Is Menelik's family significantly different from OTL now? I would guess so, his relationship with both Mika'el and Makonnen are going to be deeply changed (is Mika'el even his ally here?).
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Is Menelik's family significantly different from OTL now? I would guess so, his relationship with both Mika'el and Makonnen are going to be deeply changed (is Mika'el even his ally here?).
As long as we play blind-man's-bluff with guessing we can never be sure; let me clarify then--"Shevek" is indeed an homage to Ursula LeGuin's homage to Oppenheimer. For those who haven't read The Dispossessed, the Odonians of Annares, the habitable (marginally!
) moon of Urras (known to Terrans as Tau Ceti II IIRC) are anarchist-communists who follow the writings of a woman named Odo. Buzzwords in their ideology include notions like "the social organism;" but they don't believe in coercion (on paper anyway; the novel's subtitle "An Ambiguous Utopia" refers to the fact that coercion can manifest in hidden forms and so Shevek of the book and his circle underscore a less-well-remembered notion of Odo's, the permanent revolution). They believe people organically wish to participate creatively in society and therefore coercion is not necessary. It blew my mind when I read it in junior high school, but I wasn't sure what to make of its realism--later I learned about the Summerhill School in Britain and was more convinced it might be on solid ground.
To claim a resemblance to the talented and heroic Shevek of the book would be hubris indeed. The Annaresti Odonians however speak a synthetic language that was designed to harmonize with the world-view, and among their reforms, they are assigned single names by a central computer at birth; upon dying the name returns to the pool and so the book's Shevek had a predecessor, a woman who invented a certain kind of nut called by that name. Generations later there might be a #23....
So yeah, I'm guessing that was your guess, Jonathan. I've spelled it out before, years ago, on this site.
If Italian anarchists are going to replicate elements of Odonian thought--I'd think it important that some of their intellectual lights, recognized as such, are women. How well does that fit?
I've gotten the impression that unfortunately a lot of the radicals of OTL in this era were dangerously masculinist--not all of them fortunately, but I figured that the Odonians differed from Marxists and most anarchists of our Earth OTL because Odo was female, and the differences had to do with stuff that OTL mostly got currency with radical feminists of the 60s and 70s and later--people like Starhawk for instance. Would such a character or hopefully, numbers of them, fit in to northeast Italy in your 1896?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that no man could conceive of the issues and perspectives women would bring in; I rather hope not. But it would most probably require a woman's perspective. Your timeline drew me in because women were getting into positions to be heard from, starting with Pablo Abacar's relations with the yadjiis and his wife. Then in America we have people like Harriet Tubman and her increased importance, and lots of women involved in the earlier resistance and uprisings.
So if Malatesta sees the light, it would be most plausible if it's because there are some women of importance flashing it in his face.
I've often wondered why, OTL, the Russians, when they cast down the Soviet Union and un-named Leningrad, didn't rename it "Petrograd" rather than reverting to German-language St. Petersburg. I can imagine several reasons they did not; for one thing I've seen some clues in translated Soviet science fiction--specifically Self-Discovery, a fascinating and fun read--and I suspect technically Ukrainian rather than Russian SF, but very decidedly Soviet not just by coincidence of writing date but mentality--that Russians, and perhaps most Soviet citizens, went on thinking of it as being really St. Petersburg all along--the novel casually refers to someone from Leningrad as a "Petersburger" you see. It's hard to judge the significance of that in a translated novel but I could see no reason for it to be rendered that way unless that's actually what most Russians casually said, even in the mid-1960s. Another would be, if the name "Petrograd," despite technically being a creation of Nicholas II as part of wartime anti-Germanism, is too much associated with the revolutionary fervor that led to the Bolshevik government the Russians were just tossing out. To be sure, the only alternate association it could have would be to the last, failing and disreputable, years of the Romanov dynasty. The negativity of both, rather than neutralizing each other, seems to have multiplied and made the Russian form of the name of the city unusable.
So, I took the fact that the publisher of the second reference, "Rodina," AKA "Motherland" more or less in English, is in St. Petersburg as moderately significant. It could be the rebels changed the name as per OTL (obviously not to Leningrad, and I suspect Tolstoy would be more successful than Lenin was in forbidding the city to be posthumously renamed after himself) and then some later more conservative change changed it back.
But what I'm seeing here is that first of all the Tsar ITTL never sanctioned the sort of anti-Teutonism that took off among the Entente OTL, to quite absurd and embarrassing extremes here in the USA--because the FAR alliance included a number of German principalities. Denouncing Germans tout court would not have done, fortunately considering all the Tsar's own close Germanic relations! So he didn't mess with the city name, which helps hold the line against successors doing so.
