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Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Tomorrow, probably; it's half done, and I just got out the other side of a deadline convergence.
(Now I'm wondering what TTL's equivalent of 40K would be like - an Evil Space Caliphate as the major human power? Southern African legend could supply some pretty good Chaos critters.)
Let's see.
1) Organised religion in this timeline is seen as an often liberating and progressive force, so the tyranical empire will probably be avowedly athiest and repesssive of any trace of spirituality.
2) Almost certainly no vietnam war, so no influence of that.
3) The Empire is based on famous repressive governments of OTL, with Nazi, Soviet and Spanish Inquisition influences. Would it be a rip off of the Imperial Party or would that be thought to be too close to home?
4) Given the historical importance and cultural cachet of african and indian fights, there'd be more ethnic diversity in Marines and Guard.
1) Organised religion in this timeline is seen as an often liberating and progressive force, so the tyranical empire will probably be avowedly athiest and repesssive of any trace of spirituality.
2) Almost certainly no vietnam war, so no influence of that.
3) The Empire is based on famous repressive governments of OTL, with Nazi, Soviet and Spanish Inquisition influences. Would it be a rip off of the Imperial Party or would that be thought to be too close to home?
4) Given the historical importance and cultural cachet of african and indian fights, there'd be more ethnic diversity in Marines and Guard.
Omurbek Ismailov, The Meeting-Place: Twentieth-Century Turkestan (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2005)
… In these days of overlapping borders, layered sovereignty and non-territorial collectives, the early Republic of Great Turkestan is considered a forerunner, albeit an inefficient and flawed one. But to the world of the post-Great War generation, it seemed like a throwback to another age, an experiment doomed to fail. Its makeup was a welter of free cities, khanates and sultanates, revolutionary republics, and nomadic hordes that carried their borders with them. The federal government was democratic, but it was also weak, and the component states were ruled with widely varying degrees of democracy and justice. Governmental functions were disputed among the member states or between them and the central authority, and much of the federal courts’ function in the early years involved sorting out competing claims of sovereignty. The Republic itself was strictly neutral in international affairs, but many of its components were not. And most unusual of all to nineteenth-century eyes, much of law was a personal matter: citizens of the member states, and even foreigners, carried their law with them and had the right to be judged by it even when living elsewhere. [1]
There were precedents, but all of them were premodern. The Republic’s diffuse structure had been the only way to get the quarrelsome Central Asian peoples under one roof, and it began its life with a reserve of goodwill that came from shared struggle, but no one had ever tried to establish a modern state with such a porous conception of sovereignty, and no one had attempted to create a constitutional republic in which nomadic peoples had equal status to settled ones. It was a republic founded on trial and error, and inevitably, some of the errors were damaging.
In many ways, Turkestan’s makeup lent it vitality. There were always places where dissidents could go, and where poets or religious teachers could find patronage. Many things were prohibited in parts of the Republic, but nothing was forbidden in all of it, which made it a nation where ideas could meet and flourish. Samarkand, Tashkent and Bukhara, all ancient cities of learning and commerce, became university towns again in the twentieth century, and others became so for the first time; by 1920, there was even a University of the Plains whose itinerant teachers and radio-based courses provided education to the Kazakh tribes. Turkestan’s place at the crossroads between Russia, China, Persia and the Ottoman Empire brought investment and commerce to its cities, and by the early 1920s, the construction of the Afghan Road and the independence of India had brought an Indian merchant diaspora northward. Trade was self-consciously promoted as a renewal of Central Asia’s historic greatness, and politicians spoke of a “new Silk Road” that united cultures and continents.
But the Republic also had the vices of its virtues. Any state with such ill-defined boundaries of sovereignty was bound to generate conflict, especially among peoples who had been no strangers to it before. Member states bickered and even fought over borders or rights of passage; vassals sued their lieges and, when lawsuits failed, sometimes resorted to defiance or rebellion. Many remote mountain areas were only loosely controlled by the sultans or khans to whom they owed nominal allegiance, let alone to the Republic itself. And the federal government was often too divided to deal effectively with rebellion or nullification, especially since some restive regions could look to the great powers for support. Meddling in Turkestani affairs in the hope of political or commercial advantage was a favorite game of the Republic’s neighbors, all the more so since many of its component regions had historic ties to outside powers. Volunteers from Turkestan might fight alongside Uighur, Persian or Ottoman regiments, and in exchange, their allies would support their home provinces in internal conflicts.
