I just wanted to know details of what happened during his administration. Sorry.
Last edited:
The Silver Knight, a Lithuania Timeline
- Thread starter Augenis
- Start date
Heirs of Kubilay
Heirs of Kubilay: The Successor States of the Union (1942)
Republic of Turkey (Yenileme)
The flag of the Republic of Turkey [1].
The most bizarre partnership, temporary or permanent, of 20th-century history may have been the productive rapport between the Yenileme movement and the Republic of Armenia.
In the aftermath of the June Revolution and the eviction of the Unitarians’ rivals from Constantinople, Akarsu Kubilay’s government inherited a significant portion of the Ottoman Empire’s army and law enforcement and controlled most of western Anatolia. Though Kubilay would certainly have liked to gather the forces of his new territories and march into Karin [2] and Yerevan, he recognized that every day spent fighting the Armenian rebels was another day in which more dangerous foes like Ottoman loyalists and Arab nationalists were left alone. Meanwhile, the Armenian leadership, which generally wanted independence to be as bloodless as possible, reasoned that securing peace with the Union would allow Yerevan to spend less on the military and more on nation-building. An Armenian offer to sell some of the military supplies they had covertly received from Visegrad’s new Black Sea Fleet vindicated Kubilay’s refusal to convene hostilities, and led to a more comprehensive agreement for peace. The Sivas Conference was not a smooth process—a vein in the eye of Hagop Hovhannisyan, a future Democrat of the Armenian Republic, reportedly popped from sheer stress during an argument with a young Tevfik Rüştü Aras—but a deal was hammered out by April 1914. The Armenian Republic would not gain a coastline on the Black Sea or Lake Van, but it was permitted a shore on Lake Urmia and recognition of its full sovereignty. In return, the Armenian government granted the Union most favored nation status for trading purposes and agreed to accept Armenian immigrants from the lands of the Union, to whom the Union would grant safe passage.
The value of the Union as a trade partner was not immediately clear. One of Kubilay’s early ideas was to not create any replacement for the Ottoman lira, in the belief that money artificially separated the people from each other. Taxes ending up being charged “in kind,” a practice that translated to allowing soldiers to march into farmers’ homes and requisition their crops at will. 1915 was marked by a wholesale reversion to barter trade in urban areas. The Unitarian subcommittee for the economy decided, with Kubilay’s permission, to unveil the manat (derived from “moneta,” a word plucked straight from the Polish lexicon that meant “coin” in the Unitarian language) in 1916. The new currency was used to pay the Union’s soldiers and the civilians who did reconstruction work in the cities. To give the money value, department stores were set up in the Union’s major cities to sell food or items that the Union had produced or looted. By 1917, the manat, backed by the gold that the Union gathered over the course of its campaigns, was a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. It had become a true currency, on which future prosperity could be built— and none too soon, for the oil boom was about to begin. In 1918, the Union hired a Swedish company that exploited oil in Vespucia (the manat was never freely convertible on the international market, so the Union had to pay with the precious metalworks and gemstones of the former Imperial Palace) to examine the old Ottoman oil works around Basra and suggest ways to enlarge them. Sweden had no real reason to follow France’s and Germania’s lead on restricting trade with the Union; it was furious at the movers and shakers of Europe, and didn’t feel that the faraway Unitarians posed much of a threat to its conservative society. With Swedish technical and managerial assistance, the Union became a behemoth. The oil of the Gulf was sold to anyone who wasn’t disgusted enough with the Union or enamored enough with the state of postwar Europe to refuse the Unitarians. The customer list had a few regulars— Sweden, Lithuania, India, Japan, the South Vespucians— and shifted over time, as countries grew more or less friendly with the Union.
