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Even Republican Lithuania was quite militarized compared to it's neighbours - it inherited the near majority of the Imperial officer corps, the military remained influential and received a large share of the funding - but after the October Coup and especially after the Revivalist takeover of the country, this factor ended up upped to eleven. In some ways, militarization was the obvious choice - there was no way that Lithuania could rebuild it's former empire in peace, and the enemies it would have to fight were powerful enough to challenge it's military. A meeting of the Council of Hetmans in 1932 overlaid the goals of the Four-Year Plan - a planned period of massive centrally planned industrial expansion to boost the nation's military-industrial complex and prepare the Lithuanian army for war. The entire nation was being geared to a war economy. The Revival Front employed anything it could get it's hands on and could help fulfill the quota - political opponents and prisoners were being organized into forced labor battalions and sent to improve the nation's infrastructure, the youth was organized into semi-militarized groups such as the "Pavasarininkai" ('Spring Youth') and "Ateitininkai" ('Futurists'), giving the Party sources of free and dedicated labor. Order, complete loyalty and dedication were bring constantly emphasized, from the state-controlled work places, to the Revivalist-dominated churches, to the censored and controlled press - Stankevičius and the Revivalists always made sure to mention in their speeches that "the Sarmatian must be perfectly loyal, perfectly competent and perfectly orderly, - a new, superior man".

Of course, all this expansion to the military-industrial complex couldn't have been aimless - what's a million guns worth if you don't have a strategy on how to use them? The high command of the Lithuanian military was divided on the future doctrine of the military - there was only one thing it could agree on, and it was that the old Great European War strategy of mass infantry charges and pitched was hopelessly outdated. Lithuania had to adapt to the new age. Large portions of the officer corps were enamoured with General Jonas Kazlauskas's concept of a "modern defensive army" - built around infantry and heavy artillery concentrations, it called for a slow, calculated and centrally organized offensive, centered around forcing the enemy to attack defender positions and thus inflicting severe damage with little losses to the invading troops. However, the Vadas himself was more interested in Stasys Dirmantas's "bludgeon" (kuoka) doctrine - building up a professional, but mobile and nimble army which would be able to execute encirclements and overrun enemy infantry formations. Once the frontline forces are beaten and a breakthrough is achieved, the Army would acquire a number of strategic and important positions, like industrial centres and railway lines, and hold out until the enemy's war effort weakens and a peace can be acquired - much like a quick blow with a bludgeon does not cause much external damage, but causes enough of a mesh internally to knock the enemy out.

And when the Vadas endorses your doctrine, it's sure to be adopted almost immediately.

Kazlauskas and his cadre heavily criticized the "Bludgeon Plan" - many of them later lost their positions as a result - but some of the criticism they overlaid actually made a lot of sense. For example, the problem of building this "mobile army" - Lithuania was no Germania or France, who could afford to build entire landship divisions and provide motorized vehicles to large parts of their military, and fuel them all. Sure, Lithuania can ship fuel from Turkey for now, but in the event of a war, this supply can and will be cut off. As always, the Lithuanians had to improvise.

Sure, Lithuania has no fuel, but what does it have? Plenty of wood. Some iron (though most of it is imported). A large military industrial complex. So on and so forth.

A real life saver to the Lithuanian Army at this time was the bicycle. An 18th century invention, it had been firmly established in worldwide society as a method of transportation as well as leisure - and it was not only useful enough for transporting soldiers faster than on foot, but also required no fuel. Bicycle infantry had a few episodes of usage in the Great European War, from beginning to end, and while it was obviously slower than trucks or landships, it had it's advantages. A number of facilities in Prussia and Samogitia were converted to solely producing military bicycles, and by the end of 1936, the Lithuanian Army had been almost completely "bicyclized". Such mass production drew out innovation, too - stronger and nimbler designs, adaptation to muddy, wet and snowy environment, and army drills dedicated solely to bicycle infantry tactics.

The Lithuanian Air Force received a new addition to their forces, too. A successor of the Imperial Air Force, it didn't receive nearly as much attention as the land forces during all these years, but nevertheless, it hosted a competent force of about 300 aeroplanes. However, the autarkic nature of the Revivalist government forced it to reconsider an aeroplane number expansion and instead turned them towards military gliders. Despite often being called "aeroplanes for children", modern gliders had become a potentially powerful tool, and Lithuania was the first to uncover this potential - not in actual aerial fighting, that would be stupid, but rather in airlifting soldiers. Sending airborne infantry via gliders rather than dropping them off from planes carried the benefit of being more accurate (as gliders, unlike parachutes, can be controlled), carrying far less noise, costing less materials to construct and mainly costing wood, and, most importantly, requiring little to no fuel. The Lithuanian Glider Corps was founded in 1933, and in 1934, the Council of Hetmans gave the stamp of approval for forming five glider infantry brigades, integrated within the Lithuanian Army and it's Bludgeon doctrine.