Also, Tolstoy is significantly enough, Christian himself, and quite seriously so. I don't know if the Orthodox Church ever canonized Peter the Great (I've heard to my consternation and sorrow they have lately, in the past generation, canonized Nicholas II!) Assuming not, and anyway that his new capital was opened for business and named during Tsar Peter's own lifetime, I suppose the city is named after Peter the Apostle.
Tolstoy would respect that. So would successor socialists who are predominantly Christian.
We can't rule out any possibilities to be sure. It is even possible a radically atheistic government took power for some time and went about renaming all kinds of things, only to be reversed later. But given the lack of global wars for more than a half century after this, I'm going with the assumption of continuity in the name of the city--here, it has never been anything but "St. Petersburg," no matter who held power there. So that suggests that either the Christians hold the balance of power, or that any others who succeed them don't care about the city name, or that someone to their right eventually took power-but the passage describing the revolution doesn't seem very vitriolic, so a more moderate regime if any probably arose by moderate means.
----
Le Guin's Shevek would never extrapolate so much from so little evidence, I guess. That's why I'm number 23!
) moon of Urras (known to Terrans as Tau Ceti II IIRC) are anarchist-communists who follow the writings of a woman named Odo. Buzzwords in their ideology include notions like "the social organism;" but they don't believe in coercion (on paper anyway; the novel's subtitle "An Ambiguous Utopia" refers to the fact that coercion can manifest in hidden forms and so Shevek of the book and his circle underscore a less-well-remembered notion of Odo's, the permanent revolution). They believe people organically wish to participate creatively in society and therefore coercion is not necessary. It blew my mind when I read it in junior high school, but I wasn't sure what to make of its realism--later I learned about the Summerhill School in Britain and was more convinced it might be on solid ground.To claim a resemblance to the talented and heroic Shevek of the book would be hubris indeed. The Annaresti Odonians however speak a synthetic language that was designed to harmonize with the world-view, and among their reforms, they are assigned single names by a central computer at birth; upon dying the name returns to the pool and so the book's Shevek had a predecessor, a woman who invented a certain kind of nut called by that name. Generations later there might be a #23....
So yeah, I'm guessing that was your guess, Jonathan. I've spelled it out before, years ago, on this site.
If Italian anarchists are going to replicate elements of Odonian thought--I'd think it important that some of their intellectual lights, recognized as such, are women. How well does that fit?
I've gotten the impression that unfortunately a lot of the radicals of OTL in this era were dangerously masculinist--not all of them fortunately, but I figured that the Odonians differed from Marxists and most anarchists of our Earth OTL because Odo was female, and the differences had to do with stuff that OTL mostly got currency with radical feminists of the 60s and 70s and later--people like Starhawk for instance. Would such a character or hopefully, numbers of them, fit in to northeast Italy in your 1896?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that no man could conceive of the issues and perspectives women would bring in; I rather hope not. But it would most probably require a woman's perspective. Your timeline drew me in because women were getting into positions to be heard from, starting with Pablo Abacar's relations with the yadjiis and his wife. Then in America we have people like Harriet Tubman and her increased importance, and lots of women involved in the earlier resistance and uprisings.
So if Malatesta sees the light, it would be most plausible if it's because there are some women of importance flashing it in his face.
I've often wondered why, OTL, the Russians, when they cast down the Soviet Union and un-named Leningrad, didn't rename it "Petrograd" rather than reverting to German-language St. Petersburg. I can imagine several reasons they did not; for one thing I've seen some clues in translated Soviet science fiction--specifically Self-Discovery, a fascinating and fun read--and I suspect technically Ukrainian rather than Russian SF, but very decidedly Soviet not just by coincidence of writing date but mentality--that Russians, and perhaps most Soviet citizens, went on thinking of it as being really St. Petersburg all along--the novel casually refers to someone from Leningrad as a "Petersburger" you see. It's hard to judge the significance of that in a translated novel but I could see no reason for it to be rendered that way unless that's actually what most Russians casually said, even in the mid-1960s. Another would be, if the name "Petrograd," despite technically being a creation of Nicholas II as part of wartime anti-Germanism, is too much associated with the revolutionary fervor that led to the Bolshevik government the Russians were just tossing out. To be sure, the only alternate association it could have would be to the last, failing and disreputable, years of the Romanov dynasty. The negativity of both, rather than neutralizing each other, seems to have multiplied and made the Russian form of the name of the city unusable.
So, I took the fact that the publisher of the second reference, "Rodina," AKA "Motherland" more or less in English, is in St. Petersburg as moderately significant. It could be the rebels changed the name as per OTL (obviously not to Leningrad
, and I suspect Tolstoy would be more successful than Lenin was in forbidding the city to be posthumously renamed after himself) and then some later more conservative change changed it back.But what I'm seeing here is that first of all the Tsar ITTL never sanctioned the sort of anti-Teutonism that took off among the Entente OTL, to quite absurd and embarrassing extremes here in the USA--because the FAR alliance included a number of German principalities. Denouncing Germans tout court would not have done, fortunately considering all the Tsar's own close Germanic relations!
