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Just starting reading this AAR and woah, it is truly amazing, I have a soft spot for megacampaigns, right now I'm at 1339 with the Arabs trying to reconquer Palestine and Iraq so, this may land as an off-topic post haha. Just wanted to say I'm enjoying the AAR and I hope to reach the current updates in time. 
1931-1933 – Let Them Tremble
1931-1933 – Let Them Tremble
Vozhd Boris Makarov alongside Field Marshall Sergei Baranova
Vozhd Boris Makarov alongside Field Marshall Sergei Baranova
After the troubles of the late 1920s, faith in the direction of Russia under Boris Makarov’s leadership had been badly shaken. Within the regime, the conservative elements that had buttressed the Radicals since 1914 were unhappy and seeking alternatives. These malcontents grouped themselves around the figure of Field Marshall Sergei Baranova. A veteran of the Great War, the civil war and countless campaigns against Tatar rebellions and insurgencies, Baranova was one of the most senior figures in the Russian army and had significant governmental influence in Kiev. Like many of the military old guard, he was, in his heart, a traditionalist who might have preferred a right wing nationalist Tsarist regime over the futurist dystopia of the Radical movement. By the beginning of 1931 the Baranova faction was building strength and laying the ground for an attempted seizure of power that would place Russia under the control of a conservative military dictatorship.
As the plot grew in strength, one of its members lost heart and tipped off the secret police. MGB agents made arrests raided the homes and offices of several members of the Baranova faction and soon uncovered a shocking conspiracy of high profile members of the Russian elite against the Vozhd and his regime. While Baranova and those most clearly involved were quickly executed, there were fears that rebel sentiment was far more widespread that the old Field Marshall and his confidantes. With so many conservatives implicated, traditionalists were quickly purged from positions of power and influence in government, the military, state administration and society. Makarov himself placed heavy pressure on the MGB to root out any and every hint of disloyalty and conspiracy.
For this task, the Vozhd appointed a new head of the MGB – the firebrand Radical Feodor Golikov. Having risen through the ranks of the Radical Republican Party from the status of a blackshirt street thug in the 1910s, to take on a major organisational role in the Felaket in Muscovy, Golikov was seen as ideologically reliable, utterly ruthless and extremely effective. Under his direction, the secret police would massively expand their operation – conducting arbitrary arrests in the hope of uncovering evidence of plotting and pressuring prisoners into forced confessions. Unsurprisingly, the army was particularly badly hit – almost the entire general staff and the majority of officers of ranks being purged from its numbers over the course of the terror that followed. Golikov’s suspicions were not solely directed at conservatives, but also looked to the Radical Party itself, where it was feared that traitors and opportunists had embedded themselves.
As a wider climate of fear took hold, it quickly became apparent the best way to avoid implicating yourself was to point the finger at another, while others also saw opportunities to settle old scores. With the smallest hint of suspicion enough to guarantee arrest, and possibly execution, terror ran through the Russian elite as the scope of MGB operations escalated beyond all reason. Soon, the whole of Russian society was under suspicion, with common people in their millions taking part in the same insane logic of hurling fatal accusations at their neighbours and friends in a desperate effort to save themselves.
Through the purges of 1931 and 1932, it is estimated hundreds of thousands lost their lives and perhaps as many as two million forfeited their freedom to the MGB’s sprawling empire of prisons. The most famous victim of the purges of all was none other than one Radoslav Zvenislava – the deposed former Tsar who had spent that previous decade and a half living a quiet life at his ancestral seat in Prussia. Despite having virtually no communication with the outside world, the former sovereign was seen as a potential focal point for opposition and faced Golikov’s firing squads alongside his entire family. Only his young grandson, Yaroslav, was able to escape – reaching the safety of the Danish border with the aid of sympathisers.
By late 1932, the purges were starting to come to an end. Having pleased the Vozhd, Golikov himself had received a major promotion for his fine work – rising the control a wider Ministry for Home Affairs, while retaining his control over the MGB. This drew one of the major catalytic forces behind the terror away from the heat of the action. More importantly, the crippling effects they were having on the Republic had convinced many in the leadership that the time had come to wind them down. The military in particular was in a chaotic state. With its leadership and officer core utterly decimated, the Radical Party had instituted a strict vetting process that demanded ideological commitment from new officers and generals – effectively giving former blackshirt street leaders and Party toadies the most effect route to leadership. The economy and state administration had likewise been badly hit by the loss of key personnel whose skills could not be so easily replaces, while the horrors inflicted on wider society had left the people of the Republic exhausted with fear. The dictatorship had stamped out all hints of dissent, but at incredible cost.
