Thanks from me too for simple, straightforward maps!
Well, no one is waging these wars for convenience. I think you are quite correct, but that won't deter the war from developing on that front anyway.
At first glance one might think that the example of an earlier war where machine guns created bogged-down, static meatgrinder fronts might lead military ingenuity to consider how to break that stalemate and a future war would be started with one side or both having a plan to do so. OTL gas warfare was supposed to do that for the Germans but it didn't work; conceivably if they had had great confidence in their initial chlorine attack and followed it up with a commitment to a hard heavy breakthrough in its wake, the results might have been more dramatic. But if that alternate offensive did not immediately break the Allies and bring them to terms right there, then they and the Germans (in response to inevitable reprisals in kind) would figure out how to devise defenses as OTL, and the lines would again stabilize (with a new and escalating level of horror on them).
Here, it's possible that as OTL someone will reason as the Germans did and prepare a gas offensive before the war, to be used if the lines start freezing up. They won't know in advance how limited the advantage would be. Also, if this is thought up in peacetime, they won't know any more than the Germans did OTL how effective it would be, and probably therefore would not commit to an all-out follow-up attack. Finally, if they are preparing in peacetime, there's a good chance word of their plans would leak one way or another. The other side would have some warning and perhaps even some sort of effective preparation. More likely than effective protective gear being ready, the other side would be "prepared" in the sense of having their own gas warfare plans as a contingency.
On the other hand, events are something like 30 years ahead of OTL, but chemical technology is not. It could well be no one thinks of this in advance at all, or if they do no military command is sufficiently impressed to prepare it in advance. And I'd think the Korean front would be the least likely place for this mode of warfare to be tried out on first, even if it does turn into the classic trench war horror the soonest.
The other breakthrough that actually did break the fronts OTL was, in my admittedly limited understanding of the Great War, the tank. Jonathan has already dismissed it by saying "no armor." I'm not sure he should, but again being 30 years behind OTL Great War tech conditions may be sufficient reason. I'd think a steam-driven lumbering ox of a tank might be better than no armor at all, but it might be too infeasible to work. (And I do think IC engines had to wait for all manner of contingent technologies to mature enough to make them worth trying).
Alternatively, it is a flashpoint since the Turks can't build up its armies too much, and the place is doomed to fall in case of war, which the Russians would want as far as Crimea itself goes. The question then is, do the Turks have other strong points against Russia that will deter the Russians from engaging this Crimean tripwire? Certainly the Turks have other leverage, but I fear the main leverage will be their alliances with other powers; the Tsarists might easily miscalculate the likelihood of bringing them in against them or their effectiveness once engaged.
I guess the fortified but empty port idea is not going to happen. But if it doesn't or does but does not inspire sufficient confidence, Turkish Crimea might suffer a population drain as residents there find reason to migrate elsewhere.
And there it is, the open invitation to the questions I wanted to ask Jonathan.
I forget if you've already said Marx is butterflied ITTL. It would be easy to remove him from history; he could get caught in one of his revolutionary schemes, or get sick earlier--or something could happen to Friedrich Engels instead. Without Engels drudging away at his family's firm offices by day so he could subsidize the overthrow of capitalism by night, Marx probably would have sunk out of sight sometime in the 1850s. And Engels took his own risks that might have got him jailed or killed, or he might have had a terminal falling out with his family.
But assuming none of these not too unlikely contingencies intervene, I don't see any reason for Marx's career to be radically different ITTL. Unless you've already mentioned it--I just did a thread search, so far you haven't. By the time of the 1848 revolutions OTL, these were Marx's last hurrah as an active conspirator; with their failure, from his point of view, he withdrew to London where he stayed, with Engels backing him, for the rest of his life. From that vantage he made it his life's main work to come up with what he regarded as the scientifically correct theory of the political economy of capitalism, to be used as a weapon by the working class seeking to overthrow it.
ITTL, I daresay he'd have still written a version of the Brumiare; The Manifesto was probably already written and published much as OTL. The details of his theoretical thinking might have been affected by the different European environment, since his thinking was probably shaped by polemical battles he got into with people like Proudhon, who might be themselves either butterflied away or saying and doing different things in this timeline. But in my opinion, Marx did a good job with Das Kapital, coming up with a pretty sound analysis of what capitalism is and the nature of the societies that support it, one that if anything has gotten more clearly apt as a century and a half of its evolution has proceeded beyond the evidence he had to work with. So I think he'd produce fundamentally the same book (and leave the same notes for Engels to compile into the subsequent volumes). He might draw some interesting examples from West Africa.
