I find your thoughts on particularly India interesting, given that I would argue IOTL the British took a hardline conservative approach to India in the post Amritsar-period, moving away from the previous Liberal line. Sure, they could be even harsher than IOTL but I don't see why or how they would be. I am not really trying to wank or screw any single region on purpose, I am actively trying to avoid that but sometimes things just play out that way, but there are going to be periods where the contrast to OTL is darker and others where it is lighter. Particularly Germany has come out of all this very well, and are well on their way to becoming a hegemon across much of Europe, but nothing lasts forever and there are structural issues in any society which will eventually present problems. When and how those challenges and issues appear is another matter. For the same reason, don't expect a complete humiliation conga for any particular nation. It is a difficult balancing act to get right, and if I start straying into where it gets obnoxious please let me know - it can be a bit hard to keep track at times.

The US will definitely need to deal with some of its internal issues in the time to come. In some ways things will probably be worse than IOTL and in others they will be better. There is also an element of the US having sublimated a lot of its worst aspects and repressed them to some degree, not dealing with them at all for long stretches. There are some things which will be addressed at different times and in different manners to OTL. A straight-up ACW redux would be difficult to pull off convincingly, but who knows - I have screwed over other countries plenty already. I don't expect to go that route, but there are definitely some tense points to come in US history.
Among the reasons why I think the british will try and hold India is that Ireland showed them ITL, that if you slap them down hard enough they'll go back to being proper subjects. Also, the outcome strengthens the imperialists in both the halls of power and in popular opinion. And since the germans and french will be prospering a bit more than the british, any source of national pride is welcome. Add to that that the empires funds will not be depleted in WW2 and the USA will not aquire the leverage neccessary to force decolonisation, and you have an utterly explosive mixture of misplaced pride, envy and "proper behaviour". Maybe ITL Ghandi will end up like the students in the intro of watchmen, with the british in charge thinking that they have to squelch such things hard. Of course this will backfire - and india will suck the empire dry of blood and gold.
If I may hazard a guess into TTLs future; in the 2010s some will push in France and Germany the narrative of that there are two types of colonialism: The "exploitative" british variant, which lead to the catastrophes of India and Ireland and was narrowly averted/most successful (depending on how the author feels) in the USA. In contrast there is "uplifting" variant of the Germans/French whicht results in win-win for both parties. This is, of course, the sugarcoated variant - even if the colonies became serious projects about uplifting later, they started as racist exploitations. But the grain of truth (which most good stories contain), is that the French and Germans will have had time to reorganise the colonies before leaving while the british only ever get to tear down the old order. Which results in the chaos which you see OTL in much of Africa.

About the wank/screw thing: OTL is an Ameriwank. No bones about it. I mean, if your TL featured France&USA fighting England&Russia while handing Germany their pocketbook and colonies, while also driving their best scientific talent to emigrate to Germany so that they get an overwhelming lead in tech, you'd be called out on being an unrealistic wanker. So, by definition, for the USA to get screwed, they need to get double-screwed by their own perspective. Like Poland. Or double-Germany (in case you are interested: you get saddled with an onerous (in the sence of "the forms were not obeyed") peace treaty, an unstable political system, this comes to a head. Then you get a megalomanical dictator who manges some successes but then bites off more than he can chew. Your cities (all of them) get bombed to rubble, and your scientific talent is drained/taken to other countries. And your name is forever a byword for the evil in humans souls no matter how hard you try to atone for it). If you add two occupations and attempted genocide of your population to that and you get Poland.
So, if for the USA to get screwed, you'll need ACW redux. Moreover, I'd see screws and wanks in greater timescales. Having 20 years of stagnation doesn't constitue a screw. Just ask Japan. As for Germany becoming the hegemon of Europe: In OTL they lost two world wars and they are still dominating the continent. Well, they would, if they ever got off their asses. ITL you'll probably see a much more homogenised EU, since the end of Belgium already provides precedent for the absorption of smaller states into their larger neighbours. But yeah, Germany is going to go from "undisputed hegemon" to "primus inter pares", probably ironically exactly the opposite approach than OTL.
To iterate some more on the USA, they sublimated:
  • Making all whites "white americans" as primary identity by fighting in WWI
  • Giving both credence and backing to the civil rights movement by fighting in WWII, this simulataneously weakend their racist opposition both ideologically (well, the foremost proponents of white superiority just got beaten by "mongrels") and politically (you wouldn't argue in favor of The Enemy, would you?). Also, please keep in mind that demographically, being white was a majority and not just a plurality at this point in time. Pre-WW2 american media (for white folks) is amost universially - and utterly casually - racist. The Birth of a Nation was the summer blockbuster of its release year *shudder*. Such things were suppressed and memoryholed after the evil of the Nazis.
  • Papering over the cracks in the American Dream by externalising the "evil" as the UdSSR. It also made the "establishment" own up to said dream - after all, they needed an ideological foot to stand on against the Soviets (and their bloody, bloody contributions to WW2). Moreover, the Sovs promised a new era, so they needed to be countered by actual liberty.
I'll stop there or I'll need a stiff drink, since it implies ugly things in our future.

Right, so I've written enough for now. Thoughts?

Edit: Most of the above is rather broad brush, but then again we are dealing with a TL which altered WWI - the dominant shaper of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Edit Edit: I've added something to the point of WW2 and the cold war
 
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Correct me if I am wrong but the war in the later years caused first the growth in India nationalism and a worse Spanish flu which would cause a much worse outbreak of it all across the world in and especially in india leading to a much more stronger movement for decolonization in the colonies right?
 
Correct me if I am wrong but the war in the later years caused first the growth in India nationalism and a worse Spanish flu which would cause a much worse outbreak of it all across the world in and especially in india leading to a much more stronger movement for decolonization in the colonies right?
Which will crash right into the greater determination and means of the Empire to keep these colonies. Bad TL to be indian in. Subsequent question: Will this trigger additional migration to Europe and the USA? Fanning the flames of racism even further in the latter? And making the former more...hostile to the Empire for dumping its "problems" on the continent?
 
Which will crash right into the greater determination and means of the Empire to keep these colonies. Bad TL to be India in. Subsequent question: Will this trigger additional migration to Europe and the USA? Fanning the flames of racism even further in the latter? And making the former more...hostile to the Empire for dumping its "problems" on the continent?
Yah and will this in the long term make the 2 states idea less feasible and also make it less likely and will this lead to an earlier civil rights momvent and the Spanish flue would be causing turmoil right now but nothing been said about it especially with a later war to
 
I think that one thing you are ignoring is the sheer level of investment by the British in the Irish conflict. They are litterally dropping everything else in order to turn their focus to Ireland, including military and economic resources. This means that they do not have anything like the resources you would need for anything more harsh than IOTL, and plenty of reason to be milder. Ireland isn't proof of the success of imperialism, it is viewed as a necessary but grim struggle against out of control Irish, who are bombing the major cities of the UK. The victory in Ireland is hard fought, bitter and costly.

India did experience a rise in nationalism for a variety of reasons, most prominently the alliance between the Muslim Khalifat movement and the Hindu-majority Congress movement in the form of the Swaraj movement. As regards the flu, it isn't actually worse ITTL - it just plays out a bit differently as regards its spread in America and Europe. India is still hit extremely hard, but not to a degree far beyond OTL. For the most part, the situation mid-1918 is similar to OTL.

You could be more diplomatic in your framing of OTL, but yes - it does have a lot of Ameriwank elements. The US got extremely lucky on several occasions and was able to weather several crises which could have easily spelled catastrophe.

Arguably you could say that OTL is a Humanitywank based on the simple fact that a nuclear war didn't break out during the Cold War. Personally, I think that OTL has a lot of dystopian elements to it which can make for some pretty dismal reading and there are periods which are downright depressing to learn about. I don't know what it says about me, that I tend to focus my TLs and research on those precise periods and elements...
 
I think that one thing you are ignoring is the sheer level of investment by the British in the Irish conflict. They are litterally dropping everything else in order to turn their focus to Ireland, including military and economic resources. This means that they do not have anything like the resources you would need for anything more harsh than IOTL, and plenty of reason to be milder. Ireland isn't proof of the success of imperialism, it is viewed as a necessary but grim struggle against out of control Irish, who are bombing the major cities of the UK. The victory in Ireland is hard fought, bitter and costly.

India did experience a rise in nationalism for a variety of reasons, most prominently the alliance between the Muslim Khalifat movement and the Hindu-majority Congress movement in the form of the Swaraj movement. As regards the flu, it isn't actually worse ITTL - it just plays out a bit differently as regards its spread in America and Europe. India is still hit extremely hard, but not to a degree far beyond OTL. For the most part, the situation mid-1918 is similar to OTL.

You could be more diplomatic in your framing of OTL, but yes - it does have a lot of Ameriwank elements. The US got extremely lucky on several occasions and was able to weather several crises which could have easily spelled catastrophe.

Arguably you could say that OTL is a Humanitywank based on the simple fact that a nuclear war didn't break out during the Cold War. Personally, I think that OTL has a lot of dystopian elements to it which can make for some pretty dismal reading and there are periods which are downright depressing to learn about. I don't know what it says about me, that I tend to focus my TLs and research on those precise periods and elements...
I tried being diplomatic many times in my life. It doesn't fit me, so I'll be direct instead - feels better, too. Mainly because you stop blaming yourself - for a skill you are utterly unsuited for.
As for the grimness, misery ís always more memorable than happiness. If you'll forgive me for employing pathos this once, in aversity virtue shines. Winters, Murphy, Heyha, v. Mücke would be far, far less interesting if they had no adversity to overcome. The Berlin Airlift would be less interesting if there would be no threat of hunger and cold. And so on, and so forth. I think it does not make you a bad or wierd person.

As for the Irish/India, I hadn't thought of it that way. But I would think it probable that the hardliners will use that line of argument to drum up support. "It could happen here", "Is your cook secretly a bomber?", and all that. Even if it will not play that way, that picture will be going around a bit. The persons doing that are probably the same that have no scruples inciting the veterans against the unions.

As for OTL being a humanitywank - I disgress, simply surviving doesn't constitue a wank. But then again as long as there are no known aliens, discussing a comparative measure is without meaning anyways. As for OTL being an Ameriwank - my intention was to point out that the accusation "Ameriscrew" should be examined critically, since removing wank elements does not constitute a screw. Then I got a bit carried away, by pointing out how you can definitly interpret OTL as a mid-to-eastern-europe-screw.
 
Among the reasons why I think the british will try and hold India is that Ireland showed them ITL, that if you slap them down hard enough they'll go back to being proper subjects.

The difference is that Ireland is small, next door, and not that populous compared to Britain.

India is a whole other can of worm. Without a sizable amount of cooperation from local elites, they're never holding it. So they can't be as ruthless as they were with the Irish, because they need to turn people to their side.

It's possible the experience of the Irish war convinces them to give it a go, but I don't think they'll win, especially if anyone decide to funnel weapons to Indian fighters. Of course, they could try playing on internal divides to break it, but it means a lot more compromises and collaboration, which is the opposite of what they just did with Ireland.
 
With the longer war the famine there would be much worse and give more support to the independence movement and also yah it easy to go to Britain and I think that they will try to do the same thing in India which will result in similar results
 
The difference is that Ireland is small, next door, and not that populous compared to Britain.

India is a whole other can of worm. Without a sizable amount of cooperation from local elites, they're never holding it. So they can't be as ruthless as they were with the Irish, because they need to turn people to their side.

It's possible the experience of the Irish war convinces them to give it a go, but I don't think they'll win, especially if anyone decide to funnel weapons to Indian fighters. Of course, they could try playing on internal divides to break it, but it means a lot more compromises and collaboration, which is the opposite of what they just did with Ireland.
That is precisely the reason why such an attempt will blow up. My oringinal intent was not to show that this statement will be factually correct, merely that it presents a certain temptation or conviction for more imperialist-minded members of the british establishment to justify further efforts in India. More realist members of the public will point out precisely your argument for why this is nonsense - and warn that doing so will spell doom for the Empire. Depending on the exact sequence of events, I think both camps will have a chance at making their convictions policy.

Actually, this could be an example of the wank/screw-thingy. If the UK gets wanked, the latter camp succeeds while keeping a foot in the door and making India a loyal ally XOR the former camp wins dividing and conquering and securing Indias resources for the Empire in perpetuy by removing any idea of an indian state. If the UK is being in process of being screwed, the former camp wins, prompting an endless sink of blood and treasure against a unified Indian front, triggering a civil war at home which comes to no certain conclusion ending with the continentals stepping in since they can't have a third world country at their doorstep.
Of course, these are the two extreme ends of the spectrum - there is a continuum of bad and good luck between them.
 