While the eyes of the Russian state had been fixed upon its own people, troubling was brewing on its south eastern frontier. The Mongol Khanate had been a close dependency of the Polish state since the mid-nineteenth century, and had grown immensely in size under Kiev’s protection. However, since the 1920s an increasingly assertive Chinese regime in the south had been cultivating a strong anti-Russian current within the state – making effective use of its links to the economically important Chinese populations living around Mongol-ruled Beijing. When ruling Khagan Baraq III died in February 1932, the Beijing faction found its chance to strike as the pro-Chinese second son of the Khagan, Gegeen, seized power in Ulanbaatar and moved to remove Russian advisors, achieving a more independent position. Gegeen’s assumption of power did not go unchallenge, as his older brother Toghan fled to the western city of Urumqi and rose the banner of revolt among the Uighur tribes of the region – beginning the Mongol civil war.
Of greater world historical significance that events in Mongolia were changes underway in Europe. The Depression that began in 1929 had hit the region very hard, causing massive unemployment and social dislocation – leaving the elites, and indeed the existing forms of social organisation, badly discredited. Many looked towards alternatives, casting admiring eyes at Normandy, where a socialist regime had banished poverty and inequality while avoiding the economic woes being suffered across the rest of the continent. The ideals of revolutionary socialism had their strongest attraction among those peoples that still ached under the national humiliations of the Treaty of Lucca that ended the Great War three decades ago – the French, living under foreign domination, and the Germans, diminished and divided since their defeat. In both nations, the revolutionary left had unified under militant Socialist Workers Parties that were enjoying explosive growth with their promises of social change, national restoration and world revolution.
In the early 1930s the once stable societies of Central and Western Europe were showing signs of decay. Across the region, labour militancy spiralled out of control as ideologically motivated socialist union leaders whipped up vicious industrial conflict. In France, armed anti-imperialist groups swearing fealty to the red flag were growing more confident and aggressive in their attacks on the regimes ruling over the different corners of the nation. To the west in Germany, the social order was in disarray – on the left, militant socialists formed violent revolutionary groups who support industrial and political struggles, while in the right counter revolutionaries attempted to hold them down. The continent was heading for a reckoning.
That reckoning arrived in the autumn of 1932. Following a long summer of fierce strikes in coal country, in October the Ruhr, a territory under the control of the Archbishopric of Hesse, exploded into violent upheaval. After an ill-fated attempt to use the army to defend blackleg workers going to the pits, the Socialist Workers Party distributed arms among striking miners and party cadres alike. After handily defeated the weak armed forces of the Archbishopric, the revolutionary saw the power of the Hessian state melt away before their eyes. They therefore continued to push – occupying the mighty industrial cities of the region and expanding from there through the rest of the Rhineland and Hesse. As the mass uprising gathered steam it carried the air of a Jacquerie, as bands of revolutionary workers driven by red-hot class anger launched themselves at the church, bourgeoisie and state with all their fury – cutting a swathe of destruction in their wake and sweeping the old order before them. During these hectic weeks the Archbishop himself was killed by a mortar, ironically fired by one of his own soldiers, as he attempted to flee from his collapsing state.
By late October governmental authority in Hesse had completely collapsed and the insurrection was bleeding over into the Holy Roman Empire, with socialist militias rising up across the realm. As the crisis spiralled out of control, the Imperial government appeared powerless to act. Vienna had a clear lack of faith in the army – with reports of rank and file soldiers deserting and even attacking their officers and defecting to the revolution. Furthermore, the conservative elites in government, having a deep familiarity with the rise of Radicalism in Poland, had no stomach for close cooperation with the far right, whose militias were perhaps the most effective counter revolutionary force in the Empire by this stage.
