of the Party yet he failed to meet the expectations of a planner of the economy. His Five Year plan called first and foremost for increased military output. Secondly, he diverted a sizable portion of the budget for external operations, that is supporting communist insurrections in neighboring states, much to the ire of the Balkan Union’s stronger neighbors.

Mestrovic and others in the FDUS retained their position despite the change in leadership. There was talk among Milhailou and his supporters about purging the upper ranks of the Directorate. Two things prevented the purge. Firstly, there were no suitable replacements for such a vast and complex organism as the FDUS. Secondly, Mestrovic knew enough about every member of the Politburo and the upper ranks of the IBW to bring them bring them down with him should he fall. He used blackmail not for gain but rather for Milhailou and his cronies to leave him along. Mestrovic was a dangerous man. Unlike Trumbric, he treated security like a surgical instrument and not as a sledgehammer.

For the peasants and workers of the Balkan Union, years of toil under Trumbric began to pay off. By 1940, electricity and running water were in all of the cities and towns of the Union. Some of the positive acts of the IBW, such as mandatory primary education, vastly increased the literacy rate. Such plans were not designed to enlighten the student. Rather the goal of universal education was to prepare future workers for a life as skilled laborers.

State ran health care saw the peoples of the Balkans living longer and longer lives. The life expectancy remained on average ten years lower than the rest of Europe. Before the Revolution, the main treatments for disease were prayer and folk remedies. Modern medicine improved the lives of the people. The development of antibiotics in the 1930s reached the Balkan Union and were put quickly to use in combating disease. Vaccination programs of the Bureau of Health nearly eliminate small pox in the Balkan Union, with an outbreak in Montenegro in 1939 as the only appreciable occurrence of the dreaded diseases.

For the average Balkan citizen, the state and the Party were everywhere. The state not only planned out the economy, it also planned out how the people would live their lives. Along with nationalism, the FDUS repressed the old religions of the Balkans with zeal. The IBW wished to replace religion in the center of every citizen’s life. Churches and mosques were seized by the state, converted into schools, offices and important state institutions, such as Saint Sava being used to convene the Politburo and Haiga Sophia in Constantinople used as the headquarters of the Red Navy. With the old ways crushed beneath the wheels of progress, the people had only the state to look to for guidance.

The Union of Balkan Socialist Republics remained a third-rate military power by 1940. In some technologies it was still more than a decade behind the rest of Europe. Artillery and small arm manufacturing increased over the previous two years, yet problems with ammunition production continued to plague the Red Army. Mass purges over the slightest infraction ceased under Milhailou as the Premier was quick to point out the detrimental effect of killing of skilled laborers and administrators.

At the start of November 1940, the Red Navy completed a two year long project of refitting ships captured during the Balkan Revolution. They were still outdated by modern designs. Only a handful of new ships were finished when the crusade began, none larger than a destroyer. Despite the protests of the Red Navy’s Commander in Chief Konstantinos, the focus on arms went to the Army. Any war the Union fought would largely be by land anyway. Much of the defense budget went to the army.

The Macedonian Tank Works ramped up production in 1940, turning out more than seven thousand high-quality Red Star Tanks. The tanks were more than ready for a modern war and turned out to be the only truly modern hardware available to the Red Army. However, the Red Army lacked the modern tank doctrine to fully exploit their new weapons. Even if they learned the art, sixty percent of the Red Stars were actually exported to Kurdistan, Armenia, the Arab Republic and even the Peoples’ Liberation Army fighting in China against capitalists Chinese and imperialist Japanese fighting over control of the ancient nation.

When war finally came to the Balkan Union, the IBW would remain unprepared. The leadership recalled the days of the Great War and the glories of the Revolution. So isolated was the USBR that few in its leadership fully understood the nature of 1940s modern warfare. The coming war would hit the Balkan Union like a bolt of lightning, threatening to tear down all that the people labored hard to build.

 

[The Kiat]

III) Crusade
(1940-46)

By 1940, the governments of the German Empire, Republic of Poland-Lithuania and the Russo-Swedish Empire had enough of the communist agitation within its borders. One of the greatest of the Balkan Union’s exports was that of the Revolution itself. For twenty years the IBW supplied and aided communist parties in neighboring countries as well as revolutionaries seeking to spark off their own workers’ uprising.

Germany spent a great deal of effort controlling and Germanizing the Czechs within its border. The process was designed resign the Czechs to their own fate. However, when other Slave nationalities constantly reminded the people of Bohemia and Moravia of a possible existence outside of Germany, the assimilation process hit a patch of bumpy road. Despite repressive measures, Czech nationalism and communist separatism continued to plague Berlin after a generation of Germanization.

The supposed pan-Slavic flavor of the Balkan Union caused a great deal of concern to the Russo-Swedish crown. In Sweden and Finland, revolutionary zeal was nonexistent. Charles XIX could not say the same with absolute certainty concerning his Russian crown. For over two centuries the Kings of Sweden also ruled as Tsars of Russia and in that time the two way street of assimilation had a greater impact on the much smaller Nordic population of the state. So much so that Lutheranism ceased to be the official language of Sweden in the 1880s, when the Swedish Orthodox Church replaced it as a unifying presence for both of his crowns.

The Russian citizens were not the primary target of exported revolution. The total population of Russians, if added to the Balkan Union, would drown out all other nationalities. Nobody in a command position within the Balkan Union wished to see it Russian dominated. Ukraine was a different story. For years, revolutionaries smuggled pamphlet and weapons into the Ukrainian provinces through the Crimean BSR. Ukrainian farmers on average were far better of in quality of living compared to those Balkans living on collective farms. Why would they want to give up the land they already own?

Communism made further inroads in Ukraine’s industrial cities, though not by much. What workers in the Balkan Union received through revolution and bloodshed, the workers in Ukraine earned as a result of economic policy of the crown and through Union-company negotiations. While not as middle class as workers in, Brazil for example, they were on their way. The Revolution threatened to undermine their gains.

So where did the Revolution take hold? Mostly among the cities’ unemployed. The economic downturn of 1938 put nearly ten percent of Ukraine’s industrial workers out of jobs. They, and the unskilled, screamed the loudest for ‘income equality’. One Ukrainian steel worker’s retort to the agitation has been often quoted: “Income equality? Yes, they wish to make us all equally poor.” The lack of zeal did not prevent revolutionary agents from trying to incite the less fortunate in the population.

Poland-Lithuania enduring even greater suffering from the exported Revolution. Though their elective monarchy was abolished as the end of the Great War, it was still a country retaining a sizable nobility. Nominally speaking, the Polish-Lithuanian National Assembly was elected by the people. In reality, the nobility and wealthy continued to dominate elected offices while the franchise was solely dependent upon property qualifications until as late as 1935. After universal manhood suffrage was implemented, the composition of the National Assembly gradually began to shift towards the left end of the spectrum. In 1938, before socialist or communist parties could collect a larger gathering, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of outlawing the Communist Party, nipping in the bud any possibility of a Red takeover from within.

As the origin of the revolutionary menace was apparent, Germany, Poland-Lithuania and Russo-Sweden joined in an alliance against the spreading Red Ride in 1939. In the following year, Italy signed on to the anti-communist pact. Offers by the rump Turkish state to join the alliance were rejected, though Russo-Sweden did make use of Turkish ports. Premier Milhailou was not overly alarmed by this new alliance. Since the birth of the Balkan Union, foreign powers have sought to contain it. He expected another round of embargoes and sanctions by governments that did not trade with the Union anyway.

What he received was something entirely different. When the Union’s three northern neighbors signed their treaty, they intended it to be offensive as well as defensive. No sooner than when the ink dried did planner on the General Staffs in Berlin and Stockholm begin to plan out an invasion of the Balkan Union. The plan was named Fall Krusader. The Kaiser intended to lead a crusade against the godless communists, destroying the IBW and ridding the world of the menace.

On November 30, 1940, Kaiser Wilhelm III introduced Milhailou and the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics to modern warfare. In the dawn hours of that day, over a thousand German and Swedish aircraft appeared over the skies of the Balkan Union, bombing targets in every city north of the Danube. Budapest suffered the worst attacks as bombs struck the city’s fuel depot, igniting a firestorm across the city during the night of December 2-3. The flames were smothered by an early morning snowfall, which turned to rain over the flames.

By December 1, two hundred thousand German, Italian, Polish and Swedish soldiers crossed the Balkan Union’s frontier in the opening move of Krusader. Three main thrusts were in the works; one towards Budapest under German command, a second to Zagreb under Italian command and the third to Bratislava under nominal Polish-Lithuanian command. While the overall command of the third prong was Polish, the bulk of the soldiers involved were Russians, Finn or Swedes.

