Feeble Constitution - A Red-and-Green Russia 1917

[Salvador79]

Elections to the Duma of the Russian Federative Republic (December 1918)

As you will have already noted in the coverage of the elections of the other federative republics and of the Union Presidency, the UoE general elections of December 1918 are characterized by a very heavy overweight / hegemony of the Leftist side of the political spectrum. Now, “Left” and “Right” are not anthropological constants, of course, they are historical, and just as they emerged, they can also dissipate. The old Marxist (and Narodnik, too!) utopia of a classless society which has overcome its antagonisms is one such hypothetical state. Is this really what is happening here? Only time will tell. History has shown us countless examples of revolutions in which the Left dominated very much, bringing forth political landscapes which started out occupying only what is Left of Centre, but in the following years and decades, some parties shifted rightwards so that more of the spectrum typical for modern developed societies is occupied. (Portugal comes to mind: ever since the Carnation Revolution, the country’s political scene is divided between Social Democrats, Socialists and Communists. Only, the “Social Democrats” are by now economically neoliberal and socially conservative, thus by all means a conservative party, the Socialists are moderate, slightly left-of-centre Social Democrats, and the Communists have travelled the route over Eurocommunism to becoming the sort of separated left wing of social democracy which parties like the German Linke, the Dutch Socialists, the Spanish Unidos Podemos etc. also occupy.) So, is this what happens here? Will one of the parties shift to the right and restore the balance we are so familiar with? (If so, then it appears that the SRs are predestined for this course, given how they’re already perceived as the “moderates” with Avksentiev as their President-Elect, and the less class-antagonistic, more harmony-oriented ideological outlook of Narodnichestvo would facilitate this, too.) On the other hand, the balance we are familiar with is very much a child of the short 20th century, which ITTL is only just beginning. Before the Great War, with limited suffrage in many countries, the old bourgeois alternative between Liberals and Conservatives had been more prominent (while certainly already decaying), and the trends of our current century may point in other directions, too, what with the disintegration of the 20th century Left.

Only the continuation of this TL will tell if 1918 is going to be an exception or the new norm. I am very interested in your opinion on this matter, dear readers, of course!

But for the moment, it must be stated that this is clearly a trend from OTL which I could not have ignored if I had wanted to (which I didn’t *grin*). It would be wrong to say that Russia follows this trend – it is much more adequate to say that Russia has created this 1917-1918 trend. The federative republics we have covered so far have their own local histories, but in the large tilt to the Left, they are following something which has begun in many places, but certainly erupted first in Petrograd and took a number of escalating steps there.

Many others have written much more adequately about this trend than I could ever hope to. I will limit myself to pointing out where the divergences of TTL have picked up on OTL developments and where they deviated from them. By the time of the PoD, the massive dynamics had already been in full motion: the utter collapse of a delegitimized tsarism (and with it the entire discourse on “constitutional monarchy” vs “republicanism” etc.), the self-empowerment of the masses (embodied in the soviets), the exhaustion with regards to the war, the economic collapse (which was also a collapse of various economic policies which had dominated pre-war politics: market- and capital investment-oriented development of industry and large scale agriculture on the one hand side, militarized state dirigism on the other. If you’re looking at trends observable in the local duma elections of the summer of 1917 IOTL, and then in the Constituent Assembly elections of December 1917 OTL, the continuous leftward dynamics can’t be overseen, and the same goes for the implosion of the Russian Right. By the times of the CA election, the Kadets are the most right-wing option which is still at least barely visible – before the Great War, any ordinary educated Russian would clearly have placed the Kadets on the Centre-Left of Russia’s political landscape…

ITTL, the process is accelerated and channeled at once when Prince Lvov’s coalition (of Kadets, Octobrists, independents and one Trudovik: Kerensky) bluffs, their bluff is called, and the soviets take over power temporarily and with a good degree of political legitimacy, without a single shot being fired, and they call CA elections. The CA elections of TTL’s June 1917 thus already mirror OTL’s December 1917 outcome – with the exception of the absence of Menshevik and Right SR delegitimisation through support of a bourgeois-acting Provisional Government, an October Revolution and thus of Bolshevik hegemony over the country and over the RSDLP. Like IOTL, the SRs have inevitably been the largest party, and so they, who never led a government IOTL, have done so ITTL since July 1917. They deliver on their main promise – land reform – which secures their rural powerbase. Although attacks from the Left are no less fierce than IOTL, the SRs are in a solid-enough position to embrace those of their critics who are willing to be embraced in the November Realignment – and ruthlessly persecute the rest, both on the Right, which has discredited itself another time in August 1917 with its ties to the botched Kornilov Coup, and on the Left (remaining Bolsheviks and anarchists). Over the course of 1918, this very broad socialist coalition was faced with more military defeats, economic crisis, the need to relocate to Moscow, and ultimately the reversal of the war, having been able to triumph at the end, which still leaves the situation of the population quite as destitute as before, only now they no longer have to fear to get sent into trenches to die there. Divisions between SRs and SDs became more and more nuanced throughout 1918, and so the two parties face each other as the electoral giants of the new Republic – both on the Union level and on the Russian level. Given the conditions they had to work in, they were relatively successful together. This is not the only, and maybe not even the primary reason why they’re dominating the elections: the fact that the extreme Right is now tainted once again with its collaboration with Markov and the latter’s downfall, the fact that the Kadets are at a loss for how to adapt to the new situation, and not least the fact that the government, through the instrument of the VChK, has been oppressing and imprisoning any groups who are seen as “saboteurs” who want to overthrow the new system. (As has been noted, this is a specifically Russian situation, since the republics who had already enjoyed autonomy at the time of the November Realignment clearly objected to the VChK poking their noses into their republic’s affairs.)

Actually, this is probably the moment where I should describe how the Russian Federative Republic came into being and what its constitutional structures are. The Russian FR is an exceptional case indeed – it is the only federative republic whose constitution was not drafted by a national council or assembly of some sort or other, and whose “integration” into the Union of Equals did not require a Concordance, state contract or anything else of this sort. In some sense, this is logical, because the Russian Federative Republic, unlike all others, was not created by an autochtonous group seeking national self-determination. It was created after everyone else (well, before the Bessarabians and the Belorussians, but still) had got their own federative republic. It was created out of a desire for constitutional systematicity – the Union of Equals was to be composed of federative republics, and so “rest Russia” had to form one, too. (This is not to say that there had never been Russian nationalism. There certainly has been, but its objective had been different. In many cases, it had been directly opposed to what happened in 1917 and 1918 which ultimately led to the establishment of a Russian FR.)

The constitution of the Russian FR was drafted by the very same Constitutional Assembly in Petrograd (and later Moscow) which also drafted the constitution of the Union – only when the Russian constitution was discussed and voted on, the representatives of the already-autonomised republics were required to leave the plenary. (The Russian FR’s constitution has therefore been voted on by Northern Caucasian, Belorussian and Bessarabian delegates, too, because their federative republics were formed only later.) It stipulated that the Russian FR was to be a parliamentary socialist republic, where the Duma would vote on penal and civil laws, general taxes, education, infrastructure and the like, whilst local, regional and republic-wide soviets would set the rules of the economic game, provide social security and healthcare, administer common resources etc. The soviets would appoint a number of permanent committees to oversee day-to-day economic manamgement, whereas the Duma would elect a Prime Minister, who would appoint ministers to run the respective segments of the republican administration. When it was established in November 1917, it was determined that the elections to the next Duma (delegates to the soviets could be elected and recalled at will, without guaranteed terms, by those who delegated them) would be held on the same day on which Union-wide Presidential elections would also be held. In the meantime, Russian-only affairs would be handled by a sub-committee of the People’s Commission (popularly referred to as Roskom). Roskom, which over the course of 1918 had not been exactly very important since most decisions were still taken by the Commission at large, was officially chaired by a Bread Menshevik, Alexander Martynov (i.e. someone from the smallest and weakest group in the November Realignment coalition).

The effect of this late and involuntary “birth of a national republic” caused a lot of lack of popular knowledge in Russia about the exact differences between the Duma and the old Constituent Assembly, between the Russian Prime Minister and the President of the Union etc. This way, the Presidential election system, whose effect is that of a concentration on a handful, often only two, main contenders, heavily influenced electoral behavior in the Russian Duma elections, too, especially since people voted for both on the same day in the same voting booth.

The Russian Duma is elected in a mixed system of personalized proportional representation (like (West) Germany’s system after 1949) – but since the vast majority of Russian voters are not yet extremely familiar with the minutiae of the differences between Union Presidency, Federative Republican Duma and all that, there is a very strong tendency to vote for the Duma list of the same Party whose candidate they also voted for President. This, again, strengthens the IRSDLP(u) and the SRs at the detriment of smaller parties.

The abysmal performance of the Kadets and Trudoviks (there is nothing of any substance left standing to the Right of the Kadets at the moment) as well as of Bukharin’s remaining rump Bolsheviks (who renamed themselves into International Communist Party) and Julius Martov’s rump Mensheviks (who simply called themselves Russian Social Democratic Labour Party now that the name had been abandoned both by the ICP and the IRSDLP(u)) has other reasons, too:

The Kadets are still struggling to find their position in the new system. They oppose most of the socio-economic and political transformations which happened after Lvov’s demission, but for obvious reasons they also don’t rally for a counter-revolution. They did not want the new constitution and they objected heavily (but without any success) to the referendum held on it, but now they have no choice but to play by the new rules. They had not openly supported Kornilov’s coup, but also not credibly distanced themselves from it. They had not collaborated with Markov’s puppet regime, but the resistance against it had been formed and led by others. They had always supported the war effort, but now the radical Left, who had been full of defeatists, was basking in the glory of victory. Their economic policy agenda utterly unrealistic to be implemented under the soviet system, but the Kadets also knew they couldn’t take on the soviets single-handedly (no matter how strong they would become in the Duma – well, they would not become strong…). Their social powerbase had, in part, turned to the parties of the Left, or was turning away from politics, and to some degree was even emigrating, seeking better opportunities to pursue their happiness in North or South America. Pavel Milyukov’s days at the helm of the party were numbered, everyone knew that. Leading his party into defeat in the Duma elections would be his last “accomplishment” – even before the official results were announced, he resigned from his position.

The Popular Socialist Labour Party (or short: Trudoviks) was suffering from their lack of structures in the territory. In tsarist times, they had been the outermost leftist representatives tolerated in the toothless Duma, also serving as a mouthpiece for other, suppressed groups – their moment of glory had been the soviet interregnum in May 1917 when Alexander Kerensky had led the People’s Commission together with Victor Chernov and Fyodor Dan. But there had been little time to prepare for the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, and the Trudoviks, who appeared soft now, had not been able to put a foot on the ground either in the countryside, where peasant councils formed, utterly dominated by the SRs, or in the industrialised cities, where workers councils were shifting ever leftwards within the framework of Russia’s Social Democracy. The November Realignment left them in the opposition, where they shared many of the problems described with regards to the Kadets above. There was one important difference, though: the Trudoviks would be represented in the new Union government, and they would stand at the SRs’ side in a new Duma coalition. The Trudoviks were not yet just a Kerensky election club – politicians like Alexander Zarudny had too much of a profile for that to happen. But they were a small faction.

Between the Kadets, Trudoviks, SRs and IRSLDP(u), there was really no political space left for the last Mensheviks who have not joined the IRSLDP(u). In the December 1918 elections, they were ultimately reduced to the status of a splinter party. After this humiliating failure, its more profiled and ambitious personnel would soon join leave and the party would ultimately dissolve – Irakli Tsereteli, for example, would remain affiliated with the Georgian (Menshevik) Social Democrats (who had founded the Federation of Independent Social Democrats) and represent Georgia in the Council of the Union (more on this institution in a later update); Alexander Potresov, Fyodor and Lydia Dan and many others joined the Trudoviks, while Julius Martov, for whom the Trudoviks were decidedly too un-internationalistic and theoretically under-sophisticated, would become one of the “independent” political thinkers of the next decade (and obtain a professorship at the Lomonosov).

Bukharin’s International Communists (=former Bolsheviks), on the other hand, had suffered from serious obstruction throughout the duration of the war. When the war ended, the situation became a little more relaxed and the ICP was not hindered to participate in the Duma elections – but it had been marginalized too long, suffered too many losses (to the IRSDLP(u) as well as to imprisonment) and been infiltrated too heavily by undercover VChK agents. Its showing at the booths was so weak that I lumped them (as well as the even less successful rump Mensheviks) in with the “Others” colour of Duma seats.

This has led to the situation in which, taken together, the representatives on lists of the ethnic minorities were stronger in the Duma than the nation-wide Russian opposition parties. I’ve lumped them together in the overview because they’re simply too many. A great deal of the remaining national minorities in the Russian FR are Muslims, but not all. Among the Muslim groups, Alimardan Topchubashov’s Presidential campaign has done wonders to revive the moribound Ittifaq al-Muslimin, who has nevertheless scored much less percent and seats in the Duma elections than in the Presidential ones because in the Duma elections, they had to contend against more aggressively secessionist Young Turkic / Turanist parties on the one hand and socialist Muslim election lists like the one led by Sultan-Galiev and Waxitov. The SR faction in the Duma has been contacting many of these minority representatives in an attempt to integrate them into their SR-PSLP coalition. Some of the minority parties are willing to play along – but that support is going to come with strings attached, and these strings have the word “autonomy” written all over them. The only group of minority lists which does not call for autonomy, or at least not universally, for this is one of their main bones of contention, is the group of Jewish lists. Some of them saw themselves as closely related to Social Democracy, others were ideologically more pluralist or vague or even conservative. They diverged from one another heavily in their views regarding Zionism, the idea of a Jewish federative republic, the idea of personal autonomy following Austro-Marxist ideas, and a rejection of any such separation; they disagreed on educational matters, they had disagreed on the war, and they continued to disagree over economic policies. As Vladimir Zenzinov, the Socialist Revolutionary candidate who tried to gather a majority in the Duma which would elect him as Prime Minister, would find out, negotiations with each of the Jewish lists separately would go rather well, but bringing more than one of them into the common team would prove nigh on impossible.

Here is an overview of the seats obtained by the various parties:

And so, as 1918 ends, Russia has a parliament of its own, but this parliament has not elected a Prime Minister yet. In the meantime, Martynov’s Roskom continues as the largest federative republic’s interim government…

 

[Salvador79]

Elections for the Centralna Rada of the Ukrainian Federative Republic (December 1918)

In some respects, the political landscape of the Ukraine mirrors that of Russia to a great extent: Socialist Revolutionaries as the strongest force, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labour Party as their main contender, then smaller parties: an anti-socialist one (the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party), a social-liberal one (the Union of Socialists-Federalists), more social democratic splinters (primarily the IRSDLP(u), which also candidated against its nationalist and more moderate sister party). And lists of cultural or ethnic minorities.

In other respects, the elections in the Ukraine took place under very different and much more tense conditions. In contrast to Russia, which was undoubtedly full of armed people, too, but where almost all of them belonged to either the Union Armies or the Repulican Guards and awaited their demobilization, Ukraine was brimming with barely controllable armed groups of all sorts. And in contrast to Russia, state institutions were still comparatively weak.

The relative weakness of state institutions was a trait Ukraine shared with the Baltic and the Caucasian republics, where soviets did not step in on a large scale to supplement a deficient and politically no longer compatible administrative apparatus inherited from tsarist times. There were soviets – mostly peasant soviets, but also worker soviets e.g. in Odessa, Kharkiv, and Kiev – in the Ukraine, too, but not universally spread out and organized across the entire country, and they had not been integrated into the new Ukrainian constitution to quite the extent to which they had been integrated in Russia. (The reason for this being the opposition of the USDLP in the Centralna Rada coalition, who saw that the peasant soviets were becoming a pillar of USR power, while Kharkiv’s and Odessa’s worker soviets leaned much more radical than they were, towards Bolshevik, IRSDLP(u) or anarchist positions.) Additionally, parallel structures continued to exist in a number of regions, most prominently in those which had formed, for the time span of a whole year, Anton Denikin’s independent Cossack state.

The formerly independent Cossack regions along the Don were not the only place in Ukraine where sizable segments of the population were heavily armed in paramilitary structures. In the absence of formalized soviet rule, especially in the countryside peasant militia had armed themselves, and while a law on Agrarian Reform had finally passed the Centralna Rada in August 1918 (a whole year after the Rada had requested to be exempted from the version legislated in the Constituent Assembly of Petrograd), its implementation yet awaited the securing of the state monopoly of force in the territory, which only exacerbated tensions and caused various militia to attempt to take matters into their own hands. On average, SR-affiliated “Green Guards” were the most numerous and powerful throughout Ukraine, with the exception of the Cossack territories. But two rivalling strands of paramilitary groups, both of whom confusingly chose the colour black for their identification, competed seriously with them: anarchist groups on the one hand, and radically right-wing, anti-Semitic, reactionary groups, often sponsored by landlords who sought to protect themselves against a seditious peasantry with their help, on the other hand.

And then, there was the situation in Western Ukraine, or Eastern Galicia if you want it, the region around Lemberg which had once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and where Ukrainian-speakers formed a majority in the countryside, but towns like Lemberg exhibited Polish plurality. Here, Jozef Pilsudski had found a new task for himself. Being cajoled into abandoning Vilnius, and then finding himself officially deposed nonetheless by a coup against his marshalcy, Pilsudski soon heard of the boycott movement against the UoE general elections begun by a group of Polish nationalists in Lemberg/Lwiw/Lwow and Stanislawow [it’s called Ivano-Frankivsk today]. Pilsudski gathered a few thousand POW fighters loyal to him and joined his brethren in Eastern Galicia, organizing an insurgency there, which, by the end of the year, must be qualified as yet another failure in Pilsudski’s life, but which endangered and destabilized the situation in the region during the time frame in which the election was held to a great extent.

Now, this combination of weak statehood and strong rivalling paramilitary groups meant two things:

On the one hand, the elections most certainly did not proceed without irregularities in this federative republic. By the way, here are the official results:

On the other hand, it also had quite a different effect: The precarious situation would, over the course of December [contrary to what the Washington Post still knew a few days earlier] ultimately coagulate all the forces who supported a socially democratic Ukraine in the greater framework of the Union of Equals – and so, in spite of their differences, Vsevolod Holubovych’s Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, where Symon Petlyura has taken over leadership from Vynnychenko, the Ukrainian section of the IRSLP(u) and the social-liberal Ukrainian Socialist Federalists of Serhiy Yefremov ultimately agreed to forming a majority coalition behind a new Ukrainian government:

(I forgot to write the names of the parties into this one, sorry. From left to right: IRSDLP(U), USRs, USDLP, USF, Cossack lists, Jewish lists, UADP, others.)

 

[Salvador79]

Elections to the Sakhalkho Krebis of the Georgian Federative Republic (December 1918)

The two Transcaucasian federative republics were not only safe strongholds of the presidential campaign of Noe Zhordania, himself a Georgian Social Democrat. They shared various other characteristics: both viewed themselves under a sort of siege, being encircled by the Ottoman war enemies, who had just murdered many hundreds of thousands of their Christian subjects, by hostile ethnic groups on the Russian side who disputed the territorial borders agreed upon with Petrograd in the Concordances, and by restive Muslim minorities. Both looked back on dignified ancient traditions, most conspicuously represented in their two unique scripts and in the autocephaly of their two Eastern Christian churches, but both also had a lot to catch up in terms of industrialization, modern institutions and infrastructure.

But there were also important differences between Georgia and Armenia. While there had been a very militant Armenian resistance against the Ottomans, and Armenians were the main target of the CUP’s genocidal campaigns, which meant that Armenian politics was militant to a very extreme degree and its two major parties, the Dashnaks and the Hunchaks, had an entire pantheon of martyrs to inspire a new generation of voluntary fedayi fighters, Georgian politics was gradually less militarized and its political scene utterly dominated by the towering hegemony of its Social Democratic Party, which had always stood firmly on the Menshevik side in the decades of division, but which, being firmly rooted in its home country, had escaped the fate of Russia’s Mensheviks, who were crushed by the revolutionary process in two, with the larger group joining the IRSDLP(u) in two waves, while the smaller part had been reduced to meaninglessness by December 1918.

Evgeni Gegechkori’s Social Democratic government had strengthened various institutions which were central to Georgia’s national identity, it had legislated (through it was not yet fully implemented) a comprehensive land reform, it had created one of the world’s most progressive labour laws and enshrined the unions’ rights to strike and bargain collectively. While the former found universal acclaim by other Georgian parties, too, except for those who represented the interests of the various minorities, the social reforms were opposed in the Founding Aseembly (Dampudsnebeli Kreba) by the National Democrats and the so-called Socialist-Federalists (a centrist bourgeois party, see @galileo-034’s mentioning of Sinistrisme…) But Gegechkori’s Social Democrats also had to suppress secessionist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and raise a territorial defense force from scratch. For the sake of these latter challenges, where the two main opposition parties supported Gegechkori, the opposition moderated itself to an amazing extent. In effect, Georgia’s autonomous politics were becoming almost synonymous with the Menshevik project. This was mirrored in the outcome of the December 1918 elections, in which the Social Democrats obtained a landslide victory. [1]

These results gave them a clear majority in the new Sakhalkho Krebis, where Gegechkori was looking forward to four more years of hopefully stable government.

[1] IOTL, the Mensheviks even obtained more than 80 % (!!) of the vote. This has always smelled a little fishy to me, and while I don’t know enough about OTL’s Georgian Democratic Republic to say whether this was genuine popular support for a beleaguered and ambitiously reformist national government or the result of less commendable circumstances, I thought it would be more realistic to scale back their electoral success to a level which is less out of the ordinary in democracies.


Elections to the Presidency and the Azgayin Zhoghov of the Armenian Federative Republic (December 1918)

As has been mentioned above, the political situation in Armenia was shaped to a much greater extent than that of any other entity of the former Russian Empire – well, a sizable part of its territory lay outside of the former Empire anyway… - by militarization. Armenian politics were dominated by the two great parties, the Hunchaks and Dashnaks, both of whom considered themselves socialist, and both of whom had maintained large underground rebel armies of fedayi since the 1900s.

While the partisan fedayi were officially merged into three combined army groups of the new Armenian Armed Forces, whose ranks were swelled by refugee voluntaries and conscripts, too, affiliation remained implicitly clear. The Dashnaks, who had emerged comparatively stronger than their Hunchak competitors from the horrors of Ottoman persecution, had led the government under Hovhannes Kajaznouni ever since the formation of the new Armenia, but Kajaznouni had integrated Hunchaks, too, forming a sort of Armenian Union Sacrée. The Hunchaks, who traditionally viewed themselves as the more universalist and less nationalist social democrats, were nevertheless no less eager defenders of Armenia’s autonomy and strength, which, almost every Armenian agreed these days, was the only safe way to prevent another Aghed [one of the Armenian names for the genocide, literally “catastrophe”] from happening.

It was these specific circumstances which forged a political system in Armenia which, while still somewhat democratic, differed considerably from that of its fellow federative republics. In Armenia, Dashnaks and Hunchaks had agreed among themselves on a constitution which created the greatest opportunities for the perpetuation of their political duopoly and which would keep minority parties – most of which were Muslim – as marginalized as possible. The federative republic was divided into forty electoral districts, each of which would send three delegates into the Azgayin Zhogov under the so-called “single transferrable vote” system (also called the “Tasmanian system”, for it has been in use on that Australian island for more than two decades by 1918). [2] In order to avoid “voter confusion”, a “splintered parliament” and “an unclear situation in times of emergency”, an additional 60 seats would be elected via nation-wide lists with an electoral threshold of 20 %. As if that had not been enough to make sure that either Dashnaks or Hunchaks could govern without paying much attention to the Muslim voters of Kars or Nakhichevan, the Armenian constitution also created the office of a President of the Federative Republic, whose control over executive powers included the supreme command over Armenia’s Armed Forces. The president would require an absolute majority in the popular vote; if no candidate obtained this in the first round, a second round would be held between the two candidates with the most votes.

On the one hand, this system worked out just like its Dashnak and Hunchak fathers (in the first Armenian National Council, there were no women; in the general elections of December 1918, though, women and men were both universally enfranchised) had envisioned it: while first parliamentary preferences and nation list votes as well as first round results were much more varied, the Azgayin Zhogov ended up almost completely dominated by a Dashnak majority and a powerful Hunchak opposition, while the Dashnak Hovhannes Kajaznouni gave over the office of Prime Minister to his party colleague Hamo Ohanjanyan after he triumphed in the second round of the presidential elections over his Hunchak competitor, Avetis Nazarbekian.

Although they had, so far, not been able to implement much of their competing programs for social reform – national defense against external and internal enemies had been the top and almost single priority, while taking care of the hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees from other parts of the Ottoman Empire took a distant second place; agricultural, administrative, educational or labour reforms were postponed until “the ship of the nation would enter calmer waters” - , Dashnaks and Hunchaks had nevertheless been able to ensure that only they would battle with each other over the future of their country. (The battle would instantly begin, as the lack of palpable reform progress of the Dashnak government had been criticized by the Hunchaks during the electoral campaign already, and in the new parliament, they would go the whole nine yards to present themselves as the more proactively reformist alternative.)

On the other hand, the dirty deal was not working out quite as smoothly as the Armenian parties had wished. Politicised members of the minority groups understood the game that was being played at their expense here. Frustrated at the impossibility of fighting for their rights as equal citizens of the new republic, more and more groups from Erzurum to Ordubad went into the militant underground. Mass protests and riots during the election weeks had been only a glimpse of what Armenia would face in the near future, as new groups claimed the mantle of “fedayeen” now…

 

[Salvador79]

Brussels (Kingdom of Belgium): Vooruit [1], January 13th, 1919:

MILLIONS SUPPORT THOMAS-ADDAMS-GORKY PLAN!

by August Balthazar

There are two very different kinds of echoes to the latest proposal concerning the nature of the League of Nations offered by the Thomas-Addams-Gorky [2] group. The populations of various European nations have demonstrated their enthusiastic support: millions have come out in favour of the “World Federation of Peace”, its charter of inalienable rights of men, women and children alike, its worldwide court of arbitration and justice, its peace corps to prevent aggression, its guarantee of universal suffrage and the democratic right to constitute one’s state freely and federate with others peacefully, worldwide labour and agriculture organizations to civilize the economy and provide relief against famine, protection of workers’ rights and a ban on child labour, prohibition of liquor and a world police to end the trafficking of women and drugs, unrestricted freedom of the seas, strict limitations on armament, freedom of commerce, the abolition of tariffs, and universal access to education. Demonstrations have filled the streets of Paris, Sevilla [3], Dublin, Torino [4], Vienna [5], Munich, Rotterdam [6] and Brussels, too, with red flags and banners in support of the proposal for global peace. The Internationale of Socialist and Labour Parties in Berne has endorsed the agenda with an overwhelming majority. The governments in Munich [7], Mostar [8], Sofia and Mexico City have declared immediately that they would sign such a treaty, and even in Berlin, Herr Ebert has announced that, if Germany were asked, they would not hesitate to join such a community of nations.

