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Tomsk (1950-1962)

Central Siberian Republic Средне-Сибирская Республика Sredne-Sibirskaya Respublika
1950–1962
File:Hoi4 Tomsk flag.png Flag Coat of arms
Motto: Сибирская!
Tomsk shown in map before the Russian Civil War
Capital	Tomsk
Common languages	Russian Nenets
Government	Decembrist Republic
Head of State
• 1950-1962	Boris Pasternak
Historical era	Russian Civil War
• State declared	18 April 1950
• Russian Civil War	1953
• Tomsk Captured	14 January 1962
Currency	Ruble
Today part of	Russia

Tomsk, officially the Central Siberian Republic, is a Russian warlord in northern Siberia. It is bordered to the west by the Free Aviators, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, and Omsk, to the south by Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, and Krasnoyarsk; and to the east by Chernyshevsky and Vilyuy. The country is under a conservative government, led by President Boris Pasternak.

The Foundation of the Republic

As the Germans captured both Leningrad and Moscow in the late 1940s, many artists, scientists, academics, and other literati fled the fascist advance, crossing the Ural Mountains. Eventually, they gathered in the city of Tomsk to establish the Central Siberian Republic as the USSR crumbled. Initially, this was an ordinary republic, whose political parties, although containing high proportions of these academics, was modeled after traditional parties in Western democracies. However, it was the presence of a highly cultured and educated elite that would eventually lead to the evolution of these political parties into the salons of Tomsk.

Once order had been restored to the region, these intellectuals would lead the people in creating the first democratic government since the short-lived Russian Republic of 1917: the Central Siberian Republic. At this time, sizeable portions of the population simply wanted a return to stability and a continuation of Nikolai Bukharin's Soviet Government. Furthermore, generals such as Alexander Pokryshkin and Nikolai Andreev advocated for an indefinite military junta that would stabilize the region until Russia had been unified, at which point a democratic, civilian-led government could be restored. Such sentiments would sow the seeds for the eventual collapse of the Republic at the hands of secessionists. Nonetheless, the First Constitutional Congress of Central Siberia, held in Tomsk and chaired by Boris Pasternak, saw a vote in favor of establishing a liberal democratic constitution, enshrining freedoms and civil liberties that had been sorely missed under Nikolai Bukharin's rule.

Now that the political situation had stabilized, the first order of the day, under the newly elected Poet-President, Pasternak, was to secure the stability of the region. Fortunately, Central Siberia was the target of Nikolai Bukharin's interwar Siberian Plan, which had provided it the area with a sturdy industrial base, including considerably sized factory complexes that had escaped the devastation of the Great Patriotic War and the Luftwaffe. Pasternak's government immediately set about reactivating these complexes to meet both civilian and military needs.

This done, the government turned its attention to the food supply. The Barnaul region, governed by Vasily Shukshin, thus became the breadbasket of Central Siberia, producing abundant supplies of food that were distributed across the region in an attempt to bind the disparate loyalties of its inhabitants to the central government. At the same time, the government ramped up military production to arm its militias, which were united under the command of Marshal Matvey Shaposhnikov, a former Red Army commander who had been discharged after his refusal to order a tank division to fire upon a panicked train of civilians fleeing the Siege of Moscow. To do this, the Republic began recruiting people from its more populous settlements, such as Novosibirsk. However, the requisitioning of both food and men from this area intensified low-level separatism that would soon burst into flames.

The Siberian War

The stability and prosperity brought about by the Republic's actions were not to last. The Far Eastern Soviet, composed of the remnants of the Soviet government that had been evacuated from Moscow under Genrikh Yagoda, had begun massing its armies on the border. Jealously eyeing the food supplies and factories of the Siberian Plan, Yagoda soon launched an invasion of the Central Siberian Republic to secure his own position in the East.

The southern thrust of this invasion was ordered to seize Abakan, and then turn north to Krasnoyarsk, with the goal of severing the rail connections to the frontlines in Bratsk and starving the Republican Army of supplies. The goal of the northern thrust was to smash through the Republican Army divisions at Bratsk and then push on to capture Kansk, after which the two armies would meet at Krasnoyarsk.