All this massive militarization was followed by propaganda to both the masses and to foreign nations, and within a few years, Lithuania had become one of the most belligerent looming countries in Europe.

While Lithuania was perhaps the most well known of the dictatorships which arose from the corpses of democracies in post-Great European War Europe, it was not the only one. Russia, ironically, followed a very similar political path to Lithuania - it started out as a democracy, but once the war was over and the feeling of national unity faded, the trust in the republican government began to fall. In 10 years from 1917 to 1927, Russia had gone through 21 governments. The great economic crisis and the Revivalist takeover in Lithuania were the final nails in the coffin, and in 1931, the famous Independence war hero, one of the most respected men in Russia, Alexei Krutov, dissolved the All-Russian Council and placed the nation under martial law. Despite ruling the country as a military dictatorship, Krutov never reached nearly the same level of totalitarianism as the Revivalists - repression was mostly limited to Unitarians and Revivalist sympathizers, civilian life was mostly left untouched, mass militarization did not occur. Still, in 1936, once the economic situation started to stabilize, Russia began it's own military modernization program in response to Lithuanian belligerence, set to be finished in 1940. Both countries knew that they would come to conflict with each other - Lithuania fostered it's neo-Imperial ambitions and Russia started to remember the "Greater Russia" ideal. And only one of these two goals can live in the same world.

With Russia turning authoritarian, and Crimea and Circassia following up later, establishing military dictatorships, the only democratic country left in the ruins of the Empire of Lithuania was the Grand Duchy of the Krajina. If you don't count Volga-Russia as such, of course.

Much of Europe remained democratic, but went through a deep loss of faith in standard political parties, pushing the people to search for new, more radical and potentially better options. In 1935, once the revanchism and economic downturn reached a boiling point, the people of Sweden elected the radical nationalist "Coalition on National Unitarianism" as the new ruling party of the nation with a wide plurality in the Riksdag. While Sweden retained it's democratic structures, the nation closed off from much of the world and instead aligned itself with Britannia and Lithuania. In 1936, the CNU led Swedes signed two important diplomatic agreements - the Treaty of Christiania, marking a border between New England and New Sweden and thus dividing the last officially unclaimed parts of North Vespucia, and the Liepoja Negotiations: in exchange for allowing Sweden to reannex the nearby island nation of Moonsund, as well as additional payment, Lithuania acquired a stable flow of Kiruna steel to continue fueling their industrialization and militarization.

In the early 1920s, after German pressure and domestic troubles, Britannia took the first few steps towards democracy, allowing it's citizens and colonial inhabitants to vote in local assemblies, but the chaos of the 1930s gave enough of a reason for the new king, James III, to dismantle this "hive of degeneracy" and restore complete absolutism. This did not come without consequences, however - but the Puritan government suppressed any protests against their actions. Foreign observers could tell that Britannia was not going to last forever, far from it - economic, social and political pressures would soon turn too great for the absolutist government to overcome, it was only a matter of time.

Even the four bastions of democracy of the Western World - the VFS, France, Germania and Visegrad - had to suffer through a lot in the aftermath of the French Flu epidemic. Both the Vespucia Free State and France elected Democratic Unitarian governments in the 1930s. Promising rapid and wide change to the unjust and unequal society which caused the crisis, they solidified their control over the governments of the two nations. While it wasn't the full-on Unitarianism of Turkey and India, it still raised eyebrows across the conservative elements of the two societies. Germania, meanwhile, went into an opposite direction - the traditionally domineering Republican parties collapsed in light of being unable to deal with the recession, leading to the rise of the Protectionist "Centralist Party". The Centralists won a plurality in the 1934 elections, and the aging King Otto III von Habsburg appointed Augustina Sternberg, the first female head of government of any European country, as the Prime Minister of Germania. While this choice was ridiculed by people both in Germania and outside of it - how could a woman possibly lead a country? - the complaints faded once the Centralist government went into action. Sternberg oversaw a large expansion of the nation's public sector and the military, and rooted out corruption and bureaucracy with cold blood. She was just as stern in foreign affairs, adopting an option of "No Compromise" with the Unitarian and Revivalist threat. All of this stern action earned her the deserved nickname "The Steel Magnolia".

The country which perhaps fared the worst was Visegrad. There, the French Flu and economic crisis were coupled with a rise of ethnic tensions across the country - Poles and South Slavs both sought independence, while Romanians in Transylvania wished to reunite with their country. The control of the wide sphere of puppets turned out to be a burden rather than a boon, as Visegrad had to constantly spend important wealth to put down opposition and keep maintaining garrisons in the country. Having gotten so overstretched, the Visegradians couldn't even adequately respond to the rising threat in the northeast. The fact that Unitarian Turkey was right on their border did not help - especially not when in 1935, Turkey, India and Japan all signed the Act of Union, founding a tightly knit alliance between the three nations, the Commonwealth.

Tensions in Europe were reaching a boiling point. Was this the setup to a new Great European War, or just a seasonal war fever?..