European Crossroads
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany
A Divided Empire
The power and influence of the Hohenzollern family reached a low ebb during the first half of the 1920s as a series of family tragedies dealt body-blows to the Kaiser and his family. The first of these tragedies was the suicide of Prince Joachim of Prussia, who shot himself in 1920, dealing a severe mental blow to his father and sickly mother, to say nothing of his siblings. This acted as a fatal blow to Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, whose health plummeted in late 1920, resulting in her death on the 11th of April 1921. Both of these events drove the Kaiser into a lengthy depression which left him with little interest in governmental affairs, largely handing over most of his responsibilities to his sons and aides while secluding himself with scholars, historians and various other intellectuals willing to indulge his interests. There was even some discussion of Wilhelm retiring, abdicating in favour of his eldest son, but it was eventually decided to put this notion aside.
In the Kaiser's place stood Crown Prince Wilhelm, who was granted the right to sign legislation into law and fulfill many of the Imperial duties in his father's place. The Crown Prince soon found a friend and ally in Gustav Stresemann, a man of utmost monarchical loyalty and intelligence, who he came to rely upon for political advice and whose hold on the Chancellorship he secured. This partnership between the Crown Prince and Stresemann was crucial to allowing Germany's prosperity during the 1920s, creating a solid backdrop to which Stresemann was able to maneuver between the left and the right in order to secure various legislative accomplishments. The Crown Prince's two eldest sons would play a key role in strengthening the Hohenzollerns' ties to society, with the eldest, also named Wilhelm, engaging deeply in military affairs and associating himself with a number of up-and-coming officers such as Hermann Balck, Eberhard von Mackensen and Heinz Guderian, most of whom were noted for their anti-communist stances and experience fighting either alongside or as part of the Freikorps in Russia, while the younger, Louis Ferdinand, involved himself with the business world and national liberal politics, even serving for a time in the recently founded Luftstreitkräfte, bringing prestige to the independent German Air Force. Prince Eitel Friedrich continued his leadership of the chivalrous Order of St. John and soon involved himself in the nascent German Liberty movement while Prince Adalbert remained in the navy and Prince Oscar in the Army. The black sheep of the family proved to be Prince August Wilhelm, who became deeply enmeshed in the far-right of the DNVP and a key financier and supporter of fringe anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalistic organizations.
It was the latter of these which would cause August Wilhelm problems, when it was learned that a gang of anti-Semetic hooligans who had terrorised Jewish neighbourhoods and murdered three Jews in Leipzig over the course of 1927 had received funding from an organisation supported by August Wilhelm. The scandal, emerging in early 1928, caused an immense outcry which saw Prince August Wilhelm retire from public life and a public apology from the increasingly engaged Kaiser for his son's conduct - with rumours swirling that the prince had only barely avoided expulsion and disinheriting from the family for the public embarrassment. The August Wilhelm Scandal was the event which pushed the Kaiser to reengage in public affairs, immediately causing trouble for what had previously been an extremely stable relationship with the Chancellorship when the Kaiser publicly lamented the inclusion of the SPD in Stresemann's government (9).
Germany was not spared the crisis within Catholicism, the Fall of Rome and its aftermath serving as the vehicle for the shattering of the Centre Party's unity as liberal and conservative wings of the party, to say nothing of the German Catholic Church, split over what these events meant. The liberal wing of the Church saw the Catholic Crisis as a clear indicator that God was punishing the faithful for the traditionalist and integralist dominance of the Church, some going so far as to claim that Pope Gregory XVII had proven himself unfit for St. Peter's Throne by his overtly political stance. The conservatives on the other hand viewed this as little better than heresy and rallied behind the Pope's call for political activism, drumming up support for Catholic action groups and a deeper involvement of the church in matters as diverse as healthcare, education, justice and business.