Although the southern force was repulsed by Republican troops relatively easily, the northern armies, which contained the bulk of Yagoda's veteran troops and hardened NKVD officers, fared much better. This northern army inflicted several defeats on the 3rd Republican Army under Nikolai Krylov and Nikolai Andreev, who were forced to slowly retreat in an agonising rearguard action. However, they managed to deal significant damage to the overextended northern Soviet spearhead, causing the two sides to settle into a siege at Kansk.

The Republic, hoping to take advantage of the failed southern Soviet offensive, commanded Alexander Pokryshkin's 2nd Army and Matvey Shaposhnikov's 1st Army to defeat the Soviet Armies there. Although they managed to win a significant victory at Novokuznetsk, where some of Yagoda's divisions were encircled and neutralized after a surprisingly quick battle, their progress was hindered by the rough terrain to the east of the Kuznetsk Basin.

Thus, neither the Central Siberian Republic nor the Far Eastern Soviet had managed to actually make any significant gains in the war. The conflict then began to degrade into a series of attacks and counter-attacks reminiscent of the Western Front in World War One, where one army would seize a strip of land at great cost, only to be driven back by the opposition, who also suffered significant casualties in doing so.

This situation forced the Republican government to begin intensifying conscription efforts and the requisitioning of food supplies. For Pokryshkin and Shukshin, this was the final straw, as riots began to break out in Novosibirsk and Barnaul. The Republic, panicking at this turn of events, decided to send in the army to end this revolt. However, this backfired, causing the two men to secede and form the Federation of Novosibirsk and Altay, ostensibly to protect the inhabitants of the region from further Republican 'tyranny'.

The outlook in the East was not any better. At around the same time, the offensives of the Anti-Bolshevik Front, originally based in Harbin, managed to capture a swathe of the Far East, from Chita to Magadan. This fortuitous happening managed to throw Yagoda's troops into disarray, causing their assault on Kansk to be repelled, albeit with heavy losses on both sides. However, this was followed by an uprising of anarchist rebels who seized the town of Bratsk, surprising the Soviets, who were now trapped between it and Kansk, by attacking their rear. Citing the devastation of their lands by both the Republic and the Soviet, the anarchists fought with a ferocity unseen on the battlefield, forcing the Soviets to withdraw south of Bratsk and then east. This done, the anarchists continued their offensives and drove Krylov and Andreev out of Kansk, establishing the Siberian Black Army.

The Republic then ordered Krylov and Andreev to retake Kansk; however, they were routed and forced to retreat to Krasnoyarsk, being forced to leave valuable artillery pieces on the eastern side of the Yenisei River, in the hands of the anarchists. A further attempt to retake these guns caused Andreev to mutiny and seize the city of Krasnoyarsk, forming a 'Provisional Government'. A desperate Krylov, now trapped between Andreev's rebels and the anarchists across the Yenisei, managed to smash through a weak spot in Andreev's defenses south of Krasnoyarsk. Regrouping at Kemerovo, Krylov seized the region and fell into depression, to later re-emerge as Rurik II.

Aftermath

This string of defeats nearly caused the Republic to fall, and it may have been extinguished completely, if not for the intervention of Marshal Shaposhnikov, who managed to rally the remnants of the Republican Army around the core of the 1st Army. Under his command, the Army quickly secured Tomsk, peacefully defusing the protests simmering in the city and removing any disloyal elements who wished to place the region under military control.

At Shaposhnikov's suggestion, Pasternak held a hastily-organized referendum to establish an emergency provisional government, to stabilise the situation in the aftermath of the collapse of the Central Siberian Republic.

Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Борис Леонидович Пастернак)
File:Boris Pasternak.png
Head of State
In office 21 March 1950 – 20 October 1962
Preceded by	none
Succeeded by	none
Personal details
Born	(1932-11-04)4 November 1932 Russian SSR
Died	11 December 2008(2008-12-11) (aged 76) Russia