Sad how this seems to be done, but I'm enjoying your current Assyrian AAR a lot as well!
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It seems a little crazy to go back to an AAR that was last updated two years ago on a sub forum with so few active stories. But after re-reading this one over the last few days I was reminded of some of my old plans to take it forward that I never got to before it was abandoned, including some more gameplay.
Is there anyone still about who would be interested in a revival/continuation?
Is there anyone still about who would be interested in a revival/continuation?
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Lovely to see there are still so many people keen to see this story continue. I am only too happy to oblige!
It's been a long time since this was updated, so its worth putting together a quick refresher given there is 1000+ years of alternate history leading up to the point where the story is at now. Summaries of Poland's Medieval, Early Modern and Late Modern histories can be found in the links provided. They give the best summaries for the CK2, EU4 and Vic2 eras. However, there is no summary for the DH portion.
At the point we move to Darkest Hour in 1931, Poland (or rather the Russian Republic as it was at this point) is under the totalitarian grip of the fascistic Radical Party of Russia and its infamous dictator Boris Makarov. By the start of DH it has already done all sorts of nasty things –ethnic cleansing, the formation of a secret police, the destruction of liberty. But things are about to get worse as the early 19th century sees a wave of OTL Stalin-style purges and terror.
Internationally, the early 1930s sees a Communist Revolution unleash out of Germany and France and sweep right across continental Europe and even expand towards North Africa and the Middle East, with India throwing its lot in with the Internationale while in Asia the Japanese and Chinese duke it out before Japan also attacks European colonial holdings in South East Asia.
Russia joins WW2 in1940 with a surprise attack on the Reds, only for this to backfire spectacularly and lead the socialists to the gates of Kiev (the capital) in 1942. Overstretched, the Reds fail to take Kiev and a spectacular Russian counterattack coupled with American landings (the US being an Islamic democracy of Andalucian roots in this timeline)in Western Europe see the Revolution fall back at rapid speed. Europe is cleared of Reds by the end of 1943. Attention then turns to Asia, where the Russians conquer all of India between 1944 and 1945 –establishing a fraternal far right government. Following the defeat of the Japanese on the Asian mainland at the same time, a negotiated surrender is agreed, ending WW2.
Just two years after the end of the war, the great dictator, Boris Makarov, dies of natural causes and after a power struggle is succeeded by the head of the secret police – Feodor Golikov. The new Vozhd is in the saddleless than a year before WW3 breaks out. It is started by a dispute with China (which had fallen to a revolutionary far right nationalist government similar to Russia's during its long war with Japan) over Beijing – which was at the time controlled by Russian-aligned Mongols. The Chinese go to war in 1948, and the US (with its allies in Western Europe) join suit within weeks (as does previously neutral Korea). To make matters worse, the Indians – despite having their regime established by the Russians only a few years before – ditch Kiev to stay out of things. This conflict is monumental in scale, with fronts in the White Sea, Alaska, Middle East (and later Caucuses), across Europe, in Afghanistan, the Far East and Gobi Desert. Russia is outnumbered, outgunned, out produced and faces a worsening domestic situation. However, its development of nuclear weapons and liberal use (3 bombs falling on Germany and 2 on China over the course of the war) keeps things in the balance for years.
Its only in 1952 were things really fall apart as Russian fronts collapse in almost every theatre of war, the home front gives way and the Americans develop the bomb – dropping one on Odessa. An anti-fascist revolution overthrows Golikov and the Radical Party in December 1952 –establishing a new, Polish, government built on four new parties who will dominate post-war politics – the Jewish Democratic Union(centre-right, religious conservatives), the Constitutional Democrats or Kadets (centre to centre-right, liberals), the Democratic People's Front (left wing, socialist) and the Muscovite People's Party(centre-right, Muscovite regionalists). After a couple of months attempting to bring the Allies to the negotiating table, this temporary government capitulates in early 1953.
Poland (now restored to its traditional title) is in a desperate state – the country in ruin, millions dead, much of the country under occupation, a massive refugee crisis from internal displacement and a punishing victor's peace to await. The final peace treaty (the Treaty of Isfahan) is as bad as might be expected – with Poland reduced to its Jewish core territories and large populations of Russians and other Jews finding themselves outside the motherland. Despite opposition from a new nationalist party – Solidarity (far-right, nationalist), the Polish government accepts this fate.