Figures on the right, such as Franz von Papen and Ludwig Kaas loudly and publicly criticised Erzberger's leadership of the party, growing ever more insistent as the party leadership moved further to the left over the course of the middle years of the 1920s. Rallying significant support, most significantly amongst younger leaders like Konrad Adenaur, Andreas Hermes and Hans Globke, the right-wing of the Centre Party grew ever more powerful as cultural issue such as abortion, censorship and labor rights rose to the fore of political debate. By 1927 the two wings of the party were openly engaged in a war of words, with a few conciliatory figures such as Wilhelm Marx and Heinrich Brüning sought to keep the party together. Most vocal on the left were Adam Stegerwald, a major leader of Catholic trade unions, and Joseph Wirth, who throatily continued to support Erzberger's leadership and denounced the right-wing of the party as integralists, Latin-sympathizers and authoritarians out to silence any voice they disagreed with.
The matter culminated in a general assembly of the Centre Party on the 13th of August 1927 at which Franz von Papen sought to oust Erzberger from the party leadership. The effort, which had included a great deal of underhanded double-dealing on Papen's behalf, was exposed before Papen could press forward with his plan. However, it was at this moment that Erzberger and his left-wing supporters grossly miscalculated their position and sought to exploit the opportunity to purge the leadership of their rivals. The sudden expulsion of von Papen, Kaas and Globke caused outrage within large sections of the party and soon saw an exodus, with Andreas Hermes, Konrad Adenaur and Heinrich Brünging among the most significant departures, and the establishment of the Catholic People's Party (KVP) which absorbed many of these departures. Across Catholic Germany, the party split and political struggle which followed for party infrastructure played out with devastating consequences. By the end of the year both party organizations were in total disarray and waging an all-out political war, their partisans brawling in the streets and their party organs riddled with spies (10).
While Centre was the party to experience the most significant amount of turmoil, it was not alone in the matter. Over the course of the middle years of the 1920s, the tensions within the SPD between the leadership and the strengthening fringe surrounding Otto Strasser grew ever greater. In many ways, Strasser had never quite fit the mould of other SPD leaders and in fact proved at times downright heretical as regarded his view on social democratic ideology. Not only did he approve of the communists belief in limited government, as contrasted with the increasingly powerful SPD tendency towards centralism, but he also borrowed heavily from syndicalist and conservative ideological bases, at times even sharing some ideas with the German Liberty ideology. He wished to reshape society into an autocratic caste system based on councils which would answer to assigned managers, who in turn ruled their council with an iron hand. He and his supporters were fiercely nationalistic and proudly Christian, rejecting the Marxist prohibition on religion and referring to these ideas as True Socialism. As the years went on and Strasser continued to be held at bay by the party leadership, he also took up an ever fiercer anti-Semetic and anti-Capitalist tone which alienated a significant portion of the SPD while further strengthening Strasser's hold on his own supporters.
Events came to a head in early 1928 when, as a result of the upcoming election, the SPD brought up its election plank for discussion amongst significant party figures. It was here that Strasser finally broke what few strictures had kept him quiet, not only disgruntled by the SPD's support for abortion and unwillingness to eject Jews from the party but also believing this to be his last chance at securing power within the party. Strasser's public expression of beliefs at a major party meeting quickly produced crisis as the media took up Strasser's expressions of anti-Semitism and various other odious beliefs, causing scandal and outrage amongst the SPD's membership. Outraged, the party leadership, most vocally pushed forward by Hugo Haase, voted to expel Otto Strasser from the SPD with any of his supporters who wouldn't recant their support of Strasserism.
This expulsion came as a shock to Otto, who had believed himself to remain in strong standing within the party, and greatly provoked him, leading to his establishment of the National Socialist Party of Germany (NSPD). Amonst those to join the party were Ernst Röhm, Gustav Noske and Heinrich Laufenberg on the left, but by far the greater number of supporters came to the party when Gregor Strasser and his Bavarian compatriots, amongst them a talented Austrian rhetorician by the name of Adolph Hitler, abandoned the DNVP for what they viewed as an unwillingness to act when the nation was under threat of degeneracy. The NSPD and Richthofen-led DFP soon found themselves at greater odds with each other than either the SPD, KPD, DKP or DNVP, competing for a similar group of voters in their first election. The open rancor between the two young third-positionist parties brought considerable media attention to both parties and served as a key dynamic for the growth of both parties in the leadup to the 1928 elections (11).
