Feeble Constitution - A Red-and-Green Russia 1917

[Salvador79]

Greece and Anatolia in 1920

The key divergence of TTL from OTL in that region remains that the Entente has stayed (more or less) together (instead of the Soviets becoming pariahs and other Powers squabbling with each other in controversial attempts at containing them): That has been and will be bad news for Turkey, generally speaking. Turkish interests were not helped by Wilson’s earlier and generally known incapacitation and replacement by Acting President Marshall, who did not share Wilson’s emphasis on national self-determination. And thus, just before his assassination, UoE president Avksentiev had signed, without much American protest, along with Damat Ferid Pasha, Eleftherios Venizelos, Vittorio Orlando (the Constantinople Conference was before the general elections) and David Lloyd George (the conference was also before Law’s “coup”), the Treaty of Constantinople. It entailed the establishment of various separate nation states on former parts of the Ottoman Empire: the Arab Kingdom of Syria, the Kingdom of Iraq, the Kingdom of the Hejaz, the Free State of Mount Lebanon, the Free State of Cilicia, and the Kurdish Free State. Neighboring states would acquire lands in which ethnically related populations lived: Greece would receive parts of Ionia and Pontus, the Armenian Federative Republic had its massive gains legalised. More territory was to come under international supervision and plebiscites would later be held in Eastern Thrace. The Powers would establish permanent military bases, particularly to secure free and open passage of the Straits, but also to maintain four other “free ports”, control Anatolian railroads and generally prevent any new insurgency to spread. The Ottoman Public Debt Administration was fully re-instated and reformed.

Well, this much I had divulged already. Here is a map which illustrates the situation:

Since the last time I discussed this region (in Updates 65 and 66), a lot has happened in Greece, Bulgaria, Albania and Anatolia. Some of the key external factors have been the UoE policy shift towards (militarily) frugal isolationsim from Avksentiev to Volsky, the replacement of David Lloyd George with Bonar Law in Britain, and the changes in Serbia and its behaviour towards its neighbours.

All three of them have strengthened the importance of Greece. While all five Great Powers want to keep the Straits open and the debt payments flowing, and the US, the UoE, the EFP and to some extent even the British (who were the only ones who undertook measures in this direction IOTL, but ITTL are less inclined to play a leading role, given their own dirty Irish laundry) want Ottoman war criminals indicted in The Hague, and at least the UoE, France and Britain have a vested interest in preventing the Ottomans from recovering so much strength as to be able to challenge their annexations, most Great Powers are not really willing to commit massive military resources to ensure that everything goes as required in order to achieve these goals. Prime Minister Bonar Law famously mused that “if I had to choose between the Anatolian Straits and the Suez, our vital imperial interests would clearly force me to prefer the latter over the former.” Vladimir Volsky’s Minister for Defense, Jan Sierada, has offered large parts of the Union’s Black Sea Fleet to the Greek for sale, and was only coerced by the Armenian FR’s delegates to the Council of the Union (who had threatened to veto otherwise absolutely consensual plans on adjudicating additional competencies over trade issues like measures and weights, which the Constitutional Assembly had not thought about, to the Union level) to significantly reduce the size of these naval sell-out plans and counterbalance them with additional land forces for the protection of the Armenian border and the maintenance of a strong force of “International Cossacks” to police the Ottoman Empire and help it in keeping down nationalist rebels. And that the US Army would not send boys to Anatolia was self-evident.

Greece, under the leadership of Venizelos, on the other hand, is very much disposed to commit these resources. Venizelos has two very good years in 1919 and 1920, with much less Greek refugees to accommodate and much more EFP help in doing so, with his army encountering much less resistance in its conquest of Ionia, and almost none when they take over Pontus from a mixed international force after a tweaked plebiscite which heavily favoured the more literate Greek population over the predominantly rural and illiterate Turks. The EFP Mandate of Eastern Thrace, which is mostly calm, will be ended on December 31st, 1920, and in the autumn of 1920, plebiscites have determined which parts of it fall to Greece and which to Bulgaria. (The option of remaining in the Ottoman Empire was only available in few selected constituencies.) Venizelos has made the “Megali Idea” come true. His popularity has only increased, but his powerbase in the military is still somewhat unsafe, given that he cannot really dispose of too many disloyal monarchist officers if he wants the Greek Army to be able to face all of its many challenges. Either way, though, the Venizelists are dominating over any opposition from both Right and Left (the latter being much weaker with less misery and displacements, too), and in spite of the electoral system which really disfavours them, their Liberal Party wins the popular vote even more clearly than in OTL in the 1920 elections and achieve a clear parliamentary majority, not least because of the Ionian and Pontic votes.

Greece does acquire some Russian ships in the end (we’ve discussed some options in the thread already) because they need to enlarge their navy significantly now that they have Ionia and Pontus to defend. They secure these gains, and because international (and especially EFP) goodwill is both available and of extreme importance to Greece, who do not want to be forced to defend themselves against resurgent Turks alone (like they did IOTL), great emphasis is placed on the prevention of massacres after the first horrible incidents in Smyrna shocked the public. Greece also commits additional troops to the international forces which aid the Ottoman government in restoring and maintaining control over its territory haunted by nationalist rebels. To recall from earlier updates: There is no Turkish Nationalist Army. There have only been rogue military officers – pretty much the same ones as IOTL, based around the Karaköl Society and strategically led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha – refusing their orders to stand down, demobilise their troops and hand over their weaponry to Entente control points, and instead trying to continue the fight in the mountainous, inaccessible hinterland. These rebels are many, and initially they can count on a solid degree of covert political support from the Ottoman Empire’s urban Turkish (and not only Turkish) elites. At the few points where they faced open battles – mostly when Entente forces were able to encircle them –, they suffered defeat after defeat, and they lost many a capable military leader in those carnages. But their strategy of choice is guerrilla resistance. As such, they have never formed a coherent political alternative to the Ottoman state. There were no Congresses of Siva or Erzurum like IOTL, and there certainly isn’t a rivalling Parliament in Ankara. There is no progressive republican nationalist agenda associated with the name of Kemal, the Hero of Gallipoli. There are only bandits hiding in villages, sabotaging bridges just when trains with cargo relevant for the Great Powers are about to pass them, and all that.

In Istanbul, Damat Ferid Pasha has stepped down as Grand Vizier after he had to sign the humiliating treaty. He is replaced by Ahmed Tefvik Pasha (who had also been his predecessor, and whom he is going to succeed again in 1920). The two represent different factions of the Ottoman elites: on the one hand the Freedom and Accord Party, envisioning a liberal monarchy in which traditional Ottoman institutions became mere labels for Western-style structures, cautious social reforms, and economic integration into Europe. On the other hand, there are more conservative elements concentrated in the higher bureaucracy and former military who saw it as the prime necessity to resist Western domination, the disintegration of the state apparatus and the military as the backbones not only of Ottoman strength but also of Ottoman identity in principle, and who tended to see conservative religious views as fundamental to this whole edifice, too. While the conservatives were less drastic in their severing all ties with the former CUP politicians and even welcomed some of them among their faction, they were nevertheless united with the Freedom and Accord Party in the realization that the CUP’s war aligment had been fatal and its genocidal policies had damaged the Ottomans’ standing in the eyes of the rest of the world unnecessarily, and thus they shared the goal of preventing a return of groups too closely linked with the CUP. Both factions were not battling each other on the streets – not only because they had common enemies there in the nationalist rebels, but also because they had very little following among the broader masses in the first place. They relied on the Ottoman institutions to pursue their goals, dislodge their rivals and further their own agenda – and both their leaders also relied on the support of the Great Powers, who soon became very aware of the fact that the needed them, too, to hold the heavy yoke they had placed on the Turkish people in place. One reason why this rivalry was not openly decided and resolved was that Sultan Mehmet was, if we want to put it positively, “above this partisan strife”. (Or one could also say, he cared very little for the whole circus of politics.) And so, like IOTL, the Lower House of Parliament dominated by the CUP was dissolved at the Entente’s behest in 1918, but unlike IOTL, new elections are held late in 1919, under Ottoman auspices, and the two rivalling factions supported by the Great Powers did their best to make sure that “dangerous forces” – by which they meant both far-right, CUP-revivalist attempts like the Renewal Party and more revolutionary, republican and socialist groups like those of Ethem Nejat and Hüseyin Hilmi at the same time – would not obtain any victory in it. Not without British and French aid, the more liberal Freedom and Accord Party (HIF) and the new-formed more conservative Ottoman Justice Party (Osmanli Adalat Firkazi, OAF) de facto found a modus vivendi, or a gentlemen’s agreement, to share the power in the new Ottoman system between each other.

Nevertheless, keeping the remaining rebels down is requiring a lot of effort. The burden on Greece is almost more than the small (and still bitterly divided) country can carry. Even France is putting greater emphasis on stabilising the Ruhr, absorbing their new colonial acquisitions, and engaging in new adventures in North Africa and China, and thus limiting itself to the pacification of their Lebanese and Cilician protectorates and Cilicia’s immediate ore-rich hinterland. UoE troops, apart from those stationed along the two Straits as part of the international forces securing their openness and neutrality – and propping up the Sultan’s feeble government in Istanbul – are concentrating on Eastern Anatolia, where the unstable new Kurdish Free State gives everyone a lot of headaches and parts of it meddle in the anti-Ottoman rebellion, too.

And so, when another bomb goes off in a church full of Armenian refugees somewhere in Anatolia, the International Security Force kindly appeals to the Italian government to step up its military presence on the peninsula. Italy’s first troops have landed in Adalia in the spring of 1919, like IOTL, but unless IOTL where it happened as a sort of gesture of defiance when Orlando was not making a bella figura in Paris, ITTL they come as part of a greater international force from the beginning. British diplomats are hinting that the Treaty of Constantinople could be re-negotiated and lands from the Meander Valley to Side, rich in minerals like chrome and agriculturally productive, being Anatolia’s prime exporting regions of figs and olive oil, could be ceded to Italy in exchange for more engagement in combatting the chauvinistic Turkish terrorists.

But things have changed in Italy since these first landings in Adalia. The kingdom has gone through a bloody failed revolution, elected a new parliament in which a broad governing coalition – the Gran Alleanza led by the President of the Senate Don Luigi Sturzo – has been formed with ambitious aims of reforming Italy’s economy, society, and political system, and now, in 1920, Serbia is threatening its Montenegrin ally, infiltrating its forces into the nominally EFP- but factually Italian-protected Republic of Albania, and annexing Mandate territory in Western Yugoslavia, threatening to become another behemoth beleaguering Italy’s Adriatic flank. Sturzo’s Liberal Minister for War, Marcello Soleri, is indeed willing to engage in Anatolia, too, and the nationalist press is cheering for Anatolian annexations which would bring Italy another step closer to the mediterranean-spanning glory of the Roman Empire.

But neither Sturzo, nor his moderate socialist and socialist-revolutionary coalition partners on the left are willing to engage in this adventure. There is no Italian minority in Anatolia to speak of, there were not even any historical precedents to legitimise their interference (if one didn’t want to go back into antiquity), and Don Sturzo was keen on learning from the Cyrenaic mistakes in the costly struggle against the Senussi which had ended in a new and less openly unequal settlement with the Muslim natives after the kingdom had spent vast resources. Protecting Catholic Croat refugees and the elected (well, not exactly in fair and violence-free elections, but still...) governments of Montenegro and Albania was one thing. (And his socialist and populist-agrarian coalition partners would add, stopping the chauvinistic tyranny which murdered politically active workers and peasants was a worthwhile effort, too.) Italian engagement in Western Yugoslavia, Montenegro and Albania was consensual, thus. Here, more resources would be devoted. But sinking endless resources – even if it was “only” colonial troops from Somalia – into Anatolia in the hopes of gaining there what one could not defend in North Africa was not. Italy would not withdraw from its international engagement in the Ottoman Empire altogether, no, but it would not multiply its troops there, either.

That left only the UoE. The Armenian government was adamant: the danger of a new murderously racist, pan-Turkic regime arising out of an instable Ottoman rump Empire was not removed yet! Before the Union could talk about deepening federal competencies, starting new infrastructural projects, legislating new frameworks for international involvement in the extraction of public natural resources etc., it would have to commit to safety on the Anatolian peninsula. Volsky might well let down his allies in Berlin and on the Balkans, if he thought that wise, Armenian Prime Minister Ohanjaniyan commented, but he would not neglect Armenia’s life insurance against another Aghed! – And so it was indeed. The Armenian blackmail was a precedent which laid bare the weakness of the central government, in the eyes of some – or the prudent preservation of each republic’s most vital interests, in the eyes of others. As its result, while elsewhere UoE troops were reduced and called home, Anatolia saw a surge in the presence of the troops which were still nicknamed “International Cossacks”, although over the course of 1919 and 1920, more and more Circassians, both from the Mountainous FR of the Northern Caucasus and from Russia, would come to serve in these units.

 

[Salvador79]

Map of Europe in 1920:

 

[Salvador79]

The Evening Standard (London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), March 20th, 1921, p. 4:

A HEALTHY COURSE IN THE UNION OF EQUALS

by Marie Stopes [1]

The All-Union Congress of Health Workers in Helsinki was a sight to behold, and participating in it as a guest was an experience not to forget. Over two thousand attendants had gathered in Finland’s capital – nurses and midwives, and medical doctors of all specialties, completed by a handful of statesmen who spoke as guests. From all these speeches, often in acknowledged contradiction to each other, always performed with admirable self-confidence, what has transpired is that the East has embarked on a globally unprecedented secular collective endeavour of eradicating disease and misery and building a healthy society for future generations to live in:

We have listened to the local hero Professor Dr. Arvo Ylppö and his vision for child welfare clinics in every Finnish town. Even more awe-struck I was by the speech held by Ukraine’s Minister for Health, Professor Dr. Mikolai Hamaliya. He reported about strenuous efforts at improving hygiene through massive investments in clean water provision, garbage collection and sewage systems. He answered to the Congress’s resolutions for higher wages with his government’s strategy of creating thousands of new medical jobs for nurses, paramedics, midwives and specialised physicians and training them, whose cost already puts a high burden on his young republic’s budget. Staying with matters of finance, he used the forum at Helsinki to demand Union-wide political support and co-ordination for the efforts to develop and produce cheaper autochtonous vaccines which could substitute expensive foreign imports. [2] But where Hamaliya spoke his truest words was when he urged everyone involved in health and social care to concentrate their efforts on enlightening the womenfolk among the peasantry and the urban workforce about matters of sexuality and contraception. All progressive initiatives in the European East are threatened to stumble over this problem, all advances doomed to drown in the flood of overpopulation and the individual and collective misery which overbreeding brings to the least fit segments of society. [3] Unfortunately, his plea for other republics to follow Ukraine’s example of decriminalising abortion did not meet with the overwhelming consensual support it deserves – alas, there are bigots in Russia just like here! [4]

And that does not seem to be the only problem plaguing the colossus in the East. If we can trust the fervent but eloquent criticism of the social democrats’ expert on medical questions, Nikolai Semashko, then the funds and jobs promised by the administration are in danger of ending up in the pockets of corrupt party officials. He reported about developments in the Voronezh region, where local strongmen of the governing party hold both directorial functions, positions as union chairmen, and in the councils which were supposed to supervise the allocation of funds there, leading to great amounts of government money and all types of loans being misdirected into the pockets of these men and their cronies, instead of into sanitary facilities. Heated partisan controversies ensued here, too.

Overall, though, it must be noted that the countries of the East are making great strides forward in the healthification of their societies – soon they will have caught up with us, and, who knows, if our government continues with its mis-allocations, ill-advised frugality, and stumbling blocks for socially engaged enterprising individuals [5], they might soon overtake us.


[1] Stopes was a suffragette, a productive writer, and also engaged in the project of a “family clinic” in London with funds from her wealthy second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe. Birth control was one of Stopes’s favourite topics in the late 1910s and early 1920s. She’s a, well, colourful character, to say the least, and so was her engagement in favour of birth control: There was both a genuine concern for female dignity and equal partnership in it, but also a prejudiced eugenic view horrified of “over-breeding” of “unfit C3s”.

[2] Imperial Russia had imported many vaccines from France. As French research and development in that area is very productive post-war, too – just this year, BCG vaccines against tuberculosis are invented there –, I suppose this trend has continued.

[3] Here, she is not quoting Gamaleya. He is a eugenicist, but not quite as blunt and classist as her, who even wrote to parliamentary candidates and tried to get them to commit to a eugenicist agenda, polemically stating that the “strains on the A1 population” should be lessened lest the country be overpopulated by “C3s” (A1 and C3 being the best vs. the worst categories of fitness into which military recruits were sorted, with C3s being considered unfit for duty.)

[4] A quick reminder about the “religious revivalist” strand which is becoming one of the many competing camps within the SR Party…

[5] Setting up a new clinic is not easy, she’s bound to be frustrated at some point…

 

[Salvador79]

Warsaw (Polish Republic): Gazeta Warszawska, July 13th, 1921, p.4:

KERENSKY CONDEMNS ATROCITIES IN ARABIA; UPHOLDS SELF-DETERMINATION

by Zygmunt Wasilewski [1]

During his visit to the joint chambers of Turkestan’s parliament in Kazan [2], the so-called Union of Equals' foreign minister Mr Kerensky held a speech in which he condemned what he called “atrocities” committed by Saudi bedouins [3] against “helpless women and children” after their capture of the capital of the Rashidi emirate. [4] In the light of the threat which allies of self-same bedouins pose to the holiest city of the Mohammedans [5], and of the general state of the conflagration in Arabia, Mr Kerensky has appealed to world leaders to commit to the “immunity of the sacred sites of all religions” and renewed the declaration of the so-called Union of Equals' government’s support for “the democratic awakening of the Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish peoples and their self-determination, unfettered by foreign powers.” [6]

What has world politics come to when the very unequal union led by the Russians is the only strong voice speaking for national self-determination! Wonders apparently do happen, and we cannot help but agree with Mr Kerensky’s statements. It is to be hoped that the government of which Mr Kerensky is part should finally commit itself firmly and unwaveringly to this principle, everywhere, in Lwow and Wilno as much as in Erbil and Tehran, and that it does not merely use the principle of self-determination as a fig leave to dump its old military materiel in its poor periphery for the locals to fight in the Russians’ game for spheres of influence against their British rivals. [7]



[1] We are reading an ND newspaper, and its editor-in-chief is taking the time to comment an issue in far-away Turkestan, which counts for something, even if it’s only on page 4. He is short about it (has probably only received agency bulletins from Wolffs, or Havas, or Reuters), because he also comments on the front page about a scandal in Polish politics, but he does give this piece of second-hand information his very own twist...

