Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
The Sandman
Banned
Well, this timeline has officially become ASB: it has a Russia that can be genuinely hopeful about its future. 
Well, this timeline has officially become ASB: it has a Russia that can be genuinely hopeful about its future.
A Russia that, even though it seems better than its OTL equivalent, has to deal with a level of bureaucratic inefficiency that would make Italy look like Finland.
It might even be a slightly backwards country, since there are hints of Schizo Tech and social (not economic) conservatism in Jonathan's post.TFSmith121
Banned
Hey, I have a faux Ferguson in BROS, as well...
Hey, I have a faux Ferguson in BROS, as well... his POV and reputation is such he seems tailor-made for fantasy worlds, doesn't it?
Didn't think they still made jingos at Oxbridge, actually.
Best,
Hey, I have a faux Ferguson in BROS, as well... his POV and reputation is such he seems tailor-made for fantasy worlds, doesn't it?
Didn't think they still made jingos at Oxbridge, actually.
Best,
It's actually reached the present in certain parts of the world, with the rest to follow. My original goal of finishing by the end of May isn't happening, but it's on track to be done in the fall.
Well, this timeline has officially become ASB: it has a Russia that can be genuinely hopeful about its future.
A Russia that, even though it seems better than its OTL equivalent, has to deal with a level of bureaucratic inefficiency that would make Italy look like Finland.
Well, let's just say that anarcho-communism, even in a modified form, isn't the most efficient way to run a country the size of Russia. The narodniks' extreme localism and government by consensus work, sort of, but they're a major drag on development. The Russian economy and physical infrastructure aren't up to western European standards, and there's still a need for local work-arounds like the sleigh or snowmobile northern rural people keep in the garage for when the roads don't get plowed. One reason there isn't more immigration from Ethiopia to Russia is that the living standards in Russia are about the same as those in the richest Ethiopian kingdoms (i.e., high Second World - Russia's slightly poorer than OTL, but Eritrea and Amhara are much richer).
Also, local democracy in Russia varies from place to place, and although the law supports feminism, society hasn't caught up everywhere. There's a fairly major town and country divide in terms of social attitudes.
That said, Russia is a free and growing country, and although everyone complains, few people want to go back to the way things were under the Tsars or the oligarchs.
It's pretty widespread - as IOTL, much of Europe and Latin America adopted it during the nineteenth century, and it spread from there through colonization and eventually became the world standard. Britain would have gone metric during the socialist government of the later 1920s and brought the empire with it.
Many of the English-speaking countries do still use Imperial measurement for some purposes as, say, the UK or Ireland does IOTL: the metric system is official and everyone learns it, but people still talk about running a mile or weighing 12 stone, and certain specialized items like floor tiles are measured in inches and feet. I'd expect some residual use of traditional units in Asia too, and maybe in the Ottoman world (similar to how Israel IOTL still uses dunams, an Ottoman unit, to measure land area).
Liberia and Burma are metric ITTL. I'm not sure about the United States - on the one hand, exceptionalism in that sort of thing runs deep, but on the other, TTL's United States has been cosmopolitan for two generations longer.
Yes, he does, at least in any world where the colonial era is over or on its way out.
There should hopefully be an update this weekend.
TFSmith121
Banned
Tre bien
Tre bien. Working on one myself.
My BROS "Ferguson" is an easter egg, however.
Best,
Tre bien. Working on one myself.
My BROS "Ferguson" is an easter egg, however.
Best,
Budapest, July 1992
Ferenc Németh always said Mass in the afternoon. In the morning, his congregation had other places to be: at jobs, in the markets, with family, and for some, in the other churches where politics and safety dictated that they be seen. It also took time for all of them to get there: they couldn’t all come at once, lest the neighbors and police suspect something.
In safer times, Ferenc held the service in his apartment. These weren’t safer times, so his house church moved from place to place – basements, other people’s dwellings, back rooms of offices and stores. This week, he was in the cellar of a back-street café that one of his congregants owned. In the dim light provided by a single bulb and a television screen, with sacks and jars and crates piled all around, it might have been a catacomb, and no doubt Ferenc’s motley congregation – these from the university; those, still in their work clothes, from working-class Zugló and Angyalföld; others in the suits they might wear during the week in their high office towers; over there, a professor of mathematics whose grandfather had been a Magyarab.
One ritual was always the same, no matter where the Mass was celebrated and no matter how precarious the times were: that after the service, Ferenc would share tea with the congregation. “Our sermon,” he called it – in a house church where there might be twenty people one Sunday and eleven the next, and where all of them were there because they had strong opinions, it could hardly be otherwise. Hierarchy couldn’t be as strict in such a place as it might be elsewhere, even if Ferenc wanted it to be, and he didn’t.
“The sin of pride,” said Katalin, the Zugló housewife. She was looking over her tea at the television, which was showing another underground fission-bomb test: earlier, it had shown the launch of a spy satellite and a parade of riders massing near the Croatian border.
“Pride, yes,” said Zoltán from the crate he shared with his fellow students. “And nationalism and oppression. The sins of El Salvador, the sins of Belgium…”
“Sins washed away by blood, in El Salvador’s case,” Lajos the mathematician finished. His speech was clinical, but his voice betrayed fear. “And in ours…”
“There hasn’t been much blood so far,” said Ferenc. “Fights in the streets, yes, but no soldiers. Not even many police. The regency council is worried about what side they’ll take.”
“But tomorrow will be much bigger than before. The council can let a hundred or a thousand people demonstrate, but they know what happened in Russia when a million came out.”
“If they don’t have the army, who do they have?” Katalin asked.
“I don’t know,” admitted Lajos. “But I think it’s too much, too soon.”
“Too soon?” said Zoltán? “Almost too late, if you ask me. We need to hit them fast, before they get their feet under them…”
“You’re talking like we’re at war.”
“Aren’t we? And if we wait a month longer, the Croats will back down, and then where will we be?”
Imre the machinist gave a sharp laugh. “A month? A week at the outside. Haven’t you heard the exporters in Zagreb screaming ever since Croatia revoked the customs union? And the president of the Fiume council’s even worse. ‘Brotherhood despite disagreement’ – certainly, if ‘brotherhood’ means ‘profit…’”
“And if they do back down?” said Erzsébet. “The people on the streets started coming out because prices rose, but it’s more than that now…”
“Not as much more as you think. You’re a lawyer, so prices don’t matter much to you, but for most of us, if we can put food on the table, we’ll go home and cook it.”
“And if we don’t win this war quickly,” Zoltán said, “there might be a real one if the Croats don’t back down.”
“You don’t think…” Katalin began.
“Those riders on the television – do you think they’re for show? The regents aren’t sure of themselves, so they’re letting the diplomats and the courts handle things for now, but if things get bad enough…”
“We have to do our part to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Ferenc. “We at least have to try.”
“So you’ll be there tomorrow?” asked Anna, who sat to Zoltán’s left.
Lajos began to say something, but fell silent when Ferenc answered. “We all will be. Because otherwise, we do nothing in the face of sin.”
Ferenc had lived his entire life in Budapest, but he still couldn’t walk through its streets without thinking how beautiful it was. The boulevards and stately buildings of former centuries were all around, and only a few still bore the scars of the long-ago civil war. Some still called Hungary’s capital the Paris of the East, but to Ferenc it surpassed Paris, and never more so than today.