The German elections of 1928 marked a major changing of the guard in Germany, brought new parties into the political sphere and saw the stability of previous years brought under threat. The intense cultural and political conflicts of the last couple of years, joined with the ascendancy of new and exciting ideologies, contributed to making these elections amongst the most contentious since the start of the decade. Rumours flew and partisans clashed from Oldenburg in the north to Trieste in the south, while particularly Catholic Germany found itself in a state of bitter division between conservative and liberal church supporters. The rapid urbanisation of the last several years further had the effect of greatly strengthening the urban vote, most significantly in the SPD's favour through their support amongst unions and the working class, while the FVP and NLP also experienced important gains amongst the rapidly growing white collar working class to compliment their old bases of support. Perhaps most notable, beyond the entry of so many new political parties, was the retirement of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, who endorsed his handpicked successor in the form of Karl Jarres, turning over both party leadership of the NLP and his presumptive status as head of the governmental coalition.
While Stresemann contributed actively in the election campaign to follow, he was forced to take a backseat to much of it for fear of aggravating his worsening health, and as a result Jarres soon found himself forced to stand on his own accomplishments. Having served as Stresemann's right-hand man in government, where he had served as Interior Minister and managing most intra-coalition communications, and within the party since the early 1920s, Jarres was about as prepared as anyone to pick up where his mentor left off. However, it would not go completely in Jarres favor when election time came around. While Centre would prove considerably more successful than the KVP in retaining Catholic backing, the latter experiencing a painful weakening due to a lack of party infrastructure and the resentment of many Catholic voters over the shattering of Catholic unity, it would find its hold on power in particularly Bavaria gravely weakened by the surprisingly successful efforts of the NSPD in whipping up public furor and a concerted investment by the DNVP in the region. The DFP was able to secure an outsized level of influence, particularly in the Reichstag and the Prussian Landstag, due to the party's connections amongst the German elite, particularly the Prussian Junkers who were often spellbound by Richthofen's efforts. However, in the end the governing coalition would hold onto a slight majority of seats, experiencing some painful setbacks, particularly in the case of Centre, but making up some of the gains through a rising urban vote and the SPD's land reform efforts drawing limited amounts of interest amongst peasant voters (12)
Footnotes:
(9) I hope this helps explain what the Hohenzollerns have been up to while everything else has been going on. Wilhelm's disengagement from public affairs might be a bit convenient but the depression mirrors what happened IOTL where he went through a much shorter depression before a new marriage helped him recover. ITTL he doesn't get married again and as a result the depression runs on longer, although by 1925 he had largely recovered and just decides to keep fobbing off the responsibilities on his son while enjoying indulging in his personal interests. August Wilhelm was willing to break with his own family IOTL to support the Nazis, even after the rest of the family gave up any hope of partnering with the party, and seems to have been pretty committed to them as such I don't think this is too out of character. I should mention that he didn't directly pay the gang who ended up killing a number of Jews, but rather that the gang were members of an organization he sponsored and financed. He doesn't seem like the type to ask too many questions, so making a mistake on an issue like this also shouldn't be too surprising.
(10) The Catholic Crisis takes a bit longer to really hit home in Germany but by 1928 it explodes with devastating consequences for one of the most powerful political blocs in Germany. The unity of the Catholics behind Zentrum was crucial for their political relevance as an independent faction in German politics and their ability to play the two sides against the middle to the benefit of Catholics in Germany. While the left-progressive wing of the Centre Party retains control of the party itself, it ideologically moves firmly leftward while the KVP moves right-ward. Centre also remains a part of the governmental coalition, if gravely wounded, while the KVP soon begins building ties to the DNVP and DKP, uniting with them particularly on issues of morality. It is important to note that the grumbling about the Pope's legitimacy is just that, grumbling, and doesn't signify an actual schism or anything like that. It is just vocal opposition to the Pope's support for political action groups like Action Francaise and for integralist regimes like that of Alfonso in Spain or Victor Emmanuel in Sicily.
