In the second half of the 1930s the new age of conflict arrived in Asia in earnest. In May 1936 the two greatest powers of the Far East went to war as Japan invaded on China. The Japanese had controlled a small toehold on continental Asia since the 1900 with the city of Shanghai. However, they had watched with great alarm as the Xi Republic slowly defeated most of the remaining warlords to unify almost the entirety of Han-speaking core of the Chinese nation. Fearing that, given time, China would undoubtedly become the dominant force in the region, the Japanese looked to strike while they still held a technological advantage. Over the course of 1936 and 1937 they launched a series of ambitious invasions around coastal China, occupying large parts of her richest lands. However, as they attempted to drive inland their progress stalled and a war of attrition began to settle in that pitched the superior firepower of the Japanese against the sheer manpower at China’s disposal.
The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War only worsened the breakdown of all semblance of order across the eastern Steppe and Central Asia. In the west, 1936 two major broke out in Papal Central Asia. In the north, the Kyrgz, a Muslim Tatar people, established a small state around Dushanbe. Influenced by the socialists of Europe and Turanist thought within Russia, their state had a clear left-leaning character and offered a safe haven to dissident Tatars escaping Radical tyranny across the border. Further south, another Altaic group – the Hindu Kashgarians – took control of the eponymous city of Kashgar before riding south into Kashmir. The Kashgarians had less ideological pretensions that their Kyrgz neighbours and, with close cultural links to the Uighur faction in the Mongol civil war, looked to involve themselves in the conflict raging to the north east. Struggling in the fight against the International, and facing disquiet across much of its empire, the Papacy found itself unable to spare the resources to quash these rebellions – leaving only a small garrison in Kabul to warn off further revolts.
After half a decade of fighting, the Mongol civil war showed no signs of slowing. The anti-Russian Gegeen faction had faired rather poorly. Not only had they failed to crush Toghan in the west, the pretender and his Uighur horde had struck forth to capture Ulaanbaatar and Beijing. He had undoubtedly been aided in this success by the withdrawal of all Chinese assistance to the Mongolian government after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war. However, neither side had the strength to land a knockout blow. Indeed, after exhausting his armies with their eastward advance, Toghan himself was murdered by group of his Uighur generals in February 1937 after he refused to bow to their demands to return to their homeland rather than push on into Manchuria. Although both sides were exhausted by years of fighting, there was still no end in sight.
With the Papacy and China withdrawing to deal with existential threats closer to home, there was an emerging power vacuum in the heart of Asia. Into this two states sought to insert themselves – India and Russia. Since unification, Indian interest in Central Asia had grown immensely, and they were quick to grant official recognition to Kyrgyzstan and establish relations with the Kashgar Khan – seeking to negotiate a transfer of authority in Kashmir to themselves in exchange for aid and protection. These manoeuvrers were deeply alarming to the Russians, who feared Indian encroachment on their frontier. They therefore made the first move, invading and occupying Kyrgyzstan in December 1936. The occupation of Kyrgyzstan was a shocking act of aggression. Although Papal authority on the ground had been absent for months, they had not surrendered their legal authority in the region and therefore considered Kiev’s actions to be a violation of their territory. The Pope denounced Russia’s actions yet, ultimately, found himself unable to contemplate opening up a new front that would undoubtedly doom his regime to destruction. The Papacy therefore did nothing actively to resist Russia’s move, even as it condemned it and refused to recognise it.
Success in Dushanbe emboldened Makarov, who set his sights on a grander prize – Mongolia. The chaos on the southern frontier was an unwanted source of instability in the region that could only be ended by the involvement of troops on the ground. In May 1937, Russia negotiated an alliance with the Uighurs, whose fortunes had faded significantly since the murder of Toghan, with the promise of independence and aggrandisement. The involvement of Russian troops, albeit in modest numbers with very few division being able to be spared from the European frontier, ensured an inevitable defeat for anti-Russian forces in Mongolia. Nonetheless, in the vast expanses of this restive region it would take some time before all opposing forces were brought to heal – with the Mongol Khagan fighting on all the way until January 1938 when he was captured near the Korean border. In the west, the Russians were lured into a second violation of Papal sovereignty as their Uighur allies crossed the border into the nominally Papal territories occupied by the Khashgarians. With their hands on the matter forces, the Russians supported this invasion that created a lengthy border between the Uighurs and the Indians through the high mountains of the Himalayas.
By the spring of 1938 order had been restored across the lands of the old Mongol Khanate, which was split into a series of smaller Khanates under close Russian supervision and with permanent garrisons. In the west, the Uighurs were rewards with territories stretching from Kashmir and Kashgar in the south-west to Yichuan in the east – assuming the role as the most powerful of the Mongol successor states. To the north, a rump Mongol state ruled the historic homeland. In the far east, the resource rich Manchu lands gained their independence, while a Mongol-Chinese Beijing Khanate was established along the border with the Xi. Russian dominion over the eastern Steppe had been secured once more.
