buildings hunched in dense city blocks. Out past the outer collectives and workers settlements they would go, the steady rhythmic beat of the march timed out on the division drums. Soon they would reach the tall outer battlements and fortified walls of the city perimeter, where dark grey towers rose at intervals along the wall, overshadowed by the tall zeppelin towers where three great airships rode at anchor. There the trains would be waiting for them, already loaded with the heavy equipment of the divisions—mortars, machineguns, AT rifles and cannon, crate after crate of ammunition, trucks, armored cars and light tanks.
It was Ivan Volkov’s Praetorian Guard, his elite Orenburg Guard Legion, each man wearing a red shoulder patch identifying them as one of the chosen. As infantry went, they might match any other in the world, save perhaps the elite Brandenburgers and the tough grenadiers and fusiliers of the German Grossdeutschland Division. Most had fought for years on the Volga front, rotating in and out of regular divisions, until they were selected out in a special draft and sent to the capitol for extended training as guardsmen. Only these seven divisions would leave the city, for Volkov always kept at least two divisions close by, his personal security force at the heart of the warren of stone buildings and military bunkers in the Grey Zone. Trucks, trains, and airships came and went, bearing officers, men and the machinery of war as Ivan Volkov feverishly rushed to complete his general mobilization.
His armies stretched from the Ob river to the east, back through Chelyabinsk and then across the lower Urals to the upper Volga. There he posted his largest army, the 1st, all of twenty divisions standing watch on the long broad flow of the river as it wound down as far as the industrial city of Samara. Four other armies remained in the main force, the 2nd Army posted south of Samara to Saratov, then 3rd Army extending down to Volgograd. From there the line dog-legged southwest to the Manych River, the 4th Army sector, and then 5th Army took over at Salsk, where there had been heavy fighting for the last several months all the way along the line as far as Kropotkin on the Kuban River. Each of these armies were smaller, with ten infantry divisions, and a few supporting mechanized elements. The reserve 6th Army was on the Ob facing down the Siberians. Together they numbered 70 infantry divisions, with another five armored, five mech and several armored cavalry brigades. It was a force three times the size of every man Great Britain would put in the field during the war, and it would soon be further swelled by even more troops arriving from the vast hinterland provinces of Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan.
Beyond Kropotkin, a patchwork force raised from local militias had been battle hardened into the Army of the Kuban, where they fought to slow the Russian advance towards the rich oil fields of Maykop. Here the divisions bore regional names instead of sequential numbers. There were Rifle Divisions from the Taman Peninsula, Krasnodar, Armavir, and the Talmyk and Kuban cavalry. On the shores of the great inland sea, Volkov’s Black Sea Marines stubbornly anchored the line at Tuapse. They had been pushed out of the major sea port of Novorossiysk a month earlier, and now they were digging in for another expected enemy assault, but none came.
The long line was faced by an equal number of divisions on the Soviet side, but in recent weeks, offensive operations by the Red Army had tapered off in the east, and trains had been moving men and materiel west to the German front, where two-thirds of the Soviet army was engaged. Yet the need to keep at least sixty divisions and twenty other brigades on the eastern front meant that those troops would not be available to face the heavily mechanized juggernaut of the Wehrmacht. And considering the fact that every man now standing to arms under the black and red banners of Orenburg was one more man that should have been filling out the ranks of divisions raised to fight Germany, Volkov’s forces weighed heavily in the equation.
And so it begins, thought Volkov. The men assemble in their perfect uniforms and overcoats, and the drill is well rehearsed. Then off they go to the hell this war will soon become. How many of these men will survive?
Even with its forces stretched over two long fronts, the manpower resources of