The four-party revolutionary coalition starts to break apart over differing ideas of how to rebuild Poland and a 1954 referendum that sees the monarchy restored (having been abolished under the Radicals three decades before). For the first decade of the post-war period, the Jewish Democratic Union (JDU) is the dominant force in Polish politics, seeking to re-establish Poland's place in the world (establishing the Organisation of Jewish States to make connections across the Jewish world and seeing an attempt to unify with the Crimea thwarted by the Americans) and create a solidly conservative society at home while(guided by the input of the liberals) adopting a market-orientated economy. By the 1960s, Poland was emerging as a prosperous and increasingly self-confident nation once more while its society wasstarting to shift. In 1965, despite remaining the largest party, the JDU was knocked out of power for the first time since the revolution, having faced internal splits over plans to give autonomy to Muscovy in exchange for MPP parliamentary support – with the Kadet leader Emma Spas forming a governing with the aid of both the MPP and leftist DPF. And here we stand now.
With that out of the way – new update tomorrow!
It's been a long time since this was updated, so its worth putting together a quick refresher given there is 1000+ years of alternate history leading up to the point where the story is at now. Summaries of Poland's Medieval, Early Modern and Late Modern histories can be found in the links provided. They give the best summaries for the CK2, EU4 and Vic2 eras. However, there is no summary for the DH portion.
At the point we move to Darkest Hour in 1931, Poland (or rather the Russian Republic as it was at this point) is under the totalitarian grip of the fascistic Radical Party of Russia and its infamous dictator Boris Makarov. By the start of DH it has already done all sorts of nasty things –ethnic cleansing, the formation of a secret police, the destruction of liberty. But things are about to get worse as the early 19th century sees a wave of OTL Stalin-style purges and terror.
Internationally, the early 1930s sees a Communist Revolution unleash out of Germany and France and sweep right across continental Europe and even expand towards North Africa and the Middle East, with India throwing its lot in with the Internationale while in Asia the Japanese and Chinese duke it out before Japan also attacks European colonial holdings in South East Asia.
Russia joins WW2 in1940 with a surprise attack on the Reds, only for this to backfire spectacularly and lead the socialists to the gates of Kiev (the capital) in 1942. Overstretched, the Reds fail to take Kiev and a spectacular Russian counterattack coupled with American landings (the US being an Islamic democracy of Andalucian roots in this timeline)in Western Europe see the Revolution fall back at rapid speed. Europe is cleared of Reds by the end of 1943. Attention then turns to Asia, where the Russians conquer all of India between 1944 and 1945 –establishing a fraternal far right government. Following the defeat of the Japanese on the Asian mainland at the same time, a negotiated surrender is agreed, ending WW2.
Just two years after the end of the war, the great dictator, Boris Makarov, dies of natural causes and after a power struggle is succeeded by the head of the secret police – Feodor Golikov. The new Vozhd is in the saddleless than a year before WW3 breaks out. It is started by a dispute with China (which had fallen to a revolutionary far right nationalist government similar to Russia's during its long war with Japan) over Beijing – which was at the time controlled by Russian-aligned Mongols. The Chinese go to war in 1948, and the US (with its allies in Western Europe) join suit within weeks (as does previously neutral Korea). To make matters worse, the Indians – despite having their regime established by the Russians only a few years before – ditch Kiev to stay out of things. This conflict is monumental in scale, with fronts in the White Sea, Alaska, Middle East (and later Caucuses), across Europe, in Afghanistan, the Far East and Gobi Desert. Russia is outnumbered, outgunned, out produced and faces a worsening domestic situation. However, its development of nuclear weapons and liberal use (3 bombs falling on Germany and 2 on China over the course of the war) keeps things in the balance for years.
Its only in 1952 were things really fall apart as Russian fronts collapse in almost every theatre of war, the home front gives way and the Americans develop the bomb – dropping one on Odessa. An anti-fascist revolution overthrows Golikov and the Radical Party in December 1952 –establishing a new, Polish, government built on four new parties who will dominate post-war politics – the Jewish Democratic Union(centre-right, religious conservatives), the Constitutional Democrats or Kadets (centre to centre-right, liberals), the Democratic People's Front (left wing, socialist) and the Muscovite People's Party(centre-right, Muscovite regionalists). After a couple of months attempting to bring the Allies to the negotiating table, this temporary government capitulates in early 1953.
