A Central East

Interesting, so does that mean some kind of NEP style policy will be implimented; if so Russia's recovery could actually be relatively quick.

Keep it going :)
Very likely - for Communists, the current bunch is fairly moderate, and it is fairly easy to make an ideological excuse for it (Russia being in-between feudalism and capitalism, so obviously it has to be in-between capitalism and socialism for a transistory period;)).
Well, evreything and evreyone is better for Russia than Stalin.
;)
Well, maybe not everyone (Yezhov's USSR could have been worse, and Hitler's Russia...), but of the current bunch of contenders, quite likely.
 
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Very likely - for Communists, the current bunch is fairly moderate, and it is fairly easy to make an ideological excuse for it (Russia being in-between feudalism and capitalism, so obviously it has to be in-between capitalism and socialism for a transistory period;)).

Well, maybe not everyone (Yezhov's USSR could have been worse, and Hitler's Russia...), but of the current bunch of contenders, quite likely.

When you said that Troksky and Stalin were the main contenders that isn't strickly true, at the begining Stalin was almost the Diane Abbot of the contest; but used his influential position to play oppenants off against each other and pack the congress with his supporters.

What has happened to Kamenev and Zinoviev? ITTL I can imagine they operate a fairly sucessful opposition. Remember at this time amoungst rank and file members of the Bolshevik party wanted rapid Industrialisation a la 5 year plans and socialism in one country - they also have a broad support in areas like Moscow and probably picked up most of Troksky's support in the military and the youth after his murder.

What will be interesting is the Kulaks and other tradition members of the establishment and what their role in the politics of the future will be - if the trio can build up enough of a groundwork of support you could see market socialism along the lines of what Hungry tried.

Regards Bobbis
 
When you said that Troksky and Stalin were the main contenders that isn't strickly true, at the begining Stalin was almost the Diane Abbot of the contest; but used his influential position to play oppenants off against each other and pack the congress with his supporters.
I didn't. I wrote that they were two of the more prominent leaders, not that they were the main contenders.;)
What has happened to Kamenev and Zinoviev? ITTL I can imagine they operate a fairly sucessful opposition. Remember at this time amoungst rank and file members of the Bolshevik party wanted rapid Industrialisation a la 5 year plans and socialism in one country - they also have a broad support in areas like Moscow and probably picked up most of Troksky's support in the military and the youth after his murder.

What will be interesting is the Kulaks and other tradition members of the establishment and what their role in the politics of the future will be - if the trio can build up enough of a groundwork of support you could see market socialism along the lines of what Hungry tried.

Regards Bobbis
Outmanouevred in the struggle for power, but still in the game - so yes, they'll be the opposition (oddly, both the government and the opposition are in favour of generally focusing on building up the Federation first, they just disagree about the means). They'll have less support in the military than one might think, though - the alternate Civil War didn't give Trotsky quite the same opportunities as the OTL one.
Hm, the thought strikes me that the military might end up playing kingmaker, which could be... bad. As for the tradional members of the establishment - those that remain, at least - the smarter ones will probably realize that it is a choice between a greater or a lesser evil, where the Triumvirate represents the lesser evil, and so support the trio. Better market socialism that exproportiation of your entire livelihood, after all.
 
A rosy-Red and less rosy scenarios

Hi all!

Been catching up on this from the beginning--2 1/2 years ago!

I have stuff I should be doing but I can't resist this comment:

OTL, NEP was introduced by Lenin in a desperate attempt to get some kind of recovery going after the devastation of the Civil War.

ITTL, Russia lost really vast territories--am I correct in noting from the map that the Far Eastern puppet state, in the Japanese sphere, is at this point (after Lenin dies, late 1920s) extending all the way west to the Urals? With the loss of Ukraine, Belarus, Karelia, and several secessionist Central Asian regions, Communist Russia is a mere fraction of OTL Soviet Union. Of all these losses, Ukraine, with the Donbass and other major resource/industrial regions, would be the most severe from a Bolshevik point of view, since the Bolsheviks were focused on industrializing Russia (as a base for a world Communist system). The loss of access to Caspian oil resources would also hurt.

Yet, I don't get the impression that TTL Bolsheviks feel anything like as desperate as they did OTL, what with the relative civility of their rather tolerant negotiations with factions that OTL they shot out of hand or drove into exile.

I infer that the devastating territorial losses were perforce accepted rather quickly, before a lot of bloodshed bled the corps of the prewar Old Bolsheviks, um, white. They don't have the territory and the populations living there, but all of these regions were from a Great Russian point of view outlying conquests of the old regime, which were political headaches to control. OTL, the old Bolshevik cadres were decimated both during the War (the Tsar's regime having singled them out for early drafting and assignment as artillery soldiers, since the Bolsheviks were largely recruited from urban industry, whereas the Tsar's police wanted them out of the way on the front and preferably killed in combat--this eventually backfired when the survivors radicalized the losing army) and even worse the Civil War. OTL, when Lenin finally got control of the vast territory of what would be eventually named the USSR, he had only skeleton cadres of the old revolutionaries to work with, plus lots of new recruits who were relatively unsophisticated in both Marxist ideology and industrial skills. Whereas he badly needed skilled industrialists, in part because the old industrial factories and other facilities were themselves devastated. Thus, his grudging tolerance of more or less private enterprise (while carefully denying these "Nepmen" any political power.)