Zagreb was the first to fall, when an Italian armored division entered the city with minimal resistance. The Red Army in Croatia was simply stunned by the swiftness and violence of the assault. Any Red Star tanks spotted in the open were fell upon by German-built, Italian piloted dive bombers. Only three survived the air assault. They put up a stubborn resistance on the road leading from the northwest into Zagreb, disabling five Italian tanks at the cost of their own lives. The poorly trained and equipped garrison at Zagreb surrendered once the Italian entered the city.

The Slovak BSR declared Bratislava an open city, allowing it to fall to the third advance on December 6. It was far from a surrender however. Once the Slovak Premier declared the city open, its garrison departed to take up positions in the countryside, ambushing units of the Russo-Swedish Army. Attempts to fight the invaders head on ended almost before they began. The Red Army was ill-equipped to combat the Cossack Armored Brigades that spearheaded the advance.

Budapest proved a tougher nut to crack. Two division of the Red Army, under the command of General Vladka Macek, denied the city to the 5th Panzer and 2nd Infantry divisions of the German Army for two weeks. During that time, Budapest suffered daily aerial bombardment despite already having the heart of the city burnt to ashes at the start of the war. The Battle of Budapest was a vicious fight where the Germans advanced by leveling the city block by block just to dislodge Red Army strong points.

The Red Army was poorly trained as a regular army but its generals and colonels were holdovers from the Revolution and knew a thing or two about asymmetric warfare. The Red Army excelled at hit-and-run attacks and guerilla warfare, making the taking of Budapest expensive for the Germans. By the end of the battle, the German commander implemented the practice of taking hostages in an attempt to deter the irregular tactics. Germany’s Krusader allies loudly condemned the practice as the ruins of Budapest fell on December 23.

While the battle raged in and around Budapest, three German and one Polish-Lithuania division had the capital of Belgrade under siege. The Siege of Belgrade lasted longer than the battle over the remains of Budapest. For three weeks, few entered or departed Belgrade as shell after shell landed on the city. The rate of bombardment was not quite as spectacular as the barrages of the Great War but it was more than enough to set the city ablaze and destroy various landmarks, such as the Cathedral of Saint Sava.

The city surrendered on January 6, 1941, shortly after the last of the high ranking IBW members vacated the city. The mid-level members, faceless cogs in the bureaucratic machine, managed to largely blend into the background when the Germans began to hunt for the IBW leadership. One of the objectives of Krusader was their capture or elimination. With so much trouble caused in Bohemia, the Kaiser wanted Milhailou and his comrades tried as terrorists. Charles XIX suggested international trials in neutral locations, to insure a fair trial.

Milhailou never lived to see trial. He was among the many killed when Germany artillery leveled the Politburo. Of the leaders who escaped, Mestrovic was quick to take up his former life as a revolutionary. Unlike during the Balkan Revolution, he now had the whole of the FDUS to call upon to wage war against the invaders. When the secret police arrived on the battlefield it caused great discomfort with the soldiers. Bad enough they had to face the enemy ahead of them, now they had to look over their shoulders whenever a commissar was present.

Mestrovic tried to rally the Red Army and nearly succeeded in stopping a German/Swedish advance on Pristina. The Battle of Pristina, fought from January 28 to February 9, was the largest tank engagement of the war. It saw the Germans and Swedes face off against three armored divisions of the Red Army. Or rather three armored divisions on paper. In reality it fielded fewer tanks than the two armored divisions it faced. What they lacked in tanks they made up for in anti-tank guns.

All of it was in vain without air power. The battle was ultimately decided not by guns or armor, rather by the side that dominated the air. The Russo-Swedish Air Force dominated the skies over Pristina, swatting out of the sky ant antique the Red Air Force managed to launch. Of the five hundred aircraft the Red Air Force called its own, none were monoplanes and only a few were all metal. Those pilots brave or fool enough to face the invaders died without causing significant damage to the enemy.

The Battle of Pristina offered the last line of defense against the southward drive of the German Army. Units of the Red Army rallied around General Nikos Zachariadis in the defense of Greece. After a few skirmished, Zachariadis switched quickly over to the more effective guerilla tactics of Mestrovic. By the time German and Italian soldiers entered Greece, organized resistance of the Red Army ceased.

The last active holdout, Sofia, fell to the Russo-Swedish Army on February 27. The city suffered far less than those up north as it remained outside of bomber range, even from recently captured airfields in Crimea. The fact that airfields were captured in tact brought suspicion from surviving IBW leaders towards the Crimean BSR. It caused some to believe the fall of Crimea was caused as much by traitors within the ranks as by the Russo-Swedish Army especially after Stockholm proposed annexing the region.

 

[The Kiat]

On March 1, the victorious allies unilaterally declared the Balkan Union dissolved and proceeded to mold the Balkans into shapes that suited them. Declaring victory was a bit premature. In a speech that would come back to haunt him, Kaiser Wilhelm III declared the crusade’s mission accomplished. Less than a month after his declaration, the bombing of a German garrison in Croatia proved him wrong. The war against the Red Army might be at an end but the war against the Revolution continued to rage.

Following the end of regular fighting, Poland-Lithuania broke with the alliance. With the threat of revolution removed, the government in Krakow saw no reason to spend money trying to pacify the region and nation build. Once Poland-Lithuania was granted control over Slovakia, they saw their objectives as complete, withdrawing their soldiers from deeper in the Balkans. The only reason they annexed Slovakia was to form a buffer zone between Poland Proper and the Balkans. Krakow was not so confident that the Revolution was dead. The reaction of the Krusader alliance was cool to Krakow’s decision, with Berlin ejecting their ambassadors from Germany.

There would be no war over the split between Poland-Lithuania and its former allies. For one reason, it was hardly worth fighting over. Even if the Kaiser wanted a war, his army was too busy holding down the Balkans. In the next five years, Germany would send over three hundred thousand soldiers in its obligational zone of occupation. It would cost many lives and even greater treasure. In the end, it was deemed worth the cost for it ended the threat of revolution.

The Balkans were reorganized into three zones. The Italians attempted to revive the Latin Empire with their occupation of Greece and forge a friendly Croat state out of Croatia and Bosnia, much to the locals discomfort. The Italians actually had less difficulty holding their Croatia down than Greece. The Greeks, united behind Zachariadis in resistance, had a singular goal; eject the occupiers. There was no side Italy could play off against the others. In Croatia, Italy supported and armed Croat nationalists and effectively gave them a free hand in dealing with their Bosniak and Serb neighbors.

Russo-Sweden established a protectorate over a conglomeration of Transylvania, Moldova and Wallachia in the new state they named Dacia. Uniting all Romanian people under one government was not as easy of a task as Stockholm first believed. More than twenty years in the Balkans gave the three republics an odd and competitive nature. With nationalism crushed at every turn, Wallachia and Moldova tended to result to economic contests, to see which republic could out produce the other. It gave the people within the border a closer identity to their republic and offered an alternative to identify themselves by other than nationality.

As was mentioned early, Sweden planned for the annexation of Crimea. With Ukraine and the vast Russian steppe under cultivation, it was not for the added food production. Rather the Russo-Swedish Navy saw the Crimean Peninsula and the port of Sevastopol as strategic locations. It was not quite the fabled “warm water port” but it secured their access to the Mediterranean and removed any dagger at their belly.

The German zone of control saw the establishment of friendly governments in Hungary and Serbia, as well as a resurrected Bulgarian Empire that encompassed Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. All three were overseen by hand-picked governments, backed by the German Army which was quickest of the Krusader allies to crush dissidents. In Berlin, some of the more extreme factions within the Reichstag suggested opening these three states up to German colonization.

The allies hoped for a quiet occupation as the Balkans reformed to suit their new purposes. They were quickly disappointed. Less than a month after the declared dissolution of the Balkan Union, Marxists guerillas struck at German patrols in Novi Pazar. Chief among the leaders of first raids was Joseph Broz. Born in Kunrovc, Croatia in 1892, Broz participated in the Balkan Uprisings, first as a junior officer in the Croat Socialist Army, serving under Trumbric during the capture of Zagreb, and later progressing through the ranks of the Red Army.

During Trumbric’s reign, Broz found himself elevated through the ranks for no other reason than he was a fellow Croat. This made his suspect to officers of other nationalities. They saw him as another crony. Broz proved them wrong. He might have received patronage due to his birthplace but he earned the respect of his fellow high-ranking officers by his organizational skills and ability to lead men. One Bulgarian officer referred to him as another Mestrovic.

Mestrovic made several attempts to recruit Broz into the FDUS, partly due to his skill and partly because Mestrovic believed the old adage of keeping one’s friends close and potential enemies closer. Broz refused all offers, preferring the simplicity of the army over the politics of the secret police. Mestrovic had a file on Broz, the same as every other permanent name in the Union. However, unlike most he discovered little he could use as leverage aside from a string of former mistresses. It was a vice of which Mestrovic was also guilty.