The Union’s economic growth began to affect Armenia in the early 1920s. Akarsu Kubilay died in 1922, and his protege and successor Tevfik Rüştü Aras made sure that the oil boom’s benefits were invested wherever possible. Oil funded improvements in coal mining along the Black Sea coast, allowing the Union an energy source that it could use at home while selling oil abroad. The Union hired more foreigners, seeking out college-educated engineers and scientists in Europe’s Unitarian associations. Young men and women with few prospects in their capitalist homelands were urged to come to the Union and build Weber’s promised society. In a major milestone for modernization, the Union developed the ability to safely and efficiently mine aluminum and diamonds, and use them to produce its own drill bits for the oil industry. As public order was restored across the Union, allowing families to settle down in a state-built apartment and get a job at the local publicly-owned company, domestic demand for consumer products grew and the Union could, incredibly, meet it. With every step of modernization—the oil industry, the housing boom, and the knock-on effects on other industries like metallurgy, textiles, basic manufacturing, increasingly advanced technology—the Union not only meet but exceeded its production targets. The surplus could be sold, but not by the Union itself. Too many countries still, rightly, feared strengthening it. Here, Armenia became useful. As an island of relative stability, Armenia could be trusted by the Union to keep valuable goods safe. As its traditional merchant families, augmented by new emigrants from the Union, built up links with partners old and new in Persia, Georgia, Volga Russia, and beyond, Armenia proved that it could put money to work, investing it wisely to earn massive returns [3]. Over the course of the 1920s, Armenia grew into an exporter of chrome, steel, aluminum, textiles, automobiles, and other goods which it should never have been able to create in any appreciable quantities on its own. Though Germania responded with targeted restrictions on certain Armenian goods, most other countries saw the loophole for what it was and slid right through it. Armenia prospered, and used its prosperity to buy even more Unitarian goods even as the working conditions in which such goods were made became painfully clear.
An Ottoman military vehicle, repurposed as a taxi. Providing public transport in rapidly growing cities was an important source of revenue for the early Unitarian state.
As Sefa Armagan's nascent Yenilemist state declared war on the Kurds, Armenia considered its options. Bands of Kurds, with few prospects of employment in the civil service or military of a dying empire, once made a living out of raiding Armenian villages in the late days of the Ottoman Era. Meanwhile the Union had been, for all its faults, a productive ally. Better still, the new Yenilemists— not so much an ideological movement as a coalition of anti-Union pragmatists— were open to negotiation with Armenia, and favored common-sense measures like keeping the old Union manat notes in circulation until some future end to hostilities. The Union-built railway between Sivas and Karin was reopened, and Armenian troops massed along the border with Kurdistan. Armenia didn’t clamor for war—the government was more comfortable with supplying economic aid to the Yenilemists, and the people with re-establishing the Turkish-Armenian economic exchange and strengthening the institutions of their own democratic republic—but if the Kurds were to suddenly collapse militarily, Armenia might get its shore on Lake Van after all.
Republic of Kurdistan
The flag of Kurdistan. The Kurdish text in the corner reads “Ya Karim” (O Generous One!), a reference to one of the many names of Allah.
The Sublime State of Shirvan was sure of one thing—the collapse of Kurdistan and the expansion of Armenian influence were equally unacceptable, especially when one led to the other.
Shirvan, a centuries-old Azeri-speaking monarchy in the Caucasus, declared the end of its Ottoman vassalage after Kubilay’s June Revolution. The Union attempted to negotiate a sale of the former empire’s Azeri provinces, but the Shirvanshah’s spies had already learned that the Union was territorially cut off from the Azeri lands by Armenia and would not be able to resist a Shirvani conquest. Relenting, the Union’s representatives offered promises of non-aggression in exchange for the contents of the Ottoman treasury in Ganja. This deal went through, and after the neutralization of Republican and anarchist pockets of resistance in the mountains of Anatolia, the Union was ready to begin its campaigns against the Kurds.