The people in the streets stretched in all directions, too many to count. Maybe there were a hundred thousand, maybe three, maybe a million: only an eagle could begin to say which. They were as motley as his congregation, and they carried Hungarian flags and pictures of Kossuth and chanted szabadság – freedom. It was all patriotic and proud: it might have been a demonstration organized by the regency council itself, except that the freedom the people were calling for was real, and the regents were its targets.
Ferenc walked down Váci street, carried by the tide of people. He was moving far too slowly to be marching, but he felt as if he were, and a ribald song from his days as a conscript came unbidden to mind. He was part of a victorious army that held the city unchallenged: there was no sign thus far of soldiers, or even of the thugs the council had brought in to quash the smaller demonstrations. The regents’ palace was closer, almost in sight…
The aircraft came without warning, six of them streaking low above the crowd and releasing their bombs as they flew. There were explosions and the beginning of screams, and almost before they could finish, the helicopter gunships came in the bombers’ wake, firing machine guns into the crowds. Banners fell with those who carried them, and the shouts of szabadság were mingled with cries of panic.
“This way!” shouted Ferenc, calling to his congregation and any others who could hear. Miraculously, none of them had been hurt, but the gunships were coming for another pass. “Run! Run!” There was an alley to the left that would take them out of the kill zone and away from the crowds that might trample them, and he pointed them to it, watching them go before he ran himself.
The alley led to a side street and that street to another, and they ran. There was the sharper report of rifle fire now, sporadic and scattered: not the army or the police, Ferenc realized, but thugs who had waited just outside the ambush zone. The regents have enough loyal soldiers to control the air, but still not the ground.
But even uncontrolled mobs could be dangerous. A group of club-wielding men blocked their way, and Ferenc doubted that they’d be satisfied with administering a beating. They were out to kill. He seized a length of pipe from an alley rubbish-pile and saw that others had done the same. “Stay together,” he said. “We have to get past them. They’ll push us back to the kill zone if they don’t kill us themselves. Get ready and rush them.”
He raised the pipe and broke into a desperate charge, swinging wildly to clear a path in front of him and ward off blows. Somewhat to his surprise, the tactic worked. The thugs had expected to rush groups of panicked demonstrators, not to be rushed themselves. They fell back in confusion, and by the time they regrouped, Ferenc and the others were past them with only a few blows struck.
“Now we know who they still have, Katalin,” said Lajos, bleeding from a shrapnel wound.
“Now we know who we have to fight,” said Zoltán.
“Quiet,” whispered Ferenc. “We’re not out of danger.” His conscript training, far older than his ordination as a priest, had taken hold now. “We have to get out of here, find a place to hide until the shooting’s over. And then we do what we can.”
They found shelter in a basement, and for three days, they cared for the wounded who drifted in. Those who they could treat, they treated, and for the others, there was prayer. In thirty years as the priest of a house church, Ferenc had given last rites maybe a hundred times. In the three days after the protest, he gave nearly as many.
On the fourth day, with the smell of gunpowder gone from the streets, they began to drift home. They argued about what they might do, talked about setting up another field hospital in Ferenc’s apartment or raising money for the families of the dead, but for many, defiance had turned to despair. Ferenc wondered what he would say to them at the next Mass, turned it over in his mind a hundred times, but each idea he had was as unsatisfying as the last.
And then the next collective sermon was no longer a worry, because on the sixth day, the secret police came for him.
Maybe a spy among the demonstrators – because surely there had been spies – had identified him. Maybe someone had picked him out as a leader from aerial photographs. Maybe they had some other source of information, some other way of knowing. It didn’t matter once the cell door closed behind him.
They did all the things Ferenc expected. They denied him sleep and filled the air with harsh and piercing noises. They tied him up in positions that made his muscles burn after an hour and had every nerve in his body screaming agony after three. They put a hood on him and struck blows at unpredictable intervals as they shouted questions. They used electric shocks and rubber truncheons. And sometimes they let him see them and used fists.
“Who paid you, traitor?” asked an interrogator on what he believed was the tenth day. The man’s voice was deceptively calm, but it was punctuated by a blow to the head. “Was it the socialists? The Germans? The Consistory?”
Ferenc found that he was still able to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Another blow, this time to the gut; Ferenc doubled over as much as he could and vomited. “Was it the cigányok, you disgusting pig – the gypsies in Eastern Transylvania? Was it the zsidók in Buganda and Salonika? The fucking Habsburgs? The Sultan?”
By now, the torturer wasn’t even waiting for answers: he rained questions and blows on Ferenc as if only they mattered. The list of enemies went on and on, and all at once Ferenc found it oddly liberating: if everyone was the regency council’s foe, then he and his church had the support of all humanity.
Between that thought and the backhand slap that followed, Ferenc didn’t hear the next question. “I said, are you a member of the underground, you pig?”
“Yes, of course I am.”
“You listen to the foreign radio? You run a house church?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then who pays you, you bastard? The socialists? Germany? Russia?”
Those questions occupied the remainder of the day, and the one following.
Some time later, they gave him clean clothes and a shower and brought him into an office. The man across the desk was in an ordinary suit, not a uniform, and though Ferenc was tied to a chair, there were no guards with truncheons standing behind him.
“I’ve reviewed your case,” the officer said mildly, “and I must say I deeply regret the things that have been done to you. It seems to me that you’re not culpable. You have grandiose religious ideas, you reject the authority of the Primate of Hungary, you believe you have a messianic mission… you aren’t a criminal, you have a religious and political psychosis. You should be treated with compassion, not beaten.”
Fear stabbed through Ferenc deeper even than it had done in the face of bombs and torture. He knew better than most what happened in the regency council’s psychiatric hospitals: he’d ministered to two people who’d spent years there. One of them had been a member of the old regency council, before the Croatian secession and the coup of ’67. Most of the time, he no longer remembered.
“I’m perfectly sane,” Ferenc made himself say.
“Then why haven’t you done what sane people do, and shown your adaptation to society? Why haven’t you confessed?”
“I did confess. I can confess again now. I’m a member of the underground. I was a priest in an unauthorized church. I gave names” – he had done, of people he knew they’d already killed or caught – “and I can tell them to you again.”
“Now, now, I’m a doctor. Your confession wasn’t complete, and it wasn’t in the right spirit. You may want to think about that before we meet again.”
In the cell that night, Ferenc wondered whether this would be the point where he truly broke.
Two days later, they let him go.
His release came as much without warning as the bombers and the torturer’s blows. They took him down the route he normally walked to the interrogation chamber, but brought him to another room instead and told him to change into his street clothes. They walked him out the door without a word, closed it behind him, and left him there.
He wandered to the corner, not sure at first where he was, thinking only of putting distance between himself and the prison. It took him a few minutes to get his bearings, but when he turned onto the main street of Zugló, he could place himself again on the map.
Katalin’s apartment wasn’t far, and it didn’t take long to get there: there was still a pall over the streets, and people came out only when they had to. She was inside with her children – thank God she hadn’t been taken – and when she saw Ferenc’s face, she made him sit down while she went to get cold compresses.
“What happened to you?” she cried. “Everyone was sure they’d killed you, like they did to Zoltán – they just took him out and shot him.”