Broz’s partisans began their attacks against the occupiers in early 1941. Their raids were minor at first; small patrols vanishing, road side bombs knocking out trucks, and even a stunt were a partisan smuggled a fine, itchy powder into the laundry in Kanjiza. The Germans killed partisans when they could find them. When they failed to capture any, they turned their frustrations on near by villages, taking hostages over the protests of allies, and executing them when the brigands did not surrender.

Broz did not limit his attacks on the hated Germans, whose atrocities did more to boast Broz’s popularity than anything else. With his homeland torn apart by ethnic strife thanks to the Italians, his partisans took to crossing into Croatia and Bosnia to attack Italian garrisons. Their retribution was less violent than the Germans, seldom involving the random execution of one hundred villagers. In April 1942, his campaign against the Italians picked up pace when he captured Split.

After the fall of Split, Broz, Mestrovic, Zachariadis and other partisan leaders decided to focus first on the Italians, believing them the easiest of the three to expel from the Balkans. Germany retained a strong monarchy and the Russo-Swedish national assembly had a degree of stability that made undermining its king difficult. Italy, however, was far less unified. It had elected governments on the federal level that rose and fell with regularity. The partisan leadership believed that if they applied enough pressure, the current government would fall and the voters would elect one more inclined to peace. Killing enough Italian soldiers with no appreciable gains on the Italian Federation’s part would force a political solution.

Zachariadis launched a reign of terror against the Italians occupying Greece in the summer of 1942. He did not limit himself to attacking patrols or barracks. The Greek Resistance struck wherever the invader happened to visit. They attacked them while in the market, while in cafes and always at their favorite pubs. Little concern was given to collateral damage. One bombing at a pub in Larisa killed twenty Italian soldiers and forty-nine Greeks who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Zachariadis shifted between hailing the innocents and martyrs or condemning them as traitors for being in the presence of the enemy.

By August, soldiers began carrying out patrols in platoon strength and higher. Instead of capitalizing on the recklessness of the Greek Resistance’s bombings, the Italians began to levee reprisals upon the Greek populace. Vehicles that happened to lay in the path of an armored patrol were fired upon without warning. Villages in the countryside were ransacked by patrols, in a few cases the Italians literally tore apart furniture in search of hiding partisans. They always used the heaviest hand in rural communities under the belief that the partisans used them as bases. Unknown to the Italian occupation commander, Zachariadis set up his headquarters in a wine cellar in Thessalonika, using the alleys and side streets of the city to conceal his movement.

The Italian Federation gave up its plans for a new Roman empire. Greece proved increasingly ungovernable as the months ticked past. Croatia was another matter. There was no single national authority that could unite against the occupiers. Broz spent more time in his native land struggling to keep Croats and Serbs from wiping each other out than he did fighting the Italians. Resistance cells in Croatia were often drawn firmly along national lines with the result as they tended to fight each other. It was clear to Broz that his multi-ethnic resistance organization, comprised of soldiers from the Red Army, would be the only one able to defeat Italy’s plans for divide and rule.

Aside from ‘Marshal’ Broz, another of the Revolution-era soldiers commanding the resistance was Zoltan Tildy. Instead of fighting the German occupiers directly, he concentrated his attacks on the puppet regime holding down his homeland. The vassal government of Hungary’s will proved far weaker than that of the German juggernaut. When the German Army intervened on behalf of their puppets, Tildy and his partisans melted from the scene.

From 1942 to 1944, the Imperial German Army found itself more and more involved in the defense of its puppet regime. The Hungarian Army saw a low volunteer rate and a high desertion rate among its conscripts. Those they trained to fight had the habit of turning that training against them as they joined Tildy. Other conscripts tried to flee the country, merging into the outflow of refugees. The escaping Magyars first headed north into Poland-Lithuania before scattering across the world. The Magyar Diaspora saw Hungary’s population reduced by fifteen percent during the puppet regime’s rule.

Enthusiasm for holding down the Balkans began to wane in Germany. In early 1944, Italy disentangled itself from the mess in Croatia. The Italian government decided that 1) holding the place was not worth the effort and 2) with Croats and Serbs busy fighting each other, they were not likely to be agitating in Italy any time soon. The chaos they left in their wake was a more effective buffer than any stable Croat state.

Sweden followed suit in March 1944, three months after Italy declared its occupation over. Charles XIX saw little reason for remaining. On June 18, 1943, Russo-Sweden formally annexed Crimea. Stockholm believed its resources were better spent in digging in Crimea. From there, they had an unsinkable aircraft carrier where Swedish long-range bombers could reach nearly every point in the Balkans.

The Swedish-created Dacia thus far held the most stable government in the Balkans. Stockholm believed it succeeded in creating a friendly state which was another cause to depart. Unlike Hungary or Croatia, there was no rioting, uprising and partisan activity ebbed as 1944 approached. The decline in resistance was part by design, for Mestrovic wished to lull the rulers of Dacia and Bulgaria into a false sense of security while actively combating other vassals.

The Dacian government lasted until the middle of 1945, when Mestrovic finally struck. He led contingents of the Red Army from Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia into Dacia, quickly overrunning the small army Dacia was permitted to maintain. As soon as Mestrovic crossed the border, the Romanian resistance rose up, striking at garrisons and government offices across the three Romanian states. The government in Bucharest fell within a month, its upper echelons fleeing to safety in Swedish Ukraine.

Popularity for the occupation in Germany hit an all-time low. The limited electorate of the German Empire voted overwhelmingly in favor of peace candidates during the 1945 election. Even though he was supreme warlord of Germany, the Kaiser decided to heed the advice of the Reichstag. His military advisors pointed out that the Balkan Union was broken beyond repair and communism would not be a threat to Germany for the appreciable future.

In April 1946, Germany began to withdrawal if soldiers from Bulgaria and Serbia, leaving their puppets to fend for themselves. Adding insult to injury, German soldiers conducted a limited scorched earth campaign as they left, destroying as much infrastructure and industry as possible, denying the partisans their prizes. The notable exception to the destruction came in Macedonia. Its industrial base, barely bombed during the invasion, was already under the control of Greek and Albanian partisans.

On July 7, 1946, the Kaiser declared the crusade over, its goals accomplished. The Balkan Union was no more and the small communist world in ruins. They were no longer a threat to anyone but themselves. Little did he know his words would prove prophetic. As 1946 turned over into 1947, ethnic tensions began to rise even as the leaders of the IBW struggled to restore a shattered union.

 

[The Kiat]

IV) Dysfunction
(1947-68)

On May 1, 1947, the International Brotherhood of Workers reinstated the Balkan Politburo and assembled in Belgrade for the first time since 1940. Many of the previous party members and Representatives were absent from the assembly, including almost all of the old guard. The highest ranking member of the IBW to survive the war was two-time war hero, Ivan Mestrovic. He fought against the odds against the Germans and then again against his party comrades in 1946, emerging on top when the Politburo picked up its previous business.

The first order of business was the re-establishment of order in a now largely chaotic Balkans. The Krusader armies devastated the region, tearing down in a few, short battle what took decades to build. Lawlessness reigned supreme in the countryside as brigands and highwaymen tried to carve petty kingdoms from the Balkan Union. Crushing them was not as simple as it used to be, not with the FDUS in tatters. Before the enemies of the people could be destroyed, a new Red Army must be forged to replace the bands of brigands and nationalist partisans still roaming the countryside.

While Mestrovic tried to lead the restored Balkan Union out of the disaster that was the 1940 invasion. The individual republics, all but Slovakia and Crimea restored to their pre-war status, began to clean their respective houses. Untold numbers of Balkans collaborated with the Germans and their allies. In Wallachia alone, which was briefly part of Dacia, thirty thousand people who took part in the Dacian government in any way, shape or form, were either executed or sentenced to corrective labor after brief show trials.

The purges distracted the government from more pressing matters, such as repairing the Union. The infrastructure, which was nowhere near as advanced as the rest of Europe to begin with, was utterly destroyed by the invasion and withdrawal. The industry required to repair the infrastructure was also in shambles, especially after the retreating Germans either torched factories or looted them during their 1946 disengagement from the region. The Bureau of Industry predicted it would take as long to fully restore 1940 capacity as it took to build it in the first place.

In the Bosnian Balkan Socialist Republic, tension between Serbs, Croats and their Bosniak neighbors boiled over in 1948. Resurgence of their respective nationalisms was actively encouraged by German and Italian occupiers, as a means of control. Play of implacable foes against each other and they would be easy to rule. Divide and conquer was as old as warfare. The use of the tactic resulted in division beyond what any of the Krusader allies dreamed. It also would plunge Bosnia into a brutal on-again, off-again state of civil war for the next forty years.

The rise of the Serbian National Front, a hold out resistance band from the Krusader years, began to raid over the border into Bosnia. Its target was not the Bosniak or Croat militias but rather Bosnia villages just across the border from Serbia. The civilian casualties naturally sparked retaliation on behalf of the Bosniaks. Instead of striking at the guilty party, Bosniak militias were content with attacking any Serbs they found, thus setting into motion a vicious cycle that would continue into the 1990s.