[2] Remember, there is a Majles as-Shura and a Union Council. Determining a Turkestanic stance on what UoE foreign policy should be a matter for Turkestan’s Union Council, but since the whole dispute about the caliphates is about core theological tenets and fundamental questions of Islamic law, the Majles as-Shura has been convened as well.

[3] Whether or not this is a very accurate term, it was the most widespread one at the time.

[4] Ha’il has fallen about a week ago. Its defense was more spirited than IOTL, and a Hashemite force of over 4,000 arrived to relieve the besieged town. But a lack of coordination, tactical mistakes, and the belated arrival of one part of the forces all hampered their effort, and so, while the Battle of Ha’il is a much more costly endeavour for the Saudis ITTL, with over 1,000 casualties on their side, too, they ultimately managed to both overcome, destroy and disperse the relief force, and then force the besieged to surrender. (So far, this mirrors the one-sidedness of Saudi-Hashemite and Saudi-Rashidi encounters post-WW1, even where the Hashemites weren’t clearly outnumbered.) After this much more costly fight – and maybe also to frigthen their enemies so much as to force them to the negotiation table, and / or to deliberately create the wave of refugees which is now affecting both Syria and Iraq –, the Ikhwan went on a killing spree in the former capital of Jabal Shammar. The amount of Shammar refugees currently moving into Syria and Iraq is even larger than OTL’s.

[5] Ikhwan forces under Sultan ibn-Bayad al-Otaibi have taken Ta’if, like they did IOTL in 1924, and now Mecca is under attack. As has been discussed upthread, there is little the Hashemites can do to avert this at this point in time without even a functioning Hejaz Railway.

[6] Now this opens a big can of worms. On Monday at the latest, I hope to be able to give an authorial account of what has happened in Turkestan, Kurdistan, Persia and elsewhere. (Sorry to delay this once again, I’m halfway-through with writing it, but I wanted to update this newspaper part first or else I would have gone without update this week, which I didn’t want.)

[7] Which is exactly what the UoE does: While the British are equipping “their” Kurds around Mahmoud Barzanji who have begun to revolt against the central Kurdish government in Diyarbakir, and “their” Southern Persian government, the UoE is equipping the elected Kurdish government and covertly encouraging it to pass on more Southwards to the Hashemites.

 

[Salvador79]

Explanations (Part 1 of 3): Persia and Kurdistan

Two and a half months have passed since the Bay’ah in Damascus. Militarily, they have been desastrous for the Hashemites, as we have seen. But this has not dampened the dynamic which the Caliphial movement has created. Rather, it has gotten out of hand. Caliph Husayn has not done anything to reign it in, though, because in these weeks, the battle for the hearts and minds of Syria’s and Iraq’s population needs to be won. The wave of support and euphoria from across the rest of the Arab world and beyond is emboldening reformers and nationalists and is the wind that blows into the governments’ backs while they are forced to make some tough allocation decisions, directing both countries’ resources towards the production of militarily relevant goods at the detriment of the civilian economy. So far, determination is still strong. The defeats at al-Khurma, Ta’if and Ha’il have not disheartened most of public opinion, but they have been interpreted as a sign that the outdated military approach and the uncoordinated army of tribal warriors are not up to the challenges of the 20th century and must quickly be replaced by modern armies. Yusuf al-Azma, in the leadership of Syria’s army, agrees with this mindset and has convinced King Faisal of the necessity of full military modernisation as the top priority of the moment. The massacres have created outrage and only strengthened the resolve. For the moment, it seems that Druze and Moslems, Christians and Yazidi, Sunni and Shi’a are as united as they have probably never been before.

This all began with the coup by Zia’eddin Tabbatabaee which only two months later than IOTL, but under very different circumstances. Like IOTL, its success was helped along by the Persian Cossack Brigade. But that’s where the similarities end – even the Persian Cossack Brigade of TTL is definitely different from OTL’s. Its UoE personnel has been replaced to a great extent, and it exerts a much greater influence than it did at this point IOTL where Persian officers like Reza Shah were beginning to take over full control.

But let’s look at the two different coups of OTL and TTL in greater detail. OTL February 21st coup (or 3 Esfand 1299 in Persian) was conducted by a coalition of progressive politicians (like Tabbatabaee) and nationalist figures from military and other elites, and it was mostly aimed at replacing what had been perceived as a weak government in Tehran with one which would protect the integrity and independence of the Empire better, which meant oppressing revolts in Gilan, Persian Azerbaijan and Persian Kurdistan and keeping one’s equal distance from both the Soviets and the British. Tabbatabaee was left to conclude a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in which Moscow renounced tsarist Russia’s claim to Northern Persia as its sphere of influence, to announce new elections to the Majles and plans for land reform etc., but before this could threaten the privileges of the elites too much, a second coup swept him away and installed Ahmad Qawam, brother of the corrupt pro-British former premier Vossugh ed Dowleh, in his place. A new type of nationalist, militarist, proto-authoritarian conservatists emerged triumphant from the power struggle, and twice the Persian Cossack Brigade had played an important role, both of which would foreshadow Reza Pahlavi’s ultimate ascension to power as the new shah a few years later.

ITTL, the coup aligns with a greater wave of political awakening across the Middle East, its internal power balance diverges from OTL, it is aided by a wholly different Persian Cossack Brigade, and it aligns entirely differently with the various militant factions within Persia. To put it in very anachronistic and simplistic terms, the Left is stronger in TTL’s 3 Esfand, and the Right has no hope left but Britain.

To be more precise and less anachronistic: ITTL, the Persian Cossack Brigade is a loyal tool of the Union of Equals, which it has been from 1917 through 1919 under the command of Georgy Klerzhe and which it has continued to be under the command of Yakov Korotayev. Both Klerzhe and Korotayev have executed Union policies which have sought to strengthen democratic- and socialist-leaning forces in Persia, who would be natural allies of the UoE, Petrograd thought. This has brought them in ever greater conflict with Vossugh ed Dowleh’s government who had concluded the Anglo-Persian Agreement and generally depended on British support and whose main Persian support base were conservative land-owning elites, and the Brigade’s continued presence in Persia was owed to no small extent to the fact that they combatted the only enemy which the old Tehran government and Petrograd had in common: Mohammad Khiabani’s “Azadistan” movement, which was not only secessionist, but also Azeri irredentist and harboured many Müsavat and more extreme Azeri independence fighters who had fled Baku and the Azeri Republic within Turkestan after repeated waves of repression against such “terrorists” there. Prior to TTL’s April 1921 coup, rumours had it that British agents had managed to bring Khiabani and Dowleh to an understanding, in which Persian Azerbaijan would receive very far-reaching autonomy and in exchange would desist from raiding or otherwise interfering in matters in the rest of Persia, including breaking its alliance with other rebel groups in Gilan and elsewhere, so that Tehran would be free to get rid of the Persian Cossacks.

In his bid to prevent this, Commander Korotayev contacted only those among the political groups, who still chafed after the Majles had been dissolved in 1915 again, who would be supportive of a democratic reform government which would not align with the British. This included large chunks of Soleiman Eskandari’s secularist “Democratic Party”, but primarily Zia’eddin Tabbatabaee’s “Moderate Socialists” who supported a parliamentary system, land reform, state-financed irrigation schemes, and ITTL also a federal outlook for Persia in order to end some of the revolts at the negotiation table, while it rejected several provisions of the Anglo-Persian Agreement and sought a close alliance with the UoE in exchange. More than those two “established opposition” groups, though, the putschists (or revolutionaries, as they much preferred to be called) also counted on enthusiastic support by some segments of the urban population through a vague alignment with the wave of political awakening in Muslim lands in the context of the Sharifian Caliphate movement. It’s not as if Shi’ite Persia would follow a Sunni Caliph – even though reformers like Rashid Rida did make overtures in this direction, dreaming of religious reforms overcoming the millennium-old dividing lines between Sunnism, Shi’ism, and Zaidism. But wasn’t Persia faced with the same choice as their neighbors: staying on a traditionalist path, in good favours of the British, which had so far only brought subservience, exploitation, and political weakness? Or modernising and reforming and joining the growing alliance of self-liberating Muslim nations? Not few among the religiously educated supported reformist rule, too, chief among them Hassan Modarres.

And so, this time, when Shah Ahmad Qajar appointed Zia’eddin Tabbatabaee as the new premier, he does not run the risk of getting couped from within by conservative forces. Tabbatabaee immediately begins official negotiations with Mirza Kuchik Khan’s Jangali rebels and Simko Shikak’s Kurdish forces as well as with Azeri groups willing to break with Khiabani, announces elections for a new Majles, and communicates to Petrograd the wish to establish a treaty of friendship. Korotayev’s Persian Cossacks help him control the situation in Tehran, and so Tabbatabaee’s conservative opponents have no other option but to flee the capital, towards the South, over Isfahan to Shiraz, which is controlled by the British-equipped and -aligned Southern Persian Rifles. Here, Ahmad Qawam manages to get himself selected as “prime minister” of a counter-government by a convention of notables and conservative religious leaders.

Since these events of late April and early May, Tabbatabaee has managed to come to an understanding with Mirza Kuchik Khan, bringing some “Jangali” forces into his camp, but failed to win over Simko Shikak, who chose to ally with Mahmud Barzanji and the British instead. In “Azadistan”, Persian Cossacks and local allies have brought Tabriz under their control, but the fight is not over yet. So far, the North and the South have not clashed yet, and Volsky’s reluctance as well as Tabbatabaee’s awareness that he is still fighting at least on two, if not three fronts, have made the nominally much stronger North cautious. The British, for their part, are not interested in escalation, either. In their view, a smaller Southern Persian puppet and pro-British Kurds controlling almost all of Persia’s oil reserves as well as the safety of the Persian Gulf is all they really care for. In the long run, the two rivalling Persian governments will not agree, though – both see themselves as the legitimate Persian government and consider Persia to be too small for both of them... (The North has the head of state among them and gained additional legitimacy through elections held in those territories it controlled; the South argues with the continuity between their administration and the one which had been previously appointed, and they rightly state that the shah had been blackmailed into appointing Tabbatabaee.)

Coming to Kurdistan... Between the Paris Peace Conference and the Conference of Constantinople, a Kurdish National Council (KNC) was established under the "guidance" of the Powers, specifically France, Britain and the UoE, who each have troops stationed on Kurdish territory (the British in Soran, the French in the West, the UoE in Hakkari and other Northerly areas to the West of it). It is to this KNC that the building of the Free State is entrusted. Within the Council, the enormous heterogeneity of Kurdistan is roughly represented:

Kurdistan has Alevite, Sunnite, Shi’ite, Yazidi and al-Haqq Kurds, as well as Assyrian Christians. Linguistically, the South speaks Sorani varieties, while in the North, Kurds speak Zaza and Kurmanji varieties – and the Assyrians have their own neo-Aramaic language, of course. Then, there is a great amount of economic lifestyles – nomads, farmers, and a few town dwellers. In the KNC, this is reflected in the dominance of two major groups vying for influence, with two smaller alliances seeking to obtain their goals through aligning with either of the big two. The two major groups are Sherif Pasha’s Kurdish Democratic Party, which emerged from the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan, on the one hand, and Mahmud Barzanji’s Liberation League on the other hand.

The KDP’s support base are Alevi Kurds and the Kocgiri and Parcikan tribes; it exerts control in the North-West and leans towards the two EFP powers France and UoE. Politically, it has favoured a federal solution with cultural autonomy for the cantons but a decently strong federal government with a common army and common economic and fiscal legislation; prior to 1921, it has sought for Kurdistan to stay aloof of the conflicts among its neighbors, and to contribute to the common effort of suppressing the Turkish nationalist rebels. The Liberation League, on the other hand, is strong in Soran and particularly among the Hamavand tribe. Because all of Kurdistan’s not-yet-completely-known-but-already-estimated oil wealth lies in Soran, it has vehemently opposed economic centralisation and opted for a very loose Kurdish confederacy of three, four or more independent states, each with their own army. In terms of foreign policy, they have been supportive of Simko Shikak’s attempts to break the Kurdish part of Persia off from the Qajar Empire and join it with the rest in the Kurdish Confederacy, and they view the Kingdom of Iraq, with whom border disputes in oil-rich territories are ongoing, as the greatest threat, against which they kept together with the rest of the Kurds until 1921, even when a majority allied against them to pass the Constitution of October 1920, in the KDP’s ideas of a cantonal state with a relatively strong federal level prevail.

This constitution only came to pass because, against religious concessions and under pressure from their UoE patrons, one of the smaller factions, the Assyrian Assembly, agreed to the draft. The other smaller group are conservative Sunni Kurds, who make up a much larger portion of the total population but were underrepresented in the KNC because many of them had supported the Ottoman cause, and later even the nationalist rebels against a separate, pluralistic Kurdish Free State. Initially, this group was the main recruiting ground for anti-Free State, pro-Ottoman rebels, among them many members of the former Hamidiye cavalry. As the Free State consolidated and such militant groups were crushed, they moved into the political sphere, but were marginalised there. In their view, Armenia and by implication the UoE are the biggest threat in the region. They opposed the draft, but even together with the Liberation League, they were outvoted.

In the winter of 1920/21, elections were held in the Kurdish cantons and for the federal parliament, which especially in mixed regions were accompanied by outbreaks of violence and in which the pro-constitutional coalition parties prevailed by a very narrow margin, and Mehmet Sherif (Pasha) merely managed to get elected as the country’s first prime minister with his own vote tipping the balance. Mehmet Sherif nevertheless went on to form his government, leaning on considerable support by the EFP powers in his endeavours to maintain the peace of the land and build up administrative structures. At every juncture, he faces strong opposition, and the factions who oppose him now have official functions in the various cantons. In defiance of the constitution, they maintain and expand militia, guarding for the unforeseeable.

The unforeseeable happened with the Sharifian Caliphate movement, and with Sherif Pasha following a pro-Hashemite policy. While this irked conservative Sunni Kurds, it really enraged Barzanji and his Liberation League, who feared that that cuddling with Iraq could not be in their best interest – and so Barzanji opened himself to British overtures, receiving arms provided through (Southern and then Kurdish) Persian channels, and when the federal government in Diyarbakir attempted to depose him as governor of Suleimaniya on charges of sedition, this sedition broke out into the open, and so ever since early June, the official Kurdish government’s army (still in the build-up, and armed and trained by UoE and French officers) and the Sorani rebels are raiding each other’s territories because neither side is yet able to launch a massive offensive which could hope to knock the other side out completely. For the government, the resurgence of seasoned anti-Free State rebels in their strongholds further weakens their position. Therefore, both France and the UoE have not hesitated to prop up the democratically elected government of Kurdistan’s army and, partly on Armenian insistence, sent additional security forces...

Part 2: Turkestan

Compared to Kurdistan or Persia, the Federative Republic of the Union of Turkic Nations was stable and calm. But that was a very low bar. Upon closer inspection, not all of the smaller elements of Turkestan had really developed into functioning member republics – and already at first glance, for example by the agencies’ observers present at the convention of both Houses in Kazan, it was evident that in its current shape, the Union of Turkic Nations would not be able to speak with one voice and influence UoE foreign policy in any specific direction even on a topic which moved public opinion in Turkestan like little others: the question of the Sharifian Caliphate.(Well, not everywhere in Turkestan. Christian Chuvashs, for example, cared little for the whole matter, and neither did the Oyrot or Khakass.)

Since the establishment of the FR, the member republics have continued to develop into very divergent directions. Among the sedentary Turkic nations, Jadidism had become dominant decades ago, and the new political parties of the Volga Tatars, the Crimean Tatars, the Azeri, and the Bashkirs were all dominated by Jadidists. They immediately connected with the new reformist Caliphate movement which came from Arabia, and embraced it whole-heartedly.

Such political groups dominated, for example, the political scene in the most populous and powerful among Turkestan’s member republics: the Tatar Republic of Idel-Ural. It is the most economically developed, and also the core support base of the Ittifaq al-Muslimin, who had been the leading representative of Russia’s Turkic population in the coalition deals with Zenzinov’s SR government which led to the establishment of a separate FR of the Union of Turkic Nations in the first place. Idel-Ural saw itself as the natural leader among the member republics of Turkestan – and its governing majority coalition saw itself as the beacon of reformist progressive policy in Turkestan. Those who weren’t Jadidists in the Ittifaq mostly weren’t practicing Muslims at all, or did not consider religion one of their political priorities. In the current situation, Idel-Ural’s premier Selimgiray Canturin spearheaded the motion that the assembled chambers of the Turkestani parliament in Kazan should proclaim their religious allegiance to Caliph Husayn – a step which parts of the Petrograd and Moscow media lambasted as an “implicit declaration of secession”, but which @Falecius has assured me would be meant by the Tatars in a similar way as a German’s declaration of acknowledging the Pope’s sacrosanctity did not mean a lack of loyalty to the German state. (Well, Bismarck would disagree here...)

Kerensky had been shocked by this idea, which is one reason why he went it upon himself to travel to Kazan. But he came with the idea of a compromise: the so-called “Tea Loans” scheme. The UoE should support, so Kerensky proposed, Iraq and Syria with significant loans, purportedly for shipments of tea (some tea was grown in Russia, but most was bought from China). Well, it was true that the tea houses in Damascus and Baghdad were indeed cut off from Indian tea supplies thanks to British embargo machinations along the Persian Gulf, and even the prices for coffee from the South were rising sharply due to the risks involved. But of course what mostly Iraq and to a lesser degree Syria really received were leftover arms and ammunition from the Great War. (IOTL, all these surpluses were used up in the Civil War. ITTL, especially with Volsky’s downsizing of the military, there is a great amount of weaponry which would become outdated in the future so stockpiling it made little sense, while the Arab kingdoms could put it to use right now.) Kerensky suggested that if Canturin and his Jadidist friends wanted to support the cause of the Sharifian Caliphate, the best way to do so was to green-light the loans in the Council of the Union, perhaps underwrite some of them, and generally support the condemnation of Ikhwan atrocities with which Kerensky aimed to discredit the British policy.

But in Kazan, not only Canturin, his Volga Tatar delegates in the Turkic Union Council and his jadidist allies in the Majles as-Shura assembled. True, they had the Bashkir delegation, led by Gabdurrakhman Rasulev, on their side, too, and the Karakalpaks could certainly be swayed, too, and theologians from the Crimea to Orenburg at least supported the caliphial part (and the rest was none of their business anyway).