Poland (now restored to its traditional title) is in a desperate state – the country in ruin, millions dead, much of the country under occupation, a massive refugee crisis from internal displacement and a punishing victor's peace to await. The final peace treaty (the Treaty of Isfahan) is as bad as might be expected – with Poland reduced to its Jewish core territories and large populations of Russians and other Jews finding themselves outside the motherland. Despite opposition from a new nationalist party – Solidarity (far-right, nationalist), the Polish government accepts this fate.
The four-party revolutionary coalition starts to break apart over differing ideas of how to rebuild Poland and a 1954 referendum that sees the monarchy restored (having been abolished under the Radicals three decades before). For the first decade of the post-war period, the Jewish Democratic Union (JDU) is the dominant force in Polish politics, seeking to re-establish Poland's place in the world (establishing the Organisation of Jewish States to make connections across the Jewish world and seeing an attempt to unify with the Crimea thwarted by the Americans) and create a solidly conservative society at home while(guided by the input of the liberals) adopting a market-orientated economy. By the 1960s, Poland was emerging as a prosperous and increasingly self-confident nation once more while its society wasstarting to shift. In 1965, despite remaining the largest party, the JDU was knocked out of power for the first time since the revolution, having faced internal splits over plans to give autonomy to Muscovy in exchange for MPP parliamentary support – with the Kadet leader Emma Spas forming a governing with the aid of both the MPP and leftist DPF. And here we stand now.
With that out of the way – new update tomorrow!
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Absolutely I would! Count me in as a loyal reader, as I was previously!
1965-1968 - The Quiet Revolution
1965-1968 - The Quiet Revolution
Although she had been an influential mainstay of the postwar coalition governments of the1950s, few could have imagined when the Kadets were expelled from office in 1960 when the Jewish Democrats terminated their alliances with them that Emma Spas would return to power as Poland's first ever female Prime Minister, and one of the first elected female leaders in the world just five years later. Having finished second to the JDU at the polls, Spas did so at the head of a rickety coalition with the leftist Democratic Peoples Front, themselves aggrieved to have only recently fallen in standing behind the liberals, and the more conservative Muscovite regionalists. What held the three parties together was an ambitious programme to change the Polish state.
Perhaps Spas' greatest personal ambition was to push the Rabbis out of power and secularise Poland. Although the Muscovite MPP in particular had their limits, the government was nonetheless able to introduce sweeping legislative changes – legalising divorce, homosexuality and, in limited circumstances, abortion while amending the criminal code to reserve the death penalty only for treason and the most horrific individual crimes. There were limits to this agenda, naturally, most notably on the issue of costly state subsidies for young men to engage in years of Torah studies. The Kadets and DPF had hoped to rid this weight from the government balance sheet, yet massive Church-led demonstrations and the hesitancy of the MPP forced them to pull back and leave them in place.
Among the thorniest issues to be addressed by this secularising agenda was education. This perennial battleground of Polish history had seen the postwar Jewish Democrats establish a single network of state-run schools with a curriculum guided by the Rabbinate during the 1950s. Spas was determined to break the grip of God over the school system. Managing the fragile internal stability of the coalition government and the dangers of provoking the fury of the Hasids, the Prime Minister reached a compromise in 1967 that saw control over national curriculum hived off to state bureaucrats, completely separate from clerical influence.
The quiet revolution being brought about from Kiev was mirrored in a secularisation of Polish culture. Mass entertainment had spread greatly up to themid-1960s, with Poland's remarkable run to victory in the 1964Football European Championship proving a key catalyst in spreading television ownership to the masses. Nonetheless, up to the middle of the decade culture and entertainment in Poland was fairly static –radio and television was dominated by educational and religious programming, in line with the values of the Jewish conservative broadcasters put in charge by the JDU governments of the age. Meanwhile, foreign cultural imports were almost unheard of, pious censors rejecting everything deemed improper and corrupting for mass consumption.
Under the Kadets, this all changed. The relaxation or outright abandonment of censorship rules and changes in the leadership of radio and television broadcasters, which included the launch of the first private companies to compete with state monopolies in these fields, changed the landscape. Soon raunchy European drama were in vogue while fashions and music from America transformed the outlook of the younger generations in particular. Faced with these challenges, domestic cultural producers changed too – moving away from the Biblical epics and staid factual reporting of old to compete for the eyes, ears and attention of the Polish public.
