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Wait, we are not Poland anymore? :eek: Teh horror!
 
Oh no, this I guess is definitely the darkest timeline :eek:
 
Readers who have been rooting for Poland from the start of this AAR:

Goshdarnit. My big, floppy Cavalier hat has been trampled and my Roundhead horseman's pot is all dented. Where, now, can democracy and liberty turn? Whence shall come salvation from tyrants?
 
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Readers who have been rooting for Poland from the start of this AAR:

The only viable solution remains, as ever, unfailing scepticism universally applied. :D
 
From monarchy to radical government, Poland is hopelessly dragged along the currents of change.
 
Well, I think we can safely say that this is the worst of all possible outcomes. This has been a terrifyingly plausible portrayal of how an extremist movement can go from the political fringe all the way to the halls of power, one step at a time.
 
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1917-1924 – We Are The Future
During the Golden Decade of the 1900 Poland was comfortably the largest economy in the world, a status that had been solidified by sustained growth in the years after the Great War. This position was not to be sustained. The crash of 1909, caused by a global dip in temperatures, hit the Polish economy harder than most, while its severe politically instability ensured that the nation remained in a state of hardship through most of the following decade. During this time, its relative standing declined. More dynamic and settled economies surged ahead – the United States overtaking it as the world’s largest economy and the Holy Roman Empire regaining much of the stature it had lost during the Great War and its aftermath.

Equally concerning, the first decades of the twentieth century had seen Asia begin to stir – both Japan and China establishing burgeoning industrial entrepôts in coastal cities, while even India, lagging behind the East Asian states, saw the beginnings of the industrial revolution. While Poland had long been used to competition with the advanced economies of Europe and North America, Asian industrialisation presented new challenges. Firstly, Poland had historically exported much of its manufactured goods to the Far East, and now saw its market share threatened by domestic producers. Worse still, being in the early stages of industrialisation, these Asian states focussed on low cost textile production – for decades the backbone of the Polish economy – and proved able to outcompete Polish manufacturers on price due to the low cost of Asian labour.

The government of the newly proclaimed Russian Republic was well aware of these issues and saw the revitalisation of industry as one of its core objectives. To achieve this, they adopted a bold approach. Rather than provide ever larger subsidies for older sectors like textiles, the state provided ambitious investments in high-value, emerging industries including electrical goods, chemicals, tractors and auto mobiles. This strategy pushed the national economy towards more profitable sectors, but these new factories, requiring a more skilled workforce and being intrinsically less labour intensive, did not provide the same number of jobs as the older industries had – failing to address the problem of high unemployment that had blighted Poland for the last decade.

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This persistently high rate of unemployment was behind the government’s decision to undertake the largest expansion in welfare provision since the postwar Chernov ministry, ironically a government that Makarov had supported in his past career as a Trudovik Deputy. The Radicals had initially hoped that their investments in reconstruction, emerging industries and the armed forces would eliminate poverty and unemployment. As their policies failed to have the desired effect, between 1918 and 1922 a raft of new welfare legislation was implemented – extending unemployment benefits and old age pensions, introducing greater support for widows and orphans and establishing a system of subsidised healthcare insurance. Combined these measures offered a base standard of living for the poorest across in the Republic, helping to banish the most extreme poverty from its borders.

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Industrial Workers as a % of total population by region according to the 1921 census

The Russian Republic was a very different country to the Polish empire of the nineteenth century socially as well as politically. The first two decades of the twentieth century had been a time of unprecedented urban growth. In the Golden Decade this had been fuelled by the limitless opportunities on offer in the period, and after 1909 by the desperation of countryside and later refugees fleeing conflict. The expansion was uneven. While the core territories of the nineteenth century Polish industrial economy saw the portion of their population involved in industry double between 1891 and 1921, many areas that were still solidly rural at the end of the nineteenth century caught up to the same level of urban development – most notably Old Poland, Galicia, Moldavia the Lower Volga, the Novgorod region. Less spectacular urbanisation was also seen in the North Caucuses and Baltic. Meanwhile, the Tatar heartlands of Volga-Ural had developed notable industrial centres, even if they remained predominantly agricultural.