So, I think Marx the man and his work would be much the same as OTL barring something happening to him or Engels first. But would there be factions in Europe as inclined to latch on to Marxist doctrines as OTL? OTL Marxism made the most visible progress in Germany, though all major European powers had their Second International socialist parties which all paid homage to Marx.
It seems likely to me this would be the case in this timeline too. Again, the more advanced timing of the upcoming Great War casts some doubt; OTL the 1890s were the period in which the radical Second Internationalist parties and various European regimes reached a sort of detente whereby they were allowed to function as political parties and not just as outlaw conspiracies, and a couple decades of experience as parties in the liberal spectrum were under their belts before German Social Democrats and British Labourites were shooting at each other in the trenches. Here that 20 year buffer will not exist.
Meanwhile--Russia. When I've spoken of a 30, as opposed to 20, year advance of war politics versus OTL I'm thinking that Russia's defeat here corresponds to their defeat by the Japanese 30 years later OTL, but is worse. The enemy that defeated them is poised right on the borders of their best ports and most productive lands, not on the far side of the longest geographical reach of any nation in the world. The stab-in-the-back meme was probably not totally absent regarding the Japanese victory OTL but would have been absurdly far-fetched to anyone with any fairness of mind at all-but here it is horribly plausible and relevant.
Russia is in a mess, but it's a different mess, again because Russia is lacking 3 decades of OTL progress that transformed her.
The Bolsheviks were based on their appeal to one class, the urban proletariat (and rural industrial proletarians--Nikita Khrushchev for instance was a miner in Ukraine). Lenin certainly managed to opportunistically enlist a lot of peasants temporarily, and could hardly have achieved victory without doing so. Then again Russian proletarians were basically first-generation migrants from the countryside.
And so, a Lenin-analog 30 years before Lenin, or even 20, seems unlikely to me. The industrial proletarians the Bolsheviks organized OTL hardly existed on anything approaching the scale they'd reached in the 1910s.
To get a sense of the likelihood and nature of mass uprisings in Russia in the 1890s, one would have to study a rather different country than existed twenty-odd years later, in the OTL 1910s.
I have to agree, Marxist-guided movements seem unlikely that early. There won't be the sheer time for such thinking to grow widespread and respectable in the European left, and thus achieve critical mass for appealing to the Russian left. If it could somehow be sped up, it wouldn't find the appropriate kind of working class to plausibly mobilize and engage for a credible takeover; it was the credibility of Bolshevik rule that finally won over a critical mass of support from both peasants, intelligentsia, and military officers who threw themselves behind the Revolution for patriotic reasons.
Now, does this mean the Narodniks have a chance ITTL? I doubt that very much! Granting that their intelligentsia leadership does indeed make contact with the masses and they and actual peasant leadership manage to get together on a program that the masses can both understand and believe in--can their vision of victory result in a Russia that can exist?
Maybe exist. Maybe even defend itself from Great Power predation, by costing invaders dearly, though only at the cost of terrible bloodshed in Russia. What I don't believe is that such a Russia could aspire to be treated as a Great Power itself. It will suffer annexations and secessions--these might actually leave the Great Russian core stronger on Narodnik terms. It will not develop a modern industrial economy as rapidly as either the Tsarists of OTL did or as the Bolsheviks managed OTL, and will therefore remain economically hence militarily backward. It might be a dumb idea to invade the remnant of the Russian Empire, but those Russians are not going to figure much in the calculations of those content to stay outside their borders.
So it seems unlikely to me that the Narodniks will be able to succeed at all. They might wind up exacting some concessions from a Tsarist regime, but on the whole the powers that be in Russia--the military officers, the bureaucracy, the merchant and increasingly industrial elites--will close ranks against such an insurgency from below and the insurgency will lack leverage to overthrow the whole class structure. And if they manage to somehow do that, say with the help of a major war undermining the whole Tsarist structure, they won't be able to introduce a government on Narodnik terms--it will be essentially a new, somewhat revised edition of Tsarism again with a new dynasty, one that pays lip service and offers a few shrewd concessions to the Narodnik base but on the whole rules Russia as autocratically as before--perhaps a bit more efficiently.