The policy of “Denationalization,” as it came to be known, was born during the Kurdish pacification campaigns. To denationalize, an aging Kubilay would explain to a young Aras, was not to kill. Denationalization done right was to keep the people, but remove the idea of nationhood. In other words, it was not necessary to destroy all mosques— closing down half while keeping the other half under surveillance from planted spies, and restricting the population from displays of faith outside the boundaries of the mosque, could successfully denationalize a group. It would make their delusional beliefs a private matter, and private beliefs cannot mount a successful challenge to pan-human unity. Mecca did not have to be razed to the ground when a ban on the hajj would suffice. Sure, it was one of the pillars of Islam—but if the sick and disabled didn’t have to go, then surely the remaining Muslims could figure out some excuse to avoid that particular duty. Aras, upon taking power in 1922, followed this policy to its natural conclusions. Agriculture was mechanized— a few true believers of Unitarianism, armed with tractors and chemical fertilizers, could produce the same agricultural output as a whole village of Kurdish peasants— and the resulting dispossessed peasants migrated to cities to find jobs in the new factories. In the process, their tribal identities weakened and the Unitarian state enveloped them, providing them their money, their food, their houses, their lives. New schools were built in Kurdish towns. The first five academic grades— the only compulsory ones— encouraged students to develop literacy in Kurdish, but every subsequent grade focused on competency in Turkish and Unitarian, the de facto and de jure official languages of the Union. One could avoid becoming part of the system, but at the cost of becoming uneducated and destined for a short life of toil in the factories or the oil refineries. Wherever possible, lethal violence was avoided, but never completely. The first boats of Kurdish refugees, fleeing destroyed villages once suspected of hiding nationalist rebels, crossed Lake Urmia to reach Shirvan in the mid-1920s, and more followed.
Shirvan had, throughout the past decades, developed in opposition to the Turks. In the 1880s and 1890s, as the industrialized world’s initial whispers about oil grew into a clamor, Lithuanian investments had helped build the oil wells, refineries, and pipelines around Baku. The Ottomans protested Vilnius’s interference in the affairs of its vassal, but there was very little that it could do besides hiring French scientists to kickstart a rival oil industry. After the Great European War, Volga Russia replaced Lithuania as patron and customer, but Shirvan was not dependent on the Russians. Volga Russia and European Russia were just two consumers of Shirvani fossil fuels on a list that included the Krajina, Khiva, Circassia, Georgia, and Crimea. This already led Shirvan into a rivalry with the Armenians, whose roles as an economic middlemen required the Union’s economy to be strong and its oil industry to compete successfully with Shirvan’s. Shirvani rule of Karabakh, an Armenian-majority territory, cooled relations even further. In 1932, this was relatively immaterial. 1942 was different.
In 1942, the traditional clothes that the Kurds hid away from the regime in closets and basements finally saw sunlight. Kurdish bureaucrats across the Union used their literacy to hand in resignation letters in Unitarian and Kurdish to their superiors, and returned to their hometowns (or the places that they believed to be close enough to the ruins of their real hometowns). A collective farm in the mountains selling tobacco, managed by a Kurdish functionary and guarded by troops on his payroll, became the nucleus of a shadow government that pushed against the Unitarian authorities. That same functionary, Mustafa Salih, chaired a conference in Erbil that evolved into the First Congress of the Republic of Kurdistan. The most important member of the Congress was Murad Surchi, who, by surviving the Union’s forced disbandment of more noisy tribes, had become the most significant tribal leader remaining among the Kurds. Salih reportedly viewed Surchi himself as a source of legitimacy for the new government, and Surchi’s tribe as the nucleus of a paramilitary force that could augment the small army he already had at his disposal. Interestingly enough, representatives of the Assyrians were invited to this conference as well. Despite their differing faiths, languages, and lifestyles, the Kurds and Assyrians developed strong links, based at least partially on living in the same area and a common dislike of Turkish superiority. By the time that open war began, Salih’s government had stolen enough of the Union’s machine guns, rifles, munitions, and commanding officers of Kurdish ethnicity to give Sefa Armagan a bloody nose.
Mustafa Salih. Once a loyal employee of the Union’s agriculture management committee and later a minor warlord, he now prepares for a career as Democrat that could possibly be quite short.
