Es Geloybte Aretz Continuation Thread

On a possibly unrelated note, Germany might be unwilling to try this out of fear that the Russians might master what is considered cutting-edge management techniques and profit from them. The way German investments in Russia made in order to extract reparations after the previous war had the unintended effect of better preparing Russia for the next one.

I don't know! It's possible that 1) designing a cybernetic hobble for Russia's economy with early 50s tech just isn't feasible, or 2) that it looks far, far too expensive and difficult vs. splitting off every bit of Russia they can plausibly get away with. But it's also possible that this is a pet project of the Hohenzollern-Institut and Russia is where they see an opportunity to give it a try - limited in scope, just looking for rearmament indicators and monitoring finances and output numbers (to avoid any nasty surprises like a billion-dollar budget hole hiding a nuclear weapons program) - with the ultimate hope being a fully cyberneticized Central Europe, a grand plan that never, quite, comes to fruition - always waiting five years, ten years, for the promise of the technology to finally come true.

The key that I thought was obvious but in retrospect I didn't make nearly clear enough is that it might look appealing because they'll know it has tremendous potential to break shit - but with this as a test, the breakage is happening is someone else's state, not your own, and really, who cares (besides a couple hundred million Russians) if this Russia's economy is permanently jammed in the gear of producing Big Dumb Stuff in mass quantities (like the historical Soviet economy) while Germany dominates the world market for Little Clever Stuff?
 
Do we know that? Successfully halting Russia at the Vistula is not the same as being a position to march on Moscow.
To have a chance of nuking important Russian cities, I feel the Russian airforce would need to be very weakened, and the front pushed back enough for range. Also, I thought it was mentioned at some point the Germans were winning but tired of the war. Russia's greatest extent was to the Vistula then being pushed back.
 
Something else worth pointing out; Carlton has said, more or less, that this Russia isn't the Soviet industrial juggernaut of 1939-1945 but a much more unevenly-modernized creature. OTL, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany matched up pretty evenly at around 14% of world industrial output; ITTL, that balance is going to be skewed further towards Germany by quite a bit.

It's also hard to see a *Fascist Russia matching Soviet progress in all areas; I'm sure they turn out some rough-and-ready mechanical engineers but much less applied science.
 
Something else worth pointing out; Carlton has said, more or less, that this Russia isn't the Soviet industrial juggernaut of 1939-1945 but a much more unevenly-modernized creature. OTL, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany matched up pretty evenly at around 14% of world industrial output; ITTL, that balance is going to be skewed further towards Germany by quite a bit.

It's also hard to see a *Fascist Russia matching Soviet progress in all areas; I'm sure they turn out some rough-and-ready mechanical engineers but much less applied science.
Why could Soviet Russia do better, by the way? Corruption, stubbornness and a drive for heavy industry, or something else?
 
The Soviets saw science and technology as very much on their side; as uneven as Soviet progress was, it represented a radical departure from the Tsarist order. So when it came to things like ripping up restrictions on women and Jews entering university (a policy much to be commended, even if it did give us Ayn Rand), the Soviets took radical steps. The Soviet system wasn't purely meritocratic, but it was massively more so than anything Russia had ever seen to that point.

(Soviet pseudoscience, from Lysenko to abiotic oil to oxygen therapy, is a whole other subject, but it was the result of rapidly educating a fundamentally backwards nation, and grew out of weird prioritization and ideological influence on theory).

Integralist Russia is going to rely much more on bolting and grafting things to the established order to survive. In particular, the nobility and the Church are going to remain powerful sectors of society, and official sexism in things like education is going to be far more prevalent. This Russia is going to have more wasted potential (made up for by somewhat better relations with the rest of Europe), human, educational, and industrial.
 
Some Soviet movements such as the aforementioned meritocratic policies were conductive to development, but in general I think there's an unjustified sentiment that the communists were some kind of tech wizards who were uniquely capable of advancing Russia. For example, there's the BIG crazy Soviet theory which had the really decisive influence: not Lysenkoism, but the full embracing of Marxist economics.
 
Something else worth pointing out; Carlton has said, more or less, that this Russia isn't the Soviet industrial juggernaut of 1939-1945 but a much more unevenly-modernized creature. OTL, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany matched up pretty evenly at around 14% of world industrial output; ITTL, that balance is going to be skewed further towards Germany by quite a bit.

