While all the great powers had gathered in Persia through 1953, on the ground events did not halt ahead of their decisions. In the Baltic, interethnic violence seriously intensified over the course of the summer of 1953. After months of low level skirmishes, the Russian militias took the lead with aggressive action. Having benefited from the demobilising Polish army secretly leaving them behind large weapons dumps, the Russian militias launched offensives in several areas – taking control of most ethnically mixed regions.
The most important battle was the siege of Riga, lasting from June to September. The countryside around the city was dominated by Russians, as were most of its industrial suburbs, while the city centre was mostly Estonian. This allowed the Russians to surround the invaluable port and pound the Estonians into submission. Elsewhere, there was heavy fighting around Kaunas and Vilnius, cities with very large populations of Ashkenazi as well as Russians, as the Lithuanians desperately fought to claim control of their would-be capital city, to no avail.
Although the Baltic states received military supplies from the Allied powers, they were clearly on the back foot. It is notable that this period saw a significant degree of ‘unmixing’ occur throughout the region, as Baltic peoples left the Russian controlled regions and Jews correspondingly fled the Baltic controlled territories under mutual fear of violence. Hoping to gain legitimacy, these militia states each in turn declared their independence as the Republics of Livonia, East Lithuania and Klapedia during the autumn months.
While the Allies sat on their hands over the east Baltic, to the west there was no indecision. In April, Pomeranian nationalist militias had invaded the contested Gdansk Strip, claiming it for any future Polish state and sending the local poorly equipped and organised Danziger defence forces fleeing back to their city, which the Russian militias proceeded to pound with artillery fire. Pomerania itself was, infamously, the birthplace of Russian Radicalism and was among greatest of strongholds, and there was little surprise that there appeared to be a strong Radical influence on the militias in the Strip. Concerned by both the aggression of the militias and the potential from Pomerania to develop into a revivalist Radical hotbed, the Americans spearheaded a unilateral extension of the Allied zone of occupation – invading both the Gdansk Strip and Pomerania in May, defeating their enemy with overwhelming forces within weeks as their tank divisions obliterated their ragtag opposition.
In Old Poland, the primary territorial dispute, over the mixed city of Lodz and its surrounds, was settled in a more peaceful and democratic fashion at the ballot box. Demographically, the area appeared to be favourable to the Polish side of the debate – around half its population being Russian, a little under a tenth Ashkenazi and just over 40 per cent Krakowian. However, the Krakowians, aided by the inclinations of the occupying authorities and hefty financial support from New Cordoba, ran an impressive campaign – claiming that a return of Polish rule would mean instability, isolation and economic ruin while a future with Krakow would bring integration with the west and material prosperity. With Catholic turnout running exceedingly high, this campaign clearly also won over a sizeable number of Jewish voters. In the referendum held in July 1953, 55% of Lodz voters cast their ballots in favour of joining the new Republic of Krakow. While many Poles claimed the vote had been manipulated, the result all but sealed the fate of the area in the minds of the diplomats in Isfahan.
At the peace conference, more time would be poured into decisions over the future borders of Europe than anywhere else. In Western Europe, where most borders had been decided at the end of the Second World War, little changed aside from the restoration of Sardinian independence after the islands brief, and unhappy, union with Italy in the 1940s. In the north, Danish rule over Scandinavia was restored after two decades of socialist and later Russian control, although without the Kingdom’s eastern provinces granted their independence as Finland. In the North Atlantic, there was a three sided dispute over Iceland – as both Skotland and Denmark coveted the Nordic cultured island, while its local inhabitants tended to favour independence. In the end, the Skots, having made such a sizeable contribution to the war effort over the past two decades, had more than enough credit in the bank to secure it for themselves.
No nation in western Europe saw as great a transformation in its fortunes as Germany. As the instigator of two world wars, first as an imperialist conquering and then as the heart of the worldwide revolution. At the end of the Second World War the victorious powers had agreed to splinter Germany into half a dozen states. Although the Allies welched on this deal at American behest, four separate German states still emerged. Throughout their sacrifice in the final battle against Radicalism, proportionally far greater than any other European power, and the horrors of being the first and most badly effected victim of nuclear war, their global image had turned from being Europe’s villain to something of a Christ of Nations. Capitalising on great international sympathy, the German government won the great prize of the unification of the German lands, and promises of ambitious aid programmes funded by the United States and Polish reparations to rebuild their smouldering nation.