So he didn't mess with the city name, which helps hold the line against successors doing so. Also, Tolstoy is significantly enough, Christian himself, and quite seriously so. I don't know if the Orthodox Church ever canonized Peter the Great (I've heard to my consternation and sorrow they have lately, in the past generation, canonized Nicholas II!
) Assuming not, and anyway that his new capital was opened for business and named during Tsar Peter's own lifetime, I suppose the city is named after Peter the Apostle. Tolstoy would respect that. So would successor socialists who are predominantly Christian.
We can't rule out any possibilities to be sure. It is even possible a radically atheistic government took power for some time and went about renaming all kinds of things, only to be reversed later. But given the lack of global wars for more than a half century after this, I'm going with the assumption of continuity in the name of the city--here, it has never been anything but "St. Petersburg," no matter who held power there. So that suggests that either the Christians hold the balance of power, or that any others who succeed them don't care about the city name, or that someone to their right eventually took power-but the passage describing the revolution doesn't seem very vitriolic, so a more moderate regime if any probably arose by moderate means.
----
Le Guin's Shevek would never extrapolate so much from so little evidence, I guess. That's why I'm number 23!
Hnau
Banned
Congrats on the recent updates! Exciting stuff. The Russian Revolution is probably my favorite part of history.
Certainly the stress TTL's Great War had on Russia was worse than OTL. They had a more repressive government to begin with and the lack of industrialization pushed them towards even more totalitarian methods to get the results they wanted. They also had a rebellion to deal with in Central Asia that in OTL they did not. That this Russia managed to get to 1897 is extraordinary. Which means that none of the descriptions used to describe the revolution should be seen as an exaggeration. Just as the tragedies in the Congo were worse ITTL than in OTL, so should be counted the Russian Revolution of 1897 as more tragic than OTL.
I've written a lot about the 1917 Russian election to the Constituent Assembly before. In fact I have a couple files which constitute the clearest view on the election returns that modern research can turn up. It wouldn't matter too much here: this Russia is already so different. But I will say that in all my research, it was certain that in 1917 the most popular party that the inhabitants of the former Russian Empire gravitated to was the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the party of the narodniks. Here it doesn't seem there is an organized party, but those ideological influences will be even stronger. The results of an election will most likely yield overwhelming victories for any branch of narodnichestvo. Which is exciting! Even with its myriad of flavors and such a unique thinker like Tolstoy as its spokesmen, narodnichestvo will finally have a chance to try and transform society, which it never had in our timeline.
I hope you've picked up some books by Oliver Radkey, Jonathan, you'll need to take a look at least at one of them to understand where the narodniks were originally coming from. I can't stress enough that the central idea narodniks championed was that land shouldn't be seen as property, that the Romans perverted civilization by saying land could be bought, owned, and sold. Their principle desire was to see land as free as air and sunshine, available to any who would utilize it. In OTL 1917 they thought the best way to make that possible was to give authority to self-organizing village councils to divide rural land as they saw fit and distribute natural resources within their jurisdiction to whoever needed it. There's obviously a connection to syndicalism within narodnichestvo that its theoreticians didn't write too much about, but it would be natural to assume they'd support worker's cooperatives and the like.
If Tolstoy and the victors of the first elections get to experiment with these ideas on social and economic organization, they'll create a society that has never really been seen before in OTL. Who knows if it'll change or be corrupted, succeed or fail but it's going to be exciting.
Also, it seems Tolstoy's religious-political ideas are deviant enough from the norm that it should be recognized as a new ideology with a new title entirely. This actually happened in our timeline... his followers referred to themselves as Tolstoyans and called his ideology Tolstoyism. I think one could use the word Tolstoyist as an adjective. I hope you start using these titles in future installments just like you use the word Abacarist and Belloist a lot!
Certainly the stress TTL's Great War had on Russia was worse than OTL. They had a more repressive government to begin with and the lack of industrialization pushed them towards even more totalitarian methods to get the results they wanted. They also had a rebellion to deal with in Central Asia that in OTL they did not. That this Russia managed to get to 1897 is extraordinary. Which means that none of the descriptions used to describe the revolution should be seen as an exaggeration. Just as the tragedies in the Congo were worse ITTL than in OTL, so should be counted the Russian Revolution of 1897 as more tragic than OTL.