Law, too, was often a problem. Foreign investors faced a bewildering number of legal systems, and their contracts with different customers or vendors might each be subject to different laws. The fact that lawsuits were administered by the federal courts gave some predictability to legal procedures, but the results were more variable, and by the 1920s, legal risk was a notable drag on commerce. Also, the boundary between laws involving the police power, which were territorial, and other laws, which were personal, was far from clear. A Russian rabble-rouser in Kokand, for instance, might argue that his speech was subject to personal law, while the Khan’s police would claim that they had the right to police sedition. Court decisions in such cases were not always uniform, and in any event, the issue was sometimes decided on the streets rather than in the courtroom.
It was clear during the turbulent 1920s that change was necessary if the Turkestani experiment were to succeed, but there was little agreement on what to change: the jadidists and liberals of the cities had a very different agenda from the feudal lords and commercial magnates. The evolution of the Republic’s politics during the 1920s and 30s would come, not from consensus, but from demographic and cultural trends that had been in progress for some time.
For one thing, Turkestan was a magnet for refugees. Russians dissatisfied with their homeland’s steady progress toward oligarchy [2], Chinese fleeing the repression and provincial troubles of the 1920s, Indians seeking shelter from war and siege, all found their way to the Republic. The cities were welcoming, although many rural areas were not – the refugees’ politics usually meshed well with those of the jadidist liberals, and the teachings of Abay Qunanbaiuli, developed for an environment in which Muslim Central Asians were a minority, emphasized strangers’ right to fairness and equality [3] – and the fact that many of them were intellectuals or politicians in their own countries made them influential beyond their numbers. Between 1915 and 1940, more than 100,000 refugees would become citizens of the Turkestani member states, increasing the Republic’s Christian, Hindu and Buddhist populations severalfold and bringing fresh perspectives to urban and national politics.
Aside from the refugees’ support for full democratization, their settlement in Turkestan brought a crisis in the country’s personal-law system. The Republic’s constitution presumed that they would live under the laws of their homelands, but most of them, particularly the Russians and Chinese, had settled there precisely to avoid such laws. They argued instead that the Russian and Chinese citizens resident in Turkestan should have their own, non-territorial assemblies to make laws and administer services for their communities. This was not as radical an idea in Turkestan as it might have been elsewhere – the dispersion and urbanization of the Republic’s ethnic communities already meant that law, and often voting rights, were not entirely defined by territory – and in 1931, such an assembly was created for the Chinese community on a trial basis. A similar measure for the Russians was politically trickier, because Turkestan was nominally a Russian vassal, but by 1937, an arrangement was reached where the Turkestani Russians were recognized as an “expatriate province” of the motherland with the right to their own institutions.
More than that, however, the increasing settlement of and trade with foreigners weakened the personal-law system altogether, at least where business was concerned. Both foreign companies and their Turkestani partners wanted a uniform commercial law, and in 1928, the Republic’s parliament drafted one, based on a combination of Islamic, customary, Russian and German law. Its use in commercial transactions was voluntary, but by the early 1930s, nearly all foreign companies and most domestic ones insisted on it as part of their contracts, and both the federal courts and private arbitrators used it to fill in gaps in other legal systems.
At the same time, the Turkestani peoples were profoundly affected by the spread of education, mass media and radio. Education was a federal responsibility and one that the Republic took seriously; by the 1930s, most of Turkestan had achieved universal primary education through a combination of itinerant jajis and construction of brick-and-mortar schools. This gave an advantage to Russian, which had been a language of education and wider communication since the nineteenth century, and to Chagatai, the region’s classical literary language. [4] Even in the Dari-speaking Tajik cantons, most young people were literate in Russian and Chagatai by 1940, and in the ethnically mixed cities, a modernized standard Chagatai was increasingly replacing ethnic languages in daily speech.
Education and linguistic merger even reached the nomadic hordes, especially with an increasing number of them living in cities. On the one hand, the use of jajis and radio courses meant that young Kazakhs no longer had to go to the cities for secondary education as had once been required, but on the other hand, the opportunities for advancement and wealth in the cities – propagated through popular novels and radio programs – drew youths who wanted a more comfortable life than the steppes could provide. And the Kazakhs not only moved to the cosmopolitan southern cities but expanded, and even founded, their own towns. Kostanay had more than 100,000 people in 1935, and several other steppe cities exceeded 50,000, becoming cultural centers in their own right and exposing more Kazakhs to the growing Chagatay media.