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The period after the creation of the Republic also saw the formalisation of the organs of state terror with the creation of the Ministry for State Security or MGB in 1918. This new secret police was, in essence, a law unto itself – empowered to arrest, detain and execute anyone deemed to be conspiring against the Russian state or breaching the laws established to limit political opposition. Each year it would be responsible for thousands of arrests across the vast reaches of the Republic – presenting the world with a tool of political repression that would soon gain imitators across the globe. The creation of the MGB represented another step in the Russia’s totalitarian evolution. Notably, by 1920 the public press had been transformed. While media had initially been allowed to publish independently, within the confines of strict censorship laws, the state slowly began to takeover control of all newspapers and publishing outlets entirely – ensuring that all mass communication was controlled directly by the government.

As was to be expected, the worst repression was reserved for the non-Russian minorities of the Republic. An extensive purge was meted out in the civil service to force non-Russians out of all but the most junior roles, while many businessmen saw their assets seized arbitrarily by the state for alleged sedition. There were also key changes in education. While, in a sop to conservative Jewish concerns, the clerical control over Jewish education was maintained, the state assumed complete authority over the education of those from other faiths – instituting a strictly secular and heavily Russian nationalist curriculum that sought to eliminate cultural distinctiveness.

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In the now two decades-long campaign to calm the restive Tatar and Mongol lands of Volga-Ural and Central Asia, the Russians followed an approach of using extreme brutality and the latest technology. With the region remaining under strict martial law, normal life was heavily curtailed by constant state surveillance, interference and, at the slightest hint of disobedience or resistance, violence. In the isolated areas that the Brotherhood of the Wolf had traditionally found safety at times of weakness, the government had a new tool – the airplane. In a cruel irony, flight had actually been the invention of ethnic-Tatar scientists working in the United States in the years after the Great War. It was during the 1910s that the technology began to find military applications. From the 1920s the Russian state used biplanes extensively for reconnaissance and occasional aerial assault – with light aircraft capable of dropping small bombs causing terror and panic across the Steppe and mountain lands Turanist insurgents had fled to. By the mid-1920s, the generals in Kiev had grown confident enough to boast to the Vozhd that the east had been conquered once and for all.

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At the centre of Radical philosophy was a belief in the vitality of nations. One of the most obvious signs of this vitality was its propensity to reproduce, illustrated by a high birth rate and growing population. In this, the Makarov government saw serious cause for concern. The birth rate among Jewish mothers in Poland and later Russia had been dropping since the late nineteenth century, as the population explosion of the industrial era began to fade. This was not especially exceptional – a similar process had occurred among many advanced industrial societies in Europe. What created the greatest anxiety was in the comparison with other groups within the Republic. Christians largely followed the same pattern as Jews – although their birthrate had started to fall slightly later and had not yet reached the same level.

Most concern was reserved for the fact that the birthrate of Muslims and Hindus had seen a much shallower decline. This was true of Tatars in the harshest rural poverty of Central Asia, and in the rich lands of Muscovy. With minorities forbidden from internal migration, and Russian actively encouraged to take up settlement in different parts of the empire, the Russian share of the population in many ethnically mixed areas was in decline. Meanwhile, despite much higher rates of emigration, Muslims and Hindus were slowly coming to make up a larger share of the Republic’s overall population. These trends horrified Radical ideologies and policy makers – with their pro-natalist propaganda campaigns and offers of financial incentives of childrearing making little impact. Population anxiety was becoming a core political issue in the new state.

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A key focus of the Makarov regime after the creation of the Republic and consolidation of its dictatorship was to restore the nation’s stature on the international stage. A huge programme of military armament – seeing the army balloon in size, even surpassing its numbers at the time of the Great War – was a part of this process, cultivating fear of Russian power. At the same time there were efforts at diplomatic engagement – with most of the powers that had refused the regime recognition in favour of the Tsarist government-in-exile gradually reopening relations with Kiev in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Sport proved a valuable political tool. After Russian athletes competed in their first Olympic Games since the civil war in 1921 – in Holy Roman Vienna no less – and to the surprise of many outsiders, Kiev was selected to host to Eight Olympiad in 1925. A remarkable turnaround from a period of isolation. These warming relations gave the Russian regime the confidence to seek to address its greatest sore from the time of the civil war – Israel’s independence.