In south eastern Europe there were dramatic territorial changes as the Allies chose to dismantle the old Serbian empire and replace it with a collection of smaller nation states. This was a pitiful reward for a country that had ratted on its alliance with Russian in 1948 and then joined the fight against them the following year, only to be quickly rolled over by Kiev’s superior arms. The Serbs were a victim of the prevailing mood in favour of nation states built on popular consent. The old Serbian empire had been built upon a hierarchy of ethnic preference – with the Serbs most favoured, followed by other south Slavs in the Croats and the Bulgarians with the eastern Anatolian peoples little more than colonial subjects. This somewhat archaic entity, held together by force for many years, was divided into a flurry of new independent nations in Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Wallachia. On the Adriatic coast, the Dalmatians were unified with Italy after rejecting the prospect of independence in a referendum. It was something of an irony that the Greeks, a long term ally of the Poles and Russians after them, came out of the war enlarged while their ancestral Serbian rivals had been so humbled. To the north, the old Russian satellite in Pannonia gained control over all of the Greek speaking lands of the Danubian Plain and Carpathian Mountains, including in eastern Slovakia, as the Allies sought to build up a strong state on the Polish frontier.
The final treaty agreed as Isfahan was its most consequential, deciding the fate of European Poland. Few in Poland were prepared for just how crushing the terms would be when they were published on October 28th 1953. The eastern frontier with Turania had largely been established, and its populations ethnically sorted, long before the final peace deal – but in many other areas there were a series of unpleasant surprises, with millions of ethnic Russians setting to awake as minorities in foreign lands.
In the far north, the historically Finnish territories of Outer Karlia, Murmansk and Finnmark that had been annexed by Poland in the final days before the rise of Boris Makarov forty years before were lost to the newly independent, and greatly enlarged Finnish Republic. With the previously extremely barren territory having acquired a Russian majority over the decades of Kievan rule, Poland had expected to retain it. Henceforth around a tenth of Finland’s population would be Russians.
On the Black Sea, there was horror as the Khazar Republic of Crimea, Dobruja and South Kuban was created. Most importantly of all, despite making use of plebiscites in many other areas, the Allies forbade a referendum on the new Republic’s independence, denying the sizeable local pro-Polish movement an opportunity to contest the state’s creation.
The most explosive territorial decisions were made in the west. Firstly, the result of the Lodz referendum was confirmed, with Krakow annexing the contested city. Secondly, the Gdansk Strip was granted to an enlarged Free City of Danzig. The Free City in turn agreed a treaty for the free movement of goods with Krakow – in effect giving the landlocked state economic access to the sea and removing its core dispute over the Gdansk Strip. Further to this, Danzig’s security was supported by defence treaties with Germany and a permanent German military base on its soil. Combined, these agreements sought to bind the Germans, Krakowians and Danzigers together and resolve many of the tensions between them.
Much worse than this, from a Polish perspective, was the fate of the Pomeranians. The perennially isolated, but militantly Russian nationalist, Baltic enclave was hived off to become an independent state. Seen as the greatest hotbed of Radicalism of all the Russian lands, a joined American-German occupation authority would retain administrative control over the area for a further five years in order to take the lead in the region’s De-Radicalisation before independent democratic institutions could be restored.
In the eastern Baltic, any recognition of the facts on the ground, with half the region under the control of ethnic Russian partisan republics and home to nearly as many Jews as indigenous Balts, was ignored. Instead, the Allies approved the territorial claims of the Baltic state in full – giving them sovereignty over all the areas controlled by the militias and denying any possibility of their union with the Motherland. The Baltic states were to each agree to a spate of minority rights, but few other concessions were offered to the Jews of the region. Indeed, the Americans had offered assurances that they would increase their military support to the Baltic states to enforce the treaty.
All told, Poland was to lose half her population and the large majority of her territory – shrinking to a smaller land area that she had controlled for half a millennium.
Just as exacting as the territorial losses were the demands made of Poland’s sovereignty and finances. Poland was deemed liable to compensate the victims of Radical Russia for the damages causes to them. This predominately consisted of two large sets of reparations. The first of these was to countries that had been badly damaged during the Third World War, with the battles of the Second War conveniently forgotten, and the chief beneficiary of this was to be Germany, victim of three nuclear attacks. The second set of reparations would primarily focus on the victims of the Felaket and their families – offering compensation both for the hardship of the atrocity and for properties destroyed or expropriated. Combined, the Allies had calculated an astronomical sum to be repaid that would weight down the Poles with a heavy economic burden for generations to come.