That is precisely the reason why such an attempt will blow up. My oringinal intent was not to show that this statement will be factually correct, merely that it presents a certain temptation or conviction for more imperialist-minded members of the british establishment to justify further efforts in India. More realist members of the public will point out precisely your argument for why this is nonsense - and warn that doing so will spell doom for the Empire. Depending on the exact sequence of events, I think both camps will have a chance at making their convictions policy.

Actually, this could be an example of the wank/screw-thingy. If the UK gets wanked, the latter camp succeeds while keeping a foot in the door and making India a loyal ally XOR the former camp wins dividing and conquering and securing Indias resources for the Empire in perpetuy by removing any idea of an indian state. If the UK is being in process of being screwed, the former camp wins, prompting an endless sink of blood and treasure against a unified Indian front, triggering a civil war at home which comes to no certain conclusion ending with the continentals stepping in since they can't have a third world country at their doorstep.
Of course, these are the two extreme ends of the spectrum - there is a continuum of bad and good luck between them.

Maybe the UK ends up with parts of India under rule of local allies who agree to being part of the commonwealth because they are scared of the independence fighters radicalized by war, while the rest of India is fighting the British? Could also be a divide on religious lines...

India is big and diverse, so there are lots of fault lines to exploit in a longer conflict.
 
Great update, as usual. I‘m a bit surprised how well the Reds have done so far – they basically managed to keep control of the Russian heartland for most of the conflict. Considering how much stronger their enemies are compared to OTL, and that the Reds were even fighting each other most of the time, i would have expected them to lose control of much of western Russia. Instead they actually managed to take back territories, including parts of the Ukraine and even Belarus, i believe.

I can’t imagine the Germans are going to allow them to retain territory so far west, right next to the newly established states of eastern Europe. If there is going to any kind of peace agreement, or even just a Korea-style armistice, then one condition will surely be the evacuation of those areas by the Reds.

Interestingly, IOTL Max Hoffmann actually suggested a joint European invasion of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. He thought it would be too dangerous to let a communist state like that exist, and thought it would be best to take them out while they were still weak. I could see him advocating for a proper German intervention in this case too, with regular German troops, to at least push the Reds further east, out of Belarus and the Ukraine, and to create a white buffer territory in north-eastern Russia, reaching from northern Belarus and the UBD to the White Sea, to deny the Reds access to the Baltics and Finland (the Germans already control Petrograd, i believe?). I think the Reds would be too exhausted at this point to be able to stop any kind of serious German attack. The only thing preventing an all out German invasion all the way to Moscow (and beyond) at this point are likely the expected financial and material costs, as well as the unstable situation in A-H and Italy right next door.


I also want to give some remarks about colonialism and imperialism, since this was brought up earlier. Western attitudes in regards to their colonial subjests were always rather contradictory. On one hand the colonial powers drew arbitrary lines across whole continents, and were willing to brutally put down rebellions within those lines, but on the other hand it can’t be denied that they really did a lot of ‚uplifting‘. The European powers basically delivered their colonies the ideological (and literal) weapons necessary to break free from colonial rule in the first place.

Sometimes the question comes up if it was possible for the west to retain their colonial empires, and how this could happen. Usually people then come up with fluffy answers containing words like ‚equality‘ or ‚imperial federation‘ or stuff like that. The problem is that a true ‚federation‘ between the mother country and the colonies wouldn‘t be an empire, it would be more akin to something like the EU. Considering that the population of the colonies would likely eventually outnumber those of the mother country, i can‘t see why France, Britain or Germany would ever go along with this. Could you imagine if all former French and British colonial territories were actually part of those countries today? Including complete freedom of movement? France and Britain would basically be subsumed entirely into their own former empires. The British and French people would never accept that. The only country that ever could have successfully done something like this is maybe Japan in regards to Korea and Taiwan. Maybe.

But the question remains: Is it possible for the west to retain significant colonial empires to this day, without resorting to mass murder and genocide? I think the answer is yes, but only in certain regions, and only if the attitudes of the colonial powers change – but not in the way most think (or would want). Let me explain by pretending that i was an unscrupulous advisor to the French, German or British governments in regards to colonial affairs.

Here is how i would see the current situation: China and India at this point already show the dangers of exposing native populations to liberal, democratic, socialist or nationalist ideas – they will eventually turn them against their colonial overlords, especially if supported by a hostile rival power, or by foreign ideologues and agitators (like Red Russia, for example). The native populations will also use education, weapons and infrastructure built and delivered by their colonial overlords against them.

And here is what i would recommend to western governments in response to these developments (remember, i‘m an unscrupulous advisor, only concerned with retaining as much of my country‘s empire as possible): Change the way in which colonies are regarded, by restricting the reasons for their existence strictly to resource extraction and power projection. No more ‚uplifting‘, which means no more building of schools or hospitals for the natives, and no more infrastructure other than what is strictly necessary to extract and transport the desired resources. Don‘t allow colonial populations to travel to the mother country, or to study in western universities like IOTL, lest they take liberal or socialist ideas back home with them. This also means not to build up native, educated elites for the administration of the colonies – they might turn against their overlords as well. Don‘t try to raise the low levels of literacy and education (or non-existent, in some cases) among the native populations, keep them isolated from the rest of the world, don’t introduce modern agricultural methods or machinery, don’t build more roads or railways than is absolutely necessary, and cease humanitarian efforts like vaccinations or any other kind of subsidized measure like that – let nature restrict population growth like it always did.

Basically, turn the colonies into giant ‚reservations‘, where the natives are mostly left to their own devices, except for a few harbors, military bases and areas where the respective colonial power wishes to extract resources (oil fields, mines etc). If the native populations are mostly kept on the level of development they had a century ago, and their numbers remain low as well, and they aren’t artificially ‚unified’ by being tought the same language (like French or English, as is the case today in much of Africa), then i don‘t see why western countries couldn‘t keep many of their colonies for a long time. This is not a particular optimistic or uplifting scenario, since it would leave much of the world much poorer than OTL, but it also wouldn‘t involve large scale colonial warfare, or the kind of ethnical violence we‘ve seen IOTL in the post-colonial period – mostly because there wouldn’t be enough people to successfully rebel against the colonial powers, or to slaughter each other afterward. The colonial powers could even try to sell it as something benevolent, claiming that it would be wrong to introduce western ideas, processes or technologies into traditional societies – a bit like the attitude most have today in regards to isolated tribal communities (like in the amazonian rainforest), just on a much larger scale.

Now, i don‘t think this would work everywhere – i think it‘s probably too late for some of the Asian colonies at this point, especially China (not actually a colony, but still under heavy foreign influence), Indochina, and probably India too (though the British might take measures to ensure that India balkanizes, even if it doesn‘t remain an actual colony). Those places have been unified to varying degrees long before the arrival of Europeans, and always had a higher level of development compared to many other regions in the world. Many of their elites and intellectuals are already familiar with western thought, and concepts like nationalism etc. Not to mention that some of them already have a (tiny) industrial base from which to grow.

But i think it would definitely work for most of sub-saharan Africa, some of the more backward parts of central Asia, possibly Tibet, and maybe some parts of the East Indies/Indonesia and Oceania. It probably wouldn‘t work forever, and eventually private organizations,
philanthropist, churches, missionaries etc. might campaign to uplift the peoples from those colonies to integrate them into the modern world, but i think something like this is the easiest, least costly and least brutal way for the great powers to retain at least parts of their colonial empire for much longer than OTL, and in a form that can still be called empire.

It‘s not particular moral, and i don‘t know how realistic it is, or if there were people at the time who would propose something like this (there would probably need to be an international agreement between the colonial powers in regards to colonial policy for this to work), but i don‘t think there is any other way for large colonial empires to survive short of brutal, long-term repression. Of course, it‘s more likely that decolonization ITTL doesn’t look that much different than OTL, except maybe a bit later, but i just wanted to throw out some thoughts i had on the topic. I would like to hear what others think about this.
 
To be frank I don't think that would work anywhere for any reason. The people living in the colonizer countries would have to accept their country being engaged in a very grim and oppressive occupation of large parts of the world indefinitely and a totalitarian suppression of progress which simply amounts to brutal forced regression towards a mythologized past.

The problem is that the questionable "uplifting" tactics are part and parcel of the colonial enterprise. "Establishing" a native elite is a necessary step - you've got to coopt the local rulers or they turn against you and they fight you. Those rulers already existed long before you let them start going to your fancy schools and building hospitals. Keeping them from any opportunity for advancement is likely to fuel resentment.

Maybe this would have worked centuries ago, if the Europeans had come in, established trading posts, and done nothing more. But it's much too late now. Now you have to violently enforce stagnation at all costs and you have to convince your own people this is all worth it and there's no alternative.

Edit: I could see a quasi-fascist regime try to do something like this. Basically turn the Belgian Congo up to 11 with a helping dose of "the subhuman savages will be happier in the state of nature working for us forever." Strip away the missionary impulse and just make it a bloodbath.

The more logical way to maintain empire is through strong, possibly militarily enforced, commercial dominance mixed with a lot of soft power. Almost like OTL ;)
 
By the way. The Czechoslovak Legion was destroyed in the last hurrah against the Germans. The Polish 5th Siberian Rifle Division suffered a similar fate?
 
Great update, as usual. I‘m a bit surprised how well the Reds have done so far – they basically managed to keep control of the Russian heartland for most of the conflict. Considering how much stronger their enemies are compared to OTL, and that the Reds were even fighting each other most of the time, i would have expected them to lose control of much of western Russia. Instead they actually managed to take back territories, including parts of the Ukraine and even Belarus, i believe.

You have to remember that the build up to the revolution isn't the same. Trotsky was actually in power over all of Russia for a while, even if just nominally. This included much of the army.

And the Moscow reds were left to build up for that duration, instead of the reds having to take Moscow like OTL.
 
Turns out that there is a ton of stuff to do when you graduate to get started in the Danish unemployment system, who woulda thunk? Pretty tired, so I am limiting my responses a bit. I find the discussion on colonialism rather interesting and I would say the same for the discussion surrounding the Russian situation.

As regards the greater success of the Reds, @Nyvis is right in stating that the build up to the Civil War is different, and plays a key role in leaving the Reds in a stronger position. They had much longer to entrench themselves and were able to exploit the relatively weak position of the Whites early on to consolidate further.

You have to remember that the build up to the revolution isn't the same. Trotsky was actually in power over all of Russia for a while, even if just nominally. This included much of the army.

And the Moscow reds were left to build up for that duration, instead of the reds having to take Moscow like OTL.

One thing you missed @Rufus or at least underestimate is the sheer exhaustion of the German peoples, who find the need for continued intervention questionable at best. With the direct threat to Germany limited, and nothing approaching a Red Scare in Germany ITTL beyond a radical fringe, there are a lot who question the value of the continued fighting. Quite simply, the war is more expensive than it is worth. Furthermore, it isn't really the Moscow Communists who scare the shit out of the Germans - it is the Italian anarchists who do that. The Muscovites have been successful in bringing Proletkult to Germany, and it has played a pretty significant cultural role in shaping German attitudes towards particularly the Muscovites. With Trotsky and his supporters banished across the Volga, there is little reason to fear his influence, while the Muscovites have been working overtime to present themselves as favorably as possible to the Germans. Hell, they have even limited the extent of their revolutionary propaganda calling for active violence in favor of cultural, ideological and societal efforts meant to increase the standing of Moscow in German (Centrist and Leftist) eyes. Keep in mind that the key goal of German diplomacy behind Wilhelm's wish to balkanize Russia was that it would create a series of smaller states which could be played off against each other for German gain - the major issue with this idea IOTL was that Wilhelm wanted to both shatter Russia and be their best friends at the same time, a tall order for a towering genius like Bismarck and frankly impossible for a man like Wilhelm to pull off.

While IOTL Hoffmann was supportive of such an effort, ITTL he is increasingly in the camp of those who want to bring an end to the conflict and make good with the Communists, although it would require important concessions on their part.

By the way. The Czechoslovak Legion was destroyed in the last hurrah against the Germans. The Polish 5th Siberian Rifle Division suffered a similar fate?

No, the Polish 5th fought in Kolchak's armies as IOTL and was shattered in the defeat, with a successor force fleeing into the Transbaikal and eventually making it into the Romanov remnant in the Far East under Tsar Roman. Some joined the Reds, others deserted or died while more departed through Vladivostok and joined up with the remnants of the Blue Army, which has transitioned into a significant force in the Polish national movement.