(11) Otto Strasser's incubation period within the SPD finally comes to an end when his rather odious ideas end up going public. Prior to this he had been very careful about who he said what to, but frustrated at being continually held out of leadership positions within the party and hoping to make a name for himself, he finally breaks with them. At the same time, Gregor Strasser uses the opportunity to break with his own rivals for leadership within the DNVP and brings a pretty significant portion of the DNVP's supporters in Bavaria and Austria with him. Hitler remains something of a background player, having made a name for himself in various speaking engagements but having been unable to secure control of a party like he did IOTL. He retains his firm anti-Semitic beliefs and a belief in the Führerprinzip, but significantly he doesn't make the OTL leap to deciding he has to be that leader - something he, at least in his own words, decided in prison after the Beerhall Putsch - so he remains a supporter of autocratic rule but hasn't decided that he needs to be that leader.
(12) The government coalition holds onto power, but are definitely experiencing a pretty significant loss of popularity. The loss of Gustav Stresemann, who has been able to juggle the various coalition interests and press forward for German prosperity, is immense and whether Karl Jarres will be up for the task is very much in question. The Centre Party is wounded significantly and is shedding voters not only to the KVP, but also to the NSPD, DNVP and its coalition partners, but the new parties haven't really had sufficient time to build the requisite name recognition and infrastructure to really exploit the situation.
Collectivization Propaganda in the Volga Region
Eurasian Resurrection
For Red Russia, the middle years of the 1920s were dominated by recovery and reform, as new policies were implemented to create a Communist state while undergoing significant preparatory efforts to ensure the further spread of Communism. Under the leadership of Nikolai Bukharin, a massive ideological complex was established where debate over precisely what Communism and a Communist State was to look like, establishing councils, panels and committees to debate everything from the Russia's duty to promote global Communism and the role of the military in society to issues such as the correct forms of formal address and the economic independence of the individual.
In the meanwhile Grigori Sokolnikov dedicated his efforts to far-reaching economic reforms and worked closely with Yakov Sverdlov and Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin to negotiate important trade and licensing agreements with Germany, securing industrial aid for the massive reconstruction which occupied so much effort during the mid-1920s. Factories sprouted up across the major cities of Red Russia, in Petrograd, Moscow, Tula, Novgorod and more, while raw resources from the Ural mines flowed freely. In Yekaterinburg-controlled lands, massive collectivisation efforts were undertaken in agriculture, mining and various other resource extraction efforts, while Trotsky's militarisation efforts were strengthened.
It was during this time that major military reforms were undertaken. The revolutionary armies of the late 1910s and early 1920s had proven themselves extremely unreliable and poorly disciplined, experiencing severe desertion rates and a problematic dependence on popular support. The end of the Civil War had seen the demobilisation of millions and an initial reorganisation of forces around a small professional core of soldiers and territorial militias, but was constantly starved for officers and NCOs, with particularly the former proving few and far between due to their historical connection to the nobility. However, military schools established during the Civil War soon began to alleviate this problem as diligent military minds such as Tukhachevsky, Frunze and Alexander Svechin invested their efforts in developing a military doctrine with which to successfully ensure the security and spread of Communism.
However, it would be two disparate doctrines which emerged in the form of the Moscow and Yekaterinburg Doctrines, the former emphasising an offensive spirit aimed at completely overwhelming the enemy in a few decisive blows so as to break the enemy's will to fight, primarily formulated by Tukhachevsky, Vladimir Triandafillov and Nikolai Varfolomeev, while the latter emphasised a long and grinding military effort of attrition in which a mixture of offensive and defensive actions would slowly tear apart the opposing party while limiting the damage done to ones' own military forces, primarily championed by Frunze and Svechin, but receiving support from Trotsky for its emphasis on large-scale societal militarisation. By 1928 these reform efforts were well under way and economic recovery was well under way (13).
While Red Russia seemed on the road to recovery from the Civil War, the same could not in truth be said of the Tsarist regime in the east. While Olga Romanova proved a capable leader, the inherent biases of large segments of the population, most significantly in both the military and governmental bureaucracies, which left many without much in the way of respect for the sovereign, opening the doors to rampant corruption and factionalism, as well as significant continual resource shortages left the Ungern-Romanov regime in a precipitous position.
