Begun on January 14th, 1907, the Russian Civil war was a nearly 12-year conflict between three factions of the Russian people: the White Army (royal forces), the Worker’s Army of Vladimir Lenin, and the Army of the Red Griffin commanded by Aleksei Brusilov.
On January 13th, 1907, the supporters of Vladimir Lenin gathered for a speech in which Lenin made the case for the dissolution of the monarchy. As he finished his speech, after midnight, Lenin called for a worker’s mobilization to rise against the absolutist monarchy and its feudal ways. This general mobilisation led in six days (January 19th, 1907) to the first exchange of fire between the two camps in what was widely considered a massacre. The White Army, equipped with mounted Gatling guns, killed more than 500 workers in just a few minutes and a chaotic retreat followed. Held back from attending the fighting by Leon Trotsky, Lenin saw his forces grow by an order of magnitude following the Saturday Massacre. The massacre also saw a withering of support within the armed forces of the royal camp. Ten days later Aleksei Brusilov created the Army of the Red Griffin with entire regiments peeled off from the White Army.
Over the next nine months, the Worker’s Army and the White Army traded skirmishes, and territory, and lost nearly 60,000, mostly men.
On October 17th, 1907, with a regiment of Worker’s Army regulars advancing on the Winter Palace, Tsar Nicholas the Second and his family were evacuated under a hastily assembled guard. In a freakish incident of terrible luck, the Royal family took the wrong road leaving the palace and delivered themselves directly into the path of an advancing Worker’s Army unit. The Tsar was arrested, and on October 19th, 1907, he was brought before a Worker’s Tribunal consisting of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin. The Tsar was unanimously found guilty of Crimes Against the Workers, and he was his family were sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out on October 20th, 1907, and the royal family was shot en masse and buried in a communal grave in the forest.
In the aftermath of the murder of the Tsar, the remaining members of the White Army drifted into the orbit of the Army of the Red Griffin, which had stayed out of most of the fighting up to this point and launched The Winter Offensive (1907-1909) against the Worker’s Army. Nearly continuous fighting during this period yielded the slow decline of the Worker’s Army forces. In December 1909, agents of 1151, heretofore having supported the Worker’s Army, revealed to the senior leadership of the Worker’s Army that they would no longer be receiving weapons shipments from the Empire of Australia. It seems that Eleanor the Twenty-Eighth had lost interest in this particular pet project of hers.
In 1910, the Red Griffin extended its streak of victories and consolidated power in Saint Petersburg, which became the capital of the Russian Imperium. On December 24th, 1910, Aleksei Brusilov announced the formation of a government, “an imperial republic”, with ultimate power vested in a First-Eminent Pro-Consul and daily governing tasks devolved to an Imperial Senate of 500 officials chosen by the Pro-Consul to serve two-year terms.
In the 8 years of war that continued, the war shifted from the Open Period (1908-1911), the Guerrilla Years (1911-1916), and the Uneasy Peace (1916-1919).
The Open Period was defined by pitched battles for territory between orderly regiments of regulars. This was a period of consistent gains for the Red Griffin forces.
As the Worker’s Army’s official regiments were decimated, the war’s character shifted to the Guerrilla Years. During this period, which saw the steady decline of forces loyal to the Imperium, the Imperium’s forces evolved to fight a different enemy. This period saw the creation of Darkness, the Imperium’s espionage unit. The Guerrilla Years gave way to the Uneasy Peace in a culminating operation of Darkness known as the Night of Knives. On December 14th, 1916, agents of Darkness murdered the leaders of 29 of 32 units of the remaining Worker’s Army.
During the Uneasy Peace, no formal peace treaty existed between the combatants, but the Worker’s Army’s leadership had been nearly wiped out. Only Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin remained as heads of functional guerrilla units. This curtailment led to an almost complete end to formal operations of the Worker’s Army with only sporadic activities.
The war officially ended with the deaths of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky at the hands of partisans loyal to Josef Stalin. Stalin had, on December 27th, 1918, made a deal to turn over the other two co-heads of the remaining forces of the Worker’s Army. The next day, Stalin’s forces murdered Lenin and Trotsky and delivered their severed heads to Aleksei Brusilov in matching boxes. Josef Stalin was awarded the Griffin’s Claw for his service in a public ceremony. He was murdered seven days later, allegedly at the hands of Brusilov’s personal guard.