As regards the whole discussion on colonialism and the "ideal" way of ensuring long-term colonial success I personally think you would lose a lot of the benefits of having a colonial Empire under the model you laid out @Rufus and don't think it would be feasible at this point. Personally, I think that the problem in educating the elite was not so much in the education itself - elites educated in the west actually made up a vast majority of those supportive of a continuing colonial empire given the prominence they would be able to secure for themselves through it. I think the problem is actually in alienating that elite, in the casual and not-so-casual ways in which they had their positions and power undermined while they were the target of explicit racism. To use your framing device of advising how to retain a colonial empire, I actually think the goal should be to build class unity at the elite level between the ruling elites at home and in the colonies, educating them and incorporating them - making them directly complicit in the continuation of the empire. A colonial empire benefits a societal elite the most, and as such both at home and in the colonies the ruling elite would have an interest in ensuring that any democratic measures had their impact reduced as much as possible. having a combined elite from across the Empire, all working to protect and promote their own interests, would be the best way of ensuring a long-lasting empire. Couple that with efforts at turning the middle classes in the colonies and at home against each other while easing up on the explicit colonial rule, potentially replacing governors and other figure head positions with members of the integrated colonial elite to give the illusion of inclusiveness.

You are looking at this at the British/French/German Colonial Empire as a national project, when all indications would seem to be that it is only really the societal elite of those nations which enjoy the rewards of such an empire. Colonies are expensive for a state to run, but immensely lucrative for the elites who have vast landholdings, own mineral and property rights and use the colonies as captive markets for the sale of their products. There is a lot to be said of the neocolonialist model of decolonization where you permit the creation of ostensibly independent nations, turning over administration and local politics to local elites while retaining economic, social and military supremacy, outsourcing all the headaches of running a colonial empire to the locals while continuing to reap the rewards. Hell, the Danish welfare system wouldn't work if we weren't outsourcing all the scut work abroad. Cheap clothing, food, electronics and the various other benefits of a consumerist society are only possible in a globalized world where cheap labor and resources can be exploited outside the rigerous regulation of a European state. Getting off topic now...

...

Damnit. Got carried away...

Hope you can forgive me. :p
 
The problem with colonies is that most of them tended to be money losers. Yes, in some you had resource extraction but while early on you had basically small settlements dealing in fairly simple stuff the natives brought to you (spices, animal products like ivory, slaves) which did not require much expenditure to maintain things changed. To penetrate in to the interior roads had to be built (even bad ones), river steamers and support systems, railroads, etc. Then you needed court systems, civil service, public health (keeping the natives healthy provides workers and also protects the colonists), and much more. The number of colonies that provided significant geostrategical bases was actually pretty small compared to the total number. When you add it all up, most of the colonies were net money losers. Individuals made money, the governments did not. OTL after WWII given the financial situation of the colonial powers "poverty" overcame pride and when they could be seen as "having no choice" due to US decolonialization pressure and the Soviet "imperialism" trope, they bailed and bailed quickly.
 
I'm back and having the best of time recovering my giant backlog.
Wow. Just wow. These last few updates have been absolutely insane.

As I immerse myself back into reading, I wanted to quickly touch on the whole colonialism debate and then ask a couple of questions.

The one alternative to colonialism that has been found OTL, that gives you the same benefits of power projection without the net economic drain and having to constantly put down uprisings or face bad rap, is the offer of security guarantees. The USA have made it a core part of their policy and the USSR, now Russia, does the same with countries looking for alternative options. Having military bases everywhere gives you power projection without all the bad stuff that comes with colonialism, and has the advantage that it can be extended to both developed allies (the EU in our TL) and countries that would otherwise be colonies or backwaters.

ITTL it seems to me that several countries have the potential to develop this same alternative strategy, not just the USA - although the latter have considerably more economic resources unless tariffs and trade barriers come down in Europe. At least for now, we don't know what future developments will bring, or how many countries in crucial areas of the world risk going red (ITALY AHHHH, between that and A-H everyone must be scared shitless). Particularly powers with complicated access to their colonies or limited resources (Germany, Japan) could look into this solution to give themselves influence and power projection without overextending themselves, and it might be an alternative proposal in British circles to deal with some of their looming colonial problems after they threw everyone and their kitchen sink at Ireland.

It's also possible new solutions might be on the cards ITTL, beyond just the two that we experimented with OTL (three if you include the Portuguese attempt at making colonies an integral part of the country). Only Zulfurium knows.

Ok, I'll stop waffling and start asking!

1 - What is the situation in the UBD and Lithuania? Do they perceive recent events as a national liberation or a simple upgrade to a gentler master?
2 - We know how Germany, France and Austria have reacted to the Italian Civil War - what about the UK? Surely the risk presented by a revolutionary hostile power in the middle of the Mediterranean would be of great concern to them?
3 - What's the mood in the Arab kingdom? By which I mean, not so much the current events going on there, but how they view the peace settlement and the publication of the Allied treaties, especially since Lawrence is dead
4 - Ok, you might hate me for this question but, is Mexico affected or disturbed by the internal turmoils going on in the United States?

Back to my backlog I go!
 
I'm back and having the best of time recovering my giant backlog.
Wow. Just wow. These last few updates have been absolutely insane.

As I immerse myself back into reading, I wanted to quickly touch on the whole colonialism debate and then ask a couple of questions.

The one alternative to colonialism that has been found OTL, that gives you the same benefits of power projection without the net economic drain and having to constantly put down uprisings or face bad rap, is the offer of security guarantees. The USA have made it a core part of their policy and the USSR, now Russia, does the same with countries looking for alternative options. Having military bases everywhere gives you power projection without all the bad stuff that comes with colonialism, and has the advantage that it can be extended to both developed allies (the EU in our TL) and countries that would otherwise be colonies or backwaters.

ITTL it seems to me that several countries have the potential to develop this same alternative strategy, not just the USA - although the latter have considerably more economic resources unless tariffs and trade barriers come down in Europe. At least for now, we don't know what future developments will bring, or how many countries in crucial areas of the world risk going red (ITALY AHHHH, between that and A-H everyone must be scared shitless). Particularly powers with complicated access to their colonies or limited resources (Germany, Japan) could look into this solution to give themselves influence and power projection without overextending themselves, and it might be an alternative proposal in British circles to deal with some of their looming colonial problems after they threw everyone and their kitchen sink at Ireland.

It's also possible new solutions might be on the cards ITTL, beyond just the two that we experimented with OTL (three if you include the Portuguese attempt at making colonies an integral part of the country). Only Zulfurium knows.

Ok, I'll stop waffling and start asking!

1 - What is the situation in the UBD and Lithuania? Do they perceive recent events as a national liberation or a simple upgrade to a gentler master?
2 - We know how Germany, France and Austria have reacted to the Italian Civil War - what about the UK? Surely the risk presented by a revolutionary hostile power in the middle of the Mediterranean would be of great concern to them?
3 - What's the mood in the Arab kingdom? By which I mean, not so much the current events going on there, but how they view the peace settlement and the publication of the Allied treaties, especially since Lawrence is dead
4 - Ok, you might hate me for this question but, is Mexico affected or disturbed by the internal turmoils going on in the United States?

Back to my backlog I go!

Great to have you back, hope the exams went well!

As to your questions:

1) The UBD (majority population) is probably the most dissatisfied with the situation and largely view the Germans as overbearing assholes. This is mostly due to their rather significant backing of the Baltic Germans - including in trade, education and a variety of other measures. The Baltic Germans are very happy with the German backing and have resecured their position as the UBD elite. Given the rather harsh treatment of particularly the Latvians, relations aren't exactly happy. In Lithuania the attitude is quite different, with the Germans largely viewed as (overbearing) protectors, who have helped Lithuania achieve national liberations. There are some reservations, and political divisions over the relationship with the Germans, but by and large the Lithuanians are quite pleased with how things have played out.

2) The British were the primary backers of the Royalist Italians until they decided to cancel all their debts. The new Liberal government has strong British backing, with arms, loans and supplies provided quite liberally. They are quite opposed to the Fascists but view the Communists as the greater menace. The improving Anglo-French relationshipp should also open up opportunities for cooperation on that front.

3) The Hashemites (who have emerged as the dominant power) view the British as lying assholes who cannot be trusted. The continued British occupation of Palestine is viewed as an irrevocable stain on their relationship. Basically, they hate the British. The Germans are viewed as an ally of expedience, but are widely distrusted for their connection to the Ottomans. However, with the defeat of the Saudis, the Hashemites are definitely on the rise and expect to come to dominate the peninsula.

4) I am unsure of how precisely it will be impacting Mexico, but it does definitely have an impact. At the moment I am looking at the Cristeros War with some interest but I remain uncertain of what precisely I want to do with it.

Next update is ready and I should be posting it soon.
 
Update Twenty-One: Imperial Turmoil
Imperial Turmoil

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Delegates at the Imperial Conference of 1920

The Challenges of Dominion

The Great War fundamentally weakened and undermined the British Empire, placing it under incredible pressure as the propaganda and course of the war, with its appeals to the rights of nations and self-determination created a common political language with which to make claims against London. Against this backdrop each protest vindicated others in their common appeal to the importance of this moment in history. At the same time the twofold calamities of inflation and deflation swept through the colonial economy. As the cost of living surged, it was matched by boiling labor unrest from Winnipeg to Bombay. In November 1919, facing a doubling of prices, stevedores in Trinidad demanded a 25 percent wage increase and the eight-hour day. In Sierra Leone in July 1919, the fivefold increase in the price of rice sparked unprecedented strikes. In southern Rhodesia wartime inflation left the workforce barefoot and ragged, triggering strikes amongst railway workers, miners and public servants. Britain found itself struggling both to overcome resistance to its imperial rule and to mobilise the internal resources necessary to uphold its power. The international legitimacy and the strategic rationale of the empire were both in doubt as never before. The empire was to survive the crisis, but the challenge it had faced was like nothing it had ever experienced before.

Among the first efforts to resolve these issues was the calling of an Imperial Council near the end of the Conference Year to negotiate British relations with its dominions, most significantly those on the Pacific Rim. At the heart of the issue lay the safety and security of the British Empire as the Anglo-Japanese neared its expiration date and American pressure to prevent an extension of the alliance grew alongside growing Anglo-American acrimony over the struggle in Ireland and at the Copenhagen Conference. A variety of approaches to Pacific stability and security were discussed at the council and took shape alongside the Asiatic settlement of the Copenhagen Treaty. It was in this context that the Japanese diplomatic victory in securing all of the German Pacific Isles excepting Samoa and the main island of New Guinea provoked so much rancor in Imperial ranks. The immense sacrifices of the ANZACs at Gallipoli, in Egypt, the Palestine and on the Western Front, were widely viewed to have been wasted by the British who, while securing German New Guinea, had let the wolf in house when they accepted Japanese and American gains in the Pacific, which were sufficient to place Australia directly in the line of fire should it come to war with either power.

Among the options discussed at the Imperial Council were the establishment of a major naval base in Singapore, which met with general approval, and the creation of a fleet. The British were firmly in favour of a deal in which the Dominions, including India, Australia and New Zealand, would pay for, man and maintain half of a fleet based in Singapore while the British provided the other half as well as the leadership of such a fleet. This was felt by all of the dominions to be a gross overreach by the British and, while accepting the idea of a half Dominion-manned navy, refused to subject it to British leadership. The issue expanded considerably and there was a great deal of back and forth on the issue, but eventually the Dominions were able to assert their power in this exchange. The result was that the British reduced their commitments to the Pacific Fleet to one third of the total but left the fleet under Dominion leadership. However, this concession was sufficient to spur Lloyd George to renew the Anglo-Japanese Alliance into the post-war period, to the outrage of the Australasians and relief on the part of the Royal Navy which had expressed doubts about the effectiveness of a Dominion-led navy. The renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance coincided with the generally degenerating relationship with the Americans in the first few years of the post-war period and simply became yet another source of animosity between the two war-time allies (1).

During this period, preparations for the construction of a Channel Tunnel were also begun, but the cost estimates for the project soon proved prohibitive and while work would continue on the planning and mapping of the project, neither the Lloyd George nor the Bonar Law government proved particularly open to beginning actual work - partly due to the cost associated with the project and partly due to the relatively acrimonious Anglo-French relations during both Premierships. With Austen Chamberlain's ascension to the Premiership this changed, as his Francophilia pushed the Channel to the forefront of government policy and secured considerable French backing for the project, with initial construction work begun in early 1924 to considerable fanfare in both France and Britain. In fact, the ascension of Chamberlain led to a general warming of the Anglo-French relationship and resulted in cooperative approaches to European affairs in a particularly critical period as the chaos engulfing Europe began to calm (2).