These changes were far from universally welcomed. Moses Dobik, the former Prime Minister, called Emma Spas a pornographer on the floor of the Duma. Meanwhile the millions of Hasidim – who formed a rapidly growing portion of the population with their high birth rate and success in winning converts from mainstream Jews – accelerated attempts to forge their own parallel cultural institutions - newspapers, youth groups, even programming of their own – that would further separate them from wider society.
1. Pomerania
2. South Prussia
3. Slovakia
4. Old Poland
5. Galicia
6. Moldavia
7. South Ruthenia
8. Kiev
9. Donbass
10. North Ruthenia
11. Smolensk
12. Muscovy
13. The North
Secularisation was only one side of the Spas ministry's reformist mission, the other was constitutional. The issue of Muscovite autonomy had brought down the preceding government of Moses Dobik and from the first, the premier knew that her political fate relied on her ability to do what he could not. Rather than pursue an asymmetric devolution scheme that would have given Muscovy a degree of self-rule but otherwise retained a fairly centralised state as Dobik had attempted, Spas turned to a policy from the dying days of the First Tsardom – a federalised structure with powerful elected regional government. The idea of federalisation was enough to satisfy the MPP, attracted the enthusiasm of both liberals and socialists and was even attractive with some currents of Jewish conservatism who saw an opportunity to consolidate power in the Torah-Belt even after losing office in Kiev.
The first elections to these new regions were held in 1968 and produced landslide triumphs for the Kadets across the empire, with the liberals the largest party in nine of the thirteen regions – finishing behind the JDU in Galicia, South Ruthenia and Moldavia and the MPP in Muscovy.
In tandem with federalisation came the introduction of a new electoral system. The Duma would be expanded from 501 to 601 seats, with 401 deputies elected directly by first-past-the-post in individual constituencies and a further 200 deputies appointed via a proportional national party list, provided they could pass a 5% threshold. This new systemin part took inspiration from European fashions, where proportional systems had grown in vogue since the War, while also seeking to limit the ability of a single party to dominate the Duma on a minority vote as the JDU had at times earlier in the decade.
During the Second World War in the 1940s, the Japanese occupied the Papal and Skottish colonies in South East Asia. After Japan's defeat, the colonists returned to impose their authority on these lands. Yet from the first, anti-colonial movements taking inspiration from the far right nationalism of Radical Russia and China had struggled against their authority in insurgent campaigns. Greatly diminished not only by the horrors of the World Wars in the 1940s and 1950s, the two imperialist powers struggled to impose themselves in the region, with the Americans uninterested in aiding their ailing wartime allies and the Chinese, and to a lesser extent Indians, willing to funnel supplies and aid to the rebels. Globally, it was becoming increasingly clear that the age of colonialism was coming to a close. In the 1960s, it would receive its death knell. Following a terrible defeat to Thai revolutionary forces at Chang Mai in 1964, the Papacy announced that it was quitting the region entirely in a matter of months. This was followed in quick succession by the Skots – who surrendered their territories in Cochinchina and maritime South East Asia two years later in 1966.
The new order in South East Asia was a frightening prospect. From the old Papal colonies were cleaved China-aligned Republics in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma. This belt of totalitarian states was joined by formerly Skottish Cochinchina. To the south, Malaya – the sole democracy in the region – was granted Skottish colonial possessions in Sumatra and Borneo to complete its control over the islands .Finally, Java gained its independence as a traditional monarch, uniting with smaller polities in the islands to its east. However, unlike Malaya, a Muslim nation with strong ties to their co-religionists in the United States, the Javanese Kingdom was majority Hindu and as such came under significant Indian influence, carrying with it the contagion of revolutionary nationalism that had already overtaken the Asian mainland.
With European imperialism breathing its last breath in Asia, decolonisation had been underway in earnest in Africa since the 1930s, when many European colonies had been placed under temporary occupation by the Skots and Papacy while Europe fell to the rampaging forces of the Internationale. While some colonies were restored after the Second World War, American influence had seen a slow relinquishing of control. By the mid-1960s, relatively few parts of sub-Saharan Africa were yet to gain their independence and by the end of the decade the old Empires had surrendered control of the region entirely to local governments. As the Europeans withdrew, a grand geopolitical battle was brewing. The region was at the centre of a whirlpool of competing visions of the future: Asian-aligned radical nationalists, socialist revolutionaries – many inspired by the Internationale's attempts at liberating the continent during the Second World War, aspiring pro-western democrats, traditional monarchies, Catholic theocrats and Islamists. The Chinese, Indians, Americans and Europeans were also closely involved in backing different factions in different places to advance their interests as the continent fell into chronic disorder and civil war.
