BigBlueBox
Banned
The Turks and British are equally at fault. None of this would be happening if the British accepted the will of the Cypriot people. Instead Britain decided to Fourth Crusade the Greeks, opening them up to Turkish invasion.
The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
- Thread starter TastySpam
- Start date
Probably princess Margaret, considering she was the only sibiling of queen Elisabeth
Reign*
Hopefully someone has the good sense to push for a republic.
It hurts how true this is.
Though both sides have their fair share of the blame, I would lay most of it beneath America's feet for sponsoring Türkeş' rise to power and setting him up with such a strong foundation. While Turkey would still invade Cyprus as soon as they can to secure their Cypriots even if he wasn't in the mix, you wouldn't see the blatant genocidal intent Türkeş displays here.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Even if it wasn't Turkes in power, letting Turkey invade Greek soil is a recipe for a human rights' disaster.
This is why I believe genocide denial should be criminal: because it only sets the stage for worse things in the future.
I agree with you on that point, (and wish your second one could be the truth) but at least it would be the same expulsion suffered by the Greek Cypriots instead of the sheer fucking madness attempted by Türkeş as seen here.
The monarch would be the three-year old King Andrew I. Under the Regency Act, a regent would serve until roughly 1978. The Regency Act says that the acting regent is the person next in line to the British throne who is over 21 and a well, actual British citizen., so yeah, Princess Margaret would be the Regent.
I think B-M is so terrified of getting in the middle of the USSR and its other satellites (it's clearly the one Eastern European Communist state that refuses to adopt either side) basically because internally, it's a total mess. I don't think it really has any meaningful ability to interfere in this. Probably should do an update about it...eventually.
While quite bad, I don't think this is exactly unprecedented in Balkans history. The events that took place during and after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the killing of 200,000-700,000 Greeks in Asia Minor and the expulsion of another million. The number of Muslims murdered and expelled from the Balkans and what not is unclear because I think it's a bit hard to untangle from the WWI death toll, but it was also very bad. Probably still hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions dead/expelled. And of course, we have the Armenian genocide. Note that many of these horrible events were less than 40 years ago - which meant many perpetrators and victims probably still remember them. I really wouldn't call it the work of one madman - there's plenty of ethnic hate/bad blood in all nations involved.
Eyeballing death toll in the ITL Cypriot/Thracian genocides, we're probably looking at 50,000 dead and 700,000 expelled (albeit with a rapidly expanding death toll without proper humanitarian aid from abroad)?
Chapter 157 - The August Coup
Yeah, long hiatus, but I'm not dead.
The August Coup
Several men had reached their breaking points. It wasn't quite sure what the straw that broke each of their backs. Some had always hated the man. Some still nursed a grudge from the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities in the caucuses demanding new rights. The largest group cited the abandonment of East Germany and North China, sympathizing with the exiled Molotov. Some had cited the French coup as a sign that outreach to the West was always doomed. Some were just ambitious and figured any chaos was an opportunity to move up. Interestingly, some opposed intervention in the Indonesian conflict - while others believed that the leader in charge of it all was too "weak" to challenge the West and actually win the war. Finally, for some, what had happened in the Cypriot and Thracian genocides was the final straw, as almost anyone with experience with Soviet military expenditures realized that the USSR was covertly supporting Ultranationalist Turkey, something that deeply offended almost all of the crypto-Christians, especially ethnic Russians.
There was no shortage of participants. Chief among them was Defense Minister Bulganin, who was widely seen by most Soviets as a simpering, doddering sycophant. Indeed, he was not a particularly ambitious man, but one of those many litanies of sins was his breaking point. Marshal Vasily Chuikov had many close friends in the People's Liberation Army in Northern China (ever since he had visited in the 1920's) and in the German People's Army (where he had served for almost a decade training), so he was the first on board. Marshal Dmitry Ustinov represented many angry bureaucrats who quite simply weren't a fan of trading with capitalistic countries, chief among them in Asia. Marshal Kirill Moskalenko just personally loathed the man in charge. Marshal Ivan Bagramyan, an ethnic Armenian, did not easily forgive the massacres of Catholic Armenians. Marshal Rodion Malinovsky was disgusted by the annihilation of Stockholm. Marshal Ivan Konev and Georgy Zhukov, although both forcibly retired, secretly lent their aid to the conspiracy. Outside of the "Georgian Mafia" marshals personally appointed by Beria, the only actual Soviet marshal of any standing to not join in the conspiracy was Marshal Andrei Grechko, who basically loved how much technology from the West Beria was showering onto the Red Army. Finally, the most important player may have been Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who seemed to be politically confused...and might have been part of the conspiracy. Or not.