Although inflation was destabilizing, when deflation began in 1920 that too exacted a price. In West Africa the bursting of a post-war commodity bubble drove local businessmen into the ranks of the Pan African Congress. As the sterling rebounded from its lows against the dollar, gold prices plunged. The empire’s main gold producers, the mines of the South African Rand, faced a devastating blow to their corporate balance sheets. By the time the British government shifted back onto an inflationary track, much of the damage had already been done. With wages being slashed and the white workforce diluted with black labor, on 10th March 1922 the white miners of the Rand rose in rebellion. Drawing on both Boer military traditions and the recent world war experience of veterans, the strike commandos fought government forces in semi-conventional pitched battles involving trenched positions in the worker stronghold of Fordsburg. Although a futile clash, it expressed a desire for an order in which white workers would be considered of equal importance to other social classes composing the white community and guaranteed protection against the impoverishing notion of exploitative capitalism. To deal with the uprising, which at its peak involved tens of thousands of well-armed commandos, Prime Minister Smuts sent 20,000 troops, artillery, tanks and the air force to bomb the strikers back to work.

Following the end of hostilities amongst the belligerent powers, the colonial governments of Africa, European concessionary companies, and white settlers, traders, and investors rapidly resumed seeking financial returns on investments made in Africa. Throughout Africa, the main resource was agriculture. Economic development therefore required agricultural development. As indigenous Africans throughout the continent had been gaining expertise in local agriculture and understood the ecosystems and seasonal climate changes in their respective regions of origin, they were often best positioned to adopt and expand on the new crops and new techniques to raise yields and develop new exports. The suppression of strikes in 1913 and 1914, the concomitant radicalisation of white labour, as well as the austere economic conditions in the gold mine industry during the war years, would have a profound and irreversible impact on the white South African labour movement. In July 1921 the Communist Party of South Africa, which would on paper strive towards a non-racial South African proletariat, was founded in Cape Town setting the stage for future clashes.

In the years following the Great War, a complex array of African initiatives continued, while simultaneously undergoing changes informed by the realities of colonial rule. The majority of Africans accepted the reality of the colonial situation and worked within it while the colonies remained in what was termed a state of emergency throughout the early post-war era. The African strategies varied greatly with regard to their position within the colonial situation but the vast majority preferred a minimum of contact with the colonial institutions. In cash crop and plantation areas, the involvement of the local population with the colonial state was generally higher, though even in these cases most of the social and economic activities were organized by the Africans among themselves. A small but growing number of new elites who had received formal education and worked in colonial administration gained increasingly more influence. Some groups, like the Duala in Cameroon and the African-Brazilians in Togo, continued a tradition of political autonomy and agency long predating the colonial presence. The principle of self-determination as first presented by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson stood in opposition to the agenda of the colonial powers and caused considerable troubles. It introduced a new rhetoric into the context of colonialism and necessitated new justification strategies for colonialism. These new institutional discourses and strategies also opened up opportunities for colonial subjects, with many Africans working within the colonial system to support, use and subvert it. Theirs were not, however, unprecedented strategic choices but rather ones that dated back well into the 19th century which were being adapted to the new post-war world (3).


The defeat and destruction of the Canadian Expeditionary Force during Operation GEORG was an unprecedented disaster for the young Canadian Dominion which brought the North American dominion to its knees. Following the defeat and capture of most of the CEF, the Canadians had been left to pick up the pieces. Luckily, the Conscription campaign of 1917 had already arranged for the recruitment of considerable forces which formed an instrumental part of Allenby's forces in northern France in 1919, fighting under the leadership of General Louis Lipsett who had been given overall command following the loss of so many prominent Canadian commanders, most significantly Arthur Currie himself. The end of the war and demobilisation which followed saw the Canadian forces return under a cloud of despair as many thousands of Prisoners of War were released, including Currie. There was considerable bitterness regarding British leadership and while Lipsett himself was widely respected and even admired, the fact that the Canadian Currie had been succeeded by a British commander as C-in-C of the CEF was widely viewed as an example of British snobbery and a disparagement of Canadian courage and ability.

These factors, alongside the successive waves of labor unrest which rocked Canada late in the war and in its immediate aftermath, combined to create considerable discontent at British rule and led to a distancing of Canada from Britain itself. Rural protest shifted into political action with the formation of farmers’ parties both provincially and federally. Farmers’ parties came to power in Ontario and Alberta, and nationally, the new Progressive Party won seventy-five seats in the 1921 election while organised labor, which had become increasingly radicalised during the war, erupted in a nationwide wave of strikes in 1919, most significantly with the Winnipeg General Strike which paralysed the city for several weeks. There were other strains as well, along class and gender lines, over prohibition, woman’s suffrage, and efforts to implement moral reform such as temperance or, as others saw it, moral regulation. As the bonds of Empire diminished, they increasingly expressed this new nationalism in more North American terms. But this nationalism was not shared by all Canadians; although calm had been restored in Quebec, national unity remained strained and French Canadians increasingly began to identify themselves as Quebecois. Thus, as Canadians began to memorialise, interpret, and understand the war over the following decades it was clear that they did not all remember the war in the same way.

The hope of Prime Minister Robert Borden and others that the ruling Union Party would reflect and capitalise on this new sense English-Canadian nationalism was never realised and the Union Government failed to achieve the cohesion necessary to ensure its survival and soon after the Armistice, Unionist Liberals began breaking ranks with the wider party. It was a party of English-Canadians that had run almost solely on winning the war, and there were too many groups in Canadian society who were opposed to it, including people whose votes had been taken away temporarily in 1917. The 1921 election would see a Liberal-Progressive government rise out of the chaos, while support for the Unionist party fractured back into its constituent parts, most prominently the Conservative Party, leading to the rise of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King on a very progressive platform of government spending, most significantly on the Prairie Region and the construction of a series of Canals, mirroring the inflationary policies of the British government and causing trouble with the Americans (4).

It took over a year for the men of the Australian Imperial Force to return home. This was, for many of these citizen-soldiers, a time of frustration. They were returning to a society that, especially for those who had enlisted early in the war, was greatly changed from the one left behind. Such changes were experienced at the individual level. The war had been unkind to the Australian economy and jobs were scarce as the country experienced a wave of strikes as unions sought to make up for lost wages and conditions. Parallel systems of welfare had also emerged by the 1920s: one for ordinary people and one for returned soldiers. Before the war, Australia had been developing a rudimentary welfare state; afterwards, this project faltered so far as ordinary civilians were concerned. Returned soldiers were a significant presence in right-wing organisations and paramilitaries formed during the post-war years to fight “the enemy within”, such as union militants, unemployed workers, Irish, Germans and Communists. These secretive organisations were often led by very wealthy businessmen, sometimes ex-senior army officers, who had much to lose in the event of a social breakdown. They drew much of their support from the countryside, but were largely directed from the city offices of their leaders.

The war brought a phase of Australian development to a close, helping to produce a more repressive, pessimistic, and inward-looking society. There was now a tendency among some intellectuals to regard modern European artistic and literary movements as a foreign infection. Art which did not express the nation’s soul was inferior; conservative landscape painting was held up as the style and subject best fitted for this role. The economy slowly stabilized, although demand for many of the products that Australia had to offer the world was precarious and unemployment would never drop below six percent for the remainder of the post-war years and was usually much higher. Still, by the mid-1920s, many Australians were beginning to enjoy a greater comfort than they had previously known: there were new household appliances, car ownership was spreading, the radio was becoming central to home entertainment while the cinema opened up to Australians a wider, more exotic, and more glamorous world. These comforts and pleasures were not spread evenly. It would be a long time before car ownership became common among the working classes, while Aboriginal people of the 1920s remained marginalized and often at the mercy of bureaucrats who controlled almost every aspect of their lives. Such officials were soon advocating the whitening of the population by a program of controlled mating between mixed race indigenous women and white men. Meanwhile, children were taken from their families and installed in institutions to prepare them for a lowly place in mainstream, or white, society.

The rise of a new force in politics at the end of the war, the Country Party, resulted in the fall of William Morris Hughes as prime minister at the beginning of 1923 and the emergence of a coalition between a largely urban-based Nationalist Party, led by Stanley Melbourne Bruce, and the Country Party under the leadership of Earle Page. Post-war Australia was inevitably caught up to some extent in the turbulence and turmoil that occurred throughout the societies that had participated in the Great War. The scars afflicting society itself were evidence beyond such calculations. A relatively united and cohesive young nation found itself more divided and less confident about its future as a small and largely white country sheltering under a somewhat more tattered British imperial umbrella (5).

Footnotes:

(1) With the German fleet still afloat, the British are not able to make the decision they did IOTL to shift their Home Fleet to Singapore in case of war, and as such are forced into making some sort of concession. IOTL the Dominions were unwilling to go for a British-led Dominion navy based in Singapore and I don't see any reason for that to have changed ITTL. However, there were some efforts to ensure Dominion leadership as a possible concession which turned out to be unacceptable to the British. With the greater domestic requirements ITTL, the British are not able to simply break with the Dominion wishes and as such end up compromising. However, there is widespread distrust in British naval circles of the effectiveness of such a fleet and pressure to extend the Anglo-Japanese Alliance thus grows. IOTL the Americans ended up directly threatening the British into compliance, resulting in a jettisoning of the alliance, however ITTL the relationship between the two powers is already sufficiently bad that such threats ring hollow. The Americans have already done what they would be willing to do to rein in the British without success. This allows the alliance to go forward.

(2) Austen Chamberlain's rise to power really marks a sea change in British politics and will be remembered quite fondly for years to come as an end to the chaos of the immediate post-war period. His ascension will widely come to be seen as the end of the post-war crises which have gripped Britain and the start of Britain's return to prosperity. The rebuilding of Anglo-French relations also cannot be underestimated both for the level of security and stability it brings to both France and Britain, but also for the impact of this alliance in foreign affairs - most significantly in the Mediterranean as we will come to see.


(3) Events in Africa play out at least partially like IOTL. The main difference here is that without the implementation of LoN mandates and the vast articulated language of colonial administration that emerged from the Versailles Conference does not do so to anything like the same sort of degree as IOTL. In contrast to OTL the situation remains remarkably like the pre-war world in Africa and in contrast to OTL the path towards decolonisation seems a lot longer. This is primarily because of the lack of LoN mandates. The LoN mandates became forerunners for decolonisation and regions of considerable development and exploration of native rule which do not exist ITTL. However, like IOTL, the great dependence on colonial subjects during the Great War has left an indelible mark on particularly the French colonial Empire - including, as has been mentioned previously, the settling of colonial subjects in France as part of the reconstruction efforts and veterans settling down.

(4) The Great War leaves a far more bitter taste in the mouths of the Canadians than IOTL, even more so than with the British, as a result of the effective destruction of the CEF in Flanders. Without their prominent role in the Hundred Days Campaign, the Canadians remain respected fighters but don't reach anything close to their mythical status of OTL - particularly in British ranks. The convulsions in Canada follow OTL generally but see a greater backlash against the Unionists which prompts stronger returns for the Progressives and as a result King's first premiership sees inflationary rather than deflationary policies adopted. This greater growth in Progressive power is also sufficient to keep the Thomas Crerar, the Progressive leader, in politics for longer, giving a stronger voice to the Progressives in the coalition.

(5) This is actually not too different from Australia's OTL development in the post-war period and largely mirrors that process in a number of different ways. The shift towards conservative, insular politics with the exception of defence politics makes a lot of sense under the circumstances and beyond the global events of the TL, the only real difference for the Australians is the prolonged war - which has little direct impact outside of resulting in more casualties, and the failure to secure any pacific isles outside of the main island of Papua New Guinea. Both of these shifts should just exacerbate OTL tendencies anyway. I haven't gotten into events in New Zealand ITTL yet, but they also largely mirror OTL given how few changes directly impacting them there have been so far.


Gandhi_Kheda_1918.jpg

Mohandas Gandhi, A Leader in The Indian Swaraj Movement

The Shades of Colonialism

The scale of the challenge to British rule in India had become increasingly clear in 1916 when Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant launched their Home Rule agitation. In 1918 the promise of the Montagu Declaration, named for the Secretary of State for India Edwin Samuel Montagu, which outlined a path towards gradual Home Rule, and the containment of the threatening monetary crisis had served to hold unrest at bay. But, within the year, London quite suddenly found itself facing a mass movement on an imposing scale. In 1916 the crowds had numbered in the tens of thousands but by 1919 the anti-British movement ran into the millions. The new energy of the Indian National Congress and the Home Rule League no doubt owed much to the common denominator of economic distress. However, it suited British administrators in the Raj to blame the upsurge of rebellion and protest in 1919 on economic factors. If it was hunger and frustration that were driving the Indians to revolt, then economic remedies would suffice. If a rising cost of living produced unrest, then deflation was the cure. Since before the war, Indian nationalists had been demanding the gold standard and in February 1920 London announced that they would have their wish. At the height of the post-war boom, the rupee was established on a gold standard. Given the exaggerated rate chosen by the British, the result was not stability but a monetary squeeze, which by the summer of 1920 had drained India’s currency reserves and triggered unrest amongst the business community. For the first time the Bombay bourgeoisie swung squarely behind the nationalist movement. If the aim was to depoliticize economic issues, the strategy backfired. In any case, the tendency of the Raj administration to explain away unrest as economically motivated was itself part of their failure to come to terms with the true scale of the rebellion.