I've written a lot about the 1917 Russian election to the Constituent Assembly before. In fact I have a couple files which constitute the clearest view on the election returns that modern research can turn up. It wouldn't matter too much here: this Russia is already so different. But I will say that in all my research, it was certain that in 1917 the most popular party that the inhabitants of the former Russian Empire gravitated to was the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the party of the narodniks. Here it doesn't seem there is an organized party, but those ideological influences will be even stronger. The results of an election will most likely yield overwhelming victories for any branch of narodnichestvo. Which is exciting! Even with its myriad of flavors and such a unique thinker like Tolstoy as its spokesmen, narodnichestvo will finally have a chance to try and transform society, which it never had in our timeline.
I hope you've picked up some books by Oliver Radkey, Jonathan, you'll need to take a look at least at one of them to understand where the narodniks were originally coming from. I can't stress enough that the central idea narodniks championed was that land shouldn't be seen as property, that the Romans perverted civilization by saying land could be bought, owned, and sold. Their principle desire was to see land as free as air and sunshine, available to any who would utilize it. In OTL 1917 they thought the best way to make that possible was to give authority to self-organizing village councils to divide rural land as they saw fit and distribute natural resources within their jurisdiction to whoever needed it. There's obviously a connection to syndicalism within narodnichestvo that its theoreticians didn't write too much about, but it would be natural to assume they'd support worker's cooperatives and the like.
If Tolstoy and the victors of the first elections get to experiment with these ideas on social and economic organization, they'll create a society that has never really been seen before in OTL. Who knows if it'll change or be corrupted, succeed or fail but it's going to be exciting.
Also, it seems Tolstoy's religious-political ideas are deviant enough from the norm that it should be recognized as a new ideology with a new title entirely. This actually happened in our timeline... his followers referred to themselves as Tolstoyans and called his ideology Tolstoyism. I think one could use the word Tolstoyist as an adjective. I hope you start using these titles in future installments just like you use the word Abacarist and Belloist a lot!
Last edited:
Italy was relatively plenty of radical women in Anarchist and Socialist circles (Leda Rafanelli, who later converted to Islam IOTL, seems particularly relevant to this TL) although in general, I concur that this era's radicalism tended to be quite blissfully blind to gender oppression. Feminism existed (we have calls for gender equality IOTL since the 1790s or so) but wasn't well-rooted or well-regarded, and had relatively few connections with the labor movement; Italian early feminists I know of tended to be pretty bourgeois (this is not a problem exclusive to Italy, of course).
Anarchism of course was all for women's liberation in principle, but on the other hand, didn't usually see gender oppression as a top-priority issue in its own right (rather a sort of consequence of class and state oppression). Roy Lewis in "King Ludd" portrays a similar situation (although his Radicals are Socialists, not Anarchists).
(Honestly, I am not sure how liberation of women can work out in an industrialized Western society without washing machines and contraceptive pills.)
Also, I am not sure how relevant the fact Odo is a woman is to her ideology. I mean, it is very important for Le Guins's views, but, as long as I can recall, Odo's gender never comes to the fore as an issue in story, either in the Dispossessed or in The Day Before the Revolution.
WWI OTL hurt Russia quite badly to be sure--but the real trauma Russia took decades to recover from was the Civil War. Famines and plagues followed on the heels of rival armies fighting out Russia's future, and the Bolsheviks in particular lost key people, many of the older urban industrial rank and file Party members who would have been very helpful in reconstituting the stricken, abandoned industrial sites.
So even if it is clearly the case that Russia suffered more from the war here, it seems that if the St Petersburg "council" (it is cute how Jonathan is not using the Russian word for that
) can make peace with the Central Asian uprising then there won't be a Civil War; all sectors of Russia except Poland and Finland which are removed by treaty will fall in line behind Vozhd Tolstoy. Nor is Russia forced to hand over nearly as vast territorial losses as the Bolsheviks had to concede to buy a dubious peace from the German at Brest-Litovsk OTL. True, those concessions did not outlast the German Empire, but having made them threw the Bolshevik claim to rule in the conceded territories (and elsewhere for having made such sweeping concessions) into doubt, helping fuel the Civil War. And of course depriving the Bolsheviks of critical resources and organizational opportunities at a crucial time. That's not happening here either.So on the whole I'd say this revolutionary Russia is starting from a less low place than the OTL Bolsheviks, once the Civil War was finally stopped. And I don't see how such disruptions as the Great Purges would come about either. Of course a lot of potential might instead get frittered away by indecisiveness and various sectors enjoying autonomies they did not under the Bolsheviks and therefore refusing to synchronize into one national Plan--this is called "freedom!" And it may have a price.
I am not sure how a Russia that is organized on Narodnik/Tolstoyan principles will muster a sufficient self-defense to deter the Germans and possibly Japanese from opportunistically trying to prey on it. Well, Russia is still very big, and appears to enjoy enough political unity that no part of it can be attacked without bringing the strength of the whole to bear on the breach. I suspect that an alliance with the Ottomans is in the cards. Or actually they could ally with almost anyone, because Tolstoy and an agrarian-based socialism are not going to look nearly as threatening to the Great Powers as a vast Marxist revolutionary proletarian state did OTL.