In the corridors of the Quai d’ Orsay, though, where the leaders of the governments of the six most powerful members of the Entente [9] have retreated in order to find a common position with regards to the terms of the peace and the framework of the future order, there appears to be absolute silence about the proposal. Present negotiations purportedly focus on the pressing questions of Poland, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and the question of reparation payments to be made by Germany. Only on the first topic, a common position appears to be within reach – but even here, it seems that none of the world’s leaders is inclined to officialise their agreement before the entire picture has been painted. It appears that it is not even clear to what extent Avksentiev himself supports the plan laid out by the Thomas-Addams-Gorky group.

This is most disappointing and regrettable. For all the reasons Meneer Avksentiev has to tread cautiously, the idea of the World Federation of Peace deserves more support. Much more so than the toothless, formal frameworks laid out by bourgeois reformers like Robert Cecil, or Jan Smuts, or Woodrow Wilson himself, it tackles the problems of our present age at their roots, and seeks to really eliminate, instead of just limiting, the scourge of war, which is the only way the vital interests of smaller nations like ours and of the working population of the entire world can be truly protected.


[1] A Belgian socialist newspaper.

[2] Albert Thomas was a French socialist who had supported the Union Sacrée but who strove hard to revive the Second International after the war. IOTL, he was one of the chairmen of the Berne International in February 1919, where he sought to mobilise social-democratic parties for the fight to shape the debate over what kind of League of Nations one wanted. Jane Addams was a progressive US suffragist, education reformer, and feminist peace activist, who IOTL organized a women’s conference in Washington calling for an international league of neutral nations for peace and disarmament, just days before the Paris Peace Conference. Maxim Gorky was a Russian writer who had lived in exile in France and the US and enjoyed international popularity before the February Revolution, who was as much a spiritualist as he was a socialist who IOTL supported the Bolsheviks and, while skeptical of the October Revolution, stayed on for more than three years, trying to convince Lenin et al. to stop the terror. There is no hint that he supported an international organization for the prevention of war or anything of the like IOTL. But he was enough of an idealist, I thought, to be likely to support such a cause ITTL where the UoE is one of the participating Great Powers in Paris. IOTL, Addams had to plead endlessly with Wilson before a short statement of the women’s assemblies would be read out on the Conference and a few modifications were actually undertaken in the draft for the Covenant of the League of Nations. The Socialist International was still trying to reconfigure and find itself and sort out its position vis-à-vis the October Revolution and did not exert a very massive influence on the Paris Peace Conference, even though the Covenant of the LoN also created the International Labour Organization (ILO). ITTL, I thought its presence would have to be more prominent. Including Gorky – whom Narodniks respected and revered as much as Marxists did, if not more – in the equation means he can serve as a door-opener; the UoE delegation can give a lot of space on the conference to the presentation and discussion of a draft which has been shaped at least to some extent by feminists and socialists.

[3] 1918/19 was a time of significant secessionist, or at least independentist, movements in Andalusia.

[4] Antonio Gramsci may mistrust former belligerents like Thomas, but he knows an internationalist project when he sees one, so he puts his rhetorical skills to good use to mobilise his local PSI section.

[5] Vienna was a social-democratic stronghold (it still is), and the noble idealist plan is something both radicals like Adler and moderates like Renner can agree on.

[6] No Bolshevik coup means no Red Week aka Vergissing van Troelstra, thus the Dutch SDAP is in a confident position.

[7] Bavaria has seceded under Kurt Eisner’s government. In Berlin, the USPD has been unable to pry the other democratic parties away from the monarchy even after Kaiser Wilhelm II’s embarrassing “defiance” speech, and they were asked, as a condition for their inclusion in the coalition of national salvation, to support the imperial and Prussian government’s policies of attempting to hoodwink the Entente and diverge arms of the divisions from the former Eastern Front, which were supposed to be handed over to the UoE, towards the Heimatwehren, who have begun open fighting against Polish forces on a wide scale across Prussia. That was too much even for the moderate leadership of the USPD, the party which had been founded in opposition against the Great War. Calling off the Revolution has not really paid for them, since after the USPD declared its defiance and publicly denounced the government’s secret plans, Berlin has drawn together forces against USPD strongholds. Under these hostile circumstances, Eisner has opted for Bavaria to secede. Bavaria is too strong for Berlin to take on – which is why the imperial leadership has decided to drown the revolution in Bremen, a much easier victim, in its own blood instead. Nevertheless, Eisner, who seeks a close partnership with his Austrian neighbour and Renner’s government there, also has internal opposition to take into account – and not only from monarchists and anti-socialists. Half of the Augsburg chapter of the USPD has followed Ernst Niekisch (yes, the guy was in the USPD indeed), who is organizing a “Volksheimatwehr”, a “red” but nevertheless fiercely nationalist version of a Heimatwehr, which opposes Bavaria’s secession and supports defiance against Polish incursions in the East and French attempts to interfere in civil administration on the left bank of the Rhine.

[8] The anti-Djordjevic, anti-Pašić forces are still holding out. Actual fighting has receded, with the various Entente nations who support the conflicting sides anxious to quell open military conflict in the zone, but a solution is still out of reach, see the following text.

[9] Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Avksentiev, Orlando, and Nobuaki.

Hre is the map with the borders of Poland (neon turquois) and a internationally controlled Danzig (purple) currently being discussed by the Big Six:

 

[Salvador79]

Petrograd (Russian Federative Republic of the Union of Equals): Znamya Truda, February 7th, 1919, p.1:

THE SCOURGE OF CHAUVINISTIC REACTION

by Vladimir Karelin

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of chauvinistic reaction. All across the lands once ruled by the collapsed or collapsing militarist, murderous empires of the Central Powers, but not only there!, the old guard in the armies which had sworn to lay down their arms is coming together with ultra-nationalist agitators, anti-semitic poisoners, and scapegraces of the lowest sorts. Their attempts aim to derail the peace train, to subvert the social democratic transformation which is taking roots all over the continent, and to turn back the hands of time, to restore the imperial rule over nations who have struggled to liberate themselves, to restore the aristocratic rule over toilers who have escaped from under their yoke and joined their hands in the building of a free and fair society.

Today, these reactionary groups still operate separate from each other, each fighting for their own obsolete privileges and their own faded glory – and the revolutionary toiling masses show themselves still capable to defeat them in many countries.

In Hungary, the coup d´état, in which a self-proclaimed “Hungarian National Defense Association” [1] had removed Mihály Karoly’s government, has collapsed after only eight days thanks to a general strike and the refusal of ordinary soldiers to shoot their comrades and compatriots who fought to preserve their democratic rights and prevent a fatal flare-up of warfare with Hungary’s neighbors. The workers’ and soldiers’ council in Budapest has announced that the general elections, which the MOVE putschists [2] had cancelled, will be rescheduled and held in two weeks’ time. While they managed to oust Gyula Gömbös and his camarilla from Buda Castle and apprehend them, co-conspirers across the territory have merely hidden, and it remains to be seen which obstacles they will still be able to lay into the path of Hungary’s democratization.

In Turkey, the “national forces” of the generals Kâzim Karabekir and Mustafa Kemal are training large numbers of terrorists, determined to sacrifice their lives for the goal of uprooting order in the regions where international detachments are maintaining peace and protecting millions of men, women, and children whom the Young Turkic regime had targeted for annihilation. These generals, too, appeal to national chauvinistic sentiments, in the hope of recruiting more cannon fodder whom they can send into their doom in order to protect themselves and their cronies from losing their positions and being brought before international courts of justice for the atrocities committed during the war.

All across the lands of the Germans, from Carniola in the South to Klaipeda in the North, ultra-nationalist and rabidly anti-socialist groups have organized themselves under the leadership of imperial officers and fight, with weapons whose handover should have long been organized by these same officers in accordance with the Treaty which their commanders had committed themselves to, against Slavic people who have thrown off the imperial Austrian yoke or attempt to throw off Germany’s. Three days ago, these same clandestine forces, whose numbers we can barely fathom, have overthrown the government of the Free People’s State of Saxony and they are still engaged in the bloody oppression of resistance, which the workers of Leipzig and Chemnitz are valiantly putting up against the restoration of the old regime. It has ultimately become clear that most of these forces are coordinated by the Prussian Army Ministry.

As long as we can still deal with each of these threats one by one, we must urgently act, and act together. This is yet another reason why Leon Trotsky’s erratic collusion with Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams to throw the elections and our common institutions into doubt over the Lithuanian Question [3] is reckless political hazardry. If we act quickly and with determination, we can contain the wave of nationalistic chauvinism, and then dry out the swamp from which it arises – but if we pander and gamble, the Revolution may yet drown in it! Let us hope that we will not mourn the repealed Special Powers Act soon… [4] With our full support, the President must clarify now to our allies that the scourge of chauvinistic reaction is the greatest threat to worldwide peace at this fragile moment. It would be best if this threat were uprooted by a solid World Federation’s Peace Corps because this would knock the argument that all our conflicts are inevitable struggles of nation against nation straight out of our enemies’ hands. But if waiting for everyone’s agreement runs the risk of waiting too long, we must go ahead, both in Prussian, Austrian and Turkish lands, with a coalition of those who see the threat and are willing to tackle it [5] while the enemies still only have militia, and not yet whole armies again.

The sooner the treaties and the covenant for peace are concluded, the less space we provide for reactionary chauvinism to grow in the void which the imperialist war has torn open. There is no agreement on the sum of reparations? Here is a new proposal: why don’t we apprehend all the militaristic junkers, their Austrian and Hungarian equivalents, and the murderous Young Turkic officers, and put them to productive work for the first time in their lives in the rebuilding of the railroads, factories, houses and mines they have destroyed? Let those who led the millions into the meatgrinder pay for the damages they caused, instead of the working millions they have ruled over and still try to rule over?

This would also serve as a deterring example to those beyond the defeated aggressor states who, at the fringes of their societies, pursue like-minded, hateful agendas to the struggling reactionaries of the crumbling Central empires: the hordes in blue shirts who assault Italian workers and peasants [6], those who attempt to deny their Jewish fellow students entry to their universities in Bucharest and Iaşi [7], and everyone else who wants to destroy the peaceful and equitable new society which the war-weary peoples of the world are building together. It would show them that we mean business – we do not just demand peace, we are fighting for it, and those who want to fight against peace better think twice before they spread poison and malice!


[1] These guys.

[2] I’m not sure if that word was already in English use in 1919, but Karelin writes in Russian anyway, so let’s just say this is a modernized translation.

[3] Sometimes, when things look really hopeless for a certain group, a woman gets a chance at leadership, even under generally adverse socio-cultural circumstances. The Kadets are in such a position. Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams as Kadet leader embodies the party’s rightward shift, to the point where they (maybe) become the party in which most opponents of socialism assemble, or at least that is her strategy. The “Lithuanian Question” refers to the Kadets’ appeal against the December 1918 general elections before the Supreme Court of the Union, on the grounds that the Constituent Assembly allegedly had no right to decide not to hold elections in Lithuania, when the most recent history has clearly shown that Lithuanians want to be a part of the Union. (That is, a coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists in the Taryba have decided to apply for admission in late January 1919, in the face of Pilsudski’s hordes and Dmowski’s claims, and President Avksentiev has signaled that negotiations can begin without delay (so far, no other federative republic has raised objections against Lithuania’s admission). In a move which surprised commenters in Moscow and elsewhere, Leon Trotsky has thrown his weight behind the cause, too, a few days ago, after his IRSDLP(u) had been shut out of the ruling majority of the Russian FR, too. (Zenzinov has managed to obtain a majority for his SR-Trudovik coalition cabinet by promising various minorities the establishment of new federative republics.) Trotsky claims that he is pursuing an internationalist cause, supporting the Revolution in Lithuania, which even after Pilsudski’s crushing of the Vilnius Commune has never died down, he says. Tyrkova-Williams, who, in order to rally the Russian anti-socialists, has taken to a Russian nationalist rhetoric which goes far beyond what Pyotr Struve had pulled off before the Great War, and Trotsky are strange bedfellows indeed. The only thing which brings them together is their opposition to the minority-tolerated Narodnik government.

[4] The repeal of the Special Powers Act restores habeas corpus and sane limits on what police forces may or may not do when faced with insurgency, terrorism, or unrest. It aims to transform the VChK into a more professional, outward-looking intelligence agency.

[5] France and Poland come to mind with regards to Prussia, France, Italy and Czechoslovakia as far as Austrian-German militia are concerned, and again France, Italy, and Greece when it comes to enforcing *Moudros in Turkey.

[6] And so the spiral of strikes and land occupations vs. hired gangs of strike-breakers and protest-dispersers has begun, as was inevitable.

[7] He is speaking of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and his ilk in Romania, who rear their ugly heads a good year earlier (actually straight after they've begun uni after their military service, which may be a bit early in Codreanu's case, who is merely 19 years old right now, so maybe someone else is the loudest mouth in that crowd, whose ranks have swollen a little earlier given the PNL’s reckless campaigning on nationalist anti-UoE sentiments.

 

[Salvador79]

From the Mémoirs of Georges Clemenceau (entitled “Paix dans notre temps”, 1926), pp. 376ff.:

[…]

February turned into March. Outside, the first blossoms appeared after a particularly cold winter. In the Quai d’ Orsay, the atmosphere was frostier than ever. No compromise within reach. And the Chinese Affair proved beyond doubt how much internal divisons, the secret machinations of the past, and sheer, unfathomable corruption are to blame for much of this. Apparently, one of their delegation [1] had inserted a secret clause into the Cecil-House Proposal [2] according to which Germany’s and Austria-Hungary’s Shandong concessions were signed off to Japan, as a sort of payment for Japanese loans. With all that money, Duan Qirui had built up an army under his control which, contrary to its name, never participated in the war and which he planned to use against his rival fellow Chinese in the South [3]. Apparently, the rest of his delegation had no clue about any of it, until some American newspaper revealed the whole dirty business, [4] now all of China was in uproar for a whole week, until his fellow delegates had the traitor apprehended by embassy guards. The Japanese remained unfazed and adamant. With their silly power games, the Chinese had brought themselves and all of us into a situation where expecting signatures under any treaty by both Beijing and Tokyo had become utopian. [5]

As I mused on the Far Eastern conundrum, I asked myself whether the boy Kerensky [6] had it right: all the causes for the war had been European, so it made sense to look for a European solution first and foremost. [7] The question was only: could we trust the Russians and their little allies, and all the neutrality lovers who applauded Kerensky [8], to send their boys to Germany, to the Balkans, to Anatolia and wherever else international demilitarized zones have been proposed, when the streets of their capitals are crowded with millions of enraged pacifists? Would the Italians fully participate, like Orlando alluded, or would they backpedal to the partitioning scheme which Sonnino is was plotting around this time with his British friends? Balfour made me laugh when he painted the danger of an overreach of the old bear – what I was much more afraid of was the bear going into a long hibernation, moony and full of red dreams as he was. Avksentiev, who had so far appeared to me as the big non-committer, was one embodiment of this, and we know that there were worse of this kind around in Petrograd. [9] Whenever I had talked to the Russians, I never knew which face I would get to see: one day I thought we were doing business with cunning diplomats who play with the Dobrugea chip to influence the Romanian elections [10], and with the Thracian chip to keep both Bulgarians and Greek on their toes [11], who maybe even sacrifice their Croats to get the Italians on board [12]. The next day, it felt like I was negotiating with the Second International. And what if the Boche came again? Which mood would prevail among the Russians? Could we rely on anyone other than ourselves? If I had to sign this federation act – against the howling protests of the reactionary press, who clamoured for Syria, Lebanon and who knows what else as our new possessions [13] –, I would have to know beforehand if it would guarantee our protection beyond any doubt. Not just words – proof was needed. This is when I resolved to confront Avksentiev in private with the request to acknowledge Bavaria’s independence and send contingents to offer it the protection its government has asked from us. [14] If he would show action and determination, I resumed, then I would shrug off Lloyd George’s complaints, too, [15] particularly since the British delegation hasn’t been able to pursue anything constructive since that bean counter Keynes has threatened with his resignation.

[...]



[1] Cao Rulin, the Republic of China’s Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs and influential pro-Japanese founding member of the Anfu club, the political wing of the Anhui clique in the Beiyang army.

[2] Wilson realizes that the Thomas-Addams-Gorky proposal and the follow-up drafts presented by the UoE (see below), all of which he categorically rejects, are dangerously popular among the crowds in the streets of many European cities. He has tasked Edward House to search, together with the British Robert Cecil, for common ground in the American and British proposals, which has resulted in a draft version for a Covenant of the League of Nations, which bears many similarities to OTL’s.

[3] Things have not yet escalated so far that they would use it directly against rivalling Beiyang factions. (This moment may not be far away, though.) IOTL, to justify its existence, appear like good patriots, and broaden their powerbase, and because their uneasy Zhili and Fengtian “allies” were against another, even more intense bloodletting battle with the Constitutional Protection Movement in the South, Duan Qirui attacked Mongolia. ITTL, this option has been removed from the table because Kerensky has concluded a treaty of friendship and assistance with the Mongolian Bogd Khan. This means, marching against the Southerners is the only available military option.

[4] We’re still in the golden age of the Muckrakers, the founding fathers and mothers of investigative journalism…

[5] It didn’t happen in OTL, either.

[6] Kerensky is 37, Clemenceau 77.

[7] Kerensky has brought an idea for a compromise into the discussion: the European allies could go ahead and form a “European Federation of Peace” along the Thomas-Addams-Gorky lines, but limited to Europe, with the right to democratic secession and federation, the requirement of arbitration, a European Peace Corps to stop aggression before it can spread, a bill of rights of men, women and children, and an international police to bring European war criminals before the International Court, while for the rest of the world, the much more loose League of Nations as envisioned by the Anglo-American proposal could be installed as an overarching framework. This was meant as a compromise because it would not question Britain’s and France’s colonial empires, nor Wilson’s or Billy Hughes’ or Jan Smuts’ reservations about racial equality. The British still don’t like it (see the following allusion about the dangerous bear), and Wilson considers the separate UoE initiative, in which they even included an American anti-war activist, as a betrayal of the Lansing-Axelrod Agreement and a personal offense anyway.

[8] “Neutrality lovers” refers to the Benelux, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries and probably vaguely also refers to a lot of late joiners from Eastern Europe. Not all of them have expressed support for the European version of the T-A-G plan, but among the populations, it enjoys considerable popularity. (It certainly doesn’t refer to famously neutral Spain because the Spanish government has declared its unambiguous opposition to Kerensky’s idea.)

[9] While the Russian Duma and FR government have remained in Moscow, the Presidency and the Council of the Union have moved (back) to Petrograd after the armistice, thereby making Moscow the capital of the Russian FR, while Petrograd is the “Union Capital”.

[10] Avksentiev famously commented ITTL's Paris Peace Conference on the question of whether Dobrugea should be partitioned, come under Romanian rule entirely, or become a neutralised zone under international occupation, that "a lot depends on how deeply the Romanian population shall express their love of peace", which is taken to mean that a nationalist (PNL plus Conservatives) government would most certainly not get the UoE's consent to keep the entire Dobrugea, whereas a centre-left majority (Taranistii plus Socialists, at the most possibly plus the Transilvanian PNR) would stand much better chances.

[11] As with Romania and Bulgaria, both Bulgaria and Greece are the UoE's allies now, but the Thracian question cannot be solved to the satisfaction of both Stambolinsky and Venizelos. What Clemenceau perceives as cunning play here may just be helpless dithering and hiding behind the covers of "demilitarization", "international oversight" (which existed IOTL, too, for a while) and "building up democratic structures at the local level", postponing the ultimate decision with regard to the region's status or partitioning.

[12] Western Yugoslavia is still in a state of civil war. The Mostar government is increasingly divided between agrarian radicals leaning on the UoE, who want a Yugoslavia but not under a Serbian monarchy and who emphasise social change, and radical Catholic groups, who lean on Italy and don't want to be included in a predominantly Orthodox state at all. The political leaders of the Bosnian Muslims, who mostly come from landowning elites, in the meantime, are sitting between all chairs; they did not support any kind of independence-from-Habsburg rule movement at all, they don't want to be expropriated by the Peasantists, nor marginalised in a clerically-minded Catholic state, nor suffer retaliation for the collusion of many Muslims in the Schutzkorps who oppressed the Serbian population primarily in Bosnia, at the hands of a Serbian-controlled Yugoslav state. To Avksentiev, the pan-Yugoslavist idea is a political priority, but there are other, more Serbian-friendly and realistic groups in the UoE's diplomatic corps, and they have found a (ambiguous) mouthpiece in Kerensky, who is dropping vague hints that, perhaps, two, three or more separate solutions must be considered to safeguard the self-determination of Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, and Montenegrins.

[13] In the French public, there is the perception that going ahead with any version of the T-A-G plan precludes France’s acquisition of any new colonial territory, at the very least in the Levante, where the British would be more than happy not to have to obey to the Sykes-Picot Plan, which is – in contrast to OTL – not explicitly known to the wider public, since there hasn’t been anything like the Bolshevik disclosures.

[14] Bavaria is a difficult and dangerous case. Elections have been held, and the USPD, while obtaining respectable 13 % of the vote (when compared to OTL), has been defeated. Their political enemies, though, have not been able to form a government, either: the BVP wants to abolish the councils immediately, while the MSPD is afraid of the backlash and prefers to grant them a small role in the new Bavarian constitution; the MSPD wants to annul Bavaria’s secession, rejoin the empire and hold its National Assembly elections in Bavaria, too, while the BVP prefers to maintain independence; the BVP insists on an immediate restoration of the church’s full property and its control over the education system, while the MSPD supports the educational secularization begun by the USPD. Because no new government has been elected, Kurt Eisner’s government continues to serve as acting government – but on February 28th, Eisner has been shot and killed by a radical right-wing assassin, like IOTL. Hans Unterleitner has taken over the reigns of the acting government, but Bavaria is already descending into chaotic violence and turmoil. The army’s allegiance is in question, and many surmise – some hope for it, others fear it – that Berlin is going to send reliable detachments to “restore order” in Bavaria. Unterleitner has launched an international appeal to support “Bavaria’s self-determination and democratic order”. So far, in Paris, Italy, Czechoslovakia and the UoE have shown some degree of Bavarian sympathy, but nothing substantial has resulted from it yet.

[15] The British in particular oppose any bone-picking at the German corpse, for a long list of reasons.

 

[Salvador79]

Frankfurt am Main (German Empire): Frankfurter Zeitung [1], March 25th, 1919, p. 1:

ON THE EDGE

by Rudolf Kircher

The die-hards are going at it again. As if farcically reenacting the tragic events of five years ago, chauvinistic stirrers are making new plans to drag our tormented nation into a war, nay, into disaster and utter destruction, while leftist shirkers are planning to trip them, and all of us with them, up with destructive strikes and fratricidal battles of barricades. But they should turn and look around: this time, the millions are not following them. The German nation has had enough of the lies of the militaristic clique, and it has had enough of fighting one another, too. We simply have no strength left, devoured by the hunger, the plagues, the lack of medicine and everything else, the collapse of our industries, the fear in which we have come to live.

In the most recent Reichstag debates, even members of those parties which had hitherto acted reasonably – von Papen from the Zentrum, the Social Democrat Scheidemann, and the Fortschrittler Naumann – played with fire in the discussion of what have been labelled “alternatives” to the signing of an expectedly harsh, cruel, even tyrannical treaty, which probably will soon be dictated upon our government like the other draft is currently being forced down the throats of Renner [2], Berinkey [3], and Stambolinsky [4]. [5]

But there are no reasonable alternatives. Duplicitous and hypocritical, unfair and crippling as the impositions of the victorious powers are probably going to be, we have absolutely nothing to set against them. The best of our youth have been led into the slaughterhouse, and those who got away with their bare lives, forever marked, will not be dragged back into new trenches, this time in our own homeland, our beloved Taunus and Westerwald, our Spessart, Odenwald and Black Forest, they are not going to shed their blood on Brandenburg’s sands. If the socialists, syndicalists, and anarchists stopped all their strikes tomorrow – which they are unlikely to do –, our factories could still not produce any of what would be required to effectively resist even for a single month, for most of the vital raw materials are lacking and cannot be acquired, even if our banks had not failed. We have turned over most of the weapons for whose production we had given our gold and our sweat, and those of our soldiers who have not been demobilized yet are starving on their feet, like all of us. It was the military dictatorship who criminally misjudged the situation and misled our emperor’s government, who continued the struggle way beyond the point at which we could have negotiated and credibly threatened with the resumption of hostilities when confronted with unbearable demands. They have betrayed, undermined, destroyed our national idea. It is utterly idiotic to hope for its revival now, now that Left and Right, Republicans and Monarchists are killing each other, and tribal disunity has returned. [6]

If the government refuses to sign whatever humiliation our enemies have in store for us, that will be our final ruin. Among the Heimatwehren, and now in Berlin, too, there is talk of the “Turkish path”. But the Turkish path is failing horribly, and it means the sacrifice of hundreds if not thousands of Turks every day! [7] Niekisch knows this very well, or why else would he bring up, as a plan B, the “Irish path”, which is even more futile and self-destructive? [8] The absurdity and impossibility of a renewed war are, it seems, not enough to prevent the hotheads from starting it against all reason. Rejecting the legitimacy of another government is always a step towards war – both Ebert and the Kaiser have taken this step when they denied the legitimacy of Unterleitner’s government in Bavaria. The reply has been given: Foch [9] has denied Ebert’s legitimacy, too, and cited the repeated postponement of Prussian and nation-wide elections [10] as an argument. This is a path we must not tread, for it can only lead to the annihilation of the German nation.