On November 3rd, the Imperial elites’ decision was made for them as the Socialist Workers Party executed an expertly organised coup in Vienna under the command of their charismatic leader Ludwig Weidermann. After seizing control of key government buildings, strategic infrastructure and means of communication, Weidermann announced the proclamation of the Vereinigte Sozialistische Volksrepublik, the VSVR, on the steeps of the Imperial Parliament. With red revolutionaries sweeping across the country, this was the death knell for a millennium of German Imperial history, and the last surviving empire tracing its heritage back to the glories of ancient Rome. Yet it also marked the birth of a new world.
Just had been the case in the Rhineland, the socialist revolution across the German lands was accompanied by a brutal red terror. Uncontrolled violence and killings were targetted against the middle and upper classes, who fled the country in their hundreds of thousands, while in the countryside the socialists encouraged poor peasants to ransack manorial estates and even target wealthier independent farmers – dividing their lands and possessions among themselves. Yet even in the context of the anarchic state of open class warfare, the Party was already establishing its grip – rapidly creating the organs of a proletarian dictatorship and solidifying political power around a small clique of party loyalists around Weidermann himself.
While the world looked on, transfixed in awe and horror by events in Germany, revolutionaries around the world saw a shining beacon of hope. In France, this inspiration drove the anti-imperial resistance movement to rebellion, and by late November much of the country we in the midst of the largest national uprising in decades. The leaders of the VSVR saw socialist revolution in France as imperative not only to the security of their own nascent state, but as the next logical step towards the world revolution. They therefore sought to aggressively involve themselves in the rising – sending their armies over the border into Italian and Skottish ruled territories. Desperate to ensure success, and avoid being seen as another invader, they looked to legitimise their intervention by sending a delegation to Normandy – the small French socialist state on the Channel Coast. Pledging an independent French state, and ample assistance from the VSVR, the Germans secured the support of Caen and on December 16th Normandy declared war on France’s occupying powers and sent its armies into enemy territory. The Franco-German revolutionary axis was born.
By the end of December, VSVR troops were already pushing into the German-populated provinces of Skotland and Denmark along the Baltic and North Sea shorelines, and launching probing attacks into the Netherlands. By this stage, the Socialist International had opened hostilities against Skotland, Italy and Andalucia in France and Denmark and the Netherlands in the north. None of these states had traditionally been premier military powers, and there were concerns that the reds might well be able to overwhelm them without support. For this reason, His Holiness the Pope put himself forward as the man to lead Christian civilisation and the decency of the old order to victory against the Godless heathens of the International – declaring war on January 2nd, cajoling Sardinia and Algiers to join the fight shortly later, and sending her armies to the continent to fight. The Second World War, the Great Revolutionary War, had begun.
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Here we go, here we go, here we go! I've been looking forward to this bit for a while now
. I definitely had to correct V2's failure to give us a proper communist revolution. Bonus points to anyone who recognises the VSVR
. In game, I used the 1933 start from the base game - I buffed the VSVR (Germany) and Normandy (France) out with some extra units, although mostly weaker ones to simulate the revolutionary masses (while also giving militaries to countries like the Papacy - which is a reskinned Arab Federation, so needed everything from scratch - and a few others). An alliance of the VSVR and France is now at war with all those counties marked with white dots on the map, from day one of the scenario.
If you aren't familiar with the DH icons - the picture showing a 40% score at the end of the section about the Russian purges indicates that I have 40% dissent (which I have puffed up for our game and story from where it normally starts). For anyone unfamiliar with DH, this is extremely high and basically cripples you're country. Armies are less effective, revolts an issue, industrial production lower etc.
Indeed. Its been something I've really enjoyed doing in this megacampaign, writing those little summaries of the previous sections, as its given a chance to look at how things have changed from a broader lense. In barely a hundred years we went from enlightened absolutism, struggled with the nature and identity of the Polish state in a democratic age as a vibrant democratic culture developed, and then saw it all fall apart into tyranny and horror.
I'm glad it has gotten your attention
.I've always loved DH - and I've had a few AARs in this section back in the wrong side of the last decade, so it feels nice to make a return. I only thought a 4th part in DH would be viable when I noticed there was still an active community here!
The question is, after all this is done - will there be any good sides left?
Only time will tell if these red revolutionaries will fulfil your wish!