The allied goal of destroying the Balkan Union was now achieved. It was the rise of nationalism during the Krusader occupation that spelt the end of the socialist experiment. Mestrovic tried to keep the FDUS on top of the problem while running the IBW. He refused to cede his former office to anyone, preferring to keep direct control over internal security. He had plans to use the apparatus against dissent within the IBW. For 1947 and most of 1948, the Politburo lacked the consensus it knew before the war.

It all ended on August 14, 1948, when the SNF, led by Mikhail Igorvik stormed the Politburo in Belgrade, supported by Serb generals within the Red Army. The coup aimed to removed the Croat Mestrovic from power and place Igorvik as the new General-Secretary of the IBW and replace much of the Politburo with Party members easily pliable to a pro-Serb agenda. His plan for a bloodless coup, partly in the style of Trumbric, fell apart at once.

Their attempt to remove Mestrovic alive failed when the old revolutionary barricaded himself inside his office with loyal supporters. He and his guards were killed in the ensuing shootout between FDUS and militiamen. His death at the hands of Serb nationalists sparked an instant rage among Croats nationalists, who moved quick to retaliated against Igorvik. His actions spelt the end of the first Union.

Even before the coup, during the years of 1947 and 1948, violence in Bosnia slowly spilt over the border into its neighbors. Attacks against locals by Serbs resulted in attack on Serbs, often any Serbs. In response to the random acts of revenge, the Serb BSR sent in a small policing force of its own militia to defend Serbs. Order was never restored to pre-Krusader level in the Union and as such the republics took matters into their own hands to satisfy a great many unsatisfied citizens.

It goes without saying that the other republics did not take the Igorvik coup laying down. Instead of endless debate in the Politburo or the strong guiding hand of a dictator the Party could agree upon, what the Balkan Union received was a petty tyrant who could not rule once he seized power and an assembly that solved its disputes by breaking bottles over the heads of its neighbors. When Igorvik decided two days into his coup to suspend the Politburo, the reaction was totally predictable.

On August 17, Greece seceded from the Balkan Union. As it became clear that Igorvik was more interesting in turning the USBR into a Serbian Empire, more republics followed. Bulgaria left on August 24, followed by Moldova on September 1 and Wallachia on September 2. Croatia’s attempt to leave the Union was derailed when Igorvik flooded the republic with Red Army units created from Serb militias with total loyalty to him and their republic.

On December 25. 1948, the survivors of the coup met for the final Party Congress of the restored Balkan Union. Due to the failure of the IBW and the Serb coup, the survivors voted to disband the Union. Each believed it was better to be independent states than subjects and vassals held under the thumb of a Serb Empire. The IBW would continue to work for unity of the workers and peasants, only for now it would operate on a smaller scale, working to turn the republics into model Socialist States.

Not all were in favor of giving up Karadordevic’s dream. A faction of the Politburo survivors led by Joseph Broz swore to fight on until Igorvik was removed from power and the Balkan Union once again restored. Broz would dedicate the rest of his life to Communist unity in the Balkans. He could hardly use the argument that they were stronger together than separate for the Krusader invasion invalidated that argument.

The first of many wars in the Balkans erupted with the Serb invasion of Bulgaria, Transylvania and Hungary. With the dissolution of the Balkan Union, Igorvik managed to inherit a disproportionally large faction of the Red Army, which he did not hesitate to wield as a blunt instrument. Belgrade intended to keep a Serb-controlled Union by forcing those seceding state back into compliance. His attempt failed. The Serb advance into Bulgaria and Transylvania stalled why they were thrown back entirely by the new Hungarian Army.

Neighbor began fighting neighbor across the Balkans as generations old grievances returned to the surface. Serbia found its earlier, brief fortune reversed when the Magyars invaded while Greek and Macedonian militias skirmished across their common border.

Nowhere was the violence more appalling than in Bosnia. Bosnia, the most ethnically diverse of the Balkan Republics was home to Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs and smaller enclaves of Albanians and Montenegrins. If blood lines were not enough reason for a fight, there was also religion. The Bosniaks were Sunni, Croats Catholic and Serbs Orthodox. Nothing was guaranteed to make a civil war utterly uncivil than adding theological differences to an already unstable situation.

Following the battles in Bosnia came the massacres. Some historians call the massacres inevitable, but where they really? It is easy for a world that refused to step in to stop the violence to say it was inevitable. Europe stood back while Croats slaughtered Serb, Serb slaughtered Bosniak and Bosniaks retaliated against both. Entire villages simply vanished from the map overnight, sending streams of refugees off in every direction. For rest of the world, it was easier to say ‘it was bound to happen’ as well as cheaper than it was to step in and attempt to stop the violence.

The worst of the massacres between the First and Second Unions occurred on May 7, 1952, with the total ethnic cleansing of the Lasva Valley of its Bosniak population by the Croats. Officially, Croatia condemned the action but recent circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise. During the assault upon the valley, when all Bosniaks were expelled, the Croatian Army prevented a number of them from escaping. As a result, four thousand Bosniak men were separated from the trapped refugees, taken to a shallow ravine and shot. Several members of Croatia’s Army, acting as ‘advisors’ to the Croat militias took part in the massacre, going to great length to cover up the site.

By October 1949, Magyars were on the outskirts of Belgrade. Following the total reversal of the war, a bulk of the Red Army deserted, returning home to their republics, leaving only a reduced core of Serbs to whether the Hungarian Army’s assault. Other units found themselves cut off from Belgrade, trapped in Bulgaria or Transylvania. With a looming disaster at hand and Igorvik threatening to defend the city to the last man, his closest allies decided it was time to take action. Igorvik was not brought down by the Magyars but rather his own security chief, Frederick Gimbovik. The new head of the FDUS arrested Igorvik on the morning of October 4, and took over the reigns of government. His first act as the Premier of Serbia was to sue for terms with Hungary.

 

[The Kiat]

With their frontier with Serbia secured, the Magyars looked forward to their long-awaited return to Transylvania. In the early year of the first Balkan Union, Magyars that lived in Transylvania for countless generations were resettled within the Hungarian BSR. It was seen as a means of insuring stability in the region by removing any claim of one member state against another. With the Union dissolved, the claims returned with a vengeance.

On November 20, 1949, after the Serb surrendered, the Hungarian Army turned around and struck into Transylvania. The official reason, the one accepted by the international community was that Hungary went there to do battle with units of the Red Army loyal to Belgrade that were unreconciled with Serbia’s surrender. As per the treaty between Hungary and Serbia, all Red Army units outside of Serbia were to disband and await repatriation. Units in Transylvania did not. Even after the holdouts were over ran, the Magyars continued to drive more than a hundred kilometers into Transylvania.

Tragically, once their offensive ran out of speed, this particular conflict in the general Balkan Wars was a repeat of the Great War, with thousands upon thousands of men dying in a no-man’s land between trenches. The early failure to capture Sibiu, the Transylvanian capital, did not detour the Magyars. After two years of intense fighting along a static front, they achieved a breakthrough with the help of their new air force, driving to Sibiu. On August 18, 1951, the Transylvanian government fell, allowing the Magyars to occupy the capital and install a puppet regime. As per the peace treaty signed between the two states, Transylvania ceded its western third to Hungary and remained as a vassal of the Magyar regime.

In May 1953, in hopes of ending the chaos, Joseph broz called together delegates from across the Balkans to attend a conference in Sarejavo. The goal of this conference was to re-establish the Balkan Union under a new constitution. Many states declined the invitation while others, such as Serbia, refused to even acknowledge it. Of the Balkan states only Bosnia, Croatia, Wallachia, Bulgaria, Moldova and Albania sent delegates. Within two week, the Albanians withdrew when it became clear the constitution would not benefit them. They sought to unite all Albanians under a single government and when Broz made it clear no territorial transfers would happen, they cut their loses and returned home.

The Second Balkan Union came into existence on August 21, 1953, with its capital at Sarejavo. Almost immediately it found itself at war against Serbia. The Serbs managed, partly thanks to a lenient peace with the Magyars, to rebound quickly from its loss during the First Serbo-Magyar War. In a way, the war was a blessing in disguise as it forced the Croats and Bosniaks of Bosnia to set aside their differences and unite against the invasion from Serbia. Broz used all of his political clout to try and end the violence within Bosnia with limited success. He did start commissions to investigate the atrocities committed in that country, including one that brought several Croats involved in the Lasva Valley massacre to justice, an act that had Broz labeled as a traitor by some of his fellow Croats. To their protest, he applied the same ruthlessness used in the earl years by the FDUS to crush nationalist sentiment.