Once the new Republic proved itself capable of governing land outside its provisional capital, military aid from Shirvan arrived across Lake Urmia. Armenia disapproved, but there wasn’t much it could do— it certainly wouldn’t attack Shirvan's boats, and Shirvan had naval superiority on the lake anyways. As the Yenilemist forces launched their first raids on Kurdish encampments, each of the Caucasian rivals could only back its particular horse, and wonder privately if it had made the right choice.
United Republic of Arabia
The flag of Arabia. The green flag and white star-and-crescent are relics of the earlier Arab nationalist movement, while the white stripe on the left represents purity and clarity of purpose.
The Arab nationalist movement of the Ottoman Civil War stood for a single, united Arab state that, while protecting traditional values, could face modernity confidently. In truth, the movement was a hodgepodge of emirs, village headmen, religious leaders, urban liberals, and even former Ottoman Republicans under the overarching control of not one but two monarchs. Hussein of Mecca, the Hashemite Sharif of his home city and the father of Tripolitania’s future Emir, is acknowledged as the “leader” of the revolt and its armed men, but Sultan Hisham of Nejd is recognized to have provided vital support. Private correspondence between the Sharif and the Sultan illustrates a vision of rotating kingship, in which the monarchs and emirs of Arabia would rule as a council and select one among their number as a pan-national leader. But this plan, designed to fit the conditions of the Arabian Peninsula, made few provisions for the society of the Levant, where identifiable emirs gave way to sects, tribes, and hometowns. Nevertheless, the Arab nationalists, united by optimism, launched a daring raid on Egyptian Palestine and Sinai in early 1914, and, seizing the Golan Heights, readied an attack on Damascus. Liberating Damascus from its warlord, a governor of Syria appointed by the now-deposed Ottomans, would assert the viability of the Arab movement. Failing or letting the city fall into Unitarian hands might prove a fatal blow. As it turned out, they were exactly right. The Battle of Damascus began with the nationalist capture of the city, but ended ignominiously as the better-armed, better-supplied, and better-trained Unitarians encircled the Arab army inside and its commander, Hussein of Mecca. In one of the most brutal maneuvers of the Ottoman Civil War, the soldiers were disarmed and, along with any in Damascus who dared voice their support for Arab nationalism, marched into the Syrian desert at gunpoint. They were supposedly meant to be “resettled” in the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor, but were given almost no food, water, or rest along the way. By the time the Union army emerged from the desert into Deir ez-Zor, which was captured in the meantime by another Union army marching down the Euphrates, 20,000 of the Arabs had been killed by starvation, sickness, thirst, heatstroke, or the simple cruelty of their captors. The nationalist movement was not strong enough to recover from the Syrian Death March. News of this unspeakable end to the early streak of victories caused some nationalist leaders to note the relatively good treatment received by those who professed loyalty to the Union. They killed their pride and defected from the movement, hoping desperately to save the lives of their people and themselves. By the start of 1915, Union control of the western Levant extended southward to the Sinai Peninsula, but notably stopped cold at a line between the western Sinai towns of Bir al Abed and Ras Sedr. West of this line lay the Suez Canal, and few among the Unitarians were delusional enough to think that attacking the Canal would endear them to the great powers.
The Arab nationalists who remained in the fight, led by Sultan Hisham, swore allegiance to the Ottoman loyalist government in Baghdad, led by the deposed Mehmed V. The new coalition was one of the erstwhile Empire’s Muslims, arrayed together against a godless horde that had already seized Jerusalem. The Union refused to do anything to the place—Kubilay, recognizing the consequences of damaging the third-holiest city in Islam, threatened to personally snap the neck of any hotheaded youth who so much as touched the Old City—but this was not known to the coalition, which was fully aware that never, in the long and illustrious history of Islam, was the beating heart of the faith so vulnerable to so dangerous an enemy. It didn’t matter if the Unitarians had no real plans to sack Mecca and Medina. The fact that they could do it if they wanted, and would do it if there were no consequences, bred enough nightmares. The anti-Unitarian coalition was funded in small part by the Mughals— they could not give larger amounts of aid or launch a direct intervention because their own populace was war-weary and increasingly rebellious— but its greatest strength was its fervor. Dedication unto death enabled the coalition to drag out the war for another year, a year in which the Union threw itself bloodily against the defenses of of Mosul three times before bursting through, in which the Kurdish tribes of Sulaymaniyah were forcefully dispersed across Anatolia, in which Mehmed V supposedly remained “campaigning for our sakes” in Basra, in Qatar, and then in Shiraz even after the Unitarian conquerors found his body in Baghdad. Organized opposition officially ended just in time for the Paris Peace Accords of 1916, in which the Union sought and gained diplomatic recognition.