“They were going to break me for the show trial. They were just about to do it, too – and then they just let me go.”
She nodded, as if it all made sense. “They’re afraid,” she said.
All at once it made sense to him too. The regents controlled the air but not the ground, and while the people might have been cowed, their fury had only increased. The council was scared that a show trial of a priest, or even an execution in a prison basement, might be a spark.
“There have been clashes on the Croatian border too,” Katalin continued, “and they’re worried about desertion, or even mutiny.”
“Clashes?” said Ferenc sharply. “When did they start?”
“About three o’clock this morning.”
Ferenc did a quick calculation in his head: about five hours had separated the first shots fired on the border from his release. “If there are deserters, we need to shelter them.”
“We need to do more than that,” Katalin said.
“Of course…”
“I’ve been talking to Anna since they took you and Zoltán away. She told me about Russia and Adamawa and Sarajevo – how the people made their own state when the state failed them. You’ve already done that with your church, but we need courts and welfare workers and schools – things they can’t bomb from the air. They don’t own the ground, so we must replace them on it, and when the soldiers desert, they’ll desert to us.”
“That will take a long time,” he said. “It’ll be hard, if those clashes become a war.” He sat in silence for a long moment. “But we have to, I think, or else we’ll be silent in the face of sin.”
Ferenc Németh always said Mass in the afternoon. In the morning, his congregation had other places to be: at jobs, in the markets, with family, and for some, in the other churches where politics and safety dictated that they be seen. It also took time for all of them to get there: they couldn’t all come at once, lest the neighbors and police suspect something.
In safer times, Ferenc held the service in his apartment. These weren’t safer times, so his house church moved from place to place – basements, other people’s dwellings, back rooms of offices and stores. This week, he was in the cellar of a back-street café that one of his congregants owned. In the dim light provided by a single bulb and a television screen, with sacks and jars and crates piled all around, it might have been a catacomb, and no doubt Ferenc’s motley congregation – these from the university; those, still in their work clothes, from working-class Zugló and Angyalföld; others in the suits they might wear during the week in their high office towers; over there, a professor of mathematics whose grandfather had been a Magyarab.
One ritual was always the same, no matter where the Mass was celebrated and no matter how precarious the times were: that after the service, Ferenc would share tea with the congregation. “Our sermon,” he called it – in a house church where there might be twenty people one Sunday and eleven the next, and where all of them were there because they had strong opinions, it could hardly be otherwise. Hierarchy couldn’t be as strict in such a place as it might be elsewhere, even if Ferenc wanted it to be, and he didn’t.
“The sin of pride,” said Katalin, the Zugló housewife. She was looking over her tea at the television, which was showing another underground fission-bomb test: earlier, it had shown the launch of a spy satellite and a parade of riders massing near the Croatian border.
“Pride, yes,” said Zoltán from the crate he shared with his fellow students. “And nationalism and oppression. The sins of El Salvador, the sins of Belgium…”
“Sins washed away by blood, in El Salvador’s case,” Lajos the mathematician finished. His speech was clinical, but his voice betrayed fear. “And in ours…”
“There hasn’t been much blood so far,” said Ferenc. “Fights in the streets, yes, but no soldiers. Not even many police. The regency council is worried about what side they’ll take.”
“But tomorrow will be much bigger than before. The council can let a hundred or a thousand people demonstrate, but they know what happened in Russia when a million came out.”
“If they don’t have the army, who do they have?” Katalin asked.
“I don’t know,” admitted Lajos. “But I think it’s too much, too soon.”
“Too soon?” said Zoltán? “Almost too late, if you ask me. We need to hit them fast, before they get their feet under them…”
“You’re talking like we’re at war.”
“Aren’t we? And if we wait a month longer, the Croats will back down, and then where will we be?”
Imre the machinist gave a sharp laugh. “A month? A week at the outside. Haven’t you heard the exporters in Zagreb screaming ever since Croatia revoked the customs union? And the president of the Fiume council’s even worse. ‘Brotherhood despite disagreement’ – certainly, if ‘brotherhood’ means ‘profit…’”
“And if they do back down?” said Erzsébet. “The people on the streets started coming out because prices rose, but it’s more than that now…”
“Not as much more as you think. You’re a lawyer, so prices don’t matter much to you, but for most of us, if we can put food on the table, we’ll go home and cook it.”
“And if we don’t win this war quickly,” Zoltán said, “there might be a real one if the Croats don’t back down.”
“You don’t think…” Katalin began.
“Those riders on the television – do you think they’re for show? The regents aren’t sure of themselves, so they’re letting the diplomats and the courts handle things for now, but if things get bad enough…”
“We have to do our part to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Ferenc. “We at least have to try.”
“So you’ll be there tomorrow?” asked Anna, who sat to Zoltán’s left.
Lajos began to say something, but fell silent when Ferenc answered. “We all will be. Because otherwise, we do nothing in the face of sin.”
*******
Ferenc had lived his entire life in Budapest, but he still couldn’t walk through its streets without thinking how beautiful it was. The boulevards and stately buildings of former centuries were all around, and only a few still bore the scars of the long-ago civil war. Some still called Hungary’s capital the Paris of the East, but to Ferenc it surpassed Paris, and never more so than today.
The people in the streets stretched in all directions, too many to count. Maybe there were a hundred thousand, maybe three, maybe a million: only an eagle could begin to say which. They were as motley as his congregation, and they carried Hungarian flags and pictures of Kossuth and chanted szabadság – freedom. It was all patriotic and proud: it might have been a demonstration organized by the regency council itself, except that the freedom the people were calling for was real, and the regents were its targets.
Ferenc walked down Váci street, carried by the tide of people. He was moving far too slowly to be marching, but he felt as if he were, and a ribald song from his days as a conscript came unbidden to mind. He was part of a victorious army that held the city unchallenged: there was no sign thus far of soldiers, or even of the thugs the council had brought in to quash the smaller demonstrations. The regents’ palace was closer, almost in sight…
The aircraft came without warning, six of them streaking low above the crowd and releasing their bombs as they flew. There were explosions and the beginning of screams, and almost before they could finish, the helicopter gunships came in the bombers’ wake, firing machine guns into the crowds. Banners fell with those who carried them, and the shouts of szabadság were mingled with cries of panic.
“This way!” shouted Ferenc, calling to his congregation and any others who could hear. Miraculously, none of them had been hurt, but the gunships were coming for another pass. “Run! Run!” There was an alley to the left that would take them out of the kill zone and away from the crowds that might trample them, and he pointed them to it, watching them go before he ran himself.
The alley led to a side street and that street to another, and they ran. There was the sharper report of rifle fire now, sporadic and scattered: not the army or the police, Ferenc realized, but thugs who had waited just outside the ambush zone. The regents have enough loyal soldiers to control the air, but still not the ground.
But even uncontrolled mobs could be dangerous. A group of club-wielding men blocked their way, and Ferenc doubted that they’d be satisfied with administering a beating. They were out to kill. He seized a length of pipe from an alley rubbish-pile and saw that others had done the same. “Stay together,” he said. “We have to get past them. They’ll push us back to the kill zone if they don’t kill us themselves. Get ready and rush them.”