But among the other republics, the idea was not quite so popular. And it wasn’t just the Chuvashs, the Khakass, or the Oyrots, all three of whom insisted on Turkestan’s multi-religious identity.

The loudest voice of dissent came from the Kyrgyz (OTL: Kazakh) delegation. Anyone who knew about the region’s history could have predicted this. In the steppe, traditional nomadic lifestyles were still more widespread, and they had come under great pressure by settlers and their founding of cotton plantations. Kyrgyz defiance looked back on a long history. And it was here, and in Kara-Kyrgystan (OTL Kyrgystan - the names were used interchangeably IOTL until the formation of soviet republics and korenization solidified the current terminological distinction) that the Revolt of 1916 erupted and was drowned by the tsarist military in the blood of hundreds of thousands, with equally great numbers fleeing from the massacres Eastward into China. Here, in the revolutionary years of 1917, many different rebellious groups came together and coalesced into the Alash Party. There were Jadidists among them, yes – but not many, for the idea of salvation through modernisation really had only limited appeal here and smacked of a continuation of “Tatarisation” of the Kyrgyz by other means. Stronger wings of the Alash were secular nationalists as well as conservative (Qadimist) religious groups. The different groups could be temporarily brought together behind the platform of demanding the expulsion of the Russian and Ukrainian/Cossack settlers, the reconversion of cotton plantations into pastures, the abolition of the soviet system of the Russian speakers and its replacement with native councils, and the establishment of a Kyrgyz muftiate. When Enver Pasha intensified his pan-Turanist efforts and sponsored pro-Ottoman rebels in Azerbaijan, Petrograd came to see all Turanist groups in Central Asia as fifth columns of the Ottomans, too. This was bad news for the politically truly revolutionary and democratically minded Uzbek Jadidists of Tashkent like Abdurrauf Fitrat and their allies, the Young Bukharans who sought to overthrow the corrupt Emir Alim Khan: Petrograd supported the emir’s brutal crackdown against the revolutionaries, encouraged the Alash Party to exclude their revolutionary Jadidist wing, and to make sure they no longer posed a threat.

For this “service”, they were rewarded with betrayal, a currently popular narrative among Alash members went: ITTL, Kyrgystan is a lot smaller than OTL’s Kazakhstan and does not include a number of regions where Kyrgyz/Kazakhs (also) live: much of the ore-rich mountainous North of OTL’s Kazakhstan has remained with the Russian FR, and so have the oil wells in the West. (In exchange, Kyrgystan also includes Tashkent as its capital, a city where Kyrgyz/Kazakhs make up only the third-largest group after Uzbeks and Russians.) The reason behind this was that Moscow saw the Alash platform as dangerously anti-Russian, feared for the rights of the settlers, and considered their envisioned policies as incompatible with the UoE’s and the SR’s wider agenda of economic development.

Ever since its establishment in mid-1919, thus, Kyrgystan as well as its smaller sister republic Kara-Kyrgystan (OTL’s Kyrgystan) pursued policies in defiance of both Petrograd and Kazan. In the current context, this came easy to them: the Alash was quite purged of Jadidists, like the UoE leadership had insisted, with only a small group of non-Turanist Jadidists remaining active on the party’s fringe. Consistently, the Kyrgyz delegation led by Akhmed Baitursynov was staunchly opposed to any pro-Sharifian policy. The Kara-Kyrgyz concurred.

Another member republic on whose support Canturin had banked but who deserted him were the Crimean Tatars. (The Tatar Republic of Kırım comprises only a West-Eastern strip of the peninsula from Kacha in the West over Bakhchisaray to Alushta and Sudak in the East.) Its President, Noman Çelebicihan, was indeed supportive of Canturin’s policy. But the Crimean Tatar delegates to the Council of the Union of Turkic Nations were not sent by him, but by Prime Minister Cafer Seydahmet Kırımer. Kırımer belonged to the same party as his President, the Milli Firqa, but his view on the Sharifian Caliphate question differed – not for divergent religious convictions, but because his support base and that of his wing of the party depended very much on commerce with the Ottoman state. In order to improve the situation on this front, Kırımer wanted signals for a UoE-Ottoman rapprochement to be sent to Istanbul. Supporting the rival caliph was not exactly going in this direction, and so Kırımer had instructed the Crimean Tatar delegation to do what it could to prevent such a positioning in the Council.

Two other republics had not even been able to send delegations because their governments had just fallen – in Turkmenistan due to an armed conflict between rivalling leaders of the Yomut and the Akhali-Tekke tribes, and in Azerbaijan when seven parliamentarians of the formerly governing coalition of Ittifaq, Hömmet and SRs deserted their parties and joined the ranks of the irredentist opposition in protest over Ganja’s silence with regards to the oppression of their Azeri brethren in Persia.

And so, all Canturin could promise Kerensky was that Idel-Ural and Bashkurdistan would underwrite some of the loans (a significantly smaller amount, necessarily) and that his government would not issue any declarations which could be misunderstood as being in defiance of the federal prerogative over foreign policy. But, Cantuin and Kerensky argued, the ulama of Turkestan were of course free to judge religious matters as they saw fit, and of course every citizen of Turkestan was free to make the pilgrimage to the holy sites of Mecca whenever he wanted, whether alone or in groups, after all, there was freedom of movement and freedom of religion, too, wasn’t there.

Part 3: North Africa

If the Caliphial movement roused Persian and Turkic muslims, how much more would it move the population of Northern Africa!
After all, here lived Sunni Arabs, who chafed under direct or indirect colonial rule by European powers.

In Morocco, rebels under the leadership of Abd el-Krim and Ali el-Khattabi have begun to attack General Manuel Silvestre's Spanish army, raising the twin banners of the newly-declared Republic of the Rif and of the Sharifian Caliphate. In France's neighboring territory, a majority among the Young Algerians cheered on both them and the Hashemites. Enthusiasm for the cause of an Arab awakening washed over Tunisia and Egypt, too.

The alarm which this caused in various European capitals was dangerous for the Hashemite cause, there could be no doubt about that. And so Sharif Husayn al-Hashim saw no other option but to communicate from Jeddah through French diplomats that he had "not instigated any revolt in Africa", that he hoped that "further bloodshed could be avoided" and that he rejected to become party to any violent conflict in Northern Africa.

Especially the British cared little for this declaration, and in their attempt to encircle the Hashemites (or contain them through a cordon sanitaire) and, much more importantly, to secure their control over the Suez Canal, the British government took a bold step. In July 1921 (a year earlier than IOTL), an Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was concluded. With it, Britain committed to massively reduce its military presence in Egypt proper, and limit it to bases in Sudan, along the Suez and the Red Sea, and on the Sinai peninsula. Sultan Fu`ad, both IOTL and ITTL an opponent of the idea of a Sharifian Caliphate, was recognised as the monarch of an independent Egyptian kingdom.

The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty drove a wedge through Egypt's largest political force, the Wafd Party. Saad Zaghlul, the country's most popular politician, tried in vain to keep the party's wings together: the religious-reformist, pan-Arab "left" wing split from the Wafd and formed the Reform Party, enthusiastically cheered on by younger politicised minds like Tāhā Husayn, while only the conservative nationalist "right" wing of the party stayed with an unhappy Zaghlul and supported the independent monarchy and the deal with Britain.

Not all European powers were equally afraid of the Caliphial movement, though. Italy's foreign minister Carlo Sforza has even come around to seeing Husayn al-Hashim as a potential solution to a crisis which wrecked Italy's Mediterranean protectorate: while the newly created Emirate of Cyrenaica has become rather calm, in the Tripolitanian Republic, armed conflict between various factions had erupted in 1920, like IOTL. While IOTL, various sides agreed to seek the Cyrenaican Emir Idris's arbitration in 1922, ITTL Sforza managed to get the various Arab and Berber factions to agree a lot earlier to an arbitration by the Sharifian Caliph. So far, the process has not yet begun in earnest, but it has clearly demonstrated that Italy's Gran Alleanza government was not willing to participate in a diplomatic isolation of the Hashemites as pursued by London and Madrid and loudly demanded by conservative imperialist voices in Paris, too.

 

[Salvador79]

Iași (Kingdom of Romania): Viața Românească, August 1921, pt. 2:

MAGYAR SPECIAL PATH TO SOCIALISM AT CRITICAL POINT

by Virgil Madgearu


Last month’s local and municipal elections have only deepened the chasm between the two antagonistic wings of the Magyar Social Democratic Party. Over the past few weeks, both factions have blamed each other for the loss of many town councils and mayorates, as the bourgeois opposition parties have recaptured various provincial towns, our sister party, the Smallholders’ and Agricultural Workers’ Party [1], has swept the countryside, and the Social Democrats have held on to their majority in the capital city of Budapest by a hair’s breadth. [2]

Prime Minister Sándor Garbai has reaffirmed the recent “incentivising” reforms and accused the organized intra-party opposition of “alienating voters with their radicalism” and “creating the fatal impression of a hopelessly divided party”. Vilmos Medvegy, leader of this incriminated “Militant” opposition, in turn has denounced the reduction of regular allotments as “deliberate starvation of the proletariat” and saw in them the main reason for the party’s bad electoral showing. [3] His ally, Ottó Korvin, also repeated the Militants’ view that the government should throw its full support behind self-training and -arming workers’ guards. The Garbai government’s pressure on provincial administration and police to disarm and disband these guards would, Korvin opined, drive “hundreds of thousands of workers into the hands of chauvinists who pose as would-be-defenders of the country when in fact their accession to power would subject the Hungarian proletariat to quite the same oppression which their Serbian comrades suffered.”

After the aggravating economic crisis, the Serbian massacres and expulsions of Hungarians from Szabadka, and the electoral defeat, these divisions could warrant an impending collapse of the “Hungarian model” (as Gheorghe Cristescu put it two years ago). Already, Stelian Popescu has sneeringly declared in Universul: “Hungarians realise that socialism is a dead end.” As predictable as such statements are, we must nevertheless reject such generalizations and insist that the reforms which we have brought under way in our country are of a fundamentally different systemic nature from those which have been chosen in Budapest. Our Romanian socialism has been based on the solidaric union of the toilers of town and countryside alike from the beginning, and all our reforms have sought to strengthen the working man’s means to provide for his family, assume full civic and economic responsibility, and co-operate with others out of his conscious and informed choice. The Hungarian path, which we have criticised from the beginning, [4] has neglected the importance of personal responsibility. With the staff of whole factories virtually idle for weeks on end, [5] and peasants deserting their villages for militia training in times of harvest, we have seen where the decay of responsibility can lead to. Garbai’s government appears to have realised it, too, for the “incentivisation of productivity” has no other goal than to restore the sense of factory and peasant collectives’ responsibilities over their own work. This must not be misinterpreted. The concentration of power, capital, and responsibility in the hands of the elites, as the old pre-war systems espoused, is just as detrimental to our societies as the exaggerated bureaucratisation and anonymization of the economy in the Hungarian model, where responsibility has evaporated. We should be without the slightest doubt: Socialism is the future. It is Romania’s future, it is Hungary’s future, it is the world’s future, and with God’s help it will, on some brighter day, finally also become evident to be Serbia’s future. The toilers of the world will learn from the Hungarian lesson, and they will march on, leaving Popescu and his army of yesterday’s men behind in the museum of our past, if they remain unwilling to adapt to the reality of the necessary and beneficial transformations which our society and our commonwealth are undergoing. And this we say to our Hungarian comrades, who should not hastily exclude the option of a socialist coalition government after the next national elections, either, but who should negotiate wisely and confidently: Never cease to learn, but never cease to hope, either!





[1] OTL’s Independent Smallholders’, Agrarian Workers and Civic Party was founded only in 1930, under the conditions of Horthy’s regime. ITTL, various Agrarian groups coagulate sooner into a political force.

[2] The economically very radical Hungarian variety of socialism – complete expropriation and democratic control of the entire economy – is exerting a strong centripetal influence on all bourgeois and agrarian parties, of course, who vehemently oppose the Social Democrats and try all they can to unseat them. But it has only been three years since these very same parties had been bitterly fighting each other over the war, and since the Revolution, new dividing lines have grown between republican democrats and those who favour some sort of restoration of a monarchy (and even the latter have trouble among each other), and also between those who are conforming with the governmentally demanded strict distancing from MOVE, their putschism, and national chauvinism in general, and those who denounce these demands as a “thin veil cloaking Social Democracy’s dictatorial intentions”. And of course the old bourgeois parties - the Liberal Constitutional Party, the Party of Independence and ´48, the Civic Radical Party, the National Christian Party etc. are full of strong-headed men like Istvan Friedrich, Mihály Károly, Pal Teleki, Sándor Ernst, Károly Huszár, Oszkár Jászi, Dénes Berinkey etc. some of whom are suspected to have attempted the assassination of their rivals, and all of whom don’t find it easy to queue behind anyone else in a “united opposition”. Naturally, these rivalries play out sharpest in the capital, where all these established parliamentarians / political people reside most of the time, and so the Social Democrats have been able to barely hold on to their majority there – in addition to the circumstance that Budapest has a large industrial proletariat, of course.

[3] The reforms which Madgearu speaks about here have introduced so-called “productivity incentives”: workers in factories who fulfil, or even exceed, their assigned production quota are promised increased allotments of various consumer goods, and in a similar vein, agricultural collectives are now allowed to retain a share of their produce and consume it themselves or market it on their own. The Militant wing doesn’t just oppose these reforms on ideological grounds because they deem them a return to a capitalist mindset and an insult to the class-conscious worker; they also view them as a big threat to the covert militia system they have built up for the defense of the revolution against both internal enemies and, recently even more acute, the threat of Unitarist Serbia because the resources which shall go into the incentives or remain with the agricultural collectives come at the cost of general allotment ratios, and so both urban and rural workers might prefer to put in an extra hour of work instead of going to the militia’s drilling ground (which, on the other hand, is exactly what the economic planning committee, and with them Prime Minister Garbai, is hoping.)

[4] No, they haven’t really.

[5] Even without the temporary embargoes against Hungary, shortages were almost inevitable given Hungary’s situation. In a planned economy, this doesn’t necessarily translate into layoffs, and it also doesn’t mean the manpower is immediately transferred somewhere else. All planned economies have struggled to some degree with the consequences such events can have on collective work ethics and related cultural phenomena.

In the end, Madgearu is quite full of himself and self-confidence in the left-agrarian version of reforms he advocated IOTL and is able to implement ITTL, when the biggest difference between Hungary and Romania is probably that the former has lost the war, a lot of their territory, taken in many refugees, been subjected to an embargo etc., while the former has won the war, even though it does have some rebuilding to do, too, so this should all be taken with a grain of salt, of course.

 

[Salvador79]

Moscow (Russian Federative Republic of the Union of Equals): Molnya [1], August 27th, 1921, p. 1:

FREE MILK AND BREAD FOR ALL SCHOOLCHILDREN!

The masses protesting for bread have been heard! [2] Rakitnikov [3] has issued a decree ordering the delivery of a half-Butylka [4] of milk and two rolls for every child in every school in Russia each morning, paid for by the state budget. Deliveries shall begin immediately. Penza Oblast and the Lower Volga to be targeted first, after local governors have warned of spiking grain prices. [5]



[1] This is a new newspaper I’ve made up. It’s what we’d call a tabloid, and the latest addition to Vadim Rudnev’s growing media empire.

[2] After this newspaper and with it the rest of the SR newspapers had tried to ignore it as hard as they could, seeing them as vehicles for Social Democratic agitation.

[3] Nikolai Ivanovich Rakitnikov (SR), relatively new Russian Minister for Agriculture and Provisions after his predecessor had fallen over the fallouts from bad harvests and protests against rising prices.

[4] While the reform of Russian orthography has gone through in 1917, discussions about a reform in measurements of weight, length, volume etc. are ongoing, but have failed to be adopted by either the Duma or the Council of the Union. Resistance against it is growing in many quarters. A half-Butylka of milk is slightly less than 400 ml.

[5] Of course, the drought of 1921 is affecting the country ITTL, too. It translates into rising grain prices and the protests mentioned above (in which the IRSDLP leadership called for low fixed bread prices, most Unions called for higher wages, but spontaneous demands also called for free emergency food deliveries by the government). The Tatar Republic of Idel-Ural is hit badly, too, and going to suffer more than Russia because it has fewer means to intervene by itself. Prime Minister Canturin has sent urgent appeals for help to the President of the Union. Only weeks after the last update, the failure of the 1921 harvest in the region has swept the topic of the Caliphial movement from the agenda in Idel-Ural and put “Free Bread!” at the top of it instead.

For all the misery these recurring droughts caused, without a Civil War and its grain requisitionings and with railroad infrastructure on a good recovery path, OTL’s horrible dimensions will certainly be avoided, though.

 

[Salvador79]

Erivan (Armenian Federative Republic of the Union of Equals): Veratcnund, October 11th, 1921, pt. 1:

EIGHT LEADING TURKISH MASS MURDERERS SENTENCED FOR LIFE

The dead will not walk among us again, and the tortured will never be able to forget. Our nation, rising from the ashes, shall never be redeemed of the experience of the Aghed. The first set of verdicts which have now been passed by the International Court for War Crimes in The Hague, cannot change any of this. They cannot deliver us justice.

But they ruled, in the name of all the civilized nations which are part of the Hague conventions, thankfully clearly and unambiguously, in a first set of verdicts that all indicted Turkish ministers and generals, regional administrators, brigade commanders and medical doctors have legalised, organised, commanded, supervised, and committed millionfold murders of innocent Armenian civilians, men, women and children, that their deeds were by no degree exculpable with the conduct of the war and instead had as their sole purpose the wholesale extermination of our nation, they have judged them as the heinous crimes against humanity that they were. Seven of the eight indicted war criminals will now spend the rest of their lives behind bars, while Ahmet Djemal [Pasha] has still escaped the court’s justice. Is it fair that they can spend their lives in comfortable cells in the Hague when their victims lie dead in the Black Sea, in the deserts of Syria and in shallow graves where we still attempt to identify them? At least there is no instance of appeal, and no sovereign who might pardon them.