The main city square of 1930s Damascus, and a simplified model of the city’s geography.
By 1930, most major cities in the Union had undergone similar transformations, with Damascus as an especially prominent example. Damascus featured a central business district—the “Old City” of medieval times—at its core, where the Union’s state-owned businesses sold most of their wares and where state-owned banks handled the finances of the nation and its people. Zones of industry, which in Damascus included steel production and the making of textiles from the cotton grown on the Euphrates’s collective farms, grew along the northern railroad to Beirut and the southern railroad to Jerusalem. The living and government sectors of Damascus, however, developed in ways that the Union had not foreseen. Though the national Congress trusted city governments to build accommodations for everyone, it was unable to stop bureaucrats and soldiers' families from using their high pay and influence to move further away from the noisy zones of industry. Less educated workers, who toiled in the service of the same state as the bureaucrats, were ultimately forced by necessity to cut down on public transport costs by staying close to the factories. The government sector existed in the east of the city, in the place on the map that van Gelder marked as “high-class housing”—and not without reason. The five years of elementary school that most of the Union’s new citizens attended made sure that students had basic-to-intermediate numeracy and the ability to read their local language. However, if one wanted a serious education, one had to apply for a secondary school and do seven more years of schooling to learn, among a vast number of other scientific and social subjects, the Unitarian and Turkish languages. Mastery over these could and did make one a bureaucrat, a manager of men— by the standards of the poor, a bigshot. While the Arab and Arabized denizens of Damascus slaved away in the 20th-century hell of the factory, the traditional elite—which had always identified as “Ottoman,” spoke Turkish well, and maintained its loyalty to Constantinople even if its flagpoles no longer flew the red star-and-crescent—successfully transitioned into new roles within the Unitarian bureaucracy. The bureaucrats' gated sectors of the city, close to the city center and yet hopelessly distant from the sectors in which the poor, Arabic-speaking majority of the city's population lived, were the fruits of their success. The changes in Damascus were a model for similar changes in other Arabian cities like Amman, Sana’a, Riyadh, and Jeddah.
The United Republic of Arabia, declared in the heady year of 1942, inherited these stratified settlements and their potentially traitorous elite. It inherited the penal colonies along the Gulf Coast, where so many Turkish and Kurdish dissidents and their families lived and worked on the oilfields in the blistering heat that the Arabs were below 50 percent of the once sparsely-populated area's population.
It inherited Jerusalem. Jewish migration to the Union intensified around the same time that the Revival Front gained power in Lithuania, home to the largest Jewish population of any individual state. This was not due to the Revival Front being anti-semitic, but anti-Unitarian— a stance that alienated those Jewish intellectuals and shtetl peasants who had grown to believe in the promise of Unitarianism. Some of the Jewish Unitarians migrated to the Union-held city of Jerusalem out of some sentimental wish for “Zion,” but upon realizing the relative poverty of the area they dispersed across the Arab lands, hawking their skills to the Unitarian governors. The Jewish population of Arabia in 1942 was a little over 1.5 million. Most of this population was not composed of recent arrivals. Instead, their ancestors had lived, prospered, suffered and died in the Levant for centuries. They spoke Arabic, and generally underwent the same struggle as their fellow Semites. However, the disproportionate presence of Jews in the provincial Unitarian elite was not unnoticed. Though the current policy of the Arabian Congress was a steadfast refusal to alienate anyone, some grumbled privately about the subject.