Serbia was forced to limit its invasion to Bosnia, as it became apparent that they faced a war on two fronts against a restored Balkan Union. Serbia maintained a defensive war in the east and south, where Bulgarian and Wallachia were more than happy to wage war against those whom they blamed for the fall of the original Union. Despite pleas of vengeance against Serbia, Broz’s plan extended beyond the narrow view of his comrades. He wanted to restore all of the Union and take the IBW to places it had never had a presence.

He sent embassies to the Middle East and East Asia, succeeding in establishing ties with the so-called Peoples’ Dynasty in China as well as with rebels in Indochina and Mexico. The Broz Plan used these outlets to aid in rebuilding the Balkan Union’s shattered industry and infrastructure. Demand for arms by rebels increased over the years, spurring the output of Balkan factories not destroyed by constant warfare. The new Peoples’ Air Bureau opened in 1955 in Wallachia and produced several models of aircraft that not only saw action across the Balkans but were exported around the world.

Sadly, even with a slowly improving industry, the standards of living in the new Union were well below those of the old Union in pre-Krusader years. Poverty spread across the Union as the constant state of war drained national budgets and wore down the population. Poverty and warfare led to a collapse of infrastructure, the most famous being the bombing of a dam in Wallachia by the Serbian Air Force, and act that flooded out tens of thousands of civilians, let to a Balkan Diaspora.

To establish a balance of power in the region, Serbia turned to its former foe for aid in 1956. Gimbovik sent a proposal to Zoltan Tildy, the Premier of Hungary, for a union of their own to be the true Balkan Union. The Belgrade Council would be anything but a true union. In truth, it was little more than an alliance of convenience between Serbia, Hungary and Transylvania. Hungary considered joining Broz’s Union. Like Albania, it sought a transfer of territory, a request Belgrade was willing to grant. Hungary would gain territory from Transylvania and Transylvania would be compensated by lands gained from Wallachia.

In the year the Belgrade Council was founded, Hungary threw its considerable military weight behind Serbia in a full-scale invasion of the western Balkan Union. Sarejavo fell under siege during the first four months of 1957. The city was all but cut off from the outside world, save for its air waves. The rest of Europe heard the please for help coming out of the Bosnian and Balkan Union capital. They did not so much as lift a finger to aid them as Bosnia was simply of no strategic importance.

France and Spain imposed sanctions on Serbia and its allies with little effect. As with the pre-Krusader years, little trade existed between the various parties. For a rare occasion, sanctions actually harmed the elite more than the average citizen as it was the Party elite who consumed luxuries produced abroad. Sanctions imposed by Britain and the United Provinces hit far harder, as they exported medicine to the Balkans. With these sanctions in place, old diseases such as small pox and polio reappeared in parts of Serbia and Hungary. The towns were put under severe quarantine with any who tried to escape shot from patrolling helicopters.

During the Siege of Sarejavo, thousands were killed by the relentless bombardment, including General Stephan Filipovic. Filipovic rose to prominence during the Krusader years, leading a band of Bosniaks and Croats against Italian occupiers. After the war, he was a vital ally to Broz in his attempts to make and keep the peace in Bosnia.

When the Serb finally captured the city it was a pyrrhic victory. Nothing remained but burned out ruins. Following the city’s capture, Moldova withdrew from the Balkan Union, not wishing to be trapped in a treaty while on the losing side. To increase their position in the region, the joined the Belgrade Council with promises of territorial acquisitions in Wallachia. This defection effectively dissolved the Second Union. Despite the betrayal, Broz would not give up on his goal of restoring the Balkan Union. He did, however, withdrawal to Croatia to lead the Croatian Army against Serb invasions.

The Belgrade Council did not last long beyond their victory over the Balkan Union. Tildy decided in 1958 that he warred long enough. After failures to convince Gimbovik to end the war in Croatia Hungary dissolved its alliance with Serbia, withdrawing from the Belgrade Council along with its Transylvanian puppet. Serbia withdrew from the Council as well, leaving Moldova holding an empty bag. The Belgrade Council fell only after a few years.

 

[The Kiat]

While the Balkans burned in the flames of war, the remnants of the Ottoman Empire now known simply as Turkey, crowned a new Sultan who shared the views of the ultra-nationalists. It was time to restore the glories of the old empire. With the Balkans in utter disarray, Ankara thought it would be an easy conquest.

The first act of the brief Turkish invasion was the near disastrous invasion of Rhodes. The Greek garrison on the island had no reason to expect an attack. All of the fighting took place north on the mainland. There were no other ethnicities or nationalities aside from Greeks living on the islands. When the attack struck, the garrison reacted swiftly. Of the Turk’s air assault, twenty percent of their bombers were downed by a few surface-to-air missiles and obsolete British made turbo-prop Sea Eagles. Those that made it through to their target had jokes for bomb sites. Most of the bombs fell a foul of the Greek fortification, instead killing hundreds of the island’s civilians.

Three Greek torpedo boats dating back to the 1930s intercepted the Turkish invasion force. Though all three of the boats were destroyed the Turkish Navy failed to do so before they released their payload. One Turkish destroyer and a troop transport were sunk, hundreds of gear-laden soldiers drowning as a result. The other ten thousand Turkish soldiers made it to the shore to do battle with the fifteen hundred Greeks stationed on the island.

The landing cost an addition thousand Turkish soldiers with nearly as many dying during the capture of the Palace of the Grand Master. The old fortress was built centuries before by the Knights Hospitalier during their occupation of Rhodes. It commanded the city of Rhodes, which fell shortly afterwards. Not to be discouraged by the city’s fall, surviving Greek soldiers carried out guerilla warfare against the invaders. They were so successful in evading the Turks that the Turks began to execute civilians for each of its soldiers killed. All in all, of the twelve thousand soldiers sent against the island, the Turks lost half of its force by the time they “secured” the island.

More successful, or perhaps less of a disaster in terms of loss, was the crossing of the Bosporus by the bulk of the Turkish Army. Through October to December of 1953, the Turks placed Constantinople under siege, damaging much of the city. During the siege, twenty-five thousand civilians died and countless ancient buildings suffered damage as a result of indiscriminate bombardment. The dome of the Haiga Sofia collapsed under the bombardment.

The Sultan was obsessed with retaking Constantinople. His obsession cost him an opportunity to drive deep into the Balkans. In 1953, the Bulgarian Army fell to a low point in term of numbers and equipment, making Bulgaria an easy target. Turkish generals wanted to drive north but their autocrat decided otherwise. The old capital would fall. It was a proclamation that would never come to pass.

At the time, the Greek government recently came under the control of Nikos Zachariadis. He and the senior officers in the Hellenistic Army saw a great deal of action during the Krusader years and learned from it skills needed to face a numerically superior foe. While the Turks bogged down around Constantinople, Greek soldiers raided along the coast, attacking smaller Turkish outposts and destroying depots and convoys. Zachariadis planned to defeat the Turks the same way he defeated the Italians, through attrition.

Greece received an added bonus in January 1954, when Jefferson Patterson arrived in Athens, offering his services. Patterson served his country, the Republic of Virginia dutifully during its war with North Carolina in the 1930s. When his government sued for peace, he resigned in disgust. More than one of his war plans, deemed too drastic or unconventional by the conservative establishment, could have turned the tide in Virginia’s favor. For the shame of the defeat, he went into voluntary exile.

Patterson was a solder at heart, always seeking to fight the good fight. With his country partly disarmed, how was he supposed to fight and who? The answer came in the form of the French Foreign Legion. Patterson rose in prominence during the Legion’s action in New Granada and Sonora in the 1940s as well as fighting against Mexican rebels in the 1950s. When the Balkan Union, Patterson found himself answering the call for aid coming from Greece. When his term of service in the Legion ended, he left France to give aid to the new, imperfect republic.

Patterson was accepted as an advisor and made a general within the Greek Army. The sudden promotion from foreigner to general sparked some concern in the Greek government, concerns that Zachariadis quickly shouted down. As the strong man of the Greek state, he would decide who was best qualified for which position. It was an attitude that spelt disaster for other dictators yet Zachariadis proved to be a better judge of character. He knew Patterson’s record of service in the Foreign Legion as well his reputation as a classical scholar.

The new general and advisor’s first course of action called for the immediate relief of Constantinople. After campaigning against some of the more skillful rebels of his generation, he was surprised by the basic stupidity of the Turk’s battle plan, or lack there of. The Sultan’s chief goal appeared to be taking Constantinople and moving out from there. All of it depended upon Turkey control the waters around Constantinople. Furthermore, the Turks had a limited ability to conduct strategic bombing. When they did, they aimed more for symbolic targets, such as the Acropolis in Athens, than anything of military use.

To life the siege, Patterson had the Greek Navy force the Dardanelles and thus cutting off half of the Turkish Army. On February 20, 1954, the Greeks forced the Straits at a great cost to their navy. The besieging Turks soon found themselves under siege, surrounded by Greek on land and sea. To their surprise, when shells began to fall on the Turks, their commanders discovered that some of the Greek artillery pieces were on the Asian side of the Strait.