Assuming that is, that the Great War which is probably necessary for these Narodniks to have a ghost of a chance doesn't wind up ripping Russia to shreds. I wouldn't want to bet on the eradication of Russia ever in any timeline, but a Great War in the 1890s is probably the most likely to be able to actually do that.
Now meanwhile we have Russia's Muslim population, who are now somewhat decimated by conquest removing them from Russia, pogrom, and exile. But the remainder is more radicalized and there's Abacarism floating around the Muslim world which might seem apt to them.
I suppose I should take a new look at the Narodniks and consider carefully whether Abacarist Muslims might have something to say in their cells that would be listened to. And if Abacarist maxims might transform the Narodnik message enough to make them the advocates of a sufficiently progressive program for all of Russia to give them a shot at taking and holding power.
Offhand I don't know if Narodnikism had an Orthodox streak to it that would make them deaf to Islamic-based appeals, or conversely if they were doctrinaire atheists who hoped to find a strong anti-clerical streak in the Russian peasants they approached--either way Abacarism would not get a hearing and the Muslims would be forced to form their own movements. (The latter barrier would block devout Muslims from joining up with Marxists, if that were even in the cards this early).
But if the Abacarists can be heard, Narodniksim might modify the belief they can skip capitalism completely and go for an agrarian socialism, by the notion of a morally regulated, humanized capitalism under movement control.
I'm concluding that there are many barriers, but a drastically revised Narodnik movement, leavened with the Abacarist vision of a morally regulated capitalism, might conceivably survive and pick up the pieces of a Tsarist Russia broken by Great War.
Well, no one is waging these wars for convenience. I think you are quite correct, but that won't deter the war from developing on that front anyway.
At first glance one might think that the example of an earlier war where machine guns created bogged-down, static meatgrinder fronts might lead military ingenuity to consider how to break that stalemate and a future war would be started with one side or both having a plan to do so. OTL gas warfare was supposed to do that for the Germans but it didn't work; conceivably if they had had great confidence in their initial chlorine attack and followed it up with a commitment to a hard heavy breakthrough in its wake, the results might have been more dramatic. But if that alternate offensive did not immediately break the Allies and bring them to terms right there, then they and the Germans (in response to inevitable reprisals in kind) would figure out how to devise defenses as OTL, and the lines would again stabilize (with a new and escalating level of horror on them).
Here, it's possible that as OTL someone will reason as the Germans did and prepare a gas offensive before the war, to be used if the lines start freezing up. They won't know in advance how limited the advantage would be. Also, if this is thought up in peacetime, they won't know any more than the Germans did OTL how effective it would be, and probably therefore would not commit to an all-out follow-up attack. Finally, if they are preparing in peacetime, there's a good chance word of their plans would leak one way or another. The other side would have some warning and perhaps even some sort of effective preparation. More likely than effective protective gear being ready, the other side would be "prepared" in the sense of having their own gas warfare plans as a contingency.
On the other hand, events are something like 30 years ahead of OTL, but chemical technology is not. It could well be no one thinks of this in advance at all, or if they do no military command is sufficiently impressed to prepare it in advance. And I'd think the Korean front would be the least likely place for this mode of warfare to be tried out on first, even if it does turn into the classic trench war horror the soonest.
The other breakthrough that actually did break the fronts OTL was, in my admittedly limited understanding of the Great War, the tank. Jonathan has already dismissed it by saying "no armor." I'm not sure he should, but again being 30 years behind OTL Great War tech conditions may be sufficient reason. I'd think a steam-driven lumbering ox of a tank might be better than no armor at all, but it might be too infeasible to work. (And I do think IC engines had to wait for all manner of contingent technologies to mature enough to make them worth trying).
Again, the war was not fought for anyone's convenience--especially not the Turks, who triggered this war by trying to avoid one. They had to push the Russians wherever they could; doubtless they'd have been happier with the whole Crimea but having taken a coastal strip of it, and knowing that withdrawing from it for concessions elsewhere (where, exactly?) they'd be abandoning a lot of co-religionists who did rise up to help them to the tender mercies of the Tsarists, I don't think they had any choice about keeping it. I have to wonder if the treaty itself prohibits building up fortifications as well as basing a fleet there, but even if it doesn't, realpolitik might. If they can get away with fortifications, then perhaps they can build a really good and well-defended port for the fleet they aren't allowed to station there; in case of war, the local forces count on having to hang on long enough for a big armada convoying lots of troopships and supplies, whose warships then base themselves in the harbor for close-up attacks on the Russians. If they can manage such a building program, and back it up with sufficient strength to dissuade the Russians from thinking they can take the port overland or by sea before the Turkish fleet arrives, that might serve to deter war between Russian and Turkey, until other dominoes falling elsewhere make it inevitable anyway. At any rate conceivably this might prevent the Crimea from being a flashpoint.
