The Silver Knight, a Lithuania Timeline
- Thread starter Augenis
- Start date
For the HoI4 mod, maybe Shun China could have focuses and national ideas relating to the Chinese using Pan-Asianism as an anti-Unitarian ideology?
Japan: Blue for Unitarianism and rising sun for japan and Gear and rice for workers and farmer
shun China: a dragon for the emperor, a 12 point sun for 12 month and 12 si, a traditional measurement of time, which means to be strong for all time . and five stars for Han Chinese, Zhuangs, Hui Chinese, Manchus and Uyghurs.
shun China: a dragon for the emperor, a 12 point sun for 12 month and 12 si, a traditional measurement of time, which means to be strong for all time . and five stars for Han Chinese, Zhuangs, Hui Chinese, Manchus and Uyghurs.
Well, Yarkand is an independent Khanate and Hong Taiji (the guy who came up with the term "Manchu") never existed, so, it's probably going to be for the Mongols and Jurchens, not the Manchus and Uighurs.
Chapter 86: Strike Them Where It Hurts
Part 86: Strike Them Where It Hurts (Jul-Sep 1939)
The Ruthenian Front may have started out with Russian momentum, but troops were now being pulled away from this front to participate in the defense of the nation's heartland, which meant that the Lithuanian forces under the command of general and second-in-command of Lithuania, Stasys Dirmantas, could successfully reorganize, reinforce their positions and begin their counterattack. Here, the higher on average mobility of the Lithuanian soldiers showed, and the offensive successfully managed to defeat and rout a number of enemy positions. Within the remaining months of summer, the Lithuanians successfully captured the vital coal and iron fields of the Krajina steppe and Kursk, finally giving the Revivalist war machine a domestic source of both of these important resources. The "Kursk-Azov Line", as it was sometimes referred to, had been an important part of the economy of the Empire of Lithuania, too, and many of the cities and towns here not only had Lithuanian names, but also used to be populated with Lithuanian colonists - at least before the mass population exchanges which took place after the disintegration of the Empire. While the Lithuanians came, thousands of Ruthenians fled from these territories alongside the retreating Russian soldiers, creating a yet another problem for Krutov's regime.
Meanwhile, on the Lithuanian Front, General Antanas Sidabras was sure to follow up on the success of the Siege of Smolensk before the Russians were able to amend their faults and mistakes. A massive military operation dubbed Operation Glinskis, after Grand Hetman Mykolas Glinskis of the early 16th century, who led a successful Tverian-Lithuanian War and one of the first (but not the last) terror campaigns against the Russians. The three Lithuanian armies in the front had to pretty much execute forced marches to follow up on Sidabras's and especially the Vadas's commands to rout as many Russian military formations as possible and to march in Tver before the beginning of winter. During this operation, the Revivalist forces scored a number of important victories against the lightly fortified and retreating Russians, and by the beginning of September, the exhausted vanguard Lithuanian bicycle troops reached the town of Torzhok, a mere 40 miles away from the Russian capital. The Battle of Tver was about to begin. While the success of the mobile Lithuanian troops cannot be underestimated, the first faults of the gliders, bicycles and other cheap equipment employed by the Army had started to surface - especially their reliability. A bicycle may be a useful tool for travelling through both forests and plains, but it's usage life was far shorter than that of a truck or a landship. Bicycle tires had become the number one biggest drain of Lithuania's rubber reserves - and those reserves were nothing to boast about, 70% of the resource was imported, while the remaining 30% was produced in not so cost effective synthetic processes. Meanwhile, the wooden construction of Lithuanian gliders had become a problem in the increasingly wet Russian terrain - the army attempted a number of solutions to the fast erosion of wooden carcasses, including large masses of paint or tin foil, but all of them were "duct tape" solutions and not a long term repair.
The Russians, meanwhile, were ready to hold Tver to the last man. Not all Russians, however.
The massive speed at which the Lithuanian army was advancing through the Russian nation meant that some movements within the political spectrum of said country have decided to lay down their arms and instead join the Revivalists, most notably the extremist Russian League, led by Mikhail Levitov. A radical nationalist movement, the League was a rising force in Russia in the early 1930s, during the time when the crisis in Russian democracy was the most present. Their organization, structure and paramilitary usage resembled the Revival Front, in a way. However, their slow rise to power was cut short by Alexei Krutov's coup, and the military dictator soon became the League's worst enemy, suppressing the organization much like he suppressed the Unitarians. Levitov's party and his paramilitary "Sons of Vasily Vorskloy" organized a number of coup attempts against Krutov, but all of them resulted in failure. And now that the Lithuanians were here, pressing into Russia, the League was quick to throw away their ideals and collaborate with the Revival Front, lending the hands of the Sons of Vasily Vorskloy as the Autonomous Army of Russia.