The instability across the Third World alarmed the victorious Western Powers and pulled the United States in particular back from the drift towards isolationism that had taken hold in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This new approach would involve a tilt towards the Global South, aimed at limiting the march of totalitarianism and the ambitions of the tyrannies in China and India.
While Poland, no longer the intercontinental power it once was, stood for the most part aloof from African and East Asian affairs – the shifting dynamics of international geopolitics would have important consequence for it too. With the Americans increasingly worried by the influence of China and India, they hoped to orchestrate a thaw between Poland and their most important Asiatic ally, Turania, in order to free up the latter's focus on Asia. Bitterness between Poland and Turania ran deep, memories of the horrors of Radical Russia could never be forgotten in the east while the millions of Russians who were forced out from the Steppe and Volga region in the wild expulsions at the end of the Third World War retained their own resentments. Relations had reached a new low in the early 1960s as Turania's refusal to grant independence to majority Russian Siberia, under occupation since the war, saw the Poles retaliate through support for Caucasian separatists within Turania. The situation worsened in 1963 when the Crimean government, with full support from Kiev, sought to organise a referendum seeking unification with Poland only to be blocked by the Americans and their allies. The once interconnected economies of the two states were completely isolated from one another, while the Turanians maintained hundreds of thousands of troops in the border regions in case of escalation.
As tensions cooled with the end of the combative Dobik government and the rise of the more pro-western Spas to power, the Prime Minister was invited to Kazan in 1967. She would be the first Polish leader to step foot on Turanian soil since independence and entered a delicate situation. Many Tatars could not abide any rapprochement with Poland, one politicians in the Turanian Parliament calling for the Polish premier to be hung in the streets. Nonetheless, the diplomatic Spas impressed her hosts by visiting a memorial to the Felaket and issuing a public apology to the victims of Radical Russia and for the discrimination suffered by Tatars and Mongols under the Tsardom before it, including the imposition of the Brusilov Line. In Kazan, the two parties would reach a comprehensive agreement – opening up trade ties between their countries and entering into a security agreement that would see Poland abandon all ties to Caucasian insurgents and instead aid their erstwhile allies against them.
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And the first update is up! Thanks again to all who have shown an interest in this revival. I'm going to add threadmarks to previous updates to make this thread more easily readable.
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Poland is wounded and a pariah. I wonder if she will manage to regain some control or influence as time goes by in the areas lost.
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Large-scale domestic reform and attempts at international rapprochement will no doubt prove vital to Poland's attempts at recovery in the coming years. It is a dangerous world, and it would be well if Poland could prove a counterbalance to anti-democratic ideologies.
A fine return, Tommy – and a suitably uncertain note on which to bring us towards the end of the 60s. Lots of optimism in Poland, but after decades – if not centuries – of control by various illiberal regimes, whether fascistic or fundamentalist, I’m fairly confident this new wave of liberalisation won’t simply come and go in one smooth action. The encroachment of ‘foreign’ ideas and media into the Polish heartland in particular seems to hold the potential for a large psychic shock; Poland is no longer the master of the universe, and arguably not even the master of its own universe. The kids looking elsewhere for gratification is not going to allay the fears of the old order, already trying to rebuild itself, that things can ever go back to how they were.
South East Asia, meanwhile, presents a very ominous-looking tinderbox. Deeply troubling to have that core of far-right nationalism in the post-colonial world. Trouble ahead…
South East Asia, meanwhile, presents a very ominous-looking tinderbox. Deeply troubling to have that core of far-right nationalism in the post-colonial world. Trouble ahead…
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I am so glad this is continuing and I'm eager for future updates.
I too worry about SE Asia. What are the states of the nuclear arsenals of the various powers?
I too worry about SE Asia. What are the states of the nuclear arsenals of the various powers?
