Russian Pacific

[The Kiat]

7) Last Years of the Bear

In 1904, the Russian Empire was wracked by its most violent revolution in decades. At the head of this uprising was the Bolsheviks. Not all the rebels were communists. Most were just angry at the system and wanted some of the liberties that other Europeans took for granted. The revolution failed, and many of the rebels faced long exiles in Siberia, as well as Alaska and the sugar fields of Kauai. 1904 did lead to reforms in the Russian government, establishing the embryo of a constitutional monarchy. Up until the revolutions in 1917, most of the Duma was appointed by the Tsar.

In 1914, the Russian Empire was catapulted into the Great War. Most of its bloodiest battles took place in Europe, but the Russian Pacific was not without action. After a failed attempt to capture Kauai, the Germans did battle with the Russians in war-torn China. The Russians, in a joint effort with their now British allies, launched assault after assault on German fortifications around Shanghai. Though the officers were European, most of the soldiers who did the dying were either Indians for the British or Central Asians for the Russians.

By June of 1916, the German Protectorate’s defenses were cracked. Thanks to the Royal Navy’s might, the Germans had a great deal of difficulty supplying their holdings in China. They had an even greater difficulty in holding on to their Pacific colonies, which fell to the British one after another. The Russian Army was again prevented from taking action in the Central Pacific. Allies or not, the British were not about to share the spoils.

As the war drug on into 1917, two revolutions struck Russia. The second revolution, lead by Lenin and his Reds, took control in November of 1917. With many Reds exiled to holdings around the Pacific, Soviets in Kauai, Alaska and Hokkaido broke Tsarist control over the northern Pacific.

 

[The Kiat]

8) Soviet Pacific

The formation of the Soviet Union in 1921 saw the birth of the Far East S.S.R. and Korean S.S.R. During the civil war in post-Tsarist Russia, Russia’s allies landed on Hokkaido, the Far Eastern mainland, as well as invaded Alaska. After Lenin became master of the new state, the allies vacated, though Japan was quite vocal in the abandonment of its lost territories. Hokkaido remained part of the Far East S.S.R.

During the Stalin years, a crash industrialization of the Pacific Republic cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of the state’s enemies, real and imaginary. Gold discovered along the Kolyma River claimed even more. It is believed that one laborer died for every kilogram of gold extracted from the mines. Shipyards went up in all of the Pacific’s major cities, a means for the USSR to keep its role in the northern Pacific.

During WWII, factories in the western Republics were dismantled, packed on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and reassembled east of the Urals. A great number of factories were built around Vladivostok, Seoul and Harbin. From here, Stalin was able to have the arms produced that lead to a decisive victory over the Germans. The war ended with millions dead, and the Soviets occupying Prussia as well as a zone in East Berlin.

The new world order lasted until 1957, when trouble in Maui sparked off another world war. The Soviet Union found itself fighting in Europe as well as North America. From airbases in Alaska, Soviet bombers struck at industrial centers on the US West Coast. Conversely, from bases in Japan, NATO bombers struck at Soviet targets. When the war went nuclear, most Soviet bombers out of Alaska were either shot down, or destroyed when their airbases were the center of US nuclear strikes. One bomber did reach San Francisco, destroying the city in the process.

The Soviet Union lost nearly a hundred cities in the exchange, with more killed than in World War II. So utter was the devastation, that the central government in Moscow simply cease to exist, causing the USSR to collapse, violently. The Far East S.S.R. splintered from Moscow, then splintered even further, as ethnically different regions began to assert their old ways, those traditions that survived the Russian conquest.

 

[The Kiat]

....meh...


9) Successor States

Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Japanese moved quickly to reoccupy Hokkaido. What was once a backwater island was, by 1960, a mis-developed industrial zone. The Japanese spread further north to take control of some of the Soviet oil fields around the island. When the Kauaians, and others exiled to Hokkaido, wished to return to their homelands, the Japanese aided them in departing. They encouraged them, even to the point that between 1964 and 1967, Japan expelled a million ethnic Russians from the island. When exiled Ainu tried to return, they were barred. The Japanese rebuilt cities destroyed during World War III quickly, throwing up new high-rises well into the 1980s.

Kauai gained its own independence, under American protection. The Republic of Kauai did welcome some of its original inhabitants back, but by 1960, Russian was the island’s dominate culture. The island suffered environmental degradation throughout the Russian rule, rendering it almost as barren as Haiti. Other Pacific islands of the Soviet Union fell under American control.

Alaska broke away from the Far East Republic, establishing itself in 1964. Despite damage during the war, the new republic soon grew in wealth. Their growth was similar to that what happened to Arab nations decades earlier, and was fueled by the same black gold. Russian attempts to bring Alaska back into its fold met with failure. Both the United States and Canada declared they would go to war over Alaskan independence.

Korea and Mongolia regained their independence. Manchuria, as well as the Pacific coast, was absorbed into Russia as the Far Eastern Autonomous Republic.