Compounded by religious feeling and local resentments, melded with the radical energy of millions of dissatisfied students, workers and peasants, the uprising against the Raj was a whirlwind of disparate elements. Economic grievances were one factor, but huge masses of the Indian population were now moved to political protest by outrage at the injustices of British rule. In 1918, to persuade the conservative British provincial governors to accept the liberal provisions of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, a committee had been appointed under Sir Sidney Rowlatt to consider the need for wide-ranging post-war security measures. In January 1919 the government of India proposed to extend its emergency wartime powers indefinitely. India would, in effect, remain in a state of siege until the war could be brought to an end, and potentially beyond that. This was initially accepted quite widely, though with considerable distaste, but as the Armistice was signed in June 1919 and the Conference Year came under way with no end in sight to wartime rule, the Indian populace grew increasingly angry. In late September, Bombay and Lahore were in uproar and Ahmedabad was under full martial law. On the 8th of October there began a wave of sweeping preventative arrests in Punjab, which was met with violent resistance, culminating in the death of three officers at Shahdara on the doorstep of Lahore. Widespread fears that Lahore might explode into open violence was sufficient to finally force an easing of the situation, ending the preventative arrests and prompting a push towards ending wartime government and the revocation of the Rowlatt Act which had been used to justify the preemptive arrests (6).


As if the outrage in the Hindu community was not enough, the British in late 1919 faced another threat. Safeguarding the Muslim minority population had long provided the British with a rationale for their presence in India. In 1916 this had been thrown into question by the Lucknow Agreement between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. What gave Gandhi his pivotal role was his unique ability to orchestrate this unprecedented coalition, uniting Hindu and Muslim against the British. In November 1919 he attended the all-India Khilafat conference, held by the Khalifat movement, a growing social and political movement energising Muslim India which had turned against British rule as a result of the war with the Ottomans, in Delhi as the only representative of Hindu India. It was on that stage that he first advocated for India the strategy of non-cooperation he had first developed to protest anti-Asian racism in South Africa. At the same time Gandhi’s mass following transformed the staid assembly of the Indian National Congress. The Nagpur Congress of December 1920 was attended by a clamorous throng of 15,000 delegates. At Gandhi’s insistence, the Congress was reorganised so as to give recognition to the village as the ‘basic institution’ of Indian communal life. The effect of this was to empower the national leadership headed by Gandhi at the expense of the regional elites. Nor was gradual change any longer on the agenda. To the tumultuous applause of the assembly Gandhi promised self-rule, Swaraj, within the year. To achieve that goal Congress resolved to adopt not only constitutional methods, but any "legitimate and peaceful means".

Whilst challenging British rule, Gandhi’s insistence on non-violence played on the liberal aspirations still cherished by Secretary of State for India Montagu and the new Viceroy, Lord Reading. In December 1919 the Government of India Bill passed both houses of the British Parliament intact. With some reluctance the British Parliament approved the separate electorates agreed between Congress and the Muslim League. There was still a hope in Indian ranks that as long as Montagu's reforms were implemented properly and in a timely manner that cooperation might still be possible. The first Indian General Election, as mandated by the Montagu Declaration, would go forward in late 1920 with both Indian Congress and Muslim League backing under the constrained franchise set out for the reforms. The resultant elections saw the British-aligned Democratic Party secure 32 of the 106 seats, while the Congress captured 44, the League 21 and Europeans 9, the remainder going to a variety of lesser parties who mostly coalesced behind the British.

However, when it came to forming an actual government the issue proved considerably more contentious than anyone had initially thought they would be. At the heart of the issue lay the specific construction of the government coalition and who would lead the Imperial Legislative Council, provoking divisions between the League and Congress. Despite Gandhii's good relationship with the Muslims of India, this would eventually prove insufficient for Aga Khan III, the most prominent leader of the League at the time, and with the British stepping back from their overweening conduct following Shahdara there was a question of what benefit there would be to the League in backing the majority-Hindu Congress. This was further exacerbated by the offer of Hari Singh Gour, the most prominent figure in the Democratic Party, of a coalition between the League, the Democratic Party and a couple minor parties. After weighing the possible choices, the League eventually accepted this offer and joined actively in backing the Democratic Party's rule of the Imperial Legislative Council. This was mirrored in the regional elections, which saw a swathe of Brahmin-caste moderate elites or their Muslim counterparts secure the majority in every regional election, further strengthening pro-British sentiments.

This greatly weakened the League-Congress alliance established by Gandhi through the unified Khalifat and Swaraj movements. However, while these developments occurred in the political realm, the reality of the situation in India would prove to be dominated by Gandhi's Swaraj movement. For the British and Indian elite alike, it was a bewildering new world. Gandhi’s vision of Swaraj was in many ways deliberately utopian. It appealed to a future freed not only from the oppression of British rule, but from any modern state or economic order. It refused any vision of colonial development. It was at odds with the aspirations of the established nationalist elite and it was pilloried as absurdly anachronistic by India’s emerging Communist movement. Gandhi and his supporters were convinced that if sufficient pressure could be placed on the Indian government through a non-cooperation movement, then they would be able to force the transition of India towards dominion status.
The movement urged the use of khadi and other Indian materials as alternatives to those shipped from Britain while also urging people to boycott British educational institutions and law courts; resign from government employment; refuse to pay taxes; and forsake British titles and honours. Although this came too late to influence the framing of the new Government of India Act 1919, the movement enjoyed widespread popular support, and the resulting unparalleled magnitude of disorder presented a serious challenge to foreign rule. However, building through 1921 and into 1922 the movement took on an increasingly radicalised momentum which worried many moderates and several primary actors in the Khalifat movement who began to push for a distancing of the Khalifat movement from that of Swaraj (7).

On the 2nd of February 1922, volunteers participating in the Swaraj Movement protested against high meat prices in the marketplace of Chauri Chaura. The demonstrators were beaten back by local police while several of their leaders were arrested and put in the lockup at the Chauri Chaura police station. In response, a protest against the police was called for on the 4th of February, to be held in the local marketplace. On the 5th of February, approximately 3,000 protesters assembled and began marching towards the market at Chauri Chaura. They had gathered to picket a liquor shop in the market place where one of their leaders was arrested. In response, part of the crowd gathered in front of the local police station shouting slogans demanding the release of their leader. Armed police were dispatched to control the situation while the crowd marched towards the market and started shouting anti-government slogans where, in an attempt to frighten and disperse the crowd, the police fired warning shots into the air. This only agitated the crowd who began to throw stones at the police.

With the situation getting out of control, the Indian sub-inspector in charge ordered the police to open fire on the advancing crowd, killing three and wounding several others. However, rather than disperse the crowd, this threw them into a rage and in the ensuing chaos, the heavily outnumbered police fell back to the shelter of the ramshackle police station while the angry mob advanced. Infuriated by the gunfire into their ranks, the crowd set the police station ablaze, killing all of the Indian policemen and government messengers trapped inside. Most were burned to death, while those who attempted to escape the burning shack were killed by the crowd at the entrance to the station and had their bodies dumped back into the fire, leaving around 25 policemen and messengers dead. In response to the killing of the police, the British authorities declared martial law in and around Chauri Chaura. Several raids were conducted and hundreds of people were arrested.

Appalled at this course of events in the Swaraj movement, Gandhi went on a five-day fast as penance for what he perceived as his culpability in the bloodshed. In reflection, Gandhi felt that he had acted too hastily in encouraging people to revolt against the British Raj without sufficiently emphasizing the importance of non-violence and without adequately training the people to exercise restraint in the face of attack. A total of 228 people were brought to trial on charges of "rioting and arson" in conjunction with the Chauri Chaura affair, of these 6 died while in police custody while 172 were sentenced to death by hanging following conviction in a trial which lasted eight months. A storm of protest erupted over the verdicts, which were characterized as "legalized murder" by Indian Communist leader M.N. Roy, who called for a general strike of Indian workers but eventually backed down when the Allahabad High Court reviewed the death verdicts. Nineteen death sentences were confirmed and 110 were sentenced to prison for life, with the rest sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

As far as London was concerned Gandhi was now a wanted man, but even at this moment, at the urgent pleading of the Viceroy’s moderate Indian collaborators, Reading held back. Gandhi had to be arrested, but first the government of India should solidify its moral position by removing the basic grievance that had driven the Muslim population into Gandhi’s arms. As a result a press release condemning the violence and instability of the Swaraj movement was published, which at the same time sought to differentiate between the Khalifat and Swaraj movements. Portraying the Swaraj as an exclusively Hindu violent revolutionary movement, the government sought to distance Muslims from the movement with considerable success. Only then was Gandhi placed under arrest and sentenced to six years of imprisonment. The Chauri Chaura Incident marked the end of the Swaraj movement, which found its support from the All-India Congress evaporate and the Khalifat movement reject it. This marked the end of the disorder and disarray of the early 1920s and set India back onto the path originally outlined in the Montagu Declaration (8).

At the very end of the Great War, the man who had emerged as the leader of Egyptian nationalism, Sa’ad Pasha Zaghloul, a former Minister of Education and Minister of Justice, wavered on the edge of throwing Egypt into the abyss of open warfare. Originally a Patrician of the Egyptian ruling elite, had the threat of Egyptian nationalism remained confined to Zaghloul and his notable friends, imprisoning him or sidelining him might have been sufficient. However, over the winter of 1918–19 the cause gathered behind it an unprecedented popular coalition. By March 1919 the British faced a fully-fledged, but largely non-violent, popular uprising in which politics and economics were mingled together. The dislocation of the Egyptian economy caused by its incorporation into the imperial war effort was one of the driving forces of this unrest. Inflation was rampant as prices increased threefold and malnutrition rose to alarming levels. The cost of food hit the urban poor worst, but peasants too, who grew cotton for export, found themselves close to starvation. However, this was no mere food riot. It was the first time in modern Egyptian history that the whole of the native population had cooperated in a political movement.

By March 1919, with Cairo in turmoil and Zaghloul debating whether to press forward towards revolution, the situation seemed dire. Instead of cracking down, the British were increasingly pressed towards compromising with the nationalists given the costs of the war. Discussions on whether General Chetwode would have sufficient forces to turn south from Palestine to Egypt in order to suppress the unrest raged through the days as the Egyptian government found itself paralyzed by a nationwide civil service strike. In a symbolic display of national unity, Easter Sunday 1919 was celebrated jointly by Copts and Muslims. Following the signing of the Armistice of 16th June 1919, Zaghloul and his supporters began demanding a voice at the Copenhagen Conference, pressing for Egypt to be treated as an independent co-belligerent on the side of the Allies in the war, but were eventually forced to reduce their demands to being present as one of the dozens of national independence movements which skirted around on the edges of the Copenhagen Conference. While this delegation accomplished little tangible at the Conference itself, it did provide them with an important platform from which they were able to create worldwide attention to the plight of Egypt.

This would prove important for the events to follow, as the Wafd, the movement building up around Zaghloul, pressed for an acknowledgement of Egyptian independence, an end to martial law and a proper national reform programme. The British wavered on how to approach all this but as the costs of the war in Ireland grew ever greater through 1920 and 1921, Lloyd George's Coalition government became increasingly inclined towards compromise - particularly when it became clear that the Wafd were supportive of moderate progress, a reflection of the elite leadership of the movement and of Zaghloul himself. As was becoming clear, Egypt, while the nodal point of the entire British Empire, was not necessarily important to hold directly outside of a firm foothold in the Suez Canal Zone and in the Sudan. From these two regions, the British would be able to assert their power as needed in Egypt, but the independence movement was clearly growing so strong that open revolt would be difficult to defeat without immense costs. Given the recent British shift to deflationary policies and the ongoing conflict in Ireland this was deemed too much of a cost to be worth it.