By 1940, it was possible for the first time to speak of a Turkestani culture – one that coexisted with its regional counterparts and was centered on educated city-dwellers, but one that spanned the Republic and was increasingly influential among the Uighurs, Kazan Tatars and Muslim Cossacks. This did not end the internal conflicts – far from it – but the developing elite consensus would make the political crises of the 1940s and early 50s less difficult to resolve…
*******
Alexander Kurin, Russia After Tolstoy (St. Petersburg: Rodina, 1984)
… When Russians call the 1920s and 30s the “years of the tightrope,” they do not have domestic politics in line. Russia was more internally stable during these decades than it had been in over a century: the state companies and allied parties had firm control of the national government and economy, in exchange for leaving alone the democratic rural communes and urban villages. The majority of local governments were conservative, but many were liberal and even radical; the central authorities tolerated them, knowing that they had little power on a national scale and that their economic dependence made it easy to control any that got out of line. Radicalism had been compartmentalized, driven to the margins of the cities and the nation: at the center, a socially-enforced, vaguely progressive conformism held sway which was vital to advancement even though it was not legally mandated.
The tightrope was, instead, a foreign one, with unsettled accounts all along Russia’s borders rearing their heads. The Great War had established Russian hegemony in Manchuria and Korea at the same time that it removed Poland, Finland and the Caucasus from Russia’s sphere of influence, and there were many on both sides of the border who considered these states of affairs temporary.
Poland, for instance, entered the 1930s as a country deeply divided along ethnic lines. A common saying was that “the Liberals pit the Jews and Poles against the Ukranians, the Reconstructionists pit the Poles and Catholic Ukrainians against the Jews, the narodniks pit the Jews and Ukrainians against the Poles.” Nationalist factions of all three groups were also represented in the Sejm, with only the Socialist Party and, ironically, the pro-German Commerce Party uniting them. The Ukrainians, in particular, were discontented with both German hegemony and their place within the Polish state, and although they cooperated within the framework of the multiethnic parties, their nationalists took increasing shares of the vote in the elections of the 1920s and early 30s.
The relationship between the Polish kingdom and the Ukrainian national movement was a conflicted and frequently changing one: some Polish governments granted concessions on language rights and cultural autonomy in order to keep the peace, while others passed repressive laws and banned the more aggressive nationalist parties. Even under liberal governments, the eastern provinces were administered from cities with Polish and Jewish pluralities, and the courts were often unsympathetic to Ukrainian concerns. The decades of blowing hot and cold pushed the Ukrainians toward radicalism, and the absolute majority of the Ukrainians vote that the nationalist parties took in the 1933 election came just in time for the wave of repression that began the following year.
The Lyubchenko Rebellion started as a riot over the closing of Ukrainian-language schools in Lwow, but it caught dry tinder, and by early 1935 there was a general rising throughout the rural east. What made it even more dangerous was the fact that Lyubchenko called for arms and volunteers from the Ukrainians in Russia, and that many of them answered. The border was porous, and the Ukrainians were influential enough in St. Petersburg that smuggling was tolerated with a wink and a nod, and thousands of Russian citizens soon fought on Polish soil.
Poland did not take this lying down. Up to mid-1935, it had used only its own army to fight the rising – calling for German troops would have been unforgivable in the minds of many of the government’s Polish nationalist supporters – but Russia’s involvement, even in an unofficial role, made it suddenly more acceptable to seek German aid. This led to the “September Crisis,” in which Russians clashed with German soldiers sent to secure the border and in which Germany threatened to blockade St. Petersburg and the Hanseatic ports. For several weeks, two of the world’s great powers teetered on the edge of full-scale war.
By a combination of good fortune and good management, cooler heads prevailed. Britain and France offered their services as mediators, and frantic diplomacy resulted in both sides pulling back from the frontier and Russia pledging to seal the border against smugglers. A further round of talks involving Russia, Germany, the Polish government and the Ukrainian nationalists resulted in a compromise, in which Ukrainian cultural rights were written into the Polish constitution, and the Polish Ukrainians were permitted to establish educational and commercial links with their coethnics in Russia, in exchange for a promise not to seek political autonomy. The government in Warsaw fell the following year, to be replaced by a German-backed grand coalition. For the time being, the crisis had wedded Poland more closely to Berlin, but Russia now had its foot in the door, and the idea of Russian support as an alternative to German hegemony didn’t go away.
In the Caucasus, too, Russia moved cautiously to re-establish its influence. The proxy war of the 1920s between Persia and the Ottoman Empire [5] expanded into a hot war in 1930, which, although it remained a limited conflict, persisted for two years. In the end, with both sides’ resources being drained to little purpose, the war was ended without victor or vanquished. The peace permitted both Ottoman and Persian patronage in the southern Caucasus, and in practical terms, this meant that the Caucasian states could play the neighboring powers off against each other and adopt a more independent foreign policy. Armenia and Georgia, which had historically looked to Russia as a protector, took the opportunity to restore commercial ties to St. Petersburg, and although they still acknowledged Ottoman overlordship, they began looking to Russia as a third guarantor of their independence. Even the khanates of the Northern Caucasus and Shirvan, whose Muslim populations still remembered the oppression of Tsarist times, became less hostile, with Shirvan allowing Russian state companies to invest in its oil wells.