As bitter as the days ahead may be, it is of utmost importance now that reason shall prevail. We must avoid yet more devastation and loss of life, yet more fracturing and disintegration, yet more violence, suffering and barbarization. Whatever the price of peace, we must drink the bitter cup and pay it. When peace returns, and life returns into the veins of our economic body, we shall be able to convince our neighbours that we have left behind the fatal ways of old Prussia, and that it is in their own best interest to deal with us instead of bleeding us dry. Already, Wilson has distanced himself from the draft presented to Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, and the British government seems uncertain about what to do. We must strengthen these voices of reason, feed their doubts, not fan the flames of their wrath. We must struggle to make a better impression, and ultimately to make friends again. This is the struggle we must prepare for now – the struggle for reason and against the stupidity and the hatred aimed at us, but also seated within and among us, the struggle for our future, for that of our children, and for the survival of our beloved fatherland.




[1] This is a bourgeois, liberal-conservative newspaper. IOTL, it was among the rare voices who openly lauded the German government for signing the Versailles Treaty.

[2] Elections in German Austria have yielded results similar to OTL’s. In the light of foreign occupation, the impending conditions of a peace treaty, widespread disease and starvation and industrial collapse, a national coalition government comprising all significant parties has been formed, headed by the Social Democrat Karl Renner, whose SDAP came in first place with a very narrow margin on the Christian Social Party.

[3] After the MOVE coup has been defeated more or less single-handedly by the Left and its council movement, the Social Democrats (who have not suffered the breakaway of a Communist Party) have only very narrowly missed an absolute majority in the March elections, but also formed a coalition with social liberals and the smallholders’ party.

[4] In Bulgaria, Stambolinsky and his BANU-Broad Socialist-Democrat coalition holds on to power in spite of considerable internal turmoil.

[5] This is the reason of the panic among Germany’s political elites: ITTL, St Germain, Trianon and Neuilly-sur-Seine are rolled into one big treaty to establish a new peace order in South-Eastern Europe and end the state of war with Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, and at the same time – like the Versailles Treaty IOTL, which combined peace with Germany with the establishment of the League of Nations – establishing the European Federation of Peace (EFF). The draft (let’s call it, for if it is going to be signed, then it’ll be signed there: the Treaty of Chantilly) contains a large number of provisions which are very frightening to the German government:

a) massive territorial losses up to the complete dismantling of the former Central Powers (which only in detail differ from OTL, but which in a number of cases involve a sort of dissolution of central statehood in some regions temporarily designed at "EFF mandates", as opposed to the nation state principle which was, even if not consistently applied, a red thread of the Parisian suburb treaties – a reflection of the UoE’s involvement rather than Wilson’s influence: the US are not even considering to sign this treaty and already plan separate peace treaties with Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria –, and that is, of course, a great deal more frightening as it foreshadows that Bavaria may only be the beginning of Germany’s dismantling)

b) Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria are to have only ridiculously small armed forces (like OTL), and even parts of the Austrian und Hungarian rump states and of Bulgaria are to remain under EFF supervision for five, ten, or even 15 years, with the explicit aims of bringing all “war criminals” before the to-be-established International Court of War Crimes in the Hague (among which number many of the German military leadership fears they are going to be counted, too, when “their Chantilly” will be on the table) and of “completely removing” the danger posed by “chauvinistic paramilitaries and terrorists”

c) additional reparations are to be paid by the Austrians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians into a "War Recovery Fund" administered by the EFF (mostly by its big powers) and destined to fund the (re-)building of industrial infrastructure in Serbia, Romania, the UoE and possibly other places.

[6] He’s referring to Bavaria’s secession.

[7] TTL’s Turkish War of Independence happens under much worse circumstances. Not only do the UoE stand much farther West than the Armenians did IOTL at the time of the armistice; quite generally, there are considerably more Entente forces in the region, and the Armenians among the UoE are dead-serious about smoking out the Young Turkic menace once and for all. Also, in contrast to OTL, the French involvement is not half-hearted because France doesn’t want to use Turkey as a bulwark against Bolsheviks. In the West, the Greeks are doing more or less as they did IOTL (which was quite OK militarily until they overstretched), but in the East, nationalist forces of Mustafa Kemal et al. are suffering serious defeats.

[8] In Ireland, violent protests, wild strikes and occupations, and the takeover of parts of the military and police infrastructure by various secessionist and/or socialist forces takes a course similar to OTL, only ITTL, the British, who want to establish devolved Southern Irish and Northern Irish legislative assemblies in accordance with the modified Home Rule Act of 1914, are facing not one, but two enemy camps: Michael Collins’ Irish Republican Army on the one hand, and a council movement which seeks to imitate the model which is so en vogue on the continent. Overall, the secessionist camp is slightly weaker, and more divided. But that doesn’t mean there’s less bloodshed and chaos. Ernst Niekisch, who has founded a militant group named “Nationale Sozialdemokraten”, who have started a guerilla war against the Inter-Allied occupation in Bavaria, nevertheless sees the Irish path as an example to follow…

[9] As commander of the Allied forces, he’s currently in Bavaria. The French and Italians have sent troops there through Italian-controlled Tyrol, while a token Czechoslovak detachment and a UoE force which the international press has nicknamed “International Cossacks” (for the high number of professional soldiers of Cossack background among the UoE peace-keeping contingent) have arrived through Czechoslovakia.

[10] They are postponed because the French insist on separate countings for the Left Bank of the Rhine and the rest of the empire – which Ebert refuses because he, realistically, sees it as the preparation of amputating the Rhineland from Germany – and because no elections can be held in Polish-controlled Posen province and parts of Pommerania, Silesia, and East Prussia, against which Ebert’s government has sent note after note of protest.

 

[Salvador79]

Treaty of Chantilly (draft version, March 1919)

The treaty is at once the peace treaty with the Republic of German Austria, the Hungarian Republic and the Republic of Bulgaria, and the founding covenant of the European Federation of Peace. (Of course, its acronym should have been EFP, or for the French, FEP. The fact that it turns up on the map as “EFF” reflects my being a native speaker of German.)

Founding members of the EFP present in Paris are France, Italy, the Union of Equals, Greece, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and Portugal [Thanks to @Ricardolindo for his advice on the Portuguese decision; he said that Portugal would probably sign it, but it would cause a lot of conservative protest.). The Polish government is still sitting on the fence, caused by its internal divergences of opinion over various issues ranging from territorial claims over policies towards Germany, minority protection, to economic questions. The governments of the Netherlands and Denmark are interested in joining, but are not present in Paris. Luxembourg is having an internal political crisis, like IOTL. Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria are explicitly not allowed to join for five years. In Sweden, Edén’s government is in favour but, given conservative resistance during a process of constitutional transformation, probably not among the founding members. Norway’s conservative government looks to Britain and stays outside for the time being. So does Spain, where the opposition of leftists of various stripes, republicans, and secessionist nationalists very much demands joining the EFP, though.

The EFP has a lot of features: a bill of human rights, a European Labour Organization, a European Health Organization, a European Organization for Education and the Welfare of Children… it anticipates what is also contained in the Anglo-American League of Nations draft, namely a more explicit ban on chemical weapons, but it also goes beyond the latter’s provisions in making it a requirement to seek arbitration by the International Court in the Hague before declaring war (or else one is to be considered an aggressor, against whom all other members must defend themselves together), a standing Peace Corps (staffed by the member states, at varying levels), an inter-parliamentary assembly, and a commitment to “promote unimpeded exchange of goods for the sake of mutual prosperity” (which is a weak statement, but there were some protectionistically minded governments, too, which prevented anything resembling OTL’s Treaties of Rome of the late 1950s). And it gets to administer, together, quite a bit of territory (see map below), with the explicit goal of “helping its peaceful democratic constitution and integration among the ranks of member nations” (I can’t really express the last term the way I want to in English, what I aim for is a phrase which leaves it open whether the territories in question join AS member nations or whether they join member nations). And it has the “War Recovery Fund” (WRF) under its thumb. The WRF has been a major strategic goal of the UoE, and if it becomes a reality, it is its biggest success. Reparation payments to individual countries were not very palatable to the leftist public to which Avksentiev and Kerensky must bow. Yet, after the end of the war, especially Russia experienced a drying up of foreign credit influx (especially US credit), which made its difficult economic transformation period even worse. Not only France and Belgium, but also the UoE (and Serbia and Romania, too) need cash infusions of some sort to be able to restore or build up from the ground the kind of industries which they need to survive as relevant actors in the 20th century, or to bring their budgets back into some semblance of a balance. Greece needs help, too. The War Recovery Fund has the explicit task of rebuilding what has been damaged by the war, but it is not strictly prohibited from providing help beyond that, too. It is a supranational financial institution, and the Treaty of Chantilly would give it quite a lot of collateral from among earmarked property of the defeated Central Powers, which, in case these governments are defaulting on their payment schemes, is going to be confiscated. While France or Belgium could get their loans elsewhere, too, for the UoE this tool is of vital importance to ensure hard cash comes into the country, while the Union and FR governments still get to control how it is being used in the wider context of infrastructural and industrial build-up.

Now to the individual defeated powers and territorial issues – I think it’s best to show this with a map (horrible, as always, I’m not good at making them):

The regions with double-coloured thin lines are where plebiscites will be held.

Chantilly is actually slightly kinder to Hungary and Bulgaria than Trianon and Neuilly-sur-Seine were IOTL – that’s because both countries have very left-leaning governments right now who look to the UoE for guidance and support and in whom the UoE sees present or at least potential future allies, in spite of having fought against them in the war. In some places, the borders reflect ethnolinguistic makeup slightly more accurate than their OTL counterparts did. In others, there will at least be plebiscites. IOTL, Versailles contained a lot of plebiscite clauses, while the other treaties didn’t really. I think that was the greater degree of influence Wilson had on the former as compared to the latter. ITTL, the UoE is more Wilsonian than Wilson with regards to self-determination, and its focus is on the East rather than the West. But just like Wilson IOTL, the UoE and the other powers who drafted the Treaty of Chantilly are not really consistent: Austria is crippled even worse than IOTL; in Styria and Carinthia, this can be explained on an ethnolinguistic basis, but in South Tyrol, Moravia and Bohemia, things are just like IOTL for very pragmatic political reasons: the Italians are stronger than ITTL and they want the secure border at the Brenner, and the Czechoslovaks are important allies who cannot be encircled by a strip of German-Austria (which contains much of the country’s treasures of the soil, too). (The tiny bit at the Western edge of Austria is Vorarlberg, where just like IOTL a plebiscite is held to join Switzerland. Like IOTL, a huge majority will vote YES. IOTL, the Swiss didn't want them to join, though. ITTL this decision is still open.

On the EFP Mandates

This is probably the biggest challenge if Chantilly is signed. On paper, the EFP mandates are supposed to "build up democratic structures from the ground", and they leave open the systemic question of how this should come about. Everything is theoretically possible - from the traditional "mayors and town halls" model over council system to the Austro-Marxist idea of personalised statehood. In practice, EFP forces must form in the first place - and then gain control over these lands.
The first challenge is substantial already - there is a lot of fatigue even among the not-yet-demobilised Entente armies, and very little should be expected from the little nations who are willing to join the EFP on this front. And if troops are scraped together, you'd still need to sort out questions of common command structures, their powers etc.
And the second challenge is not trivial, either. Albania is comparatively easy since it's already fully under Italian, Serbian, and Greek control, and Thrace is not very hard since the Bulgarians have pulled out of their part and Franco-Greek troops have moved in. But Western Yugoslavia / the SHS state, which is really why the whole idea has been set up to begin with, is still in a state of simmering civil war.

The biggest divergence from OTL, if we look at the map, is that there isn't a Yugoslavia. My reasoning here was that, at some point, Nikola Pasic's Serbian government simply becomes fed up with having their soldiers killed by various anti-Serbian groups in the West and abandons the whole Yugoslav project in exchange for getting a few Serbian-dominated strips of Bosnia, a bit of Eastern Croatia, a bit of the Sandchak for certain and the option of gobbling up more through plebiscites in the future. Because the Yugoslav project has died, they also pull out of Montenegro, where the Greens, supported by the Italians, have put up annoying resistance, too. Sacrificing Greater Yugoslavia was a tough price for the UoE to pay, but they got Italy on board for Chantilly and the EFP this way, and at least the "SHS state" leftover gets to become a laboratory for political experiments. Right now, though, there is still the SHS council in control of its Northern part, and rivalling factions in the South. There are a few French troops there, but it would need a lot more military power to pacify the region. Whether this is ever going to happen, remains to be seen.

If the treaty is signed at all...

 

[Salvador79]

Petrograd (Russian Federative Republic of the Union of Equals): Prawda, April 6th, 1919, p. 1:

A REVOLUTION BETRAYED

by Adolph Joffe

Around the world, soviets have become the means of the revolutionary working class in their struggle to reorganize society: Germany’s workers’ and soldiers’ councils have ended the Great War, Bulgarian soviets have thrown off the yoke of the tsar, and more lately, America’s striking workers organize themselves and their communities in councils [1], Scottish workers striking for the 40-hour-week form soviets [2], Hungary’s chauvinistic coup was brought down by nation-wide mobilization of the soviets, and as long as the imperialist governments of Britain and Spain are oppressing their right to self-determination, Irish and Catalan workers are organizing counter-structures and their own self-defense in councils, too [3]. And in our Russian motherland, where workers’ , peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets celebrated their first revolutionary success?

Here in Russia, the soviet movement has become corrupted, as the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets has shown. Everywhere across the world, the working class knows it has three options at their disposal to attempt to improve its lot – two of them reformist and one revolutionary: it can form political parties, vote them into parliaments and attempt to bring about legal reform; or it can form trade unions, strike and attempt to negotiate better wages and working conditions with the capitalists. Or it can form soviets, resist the force of the capitalist state, and revolutionize society from the grassroots. Here in Russia, though, we carried out our revolution triumphantly and now we have workers and peasants electing trade unionists into the soviets – and these soviets are showing themselves to be managers of a reformed capitalism!

The clearest evidence of this capitalist corruption is the rejection of the Principle of Auto-Preference [4], which the Congress has adopted only in the limited domains of military and rail industries, both of which may prove toothless as these fall largely under Union legislation. In energy production, where the decision for Auto-Preference was taken with the narrowest of margins, the Narodnik-dominated Duma is certainly going to subvert the soviets’ decision by entrusting the planned new federative republics in the South with the task of overseeing petrol extraction, and one does not have to be a clairvoyant to predict how the economically and politically backwards Tatars and other nations of the steppe are going to behave when the American trusts knock at their doors. Rejecting Ryazanov’s proposal for Generalised Auto-Preference means that millions of workers, who have seen themselves as a vanguard merely a few steps ahead of their comrades when they took control of their means of production through the soviets that they formed, are now forced to co-operativise. But they have never wanted to form co-operatives and become worker-capitalists who compete on a capitalist market! They have wanted to bring about socialism, democratic control over the economy. The unions which claim to represent them now in the Supreme Soviet have rejected the hands which the workers had extended to them; they have made economic democracy a limping dwarf. They have declared for all of us that this is not the time for economic democracy (but when is?), that means, they have told the workers who took over bankrupted factories and proved that they can perfectly continue to operate, that they must see themselves as competitors with their comrades, and with powerful capitalist trusts and corporations from all over the world, now instead.

How could this development have happened? It was a most unfortunate historical coincidence that our socialist revolution had to happen in the midst of an inescapable war which threatened us all with annihilation. Resisting this annihilation has made compromises with less class-conscious forces necessary. Now we see the fatal consequences: just like the Duma, the soviets are almost dominated by green and blue “unions” [5]. They are not only pursuing their particular interests – which are going to cost us all dearly in the envisioned projects in the educational and health sectors! [6] –, they are also fundamentally alien to socialism and to the soviets as its instrument. They are abusing it, and they attempt to further transform it in their mould through the Direct Vote Proposal [7].

To save and restore our Revolution, it is not enough to reject subversive proposals like the Direct Vote. When the institutionalized soviets are failing us, we must seek new means of channeling the revolutionary impetus of the proletariat. If the Supreme Soviet wants to force workers to co-operativise, they should resist this coercion to conform into a reformed capitalism, and organize preferential agreements between soviets of the same level independently instead, without reliance on superior institutions [8]. The soviets may be lost, but socialism is not! The working class has seen that it can achieve any change if it is determined – and it will exert this newfound power again and again, whenever it sees itself locked out of power by usurping forces.




[1] The major divergence concerning the Seattle General Strike is a greater public presence of striking workers, protest rallies etc. given a less fearful general atmosphere at the start. This less fearful atmosphere has evaporated over the course of the strike, on the other hand, with mayor Ole Hansson holding much the same kind of speeches as he did IOTL. The strike is bound to end in a failure like IOTL because shipbuilding industries would inevitably experience drastic post-war cuts and the Seattle workers were too isolated, and when push came to shove, internal divisions between the radical IWW and the moderate AFL would prevent a really revolutionary development, but with more people on the streets, the strike is not “counter-organization in an eery silence”, it’ll probably end with a short violent confrontation, akin to the “Battle of George Square” IOTL in the Red Clydeside at around the same time period. By this point, political polarisation has inevitably occurred in the US, too, but for the more militant segments of the labour movement, Seattle is not a failure one had to admit to, it’s been “bloodily suppressed” in the end, creating its own set of martyr legends.

[2] The Red Clydeside is going to strike even harder than IOTL because their demand – shortening the work week to compensate for decreasing orders – not only was a solution which had some degree of plausibility, ITTL shorter and more humane working weeks and enough time for workers to participate in society, culture, and politics are also items on the list of things the ILO member states are committing themselves to. Lloyd George’s UK government has not joined the EFP and its ILO so far, but the strike wave probably spreads faster with this demand (together with the demand to join the EFP and sign Chantilly with its labour charter) on a national agenda, and Labour endorsing it wholesale. So probably the National Coalition gives more priority to defusing the matter and taking some of the wind out of the “Joiners” sails.

[3] Think of this happening on a greater scale in various Irish towns. In Catalonia, there was a wide popular movement for autonomy around the time (well, not just then!) IOTL and also a wave of general strikes later. Here, with “democratic self-determination”, the “Join the Federation” momentum, and labour mobilisations all overlapping to a very great degree, they may intertwine and coordinate to a greater degree, drawing on the popular council/soviet structure.

[4] We’re moving into utterly unchartered politico-economic territory here. Under the circumstances of some (regional or local) soviets having communalised / brought under their own control certain (or all) industries, and other soviets having adopted a more laissez-faire attitude, what Joffe refers to as the TTL-established term of the “Principle of Auto-Preference” means the idea that superior level soviets should, when setting more general frameworks for economic operations, automatically favour “their own” economic agents, i.e. communalised economic entities. The example of the railroads, where the Supreme Soviet / Congress of Soviets has decided to apply Auto-Preference, can illustrate this: Railroads are Union property, railroad construction and maintenance is a purely public task done by a Union agency whose members are appointed by the Supreme Soviet; railroad operation is purely public, too, and the Union railroads are also managed by a body consisting of delegated railroad workers and representatives elected by the Supreme Soviet. But what about the industrial production of the rolling stock? By early 1919, across the UoE, there are now both publicly owned and privately owned factories producing locomotives, waggons and parts thereof as well as other products vital to the construction, maintenance and operation of railroad traffic. The Supreme Soviet’s decision to apply the Principle of Auto-Preference here means that the network oversight board as well as the operations agency are obligated to procure their material from communally owned / sovietised providers and to co-ordinate with the respective soviets in order to meet the general goals and frameworks laid out by the Supreme Soviet for the oversight agencies to carry out. This practically means that private factories will be marginalised and, sooner or later, disappear in this industrial domain because their main customers are no longer buying from them – they can still try to sell to foreign operators, but that’s not a realistic option given their disadvantages vis-à-vis local competitors there. So either these private companies go bankrupt, or they sell their stuff to the communalised ones and take their money elsewhere, or local soviets try to pre-empt the latter development by communalising the factories in question, too, like other soviets elsewhere had done before them.

In short, the Principle of Auto-Preference would enforce socialist transformations from the top down, with already socialised parts of the economy exerting their pressure to socialise the rest. The Supreme Soviet has decided against applying this on a wider scale, and our Social Democratic author doesn’t like this.

[5] “Green” unions, which indeed make up a majority in the Supreme Soviet, are SR-affiliated unions, Most of them are peasant associations, but there are SR-aligned unions in the towns, too, who are very loyal to the new system. “Blue” unions are really the professional associations of old of non-working class groups like teachers, medics, engineers etc., who, after having been rather ill at ease with the entire new system, have begun to send delegates to the soviets, too, now. Joffe calls them “blue” in order to associate them with the Kadet Party, but in contrast to the latter, which is on a course of increasingly radical opposition to socialism, the so-called “blue union” members of the soviets show themselves to be willing to democratically integrate into the new order and to constructively shape it. The Supreme Soviet is certainly not dominated by them; they are a small minority.

[6] This refers to the Supreme Soviet defining new qualification standards for those who are supposed to work in the to-be-massively-enlarged education and healthcare systems. Especially with regards to teachers, the requirement of completed “pedagogical college” studies makes sense with regards to quality, but Joffe sees it as a (financially costly) way of preventing proletarian self-organsied self-education and feeding a new well-paid intellectual middle class instead.

[7] So far, workers and peasants gather in assemblies and elect representatives to local soviets, who elect representatives to regional soviets, who elect representatives to the Supreme Soviet. (An “indirect” structure.) Those whom Joffe labels the “blue unions” are indeed advocating the replacement of this system with one where employees and peasants elect representatives to all levels directly, under proportional representation. The reason is that the current system disadvantages them at all higher levels: in the countryside, peasant representatives outweigh them and only elect reprsentatives from among their number to the higher levels, while in industrial towns, factory workers outweigh them and do the same

[8] This is a vague instigation to form a syndicalist counter-structure.


On Economic Systems and Economic Thought

Whichever direction real systemic transformations take will depend a lot on concrete material as well as equally concrete party- and union-political developments than on systemic political economic thought, I suppose.

But political economic theory is going to be an indirect and very important (and exciting!) source of inspiration, too, of course.

I'm playing with the idea of the political system with its two main parties - the SRs and the SDs - mirroring itself in two emerging schools of economic thought, one at Petrograd University and the other at the Lomonosov in Moscow.

Petrograd is destined to be the more radical one (because the city was the most radically left-wing even in February 1917, and since then it has been ravaged and depopulated various times over in 1918 and at least its first wave of repopulation was led by Trotsky, with the following waves of returning refugees, soldiers, and sailors probably also being rather disproportionately imbued with revolutionary spirit), and the more Western-looking one, which both hint towards it becoming the place where Russia's Marxist school of economic thought gathers and develops. People like Stanislav Strumilin and Vladimir Groman come to mind, and of course, first and foremost - if his rump Bolsheviks return into the fold of the IRSDLP(u), which they well might, now that the war is over and the window for a second revolution seems to have closed and the IRSDLP(u) is radicalising itself in the opposition anyway - Nikolai Bukharin. The Petrograd School of Marxian Economics would certainly attract - even if its salaries might be meagre and general living conditions in Petrograd rather adverse at least in the first couple of years - Marxist-leaning economic thinkers from many other countries in the world. The economic thought which is maybe developed and taught here could, in turn, inspire lots of young students from across the world, especially since intellectual institutions associated with "the opposition" (even within Russia) are often imbued with a spirit of Bohemianism and counter-culture.

That leaves the Lomonosov in Moscow as the more "official" school of economic thought with more direct influence on Russian policies, at least in this phase. Grand old figures of Narodnik economic thought like Vasily Vorontsov are dying around this time, for them, all of this is coming too late. Probably at least Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky lives longer if the overall health and food situation is improving instead of worsening over 1919, but even then, he's probably staying in Ukraine and inspiring things there. This institution, too, will probably actively seek input from thinkers from others parts of the world and maybe receive it - although I wasn't thinking so much about left-wing anarchists as about Georgists and populist-progressives like this man. Maybe they can help and shape a promising new generation of neo-Narodnik economic thinkers.

 

[Salvador79]

Wien (Republic of German Austria): Der Abend [1], April 25th, 1919, p.1:

ULTIMATUM EXPIRED * NEW CHANCELLOR * PRUSSIAN MILITARY MACHINE BEFORE LAST STAND?

by Bruno Frei

The whole continent waits with baited breath. Yesterday at noon, the ultimatum of the allied and associated powers for Germany’s signature under the peace treaty has expired. Germany has not signed. Instead, Emperor Wilhelm II. has dismissed Reichskanzler Friedrich Ebert (SPD) and replaced him with colonel general Hans von Seeckt.

Speculations abound. Was Ebert willing to sign at the last hour? Two weeks ago, Wilhelm declared before assembled guard regiments that “the hand of any German who should sign that shameful piece of toilet paper should foul”. Now he has appointed his colonel general, who has done his utmost to camouflage German non-withdrawal East of the Oder and is rumoured to be the grey eminence commanding the Heimatwehren at the Polish front. Honi soit qui mal y pense. [2] Foch and Brusilov have left no doubt as to how they see things: their states, and all their allies, are still at war with the German Empire, and the armistice has just expired. But what are the Kaiser and his general aiming at? So far, there have not been any reports about a resumption of hostilities. US President Wilson, who has just returned from Washington with doubts in his rucksack [3], has not yet commented on the situation.

How will the Reichstag react? Leaders have called their factions together urgently to discuss the situation. Will the Prussian military machine throw its subjects into one futile, bloody, last stand – to save the leaders who have driven it, and with it the whole continent, against the wall [4]? And what will these subjects do? For the sake of our German brethren and comrades, we must place our last hope in the councils now – may they mobilise fast and with determination! From over here, from the capital of our free state, we are calling at you: Comrades, stop all the wheels! Throw Brandenburg’s sand into the junkers’ and industrial barons’ machinery of war [5]! The Viennese workers’ council will convene over the weekend, too. Under the Damoclean sword of renewed war in Germany, the announced national march of the Heimatwehren [6] might turn into the beginning of a coup aimed at dragging our republic into this morass of blood, too. We must be watchful and defend the peace and what little we have achieved so far now, for else all may be lost.

Der Abend will keep you informed throughout the weekend with extra issues, should events take a dramatic turn. For the moment, we appeal to all our readers to be on their watch and to support the congress of the Viennese workers’ council.


[1] A socialist newspaper.

[2] He will have written: “Ein Schelm, wer Böses dabei denkt.”

[3] Like IOTL, dissent is brewing in Congress over the Covenant for the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles shoved under Germany's nose. Some info about Versailles in the next two footnotes; I'll follow up with more info on the text of the treaty in the new year. In principle, it commits the US to even less than the OTL Covenant did, but to Henry Cabot Lodge it's still too much, and he doesn't know OTL's text version to compare both.