The result was that in mid-1921, bare months before Lloyd George's fall from power, the Coalition government acknowledged Egyptian independence and pulled back its military presence to the Canal Zone and into the Sudan while reducing their presence in Egypt proper significantly, while sponsoring the liberal constitution being pushed forward by Zaghloul. The result was the Constitution of 1921 which coincided with the declaration of independence of the Kingdom of Egypt under King Faud I, leaving Egypt itself with internal autonomy to push forward with various reforms under the leadership of the swiftly elected Wafd, under the new parliamentary representative government system inaugurated with the constitution, and the leadership of Zaghloul as Egypt's first Prime Minister with an excess of 90 percent of the vote (9).

Footnotes:

(6) This is a very significant divergence in India which sees the Amritsar Massacre butterflied and avoids the killing of Europeans, which prompted the outcry that led to Dyer's dispatch to Amritsar and the bloodbath that followed. Instead, cooler heads prevail and a de-escalation of the situation is begun. This has a couple of major consequences, most significantly removing a major point of nationalist/independence movement myth building. There are plenty of other things to protest about the Raj government but by avoiding Amritsar, the relations with the Indian populace don't quite collapse to the degree of OTL. You also avoid the complete discrediting of the British Liberal Imperial vision which happened IOTL.


(7) There are a lot of divergences happening here which I think won't be generally recognisable unless someone has a pretty decent understanding of Indian events in the period, so please bear with me. The decision to rein in the Indian government, avoiding anything like the Amritsar Massacre, has a profound impact on the 1920 elections. IOTL the Congress and League both boycotted the elections and disbelieved British promises about the election due to the violence both at Amritsar and its aftermath. Furthermore, the Khalifat movement moved firmly in an anti-British direction following the Treaty of Sévres with Turkey, which deeply wounded British-Muslim relations, a key pillar of British power in India. Neither of these two events occur ITTL which means that both the League and Congress participate in the elections and Indian radicalisation is considerably weakened. Most importantly, the crucial alliance between the Khalifat/League and Congress/Swaraj are much weaker and troubled ITTL. While the League-Congress alliance collapses in the immediate after the elections, the Khalifat-Swaraj alliance continues if with a growing number of reservations on the Muslim side. The main thing to draw from this is that Indian support across the religious divide for the British is higher than IOTL, the Khalifat-Swaraj alliance and the religious harmony it was meant to promote are considerably weakened and the Swaraj movement as a whole is filled with fewer moderate voices as a result.

(8) The Chauri Chaura Incident is almost entirely OTL, though with slightly more protesters and killed Policemen. The immediate aftermath is also largely the same as IOTL. The major divergence comes in how the British deal with Gandhi and the Muslim contingent and has considerable consequences for the British approach to India. IOTL, the situation in Turkey and across the Middle East was a key component in Muslim dissatisfaction and anger at the British, but ITTL none of those factors play into their decision-making. Without the humiliation of Sévres and the dismemberment of the Middle East, the Anglo-Muslim relationship in India is a lot less fraught. This means that instead of Montagu sending out a Liberal-skewed press release calling for the end of Greek occupation of Turkish lands, the restoration of the Caliph and Muslim control of the Holy Sites, and getting dismissed by the Conservative government in London as happened IOTL, the Liberals are able to keep control of India policy and continue their devolution efforts in the region. They are thus able to get away with condemning the Swaraj movement as a Hindu movement and blaming Gandhi for the violence, while acting like the Muslims played no part. This has some profound consequences for India and the British Empire. This also has the effect of shattering the relationship between the League and Congress, bringing the Muslims into alignment with the British and dealing a grievous blow to the Congress.

(9) Egypt is where the extra costs of British focus on Ireland really comes to bear. In contrast to OTL, Zaghloul is never sent into exile because the extension of the Great War allows him more time to build greater support. Rather than imprisoning him, the British are forced to make compromises and he is present at Copenhagen. This brings considerable prestige and attention to Egypt which also restrains the British in how they react to the large nationalist movement. The effect of all this is to skip much of the chaotic, costly and harmful back and forth the British had between 1918 and 1923 over how precisely to deal with the Egyptians, leading them to skip straight to the point and allow for the OTL progressive constitution. In general, the fact that the liberal vision of empire isn't discredited and the British don't fall into repression in India and Egypt means that particularly Egypt comes out of all this extremely well. There is nowhere near the same level of British intervention in Egyptian domestic matters, with the result that a firm base for parliamentary democracy is established there. This all also combined to result in a much stronger Empire in the Middle East and India.


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American Troops March Through the Streets of Vladivostok

An Ending? A Beginning?

While much of Russia east of the Urals found itself consumed by the horrific famine of 1922-1923, in Siberia the situation remained relatively fluid. allowing the Siberian Whites to exploit the situation. Having captured Omsk in early 1922, the Whites had spent the first few months of 1922 building up their rear elements to support the long logistical network which they now sat at the end of, while preparing for a push into the Urals. This was a gambit which had led to Kolchak's fall from grace not even three years previously, and few were eager to repeat those mistakes. However, these stretched supply lines, particularly once they began transporting the various resources of the AMA on behalf of the United States government, soon proved a target for the numerous desperate peasants, refugees and bandits who were struggling to survive along the route. It did not take long for them to start attacking trains across the length and breadth of Siberia. As the starving masses fled the Volga, they placed increasing pressures on the lands they passed through, provoking bloody violence in their desperation for food, which in turn triggered a rippling cascade of new refugees. Just as the final preparations for the White's next thrust west were coming to an end, Omsk found itself inundated with starving farmers who placed immense pressure on the Whites own ability to feed their troops and support elements.

While the Yekaterinburg Reds' forces essentially disintegrated under the pressure, unable to even feed their own soldiery or the refugees with them, the Whites were able to hold the line, if barely. Further south, in the hellish conflict gripping Central Asia between Bukhara and Khiva, the refugee streams quickly found themselves subsumed in the war effort, with refugee soldiers fighting on either side for food while those unable to provide some sort of gain to a faction were often killed out of hand or driven away without regard. The Khivans in particular, already experienced in dealing with refugee streams from their inundation by primarily Armenian and Assyrian refugees late in the Great War, proved adept in this and were able to minimise the strain on their system while redirecting starving peasants eastward to Bukhara. Under ever-growing pressure, Bukhara finally collapsed under the strain in late 1922 in response to depleted food stocks and a Khivan attack which overran their anemic frontlines, sending another wave of refugees rushing northward towards the lands of the Siberian Whites. At this point, while the refugee stream from the west was increasingly becoming manageable, this new wave from the south proved too much for the Whites to bear and the decision was taken to undertake a strategic retreat in order to cut down the sheer scale of the logistical efforts that were required. As a result, the Siberian Whites pulled back to Novosibirsk with American promises of aid for the settlement of refugees.

Over the course of 1923, the refugee crisis in the east would slowly abate as American food stocks helped keep the population alive while they were settled across the region. This mass-scale population movement would ultimately see the region east of Novosibirsk, most notable around Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Chita grow immensely, increasing the region's population by nearly one-and-a-half million inhabitants from its pre-civil war population. As things began to settle down in the latter half of 1923, with the first good harvest on the basis of the AMA and Pomgol's work in Siberia, the Yekaterinburg Reds and Siberian Whites were slowly able to reestablish their forces and press forward into previously abandoned regions. However, these forces were surprisingly anemic and lacked much of the vigor of pre-famine forces. After fighting a few skirmishes and a couple of minor battles by the standards of the pre-famine period, the two forces disengaged and the border settled down around fifty miles west of Novosibirsk. To the south, the Khivan Khanate and its ruling class of Caucasian Clique leaders extended their regime far into Central Asia, eventually running into the forces of the Chinese Xinjiang Clique, who they skirmished with briefly before the border settled down once more. By early 1924 negotiations had begun between the Siberian Whites and the Yekaterinburg Reds for a truce, neither side believing themselves able to emerge victorious from any further clashes and wishing to lick their wounds in preparation for future clashes (10).


In the west, Pomgol would serve as the ignition for diplomatic interactions and communications between the deeply opposed factions of the Russian Civil War even as the famine and its associated wave of refugees put incredible pressure on the factional governments. In Yekaterinburg, large portions of the population were forced to near-starvation while the Upper Volga, which had once been tamed by Kaganovich, was decimated. The cities of the Urals, already considerably diminished in population, were given another blow as the rural-urban exchange mechanisms ground to a halt and forceful requisitioning by the central government turned up very little food stock. The Pomgol assistance would go, above anywhere else, to the Yekaterinburg Reds who experienced considerable disillusionment in their own ranks as the inability of Trotsky's government to deal with the crisis itself became increasingly clear. However, with aid from the Muscovites and a flood of international aid funnelled through Pomgol, Trotsky and his supporters were able to right the ship by the end of 1923.

The crisis would see the Muscovites emerge as the dominant partner of the United Front and saw Trotsky's Yekaterinburg Reds reduced considerably in power and authority - increasingly reliant on Muscovite aid in most of their endeavours. It was this dependence which forced Trotsky and the rest of the Yekaterinburg Reds to accept the Muscovite push towards peace with the Don Whites, eventually extending to the Siberian Whites as well. The Muscovite reasoning for this peace effort was first and foremost a belief that a continuation of the current conflict could only favour their enemies. By presenting themselves as peace-makers, the Communists were able to weaken the widespread criticism of their leadership, which focused primarily on their extension of the war far into the post-war period. However, for them to have any chance of success the Communists would be reliant on a Don White wish to accomplish the same. On this issue it would prove the growing costs of the war for Germany and a German shift in attention towards events in Italy and Austria-Hungary which would prove most important.

With their German backers increasingly pressing for an end to the costly war effort in the east and war weariness on all parts, not to mention the weakening health of Brusilov, which brought succession to the forefront of the Don White political scene, it finally seemed that there might be a way to end the long and bitter civil war. While all parties knew that any peace which left factional rivals in place would likely be little more than a temporary truce, the needs of the moment were sufficient to see a push on all sides for peace. Pomgol played a vital role in ensuring that the opposing factions became aware of these changes in attitude, and it would be Gorky who made the first entreaties to the Don Whites. Over the course of 1923, as relief efforts led to increasing cross-factional interactions, the push towards peace grew ever greater. Finally, in early 1924 this push for peace saw tangible results when delegates from Moscow, Rostov and Yekaterinburg all met near Petrograd at the former Imperial palace complex of Tsarskoye Selo, in the magnificent Catherine Palace (11).

The Catherine Palace Conference began on the 22nd of February 1924 and initially was comprised of three delegations, one from each Red faction and the Don Whites, as well as a German and a Finnish delegation alongside a number of observers from various interested nations - most significantly France, Britain and Sweden. However, in early March a fourth delegation led by Boris Savinkov arrived on behalf of the Romanov-Ungern Siberian Whites from the United States, to the angry whispers of all other Russian delegations, alongside American representatives, feeling they would be able to get a better result from the joint negotiations than in a one-on-one scenario with the Reds. Despite multiple efforts, the Khanate of Khiva and the Caucasian Clique with it were unable to secure access for their own delegation, and they were thus forced to rely on securing a couple posts in the Muscovite delegation, held by Mikoyan and Kirov, in return for a promise to remain in the Third International and as part of the United Red Front.

Thus, by the middle of March 1924 the negotiations could truly come under way. While the Khivan-Siberian-Yekaterinburgian borders would remain extremely amorphous and unclear, becoming a constant source of conflict in the post-war period, a degree of clarity not previously established was created in the East, with Novosibirsk serving as the key dividing point between White and Red forces, near where the current frontlines were located, while the border with Khiva would eventually be settled along a line from the Caspian, stretching along the northern coast of the Aral Sea, before reaching Lake Balkash and ending at the easternmost edge of the Tien Shan mountain range. The right of transit for Red trade goods along the Trans-Siberian Railway was assured by the treaty, but the details remained murky and would continue to be a constant source of tension between Red and Whites factions in the region for years to come.

The negotiations in the west would prove somewhat more sedate than in the east but contained some surprising results. The vast majority of the negotiations would focus on settling the border between the Don Whites and Moscow Reds, a task of considerable difficulty. In the end the border would largely follow the frontlines as in the east, although the Don Whites would cede control of all lands east of the Volga to the Yekaterinburg Reds. From south of Saratov on the Volga, the border ran in an almost straight line to the Don south of Voronezh, from there to Chernigov north of Kiev before running to Pinsk, where the border ran into the German-Polish occupied territories of Belarus. This nearly straight line cut European Russian in half, leaving the south under White rule and the north under Muscovite leadership. Trade and diplomatic relations were mandated immediately, while right of passage along the various rivers that bisected the two factions were written into the treaty.

