Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals Read Online Free PDF

and generals who had forced the abdication of Nicholas II had found it extremely difficult to establish the kind of English-style monarchy they had originally envisaged. On the one hand, urban workers and many peasants continued to hanker after the kind of fundamentalist theocracy called for by the more radical religious sects. It was a major blow to the religious zealots when Ulyanov - one of the most prominent of their ‘prophets’ - was exposed as a German agent and executed in the summer of 1917. On the one hand, there was considerable centralist reluctance to adopt a devolved political system along Stuart or Habsburg lines. Not without reason, the Russians had reason to doubt their hold over such subject peoples as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had left them. Indeed, the real problem for the government was the same problem which was threatening Anglo-American power in Asia: the growing hostility of the non-Russian peoples to the power of the imperial government.
    The Germans had, of course, begun the process of breaking up the Tsarist empire in 1916 by giving nominal independence to Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine. During the 1930s, other territories - notably Belorussia, Georgia and Armenia - began to press for greater autonomy. Ironically, the strongest opponent of the government’s indecisive policy of half-measures and concessions to the minorities was himself a priest of Georgian origin. But Joseph Djugashvili’s apocalyptic warnings that a rump Muscovy would be consumed by demonic foreign saboteurs - thought by many to refer to a second German attack - went unheeded. In June 1941, the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa. Just as Djugashvili had feared - and the new Minister for the Occupied Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, had hoped - the non-Russian nationalities flocked to the German standard, seizing the opportunity for a final decisive victory over their traditional oppressors. A Belorussian protectorate was set up, along with a Caucasian federation and a new Crimean Muftiate. Cossack, Kalmyk and Tatar formations were integrated into the Wehrmacht. The Germans allowed considerable political latitude to peoples like the Chechens and the Karachai in the Northern Caucasus.
    Admittedly, as Michael Burleigh argues, Rosenberg’s policies were not entirely to Hitler’s taste, and still less to those of the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. But it was clear that their dreams of the ethnic transformation of Eastern Europe, involving massive population transfers, would have wasted precious economic resources which the Germans needed for their planned war against America. Only with respect to the European Jews, whom Hitler obsessively loathed, was a policy of forced resettlement and mass murder adopted. Of course, for many years it was denied by the German authorities that there had been a policy of genocide. Those who talked of ‘death camps’ during and after the war were simply not believed in the absence of tangible proof. Only the final defeat of Germany in 1952 allowed archaeologists to uncover the evidence of the existence of such camps at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. It is striking that the Germans were able to carry out this appalling slaughter without any perceptible opposition from local non-Jewish populations, and with little disruption to their war effort. Indeed, in some camps (notably Auschwitz), prisoners were used as slave labour by major industrial concerns like IG-Farben. Jewish prisoners (including eminent scientists) were also used in the work on the German atomic bomb, which Hitler had become convinced would make him the master of the world.
    It is difficult to say what might have happened if Hitler had lived long enough to see the work on the bomb completed. Very possibly there would have been an atomic strike against America. But thankfully it was not to be. The collapse of the Third Reich had for some time been predicted by exiled critics of Hitler’s ‘Behemoth’, who