[4] TTL's Versailles treaty demands the extradition of Wilhelm himself, and the entire upper echelon of the military, as well as a number of civic politicians, to the International Court in Hague to be tried for war crimes and atrocities. ITTL, Clemenceau is not the only one at the table of the big guys who can tell about German atrocities and their destruction of one's country. Avksentiev has a lot to say on this topic, too: about three years of Ober Ost exploitation and Markov's tyranny, about the poison gas attack on Petrograd, and about destroyed infrastructure far and wide when the Germans did retreat. Even in Britain, "Hang the Kaiser!" was a popular slogan at the time. How much more in the UoE! (Although the death penalty has been abolished there immediately after the February Revolution.)

[5] The industrial barons are mentioned, too, because TTL's Versailles contains a hefty sum of reparation demands, too. A heftier one than OTL even - given that it includes all kinds of damages caused in the East as well. More on the exact sum in January!

[6] The protest march of the Heimatwehren is aimed against Austria's government having signed the Treaty of Chantilly - just like Hungary's and Bulgaria's.

 

[Salvador79]

Germany’s End

Two days after the ultimatum expired, the Reichstag convened. With a somewhat solid majority (because, beyond the "Peace resolution coalition", Stresemann got more than half of the National Liberals behind it, too), the Reichstag passed a resolution which the international press would have labelled “Neither Peace, Nor War”, only that ITTL Trotsky never coined this phrase. There was no majority for a resolution of leftist liberals, a few SPD renegates, and USPD to sign the Versailles Treaty. Instead, the majority opted to deny von Seeckt’s government any authority and call Ebert’s replacement a “coup”, and for a call to all institutions not to obey any orders sent from the chancellory, and specifically not to engage in renewed military activity, not to sacrifice lives and risk the destruction of German infrastructure, but also not to “play the game” of the invaders. (What territorial bodies, institutions, units etc. were supposed to DO exactly was left unspoken.)

Three days after the ultimatum expired, French and Belgian troops began moving across the Rhine and swarming out from their Cologne bridgehead. Simultaneously, Polish and UoE forces crossed the Oder at Frankfurt, while Czechoslovak detachments overcame weak defenses in the Elbe gorge. In Gotha, Rosa Luxemburg (who escaped the crackdown on Breslau’s Spartakists in November 1918 and had been active clandestinely ever since) issues a declaration from the town hall, which a leftist group had stormed to many people’s surprise, in the name of “Internationale Revolutionäre Sozialdemokraten” (a name which clearly alludes to the IRSDLP(u)), in which she declared the beginning of the self-liberation of the proletariat which has no fatherland, and announced passive defense against any force which the reaction would send against them. She announced similar actions in the Ruhr, Silesia, Kassel, Frankfurt and Karlsruhe, and called on all proletarian organizations to support the revolution with a general strike and the takeover of local control on May Day.

In the following days, the only superficially demobilized Seventh Army commanded by Oskar von Watter began cutting railroad lines, destroying bridges, erecting defensive works in the wooded hills to the East of the Rhine Valley, re-drafting soldiers and integrating Heimatwehren, and restoring wartime command structures over the economy. Franco-Belgian advances into the Ruhr basin, and a smaller French advance into the Main basin, were not yet confronted. East of Berlin, though, the VIIth Prussian Army Corps and various other regular and irregular groups commanded by Kurt von dem Borne defied the onslaught and pushed back the Polish and UoE advance across the Oder, in turn capturing the right bank of the Oder and establishing a bridgehead. Hastily, works on a line of defense along the Oder are intensified.

In various industrial centres, most notably in the Ruhr region, general strikes have begun, “Vollzugsräte” are formed again, contact to each other and to the advancing foreign troops are sought. Although no coordination is possible as of yet, massive takekovers, like called for by Luxemburg, are prepared for May Day.

In the second week after the expiration of the armistice, von dem Borne’s success as well as Luxemburg’s energise the radical Right and Left, while some advancing forces celebrate successes. Across Tyrol, Heimatwehren sabotage the supply lines of the Italians who have sent 20,000 more men into Bavaria, with the aim of securing control there and then advancing North-Westward against Württemberg, where they hope they would meet with French forces advancing South-Eastwards. Tyrol, North and South, is in flames, as Italian arditi retaliate. South of Munich, the Heimatwehr-Corps Epp prepares several thousand defenders for their stand against the Italians or a march on Munich. In Munich, anarchists mobilise against them. In Elberfeld and Barmen, Hagen, Essen and other cities in the Ruhr region, socialist and syndicalist Vollzugsräte take control after hundreds of thousands protest on May Day. They pledge non-obstruction to the French, but don’t ally directly with them. Anti-socialist groups led by Heimatwehr corps Lichtschlag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps_Lichtschlag begin to attack them, supported by parts of the administration loyal to von Seeckt (under the leadership of Landeshauptmann von Renvers). The Czechoslovak Army captures Dresden, where the provisional administration (instituted by Berlin under imperial execution) gives in after Heimatwehren were defeated at Bad Schandau and socialists have erected barricades. South of Danzig, von Quast has drawn together an army over 50,000 men strong, but only lightly equipped, in order to throw back the Poles and UoE detachments, and farther to the East, at Bartenstein, von der Goltz has assembled another force only slightly smaller. Hindenburg visits them and exhorts them to remain steadfast. Loosely affiliated, Heimatwehren in the East unify under the command of the nationalistic Social Democrat (!) August Winning, and begin an unprecedented campaign of terrorism, sabotage, assassination attempts and other acts of guerilla warfare against Polish and UoE units. Like all other “loyalist” German forces, their rationale is ultimately, since they can’t effectively defend the country, to make its occupation as ineffective and costly to the occupiers as possible.) In Berlin, most members of the Reichstag has fled due to fears of being apprehended or even shot by von Seeckt’s men, who have begun committing atrocities against anti-war socialists.

The British and US governments are reluctant to intervene, but feel compelled to ultimately participate, too, and have set their flotillas in motion. Von Seeckt attempts to prevent their re-entrance into the war by offering to accept the reparations and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine as well as Posen Province, but not the demilitarization and occupation of Germany, the persecution of its politicians and militaries, and any further losses in East Prussia, Pommerania, Silesia, or left of the Rhine.

In the third week, full-scale civil war rages in Bavaria (where Epp marches on Munich and fighting endures without a clear outcome, while in the countryside, more Heimatwehren form, while the Gandorfer brothers Karl and Ludwig organize a revolutionary peasant militia in Lower Bavaria who defeat a Heimatwehr corps from Regensburg in the Battle of Schierling and prevent the latter’s march on Munich from the North. Both Unterleitner’s acting government and the majority factions in the Landtag decide to adopt a passive approach, which leads to a degree of rapprochement between the hostile camps of Bavarian politics. Full-scale civil war also rages on along Rhein and Ruhr, in Silesia, Pommerania, Posen, East Prussia, Tyrol… Under the inofficial leadership of Luxemburg, red militia liaise with the Czechoslovaks in Thuringia and Saxony and prepare the liberation of Berlin from the South. Meanwhile, UoE General Gutor decides not to attempt another assault across the Oder, and not to attack either von dem Borne’s, von der Goltz’ or von Quast's armies for the time being, and instead landing troops amphibiously (the Russian Baltic Fleet completely controls the Baltic Sea at this point) behind the new German defense line. They land West of Swinemünde and then defeat a small force which attempted to protect Anklam, from where they proceed Southward by train.

The British Navy went an even easier path. They negotiated with the Hamburg Senate that the city abjures von Seeckt’s command and welcomes and fully complies with British (and potentially US) military administration. After a small skirmish in Cuxhaven, marine units loyal to the Senate overcome their comrades who wanted to fight the British. They lower the defenses protecting the entrance to the Elbe River and help with the removal of floating mines. Hamburg is used to send more ships and troops upriver and via railways towards Berlin (and a few towards Hannover, where loyal Guard Regiments are preparing to crush the bourgeois-MSPD breakaway attempt of a Free State of Hannover. Left of the Rhine, the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer (Zentrum) has formed a coalition of towns and Kreise (counties) who have negotiated non-resistance and a possible future political settlement with the French and Belgians and sends armed police units against Heimatwehren in the Eifel.

The fourth week finally sees imperial German resistance crumbling. The French defeat von Wetter’s army, whose defenses have been utterly in vain because of the tacit support of the Red Ruhr, in the Battle of Geseke, and while Northern Hesse, where MSPD and USPD cooperate, has decided to break away from under von Seeckt’s control, the French advance North-Westwards, where they converge with a British detachment. Braunschweig declares itself a free state. UoE units stare down Prussian defenders in the Schorfheide. Luxemburg’s Red Hundreds and the Czechoslovaks reach Dessau. The German Baltic Fleet moored at Riga is scuttled at nobody knows whose command – a clear admission of impending defeat. The Red Ruhr triumphs over Lichtschlag et al. After thousands of deaths, the Left and Internationals, relieved by Italian arrivals, restore control over Munich. Among the killed are not only many prominent leftists and anarchists, but also Heimatwehrler Adolf Hitler. Niekisch escapes before Augsburg is captured, and switches to terrorism from positions in the Allgäu. The Italians begin deporting German Tyroleans suspected of terrorism and insurgency to detainment facilities in Libya.

In the fifth week, the Empire finally dissolves. To avoid capture, Wilhelm II. flees to the Netherlands (but he doesn’t abdicate yet), while von Seeckt and his junker cabinet resigns and flees from Berlin (since the armies deployed to Germany are comparably light in numbers – massive deployments are politically unfeasible in 1919 –, there is no such thing as a stable front anywhere, and that includes Berlin, too, which has never been effectively encircled). Czechoslovaks, UoE and British race each other to Berlin; the UoE, who had the shortest route, succeeds after a triumph over demoralized defenders at Chorin, and Gutor triumphantly enters the city where streetfights are killing hundreds. (Karl Liebknecht has been liberated from his prison in Luckau in the meantime.) A conservative rump Reichstag – mostly composed of those forces who had not turned against von Seeckt – was confronted with the demand to ratify Versailles, and chose to dissolve itself instead. The Bundesrat, then, confronted with the same demand, did, without even the required quorum of present delegates (given Prussia’s and Saxony’s lack of a government and Bavaria’s declared secession) what some would later label the “Second Reichsdeputationshauptschluss”: it declared that, with the flight (which they equate with an abdication) of Wilhelm II. as Empreror of the Germans and King of Prussia, the usurpation of von Seeckt and his resignation, too, both as chancellor of the empire and as minister-president of Prussia, the dissolution of the Reichstag and now also the absence of a quorum in their own forum, that their union no longer functions and that the Empire in its form of 1871 has ceased to exist.

Reichstag and Bundesrat were, of course, not the only institutions or actors who vied for the mantle of representing Germany. Soon, an All-German Congress of Workers’ Councils would convene in Elberfeld, and declare to lead the country’s transformation into being a part of the worldwide socialist commune which they were sure was presently emerging worldwide. When they convened, the Great Powers are already severely at odds with each other about the future of Germany and Versailles and nobody even asked the German soviets if maybe they wanted to sign on the dotted line. In Frankfurt, dispersed former Reichstag members and other politicians of the established and a few new political parties formed a “Vorparlament” which, too, claimed that it would lead the process of Germany’s political rebirth, in this case in a bourgeois-democratic framework, by attempting to organize – together with the sovereign German states from Oldenburg to Austria and from Baden to Prussia, and with the occupying powers – a process of electing a constituent assembly. They, too, came too late to be asked to sign Versailles.

Who did sign something – albeit not the peace treaty designed in Paris – was Paul von Hindenburg. On May 30th, he signed an order to all German military units to desist any form of hostilities and let the occupying powers disarm and disband them. Three days later, on June 2nd, 1919, he committed suicide.

This is, quite unambiguously, a less than satisfying outcome for London and Washington, both of which wanted some centralised German government with a minimum of legitimacy and some degree of internal stability (ideally under their control) to sign the initial Versailles draft, which would have kept Germany together as a political and economic entity, able to acknowledge and also pay the hefty reparations heaped upon it, instead of a power vacuum in the process of transforming into a checkerboard of political non-entities mostly puppetised by the EFP powers and imbued with all flavours of socialism. But that’s what you get when you’re coming late to the party and then act half-heartedly. (France, Belgium, the UoE, the Poles and the Czechoslovaks all had the removal of the German threat as a top priority. Well, in Poland this policy was not uncontroversial, but in France, Czechoslovakia, and in the UoE, there was not much opposition against the intervention against a recalcitrant and restorationist Germany. In the UoE, no federative republic is opposed to it, and most major political forces – from the Marxist Social Democrats over the Narodniks to bourgeois nationalists – support it, too, if it doesn’t mean too many deployed soldiers and too many losses. In France, Clemenceau has the support both of the conservatives and the liberals, and the smoother French cooperation with the Red Ruhr went during the war, the more the Socialists saw the merit of the whole enterprise, too. But in the British government, while Wilhelm’s stubbornness and the restoration of a junker regime which defies the rules of the armistice is quite clearly unacceptable to everyone, forces sympathetic to the French and to a continental supranational solution for peace and democracy (one might be tempted to call them “pro-European”) were not quite strong, especially after the Conservative and Unionist landslide victory in the 1918 general elections, and France’s cosying up to the Red Ruhr was so repulsive to some that engaging its own forces in the region in the same theatre, following in the footsteps of the French, was out of the question. The same goes for Wilson, by the way, even though he would have worded his doubts differently than the British. Dismembering Germany was certainly not his aim, nor was leaving her in the hands of socialists… Both the UK and the US ultimately decided that NOT joining in would be even worse for their interests, but that was a bit late, given how fast German imperial government collapsed. As mentioned, geography also played against them. The UoE already had forces stationed along the Oder since winter, and its fleet controlled the Baltic Sea. From there, it’s a much shorter ride to Berlin.)

But the current state of affairs is not easy for the EFP powers, either. There is not only the fallout between the EFP powers and the Anglo-Americans over the future of Germany (and the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, and, basically, everything). There are also more than 150,000 men under arms East of the Oder who have not been defeated yet, and not all of them are going to follow Hindenburg’s last order and lay down their arms. Elsewhere, too, armed guerilla resistance isn’t going to disappear overnight. The nationalist Right has a sort of covenant moment of its own, too – but it’s a clandestine one. Heimatwehr leaders, aristocratic officers of the defunct Prussian armies, nationalist politicians of various sorts and such like met at an aristocratic manor in Tannenberg (a place of almost mythical importance in the “Germanic fight against the Slavs”) in East Prussia to plan on their future strategies, too. This so-called “Vinetabund” was the largest, but not the last of a series of such clandestine conventions, in which frightened members of the old elites who felt their backs against the wall came together with young men who had been brutalized by the war, impressed by the esprit de corps, imbued with the nationalist spirit of an age, and who knew they could count on the support of people who would feel treaded upon and shoved to the side in this new age. Germany was no longer a vital threat – but controlling it would prove a mighty challenge to those who undertook it indeed.

 

[Salvador79]

London (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland): The Times, June 26th, 1919, p. 3:

COALITION ON BORROWED TIME

by Wickham Steed

His Majesty’s Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, has received a resounding slap in the face in the House of Commons’ debate on foreign affairs. In particular, a majority of the parliament does not follow the Premier’s criticisms of his Foreign Secretary. The leader of the Majority, Mr. Law, defended Mr. Balfour’s plans for a separate entendre with France regarding Germany and her former colonies as well as the Ottoman Empire’s former provinces and the oversight over its foreign debt [1]. He admonished every member of the government to fulfill their responsibilities as dutifully as Mr. Balfour; a not-very-covert criticism at the address of the Prime Minister himself, whom many Conservative and Unionist MPs have come to view as weak for his concessions to the labour unions, which have failed to stop the devastating wave of strikes, for his failure to restore order in Ireland, pursue a coherent strategy for Arabia [2], and defend imperial stability in India [3]. Also, except for Mr. Cecil, the faith of leading Conservatives in the wisdom of Mr. Lloyd George’s allegiance to the goals of U.S. President Wilson’s agenda seems to wane. There appears to be some reason to think that Mr. Lloyd George is betting on the wrong horse indeed, when the dominating opinion in America’s Congress apparently has moved away from its ultra-progressive interlude [4], and Russia’s foreign minister, Mr. Kerensky, has already bluntly called Mr. Wilson “castrated by his Senate” [5]. Under these circumstances, many parliamentarians bemoan how the Prime Minister has neglected relations with France, driving Mr. Clemenceau’s government into the arms of the Russians and their socialist project. The pragmatic settlement prepared by Mr. Balfour and Mr. Pichon, which Mr. Lloyd George so quickly excluded from consideration, appears perfectly reasonable to many M.P.s, on the other hand. How long will this Coalition last and sustain Mr. Lloyd George in his position?



[1] The Balfour-Pichon agreement redraws Anglo-French zones of influences in the Middle East, extending the British zone far beyond the Sykes-Picot lines – more on the Middle East in an upcoming update currently written by @Falecius ! – while compensating the French in a pre-arrangement for the division of Germany’s former colonies with all of Togo and Cameroon, and beyond that a scheme for the Ottoman Public Debt Administration which would allow it to be de facto controlled mostly by Britain and France, plus an acceptance of the possibility of both powers to conclude separate peace treaties with individual German states instead of either Wilson’s insistence on peace with a reunified Germany or the Kerensky-Benes plan, which would give the EFP far-reaching control over Germany’s future.

[2] As I said, more on the Middle East by Falecius – but we ought to remember that, just like IOTL, the British are faced with a “revolution” in Egypt, trouble with unreliable Kurds, and of course between the Hashemites and the Saudis, all very much like IOTL.

[3] That’s just an allusion to Afghanistan’s attacks, also very much on OTL’s schedule.

[4] The Senate is as opposed to any League of Nations, World Federation of Peace or any similar proposals. The existence of the latter idea, even more far-reaching the former, associated with socialist internationalism, which begins to appear somewhat scary to some in the US (not as bad as OTL’s Bolshevism, but remember Seattle went worse than IOTL, and there have been more strikes and protests since), has not succeeded in rallying Congress around the more moderate proposal of their President, but rather caused an even more severe isolationist reaction than IOTL. Henry Cabot Lodge’s counter-proposal, ITTL, is therefore to give up on the whole idea of a League of Nations and just strengthen the International War Court in The Hague a little instead.

[5] Kerensky did it. There has been a build-up to this point. The way I envision it, Kerensky doesn’t get along well neither with Foreign Minister Lansing, who was an anti-socialist Anglophile, nor with Wilson, who would lecture the Russians on “Germany’s right to self-determination”, at which Kerensky probably murmured under his breath “What about the Philippines’ right to self-determination?”, but when Wilson would, which he inevitably would have to, make concessions to the British imperialists who were actively oppressing and killing "small nations" like Ireland and colonial populations in various continents at the moment, while still lecturing the Russians on the true rule of law, or on how to write a proper constitution where conflicts like the one the UoE has undergone throughout June on the matter of whether and how to establish more federative republics in Russia’s Muslim South – a key requirement for the formation of the coalition in the Duma, which is on the way to become reality: more on that soon in an update, now only so much: there is intense debate in the Council of the Union as to how to re-calculate the votes of each federative republic, and that is what Wilson referred to when he lectured Kerensky or, more probably, Avksentiev –, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Given how much Wilson wanted the League of Nations, the Senate’s position has indeed politically “castrated” him, but of course that wasn’t a nice thing to say.

 

[Salvador79]

Here is the guest contribution by @Falecius on the Middle East, and I must say, I love it a lot! Thank you so very much for writing it!


The Future of the Arabs, the Future of Egypt

By Muṣṭafà Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī [1]

al-Mu’ayyad, June 25th, 1919

I write, as news come from the West, of the agreement between the Italian government and the leaders of the peoples of Libya, from the North, of the formation of the new Muslim autonomies in Russia, and from the East, of the Emirate of Syria receiving the recognition of the colonizer.[2]
I write, and here in Cairo itself the streets teem with the sons and daughters of the Homeland, claiming their right as citizens. A right that the English still deny here, despite their retreat of some troops from inland Syria.

Hope, I believe, beckons to our oppressed land, hope that shines in the hearts of all Egyptians. The English have seen their arrogance for what it is worth, across the dreadful bloodshed of the Flemish trenches, and so have the French. More arrogance had the Germans, and behold, what came to be of their once proud realm. The might of their armies shattered facing the will of the freedom-loving peoples.

The subjects of the Russian Empire have broken their chains, and put the power-hungry monster-dream of Empire to rest – they now tend a helping hand to their former Muslim subjects in Turkistan and the Caucasus and in Tartary, to build a true brotherhood of nations [3]. Let us all pray in homes and mosques and churches and synagogues, that they will stay true to such a bold promise, will God that the brotherhood of nations, the very one His Noble Scripture announced, will come for all us to see.

And when Russia sets such a lofty example, and even the greedy Italian colonizers [4] do see reason in their dealings with the Tripolitanian Republic, it stands to us Arab peoples to understand our place in this new world, a world consumed by war and still teeming of promise for the survivors of the onslaught.

I regard with moved heart the Egyptian people now taking pride in their Homeland and demanding the occupier to leave. Let us look at the bright example of our Syrian and Iraqi brethren, let us extend to them our hands and share our struggles.

The English have been keen to support the Syrians and the Iraqis and the Hijazis against the Turks, and they are keeping their word to them so far, in their strange way. A lighthouse shines on us from Damascus, where Amir Faysal has returned from Chantilly with the promise of the national freedom for the Arabs of the Levant.

The promises of Chantilly, the promise of the liberated Russians to the world! Peace for all, freedom for all, justice for all! The promises of Damascus, where the Committee presided by dr Rashid Rida is drafting the Constitution of the Syrian emirate!

Alas, not all words at Chantilly have been so noble. The vices of the powerful have clouded the promise, indeed. Faysal had to concede much to the colonizing greed, that the French can still strangle the Syrian realm from Lebanon and Cilicia, the English from Palestine, the Saudi-led bigoted fools from the Southeast. Nor do we know yet if his brother would be capable enough to bring the Iraqi quarrelling factions to a common table. Basra and Mosul and Baghdad and Deir az-Zor, how different are these provinces and their inhabitants! Yet, Arabs all of them, they are. Let them agree with the Kurds of Sherif Pasha a common border and live in the peace and brotherhood they deserve after the Turkish oppression. [5]

The English themselves are slowly coming to accept, that they cannot lord over us as they used to think they could, as long as France really worries about the Rhine more than the Euphrates. Balfour himself, having granted to other peoples what was not his to give, offering Palestine to the Zionist Jews, has asked France to let the Syrians alone. It is a mutilated Syria that will join the new community of nations, without Lebanon and the land west of the Jordan. But a free Syria for its people will it be nonetheless, and no fault of the Majlis in Damascus that the Lebanese leaders refused to join it. Neither fault of Faysal to have talked to the Jewish leaders, who seem to be proving more reasonable than the English minister trying to please them. [6]

The ultimate fate of Palestine, as well as the matter of the exact borders between the Kurdish lands and Iraq and Syria, will need further finesse, and we cannot pretend that the colonizing Powers will not want to project their interests. Watchful, Arabs, you must be!

For the greed of the capitals of Europe is not exhausted, not the American support to be granted, nor the Turkish threat spent yet[7], nor the Russian help ever so forthcoming.[8]

We will seek, as Egyptians, the inspiration of the Emirate of Syria and the Iraqi Administration, to reclaim our own land for ourselves. If they chart a Constitution in Damascus, we keep calling for one in Cairo, so that our own people can join the brotherhood of Chantilly, that our sons and daughters [9] can live free and take part in the life of their nations.



[1] A prominent Egyptian writer and journalist at the time, although relatively obscure nowadays. He stood usually afloat of actual politics, but sympathized with the Egyptian nationalist cause, Islamic reformism and toyed with utopian socialism. His translations from French (actually not translated by al-Manfalūṭī himself – his mastery of French was poor) were widely read, as were his opinion pieces on the newspaper al-Mu’ayyad. His style was particularly appreciated, and indeed notable at the time. I did my best to try to convey a glimpse of it here.

[2] Basically, both the British and the French have recognized in principle that Faysal and the Syrian National council in Damascus do represent the legitimate, albeit provisional, voice of the inhabitants of Syria. This is not as much as recognizing Syria as a fully independent state yet, though.

[3] [by Salvador79]:The Russian press, both Muslim and not, is a lot more critical of this protracted process in which a lot of high hopes have been dampened and what appears to be the ultimate outcome is somewhat far from what the various groups had initially wanted. I have a little authorial overview on the matter almost finished, and am working on a map, but I'll post this separately. I believe Falecius is preparing a map for TTL's Middle East, too, which should be posted first.

[4] Egyptian opinion was broadly hostile to Italian colonialism in Libya and highly sympathetic to the Libyan resistance. Italy is now trying to reach a peaceful agreement with the Libyan insurgents, exactly as was done IOTL. The Libyan Statutes, that amounted to Libya becoming integral but autonomous part of Italy with the locals enjoying full civil rights, were announced on June 1st historically and the same happens here. The differences are that the Italians operating with better faith: they have not been humiliated by Wilson at Versailles and are not scared by a large Yugoslavia, the Turkish activity in Libya is even less significant than IOTL given how many pressing concerns the Turks have elsewhere, and like everyone else, they have Germany to worry about. This means that the Italian forces in Libya are weaker and both sides have more incentives to reach a fair agreement and stick to it. Clearly, this does not mean that everyone is going to happily dance together in peace thereafter. There are Libyan groups very unhappy about Italian colonialism still, and many in Rome who do not really believe the Arabs to be their equals. However, there’s reason to hope that the bloodbath that “pacification” of Libya turned out historically could be avoided.

[5] al-Manfalūṭī is being optimistic here. The main thing the provisional national council of Iraq can agree upon is that they want the British out, fast. Things are not yet the point of armed insurgency, and the British have plonked Faisal’s brother Abdallah into Baghdad hoping to sort out the mess, but neither are the British going to leave entirely and immediately; things might easily spiral into violence. Also, the Iraqi leaders think that the Ottoman vilayet of Mosul should be part of Iraq, a notion that the Kurds and Assyrians in northern half of said vilayet tend to disagree with, with some vague Union backing. Since this is where known oil reserves are (a point whose importance is lost to al-Manfalūṭī) the definition of borders here is unlikely to turn out a smooth process. Things are still quite in flux in the area. Also note that Deir az-Zor is said to be part of Iraq here. The Iraqis claimed it IOTL, and with Sykes-Picot essentially gone, are likely to keep it.