The focus next turned to the Muscovites' western and northern border where the Belarussian border was fixed on a line stretching north from Pinsk, with the southern portions going to the Kingdom of Poland and the northern parts to the Kingdom of Lithuania. It would be on the issue of Petrograd that a surprising development occurred. Since the German occupation of the city and its handover to White hands, the city had been in constant turmoil as the strong communist grass roots movement went underground and had continually provoked tension and outrage between the White rulership and the Red common populace, most people of White persuasions having fled abroad years earlier, and the new administration finding itself the target of bombings and assassinations on a consistent basis. The cost of garrisoning the city and keeping it pacified had increasingly ballooned out of all proportion with German investment in keeping the city secured. As a result, the negotiating team led by Graf von Kühlmann, called out of semi-retirement to aid in the negotiations given his expertise in dealing with the Russian Reds, proved amenable to surrendering control of the former Russian capital but looked to extract concessions where they could.

The most tangible results of these concessions would be securing Karelia and the Kola Peninsula for Finland, the partial restoration of German investments in Russia - although with the requirement that the Communist government be granted a stake alongside local workers and international investors in any investment. Further, the Muscovites were made to pledge to not construct any Baltic fleet. There were a vast variety of lesser dealings at the negotiations, but along this broader outline was the Tsarskoye Selo Treaty signed on the 14th of April 1924, bringing to an end the long and grueling Russian Civil War. Few believed the settlement more than a temporary reprieve, as the warring factions caught their breath and recovered from the last decade of constant warfare, but the settlement was an end to the bloody conflict which many had been praying for (12).


The signing of the Treaty of Tsarskoye Selo did not bring the fighting to an end, with continued skirmishes and raids through the rest of 1924, but it did mark the end of open conflict and finally allowed the various factions to turn their attentions to internal matters. This allowed the various regimes to deal with the hyperinflation of the war and to restore some measure of economic stability and security. The end of the Russian Civil War also allowed for the slow withdrawal of foreign forces, most prominently German and American in nature, although they were rapidly replaced by a vast number of advisors in the fields of economics, agriculture, governance and much else as two of the most powerful nations in the world sought to secure the factions they had chosen to back.

Trade was slowly restored, although particularly Muscovite fears that they would find themselves swamped by imports meant that careful control of all trade in and out of Red Russia was undertaken and anything that might threaten the rebuilding economies of Red Russia was kept at bay. The German trade and investment normalisation agreement with the Muscovites met with immense critique, particularly from French, American and British quarters, for the limitation on the agreement to a restoration of pre-war loans to Germany, not to the international community as a whole. Efforts at economically sanctioning the Muscovites found themselves stymied by German dominance of trade with Red Russia, a rapidly growing international market which complemented the pre-existing German economic dominance of Eastern Europe. Efforts at sanctioning the Germans for trading with the Muscovites while the Russian war loans remained unaddressed were undertaken, but ran into almost immediate difficulties when it became clear that German retaliatory measures would do at least as much damage as the sanctioning powers might be able to achieve and would threaten the tenuous prosperity that was beginning to blossom across much of Europe by the middle of the 1920s.

Despite initial hesitancy towards the Russian Communists, the end of active aid for revolutionary movements internationally, a concession secured by Central Committee Member Grigori Sokolnikov in the name of securing German aid for the weakened industry of Red Russia in early 1925, proved sufficient to end all questions on the matter. German technological aid streamed into Russia, while the reopening of communications between Moscow and Berlin meant that a flood of Russian art, cinema and music associated with the Poletkult movement became widely available in urban Germany, provoking a German cultural renaissance as the Poletkult movement's focus on the working classes proved wildly popular, particularly in Berlin and the Ruhr. From Berlin, these new cultural and artistic movements would spread throughout Europe, following German trade and investments into Eastern Europe and west into France, the Netherlands and Britain where it was met with varying degrees of interest.

Russia's return to peace and the restoration of its ties to the rest of the world, no matter how tenuous those were, would have a profound impact on the people of Muscovite Russia. In Siberia, the departure of American troops were eventually followed by those of Japan, whose new liberal government felt that their military investments in the region now had to be compensated by economic gains. As such, both American and Japanese investments in the Russian Far East grew exponentially in the post-civil war period and saw a wave of primarily Korean and Japanese migrants move northward to work in the growing industry of the region. With Tsar Roman largely disinterested in the day-to-day rule of the realm, active rule was left in the hands of Tsaritsa Olga Romanova, who proved extremely welcoming of both Japanese and American aid in whatever form it took. Soon after the signing of the Treaty of Tsarskoye Selo, Olga gave birth to a second daughter named Alexandra (13).

Footnotes:

(10) The major problem in Siberia is not, at least initially, famine, or at least nowhere near the degree of challenge it is further westward. However, their problem is instead a massive flood of starving refugees who rush out of Western Russia, mostly from the Urals and along the Volga, who seek food and safety in Siberia. To begin with there is enough available, but as the crisis rapidly escalates the requisite food stocks just to keep an army in the field prove insufficient and the entire region collapses into complete chaos. By pulling back to Novosibirsk, a decision pressed for by the Americans, the Whites under Ungern are able to shorten their supply lines and significantly ease the pressure on transports from further east while also extending the distance that refugees need to cover before they get to the Whites, reducing the number of people who survive the trek considerably and thereby lessening the burden on the Whites. The really interesting point here is the resettlement of many of these refugees in the Baikal region, greatly strengthening the population base on which the Whites can rely and providing them with a broad assortment of competencies from amongst this new settler population. The aforementioned cities grow considerably while the settled peasant population gets a major infusion as well. It is important to note that the famine has immense impacts on the military and administrative capabilities on all sides, significantly reducing the amount of forces available to all sides and completely exhausting them in many cases, leading to a push towards peace.

(11) Gasp! Is that progress I see? Yes, we are now moving firmly towards an end to the Russian Civil War which has been raging since 1918. It has been a long and gruelling effort, with incredible losses and sacrifices on all sides, but now the end is finally nearing. The use of Tsarskoye Selo is put forward by the Germans, given that it is both a place of considerable weight, which will transfer legitimacy and authority to the proceedings, but it is also a complex which is close to German lines but within Muscovite control. It has been left quite run down from neglect and a variety of different looters, squatters and vandals, but its tarnished majesty is still there. I hope that this comes across as plausible. All sides are pretty much exhausted an cannot keep fighting. The Germans want peace, and they want it now, with pressure to rein in military spending and worries about the situation in Southern Europe. At the same time Pomgol presents the first real opportunity for the various factions to really communicate once more, and becomes an unofficial diplomatic network for dialogue between the factions while the relief efforts go on. By the time the crisis provoked by the famine comes to an end, these diplomatic efforts have grown into a hope for peace on all sides which we now see acted on.

(12) There we have it, the Russian Civil War has come to an end. The road to recovery will be long and fraught with challenges, but there is now hope for a path towards a return to prosperity. I realise that I have given barely any details on internal developments in the latter periods of the conflict, but I have set aside sections in coming updates in which to get into all of those things. For now, just enjoy that the conflict has come to an end. It is more a matter of everyone running themselves to exhaustion than anything else, and how feasible these new borders will be is a question everyone is asking themselves. It is important to note that these new factions all still claim to be the rightful government of Russia, and that there is plenty that remains unsettled at this point, but at the moment everyone is just happy to have peace. A map of the settlement is located in the End Notes.


(13) I have refrained from actually detailing many of the developments in the various Russian states, leaving that for a later update. However, the importance here is in the relatively swift reestablishment of Red (Muscovite) Russia as part of the international order and its step back from supporting revolutionary movements officially. The fact that it is the Germans leading this effort also means that it is them who reap the rewards from this. In fact, as we move forward the Germans are going to find themselves increasingly appreciative of the competent collective leadership in Moscow as contrasted with the increasingly back-biting and factionalised Don Whites who actively jockey for support from the British, French and Americans to counter German influence. The Muscovites don't really have much of a choice in who they can deal with given that they are unlikely to be able to pay the massive war loans and various other loans taken with the Allied powers both during and prior to the war. Germany's pre-war investments were more limited in scope and as such are relatively manageable. It is a decision similar to the pragmatism of the negotiators who signed the Rapallo Treaty and the various cooperative efforts with Weimar IOTL. Germany is by this point so large of a force that if it turned all its resources on Moscow there would be little they could do to stop them, being friendly towards the Hegemon of Eastern Europe seems like a good idea.

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Military Parade in Washington By Demobilizing Soldiers

A Time of Troubles

The end of the Russian Civil War could not have come at a better time for the increasingly embattled President Wood, who found his position assailed from all sides on a variety of issues. The continuing fighting in West Virginia, the continual state of war experienced by the United States since its entry into the Great War in 1917, the continual mind-numbing paranoia provoked by government and media about the power and influence of the Reds, the continued economic fallout from governmental deflationary policies and growing accusations that the Wood government was compromised by foreign interests all combined to create a furour in American society all aimed at the President. The close relationship between the President's aid, Quentin Roosevelt, and Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova was scrutinised constantly, and the presence of various Russian emigres, particularly in New York and Washington society, proved contentious and an avenue of criticism of the government which avoided the continued influence of informal censorship guidelines at many major US newspapers. On the Right, Republican Conservative voices rose in anger at the sidelining of their faction, most clearly illustrated in the appointment of Elihu Root to Vice President, which remained a sore point regardless of Progressive Interventionist efforts to downplay the move, while nationalist and isolationist forces grew, with the Ku Klux Klan exploiting popular dissatisfaction to the utmost.

The end of the Siberian Expedition was marked by considerable celebration on the part of the government, and military parades were organised in several major cities to celebrate the return of the expeditionary force. While the first parade in San Francisco proved relatively problem-free, and saw crowds swarm out to greet the soldiers as they disembarked, the same could not be said of those in Chicago, Detroit, New York and Washington. Most significantly in Chicago, the soldiers were met with boos, rotten fruit and protests provoked by a recently published story in the communist newspaper The Voice of Labor which included a lengthy feature written by John Reed from Moscow which detailed horrific stories of expeditionary forces brutalising the Russian populace of Siberia, collected and carefully documented by Reed before being smuggled into the United States for publication in all the major Socialist and Communist papers. With claims that the expeditionary soldiers had burned, raped and murdered by the dozens - looting and destroying with wild abandon in the far reaches of Siberia, the mood in Chicago had turned ugly. It was no accident that the publication of the story, titled The American Tartar, coincided with the parades, and as such should come as little surprise when violence ensued.

The returned soldiers, who had just spent the last several years fighting in one of the most bitter and horrific conflicts in human memory, were first shocked and then enraged at the response they got. As bricks and stones began to be thrown into the columns, joining the hail of eggs and rotten tomatoes, the soldiers did what they had been taught to do when under assault. They attacked. Rushing forward in their parade uniforms with their rifles raised high, a melee erupted along the parade route and quickly spread as more men on either side piled in. The soldiers initially refrained from firing their weapons, and instead used them as clubs, but when a pair of them were stabbed in the chaos, sporadic gunfire began to erupt. As the parade collapsed into chaos, people fled in all directions. Order was finally restored two hours later, but not before eighteen protesters and four soldiers were left to bleed out in the streets. The media storm which ensued was immense and did much to tarnish the return of the expeditionary force. While few in the major media publications refused to address John Reed's allegations, there was little that could be done to keep a lid on it. Calls began to arise from the left-wing of the Republican Party as the Isolationists raised the question of whether American intervention had tarnished its unique position in the world - soon followed by quiet discussions on whether to push for an investigation into the claims, although any such idea was dropped in the face of what damage it might do to the reputation of the United States (14).

The tumultuous situation in the United States proved ideal for the strengthening and expansion of the Ku Klux Klan, even as that very increase in power brought the struggle for control of the Klan to the forefront of Klan politics. The immense power and influence of the Indiana Klan placed Stephenson in a position to strengthen his own influence in the national organisation, seeking to unite other Grand Dragons at a state level in opposition to the pressure from Evans to consolidate power at the national level. A major backer of Stephenson found himself removed from a position of authority in the Illinois Klan when an ill-considered declaration in favour of the soldiers in the Chicago Parade Affair damaged Klan membership in the suburbs of Chicago, allowing Evans to replace him with one of his own supporters. A struggle for control of the mid-west Klan branches ensued over the course of 1923.

Despite the efforts required in the quiet struggle with Stephenson, Evans was able to make significant gains in his national ambitions, making contact with a number of southern Senators and Congressmen, building on the wider opposition to the President's openness towards foreigners. In a moment of unanticipated irony, both the Klan and Communist newspapers in Chicago carried stories criticising the Wood Presidency's close relationship with the Ungern-Romanovs, explicitly pointing to the corrosive influence of Boris Savinkov as a dangerous foreign agent. In fact, both the Klan and the Communists would often prove equally opposed to the waves of Russian migrants which had begun arriving in the US in response to the revolution and subsequent civil war, most of them of one White alignment or other. Klan rallies became increasingly brazen and tales of attacks on immigrants, Catholics and African Americans became a stock section of many newspapers.