Since breaking with the Radical regime in Kiev during the civil war in 1914, Israel had been a source of endless humiliation for the Russian government – offering shelter to Polish dissidents, giving the anti-Radical Kohen Gadol the freedom to exert influence within Russia’s borders through the institutions of Jewish Orthodoxy, leaving a million Israeli ethnic Russians marooned from the motherland and denying Kiev its traditional geostrategic role in the eastern Mediterranean. One of Makarov’s clearest ambitions was to overturn this intolerable situation. The moment for action came in June 1922 when the Tsarist government in exile was asked to leave the Holy Roman Empire at the behest of the Russian government, the Empire accepting the request as it sought to improve its relations with its eastern neighbour. The Tsarists then relocated to Jerusalem. Makarov took this provocation as an excuse to deploy gunboats to the Levantine coast and issuing a lengthy list of demands that would have reduced Israel to its traditional role as subservient to Kiev. When the Israeli government rejected these demands, Russian troops started to land along the Palestinian shoreline and moved to occupy the country.

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The Israeli military had little realistic hope of resisting the Russian intervention, and therefore looked abroad for allies. The Papacy, who had been at the heart of the Kingdom’s break with Kiev in 1914, remained an enthusiastic supporter of Israeli independence, yet the Holy Roman Empire showed no interest in going to war over the far off Jewish state – offering little other than feint criticism, as it prioritised its relationship with Russia. Standing alone, the Papacy called for an immediate Russian withdrawal and began to deploy its army to its borders with Russian in Central Asia and the Iranian Plateau. Through the following six weeks Russian and Papal forces tussled in an undeclared border war along their frontiers – testing one another’s strength before risking entering open conflict. Outnumbered and having fallen behind in military technology, the Papacy came out of these skirmishes in poor shape. They therefore quietly withdrew their opposition to the Russian takeover in Israel. By this stage the Holy Land was firmly under Kiev’s control. By the end of the year the Republic of Israel had been established, under the control of an Israeli Radical Republican Party dictatorship, under occupation from Russian troops, with the existing Kohen Gadol pressured into resigning in favour of a more ideologically suitable successor.

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Throughout this time, the Radical movement was fraught with internal tensions. Many of the thousands who had marched on Kiev in 1914 had done so inspired by the promise of national revolution. However, in the decade since that great event the Makarov regime had remained tightly aligned with its conservative alliances. The aristocracy and bourgeoisie, at least those who had bent the knee to the regime, had been largely untouched – indeed many had benefited from the involvement of the state in the economy – while clerical power was even greater than it had been during the progressive era. The greatest symbols of this were the facts that both the deposed Tsar behind the Boyarka Coup and the Kohen Gadol in Jerusalem who had supported Israel’s break with Russia remained free to live out their lives in peace. Equally, although the regime had taken a harsh stance against minorities, some wanted to go further with the seizure of land and property. For the most extreme elements of the Radical Republican Party, the revolution was unfinished.
 
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And we are now within 1, possibly 2, updates of the end of the Victoria 2 part of this AAR :eek:.

Nothing remotely redeeming about the situation, and one is mostly left bemused as to how everyone seemed to conspire for so long to allow it to happen.

Let's hope the Papacy and the HRE maintain their diplomatic fortitude.



Funny that…

It really took something of a comedy of errors for us to get to this point. Let us not forget that in 1914 (even with the Brusilov Line reimposed) the Radicals only managed a quarter of the vote and didn't get close to a Duma majority. Yet they still came out with everything.

And we've the HRE looking to rebuild relations with Kiev, and the Papacy finding themselves too weak to stand up to them alone. Who can stop the Russian Republic? :eek:

Well, I, uh, shit.
Literally my only consolation is that forum rules prevent Makarov from doing anything as bad as what the mustache man did OTL (at least that's acknowledged in writing), but in some ways that might be worse; without such overt evil there might be nothing to discredit Fascism. All I can say is that Polish democracy has been a consistent disaster that has done nothing but breed division and conflict. Democracy should have been granted to all equally or to nobody at all; the way it was done in this AAR only led to the horrors of Makarov.