It's also hard to see a *Fascist Russia matching Soviet progress in all areas; I'm sure they turn out some rough-and-ready mechanical engineers but much less applied science.

A fascist Russia (at least the one described here) would have a better agricultural sector. The Industrial sector would be more productive, but would lack the Soviet focus on heavy industry, so it wouldn’t be able to turn out as much arms as USSR, fundamental meaning that Germany would have the edge in a war of attrition. The population would be more rural and have a higher birth rate, so this Russia would likely have a greater focus on infantry and be less mechanized than USSR. We can also expect a higher morale in the early part of the war.

A major question is whether we see a counterpart to OTL ethnic cleansing of Germans East of the Oder after the next war. We could very well end up with Russians ethnic cleansed from Greater Ukraine and the Crimea plus the near mainland ending up a German counterpart to Kaliningrad.
 
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Deleted member 90563

Some Soviet movements such as the aforementioned meritocratic policies were conductive to development, but in general I think there's an unjustified sentiment that the communists were some kind of tech wizards who were uniquely capable of advancing Russia. For example, there's the BIG crazy Soviet theory which had the really decisive influence: not Lysenkoism, but the full embracing of Marxist economics.

Would you awfully mind keeping your posts free of ideological bait? That's what chat is for.
 
Can the germans not nuke russia like that scene from skyline deploy a large force of fighters to escort the bombers and fight there way though russian airspace allowing the bombers an opportunity to drop the nuke.
 
Some Soviet movements such as the aforementioned meritocratic policies were conductive to development, but in general I think there's an unjustified sentiment that the communists were some kind of tech wizards who were uniquely capable of advancing Russia. For example, there's the BIG crazy Soviet theory which had the really decisive influence: not Lysenkoism, but the full embracing of Marxist economics.
Jürgen's answer is pretty much where I would have gone, so I'm just going to address your mischaracterization of me; I don't think the Soviets were 'uniquely capable of advancing Russia'; I think they were, due to a number of contingent historical accidents, the ones who ended up in the hot seat when the problem of modernizing the Russian state became acute. Elsewhere on the site, if you scroll through my posts, you can see I'm a big fan of Spufford's Red Plenty, which does a very good job of showing just how badly the Soviet system failed at a key stage of economic growth.

What I'm trying to point out here is that Russia is not destined to become an industrial juggernaut; an agricultural juggernaut plus FDI and French aid in key warmaking sectors seems like a much more plausible route for a right-wing modernizing Russian regime. I'm a fairly conventional left-liberal with no taste for communism; you are free to ask me what my ideological blinders might be, much less so to assign me some without reasonably knowing anything of the sort, just because you need a windmill to joust at.

Would you awfully mind keeping your posts free of ideological bait? That's what chat is for.
It's not really ideological bait to point out that Marxist economics (in the sense of the actual ideas advanced by Karl Marx) are... somewhat bad, or at least outmoded where they aren't actively wrong, that those policies were in large part what sank the Soviet Union, and that they are, indeed, somewhat crazy.

This might be skirting up on the edge of the sort of thing a warning gets issued for, so I'm going to leave it there.
 
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Russia's industrial stzrerngthv is going to be signally less than that odf the USSR for several reasons. First, because the USSR was really in a unique place for industrial growth historically as a regime that was free to do almost anything conceivable and one whose self-understood historic mission was to create more industrial workers. The Societ government saw itself as a proletarian government, which meant it desperately needed more proletarians. Hence its effort to expansd industry and industrial living conditions into all fields of existence. The party (thought it) understood proletarians and wanted everybody to be one.

The PU has much less scope for action, constrained by German treaty oversight, entrenched interest, and ideological hesitancy. Basically, just like the CPUSSR was ideologically blinded in its dealings with rural communities, the PU is hobbled in its dealing with cities. They want industrial production, just like the Soviets wanted agricultural production, but the don't want industrial workers, really. It's a mirror image of the attempt to create industrial workers on the land in kolkhoz - they want peasants working in factories. It's not realistically possible, obviously, but the attempt puts a crimp in growth (it inadvertently helps by not putting too many big industrial concentrations on Germany's target maps).