Both of the sides believed that they were ripping the other off. Levitov wrote that this collaboration will only be used to help the League overthrow Krutov's regime and then establish themselves as the sole rulers of Russia. The Lithuanians saw the League as useful idiots who can be sent to the front lines to die.
Mikhail Levitov, leader of the Russian League and the Autonomous Army of Russia
The rest of the world, meanwhile, was doing what it always does best - fall apart.
The beginning of the War of the Danube incited Unitarian movements across the globe, and soon it manifested in the assassination attempt on Democrat Fredrik Koertsen of the Vespucia Free State. Compared to, say, Europe, the VFS had gotten off lightly from both the French Flu epidemic and the resulting economic crisis. Throughout both the 1920s and 1930s, this Reformist democracy was dominated by various Christian and Protectionist parties and politicians, including Koertsen himself, and outside of promoting Christian values, they were also isolationist and supportive of moderate economic intervention. However, at the same time, there was a rising contingent of blue-wing forces, rallied under the Republican-Unitarian Party - formerly a Democratic Unitarian party now overrun by their more radical counterparts. However, the events in the summer of 1939 were unrelated to any of this - in fact, it was all the work of a single man. Nobody knows how the deranged madman Frits van Egters managed to circumvent the harsh gun laws in Vespucia or even organized the assassination attempt without being noticed, but he did, and on July 25th, 1939, he fired three pistol shots at the Democrat of his country during a rally in New Rotterdam. Two of the shots missed completely and the third blew off the politician's right middle finger.
As soon as van Egters was arrested, he immediately laid out his intentions with this attack on the leader of his country - to kill him, cause chaos within the VFS and thus start a Unitarian revolution similar to the one in Visegrad. Ironically, his actions had the opposite effect, as not only did the public of Vespucia find itself disgusted with the "deranged" Unitarians, but the Koertsen government immediately passed a number of laws in the assassination attempt's wake to prevent that exact chain of events from happening, most notably the Anti-Radicalism Act, banning all radical blue or red wing organizations with ties to violence or plans to overthrow the democratic government of the Free State. The shock caused by the assassination also gave Koertsen enough political capital to pass the Solidarity Act through the normally isolationist Vespucian Assembly, denouncing the Unitarian rebellion in Visegrad and the Turkish invasion of the Balkans as illegal, as well as placing an embargo on the Commonwealth. One of the more... interesting results of Egters's attack, however, was the legalization of signature stamps in the Vespucian administration in late 1939 - the Democrat has lost his middle finger and thus could no longer write with a pen, after all.
While Vespucia was reeling from the impact of Unitarian violence, Africa and Europe were in complete chaos. What used to be a war of resistance in Tripolitania between the Fatahist Emirate of Tripolitania and the superior Visegradian garrisons had now developed into a full-blown war, one which the Visegradians were losing. The Turks had captured most, if not all of Visegrad's ports, Germania had no interest in trying to reclaim them, and even if Visegrad had a route to their colony, they had nothing to spare as support for Horthy and his men - and thus, the result was that the Visegradian forces were running out of everything from manpower to ammunition to boots, while the Fatahists and the Senussi had a permanent flow of supply from Egypt. After a series of defeats in Sirte, Benghazi and across the Libyan desert, the Visegradian garrisons and the colonists, knowing exactly what will happen if they stay, began to flee in mass. Those who could not reach the border with Spanish Argelia, including Horthy himself, had to flee on boats across the Mediterranean. Here, Turkish submarines awaited them - only a small portion of the fleeing Visegradians were lucky enough to reach the shores of Italy. The victory in Tripolitania was not only a blow for Visegrad, but also a blow to all the other colonial powers in Africa - after all, if the Senussi and Fatahists could make it, why can't everyone else? Morocco and Ethiopia come to mind...
Visegrad was not doing well at the homefront, either. By now, almost the entirety of the former Kingdom of Poland was now either under the control of Bolek and Lolek or the Unitarians. And any requests for the German Army to destroy the Polish rebellion resulted in failure - after all, the Poles were a lot more motivated to fight the Unitarians than the average Visegradian soldier could ever hope to be, so why not keep them around and use them? Sandor Marton, the chairman of the Convention of Three Nations, did not recognize that logic, and the longer this went, the more his anger with Augustina Sternberg and his German allies kept growing. By doing so, however, he continued to dig his political grave - the establishment and the loyalist movement was already angry at him for causing this civil war in the first place, and the threat of having the German army simply leave and stop keeping Visegrad alive was a threat they could not tolerate. Marton was still in control... for now.