With the Tsar held under house arrest, a fact which soon became common knowledge in the capital, the circumstance left many an ambitious man spying an opportunity in Olga's bed. There was more than one attack on Tsar Roman's prison in the next couple of years, one by desperate supporters of the imprisoned Tsar and two by men hoping to replace him as Tsar, and efforts at wooing the Tsaritsa were commonplace, a bitter game which saw more than one high-standing official dead, while Olga and Anastasia did what they could with what little loyal support they could muster to protect themselves, the royal children and their reign. The most brazen of these suitors was Andrei Shkuro, who had risen to power as one of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg's lieutenants late in the Civil War, who launched an assault on the recently constructed Chita Palace in mid-1927 after Olga refused his advances, seeking to capture her and her family in order to force a marriage whereby he might ascend to the throne, after killing Tsar Roman, naturally, and secure power. Luckily for Olga and her family, the attempt was disrupted when the young Alexander Rodzyanko, who had been in Anastasia's orbit for some time and hoped to marry her, rallied a nearby segment of the Chita garrison and counterattacked Shkuro's forces with great success.
While Shkuro was defeated and killed, rather than leaving the Romanovs in a more powerful position it allowed Rodzyanko to install himself as protector of the royal family, increasingly insistent on his hoped-for marriage to Anastasia. However, before Rodzyanko could become anything more than insistent on the matter, the failures of a distracted and corrupt government were sufficient to raise a peasant force in revolt along the Amur River in late 1927 which threatened to cut the Trans-Siberian Railway and potentially might result in the overthrow of the regime. While granting Rodzyanko command of the force sent to suppress the Amur Revolt removed Rodzyanko temporarily from the capital and created some space for manoeuvring for Olga, it at the same time paved a path for Rodzyanko to ascend to power should he succeed.
Over the course of the winter of 1927-28, bitter fighting consumed the Amur region while the revolt threatened to spread further - only held at bay by the extreme cold and insufficient infrastructure in the region. However, as spring dawned the rebels were able to successfully cut the Trans-Siberian Railway for a week before Rodzyanko could chase them off, during which time they captured the contents of four major railway shipments and were able to break up the rails at several sites. This triggered a collapse in investor trust in the longevity of the Tsarist regime, causing a significant shortfall in foreign investment just as the Rodzyanko's army's payroll came due. When it was announced that the soldiers would not be paid for the month of April, the force went into mutiny, capturing Rodzyanko and demanding the Chita government pay them what they were owed. While Olga was able to scrape together enough to pay off the mutineers, she delayed long enough for them to murder Rodzyanko. Paid in full, even if it created massive shortfalls in almost every other governmental department, the mutinying soldiers returned to duty under a newly appointed commander, Alexander Kutepov. Kutepov proved extremely ruthless and efficient in the campaign that followed, crushing the remnants of the Amur Revolt by the end of the Summer and restoring an exhausted peace to Tsarist Russia by the Autumn of 1928 (14).
In Moscow, the eruption of rebellion in Siberia was greeted with considerable interest from the Military faction around Trotsky and Tukhachevsky. As the situation grew from bad to worse, Trotsky began authorising covert subversive effort to be directed by the head of Yekaterinburg's intelligence aperture, Artur Artuzov, an extremely talented and experienced spy master who had helped consistently subvert Tsarist military efforts in Siberia during the Civil War. Under Artuzov's direction, infiltrators were inserted into the Siberian peasant populace, still disordered by the massive population movements of the civil war, in order to provoke public outrage and threaten further revolt. Agitating against corrupt officials and greedy military officers proved extremely effective, soon bringing much of the Cisbaikal region into ferocious foment against Tsarist rule. In Chita, Olga was increasingly reading the writing on the wall, coming to the conclusion that her reign was unlikely to survive the decade. As a result, she secretly arranged for her sister Anastasia to take her three children, Anastasia, Nikolai and Sophia Ungern-Romanov, to safety in the west until she had either stabilised the situation sufficiently or failed.
Beginning on the 27th of April 1928, the Cisbaikal went into open revolt, cutting rail lines, assassinating officials and raiding arsenals across the region. Once more, Olga turned to Kutepov for command of the suppression effort while "volunteers" from Yekaterinburg crossed the border in secret with supplies and arms to aid in the revolt. By this point in time Kutepov had gained considerable experience in combatting peasant guerrillas and was well aware of how best to deal with them, hammering them hard at any strongpoint they had seized control of while combing the countryside for irregular forces and making preparations for a starvation campaign. However, he had not expected anything close to the resistance he faced when he passed north of Lake Baikal, running into well armed heavily defended positions commanded by professional officers. Initially caught by surprise, Kutepov sent a warning back to Chita that something seemed wrong with the situation, but pressing forward regardless. The bitter fighting which followed dwarfed anything seen since the civil war and shook the Tsarist leadership's trust in the Treaty of Tsarskoye Selo, serving to quiet the intrigues in Chita for a short while.