Alternatively, it is a flashpoint since the Turks can't build up its armies too much, and the place is doomed to fall in case of war, which the Russians would want as far as Crimea itself goes. The question then is, do the Turks have other strong points against Russia that will deter the Russians from engaging this Crimean tripwire? Certainly the Turks have other leverage, but I fear the main leverage will be their alliances with other powers; the Tsarists might easily miscalculate the likelihood of bringing them in against them or their effectiveness once engaged.
I guess the fortified but empty port idea is not going to happen. But if it doesn't or does but does not inspire sufficient confidence, Turkish Crimea might suffer a population drain as residents there find reason to migrate elsewhere.
And there it is, the open invitation to the questions I wanted to ask Jonathan.
I forget if you've already said Marx is butterflied ITTL. It would be easy to remove him from history; he could get caught in one of his revolutionary schemes, or get sick earlier--or something could happen to Friedrich Engels instead. Without Engels drudging away at his family's firm offices by day so he could subsidize the overthrow of capitalism by night, Marx probably would have sunk out of sight sometime in the 1850s. And Engels took his own risks that might have got him jailed or killed, or he might have had a terminal falling out with his family.
But assuming none of these not too unlikely contingencies intervene, I don't see any reason for Marx's career to be radically different ITTL. Unless you've already mentioned it--I just did a thread search, so far you haven't. By the time of the 1848 revolutions OTL, these were Marx's last hurrah as an active conspirator; with their failure, from his point of view, he withdrew to London where he stayed, with Engels backing him, for the rest of his life. From that vantage he made it his life's main work to come up with what he regarded as the scientifically correct theory of the political economy of capitalism, to be used as a weapon by the working class seeking to overthrow it.
ITTL, I daresay he'd have still written a version of the Brumiare; The Manifesto was probably already written and published much as OTL. The details of his theoretical thinking might have been affected by the different European environment, since his thinking was probably shaped by polemical battles he got into with people like Proudhon, who might be themselves either butterflied away or saying and doing different things in this timeline. But in my opinion, Marx did a good job with Das Kapital, coming up with a pretty sound analysis of what capitalism is and the nature of the societies that support it, one that if anything has gotten more clearly apt as a century and a half of its evolution has proceeded beyond the evidence he had to work with. So I think he'd produce fundamentally the same book (and leave the same notes for Engels to compile into the subsequent volumes). He might draw some interesting examples from West Africa.
So, I think Marx the man and his work would be much the same as OTL barring something happening to him or Engels first. But would there be factions in Europe as inclined to latch on to Marxist doctrines as OTL? OTL Marxism made the most visible progress in Germany, though all major European powers had their Second International socialist parties which all paid homage to Marx.
It seems likely to me this would be the case in this timeline too. Again, the more advanced timing of the upcoming Great War casts some doubt; OTL the 1890s were the period in which the radical Second Internationalist parties and various European regimes reached a sort of detente whereby they were allowed to function as political parties and not just as outlaw conspiracies, and a couple decades of experience as parties in the liberal spectrum were under their belts before German Social Democrats and British Labourites were shooting at each other in the trenches. Here that 20 year buffer will not exist.
Meanwhile--Russia. When I've spoken of a 30, as opposed to 20, year advance of war politics versus OTL I'm thinking that Russia's defeat here corresponds to their defeat by the Japanese 30 years later OTL, but is worse. The enemy that defeated them is poised right on the borders of their best ports and most productive lands, not on the far side of the longest geographical reach of any nation in the world. The stab-in-the-back meme was probably not totally absent regarding the Japanese victory OTL but would have been absurdly far-fetched to anyone with any fairness of mind at all-but here it is horribly plausible and relevant.
Russia is in a mess, but it's a different mess, again because Russia is lacking 3 decades of OTL progress that transformed her.