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1968-1969 - Echoes of an Old Tune
1968-1969 - Echoes of an Old Tune
Born in the aftermath of the end of the Third World War, the Solidarity movement had been a major player in Polish political life – rallying mass support behind popular nationalist causes that the mainstream ignored including opposition to the Treaty of Isfahan, support for the rights of displaced Russians and opposition to de-Radicalisation. However, by the mid-1960s these old causes had lost much of their lustre. The International Board for De-Radicalisation and Democracy had closed its operations in 1960, over time the displaced Russians had gradually integrated more fully into Polish society with the chronic housing shortages of the past largely resolved, meanwhile some of the most punishing elements of Isfahan, including heavy reparations, had been softened over the years while the likes of the Jewish Democrats had offered a more appealing voice for territorial revisionists. As such, the party's electoral appeal dwindled. It won just 9 Duma seats in 1963 and 2 in 1965, while it performed atrociously at the inaugural regional elections in 1968.
With its mainstream pull weakening, the party became increasingly influenced by its most active and extreme activists – those who wished to move away from populist nationalism and root themselves firmly in the legacy of the Russian Radical Party. Apologising for its crimes, supporting its former members and seeking to emulate it in the present day.
Two thousand miles to south of Poland, the most internationally transformational events since the War were taking place in the ancient land of Egypt. The decline of Papacy over the past several decades had been staggering. Although having fallen from the peak of its power in the mid-nineteenth century, it was nonetheless a core member of the victorious coalitions in the First, Second and Third World Wars. Despite this, the latter of those two conflicts had seen it shorn of most of its colonial possessions and pay a heavy price for victory. While it held on to its last overseas possessions in South East Asia somewhat longer, these two were lost in 1964, leaving the once sprawling Papal empire confined to its core territories in Egypt and the Sudan. Egypt itself was an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, however there were sharp divided between the indigenous Coptic-speaking masses and the theocratic elite, that highest ranks of whom were largely of European origins. Unlike its European contemporaries, the Pope offered no concessions to democracy, his was an absolute and totalitarian rule. While this might have been acceptable in a more pious age, when the fruits of empire kept the Egyptians happy and strong, by the late 1960s this was utterly unacceptable. In early1968 a broad anti-theocratic movement that united Christian, liberal, moderate leftists, far right nationalists and revolutionary socialists toppled the Pope – sending him into exile back to Rome. In the ensuing months much with Egyptian society was uncertain and influx, however in July the Egyptian Communist Party undertook a violent seizure of power, eliminating all opposition groups and proclaiming a socialist republic in Egypt – the first of its kind anywhere in the world since the Second World War.
The Communists moved quick to seize control over foreign and privately owned assets. As the country was hit by a flight of capital and people, the tiny state of Damietta in the Egyptian Delta provided safe haven to the enemies of the regime in Alexandria. Unwilling to tolerate this, and seeing the Delta as an extension of the traditional Papal-dominion that they had inherited, the Egyptians invaded and annexed Damietta. This action provoked the Americans, Europeans and Poles to implement a raft of crippling economic sanctions on the revolutionary state and raised the prospect of war –with American vessels gathering in the Eastern Mediterranean and troops mass in the Arab Federation. In retaliation, the Egyptians shut the Suez Canal off from all international shipping.
This was a disaster for the global economy. Although there were vast supplies of oil in Turania, Siberia and the Caucuses; production in these regions had actually fallen significantly since they had broken free from Radical Russia given their economic dislocation from Poland and the breakdown in Turania's relationship with Persia had made export challenging. Instead, Europe and North America depended on the cheaply produced and near-limitless oil wealth of the Persian Gulf to provide the cheap energy that fuelled their economies. Although the Arabian Federation had begun works on an overland pipeline to the Israeli port of Beirut, this was far from completion – forcing thousands of miles onto the journey of oil tankers round the Cape of Good Hope. Given this shock, the price of oil began a climb that would see it rise by several orders of magnitude over the coming months, leading to mass economic dislocation around the world.
Although no friend of the Papacy, events in Egypt drew an angry response from Kiev. Damietta had a large and centuries old Jewish population who had formed the state's traditional elite. These Jews were naturally regarded as enemies of the revolution. Those who didn't flee, their properties expropriated, were left to be lined up against the wall by the zealous revolutionaries or wrenched from their homes to unknown fates. Compounding on this, as the Egyptians rattled their sabres during the Suez crisis, they threatened the Kingdom of Israel– launching probing raids into Gaza.
In December 1968, Spas flew to Israel where she promised unlimited Polish support in defence of the sovereignty of the Kingdom – including the deployment of an entire Polish division and the offer of vast quantities of WW3-era equipment, much of which had never been fully decommissioned and remained in warehouses across the Tsardom. She also announced there-establishment of a Polish navy and air force – buttressing the security guarantees offered to the Israelis.
