1924-1931 – A Thousand Years of Sorrow
The mid 1920s marked something of a high point for Boris Makarov and his Radical regime, filled with great optimism and reassertion of national prestige. Having restored control over Israel through force of arms and political brinkmanship in 1922, the Russian Republic seized its opportunity for its grand debut on the international stage at the 1925 Kiev Olympics. The state invested extremely heavily in the event – building larger stadiums and hosting a more elaborate opening ceremony that in any previous Games while spending outrageously to beautify the capital as it welcomed foreign guests. Russian athletes also performed very strongly – comfortably topping the medal table, to the delight of the Vozhd. Just one year later, the Republic was presented with another grand opportunity for pageantry and national celebration in the form of the one thousand’s anniversary of the foundation of the First Polish State in 926. Naturally, this was taken as a chance for national myth-making – grounding the Republic as the successor to the rich tradition of Polish history, while highlighting its core Slavic nature, its Russian character from its earliest days – the Kingdom of Poland having been founded by East Slavic Galician conquerors who moved into the West Slavic Vistula basin, and its position among a wider Slavic history encompassing the East Slavs who were not joined to Poland for centuries thereafter.
Away from the pomp of these grand occasions, the tensions within the regime were growing more troublesome. While conservatives and moderate Radicals were in large part satisfied with the direction of the government, the grassroots and firebrands of the Radical movement demanded more. A great project was required to reinvigorate the regime, and reignite the passions of the movement that underpinned it. This project, horrifying in its scale, would be the vast expansion of ethnic Russian dominance within the Republic through the forcible expulsion of millions of Tatars and Mongols from the European provinces of the empire into Ural-Volga and Central Asia. The move would free up vast lands and resources to be redistributed to regime loyalists, and permanently secure Slavic power in these long-contested territories. The move would see ancient communities, some a thousand years or more old, uprooted from their ancestral homelands – the Orsha Pechenegs that had given the world the great Oronartai Belugunutei, great city of Tver – home to the most sacred Hindu temples in Europe and the centre of Muscovite Turkic civilisation, the Zemgalians of the Baltic and the Tatars of Don who had lived there for centuries before any Slav had stepped foot on the river’s banks. All were to be ripped from their homelands – in total nearly 15,000,000 people.
What followed was the boldest and most chilling exertion of bureaucratic state power and mass mobilisation the world had ever seen. Starting from the last months of 1926 and continuing into 1929 a programme of mass, forced, deportation was put into place – transplanting entire families and communities thousands of miles from their homes to the newly defined ‘Tatar homeland’ east of the Volga. When the process began in the winter of 1926, deportations initially moved slowly as the logistics of moving people against their will in unprecedented numbers were explored. This attracted the most extreme elements of the grassroots Radical movement into the breach – who organised bands of blackshirts in a string of violent pogroms in the targeted areas, sending streams of refugees into flight. In part to regain control over the situation, the state stepped up its deportations more aggressively thereafter – making extensive use of the military for both its use of force and organisational capacity. By early 1929 virtually the entire Tatar and Mongol population of European Russia had been deported. Hundreds of thousands had died through pogroms, state violence and inhumane conditions of transportation, while entire nations had effectively been wiped out of existence. To the Tatars, and internationally, this event became known as the Felaket, the Disaster, and would become one of the defining moments in Eurasia’s early twentieth century.
Aside from the catastrophe for the millions forcibly stripped from their ancestral homelands, the Felaket carried with it a raft of unforeseen consequences. For one, this process, grandiose to the point of madness, proved to be a black hole for the Russian state – requiring enormous economic, planning and logistical energy to accomplish and directing resources away from productive ventures. The expulsion of the Tatars and Mongols failed to create the bonanza of opportunities for Russians that the regime had expected. Even after Russian settlers started to flood into the territories effected by the expulsion, Muscovy and the Don Valley remained significantly depopulated as, quite simply, settlers could not be attracted in the numbers necessary to replace the expellees. Moreover, the new arrivals did not adjust as quickly as had been expected. A complex society is impossible to recreate overnight, and the flood of predominantly unskilled Russians (the unemployed and landless peasants being the largest groups drawn to the new lands) created a host of economic and social imbalances in their new homes. Not least, with the emergence of a neo-aristocratic class of party loyalist latifundia – enriching themselves with great estates and economic empires left behind by the expellees. To the surprise of many state planners, the new societies created were not as ethnically cohesive as expected. In Muscovy in particular, a new social conflict emerged to replace the old, pitting the indigenous Muscovites against the largely Ukrainian new arrivals.
The arrival of the multitudes of European Tatars and Mongols in their new homelands put these areas under incredible stress. For one, the European Turanian peoples came from a far more urbanised, industrialised and modern society and stood apart from their new surrounds. Many of the eastern lands, particularly Ural-Volga were already overpopulated even before the Felaket and struggled to accommodate the massive increase in population. Vast slums were hastily constructed on the fringes of Tatar cities, sprawling with unemployment, poverty, crime and anger, heavily dependent on state support. For this reason, the state allowed for the largescale emigration of those who did not wish to be resettled, mostly to America, which in turn brought vivid stories of the horrors occurring in Russia to the attention of audiences abroad.
Events in Russia shocked the world, but nowhere would they have a larger impact than in the United States. The Americans had long offered their nation as a safe haven for their fellow Muslims fleeing oppression in the Old World, and during the Felaket they made sure to offer whatever support they could to the blighted Tatars and Mongols – subsidising steamers taking refugees to North America and promising to give any who arrived on their shores the right of residency. While relations with Kiev had been deeply strained ever since Makarov swept to power in 1914, this marked their breaking point. In January 1927 the United States broke off all diplomatic relations with Russia and implemented a harsh economic embargo – cutting off all economic interactions between the world’s two largest economies. With many other states condemning the Russians, and some joining the Americans in putting economic sanction in place, the Republic found itself an international pariah once more.