OTL, during the power struggles when Lenin was incapacitated and then dying, serious economic issues loomed over the Party. They called it the "Scissors." Having conceded economic autonomy to the peasantry, the peasants raised decent amounts of crops (and some got rich doing so) all right, but they wanted to be able to buy something decent for their troubles, whereas Soviet industrial development lagged. The stronghold of Bolshevism was among the urban industrial proletariat, but the factories simply could not produce enough goods of enough quality to compensate the peasant farmers at a rate the latter thought fair. So the regime faced the possibility that their core supporters would starve while the peasant farmers could either sell their goods or simply cut back on production and live more or less self-sufficently on the land. Either some miracle of industrial production could hopefully occur that would allow the cities to keep the farmers happy, or the regime could sell the surplus crops on the global market in exchange for foreign industrial products (both luxury consumer goods and farm machinery) to exchange to the farmers--thus bypassing urban industrial development and undercutting Bolshevik legitimacy. Or, the regime could somehow try to force the peasants to produce without being bribed, for the good of the better developed socialist/communist future their children would one day enjoy.

In these debates OTL, Bukharin was more or less on the side of continuing NEP via foreign trade, while both Trotsky and Stalin (the latter lying low during the arguments but eventually demonstrating what side he was really on with deeds) favored some kind of coercion--Trotsky framing it as fostering class war between the pro-Bolshevik poor peasants against the richer ones, the so-called "kulaks." After he had maneuvered Trotsky and lot of other potential rivals out of the picture, Stalin did this, via forced collectivization, on a massive scale. The Party/State imposed collective farm system was never very productive, but it was more or less grudgingly under regime control, and what surplus could be sullenly squeezed out of the land was put at the disposal of the industrializing regime's ambitious Plans.

Trotsky by the way was at risk politically for a variety of reasons--one very telling one was that he had not been a Bolshevik but a Menshevik, changing sides only in the summer of 1917. I also think he wasn't much of a politician, not of the conniving, backstabbing kind that one had to be in years when Stalin was maneuvering for supreme power. He relied on his relationship with Lenin and Lenin could trust him to be loyal to him--with Lenin out of the picture, Trotsky was dead meat, politically speaking.

Now, ITTL, on one hand the Reds have lost control of vast territories--by far the majority of the land area in fact. And with these they have lost control of key resources and people to potentially work them. (If the Reds don't get control of Ukraine PDQ, for instance, ITTL we'd never hear of Nikita Khrushchev, not at any rate as a Communist boss, because he was an ethnic Great Russian whose family lived in Ukraine--the only way he'd turn up in Party circles would be if he fled the Austrian-controlled regime, or perhaps was involved in a domestic revolution there that later federates Ukraine to Russia). OTH, perhaps the cadre of old Bolsheviks, retreating to the Great Russian core, is far less decimated, and wearing both Marxist and pragmatic factory-worker hats they get a less-damaged industrial system back into more or less good order much more quickly, and on a more socialist basis than NEP from the beginning. The political survival of Tomsky is telling--Tomsky was the leader of the trade-union movement, and OTL had been purged while Lenin was still alive and in charge, as part of a crackdown on the independence of actual factory workers organized as such. If this breach never happened ITTL, it suggests that the Bolsheviks have been having more success in rebuilding and advancing industry along more idealistically Marxist lines than they managed OTL. Thus in the Bolshevik strongholds of the urban industries, there is more real democracy of the literally "soviet,"--ie, in direct translation, "councillar", kind. Worker's meetings on the shop floor, which were supposed to be the foundation of the Soviet Union OTL, may actually still be a force to be reckoned with. This may help explain how and why TTL Bolsheviks are merely a faction, though a dominant one, within a larger Communist Party, one that tolerates and perhaps thrives on a certain amount of dissent and policy shifts reflecting the rise and fall of various factions--who do not generally try to purge each other, or even silence debate.

And meanwhile, greater success in industrial production means greater success in amicable trade with the peasant countryside, while the cities are places that are inherently attractive to labor recruited from the country, instead of being made artificially less unattractive than the collective farm regime.

As Lenin once said, "Better fewer, but better!"

If this sort of rosy "what if Leninist socialism actually worked as advertised" scenario seems too ASB--well, then these Reds are going to face the closing of the "Scissors" the same as OTL Bolsheviks did, and if they take the Bukharinite route, they will become basically agents of an increasingly strong peasant countryside while their original base, the urban workers, get bypassed and filter back to the land from the cities. Thus Russia would tend to remain industrially, hence militarily, backward. Or they could follow more or less in Stalin's steps, risking severe political backlash and incurring huge inefficiencies in a terror-based system that might nevertheless yield dividends in raw power. But with their territorial liabilities, this approach would be even more problematic than OTL, and without someone as devious and ruthless as Stalin in charge would be more likely to fail. Meanwhile, on the Bukharinite path, a bucolic Russia of modestly prospering peasants would be too tempting a target for the Germans and other Great Game players not to try to incorporate somehow--by means of trade spheres of influence, or outright conquest.

As for the role of the military--well, the Bolsheviks were students of the revolutions, especially the French ones, of the 19th century, and they were on the lookout for Napoleon-types. According to Marx, a peasantry (who were still the numerically dominant class in 1848 France) can only be "represented" by a monarch or dictator, such as Louis Bonaparte made himself with their support when he liquidated the Second Republic, as his uncle had done to the First. Especially in the Bukharinite version of things, military leaders would indeed be likely to carry out some kind of coup, and as things got tight the other components of the Red leadership would lash out in defensive jealousy against the best ones. (OTL, the fact that Trotsky had organized the Red Army was yet another blow against him in the eyes of his Bolshevik rivals, for this very reason!)