But the brief Polish crisis, and the largely-peaceful restoration of friendly relations in the Caucasus, paled before the troubles in China and Ethiopia. During the 1910s, and continuing through the 1920s rebellions against Ma Qi’s crash industrialization and modernization programs [6], Russia had supported the Ma Dynasty, whose power base was concentrated in the northwest and which had recruited many Turkestani and Russian Muslim troops to its side. By 1930, however, the rebellions had been crushed, Ma Qi’s rule was secure, and China had become both an economically and militarily stronger nation than it had been before the Ma clique seized power. And with China’s new strength came an ambition to retake its borderlands.
This put Russia, which was the guarantor of Manchurian and Korean independence and had established great influence among the Mongol and Uighur clans, in an extremely awkward position, and Russian citizens on the Chinese side of the border fared even worse. The narodniks who had fled to northern China in the 1910s and 20s, and who had married into the local populations and formed their own syncretic Christian faith [7], were now considered dangerous foreigners, and became targets of repression and persecution. Even the Uighurs, which had long been considered the Ma Dynasty’s most loyal supporters, were suspected due to their ties to Russia and Turkestan, and were shut out of high office.
Like the Ukrainians in Poland, the Transbaikal Mahayana Orthodox population in China sought help from their compatriots north of the Amur, and as in Poland, those compatriots answered. Where its own citizens were concerned, Russia was less willing to compromise, and the number of border clashes increased dramatically during the late 1930s. At the same time, a Han Chinese rebellion gathered steam in Manchuria, breaking out in 1938 and drawing thousands of Russian troops south to support their Qing clients. After the “Mukden Incident” of 1939, in which a Russian troop train was ambushed using Ma-supplied Chinese munitions, it appeared that a regional war was only a matter of time.
And the 1930s also saw Russia’s close African ally, Ethiopia, slide inexorably to war with Egypt over Nile water rights. In itself, this posed little danger to Russia, but Egypt was an Ottoman client, and there were some in both the Porte and St. Petersburg who saw the conflict as an opportunity to conclude unfinished business. They were in the minority, and the governments of both countries cooperated in an attempt to restrain their allies, but when war broke out, the hawks in St. Petersburg and Stamboul began increasingly to sabotage peacemaking efforts and call for vengeance against ancient enemies. The ability of Russia and the Ottoman Empire to stay at peace with each other – or not – would be, along with the Nile War itself, one of the great tests of the international system…
_______
[1] See post 2242.
[2] See post 3449.
[3] See post 963.
[4] I am indebted to Wannis for informing me of this language.
[5] See post 4509.
[6] See post 3449.
[7] See post 3449.
Looks like Turkestan will end up being a love child of the Holy Roman Empire and our own European Union. 
Glad to hear that Turkestani melting pot is quite the place! Will there be conservative backlash to the cultural displacement being done by chagatai? there are multiple ethnicities (you mentioned the Kazakhs as one) that might disagree with the HRE-EU madness.
Interesting to hear what's happening in China and that its back on the road to strength. Too bad that it sounds like conflict with Russia is in the cards. With all the fronts opening up it seems like Russia might end up in a 3 front conflict (China, Ottomans, and Ethiopia/Egypt) and that could spell the end of the oligarchic stability.
Interesting to hear what's happening in China and that its back on the road to strength. Too bad that it sounds like conflict with Russia is in the cards. With all the fronts opening up it seems like Russia might end up in a 3 front conflict (China, Ottomans, and Ethiopia/Egypt) and that could spell the end of the oligarchic stability.
I have a feeling that Chinese repression of Uyghurs will result in the Uyghurs somehow formalising their ties to Turkestan and/or moving away from China. This could mean indepence, joining Turkestan or some sort of joint Sino-Turkistani sovereignty. Knowing this timeline, my money would be on the last one.
Umm.....really? Sounds almost too good to be true, TBH. Do you have any sources for such?
Actually, from what I can find it was decriminalized, which isn't the same thing.
True, and it actually occurred in 1858 IOTL. But still, IMO, that is a remarkable development for the era, if I may say so.
I hope this isn't too trite for a post, but I just wanted to say that this is one of the best AHs I've ever read; certainly my favorite, by far, online. It took me the better part of two weeks to get through, and I definitely haven't finished going through all the discussion, but I also definitely just registered with AH and subscribed to this thread.
