Made by Fella name Rusty2005 put on Alternate History wiki for a while but then taken out. Will be made in many installement
Rusty2005 said:World History, 1918-1946
"Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard of its covenants under Articles 12, 13 or 15, it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League..."
~Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (extract)
The Children of Versailles
The end of the Great War in November 1918 propelled the world into a new era, dragging Europe and the West from the Victorian age and replacing nineteenth-century self-assurance with a mixture of hope and apprehension for the new society emerging across the world. The impact of the war had been nothing short of cataclysmic. More than ten million men had died - over 5,500 deaths every day for four years - while millions more were falling victim to the incurable "Spanish Flu" sweeping the planet in the aftermath of the war. Four ancient empires of the defeated Central Powers and one of the Entente - the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Turkish - had collapsed into chaos, while the victors emerged from the war teetering on national bankruptcy, their colonies eager to break away from European control, their domestic populations either numbly apathetic or furious at the governments which had dragged them through four years of pointless slaughter. When the wary victors met in Paris in 1919 to draft treaties with the defeated Central Powers, they quickly found themselves faced with the insurmountable task of building a new world, as societies across Earth cried out for an end to colonialism and conflict, an abandonment of secret diplomacy and armaments races, the crippled and apprehensive human race desperate to save future generations from the horrors of another World War.
Despite the chaos engulfing the new German Republic as Germany faced the harsh reality of its defeat, the victors determined to bleed Germany dry in recompense for the war, to "squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeaked", and thus cripple Germany so severely that she would never again be able to drag Europe into a war. The puntive Treaty of Versailles, signed by German diplomats who faced no alternative to Allied demands, stripped Germany of her colonies, annexed swathes of Germany and Germans into newly-created nations such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, reduced the once-mighty German military to little more than an armed police force, and demanded immense reparations payments, forcing the people of Germany to pay for the damage caused by the Kaiser's aggression. Appalled at the terms of the Treaty, Germans erupted into civil war as rival political movements clashed across the country. Numerous parties of right-wing extremists emerged, plunging the country into political chaos as they fought communist movements across the country. Ultimately, with the support of the army and the middle classes, the new Weimar government of Germany succeeded in overpowering threats to Germany posed by both left-wing and right-wing extremists. Police and judiciary across Germany crushed communist movements simply by imprisoning their leaders. An attempted putsch in 1919 by Wolfgang Kapp failed when the police and government simply ignored Kapp, forcing him to surrender as the country ground to a halt. An attempted putsch by the disconcertingly xenophobic National Socialist movement in Munich failed to overthrow the German authorities, and the movement disintegrated following the disappearance of its leader, Adolf Hitler, upon his release from prison in 1924. As the Weimar government suppressed or won over its opponents, criticism of the new government quietened as Germany's economy boomed in the early 1920's. The Western powers, fearful of embittering Germany with their reparations demands, passed a series of amendments to reparations requirments, lowering the total sum to be paid and giving Germany more time to pay. By 1926, Germany had settled down, and with Germany's economy soaring on the back of American development loans and Germans growing comfortable with their new democratic system, Chancellor Gustav Streseman, marked a new stage in Germany's attitudes by integrating the Federal Republic as a full member of the League of Nations.
The League of Nations, a creation of American President Woodrow Wilson and a child of the Paris Peace Conference, sought to avoid a repetition of the catastrophic 1914-1918 war by giving every country the opportunity to address grievances via peaceful, public discussion, and established a variety of international bodies to combat drug trafficking, armaments trading, slavery, and to promote human rights across Earth. While politicians often had a poor view of the League's ability to preserve world peace, its image among ordinary populations - those who had suffered most from the Great War - was very high, with ordinary people across the world viewing the League as the first step towards creating a world in which their children would be spared the horrors of a future war. For the first time in world history, the League gave smaller, less significant countries to voice their opinions, establishing a new diplomatic climate in which the sprawling empires of industrialised Europe no longer decided the fate of peoples across the planet. A succession of disarmament intiitiatives, diplomatic successes, and the first stirrings of colonial independence, boded well for the League, and as the new democratic, liberal institutions created over the old Central Powers basked in political and economic security, the world appeared to be entering a perceived new "Golden Age" of peace and prosperity.
