Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
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A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia
"...straightforward fact that Michael was, personally, quite hostile to the Black Hundreds movement. As detailed in several previous chapters, Michael's liberalism was overstated frequently by contemporaries, especially those abroad, and the perception of him to this day as a man who desired to be a constitutional monarch in the British fashion is by all accounts entirely wrong, placing the blame for the perpetuation of Russian autocracy on "the machinations of men," rather than on Russian institutionalism and inertia instead. That being said, he was put off by "organized pogroms," and by the late 1910s he was personally quite alarmed at the rapid growth of the Black Hundreds and their principal political vehicle, the Union of the Russian People, or SRN (Soyuz Russkogo Narodna).
The symbology of the SRN was tied deeply to Russian traditions; the "Black" came from the "black lands" of the taxpaying peasantry, and the "Hundreds" came from a unit of feudal land measurement. The SRN's footsoldiers viewed themselves as the traditional vanguard of Russia, the conservative, strongly devout peasantry who enjoyed a symbiotic, father-son relationship with Tsarism. To them, any deviation from the traditional position of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality" was a grievous crime not just tantamount to treason but, in many ways, heresy; perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the more charismatic itinerant Orthodox hieromonks and preachers were closely associated with this movement, chief among them the famed John of Kronstadt or the more infamous Hieromonk Iliodor. Nikolai Maklakov quietly tolerated their meetings and marches, which usually inevitably came to blows with socialist or anarchist counter-marchers; the Durnovo family was thought to support them tacitly through their financial empire.
What really worried Michael and eventually both Stolypin and Sazonov, though, was that SRN was just a more extreme, demagogic version of a more staid and establishmentarian outfit, the Russian Assembly. SRN had been formed from Assembly dissidents who wanted a more muscular approach to nationalism and traditionalism, and attracted figures like Alexander Dubrovin or the fiery, cartoonish demagogue Vladimir Purishkevich, a colorful speaker in the State Duma (when he bothered to grace it with his presence) best known for directing more than a few pogroms personally or in articles in the polemic newspaper Russkoe Znamya. At its heart, the SRN was an organ of right-wing street violence, a grassroots organization with the tacit support of government officials to harass those seen as opponents of the regime to create both a popular vehicle of support for the harshest forms of Tsarism, target scapegoated social minorities like Jews and trade unionists, and give the government a shield from having to do these things themself.
The Russian Assembly was no less a creature of the Black Hundred impulse but was considerably more sophisticated; it had preceded the SRN, and considered its practices gauche and uncultured. Rather than a militant right-wing peasant paramilitary, the Russian Assembly was itself a conservative party within the Duma that was no less hostile to democracy and constitutionalism but flowed out from the bureaucracy and the establishment; its leaders were Army generals and Navy admirals, members of the nobility, statesmen such as the Minister of Agriculture Alexander Krivoshein, peripheral junior ministers such as Boris Sturmer or Alexander Trepov, and most importantly the canny and cunning parliamentarians, Alexei Khvostov and Vladimir Gurko.
It was Khvostov who, in the late 1910s, found his surest footing in the emerging shift of the Tsarist establishment from a traditionally rightist position that had taken an almost defensive posture since 1908, to a more aggressive, reactionary and proactive sense, aiming not just to slow reforms but to arrest and, in many ways, perhaps reverse them. Khvostov, almost as soon as he had been elected in 1912, had begun plotting his maneuvers carefully, seeking to use the SRN as a catspaw for his more cautious attempts to ingratiate himself with new patrons in the Council of Ministers, ignoring men like Guchkov or the other Maklakov to train his attention on leveraging his relationship with Krivoshein and the decline of Kokovstov's authority into, perhaps, a ministry such as that of Justice (he was a talented lawyer, after all) or maybe even Interior, if Maklakov could be nudged away.