I'd also like to congratulate you on writing this, because this section of the AAR has been very good from a worldbuilding perspective. It delved deep into a serious issue that would naturally arise for Poland in this situation and built up politics around it, ultimately culminating in probably the best buildup to the rise of Fascists I've seen. Obviously I'd have preferred the glorious Tsardom continuing (or, you know, any non Fascist situation) but this is a depressingly realistic way for the story to go.

We will see what is in store for us in the rest of the story to go. My gameplay in DH takes us up to the 1950s, I'm undecided on whether to end it there or for us to have an epilogue rounding off the twentieth century.

Thank you for the high praise! I hope you continue to enjoy what we have in store with the remainder of the story :).

The russian state of Poland? What the fuxk does that even mean???

A title noting both the ethnic nature of the nation while tying it into the traditions of an older state - I was thinking along the lines of the OTL German State of Austria.

Wait, we are not Poland anymore? :eek: Teh horror!

Yes, in game I clicked the 'form Russia' button :eek:.

Oh no, this I guess is definitely the darkest timeline :eek:

Indeed, and only time will tell how dark things will get in the last part of this section and then in DH!

Readers who have been rooting for Poland from the start of this AAR:

Goshdarnit. My big, floppy Cavalier hat has been trampled and my Roundhead horseman's pot is all dented. Where, now, can democracy and liberty turn? Whence shall come salvation from tyrants?
Densley: The only viable solution remains, as ever, unfailing scepticism universally applied. :D

I had that scene exactly in mind when reading the comments as we saw the Radicals take over. Are we going to see the readers cheering on the opposition when *spoilers* we reach WW2? (although I thought everyone could assume the DH section wasn't going to be 20 years of peaceful coexistence ;) )


Poland only became the bad guys when the Brusilov Line was put up, change my mind

Or have we really been the badies from the very start in 926? :eek:ooooo

(Incidentally, in the next update we will reach the millennium of Polish statehood, 1,000 years of megacampaign)

From monarchy to radical government, Poland is hopelessly dragged along the currents of change.

And, even with their democracy, the Polish people saw events run out of their control. Now under totalitarian rule they are completely helpless to forces beyond their control.

It might be just superficial but the Lvov Trials have me worried the Radicals might stray into aspects of Stalinism
Yeah they have kind of a slightly nazbol flavor

I don't know what about the Ministry of State Security might fit into that description ;) :p.

it seems it has once again come time for me to post the video
RADREP PARTY, IT IS THE GANG FOR YOU AND ME
RADREP PARTY, TO KILL THE TURKISH BOURGEOISIE

Haha :p XD

Well, I think we can safely say that this is the worst of all possible outcomes. This has been a terrifyingly plausible portrayal of how an extremist movement can go from the political fringe all the way to the halls of power, one step at a time.

I'm glad you enjoyed seeing this develop, I tried to make their rise to power seem plausible in this world.
 
More dispatches from the terrifying descent into the abyss of fascism. I'll be intrigued to see whether Makarov can necessarily hold it all together himself, or whether he has "allies" who feel they might be better suited to call themselves Vozhd.

After Russian athletes competed in their first Olympic Games since the civil war in 1921 – in Holy Roman Vienna no less – and to the surprise of many outsiders, Kiev was selected to host to Eight Olympiad in 1925.

Vicky likes to do this, I think. In my Commonwealth game I got to host the Olympics five years after the revolution.
 
Can no one stop Makarov? :eek:
 
It's odd to find oneself dismayed that the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire are insufficiently opposed to our beloved Poland... but Makarov is a menace and his evil regime must be destroyed.
 
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Things only continue to get worse in Poland / Russia, even though paradoxically the country is probably at the height of its power at the moment. The average Pole or Russian might not see the worst of it so long as he keeps his head down and toes the party line, but the situation beyond the Brusilov Line is once again a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off, even if the Russian state has the upper hand for now with its technological dominance.
 
With how uneven industrial expansion is, its technological and economical advantages seem more like a house of cards.
 
how awful did everything turn out to be! short of another revolt, I don't know how Poland/Russia can get rid of Makarov, and there's only 1-2 updates left :eek:

waiting on the edge of my seat
 
1924-1931 – A Thousand Years of Sorrow

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
 
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End of Part Three