The Union left behind one last gift: a budding drug problem. Though officials maintained an anti-drug stance, it was an open secret that the collective “wheat” farms in Yemen grew khat, a plant with leaves containing an amphetamine-like stimulant. The secret police was tasked with selling the plant and drugs derived from it on the streets. Selling the stuff secretly, through Arab middlemen, generated profit and distracted volatile young Arabs from thoughts of rebellion while allowing plausible deniability. Upon conquering Yemen, the Arabian government found that most of the land’s cultivable areas appeared, on closer inspection, to be given over to khat production. The region’s economy practically ran on khat. While the provisional government in Mecca could do something drastic about the problem, it could not do so without appearing to have abandoned its respect for regional and tribal autonomy. The government could, for the short-term, do little but be thankful that the Union had decided to plant its poppy fields in Anatolia instead, and wonder what techniques the Yenilemists might use to deal with their up-and-coming opioid crisis.
A coffeeshop in Baghdad, 1942
As I enter, I see five fingers splay out from the outline of an open hand. The shape is painted on a small wall-mounted plaque. The old functionaries of the Public Health Committee were left behind to die in Kubilay, but the newly-reconstituted agency has been here recently. For as long as I or my friends can remember, five blue fingers show that an establishment has been inspected and declared perfectly healthy. The definition of “health”, however, was never just physical. The manager of even the smallest cafe was appointed by the city government, whose members were appointed by a subcommittee of the Unitarian Congress, and all of that allowed a lot of room for error in screening management candidates for ideological health. Establishments in which “unhealthy” activities were suspected to occur were given plaques with some fingers retracted. This created much confusion—a dissident might walk into a two-finger cafe expecting subversive discussion and walk out with hepatitis A, while a hypochondriac might walk past a three-finger joint's open door only to find that he had missed a relatively free exchange of ideas. Still creates, I must say. The aforementioned conditions still exist, just like the avenue of closed shops not far from here. A clenched fist, painted in an angry shade of red, adorns each of their boarded-up doors.
The manager is gone, so I pour myself a cup and stuff some manat notes into the cash box. Under the cash box, there are a stack of flyers for an old film my uncle used to love. Literacy was rare in villages like his, and Kubilay knew it; he created a bureau to make films in Arabic so more people could hear the message. This film, around ten or fifteen years old, is about a young man who is always being scolded by his father for leaving trash on the floor of his room in the family apartment, and not putting his books back on the shelf, and wasting the sweat of the people by not turning off his electric fan before leaving the room. He tries to get a job in the civil service to escape his father’s nagging, and while waiting for his interview he notices some things about the waiting room and fixes them. He finds some trash and throws it away, places a stack of Unitarian documents on the top of the shelf, and turns off the fan since he doesn’t need it much. The commissar, seeing the improvements, hires him immediately. The young man learns that his father’s nagging has made him responsible, and enabled him to turn his wasteful existence into a productive and happy life, spent in the fruitful service of humanity. Many people loved this film, and so it has been brought back for another run in the reopened theater. I suspect that the manager’s disappearance is related to his failure to distribute these flyers. I hope the Indian soldiers enjoy the show—it was their idea, after all.
Two boys outside share a piece of pita bread, handing it back and forth between bites. I walk past them. Their eyes flick to the patrolman on the street corner. The tall one doesn’t move his arm, but his right index finger shoots up. He stirs the air with it once, and leaves it standing.
All the world under the one God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
I return the gesture. The short one bunches his fingertips together, pointing them upward, and moves his hand up and down at the wrist. The tall one makes three signs in quick succession: he cups his left hand and scoops the air within with his right thumb, he extends two fingers outward to the side with his thumb pointing up while keeping the ring and index fingers retracted, and he points behind him with both thumbs.
Stay a while, and do business with us. We can give you food, protection, or a chance to talk with our higher-ups.