So it probably won't be vitally necessary for Russia to seek the rapid industrialization Stalin sought OTL. I rather hope they find ways to do it pretty fast anyhow, but if the horrible aspects of the drive of OTL can be avoided that is worth a lot of backwardness I guess. As long as there isn't some crazed industrial nation with a vast army and the ambition of subjugating them wholesale champing at the bit on their border!
Without my getting all tedious about it, let me just say I think there are some deep ideological viewpoints that even radicals tended to carry over, that are founded on an unfavorable gender division. And so when an ideological system is being seen from a woman's point of view she will much more likely see things that men who otherwise regard themselves as polar opposites will both take for granted and thus not properly factor in at all.
So--LeGuin didn't tediously spell out how Odo's teachings differed from Karl Marx's. But the outcomes were different; I infer from the author's own feminism and the different style of the Odonian movement that the model of society she worked with and presented was more accurate and useful due to her factoring in properly what gender oppression was and how it worked.
Similarly in pre-pill Italy--feminism became easier and less threatening to mainstream capitalism with increased prospects for a woman to opt to live her life more like a man, therefore versions of it became more likely to spread. But the importance of the perspectives women bring to our perceptions of the situations we deal with was no less when the truths they'd be honestly reminding us of were less easy to swallow. They would however be less palatable; instead of being able to belatedly offer women a partial enjoyment of male privilege, the pressure would be on men to give theirs up.
I'm all for progress; a wide range of contraceptives (and disease prophylactics) makes our life options better. So do gadgets like washing machines and vacuum cleaners. But I don't see them as the inventions that made feminism possible. At best, they are inventions that made feminism potentially easier for the mainstream society to accept--in relatively diluted, uncritical versions that is. The option of facing the oppressive aspects of our social organizations and crying foul on the lies the systems depend on is always there.
I mostly agree with all the above.
I never thought or intended to say that washing machines, pills and some other technical progresses made Feminism possible. This, by the way, would have been gross historical falsification, since Feminism existed way before that.
What I say is that they made Feminism successful, although as you say, it's a very limited and mixed success. And it has, in my opinion, a price: failure to bridge with the struggle against class (and race, where relevant) oppression. I.e. the form of Feminism that has been successful was the one that compromised with Capitalism.
Obviously, Le Guin is and was very aware of such problems: she was always very clear about the link between all forms of oppression and the need to tackle them together. Which is probably a great deal of what Odonianism is all about.
At risk of contradicting myself, however, I really don't see how a (dominantly male) labor and women movements can avoid having very different agendas, especially in a context where contraceptives and washing machines are not there. Different does not mean "incompatible", of course. IOTL, labor movements didn't give women much voice in general, for the simple reason that there weren't that many women among organized workers. Their perspectives and problems simply didn't matter much.
OTOH, Feminism not rarely failed to assess properly the amount and nature of class oppression in society, with the result of sounding sometimes unappealing to working class women too. This is far from universal though, and I believe it really changed after the fifties (again, washing machines and pills probably play a role).
A Jewish officer rescues an emperor from assassination and the Russian regime resorts to right wing extremists to shore itself up. I'll miss the overlap with Es Geloybte Aretz once it's gone.
I can divine Jonathan's intention here.
In the second series of Male Rising, we will follow the adventures of the scion of Romanov - Solomon dynasty, as she seeks to crown herself Caliph of all Christians on the steps of St Peters, in front of the leaders of the world.
Or something like that
In the second series of Male Rising, we will follow the adventures of the scion of Romanov - Solomon dynasty, as she seeks to crown herself Caliph of all Christians on the steps of St Peters, in front of the leaders of the world.
Or something like that
....it seems that if the St Petersburg "council" (it is cute how Jonathan is not using the Russian word for that
Ha! Good catch.
Germany does remain a threat, but one that'll be limited by having been the most externally abused of all the Big 6 (or 8 or 11 or whatever) Powers. And that's both a threat that that will rapidly diminish as Russia gains in strength while being less globally ostracized, and one that they can afford to focus on.
Because of course Japan has ceased to be a problem. It's still an opponent, sure, but one that only helps Russia's geopolitical position by existing. Poor relations between Russia and China historically followed as symptoms of disparity in power. When Russia was stronger, it naturally had designs on border territories. When that disappeared - about the time China finished its first nukes - Russia's overextension into Mongolia and Indochina became the source of conflict. But without one state able to get in the other's business, the two are natural allies (see the relationship prior to 1830 and post-1991). Russia's too weak for the foreseeable future to play a role in East Asia without its allies but with them will be dominant there. And they in turn are bound to Russia by the Japanese - Korea indefinitely and China as long as Taiwan is lost to them.