The situation in Russia, though, was neither peaceful nor prosperous. The First World War had shattered the fragile Russian Empire, and when a Bolshevik revolution led by Vladimir Lenin broke out in October 1917, the Empire was plunged into civil war. The war becamse increasingly vicious, as Bolsheviks and the so-called "White Russians" - supporters of the murdered Czar or other political parties - both turned to committing atrocities in an effort to seize control of what was left of Russia. Fearful of Bolshevik ideology, the victorious Allies dispatched armies in 1919 to assist the White Russians in their war, but by 1920 the Whites were in retreat, and the Allies abandoned Russia to its own devices. The nightmarish civil war ended in 1922 with the victory of the Bolsheviks, who established Russia and its captive territories as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the first communist state in the world and a potentially enormous threat to the security of its democratic neighbours in the world community. The new nation, though, was more concerned with rebuilding its devastated economy and catching up with the rest of the world through an artifical Industrial Revolution, and remained isolated from world affairs. Lenin's death in January 1924 precipitated a power struggle between the leaders of the USSR which, by 1927, saw the emergence of Josef Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party, as the prime candidate for Lenin's successor.
As Stalin was emerging as the dominant figure in the Soviet Union, the west was jarred out of its peaceful growth by a financial disaster at the New York Stock Exchange. As shares plummetted and the global economy began to tumble, the Wall Street Crash propelled the world into a dangerous new era.
Credit and Debit: The Wall Street Crash and global politics
Black Thursday: the "Roaring Twenties" give way to the Great Depression
The financial disaster at Wall Street precipitated a global economic slump - the "Great Depression" - and damaged the global economy for decades to come. Across the industrialised world, unemployment soared, trade ground to a halt, and governments rose and fell in rapid succession as politicians vainly attempted to haul their countries out of the economic rut. As countries searched for credit and capital to stimulate trade and create jobs for the millions of unemployed, the west's comfortable economic symbiosis was shattered, with each nation calling for its creditors to pay their debts, regardless of the consequences. The flow of American money into Germany stopped, America demanded the repayment of its old war loans to Britain and France, and the leaders of Europe, in their turn, approached Germany demanding reparations money to pay off the Americans.
As the west squabbled over its finances, the worldwide economic malaise dragged on into the 1930's. Despite significant economic growth under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, the USA was nevertheless facing difficulties in rejuvenating the American economy. Relief for the victims of dustbowls and environmental degradation in the Midwest, and payment for economic and social development in the impoverished and segregated Deep South, were draining the USA's financial resources and generating increased political tension across the country. Recognising that faster economic growth would encourage social cohesion and help settle the increasingly violent racial tension in the USA, the interim government of Harold Truman demanded in January 1940 that America's War Loans be repaid in full by December 31st 1946. The USA's primary creditors - the United Kingdom, France, and Germany - treated this declaration as an exhorbitant demand that would cripple their economies. Great Britain and France, still owing immense sums of money which they had borrowed from the USA during the First World War, simply could not afford to repay the loans in time. Increasing disgruntlement across the British Empire during the 1920's and 1930's had forced, and was continuing to force, Great Britain to grant political concessions to colonies and dominions. Unable to pay for the empire's administrative and military concerns, London granted increasing autonomy to the "white colonies" - Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, while populist movements across the empire and in Britain itself increased the pressure on London to grant political autonomy to colonies from Belize to Hong Kong. India, Nigeria, and Egypt increased their demands for independence, the British Protection Force in Palestine struggled to quell fighting between Arab populations and Jewish immigrants in the volatile Near East, strikes across the United Kingdom crippled the already desperate economy and fuelled political tension. In France, political tension had been mounting since the end of the First World War. The re-emergence of Germany as an economic power in the 1920's had unnerved successive French governments, who devoted increasing sums of money to the construction of fortifications along the Franco-German border. By 1940, France was still rebuilding the devastation of the Great War, and as in the British Empire, French colonies from Algeria to Vietnam, already dissatisfied at being ruled from Paris, were demanding independence. Political tensions in France mounted as the French Communist Party clashed with reactionaries across the country, while the National Assembly remained in a permanent state of stalemate as opposing political factions vetoed proposals and forced endless elections, each of which returned governments as powerless as their predecessors. By 1940 Germany was facing severe political schisms, as the recall of American loans, extended to the new Federal Germany in the 1920's to promote economic growth, caused outrage. France and Britain, obliged to pay their debts to the USA but fearing the consequences of German resentment, had already cancelled Germany's reparations payments in 1932, but nevertheless public opinion in Britain and France demanded that Germany, still widely perceived as the vicious aggressor of 1914, make restitution for her unpaid war debts. The federal government in Berlin, trapped between extremists on the left and right wings, was already struggling to rebuild Germany's economy, which had collapsed within months of the Wall Street Crash fifteen years previously.