The idea of targeting a Russian city for bombing is not far-fetched. The German Reichsluftmacht pioneered strategic bombing and put a lot of resources into a bomber fleet first of airships, then of areoplanes. It can dominate high-altitude airspace almost anwhere within its range. The problem is not to reach a target, it is to damage it. As everybody learned in WWII, strategic bombing is an enormously costly business. You have to put huge numbers of very expensive planes in harm's way to scatter bombs over a large area in the hope some will do the damage you are hoping for. Most Russian cities ITTL are less dense than German ones IOTL, so even if the Germans could muster a thousand bombers (they never can), a firestorm raid is not really feasible. The Russians gave up on the idea early, despairing of mustering the technological muscle necessary, and instead concentrated on short to medium range aviation to support army operations. That only puts a small part of enemy territory within its striking range - it's basically extended artillery - but the intensity is greater. One reason the atomic bomb is developed with such intensity is that it meets a very specific need of the bureaucratically very influential Luftmacht: a viable munition for strategic bombing if you don't have thousand-bomber fleets.
 
Can the germans not nuke russia like that scene from skyline deploy a large force of fighters to escort the bombers and fight there way though russian airspace allowing the bombers an opportunity to drop the nuke.

That is basically the idea: big, long-legged high-altitude bombers excorted by swarms of fast, long-range fighters. It works, but the mission requirements give the Luftmacht some very specific weaknesses, too.
 

Russia's industrial stzrerngthv is going to be signally less than that odf the USSR for several reasons. First, because the USSR was really in a unique place for industrial growth historically as a regime that was free to do almost anything conceivable and one whose self-understood historic mission was to create more industrial workers. The Societ government saw itself as a proletarian government, which meant it desperately needed more proletarians. Hence its effort to expansd industry and industrial living conditions into all fields of existence. The party (thought it) understood proletarians and wanted everybody to be one.

The PU has much less scope for action, constrained by German treaty oversight, entrenched interest, and ideological hesitancy. Basically, just like the CPUSSR was ideologically blinded in its dealings with rural communities, the PU is hobbled in its dealing with cities. They want industrial production, just like the Soviets wanted agricultural production, but the don't want industrial workers, really. It's a mirror image of the attempt to create industrial workers on the land in kolkhoz - they want peasants working in factories. It's not realistically possible, obviously, but the attempt puts a crimp in growth (it inadvertently helps by not putting too many big industrial concentrations on Germany's target maps).

I generally agree, and the argument about treaty limitations is also an important one. I'm definitely not saying that a capitalist Russia must be more industrialized than a Red one. The points made in these posts are all valid, although they will be mitigated to a certain extent by the lack of the economic disruption caused by the civil war, collectivization and so on, and by the fact that without the civil war or famines there will be a much larger number of citizens at work producing GDP instead of being dead. A smaller percentage of the cake will be going into heavy industry than in OTL, but the entire cake may be a lot larger.

Would you awfully mind keeping your posts free of ideological bait? That's what chat is for.

Some ideologies simply provide a more effective framework for running things than others. I don't see why this should be ignored.
 
This isn't just a capitalist Russia, though; it's a *Fascist one. That means that whatever gains it might have from nominal capitalism, it's also going to have a lot of the same inefficiencies inherent in any authoritarian state; vicious power struggles, jockeying for imperial/royal/dictatorial favor, powerful stupid men who can't be dislodged, bull-headed aggression and maladaptive strategic planning. A good example; one of the reasons Italy had such famously bad tanks in the OTL WW2 period was tariff wars that artificially limited the growth potential of the Italian automotive industry. A simply capitalist Italy wouldn't have had that same blinkered fixation on autarky.

Also, yeah, the cake might be larger, but it also might take longer to rise, into the post-SRGW peace. More people but less educated (re-educating some of them away from Integralist propaganda is probably a good time for some clever Russian fellow to realize they can get Germany to take the blame for some overdue educational reforms) means lower per-capita productivity, and pastoralist economies are much less resilient; an industrial, urbanized economy is much more capable of using substitute goods.
 
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This isn't just a capitalist Russia, though; it's a *Fascist one. That means that whatever gains it might have from nominal capitalism, it's also going to have a lot of the same inefficiencies inherent in any authoritarian state; vicious power struggles, jockeying for imperial/royal/dictatorial favor, powerful stupid men who can't be dislodged, bull-headed aggression and maladaptive strategic planning. A good example; one of the reasons Italy had such famously bad tanks in the OTL WW2 period was tariff wars that artificially limited the growth potential of the Italian automotive industry. A simply capitalist Italy wouldn't have had that same blinkered fixation on autarky.