Just starting reading this AAR and woah, it is truly amazing, I have a soft spot for megacampaigns, right now I'm at 1339 with the Arabs trying to reconquer Palestine and Iraq so, this may land as an off-topic post haha. Just wanted to say I'm enjoying the AAR and I hope to reach the current updates in time.
Glad that you are enjoying it! You've just got the 600 years left to catch up with us
. That was a section I really enjoyed. In game I felt it was getting a bit stale and I needed to spice things up, and I certainly achieved that! I hope to see you when you've caught up
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I fear that these revolutions will be seen as the great missed opportunity of history. While the beast in Kiev purged itself and faced a moment of weakness, the Communist and liberal powers went to war rather than presenting a united front. Whoever wins, I hope they aren't too exhausted by war to resist Makarov's forces when they march west.
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I don't know how this will work but it seems i'll follow the AAR supporting the communists lol
Bonus points to anyone who recognises the VSVR
Now, there's a name I haven't heard in a long time...
My bet would be on the VSVR winning the first stage of the war handily, leaving Europe trapped between Red Terror in the West and Black Terror in the East. The question is whether or not Skotland can avoid invasion, and so be able to act as a staging post for the Americans when the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.
Which reminds me to ask; was there any liberalisation of politics in Skotland during the 19th and early 20th Centuries? I went back through Part Three, and the only reference to their political system I could find was of it being an autocratic regime in the 1830s and 40s.
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Iberia and Italy could also use the Alps and the Pyrenees as natural fortifications, theoretically. It's an interesting situation, sort of the French Revolutionary Wars in the 30s, with the Reds seeking to spread the Revolution before consolidating at home.
So the first act in the drama is to be a clash between Revolution and Reaction -- two crusades for two millennarian creeds, one ancient and one modern, dead set on a collision course that will undoubtedly end in rivers of blood shed.
And all the while Black Russia is sitting on the sidelines and watching these two titans fighting, biding its time while it recovers from its latest act of self-destruction.
And all the while Black Russia is sitting on the sidelines and watching these two titans fighting, biding its time while it recovers from its latest act of self-destruction.
It occurs to me that if this was published as a more mainstream AH it would be incredibly controversial for essentially featuring a Jewish Russian Fascist party murdering their Muslim and Christian minorities.
Bonus points to anyone who recognises the VSVR
Well, the ruling classes certainly seem to be trembling!
As has been said, terrible missed opportunity for a VSVR-led popular front against Russia. Makarov is going to thank Weidermann for those extra few years on the sidelines one day…
1933-1936 – Workers of the World Unite!
1933-1936 – Workers of the World Unite!
With Europe falling into war, observers looked to the great capitals of Kiev and New Cordoba for signs of how the world’s premier totalitarian state and its largest democracy would involve themselves. Both parties were internally divided on this question. The Russian regime had little love for the liberal states of West-Central Europe being swept away by the revolution, yet the socialists were undoubtedly a more hated and threatening opponent. However, in the immediate aftermath of the purges the Republic was in no fit state for a major war. Although warhawks like Golikov, the architect of the purges, still pushed for intervention, it was clear that time would be needed to restructure the decimated armed forces and promote a new officer and leadership core before war could seriously be contemplated. The Russians therefore settled for a position of armed neutrality – placing large numbers of soldiers on the Russo-German border, and deploying troops to Panonnia to guarantee its independence but leaving the socialist and western states to fight among themselves.
For the United States, the war present different questions. Traditionally, the Americans had not been a major military power. Its armies had never stepped foot outside of North America and its largest military conflicts since independence had been fought against indigenous tribal confederations. As such, in 1933 it was little more than a third rate military power – even if its immense economic and human resources gave it the potential for much more. Politically, the nation’s politicians hewed close to their traditional isolationism, with distaste for the Christian European imperialists in general and the Papacy – with its centuries long oppression of Muslims in the Middle East – particular strengthening this sentiment. However, there was a strong opposing minority current. These interventionists were motivated firstly by a spiritual bond with the Andalucian motherland that had given birth to their nation and was now threatened with invasion on one hand; and a visceral hatred of the revolutionary socialists, whose anti-capitalist, militantly atheist, anti-democratic and expansionist ideals horrified mainstream opinion across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, any American entry into the war was a long way off.