All things considered, the conspiracy had not gone off well at the start. Beria's MVD, which included under its umbrella both the NKVD as well as the sub-agencies normally found in an Internal Affairs ministry, remained basically loyal and had gotten wind of a plot against Beria, which was unsurprising given their sheer dominance over Soviet society. Although they had no idea how large the actual conspiracy was, they clearly knew one was coming. As a result, they had prepared ambushes and checkpoints across almost every street in Moscow, ready to basically catch any squads of soldiers sneaking into Moscow that they believed could try to kidnap or arrest Beria. They set up communication lines that would easily be able to inform other NKVD "Internal Troops", many of which had been pulled back from the provinces into Moscow itself. They were perfectly prepared for any infiltrators that might try to sneak into the capital or the Kremlin.
They were entirely unprepared for hundreds of Soviet tanks to basically run over their barricades. They had expected small squads of the Soviet Army to try to apprehend Beria. They did not expect entire motorized divisions to be secretly diverted directly into the outskirts of Moscow, aided primarily by East German stasi agents who had more or less "leaked" fake documents to the NKVD about the Soviet troops returning from East Germany. Aided by both the East German and Polish militaries, those divisions had moved far far faster than an army with normal logistical needs could. And now, they were bulldozing NKVD checkpoints in Moscow. Generally, attempts by NKVD troops to fire upon Red Army armor....ended exceedingly poorly for those troops in question, who generally surrendered. The mood from Berlin to Warsaw to Bucharest to Harbin was jubilance as more and more reports indicated that NKVD troops...really couldn't do anything about this. The Red Army always knew they weren't ever going to surprise the NKVD, so the only way to beat them...was brute force.
However, the NKVD had one last trick up their sleeve. Many of the lower-level soldiers defected, generally not wanting to die for what they saw was a lost cause, but most of the officers remained loyal realizing that a successful anti-Beria coup would probably lead to the abolishment of the NKVD. They had generally set up excellent communication lines across the entire city to warn of incoming squads. Instead, now they were quickly destroying radio towers before Red Army soldiers could get ahold of them. At this point, the "Committee for National Salvation" had promised amnesty to all officers, soldiers, and politicians, including quite aggressively, Beria himself (that being said, they generally did not intend to actually keep this last promise, given their widespread loathing of Beria). Beria, being updated on the spot that the Red Army was getting closer and closer, could have chosen to surrender. Indeed, the choice made on that night of August 8th, 1963, is often a subject of alternate histories. In general, the trope goes that had Beria simply surrendered on the spot, the Soviet Union would have developed into an orthodox Marxist-Leninist state, run by a junta of relatively apolitical generals who prioritized military self-defense and political stability. Presumably, the same outcome would have happened if Beria merely chose to try to rally the NKVD, given their total inability to resist the Red Army.
Instead, the General-Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made the kind of surprising gamble that only someone with their back to the wall - and their front to a firing squad (both literally and figuratively), would make, sending Soviet history careening in a direction that almost no observer in the West, or the Soviet Union itself, had predicted.
The August Coup
There was no shortage of participants. Chief among them was Defense Minister Bulganin, who was widely seen by most Soviets as a simpering, doddering sycophant. Indeed, he was not a particularly ambitious man, but one of those many litanies of sins was his breaking point. Marshal Vasily Chuikov had many close friends in the People's Liberation Army in Northern China (ever since he had visited in the 1920's) and in the German People's Army (where he had served for almost a decade training), so he was the first on board. Marshal Dmitry Ustinov represented many angry bureaucrats who quite simply weren't a fan of trading with capitalistic countries, chief among them in Asia. Marshal Kirill Moskalenko just personally loathed the man in charge. Marshal Ivan Bagramyan, an ethnic Armenian, did not easily forgive the massacres of Catholic Armenians. Marshal Rodion Malinovsky was disgusted by the annihilation of Stockholm. Marshal Ivan Konev and Georgy Zhukov, although both forcibly retired, secretly lent their aid to the conspiracy. Outside of the "Georgian Mafia" marshals personally appointed by Beria, the only actual Soviet marshal of any standing to not join in the conspiracy was Marshal Andrei Grechko, who basically loved how much technology from the West Beria was showering onto the Red Army. Finally, the most important player may have been Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who seemed to be politically confused...and might have been part of the conspiracy. Or not.