The court has found guilty: Jevdet Tahir Belibez [Bey], for ordering the massacres in Van in April 1915; Mehmet Talaat [Pasha] for legislating and ordering million-fold murders with the Tehcir Laws and numerous other executive orders between 1915 and 1918; Damad Ismail Enver [Pasha], for ordering million-fold murders as Ottoman Minister for War [1]; Ahmet Djemal [Pasha] for ordering million-fold murders as Ottoman Minister for the Navy; Sükru Kaya for organising the murder of hundreds of thousands of victims of deportation in administrative functions in Aleppo and various concentration camps; Mehmet Vehib [Pasha] for the massacres in Erzincan; Mustafa Nail [Bey] for ordering the drowning of tens of thousands in Trabizon; Tefvik Rushdu, for ordering thousand-fold murders by medical personnel as Inspector General for Health Services in Trabizon.

It is to be hoped that these verdicts are but the beginning of thorough and impartial judicial proceedings of the court, and that the unparalleled atrocities committed by Turks and Kurds during the war shall be attributed, adjudicated, and judged accordingly to the last person, while the apprehensive capacities and competencies of our own judicial system do not provide for it. It is indeed to be hoped that this Court, which is one of the cornerstones of the new order of peace without whose stability the entire edifice should crumble, will weather the criticisms hurled against it by governments who appear not to have any appreciation of the magnitude of the horrors and the guilt experienced on our continent. [2] And it is to be hoped that it will continue to shed light on, and pass unambiguous sentences of the most horrible atrocities committed during the worst carnage which humankind has ever sunk to, whether it be in Armenia or Iraq, in Russia or in Belgium. The dead will not walk among us again, but it is to be hoped that a firm and clear commitment of the civilized nations to common, inviolable principles of humanity shall prevent that more innocent souls must follow them. The tortured will not be able to forget, but the condemnation of their tormentors is the first condition without which they could never hope to attain closure.



[1] Talaat, Enver and Djemal fled Constantinople aboard a German submarine shortly before the war ended, just like IOTL. But unlike IOTL, ITTL Germany does not remain a safe place for them. As councils gain power in Berlin, where Talaat and Enver dwelt, and Entente troops occupy the whole country, the German revolutionaries decide to co-operate with the Entente efforts to detain war criminals. Djemal has fled on to Switzerland in time, like IOTL, but Talaat and Enver are caught and apprehended. The other leading Ottoman officials have, in part, been detained and turned over by Ottoman authorities, in part been taken prisoners by Entente forces (like the British detained many leading Ottoman officials and military commanders in Malta IOTL).

[2] This is an invective against the government of Argentina, which has rejected to sign the convention – it did not join the League of Nations IOTL, either – and has vehemently criticised the presence of undercover intelligence personnel sent by the Hague Court Prosecutor’s Office in Argentina, where they had attempted to stage an abduction of the former German Kaiser Wilhelm II. and various of his generals. (Willy2 has fled the Netherlands after it became clear that Ruijs de Beerebrouck would sign the latest Hague convention, and found a new asylum in Argentina.)

 

[Salvador79]

Manchester (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland): The Manchester Guardian, October 23rd, 1921, p. 1:

MPs SHOCKED AFTER BOMBINGS AND RIOTS IN LIVERPOOL * SOCIALIST JUSTIFIES DEEDS

Mr Cecil L. Malone, MP for Leyton East, [1] has declared understanding for the actions of the so-called “Irish Red Brigades” [2], whose bombs killed hundreds in Liverpool three days ago, [3] and expressed solidarity with the goals of the men who had attempted to take over power in the city on the Mersey by brute force. Members of all other parties in the Commons have expressed shock and a determined rejection of terrorism.

Only hours before, His Majesty’s Prime Minister, Mr Andrew Bonar Law, had made his address after a silent minute of commemoration. He impressed on the assembled parliamentarians not to fall victims to fear and futile self-doubts, as this were what the terrorists wanted to achieve. Against all criticism, [4] he reiterated once again his stance in the Irish Question and the necessity to press on with “the combing” [5] after the expiration of the ultimatum for the surrender of the remaining insurgents. [6] Socialism and separatist nationalism were the venom which threatened to poison the foundations of the Empire, its industry and society, peace and well-being. After Liverpool, the Prime Minister added, the strength of the keepers of peace and order and the ability of the courts to deliver quick justice must only be increased. He announced that the Home Secretary was currently evaluating whether an extension of the application of martial law to especially threatened industrial cities of the North – among whose number Manchester would certainly fall [editors’ note] – should be proposed to Parliament.

For the Liberals, Mr Winston Churchill attacked the Prime Minister frontally. While he agreed that the terrorists should feel the full weight of justice and the entire cobweb of socialist and other terrorists must be swept away, he considered that the full blame for the tragic escalation of this conflict lay with Mr Law and his government’s policies of suspending the Home Rule Law, ignoring legitimate Irish grievances, and rejecting to negotiate with moderate elements on the island. He announced vigorous Liberal opposition to any plan to extend martial law any further, predicting that its application would only serve to repeat the Irish mistake and radicalise English, Scottish and Welsh workers. After Sligo last week, [7] Liverpool was now an unmistakably clear sign of the failure of the government’s militarist strategy.

Mr John Robert Clynes spoke after Mr Malone and for the larger Labour faction, distancing himself from the previous speaker and calling the bombings a “horrible tragedy”. He joined Mr Churchill’s criticism of His Majesty’s government, though, but clarified that only the Labour Party unconditionally defended Irish Home Rule and demanded that the nationalist bombings not be instrumentalised for an anti-socialist witch-hunt or the disenfrachisement of wide swathes of voters. [8]

Also in this issue:

Acting President Harding Addresses U.S. Congress, Promises Continuity (p. 2)

Hashemite “Caliph” Arrived in Exile in Damascus after Saudi Forces Have Overrun Sacred Sites (p. 3)

City crushes desolate United 4-1 (p. 4) [9]

Elections in Sweden Render Hung Parliament (p. 5) [10]


[1] Malone was IOTL the first MP in Westminster who adhered to the Communist Party. ITTL, he has joined the small British section of the IRSDLP instead, along with his relative Constance Markiewicz, who is also an MP for a Dublin constituency. In England, Scotland and Wales, they basically fulfill the fringe function which IOTL the Communists occupied.

[2] The IRSDLP is an important part of the Irish resistance ITTL, though. In the “Irish Red Brigades”, not only Irish workers, but also many Hungarian and Italian veterans of the failed Italian Revolution as well as some radical “Militants” who fled Prussia after the defeat of the Wolffheim regime and other international volunteers are fighting side by side in what they consider the most promising struggle against the imperialist “heart of darkness” that is British rule.

[3] IOTL, the IRA was very close to losing their capacity to carry on their guerilla warfare in Ireland when the peace talks began, at least according to some IRA leaders including Michael Collins. Had there not been a truce and peace talks, then, some argue, the IRA would have been forced to take the conflict to the larger island, planting bombs there and continuing their struggle on a more openly terrorist strategy. ITTL, with Bonar Law’s much harsher repression in Ireland (more on that in the next footnotes), and without any serious effort on his part to negotiate with either Sinn Féin or the Red Brigades, the moment for Irish terrorist bombings in England and elsewhere on the larger island has come.

[4] That criticism has been massive. Brutal actions against Ireland’s civilian population have hurt Britain’s reputation like nothing before since the Boer Wars, drawn criticism from European as well as American quarters, caused governments of various Dominions to attempt to side-step Law’s government in attempts to motivate King George V. to mediate in the conflict, and generally isolated the British government. Law has proven quite the stubborn Unionist and attempted to weather all these criticisms.

[5] “The combing” is TTL’s British strategy for the suppression of the Irish rebellion after more spontaneous, reactive, and locally limited approaches have gone quite the way they did IOTL in late 1919 and the first half of 1920. Deploying more than 100,000 regular and auxiliary troops from all quarters (which is almost three times the number of all the various regular troops, Black and Tans, RIC, USC and other auxiliaries together counted IOTL) and beginning in the relatively calm North of Ireland, British forces have then formed almost a regular front line, slowly moving forward, “clearing” captured villages and towns through the internment of anyone even remotely suspected of collaborating with the rebels in what by 1921 come to be concentration camps for tens of thousands, of whom several hundred have already been convicted by courts-martial and executed by firing squads, then again moving forward, sealing off the already-“cleared” parts from any movement from the rest of the island. In the course of a year, in which especially the hard-fought “Battle of Cork” has claimed the lives of thousands, almost 90 % of the island has been declared “cleared” by now, with only the island’s largest city and biggest nest of remaining rebels, Dublin, and its outskirts remaining to be “cleared”.

[6] The horrible echo which Cork and various smaller massacres have produced still ring in Law’s ears, which is why his government had declared a unilateral two-week ceasefire and promised leniency for any rebels who lay down their weapons and surrender. If at all possible, Law had hoped that a “Battle of Dublin” would not be necessary.

[7] Bombs and shootings in Sligo have caused Law to despair last week already because the town had been considered “cleared” almost ten months ago already. But it’s quite impossible even for the British Navy to find each small barge which carries a few guns, explosives, and fighters from a region where the rebels can still move relatively freely – and that includes the larger island, too – to a region considered “cleared”, especially under cover of night...

[8] A bipartisan initiative of some Liberal and Conservative MPs has come up with an idea how to “save” Irish Home Rule and hopefully solve the conflict this way without causing the first Irish elections to sweep a coalition of anti-imperialist extremists into power: elections for Northern and Southern Irish Assemblies according to the Home Rule Law of 1922 should be held in 1922, they argue, but everyone who had participated in the rebellion should be stripped of their active and passive voting rights for a period of at least ten years.

[9] ManU would finish at the very bottom of the First League in 1921/22 IOTL (and ITTL, too). The game and result are exactly what happened IOTL, too, on the exact same day.

[10] Sweden’s 1921 elections, the first ones under universal suffrage, returned a hung parliament IOTL, too, but IOTL they were considered a breakthrough victory for Hjalmar Branting’s Social Democrats. ITTL, a significant influx of “White Finnish” refugees has given the conservatives a boost compared to OTL, and while the Social Democrats still make gains, the picture is more ambiguous. More consequentially, Branting won’t be able to form a minority government because quite a few rabid anti-socialists among the conservatives prevent cross-party toleration, agreement and consensus. In his place, the conservative industrialist Arvid Lindman will be Sweden’s next Prime MInister.

 

[Salvador79]

Short Update on the US government in 1921:

@LuckyLuciano has been so kind as to provide us with a wikibox for the cabinet of the 29th President of the United States of America, Philander Chase Knox:

Several ministeries are headed by their OTL counterparts, since such a composition always reflects, beyond a president’s preferences, a balance of intra-party groups and above all geographics. Hence Mellon, Weeks, Hays, Denby, Fall, and Wallace in their OTL positions.

As for the changes:

Elihu Root as Secretary of State has already been discussed in a previous update, and James Beck was mentioned in my last reply to @TheBerlinguer. That leaves only Wilson as Secretary of Commerce (instead of Herbert Hoover) and William Stephens as Secretary of Labor (instead of James J. Davis).

Commerce is very much at the heart of Knox’s approach to politics: when he was Secretary of State, he had practiced what was called “dollar diplomacy”, and with his ascension to the presidency, high hopes were attached that Knox would abolish wartime regulations on the US economy and create the right kind of atmosphere and conditions for a speedy economic recovery. And that was Knox’s priority, too. Therefore, someone like Herbert Hoover who had his own set of opinions – even if they converged with Knox’s more often than not – was not the most logical choice for Knox. Instead, I thought Knox would want someone there who was a close associate.

Francis Mairs Huntington Wilson, to quote LuckyLuciano: “served as assistant secretary of state to Knox [and] would be a really good fit upon closer inspection. Knox was apparently a very absent SoS and most of his responsibilities devolved unto Wilson. This was also during the height of dollar diplomacy, wherein the state department was the main arm of commerce even more so than the department of commerce and labor, as Wilson himself argues in a letter to Knox at the time. He would also be president of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum later in [OTL] life, and in 1921 would either be working for the National City Bank of NYC or president of a Connecticut manufacturing company, both positions I think which add to his potential confirmation as Commerce secretary.” Wilson is overseeing the same kind of deregulation that Hoover initiated IOTL, with the difference that he and Knox are somewhat more reserved about the initiatives of the Republican-dominated Congress to raise tariffs once again. At Knox’s death in October 1921, the Emergency Tariff of 1921 which sought to protect agricultural producers has been passed like IOTL, but discussions on the allegedly “scientific” overall tariff reform which IOTL resulted in the Fordney-McCumber Tariff which replaced the overall lower tariffs of the Underwood Tariff, have not made much progress so far. With the transition from Knox to Harding, though, this might change now.

For Secretary of Labor, Knox could not have James J. Davis, since he was another Pennsylvanian (and we already have Beck as Attorney General). Our choice fell on William Stephens, the Governor of California. He was still regarded a progressive, so his choice is a nod to that wing of the party and especially still-powerful Californian progressive Republican (and friend of Knox’s) Hiram Johnson. William Stephens, IOTL and ITTL, is a tough hard-liner on “Criminal Syndicalism” as he had labelled it in California, and that’s cherished by capitalist interests in the current situation more than ever. Stephens’s no. 1 welfare project priority are better provisions for WW1 veterans, including government-sponsored retraining and funds to help re-employment. Stephens implemented a similar scheme as Governor of California. Another political priority of his as a Governor of C. was Japanese exclusion, so that gives you a hint as to what he’s probably up to as US Secretary of Labor... expect an Immigration Act similar to OTL’s which bore the names of Albert Johnson and David Reed to be promoted in Congress and probably legislated earlier than IOTL.

When Philander C. Knox dies, his Vice President Warren G. Harding becomes Acting President, changing the composition of the cabinet to this outlook:

 

[Salvador79]

Berlin (Free City of Berlin under EFP Mandate): Berliner Tageblatt, December 28th, 1921, p. 1:

UNIFICATION CONGRESS OF THE PARTY OF UNPRINCIPLED OPPORTUNISM IN MUNICH

by Theodor Wolff [1]

In Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, over a thousand delegates of SPD and USPD have met for the congress in which the remainders of both social-democratic parties plan to merge into the Vereinigte Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. A 35-strong delegation of the Austrian SDAPÖ is also attending, carrying a mandate from Vienna to sound out possibilities for an even greater unification which would encompass the Austrian comrades as well.

From the onset, with the opening speech of the designated new chairman of the united party, Philipp Scheidemann, it has already become clear that Munich is likely to become the unification congress of Germany’s party of unprincipled opportunists. [2] Scheidemann apparently seeks to mould the maxim of the “Frankfurt Talks” [3] into the underlying ideological foundation of the new unified party: The VSPD “aims all its struggles at saving Germany’s workers from their present misery, defending their rights and past achievements, and furthering the cause of socialism, where necessary forming temporary coalitions with other progressive democratic forces”. Who these progressive democratic forces are, they don’t say: in Württemberg, they ally with Erzberger’s Zentrum against the liberals, in the Rhineland, they seek an alliance with the liberals against Adenauer’s Zentrum. Here in Berlin, we hear SPD and USPD declare any cooperation with the IRSDLP absolutely excluded, but in Saxony, the SPD is the junior partner in a coalition with the IRSDLP which has swallowed the local USPD whole. This is not just normal parliamentarian business: the ultimate result of such opportunism is the lack of any defined agenda. In Baden and Württemberg, the SPD pledges to respect the sacrosanctity of private property. In Bavaria, they have implemented a land reform, and in Saxony they have accepted, with their entrance into the coalition government, the much more extreme repartition undertaken by Wilhelm Koenen’s IRSDLP government. On the left bank of the Rhine, Social Democrats try to defend the councils against Adenauer’s charges of sedition, declaring them mere harmless instruments of worker participation and arbitration, while on the right bank, in the Ruhr region, local SPD chapters seem to no longer find fault with wholesale expropriations without compensation and without even the guise of bringing the factories under “national control” or anything of the sort when they insist that the syndicates should be treated as the new rightful owners. Among the alluded “other progressive democratic forces”, patience with SPD and USPD is running low: Social Democratic participation in the consolidation of production and provisioning, in uniting a bitterly divided populace, guaranteeing safety, and working towards rebuilding a democratic united national republic is bitterly needed. But we need to know with whom we’re actually working together, and what their real goals are.

Similarly, while the Austrian delegation has not yet made their decision, it can be considered very unlikely that they agree to join the Social Democratic marriage as the fifth wheel on the wagon. Why would they? Their electoral chances in 1922 look much better than any of their SPD or USPD counterparts, [4] and they have kept the IRSDLP a tiny grouplet on the uttermost margins of Austria’s political landscape. While the new VSPD’s Munich Manifesto speaks favourably, in general terms, of national unity under a republican constitution, the party’s regional leaders will all continue their course of entrenching the divisions, and Scheidemann will continue his strategy of inter-governmental co-operation with every possible entity - well, stop, no, not exactly every single one! The prize question of the day: What legitimacy does the Grand Council of the Syndicates of the Ruhr have that the Congress of Sudetendeutsche Workers’ Councils not have? Yes, exactly: the former is approved of by the Entente, while the latter is not. Why would the SDAPÖ unite with the SPD/USPD if the SPD is unable to find its spine and utterly incompetent to form a coherent position with regard to the question of national sovereignty, self-determination and unity anyway?



[1] Wolff was the best-known head of a liberal newspaper in both Wilhelmine Germany and later in the Weimar Republic IOTL; the call to form the left-liberal “Deutsche Demokratische Partei” was issued in his newspaper IOTL. The Berliner Tageblatt has been named the “core Republican force of Weimar”. ITTL, where the left-liberal / progressive parties still remain un-unified, Wolff is still the leading voice of liberalism and an important figure in the Prussian Progressive People’s Party (FVP). During the more radical Red days in Berlin in 1919, Wolff and his newspaper have been the most vocal critics who were still allowed to publish (the right-wing press having been shut down by Occupation Authorities and the council republic’s police apprehending various of its editors for “instigation of aggressive war and atrocities”). As the situation in Berlin and the Eastern half of Prussia in general has disintegrated even further and the EFP Mandate Authority has assumed many competencies previously held by the Supreme Workers’ Council, more opportunities for the liberal press have opened up, and Wolff employs them to the best of his abilities. By late 1921, he and his newspaper are the leading voice of non-socialist forces in support of a unified republic.