Thus the foxes were inside the henhouse, foxes who found even the staunchly conservative Stolypin to be too reformist, too moderate, too accommodating to modernism, and the Duarchy increasingly came to the view, one shared by the Tsar, that the destabilizing SRN and the insidiously entryist Russian Assembly that was well-supported within the Council itself were just as much a danger to the project of gradual reform in the Tsardom as the SRs and Chernov were..." [1]
- A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia
[1] Mostly just seeding future Russian stuff here, introducing the next generation of Tsarist officials as Stolypin and Sazonov get ever-older
The symbology of the SRN was tied deeply to Russian traditions; the "Black" came from the "black lands" of the taxpaying peasantry, and the "Hundreds" came from a unit of feudal land measurement. The SRN's footsoldiers viewed themselves as the traditional vanguard of Russia, the conservative, strongly devout peasantry who enjoyed a symbiotic, father-son relationship with Tsarism. To them, any deviation from the traditional position of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality" was a grievous crime not just tantamount to treason but, in many ways, heresy; perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the more charismatic itinerant Orthodox hieromonks and preachers were closely associated with this movement, chief among them the famed John of Kronstadt or the more infamous Hieromonk Iliodor. Nikolai Maklakov quietly tolerated their meetings and marches, which usually inevitably came to blows with socialist or anarchist counter-marchers; the Durnovo family was thought to support them tacitly through their financial empire.
What really worried Michael and eventually both Stolypin and Sazonov, though, was that SRN was just a more extreme, demagogic version of a more staid and establishmentarian outfit, the Russian Assembly. SRN had been formed from Assembly dissidents who wanted a more muscular approach to nationalism and traditionalism, and attracted figures like Alexander Dubrovin or the fiery, cartoonish demagogue Vladimir Purishkevich, a colorful speaker in the State Duma (when he bothered to grace it with his presence) best known for directing more than a few pogroms personally or in articles in the polemic newspaper Russkoe Znamya. At its heart, the SRN was an organ of right-wing street violence, a grassroots organization with the tacit support of government officials to harass those seen as opponents of the regime to create both a popular vehicle of support for the harshest forms of Tsarism, target scapegoated social minorities like Jews and trade unionists, and give the government a shield from having to do these things themself.
The Russian Assembly was no less a creature of the Black Hundred impulse but was considerably more sophisticated; it had preceded the SRN, and considered its practices gauche and uncultured. Rather than a militant right-wing peasant paramilitary, the Russian Assembly was itself a conservative party within the Duma that was no less hostile to democracy and constitutionalism but flowed out from the bureaucracy and the establishment; its leaders were Army generals and Navy admirals, members of the nobility, statesmen such as the Minister of Agriculture Alexander Krivoshein, peripheral junior ministers such as Boris Sturmer or Alexander Trepov, and most importantly the canny and cunning parliamentarians, Alexei Khvostov and Vladimir Gurko.
It was Khvostov who, in the late 1910s, found his surest footing in the emerging shift of the Tsarist establishment from a traditionally rightist position that had taken an almost defensive posture since 1908, to a more aggressive, reactionary and proactive sense, aiming not just to slow reforms but to arrest and, in many ways, perhaps reverse them. Khvostov, almost as soon as he had been elected in 1912, had begun plotting his maneuvers carefully, seeking to use the SRN as a catspaw for his more cautious attempts to ingratiate himself with new patrons in the Council of Ministers, ignoring men like Guchkov or the other Maklakov to train his attention on leveraging his relationship with Krivoshein and the decline of Kokovstov's authority into, perhaps, a ministry such as that of Justice (he was a talented lawyer, after all) or maybe even Interior, if Maklakov could be nudged away.
Thus the foxes were inside the henhouse, foxes who found even the staunchly conservative Stolypin to be too reformist, too moderate, too accommodating to modernism, and the Duarchy increasingly came to the view, one shared by the Tsar, that the destabilizing SRN and the insidiously entryist Russian Assembly that was well-supported within the Council itself were just as much a danger to the project of gradual reform in the Tsardom as the SRs and Chernov were..." [1]
- A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia
[1] Mostly just seeding future Russian stuff here, introducing the next generation of Tsarist officials as Stolypin and Sazonov get ever-older
"It aint meee.... it ain't meeeeee.... I ain't my cousin's son...."
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Apropos of nothing, I think I will be hard-pressed to do a "1920 Census" update for the CSA, lol.
All three of these are probably pretty similar; due to the nature of the GAW, I'd say the Royal Navy has probably enhanced their presence in Jamaica and the Bahamas a decent amount
F..k ITTL has not being kind with the USA, sure they are still a very strong nation that had come victorious from a nasty war but between the war, getting the worst part of the flu pandemic and at the same time their little vietnam mean that the 10's will be remembered as the most trying and terrible time of the republic.