On the front, the opening manoeuvres of the Revolutionary War were a resounding success for the International. Joining with German forces pouring into France from the west and domestic rebels, the Norman French captured Paris – the greatest of all Francophone cities, in mid-January having barely fired a shot in anger as the Skots withdrew to more defensible coastal redoubts in a disorganised rout. From then, the rising in France only intensified – with the armies of the revolution sweeping across the land. The fiercest resistance in the Gallic lands came from the Italians in the Rhone Valley – where the Italians had taken the time to heavily dig in to fortified positions. As such, the last Italian territories west of the Alps were not captured until the late summer of 1933. To the north, the Netherlands collapsed just days into the German invasion – with the attack on their borders being coordinated with a socialist rising in Amsterdam itself. In northern Germany, the Danes found their Baltic territories untenable – but were able to halt the Germans in their tracks alongside Skottish troops in Holstein. By the end of 1933 the Allies had halted the socialists’ progress, at least temporarily, around the natural boundaries of the Pyrenees, the Alps and the river lines guarding the approaches to the Jutland Peninsula.
While the armies of the Socialist International clashed with the western allies across Europe, much radical leftists around the world stirred fervently as they awaited the coming world revolution. This enthusiasm would bring Russia and the VSVR to the brink of a war both parties hoped to avoid in the spring of 1934 over the issue of the Zagreb Commune. The Croat city of Zagreb had been a source of unrest within Pannonia for well over a century. Energised by events in Europe, in April 1934 a coalition of nationalist and socialist groups launched an uprising in the city – forcing the Pannonian garrison to withdraw from the city and proclaiming an independent Croat Socialist Republic, their state being known to the outside world as the Zagreb Commune. Pledging allegiance to the International, the Commune pleaded for the VSVR to send assistance to protect their revolution. As Kiev warned that any interference in their southern ally would result in war, for several weeks both parties collectively held their breath in a tense stand off. In the end, the VSVR was forced to relent upon their revolutionary idealism, and leave the Croats to be mercilessly crushed by Pannonian army in May.
The Croat Crisis came at a critically important moment in the war in Europe. As the snows melted in the spring of 1934, the International launched largescale offensives over the Alps and Pyrenees – facing intense resistance in both theatres. The breakthrough in Iberia arrived after leftist sleeper cells in Barcelona launched a rebellion – severely disrupting Andalucian supply lines and facilitating the collapse of their Catalan front. Once they had pushed over the mountains, the socialists soon rampaged over the country – the Iberian elites desperately taking to the ports in an effort to flee to sanctuary across the Atlantic. The fighting in Italy was rather fiercer, where the Papacy had deployed its expeditionary forces to reinforce their allies and, crucially, maintain the security of Rome. The Alpine battles last through the majority of the year, costing the socialists hundreds of thousands of lives as the Allies held firm against their advances. However, their lines finally broke east of Grenoble in August 1934 and by the autumn the reds were pouring into Piedmont and Lombardy. Thereafter, Italian and Papal forces withdrew towards Tuscany and began a long, bloody, fighting retreat further down the peninsula as the International slowly ground them towards submission.
This era was a time of global rather than merely European upheaval. Since the early nineteenth century India had been divided between the powerful Rattas empire, the smaller coalition of princely states named the Vengi Chalukyas and the Papacy’s imperial provinces. The ambition to unify India and restore the historic greatness of Hindu civilisation had been a growing inspiration for nationalists for decades. As the beginnings of industrialisation produced a large and literate middle class from the turn of the century, this national movement gained organisation and direction with the formation of the Revolutionary League of India – a left-leaning anti-imperialist party.
When Rattas held its first democratic elections in 1923 the RLI secured an overwhelming victory and quickly went about dismantling the power of the imperial monarchy and embarking on their revolutionary nationalist project. In 1929 they succeeded in coaxing the Vengi Chalukyas into unification – creating the Empire of India. As the 1930s arrived their attentions turned to the Papal colonial empire. Nationalist revolutionaries sought to make Papal provinces in the Punjab and Indus valley ungovernable with all manner of resistance, both peaceful and violent, while mother India gave their ideological and material support. Maintaining order in such densely populated and restive lands proved exceeding costly for the Papacy, and after the outbreak of war in Europe, increasingly difficult to sustain. In 1934 the Papacy decided to partition its Indian provinces – granting independence to the Punjab, but retaining control of the more strategically valuable territories along the Indus. The new Punjabi state lasted for less than a year before RLI militants overthrew the government and petitioned for annexation by India.