I extend my middle finger, index finger, and thumb, and then quietly bring the three fingertips together. I then stretch all my right fingers out, keeping them apart, with my palm facing my chest.
No, I don’t need those at the moment. Thanks for offering, but I must be going.
They repeat the last gesture. I continue walking to my apartment. The patrolman is leaning against a wall, dozing.
An apartment block in Baghdad, built during the Union era and pictured on a foggy day. Near the ground, one can see crude recreations of pointed arches—the planners’ attempts at injecting the architecture with local flavor.
Aras built us all apartments, but his real gifts were the kitchens. One had to speak quietly in his kitchen, and sometimes turn the tap on so the neighbors could not hear his words over the sloshing water, but here one could have privacy. Privacy meant listening to music, reciting poetry with friends. It meant getting a 1915 Arab rebel’s badge of service for your thirteenth birthday from a stepbrother with connections, but being forced to return it because you might be arrested or killed if someone saw you with it outside. It meant listening to forbidden channels on the Sengupta, and wondering just how the Germans enjoyed such strange music. It meant having political discussions unfold before you, and steadily growing smart enough to participate meaningfully. Today, it means having ten of your friends sitting around a table, waiting for the guest to begin speaking. I turn on the tap and sit down. The guest takes a breath.
“I am Abdulhamid al-Tarabulusi. For four of the last five years, I have served the revolutionary state in Tripolitania. For the most recent of the five, I served al-Qaeda, setting up cells of dedicated revolutionaries in Syria. Now, I am here only through your beneficence. You have risked your lives in sheltering me, and risked them again in hearing what I have to say. I can only repay you by answering any questions you have about me, what I have done, and who I have done it for.”
[1] I stole this very lovely logo from a far-right Turkish party called the Great Union Party.
[2] OTL: Erzurum.
[3] Partly based on OTL Finland’s relationship with the USSR, and British Hong Kong’s relationship with the PRC.
[4] Based on OTL theories. Look up Homer Hoyt's sector model for more info.
I was working on something like this for a while; I wanted to see what daily life under the most doctrinaire of the Unitarian states would look like. The Union is now dead, so I repurposed what I wrote to show the Union’s effects on the successor states and societies.
Last edited:
Well, the Russians are even worse, calling their country the "Russian Democracy" when it's a military dictatorship ruled by Alexei Krutov.
Something tells me that we might get a 1984-esque three-way Second Great War between China, Germania, and India.
Chapter 95: Hearts of Iron
Part 95: Hearts of Iron (1942-1943)
At this point, the Vadas - whose sanity was rapidly deteriorating over the days, both from ruling pressure, wartime stress and developing bipolar disorder as a result - and his government were starting to regret ever embroiling themselves in a war in Russia. The Slavs were not giving up, and now their own empire was collapsing. Long gone were the days of the Ruthenians being a toothless, disarmed nation, easy to control - resistance movements were disrupting production, recruitment and transport from their underground cells, while the civilian Ruthenian population itself took on the choice of passive resistance, anything from avoiding military service to sabotaging their workplaces. Even the ethnic Lithuanians and Jews, both nations which were once nigh-fanatically loyal to the regime, were having second thoughts - after all, who would be happy with having an entire generation of their children sent to the eastern front, while they themselves work for long hours for a regime held together by brute force, propaganda and lies. Maybe the democratic Republic of the past wasn't as bad as the propaganda says - hell, maybe even the Ciesor was better than that. This was the idea behind the underground resistance movement known as the Sąjūdis ("The Movement"), led by neurastenic deserter turned democratic resistance leader, Antanas Garšva. Should it even be mentioned alongside all this that Lithuania was completely unprepared for a second front? 95% of their divisions were stuck in the East, and few could be soared to slow down the onslaught.
Russia was war weary.