By early 1940, France, Great Britain, and Germany had been placed in a very difficult position. Obliged to repay their loans to the economically crippled United States, the leading nations of Western Europe, already wracked by problems of their own, could not rely on their colonies to support them, and were afraid that bringing back reparations would re-ignite nationalist tensions and shatter the delicate emerging friendship between London, Paris, and Berlin. Simultaneously, concern grew that unless the United States was placated with debt repayments, the USA, with its immense consumer base, would cease trade with Western Europe and thus block access to America's markets, without which European exports would plummet. With few alternatives, the leaders of the major nations of Europe convened an economic summit in Luxembourg City in March 1941 to discuss an economic union. The result - the European Economic Charter - bound Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the Benelux, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Turkey, and Ireland into a mutually-beneficial economic alliance, dubbed "The European Coalition". By pooling resources and streamlining trade, nations owing money to the USA raised sufficient funds to meet American payment deadlines and increased their economic ties with the invaluable markets of the United States, clamouring for increased trade with Europe and the European colonies in order balance America's own budget deficits.
The early 1940's revealed increasing distance between Europe and the USSR, but tensions had already been developing for years. The first clear signs of tension between the Soviet Union and European nations appeared during the 1936-38 Spanish Civil War, fought between Spanish Republicans and the Spanish Fascist Party. The war in Spain alerted many Europeans to the potential threat of Soviet intervention in foreign affairs, specifically the ideological threat posed by the presence of Soviet military forces in Europe. Although the war was won by the Fascists and communism was crushed in Spain, the threat of Soviet indoctrination remained strong. This continued throughout the economic and political crises of the late 1930's and early 1940's, as Stalin, eager to distract the Soviet people from the USSR's dire economic situation, began to turn towards Trotsky's concept of spreading the Soviet Revolution across the world (although, of course, Stalin claimed the idea to be his). By the time of President Roosevelt's request for debt repayments in January 1943, the democratic nations of Europe were already feeling the pressure of Soviet influence.
The Workers' Paradise
Josef Stalin, totalitarian ruler of the USSR
As Western Europe reeled in the financial chaos of the Great Depression, the isolationist Soviet Union was experiencing economic problems of its own. Following the Bolshevik victory in the 1917-1922 Russian Civil War, diplomatic relations between the nascent USSR and Western Europe had deteriorated significantly. European political leaderships had, since 1917, been reluctant to involve themselves with the potentially subversive Marxist government of the Soviet Union, and the social impact of the Great Depression heightened tension between the two blocs. As European populations faced mass unemployment and spiralling inflation, communist factions across Europe gained increasing support, resulting in increasing numbers of people accusing the USSR of exploiting Europe's chronic economic situation in order to strengthen communist movements across the traditionally hostile continent. The de facto leader of the Soviet Union, General-Secretary Josef Vissarionivich Stalin, had originally been content to remain isolated from Europe, and concentrate on modernising the USSR. During the late 1920's and early 1930's, Stalin's government indeed ignored foreign affairs in order to focus on rapid industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture. However, a series of catastrophic famines and major economic depressions resulting from the collapse of world trades in the late 1920's encouraged Stalin to pursue more forceful diplomatic measures in an attempt to distract the Soviet people from domestic problems. In 1936, crop failures in the USSR's southern regions resulted in the Communist Party's mass requisitioning of foodstuffs from the Ukraine, providing the cities and densely-populated areas of European Russia with sufficient food, but causing devastating famines across the Ukraine. In the meantime, Stalin's industrial drive, executed via the Five-Year Plans, had thrown the Soviet economy into chaos, as mass urban migration, forced collectivisation, and reckless industrialisation resulted in overcrowded cities, appalling living conditions, plummeting agricultural output, and extremely low-quality industiral production.
As the USSR's economy stumbled forwards, Stalin's government initiated a series of political liquidations dubbed "The Purges". Initially aimed at removing apparent subversives and traitors within the high leadership of the USSR, the Purges rapidly spread to the people of the Soviet Union, as Russia's chaotic economy was explained as the consequence of Trotskyite wreckerism and sabotage by "Enemies of the People". Honing terror as a weapon against his own people, Stalin accelerated the Purges, demanding that municipal authorities execute "subversives" according to preset quotas, and unleashing Lavrenty Beria's NKVD - the Soviet Secret Police - against the leadership of the Communist Party. By 1938, the Soviet Union had degraded into a terror state. Party and military leaders, most of whom had experienced incarceration in NKVD torture chambers and all of whom agreed with any policy initiated by Stalin (disagreeing with Stalin could result in further torture and execution), split into opposing factions vying for Stalin's favour, leading to political deadlock. By the early 1940's, the citizens of the USSR were losing respect for Stalin. As increasing numbers of ordinary people were shipped en masse to the gulags and labour camps of the Arctic Circle, and as Russia's economy continued to struggle out of its artificial malaise, discontent within the USSR grew, becoming increasingly visible to the General Secretary.