[6] This is a personal initiative by Faysal (done earlier than IOTL and from a much stronger position) met with general publicly sympathetic noises among the Zionist leaders as well as much irritation among the Syrian nationalist leadership. However, whatever talks are ongoing are not going anywhere clear, except that Faysal hints, in principle, that he might be willing to write off Palestine for time being (not that he controls the area anyway).

[7] The nationalist military council convened in Ankara under Mustafa Kemal; they are evaluating their very limited options. The mess in Germany is a very clear cautionary tale of what happens if you refuse the victor’s peace. Their strategic position is between an extremely hostile Union to the East whose army in the theatre is largely made of angry Armenians, and the hungry Greeks to their West. Chances of military resistance seem very dim. However, alt-Sèvres is shaping as a very unpalatable deal, and they have some troops still.

[8] While Kerensky and Wilson hate each other, in the Middle East their aims broadly align. Both dislike stuff like Sykes-Picot and agree in principle on self-determination, although here Wilson is unwilling to confront the British sending a commission to investigate the local people desires. It does not matter much, since the British themselves are a lot closer to treating the Syrians with something approaching fairness. Also, note that al-Manfalūṭī still thinks in terms of “Russia”, not “Union of Equals”.

[9] The point about daughters is not purely rhetorical. The discussions about Syrian constitution include the idea of voting rights for women, something that the Union of Equals already has, and the Americans and the British are doing as well. It is obviously controversial in Syria, but there’s already a Feminist movement both there and in Egypt that supports the nationalist cause. Al-Manfalūṭī is not a Feminist fellow traveller as such, but he certainly thinks that women have been historically oppressed and that they should have access to better education and public participation.

 

[Salvador79]

The Restructuring of the Muslim South

The Muslim South had been a thorn in the Revolution’s side from the beginning. 1917’s February Revolution came only a few months after a very widespread popular revolt of Central Asia’s Muslim population had been drowned in the blood of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in 1916. The Tsar had not fallen over these protests, nor over their horrible oppression. He had fallen over the protests of some workers in distant Petrograd. At the beginning, it is not very surprising that the Revolution was, by many Muslim groups in Russia’s South, not perceived to have been “theirs”.

Things changed, but the relation between the new influential revolutionary Russian groups and the various Southern peoples did not improve over the course of 1917 and 1918. There were All-Muslim Congresses, a Congress of Kazakh and Kyrgyz peoples etc., but their relation to the Revolution and to Petrograd (and Moscow) remained ambivalent. The Revolution and the democracy it brought, as well as the national self-determination it implied for various Christian nations like the Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians, were increasingly seen as signs that a window of opportunity had opened to escape from under the imperial yoke. Autonomist and separatist ideas already had momentum, and they gained more. At the same time, it was difficult for the Constituent Assembly and the groups which dominated it to negotiate with “the Southerners”, to appease them with autonomy and integrate them into the new constitutional framework, for a number of reasons we have already discussed: Petrograd (and Moscow) saw control over the oil fields as vital, and they could not yield power to groups whose agenda contained the expulsion of Russian settlers. Among the various Southern groups, a mixture of Islamist Reformism and Western-inspired nationalism – undoubtedly a consequence at least as much of modernizing influences of the Russian Empire on the region as it was inspired by simultaneous developments in the Ottoman Empire – was strong, and the Russian side often lumped it all together under the suspicion of Young Turkic Ottoman-fifth-columnism. And as long as Enver Pasha was still in control of things, he did try to organize and equip some such fifth columns indeed, though mostly only in geographically close areas South of the Caucasus – hence why political protests for autonomy and/or independence led by the Müsavat in Baku escalated quickly into race riots which, while not killing quite as many people as OTL’s March Days of 1918 (where both Bolsheviks and Dashnaks escalated the situation ruthlessly), nevertheless killed and displaced quite a few people and disrupted dialogic ties in what we call Azerbaijan for a while, while the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan city of Baku has remained under Russian control ever since. Elsewhere, massacres were committed by silent allies of Petrograd (and Moscow), for example in Bukhara where the Emirate, no doubt aided by the VeCheKa and Russian paramilitaries, broke the back of its home-grown reform movement. The culmination point of this neo-imperialist pacification campaign – or the pivotal moment which marked the beginning of a new policy, depending on whose perspective you follow – was the establishment of the Mountainous Federative Republic of the Northern Caucasus, where control was firmly in the hands of local oligarchs and tribal leaders, who organized allegiance to the UoE and the marginalization of any group who opposed this in exchange for the right to exploit their own oil reserves under their own conditions.

Of course, not all non-Russian groups of the South, and not even all Muslim reformers, were opposed to the new system and to the UoE. There were Muslims in the soviets of Baku and Kazan, there were the Muslim Social Democrats (Hömmet), Muslims who voted SR and struggled to establish “pastoral and agricultural toilers’ soviets” in the steppe, conservative groups who were content with a limited, cultural autonomy, and even liberal Jadidist reformers who preferred loyalty to the Union over Pan-Turkic Ottoman support.

The latter would prove to be the most important change of 1918 and into 1919 – caused by the increasing weakness and then collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the replacement of its Young Turkic triumvirate with more moderate politicians in Istanbul who were more pliant to the terms dictated by the Entente. Within the UoE’s South, it was reflected by the wave of electoral success for the Ittifaq al-Muslimin, who also ran a presidential candidate and presented itself as a reformist and autonomist, but loyal and not Ottoman-affiliated alternative and managed to marginalize groups like the Alash Party in the Duma elections, and thanks to its presidential candidate Alimardan Topchubashov even scored a number of victories in the Azeri fiefs of the Müsavat.

This opened the window for the formation of a coalition government of SRs and Kerensky’s PSLP with not only Jewish and Buddhist, but also Muslim minority groups who made autonomy a requirement for their support.

But how?

While the geographically dispersed and politically even more divided Jewish factions were content with a more explicit enshrinement of cultural liberties and rights in the Russian FR’s constitution, the formalization of a separate command structure and organization of (voluntary, tax-financed) Jewish Self-Defense Units within the Republican Guards, and securing good financing and full autonomy for Jewish schools (in all kinds of languages from Yiddish over Russian to various languages of the Caucasus) and respective teacher training institutions, the “Muslim” or “Tatar” groups were more complicated. First of all, in spite of Ittifaq’s electoral success, not all Duma members from these groups really accepted autonomy instead of secession and full independence. Even among the majority which pursued autonomy, two alternative models were hotly debated:

• one single federative republic for the entire Muslim South, with an additional internal layer of federalism?
• or many different federative republics?

While the Ittifaq, with its largest Muslim presence in the Duma, favoured the former solution, those who held some degree of power in the respective regions and controlled large potential crowds of rebels or supporters, like the Müsavat in Azerbaijan or the Alash in *Kazakhstan, opposed it and preferred the latter. Russia’s Prime Minister, Vladimir Zenzinov (SR), preferred the latter model, too, for a number of reasons. Firstly, he wanted a solution that would truly pacify the unruly elements. Secondly, he was not exactly fond of the thought of creating a large state with over 15 million people in the South, which would be perfectly capable of coming up with its own solutions with regards to petrol extraction and transportation infrastructure and probably pursue a quasi-independent policy, continually overstepping its boundaries by meddling in the domain of foreign affairs where neighboring fellow Muslim nations from Anatolia to the Tarim Basin were concerned. And thirdly, he hoped that, being able to negotiate boundaries with each would-be federal republic separately would provide him with the greatest amount of leverage and potential for bringing grateful clients into positions of power. These three goals weren’t even very compatible with each other. But it was only with illusions such as these that the pivotal change in Russian policy, towards accepting self-rule for the various Muslims, whom many in Moscow still considered “backwards” and “fanatically religious”, could be initiated.

The biggest obstacle to Zenzinov’s plans only appeared when they were already fairly well developed. In a meeting in late May, the Council of the Union struck down, with the votes of almost all non-Russian members, a first proposal for the establishment of nine new federative republics. This was a problem Zenzinov had not sufficiently anticipated. The governments of the other federative republics, from Helsinki to Erevan, were not amused at what they perceived as the loss of their combined majority of council votes. As Juhan Kukk, Estonia’s third prime minister in this year already (in Update 43, we have seen how the elections had made the formation of any stable coalition difficult), put it: They would not suffer Russia to multiply herself at the expense of everyone else.

The Ukrainian counter-proposal, that the council seats of the new republics should come from Russia’s number, was utterly unacceptable to Zenzinov, too, of course – Russia was already under-represented in the council if one looked at relative population sizes: a Bessarabian council member represented only 400,000 citizens, whereas a Russian council member represented almost four million. Any worsening of this ratio was off the table as far as the Russian government was concerned.

Towards the end of June, the Muslim coalition partners increased the pressure on Zenzinov with an ultimatum: if no acceptable federative statute would be created and passed by the Council of the Union by the end of summer, they would leave the coalition and support one of Trotsky’s many motions of no confidence (more on what else Trotsky does in the next authorial overview).

Under this pressure, Zenzinov would ultimately agree on the solution he liked least: a unified Federative Republic of the Union of Turkic Nations. It would be sub-divided into nine autonomous national republics:

• the Kyrgyz Republic (which, confusingly for us, comprised mostly what we see as Kazakhstan today),
• the Idel-Ural Republic of Tatarstan,
• the Republic of Azerbaijan (which did not include Baku, where non-Azeri had been in the majority long before the race riots and now were even more so, and which was also the last source of oil to which the Russian FR unequivocally clung to without having to share control over it),
• the Kara-Kyrgyz Republic (roughly today’s Kyrgystan),
• the Republic of Bashkurdistan,
• the Chuvash Republic,
• the Karakalpak Republic,
• the Khakas Republic,
• and the Oyrot Republic.

(If you wonder where lots of other Muslim minorities of the Caucasus are, they are most likely in the Mountainous FR of the Caucasus, unless they’re within Georgia’s or Armenia’s borders, in which case they have tough luck if they’re desirous of autonomy, at least in 1919.).

The FR of the Union of Turkic Nations was by far not as centralized as the (also internally pluralist) Mountainous FR of the Northern Caucasus, which only few conservative groups considered a possible model for Turkistan. Its union was, to a great degree, a construction designed to fit the new polity into the framework of the UoE, and accordingly its primary functions were the establishment and pursuit of “foreign” (i.e. federal, on the UoE level, for truly foreign policy was a UoE prerogative) policy, mutual help in case of emergency, arbitration in cases of conflict, and common command and coordination over the FR’s territorial defense forces, who were (in a model not unlike that of pre-WW1 Germany) organized in separate ethnic units, some of which didn’t even number as much as a hundred people. For these ends, a Majles as-Shura was established, and a Union Council with delegates sent and recalled by the member republics’ governments would elect a President.

In all other regards, from the majority of taxes over the judiciary system to the education system, each national republic (all of which were at least formally parliamentarian republics, following the trend of 1917 and 1918, where a Milliyet Majles, elected by universal male and female suffrage, held all the strings) was acting autonomously.

And the differences between the various polities are conspicuous from the beginning. The Karakalpak, Khakas and Oyrot Republics, for example, were underdeveloped, mostly nomadic societies whose (often long-established, if hitherto unrecognized) leaders primarily sought to protect their traditional ways of life from the intrusions of export-oriented settler agriculture, industrial uprooting, infidelity and cultural assimilation pressure. The Kyrgyz Republic could not always rely on them in their valiant political fights with the Russian FR over railroad infrastructure, petrol extraction, and the application of the economic soviet system. In fact, it could not even always count on the Idel-Ural Republic, where socialist groups were considerably stronger than in Kyrgystan, where the Kyrgyz Congress of Muslims – some say, the old Alash Party in a new dress – was hegemonially dominant. Nevertheless, all of these republics would be considerably more stable than Azerbaijan, where an irredentist Müsavat, in turn challenged by even more radical nationalist fringe groups, refused to take the role of loyal democratic opposition against the government which emerged in the republic’s new capital, Ganja, and continued with mass protests, which were accompanied by bouts of violence. (They did not only want Baku, but also Nakhchivan, which ITTL is an integral part of Armenia.) The Azeri government itself was a shaky coalition between the liberal-conservative Ittifaq, the Azerbaijani section of the SRs, and the socialist Hömmet, who had little in common except their acceptance of the autonomy statute and their abhorrence of a potential civil war.

In a compromise with the other FRs, the FR of the Union of Turkic Nations received nine seats in the Council of the Union, for which Russia’s number of seats was reduced from 24 to 21.

 

[Salvador79]

Here is one of many telegraphs with similar content sent in many different languages from Paris on July 1st, 1919 into all corners of the world, reaching newspapers, governments, parliaments, colonial administrators etc. on all continents:



FAILURE IN PARIS stop FRENCH PREMIER ADJOURNS CONFERENCE NO NEW DATE stop COMMITTEES ESTABLISHED FOR HAGUE GERMANY TURKEY TRADE DISARMAMENT stop MANY SKEPTICAL stop WILSON HOSPITALISED CONDITION CRITICAL



and the first of a series of installments with very rough authorial overviews over what has happened in the first half of 1919 before we move on into the second half…

The First Half of 1919 Around the World

In Paris, after half a year of exhausting and divisive debates and negotiations and some results already achieved by some participants and for some parts of the world with the Treaty of Chantilly, the conference ends without an all-encompassing new covenant, and indeed without the US, UK, Japan and other non-European powers having signed any peace treaty with any Central Power (they were not parties to the Treaty of Chantilly), while the Ottoman Empire and the German states are also still without peace treaties with anyone. All other high-flying plans for world peace have been postponed indefinitely, too – TTL’s conference has brought no League of Nations because the conceptions of the Big Six are too incompatible. The Europeans have gone ahead and agreed what they could agree on in Chantilly, and, much to Wilson’s and Cecil’s dismay and to the outcry of the pacifistically minded public across the world, there is no agreement between them and the Anglo-Americans on a much more toothless, self-contradictory Covenant for a League of Nations which does not offer them any advantage, while the British (where the Tories have gained new confidence and speculate on the separate deal with the French) – and even more so their Dominions, especially South Africa and Australia – and Wilson won’t agree on a global version of Chantilly, either, which they (and the French, Belgians, and Italians secretly, too) deem as too dangerous for their colonial and racial policies.

The French maneuvre of "adjourning" the conference without a precise date is nothing but face-saving: all sorts of committees are supposed to discuss and prepare drafts for another conference probably next year. But since the matter of peace and the divisions of the zones of influence is most pressing, all sorts of bi- and trilateral and other such separate treaties can be expected to be concluded in the meantime. How much will be achieved from the rest of the agenda of global peace? Well, perhaps the climate conferences of our own days can give us a hint – or indeed OTL’s interwar conferences of arms control…

So, no Versailles ITTL.

Russian Party Politics

There are some gradual developments in Russian party politics which I haven’t covered yet; concerning both major opposition parties and the governing SRs, too.

The Kadets have continued on their journey towards the very right of the (accepted) political spectrum in the Russian FR under their chairwoman Ariana Tyrkova-Williams. Three topics are at the top of their agenda: opposition to socialism (they want the soviets abolished, the expropriations reversed, they oppose SR plans for a comprehensive tax reform, you know, the full monty), Russian nationalism (they oppose the new federative republics as well as other plans for autonomy), and a scathing criticism of what they (ironically together with the ultra-left opposition beyond the IRSDLP(u)) see as systemic corruption, only the Kadets don’t blame capitalist habits or structures for that and instead target “party nepotism”, “trade union mafias” and “promotion of incompetence” (which is part-true and part classist shorthand for the promotion of people without bourgeois socio-cultural background and manners into management positions). In their position of relative parliamentarian isolation, Tyrkova-Williams has embraced informal alliances with a “civic” movement: the Cherry-Tree Picnickers. (Cherry trees are not only symbols of the aesthetically pleasing; ample orchard-gardens of former manorial estates are also something which the Red-and-Green Repartition has frequently eliminated, with peasant soviets in the revolutionary phase ruling that all that land was “not being put to use” and should therefore be given to landless peasants, who more often than not cut down the dispersed trees to plant more productive crops.) The Cherry-Tree Picknickers are an extra-parliamentarian political movement of former aristocrats, former tsarist officers, and (sometimes former, sometimes still active) higher administrative personnel, led by right-wing intellectuals. Beginning with (very legitimate) criticisms of the violent oppression some of them had been subjected to by the VeCheKa in the period of the Special Powers Act and with criticisms of local mismanagement etc., they have come to include people who reject the whole constitutional system in favour of a return of the tsar and the like. They are dangerous friends for Tyrkova-Williams’ s Kadets because of such positions, but she’s trying to walk this thin line, not openly endorsing them but sending discrete signs and counting on their support. Since they’re lately vaguely associated with the Kadets, more and more industrialists, highly skilled engineers and other people from the industrial sphere are joining, too. Not all Cherry-Tree Picknickers really like the Kadets, though; many of them blame them for the turn things have taken in Russia. Tyrkova-Williams herself is denouncing “mistakes we have undoubtedly made”, “rash decisions”, “false friends” and “cowardice” on the part of her party, signaling that the KD will pursue a more stringently right-wing agenda under her leadership than in Milyukov’s time.

Even though Tyrkova-Williams’s Kadets are solidly on the right of the political spectrum by now, they do not have any problem with voting for the motions of no confidence and other legal maneuvres with which Trotsky and his Social Democrats attempt to obstruct Zenzinov’s SR-led coalition. This is a purely negative alliance, of course, and both sides know it. Well, OTL even the Nazis and KPD both struck down the same measures in the 1932 Reichstag together…

Other than that, Trotsky has led his party on an expansion course after the disappointing elections. Uniting the entire old RSDLP had always been a top priority of his up until the summer of 1917 IOTL, which was a core raison d’ être for the Mezhraionka. With the war concluded, his party anchored in leftist opposition, and the elections having gone a lot worse for the other Social Democratic splinter groups still, Trotsky was able to win back old comrades left and right. In February 1919, Julius Martov and the last Menshevik splinters announced that their party would join the next IRSDLP(u) congress in autumn and merge. In early April, Nikolai Bukharin followed suit, announcing that the last few thousand independent Bolsheviks would join everyone else under the big tent, too. (The latter would not fully materialize – many Bolsheviks in the territory, who were not protected by their parliamentary immunity, had suffered under the VeCheKa’s campaigns against “saboteurs”, and they did not forget so soon. With Lenin touring the revolutionary world – he would visit Italy in the spring, only to return to Germany in June, but depart again after a heavy dispute with Rosa Luxemburg – and Bukharin taking the rest of the upper echelons with him into the IRSLP(u), local uncompromising Bolsheviks, now without intellectual leadership, are beginning to blend into the extra-parliamentarian ultra-left underground, which is heavily dominated by anarchists of various strands.)

These infusions of fresh red blood revitalized the internationalist zeal and the fervor of ideological debate within the IRSLDP(u) again – where the last months of 1918, the wave of strikes and the street protests after the elections had all strengthened other currents in the party, especially the trade unions, who were almost exclusively focused on Russian domestic politics. In particular, Kamenev’s Pravda and the most Trotsky-loyal Rabochy turned, over the spring and early summer of 1919, into opponents in a heated debate over the right kind of internationalism: On the one hand, Pravda upheld a classically anti-imperialist view, lambasting Avksentiev’s and Kerensky’s compromises with the imperialist powers in Paris unrelentingly. Among the Social Democratic politicians formulating the views of this current was not only a returned Karl Radek [1], but also radically Socialist muslims like Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev and even international guest contributors like Manabendra Nath Roy [2]. They actively supported the establishment of sister parties or branches of the party in countries like Persia and India.

The leading newspaper expounding the rivalling internationalist view was Rabochy, in which Adolphe Joffe and other close allies of Trotsky are formulating an updated version of Kautsky’s theory of Ultra-Imperialism. In their view, the emerging European Federation of Peace, and other initiatives for worldwide leagues of peace, demonstrate that ultra-imperialism has become a reality, and that, beyond cartelizing the powers of the imperialist capitalist states, it also went hand in hand with an internal political cartelization which aims not only at the same sort of pacification domestically which Ultra-Imperialism seeks to guarantee on the international scale, but also at an intensification of capitalist accumulation by exploiting hitherto untapped potentials.

Both strands agreed on one thing, though: the current situation in Russia and the UoE was not, in their view, socialist. While the anti-imperialists (many of oppositional Bolshevik extraction) had always viewed things this way, the theoreticians of ultra-imperialism – many of whom had cooperated in the November Coalition – developed a new view on the situation. In their understanding, the parties of the proletariat and potentially also revolutionary pre-proletarian classes like Russia’s subsistence-oriented peasantry are no longer aggressively combatted at this stage of development, instead they’re being politically undermined and divided, with the bourgeoisie aiming to co-opt them into their cartelized political systems (this is their interpretation of widespread reforms like universal suffrage). Economically, the capitalists now amplify their efforts to instruct the proletariat to exploit itself (with many examples drawn from Russian peasant communes which not even Stolypin had been able to break up now being successfully exhorted by SR-led soviets to form market production-oriented cooperatives and indebt themselves in the process of investment beyond the hope of ever repaying their loans back).

Under these circumstances, this generation of Ultraimperialists argue, socialist revolution can only happen simultaneously on a global scale, using the instruments, channels and institutions which the ultra-imperialist cartels are creating and turning them against the bourgeoisie. To prepare the path for that, international ties of the revolutionary labour movement had to be intensified, and political education of the working class should strive to subvert and seize the newly expanded bourgeois institutions of public education.

To this choir, yet more nuanced or creative interpretations of Marxist internationalism were added, e.g. by Gorky in Novaya Zhizn, or by Bukharin (whose take on the matter is too complicated to expound in such an overview). So while the rank and file of the IRSDLP(u) was by no means quite as unequivocally internationalistic, among published opinions, only the Rabochaya Gazeta, who stood on the right wing of Russian Social Democracy and remained critical of the unification process, openly raised questions whether concentrating on bargaining for a decent wage raise wouldn’t perhaps pay more than debating the question of what kind of internationalism to espouse.

But internationalism was not only a theoretic fad – Trotsky and many of his loyal “Petrograders” also expanded quite a lot of energy into convincing social-democratic parties in other countries to join the IRSDLP(u), whose name already gave away the idea that this was not supposed to be only a Russian or UoE party, but a worldwide one. This raised the question of how IRSDLP(u) and the Second Internationale (which, in the eyes of Trotsky and all of the above-mentioned Russian Marxists, except for the Rabochaya Gazeta crowd, need not be dissolved, but also wasn’t a suitable vehicle for the ultra-imperialist revolutionary strategy he had in mind since it was full of nationally-framed reformists, too) should relate to each other. More on the fruits which Trotsky’s efforts bore in the following parts of this authorial update when we deal e.g. with Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy etc. (In Germany, we have already seen that Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionaries are seriously considering aligning themselves to this emerging formation, while the “old” USPD had rejected the idea on its Leipzig Congress).

Which leaves us with the Socialist Revolutionaries. Minutiae of their ideological currents and how those are developing will be discussed in a separate update (but that’s still a bit in the future) – for the moment, I’ll limit myself to analysing them sociologically. From this perspective, two trends emerge: regionalization and growing signs of transformation into a “state party” [3].

Before the Revolution, democratic “politics” in the territory was a very limited thing, and the zemstwos were not really forums of party politics. After the revolution of 1905, Russian parties were either concentrated on Petrograd and its powerless Duma, or they were exile groups, or underground groups (with many party leaders imprisoned or internally exiled to Siberia, too). Even in the case of the SRs who, as the party of peasantry, had a comparatively broad amount of roots in the territory, these roots were rather shallow before the revolution. With the revolution, and especially with the introduction of the (peasant) soviet system, though, their management of the repartition, the build-up of local militia and their later integration into Republican Guard units etc., ongoing soviet elections on various levels and their organization of many aspects of economic and social life, politics have become something with very local roots in post-Revolutionary Russia. Especially among the SRs, this means that local and regional party leaders who have emerged from the revolutionary turmoil are often developing into powerful heads of patronage networks. This begins to reflect on the national level – in the next conventions, ideological currents may not play quite as much of a role as they did in 1918, being partly replaced by regional allegiances. Who emerges as powerful local “barons” I haven’t decided – this is going to be a bunch of made-up names of people who IOTL didn’t become known, or pursued totally different career paths. When we get to the next election cycle, I’ll have to flesh out a few characters, but until then I’ll leave this open.

This trend is somewhat mitigated or balanced by another trend, which pulls the SRs with a mighty force towards the centre / the middle ground of Russia’s political spectrum: the fact that a great number of skilled and educated people have come to realize that a new administrative apparatus is being built up across the country, and management positions are being filled with new people, and in both cases, it is potentially helpful if you belong to a “Green” union, or are an SR party member. Tens of thousands have begun to join the party and will join the party in the future under such very opportunistic motivations. They may not be very politically active – but still they exert a degree of influence on the party’s agenda, primarily because they’re going to defend their jobs, and secondly because they bring a wide variety of opinions into the party, reducing the relative number of staunch Narodniks of various flavours. Others among these new members are not quite as opportunistic and seek to engage in local and regional politics, doing something worthwhile for the place they live in, and across much of the vast territory and in many small towns, the SRs are the only party around, so unless you really have very clear anti-Narodnik views, you’ll probably end up as an SR. These people, too, weakened the party’s left wing, too. In many cases, people’s motivation to join the SRs was probably a mixture between both (opportunism and genuine engagement).

The party leadership is noticing both these trends who threaten to depoliticise and corrupt the party and strengthen the hands of local power brokers of questionable agendas, and they see how lively the debate among the oppositional Social Democrats, who are still stronger than them in many industrial towns and cities, is. In conclusion, the presidium of the party has decided to found the “Alexander Herzen Institute” in Moscow. Chaired by Victor Chernov, the Herzen Institute grants fellowships to political thinkers from both Russia and abroad and scholarships to young people, holds lectures, publishes pamphlets, organizes political debates across the territory and in other countries, too, invites guest speakers, weaves networks with the press etc. – it comes close to what is called a “think tank” in English, but it comes even closer to what is called a “parteinahe Stiftung” (party political foundation) in German.