The Bolsheviks were based on their appeal to one class, the urban proletariat (and rural industrial proletarians--Nikita Khrushchev for instance was a miner in Ukraine). Lenin certainly managed to opportunistically enlist a lot of peasants temporarily, and could hardly have achieved victory without doing so. Then again Russian proletarians were basically first-generation migrants from the countryside.
And so, a Lenin-analog 30 years before Lenin, or even 20, seems unlikely to me. The industrial proletarians the Bolsheviks organized OTL hardly existed on anything approaching the scale they'd reached in the 1910s.
To get a sense of the likelihood and nature of mass uprisings in Russia in the 1890s, one would have to study a rather different country than existed twenty-odd years later, in the OTL 1910s.
I have to agree, Marxist-guided movements seem unlikely that early. There won't be the sheer time for such thinking to grow widespread and respectable in the European left, and thus achieve critical mass for appealing to the Russian left. If it could somehow be sped up, it wouldn't find the appropriate kind of working class to plausibly mobilize and engage for a credible takeover; it was the credibility of Bolshevik rule that finally won over a critical mass of support from both peasants, intelligentsia, and military officers who threw themselves behind the Revolution for patriotic reasons.
Now, does this mean the Narodniks have a chance ITTL? I doubt that very much! Granting that their intelligentsia leadership does indeed make contact with the masses and they and actual peasant leadership manage to get together on a program that the masses can both understand and believe in--can their vision of victory result in a Russia that can exist?
Maybe exist. Maybe even defend itself from Great Power predation, by costing invaders dearly, though only at the cost of terrible bloodshed in Russia. What I don't believe is that such a Russia could aspire to be treated as a Great Power itself. It will suffer annexations and secessions--these might actually leave the Great Russian core stronger on Narodnik terms. It will not develop a modern industrial economy as rapidly as either the Tsarists of OTL did or as the Bolsheviks managed OTL, and will therefore remain economically hence militarily backward. It might be a dumb idea to invade the remnant of the Russian Empire, but those Russians are not going to figure much in the calculations of those content to stay outside their borders.
So it seems unlikely to me that the Narodniks will be able to succeed at all. They might wind up exacting some concessions from a Tsarist regime, but on the whole the powers that be in Russia--the military officers, the bureaucracy, the merchant and increasingly industrial elites--will close ranks against such an insurgency from below and the insurgency will lack leverage to overthrow the whole class structure. And if they manage to somehow do that, say with the help of a major war undermining the whole Tsarist structure, they won't be able to introduce a government on Narodnik terms--it will be essentially a new, somewhat revised edition of Tsarism again with a new dynasty, one that pays lip service and offers a few shrewd concessions to the Narodnik base but on the whole rules Russia as autocratically as before--perhaps a bit more efficiently.
Assuming that is, that the Great War which is probably necessary for these Narodniks to have a ghost of a chance doesn't wind up ripping Russia to shreds. I wouldn't want to bet on the eradication of Russia ever in any timeline, but a Great War in the 1890s is probably the most likely to be able to actually do that.
Now meanwhile we have Russia's Muslim population, who are now somewhat decimated by conquest removing them from Russia, pogrom, and exile. But the remainder is more radicalized and there's Abacarism floating around the Muslim world which might seem apt to them.
I suppose I should take a new look at the Narodniks and consider carefully whether Abacarist Muslims might have something to say in their cells that would be listened to. And if Abacarist maxims might transform the Narodnik message enough to make them the advocates of a sufficiently progressive program for all of Russia to give them a shot at taking and holding power.
Offhand I don't know if Narodnikism had an Orthodox streak to it that would make them deaf to Islamic-based appeals, or conversely if they were doctrinaire atheists who hoped to find a strong anti-clerical streak in the Russian peasants they approached--either way Abacarism would not get a hearing and the Muslims would be forced to form their own movements. (The latter barrier would block devout Muslims from joining up with Marxists, if that were even in the cards this early).
But if the Abacarists can be heard, Narodniksim might modify the belief they can skip capitalism completely and go for an agrarian socialism, by the notion of a morally regulated, humanized capitalism under movement control.
I'm concluding that there are many barriers, but a drastically revised Narodnik movement, leavened with the Abacarist vision of a morally regulated capitalism, might conceivably survive and pick up the pieces of a Tsarist Russia broken by Great War.