Finally, going back to my "Rosy-Red" version--if Leninist soviet-democracy did develop more or less on track as advertised, due to more old Bolsheviks surviving, making the factories work on a socialist basis with soviets actually running them, and by that example (as well as a flow of both consumer and capital goods) encouraging voluntary cooperative development of the countryside as well under real collective farms--then not only would the political legitimacy of the rump Russian state be more firmly grounded, while its military potential would be enhanced by a higher and rising level of industrial development--but internationally as well, Bolshevik Communism would be more on track with Lenin's original notions. That is, Lenin never intended merely to revolutionize just Russia--his ambition and hope was to trigger the world revolution against capitalism as such predicted by Marx. If as the decades passed, Communist Russia, despite its liabilities, not only survived but prospered on a socialist basis, its example would be seriously destabilizing to capitalist regimes overseas--surely in defeated France, but also in triumphant Germany, in stand-offish Britain and the USA, not to mention such nominal victors as the Austro-Hungarian-Polish amalgamation.

Already in your canon, without getting explicit as to whether TTL Russia is indeed a nicer place than OTL precisely because it is more truly both more democratic and more socialist, we already see China getting drawn into the Leninist sphere. What about German Africa? India? Disgruntled reaches of the Ottoman Empire? Latin America? Southeast Asia?

----

This is, of course, a fantastic timeline or I wouldn't be getting so caught up in it!
 
oh, one more thing...

Do any of these "Central powers win the Great War" timelines explore what the German expertise in big airships might have accomplished in the post-war period?

I have in the past and elsewhere been a big Helium-Head. I gradually came to understand some of the constraints on LTA that have made airships largely a footnote in modern aviation OTL. Bottom line, airplanes are actually pretty good. (As OTL, Count Zeppelin himself came to realize when he got disillusioned during WWI with the grand invention he'd done so much to foster, and shifted his personal support to big airplanes instead).

ITTL, the Zeppelin works would have had less time and opportunity to develop the improvements that made the last wartime Zeppelin such a radical contrast with the ones they started the war with. Still I imagine they'd have made progress with military funding, and after the war Hugo Eckener and his team would have been proposing big, nicely streamlined ships for transcontinental transport. Meanwhile, the British Admiralty and their American counterparts would be all the more interested in airships as naval scouts, especially with both Germany and Japan so much relatively stronger. While American military funding might not have been as forthcoming, Britain is far less bled white than OTL. And in both Britain and the USA, there would be strong interest in long-range transoceanic transport as well.

Germany's newly expanded and consolidated empire in central Africa might be reached from Germany by flying from the Zeppelin base at Friedreichshafen on the Bodensee over friendly Austria and Italy, through Italian Libya, to central Africa. From there there is no direct route to Tanganyika and Madagascar except over either Belgian or British controlled territory, but for quite some time either of these powers might be civil enough to allow it if there is some benefit to them as well. It would be difficult but not impossible to reach German Indochina from there without trespassing on potentially hostile territory. With Anglo-American-German cooperation, at least in a private civil aviation venture, a global network of airship lines based on German airframes (and possibly contracted local manufacture in both Britain and the USA as well) would be possible by the end of the 1920s. Only by then would HTA aircraft begin to be competitive on such long routes, and I think I can make a case for airship/airplane synergy if the airships and their infrastructure are already established by then.

This involves airplanes that, like the onboard scout/fighters and tender planes carried by the US Navy ZRS scouts Akron and Macon OTL, hook on to the airships in flight. For these planes to have any real size to them, the airships would also have to evolve to even bigger sizes, but if there is a commitment from industry to them I think this can happen, up to certain limits. This in turn might delay the development of the elaborate and numerous airports we have OTL, thus locking in the synergistic use of both approaches. I see a specialization in airplanes, between relatively slow and short-ranged planes designed to take off and land from rather undeveloped airfields and shuttle cargo, passengers, and fuel up to the airships (and the former two back down at their destinations) and fast, long-range planes designed uncompromisingly for good performance in those regimes that in turn shuttle between airships along the trade routes. Passengers and cargo shippers would have the choice of either puttering along slowly (but economically, for cargo, and gracefully, for passengers) with the airships or getting there faster at greater expense with the fast planes via the airships. The planes would refuel periodically along the routes, exchanging passengers and cargo as well. Airfields on the ground would not have to accommodate planes that need to take off at very high speeds as in OTL.

One might wonder how a fast airplane that needs to be going at say 120 knots or more just to get airborne at all without stalling could hook on to a 60 knot airship. (One of the constraints on airships is that they really can't go a lot faster than that, due to the rapidly rising need for structural strength as dynamic air pressures rise with the square of velocity). I envision long pendulums hung down from the airship, really big trapezes. The plane has a hook that snags the trapeze, and it swings up to the airship, losing speed to gravity. The sixty-knot speed difference above is 30 meters per second, which corresponds to a pendulum fifty meters long. Faster planes can be accommodated by longer pendulums. Obviously there are some limits--the airship has to be strong enough to take a sudden jolt (twice the weight of the airplane--the plane itself can probably handle that with standard safety factors of design), and bear the weight of the pendulum (but that isn't that much compared to the weight of the plane itself). The pilot of the plane has to be able to snag a hoop hung in the breeze with a hook set above the center of mass of the plane (typically, in or above the wing roots) at whatever speed is necessary. Electronic homing devices may help with this.

But bottom line, the US Navy pilots who flew off the ZRS ships said that on the whole hook-on flight was easier than landing on floating carrier ships. Certainly it seems safer for the carrier--if something goes wrong the plane falls down, it doesn't crash onto the airship. This is also better for the airplane--it has a chance to recover, go around again, or for the pilot and any crew/passengers to bail out, where their disaster is watched by the airship crew who will presumably set out immediately to rescue them. Gravity becomes the pilot's friend instead of enemy as usual. This is why I have some confidence that the skill needed to snag a trapeze at 60 or 100 relative knots might be forthcoming even before good electronics become practical. If so, very fast, hence heavy, airplanes might become practical earlier ITTL.

And Dr Eckener would be a renowned public figure globally, perhaps far more so than he already was OTL. Perhaps able to even influence German politics. (OTL, some Germans tried to get him to run for President of the Republic.)
 