The CSA? The CSA seem on the verge to become this world Somalia
The CSA? The CSA seem on the verge to become this world Somalia
That’s a stretch, in two ways. First, OTL’s Republican Progressives and TTL’s Fusion Liberals are hardly “radical left” by any sane definition of the word. Secondly, the GOP and Liberals had a long-standing of emphasis on “good governance” that made them a natural home for a lot of “state capacity” reformers and progressives at the time, and the Democrats really never did.
Hell, the Democrats still suck on state capacity issues today IOTL, in favor of poorly overseen check-cutting. The Republicans giving up that slot of the political spectrum under the Goldwater-Reagan nutjobs is something from which the US has never recovered.
Not having the reforms and settlement plans begun by Stolypin interrupted by A) his death and B) WW1 are allowing this move along quite well, though Russian industrialization is still quite a bit behind OTL (right around its 1906-07 rate by 1918-19).
And thank you! They're hard to write, but I find them important to include.
The 1910s will basically have the reputation of the 1930s and "WW2, but less "rah rah USA"" combined ITTL.
So, the Commonwealth's take on the 1910s, basically.
The two parties needing to actually compete in that space - Democrats through "machines that deliver the goods," Liberals through "state capacity goo-gooism" - are a big part of what makes the USA ITTL function so well. The nutjobs, as you describe them, will all be consigned eventually to our right-wing populist third-party but that's decades and decades away.
Maybe, maybe not. What I can promise is a prominent political career, at the very least.
And I'm not sure that we are seeming *that* many decisions post war that would be significantly different with the other party in the White House. I'm not even sure that many would be different if the British government was looked to for advice. Poisoned Chalice..
Somalia isn't really *that* much of a model here. iOTL, (post-1800) we don't have any good examples of countries dropping from the top 15 economies/powers of the world in the same way. the losers in WWI mostly didn't have the same level of war damage as the Confederates do and the losers in WWII all were supported with US money to help oppose the soviets. (or to some degree vice versa in East Germany & Poland).
Various models here are Paraguay post the war of the triple alliance , the ottomans after WWI and a few others (including the ones above that I said weren't great). Northern Ireland is probably in the running and eventually post-1970s Lebanon, I think.
I wouldn't be that surprised if it was the 1950s or 1960s before travel from Richmond to New Orleans was as safe and luxorious as it was in 1913. And as for when Nashville reaches its 1910 population, it could be even later than that.
Thinking about the attacks into Maryland, I presume they were into the area that pre-war was part of Virginia like Fredericksburg.
The US/CS border post-war, from East to West.
0) no border on the Eastern shore, which will essentially leave the southern eastern shore of Maryland, a large Military base.
1) New Maryland Counties bordering Virginia. Most of that is Red Zone, with probably Unexploded Ordnance.
2) New West Virginia Counties bordering Virginia. Not quite as ugly as #1
3) Old US-CS border running from about Roanoke(?) to small parts of the Ohio river just downstream of West Virginia. Hatfields & McCoys writ large, the only question is how well to arm the West Virginians.
4) FCK. Unlikely to see many attacks from the hillboys in that area.
5) Missouri Boot. Not sure here
6) Ozarks, this is where he attacks came from.
7) Key West. Easy to secure the base, but Miami is going to be dangerous for US Soldiers....
The US/CS border post-war, from East to West.
0) no border on the Eastern shore, which will essentially leave the southern eastern shore of Maryland, a large Military base.
1) New Maryland Counties bordering Virginia. Most of that is Red Zone, with probably Unexploded Ordnance.
2) New West Virginia Counties bordering Virginia. Not quite as ugly as #1
3) Old US-CS border running from about Roanoke(?) to small parts of the Ohio river just downstream of West Virginia. Hatfields & McCoys writ large, the only question is how well to arm the West Virginians.
4) FCK. Unlikely to see many attacks from the hillboys in that area.
5) Missouri Boot. Not sure here
6) Ozarks, this is where he attacks came from.
7) Key West. Easy to secure the base, but Miami is going to be dangerous for US Soldiers....
Wonder if Nathan Bedford Forrest III gets shot down like in OTL...