He raised the pipe and broke into a desperate charge, swinging wildly to clear a path in front of him and ward off blows. Somewhat to his surprise, the tactic worked. The thugs had expected to rush groups of panicked demonstrators, not to be rushed themselves. They fell back in confusion, and by the time they regrouped, Ferenc and the others were past them with only a few blows struck.
“Now we know who they still have, Katalin,” said Lajos, bleeding from a shrapnel wound.
“Now we know who we have to fight,” said Zoltán.
“Quiet,” whispered Ferenc. “We’re not out of danger.” His conscript training, far older than his ordination as a priest, had taken hold now. “We have to get out of here, find a place to hide until the shooting’s over. And then we do what we can.”
*******
They found shelter in a basement, and for three days, they cared for the wounded who drifted in. Those who they could treat, they treated, and for the others, there was prayer. In thirty years as the priest of a house church, Ferenc had given last rites maybe a hundred times. In the three days after the protest, he gave nearly as many.
On the fourth day, with the smell of gunpowder gone from the streets, they began to drift home. They argued about what they might do, talked about setting up another field hospital in Ferenc’s apartment or raising money for the families of the dead, but for many, defiance had turned to despair. Ferenc wondered what he would say to them at the next Mass, turned it over in his mind a hundred times, but each idea he had was as unsatisfying as the last.
And then the next collective sermon was no longer a worry, because on the sixth day, the secret police came for him.
Maybe a spy among the demonstrators – because surely there had been spies – had identified him. Maybe someone had picked him out as a leader from aerial photographs. Maybe they had some other source of information, some other way of knowing. It didn’t matter once the cell door closed behind him.
They did all the things Ferenc expected. They denied him sleep and filled the air with harsh and piercing noises. They tied him up in positions that made his muscles burn after an hour and had every nerve in his body screaming agony after three. They put a hood on him and struck blows at unpredictable intervals as they shouted questions. They used electric shocks and rubber truncheons. And sometimes they let him see them and used fists.
“Who paid you, traitor?” asked an interrogator on what he believed was the tenth day. The man’s voice was deceptively calm, but it was punctuated by a blow to the head. “Was it the socialists? The Germans? The Consistory?”
Ferenc found that he was still able to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Another blow, this time to the gut; Ferenc doubled over as much as he could and vomited. “Was it the cigányok, you disgusting pig – the gypsies in Eastern Transylvania? Was it the zsidók in Buganda and Salonika? The fucking Habsburgs? The Sultan?”
By now, the torturer wasn’t even waiting for answers: he rained questions and blows on Ferenc as if only they mattered. The list of enemies went on and on, and all at once Ferenc found it oddly liberating: if everyone was the regency council’s foe, then he and his church had the support of all humanity.
Between that thought and the backhand slap that followed, Ferenc didn’t hear the next question. “I said, are you a member of the underground, you pig?”
“Yes, of course I am.”
“You listen to the foreign radio? You run a house church?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then who pays you, you bastard? The socialists? Germany? Russia?”
Those questions occupied the remainder of the day, and the one following.
Some time later, they gave him clean clothes and a shower and brought him into an office. The man across the desk was in an ordinary suit, not a uniform, and though Ferenc was tied to a chair, there were no guards with truncheons standing behind him.
“I’ve reviewed your case,” the officer said mildly, “and I must say I deeply regret the things that have been done to you. It seems to me that you’re not culpable. You have grandiose religious ideas, you reject the authority of the Primate of Hungary, you believe you have a messianic mission… you aren’t a criminal, you have a religious and political psychosis. You should be treated with compassion, not beaten.”
Fear stabbed through Ferenc deeper even than it had done in the face of bombs and torture. He knew better than most what happened in the regency council’s psychiatric hospitals: he’d ministered to two people who’d spent years there. One of them had been a member of the old regency council, before the Croatian secession and the coup of ’67. Most of the time, he no longer remembered.
“I’m perfectly sane,” Ferenc made himself say.
“Then why haven’t you done what sane people do, and shown your adaptation to society? Why haven’t you confessed?”
“I did confess. I can confess again now. I’m a member of the underground. I was a priest in an unauthorized church. I gave names” – he had done, of people he knew they’d already killed or caught – “and I can tell them to you again.”
“Now, now, I’m a doctor. Your confession wasn’t complete, and it wasn’t in the right spirit. You may want to think about that before we meet again.”
In the cell that night, Ferenc wondered whether this would be the point where he truly broke.
Two days later, they let him go.
*******
His release came as much without warning as the bombers and the torturer’s blows. They took him down the route he normally walked to the interrogation chamber, but brought him to another room instead and told him to change into his street clothes. They walked him out the door without a word, closed it behind him, and left him there.
He wandered to the corner, not sure at first where he was, thinking only of putting distance between himself and the prison. It took him a few minutes to get his bearings, but when he turned onto the main street of Zugló, he could place himself again on the map.
Katalin’s apartment wasn’t far, and it didn’t take long to get there: there was still a pall over the streets, and people came out only when they had to. She was inside with her children – thank God she hadn’t been taken – and when she saw Ferenc’s face, she made him sit down while she went to get cold compresses.
“What happened to you?” she cried. “Everyone was sure they’d killed you, like they did to Zoltán – they just took him out and shot him.”
“They were going to break me for the show trial. They were just about to do it, too – and then they just let me go.”
She nodded, as if it all made sense. “They’re afraid,” she said.
All at once it made sense to him too. The regents controlled the air but not the ground, and while the people might have been cowed, their fury had only increased. The council was scared that a show trial of a priest, or even an execution in a prison basement, might be a spark.
“There have been clashes on the Croatian border too,” Katalin continued, “and they’re worried about desertion, or even mutiny.”
“Clashes?” said Ferenc sharply. “When did they start?”
“About three o’clock this morning.”
Ferenc did a quick calculation in his head: about five hours had separated the first shots fired on the border from his release. “If there are deserters, we need to shelter them.”
“We need to do more than that,” Katalin said.
“Of course…”
“I’ve been talking to Anna since they took you and Zoltán away. She told me about Russia and Adamawa and Sarajevo – how the people made their own state when the state failed them. You’ve already done that with your church, but we need courts and welfare workers and schools – things they can’t bomb from the air. They don’t own the ground, so we must replace them on it, and when the soldiers desert, they’ll desert to us.”
“That will take a long time,” he said. “It’ll be hard, if those clashes become a war.” He sat in silence for a long moment. “But we have to, I think, or else we’ll be silent in the face of sin.”
Last edited:
Budapest, July 1992
Ferenc Németh always said Mass in the afternoon. In the morning, his congregation had other places to be: at jobs, in the markets, with family, and for some, in the other churches where politics and safety dictated that they be seen. It also took time for all of them to get there: they couldn’t all come at once, lest the neighbors and police suspect something.
In safer times, Ferenc held the service in his apartment. These weren’t safer times, so his house church moved from place to place – basements, other people’s dwellings, back rooms of offices and stores. This week, he was in the cellar of a back-street café that one of his congregants owned. In the dim light provided by a single bulb and a television screen, with sacks and jars and crates piled all around, it might have been a catacomb, and no doubt Ferenc’s motley congregation – these from the university; those, still in their work clothes, from working-class Zugló and Angyalföld; others in the suits they might wear during the week in their high office towers; over there, a professor of mathematics whose grandfather had been a Magyarab.