ITTL, Russia lost really vast territories--am I correct in noting from the map that the Far Eastern puppet state, in the Japanese sphere, is at this point (after Lenin dies, late 1920s) extending all the way west to the Urals?
Actually, it is supposed to stretch to the Yenisei (I am aware this is a bad border. This has been taken into account, and is retconned as a deliberate statement of intention on the both sides), so the greater part of Siberia proper is still in RSF hands.
Yet, I don't get the impression that TTL Bolsheviks feel anything like as desperate as they did OTL, what with the relative civility of their rather tolerant negotiations with factions that OTL they shot out of hand or drove into exile.
Well, the main reason at start is that the Bolsheviks, well, can't shoot out of hand or drive into exile, the *Revolution - and, as a result, the Reds of the Civil War - being much broader and incorporating the leftist elements of OTL White side (thus, Kerensky ending up head of state). What this means is that they *have* to negotiate tolerantly with other factions, simply because they aren't in the dominant position they were in OTL. It is only later, when things go a bit sour after the Civil War, that the Bolsheviks are able to exploit the situation and become the core of a 'Radical' opposition and, finally, government. Due to the circumstances, they still end up being a bit broader than the OTL counterpart, however, which is one reason why they have to be a bit more tolerant - it is harder to build up a coalition for purging any one faction.
Very good analysis! I obviously can't go into all that much detail - don't want to spoil the future of the TL;) - but I will note that one factor that speaks in favour of the peasants is that the SR, sans the right-wing, is one of the factions incorporated into the Communist Party (oddly, the thought strikes me that CPR might be explicitly less Marxist in TTL, even if its dogma is not all that much more different from Marx's ideas than Marxism-Leninism was).
Already in your canon, without getting explicit as to whether TTL Russia is indeed a nicer place than OTL precisely because it is more truly both more democratic and more socialist, we already see China getting drawn into the Leninist sphere. What about German Africa? India? Disgruntled reaches of the Ottoman Empire? Latin America? Southeast Asia?
Well, technically the United Provinces - Southern China, that is - is quite happy to receive help from anyone that gives it, and the RSF isn't the only state to give aid to Sun's federation, just the biggest source. Of course, the Russian aid will have an influence on the United Provinces, so the Germans' assistance might prove problematic in the end...

For now, the RSF won't actively be trying to spread socialism (too risky - Russia needs at least some foreign trade to rebuild), but as for the future, or just the influence of being an example...
One state I can say they *will* make an exception for is what is probably amongst the nastiest of states that have only been mentioned in passing in TTL: the Cossack Union. Military caste-based dictatorships aren't fun places to be, and with the RSF's socialism being a bit more agrarian than the Soviet Union's, the oppressed (mostly Russian) peasants and 'auxillaries' might very well be more than happy to destroy the Union from within if given the chance...
This is, of course, a fantastic timeline or I wouldn't be getting so caught up in it!
Thank you!:)
Do any of these "Central powers win the Great War" timelines explore what the German expertise in big airships might have accomplished in the post-war period?
I believe A Shift In Priorities touches upon it. I've been trying to keep things vague so I can avoid retconning as much as possible.:eek:
From there there is no direct route to Tanganyika and Madagascar except over either Belgian or British controlled territory, but for quite some time either of these powers might be civil enough to allow it if there is some benefit to them as well.
The Belgians, at least, will be fairly happy with the Germans for the next few years - after all, in this TL it was the Germans that followed the 'piece of paper'! And after that, well, the Germans do dominate Europe. Belgium might not be forcibly incorporated as it would have been in an ordinary Alliance* victory-TL, but the Germans would be in a fairly good position to set up an informal 'Mitteleuropean' zone of economic dominance, and with Belgium being a relatively middling economy bordering on the German juggernaught, Belgium might have to be very carefully about being hostile to the Germans in the future.
And Dr Eckener would be a renowned public figure globally, perhaps far more so than he already was OTL. Perhaps able to even influence German politics. (OTL, some Germans tried to get him to run for President of the Republic.)
Oddly, I knew about that attempt - there's actually a relatively recent (started this year, if I recall correctly- I can be a rather slow updater at times, as you might have noticed by the dates of the posts) TL on this Board about just that thing.

And thanks for the speculation and information! I'll have to think about this for the next update, since it will centre upon one of the main actors you talk about...

* The main reason I consistently refer to the Central Powers as the Alliance in regards to this TL is that the Central Powers aren't quite as Central in TTL.
 
...the Bolsheviks, well, can't shoot out of hand or drive into exile, the *Revolution - and, as a result, the Reds of the Civil War - being much broader and incorporating the leftist elements of OTL White side (thus, Kerensky ending up head of state).

I notice that only I have brought up the word "soviet." Are you leaving yourself wiggle room to avoid unnecessary retconning, or is it firmly established that actually the small-s soviets did not form, or at any rate did not play the crucial role they did in the February-October interim of what Trotsky called "Dual Power" OTL?

I must admit I am very strongly influenced by the accounts Trotsky, Reed, and other partisans of the Bolsheviks wrote about that period. Thus it is my perhaps exaggerated understanding that actually the so-called "Provisional Government" had no particular legitimate basis, other than being something that foreign powers and the desperate former ruling classes clung to as something of a familiar form and at any rate less dangerously radical than the soviets. It was just a sort of club of old regimists and opportunistic more or less visionaries whose class bases of power were vanishing or non-existent, save insofar as they could bring up some strong man or other to seize power more or less for them. Whereas the soviets, particularly the Petrograd Soviet, were clearly representative bodies of the actual populace, albeit without any written constitutional basis. Russia just didn't have any sort of constitutional basis at that point, but the soviets did have the people, most of them.