Russia didn't "win" this war in the founding-a-nation sense that Germany or the Ottomans did. But I'd argue that they could more truly be said to have "won" the peace than did the rest of the BOG - Great Britain, Italy, or Japan.
In general, it has seemed like this TL has been heading on a semi-utopian track for awhile. True utopia, of course, would be implausible, but the world seems universally sunnier than IOTL, not only in terms of racial equality, but also overall political liberalism and economic justice. Indeed, unlike "dystopian" TLs like Decades of Darkness, where some countries were really better off than OTL, I can't think of a single nation which is faring worse - at least if you look at things from the perspective of someone on the left, even if in some cases (like the U.S.) the changes are very minor improvements.
Indeed, as much as it's now a hackneyed phrase, "another world is possible" would be a good description of the overall course of history within the timeline.
Indeed, as much as it's now a hackneyed phrase, "another world is possible" would be a good description of the overall course of history within the timeline.
Hnau
Banned
Shevek23 said:
Very true, if Tolstoy and the others can make peace quickly in Central Asia there will be few forces to fight a devastating civil war against. What gave the White movement so much momentum was that they were fighting for the majority that had been left out of the government by the Bolsheviks. It included ultranationalists, reactionaries, as well as democrats, capitalists, narodniks and Mensheviks and anyone that didn't agree with the Leninist regime and was willing to fight for a different Russia. If Tolstoy can manage to organize a democratically-elected assembly, there will be few left to fight against it. The remnants of the ultranationalists, militarists and monarchists will continue the fight for a time, yes, but they won't have significant forces by any means. In the long run, Russia will be better off.
Shevek23 said:
Russia might industrialize more slowly, its true, but I predict that eventually the better starting place for infrastructure and the increased population and less military expenditure will pay off and industrialization will happen more organically in a way that in OTL wasn't possible without using force post-RCW. And agrarian socialism might not hold Russia back as much as you think. As Radkey once suggested, if Russian peasants could be given the noble estates and expand their holdings, they might all become what in OTL were called kulaks. The increase in capital might inspire them to ditch their revolutionary fervor and follow new business opportunities, reinvigorating Russian capitalism. We could see the rise of a new Russian middle class within a generation or two. And the increased demand for quality goods and products could drive industrialization. But maybe not.
I think its plausible the Germans could stop at the lines they are now, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't some kind of trouble in the Ukraine, and that'd be a tempting prize for either Germany or Poland to carve off of Russia. The Ukrainians had been under a lot of pressure by this time in OTL and I'm not sure they'd be content to stick with their Russian neighbors when other subject peoples are finally getting the chance to see what its like to be independent.
Japan would have to be very overstretched in China and Korea to not invade Vladivostok at this time and try to take some territory. Also on the table is Mongolia and Tannu-Tuva. It is possible China could assert itself there in the chaos, reclaiming the old borders.
His path to power was different in TTL, so his family is different. Ras Mikael is still an ally and the point man in negotiating with the Muslim princes (he's been mentioned in prior updates) and Makonnen, as a close relative, is still in the thick of things, but the Selassies in general won't be as powerful in TTL as in OTL. Menelik made a different marriage, and has a healthy son not much older than Anastasia; it is this son who will undertake Ethiopia's economic and social modernization, and the Russians and Muslims will be deeply involved in this project.
Yes, that was my guess. What other Shevek is there, after all, except for his predecessor the hardware inventor?
Anyway, I won't say too much more at present, because Italian anarchism will be only a little Odonian. Feminism will indeed be part of it, though, and it will come both from above (women who are movement theorists) and below (the women who became factory laborers during the war, and stayed there afterward because of the continuing manpower shortage). It will start with low-wage unskilled women workers forming their own unions because the skilled-trade associations don't represent them, and the educational and mutual-support institutions developed by those unions will merge into the broader anarchist movement.
I'm of two minds on how far feminism can go without contraceptives and labor-saving technologies. To some extent the technological changes may be a consequence of the social change rather than vice versa; if feminism has progressed to the point where there is a need for washing machines, manufacturers are more likely to devote resources to developing them, and the development of contraceptives becomes more possible where they are legal and socially accepted (assuming always that the necessary technological base is there). One of the accomplishments of left-wing feminism may be precisely to make the movement aware that things like washing machines are necessary parts of a more equal society, both because they reduce the need for servants and because they facilitate the liberation of women.
There will, of course, be conflict between bourgeois and working-class feminism, as well as between left-wing feminists and the more traditional left. TTL isn't going to be Alexandra Kollontai's utopia, and there will be a lot of the same infuriating sense of talking past one another that occurred in OTL. But an Odonian feminism, for lack of a better term, will make inroads - and there will be blowback to the Sahel, which is already primed for that sort of thing. There's one child of Usman's we haven't heard from yet, and she's at a very impressionable age.