All things considered, the conspiracy had not gone off well at the start. Beria's MVD, which included under its umbrella both the NKVD as well as the sub-agencies normally found in an Internal Affairs ministry, remained basically loyal and had gotten wind of a plot against Beria, which was unsurprising given their sheer dominance over Soviet society. Although they had no idea how large the actual conspiracy was, they clearly knew one was coming. As a result, they had prepared ambushes and checkpoints across almost every street in Moscow, ready to basically catch any squads of soldiers sneaking into Moscow that they believed could try to kidnap or arrest Beria. They set up communication lines that would easily be able to inform other NKVD "Internal Troops", many of which had been pulled back from the provinces into Moscow itself. They were perfectly prepared for any infiltrators that might try to sneak into the capital or the Kremlin.
They were entirely unprepared for hundreds of Soviet tanks to basically run over their barricades. They had expected small squads of the Soviet Army to try to apprehend Beria. They did not expect entire motorized divisions to be secretly diverted directly into the outskirts of Moscow, aided primarily by East German stasi agents who had more or less "leaked" fake documents to the NKVD about the Soviet troops returning from East Germany. Aided by both the East German and Polish militaries, those divisions had moved far far faster than an army with normal logistical needs could. And now, they were bulldozing NKVD checkpoints in Moscow. Generally, attempts by NKVD troops to fire upon Red Army armor....ended exceedingly poorly for those troops in question, who generally surrendered. The mood from Berlin to Warsaw to Bucharest to Harbin was jubilance as more and more reports indicated that NKVD troops...really couldn't do anything about this. The Red Army always knew they weren't ever going to surprise the NKVD, so the only way to beat them...was brute force.
However, the NKVD had one last trick up their sleeve. Many of the lower-level soldiers defected, generally not wanting to die for what they saw was a lost cause, but most of the officers remained loyal realizing that a successful anti-Beria coup would probably lead to the abolishment of the NKVD. They had generally set up excellent communication lines across the entire city to warn of incoming squads. Instead, now they were quickly destroying radio towers before Red Army soldiers could get ahold of them. At this point, the "Committee for National Salvation" had promised amnesty to all officers, soldiers, and politicians, including quite aggressively, Beria himself (that being said, they generally did not intend to actually keep this last promise, given their widespread loathing of Beria). Beria, being updated on the spot that the Red Army was getting closer and closer, could have chosen to surrender. Indeed, the choice made on that night of August 8th, 1963, is often a subject of alternate histories. In general, the trope goes that had Beria simply surrendered on the spot, the Soviet Union would have developed into an orthodox Marxist-Leninist state, run by a junta of relatively apolitical generals who prioritized military self-defense and political stability. Presumably, the same outcome would have happened if Beria merely chose to try to rally the NKVD, given their total inability to resist the Red Army.
Instead, the General-Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made the kind of surprising gamble that only someone with their back to the wall - and their front to a firing squad (both literally and figuratively), would make, sending Soviet history careening in a direction that almost no observer in the West, or the Soviet Union itself, had predicted.
A coup!!! The Red Army got fed up with Beria, at last.
As to what the trick is...Beria invites the West to aid him?
As to what the trick is...Beria invites the West to aid him?
Beria is gonna go Scarface on the Red Army. He'd rather die fighting than be arrested.
Unless there's a helicopter...
Unless there's a helicopter...
He is gonna nuke Moscow isn't it? That would kill both him and the generals. After all, the story insinuates that neither of them rule the country afterwards
Bookmark1995
Banned
Most likely, he is going to do what he did OTL: beg for mercy like the whiny little bitch he was.
That scenario actually sounds...pretty funny.
An NKVD officer expects to be greeted by a wayward soldier, only to be panicking when he sees a tank coming toward him.
I think i'll wear myself out thinking of all the things in life that fall under that category.