[2] They really were IOTL, too. Or formulated more positively: SPD leaders have consistently attempted to work with almost anyone under almost all circumstances in order to improve the lot of the working classes, with the noble and unambiguous exception of the Nazi era where they were about the only staunch and uncompromising opposition from the start. After a while in which I simply planned SPD politics to pursue a centrist course, out of my own laziness or inability to grasp the fundamental forces at work - I see the SPD always taking the centrist path in so many TLs -, I realized that the SPD leadership was not opting for a bourgeois-republican alliance IOTL because it was full of Lasallean centrists who had an agenda of social liberalism and progressive reform at heart. No. It was opting for this course because Ebert and Scheidemann, Müller and even Hilferding and Kautsky considered this to be the only and the most realistic course of action. Then it dawned on me: If the SPD would find itself in a situation of a multi-party, councilised or syndicalised, economically socialist regime (as is the case in Saxony, the Ruhr and the Eastern half of Prussia), then this adaptive generation of SPD leaders would ultimately opt for working within these systems, even if they opposed them at the beginning, and they would find some superficial rhetoric to legitimise this. And if – and that is TTL’s situation, some parts of the SPD would find themselves in such a situation, while other parts would find themselves in constitutional monarchies forced into coalition alliances with bourgeois parties of various sorts where they have to make painful concessions in order to get any reform done, then the SPD would schizophrenically support course A in place X and course B in place Y. Because the topmost priority for this generation of non-radical labour leaders in Germany, and I think elsewhere, too, was to “get something done” for the working classes.

[3] The “Frankfurt Talks”, hosted by Scheidemann’s Hessian government, have replaced the failed initiatives of the Frankfurt Vorparlament and the Elberfeld Congress of Workers’ Councils at creating a new German state or at least work towards it. The Frankfurt Talks proceed much, much more cautiously, bringing together very different political “entitites” (some notionally sovereign, others under EFP Mandate; some republics, other monarchies; some of very questionable political legitimacy and others broadly democratically mandated) with no previous questions asked, facilitating the negotiation of partial inter-governmental (or inter-structural, for the syndicalists probably don’t take kindly to being called a “government”) agreements, be they concerning trade, currency, free movement, foreign politics, compliance with the EFP etc., all of this garnished with a lot of Sunday talk about national unification as the goal of the process, but without actual proceedings really pointing towards that goal...

[4] Indeed, here is a short overview of party politics in the different German statelets: In Bavaria, SPD and USPD govern together since 1919, in a coalition with the left-agrarian BBB. Unequal terms of trade with regards to agricultural products are especially dramatic for mostly rural Bavaria: the US market has been protected by tariffs against imports, while US producers can sell to any German state without any impediment (this “open door policy” was a precondition for the British to allow free passage of goods between the zone of the Pinneberg Agreement, against whom they had lifted the embargo, and the rest of Germany). Bavarian industry has also not recovered, and the Christian Socials are loudly blaming “socialist mismanagement”. The latter have been rather successful in recent municipal and mayoral elections, and lately a group within the BBB loudly demands protective tariffs at any cost, being held back from dissolving the coalition so far only by the desperate inferferences of the Gandorfer brothers. The Christian Socials like to point to neighboring Württemberg, whose agricultural producers are facing the same difficulties, but where industry has recovered a lot faster. Here, the SPD has formed a great coalition with Erzberger’s Zentrum and the liberals, in which the SPD has acquiesced to a de facto castration of the council movement, turning it into one chamber of a cameralist arbitration and self-regulation regime. SPD ministers have not even intervened in favour of striking workers when these began a general strike in Stuttgart in solidaric protest against wage cuts in a former war wagonry factory converted into a producer of agricultural vehicles in the winter of 1919/20. Therefore, the SPD is expected to lose in the 1922 elections, bleeding moderate Catholic voters in favour of Erzberger’s resurgent fairly centre-leftist Zentrum and radical proletarian votes towards the IRSDLP. In Baden, the situation is similar. In the Rhineland, moderate SPD leaders have been negotiating alliances with liberal parties against the hegemony of Adenauer’s Zentrum – so far, it is unclear whether these alliances will be able to break into Adenauer’s super-majority. First signs of economic recovery, even if with a decidedly French accent (from foreign trade to direct investments), are strengthening the Zentrum’s hold, and Adenauer has announced new infrastructure projects which, while also serving to connect the Rhineland closer with France, are also rather popular. In Hannover, the royalists have pushed a remarkably old-fashioned constitution through against SPD resistance and will be able to keep the SPD at bay as long as this constitution holds. (More on that in a future update which I’ve already roughtly outlined.) In Saxony, the USPD has merged with the IRSDLP already, and the SPD had stayed on the fence for a long while, just like in the Eastern Prussian provinces, where some local SPD chapters sympathised with the “Prussians” in the intra-council struggle. After the latter’s defeat, the Saxon SPD has decided to become a “loyal opposition” in Dresden, but in Berlin, chasms between SPD and IRSDLP are still too deep (and the moderate USPD wing, while having bled its revolutionary left to the IRSDLP, now leans towards making common cause with the SPD, also rejecting an all-socialist bloc with the IRSDLP and the Socialist Revolutionary People’s Party (an SR-offshoot present mostly in Eastern agricultural provinces, where it militates for the preservation of the repartitioning) in the Congress of Workers’ and Peasants’ Councils.

Thus, the only place where SPD and USPD have already joined their hands together in a broader coalition government and appear in a good position to defend their lead in the next elections is Hesse, where the charisma of a surviving Scheidemann is eclipsing all other regional political leaders.

(Oh, and by the way, the IRSDLP's German name is, of course, IRSDAP.)

 

[Salvador79]

Bulgaria in 1920 and 1921:

Against the global trend, 1920 saw the beginnings of an economic recovery in Bulgaria, synchronous with a regional recovery experienced by Romania and the UoE. Bulgarian foreign policy has come to be very closely aligned to that of the latter – not so much out of left-agrarian ideological proximity or solidarity between Stamboliysky’s Foreign Minister – the liberal Nikolay Mushanov – and the UoE government and its foreign minister Kerensky, but out of sheer necessity. Bulgaria was surrounded by nations with which it had ongoing conflicts: with Romania, the Dobrugea and the question of Vlachs in Bulgaria were controversial, with Greece, Thrace and the question of Slavic speakers in Greece were equally controversial. As for Serbia, well, let’s not mention that. Bulgaria’s wartime allies had either ceased to exist (Austria-Hungary and Germany) or become a shadow of their former self (the Ottomans). While many political planks of Stamboliysky’s BANU-Broad Socialists-Democrats coalition government were controversial and faced not just criticism but outright hostility from both the reactionary Right and the IRSDLP on the Left, this general trend in foreign policy was not. To many, it felt like a return to the general orientation prevalent since the establishment of the independent Bulgarian state in the 19th century.

In terms of the governing coalition’s policies, 1920 was another busy reform year. After 1919 had seen the full implementation of the land reform and a legalisation of the role of workers’ councils in the industry, 1920 brought the beginnings of ambitious plans for an expansion of education and healthcare especially in the countryside, accompanied by major reshuffles in the country’s administrative bureaucracy in which many experienced, but anti-republican civil servants were sent into retirement. Their replacements were not only generally a lot younger, but also dedicated followers of the governing coalition’s parties.

All these groundbreaking reforms met with shrill protests and hostility from the parties of the old regime and the social strata on whom they relied, the former elites, retired military officers and civil servants, and industrialists, too. But this loud noise had accompanied the young Bulgarian Republic ever since its revolutionary birth in the last days of the Great War.

But as 1920 turned into 1921, the situation aggravated seriously for the governing coalition. The putsch in Serbia presented a double challenge to Stamboliysky’s government: on the one hand, it meant a worsening of the situation for the Macedonians in Serbia’s Southern provinces for which many even in the new Bulgarian government felt a degree of national responsibility, and an omnipresent threat by a militarised neighbour who, by any rational measure, should be completely territorially “saturated”, but it was not yet clear how much rationality could be expected from Serbia’s Unitarist regime. On the other hand, Račić’s example emboldened many Bulgarian nationalists and anti-socialists to try something similar in their own country, too. Spring brought the desertion of Ilya Georgov and his Radical Democratic faction, which crossed the floor from conditional support for the government to unambiguous opposition. Now, Stamboliysky depended on the representatives of the minorities in order to avoid a motion of no confidence. The growing opposition and its newspapers hurled nationalist and anti-socialist propaganda against Stamboliysky and his allies like never before. But even the government looked at events in Western Yugoslavia and Montenegro and was no longer so sure if fully complying with the Treaty of Chantilly, which limited the size of Bulgaria’s national army to a mere ornamental status, was really such a good idea (when Serbia’s open aggression went almost un-sanctioned, even the suspension of Serbia’s membership in the EFP only came about towards the end of 1921). Bulgaria had a much larger inofficially state-supported paramilitary force in the form of the BANU-aligned “Orange Guards”, and then there were Red Guards, of which some aligned with the pro-government Broad Socialists and others with the oppositional IRSDLP (formerly Narrow Socialists), the VMRO, and of course countless experienced soldiers and officers who could be easily reactivated. Renewed build-up would require military materiel – but more importantly, it would be in open defiance of Chantilly and it would strengthen groups within Bulgaria who were not at all loyal to its current government. Mushanov conversed with Kerensky. Stamboliysky hesitated.

And then, on June 6th, 1921, an attempt by VMRO members to assassinate the Prime Minister and a coordinated attempted coup by political allies in the anti-socialist and nationalist parties led by Kimon Georgiev occurred and was only suppressed by a strong presence of Orange Guards in Sofia. . Stamboliysky took a bullet in his shoulder and two grazes, while one of his bodyguards died before the others were able to shoot the terrorists. With a handful of supporters, Georgiev took control of the capital’s new radio broadcasting station and announced to the few wealthy citizens who were able to listen to it that a “democratic national government” had been formed and would secure the country’s defenses and the defense of the rights of its conationals under the Serbian yoke.

Just like the assassination, the coup fell in on itself, too, though, when thousands of armed Orange Guards began to comb the capital and apprehend – or in the worst case, shot – real or suspected putschists from among Bulgaria’s old political elites. A massive VMRO mobilisation, promised to Georgiev by Todor Alexandrov, failed to materialise in time. Georgiev’s group was apprehended before they could even try to take over control of parliament or government, and the leading conspirator was shot in the fire exchange. The rest of the bourgeois opposition was paralysed. Most leaders of the People’s Party, the Progressive Liberals, and the Radical Democrats would have loved to applaud and legitimise a successful coup, but had stopped and shut their mouths fast enough when they realised which way the wind was blowing. Still, their future looked grim now.

A few days later, Stamboliysky returned from hospital and addressed cheering crowds of his supporters. The man who had assumed power three years ago at the age of 39 now looked like he had aged ten years at once, but the policies of his government took on a much more resolute shape now. The ranks of the remaining coalition had closed behind him. The immunity of several parliamentarians involved in the attempted coup was lifted and they were imprisoned (thereby handily restoring a majority for Stamboliysky even without the minority representatives again). Orange and Red Guards assisted the state police when it went after the heads of the VMRO. In various successive waves of repression following throughout the rest of 1921, plots among former military officers were discovered, too, and their leaders detained, too, if they had not fled the country already.

But Stamboliysky not only tightened the screws on his internal opponents. A breakthrough solution for the country’s military defense was found in the negotiations with the UoE: Since Bulgaria was not allowed any significant military forces of its own, the UoE would increase its presence of EFP peacekeepers in Bulgaria to a solid 60,000 men, nominally consisting of UoE Republican Guards, but de facto recruiting from rural Bulgarian supporters of the government with only higher commanding positions initially held by seasoned UoE militiamen. To make the solution palatable to UoE President Volsky, too, the costs for the operation were carried by a fund whose contributions came half from the Bulgarian and half from the Union’s budget.

 

[Salvador79]

Paris (French Republic): Le Temps, January 4th, 1922, p. 1:

ITALIANS BOMB PLEVLYA AND BERANE

More than a month after the advance of League troops [1] against rebel strongholds in Northern Montenegro came to a standstill due to adverse weather conditions, Italian military forces have resumed hostilities with airborne attacks on the towns of Plevlya in the North and Berane in the North-East of the small Adriatic kingdom. The amount of casualties and civilian losses is not yet known. Both towns are rebel strongholds, and the governments in both Rome and Cetinje have claimed that they were being used as centres for the further deployment of Serbian Chetniks. It appears that the new year might bring yet more suffering to the troubled little state and its population. (More on page two.) [2]


PEACE PROTESTS IN DAMASCUS SUPPRESSED

After a week of protest marches and demonstrations, King Faisal’s government has apparently restored its control over the Syrian capital. Workers in various factories had declared a general strike in protest of new and yet tighter rationing, and an unusual alliance of conservative notables and socialistic agitators [3] had been seen to lead sizable protests in Damascus, demanding immediate peace with the Saudis of the Nejd. Faisal’s Prime Minister Rīda has deployed newly-formed forces of Shammar recruits, who have already acquired the epithet of “the King’s bloodhounds”, to crush the protests after negotiations had broken down and an ultimatum had expired on Friday. But will the ambitious Emir truly be able to continue his militaristic course regardless of losses? (More on page three.)



[1] The League which is being referred is not the League of Nations, of course, which does not exist ITTL. It is the newly founded “Mediterranean League”, an Italian-led alliance which has been concluded in 1921 with the Kingdom of Montenegro, the Provisional Governments of Albania and the Tripolitanian Republic – where a short civil war has been resolved in favour of the faction which is in favour of this alliance – and the Emirate of Cyrenaica, and which included the colonies of Eritrea and Somalia, too, even though they were far from the Mediterranean Sea. Eritrea and Somalia, where a Dervish Revolt had just been crushed, would receive Advisory Councils to their governorates, with some degree of native participation and which would send notables into the League’s Diplomatic Assembly.

The Mediterranean League is one of the cornerstones of Don Sturzo’s coalition government’s new foreign policy. It’s a glorified free trade zone with a military alliance in which everyone knows who really calls the shots. Regarding Italy’s colonies, the move will be likened by contemporaries to how the British used to elevate the status of some of their colonies to “dominions”. The Catholic Popular Party and the moderate Socialists enthusiastically celebrate a new chapter in Italy’s history in which Italy defends civilizational values (like workers’ rights against the Unitarist threat in Montenegro, or the abolition of slavery in the face of its continued existence in independent Ethiopia) in a more equal partnership. The Liberal foreign minister Soleri views it more pragmatically as a means to secure Italian control over the Adriatic and Italian investments in Africa against recurrent revolts. Only the radical right and left fringe opposition in Italy protests: the ANI derides it as a “second-rate empire” and the radical Socialists denounce any imperialism.

In Albania and Montenegro, things are more ambivalent. Stefan Noli, already the fourth premier of Albania’s Provisional Government under the crumbling EFP Mandate, faces stiff resistance from almost all quarters, but saw no alternative to the Italians while the Serb forces in the country which had been EFP Mandate forces have openly switched to securing annexed territory in the North and the Greek EFP Mandate forces are tempted to follow their lead in the South. Nevertheless, the Constituent Assembly, which has still not been able to agree on a constitution, is as full of groups opposed to the League solution as is the Albanian countryside, and Noli may very well have to make place for the fifth premier soon.

More on Montenegro in the next footnote.

[2] Here is the back story to what happened in Montenegro in 1920 and 1921:

The small Kingdom of Montenegro had balanced on a tight rope ever since the Unitarist coup in Serbia in 1920. Sporadic unrest and political violence haunted the Adriatic kingdom. To a superficial observer, things might look just like two years ago – but upon closer inspection, the camps were not the same. Not all those who had been Whites in 1918/9 still supported unification with Serbia in 1920. A significant faction around Andrija Radović, who had supported unification with Serbia when Serbia seemed like a beacon of democracy, now opposed the Unitarist regime. The rebel movement for unification with Unitarist Serbia was now led by Gavrilo Dožić, whom the Montenegrin monarchists no longer recognized as bishop.

Renewed escalation began after the death of King Nikola on March 1st, 1921. It was the signal for which pro-Serbian forces in the Kingdom had waited. In a co-ordinated manner, they took to the streets and attempted a takeover of power, attempting to prevent the coronation of Crown Prince Danilo. They fail to take Cetinje, Podgorica or any other town in the South, though, and so Danilo III. becomes the new King of Montenegro. But the rebels are nevertheless strong, and Serbia sends more and more Chetniks into the country as infiltrators. Fighting drags on, and a front line stabilises. Danilo’s Prime Minister Špiro Tomanović (successor of Jovan Plamenac, who had not been able to form a majority government after the 1919 elections; Tomanović managed to reach out to the anti-Unitarists among the People’s Party of Montenegro) brought the troubles in his country before the EFP Assembly, but France and Greece prevented the suspension of Serbia’s membership for the moment as well as a call for all member governments to support Montenegro’s defense. The General Assembly merely appealed to all sides to refrain from stoking the flames of political violence in the Kingdom of Montenegro.

That is when Tomanović accepted the Italian deal and actually had quite a bit of influence on its military dimension. Italy has kept a small military presence in the kingdom since the Great War, but after the conclusion of the Mediterranean League with the Treaty of Rome, this presence is massively ramped up. Tomanović must fight hard to scrape together a majority in the Montenegrin parliament for its ratification because many see it as the loss of national independence, and he only succeeds because even the socialist delegates consider the League as the lesser evil compared to the threat of Unitarist reign.

Reinforced with League troops, an offensive against the rebels and their Serbian allies started, but did not make much headway in the second half of 1921, and then winter came. Now, aerial attacks by Italy’s Servizio Aeronavale are about the only military option available while both sides build up and fortify. So far, there has been no declaration of war between Serbia and the countries of the Mediterranean League. But in late 1921, as more first hand news of Chetnik atrocities against Njegos-Petrovic loyalists have been shared with the European public by Italian journalists, at least Serbia’s membership in the EFP has been suspended by the General Assembly.



[3] Syria and Iraq have undertaken an economic conversion of what industrial capacities they had for wartime goals, and they have dedicated precious many resources – raw material, finances, and human workforce – to this endeavour. This has made itself felt in the provision of almost everything necessary for civilian life, and so protests are inevitable. As was the case everywhere around that time, it’s urban workers who make up the numbers in these protests. In the two Hashemite Kingdoms, though, the protesters have found unusual allies, as the French newspaper has aptly called them, in the conservative notables and tribal leaders who see their positions threatened by this war which forces Syria and Iraq to modernise quickly and in which their formations of traditional fighters have already suffered staggering losses against the Saudis, to such an extent that at least the Syrian Army is now mostly composed of recruits in regular units under the direct command of close allies of Faisal’s. The influx of refugees from Jabal Shammar as well as from oases along the Southern borders of Iraq and Syria, which have been repeatedly raided by the Ikhwan with ostentatious cruelty in order to force the Hashemites to the negotiation table, has also shaped these regular army units: these refugees are desperate enemies of the Saudis and therefore ardent loyalists to the Hashemite kings whom they see as the only hope left to restore their homes and families.