The other "Odonian" ideas which will develop in TTL are... well, you'll see. You've already mentioned two of them.
So, I took the fact that the publisher of the second reference, "Rodina," AKA "Motherland" more or less in English, is in St. Petersburg as moderately significant. It could be the rebels changed the name as per OTL (obviously not to Leningrad
But what I'm seeing here is that first of all the Tsar ITTL never sanctioned the sort of anti-Teutonism that took off among the Entente OTL, to quite absurd and embarrassing extremes here in the USA--because the FAR alliance included a number of German principalities.
You're substantially correct. The city's name never changed during the war - Tsarist propaganda was directed against "Prussians," not Germans in general - and the revolutionary government isn't inclined to change names. They aren't militantly atheist - at least most of them aren't - and they also aren't as adamant about changing state symbolism.
One thing, though: by 1947, St. Petersburg will no longer be the capital. It will still be Russia's "New York" - the largest city and the cultural center - but the seat of government will be further from the border.
There's one other thing that might help avoid a civil war: the fact that the Tsar is living in Eritrea and is at least its titular ruler. The die-hard loyalists will have someplace to go, and might decide that the path of least resistance lies in joining their emperor in Africa rather than fighting it out against Tolstoy. They'll take their Swiss bank accounts with them - a minor capital loss to Russia, a proportionally major investment in Eritrea and Ethiopia - which means less money to equip and arm a monarchist army.
I expect that there will be some rebellions, and that some army units won't accept the new order. Marginal areas like eastern Siberia may even stay independent for a while. But a civil war on the order of OTL's isn't in the cards.
I hope you've picked up some books by Oliver Radkey, Jonathan, you'll need to take a look at least at one of them to understand where the narodniks were originally coming from. I can't stress enough that the central idea narodniks championed was that land shouldn't be seen as property, that the Romans perverted civilization by saying land could be bought, owned, and sold. Their principle desire was to see land as free as air and sunshine, available to any who would utilize it. In OTL 1917 they thought the best way to make that possible was to give authority to self-organizing village councils to divide rural land as they saw fit and distribute natural resources within their jurisdiction to whoever needed it. There's obviously a connection to syndicalism within narodnichestvo that its theoreticians didn't write too much about, but it would be natural to assume they'd support worker's cooperatives and the like.
If Tolstoy and the victors of the first elections get to experiment with these ideas on social and economic organization, they'll create a society that has never really been seen before in OTL. Who knows if it'll change or be corrupted, succeed or fail but it's going to be exciting.
Tolstoyan Russia will see a radical and very experimental transformation of society - more so, even, than the French avant-garde under Verne. Some of it will succeed, some of it won't.
I haven't yet read anything of Radkey's, but I plan to in the near future. A quasi-syndicalist organization of workers' cooperatives and village councils would seem to be the most natural way to go in the short term, along with some mechanism of exchange between the cities and the countryside, but as the country develops, it will become necessary to modify these things.
And yes, the term "Tolstoyism" will become current, much to Tolstoy's chagrin.
it seems that if the St Petersburg "council" (it is cute how Jonathan is not using the Russian word for that
That was by design. Tolstoyan Russia won't look much like the USSR, and I didn't want to use language which would suggest convergence between the two. There will, of course, be soviets galore in Tolstoy's republic, but I probably won't call them that more than very occasionally.
Also, the prewar and wartime crash industrialization programs, while taking a great toll in human lives, have left Russia a more developed country than at this time in OTL. To some extent, the Stalinist industrialization has already happened, which will make it easier for the Tolstoyans to avoid extreme measures.
Also, Germany will have all it wants out of Russia - once Finland, Poland and the Baltic states have become independent German clients, there's really no reason for Germany and Russia to fight. Not to mention that postwar Germany will be undergoing extensive social and economic changes and will be preoccupied with internal reforms, so it isn't going to be an immediate threat to Russia.
Tolstoy will probably try to rebuild bridges with the Germans and Ottomans, though, both on principle and because Russia will need foreign markets.
Absolutely - Japanese militarism has taken a hit due to the army's poor performance in Korea, and Japan's energies for the foreseeable future will be directed at expanding its economic and political influence in the Pacific. Japan will still have commercial interests in Korea, but it won't invade again anytime soon, and it won't challenge Russia's position on the mainland.
On the other hand, long-term conflict with China may still happen, if borderlands like Mongolia and eastern Siberia become more important to it than Formosa.
A Jewish officer rescues an emperor from assassination and the Russian regime resorts to right wing extremists to shore itself up. I'll miss the overlap with Es Geloybte Aretz once it's gone.
Yeah, I thought of that myself. Both carlton_bach's and my militias, though, are riffs on OTL, and they're a natural thing for the Tsarist regime to rely on once it starts to lose the loyalty of mainstream society. And Dreyfus' escapade won't have any major consequences for the Jews of France, although he'll do well out of it personally.