The most immediate consequences of this diplomatic fallout were economic. The Russian state’s heavy investments in industry, the military, great events like the Olympics and indeed, the Felaket itself, had involved a substantial increase in government borrowing. With the United States acting as the world’s lender in chief, Russia found herself cut off from the largest capital markets on earth, leaving her large debts harder to service than ever before. Coupled with the self-inflicted economic blow associated with the Felaket, the Russian state was forced into a period of austerity to avoid a full blown fiscal crisis – halting planned investments, and cutting spending across the board.
The first two decades of the twentieth century had been a hard time for international socialism. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the movement had appeared to be in ascendance – the Trudoviks assuming power in Poland, socialist parties making great strides across continental Europe and joining or even leading coalitions in a number of countries in the years immediately before, after and during the Great War. For a time, it appeared that the future was red. The optimism of these years was not to last. Across much of Europe, socialist parties saw their electoral fortunes plateau in the 1900s and go into reverse following the 1909 crash. Worse, authoritarian regimes in Poland, and the Holy Roman Empire banned and suppressed their socialist parties, while a period of toleration in the theocratic Papal States came to an end in a similar wave of repression. In France, socialist and labour groups closely attached themselves to the national struggle for French independence – putting the movement on a violent collision course with the Skottish, Italian and Adalucian occupiers of their homeland, and spreading suspicion of the left into those countries as well. Indeed, Denmark was the only country in Europe to see a socialist-led government during the 1910s.
This era of reverses and state repression pushed leftists in a more militant direction. While the parties of the turn of the century had largely advocated for reform within the existing political and economic system, by the 1920s revolutionary change was in vogue and the reds were rising once more. Nowhere was the growing power and radicalism of the movement as obvious as in France. There, in the Duchy of Normandy – the only independent part of the French nation, the French Workers Party secured power in 1926 following a landslide election victory. The socialists then proceeded to abolish the Duchy, form the French People’s Republic and begin a bold experiment seeking to construct a new form of society, in which all the inequities and injustices of capitalism were banished forever by the embrace of a proletarian state. Although despised by her threatened neighbours, Red Normandy was spared from foreign invasion by the unlikely diplomatic intervention of the Holy Roman Empire – whose government saw utility in maintaining the independence of a disruptive and nationalist French state.
While the United States stance against the horrors of the Felaket in 1927 had won it prestige and moral authority internationally, cementing New Cordoba’s position at the seat of the world’s premier powers, it left the global economy sleepwalking towards catastrophe. The Russian embargo ruined many speculators and left investors to seek out alternate, often riskier, investments in other markets. Through the following two years the financial markets of North America grew increasingly erratic until a series of bankruptcies in early 1929 sent them into meltdown. America rapidly slumped into a steep depression – bringing down the economies of Europe, with which it was closely inter-twinned, with it. Although Russia survived the immediate blow of the American collapse, having already cut off ties two years previously, the troubles in Europe impacted it harshly – severing it from its last remaining source of credit and effectively destroying its key export market. Across the industrialised world, fortunes evaporated, millions were left jobless and poverty spread far and wide.
With Russia’s economy sinking into despair, the government’s response to the crisis was to push for a sharp cut in wages alongside a push for higher output through longer working days and more ambitious work targets. To the shock of the regime, the working men of the Republic – Slav, Tatar and Christian alike – refused to take these impositions lying down. Through 1929 and into 1930 the of country was hit by an intensive wave of industrial unrest. Even in the absence of trade union leadership, organised labour having been wholly subsumed by the state in the 1910s, wildcat strikers were able to rock the country to its core – reducing production by as much as 50% at their peak. To the horror of the regime, many strikes took on an openly political accent, with ominous flashes of red flags being seen in many parts of the country, while in others some Radical militants took on leadership roles – believing that the Vozhd could not possibly know of the ill deeds of his ministers and the big industrialists. Seeing the strikes as a threat to their authority, the government proceeded to deploy the army and secret police to put them down in typically brutal fashion.
The strikes turned out to be merely a prelude to an even greater cataclysm in the 1930. The teeming slums of the Tatar cities of the Volga were already awash with anger long before the crash. In the Tatar lands of Volga-Ural the strikes of 1929-30 took on a predictably nationalist character. Notably, they marked the emergence of a new generation of Turanist leadership – with little association to the now largely broken Brotherhood of the Wolf, and born among the poor but educated refugee of the Felaket. As the cities of the Volga-Ural were rocked by strikes and mass demonstrations, these young new nationalist leaders brought revolutionary direction to the crowds. In the spring of 1930 this developed into a, largely urban, popular uprising. In May, Turanist revolutionaries seized power in Kazan and Tambov and forced the Russian army to withdraw from much of the Volga valley. Between May and October a self-proclaimed Grand Turanian Republic held sway over a large swathe of land before the army was finally able to restore order.
The events of the previous few years had been a humiliation for Boris Makarov and his Radical regime. The deportations of the Tatars and Mongols, an act always viewed as rash by conservative interests, had led to a raft of unintended consequences even as it delighted many in the ruling party. More concerning, the key foundations of the regime’s legitimacy – its promise to restore a strong economy and improved standard of living after the 1909 crash, and above all to maintain order by holding down the socialist and labour movement on one hand and Turanist insurrection on the other – had been irreparably undermined. The Russian state had been shown not to be the all-powerful, omnipotent, force it had claimed to be. For the first time in his long reign, there were now serious questions among elite circles whether the Vozhd should remain in power any longer.
Elsewhere, as 1930 turned to 1931 uncontrollable forces were brewing in Europe that would, in short order, change the world.