 

[Salvador79]

Seattle (USA): The Call, January 23rd, 1922, p. 1:

POLITICAL AMNESTY IN RUSSIA – WHEN WILL OUR COMRADES BE FREED?

Last week, Russia’s socialist government [1] has enacted an amnesty for a large number of the country’s prisoners who had been convicted for high treason during the Great War and the Revolution in 1917 and 1918. Among them are prominent figures like former parliamentary leader Alexander Rodzyanko, the former Tsar’s War Minister Alexander Guchkov, former industrialists and old order politicians Alexander Konovalov and Pavel Ryabushinsky, and bourgeois intellectual Peter Struve. President Volsky’s amnesty had been preceded by protest marches in Petrograd and Moscow. Already, some of the released politicians have addressed crowds of their followers and announced their intention to form a new political party and participate in this year’s parliamentary and presidential elections with it. The presidential amnesty is controversially discussed among fellow socialists since the released prisoners had participated in attempts to overthrow the People’s Commission. Excluded from the amnesty were only inmates convicted for their collusion in atrocities committed by Markov’s pro-German regime.

This magnanimous gesture of the socialist government vis-à-vis its bourgeois enemies [2] forms the starkest possible contrast to the oppression and persecution under which we suffer here. When will the thousands of political prisoners in the U.S. be able to breathe free air again? When will comrades Debs, O’Hare, or even Haywood be able to resume their elected party offices, and the elected councilors and members of the House of Representatives be able to take their seats and speak up for the American workingman again?! It is high time for President Harding to follow the example of his counterpart Volsky. It appears as if we, the workers and disenfranchised citizens of this American Republic, must once again take to the streets, resuming the great protest waves of two years’ ago, and this time also lay down our tools and neither go home, nor back to our workplaces again before our representatives, our speakers, our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, our co-workers and comrades are released and all their rights restored.


[1] In fact, it was the President of the Union of Equals, Vladimir Volsky.

[2] Initially I had the term “class enemy” here. Then I realized that this was a Leninist coinage, so I dropped it as non-frequent ITTL.

 

[Salvador79]

Canadian elections 1921:

I’ve done a full check on all constituencies (or “ridings”, as they are evidently called in Canada). The background reasoning was the coagulation of a more decidedly leftist alliance of Farmer-Labour lists, catalyzed by the council movement which ITTL is more widespread and endures after the Winnipeg general strike and becomes a vehicle for engagement of farmers on the prairies, too, where it takes on not socialist, but populist content. Now this means that some of the least leftist figures among OTL’s Progressive Party (specifically Burt Wendell Fansher in Lambton East, Robert Henry Halberth in Ontario North, William Elliott in Waterloo South (all in Ontario) and Robert Forke in Brandon (Manitoba)) are not attracted by this coalition and instead might run as Independent Farmer or United Farmers of X candidates. Along the same lines, Andrew Johnson and John Frederic Knox stay with the Liberals and win their Saskatchewan ridings for them instead of for Progressives. On the other hand, William Thomas Lucas enters the Commons as a Farmer-Labour candidate instead of a United Farmer of Alberta.

Also, Liberal candidates will not stand aside for Progressives like IOTL in various ridings, contesting them against the Farmer-Labour candidates instead. Thus, where Progressive candidates won by small margins against Conservatives without Liberal competitors, I reasoned that Liberal counter-candidacies would turn these ridings into Conservative victories: Dufferin, Dundas, Frontenac, Muskoka and Port Arthur/Kenora in Ontario, and Lisgar as well as Portage-la-Prairie in Manitoba. The last one of these is really important since it means that the Conservative MP Arthur Meighen does not lose his seat to the moderate Progressive Harry leader.

Where Liberals ran against Progressives and the run was very, very close IOTL, I decided that some voters would swing from the Progs to the Libs ITTL compared to IOTL, so such ridings would go the Liberals ITTL. This was only really the case in Huron South.

On the other hand, where there were separate candidacies of Progressive and Labour candidates, I checked and, if I could see no personal reasons standing against it, added up both numbers and subtracted a little. This produced united Farmer-Labour gains in a few ridings which IOTL were won by other parties: Hamilton East (Charles Goodenough Booker for Farmer-Labour instead of Sydney Chilton Mewbourne for the Conservatives), Lincoln (Edwin John Lovelace for Farmer-Labour instead of James Dew Chaplin for the Conservatives), South Renfrew (John Henry Finlay for Farmer-Labour very narrowly beating Liberal Thomas Andrew Low). Also, with some supra-regional help, Labour candidates James Singer and A. A. Heaps could win Wellington South and Winnipeg North respectively on Farmer-Labour lists.

This yields the following nation-wide results:

Party	Popular vote OTL	Seats OTL	Popular vote TTL	Seats TTL
Liberals	41.15 %	118	42.85%	119
Conservatives	29.95 %	49	30.16 %	54
Progressives IOTL; Farmer-Labour ITTL	21.09 %	58	19.75 %	54
Labour	2.73 %	3	(above)	(above)
Others	5.07 %	7	7.23 %	8

The Farmer-Labour list is smaller than OTL’s Progressive and Labour combined. But then again, TTL’s Farmer-Labour alliance does not know about OTL and that an even bigger breakthrough could have been possible with more moderate Progressives. They will celebrate their triumph greatly: achieving as many seats as the Conservatives! And their parliamentary faction is leaning decidedly more to the left. In addition to tariffs, who are still the dominant plank which also won them the Prairies, the two other big topics for Farmer-Labour are direct democracy (also quite like IOTL), support for co-operatives, and, for their comparatively slightly stronger “Labour” wing, a repeal of the Industrial Disputes Resolution Act of 1907.

Especially the latter is going to be a demand that will fall on deaf ears since it was, if we can trust The Canadian Encyclopaedia, “the brainchild of William Lyon Mackenzie King”, and this King is going to become the next PM of Canada.

And in contrast to OTL, he has a majority. A slim majority of three, but better than IOTL, where he had a majority of one, and then Arthur Lucien Beaubien (Provencher / Manitoba) crossed the floor from the Liberals to the Progressives. ITTL, with the chasm between the two parties larger, I don’t think this is going to occur. So, King has a majority of his own, and he might also lean on one or two independent agrarian MPs, too, while Farmer-Labour and the Conservatives are equally strong opposition parties.

 

[Salvador79]

Riga (Latvian Federative Republic of the Union of Equals): Rītausma [1], February 22nd, 1922, p. 1:

THE DANGERS OF ONE RECKLESS CANDIDATE

Yesterday in Tashkent, a dark shadow has fallen over this big election year. Yesterday’s nomination of Boris Savinkov as the candidate of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Turkestan for the Presidency of the Union was a historical mistake and is bound to have fatal consequences on many different levels: the course which his campaign has taken, the agenda he stands for, and how he walked away with his nomination.

Savinkov’s campaign in Turkestan does not deserve to be called “electoral”. It was a chain of instigations, exculpations and exhortations of national and racial conflicts. Out of nowhere, he had appeared with his special commissioner camarilla [2], taken over a small and irrelevant section of the party and pushed its old leadership aside. The formation of his campaign team and especially how he “mobilised voters”, always clad in uniform, more often than not resembled the rallying of Greater Russian militias against the constitutional authorities especially in Kyrgystan [3].

His political platform is laying dynamite in the foundation of our feeble federalism: What he proposes to do as President is a lot of follies that will incite revolts and protests over land use and access to water in some of the most precarious regions of the Union. How he proposes to legislate these policies is outright unconstitutional. While plebiscites may have their merits on a local and regional scale [4], if all segments of society agree on this means of immediate and simplified decision-making, their unrestricted implementation on a Union-wide level is an unconcealed threat to the autonomy and rights of the Federative Republics. [5] Savinkov’s ideas not only have nothing in common with those held by the Progressive Peasant Party of Latvia – they are also dangerously incompatible with the entire framework of the Republic which we have proudly defended.

Now, the danger of Boris Savinkov truly becoming the next President, or even the official Green candidate, is certainly limited, as Volsky’s resounding victories in the Olonets and Vyatka races clearly show – oblasts whose electors the SRs have good chances to win, in contrast to Turkestan’s. Regardless, though, the way in which Savinkov has violated the statute of his own party and pocketed a separate list of signatures instead of merely sending delegates to the assembly of the parties affiliated to the Green Internationale, as the SRs have committed themselves to do, is going to provide a bad example for others elsewhere. [6] And in this case, our own federative republic is most likely to be just one such “elsewhere”. It is easy to predict that Karlis Ulmanis is soon going to address the press and restate the Farmers’ Union’s opinion that the Alliance of Agrarian Lists in Latvia should collect their own list of signatures for a candidate of their own – by whom he means himself, and with which he could run away and join any obscure and hopeless Republics’ Rights campaign or anything of the sort, should he find the choice for the official (most likely Socialist Revolutionary) Green presidential candidate unpalatable. If he does that, then all progressive agrarians should in turn withdraw their commitment to a common nomination campaign with the Farmers’ Union. But this would be most lamentable. Our only chance to exert influence, in the campaign and in the later government of a candidate we have elected into office, is if we stand united, instead of splintering indefinitely. Unfortunately, Savinkov’s one-man show in Turkestan has made agrarian unity on our shores unlikely, too. If our disunity should really hand the presidency to a Marxist or, Heaven forbid, to the "Gatherers" [7], then he would have pulled quite a self-defeating stunt indeed.




[1] This is a newspaper (whose name, once again, means “Dawn”, or “Aurora”) I made up because I could not ascertain historical left-agrarian Latvian interwar newspapers. But that is what it is: the newspaper of a left-agrarian Latvian party, akin to OTL’s “Latvian Agrarian Union of the Landless”, which has entered into an electoral alliance with Ulmanis’ more conservative “Farmers’ Union” and a number of other agrarian parties. The reason for the formation of this electoral alliance is that Prime Minister Peteris Stucka and his IRSDLP government have amended the electoral system so that over half of the seats in the next Saeima will be awarded through FPTP. Officially, they seek to prevent an “Estonian situation” – their neighboring republic has seen nine prime ministers come and go in little over three years in which no majority coalition in the Maanukogu has ever proved stable. Implicitly, though, the IRSDLP hopes that FPTP is going to benefit them and only them as the single largest party.

[2] Here is Boris Savinkov’s biography after the PoD: Like other defencist Narodniks, he had supported Prince Lvov’s provisional government. When Kerensky and the social democratic emissaries from the Petrograd Soviet called Lvov’s bluff and took over power directly, Savinkov, who had not been in on the game, felt personally betrayed by Kerensky (whom he came to distrust IOTL, too). He was elected to the Constituent Assembly, where he was one of very few SRs who did not vote for Chernov as Supreme Commissioner because he considered him too dovish and soft (and because he still remembered Chernov’s wise-assed distancing from terrorists like himself with resentment. As the November Realignment began to announce itself in 1917, he did not join the inner circle of conspirators who elevated Kamkov as Supreme Commissioner, either, this time not only because he rejected Kamkov’s stance on the war even more, but also because he abhorred the thought of an SR coalition with whom he saw as intellectually arrogant, anti-populist “Marxist Jews”. But he did jump on the bandwagon early enough to become one of the members of the directory of the VeCheKa in November 1917 and throughout 1918, hence the allusion of his other friends from “the special commission”. With the VeCheKa’s dissolution by Avksentiev, Savinkov was sidelined once again, and so he left the political centre-stage for a while and joined a detachment of “International Cossacks” deployed to Germany, where he also partook in taking over Berlin in May 1919 (hence his decorations). He has since sought to prepare the ground for a re-entry onto the political scene by consolidating his manifold connections in military and intelligence circles, including some very influential people in his coterie. He knew in advance that especially Kyrgystan was likely to descend into violent conflict, and, encouraged by powerful friends, seized his opportunity to create an entirely new movement within the SR which is fairly alien to how Narodnichestvo has generally developed so far in the UoE (well, so is he).

[3] The backdrop of this is that throughout 1921, in the Kyrgyz Republic, indigenous councils have at last begun their offensive against irrigation projects begun in tsarist times as well as large-scale reconversions of cotton plantations into pastures. This caused simmering conflicts between Russian and Ukrainian colonists on the one hand, and the indigenous majority in the region to erupt into open violence. Savinkov’s campaign has blamed the government of the Kyrgyz Republic for such “backwardness and prejudiced irrationality in agricultural planning” and spelt out an agenda for massive “nation-wide improvement schemes”, involving more irrigation instead of less, more support for cash crops and machinisation instead of less, and, what is more importantly, he has announced Union-wide plebiscites (a tool which isn’t even in the UoE constitution, but which he wants to put there by, you guessed it, plebiscite!) to implement it Union-wide. That is plain Great Russianism veiled in agricultural and direct-democratic terms. Thus, while the SRs elsewhere have generally become strongly identified with the federal project, with national, cultural and regional autonomy etc., Savinkov’s Turkestani section is now rabidly centralist and against divergent paths in the federative republics self-governed by minorities, and his new-formed Green Guards are basically colonist militia aimed not so much against “enemies of the revolution” (like they had been across much of the Union in 1917 and 1918) but against their Kyrgyz neighbors.

[4] Something which OTL was not a topic in the interwar Baltic states. The SR’s search for new political projects and frameworks for the emerging Republican polity and their closer connection to populist-leftist parties elsewhere is showing here, too – in this case, the goal of direct democracy has been strengthened by the Canadian Farmer-Labour lists espousing it. It does connect with existing Narodnik ideas – the soviets are an instrument of direct democracy, too, after all, and so has the idea of imitating the practices of some US states to nominate presidential candidates in local and regional gatherings.

[5] Evidently, in a plebiscite – at least in its simplest form, as Savinkov now proposes it –, the vastly greater number of Russians could crowd out all other nationalities combined; a fact against which the Constitution has guarded with a careful balance of institutional arithmetics, all of which would be unhinged with unrestricted plebiscites.

[6] The constitution of the UoE only states the constituencies in which electors are chosen and the modalities of the official presidential election as well as that candidates need a certain amount of signatures. Now, because candidacies from small parties have next to no chance, and the IRSDLP is a unified party anyway, the SRs and other agrarian parties have agreed to choose a common candidate together in a Congress of parties affiliated to the Agrarian Internationale, which means that oblast and FR sections of the SR are bound to nominate delegates to that Congress and instruct them which candidate to support, not collect lists of signatures for that candidate already. Savinkov has done the latter now. That implies that he could always hand in his candidacy on his own, if he does not get the nomination on the big Union-wide congress – or he could support another candidate’s campaign if his voters are deemed to follow his advice, which in his case they might. As our left-agrarian Latvian newspaper will go on to imply, this could set a bad example for non-SR members of the Green Internationale to do the same, which might threaten the entire bloc’s coherence. But it is a very wide tent anyway...

[7] As announced in the last regular update, a bunch of released prisoners, mostly former Octobrists and right-KDs, have announced to form a party or rather a movement around a common electoral option of their own, too, because they think they have a better chance than the KDs. These are the "Gatherers" to which this newspaper alludes: the new "Gathering for the Salvation of the Motherland".

 

[Salvador79]

Overview of the Union's economy before the elections:

The shortest description is probably: "Still in a difficult phase of transition."

The slightly longer answer is:

Compared to the situation before the last elections, i.e. in 1918, various economic sectors and, from our present perspective, important indicators have somewhat stabilised, but that's not necessarily mirroring how people experience it in their lives. And this time - you hit the nail on the head - the economic situation is going to be a much bigger topic than in 1918, when a coalition of the Revolutionary parties had just won the war and were generally reinforced across the board because of widespread popular support for "the new system" over "the old", and the SRs mostly won against the SDs in most parts of Russia and Ukraine because, while both parties were seen as parties of the Revolution, the SRs were also seen as the party of the peasantry and the IRSDLP as the party of the industrial workers.

This time, the performance of the SRs and other governing parties is going to be critically evaluated by some voters - others will loyally vote what is becoming "their party". Other issues are going to play a role, too, but the economy is a big factor. And here, the SRs are not really exactly clear about where they're heading. I'll elaborate more on various topics and projects which dominate the debate here and there, but it's not as if they had a blueprint like apparently Lenin had it IOTL, and while years of post-revolutionary reality have concretised things, that doesn't necessarily work towards a grand idea. Therefore, voting SR amounts - to the "swing voters" at least - to implicitly saying "Don't change the way it is right now too much; let's have more of what he had in the past few years." If the economy is perceived to be in good shape, and you're doing personally better than you had done before, then that's your logical choice. What exactly voting IRSDLP means as a program is also not as set in stone as one might think - I'll come to that if I have time - but as a rough feeling, everyone knows it would mean "more radical reforms aimed at improving the workers' lot", while voting for bourgeois parties means you're generally opposed to the socialist reforms. If you're not doing too well, or you perceive the situation as generally bad, you might choose one of these two options, probably depending on your social background. All of this is grossly oversimplified, of course, and not only because it omits the national and religious peculiarities and the way regional parties align with the larger Union-wide blocs. It's all a bit in flux in 1922, though, and the absence of a general feeling that the country is going just wonderful is probably contributing to this fluidity, which is of course a bad sign for the SRs. It could not be any other way - all structural reforms cause disruptions, and 1919-22 has seen an economic downturn across the world IOTL and ITTL no less. On the other hand, time has also worked in favour of strengthening patronage/clientelist networks across the territory, and the general impression isn't utterly catstrophic, either.