All of this was indirect and flagrant contravention of the terms of the Treaty of Isfahan. For a figure who had been a pro-western conciliator for her entire political career it was a remarkable about face. Naturally, the status of Israel and the persecution of Jews captured intense passions within Poland that had to be responded to, but Spas was at least in part influenced by the Tsar as well. Yaroslav IV had spent half a decade as the King of Israel between its liberation by the Allies during the Third World War and his restoration in Poland in1954 and could not abide being seen to stand by while his former subjects were under threat. Indeed, Yaroslav, who had played a diminishing role in active political affairs over the past decade, was front and centre of a diplomatic offensive aimed at diffusing the backlash to Spas' unilateral actions. Meeting American officials, with whom he had always had a very strong relationship, at a summit in the Free City of Constantinople, Yaroslav was able to extract American acquiescence to a modest increase in the size of the Polish military and its engagement in defensive actions in Israel by leaning heavily on their shared enmity to the Egyptian Communists and the strength of recent Polish-American relations.
Elsewhere, the fallout from the Egyptian Revolution had consequences for European-American relations. Across Catholic Europe, sympathy for the Papacy was naturally very great while memories of the socialist revolutions of the 1930s remained poignant. The Europeans had been largely united in calling for a military intervention to bring down the Egyptian Communists from the first. They would be sorely disappointed to seethe Americans dithering, delay and ultimately step back from an armed intervention. Continental opinion was further upset by the apparent tolerance of Poland's backsliding on the Treaty of Isfahan. For many, it appeared that the Muslim superpower across the Ocean, which had no experience of either Socialist or Radical totalitarianism and could not connect with Christian European sensibility, would never be a reliable guarantor of Europe's security. The nations of democratic, Christian, West and Central Europe had already moved towards integration with the free trade zone created by the 1958 Copenhagen Accords, and would accelerate this drift with the formation of the European Defence Initiative in 1969 – which sought to integrate the armed forces of the continent under a mixed Skottish and German leadership structure.
Just as it shaped global affairs, the Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath had a debilitating impact on the Polish economy and politics. The decade from the late 1950s to the end of the 1960s was one of protected and accelerated economic growth for Poland, a boom initially set off by the reforms of Emma Spas during her prior tenure as Finance Minister while a junior partner in coalition with the JDU. Through those years, Poland not only recovered from the devastation of the Wars, but saw living standards surpass anything witnessed during the Radical era. However, as the boom had proceeded, the rate of inflation had started to rise – surpassing 5% in each year after 1964. This had been a source of tension within the governing coalition for some time, with hawkish Kadets seeking to reign in government expenditure as a means of controlling inflation while the DPF hope to increase spending to share the fruits of economic growth across society. Through the first years of the Spas government, the status quo largely held with state expenditure rising modestly.
The Egyptian crisis brought this convivial situation to an end. The sharp rise in international oil prices that resulted caused inflation to skyrocket in Poland. In response to inflationary pressures, a wave of industrial militancy hit the country – with factories and offices across the Tsardom going on strike while many with fixed or inflexible incomes were left in penury. Faced with this crisis, and a need to ramp up military expenditure, the government would organise an emergency budget in February 1969. With the Kadets controlling the Finance ministry, they proposed an austere budget – refusing any pay rises for those on the public pay roll, reducing public benefits, sharply increasing interest rates and introducing new industrial laws that would place legal limits on striking workers.
With the Jewish Democrats determined to reject the so called 'Poverty Budget' from opposition, Spas could afford no division with the ranks of the government. This was most significant for the leftwing Democratic People's Front, for whom the budget represented a battle for its soul. The DPF was a complex and arcane institution. Born out of the fusion of groups of anti-Radical partisan bands, trade unionists, socialist ideologue sand leftwing exiles; it was not technically a single political party but an alliance of dozens of constituent organisations who each had their own structures and say over its direction. This ungainliness had contributed to its slow decline since the overthrow of Radicalism– once a close competitor with the JDU as the leading political force in the country, now Poland's distant third party. Many on the left of the Front had been uncomfortable with participation in a liberal-led government for sometime, but the Poverty Budget was the final straw.