One ritual was always the same, no matter where the Mass was celebrated and no matter how precarious the times were: that after the service, Ferenc would share tea with the congregation. “Our sermon,” he called it – in a house church where there might be twenty people one Sunday and eleven the next, and where all of them were there because they had strong opinions, it could hardly be otherwise. Hierarchy couldn’t be as strict in such a place as it might be elsewhere, even if Ferenc wanted it to be, and he didn’t.
“The sin of pride,” said Katalin, the Zugló housewife. She was looking over her tea at the television, which was showing another fission-bomb test in space: earlier, it had shown a parade of riders massing near the Croatian border.
“Pride, yes,” said Zoltán from the crate he shared with his fellow students. “And nationalism and oppression. The sins of El Salvador, the sins of Belgium…”
“Sins washed away by blood, in El Salvador’s case,” Lajos the mathematician finished. His speech was clinical, but his voice betrayed fear. “And in ours…”
“There hasn’t been much blood so far,” said Ferenc. “Fights in the streets, yes, but no soldiers. Not even many police. The regency council is worried about what side they’ll take.”
“But tomorrow will be much bigger than before. The council can let a hundred or a thousand people demonstrate, but they know what happened in Russia when a million came out.”
“If they don’t have the army, who do they have?” Katalin asked.
“I don’t know,” admitted Lajos. “But I think it’s too much, too soon.”
“Too soon?” said Zoltán? “Almost too late, if you ask me. We need to hit them fast, before they get their feet under them…”
“You’re talking like we’re at war.”
“Aren’t we? And if we wait a month longer, the Croats will back down, and then where will we be?”
Imre the machinist gave a sharp laugh. “A month? A week at the outside. Haven’t you heard the exporters in Zagreb screaming ever since Croatia revoked the customs union? And the president of the Fiume council’s even worse. ‘Brotherhood despite disagreement’ – certainly, if ‘brotherhood’ means ‘profit…’”
“And if they do back down?” said Erzsébet. “The people on the streets started coming out because prices rose, but it’s more than that now…”
“Not as much more as you think. You’re a lawyer, so prices don’t matter much to you, but for most of us, if we can put food on the table, we’ll go home and cook it.”
“And if we don’t win this war quickly,” Zoltán said, “there might be a real one if the Croats don’t back down.”
“You don’t think…” Katalin began.
“Those riders on the television – do you think they’re for show? The regents aren’t sure of themselves, so they’re letting the diplomats and the courts handle things for now, but if things get bad enough…”
“We have to do our part to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Ferenc. “We at least have to try.”
“So you’ll be there tomorrow?” asked Anna, who sat to Zoltán’s left.
Lajos began to say something, but fell silent when Ferenc answered. “We all will be. Because otherwise, we do nothing in the face of sin.”
*******
Ferenc had lived his entire life in Budapest, but he still couldn’t walk through its streets without thinking how beautiful it was. The boulevards and stately buildings of former centuries were all around, and only a few still bore the scars of the long-ago civil war. Some still called Hungary’s capital the Paris of the East, but to Ferenc it surpassed Paris, and never more so than today.
The people in the streets stretched in all directions, too many to count. Maybe there were a hundred thousand, maybe three, maybe a million: only an eagle could begin to say which. They were as motley as his congregation, and they carried Hungarian flags and pictures of Kossuth and chanted szabadság – freedom. It was all patriotic and proud: it might have been a demonstration organized by the regency council itself, except that the freedom the people were calling for was real, and the regents were its targets.
Ferenc walked down Váci street, carried by the tide of people. He was moving far too slowly to be marching, but he felt as if he were, and a ribald song from his days as a conscript came unbidden to mind. He was part of a victorious army that held the city unchallenged: there was no sign thus far of soldiers, or even of the thugs the council had brought in to quash the smaller demonstrations. The regents’ palace was closer, almost in sight…
The aircraft came without warning, six of them streaking low above the crowd and releasing their bombs as they flew. There were explosions and the beginning of screams, and almost before they could finish, the helicopter gunships came in the bombers’ wake, firing machine guns into the crowds. Banners fell with those who carried them, and the shouts of szabadság were mingled with cries of panic.
“This way!” shouted Ferenc, calling to his congregation and any others who could hear. Miraculously, none of them had been hurt, but the gunships were coming for another pass. “Run! Run!” There was an alley to the left that would take them out of the kill zone and away from the crowds that might trample them, and he pointed them to it, watching them go before he ran himself.
The alley led to a side street and that street to another, and they ran. There was the sharper report of rifle fire now, sporadic and scattered: not the army or the police, Ferenc realized, but thugs who had waited just outside the ambush zone. The regents have enough loyal soldiers to control the air, but still not the ground.
But even uncontrolled mobs could be dangerous. A group of club-wielding men blocked their way, and Ferenc doubted that they’d be satisfied with administering a beating. They were out to kill. He seized a length of pipe from an alley rubbish-pile and saw that others had done the same. “Stay together,” he said. “We have to get past them. They’ll push us back to the kill zone if they don’t kill us themselves. Get ready and rush them.”
He raised the pipe and broke into a desperate charge, swinging wildly to clear a path in front of him and ward off blows. Somewhat to his surprise, the tactic worked. The thugs had expected to rush groups of panicked demonstrators, not to be rushed themselves. They fell back in confusion, and by the time they regrouped, Ferenc and the others were past them with only a few blows struck.
“Now we know who they still have, Katalin,” said Lajos, bleeding from a shrapnel wound.
“Now we know who we have to fight,” said Zoltán.
“Quiet,” whispered Ferenc. “We’re not out of danger.” His conscript training, far older than his ordination as a priest, had taken hold now. “We have to get out of here, find a place to hide until the shooting’s over. And then we do what we can.”
*******
They found shelter in a basement, and for three days, they cared for the wounded who drifted in. Those who they could treat, they treated, and for the others, there was prayer. In thirty years as the priest of a house church, Ferenc had given last rites maybe a hundred times. In the three days after the protest, he gave nearly as many.
On the fourth day, with the smell of gunpowder gone from the streets, they began to drift home. They argued about what they might do, talked about setting up another field hospital in Ferenc’s apartment or raising money for the families of the dead, but for many, defiance had turned to despair. Ferenc wondered what he would say to them at the next Mass, turned it over in his mind a hundred times, but each idea he had was as unsatisfying as the last.
And then the next collective sermon was no longer a worry, because on the sixth day, the secret police came for him.
Maybe a spy among the demonstrators – because surely there had been spies – had identified him. Maybe someone had picked him out as a leader from aerial photographs. Maybe they had some other source of information, some other way of knowing. It didn’t matter once the cell door closed behind him.
They did all the things Ferenc expected. They denied him sleep and filled the air with harsh and piercing noises. They tied him up in positions that made his muscles burn after an hour and had every nerve in his body screaming agony after three. They put a hood on him and struck blows at unpredictable intervals as they shouted questions. They used electric shocks and rubber truncheons. And sometimes they let him see them and used fists.
“Who paid you, traitor?” asked an interrogator on what he believed was the tenth day. The man’s voice was deceptively calm, but it was punctuated by a blow to the head. “Was it the socialists? The Germans? The Consistory?”