And the long answer, which really still leaves lots of things uncovered, is probably along these lines:

Agriculture and Provisioning

Agriculture is of utmost importance, not only because it dominates the gross domestic product and occupation of the majority of the Union's population, but also because it provides BREAD. Agriculture had been in a horrible shape in 1918. It has recovered considerably since then. New structures after the repartitioning are beginning to work, new investments have been made (not only because so many horses have perished in the war so that a new start had to be made anyway) and generally high prices have incentivised production across the Union. Now, as has been described a few updates ago, the drought has hit certain regions in Southern Russia and Turkestan pretty hard in 1920 and 1921, so things are not at all rosy and overall production probably hasn't risen by a large percentage because of these climatic adversities. In many regions not hit by this drought, though, 1920 and 1921 have continued to be good years, and the way the government and the soviets have handled the crisis (immediately by buying up foodstuff from other regions and providing it to precarious segments of the population in the famine zones so that the pressure there is reduced, and middle-term by propping up all the farmers and co-ops from those regions who couldn't repay any of their ISOMA obligations in those years either through employment in other economic sectors or through influencing the ISOMA boards towards leniency), while criticised here and there for not doing quite enough, has not been too unpopular... with either the peasantry or the population in the regions hit by the drought. Petrograders and Muscovites, and dwellers of many other cities across the Union, be they more proletarian or more middle-class, complain about the continually rising prices for foodstuff. That's in part because of ongoing inflation, but also of course because this crisis-management has done nothing to keep prices down at all.

But generally, Agriculture is the economic segment doing comparatively best, as was to be expected from an SR government, but providing the cities with everything everyone needs at affordable prices is still difficult. 1922 is going to show a more benevolent climate - well, it did in OTL, so why would it not ITTL? -, so 1922's harvest should be more bountiful than that of the previous years. This could bring down bread prices just in time for the hot phase of the electoral campaign, if things go very well for the SRs.



Industry, the Crafts, Wages and Overall Employment

Industry had been the fastest-growing sector prior to the Revolution, and then nose-dived in 1917 with the unrest, the transformations, and the financial meltdown. After the Revolution, the situation is rather heterogeneous. In Russia, many of the bankrupt factories and quite a few more are worker-run now, officially sanctioned by local soviets, and while some of them have proved astonishingly creative in adapting to the new circumstances, found new providers and clients and viable ways to organsie their work internally and thus have increased their output again, many more have not, as is to be expected. The majority of Russia's industry which is still privately owned - albeit under varyingly strict labour rules - is in part doing even worse, as they, too, have been affected by the implosion of trade contacts and financial industry, but they often don't find it easier than the afore-mentioned worker co-ops to integrate into the alternative networks of economic exchange which have grown after the Revolution, e.g. through the ISOMA. Labour conflicts continue to fester there, and there is still widespread insecurity, which is why some candidates even outside of the bourgeois spectrum are going to call for an "economic constitution" in which the soviets should commit themselves to some reliable ground rules which apply in all of Russia for the foreseeable future.

The only industrial enterprises recovering relatively fast are those with foreign direct capital investment (whom Avksentiev has protected and pushed consecutive supreme soviets to accept these terms; this has not been seriously challenged under Volsky). They have grown accustomed to dealing with the ISOMA when selling tractors to co-ops (but this has become easier over the past few years, see below), they're selling locomotives to the state, they're involved in extracting much of the Russian petrol of which a decent part is exported.

The way things are, the Russian and the Union government and soviet-based public entities are the primary drivers of industrial development now, providing orders/demand and often the necessary loans for it, too. This means that political priorities affect industrial development greatly. And on the political agenda, rural mechanisation, railroad and other infrastructure, housing and healthcare are way up. Resource extraction is mostly working under full steam again, too. Wartime-to-peace conversion was rough like everywhere, but Russia's collapse in 1917 meant that it had gone through many of its problems early on. Overall, 1922 industrial output probably still hasn't reached 1916 levels, though, and that affects living standards of the proletariat. Even quite a few of those workers who now own their factories make less than their 1914 wages, purchasing power-wise. That's not making them happy, but the conclusions they're drawing from that can be manifold.

In lots of niches, crafters have stopped some of the gaps left open by the industrial convulsions: if no new machinery is being produced, you need people to repair the old, as the Cuban example most vividly shows us for decades now. While this is not exactly good for overall labour productivity, it smoothes over the worst problems for the time being, and it's been quite a booming economic sector after the Revolution. The soviets are not always strict with professional norms and qualification requirements, and so many a jobless (or otherwise income-less) factory worker now dabbles in fixing this and improvising that. Who knows what these countless shabby little workshops will look like in a few years' time...

There aren't armies of unemployed across Russia, but a lot of people are presently under-employed, or working precariously.


Services

Outside of finances, the Revolution has created winners and losers amidst those educated town-dwellers who earn their living behind office desks and lecterns, in lab coats or doctors’ overalls. The ambitious social programmes of the Russian Federative Republic (from education to healthcare) are creating jobs here, a good part of which are often being filled with loyal enthusiasts of the Revolution or, even more narrowly, party members. Among this social group, there have been not few who have lost immobile property or financial fortunes in the repartitioning and the financial meltdown. Therefore, strong supporters and staunch enemies of the Revolution are among this growing social class, and they are doing differently economically, even though the whole segment is in full growth.

Well, except for finances maybe. But even here, the new structures need people with background knowledge to work in them, and some of them come from the bankrupt private banking system. Banks across the entire former Rouble zone (i.e. except for Finland) have crashed in 1917 and continued to do so in 1918. Except for a few branches of foreign banks, there is very little left of the former Empire’s budding banking sector. Its role in providing credit for all other economic sectors has been taken over by governments and alternative public structures like the ISOMA. Speaking of the latter: The ISOMA has undergone an important transformation over the course of 1920ff. Since the Russian and Union governments have increasingly turned to them, too, in the financial organization and cushioning of their various big investment projects, the ISOMA has become increasingly monetised, too. Instead of merely exchanging complex “quid pro quo” relations, you could abstractly refer to them as “labour notes”, they now also receive cash from the government which they can allocate and receive back, which helps in dealings with the world outside Russia, but also changes the ISOMA’s character deeply. I’ll have to come back to that at some later point in time. The ISOMA’s handled credit value is still difficult to estimate because big parts of it are still unmonetised, but I would roughly say that between 1919 and 1922, it has multiplied at least twentifold, if not more. It has become a huge “Social Credit” machine, and its various branches, tied to local and regional soviets and their oversight, are employing thousands of people by now.


Outside Russia

Russia is the biggest, but not the only federative republic. Elsewhere, the situation is markedly different. Finland, for example, has stabilised much faster after its civil war, and especially its industry is faring a lot better than Russia’s. So does Latvia – even though its IRSDLP government has taken much bolder steps, providing workers in all factories with more than 50 employees with 50.1 % of the shares by law and subjecting their activities to a sort of government-overseen cameralism which is not exactly central planning and not syndicalism, either, but a bit of both with some private elements left. But while owners (few of whom were actual Latvians, which helped) have howled, the structures are clear for everyone now, and Riga is churning out machinery, chemical products etc. at levels comparable to those of 1914.

 

[Salvador79]

Szatmar / Satu Mare zone:

Romania? 45.9 %
Hungary? 54.1 %
This zone became Romanian IOTL as per the Hungarian-Romanian War and the Treaty of Trianon, but the ethnolinguistic makeup is too strongly Hungarian for the Romanian attempts to influence the outcome to bear fruits.

Nagykarol / Carei zone:

Romania? 41.5 %
Hungary? 58.5 %
Same as in Szatmar here.

Varsand / Olari zone:

Romania? 60.6 %
Hungary? 39.4 %
This zone becomes Romanian like IOTL. The demographics are much more balanced, but Romania had the “stronger arguments” on her side...

Nagyszentmiklos / Sinnicolau Mare / Veliki Semiklush zone:

Romania? 59.4 %
Hungary? 33.1 %
Serbia? 7.5 %
This is the only zone with Serbia as an option where the plebiscite has been recognised by the EFP. Romanian military was present here and, from their point of view, prevented Serbian falsifications. (From the Serbian point of view, of course, the Romanians faked their victory. The truth is perhaps closer to the Romanian perspective, as the associations of the German minority in the region have pronounced themselves in favour of Romania, too, so the results are not at all implausible.)

As a consequence, Romania receives slightly less territories in the North-West. Instead of yet more Hungarians finding themselves in Romania (and often emigrating), we now have small numbers of Romanians finding themselves in Socialist Hungary (and probably often emigrating, too). Of course there are still many Hungarians in Romania since they're scattered all over Transilvania. But of the border territories where they formed majorities IOTL, some go to Hungary and some to Romania. It's an outcome that makes no-one particularly happy and leaves no-one extremely disgruntled.

The same cannot be said about the following two plebiscites:

Vorarlberg zone:

Austria? 23.4 %
Switzerland? 76.6 %
Like IOTL, the Swiss Confederacy did not admit Vorarlberg as a new canton, though, so it’s doomed to remain a part of Austria like IOTL.

In the Szabadka / Subotica region, Unitarist Serbia has held plebiscites, too, in which the (very predominantly Hungarian) population officially voted almost unanimously for Serbia. Here, the EFP has not recognised the outcome, but a UoE motion to call “bullshit!” on the Serbs and condemn them for their fraud and intimidation has failed for French and Greek resistance, too. Thus, the EFP does not recognise Serbia’s annexation, but it does not do anything against the fait accompli, either. (Proving a toothless paper tiger with regards to Serbia once again.) Budapest has protested desperately and repeatedly. A Hungarian exodus from the Vojvodina has been ongoing ever since the Unitarist coup, and it has intensified after the “plebiscite”.

In the Krumau / Cesky Krumlov and the Kaplice / Kaplitz zones, there were solid majorities (>80 %) for Austria over Czechoslovakia. These regions, which IOTL were attributed to Czechoslovakia in the treaty of Saint-Germain without plebiscites, thus stay with Austria ITTL. Likewise, the Burgenland plebiscite resulted in accession to Austria, too, like IOTL.
Austria therefore extends slightly further Northwards than IOTL, and the number of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia is slightly reduced comapred to OTL.
How much - this maps shows:

With Dobruja and Thrace, UoE foreign policy has been absolutely self-defeating so far, and there's no end in sight to this sad record.
Why is that so, when the UoE is the region's clear hegemon?
Well, probably precisely because it is. And because of the shifts, twists and jerks at the topmost level of UoE politics over the past four years. Or maybe, you could interpret it as a continuation of Russian inability to grapple with the region (a continuity which IOTL was only broken in 1945, when Stalin brought everyone except for Tito and Hoxha to heel and the Soviet Union kept the Eastern Bloc cohesive with an iron fist until 1989), a repetition of the 19th century in which the Russian Empire lost much of its huge political capital in the region.

When the war ended, all countries in the region saw themselves more or less as allies of the UoE. Romania, Serbia, and at least Venizelist Greece had fought and won the war alongside the UoE and the rest of the Entente. Bulgaria had a Revolutionary government led by Left-Agrarians, who looked to the UoE as their close ideological friend and big Slavic brother. And Hungary was on its way towards Social Democracy (in TTL's meaning of the word) and likewise looked to the motherland of the Revolution for aid.

From there, things could only go downhill... and they did. Fast. That started long before the Paris Peace Conference already with the shitshow of the Western Yugoslav Civil War in which the UoE alienated Serbia, the Western powers and the old elites of Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia with its pro-Greater Yugoslavia policy.

The Treaty of Chantilly included provisions that a plebiscite be held to determine the future of Dobruja, and it established a temporary EFP Mandate over Thrace. Both came at a high price for the not-quite-perfectly-attuned tandem Avksentiev/Kerensky - only for any of its gains to be given away by Volsky less than a year later. The EFP Mandate over Thrace was not such a scandal - the region had been Bulgarian before the Great War, now Greece coveted it, and France and Britain were principally disposed to award it to them, but the temporary construction of an EFP Mandate was, at least from the French point of view, not a bad way to proceed at all, and Lloyd George did not mind all that much, either. As for why the UoE pushed it, well, here Avksentiev and Kerensky had slightly different motives, but they went in the same direction: Avksentiev, who had been a great promoter of Narodnik Internationism / Left-Agrarian Solidarity already during the war and to whom Bulgaria's new government and Stamboliysky were really close to his heart, wanted to avoid a complete humiliation of Bulgaria. For Kerensky, who favoured a much more classical interpretation of power spheres, it was about balancing the Bulgarians and the Greeks while at the same time strengthening Russian/UoE involvement in the immediate vicinity of the straits. In Kerensky's mind, Chantilly balanced it out quite evenely for everyone except the defeated Ottoman enemies: Greece got Ionia and Pontus, Serbia got parts of Bosnia, Romania got most of Transilvania and the Banat, Hungary was assured a chance to maintain some of its territories which the victors coveted via plebiscites, and the same went for Bulgaria: it lost its access to the Aegaean but it stood a chance to recuperate the "Quadrangle" of Dobruja and the future of Thrace was not yet determined.

Unfortunately for Kerensky and the UoE, almost none of the political forces in the countries in question viewed it that way. After a century of nationalist craze and hubris, almost everyone felt betrayed and back-stabbed in some way or other. Dobruja was a particularly striking case because here, a victor - Romania - had to concede a plebiscite in a part of the territory it had already acquired before the Great War, namely with the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest. Admittedly, it was a territory with very few Romanians and very many Bulgarians and Turks in it, and admittedly, Chantilly made sure that no comparable thing would happen to potential enclaves in Transilvania. But still, having to admit the Dobrogea Clause did not make Chantilly very popular in Romania. The idea had been something Avksentiev and Wilson very quickly agreed with each other on, and Kerensky thought it served the Romanians well whose end-of-the-wartime Prime Minister Bratianu had struck rather anti-UoE rhetorics. When the Romanians elected a Left-Agrarian government of their own, too, in the spring of 1919, Avksentiev almost got cold feet and considered dropping the Dobrugea Clause, but Kerensky convinced him that it was for the best to keep it in the Treaty.

Quite some shards left when the UoE bull left the china shop of Chantilly - but with Volsky's volte, it would also all prove for nothing. Guarding against a marginalisation of Bulgarians and other minorities in the region before the plebiscite required the maintenance of a military base in Silistra, and the EFP Mandate in Thrace was an even bigger drain of military and financial resources. Together with Prussia, these were the top priorities on Volsky's red list of expenditures to be slashed. And so Kerensky met with his delighted Romanian counterpart Diamandy to hammer out a plan for a Romanian minorities policy which would allow the UoE a face-saving option of withdrawal from Dobrogea, and from there he travelled on to Athens to surprise Venizelos with his super-sale offer of ships and UoE acquiescence with a Greek Thrace if Greece dedicated more forces to the counter-insurgency campaign in Anatolia and stopped nagging about other EFP projects like Albania. Soon after the conclusion of that secret deal, the UoE envoys in the Supervisory Council of the EFP Mandate for Thrace surprised their French counterparts by proposing that - given the "present tranquility"! -, the UoE would consider a massive reduction of Mandate forces and a plebiscite within one year as viable. The French were not in such a hurry to withdraw, though, and their presence was crucial in helping the outcome reflect not so much the ethnic affiliations on the ground but the desire to stabilise a Greek state which would hopefully not forget.

And just like Thrace thus became Greek, in the Dobruja, there would be merely a referendum on two Autonomy Statutes (I'll elaborate a little on Romanian minority policies and constitutional change projects of the Centre-Left government in another small authorial note in a few days.), without the option of seceding from Romania and joining Bulgaria being even on the ballot. These plebiscites were held in early 1922 and adopted with large majorities, but at the cost of a very low voter turnout as both moderate pro-Bulgarian parties and the more militant groups, who were split among themselves into the right-nationalist and anti-Stamboliysky "Internal Dobrujanian Revolutionary Organization" and the leftist-Pan-Yugoslavian militants of the local IRSDLP chapter, were successfully appealing to boycott the referendum.

But that would, of course, not make Greece and Romania best friends with the UoE again. Especially since the government of the Turkestani FR of the UoE has repeatedly nagged the Romanians about its Tatars and equal treatment of all religions in the Kingdom. Except for Serbia, none of the governments in the region is really hostile to the UoE - even the Bulgarians, who were really screwed over, know that they need UoE support like in the case of the "International Cossacks" who guard their border against Serbia and their capital against insurgents now. It's more that they've disillusioned and know that UoE foreign policy often follows rather pragmatic and shifting domestic interests and that seizing one's opportunity when it arises should never be wasted out of respect for the Union's friendship...

 

[Salvador79]

Lenin on the Radio

On Thursday, April 20th, 1922, hundreds of Social Democratic activists, students and faculty – and a handful of other watchful listeners, too – in Petrograd and its environs wear headphones and sit next to their crystal radios, when, at 19:00 hours sharp, they hear a signal tone, followed by a young male voice: “Attention, attention, this is the Democratic Wave sending on 170 P [1] from the Electrotechnical Institute at Petrograd University.”

A phonograph-playback rendition of The Internationale follows. The young male voice returns:

“Good evening, dear listeners, dear comrades, here is the Democratic Wave. We have an esteemed guest at our broadcasting point tonight. Please listen to Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Lenin speaking to us on the topic of the oncoming elections.”

[Silence.]

Lenin’s voice: “Be healthy, comrades! [2] Across this republic, the masses are gathering. In most parties, they gather to vote for candidates, and then return to their crammed homes and hungry families. In the party which proudly calls itself international and revolutionary, in the Social Democratic Labour Party, this must not be the case.

By this, I have not said that it does not matter whom we delegate and whom we vote for; and not in the least have I said that we should abstain from participating in the elections. Such Otzovism is as misguided today as it has been fifteen years ago. Its fundamental delusion is that the ruling classes care in the least for our electoral boycott. They do not care about it; they rejoice when the proletariat sinks into resignation.