In the Duma, none of this reflects yet. The SR faction, the largest in the Duma, is balanced between centrists and left-wingers, but the faction’s charismatic and rhetorically endowed leader, Maria Spiridonova, is a staunch leftist. Although by November 1917 she shared many views with Kamkov and had viewed his accession to the Commissariate and the coalition with the leftist Social Democrats favourably, she had never been a part of the close entourage of the former Supreme Commissioner, the “Kamkov clique”. In December 1918, this turned from a disadvantage into an advantage – she was not part of any back-chamber intrigues of the Kamkov clique which conspired, without success, to keep as many of their men as possible in positions of power and prevent the outright repeal of the Special Powers Act. She was, therefore, an acceptable candidate for the position of Duma faction leader to the Centrists in the party, in exchange for the left wing’s support for Zenzinov as Prime Minister. Spiridonova was, by far, the best orator the SRs had. Her vocal support was crucial to the success of a number of difficult SR initiatives in the Duma, from the expansion of the tax administration – whose necessity she defended as a necessity to enable regional and local soviets to build up modern schools and hospitals worthy of a member of the European Federation of Peace and the vanguard of international socialism and to finance them in a just and equitable way – to the various versions of Concordances with which many, and then only one, Turkistan(s) were supposed to be created.



[1] He parted ways with Lenin before the latter went to Italy, himself going to Paris instead where the atmosphere on the streets was heated in the first weeks of the Peace Conference. Later, Radek returned, via Poland, to Petrograd, where, not having become an elected politician unlike many of his former comrades, he’s earning his money as an editor for Pravda now.

[2] He’s a really interesting person, an Indian independence fighter who had participated in the Mexican Revolution and IOTL went on to become a founding member of India’s Communist Party and an influential Comintern leader.

[3] Not in the sense of “one party state”, but in the sense of the German word “staatstragend”, I found it hard to translate (and various online dictionaries did not solve the problem, either).

Middle East Map:

Some key aspects:
- France is not fighting down Syrian independence movements, meaning the Syrian National Assembly will find whatever constitution they prefer for their country, although the feeling of being somehow dependent on Britain won't go away, and since the secret talks with the French (Sykes-Picot) will leak at some point, they'll be very suspicious of France, too, where the Right is disappointed about the results anyhow.
- And this is not yet carved into stone - it's where multilateral talks in the commission on "Turkey", bilateral talks, and the situation on the ground slowly gravitate towards. When Balfour and Pichon hammered this out, the League of Nations idea was still somehow around, so it was imagined that such an international covenant would entail mandates for Lebanon, Pontos, and the Straits. and possibly Cilicia, too. It's now likely that no such entity will exist to hand out mandates, which means the frontiers on the map are, in some places, agreements between the victorious powers delineating their respective spheres of influence in various degrees of direct or indirect control. Maintaining control over "your" area now also depends on organizing and stabilizing local nuclei of statehood while at the same time keeping them dependent on your support.
- In the case of Lebanon, this means that a National Assembly of Mount Lebanon (or some such like) has already formed, probably under considerable clerical influence. France can secure its influence here for the time being by shipping food to the starved region where a famine has recently killed incredible numbers of people, and keeping a few troops around. If I interpret the map correctly and remember the discussions with @Falecius right, then I think this Lebanese state under French protection does not stretch to the Anti-Lebanese mountains in the East and thus has an undisputable Maronite Christian majority.
- In Cilicia, the French are attempting a similar thing, but it hasn't gone so well so far, with Armenians and Greeks supporting not being ruled by the Ottomans anymore, but no alternative polity emerging yet while the French are still actively engaging in suppressing Turkish nationalist resistance. Obviously, the French zone here includes a lot of Turkish-speaking Muslims, which is in part because it is cut (like IOTL) in such a way as to include relevant treasures of the soil.
- Greek control over the Smyrna zone is more stable than IOTL. Over-extending themselves is not something that looks like a realistic danger in the future because there are other international troops, too, to work towards upholding "the law and peace of the Sultan" against Nationalists in the hinterland.
- While the Straits zone is a truly internationally controlled area, where British, French, Greek, UoE, and Italian troops and ships are making sure this vital artery of international trade (and potential arms supply) as well as the Sultan's government in Istanbul stays out of Turkish Nationalist and instead under their own control, the internationality of the Pontos zone is more of a polite fiction because, to the extent that it is under anyone's control, it's UoE troops who run the show (but their grip is as tenuous as that of the French in the South, and worse than that of the Greek in the West, who have devoted more troops to the task and are being a lot more ruthless). The Pontos zone has Greeks in it, but not as a majority. Their protection is what the zone is theoretically for. The internationality of the zone is a nice fiction for all great powers: the British, French etc. could potentially claim to have say over it, too, without lifting a finger so far; while the UoE is spared the open recognition that it engages in an imperialist endeavour.
- Different from the map, Baku is not part of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the FR of the Union of Turkic Nations, but other than that, the map shows the diverging borders nicely, including Armenian Karabakh and Naxchivan.
- Kurdistan is still the big problem. There are Kurds who have fought on the British side (but are not quite so fond of the British anymore right now), there are Kurds who had co-operated with Tsarist Russia (and are now divided over whether to align with the UoE or not), and then there is the majority of Kurds who are Ottoman loyalists but opposed to Turkish Nationalism, and a minority of Kurds who are fighting alongside Atatürk's rebels. Therefore, a "free Kurdistan" has been proclaimed by many, and the Great Powers (basically only the UoE, France, and Britain, with intermittent and contradictory interventions from different US statesmen) have decided among themselves where the borders of such a Kurdistan could run, which is what the map shows. It would make a nice buffer state between allied great powers who are on the way back to becoming rivals again. The internal rivalries also mean, though, that there is ample space for undermining this status and trying to drag it into one's own camp entirely. So far, there are lots of fights in the region - including Assyrian militia who want autonomy, safety and protection, too (conflicting goals, I know) - and no single Kurdish National Assembly or anything of the like has been established yet.

The First Half of 1919 Overview – Part Two: Romania and Hungary

In March 1919, for the first time in Romania’s history, all adult men and women [1] could vote for the new national parliament, which would be the legislature not only for the Old Kingdom anymore, but also for Transilvania, Eastern Banat, Southern Bucovina, and Northern Dobrugea, too. Its outcome was quite the avalanche all political spectators had anticipated: the National Liberals, who had been the “natural” party of parliamentary hegemony for many decades, were halved and confined to the opposition banks – and it was probably only Brătianu’s shameless and rather hypocritical playing of the nationalist card which prevented the PNL from suffering the fate of its formerly proud rival, the Conservative Party, who was almost reduced to irrelevance with only little more than 6 % of the vote. [2] Brātianu’s unexpected flirt with what today we would call “right-wing populism”, but which did not yet exist as a concept in 1919, also flattened Take Ionescu’s Conservative Democratic Party, who took too much time to redefine their position with regards to their old nemesis PNL, beginning with sharp attacks on PNL hypocrisy and ended up with proposing an electoral alliance, which the PNL, in turn, rejected. While PNL and PC lost large parts of the countryside to Ion Mihalache’s Peasant Party (PŢ), the PCD lost in its urban strongholds to both PNL and the Socialists, who emerged from illegality to a respectable fourth place – behind the electoral alliance of PŢ and the Toilers’ Party (PM) led by Gheorghe Diamandy (a Romanian equivalent of Russia’s PSLP Trudoviks: a labour party with an electoral base mostly among the semi-urban small town/surrounding villages people who mixed wage labour with subsistence agriculture), which scored almost 30 %, the PNL at 23 %, and the Transilvanian-based Romanian National Party (PNR). [3]

Both in the preparatory stages and on election day, too, partisan violence and intimidation attempts overshadowed Romania’s celebration of democracy [4]. As the new parliament gathered, in the midst of mutual reproaches and accusations, primarily between the PNL and PC on one side and the PŢ, PM and PSR on the other side, three centre-to-left lists – PŢ/PM plus PNR plus PSR – conducted negotiations to form a coalition. This was the outcome both the old and the new UoE leadership had hoped for – in terms of foreign policy, the “pro-Russian” camp had won and was coalescing. Domestically, Mihalache, Bujor, Titel Petrescu (PSR) and Alexandru Vaida-Voievod (PNR) committed to an agenda of cautious reform: the land reform law would not be radicalized, but its implementation as well as the formation of voluntary co-operatives juridically and financially facilitated; the duration of compulsory education in the lands of the Old Kingdom would be expanded to that which had been the norm in Transilvania; freedom of coalition was enshrined and a number of labour protection laws were scheduled with which Romania would comply with the standards currently being formulated in the negotiations for the Treaty of Chantilly (at that point in time), with which the European Labour Organization would be founded.

To the left wing of the Socialist Party, this was way too little – especially when they saw how bold an agenda their Hungarian comrades were pursuing. In Mihalache’s coalition, the monarchy was not questioned, the foundations of the budding capitalist economy remained entirely untouched, there was not even a commitment to an encompassing social insurance scheme, which even the moderate wing of the PSR had declared as a central goal in the election campaign. On their party’s congress in Ploieşti, emboldened by the country’s largest May Day demonstrations in history a few days earlier, a group of Maximalists led by Gheorghe Cristescu and Alecu Constantinescu left the party and declared their intention to create regional branches of the IRSLP(u) instead.

Cristescu and Constantinescu took four members of parliament with them – reducing the coalition’s majority to a very narrow margin of three. Nevertheless, on May 23rd, Ion Mihalache was elected. His official commissioning by King Ferdinand took suspiciously long, though – for two long weeks, rumours abounded in Bucharest, rumours about a planned coup, about secret talks between the king and members of the opposition, or between the king and Mihalache. Finally, on June 6th, Ferdinand officialised Mihalache’s premiership, and the leader of the Ţărăniştii succeeded Ion I. C. Brātianu. Mihalache’s cabinet would proceed quickly with the first reform drafts which, when they were submitted to the parliament, dispelled fears among its centre-left parties that Mihalache might have been coerced by the King to moderate his policies too much. [5] Mihalache and Diamandy and their respective parties might even pride themselves before their international political companions with having brought the first of their reforms all the way through all parliamentary procedures by late September 1919, when an international congress of Narodnik and other left-agrarian parties would meet in Bucharest.

In terms of foreign policy, everyone who had expected the new Russophile foreign minister Diamandy to behave either too flamboyantly, or too submissive vis-a-vis the UoE would be positively surprised by a predictable and self-confident agenda: he exhorted the parliament successfully to ratify Chantilly and his cabinet colleagues to cough up ressources for a significant Romanian engagement in the European Federation of Peace's institutions and operations, and his ministry did what it could to strengthen the Romanian cause in the border areas with Hungary and Bulgaria where plebiscites were scheduled to be held in 1924.

There, they came into conflict with other left-aligned governments… Among those, Hungary’s was the more radical. After the failed MOVE coup, the Social Democrats had fared very well in the elections, but they were still two seats short of a parliamentarian majority. Sándor Garbai formed his Social Democrat-only government anyway, and successfully speculated on the lifting of the parliamentarian immunity, and subsequent imprisonment, of all four members of parliaments who had formed the Awakening Hungarians faction, for their suspected involvement in the January coup [6]. After the seats of the Awakening Hungarians were vacated, Garbai was elected, to the outcry of conservative and liberal parties alike. His party was the first governing party outside of the UoE who would take Trotsky up on the offer of a great merger on the October Congress. The Hungarian IRSDLP(u) government implemented the radical socialist agenda many Marxists in Russia and elsewhere dreamed about: not only did it begin a thorough land reform which converted manorial estates into peasant co-operatives. It also socialized all industrial enterprises with more than 50 employees and all domestic financial institutions, and created the Democratic National Council for Economic Planning, or short: DeNeGaTa. [7]

In terms of foreign policy, Garbai’s government hedged all its bets on the UoE, hoping that they would put in a good word for their Hungarian comrades to be allowed to join the EFP quickly, which would ease Hungary’s now largely centralized imports and facilitate any potential exports. For the time being, Kerensky and Hungary’s Foreign Minister Manó Buchinger have concluded a quick agreement on free trade and free movement between Hungary and the UoE – followed by a similar agreement with Austria’s Foreign Minister Otto Bauer. But even an IRSDLP(u) government in Hungary would not abstain from attempting what stood in its powers to counterbalance Romania’s influence in the plebiscite area…



[1] IOTL, franchise was expanded in a 1918 law, too, but there were still qualifications, and there was no female suffrage anyway. ITTL, UoE “influence” has made itself felt quite clearly here (not only in the form of soft power, but also as covert blackmail during the months of war in which Romania direly needed Baluyev’s Fifth Union Army). The different election laws account for various divergences in election outcomes: liberals and conservatives fare worse, while the Peasant Party and the Socialists obtain more votes and seats.

[2] The Conservatives were already sidelined by the new rival in the form of the PCD, then had picked the wrong side in the Great War (rooting for a Romanian alignment with the Central Powers, or at least for neutrality), and they’re still unable to adjust to the new realities of mass democracy – which is not surprising: the land reform is undermining the party’s main support group’s powerbase, and that mobilises its clientele, exhorting its aged leaders to pursue their lone fight against everyone else in opposition to the repartition. IOTL, the Romanian Right was deeply transformed by the appearance of leading military officers on the political stage. I doubt that people like Averescu had been deeply politicized before the Great War – they had grown up in the oligarchic system of the Old Kingdom where politics was mostly the business of a cartel of gentlemen; they had been marked by the war, which IOTL showed them a) Romania’s weakness as a small nation, b) how people from all walks of life became one uniform, determined fighting nation, and c) how socialism had undermined their ally and tried to undermine their own fighting power, too, and ultimately caused their long-term ally Russia to abandon them to their enemies, with its undisciplined soldiers plundering the country on their unorganized retreat after the October Revolution. All of this pointed them in one direction IOTL: Romania had to become a large, united, strong nation, and socialists and the like had to be rooted out. ITTL, the lessons to be learned from the Great War are different ones: the militaristic monarchies have crumbled, democratic revolutions are triumphing everywhere, the new Russians are running the show on the Balkans again, and Romania stands a lot to gain by not opposing them and instead surfing the red/green/orange/whatever wave. This is not a context which compels them – who are of upper and upper-middle class background – onto the political stage. Without them, Romania’s inter-war Right as we know it is basically butterflied. Sure, the reforms will be hated by some; sure, young Codreanu and his ilk will ventilate the same venom they spread IOTL. But a strong, politically powerful Romanian Right? If it emerges, it must come from somewhere else.

[3] Diamandy was a colourful figure of Romanian politics. He was quite fond of Russia's SRs, and visited Russia in 1917. Fleeing from the October Revolution, he died on his voyage. ITTL, maybe without having to flee he doesn't die and instead returns to take back the reigns of his little party.

[4] Elections in OTL interwar Romania were also accompanied by a lot of violence.

[5] IOTL, this was the fate of the first National Peasant Party government – but the political climate was entirely different IOTL’s 1928.

[6] After Gömbös was already eliminated during the coup, the parliamentarian arm of the movement had been led by László Endre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/László_Endre – now all OTL-known heads of Hungarian fascism are in prison.

[7] The first Marxist party alone in power, and in a situation of utter economic collapse, they implement what we IOTL associate with Soviet Russia, right down to a Hungarian Gosplan. Foreign financial institutions had to be exempted because of obligations Hungary had subscribed to in the Treaty of Chantilly, but that’s not a very serious obstacle since they had not been widely operating in Habsburg Hungary. IOTL, the Hungarian Communists tried this economic system change, too. But the parallels end here. TTL’s IRSLDP(u) is a party who is in opposition in its original country (except for Latvia), nobody in Hungary expects them to lend a military hand (how could they?), so there will be no aggressive campaigns. With regards to political violence and terror, the picture probably differs in nuances. On the one hand, Garbai’s government and its soviet system are really under serious threat of being overthrown, so copying the Kamkov Commission’s Special Power Acts is probably plausible. On the other hand, this role model is still not quite equivalent to OTL’s Red Terror of 1918, so the role model of any potential Hungarian Lenin Boys is also slightly different.

In Bulgaria, the first half of 1919 could have told the story of the consolidation of a young republic, the success of its agrarian reform policies, and the steady hand of Stambolinsky and his coalition of the BANU, the Broad Socialists and the Democrats stabilizing the country again.

In the perception of many, especially influential, Bulgarians, though, the narrative of 1919 Part One was one of Avksentiev’s betrayal of his pan-Yugoslavist promises, and subsequently of the national humiliation suffered at Chantilly. Rumours have it that Stambolisnky had intended to shoot himself after signing it.

It certainly hung like a millstone around his neck now. The opposition from both left and right became increasingly shrill and militant. On the Right, former personnel of the military which Bulgaria had to almost entirely dissolve shook hands with tsarist-restaurationists and, of course, the Macedonian-irredentist IMRO. On the Left, Dimitar Blagoev’s Narrow Socialists had long remained reserved about Trotsky’s offer of joining the IRSDLP(u) – firstly, Blagoev was too proud to play second fiddle to anyone else, and secondly, Trotsky and by association the Union of Equals were too closely associated with the betrayal of the Pan-Yugoslav Socialist project. But when Hungary’s IRSDLP(u) went all-out on its socialist transformation course, Bulgaria’s Narrow Socialists decided without any serious dissent to join the IRSDLP(u) on the October Congress. Within the oppositional Bulgarian IRSDLP(u), particularly Vasil Kolarov developed the position that all Southern Slavic socialists should prepare to overthrow their regimes at once and join forces with Hungary so that their inter-national socialist revolution would re-ignite the fire of proletarian revolution and would help tilt the balance in Russia and other countries with strong Marxist parties towards leaping back into action. Explicitly, Kolarov advocated clandestine political education and the organization of party cells in all South Slavic countries. Implicitly, though, some of the phrases of Kolarov’s manifesto read like exhortations to destabilise Bulgaria’s and Serbia’s (and probably Romania’s and Greece’s, too, as well as the EFP administrations in Albania and Western Yugoslavia) through acts of terrorism and political general strikes.

The “Kolarovite” agenda was not yet officially embraced by the party – so far, the first terrorist attacks under which Bulgaria’s government suffered came from the Right and the IMRO. But it was clear Chantilly had changed the situation for the Bulgarian Far Left: clandestine militant organizations aiming to overthrow Bulgaria’s narodnik-socialist-liberal coalition from the left had, all of a sudden, much greater appeal than before.

While Stambolinsky was still the undisputed leader of the BANU and the government, internal criticism of Chantilly e.g. by Rayko Daskalov from the BANU’s left wing would not be silenced and continued to pose an embarrassment for the leader of the new state who had signed the treaty.

When the EFP administration of Western Yugoslavia began its policy of personal autonomy, Stambolinsky saw his chance for a counter-offensive. He offered material and administrative support to the movement which aimed to create a “Constituent Nation” by the name of “United Toilers of Greater Yugoslavia”.

This is probably a propitious moment to explain the emerging structures of the EFP administration in Western Yugoslavia.

What emerges here is as much a product of the difficult pacification as it is a result of international groups treating the region as a laboratory for their political pet projects. Throughout the winter of 1918/19, two main forces had fought against each other: in much of the North and along the Eastern border with Serbia, the forces of the official Yugoslav Committee, with massive support by the Kingdom of Serbia, had gained the upper hand and oppressed (predominantly leftist) protests. In parts of Bosnia and Dalmatia, a disparate coalition of rebels (from Catholic Croatian nationalists over left-agrarian populists to Muslim groups) held its ground, initially based on the undisciplined but numerous Green Berets, later more and more relying on Italian military (and UoE diplomatic / political) support. Pacifying the region required the international forces involved to compromise and renounce on some of their objectives in the region: the UoE was forced to give up on its project for a Greater Yugoslav Federation for the time being; France had to renounce on the Corfu Declaration and the united Kingdom of Yugoslavia (without Bulgaria) which it envisioned, while Italy had to acknowledge that prying away Southern parts of Western Yugoslavia as a sort of client state would not be viable in the long run. Hence the compromise of a joint EFP mandate. But pacification also required appeasing and/or integrating all the relevant powerful militant groups in the region – or isolating those who opposed any compromise, and then effectively oppressing them. War-weary as they were, the three powers attempted to go down the first road as long as they could. This meant awarding continguous Serbian-majority territories in the East to the Kingdom of Serbia. For all the groups in the rest of the territory, though, a solution seemed difficult.

Bringing them all together at one table in Paris was the beginning. But that only revealed how incompatible their visions really were. It was in this situation of frustration and despair that the Great Powers were willing to lend an ear to the moderate Belgian socialist Jules Destrée. had an idea how complete border gore or unviably small statelets could be avoided and any future political conflicts be solved within a system which enshrined compromise among a potentially infinite number of groups. His idea was inspired by Karl Renner’s and Otto Bauer’s (now obsolete) visions for defusing the national question of the Habsburg Empire through “personal national autonomy” and by similar concepts developed by the anti-Zionist Jewish Bundist thinker Vladimir Medem.

Destrée had modified these conceptions and, in particular, added a cantonal structure to the make-up – which marked the nucleus of the concept of the Dual Constitution – as well as a few unalterable foundational principles to the new constitution for the Mandate Territory. (Destrée’s endgame was to prove that this new brand of federalism could work, so that it could be used to reform his own bitterly divided home country.)

The Dual Constitution consisted of territorial cantons on the one hand, and Constituent Nations on the other hand. (In fact, it was much rather a triple constitution, with the third dimension being the EFP oversight. EFP administration of Western Yugoslavia received, with the Treaty of Chantilly, a central Mandate Commission in Zagreb, in which eleven representatives of various member countries are sitting, but where the three commissars from the UoE, France and Italy have a de facto veto right because anything that pertains to “matters of security” needs to approved by their Command Council for the Mandate’s Protective Forces, which can only take decisions unanimously.)

The mandate territory was divided into eighteen cantons, in six of which UoE forces “kept the peace as long as necessary”, while in six others, the Italians did just that, in five others the French, while the Zagreb canton was occupied jointly. Each canton had an assembly which decided over matters of land and natural resources, infrastructure and other such immobile things, elected a cantonal administration to take care of such things, ran the judicial system which concerned itself with matters pertaining not just to one constituent nation and its members (i.e. almost all matters) and financed all this through levying taxes on land and resource extraction, tolls etc. The cantonal assemblies would consist of delegates elected within the constituent nations, with each constituent nation being apportioned the percentage of delegates which corresponds to their percentage of inhabitants. Decisions require not only an overall majority, but also the absence of a negative majority in any of the constituent nations’ delegate groups. Cantonal administration is headed by a council into which every constituent nation elects one councilor. Likewise, cantonal courts are to be staffed with judges from all constituent nations in rough accordance with their proportion of the population.

The constituent nations were not only tasked with such soft cultural politics like education – they also had full autonomy over their members’ personal registration (citizenship, marriage, death etc.), free reign to tax the movable property, income and consumption of their members as they saw fit, to build social security systems and collect contributions to them, to pass “national laws” pertaining to all these domains of civic and public law and even to some domains of criminal law (which exactly was rather ill-defined as “pertaining to cultural specificity”). They were also free to design their internal political systems as they saw fit, as long as they obeyed the standards of democracy and civil rights enshrined in the EFP Charter (which is, of course, a matter of interpretation). (Newborn babies acquired the national citizenship of their parents at birth. In a patriarchal stroke still typical for the time, it was also decided that in the case of binational parents, the child would acquire the citizenship of the father, unless the couple agreed on it acquiring the citizenship of the mother.)

Oversight over the entire system, as well as military issues, border control, and the currency which took the place of the devalued Krone (I don’t have a name for it, any suggestions anyone?) remained with the Mandate Commission for the time being.

Because the system had to pacify the Mostar rebels, too, many of whom (especially on the left wing) did not identify themselves primarily through an ethno-national lens, groups were initially free to form constituent nations as they liked, with the only prerequisite being that each person could only belong to one constituent nation.

This would have dramatic implications already in the first weeks after Chantilly was signed and the Mandate Commission began to move into its offices. There had been preliminary talks with parliamentarians and extra-parliamentary politicians of the three titulary nations of the “State of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes” which had been proclaimed in September 1918, so that initially, there was only a choice between declaring oneself a Croat, or a Serb, or a Slovene. It took only days until a fourth nation constituted itself: a group around the Džemijet made sure that Bosnian Muslims could form a nation of their own, too, and began to gather declarations of adherence. While Croats and Serbs complained why the Muslims didn’t identify as “Muslim Croats” or “Muslim Serbs”, this fourth constituent nation was accepted without major headaches by the protecting powers and neighbors.

The same cannot be said about the fifth constituent nation, in which many from the left wing of the Mostar rebels united at first, but which also gained traction elsewhere across the territory: the constituent nation of the “United Toilers of Greater Yugoslavia”. Uniting socialists, left-agrarians and pan-Yugoslavists, the Toilers also had some appeal for people in mixed families and among those who did not want to be defined through their confession or dialect.

Their formation was immediately seen with alarm, especially, but not only by Serbia. The Mandate Commission reacted by decreeing a threshold of 100,000 enrolled members for the recognition of a Constituent Nation. While this prevented the officialisation of dozens of religious sects and such creatively fashioned wannabe-constituent nations as “The Free Communion of the Anarchist-Naturists”, it did not stop the Toilers, who would jump the hurdle easily somewhere in late summer. I am getting a little ahead of schedule here, but I’ll write this nonetheless. When this happens, Italy and France are not happy, either, both suspecting the Toilers as an instrument of Bulgarian meddling (Stambolinsky’s government provided important help in setting up the Toilers’ institutions, the collection of signatures and the like) as well as of extending the UoE’s influence beyond its mandate. But the most enraged government was the Serbian one. Nikola Pašić decried what he saw as a violation of the (implicit) agreement not to allow the formation of any sort of pan-Yugoslavia which would include Bulgaria. He was not calmed, either, when the Toilers dropped the adjective “Greater” from their denomination under Italian pressure – Serbia withdrew his commissioner in the Mandate Commission in protest over the recognition of this fifth constituent nation.

Pašić’s government did not only fear encirclement. Over the summer and autumn of 1919, it will become clear that the “United Toilers” are not only forming in the EFP mandate zone, there are also Serbian socialists who openly declare their allegiance to this entity. Even though all members of the Mandate Commission have clarified unanimously that this is an irrelevancy and that the legal framework of personal statehood pertained only to the Mandate zone, the movement would not be stopped. Afflicted by the same harsh economic situation as elsewhere (plus Austro-Hungarian wartime plunderings) and disaffected with a monarchy and a Radical government who had conducted a civil war against a primarily leftist and democratic opposition in Western Yugoslavia (and Bulgaria at first, too), Yugoslav workers and poor peasants took a liking to the idea, and in a wave of strikes in Osijek, Belgrade, Skopje and Niš [1], not only economic improvements were demanded, but also the recognition of their desire for autonomous self-rule and unification with their comrades to the East and West. While this movement was mostly associated with the social democrats, who also decided to become a part of the IRSDLP(u), it also found some support among the Republican and Democratic Party. But Pašić did not only come under fire from the left – his government was, at the same time, lambasted by the (still relatively moderate) Right (the Serbian Progressives and Conservatives) for what they perceived as a string of failures both at home and abroad.