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In a move to stem discontent, Stalin adopted a new course to instill confidence in the Soviet people. With much of the old leadership of the Communist Party liquidated in the Purges, Stalin appointed a new cabinet. Marshals Georgei Kukov and Pyotr Gradenko were appointed to high-ranking positions on the Peoples' Revolutionary Council. Nadia Kulashenka, Assistant Director of the NKVD, was appointed to the Ministry of Propaganda and Intelligence, while Professor Major Vladimir Kosygin became Chief Advisor of the Soviet Nuclear Project. Stalin also supported the research of renowned physicist Nikola Tesla, encouraging the development of new static weapons systems based flame-throwing and electrical defences. Stalin also permitted unrestricted research on the "Iron Curtain", a device using the Einstein-Tesla theory on resonating molecules to render objects invulnerable to ballistic attack. At Moscow University, members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Central Committee's Department of Science and Technology developed - in secret - increasingly sophisticated military technologies.
In the face of mounting domestic troubles, Stalin turned to military intervention in foreign affairs to distract the Soviet people.
While the USSR's relations with the nations of Europe slowly deteriorated, relations with the turbulent Peoples' Republic of China worsened at an alarming rate. Ever since the collapse of the Qing Empire in 1911, China's political and economic climate had simply lurched from one catastrophe to another. Endless civil wars and economic chaos across the weak and vacillating Chinese republic presented a golden opportunity to the Soviet Union, already eager for a convenient shift in foreign affairs which would provide Stalin with an opportunity to distract the Soviet population from domestic problems via foreign military intervention. At the behest of the NKVD, Russian officials along the Sino-Soviet border dispatched reams of reports on (fabricated) Chinese military incursions across the USSR, and of swarms of Chinese refugees seeking asylum in the Soviet Union. The Chinese government, embroiled in a continuing political crisis with the Japanese Empire over territory in Manchuria, and unable to rely on the ability of unpaid and disloyal border control officials to provide genuine evidence of Chinese activities along the border, faced severe difficulties in responding convincingly to the USSR's claims.
Citing the threat of Chinese incursions across the border and highlighting the weak Chinese government's political and economic decline, the USSR pursued increasingly forceful measures against the PROC. Military intervention, though, was not a possible option - the USSR was a member of the League of Nations and a signatory power of the League Covenant. Article 16 of the Covenant expressly forbade signatories from commencing hostilities and/or military action against another League member prior to a full investigation by a League of Nations Executive Commission and open discussions between the involved powers, the League Council, and all members of the League. On March 4th 1944, eager to avoid legal complications during his imminent invasion of China and scornful of the League's ability and perceived right to preserve world peace, Stalin withdrew the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the League of Nations.
News of the USSR's withdrawal from the League provoked international outrage and increasing criticism of the Soviet Union's tyrannical dictator. The League, still concerned over the Japanese Empire's withdrawal from international discussions in 1931 and the United States' continued refusal to join the international organisation, launched a campaign of worldwide protest against Stalin's aggressive foreign policy. Supporters of the League vociferously called for the implementation of Article 16, which required that in the event of the Article's violation (perpetrated by the USSR), other members of the League were required to sever diplomatic links and cease trade with the aggressor, and if necessary, assemble an international military force to support the defenders of the attacked nation. However, Article 16 had never before been invoked, as members of the League had neither the money nor the will to intervene militarily in affairs in far-away countries. Although the League was unable to intervene directly against Stalin, though, discussions at the Palace of Geneva throughout 1944 significantly damaged the USSR's image as nations increasingly perceived the Soviet Union as little more than an aggressive terror state bent on exploiting its neighbours as a means of concealing its own spiralling crises.
After six weeks of confused fighting in Mongolia and the Kazakh region, the Red Army overwhelmed Chinese defence forces at the Battle of Xiangjian. In Bejing, an attempted coup by Mao Zedong on June 30th, although unsuccessful, highlighted the political unreliability of Chinese security forces, many of whom had joined Zedong's rebels. On July 17th 1943, with no ready troops remaining and political disturbances breaking out across the Republic, the Chinese government surrendered to Stalin. Mongolia became a dependant of the USSR, whilst parts of Xiangjian province were annexed directly to the USSR, leading to China becoming a Soviet satellite under the puppet government of Mao Zedong and his Communist Party. In late June, Stalin, Mao, Mongolian President Gonchigiyn Bumtsend, Korean Communist Party Leader Kim Il Sung and Indochinese Rebel Leader Ho Chi Minh formed the Asian Defence League, an organization intended to repel any invasion from the Pacific rim. Throughout late 1943, Soviet diplomats worked to create the World Democratic Society and the Freedom Consortium, centralising and co-ordinating world communists and revolutionary movements.