Asia had a new great power, and one with grand geopolitical ambitions. The RLI political project was clearly not yet complete. Not only were millions of Indians still under Papal rule in the Indus Valley, the lands of wider Hindu civilisation across Iran and Central Asia remained under Papal and Russian domination. Both imperial powers were viscerally despised in the subcontinent – the Papacy for its more direct colonialism in India, and Russia for its unspeakable inhumanity against its Hindus. While the Felaket and the Radical repression of the Steppe peoples was more often told as a story of Muslim abuse, it should not be forgotten that the victims included millions of Hindu Mongols as well. Tver and Moscow had been home to great Hindu temples and centres of religious learning just as it had been Mosques and Madrasas. With this anti-western and anti-Russian mindset, there were fears in many quarters that the Indians might be susceptible to the advances of the Socialist International if they were not guarded against.
Within Russia, the period after 1933 was one of recovery and preparation. Having seen war break out in Europe, it was recognised by Kiev that Russia’s entry into the conflict would become inevitable at some stage and that both the armed forces and wider society would have to be prepared. This involved a mass propaganda campaign popularising fear of socialist revolution occurring across the border, that galvanised popular opinion behind the regime – particularly among the conservatively-minded who had been horrified by the terror of the purges and the excesses of the Felaket. Moves were made to reorientate the entire Russian economy towards war production, with factories involved in producing civilian goods repurposed for a new war economy. The military itself was reorganised from the bottom up and expanded an unprecedented speed. With the leadership destroyed by the purges, a new class of ideologically trained officers – with strong Radical connections, and often histories in the blackshirts – soon found themselves leading one of the largest armies ever assembles. This grand expansion of the military served to ease some of the worst effects of the Great Depression as well. Military demand buttressed a significant growth in heavy industry. The new factories and the need to fill the ranks of the growing army helped to reduce unemployment to its pre-1929 level by the middle of the decade, with the poverty of the early 1930s fading away.
From late 1934 and 1935 the western Allies struggled in the face of two major socialist-aligned revolutions. The first of these occurred in North Africa, with a largescale Berber revolt beginning in late 1934 against the ethnically Italian rulers of the Duchy of Algiers, who had formed a minority ruling class in the region for centuries. The Berbers met with huge success – gaining control over most of the region’s major cities by the spring of 1935. Despite largely defeating the Algerian armed forces, the revolutionaries were far from victory as crack reinforcement began to arrive from the Papacy – forcing the Berber rebels from urban areas and into a rural insurgency. Another restive region rose up in the summer of 1935 on Ireland, where the culturally Celtic western provinces had long resented Skottish rule from the British mainland. With the island only lightly garrisoned, the rebels were able to take control over most of the rural parts of Ireland – forcing the Skots to hole themselves up around Dublin and Belfast on the east coast by the winter. They subsequently pledged themselves to the International, inviting French marines to conduct a risky crossing to Ireland and successfully capturing Dublin just before Christmas.
On the front, progress slowed significantly. In Italy, the Allies gradually lost ground until they were finally forced to evacuate the peninsula in the summer of 1935. To the north, quite remarkably, it took until June 1935 for the reds to finally break through the Allies’ defensive lines in Holstein and occupy Jutland. Thereafter, the war entire a period of suspended animation. Although the International was furiously constructing the ships and planes it would need to advance on other fronts, the fleets of Skotland, the Papacy and Denmark were able to keep them at bay. This was until the mutiny of the Danish navy in Stockholm in November 1935. With the sailors rising against the admiralty and state, the took their ships out to sea and then defected to the VSVR in Lubeck. The International reacted to its sudden acquisition of naval supremacy in the Baltic by launching an invasion across the sea in southern Sweden in December. By March, the Kingdom of Denmark had surrendered.