Ferenc found that he was still able to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Another blow, this time to the gut; Ferenc doubled over as much as he could and vomited. “Was it the cigányok, you disgusting pig – the gypsies in Eastern Transylvania? Was it the zsidók in Buganda and Salonika? The fucking Habsburgs? The Sultan?”
By now, the torturer wasn’t even waiting for answers: he rained questions and blows on Ferenc as if only they mattered. The list of enemies went on and on, and all at once Ferenc found it oddly liberating: if everyone was the regency council’s foe, then he and his church had the support of all humanity.
Between that thought and the backhand slap that followed, Ferenc didn’t hear the next question. “I said, are you a member of the underground, you pig?”
“Yes, of course I am.”
“You listen to the foreign radio? You run a house church?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then who pays you, you bastard? The socialists? Germany? Russia?”
Those questions occupied the remainder of the day, and the one following.
Some time later, they gave him clean clothes and a shower and brought him into an office. The man across the desk was in an ordinary suit, not a uniform, and though Ferenc was tied to a chair, there were no guards with truncheons standing behind him.
“I’ve reviewed your case,” the officer said mildly, “and I must say I deeply regret the things that have been done to you. It seems to me that you’re not culpable. You have grandiose religious ideas, you reject the authority of the Primate of Hungary, you believe you have a messianic mission… you aren’t a criminal, you have a religious and political psychosis. You should be treated with compassion, not beaten.”
Fear stabbed through Ferenc deeper even than it had done in the face of bombs and torture. He knew better than most what happened in the regency council’s psychiatric hospitals: he’d ministered to two people who’d spent years there. One of them had been a member of the old regency council, before the Croatian secession and the coup of ’67. Most of the time, he no longer remembered.
“I’m perfectly sane,” Ferenc made himself say.
“Then why haven’t you done what sane people do, and shown your adaptation to society? Why haven’t you confessed?”
“I did confess. I can confess again now. I’m a member of the underground. I was a priest in an unauthorized church. I gave names” – he had done, of people he knew they’d already killed or caught – “and I can tell them to you again.”
“Now, now, I’m a doctor. Your confession wasn’t complete, and it wasn’t in the right spirit. You may want to think about that before we meet again.”
In the cell that night, Ferenc wondered whether this would be the point where he truly broke.
Two days later, they let him go.
*******
His release came as much without warning as the bombers and the torturer’s blows. They took him down the route he normally walked to the interrogation chamber, but brought him to another room instead and told him to change into his street clothes. They walked him out the door without a word, closed it behind him, and left him there.
He wandered to the corner, not sure at first where he was, thinking only of putting distance between himself and the prison. It took him a few minutes to get his bearings, but when he turned onto the main street of Zugló, he could place himself again on the map.
Katalin’s apartment wasn’t far, and it didn’t take long to get there: there was still a pall over the streets, and people came out only when they had to. She was inside with her children – thank God she hadn’t been taken – and when she saw Ferenc’s face, she made him sit down while she went to get cold compresses.
“What happened to you?” she cried. “Everyone was sure they’d killed you, like they did to Zoltán – they just took him out and shot him.”
“They were going to break me for the show trial. They were just about to do it, too – and then they just let me go.”
She nodded, as if it all made sense. “They’re afraid,” she said.
All at once it made sense to him too. The regents controlled the air but not the ground, and while the people might have been cowed, their fury had only increased. The council was scared that a show trial of a priest, or even an execution in a prison basement, might be a spark.
“There have been clashes on the Croatian border too,” Katalin continued, “and they’re worried about desertion, or even mutiny.”
“Clashes?” said Ferenc sharply. “When did they start?”
“About three o’clock this morning.”
Ferenc did a quick calculation in his head: about five hours had separated the first shots fired on the border from his release. “If there are deserters, we need to shelter them.”
“We need to do more than that,” Katalin said.
“Of course…”
“I’ve been talking to Anna since they took you and Zoltán away. She told me about Russia and Adamawa and Sarajevo – how the people made their own state when the state failed them. You’ve already done that with your church, but we need courts and welfare workers and schools – things they can’t bomb from the air. They don’t own the ground, so we must replace them on it, and when the soldiers desert, they’ll desert to us.”
“That will take a long time,” he said. “It’ll be hard, if those clashes become a war.” He sat in silence for a long moment. “But we have to, I think, or else we’ll be silent in the face of sin.”
I smell Syria here.
The Sandman
Banned
I suspect the regents will ultimately be given a deal: hand over their nukes, step down and be allowed to flee into exile, or be crushed. They have no foreign sponsors like OTL North Korea, they have much stronger neighbors than OTL Syria, and they've been a running sore on the face of Europe for decades now.
Plus they're landlocked, which makes it much easier to embargo them from critical materials.
Oddly enough, the nukes are what ensures that their regime is doomed in this situation; even in the more stable world of the Malêverse, a nation losing control of its nuclear arsenal would be a nightmare scenario. Without nukes, they could be allowed to collapse into chaos; with them, they have to be stabilized post-haste.
Plus they're landlocked, which makes it much easier to embargo them from critical materials.
Oddly enough, the nukes are what ensures that their regime is doomed in this situation; even in the more stable world of the Malêverse, a nation losing control of its nuclear arsenal would be a nightmare scenario. Without nukes, they could be allowed to collapse into chaos; with them, they have to be stabilized post-haste.
Totalitarianism: you're doing it frighteningly right.
The Regency Council 3.0 is certainly one of the most totalitarian governments TTL has seen. Its predecessors were garden-variety authoritarians, but by the time of the 1967 coup, many authoritarian governments have fallen, and the lesson learned by the new, hard-line regents was that they must control every aspect of life in order to avoid this fate.
As can be seen, though, there are signs that this model is reaching its sell-by date. Only a desperate government bombs its own capital from the air.
It's the stronger neighbors that are key. None of the surrounding countries - many of which have significant Hungarian diaspora populations or (in Eastern Transylvania's case) have an ethnic Hungarian majority - want a total collapse of Hungarian society, and certainly none of them want a potentially-nuclear civil war. They're strong enough to keep the peace, and they're collectively committed to do it. On the other hand, once the regime does fall apart - at this point it's when, not if, especially since this is around the time when the Court of Arbitration's jurisdiction is being expanded - the interaction between European countries, the Hungarian diaspora and domestic political factions over the direction of the new state is likely to be messy. Much will depend on exactly how the fall happens.
The next academic update - anglophone North America and the Caribbean, with Latin America to follow - is about 70 percent done. I may finish it tomorrow; if not, we're probably looking at midweek.
Excellent update. Liberation theology with lead pipes and rifles, it seems.
I wonder if in this timeline Hungarian aristocrats have replaced Germans as pop culture's sinisterly accented villains of choice?
I wonder if in this timeline Hungarian aristocrats have replaced Germans as pop culture's sinisterly accented villains of choice?
Indeed they should be stabilized, but by whom? I forget if we have a post-Great War map of southeastern Europe, and anyway the post itself mentions at least once change since the original Regency took control (after some years of disorder IIRC)--Croatia has split off. I also forget if Transylvania is some weird post-Westphalian thing that both Hungary and Romania have mixed sovereignty over, or is independent, or what.