What I mean, and what is crucial to understand in this hour, is that we must not place hope or faith in the electoral circus, either. Elections have not delivered the German workers from the yoke of the steel and rye barons; elections have not brought French workers the society of equals for which they have shed their blood for 130 years now; elections have not saved the American negroes from their miserable lot. Yes, our voting rights are worth defending, and yes, we must vote for the proletariat’s vanguard, the parties of real socialism. But electoral victory would never be enough. As long as capitalism and bourgeois rule remain untouched, socialists in governments will either remain tame lackeys like the German SPD. Or they are overthrown, as happened in Romania recently [3]. The Hungarian comrades might be the next to witness this: they have expropriated their bourgeoisie, but they have not freed themselves from those deep poisonous roots of capitalist ideology which induces them to believe they depend on the bourgeois to manage the productive forces, the laboratories, the art galleries and lecture halls where minds are forged. Even where the bourgeois have wandered off by themselves, hesitant workers do their best to mimic them. Only an idiot can be surprised that now the original attempts to come back. [4]

Across the globe, the bourgeoisie has held their breath for a few years, and conceded a few inches. Now, they are seeing that the proletariat pursues no consistent strategies to make them superfluous – even our syndicalised workers at Putilov in Petrograd have resorted to hiring their highbred managers and bow to their arrogant bellowings again! –, and so they feel their opportunity coming to roll back what they had to concede the workers. When Spain’s disorganised workers and soldiers struck and mutinied, they got their backs broken by the new Directorate. [5] When the disorganised Irish rebelled, they received the Boer treatment, and when some of their half-hearted English comrades struck in sympathy, all of them were rewarded with pay cuts, and the most misled now blame and turn against their more illuminated colleagues, throwing solidarity to the wind and wasting the fighting spirit of the world’s most advanced industrial working class, just like their capitalist masters had hoped. [6]

This recent turn will tear apart the Narodniks everywhere like it happened with their Chinese friends [7]: those who still believe themselves to be progressive revolutionaries will get crushed by their fellows who have fully embraced the bourgeois character of their ideology by now. In Latvia, in Bulgaria and Poland, it cannot be otherwise, the progress of history radicalises their internal contradictions beyond the breaking point. The so-called “Socialist Revolutionaries” have chosen their side, whether it be Savinkov who exercises in Turkestan for his role as caudillo, or Gots the bigot who sells the old opium in new bags – but, no, it is going to be Volsky anyway, he has been playing this game for quite a while already and his warlord friends and their kulak cossack brigades [8] will not suffer to see their green tsar driven out of office.

Voting for real socialists instead of our “Socialist Revolutionary” Narodniks is vital, thus, but it is not enough. The great chairman [9] has been sitting idly on the questionable laurels of his second place of years ago, and he seems to harbour no greater ambitions for the proletariat than to gather in masses at the ballot boxes like sheep and restore him to that very same pitiable position this time, too. I have talked to your fellow students who have formed the “New Social Democratic Revolutionaries” [10] across your institutions here, and I can encourage you to join hands with them in laying the groundwork for a real proletarian and socialist revolution. That does not entail merely delegating them to the nomination congress. What has been created here and what you are witnessing is the future of revolutionary agitation. Half of this country’s poorest and most destitute population still cannot read newspapers. Being their revolutionary vanguard means speaking to them, explaining how their plight is caused by our neo-capitalist structures, immunising them against its ideology, preparing them for the decisive day. Communism requires broadcasting the revolution across the entire Union! Only the courage and lucid analysis of the vanguard will cause the masses to follow and rise again, too. Time is of the essence, for the new lackeys of capital are sharpening their instruments of tyranny as you listen.

But let me not speak on behalf of others. Behind me, your comrades are waiting impatiently to appeal for your vote to delegate them. I cannot vote here, but if I could, they would have my confidence. May they now also gain yours!” [11]



[1] The unit „Hertz“, named after the German radio pioneer Heinrich Hertz, was only named so in the 1930s. ITTL, frequency is currently measured in Russia in “Popovs”, named after Russian radio pioneer Alexander Popov. 170 P equals 170 000 cycles per second, i.e. in the range we’d call “long wave”.

[2] Normally, Здравствуйте is simply translated as “Hello”, which is certainly more appropriate. Yet, in our times of pandemics, I couldn’t resist using the underlying semantics for my translation of Lenin’s greeting.

[3] @galileo-034 has been prescient. Whether it was an “overthrow” / “coup” or not is heavily debated in Romania and beyond. King Ferdinand has dismissed Prime Minister Ionescu, dissolved Parliament which automatically causes new elections within three months, and nominated General Alexandru Averescu as Prime Minister of an interim caretaker government of “experts”, in truth staffed by anti-leftist generals, conservative jurists and landowners associated with PNL and Conservatives.

The King, Averescu and the right-wing press insist that of all this was perfectly legal and constitutional. In their view, as long as the King has not signed a new constitution, the old one still applies, and according to the constitution of 1866, last amended in 1917, the King has the right to appoint and dismiss ministers at will and dissolve parliament.

The ousted government and the centre-left parties who support it including their popular support base view things entirely differently, naturally. They point at the large majority margin of popular support for the new constitution, and at the fact that many people, including King Ferdinand himself, had spoken of the Parliament elected in 1919 as a constituent assembly for the new and vastly enlarged state of Greater Romania.

Averescu, who had gained experience in suppressing peasants in 1907 already, has made sure beforehand that the military is not standing in the way of this change of government, but I would still not definitely call it a military coup. There are generals like Nicolae Samsonovici, who have genuine sympathies for the Peasantists, and others like Constantin Prezan, who think that the military should keep out of political affairs under all conditions. Both of them are national heroes of the defense of Moldova, and just two which I picked which would not have involved themselves in anything they would have seen as a coup. With their dominance on the elites’ political discourse, the traditional right-wing parties have made sure, though, that none of these people see what happens as a coup. Now, there are hundreds of thousands protesting, and demanding that the constitution they voted for be the groundwork for the new elections, and that Ionescu be restored as prime minister. Peasants fear that the land reform is halted and reversed; workers fear for their new-won rights, Transilvanians who fear marginalisaton in a state dominated by the Old Kingdom’s old elites, minorities who fear for their cultural and political rights, and there are some urban Romanian intellectuals, from Radu Rosetti over Ioan Nădejde to Octav Băncilă, to name just a few of the old men (because the younger generation is much more difficult to pinpoint given the divergences so far) who disagree with the turn of things, too. The political fronts have hardened, and the country is polarised, but so far no open civil war or anything of the sort.

[4] Nothing decisive happened in Hungary yet. But the turmoil in Romania has further inspired the anti-socialist opposition in Hungary, too, to take to the streets and demand the demission of the government and the restoration of private property over the means of production.

What Lenin is formulating here is an increasingly heterodox divergence from Marxist materialism, one that bears vague resemblance to the thoughts which IOTL Antonio Gramsci would formulate in a fascist prison cell, but imbued with Lenin’s penchant for letting heads roll, so it comes closer to some tenets of OTL’s Maoism: In Hungary, the material structures have undergone socialist transformation, so far even Lenin agrees. His explanation why things are not working too well, and his take on the possibility that this might lead to a reversal in the next elections, is that the Hungarian comrades have not had the balls to eradicate the bourgeoisie as a socio-cultural category and a set of, well, Émile Durkheim would probably call them “collective myths”. Led by a heterogeneous – and thus from Lenin’s point of view undecided and dithering – social democratic party, the Hungarian proletariat has not fought for “cultural hegemony”. Next thing, he might propose to the Hungarians that, instead of holding elections, they should start a “cultural revolution”. Some elements among Hungary’s “Militants” don’t need that encouragement from him really to view things this way.

[5] Like IOTL, the situation among the conscripts who had been sent to Morocco is dire after the defeat at Annual and the ensuing rout. Those who returned brought tales of inept military leadership and catastrophic conditions with them, more and more Spaniards attempted to resist recruitment, and on top of all that, wild strikes in various places coagulated together with the criticism of the military leadership in the Cortes and with regionalist protests into a broad proto-revolutionary movement which seriously scared King Alfonso XIII. This is all very close to OTL, and so is the reaction of the junta led by Miguel Primo de Rivera to simply dissolve parliament and replace the government with a Directorate headed by himself, invested with special powers, supported by the King.

The difference from OTL is in the schedule: Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship is established more than a year earlier. The reason for this is that there is much more revolutionary turmoil in the countryside compared to OTL because the inspiration from TTL’s Russian Revolution, with its agrarian focus, as well as the less top-down approach to politics compared to OTL’s Communists resonates much easier with the rural population as well as with the strongly anarchist- and syndicalist-influenced leftist revolutionaries in the country. Because the chaos is worse than IOTL, the king and the military react faster.

[6] Pay cuts in the wharves, the mines etc. occurred IOTL, too, in the context of the post-war slump. The alleged infighting refers not only to quarrels between the Labour Party and the IRSDLP, but also to things like the political assassination of IRSDLP politician Isaac Brassington by an electrical worker in Manchester, although the latter was probably both mentally ill and politically chauvinistic.

[7] What Lenin lumps together as “Chinese Narodniks” here are Sun’s followers as well as liberal “Decentralisers” like Chen Jiongming and the more radical and revolutionary youth movement in Beijing and its “Chinese Socialist Revolutionary Party” led by Chen Duxiu. Since the last update on China, the Decentralisers’ faction have gained the upper hand in the political arm-twisting for how to organize the building of a more federal Chinese Republic, since interim premier Chen Jiongming is fully relying on various local strongmen (we’re not calling them warlords ITTL anymore since there is little open warfare going on), over the Generalissimo Sun Yat-Sen and his Chinese Revolutionary Party. Sun Yat-Sen and Chen Jiongming have switched political views with regards to the radical Beijing revolutionaries over the past two years. While at first, Sun wanted to sideline the “Beijing soviet” and had some of its leaders imprisoned for violent resistance against the “central government” while Chen thought the radicals could play a constructive role in a republican clean-up in the capital if they limited themselves to just that, over time Chen Jiongming has realized that Chen Duxiu’s Beijing SRs and other new “Chinese SRs” from elsewhere like Li Dazhao would not at all limit themselves to the capital, especially organising a campaign against the Ma clique’s mismanagement of relief efforts after the catastrophic earthquake in Gansu (thanks to @TheBerlinguer for bringing it up!) which destabilised one of Chen Jiongming’s key “Decentralist” allies, and so Chen Jiongming had loyal military forces overthrow the “Beijing soviet”, leading to quite some bloodshed in the capital. Sun, on the other hand, has come to realise that the Chinese Socialist Revolutionaries are natural ideological allies of his, and so he has taken to criticise the “excessively hard hand of the government”. The campaign for China-wide elections, organised in the different regions autonomously according to rules established there, is presently finally under way, and the Chinese SRs are presently persecuted or attempted to be sidelined by regional authorities in many parts of China, while lame duck “Generalissimo” Sun attempts to do what he still can to protect them. So, it’s not really “Chinese Narodniks vs. Chinese Narodniks”, but such minutiae would have escaped Lenin’s sweeping analysis, especially since he has visited Germany, Italy, Hungary and many other European countries lately, but not China.

[8] All of these are Lenin’s own derogatory denominations. What he refers to are leftover structures of the Green Guards from Revolutionary times, and throughout the timeline we have already heard criticism here and there of corruption in the territory, of SR strongmen who control soviets through patronage and bribery and, as we hear now, also through threats of violence.

[9] Trotsky, of course.

[10] The Militant section of the IRSDLP’s student organization in Petrograd. The Ultra-Imperialist, Trotskyite section calls itself “Social Democratic Student Brigade of the Liberators of Petrograd” and traces its tradition back to 1918 and the fall of Markov’s regime.

[11] Playing such a humble role must be horrible for Lenin. Given how low he fell from grace in 1917 and 1918 ITTL, widely denounced as a defeatist, blamed for sabotages, defamed as a German collaborationist, abandoned by most of his fellow Bolsheviks, his return happens very much at the fringe of Russia’s labour movement. Humility really wasn’t his strength, but he almost always knew, better than many of his fellow travellers, how the political situation was really like, and so he knows this time, nobody’s waiting for inspiring words from him at Finland Station. Petrograd, for example, is a city with an IRSDLP mayor, Vasily Anisimov, only recently re-elected with a wide margin, who is even more “electoralist” than Trotsky but who backs Trotsky in the intra-IRSDLP power struggle before the nomination congress. Lenin’s instincts that Trotsky is weaker now than he was four years ago are right, but he knows that this is not enough to propel him back into the first row. Among the Militant Left which he seeks to revigorate, there are more than enough colourful, influential and well-established leaders, too, who compared to Lenin enjoy the advantage of having stood on the right side of the barricades when the Revolution turned back to finishing the war.

 

[Salvador79]

New York City (USA): New York Times, May 3rd, 1922, p. 1:

NOMINATION RACE FOR RUSSIAN ELECTIONS HEATS UP


FOREIGN MINISTER RUNS FOR PRESIDENT

The race for the Russian presidency has a new prominent contender: Before a crowd of tens of thousands of workers in Vladimir on Labor Day [1], Foreign Minister Alexander Kerensky has announced his intention to run as the Labor Party’s [2] candidate for the presidency. His electoral platform was well-received by the crowds, consisting of promises of increased investments in railroad expansion, criminal prosecution of embezzlement of co-operative funds, a firm commitment to universal social care for all [3] as well as an assertive foreign policy.

Local experts say there is little doubt that Mr Kerensky will clinch his party’s nomination; after its weak performance in last year’s communal elections, there is little left of it beside him, and no serious contender would challenge the only political celebrity which this small moderately leftist party still possesses. In spite of the party’s limited size, Mr Kerensky’s candidacy may not yet be considered hopeless at all: Beside his own political fame, his candidacy has received the backing of an important federation of industrial unions [4] as well as the endorsement of two large Moslem parties, whom he has promised a firmer Russian support for Arabia’s and Persia’s reformers – a policy which he has long been rumored to favor, but whose open declaration marks a decisive turn away from the cautious current government policy which he had officially supported and represented thus far.

Another platform announcement which represents a step away from the course of the government he is still part of is his sudden embrace of the idea of nation-wide plebiscites. Mr Kerensky gave the example of a national {5] referendum on the reintroduction of internal border controls and restrictions of the free movement of goods with the limited scope to allow regions to enforce more effectively their prohibition of inebriating liquors. [6]


INCUMBENT LOSES NOMINATION RACES IN PETROGRAD, MOSCOW, SIBERIA

Populist President Vladimir Volsky’s prospects of re-election are looking increasingly dim as important local branches of his own party have opted for rivalling candidates: Last week, the Moscow branch nominated Mr Avram Gots, the candidate favoured by the city’s mayor, Mr Vadim Rudnev. This week, Petrograd has become the first success for the heroine of the party’s revolutionary left wing, Miss Maria Spiridonova. [7] Meanwhile, Mr Boris Savinkov has celebrated various primary victories across Siberia, where his message against what he labels “double standards” in the debate over autonomy for indigenous groups seems to appeal to the colonist electorate. [8] Even his own foreign minister has left the sinking boat and announced his own candidacy (see LEFT). Among growing violent tensions and persisting poverty, President Volsky appears to have lost much of his appeal with the Russian electorate. The race for the highest office in the largest country on the globe is, thus, wide open, and its outcome entirely unpredictable.


YET MORE CONTENDERS!

Other parties are not idle, either. The most radical faction of the Social Democrats, [9] the so-called Militants, have decided to back the Latvian leader of the Russian-wide paramilitary organization of the party, Mr Ivar Smilga, in his bid to challenge the party’s chairman, Mr Leon Trotsky, for the official presidential candidacy. Meanwhile, the country’s largest liberal party, the Constitutional Democrats, have decided on a tumultuous and controversial congress in Nizhny Novgorod to field their own candidate, Mr Vladimir D. Nabokov, against the party chairwoman’s wishes who wanted the party to join in an alliance with other liberal and conservative parties and support the “Alliance for Law and Progress” and its presidential candidate, Mr Alexander Rodzyanko.


VIOLENT CLASHES IN MANY CITIES BEFORE PARTY CONGRESSES

The electoral fight has long escalated into violence. Clashes between political groups have gripped various cities across Russia. The worst of these excesses has begun on Labor Day and is currently still raging in Kiev, where supporters of various parties and candidates, wearing various green, red, blue and black shirts or armlets, have fought against each other for more than two days now. Police have not been able to bring the situation under control; so far, more than fifty deaths have been confirmed. [10] More on page SIX.



[1] An official holiday in Russia, Ukraine, Finland, Latvia, Bessarabia, Georgia, and Armenia.

[2] They mean the Popular Socialist Labour Party, i.e. the Trudoviks, of which Kerensky is by far the most well-known and popular member. Not the IRSD Labour Party.

[3] This has become a surprisingly controversial issue and become tangled up with the question of autonomy for various smaller indigenous nations. More on this weird issue below in the footnote on Savinkov’s successes among Siberian SRs.

[4] More a sector-wide alliance of trade unions, but still: This is the price the IRSDLP is paying for its distant relationship with trade unionism…

[5] What is meant here is “Union-wide” really.

[6] Prohibition is an issue in this Russia’s electoral campaign for sure. Kerensky, who IOTL sharpened a war-time prohibition ordererd by the tsarist government and made it permanent, stands by his Progressive conviction that alcohol is a social ill and weakens Russia’s power. Other candidates view things differently...

[7] Given the rumours about a love affair between Volsky and Spiridonova in tsarist times, I hesitated to put her forward as the left’s candidate against him as incumbent, but given her popularity, she really is a logical choice.

[8] Coming back to footnote 3: Two planned reforms which do not concern the Union-level, but that of the Russian Federative Republic, are at stake here, and the fact that Savinkov brings them into the presidential campaign shows how his plebiscitarist message mixes up the federal levels and blurs the boundaries. Reform project A is to enshrine a more limited form of autonomy for the various smaller indigenous groups and other minorities within the Russian Federative Republic, from Kalmyks over Volga Germans to Ewenks. Reform project B is to centralise the provision of social security, especially pooling all financial means and establishing standards for provided benefits and services across the entire Federative Republic. At the moment, social security has been taken over (from the rudimentary predecessor structures of the zemstvos mostly) by the soviets. This has proven very dangerous when calamities hit certain regions very hard, as has been experienced in the recent drought-related famines. So now a project is discussed both in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and in the Duma to provide a legal framework in which the soviets merely oversee collection and distribution at the local level while decisions are taken Russia-wide and the Duma backs such nation-wide social security funds by defining the legal framework of to whom they apply, by defining what it can and cannot do financially etc. This has been debated heatedly for many months now. Savinkov breaks down this complicated debate for the Siberian colonists into a simple message: These minorities want out (want to do their own thing, want to be allowed to be as backwards as they wish, ...), yet when they’re in trouble, we’re supposed to pay for their everything (healthcare and whatnot). Surely that is not fair! Either stop the autonomy / devolution, or kick the “reservatinons” (as Savinkov has called the project of autonomy, not being the first to do so) out of the social security system.

[9] I.e. the IRSDLP

[10] Why Kiev? Well, here, the intra-party divisions among the SRs along federalist vs centralist lines (often: Ukrainian vs Russian) are sharp, and all of Ukraine is rather full of weapons from the chaotic days of the Revolution where Ukraine was where much of the front was, and then the low-level warfare against Polish insurgents in Galicia, and Ukraine has a newly alarmed nationalist faction, plus chauvinistic Russian groups have never been crushed effectively here (remember: Avksentiev was shot in Odessa), so successor groups of the Black Hundreds etc. are still more active here than elsewhere.