Naaah, she's just going to found a Russo-Ethiopian moon colony and rearrange a million square kilometers of the lunar surface into a giant Romanov flag.
I could quibble a bit with that. The Congo and Amazon basins are worse off, Argentina isn't faring well, and Jim Crow is less widespread but deeper where it exists. The world has undergone a bloodier and more widespread Great War than OTL, with close to twice the total number of casualties and with many areas that were peaceful in OTL being part of the fighting. In some places this has been devastating - Russia, but also the Great Lakes of Africa (which have been going through their own Mfecane for the past fifteen years), and Bornu, which has been a battleground throughout the war and which has suffered casualties similar to Serbia in OTL. There will also be future conflicts which set parts of the world back at least temporarily from OTL - I've hinted at a couple of such conflicts within the British Empire.
TTL also appears to be headed for a world with more monarchies, which was not what I intended when I started it, although that may or may not be dystopian depending on one's view of monarchy and on what kind of kingdoms there are.
But overall, you're right. I'm a meliorist at heart, and that probably comes through in my writing. Like the novel that Shevek23 took his username from, TTL is in some ways an ambiguous utopia - ambiguous because conflict continues and much injustice exists, but tending toward the utopian nonetheless. I don't think there's anything wrong with that - to my mind, semi-utopias aren't inherently less honest or less revealing of the human condition than semi-dystopias - but I'll certainly confess it.
Which leads to a question which I will take up in time: is totalitarianism an inevitable outgrowth of industrial modernity? Does the reality of industrial warfare, in which the entire output of a nation must be committed, necessarily lead to ideologies that seek to militarize politics and turn the life of the nation into an analogue of total war? Such ideologies will exist in TTL; I don't think it would be plausible for nobody to get the totalitarian idea. But whether they take power will depend on the answer to that question, and it's one I'll be returning to as the twentieth century progresses.
Last edited:
Fantastic stuff as always, Jonathan. I was wondering if this Great War would have a Spanish Flu analogue. It seems rather unavoidable. Indeed, the more internationalist nature of the war would likely see it far more globally pervasive than OTL, though the US might have some breathing room due to its non-participation.
There may or may not be a super-bug like the Spanish Flu - there will certainly be opportunistic diseases spread by poor nutrition and conditions in the trenches, but a cytokine-storm virus crossing over at just the right time isn't a given. If someone here with greater medical knowledge can give me a better idea of the odds of various outcomes, I'd be grateful.
There could be something else, though. Think eastern Congo, widespread population movements, and war/refugee conditions that give rise to a demand for bushmeat, and remember that many of the soldiers fighting in that region are European, Indian or from other parts of Africa.
Yes, among other things.
That would certainly put the fox among the chickens. It seems that there was an OTL flu epidemic in 1889-90 and in 1898-1900, starting in Russia. Some sort of flu epidemic, given the trench conditions and amount of people involved, seems likely.
Last edited:
To the main question, I would say: very likely, but not inevitable.
It is probably inevitable that totalitarian movements emerged but in my very humble and not especially qualified opinion, nothing inevitable to their success, though probably the starting condition are there. Arguably some form of totalitarianism was almost inevitable after OTLs Great War, which was after all a largely inter-european affair. The more apparently global and tangled nature of this conflict will likely bring a wider array of issues and ideas to the fore.
There are more empowered social groups.
Pulling out a totalitarian solution and having it accepted enough to enforce it is likely to be messier.Still possible, mind you: it could sound an easy way out to the aforementioned tangles.
(As an aside, good point about washing machines and contraceptives, although I think that in the first case, the potential benifits were very obvious even to most benighted capitalist patriarch, outweighting any "revolutionary" foreseeable consequence. And I've heard enough from my elders to appreciate that yes, those things were really felt as revolutionary. Contraceptives are very different in this regard).
That would prove, erm, problematic for the anticipated Feminist blossoming post-war. STDs are hardly any friend of any kind of gender liberation.
Hnau
Banned
Hahaha, really? Okay... What would be the best short explanation for Malê Rising? Here's my attempt:
In Malê Rising, Muslim slaves revolt in northeastern Brazil and take ships to Africa where they conquer the Sokoto Caliphate under the direction of their leader Paulo Abacar. Abacar leaves behind a political philosophy that is the Islamic version of liberation theology, which goes on to influence much of the Muslim world and beyond.
At the present moment we are seeing the last months of an earlier Great War between an alliance led by Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and north Germany and their rivals led by France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.
Jonathan Edelstein said:
IMO totalitarianism originates from political or religious ideas modified by the new industrial modern climate, yes, but its success in taking over peoples and nations is definitely not a guarantee.