Anyway, trying to visualize who borders on Hungary of this ATL, which may have quite different borders than post-WWI OTL, I come up with, going clockwise from the west:
The Hapsburg realm--basically a somewhat Greater Austria, extending south to include much of OTL former Yugoslavia (but obviously not Croatia?) and east to include German-speaking lands (Burgland?) that would have fallen to Hungary on historical grounds.
Hungary might possibly border on the German Empire, which took control of Bohemia and incorporated it (perhaps with a transitional post-Westphalian arrangement comparable to the terms with which France holds Alsace). The question is how far southeast does the GE extend, does it include any of OTL Slovakia? Or vice versa has the Hungarian Regency managed to hang on to Slovakia, which moves its border northeast to meet the two German empires?
To the north is Poland, I suppose--again it depends on whether Poland got Polish Galicia or not when it formed. That seems most likely--Poland probably lacks any of Silesia (though I seem to recall Wilhelm II, still just King of Prussia and President of the Confederation, offering or seeming to offer some of Silesia as an incentive to the Poles) but anyway would almost surely have got Galicia, lest it fall into Hungarian or Russian hands.
It is also unclear to me whether Hungary borders on Russia anywhere, or if Romania is interposed entirely in the northeast and east.
Then I suppose Hungary does border on Bulgaria, and probably not on Greece; this brings us round to the Balkans where possibly it touches on still-Ottoman lands, albeit in one of the outer tiers of Ottoman allegiance.
So--by far the most suited of these powers to carry out an intervention would be Germany, but any border the Germans have would be narrow. If Poland and the Hapsburg realm also support intervention, then front would be broad; surely in such circumstances Romania and probably the Ottomans, either as a whole or deferring this to the local entity, would be on board too.
But if the Hungarians do have a nuclear arsenal, a straightforward invasion would be very risky; the post stresses that the one division of their military the Regency is most confident of is the Air Forces, so any nations supporting intervention risk nuclear strikes if they can't stop the Hungarian planes. Or quite possibly even as a third-rate power the Hungarians have at least intermediate range missiles by now; perhaps some of the greater powers, surely including Germany, would have developed some sort of anti-missile systems, but these are inherently dicey. It may be that if Hungary could only muster a small missile force that the Germans have confidence they can stop them (or most of them anyway, leaving just a couple to get through--
) but they will hardly have deployed such ABMs in all the surrounding weak states they would want in the coalition. Maybe in Poland, if the Poles have returned to a pro-German alignment, maybe in the Hapsburg realm which may well have drifted into one over the past century. But how likely in Romania? In an Ottoman-affiliated Balkan federation? Where the heck is Serbia on the political map anyway?So, if the Germans have ABMs and have shared them (more likely, deployed them in German control under terms of an alliance) maybe they and the covered allies threaten to invade, while cultivating insurgencies that can, if they seize enough plausible degree of real power, invite them in to assist in restoring order. The Regency loyalists might still be able to use nukes on their own territory, to decimate interventionist forces and take revenge on pockets of new regimists.
It looks to me like it might be more likely that everyone waits for indigenous rebels to topple the Regency, and hopes the latter will not be so mad as to take nuclear vengeance on their way down--offering them amnesty and safe exile if they will restrain themselves does seem smart.
Something like this is all the more likely if no one has any ABMs, or has limited confidence in them.
-----
Indeed, only one map has ever been generated that attempts to show how the former Austro-Hungarian Empire was portioned out. Looking at it, even counting the Kingdom of Bohemia as basically German, the northern Great power is completely cut off from direct contact by the Slovakian Republic, and Russia by Poland and Romania. It is not clear to me whether, by the end of the 20th century, Austria (to which Carniola is presumably affiliated, at least for purposes of foreign relations) is a greater power than either Poland or Romania. It would seem then that any outside intervention would be more likely to come from the northeast than northwest, and any first-rate power involved would be drawn in via a minor power local proxy. Poland, Romania or Austria/Carniola might conceivably have some batteries of ABMs deployed, but only if the general state of the art has evolved to make such systems common, and even then I'd think any of these would have to be getting the weapons from a Great Power patron--the Germans seem likely to supply either the Austrians or the Poles; the Romanians might be in partnership with Russia, the Ottomans or perhaps with distant allies such as France, Britain, or even customers of the USA if they have ready cash--the Americans would have no interests to speak of in the region.
Anyway I don't really believe in ABMs and I doubt anyone in the ATL would bet their lives on them--they may well have been developed and procured on the ostensible argument that some protection is better than none, also in this ATL we haven't encountered any superpower with the combination of wealth and either paranoia or aggression that would lead to the truly massive arsenals of the OTL Cold War rivals, so a battery of weapons of some kind designed to attrit a full-scale nuclear strike might have some hope of working, or mostly working. Given the OTL case where the strike forces were already overwhelming in number and a mere few percent getting through translates to dozens of cities destroyed, deploying ABMs arguably just gives the rival power incentive to multiply their strike force (more cheaply than the cost of the ABMs) to overwhelm and penetrate the shield. Given the situation here, where many powers, first and second and even in some fanatical cases like Hungary, third-tier nations, have nuclear strike forces, but numbering in just dozens instead of thousands of warheads, an ABM system might seem to make good sense, against smaller rather than larger opponents anyway, and might not provoke a runaway arms race since powers that could afford an overwhelming strike force can also afford ABMs of their own, and the greater powers all have sufficient diplomatic confidence in each other that none of them are in an ideological death struggle, so the combined weapons systems, offensive and defensive together, are seen as maintaining peace through deterrence rather than as bids for world conquest. So ABMs would mainly be a response to minor nuclear powers like Hungary.
Even so, they are inherently expensive; even a power that might not be able to afford to simply make more missiles until they can overwhelm even Germany's defenses might be able to make their missiles tricky to intercept, so the hope is that at least one or a few get through, thus terrorizing even the greatest single power. Nor can the Germans afford to go around making a free gift of enough ABM batteries to cover all of Hungary's potential regional foes. I'd think the point-blank range would also favor the attacker over the defense--Berlin and even Prague might be defensible, quite likely Vienna is not, from a Hungarian missile launched from Hungary's western border.
Violence is not much of an option then; if the Regency is crazy enough to fire nukes at other countries or perhaps even use them in Hungary itself, the whole European consensus might then be that it is time to bite the bullet since they have little left to lose, but as long as the Regency keeps cool enough not to do that the threat is pretty effective at keeping foreigners at bay.
I have to agree that a total shutdown of foreign trade is feasible though; most of the bordering states are strong enough not to be intimidated by Hungarian threats, especially with internal control visibly breaking down, and the weaker ones such as Serbia doubtless will seek and find protective allies. So isolating the rogue regime is clearly an option at this point, particularly if regional uprisings near the border put rebels in contact--the Regency will either cooperate with whatever terms are put on humanitarian exemptions to the sanctions, or the ring of sanctioning nations will divert that to the more credible of the insurgents. Even if the Regency has nukes, they will understand that many of the rival powers on their borders might have a few also, and if they don't, the Germans, Russians and Ottomans surely do--along with other great powers like Britain and France of course. So if the Regents have a way out, they might not want to be the first to start firing nuclear weapons.