[1] OTL fiefs of the Yugoslav Communists in 1920 in the territory which ITTL is the Kingdom of Serbia.

Scandinavia:

The overview over the three Scandinavian countries (Finland I will tend to lump in with the rest of the UoE, while Iceland is outside of my focus so far – the Förbundslov has been concluded like IOTL – thus I mean Norway, Sweden, and Denmark) is going to be somewhat short and rough. Butterflies are flying less massively in the peaceful North, but some divergences from OTL are clearly happening here, too.

The three countries have a few things in common: they were all neutral during the Great War, whose limitations on trade brought hardships to many and spectacular profits to a few. In all of them, bourgeois parliamentarian parties had, with or against their will, extended the franchise to the entire citizenry recently. And in all of them, the labour movement and its parties were on the rise.

But the differences also should not be overlooked – and they are slightly more pronounced ITTL than IOTL. It begins with neutrality already: while all three were officially neutral, Norway was commercially tied so closely to Great Britain that the British considered them “our neutral ally”, while Denmark traded predominantly with Germany, and Sweden had vaccilated between both camps.

The political landscape in the three countries differed in nuances, too. ITTL, these differences show themselves quite clearly along the line which divides many European countries’ political spectrums: for or against accession to the EFP?

Norway is not going to join the federation any time soon. Its economic ties with Great Britain are very close, and the governing Liberal Party is of the variety which would rather kill itself than embrace anything that smells like socialism. Prime Minister Gunnar Knudsen (who has made a fortune in the shipping business) is therefore preferring to maintain the special relationship with Britain. Norway’s Labour Party was the most radical of the three countries IOTL (its majority joined the Comintern, and then split again over leaving it) and that probably doesn’t change iTTL). ITTL, there are no signs for such a three-way split yet, but the party is still farther away from power than both its Swedish and its Danish comrades.

In Denmark, the picture is significantly different. Its Prime Minister, Carl Theodor Zahle, has been a staunch pacifist for a long time, and an early supporter of international covenants of peace. He and his party, the Radikale Venstre (literally: Radical Left, in truth left-liberal, like its namesakes in France and Italy), were open towards alliances with the Social Democrats, whose leader Thorvald Stauning is quite the same charismatic and moderate person as IOTL, and they enacted quite a number of tight wartime economic regulations which prevented some of the worst speculative excesses which e.g. Norway experienced. IOTL, King Christian X., the Conservatives and various business interests had developed such a dislike for Zahle (and the social democrats, too, of course) that Christian dismissed Zahle over his moderate stance towards Germany on the Schleswig issue. Under massive public protest, he had to take the measure back, which is widely seen as the last nail in the coffin of a Danish monarchy which is anything more than a figurehead, if we can trust Wikipedia on this matter. ITTL, this exact course of events cannot happen, for Denmark will be awarded all of Schleswig. Instead, Christian could veto the parliament’s ratification of the accession to the EFP – for Zahle would certainly aim to make Denmark a member, and he could count on Social Democratic support in this matter. The reaction would be similar: public protests against the king overstepping his boundaries on a matter where public opinion does not follow him anyway, the king backtracks and becomes sidelined ever after. Denmark’s path towards post-war prosperity, Social Democratic governments and EFP membership would look free of obstacles by mid-1919 then.

Sweden is probably the country where the divergence from OTL is felt most sharply. Sweden’s Social Democrats have a similarly able and moderate leader in Hjalmar Branting, the country has gone through a similarly tight wartime economic regulation and even harsher scarcities, and they have a similarly conciliatory left-liberal premier to deal with in Nils Edén. But Sweden has also absorbed thousands of anti-socialist Finnish refugees linked to Svinhufvud’s Vaasa Senate, who are now loudly clamouring against socialism, the UoE and the EFP in Sweden. This will resonate among the Conservative and Liberal Parties, and even more so as long as relations between the Swedish minority in Finland and Paasivuori’s Senate have not been put back onto a good track, which means that the community of émigrés is going to denounce a marginalization of Swedes in social-democratic Finland. All of this does not yet mean that the future of Swedish Social Democracy as we know it is butterflied. But it means that, for the time being, Edén does not dare propose Swedish accession to the EFP, which only the social democrats are demanding. Whether Sweden, whose elites are still smarting over Norway’s secession, is really going to follow Norway into the British “camp”, remains to be seen. (IOTL, Sweden joined the League of Nations under Edèn’s auspices, but TTL’s EFP is not the same as OTL’s LoN, and, as I said, the political landscape is slightly altered.)

* * *

The Kingdom of Montenegro, the smallest member of the Entente, had been overrun by the Central Powers in 1916, who installed an Austrian military governor there. The Montenegrin Army had already fought in close cooperation with Serbia’s. Discussions about a unification of both countries had gone on for more than half a century already, and they had always been extremely divisive – the kingdom’s two main “political parties”, if we can really call them that, which formed when Montenegro was granted a parliamentary constitution in 1905, were ostensibly divided over the question of unification with Serbia under the House Djordjevic (favoured by the People’s Party) vs. keeping the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty and Montenegrin independence (favoured by the True People’s Party).

There was more to this divide than just the question of dynasties or union vs. confederation. The People’s Party grew out of and amongst political milieus who called for democratic and liberal reforms, and while Prince Nikola had always been a credible fighter for the goal of South Slavic independence, the new Serbia (i.e. after the coup which exchanged one dynasty for another) under the Djordjevic dynasty and Radical Party governments was seen by many in Montenegro as a shining example of democracy and progress, and an even more hopeful vehicle for South Slavic unity and strength. Like the Serbian political forces they idolized, Montengro’s People’s Party was repeatedly associated with violence and political terrorism, and the short pre-war parliamentary history of the country is marked by intense conflict among the two camps, electoral boycotts and the like. As the poor showing of the True People’s Party in 1914 demonstrated, though, opposition to the People’s Party’s militancy and pan-Serbism (but also its promises of social progress) was not very well organized or deep-rooted, and was very much organizationally centered around (now) King Nikola, although this camp, which would evolve into the “Green” faction in Montenegro’s short civil war, was also motivated by other forces than just loyalty to the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty: first and foremost, it was fuelled by caution and conservatism. It also enjoyed comparatively solid support among Muslim Montengrins and the small Italian minority.

The Great War and the Corfu Declaration brought a new dynamic. Now, the pan-Serbists apparently had international backing. Montenegro’s King Nikola I. and his government had fled and were in exile in France when things begin to diverge from OTL. Like IOTL, French, Serbian, and Italian forces take control over Montenegro in autumn 1918 (a few weeks earlier than IOTL). With the end of the war, things begin to diverge massively.

IOTL, the Yugoslav Committee of the SHS state decided almost unanimously to unconditionally merge with Serbia. A few days later, the Podgorica Assembly is called together while Serbian soldiers control the country. Two factions consolidate: the “Whites” (mostly from among the old People’s Party, but also supported by Cetinje’s Serbian-Orthodox bishop Gavrilo Dožić), who support Nikola’s demission and the absorption of Montenegro into Yugoslavia / the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and the “Greens” (mostly the old True People’s Party) who oppose this unconditional absorption. Seriously rigged indirect elections are held for a new Montenegrin assembly, in which the Whites triumph and declare Montenegro merged into the SHS Kingdom. The Greens, now increasingly supported by Italy (Wikipedia points at the explanation that the Montenegrin Queen is Italian-born, but I think this was of minor political relevance), attempt a rebellion (the Christmas Uprising), which is crushed mostly by the Serbian Army. That was it for Montengro – for a while.

ITTL, the Yugoslav uniters are divided among themselves. There is the faction pursuing the OTL course of submerging into Serbia, after all most Montenegrins saw themselves as Serbs at this point in time and many still do today – but then there is also a Pan-Yugoslavist group (i.e. for the inclusion of Bulgaria), politically supported by the UoE. At least I believe it would be there. In OTL’s 1920 elections, Podgorica had become one of the reddest strongholds of the Communists, which, to me, hints at the fact that there was more to the conflict than just the question of whose family one wanted a king from or whether one considered onself a Serb or a Black Mountaineer primarily. Montenegro’s pre-war party system certainly didn’t transmit the entirety of political opinions, interests and dissent when it focused so much on the Serbia-or-not question, and neither did the White-Green divide. While Montenegro was still mostly rural and had no organized labour movement to speak of, there were still demands for social and economic progress which, it soon transpired, would not feel so much at home with merely transplanting Serbia’s political culture into Montenegro. From among these groups, I believe that support for a third faction – for simplicity’s sake, let’s call them the “Reds” – could emerge.

ITTL, given the strife and then even civil war in Western Yugoslavia, there is considerably less momentum for a unification with Serbia. And when two Yugoslavist factions (Reds and Whites) quarrel, it’s the third (Green) faction which profits: those who support Montenegro’s independence. It is clear that they have Italy’s support ITTL, too – but not only Italy is throwing monkey-wrenches into Serbian and White schemes to gobble up Montenegro. It is quite likely that an alt-Assembly of Podgorica is going to be quite as rigged as IOTL because Serbia has most boots on the ground here and plans for a bilateral unification are, as has been argued, older than most other Yugoslav projects. But this election-rigging is going to be called and criticized by the UoE, too, and so the Assembly of Podgorica is not going to be viewed as having a mandate to simply abolish the state of Montenegro by many. Plus, against all manipulation, the opposition is going to be stronger even within this forum.

That is another disappointment for Nikola Pašić’s Serbian government – they are not getting much for having fought so hard against overwhelming Central Powers and for having suffered under their occupation. But then again, Montenegro fought, too, as best it could, and suffered the same… With Podgorica not sending the clear signal for unification as IOTL, King Nikola returns from his French exile, and the Serbs cannot really oppose the restoration of a separate, independent Montenegrin Army when their Entente allies in the region are all non-accepting of overt annexationism.

As the civil war in Western Yugoslavia drags on and it becomes increasingly clear that the pan-Yugoslav solution is not becoming a reality at this point in time, the UoE and the Reds within Montengro who supported this cause are joining forces with the “Greens” for a short time, i.e. the battle is seen as for or against Serbian hegemony. In Western Yugoslavia, Serbia had a much better position because a greater part of local elites supported Serbian takeover as the lesser evil against the threats of Italian annexation and socialist revolution. In Montengro, the situation is gradually different because of the close Italian alliance with King Nikola, and also the Whites are not really a conservative force.

As a result of all these difficulties and setbacks, Serbia reduces its engagement and treads more carefully. On the last diplomatic meters before Chantilly, Montenegro is part of the deal in which the UoE abandons the Pan-Yugoslavist cause (for the moment – we can see that only months later, the “Toilers” mean that the idea is resurfacing…) in exchange for everybody else abandoning the Corfu Scheme, i.e. a Serbian-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

After Chantilly, Montenegro stabilizes somewhat. More than ever, it has de facto entered the Italian sphere of influence, but its independence is also recognized and protected by the EFP as a whole, to which the small Kingdom quickly adheres as the alliance’s smallest member (Luxembourg will probably join only later).

But stability is not tranquility. As I have argued, the genie of social change is out of the bottle in Montenegro, too, and the militancy of the conflict in the immediate weeks and months after the armistice has deepened chasms. New parliamentary elections, to which King Nikola invites an EFP oversight committee to demonstrate to everyone that under his reign, fair elections are held in Montenegro, are scheduled for autumn 1919. Not only will they not cover the rifts which have opened - I am positive that new political forces beside the two established opponents will compete, too. Most probably, one or more new voices will appear on the Left, as they have IOTL under very different circumstances, too. For the time being, Montenegro tries to tap the European Reconstruction Fund, but since there are no German payments incoming, there isn’t much to expect from these quarters. With the new and chaotic political situation in Western Yugoslavia, Montenegro’s interim government (led by Jovan Plamenac of the Greens / True People’s Party) probably attempts to establish some sort of ties with the emerging new Constituent Nations, and it might offer its engagement in the EFP Mandate of Albania, too, all the while realizing that it is the larger EFP powers who are calling the shots in the region quite directly now and with whom one needs good relations if one wishes to recover and rebuild fast and exert some sort of influence.

While the EFP mandate in Western Yugoslavia, emboldened by the huge task of stopping a civil war, went unique new ways, the two EFP mandates neighboring Greece – Albania in the West and Eastern Thrace in the East – were treated in a more conservative manner. In Albania, not only under strong US suggestions, the explicit goal was to create a viable and stable nation state and future member of the EFP – but the only powers who were interested in committing troops to keep the various quarrelling factions off each others’ throats here (Italy, Greece, Serbia) were not exactly the best arbiters for this cause. In Eastern Thrace, on the other hand, no such nation-building was intended. The region was very heterogeneous, and the EFP Mandate was a compromise between pro-Greek (France, also Britain in the background) and cautiously pro-Bulgarian (UoE) great powers – the difficult question of how to partition the territory was, more or less, postponed to an unclear future, while in the present, housing, feeding, medically treating and ultimately employing countless refugees was the main task of the EFP Mandate administration here.

Eleftherios Venizelos was otherwise not very happy about the Eastern Thrace situation, but he surely was glad his government did not to have to deal with the refugee crisis all on their own. In Eastern Thrace and Albania, the Greek government did what all Eastern European governments did with regards to the mandate and plebiscite areas – officially, they were neutral, respected the EFP Mandate Status, and fulfilled only the mission of keeping peace and building up democratic structures. Inofficially, everything possible was done to raise the likelihood of favourable partitioning and accession or at least of the creation of new entities who would be friendly to oneself.

Greece adopted the former course in Eastern Thrace, whither teachers were sent in an effort to Hellenise as many of the displaced persons placed in the region (and others, too, if possible) as they could, of course under the banner of respecting the EFP’s commitment to universal access to education, and important people (the 21st century might call them “influencers”) were attempted to be recruited for good jobs in the Greek civil service in order to ensure their loyalty.

In Albania, the project of far-reaching autonomy (reaching as far as de facto independence) for “Northern Epiros” was pursued once again. Local elites had not forgotten how unreliable Greek support had been so far, and the official Greek declarations did not do much to change their minds. The “Yugoslav” model of personal autonomy was discussed among Southern Albanians, and so was the “Swiss” model of Albanian cantons. Both solutions were not particularly popular with the other Albanian politicians, e.g. in the Congress of Durres, who sought the support of the Great Powers for faster elections for a Constituent Assembly for an Albanian Republic. US President Wilson was diplomatically and rhetorically highly supportive, but didn’t commit any US troops to the country, and with his incapacitation, even the former is thrown into doubt now. The UoE, Britain and France, too, support a united Albania in principle, but don’t give much about it, either. Only Italy has committed troops, and while there is some distrust among Muslim Albanians as to the Italian intentions in the region, they are still seen as the lesser evil compared to the Serbs and Greeks. With the political situation in Italy deteriorating fast in the summer, Italy looks both less threatening and less reliable, and might even call back some of its anti-insurgency special units from Albania in order to deploy them at home.

Overall, and even more so with the Nationalists in Turkey being cornered and hunted down in a joint effort of all Entente powers, and a breakthrough in negotiations with the Sultan’s government in sight, things are looking pretty OK for the Venizelist government. But that is only foreign policies. Domestically, Greece is still suffering from the deep chasm which had been called the “National Schism”. King Alexander still lives (probably another year like IOTL), but his father Constantine, like IOTL, is still plotting against Venizelos’ liberal government which had ousted him. But this is not only a fight between a party and a king – while I won’t claim that I have understood the minutiae of the Greek political climate and situation in greater detail (any help from experts on Greece would be more than welcome!!!!), it is quite clear to me that the two camps are fully-formed opposed political movements. The “monarchists” even have their own paramilitary units, the Epistratoi. The fight between conservative and liberal, monarchist and parliamentarian, rural and urban forces, who were both nationalists but with different conceptions of the nation, who had opposed each other over the question of alignment in the Great War and fought bitterly in the Noemvriana, is not going away. None of its causes are altered in comparison to OTL. Neither is the weird electoral system which IOTL caused Venizelos to lose the parliamentary majority in the 1920 elections so clearly when he won the popular vote narrowly. One thing which will influence the outcome of these elections is that Eastern Thracians are not going to participate in TTL’s Greek national elections. But until then, a lot can happen still. Another thing which is still up in the air is the future success of the Avraam Benaroya's socialist SEKE, the only non-nationalist and anti-war party - we'll have to wait for the outcome of the situation in Turkey and for the dust to settle in Greece to see where they're heading.

 

[Salvador79]

Rome (Kingdom of Italy): Il Popolo d’Italia, July 2nd, 1919, p. 1:

OUR MOMENT HAS COME!

by Benito Mussolini

The Revolution is spreading, and nobody can stop it. Protests have reached Tuscany and Veneto. Workers have taken over their factories in Genoa and Livorno. The countrymen of the Emilia-Romagna and the Po Valley have joined them. [1] It is really difficult to understand how the PSI and its spineless General Secretary Serrati are failing to see that the Italian Revolution has already begun. In long and boring articles, the leaders of those who still dare calling themselves socialists have pondered and finally adopted the theory of Ultra-Imperialism, another stillborn brainchild of Kautsky’s – it is absolutely enigmatic how they can claim that the proletariat of the entire world will rise together at some point in the distant future, when their own party is too blind to recognize a revolution when it is happening right under their eyes.

It is equally mystifying why Gramsci, Togliatti and the other little boys from the Ordine Nuovo are still riding the dead horse of the Marxist PSI, who prefer theory over action, but whose dogmas they still cling to even when their comrades are failing them in the moment of need.

But Italy’s laboring population of the countryside and the town, and our Nation’s brave heroes who are returning from yet another victory to a country ruled by an ungrateful oligarchy, are losing their interest in the pointless Marxist debates. We have begun to take our future into our own hands, and we will not dawdle and wait for the ponderers.

The workplaces of all types belong by those who work there and know best how to manage them, and the same goes for the land which nourishes our glorious Nation. But all of this shall never hold, if our defense is not taken into the hands of those who have dared their lives and bested our enemies in fierce battles! This is the most important decision which the Assembly of Revolutionary Committees in Parma must take on this weekend. [2] There is a new order emerging, and the old bourgeois regime is crumbling as new ways of working, fighting and living together arise – but it will only finally fall if we boldly stride forwards and seize real power, and pursue the appropriate course by which to expand it and spread the Revolution, instead of having it massacred or corrupted. If the Marxists prefer to sit on the fence – let them! But let them know that the French Revolutionaries did not change our world by perpetuating encyclopaedist debates, but by storming the Bastille. And those who sowed division among the revolutionary nation would ultimately be pushed aside by those who knew that the common enemy was assembling its forces beyond the borders, and who were not afraid to wield Justice’s sword for the welfare of their own offspring and for that of those they vanquished. (3)

This new nation that will soon be born, this new Italy will be worthy of an empire, a fascist [4] empire because it will have the indestructible sign of the will and power of the Roman Littorio. Because this is the goal of all our sufferings and trials, which have brought out in the open the explosive and disciplined energy of the Italian soldier and worker. An empire of peace, civilty and humanity, in the glorious tradition of Rome, which wed the destiny of all peoples to its own after each and every time in which its new order triumphed. [5]





[1] TTL’s Biennio Rosso-like events have begun. What has triggered them are the radical reforms undertaken in Hungary, which, although a smaller country, is viewed by many revolutionary Marxists ITTL the way Soviet Russia was viewed by them IOTL.

[2] This is a gathering of Rossoni’s Union of Italian Workers (UIL), the Fasci Autonomi d’ Azione Rivoluzionaria, various Arditi organizations, and the Contadini Rivoluzionarii Socialisti. The latter is a revolutionary left-agrarian party I have made up. IOTL, dissatisfied agricultural workers either aligned with the PSI-Maximalists in their campaign for repartition, or they set their hope on the fascists and their promises of agricultural improvements. ITTL, there is a movement and a nascent party inspired by the SRs, which operates independently from the PSI and, as seen here, is open to an alliance with Mussolini’s Independent Socialists and other national syndicalists. @lukedalton has opened my eyes to the great divide between Italy’s urban and rural workforce.

By no means the entire spectrum of the revolutionaries meet in Parma. Those affiliated with the PSI – a majority of the revolutionaries – will hold a counter-meeting in Torino.

(3) Yes, Benito will not make any friends or gain influence in the other socialist circles, he know that and so he can freely made this not -so subtle menace towards the Gramsci and Turati groups. Unfortunely for him (and for the ANI), the goverment will have some issue towards any attack towards the second group, after all they are part of the goverment and even if Orlando (and many others) don't like them, they still need them and any open attack to them will mean a direct attack on the state and this will not look well in general. The fascists do not enjoy the protection they had in OTL. The same goes for the ANI when it openly attacks moderate socialist coalition members.

[4] The term "fascist", I think that much is clear by now, will acquire quite a different meaning from OTL. The term has slowly changed its meaning from "any militant league" to "nationalist socialist / syndicalist militant league". Whatever the outcome of Mussolini's adventure here is will stick as the connotations of the term.

[5] The last paragraph is a repurposed and slightly modified Mussolini speech after the Ethiopian War.
* * *

Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts are revolutionaries ITTL – but that doesn’t mean they’re fighting on the same side as the Red revolutionaries affiliated to the Maximalist faction of the PSI, or rather to some more activist parts of it. Reds vs. Blacks vs. the reactionary Blueshirts of the ANI is, instead, a potential three-way battle, if the Congress of Parma really opts for a syndicalist attempt at taking over power, an early March on Rome with a different context as it were. How is the government going to react? One thing to consider here is that not only the reactionary paramilitary side is weakened (by Mussolini’s channeling nationalist veterans for instead of against revolution), but also the revolutionary side is not only split, but also overall protests might not have reached the same depth and breadth they had IOTL where there were fewer top-down social reforms and the food situation was even worse. Under no circumstance can we just lump in OTL’s later fascist strength onto the Black Revolutionary side – they received a lot of support from industrialists and landowners, and recruited heavily among anti-socialist groups which ITTL are more likely to flock to the ANI, if at all.

Before all this hell broke lose, Italy had been well on its way towards stabilization. Given the earlier massive streetfights after the shots on Turati and more moderate socialist “input”, Orlando’s government has finally started to react, in the last months of winter, with a mixture of social reforms (pensions, veteran care, paid sick leave, affordable loans for poor peasants etc.) and measures aimed at restoring law and order (from curfews to recruiting demobilized soldiers into riot police units). The latter drew the ire of General Secretary Serrati, who wanted to have Malverini and other PSI parliamentarians who had agreed to the “repressive” measures, excluded from the party. But the divided PSI cannot agree on this, either, and so it never comes to pass.

Public opinion is also mostly viewing the results of Paris, including Chantilly, as an OK deal, and even the intervention in Germany is still supported from bourgeois political parties over the new Catholic Popular Party to well within the socialist camp. Especially on the Left, there was a lot of support for the protection of Unterleitner’s USPD government against “chauvinistic Great German revanchists” and for making sure that the EFP, whose ratification against conservative resistance needed all the votes from Liberals and the Left together, got some teeth to protect the continental peace in a robust fashion. Among democratic Catholic circles, who often found themselves in Luigi Sturzo’s new party, a robust peacekeeping mission which protected Catholic Bavaria against potential aggressions by a weakened but still dangerous Prussian-controlled German Empire found some support, too. Actually, the only resistance against the Bavarian intervention came from the Extreme Right: the ANI, led by Enrico Corradini and Francesco Coppola, who had made itself a name in brutal attacks on squatting landless peasants and dispersing leftists who wanted to protest in spite of the curfews, now also mobilized marches of thousands of blueshirts who shouted that Italy had no business in Bavaria and nothing to gain by doing the dirty job for international socialism. The great bard of Italian nationalists, Gabriele d`Annunzio, is loosely affiliated with them ITTL.

And then, the Hungarian socialist reforms began in earnest. In contrast to Trotsky’s Russian section of the IRSDLP(u), who was in opposition and thus powerless, the Hungarians provided an attractive blueprint for many Maximalists in the PSI – among them the young faction which led Torino’s PSI after its elected leaders had been apprehended in 1917. Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti and others lauded Hungary’s reforms in L’Ordine Nuovo – and when tens of thousands of hungry and dissatisfied workers took their protests from the streets back into their factories and formed soviets there, Torino’s PSI newspaper enthusiastically supported them and let the spark of proletarian revolution fly into other regions, too.

We shall see how it all will turn out…!

 

[Salvador79]

Paris (French Republic): L’Humanité, July 21st, 1919, p. 1:

POINCARÉ SPARES MURDERER OF JAURÈS THE GUILLOTINE

by Anatole France [1]

The President of the Republic has pardoned Raoul Villain, the convicted murderer of Jean Jaurès, and transmuted his death sentence into life-long imprisonment.

From a humanist point of view, every annulled death sentence is a condonable act because the state should not arrogate to itself the right to kill. In this case, though, there is no doubt that M. Poincaré has certainly not been moved by such doubts and thoughts.

Instead, his decision is most certainly driven by the anti-socialist hysteria which has gripped the nation once again in these days. [2] It is this bowing to aggressive chauvinism which deserves the most severe criticism.

Comrade Jean Jaurès has not been the first socialist leader to be murdered by chauvinistic terrorists, and he would not be the last. Two years ago, Max Wexler [3] was illegally executed by chauvinistic officers from Romania’s old guard. Last year, chauvinists made an attempt on the life of Italy’s great Filippo Turati. In the past few months, Francisco Largo Caballero was assassinated in Madrid [4], probably with the consent of Maura’s government [5], and Germany’s loudest, earliest and clearest voice against the war of aggression, Karl Liebknecht, has been shot dead by Prussian chauvinists [6] only a week before the President of our Republic deemed it adequate to send his signal of Villain’s pardon.

What it signals is that the murder of a socialist is less abominable than the murder of another man. That the head of the French Republic sees international socialism as the danger, not the national chauvinisms which in the last years have consumed our lands and our young generations in a horrible conflagrations and which now want to drag us away from peace and back into the marshes of blood.