With socialist controlled member organisations threatening to veto the DPF's support for the budget and a flank of the parliamentary party backing them, the Front's leader Illiya Yablokov gathered an extraordinary meeting of the parliamentary party. There, he informed his parliamentarians that he intended to overrule any dissent from the constituent organisations of the Front and support the Budget and the government, making clear that refusal to do so was incompatible with continued membership of the group. As the meeting descended into anger and even physical violence, Yablokov being punch squarely in the jaw by one of his incensed deputies, a total of 15 Duma members would leave the Front to form the Socialist Workers' Party. This was unmistakeably revolutionary socialist party that would quickly make a name for proactive actions including praising the Egyptian Revolution, sponsoring a statue of Josef Bronstein – the Trudovik leader who had led the socialist faction in the 1914 civil war that led to Boris Makarov's rise to power – and releasing a 1930s-style programme of nationalisations and expropriation.
As the majority faction, shorn of its extreme wing, remained loyal members of the government, Yablokov would subsequently dissolve the DPF entirely in favour of the membership-based Popular Democrats – seeking to pursue the goals of secularisation, minority protection and a centre-left economic agenda while retaining their alliance with the Kadets.
The worsening economic picture and split on the left formed the backdrop for a general election later in 1969, which offered the Polish people their chance to present their verdict on Emma Spas and her administration. The Kadets could hardly of dreamed of the results to come. For the first time since the end of Radicalism, the Jewish Democrats were dethroned as the leading party of Poland, with the Kadets surging to nearly two fifths of the popular vote and a little under half the seats in the Duma. Indeed, had the Kadets not reformed the electoral system ahead of the election, they might have come close to a majority in their own right. Regardless, their success was striking – their popular vote having doubled since 1959 and their parliamentary representation grown five fold.
Liberals success inevitably meant failure for the Tsardom's other parties. While the Jewish Democrats endured a tight contraction of their vote, the expansion of the Duma spared them from any loss of seats –nonetheless the blow of falling behind the Kadets was traumatic itself. While the JDU could put down their loss of power in 1965 to parliamentary intrigue as much as anything, they now had little credible claim to lead the nation. On the left, the squabbling successors to the DPF both endured painful failures. The centre-left Popular Democrats could only muster three quarters of the Front's1965 and were saved from obscurity largely by the party list system. Their leftist competitor, the unapologetically red Socialist Workers' Party, failed to even come close to clearing the threshold to win seats on the national list nor offer a competitive challenge in any constituencies – losing its entire parliamentary block. The combined left vote was lower than it had ever been prior to the dissolution of the Front. The one grain of satisfaction the Socialists in particular could take was that they, unexpectedly, outperformed their hated far-right rivals in Solidarity – who were wiped out as a nationally competitive force, losing their last two Duma seats and registering barely three quarters of a million votes. The only other real winner were the Muscovite regionalists, who secured their best ever election result on the back of their final victory in the long struggle for Muscovite autonomy – rising to become the third largest party in the Duma for the first time since 1954.
In stark contrast to 1965, there was no question over who would lead the next government, with Spas retaining her premiership and forming a narrower two-party coalition with the Popular Democrats.
The Jewish Democratic Union was founded upon an alliance that had two key pillars – the Hasidim, and pious Jews from Mainline Orthodoxy. While their vote had fallen steadily over the past decade, it remained as high as ever among the Hasidim, whose numbers within the electorate had only grown. It was among the mainstream of Jewish Orthodox, the pious although less extreme Mainliners, where they were losing out to the liberals. This had altered the shape of the Jewish Democratic electorate. While in the 1950s, Hasids had made up as little as a third of JDU voters, by 1969 they were the clear majority. Defeated again, the Hasidic lobby within Jewish Conservatism was no longer content to play second fiddle. With Moses Dobik having unexpectedly lost his parliamentary seat in Moldavia to a Kadet challenger, theJ DU turned to an elderly but respected Rabbi from Lvov named Shlomo Mendel to take charge, leading the party to consolidate around a religiously conservative agenda.
This agenda found its touchstone issue not long after the election. With the economic situation remaining dire, the second Spas ministry looked to implement further cuts – targeting the costly subsidies granted to young men continuing their Torah studies into adulthood. These were massively reduced to a mere fraction of their former level, making continued study impractical for millions of the pious. Enraged Jewish conservatives rallied around the issue – leading large demonstrations, severing all cooperation at a regional level with both the governing parties and placing the issue at the heart of their campaigns.
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