---------------
I was going to make it a separate post, but I noticed in this one that someone or other is testing nuclear explosions in space somewhere. That's a definite worse-than-OTL thing in my opinion. Of course it might also mean that nuclear space drives of various kinds are more in the cards than OTL--but I am not of the belief that we've foregone a lot of realistic opportunities for effective propulsion, not yet anyway. An Orion type thing is not strictly illegal in the current OTL legal regime after all; if we haven't done it it is largely because there is some doubt it will work. And I hope those tests are happening a long long distance away from Earth, because anything released anywhere near Earth is going to get swept up in the magnetic field and eventually routed to the atmosphere at the poles.
I can't quite reason out whether a perceived freedom to put whatever arms one likes into low orbit and beyond is stabilizing or destabilizing but instinct certainly points to the latter; only some of the richer nations can afford access to orbit; putting arms in space could well look like a bid for renewed world empire.
Therefore I would have thought the international legal regime that has evolved would have sought and (perhaps grudgingly in some cases) got treaty commitments underscored by judicial findings against space weapons of all kinds.
I guess I can still hope that this particular space explosion test was not for a weapon system but for an internationally approved investigation into useful applications of nuclear explosions in space, as for an Orion type propulsion system for instance.
I still think it's pretty ominous though.
Actually, messing around on the Internet one day some months ago, I read an article on nuclear weapons. To an extent, "fusion" and even "thermonuclear" bomb is a bit of a misnomer. Practically, just about every bomb that initiates fusion does so mainly to trigger a second fission explosion. Most of the energy released in fusion is in the form of neutrons, which can usefully cause a mass of fissionable material to fission, but otherwise would be hard to use, unless one wanted a burst of neutrons as such. Although fusion reactions are more energetic per unit of mass involved in the reaction, fissionable materials are so much denser that most of the energy released comes from them, not the fusion event (even counting the neutron energy--if we discount that, then the fusion thermal release is a lot lower).
So, it might be rational for ATL terminology not to call even the big bombs that do use fusion "fusion bombs" or "H-bombs."
OTL, the article I read implied that one reason we have this allegedly confused terminology is that it was a bit of disinformation; national security organs preferred people talk about it in misleading terms and prevented experts who knew better from correcting the dialog. ITTL, with a much more multipolar world and a United States and Britain and France all less worried about existential survival, it seems likely that the security mentality will be less dominant and what there is of it to be more relaxed.
So, it might be rational for ATL terminology not to call even the big bombs that do use fusion "fusion bombs" or "H-bombs."
OTL, the article I read implied that one reason we have this allegedly confused terminology is that it was a bit of disinformation; national security organs preferred people talk about it in misleading terms and prevented experts who knew better from correcting the dialog. ITTL, with a much more multipolar world and a United States and Britain and France all less worried about existential survival, it seems likely that the security mentality will be less dominant and what there is of it to be more relaxed.
There's been a fair bit of that ITTL - in some ways, Ferenc's house church and other like-minded Hungarians are the Niger Valley, Ottoman and Afro-Portuguese revolutions coming home to Europe.
They're up there with Imperial Party bosses, Tsarist Russian nobles and African dictators who just happen to look a lot like Tschikaya.
The map is correct for the period from about 1905 to 1950. Since then, Bulgaria has become fully independent and Croatia split off from Hungary, the latter event precipitating the hardline palace coup within the regency council. Croatia remained in a customs union with Hungary, more by default than anything else, until a series of crises in 1991-92 led to the union being abrogated and triggered the events of the story.
Austria is, for lack of a better word, a great power emeritus. Even with Carniola and Dalmatia following a common foreign policy, it isn't a military or economic powerhouse, but the Habsburgs still have centuries of accumulated diplomatic prestige, so that gives it some clout. The Hungarians consider Austria somewhat more of a threat than it in fact is, given that it's a historical bête noire; in fact, it isn't really a greater regional power than Poland or Romania, and is unlikely to do anything on its own.
Also, while Bohemia could safely have been lumped in with Germany in the 1950s, it has taken a more independent course since the 1960s. Its economy is still closely tied to Germany's and it's a member of the Zollverein and the innermost tier of the European union, but it has become considerably more assertive within those bodies.
Anyway, I suspect you're right about how the neighboring powers view the Hungarian situation. Barring extreme situations such as all-out war in Croatia or a nuclear first strike by the Hungarian forces, they'd be very reluctant to try bringing down the regency council by force. Most of them have ABMs (provided, as you say, by Germany or Russia), but the anti-nuclear defenses have never been tested, and nobody wants to bet their cities on an unproven and possibly ineffective defensive system. The more likely course of action is, as you say, to give aid to the domestic opposition, tighten economic sanctions and regional defense structures, wait for the regents to be overthrown from within, and then help to stabilize the situation and prevent collapse into civil war.
Precisely. At this point the great powers aren't really worried about each other - most of them are members of the same intertwined economic and collective-security structures by now - so much as they're worried about a rogue entity getting its hands on a few warheads and using them for blackmail.
It's Hungary being a rogue state. International law ITTL, as IOTL, prohibits space-based weapons; the Hungarian interpretation is that it's legal to launch Earth-based weapons into space for testing purposes, and it isn't signatory to the Consistory-negotiated test ban that was drafted in order to close the loophole. Nobody else tests weapons in space, and by 1992 there's also a test ban on earth which has sufficient ratifications to be enforceable as customary international law.
The advanced nuclear powers have have fusion bombs for decades by 1992, and my working assumption is that the language does distinguish between the two. A shoestring program like Hungary's, though, does involve fission bombs in the 30-50kt yield range. Hungary has nukes, but not state-of-the-art nukes.
Maybe you'll have some when the regency council gets what's coming to it.
It's hard to overstate how tremendously unpopular this would be, especially once space stations and any degree of space commercialization exists. Even the one test that was actually done in the real world in the 1960s, Starfish Prime, managed to knock out a third of all satellites in orbit at the time and create an artificial radiation belt that persisted for several years and constituted a hazard to other satellites and crewed missions (so much so that NASA actually studied whether artificial radiation belts would be a hazard to Apollo). The impact was only mitigated because there were only a few satellites in orbit at the time, only one of them (Telstar) commercial (it was paid for by AT&T) and no permanent space stations or the like. A similar test in the 1980s would have been catastrophic, even though most of the commercial applications were at the time centered on geostationary instead of low Earth orbit.
Quite honestly, I would pretty much expect an intervention if they did this at any point after the 1960s...it would be as if Egypt, say, decided to test a nuclear bomb off shore at Suez, so it severed the submarine cables there, thereby cutting off Pakistan and India (among others) from the Internet. Obviously this would be very unpopular and quite possibly lead to invasion of the rogue government that is attacking international communications links, nuclear-armed or no.
Would this be so even if the test were conducted outside LEO? If so, maybe I'll just change the update and make it an underground test - I see another typo I'll have to correct anyway, and the test occurring in space isn't important to the story.
Well, getting to anywhere out of LEO is increasingly difficult--you need specialized space launch vehicles to get up to MEO, let alone GEO--so it would be a bit difficult. The exact damage is a little uncertain because no one's ever done it, but if you pressed me I would say that if you did a test deep inside one of the radiation belts, especially the inner belt, that probably wouldn't affect much. Because of the radiation exposure, there's pretty much nothing in the belts themselves, and there's relatively little at medium altitudes above the inner belt. So if they did it about, say, 5,000 kilometers up, that probably wouldn't have a very big impact on anyone else. Probably.