Because soviets were councils of workers, formed at various workplaces, under a purely soviet form of government, however federated, people who were not in recognized categories of at least somewhat proletarian workers would have no representation whatsoever.

As things were in Petrograd throughout most of 1917, the Provisional Government could make proclamations and give orders, but the only ones enforced and carried out were the ones that the city Soviet countersigned, because only they had any organized forces at their disposal--the people had, according to Trotsky at any rate, risen up and massacred all the old regime's police they could find, and the Army's soldiers obeyed the Soviet.

The soviets first emerged in Russia during the 1905 rebellions--they were by no means a Bolshevik creation. In the October Revolution, IIRC Lenin's forces seized power over the city Soviet in exactly the same way they seized the institutions that obeyed the Provisional Government. Earlier, in the July Days I think, they had some hope of commanding solid electoral majorities in the Soviet (and the smaller factory/shop soviets that the city Soviet was constituted from).

So far, it seems to me that your backstory could go either way--either the soviets did form, and the Bolsheviks never attempted to seize complete control of them and so they remain at this point (late 1920s still, right?) the real form of government--it's just that a combination of strong-arm tactics and legitimacy won by both recent results and the legacy of Lenin make the Communist alliance by far the dominant faction.

Or the soviets never did achieve the sort of sweeping power they did OTL, not in 1916 (wait, that is when the March Revolution took place, isn't it--it isn't easy for me to track back through the whole thread right now...apologies if I misremember!) anyway. And so Lenin and crew had to pretty much make nice to a Provisional Government that ITTL did enjoy a much broader esteem than OTL.

Frankly either way it is a matter of detail and not really necessary to resolve at all. I imagine a form of "dual power" persisting and institutionalized, with both the soviets and more traditional Western-style parliamentary bodies, presumably called the Duma, existing side by side; perhaps their relationship gets formalized in some constitution or other which defines the Duma as being kind of like a senate or House of Lords, with the soviets serving as Commons/Representatives on a more strictly working-class basis.




What this means is that they *have* to negotiate tolerantly with other factions, simply because they aren't in the dominant position they were in OTL. It is only later, when things go a bit sour after the Civil War, that the Bolsheviks are able to exploit the situation and become the core of a 'Radical' opposition and, finally, government. Due to the circumstances, they still end up being a bit broader than the OTL counterpart, however, which is one reason why they have to be a bit more tolerant - it is harder to build up a coalition for purging any one faction.

I want to stress, since I'm obviously a leftist, that that strikes me as a Good Thing...provided...

... I will note that one factor that speaks in favour of the peasants is that the SR, sans the right-wing, is one of the factions incorporated into the Communist Party (oddly, the thought strikes me that CPR might be explicitly less Marxist in TTL, even if its dogma is not all that much more different from Marx's ideas than Marxism-Leninism was).

Right, they were part of the October Revolution coalition OTL, but thrown out quite unceremoniously shortly thereafter. Or rather, IIRC, they found the way the Bolsheviks high-handedly dominated every proceeding intolerable, and along with more rightist groups left the Bolshevik-ruled Soviet in a huff after the Bolsheviks shut down the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to draft the new constitution. They were intending to make their own revolution...and this was part of the Civil War.

So, if my hypothesis that one reason things are more balanced, diverse, and tolerant ITTL in Russia (because the Civil War/Intervention, while being far more catastrophically costly in terms of amputated territories the CPR has absolutely no claim to control (for the moment!), it was far less traumatic in terms of body count (particularly of more or less educated and ideologically committed leftist cadres) and devastation of infrastructure)--if that is the case, another dimension, and indeed a reason the war was relatively short and bloodless, is that the Bolshies and their other rivals in a spectrum that might even go as far right as the Kadets, managed to avoid factional infighting. Thus the much larger number of more or less educated, industrially competent workers includes people who never were Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, any kind of Marxist at all, and all the varieties of Marxists. (OTL, reading not only Trotsky but the works of Mensheviks whose names elude me for the moment, it was a truism that left of the actual Tsarist nobility itself and the Kadets ("CD's--Constitutional Democrats," an explicitly bourgeois party) everyone (among the intelligentsia anyway) was some kind of Marxist. Even, perhaps only by a stretch, the SRs). Anyway. If all these diverse ideolouges could cooperate on practical matters without killing each other, we'd have both a possible basis for faster and more effective rebuilding (of infrastructure and industry less damaged to begin with) and for a lasting balance of power that would protect out-of-power factions from being silenced completely.

Cue "Odd Couple" theme.

Well, technically the United Provinces - Southern China, that is - is quite happy to receive help from anyone that gives it, and the RSF isn't the only state to give aid to Sun's federation, just the biggest source. Of course, the Russian aid will have an influence on the United Provinces, so the Germans' assistance might prove problematic in the end...

Right, at this point Sun seems pretty much like Chiang Kai Shek.

One reason (probably not the only or even most important reason, but it was something Trotsky raged against) that Third International Communism did not spread more than it did between the wars OTL was that once Stalin took control in Moscow, he asserted control over the international movements as well, demanding a form of Party discipline that was above all loyal to and not threatening of him. It was not that Stalin didn't want a successful revolution in Germany or China or elsewhere, it was just that he defined "successful" as first of all being under his control, not a bunch of loose cannons who might (even inadvertently) undermine his own reputation as the indispensable Boss. So the conditions he put on indigenous movements elsewhere, including purging people he did not trust and dictating certain strategic policies that perhaps the locals would never have tried on their own, tended to limit their actual revolutionary potential. Note that no nation went Communist OTL (ie Leninist) until WWII fostered such guerrilla leaders as Mao and Tito, who benefited not only from the eradication of the governments they rose against, but also out of range of Stalin's effective control. Mao rose to leadership in China mainly because the leadership Stalin chose obeyed his instruction to join with Chiang's Kuomintang, and Chiang very predictably turned on the Communists, executing most of the leadership. Only mavericks like Mao were left standing to organize resistance both the the KMT and the Japanese. Similarly Tito, who was much more inclined to obey orders from the Kremlin than Mao initially, was left pretty much on his own resources under Axis occupation, and what aid he got he got more from the Western Allies than Moscow. He was in a position to order the Red Army to merely transit through Yugoslavia rather than stay and occupy it. Even so he was quite loyal to Stalin, bullying other "fraternal" socialist bloc leaders at Moscow's behest, until Stalin turned on him--at which point he took his country his own way.