In Moscow, the Central Committee met to discuss the Cisbaikal revolt where Trotsky urged immediate action, calling for an all-out assault to sweep away the corrupted Tsarist regime. The issue was fiercely debated over several days, storm clouds seeming to gather over Moscow under the threat of war. It was days into these debates that word leaked of Trotsky's role in inciting the revolt to begin with, provoking considerable anger amongst the other members of the Central Committee, not only at his disingenuous actions but also at what they viewed as his attempt to force the Central Committee's hand to back his effort. However, it would be the arrival of news on the 13th of July which finally pushed the Central Committee to action. A week earlier word had arrived from the Cisbaikal that Kutepov had won a major victory near the town of Bratsk over a force of nearly 20,000 rebels and the subsequent massacre of nearly 3,000 Yekaterinburg Volunteers discovered amongst the captured, and it was feared that a massacre of the Cisbaikal peasantry was about to be undertaken. Rallying the news media behind him and taking to the streets of Moscow to gain support for the effort, Trotsky put his vaunted oratory to use in whipping up support for an intervention. With crowds of as many as 100,000 men massing in Red Square, the Central Committee finally bowed to Trotsky's demand and authorized an armed intervention in Siberia (15).
While events further east were playing out, Germany's network of satellite states across Eastern Europe was finding its relationship with Germany under growing pressure. At the heart of the emerging struggle lay Poland, which had emerged as the second most powerful state in the region after the Don Republic and still held out hope for national aggrandisement at the cost of its neighbours. To the north, they disputed Lithuanian control of Vilnius, in the east they contested the wide reaches of western Ukraine while to the west they looked longingly towards Prussian Poland and Silesia. Standing against this effort by Polish nationalists, foremost among them the Popular National Union under Wojciech Korfanty, who despite his ties to Germany was a firm opponent of Germanisation, was Prime Minister Jan Kanty Steczkowski whose pro-German attitudes were key to giving Poland the breathing room it needed to recover from the Great War and even enjoy a significant economic boom as German investors worked to exploit the cheap labor and rich natural resources available in Poland. The remnants of the Polish Military Organisation continued to cause trouble, bombing German investments and assassinating pro-German politicians and officials when possible, but found its support limited by less radical movements and political parties.
To the South, in Romania, the most explicitly puppetised states of Eastern Europe, public resistance to German inroads were significantly larger and more popular. Peasant agitators travelled the country, constantly on the run from government agents, working to work the populace into a furor against German influence, at times even succeeding, most significantly with the Ploiesti Riots in which half a dozen German expatriates were killed by a riotous mob before the Romanian Army could disperse the crowd, leaving nearly fifty Romanians dead.
To the East, in the Don Republic, Pyotr Wrangel balanced precariously atop an ever more divided republic as French and British efforts at gaining influence in the republic were met with considerable success. With the Germans increasingly interested in a partnership with Red Russia, Wrangel found his own pro-German stance increasingly under assault. As the relations between Chita and Moscow deteriorated, the issue of how to respond to an eventual reignition of the Civil War became an ever larger part of the public discourse, with Wrangel's wish for continued peace proving increasingly unpopular as the threat of a Red Russia stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific rose to prominence in political discourse. During this time, the Don Republic found itself increasingly pressured by the large Ukrainian segment of their population to adopt more pro-Ukrainian policies, including the acknowledgement of Ukrainian as a national language and the creation of Ukrainian-language schools and government institutions.