Patterson not only cutoff the Turks but managed to ferry five divisions from Greece to Anatolia, capturing ports on the Ionian Coast. His goal was to make it impossible for the Turks to withdrawal from Thrace, forcing them to surrender. It did little good to defeat an enemy if they were not disarmed. The Sultan, with half of his army trapped, refused to listen to reason. He order the rest of his army away from Turkey’s other borders to fight in Ionia.

One more nail in the Turkish coffin came in the form of outside intervention by the Dutch East India Company. The Turkish invasions severely disrupted trade in the Aegean Sea. That alone was no cause for alarm to the VOC. However, oil from Armenia and Kurdistan flowed through the Aegean, and as some of the wells were developed by the VOC, the company decided it was in their best interest if Greece was in complete control of the sea.

Their private navy was small by comparison to national navies but it was also state-of-the-art. Guided-missile frigates began to escort shipping through the region, firing on anyone who tried to obstruct them. The VOC supplied weapons to Zachariadis at a reduced cost, purchasing them from other arms manufacturers and selling them to Greece for a near term loss. VOC intervention proved so decisive that by the end of April 1954, the Turkish Navy ceased to exist as a functional branch of their armed forces.

It was not until July that the Ankara government collapsed, causing Turkey to fail as a state. The last Sultan was killed in an attempted palace coup. Two of his sons were quick to fight for power, forgetting an external enemy even existed. From there, Turkey further fragmented until today, sixty years after the Greco-Turkish War, Turkey is still ruled by petty warlords and families of the Ottoman Mafia.

Without a government to sign a peace treaty with, Greece unilaterally annexed the west coast of Anatolia on January 1, 1955. Zachariadis intended to return lands that were once inhabited by Greeks over to Greek settlers. In order to clear the way, the Greek Army began its systematic expulsion of Turks from Ionia. It was not as violent as Bloody Thrace but the results were the same. Within two years, more than 90% of the Turks were removed from Greece’s new borders.

This was not the end of Greek expansion. While Greece worked to consolidate its holdings in Asia, Zachariadis soon turned his attention towards the state that insisted upon called itself Macedonia. As Macedonia was part of Greek history, the Greek government decided that any state of that name should part of Greece. The reasons for seizing Macedonia were more than historical. The main factor was the industrial base in Macedonia that survived the Krusader years and in the 1950s, grew large enough to supply arms to most of the Balkans.

Zachariadis sought to make the military-industrial complex of Macedonia, especially the Macedonian Tank Works, sole property of Greece Inc. He was convinced to stop an invasion in 1959 at the last second. Greece needed to build its strength, rebuild its infrastructure. Address its wounds before expanding again. During the next decade, Zachariadis did just that, he rebuilt Greece.

As he oversaw the rebuilding, he briefly considered restoring the Byzantium Empire, with himself as Emperor naturally. His advisors and generals were appalled by the idea. Not because they abhorred restoring former glory. Far from it. At its heigh, Byzantium ruled the Balkans and there in lay the problem. A restored Byzantium would be a threat, perhaps one great enough to unite the other Balkan states against it.

Zachariadis had to consider the internal politics of such a move as well as international consequences. How would it look if a former member of the IBW, one that worked since 1950 to completely remove Greece from its clutches, were to set himself up as a monarch? He would be come the hated tyrant, no different than the Habsburgs or Osmani. For three generation, the Greek people were taught that monarchy was the natural enemy of the people. If Zachariadis put a crown on his head, the people would remove it along with his head.

Empire or Republic, he would not rest until Macedonia was again part of Greece. In 1969, he made his move when he took Greece into a war against the Third Balkan Union. The war was no easy victory, lasting four years and claiming the lives of two hundred sixteen thousand people. It concluded in 1973, with Greece annexing Macedonia. Victory was quickly followed by tragedy when, three days after the treaty was signed, the long standing Greek Premier Zachariadis died. General Andreas Papandreou replaced him as Premier until 1981, when elections were finally enacted.

The new Greek Constitution created a unitary republic that made use of the executive system. The executive system was copied from kingdoms with strong monarchies and in the place of the king is an elected executive. In the case of Greece, a President, who served as the head of state separate of the legislature. Greece developed a set of checks and balances against the executive and legislature and a clear separation of power, preventing any individual from taking complete control of Greece.

With the new republic came a revival of Greek culture, starting with moving the capital to Constantinople. From there, the Hellenistic Republic began to restore ancient buildings damaged by war and ancient ruins long neglected. Rebuilding and remodeling the Haiga Sofia took two years, allowing it to open in time for the Greek Congress to convene in 1982. Other Greek monuments were similarly restored. The Acropolis in Athens was restored partly to its pagan past and partly to its Orthodox traditions, with the temple acting both as a church and a museum.

The sight of old Sparta was selected as a training camp for the Hellenistic Army, with standards not nearly as stringent as the long dead warrior culture. The jewel of the new Sparta was, of course, the Spartan Academy, a school for future Greek officers. On plan for restoring Ancient Greek culture stalled and had yet to be complete; the rebuilding of the Colossus on Rhodes.

Further north, following the collapse of the Belgrade Council, the Serbians were up to their old bag of tricks again; plotting to found a Serbian Empire on the ashes of the Balkan Union. As with every attempt, Serbia began its expansionism at Bosnia’s expense. Though this new wave of invasions lacked the ethnic violence of previous wars, it still ripped up what little of the roads and rails the Bosniaks managed to repair since the fall of the Second Union. Bosnia itself fell under Serbian control from 1961 to 1963.

Bosniaks and Croats were not content to let Serbia colonize their homeland. Resistance movements hampered Serb occupation and administration. Despite previous levels of violence, the Serbian Army did not instigate massacres against the non-Serb population. They did, however, impose martial law under draconic conditions, including internal passports and identification cards. Those who lacked papers were arrests and held for long periods. Those who violated curfew were often assumed to be part of the resistance and shot on sight.

Even with lower levels of violence, the Serbs preceded to deport Bosniaks from regions bordering Serbia. The Serbian government planned to move Serbs within Serbia closer to the border with the motherland. This ethnic redistribution caused serious disruptions to supply, and even allowed near-famine conditions in some of Bosnia’s cities. Most of the resources were expended in transporting peoples and making the demography of Bosnia something that met with Belgrade’s approval.

In Kosovo, the Serbs decided also to redistribute the demographics, but not in the same way as Bosnia. In Kosovo, Belgrade decided that it was time to expel the Albanians. The ethnic cleansing brought numerous protests from Albania, but protests were all they were. Albania attempted to garner Great Power support. The United Kingdom gave moral support, but locked in tensions with the United Provinces, and later war, they could do nothing but morally support Albania. By 1963, more than forty percent of the Albanians were refugees within Albania.

In May of 1963, Hungary once again went to war against Serbia. It was not that they supported the Bosniaks or Albanians, but rather they could see the writing on the wall. There was concern in Budapest that the Serbs might turn their eyes towards Hungary. Deciding to preempt them, the Hungarians struck at the relatively undefended eastern border of Serbia, breaching their defenses after only three days of brutal fighting.

On June 4, 1963, the Hungarian 3rd Division rolled into Belgrade, virtually unopposed. When news of the city’s fall reached Serbia’s colonies, the Bosniaks and Croats of Bosnia and Albanians living within the Serbian border, rose up in revolt. The uprisings were almost as abrupt as the original Balkan Uprising. So forceful were they that Serbian units in Bosnia withdrew to the firmly Serb-held areas. On June 9, the Serbian government fell.

Terms for peace were again rather lenient. Hungary had no interest in occupying Serbia, but demanded that it withdrawal from Bosnia and Montenegro, the former racked by civil war until 1971. There were no terms concerning Kosovo, which was a province within Serbia. Thus, the Serbs continued their cleansing. However, having much of their power broken, Albania went to war against Serbia. There was no declaration as units of the Albanian army crossed the border to protect ethnic Albanians, and did manage to push Albania’s border several kilometers into Serbia.

 

[The Kiat]

V) Equilibrium
(1969-2001)
At the start of 1968, with the better part of a violent decade behind them, Joseph Broz once again tried to restore the Balkan Union. He called for all Balkan States to send delegate to a conference in Zagreb. Few delegates arrived, and even fewer agreed to a new constitution, this one authorizing more power to the executive branch. Of the ten states that attended, only Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, Wallachia and Macedonia ratified. The Third Union was weaker than the previous two, and infrastructure in Bosnia was all but shattered did little to help.

Broz’s first Five Year Plan of the Third Union called for linking all the states by road and rail. Hundreds of millions of guilders were spent in rebuilding Bosnia alone. The Third Union was almost a failure from the beginning. In the 1970s, they fought a losing war against Greece, where all of Macedonia was annexed by them. Further Greek air strikes into Bosnia and Albania severely damaged industry and infrastructure that had already seen two decades worth of on-again, off-again warfare. The plus side of the conflict saw that outsiders were getting involved within the Balkans.