The two years after the surrender of Denmark in April 1936 are often described as the ‘Phony War’. After three years of gruelling fighting across Europe, the conflict reached a calmer point with relatively few major battles or campaigns. The most important fighting was in the air and on the high seas where the initial advantage of the Allies in both fields slowly started to weaken as the incredible industrial might of the Socialist International churned out the planes and warships needed to break out of the European fortress. That said, key battles did take place during these years. Through 1936 the Skots were able to turn the tide in Ireland, establishing an effective blockade of the island that prevented any further assistance reaching the rebels and slowly reconquering all of Ireland by early the following year. In the Mediterranean, the International achieved their own insular success on Sardinia. The Kingdom of Sardinia was an ancient state tracing its roots all the way back to the ninth century, and was one of Christendom’s greatest powers for much of the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern era. That proud history was brought to an end in 1937 by a successful Italian-led invasion that saw the strategic island fall with shocking ease, in what proved to be a practise run for larger operations.
While the land war between the Allies and International had died down, the VSVR began to deploy the large majority of its armed forces away from any active front and to its eastern boundaries with Russia, Pannonia and Serbia. As both parties sized one another up, the Russians became concerned that the VSVR might outflank in the Balkans by overrunning a weak Serbia before striking into their heartlands. Mutual fear of socialist attack therefore drove a détente between Belgrade and Kiev – two traditional enemies that had fought countless wars over the centuries. This began with a Russian guarantee of Serbian independence in early 1936 – with Makarov threatening war should the reds attack then-neutral Serbia. Over the next years a series of diplomatic initiatives by the two states saw Russia and Serbia bind closer and closer together, although the Serbs remained stubbornly opposed to Makarov’s calls for the deployment of Russian troops onto their territory – and were reluctant to shut off their relations with the Allies by adopting the anti-western stance pushed for by Kiev. Despite these misgivings, the need for a formal alliance in the face of the red threat pushed the Serbs into becoming a founding member of the Eurasian League – a Russian-led military defence including Serbia, Pannonia, Greek Crusader Anatolia and Israel.
In June 1938 the false sense of calm that had come over war was halted as a multinational invasion force of Germans, French, Italians and Andalucians brought the red flag to Africa. With the Skots focussed on their home islands, particularly after having wrestled Ireland back under control, the naval war in the Mediterranean had become the responsibility of the Papacy. While the Papal navy had been able to hold the whole sea under a tight grip in the mid-1930s, its Egyptian shipyards had little capacity to replenish losses in comparison to their continental rivals. As time went by, it become increasingly focussed on defending Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean over the west. This provided the opening for a hugely ambition International invasion of Algiers – a state that had never truly recovered from the Berber revolt. Red troops landed in Morocco, Algeria-proper and Tunis – pushing on to destroy to Duchy and overwhelm the Maghreb. Although stiff Papal resistance held back an invasion of Egypt itself – a largely Italian army suffering a heavy defeat just over 100 miles west of Alexandria – socialist units drove deep into the continent, crossing over the Sahara in an effort to threaten colonial West Africa, and stoke anti-imperialist revolution. The International ultimately found popular support in the region weaker than they had hoped, and the logistics of campaigning across vast deserts difficult to overcome. However, despite their offensives beginning to stall by 1939, they remained in control of Africa north of the Sahel and west of Egypt through to the following year.
While the International had struggled to rouse an anti-imperialist revolution in West Africa, they found much greater, and unexpected, opportunities in the Middle East. Ever since the conquest of their homelands by the Papacy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Caliphate, the Arabs had chaffed under theocratic Christian rule. Yet, the region was of incredible economic and political importance to the Pope – and therefore kept on a tight leash. Furthermore, the left had historically been very weak in the region – where American and Australian inspired democratic movements, or more conservative Islamist currents, tended to dominate anti-imperialist circles. For these reasons the International had held little hopes of finding the sort of sympathetic revolutionary fervour here that had supported them in Europe and the Maghreb. The Arab Revolt of 1939 therefore took all sides by surprise, as a nationalist revolution broke out in Iraq that quickly swept over much of the Papal Middle East and swore its allegiance to the International. The western Allies appeared on the verge of collapse.
In Russia, the fear of war and invasion had become the unifying current running throughout society. As the regime provided gruesome details of the revolutions occurring in Europe, and the shocking successes the red war machine, the Radical Party defined itself as the guardian of civilisation against the advance of godless barbarism. Makarov himself began to speak of the need for a palingenetic national rebirth through a civilisation struggle against the socialist hordes that would cure the ills that had befallen the Radical’s own revolutionary project during the 1920s and 1930s. That said, many regime insiders were terrified of the coming conflict. Despite nearly a decade of rebuilding from the purges, the military command remained novices and the Russian army had struggle to keep up with the rapid development of military technology and ideas that the war years had produced. On June 21st 1940 the moment finally came as Russian troops launched a surprise attack across the frontier into Germany. The Second World War had reached its largest and bloodiest frontline. In the ensuing struggle, the fate of world history would hang in the balance.