Elsewhere also--wherever the map was Red during the Cold War, you had either a regime that owed its very existence to occupation by the Red Army--or else, one such as Castro's Cuba, or Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam, that was entirely a do-it-yourself project that (we now know from post-Soviet disclosure of Soviet internal memos) upset the applecart as the Kremlin was trying to push it. They were often able to put a brave face on international socialist solidarity, but all these spontaneous regimes were headaches.

Whereas, ITTL, there is as you have pointed out the incentive to trade with the West and also a lack of rigid ideological unity to weigh against bold and sweeping pronouncements of World Proletarian Revolution now--but at the same time, the more successful the RSF is, especially if it is successful on even modestly socialist terms--avoiding the rise of a capitalist ruling class, and especially if the standard of living of both workers and peasants does rise without a severe cost in the form of terror--the more inherently polarizing it must become overseas. As things were OTL, the notion that the Soviet Union was indeed a new Workers Paradise that the workers of other nations, including developed ones, could aspire to, was widespread and provocative enough, and this despite the strong evidence that progress was in some doubt there and also came at a severe price. If the progress were real and Russia a place foreigners could visit freely and leave to tell whatever tales they might have a mind to, the leadership of the capitalist nations might have no choice but to silence their own masses.

This is essentially how Trotsky defined fascism--as what happens when the classic mechanisms of liberal civil society can no longer be counted on to guarantee the capitalist order, but the capitalists are not ready to be hustled off the stage yet. They abandon the pretense of a free society in order to maintain the social order by naked coercion. By Trotsky's thesis, the reason Italy and Germany fell under fascist power was that they were each ripe for proletarian revolution. If the ideological threat is not explicitly Marxist/proletarian but has a broader form, perhaps the liberal societies could have absorbed and incorporated them somehow. But if Trotsky were at all right on this point, regardless of ideology sooner or later the masses would threaten, perhaps without realizing it, to overstep the bounds beyond which the capitalist ruling classes would be doomed.

Well, perhaps we won't have a Russia that is that successful! However, without a certain degree of success, the ruling coalition, no matter how broad, would once again face the "Scissors," and decide, if they can't deliver on Lenin's most inspiring promises, whether they will submit to an essentially capitalist order once again--and if on a strongly agrarian basis, probably under some strongman--or take the path that Stalin took OTL. (If anyone tries that ITTL, they will probably come to a nasty end!)

Perhaps a sort of staggering, muddling success--enough fitful progress to keep the peasants and workers convinced (without so much invoking of saboteur boogeymen) that this particular Rosinante is still the winning horse for them, but not enough to make the working classes of London and New York City swoon with envy?

I suppose that given the breadth of the Red coalition in Moscow, there is no definitive break with the Second International. Perhaps they just don't declare membership in any organized Socialist International and let the rest of the world muddle along without them?

But meanwhile, back in London and Berlin and Paris, what goes on with working class politics there?

A shorter, more decisive Great War would tend to glose over a lot of the bitter divisions that split the Second International parties. Actually, it tends to discredit them all completely--that's a short-term bump that according to Leninist and Trotskyite philosophy, is one of several major motivations for a capitalist power to go to war in the first place--it tends to make the Leftists shut up, and those who won't shut up will find, for a while, a less sympathetic audience and are easier to lock up or otherwise silence by force. Trotsky produced some interesting tables of rising labor unrest leading up to 1914; it plummets impressively once Russia was at war. Partially because as I said before the police rounded up all the Bolshevik agitators they could find and sent them to Siberia or the front.

But still--in both Germany and France OTL, the socialists in each country were split by the issue of "war credits," in Germany especially. The leftist dissenters who refused to support the war effort split off to form an Independent Social Democratic party which was promptly outlawed, and leaders such as Rosa Luxemberg were jailed. With a quicker and decisively victorious war, perhaps no one would be so bitter at Red Rosa to assassinate her as OTL, but neither would the regime have any reason to let her out of prison. Without a dynamic, tightly focused, internationalist-minded bunch in charge in Moscow, I guess the disgruntled radicals would not reform their radical party as the Spartacists, eventually Communists, OTL. But there would be lingering bad blood between radical and moderate leftists. If the liberal Western regimes come on hard times domestically, the radicals might suddenly get much more of a hearing, and hard-left parties might belatedly form; these would probably want to align themselves with Red Russia.

Meanwhile there is the colonial world to consider.

I think you've dropped some hints that these issues are indeed simmering away on the back burners ITTL. I want to stress, there are many plausible ways these things could play out. So far you've done great at making events seem to flow logically and in an emotionally sensible way as well.

....
{About the airship thing and Dr Hugo Eckener's prestige}
Oddly, I knew about that attempt - there's actually a relatively recent (started this year, if I recall correctly- I can be a rather slow updater at times, as you might have noticed by the dates of the posts) TL on this Board about just that thing.

