The Limpid Stream
By Jack Tindale
3/5
()
About this ebook
In the spring of 1917, Vladimir Lenin was taken from his exile in Switzerland, loaded onto a sealed train, and taken to the Russian capital of Petrograd – a city where all manner of revolutionary ideas were in the air. Sent by the German government to add his radical voice to the chaos of the post-Tsarist regime, few would have expected that Lenin would soon preside over the establishment of the world's first communist state and inexorably change the course of human history.
But what if he had never arrived?
In The Limpid Stream Jack Tindale postulates a world where Lenin's assassination on his arrival at Finland Station leads to a divergent Russian Revolution. With the Bolshevik cause robbed of its most charismatic leader, a nation quite removed from our universe's Soviet Union emerges. From the bumbling actions of Alexander Kerensky, to the autocratic modernisation of Pyotr Wrangel, to the staunch liberalism of a very different Ayn Rand, The Limpid Stream shows a vision of a highly divergent 20th Century.
Read more from Jack Tindale
Shuffling the Deck Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPresident Ashdown Is Retiring Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYou've Always Had It This Good Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Agent Lavender Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemain Means Remain (and other stories) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsT'Yorkshire Assembly Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLa Isla Blanca Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Limpid Stream
Related ebooks
The Bloody Man: The Bloody Man, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Days In Yangon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCaesars of the Bosphorus Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPresidential Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Making Murder Sound Respectable Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The Curse of Maggie Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsApocalypse How Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Year of the Prince: The House of Stuart Sequence, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDouble Play Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Plague Policeman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFight Them on the Beaches Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5La Isla Blanca Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTippecanoe and Wallace Too Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Boy in the Storm Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Only Winning Move Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMore Than Just a Game: Sports in American Life Since 1945 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhy Political Democracy Must Go: The Origins of Socialism in the United States Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe King Shall Have His Own Again: The House of Stuart Sequence, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOut of the Blue Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShadow of Montreux Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBombard the Headquarters! Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Unreformed Kingdom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe People's Flag: The Union of Britain and the Kaiserreich: The People's Flag, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Zonen Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNot An English Word Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Red Führer: The Red Führer, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Boristopia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Road To Stalingrad Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarooned : An Asian Alternate-History Science Fiction Saga: First Contact, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Alternative History For You
The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: A Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Man in the High Castle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5She Who Became the Sun Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lost in Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Men Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Damiano Trilogy: Damiano, Damiano's Lute, and Raphael Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Electric State Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Things From the Flood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Diana Gabaldon's Best Reading Order: with Summaries & Checklist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi: A new fantasy series set a thousand years before The City of Brass Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Shamshine Blind: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Plot Against America: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tales From the Loop Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Kingdoms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The King's Daughter Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Out of Time: a Time Travel Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Accidental Christ: The Story of Jesus (As Told by His Uncle) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lavinia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5At the Table of Wolves Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When the World was Black Part One: Prehistoric Cultures Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Strange Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Guardian Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Aftermath Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anson House Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings1888: The Ripper Revelation: Infinity Engines: Missions, #2 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Limpid Stream
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
The Limpid Stream - Jack Tindale
The Limpid Stream
Jack Tindale
1917-1919
Alexander Kerensky
Social Revolutionary Party
The man who destroyed one empire and created another
What strangled Bolshevism? Certainly, the assassination of Vladimir Lenin at Finland Station on 15th April 1917 did not help the Communist cause. As he mounted the makeshift podium that had been hastily hammered together from the little available lumber left in Petrograd, he could have been forgiven for allowing himself a small smile. Lenin's personal papers, now available to any keen researcher at the University of Zurich, indicate that he had already planned out an uprising against the Provisional Government in Petrograd, which he felt would have been undone as the war against Germany continued.
How effective his plans would have been is a matter of speculation. A matter of seconds after mounting the steps to the ramshackle lectern, a single shot was fired. As the crowd dispersed, screaming, the herald of Russian Marxism lay dying in the watery spring air.
The reaction from the revolutionary intelligentsia was immediate. Some accused the anarchists of plotting the action, others blamed right-wing elements of the Provisional Government. A select few even whispered rumours that the assassination had been masterminded by Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin’s friend and rival who assumed leadership of the shell-shocked Bolsheviks in the days following the incident. Despite this, the furious reaction of the revolutionary left-wing was a unifying factor for the anti-war movement, with the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets calling for general strikes on 13th April.
By this time, the true benefactor of the assassination had risen to prominence. Alexander Kerensky, the interim Minister of Justice, assumed the mantle of leadership following the sudden resignation of Prince Lvov. Orthodox history has traditionally viewed Kerensky’s actions as motivated by the lack of attention accorded him owing to the strike action, but more revisionists theses have proposed that the Social Revolutionary leader was driven by a desire to end the war with Germany by any means necessary – a decision that he considered to have been one that was best made whilst the left-wing opposition was still in disarray.
The Declaration of Lomonosov on May 1st, International Labour Day, ended Russian involvement in the Great War, nominally at least. Kerensky had already informed both Paris and London that such an announcement was only interim, intended for the country to recuperate and stave off civil war whilst military and economic reforms were completed. Flanked by the new Minister of Defence, Lavr Kornilov, Kerensky also announced that the Russian army would retreat for the duration of the summer. Whilst humiliating on paper, the vast Austro-German force that would be required to police the newly independent nations of eastern Europe would only increase the pressures on the Western Front. For Jozef Pilsudski, the interim-Prime Minister of the newly and nominally independent Kingdom of Poland, the peace was only an interim one, merely an intake of breath by the Russian bear, steadying to blow down all before him!
Pilsudski’s words, now immortalised in his diary at the Royal Museum in Warsaw, today seem highly prophetic.
Co-currently, Kerensky also called for the formation of a new Constitutional Assembly
, with elections being held over a ten day period in the summer of 1917. Despite complaints from some quarters about the rapidity of the decision, as well as the general ill-preparedness of the country to actually hold the elections, the polls went ahead as planned, resulting in a landslide victory for the SRs, who held a narrow majority over the Constitutional Democrats, a loose coalition of Rightists
(monarchists, anti-Semites, Germanophobes or, in many cases, all three) and the rump Mensheviks. Despite demands from some on the right to recall the monarchy, the overwhelming majority of delegates voted in favour of a Chairman-President
, or figurehead, to become head of state. Kerensky, fearing that he would be appointed to the position in an effort to curtail his power, immediately proposed Prince Lvov for the role. Despite some grumblings about the Premier’s Dictatorial Leanings
, Lvov was appointed unopposed.