Finally, in the north, the United Baltic Duchy struggled to recover from the deep wounds dealt to it by the Great War and Civil War which followed, the tense ethnic rivalries between Estonian, Latvian and Baltic German populations, the former two vastly outnumbering the latter while the latter exploited economic, social and cultural ties to Germany to the utmost. In Lithuania, Vilnius grew immensely, becoming a favoured hub for further east-ward investment among German banks and financiers, and experienced a significant amount of Germanification in everything from education, culture and high society, all of which provoked considerable resistance from the native Lithuanian populace. In Finland, the divide between the left and right continued to fester as the wounds of the Civil War and subsequent right-wing monopolisation of power at the highest levels left a great deal of bitterness on the left. However, significant German investments into the native forestry, mining and fishing industries all helped support a significant economic boom which helped alleviate some of these pressures for the time being. For the time being, Germany seemed in control of its vast satellite empire in the east, by hook or by crook, but as people moved on from the Great War and looked into the future - many ambitious men and women began to wonder how long those bonds might hold (16).
Footnotes:
(13) The important thing to note here is that the two disparate elements which IOTL ended up being combined into the Deep Operations military doctrine are separated ITTL, at least for now. IOTL it took until around 1930 for Tukhachevsky to accept Svechin's focus on the grinding aspect of DO doctrine after a great deal of back and forth - and only really after most of his major military thought rivals had died. The end result is that the Moscow school focuses heavily offensive operations, particularly large-scale war-winning offensives, while the Yekaterinburg school is far more defensive in outlook.
(14) The situation in Chita turns positively medieval as Olga's effective availability following her removal of Tsar Roman from power serves to bring every ambitious idiot running. The intrigues, coup attempts, murders and assassinations which follow each other in rapid succession are not really all that conducive to effective governance and leaves the Romanovs fighting a constant war of survival and control, using every dirty trick in the book to accomplish it. One thing to note is that the appointment of Kutepov is the first time in this entire farce that Olga actually found the opportunity to appoint the person she wanted to the job. Kutepov proves surprisingly loyal and effective in his support for the Romanov women, neither attempting to woo them nor fighting to gain more power for himself. The main problem facing Olga is that she is a woman in a position where everyone is trying to exploit her, at a time in which few are willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Her orders are criticized and often ignored, her appointees are met with scorn more often than not and there are few officials who have the slightest qualm about engaging in corruption. However, by late 1928 things seem to be looking up and the Romanovs hope that they might finally have some breathing room.
(15) With Red Russia on the path to recovery and the Siberian Whites gravely weakened, Trotsky exploits the opportunity to whip up a conflict which could allow him a path to greater power. Olga spots that things seem to be swinging against her and removes her children from the field of battle while Kutepov does everything in his power to force compliance on the Cisbaikal population. All of this finally draws Red Russia into action, reigniting the dormant civil war once more.
(16) I am really sorry about how messy this paragraph is, jumping all over the place, but there really isn't a great deal to get into just yet as regards eastern Europe. This was more an effort at bringing the region up to date with the rest of the timeline. A couple of things to note - Germany's power outside of Romania remains largely soft-power reliant, although they could probably force their will should they need to.
Summary:
Integralism rises to prominence in Spain and Sicily while the Communist Regime in Italy struggles with a variety of challenges.
France and Britain experiences important political and social shifts while the impact of the Fall of Rome plays out on French Politics.
Germany experiences a significant degree of political division, but for the time being holds steady.
Events in Tsarist Russia spin out of control as Red Russia looks to pounce while Eastern Europe deals with its German relationship.
End Note:
Sorry about leaving off on a cliffhanger with the restart of the civil war, but I think it is better to push it to the next time we deal with Russia. Russia enjoyed barely a couple of years of peace before the peace began to crumble, but hopefully they can find a more sustainable configuration soon. As for the rest of this update, the focus is really on the slow weakening of Germany's grip on power in the east and the way in which it opens up for various actors to push into the gap. Whether this trend will continue is definitely a major question, but as it stands there are some very important issues Germany will have to deal with in the near future. I really hope you enjoyed the update.
All that said, I do have some IRL stuff to get out of the way. Tomorrow I start on an internship in hopes of securing something more permanent at the end, so I don't really know how much time or energy I will have to dedicate to the TL. I will be trying to get out at least one segment of an update a week, but I really don't know how all of this will work out in the long run. I will have a better idea after a week or two of the internship, but either way I will keep you updated.
