The last roll of the dice (Trade Weapon Crisis 1922)
By the end of October 1922, the general mood in Europe was tentative optimism. The Greek weapon crisis thankfully appeared to have not resulted in a war, and on the other side of the world, China had not behaved like the UPNG Conservative propaganda wished, invading everything near their own territories.
The Great Powers remained at peace. Assuredly it was uneasy one and the levels of militarisation were higher than any pacifist man or woman was comfortable with, but it was still a lack of hostilities and bloodshed.
Despite some journalists’ non-negligible imagination, it looked like the fable of the mountain giving birth to a mouse was true once more.
Unfortunately for these avid news-seekers, they were looking on the wrong direction when on November 2, a brutal coup d’état was launched in the streets of Belgrade.
It wasn’t really their fault. The nature itself of the Anarchist Serbian government had ensured the country was isolated and a mystery for the foreigners.
In fact, while Paris, Moscow, and other capitals hadn’t advertised the fact, the leading intelligence agencies of the Great Powers were confident many politic struggles of the Serbians had resulted in bloody purges. Unfortunately, when they happened in the late 1910s, these brutal forms of power-grabs were often discovered months after, and even then, the intricacies of these miniature revolutions were not fully understood.
This one would not be the exception to the rule. As far as the Russian sources of information were able to discover, the ‘International’ faction of the Anarchist Syndicate had suffered many public reverses, from their failure to sink the armament shipments with a Sicilian submarine to the scandal which had seen several Hungarian and Polish arm-makers and politicians lose their jobs for having accepted various deals with Serbia.
In what was ‘normal circumstances’ for their form of government, it should have resulted in one or two leaders losing their heads, several key minister-level commandants relegated to unglamorous tasks, and another faction seizing power. Unfortunately for Serbia and the world in general, the faction which replaced them called itself the “Anarchists’ Levellers”, in inspiration of the English movement of the same name.
If the Anarchist’s Levellers had a common point with their predecessors though, it was their love for violent solutions. The majority of the Serbian factions, largely aware of their inclinations, had largely relegated them to minor duties where they had languished for all the post-Great War period.
No one had really thought this fringe group would be able to muster a large amount of support, but in this the governing men and women of the Syndicate had been utterly wrong. Allying with several populist groups and diminishing their firebrand rhetoric, the Anarchist’s Levellers were able to recruit several thousand militia volunteers under their banner, to which they added a few hundred regulars.
The coup, based on their own propaganda and the effects of it in the weeks after, was incredibly effective: more than five thousand people were captured and imprisoned before being sentenced in parodies of trials.
In better times, the Serbian population would have revolted against this new rule, which promised certainly dark days ahead. But this was the problem. Serbia was not in a good state right now. The nation had always suffered from being entirely land-locked economically, and the rise of Anarchism has not helped correct this problem, in fact it had worsened it. Serbians were often treated as if they were harbouring the seeds of a demonic plague in them, Western and Eastern propaganda often broadcasting that Anarchism was the first cousin of Collectivism.
The Levellers in this grey existence promised prosperity and a new state of affairs which would see the enemies of Serbia humbled and the encirclement of their country broken forever.
And they had charismatic propaganda-masters to help pass the message. Serbia being not exactly rich enough to have several radio stations in every street, the Levellers’ fast offensive in stealing or outright silencing every form of modern communication was a great boon in the first days.
Then the new Anarchist leadership began to draft its plans for war, for behind calm and gentle faces, the men and women now ruling over Belgrade and its surrounding lands knew very well that unless they promised results, sooner or later the fate of their defeated opponents would be theirs.
The main military objective, acknowledged from the start, was to defeat Greece before it had the time to truly adapt its army to the new weapons just delivered. It was an all-or-nothing offensive strategy. It also required the Russian divisions stationed in the Grand Duchy of Transylvania to remain idle, or at least not launch an offensive against the Serbian eastern frontier. Since the pact between the Tsarina and Athens was solid, it meant the circumstances of such a defection had to be engineered.
In early December, without warning, many train stations, locomotives, wagons, and military and civilian quarters on both side of the Transylvanian-Ottoman frontier went up in flames.
Unfortunately for the Anarchist, one of their main cells was seen and caught in the open before they could retreat to Serbia, and while the leaders of such black operations knew better than to carry highly-sensitive documents with them, several corpses were recognised as agents of foreign powers which had been a bit too active in the vicinity lately.
And in the middle of Transylvania, where the population wasn’t exactly shining with fervour for the Russians, the secret police of the Romanov began a long counter-intelligence campaign for the rest of the year 1922, interrogating and making disappear hundreds of potential rebels and saboteurs.
It didn’t improve the popularity of the Russian men and women present in the region. But the Russian Empire’s ministers – and for once, the Sublime Porte too – didn’t care, for it allowed them to seize enough evidence the Serbians had been trying to create a major war. Combined to other intelligent coming from Greece, it didn’t take a genius to guess their goals.
A diplomatic ultimatum was delivered on December 26 by a Russian envoy at the eastern Serbian frontier. No answer was given before the 31st, which was the date the message’s offer expired.
On January 2, seeing the Anarchists weren’t backing off, the Kingdom of Greece and the Empire of Russia declared war to Serbia and the murderous Anarchists leading them.