The Allies would also place significant limits upon the Polish state’s freedom of action. Poland was to be forbidden from possessing an armed navy or airforce, and allowed only a modestly sized army for the purpose of domestic security – strictly forbidden from ever taking part in any operations beyond its borders. Regular Allied inspections of the country for illegal weaponry and nuclear technology were to be legally enshrined. Finally, the Americans in particular had grown frustrated at the slow pace of De-Radicalisation within Poland and demanded the creation of a new institution – the International Board for De-Radicalisation and Democracy. This body, the IBDD, would be controlled cooperatively by Western states and hold political authority on Polish soil to direct and administer the De-Radicalisation of Polish society, capable of overriding the will of the national government if need be.
Throughout the peace conference Polish representatives had not been permitted to attend in Isfahan, and as such even the government was not prepared for the harshness of the terms of peace. Among the public howls of anger washed over the country as bubbling tensions over the still unresolved refugee crisis that saw millions living in shantytowns, the dire economic situation that, with winter approaching, was starting to see many go hungry on a daily basis, combined with the national humiliation of the treaty into a nationalist rage. However, with much of the country still occupied, the Allies insisting on withholding access to the international markets Poland needed to reach to revive her ailing economy and even feed her own people, and the every present threat of a resumption of hostilities, the government was hopelessly cornered. After a few short weeks of obfuscation and attempts to negotiate with the Allies that were met with stony silence, the government was under great strain. Elements of the coalition were becoming unnerved, with some backbenchers, particularly in the JDU, growing unruly while restlessness afflicted the country as a whole.
Seeking a public buy-in for any agreement, Sidorov informed the Allies that he could not sign the treaty without a popular mandate – calling new elections to form a constituent assembly that would ratify the peace treaty and form a new constitution. Although frustrated, the Allies agreed to facilitate this, allowing for voting to take place in the Polish provinces still under their occupation.
Although many members across all four main parties opposed signing the treaty, at the very least until it could be renegotiated, the governing cabinet had reluctantly agreed to the necessity of making peace, by extension ensuring that the leaders of the JDU, DPF, MPP and Kadets were all running on a platform accepting the treaty. Into this breach emerged a new, stridently anti-Isfahan organisation – Solidarity. The group had originated as a representative body for the millions of ethnic Russian refugees left destitute across Poland, advocating for their interests and the interests of all Russian that now found themselves isolated from the Motherland. This had intertwined them with nationalist causes across the crumbling empire, and made them the most passionate supporters of the Baltic Russians in Poland. In the days after the elections were announced, they scrambled to establish themselves as a political party with candidates across the country – demanding the rejection of the treaty, social support for the refugees and direct intervention to safeguard Russians abroad. They were the party of no. Those who would not put up with the humiliations and capitulations that had beset the Russian people over the past year. With its distinctive stance, and willingness to tap into the nationalist rage pouring over in Poland, Solidarity caught fire during the election campaign – causing grave fears among the coalition parties that could disrupt their hopes of peace as the vote approached in January 1954.
Solidarity did indeed come very close to causing the feared breakthrough, finishing only narrowly behind the second place DPF in the popular vote with more than a fifth of all ballots cast. They won widespread support across the nation, capturing other parties’ voters and luring in those who had shunned the 1953 ballot. Indeed, many observers noted that a class of voter who had been quietly dismayed by the 1952 revolution and the fall of Russia saw their interests represented in the new movement. The two largest parties were hit the hardest, each losing swathes of support and dozens of seats. However, the anti-Isfahan party fell just short of the level of support it needed to genuinely upturn the election, winning less than half the left’s seat tally despite running them so close in voting, with near misses in constituencies across the nation. The smaller parties of the ruling coalition fared rather better than their stronger compatriots. The Kadets saw their vote share fall in eastern Poland, but compensated this with strong results in the occupied western territories – marginally increasing their seat tally as they benefited from the weakness of their larger rivals. The MPP largely maintained its level of support among Muscovites in the north, although the community’s electoral weight was reduced by addition of the occupied territories to the electorate. Despite seats being reallocated away from Muscovy, the party was still able to make gains – hitting an electoral sweet spot as the two largest national parties lost support to Solidarity, but the newcomers failed to make serious inroads themselves.
Re-elected, Sidorov’s government duly proceeded to sign the treaty, accepting Poland’s humiliating surrender but regaining control over the occupied territories and ensuring peace.
With the treaty agreed, albeit with bitterness, the government turned towards the future and the question of the constitution. Divided between the monarchism of the Jewish Democratic Union and the Kadets, and the republicanism of the Democratic Peoples Front, and the Muscovite regionalists suspicious of both camps, it was decided that the only way to resolve the question of the Tsardom would be to hold a referendum. The people would decide whether the Fifth Polish State would be a Tsardom or a Republic.
) so that the issue of Central Asia and Indian subcontinent is resolved and last remnants of Radicalism is eradicated from the world. And maybe a warm sea port for the new Tatar country to come?
