Oktoberkrieg (Napoleon's World)

The Oktoberkreig was a violent internal conflict within the French Empire's Eastern Department during the late 1920's and the early 1930's. The civil conflict, which draws its name from the German October War, was begun with the execution of populist Russian political leader Dmitri Dagadev on September 8, 1928. Shortly thereafter, mass uprisings began across beleaugured, impoverished and long-abused Old Russia, soon giving the appearance of a fully-fledged civil war ongoing in the East.

The conflict lasted from late September 1928 deep into the spring of 1929, with French troops being committed to Russia to mercilessly put down the attempts to form a breakaway state. While the uprising was deemed officially over by Albert II and his inner circle by Christmas 1928 following the capture and execution of Nikolai Bukharin, the revolution's de facto figurehead, violence in the region continued for months and Old Russia remained unstable for the next decade due to the collapse of the local economy.

The Oktoberkreig is significant for numerous reasons. It brought hundreds of thousands of Franco-German troops from the heart of the Empire out to the sparsely populated and impoverished Eastern Department for the first time and over a million soldiers were eventually stationed in Russian cities by the early 1930's to stave off another such potential uprising, to the chagrin of the soldiers, their commanders and the populace. The paranoia in Paris after the uprising and sustained violence led Albert II to initiate the New Reign of Terror to prevent more uprisings closer to Paris or the Rheinland, where the French had an enormously vested economic interest. It also destabilized Old Russia's vast rural regions to the point of total anarchy throughout most of the 1930's. All of these factors contributed to Sebastien Bonaparte's surprisingly rapid rise to prominence, power and influence in the East during the late 1930's while in practical exile, where he amassed the diverse coalition of fighters who would eventually help him overthrow the Parisian government in the French Civil War. Some historians consider the French Civil War to merely be a continuance of the Oktoberkreig on a larger scale, which in turn was itself a continuance of deep-rooted cultural, societal and political divisions within the Empire that were not resolved until Sebastien instituted sweeping modernization reforms in the 1940's.