By the spring of 1936 the International appeared on the cusp of victory. Denmark, Italy, Andalucia and the Netherlands had all capitulated and socialist republics established in their stead. The Skots lived in fear of an invasion of their homeland, barely holding on to a toehold on the neighbouring island of Ireland. In the south, the Papacy had shored up their Algerian ally, yet remained isolated and insecure, with much of its own colonial empire restive.
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No spoilers for how inevitable Patriotic War to come goes!
I don't know how this will work but it seems i'll follow the AAR supporting the communists lol
Well they have certainly had an impressive opening act. All those middle sized independent states will be pumping out armies, and aircraft and ships of their own in short order as well. Is the World Revolution at hand?
Your predictions turned out pretty accurate for this part of the war. The VSVR and friends have conquered Europe in 3 years flat, but they lack the naval resources to finish the Allies off. (Although they are working on that rapidly!).
I'm not sure if I got to mention Skotland in the updates. My vision was that all the Christian states of Europe drifted towards some degree of constitutional government during the nineteenth century (with some early twentieth century backsliding in the HRE after the Great War), with the Papacy being something of an outlier as the last great absolutist regime. Of course, this is not for viewers in France, who remained divided by foreign empires until now.
The Alps and Pyrenees slowed the socialists down for a while. Just about every country in Europe seemed to suffer from massive levels of dissent (which I didn't put in) in this early party of the game (with the exception of the socialists powers). Part of that was that lots of countries had land they don't have cores on - but doesn't explain why Andalucia saw rebels take Barcelona, Madrid and several other provinces just as they were trying to hold the mountains. That story-narrative was true to the game. Equally, Algeirs uses the Algerian tag, so has cores across modern day Algeria - yet they had rebellions even in their core lands. I did really like the sense of instability and international turmoil it all created though.
Italy meanwhile, had a big army at game start, good geography and an easy root to reinforcements from the Papacy (who also had a major military), but still ended up falling before Denmark. Embarassing!
The horrors of the proletariat is coming
And horrors there are plenty. We can imagine the violent revolutionary reconstruction going on across Europe at this point with all of Central and Western Europe in the socialists' hands.
And the first stage of this drama has been a resounding success for the Revolution. The Reactionaries are not dead yet, but they are hanging by a thread.
Its amazing just how much we have done to self sabotage since the Great War. Turning away from all the old alliances, and going on a path of self-destruction with a civil war, the Felaket and the purges. 30 years ago it seemed there was not a power on earth that could challenge us. Today, I am not so sure.
Indeed, and we had some of that controversy in the comments when the Radicals were first introduced. But I'm glad our paradoxians seem to have gone along with the story, even with their fingers over their eyes for the most recent sections.
An early war before the Allies were beaten would have strongly favoured Russia even with our debuffs. The VSVR (in game and story alike) needed some time to build up its armed forces before it can take on the big boys. Note that it took them almost 2 years to take Jutland from the Danes and few token Skottish units ...
Haha, I hate myself for doing this but I'm not suddenly posting over those threads just to say it, but, damn. It has been an amazing run, right now I'm by 1853, going full speed to catch up.Glad that you are enjoying it! You've just got the 600 years left to catch up with us
I hope to see you when you've caught up
I can only say, the more I read, the more my hype builds up regarding the latest updates, it truly is a marvelous AAR and it has been so fascinating the way Poland has evolved. I mean, when I started reading it I was like "Huh, maybe this Poland will expand westwards and form some sort of Poland-Germania" haha though it's amazing the way Poland ended up becoming some sort of Russian-core Poland, anyways,
will stop now to not derail from the current thread, will be back when I've reached this part of the AAR. ^^
When the war finally comes, it is against an almost united Europe. Dangerous. Yet also potentially rewarding if you succeed of course!
Comrade Bronstein is presumably looking on from some other realm, feeling really rather vindicated. Striking just how much of the success of the revolutionary wave seems to have been popular rather than strictly strategic from the VSVR’s point of view.
Wonderful AAR, really gripping. Hopefully it won't be too insulting that I'm definitely rooting for the socialists; these Russian Radicals are just awful people with a domestic policy built on racism and an economy built on military expansion. They deserve a reckoning! The minute things kick off on the Eastern Front the oppressed minorities and the Indians should stab the fascists in the back.
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