Yes, I saw that when I was first joining, about a month and a half ago, but I didn't get into it because skimming from the beginning, it seemed to take all the airship stuff for granted in the background, whereas when it comes to LTA I like my wankery to be technical. I've been thinking about back-of-the-envelope sketches of the sort of integrated airplane/airship system I've talked about. I definitely have no time until sometime next month to get really into that though. Anyway, only after I've come up with something more concrete would it be possible to judge whether such a thing might ever have been commercially or even technically feasible!
 
I notice that only I have brought up the word "soviet." Are you leaving yourself wiggle room to avoid unnecessary retconning, or is it firmly established that actually the small-s soviets did not form, or at any rate did not play the crucial role they did in the February-October interim of what Trotsky called "Dual Power" OTL?
Well, I have established that soviets must have come into being:
the constitution it produced were used to legitimise the new, Soviet-based, Radical regime
Of course, I left it unsaid just how much actual power the soviets held before the constitution (or, for that matter, just how soviet-based the new constitution)...
I must admit I am very strongly influenced by the accounts Trotsky, Reed, and other partisans of the Bolsheviks wrote about that period. Thus it is my perhaps exaggerated understanding that actually the so-called "Provisional Government" had no particular legitimate basis, other than being something that foreign powers and the desperate former ruling classes clung to as something of a familiar form and at any rate less dangerously radical than the soviets. It was just a sort of club of old regimists and opportunistic more or less visionaries whose class bases of power were vanishing or non-existent, save insofar as they could bring up some strong man or other to seize power more or less for them. Whereas the soviets, particularly the Petrograd Soviet, were clearly representative bodies of the actual populace, albeit without any written constitutional basis. Russia just didn't have any sort of constitutional basis at that point, but the soviets did have the people, most of them.
From what I've understood, this is a partial exaggeration, in that at least parts of the opportunistic visionaries did have at least a degree of support from elements of Russian society - but without the cities, it is hard to control a country, and that support wasn't all that found in the cities. So the soviets might not have had most of the people in OTL, but they had them where it counted (in the army and in the hubs of governance).;)
Or the soviets never did achieve the sort of sweeping power they did OTL, not in 1916 (wait, that is when the March Revolution took place, isn't it--it isn't easy for me to track back through the whole thread right now...apologies if I misremember!) anyway. And so Lenin and crew had to pretty much make nice to a Provisional Government that ITTL did enjoy a much broader esteem than OTL.
Likely more as that - if nothing else because in this TL Lenin and his crew were a part of the Provisional Government, although initially a junior partner. With the revolution making peace with the Germans quickly, and the Soviets more in-line with the PG, there isn't quite the breakdown of authority there was in OTL.
I imagine a form of "dual power" persisting and institutionalized, with both the soviets and more traditional Western-style parliamentary bodies, presumably called the Duma, existing side by side; perhaps their relationship gets formalized in some constitution or other which defines the Duma as being kind of like a senate or House of Lords, with the soviets serving as Commons/Representatives on a more strictly working-class basis.
Good call.;) After all, the Federation's new constitution does base itself on the soviets to some degree, but that doesn't say the Federation can't have another assembly of some form (actually, why not have three? A Duma to serve as a kind of House of Lords, an Assembly of Provinces to serve as a kind of Senate, and an Assembly of Soviets to serve as the soviets' main voice at the central government)...
So, if my hypothesis that one reason things are more balanced, diverse, and tolerant ITTL in Russia (because the Civil War/Intervention, while being far more catastrophically costly in terms of amputated territories the CPR has absolutely no claim to control (for the moment!), it was far less traumatic in terms of body count (particularly of more or less educated and ideologically committed leftist cadres) and devastation of infrastructure)--if that is the case, another dimension, and indeed a reason the war was relatively short and bloodless, is that the Bolshies and their other rivals in a spectrum that might even go as far right as the Kadets, managed to avoid factional infighting. Thus the much larger number of more or less educated, industrially competent workers includes people who never were Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, any kind of Marxist at all, and all the varieties of Marxists. (OTL, reading not only Trotsky but the works of Mensheviks whose names elude me for the moment, it was a truism that left of the actual Tsarist nobility itself and the Kadets ("CD's--Constitutional Democrats," an explicitly bourgeois party) everyone (among the intelligentsia anyway) was some kind of Marxist. Even, perhaps only by a stretch, the SRs). Anyway. If all these diverse ideolouges could cooperate on practical matters without killing each other, we'd have both a possible basis for faster and more effective rebuilding (of infrastructure and industry less damaged to begin with) and for a lasting balance of power that would protect out-of-power factions from being silenced completely.

Cue "Odd Couple" theme.
That is indeed quite reasonable - no split between 'pro-Soviet' and 'Pro-Provisional Government/Constituent Assembly' factions, to begin. Although I do wonder where the Kadets would end up... the Reds are still, well, Reds, just a fair bit more pinkish sort than their OTL counterparts, so the CDs would be quite the odd one out. On other hand, the Whites have a weaker pro-democratic element without moderate socialists on its side... perhaps they end up splitting between those who hedge their bets with the socialists (and probably get up purged in the post-Tukhachevskian Coup-enviroment for their troubles) and those who aren't willing to extend that much trust (and probably end up getting into trouble with the local White leader/running to the Far Eastern Republic for their trouble)
If the ideological threat is not explicitly Marxist/proletarian but has a broader form, perhaps the liberal societies could have absorbed and incorporated them somehow. But if Trotsky were at all right on this point, regardless of ideology sooner or later the masses would threaten, perhaps without realizing it, to overstep the bounds beyond which the capitalist ruling classes would be doomed.
To be entirely honest, I suspect there will be a goodly chance of incorporation in at least the stabler liberal societies, with some already having begun on that path - namely, gradualist, reformist socialists, what we today would term 'social democrats' being integrated into the system and providing enough of a voice and bringer-of-better-life to the workers that things just never cross over that line.
Perhaps a sort of staggering, muddling success--enough fitful progress to keep the peasants and workers convinced (without so much invoking of saboteur boogeymen) that this particular Rosinante is still the winning horse for them, but not enough to make the working classes of London and New York City swoon with envy?
Likely, I'd say. After all, the Federation might be successful in raising the Russian worker's living standards without making the Russian peasant's life a great deal more complicated, but they'd still start from a lower point. Hard to make a man swoon with envy if the person he's supposed to be swooning over lives a tougher life.;)
I suppose that given the breadth of the Red coalition in Moscow, there is no definitive break with the Second International. Perhaps they just don't declare membership in any organized Socialist International and let the rest of the world muddle along without them?
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the answer is 'doesn't declare membership in any organized Socialist International' simply because the Party never quite manages to agree on whether to rejoin the Second International, set up their own International or stay out of formal organizations altogether.:D
But meanwhile, back in London and Berlin and Paris, what goes on with working class politics there?