During the UBSR’s war against Greece, the Italians sent in a small expeditionary force into Albania to prevent the spread of Greek influence. The Italian Federation was already wary of Greece following their crippling blow against the former Republic of Turkey. Greek shipping began to overlap on Italian interests, and pirates were even operating out of the many islands in the Aegean Sea, targeting mostly Italian ships. Though Italy did not declare war on Greece, it did fight several small naval engagements against pirates and Greek patrol boats, along with landing a regiment in Albania to keep the Greeks from gaining any holds on the Adriatic coast. There was some concern in the Italian Federation that Greece might seek revenge for the Italian occupation of Greece.

The idea that Greece, despite its regional power, was ever a threat to the Italian Federation is somewhat of a misnomer. The Greek Navy was modern compared to Balkan standards yet their newest ship remained nearly a decade behind Italy in terms of technology The Hellenistic Navy possessed a handful of guided-missile frigates while the Italian Navy had five guided missile cruisers and a small aircraft carrier. Italian nationalism played a role as well, for the Nationalist Party, with its ultra-nationalistic views, was playing on the Greek menace to gain votes. It did gain a coalition majority in Italy’s parliament, and went about trying to ‘rebuild the glories of Rome’. They did in part, restoring Ancient Roman structures in time for the 1972 Olympics, and even completely rebuilding the Flavia Amphitheater, the legendary Roman Coliseum for the games.

In the end, Italian intervention, albeit light, did not stop Greece from achieving its goals. By 1973, it was in control of the relatively intact industrial base of Macedonia. For two decades, Macedonia managed to avoid much of the Balkan Wars, mostly because it was a primary arms manufacturer in the region. This became doubly important following embargos and sanctions against the various states in the region. Greece had little to no interest in supplying any of its northern neighbors, and instead used the industrial pygmy to help rebuild its own country. Their selfishness catapulted Greece head and shoulders above its Balkan neighbors, making it the true success story of the Balkan Peninsula.

On January 17, 1979, Joseph Broz, the General-Secretary of the Balkan Union, was scheduled to give a speech outlining his new Five Year Plan in Sarejavo. The plan called for the completion of the public works and repair to the regions’ damaged roads and rails, along with expanding the production of consumer products. He was to speak in front of the Sarejavo Copper Works, a state-ran business that once produced copper plating and wiring, but was now retooled to produce cooking ware and hand tools.

His speech was not to be. At 9:16, only fourteen minutes before he was scheduled to make his appearance, Broz worked his way through the crowds outside of the factory. Though many of the International Brotherhood of Workers claimed to be ‘of the people’, Broz was truly the People’s General-Secretary. When he encountered one Pavel Minkail, he offered his hand and called the man comrade. In return, Minkail produced an Austrian-era pistol and fired three shots into Broz. The first two shots missed anything vital but the third shot entered his chest and ripped through his heart. Broz died only minutes later, while his personal guards and some of the local workers tried to get him to medical attention. As for the assassin, the instant he fired off his rounds, three of Broz’s guards drew their own weapons and gunned him down. Tragically, not all shots found their target in the crowd, and two other workers were wounded.

Broz’s death rippled across the Third Balkan Union. Days after his assassination, senior members of the IBW began fighting for control of the Party and the Union. It was not open civil war, but two of Broz’s senior party allies did vanish, and neither man was a Croat. By November of 1979, Croatian Statesman Andre Marik was in control. He placed fellow Croats in key positions in the government and military. Non-Croat Generals were purged from the service. In response, the Union began to fracture. It began with Albania withdrawing in January of 1980, followed by Wallachia in March. Wallachia did not so much as secede as it was taken control of from within by the Ceausescu Junta. By April, the Third Union was dissolved, and Croatian forced moved to occupy Bosnia while Albania split.

On January 7, 1980, the Romanian Nation was founded by a military junta commanded by Nicolae Ceausescu. Romania was first established by simultaneous coups in Transylvania, toppling the Magyar puppet regime in place since the 1950s, and Moldova. The Romanian National Front was a nationalistic movement with occult undertones. The society saw the Romanian people as the lost children of Rome and Byzantium. They also traced their alleged roots back to mythological times, and had racial views that set them apart from the Slav. The fact that the original Roman genes had long since been replaced by genetic Slavs did not even factor into their racial superiority dogma.

The first and only, Tsar of unified Romania started his life on January 17, 1918, in the village of Scornicesti in the Wallachian Balkan Socialist Republic. Unlike many future leaders in the Balkans, Nicolae Ceausescu was born a peasant on the eve of the USBR’s founding. Little is known about his early years, save for the official biography commissioned during his reign as Tsar. At the age of fourteen, he left his hometown and was relocated to work in the factories during the industrialization process along the Danube. Working conditions were tough, though nowhere near as difficult in the labor camps or those that Ceausescu would later impose upon his enemies.

During the crusade, the official biography runs accounts that have Ceausescu leading his own resistance band against Russo-Swedish occupation and their puppet state of Dacia. There is little evidence ever fired a shot against the Swedes, or was in the resistance. Dacian documentation recovered after the war reports that Ceausescu was arrested and interned for his membership in the Wallachian Worker’s Party. It is said that much of what he inflicted upon his countrymen later in life, he learned first-hand from his captors.

Following the war, the Balkan Union tore itself apart in civil war, as the occupation brought back ancient ethnic rivalries and vendettas. Ceausescu did participate in these wars, rising quickly through the ranks of the Wallachian People’s Army, obtaining the equivalent of Colonel by 1960. It was around this time he began to become deeply involved in the local branch of the IBW, rising in rank as quickly here as in the army. By 1965, he was within the Party’s inner circle, and by 1967, he had enough support from Party men and the army to launch his own coup.

His enemies were dealt with quickly; some thirty-two thousand alone were executed in his first year as General-Secretary. Most of the 1970s were spent in reforming Wallachia, and streamlining the previously inefficient councils. By 1978, Ceausescu had turned the country into a one-man dictatorship. His Romanian National Front soon eclipsed the decaying IBW as the new face of the state. During his first decade in power, he encouraged a cult of personality around him, elevating him to the Communist pantheon, alongside Marx and Karadordevic. His influence expanded well beyond his own borders, into the third incarnation of the Balkan Union, as well as Moldova, Transylvania and Bulgaria.

On January 7, 1980, juntas organized by Ceausescu and his foreign supporters took control simultaneously in Moldova and Transylvania. One of the RNF’s long standing goals were the unification of the Romanian people under one ruler, that being Ceausescu himself. On May 8, 1980, the three states, under the same guiding hand signed the Treaty of Unification, establishing Romania as a state. The state was not to be a socialist republic or any republic at all. Ceausescu saw himself as Caesar reincarnate, and on June 19, he declared himself Tsar Nicolae of the Romanian Empire.

Romanian plans for empire were evident from the beginning. On February 14, 1981, the Romanian Army, with the Tsar in personal command, invaded Bulgaria. Factions sympathetic to Romanian goals did exist within the Bulgarian government, and even moved to press for union with the new state. The vote did pass Bulgaria’s lower chamber of parliament, but was blocked by the upper chamber. When the Romanians crossed the border, they would cross as liberators, freeing the people from the tyranny of the minority.

Romania’s invasion of Bulgaria has to be the most bloodless conquest of the Balkan Wars. For the most part, the Bulgarian Army did not resist and their Air Force remained grounded. Romanian infantry marched into Sofia on February 20. It is now known that a Fifth Column was planted the year before by Ceausescu and his followers. Many in the government were appointed by a pro-unification president. When the Romanians crossed the border, no orders were issued calling for the Army to fight.

It soon became clear that it was indeed a Tyranny of the Minority. However, it was not in Romania’s favor. The minority were the pro-unification faction. The bulk of Bulgaria’s masses were against Romanian occupation. The Tsar had hoped to add Bulgaria’s industrial capacity to his own, but wide-scale strikes broke out in late 1981, that brought the Bulgarian economy to a halt. When the Tsar attempted to use his army to end the strikes, full scale rioting engulfed Sofia for three days. It was only after additional army units were flown in from Romania that the rioters were dispersed, and an addition week was required to extinguish the fires.

Strikes continued into 1982 and 1983. Ceausescu was forced to import Romanian workers to take over the industry, causing a worker shortage within his own kingdom. By 1984, Romania’s position in Bulgaria was no longer practical to hold. The Tsar had some concerns about other Romanian state attempting to secede, but with enough of his own people in position, Romania remained united. By June 29, 1984, the last of the Romanian soldiers left Bulgaria, and it was “granted” its independence from Bucharest.