Even those who have no sympathies for the cause of socialism should realize, though, that such a signal is most unwise. Not only because it will only serve to alienate our country’s socialist movement from the Republic, its laws and institutions [7]. More importantly, because it encourages a scourge which can – and has – turned against ruling elites, too, and because it costs us credibility in insisting on legality in national and international politics. The assassination of a Habsburg prince by Serbian chauvinists had initiated the great bloodbath, and a few weeks after its conclusion, Portugal’s chauvinistic dictator was assassinated by one of his countrymen, too. A few weeks later, our prime minister only escaped with a bullet in his shoulder because his assassin had not been very skillful. Pardoning the assassin of Comrade Jaurès certainly encourages more such deeds. And how can M. Poincaré denounce the Hungarian government for instigating political violence in Italy and sign the government’s trade embargo aimed at strangling this brave little nation [8], when he sends such a calamitous signal to our own chauvinistic rabble-rousers?




[1] France’s laureate writer has criticized OTL’s “Not Guilty” in L’Humanitè. ITTL, Villain has been convicted in March and sentenced to death for murder because French nationalism is not quite as anti-socialist at that point in time, what with the SFIO still rather split on the great war and the UoE being an Entente partner instead of the Bolshevik defeatists of OTL. Now, Anatole France is looking ambivalently at the presidential pardon.

[2] The effects of the Italian Revolution, on top of red banners flying over the Ruhr and (lower) Elbe and on the Hungarian Danube, are clearly showing at this moment.

[3] Like IOTL.

[4] This is different from OTL. As I mentioned very briefly, there are more widespread protests in Spain ITTL, both in Catalunya where IOTL a syndicalist strike was rather successful and in Andalucia, and later in spring / early summer, combinations of strikes and political protests shook Madrid and other Castilian cities, too. The clashes between Left and Right have been violent in Spain for many decades – ITTL, the Left is more encouraged by the formation of the EFP to which its oligarchic Restaurationist government does not want to adhere, and until the IRSDLP(u) question arises, it is also more united. With the assassination of Caballero who at this time IOTL took a moderate position, the PSOE and the general atmosphere among the Spanish Left is changed not quite so subtle ways.

[5] This man is temporarily prime minister of Spain, like IOTL. He had many fanboys who would later form the foundation of various Extreme Right groups, and it is plausible that the assassin comes from among these groups, although I don’t think Maura really ordered Caballero’s assassination.

[6] Even if they don’t have government backing, militant right-wingers running around in Germany with more guns than the Entente wishes means it’s still a dangerous place for their political opponents. Whilst I have Rosa surviving (she has the shelter of UoE and Czechoslovak troops) so far, Karl met his bullet ITTL, too, only a few months later than IOTL.

[7] The SFIO's General Secretary, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, belongs to the party's radical left wing and has been a staunch pacifist throughout the war. He is not only criticised by Moderates, but also by a ultra-imperialist-theory faction around Boris Souvarine, who want the SFIO to join the IRSLDP,(u) which Frossard opposes. It is not quite clear which faction would be more radical indeed, but the picture that the party has lots of shades of radicalism is probably not wrong.

[8] France and the official Italian government have pushed for an EFP embargo against Hungary in retaliation for its political support for the Reds in Italy. (More on the Italian Revolution a few updates down the line, suffice it to say that three weeks after Mussolini’s call to arms, there has indeed been bloodshed across the country.) The UK and the US support it, too, but the embargo is not really very effective because the UoE is not participating, and Czechoslovakia is trading with Hungary, too, in exchange for the cessation of Hungarian “propaganda” in the plebiscite zones in Southern Slovakia / Northern Hungary. Hungary especially needs coal and fertilizer right now, and the UoE and CZ can provide both in sufficient quantities and buy up Hungarian machinery in exchange.

 

[Salvador79]

Dortmund [1] (EFP Mandate of Westphalia), July 29th, 1919: Der Syndikalist, p. 1:

TOGETHER FOR FREEDOM, PEACE AND SELF-ORGANISATION!

by Rudolf Rocker [2]

Last weekend, over a thousand members of the Free German Workers’ Union (FAUD) have steadfastly upheld the principle of voluntary association and triumphed over the temptation of “proletarian” dictatorship. The congress which convened in Elberfeld, the seat of the German Workers’ Council, has rejected the call of a fascist group around Arthur Barthels [3] to form Black Guards, arm themselves, arrogate the state’s monopoly of power for themselves, defy the French and imagine themselves in an alliance with the Black faction in Italy in a hypothetical struggle for continental hegemony. Barthels’ group, numbering some few dozens altogether [4], has left the congress, shouting wild insults and denouncing the FAUD as “lackeys of the French” [5] thereafter.

To them we say “Good riddance!”, and we are grateful for the purification of our movement which is the only guiding light and vanguard of Germany’s workers of the mind and the hand in their struggle towards non-exploitative voluntary association. The congress has sent an encouraging sign. We have understood: STATEHOOD MEANS WAR. We fill the space which the crumbling imperial state has left, we take into our hands what it had monopolized, but we do not become the new state, we do not establish a new monopoly. [6] Even struggling for this aim can only lead to more futile bloodshed and fratricide, as our Italian comrades must witness now. [7]

Statehood and the capitalist monopoly it upholds has perverted our intuition for cooperation into the cadaver obedience of puppets, and our natural feeling of solidarity and infested it with false and venomous strife. Liberating ourselves from under this yoke is not possible by assimilating ourselves to the ruling monopolists. On the other hand, the free associations we are building here in Mengede, in Essen, in Wattenscheid are recuperating our true spirit of brotherhood – it is here that the fruits of technological progress and scientific experiment will come to be enjoyed by all, where the masses will lift themselves from their abject misery and ignorance, where a young generation will unfold their personalities freely and learn to help each other instead of robbing and killing each other.



[1] The then-independent commune of Mengede, close by Dortmund of which it is a part today, was a stronghold of the anarcho-syndicalist FAUD IOTL, too. “The Syndicalist” was published in the namesake publishing house run by Fritz Kater in Berlin IOTL. ITTL, the fractured situation in Germany and the stunning success of the syndicalists along the Ruhr have caused the publishing house and the FAUD party headquarters to move to the West.

[2] Like IOTL, he is the leading thinker of German anarcho-syndicalism. And his name isn’t even a pseudonym!

[3] One of the leaders of a schismatic group IOTL, too, the “FAU Gelsenkirchener Richtung” who, in contrast to Rocker, Kater and Oertels, supported immediate engagement in revolutionary actions together with council communists and other Marxists with the aim of overthrowing the Weimar regime, while the party’s leadership in Berlin considered this pointless and emphasized education and propaganda. Barthels and the FAU (G), both IOTL and ITTL, are certainly not fascists in the OTL sense of the word – but ITTL, the term “fascist” has different meanings, as I have alluded to before, because the Italian model has a different character. Here (and increasingly elsewhere, too), it is taken to mean “militant revolutionary syndicalism aimed at taking over state power” – in contast to Rocker’s preferred brand of anarcho-syndicalism which rejects any state-based strategy.

[4] That’s a gross and intentional misrepresentation of a group which is certainly a lot larger.

[5] The recurrent allusions to the syndicalist relations with “the French” need some clarification. The renewed war against imperial Germany in May 1919 has brought various Red Revolutionaries, organized in soviets, into positions of power in the Ruhr Industrial Zone. The French (and Belgian) Army supported them as proxies who fought off Wetter’s Army and kept both monarchist Prussian forces and Heimatwehr militias off the French Rhineland and prevented all the latter from cutting the supply lines of the French as they moved Eastwards in the race for Berlin in the end phase.

After Wilhelm’s flight and Hindenburg’s surrender and suicide, French and Belgian forces have stayed on the right bank of the Rhine, dispersed over a large area which they could never hope to effectively control without either massive increases in troops or the collusion of local power holders. Since the former option was out of the question for political as well as financial reasons, French military leaders acted pragmatically. In the more rural and conservative Eastern parts of Westphalia, from Siegen in the South to Minden in the North, the administrative apparatus of the districts of Arnsberg and Minden were mostly left to function unimpeded. In the Ruhr Industrial Zone, the French arranged themselves with local workers’ councils and entrusted their Red Guards, whom they themselves had armed only weeks before, to police the urban areas while pre-war municipal administrations were told to prepare new elections on the local level and support the workers’ councils in the meantime.

The temporary structural outcome in the area which an EFP Council assumed formal responsibility over as the “Mandate of Westphalia” was a deliberate political void on the upper levels of legislation and jurisdiction. By now, a Mandate Commission has been established in Münster, in which the French (and to a much lesser degree the Belgians) run the whole show, but this commission has not yet taken any steps to remove this political void. The Mandate Commission has assumed legal control over all war-relevant industries (which includes the coal mines, steel plants, and factories for all sorts of machinery of the Ruhr Industrial Zones). This has further consolidated the workers’ councils symbiotic relationship with the occupiers: they’re delivering most of the coal and ore, which isn’t needed directly in the region, exclusively to the Mandate Commission, which is a fig leave for the French and Belgian governments, well below world market prices. The councilised workers still make a better cut than before, given that they haven’t just swapped capitalist profit margins for occupiers’ bargains, but that in the war years, wages had been strictly controlled, too.

This arrangement is not universally embraced on both sides, of course. In the Elberfeld Supreme Soviet, an SPD-aligned faction protests against French imperialism and demands a return to legality and immediate democratic elections in all of Westphalia and Germany. A USPD-aligned faction supports this call for elections, but abstains from anti-French propaganda, given its extremely pro-EFP stance and the chance that even the half-hearted French support means for the emergence of a new democratic polity which really commits to socialism. The local IRSDLP-aligned faction basically shares the same political agenda, but doesn’t merge with the USPD because they’re mostly survivors of the Spartakist uprising who haven’t forgotten the USPD’s betrayal. But neither of these three factions is the strongest among the delegates from workers’ town councils on the Ruhr: like IOTL, syndicalist groups are stronger here, even though they, too, don’t form a majority, either. Among them, many support Rocker’s policy of tacit agreements with the occupation forces. In earlier articles and speeches, Rocker has clad this policy in anarchist terms, interpreting the temporary political void in Westphalia as a first sign of the disappearance of the coercive state apparatus and the triumph of voluntary association. Of course he is aware that “statehood” hasn’t disappeared and that the rule of force is now embodied by the French and Belgian military – but he declares this as merely a temporary situation which will sort itself out when the consequences of the war have been straightened out a little.

This position is not embraced by all syndicalists, though. Some of them – actually, quite a lot – view this tacit arrangement as a betrayal of German workers’ interests and selling out to the French. Now that the Italian Revolution is setting an example of revolutionary workers attempting to take over state power, and Mussolini’s Blacks combine syndicalist and nationalist rhetoric, it’s inevitable that some syndicalists on the Ruhr attempt to imitate this policy – which implies, as a first step, resistance against French rule.

[6] This description is in stark contradiction to how soviet power on the Ruhr actually works: municipal administrations and private companies are coerced to comply because everyone is absolutely reliant on coal and coal-fuelled electricity at this point in time…

[7] The first weeks of the Italian Revolution, or rather: the Italian Civil War, have gone differently than both Reds and Blacks planned. While the assembly of Marxist communes had been paralysed by a schism between those who support a stab at capturing nation-wide state power, led by Amadeo Bordiga, and those who prefer grassroots sovietisation and self-defense (primarily the Torino group), the Black Assembly in Parma has decided overwhelmingly for the revolutionary attempt to take over state power. To this end, revolutionary armies are planned to assemble and arm themselves in six centres of power, and once they consolidated, they are supposed to march on Rome together. Fighting against their Marxist revolutionary rivals was not declared a primary goal – but in the process of consolidation, a subordinate aim of the Blacks had been to infiltrate Marxist-controlled councils and factory groups so that now “Red” areas would join the revolution, too.

This far, gaining weapons has not proved quite as easy as Mussolini had envisioned, and infiltrating Red areas has not been as successful as hoped, either. Quite the opposite: the Reds are reacting with similar counter-measures. As a result, the first weeks have not seen any major takeovers of arsenals or town halls, and instead degenerated into extremely bloody “anti-infiltration fights” between Red Guards and Black Fasci.

 

[Salvador79]

Copenhagen (Kingdom of Denmark): Politiken, August 15th, 1919, p. 1:

RECORD LOANS APPROVED AFTER NICE CONFERENCE [1]

by Henrik Cavling

His Majesty’s Minister for Finance, Edvard Brandes, has approved of loans to Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, the Ukraine and the Union of Equals as a whole in the total sum of more than 125 million crowns. [2] Intense parliamentary debates have preceded this decision over the past weeks. The Coalition has pointed out the economic dangers of a domino of state bankruptcies rolling over the continent from East to West [3], and stressed the benefits of close economic ties in the Baltic space. [4] Critics of the measure from among the Opposition have uttered both skepticism with regards to the trustworthiness of the borrowers and considerations of international political strategy.

With the decision now finally taken, the Zahle cabinet has taken an important step towards consolidating Denmark’s stature. Crucial for this decision appears to have been the cautious and conciliatory stance of the Union’s President Avksentiev at the international conference in Nice [5] and the efforts undertaken by his government to promote a peaceful resolution of the crisis in Italy. [6] International political commentators have sought to explain this as a victory of the Khrystiuk faction over the Kerensky faction in the latter’s own domain of cooperating with the other great powers of the world. [7]

Be that as it may – both the outcome of the Nice Conference and the series of loans extended by our government, which will probably be followed by similar such arrangements between other states [8], seem to suggest that, after all the horrors and the turmoil of the last years, the world is now slowly returning onto a more steady path, hopefully one which shall lead us towards a new age of co-operation which brings peace and prosperity to all our nations.


[1] This does not mean “pleasant conference”, but rather a conference taking place in the French coastal city of Nice. The ambiguity would not occur in Danish.

[2] Approximately 25 million US dollars, this may not appear much from our present perspective. Considering that this amounts to a third of the Danish government’s annual budget, though, it is a massive set of loans (which Denmark, although experiencing a bit of inflation during the war, too, can afford to extend, better than many others, its economy having fared comparatively well in the past five years). For the Union of Equals, it is only a slight help, given that in the Great War alone, they have acquired foreign debt of more than 5 billion dollars. But it can help them avoid immediate bankruptcy and buys them a few months of time. For the constituent republics mentioned here, it is groundbreaking, since these (in contrast to Finland and the Union level) have not inherited any precious metal reserves or anything of the sort.

[3] Russia (now the UoE) owes billions to both Britain and France; France owes Britain and the US even more, and much of the British loans have been made possible by US credit in turn.

[4] Or, less carefully put, favourable terms of trade with these countries for the Danish economy, and some degree of political influence as well.

[5] Two topics were on the official agenda of the summit in sunny Nice: the “crisis in Italy” and the Ottoman Question. With regards to the former, a common EFP policy has finally been formulated (more details in footnote 6), which meant that the UoE had to swallow a lot of internationalist socialist pride. With regards to the Ottoman Question, too, a draft has been finalized which is now communicated to the Ottoman government for signature. In exchange for a seat on the Ottoman Public Debt Administration board and on the International Administrative Board of the Straits, the UoE has committed to a long-term stationing of its “International Cossacks” without any gains beyond those which they had obtained in Armenia in the Great War, while other Entente nations would receive additional territorial gains (Greece in Smyrna and Pontos, and after the 1921 Plebiscites probably also in Eastern Thrace) and protectorates (France in Lebanon and Cilicia, Britain in the form of the Hashemite Kingdoms of Syria and Iraq as protected states). Also, the UoE had to accept that combatting “military aggression, chauvinism, terrorism and massacres” are the_only_internationally recognized relevant parameters in the process of finding a new constitution for the Ottoman rump state – with no talk of democracy, civil rights, social equality or the like added.

(Committing to the policing of Turkey implied, under the given circumstances, massively reducing the UoE presence in the Eastern half of Prussia including Berlin. Here, the UoE could find itself between the seats: on the one hand, they must seek to stabilize the Berlin Soviet as much as they can as fast as possible if they want any lasting influence on Germany. On the other hand, keeping all the various leftovers of the old Prussian system from coagulating and forming another aggressive and dangerous entity somewhere in East Elbia without proper military forces means relying on the Poles who consistently pursue the policy of policing and cleansing only those territories they are designated to take over. Selling massive territorial losses in the East to any Prussian / German polity, even to one led by the likes of Rosa Luxemburg, may not be very easy, though, and could destabilize them.)

[6] The Italian Civil War is indeed already nearing the end of its hottest phase. I had intended to describe it in greater detail, but that would have gone way beyond my own possibilities and I did not dare ask so much input from lukedalton or others knowledgeable on the Italian situation. So here goes the very short summary of how things turned out: The Blacks had more weapons and more battle-experienced men on their side, and they had the momentum of the offensive, too, at first. As the infights between Reds and Blacks wore on in July, the latter momentum was lost, and it became evident that the PSI fiefs in many industrial cities on the North would neither join nor fall to the Blacks, especially with Hungarian volunteers with weapons filtering into the Red strongholds and ammunition production there being put to use in the defense of Red strongholds. Orlando’s government did take a wait-and-see approach, as @lukedalton has suggested, and while the Coalition as a whole did not support Blueshirt attacks on Reds and Blacks officially, wealthy individuals with ties to the liberals and conservatives did lend them quite concrete aid.

By early August, the question of a March on Rome had to be forced now, in spite of sub-optimal conditions, or be given up on. In this situation, the Black front turned out to be a rather loose assortment. Crucial for its manpower reservoir and territorial depth was the contribution of the left-agrarian Partito Rivoluzionario dei Contadini Italiani (PRCI), who looked to the Russian SRs as their inspiration and sought to copy their radical land reform. Part of the self-moderating volte in UoE foreign policy, forced upon them by their illiquidity, was how leading Russian and Ukrainian SRs involved themselves in brokering a “pact” among all major Italian parties for social, industrial, and agrarian reform, but also for civil disarmament, a disavowing of partisan political violence, and a strengthening of public law and order infrastructure and personnel after the elections, including higher wages for police staff, and moderate land reform elements, and even more so in convincing the PRCI to join this pact and desert the Black Revolutionary cause. The PRCI split over this issue – I had intended to research and cover this in greater detail, but in the end, it would be me making up all sorts of people and events since IOTL the situation in the Italian countryside was different in terms of which political forces existed, so here’s just the short summary – , but the larger faction went with the pact, and so the Black Revolution is fizzling out, and Benito Mussolini has fled to Switzerland (will he meet Bavaria’s royal family there? …) for the moment. The UoE has also exerted (trade) pressure on the Hungarian government to withdraw its “volunteers” and thus prevent the Red side from filling the void which the collapsing Black front left. This is the moment for ordinary Italian gendarmerie, police, military etc. units to move in and restore the constitutional order city by city, province by province. It’s not yet entirely calm, but by now, everyone is aware that the Revolution in Italy (either of them) has failed, and the constitutional system will survive.

[7] The Ukrainian SR Pavlo Khrystiuk is Minister for Finance in the Union of Equals’ federal government. (The Ukrainian SRs needed an important portfolio, given their pivotal influence both in Avksentiev’s nomination campaign, in his victory over Trotsky, and quite generally Ukraine’s status as the second-largest republic of the union. Since foreign policy, the other major competency of the federal government, has gone to the Russian Popular Socialist Labour Party (i.e. Kerensky), finances was the only other option which made sense. Khrystiuk is a very centrist SR, but that isn’t the root of the dissent with Kerensky hinted at here – it’s their respective ministeries and the logic they follow. Kerensky’s foreign ministry is, every so often, involuntarily (or voluntarily) relapsing into the patterns of an expansionist tsarist Russian foreign policy. Khrystiuk, on the other hand, knows that much of the strong appearance the UoE is making with all its involvements in so many places is built on a very shaky foundation, that the Union is close to the day is in which the UoE government has become unable to repay one of its loans to a foreign creditor. Within the federal government, Khrystiuk has quietly urged for a massive reduction in UoE military presence around the globe and for strategic concessions to the other great powers so that the Union gains time to restructure its debt.

[8] As alluded to above, the UoE is not the only one tetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The fact that this is openly expressed in a newspaper suggests that the situation is serious indeed.

 

[Salvador79]

Helsinki (Finnish Federative Republic): Helsingin Sanomat, September 2nd, 1919, p.1 :

TERRORISTS KILL AVKSENTIEV!

Russian terrorists from a group named “The Golden Cross” have assassinated the President of the Union, Mr Nikolai Avksentiev, in Odessa yesterday, where he had alighted from the ship which had brought him and his staff back from the Constantinople Conference. [1] In the midst of a crowd of spectators and protesters, the assassins successfully brought themselves in immediate proximity of the presidential entourage, where two of them attempted to set off explosive devices which they carried under their clothes. While the bomb of one of the terrorists, one Serghey Bazanov, failed to detonate and could be defused by the president’s guard, another bomb exploded close to Mr Avksentiev. Medical doctors have confirmed the death of the President and one of his bodyguards, as well as of the perpetrator, Konstantin Goremykin. Five other members of Mr Avksentiev’s staff as well as two of the terrorists have been severely wounded and are treated in a hospital in the port city on the Black Sea.

Expressions of condolence have reached the Winter Palace [2] from all over the world. The President of our Senate, Matti Paasivuori, has expressed his shock and grief, and so have Mr Thomas Marshall, acting President of the U.S.A., M. Raymond Poincaré, President of the French Republic, Duke Ernst August of Brunswick, Lüneburg and Hanover [3], and many others.

Undoubtedly, the Union and the entire community of nations has lost a circumspect and thoughtful statesman. Nikolai Avksentiev has managed to steer the big ship of our federation into calmer waters and facilitated a return to orderly politics. Patiently and carefully, he has brought a polity shaken by revolutionary turmoil back into the choir of the leading civilized powers. Across the continent, he will be remembered as one of the founding fathers of the Federation of Peace, which we hope will avert the scourge of war from coming generations. In Finnish politics, his willingness as leader of the PSR faction in the Constituent Assembly to renegotiate the Concordance as well as his admonitions at the address of Boris Kamkov to call Trotsky back from Finland have earned him our respect.

It is almost impossible, though, not to notice the historical irony which lies in the fact that a President and party leader has been murdered by terrorists now, when it was his own party which had so fervently advocated terrorism and assassinations of government officials twenty years ago. This past is not quite so distant – the man who succeeds Mr Avksentiev in the office of President of the Union now, Vice-President Vladimir Volsky [4], has personally participated in such acts. At the turn of the century, Russia’s new Populists opened a can of worms which is now eating into their own flesh. From the entourage of the presidential cabinet meetings held in Petrograd under Volsky’s leadership when Avksentiev had been in Paris, rumours have spread about an allegedly impulsive nature of the vice-president. We can only hope that these rumours will be proven wrong. We can only hope that Mr Volsky has fully understood the responsibility he has inherited now, the frailty of our continental peace and recovery, and that his party as well as the other parties of the Left have fully understood how disastrous their past engagement in political terrorism has been and that an unambiguous rejection of such deeds is necessary.

Our National Assembly Party has issued such a declaration of unambiguous rejection of political terrorism after the assassination of Oskari Tokoi and Kyösti Kallio by the Vihan Veljet. Other parties and movements across the Union must follow this example now. The parties presently in power should realize that this is a goal of utmost national and global importance – and that they can make it easier for national-minded and non-socialist parties to position themselves firmly on this fundament of non-violence if the Left desists in its rhetoric of class warfare and its threats of violence against “the bourgeoisie”. Stating the obvious, namely that a large segment of the population, without whose engagement and loyalty no society can thrive, currently feels existentially threatened, and that such threats and fears are the ferment on which terrorism grows, does not mean to exculpate the terrorists. The manifesto with which the "Golden Cross" has assumed responsibility for the deed is full of the vilest hatred against Jews and others deemed non-Russian, clings to dreams of a mythical past and a glorious czardom, rejects freedom and democracy, and is in every detail utterly unacceptable. Such extremism must be rigorously rejected. All violent and extremist policies must be rejected. This should be the moment in which we all pause and reflect on the value of peaceful and harmonious social relations and on their requirements.

And when we have found the resolve to say no to political violence of any kind, we ought to expand the mandate of the International Attorney in the Hague, so that he can prosecute terrorists across the globe – because political terrorism has become a global scourge. We owe this to Nikolai Avksentiev, and to all other victims of political assassinations.



[1] In Constantinople, an alt-Sevres treaty, along with additional Protocols to the Hague Conventions, establishing a Court for Crimes and Atrocities Committed during the Great War and an International Attorney along with auxiliary (investigative) organs, and also more explicitly banning chemical and biological warfare (akin to the Geneva Protocol of 1925: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol ) was signed by the Ottoman government on the one hand, and the governments of Britain, France, Greece, the UoE and Italy on the other hand. Additional signatories to all three documents were the provisional governments of the Arab Kingdom of Syria, the Kingdom of the Hejaz, the State of Lebanon, the Kingdom of Iraq, and the Kurdish Free State. Signatories to the two protocols added to the Hague Convention only would become the governments of more than 30 countries over the course of the rest of 1919. The United States of America would only sign the protocol banning chemical and bacterial weapons, but not the one which established the Great War Court and International Attorney due to fears that the latter’s function was not formulated explicitly enough in a way which would exclude its prosecuting US military personnel for their conduct in any past or future conflict.

[2] Both the Presidential offices and the Council of the Union are housed in the Winter Palace in Petrograd since the beginning of the year.

[3] Who of what? you may well ask. More on that in an authorial update on Germany. I have decided to go with the idea of a Welf restoration campaign. While it had only limited support as is, significant British meddling could change this. This is part of the Conservative-led turn-around in British policies towards Germany, which is the last nail in the coffin of Prussia.

[4] Vladimir Volsky is the first man from the second row of the SRs who IOTL never became very prominent but of whom more and more will come to the fore ITTL. IOTL and ITTL, Volsky was a regional SR leader in Tambov. Allegedly, he and Maria Spiridonova had been lovers once. In contrast to the latter, though, Volsky did not join the Left SRs IOTL; instead, he shortly played a role in the White movement until the likes of him (i.e. leftist anti-Bolsheviks) became sidelined. What I have gathered about his biography makes me believe that he is a possible candidate for the type of “revolutionary militia-warlord in 1917 turned regional SR strongman”. A politician from the centre of power like Avksentiev would need, in the big coalition which only could have carried him into office in the autumn and winter of 1918, some such regional – well, in today’s Russia such people tend to be called “oligarchs”, but ITTL’s Russia in 1919 the economic circumstances are different, so even if this name might be applied to people like Volsky, it carries slightly different meanings – powerful person is required, too, in order to ensure other regional leaders that a SR-led Union government would not threaten their powerbases. That is why, I think, Avksentiev might well have chosen someone like Vladimir Volsky as his vice-presidential candidate, and have won on this ticket.