However, perhaps the most alluring aspect of the Klan as the 1924 elections grew closer was its promise of a return to the peace and tranquility of the pre-war years. Pointing to the chaos and turmoil which had engulfed the nation during the past decade, the young Klan was able to paint itself as a defender of peace and order, framing its activities as actions meant to promote those very means with varying degrees of success. However, as the Klan grew larger and more influential, its very structure seemed to encourage corruption, as the heterogenous nature of the decentralized Klan left little organization or oversight of the state-level Grand Dragons. This was brought to the forefront when Stephenson broke with the national Klan in September 1923 and formed a rival Klan with chapters in a dozen different states, mostly centred on the Mid-west. This was a major blow to the national KKK and led Evans to press forward with a vocal condemnation of the ambitious Stephenson, who was already then moving to secure control of Indiana.

Since 1922, the Indiana Klan had been in a protracted struggle with the governor, Warren T. McCray. This had begun when Klansmen in the Indiana General Assembly passed a bill which established a Klan Day at the Indiana State Fair, complete with a nighttime cross burning, only to have Governor Warren T. McCray veto the bill, beginning his public resistance to the Klan. The same year Edward L. Jackson, a Klan member who had been elected as the Secretary of State for Indiana, granted the Klan a state charter which McCray immediately demanded be revoked because the leaders of the Klan had not reveal themselves to sign the document but Jackson refused to revoke the charter. In a bid to end his resistance, Stephenson ordered Jackson to offer McCray a $10,000 bribe to try to end his anti-Klan stance but McCray was personally wealthy and he refused the bribe to the Klan's chagrin.

Alongside founding his independent Klan, Stephenson changed his affiliation from the Democratic to the Republican Party, which predominated in Indiana and much of the Midwest, and supported Jackson for governor in 1924. With its high rate of membership, the Indiana Klan was becoming influential in the Indiana politics and a public endorsement from the organization leadership could practically guarantee victory at the polls, which led many Indiana politicians at all levels of government to join the Klan in order to gain their support. Having proven themselves unable to bring Governor McCray to their side, leaders in the Indiana Klan worked to uncover dirt on McCray to force him out office. They uncovered loans solicited by McCray in a questionable way which, because the solicitations were sent by mail, were subject to federal mail fraud laws. The Indiana Klan leaders then used their influence to have McCray tried, convicted, and imprisoned for mail fraud, forcing him to resign from office in 1924, where to Jackson would succeed him as Governor (15).

The end of deflation and slow recovery of late 1923-1924 was a pained affair, where the continued domestic turmoil and growing threat of international trade pressures held back American industrial might. While new and exciting industries were developing and various nascent industries were coming into their own globally, the Americans lagged behind. The harsh shocks of the post-war period slowed the spread of new technologies and hampered the growth of industries as diverse as cinema, car and radio. While the early years of the recovery would see the Americans win back some of these initial losses, they were unable to emerge as a clearly dominant power in these important new drivers of industrialisation and allowed companies like the German Benz, Daimler and Opel to make significant market gains to the detriment of Ford and General Motors. These had all found their international market share weaken in the face of the cheaper and increasingly well-made German products, German business men having proven fervent in a push for industrial rationalisation.

Over the course of 1924, American industry began to make inroads internationally once more while the flow of money which had been streaming out of the United States and into Northern and Central Europe found itself turned towards domestic investments once more. Many fortunes were made in the complex financial wrangling of this period, as clever financiers exploited shifts appreciation and depreciation in assorted currencies for personal gain. Having been slowed to a crawl by the Great War and subsequent turmoil, electrification took on an increasingly ferocious pace while major oil strikes in East Texas saw pushed the economy back into gear. The economic doldrums of the early 1920s slowly began to give way to increasing consumption as money was injected back into the economy by returning investments, beginning to put money back into the pockets of the working classes after a long period of struggle (16).

However, this had the unanticipated of fuelling the illicit bootlegging industry, and the slowly coalescing network of criminal gangs which took control of it. Dominated primarily by Irish gangs in the North-East, swelled with refugees from Irelands whose members often had combat experience either from service in the Great War or the Irish War of Independence that followed, these organisations grew incredibly powerful in a very short amount of time on the basis of the immense sums of money they were beginning to rake in. However, the most significant development came in the consolidation of the Irish White Hand gangs under the leadership of Wild Bill Lovett, who was able to exploit the growth in the Irish population to crush their Italian rivals in the Black Hand, firmly securing control of the New York criminal scene for the Irish White Hand. Having survived several assassination attempts, Lovett had at one point been considering retirement in early 1922 but the economic hardship of the period had eventually forced to reconsider, although he was able to end his drinking while pushing the Irish mob into bootlegging.

With a strong base in New York, the White Hand had been able to establish a loose alliance with the rapidly growing Gustin Gang in Boston which allowed them to secure control of the eastern smuggling routes from Canada, coming into conflict with many of the powerful Chicago gangs who felt that this expansion infringed on their own bootlegging across the Great Lakes. A flood of Italian refugees began arriving as the Italian Civil War began to heat up, but they lacked much of the organisation or discipline that Lovett had been able to enforce upon the White Hand during the early 1920s, and as such found themselves largely marginalised by the powerful Irish criminal organisation in New York, pressing the Italians towards other cities, most prominently Detroit and Chicago (17).

The incredible turbulence of the early 1920s would also spill over into the political realm, where President Wood found his ability to act increasingly slowed by growing political opposition. The maverick William Borah was a key figure in this opposition, rallying Progressive Republican resistance to President Wood's wilful ignorance of the considerable breaches of civil liberties by the AILE under J. Edgar Hoover. The semi-autonomous nature of the agency proved a major boon for the young Director, who had been allowed to unleash a reign of terror on peoples as diverse as communists, socialists, civil libertarians, more radical progressives and various other leftists, complete with secret courts, flimsy and wide-ranging writs of authority as well as the widespread use of deportation and long prison sentences on the slightest provocation. The fact that Hoover soon began clashing with the Ku Klux Klan and the White Hand, saw further political opposition to the AILE grow. This in turn had prompted the overzealous Hoover to turn his gaze upon Congress itself, initiating a series of investigations into the conduct of dozens of vocal political opponents to Hoover's power.

When William Borah began making intimations that the President's victory at the Republican Convention had occurred through bribery and blackmail, Hoover spied a chance at removing his most vocal opponent. A deep-ranging investigation by Hoover loyalists in the AILE soon uncovered a scandal which he hoped would end Borah - the married Senator was engaged in a torrid love affair with none other than Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the poisonous flower of Washington. First threatening Borah with exposure, a move which did little other than enrage the senator and warn him of Hoover's animus, Hoover decided to leak the scandal to the newspapers. The furour which ensued was soon turned on its head by Alice Roosevelt herself, who used a combination of wit and threats, having already served for over a decade as a key gatekeeper in Washington society, to turn much of the Capitol against the young and arrogant director.

While Borah came under some fire, and saw his moral standing damaged, he was able to retain his popularity and his seat in Congress. For Hoover, it was a different matter entirely. With Alice Roosevelt leading the way, Hoover soon found that even the President's sanction could only reach so far and that even the greatest of men have to answer to their supporters. With his own backers and supporters now baying for Hoover's head, there was little President Wood could do other than acquiesce. As a result, J. Edgar Hoover was asked to resign from the directorship in mid-1924 under a scandalous cloud and soon found himself replaced by the man known as "America's Sherlock Holmes", William J. Burns.

The departure of Hoover coincided with a weakening of the AILE, which found its independent authority sharply curtailed while an oversight panel of Senators was instituted to ensure the judicious running of the agency. Hoover himself was directly recruited by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he was able to secure a prominent position on the strength of his personal vigour and extensive law enforcement network, having used his few years at the head of the AILE to place his supporters throughout much of the agency. With the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Hoover would take up the task initially envisioned by the company's founder, the collection and centralisation of a clearly organised national criminal and subversive database (18).

Footnotes:

(14) I have a hard time believing that anyone could have remained involved in the Russian Civil War for nearly five years and not have gotten their hands dirty. Sure, some of the claims are probably hyperbolic and intentionally worded to be inflammatory, but there is undoubtedly a kernel of truth to the matter. Considering the sheer corruption of Kolchak's Siberian Whites and the sheer brutality of the Ungern Siberian Whites, it seems like a given that American expeditionary forces would get swept up in the horror. As regards the Chicago Parade fiasco, it might be a bit dramatic, but it should illustrate how divided the country is and that there is an undercurrent of violence layered beneath everything at this point in time.

(15) The Klan sees greater support than IOTL, and as such the power struggles become somewhat more heated. This is still primarily OTL, particularly the specifics of events in Indiana are actually almost all OTL, which is kind of scary to think about. The most significant point here is probably that the split between the Indiana Klan, and its subsidiaries, and the Atlanta-based National Klan happens more explicitly early on and is more well-known because of clashes between Klan figures in the Mid-West. The Indiana Klan is stronger than IOTL and is increasingly the more dynamic of the two. There is also a more explicit political divide between the Republican-aligned Indiana Klan and the Democrat-aligned National Klan developing here.

(16) With the economic problems experienced by the United States in the early 1920s and its inability to enforce worldwide deflationary policies, American industries take a pretty significant hit. This means that while particularly German industry is able to get off to a running start, winning market share across much of Europe, the Americans find themselves faltering early on. That doesn't mean that Ford, GM or hundreds of other American companies aren't growing considerably but it does prevent the OTL dominance they were able to secure.

(17) In contrast to OTL, the United States finds itself flooded with Irish refugees just as Prohibition begins to take off, similarly to the OTL Italian immigration, while it takes a few years longer for the Italian refugees to start arriving. Furthermore, in contrast to OTL where the Sicilian Mafia was a key section of the exodus in the face of Mussolini's efforts to suppress them - ITTL it is a much more diverse collection of refugees while the Mafia stays put in Sicily. Combined with the greater military experience of the Irish gangs, their larger population compared to OTL, the pre-existing ties of the Irish War of Liberation coming to serve as the foundation for these new criminal networks and the luck of the draw which pushes the talented and energetic Wild Bill Lovett to stay in the criminal life all combine to allow for the beginnings of a consolidation of Irish criminal power in New York - in contrast to their OTL destruction and defeat, whereupon they were replaced with the American Mafia. That isn't to say that the Italians aren't strong elsewhere, but the Irish are able to hold onto their historical dominance of the criminal underworld in much of the Mid-West and North East. The greater Italian presence in the Mid-Western cities, most significantly Detroit and Chicago, play a key role in pushing even greater recruitment into the KKK in the region.

(18) Hoover gets overly ambitious and overreaches, leading to his fall from grace. For Now. Given his expanded authority, presidential backing and zeal to crush his enemies I think it is plausible for him to overreach early on under the circumstances of TTL. He remains a significant figure and still has followers in the ranks of the AILE, but for the time being he has had his legs cut out from underneath him. Note that it isn't his infringement on civil liberties or extremism against leftists which does him in, but rather his decision to drag in a key backer of the President in his vendetta with Borah. The resignation of Hoover does mark the quiet end of the Red Scare as the Russian Civil War comes to an end and focus turns towards a return to peace-time stability. Hoover's decision to alienate key supporters of President Wood in the lead-up to the election isn't exactly going to help either. All in all, the prospects of a second term for President Wood seem questionable.


Summary:

Britain struggles to secure its relationship with its dominions even as they recover from the Great War and move forward into the post-war period.

The Liberal Imperial Experiment survives the challenges of the initial post-war period in India and Egypt.

After a final bout of conflict, the Russian Civil War comes to a close with the Treaty of Tsarskoye Selo.

Even as the United States begins to recover from its economic doldrums it continues to struggle with social, economic and cultural divisions - leading to strife on multiple levels.

End Note:

Alright, that is it for now. I am going on Hiatus for the time being so that I can get RL on track and get a clearer idea of how to proceed with the TL. I realise that there are still threads left hanging which I will get back to as we move forward, but for now I just need some time. I am aiming for the start of November as a possible point to restart the TL at - I will keep you updated as I move forward. If you have any region, topic or figure you want to learn more about, or good ideas for the timeline moving forward, this is the time to put it forward.

Thanks for following this TL so far!

Map of Russia following the Treaty of Tsarskoye Selo (White = Don Whites, Red = Moscow Reds, Orange = Yekaterinburg Reds, Grey = Siberian Whites, Green = Khiva) - Keep in mind that this is a very rough map:


Russia Treaty Map.png
 
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