The occupation of Bulgaria put severe strains on the Romanian economy. Ceausescu worried that the withdrawal might be seen as a weakness and exploited by his neighbors. Over the next five years, the annual budget for the Romanian Military rose to 37% of Romania’s income. The Tsar began to show signs of mental instability in 1987, when he declared before parliament that not only would Romania have an army to rival Greece, but it shall have one to rival even Russo-Sweden. As Army and Air Force grew, civilian spending power declined. By 1989, the last year of the Empire, more than forty percent of the nation’s inhabitants lived below the poverty level. Food and supply shortages popped up in every city, and the nation’s children began to go hungry. Lack of supplies saw an increase in the black market, unauthorized commerce largely controlled by petty gangs of smugglers who would, at the turn of the 21st Century, emerge as the Romanian Mafia.

During the early 1980s, the Tsar worked thousands to death on constructing the Palace of the People in Bucharest. Many who were sentenced to hard labor were Magyars who settled in Transylvania during the former state’s time as a puppet of Hungary. Ceausescu drew up plans to invade Hungary and reclaim the Transylvania lands from the Magyars. His plans, began in 1988, came to naught as the forces required would not be in place until 1990, the year after the Tsar’s fall.

This palace still holds the record as the largest administrative building in the world, and is only outsized overall by a few aerospace assembly plants. The palace cost ten billion guilders, three thousand lives and four years to complete. Several districts of Bucharest, including some dating back to medieval times, were bulldozed to make room for the neo-classical monstrosity.

Life was not all good within the Palace. The heir designate, Nicu, took over reigns of the puppet parliament, and his sister Valentina was placed in charge of the Ministry of Industry and Technology. Both proved to be as ruthless as their father. In the case of Valentina, when the workers in a Sibiu Steel Mill went on strike, she ordered army units in the region to break the strike. Leaders of the union, as well as other Steel Unions, were put on trial as traitors to the Empire and executed between May and July of 1987. The only one of the Tsar’s children who was not cold-hearted and cruel was Zoia, whose defection to the Italian Federation in 1988, hit the Tsar hard.

What brought down the Emperor was not the will of the people or outside invaders, but his own socialist planning– or at least his own concept of socialism. By 1989, the total debt collected during the Imperial Years nearly equaled the country’s annual income. Banks began to stop handing out loans, and a few demanded payments. Cuts were made across the board, with the Army being the only exception. During the summer of 1989, hard times hit the country as stores ran out of goods and queues wrapped around city blocks. Some citizens were forced to wait in line all day for their bread rations.

The final straw came in October of 1989. With deficit spending at its end, the Tsar began to make cuts from education, healthcare and unemployment to support his bloated army. To this, the people of Bucharest rose up and stormed the palace with the same force as the Spanish had in the 1820s. Fighting broke out across Bucharest, with Ceausescu’s diehard supports fighting elements of the army that would rather see him deposed. His madness over the previous two years prompted many in the higher levels of the military to begin plotting his downfall. They feared that with all his spending on the army that the Tsar might actually be foolhardy enough to start a war with Greece, or God forbid, The Russo-Swedish Empire. In either case, the international community would be against them, and in the end Romania would lose. A defeat would spell the end of the new unified nations.

Popular uprisings spread like a wildfire across the country in the Fall of 1989. The Tsar became more and more erratic, and in October of that year, turned against his own army chiefs. He went as far as to accuse General Michael Romani of treason when he refused to fire upon crowds of hungry Romanians. When he attempted to have Romani arrested, the Army mutinied. Like Ceausescu before him, Romani had the support of the Army when he pulled off his own coup.

On October 8, the fighting in the palace was over, when General Michael Romani captured the Tsar and put him before an impromptu peoples’ court. By the end of the day, the Tsar was taken out into the courtyard and shot. At the end, his iron will that he worked so hard to project broke down, as he offered the guards taking him to his execution two million guilders each if they helped him escape. The next month filled Romania with the 20th Century pastime in the Balkans; endless purges. By December, the monarchy was abolished and a military dictatorship installed until such time as elections can be arranged. This period lasted until Romania joined the Fourth Balkan Union. They applied for admission on the last day of 1989.

Romania was not the only country with dreams of empire. Once again, Serbia rose up and took notice at her neighbor’s lands. As a rule of thumb in Balkan regional dynamics, it appears mandatory for Serbia to grab the land around her once per decade. However, Serbia did not start out to become a monarchy. Instead, this empire was ruled by the Communist Party of Serbia with goals of a Greater Serbia. No longer did Serbia desire, nor contain the ability to, rule all of the Balkans.

The Unification of the Serb people began in 1982, with Serbia’s intervention in the growing Bosnian Civil War. By the 1980s, the ethnic distribution of Bosnia was divided sharply, with the Serbs living in the provinces bordering Serbia. Croats attempt at taking total control of the country forced a stream of Serb refugees to flood into Serbia. The humanitarian plight was exactly the justification Belgrade required to invade Bosnia without turning the international community against them. Not that Serbia ever required either justification or support. For once, its invasion of Bosnia was not condemned.

For two years, Serbia pressed its way into Bosnia, and once again the country was torn apart by warfare. Croatia pressed back against Serbian advances, retaking cities occupied by the Serbians, and lashing out against the populace. In the case of Banja Luka, retaken by Croats on May 19, 1985, the Croats executed hundreds of Serbs and Bosniaks. Among the dead were dozens of Croats declared collaborators. When the town was again taken back by Serbia, on July 25, the atrocity was exposed to the world.

In response to the massacre, Belgrade decided to take a more direct approach to the Croat problem. On August 29, two divisions of the Serbian Army crossed the border into eastern Croatia. For three years Croatia and Serbia fought along a static front. The war would have continued to this day, if not for the fall of the Croatian government. Milan Kucan, follower of Broz back in the 1970s, led a coalition that came to power in Zagreb. Peace talks between Croatia and Serbia lead to a division of Bosnia that exists to this day.

The Treaty of Split effectively partitioned Bosnia. The Serbian portion of the country was fully integrated into Greater Serbia. After 1993, when Serbian Premier Milenko Kulik staged a coup against the parliament and declared himself Tsar of Serbia. Serbia began a full scale effort to expel not only Bosniaks and Croats, but also all the remaining Albanians from the portions of Kosovo under Belgrade’s control. Albania attempted to prevent the expulsion, but to little effect. Serbia of the 1990s was far stronger than the Serbia of the 1970s. The Serbian Empire survived the turn of the century, with Tsar Milenko still in power as of 2014. The part of Bosnia under Croatia’s control accepted the Bosniak refugees and became the cornerstone of the Fourth Balkan Union.

The current incarnation of the Union of Balkan Socialist Republics came into life on December 8, 1988, when Croatia, Bosnia and free Montenegro signed the Zagreb Accords. Bulgaria ratified the Accords on December 19, becoming the fourth member. Following the toppling of Ceausescu from the throne, Romania joined the new Union in 1989. Romania’s revolution and ascension to the Fourth Union often marks the end of the Balkan Wars. The 1990s, despite ethnic cleansing in Greater Serbia, offered the first regional peace in fifty years. The Balkan Union also acts as an effective counter to the Serbian Empire, forcing a balance of power in the Balkans.

With peace, albeit a cold peace, in effect, the Balkan Union began rebuilding once again. This time, the outside world took an interest in the Union, despite it being a communist state. China, under the Peoples’ Dynasty, is the biggest investor in the Union, followed by Sweden and Italy in a distant third. In 1994, Greece hosted a general peace conference for all the Balkan states. The Athens Pact, negotiated over a five month period, finally settled borders between all the Balkan states. The Pact also guarantees the movement of ethnicities out of states where they are minority and into their ethnic homelands. This last piece was inserted by Serbia as a condition for them to sign. It also permits their acts of purification in a legal sense.

Foreign investment within the Balkan Union has risen to twelve billion guilders by 2005, with much of it going into developing the Ploesti oil fields, which suffered from lack of proper maintenance during the Empire-era in Romania. Further investment rebuilt the roads in Croatia and Bosnia. France and Britain signed free trade agreements with the communist state, and began to out source some of their industries to the cheaper labor of the Balkan Union. The IBW appreciated the irony of the ‘capitalist fat cats’ own greed being used to power the Worker’s State’. The Balkan Union even hammered out an agreement with the VOC, for use of the Union’s Black Sea ports in exchange for technical support and modernizing facilities on the Romanian and Bulgarian coasts. The VOC uses these new ports as a base to protect the oil flowing out of Armenia.

The Balkan Union’s future remains uncertain. Despite two decades of peace, the concentration of ethnicities in ethnic homelands could still tear the Union apart. Attempts to expand the Union have thus far failed. Kucan extended membership offers to Hungary, Albania and even Greece. In response, Tsar Milenko accused Kucan of attempting to surround Serbia, and such an arrangement would not be tolerated by Greater Serbia. Some say a war between the Union and Serbia during the 21st Century is inevitable; only time will tell.