Also, yeah, the cake might be larger, but it also might take longer to rise, into the post-SRGW peace. More people but less educated (re-educating some of them away from Integralist propaganda is probably a good time for some clever Russian fellow to realize they can get Germany to take the blame for some overdue educational reforms) means lower per-capita productivity, and pastoralist economies are much less resilient; an industrial, urbanized economy is much more capable of using substitute goods.

OTL soviet union was a authoritan state as well so in this aspect they will be similar.
 
Yes, that was my point. Some of what was wrong with the Soviet Union was down to Marx, and some of it was just authoritarianism and gerontocracy, which the Integralists will have as much or more of. This Russia is going to be starting with even harder arteries, even if it has better medical care in many ways - FDI and French military aid are not to be underestimated; France is going to turn on the money and to a lesser extent technical faucet to keep Germany looking nervously east.

But that money and tech faucet isn't always going to go to watering and sowing the iron crop Integralist Russia needs for war; it's going to be dissipated on weird, impractical crap and projects that never pan out, too. The story of the Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company is pertinent here; Textron benefited enormously from the deal, even founding a new division to handle it. Iran, on the other hand... well, 1979, before any of the promised benefits appeared, was not such a happy year for the Shah. The factory still exists, but it's hardly a world leader in aircraft technology.

They'll replace weird ideas about the industrial proletariat and the inevitability of the Worker's Paradise with weird ideas about techno-pastoralism and the miraculous power of the Tsar to inspire the (Great) Russian People.
 
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What are the emperors children like? Especially the crown prince did the kids end up having the traditional prussian military education and serve in the second russo german war.
 
What are the emperors children like? Especially the crown prince did the kids end up having the traditional prussian military education and serve in the second russo german war.

Right, there are two levels you can answer that question at. Firstly, Wilhelm III breaks with Hohenzollern tradition by having his sons get private tutors. they all attend university, studying respectable fields of their choice (crown prince Friedrich opts for Staatswissenschaft, basically a coss of economics and poli sci). They all hold commissions in guards regiments and spend several years pulling duty as subaltern officers, but the job is light enough. They do not in any meaningful way 'serve' in the war, though they have duties that they perform conscientiously.

So much for the technical side. Now let's talk about Wilhelm. Emotionally stunted, wounded, technocratic and more than a bit of a control freak, you can imagine what a brilliant father he makes. His influence on the lives of all his children is deadening, a crushing weight of expectation and manipulation. Some rebel. Friedrich responds by becoming a model son, perpetually after badges of affirmation, craving approval. He studies hard, marries into the right family, sires the required number of sons, attends the necessary functions, discharges his military duties with conscientious care. He is not a bad man, nor a stupid one. In fact he is an intellectual of some small stature, his dissertation is read on its merits within a narrow field. All his policies are carefully considered. He works hard all his life under the influence of a succession of chancellors, chiefs of staff, and personal advisers. But he remains a nonentity, a placeholder in the emperor-shaped hole his father left on his death.

The good news is that that is EXACTLY what Germany needs at that point. Its institutions are of age. Now, the training wheels come off.
 
Right, there are two levels you can answer that question at. Firstly, Wilhelm III breaks with Hohenzollern tradition by having his sons get private tutors. they all attend university, studying respectable fields of their choice (crown prince Friedrich opts for Staatswissenschaft, basically a coss of economics and poli sci). They all hold commissions in guards regiments and spend several years pulling duty as subaltern officers, but the job is light enough. They do not in any meaningful way 'serve' in the war, though they have duties that they perform conscientiously.

So much for the technical side. Now let's talk about Wilhelm. Emotionally stunted, wounded, technocratic and more than a bit of a control freak, you can imagine what a brilliant father he makes. His influence on the lives of all his children is deadening, a crushing weight of expectation and manipulation. Some rebel. Friedrich responds by becoming a model son, perpetually after badges of affirmation, craving approval. He studies hard, marries into the right family, sires the required number of sons, attends the necessary functions, discharges his military duties with conscientious care. He is not a bad man, nor a stupid one. In fact he is an intellectual of some small stature, his dissertation is read on its merits within a narrow field. All his policies are carefully considered. He works hard all his life under the influence of a succession of chancellors, chiefs of staff, and personal advisers. But he remains a nonentity, a placeholder in the emperor-shaped hole his father left on his death.

The good news is that that is EXACTLY what Germany needs at that point. Its institutions are of age. Now, the training wheels come off.
I feel like this then is just begging the question, if that is the model son Friedrich, how fared the others?
 
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