Boleslaw Bolek and Karol Lolek, leaders of the independent Republic of Poland
"For now" is also a string of words one could use to describe the current situation in the Far East. Foreign observers could tell that East Asia was spiraling to war - but who against who? And when? And, most importantly, who would win?
It's... hard to say, but there was one thing the same observers could agree on - although Shun China was a competent power on it's own, the Unified Indian State was a superpower in the making.
Under his absolute rule, Sanjay Nijasure controlled the world's most populous nation, which, even before the Indian Revolution, was considered to be a formidable economic and military power in it's own right - and this situation got multiplied by dozens of times after. One of the very first decrees released by the Indian Unitarians after the completion of the revolution, the death of Ranjit Nijasure - perhaps the only person who could stand before Sanjay - and the recovery after the civil war and the famines, was the policy of Accelerationism. In order to strengthen India's standing within the wide world, mass industrialization, militarization and accelerated economic and technological development had to take place in order to help it catch up before the capitalist powers crash down on it. What followed was a level of mass industrial and military expansion so great and terrifying that later on, that upon taking power, the Revivalists even sent observers to India to check just how these "madmen" managed to basically construct an industrial society from scratch. Hundreds of new cities were founded and given beautiful, optimistic names like "The Tomorrow", "Brightness", "Unity" and "Strength" - the Indian Unitarians had plans to do away with all of the "nationalistic" city names within the State and replace them all with "nationally-neutral" titles, but this plan was scrapped at the last minute. Under the guise of autarky, national resources across the nation were being tapped into to do away with foreign dependency. Transformation of nature took place as well, the Unitarians did not shy away from mega-projects, either - after all, how else will you show the superiority of a fully united, perfect nation over their unequal and divided counterparts?
Foreigners visiting India were greeted by a rapidly modernizing and industrializing society, one which is close to passing all of it's competitors in industrial output and military power - and yet one where even the lowest worker can enjoy the same rights as his chairman. Sure, Turkey and even Japan could show similar successes, but India was what most awed foreigners.
But how was this massive progress achieved? Quire simply, in fact, so simple that the Revivalists later ended up inadvertently copying their model - through totalitarian control over the population and brutality. Lithuania's idea of a "perfect Sarmatian man" was their equivalent of the "Accelerationist" in India - a perfect member of their society whom everyone should strive towards. And those opposed to it get eliminated. Under Nijasure's reign, entire cultures which failed to integrate into India's Unitarian society were deemed for elimination - and why not abuse the eliminated by forcing them to work and build this society you seek. Lithuania had forced labor camps - India had forced labor camps. Lithuania had mass propaganda and instillment of values - India had mass propaganda and instillment of values. Lithuania was centralized around a single supreme ruler - India was centralized around a single supreme ruler. Come to think of it, Purple Unitarianism and Revivalism were not that far away from each other. Of course, the main difference was that Lithuania was a regional power whilst India was a superpower.
Or, a rising superpower.
The only thing it lacked was a wide sphere of influence.
But that's where China might come into play.
Map of the world in September 1939
I must say, I find it hard to believe the Turks can just causally torpedo the boats evacuating the Visegradians, even if there are no "war crimes" here such a reckless attack would still be seen as cowardly and would likely provoke a massive international condemnation beyond "simple" ideological differences.
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Indeed, the hunt for fleeing Visegradians is not seen lightly across the international community - although, since the Commonwealth has already been diplomatically isolated from much of the world, this is not a huge blow to the Turks. They've already made enemies with much of the world, even if they are only at war with Visegrad and Germania.
I'd say that the Shun should have a Purple Unitarian branch at least for the coup succeeding.
Seems likely. Of course, the Japanese people are probably going to suffer the most in such a war.
It's a diarchy right now and neither one of them have any "official" titles outside of being former members of the Visegradian military.
Lieutenants in the autonomous army of the Kingdom of Poland within Visegrad.
So, what unfortunate ethnic groups have been victims of Nijasure's policies of "Accelerationism"?
A number of nationalities in the Deccan comes to mind, it has been the region most opposed to the revolution ever since it began. The Sikhs are an another example.