Hello everyone,
last year was a successful one: I handed in my habilitation thesis, which was accepted, and I passed the oral examination, so now I’m officially overqualified for almost every position ;-) Also, with COVID turning from a pandemic to an endemic disease and the end of lockdowns, distance learning etc., combining work and family (and AH, too) has become possible again, too.
I won’t return to this TL, don’t get me wrong. I already have some ideas in my drawer for a new one (an 1848 one). But a few days before Christmas,
@Ukrainian Victory asked me a few questions concerning this TL, and I thought the answers might interest everyone here.
Also, I wanted to announce that I’ve started to move this TL to the „FInished Timelines“ section and will re-upload regular instalments and the most important discussion contributions there. The link can be found here:
Here is my fourth TL, finally in the finished format. Enjoy!
www.alternatehistory.com
Now for Ukrainian Victory's questions:
His first question was whether the UoE could have realistically fallen apart, like the Soviet Union did IOTL, at some point in time. My answer to this was:
I tend to consider it a lot less likely. IOTL the Soviet Union was kept together by a globally ostracised ideology and its power apparatus. When that ideology suffered a global defeat, the USSR fell apart just like Yugoslavia, when various groups wanted both their own national thing and out from the sinking ideological ship . ITTL, while ideology plays a role, too, it is closer to global general trends,.so even crises and reforms need not create such uncontainable centrifugal forces.
Then again, while thr USSR and post-WW2 Yugoslavia were held together by communism, interwar Yugoslavia was not, yet possessed many centrifugal forces. Serbian dominance there was not by far as strong as Russian in the UoE. So while it isn't an automatism, breakup might still happen.
One fault line I had thought of was in the Islamic South. Its initial pro-UoE forces were either Jadidist or corrupt or both. Given that conflicts between conservative and reformist forces would continue, radical conservative Islamist groups, backed by ethnic dynamica, might try to break free.
Another fault line is Russian chauvinism It must come back at some Point, and when it does it's toxic and fatal for the union. How breakup might proceed then, I am not sure.
Then, he asked about Jewish migration out of the former Pale of Settlement and in general the Jewish population in those regions, as well as whether a democratic Russia might attract immigrants from other European countries.
That is another complex question that requires quite a few other factors to be considered. I’ll give it a shot, though.
The Jewish population in the Pale had started to decline long before 1917. From its peak at around 5 million, it had decreased by something between 25 and 40 percent over the next 34 years, i.e. before the war began. Poverty was not the only reason (that had not changed from before); it was the repeated pogroms of the 1880s and 1900s, the rabid antisemitism of Tsar Alexander III. and the new restrictions he introduced, in a time in which global mobility was rapidly expanding, and especially the USA had become an attractive destination for Jewish migrants (and Zionism was forming, too).
Would this trend continue?
Well, first of all, the official end to the restrictions on Jewish settlement issued by the Provisional Government in March 1917 meant that Jewish citizens of the former Russian Empire could now freely choose where to live in the new Union of Equals. Thus, to some degree, movement out of the Pale and into other parts of the UoE would happen and lead to some degree of deconcentration. Open-minded young Jews from the Pale will start studying in Petrograd, Moscow and elsewhere within the UoE. Zones of heavy industrial production across the Union will attract Jewish workers. And so on. This alone will probably drive down the number of Jews in the Pale to some extent, though I find it hard to predict exactly by how much.
Emigration to the US will be limited by the US itself, first by restrictive laws comparable to OTL, then also by the economic breakdown and poverty that the US experienced IOTL and experiences ITTL, too, after 1929. It will not completely stop, but slow down considerably.
Entirely different pictures compared to OTL are Germany and Palestine. Some emigration of Russian Jews to Germany had occurred pre-WW1. IOTL, the Bolshevik takeover caused a new wave of Jewish emigration in the 1920s. That completely ended in 1933, of course, although very few „Ostjuden“ living in Nazi Germany fled back to the Soviet Union. Palestine, on the other hand, is not a League of Nations mandate ITTL, but an utterly dependent British client state, wrought from the hands of the Hashemites in the treaty that ended the Hashemite-Saudi War. The new Palestine iss maller than post-WW2 Israel, by a lot, and hasn’t been officially declared a „Jewish state“, but it’s been designed to be majority-Jewish and controlled by pro-British Jewish groups. Jewish immigration is allowed, but numerically limited. Without the Holocaust, I doubt that this changes soon.
Which takes us to the biggest elephant in the room – the Shoah, whose victims were to a very significant degree Jews from the former Pale. And to a smaller elephant, namely the question of whether decolonisation will proceed differently from OTL.
Addressing the question of decolonisation is a bit too huge, to be honest, and might derail my attempt to answer the question. Let us just say that the British Empire holds on to its Palestinian client state well into the second half oft he 20th century, all the while keeping the lid on Jewish (and other) immigration on, late enough for a Jewish migration from the former Pale into Palestine to require a new, different reason from the ones that had driven the dynamics of the pre-WW1 emigration, and of course a different reason from OTL’s Shoah, which does not take place ITTL, neither in Germany, nor anywhere else.