A shorter, more decisive Great War would tend to glose over a lot of the bitter divisions that split the Second International parties. Actually, it tends to discredit them all completely--that's a short-term bump that according to Leninist and Trotskyite philosophy, is one of several major motivations for a capitalist power to go to war in the first place--it tends to make the Leftists shut up, and those who won't shut up will find, for a while, a less sympathetic audience and are easier to lock up or otherwise silence by force. Trotsky produced some interesting tables of rising labor unrest leading up to 1914; it plummets impressively once Russia was at war. Partially because as I said before the police rounded up all the Bolshevik agitators they could find and sent them to Siberia or the front.

But still--in both Germany and France OTL, the socialists in each country were split by the issue of "war credits," in Germany especially. The leftist dissenters who refused to support the war effort split off to form an Independent Social Democratic party which was promptly outlawed, and leaders such as Rosa Luxemberg were jailed. With a quicker and decisively victorious war, perhaps no one would be so bitter at Red Rosa to assassinate her as OTL, but neither would the regime have any reason to let her out of prison. Without a dynamic, tightly focused, internationalist-minded bunch in charge in Moscow, I guess the disgruntled radicals would not reform their radical party as the Spartacists, eventually Communists, OTL. But there would be lingering bad blood between radical and moderate leftists. If the liberal Western regimes come on hard times domestically, the radicals might suddenly get much more of a hearing, and hard-left parties might belatedly form; these would probably want to align themselves with Red Russia.

Meanwhile there is the colonial world to consider.
I could see a split occuring/persisting - after all, in OTL even countries where the War was *not* an issue had the parties split, and as you note, there were bitter divisions in the background. Especially Germany has something that could prove too great an issue to remain united over - the 'Missed Chance' for a revolution in '21, during the Flu. Radicals would, well, call it a missed chance. Moderates might make the judgement that the time really wasn't all that ripe for a workers' revolution. Couple that with war-time disagreements, and all the other issues, and it might not be that strange if there is a German hard-left party separated from and... not all that friendly with... the SPD, which in turn is likely to provide a similar effect in the more German-influenced parts of Europe (although Sweden might have pre-empted Germany; a separation between Höglund's radicals and Branting's reformists seems likely, and the personal antagonism could have kept such a separation running even after the war). With a large part of Europe having the split maintained and/or formalised, it might become a self-perpetuating process even without the RSFSR-impetus. Might.;)
So far you've done great at making events seem to flow logically and in an emotionally sensible way as well.
Thank you, although... erm... emotionally sensible?:eek::confused:
 
Yes, I've been patient because I noticed going in, 15 pages back, the beginning, started 3 years ago. This isn't one of those giant threads that mushrooms overnight. It is good though, and if this is pace we need for this kind of quality then I will wait patiently. At 5 pages a year we should only expect something every couple months or so.

I just dropped your name again in this post of this thread, LI.

Now I see I have to go back and edit that post because I was confused as to who started the thread...:eek:
 
Nice thread great idea. Not many ppl think of a Russia first policy, although it would make sense to defeat the larger army first. Even though Russia's track record sucked in recent wars. However France's record sucked in the Franco-Prussian war.I could see why they would decide to defeat Russia, just so they would be able to hold off the French because the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. Plausible TL. Yes I could see Italy getting what they want, because Germany would be more concerned with future allies, considering AH has so many problems. Now with AHP there are even more problems. Italy is at least more stable, and Germany could be waiting for AHP to destabilize to absorb Austria. A pan slavic/magyar Empire not including Russia because of the Red menace would be a better ally, because Austrian/Hapsburg designs never were really liked in the slavic countries. So I like your TL.
 
Nice thread great idea. Not many ppl think of a Russia first policy, although it would make sense to defeat the larger army first. Even though Russia's track record sucked in recent wars. However France's record sucked in the Franco-Prussian war.I could see why they would decide to defeat Russia, just so they would be able to hold off the French because the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. Plausible TL. Yes I could see Italy getting what they want, because Germany would be more concerned with future allies, considering AH has so many problems. Now with AHP there are even more problems. Italy is at least more stable, and Germany could be waiting for AHP to destabilize to absorb Austria. A pan slavic/magyar Empire not including Russia because of the Red menace would be a better ally, because Austrian/Hapsburg designs never were really liked in the slavic countries. So I like your TL.
Well, to be honest, I'd be the first to say that this TL is pretty unlikely in the first few chapters. I mean, it has France attacking Belgium, even if I did try to cover it up by suggesting miscommunication between London and Paris.
As for Russia First, actually, it has come up several times over the years. The main reason why it isn't around more is, I suspect, simply that there aren't that many Great War TLs around. The Germans did have a reason for France first, though: the French could be knocked out quickly, whereas the Russians couldn't, or so the idea went. That'd leave the largest army, but it is better than a two-front war.
Thanks for liking my TL.:)
 
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