Firstly - a massive thank-you to all of you for your kind words. As many of you noted, this was an exercise where I realised just how many White Russian refugees from notionally political backgrounds ended up as writers, philosophers and musicians. I suppose that, whilst Russia may be better off in some respects, the artistic world is a hell of a lot poorer.
I am sorry that this turned into a TLIAW, rather than a TLIAD, but that is the problem with doing this at work, things sometimes crop up. Next time, I may wait until I actually have a day off!
Meadow and I are in the early stages of a joint-effort though, so watch this space over the next few months.
I assume the latest was inspired by Simeon of Bulgaria?
Yes indeed. A friend of mine from the LSE is Bulgarian and she seemed astonished when I mentioned him back when I was studying there. Apparently, he still isn't very popular and (according to her) - he would have been much better off requesting a referendum to bring back the monarchy, he would have won a job that he would have been quite good at, rather than one that he wasn't.
After a while of partisan too-and-fro, it seemed like a plausible outcome from the Russian Republic.
Interesting. Anglo-Italian flypast of Venus? Please tell me that is somehow a manned mission. I would expect that it is "only" a robotic probe, but still, a successful space programme for the UK. It's a little bit sad that Russia is so far behind OTL in exploring space though.
I did like Miguel Portillo as Spanish President and his railway journey. I'm a bit surprised at how Poland and the Baltic states seem to be monarchies rather than republics.
A successful peacemaker in charge of Russia. That really is a change from the norm. A most welcome one too.
I did envisage this as a robotic probe, sadly. As Thande notes, there certainly isn't anything too SF about the concept, but as I think I made clear, rocketry is far, far behind OTL at this stage, probably no more advanced than the mid-seventies. The lack of a proper Cold War would not have helped, nor the likes of Operation Paperclip giving one side a major advantage. Although the technology exists, there hasn't been a manned moon landing as of yet and international co-operation doesn't go much beyond the odd bilateral mission for some of the big ones.
As you say - the Eastern post-German states tend to be monarchies, just as the ones that were envisioned in OTL would have been - but Republicanism in the West, especially with the likes of Spain and Italy, has happened - especially given that there's no *Nazi Germany to prop up the Nationalists in any sort of Spanish Civil War.
It just popped into my head! A very good example of how symbols can totally change in a matter of years! For an OTL example,
this was in the news a matter of weeks ago!
Just went through this, and I must say, my lord, that you are a credit to this website
Might I be so bold as to request a map?
I may do one - if I have some time over Easter!
I can't tell if it's true, or just bias from the posts, but this Russia seems much better off, perversely, than OTL's.
As a pink, western-minded, libertarian socialist, I think that it is always going to be hard to talk about an industrialised democracy that is worse that an industrialised dictatorship - but this is the thing about Alternate History, dystopia is hard! That said, if I had had more time, I would probably have gone into more detail about the massacres undertaken by the Wrangel government, or the Kazakh pogroms under Trotsky. I doubt that Wrangel would have industrialised the countryside nearly as much as Stalin and - as I mentioned - illiteracy is an issue right into the sixties in this version of Russia. The one genuine success that the Bolsheviks had was their reading and writing programme, which is still almost unmatched in world history.
The fact that eugenics is still fairly mainstream ITTL is quite likely, given that you haven't had the mass discrediting of the idea under Fascism. The lack of a major international conflict post-WWI has also made international politics a great deal messier. Despite the best intentions of the League of Nations and the European Confederacy, bi-lateral rivalries are going to be more common, and I think that small-scale conflicts between otherwise developed nations will persist for quite some time to come.