No aliya to Israel waves, no Bolshevik revolution and civil war, and most importantly no Nazi invasion and no Shoah all mean that the Jewish population in the former Pale of Settlement will remain incomparably more numerous than IOTL. It might shrink for a while still, probably rebound a little, before the anti-baby pill brings down birth rates in all more or less developed countries.
Thus, a figure somewhere between two and three million Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, or more precisely, in the Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Bessarabian Federative Republics, makes sense to me. (For we need to take into account that of the 3-4 million Jews living in the Russian Empire in 1914, about a fifth ends up in TTL’s Poland.)
So… is the end of the shtetl averted ITTL?
(I know this was not the question, but I’ll address it anyway.)
In a way.
Sure, once it becomes easier to move out somewhere else, some people will do that, and most of them will blend in or form less compact communities. Sure, modernity’s teeth are gnawing at all culturally coherent communities.
But the mere fact that no Shoah is killing off the majority of the former Pale’s Jews and motivating many of the rest to emigrate e.g. to Israel means that these communities evolve without great exogenic shocks through the 20th century. Ethnic and cultural enclaves exist across the world, and while some dissolve faster, others remain distinguishable for many centuries, and our modern (post-)industrial age knows quite a lot of coherent, compact, distinct communities in small alleys of the global village. Hasidic Jews have been particularly known for such behaviour. Now, the different course of TTL’s 20th century must change Hasidism deeply, too, when compared to OTL. Still, it doesn’t change everything.
And I believe I have already set the ground for more structural reasons for the shtetl to maybe take on new forms, diversify, in some parts modernise, but not necessarily to disappear. In various post-revolutionary governments, Jewish groups have played a small but indispensable role in the formation of coalition majorities. And they have delivered to their constituents things which I believe will not be taken away from them in the decades that came after the revolution: tax money going into (formally democratically overseen) Yeshivot and schools in general; the formation of a Jewish militia as a component of the Republican Guards etc. All of this strengthens the cores and the function of existing Jewish settlements for Jewish life: sure, now there will be Yeshivot in Moscow and Petrograd, too, but the existing traditional important ones will continue to shine brighter for quite a while still. The paramilitary arm can protect Jewish inhabitants of compact communities a lot better than Jewish citizens living somewhere else among the gentiles. While I don’t see another significant wave of pogroms in the cards ITTL, some unfortunate events here and there can never be excluded, considering how deep antisemitism runs in most European societies. There will be modern, urban Jews who frown at the narrow-minded traditionality of the shtetl and would never move there, not even if it would protect them better, and there will be traditionalists who see their compact community as the centre of their world. And there will probably even be new thinkers who will draw on some of the communal traditions of the shtetl even in new places and new contexts.
Now, the other question:
Immigration from other European countries… hm, probably not much. Petrograd, with its wild anarchist flavour / sub-culture (and no tuition fees) will certainly attract students from all over the world, and of course in a globalised economy, you will always have people moving from here to there, working in another country for a while. Few of them will stay for ever. Some people move to where their heart draws them. But the big push and pull factors of migration are wars, violence, catastrophes, and huge economic disparities.
In terms of economic disparities, even the most rose-tinted optimistic view on the UoE’s economic development compared to Western Europe and North America will have to acknowledge that the UoE will most probably continue to lag behind to some degree. To overcome or reverse the structural differences in development between Western and Eastern Europe – another interesting topic for a TL! – might require a much earlier PoD, maybe even one which sees no Mongol invasion. A world in which the UoE continues the former Russian Empire’s trajectory of economic development roughly still means a world in which e.g. Southern Italians looking for better paid jobs will more likely go to the US than to Ukraine, Russia or Turkestan. So, no mass immigration from Europe. Especially since I don’t think we would see another horrible world war in the heart of the European continent without the Nazis, which I have nipped in the bud.
That does not mean that the UoE would not attract immigrants at all. In comparison to other regions of the world, it is more developed, and elsewhere, violent conflicts will happen. Conflicts in China and Southern Asia might push some people (not unlikely of Muslim persuasion) into the UoE (maybe into Turkestan, but not necessarily exclusively). Speaking of Muslim immigration: the close ties between the UoE and the Hashemite kingdoms which I have already begun to build would only consolidate in a world where the main rivalry is between the UoE and Britain, and the British have lost their favor with the Hashemites. This is a tie that specifically binds the Jadidist-led new political entities and forces in the UoE to the equally reformist elites of these MIddle Eastern nations. If conflicts should break out somewhere across the globe, and reformist Muslims come under attack by whomever else, then the UoE generally makes a lot of sense as their place of asylum.
Thus, I expect the UoE’s countries to look a lot more diverse and colourful than IOTL, especially compared to OTL’s Russia, which has seen little immigration.