I've got a thousand and one questions, but I'll just lead with one on Turkestan and neofeudalism, with apologies if it's already been discussed to death: mentions of foreign power sponsorship and domestic interference made me wonder how widely people dispute neofeudalism as a progressive force by Ismailov's 2005.
If subsidizing another country's restive minorities is something only failed states do by modern times ITTL, that's one thing - but if it's treated more like espionage, and everybody does it within a set of open-secret limitations, it seems like even some progressives would opportunistically romanticize the nation-state or military confrontation ("When men were men and countries could defend themselves!" or something), or maybe just wonder if all this power distribution is only forestalling inevitable conflicts.
I've got a thousand and one questions, but I'll just lead with one on Turkestan and neofeudalism, with apologies if it's already been discussed to death: mentions of foreign power sponsorship and domestic interference made me wonder how widely people dispute neofeudalism as a progressive force by Ismailov's 2005.
If subsidizing another country's restive minorities is something only failed states do by modern times ITTL, that's one thing - but if it's treated more like espionage, and everybody does it within a set of open-secret limitations, it seems like even some progressives would opportunistically romanticize the nation-state or military confrontation ("When men were men and countries could defend themselves!" or something), or maybe just wonder if all this power distribution is only forestalling inevitable conflicts.
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Every now and then you post something that is unusually amazing, and this is one of those posts.
I can't wait to see what the present looks like, if this is how sovereignty and states work.
This is a brilliant and fascinating idea. I love it.
I can't wait to see what the present looks like, if this is how sovereignty and states work.
This is a brilliant and fascinating idea. I love it.
The situation varies from place to place. Women gained legal equality after the revolution and have kept it. In many parts of Russia, though, social expectations have reverted to something more traditional, and there aren't as many women in the labor force in 1930 as there were in 1900 (when the post-Great War manpower shortage meant that they were badly needed). There's a strong feminist movement, some of the more liberal cities and communes are egalitarian in practice, and a few women have risen to high office, but overall, women in Russia are less equal than in France or even the United States.
The former comparison has already been made in-universe: the HRE overlaid with a thin layer of modernity. The layer's getting thicker, and no one's quite sure how to handle that.
Oh, certainly. As mentioned in the update, the emerging Turkestani culture is mainly an urban thing thus far, and many old-school nomads or mountain clan-chiefs view it as decadent and corrupt. There will be preservationist movements right up to the present day, with varying degrees of success.
I've mentioned that certain conflicts in the 1930s and 40s will help to remake the international system. The Nile War is one, and the Sino-Russian conflict will be another. There will certainly be domestic fallout in Russia - it might well be able to avoid a three-front war, but events will take the oligarchs well out of their comfort zone.
I won't say exactly how things will turn out, but the Uighurs will definitely play a part.
As others have mentioned, the Ottomans decriminalized same-sex relations as part of the Tanzimat, both in OTL and TTL. I'd expect that, by now, much of western Europe will have followed suit, along with parts of the United States (and also those parts of Africa and Asia where there were never any criminal prohibitions in the first place). Progress beyond decriminalization is just starting; as mentioned in a recent update, tolerance of long-term, monogamous same-sex relationships is one of the things being discussed as part of the fight against Congo fever, but at this point there isn't a broad consensus.
There will absolutely be people saying that, just as in OTL, some people argue that the post-WW2 norms of collective security and sanctity of borders are creating frozen conflicts. Not all countries will embrace post-Westphalianism either, although enough will do so for it to be the norm.
The thing to remember, though, is that Turkestan in the 1900s-30s, as well as the other post-Westphalian entities created during this period, are first drafts. The system will be refined a great deal later in the century, with more collective-security elements added to prevent abuse; also, as the great powers themselves take on more post-Westphalian traits, they'll have more incentive to avoid tactics that can be turned back on them.
Anyway, welcome to the board and please keep reading and commenting.
Well, in 2014, the closest thing TTL has to a United Nations will have 11,000 members - there won't be many more states than there are in OTL, but entities above, below and alongside them will share international personalty.
Thanks! This was one of the inspirations, albeit with more of a jaji twist - there's a focus on bringing the teachers, as well as the lessons, out to where the students are.
East Africa in the 30s will be next - the Nile War, and the beginning of the Zanzibari breakup.
True, and it actually occurred in 1858 IOTL. But still, IMO, that is a remarkable development for the era, if I may say so.
It was in parts of Western Europe in the late 18th century and in most of South America in the first half of the 19th century.