Although their three year long resistance was applaudable, by now, Russia was an army with some patches of land around Nizhny Novgorod, and an army which was basically propped up by the Volgaks. The Volgaks weren't enthusiastic about the war, either. Although it appeared that the battles of the last year would shut up the anti-war opposition, it only grew more vocal by the time 1942 arrived. People were protesting against thousands of Volgak sons being thrown to the meat grinder and pressed the Council to request an armistice from the Lithuanians, even if it would require throwing Russia to the hounds. Russia itself had no such dissent - partially because most of it had already been silenced - but they had a bigger problem, manpower. As much of Russia was occupied by the Lithuanians, reserves were lacking, and the lands of Nizhny Novgorod were completely drained of men. Thus, the Russian Army kept dwindling every day, held together by a common cause and their national spirit, but a stronger strike against them could very well be the end of it.
Germania was war weary.
The declaration of war against Lithuania was met with surprise, shock and anger among the rainbow of an opposition in the Congress of Vienna. The war with Turkey was not yet completely solved, and it had already cost hundreds of thousands of German lives. In addition, France was not here to help the Germans this time by supplying them with whatever they couldn't produce themselves, like technical knowledge about glider and ship technology and whatnot. The people's living in occupied Europe were even more displeased - after all, this meant that the Germans delayed the question of granting all of the nations they occupied independence, military occupation continued, so on and so forth. Which Germania held the torch of liberty, its subjects were reluctant to do so.
Three exhausted combatants facing off on the ruins of eastern Europe. While it might appear like a level playing field, one should remember - two exhausted nations are stronger than one.
German infantry in eastern Poland upon the beginning of the invasion of Lithuania
Vilnius in 1942
As the first shells began to fall on the outskirts of Kiev, the Russians went on to seize the opportunity of their own. With troops being diverted from the Eastern Front to slow down the German advance, a number of gaps in the front line began to appear, not to mention the opposition dwindling in numbers. The Supreme Commander of the Lithuanian Army, Petras Cvirka, ordered the commanders on the Eastern Front to halt all offensives and dig in for a defensive line - something the military was not adequately prepared for, and something the Russians used to their advantage. Parallel to Operation Eylau, Campaign "Vorskloy's Revenge" began as a wide Russian and Volgak push across the entire Eastern Front. Although the momentum of the offensive grinded to a halt in the first few days, when the Slavs were faced with heavy Lithuanian resistance, it soon began to pick up steam once the opponent began to retreat after suffering heavy losses. The two primary paths of advance came from the north, from Nizhny Novgorod along the Volga River, and from the south, through the Don steppe and along the Azov Sea into the Kursk-Azov Line. The crowning achievement of the two-month long campaign was the Liberation of Tver, the capital of the Russian Democracy, which had been occupied by the Lithuanians for well over a year by now. The Lithuanian defenders provided little resistance in the attack on the town, abandoning it soon after the mass assault began and retreating behind the river. Three years of hard labor in the Eastern Front was fading away by the minute.
If they hadn't realized this before, the Lithuanians did now - this was a two front war, and the enemies on both sides were as powerful, if not even more powerful, than their Sarmatian motherland. Is it time to lay down arms?..
As said before, the beginning of June was when the German army reached the outskirts of Kiev, one of the most important cities in Lithuania, and one where the Lithuanians decided to make their counterattack. The Vadas gave orders to defend Kiev to the last man - not just because of the historical and patriotic importance of the city, but also because it was a major industrial and infrastructure hub. Losing it would mean that the connection to the south of the country, such as Odessa and the vital iron and coal deposits in the Kursk-Azov Line, would be severed, and if that happens, then the war may as well be lost. The Battle of Kiev began. Hastily assembled units from youth organizations, Green Berets and reserve divisions were the frontline defense and were supposed to hold out until experienced regulars arrive from the East - however, who could have imagined that reservists and youngsters wouldn't do all that well against landships? Lacking aerial and artillery support, the Lithuanians were quickly pushed back into the center of the city, where they ended up faced by an another problem - local Ruthenian resistance. The people of Kiev, flying the flag of Russia, took arms and began openly fighting against the occupants, either from basements and their homes or in outright street skirmishes. This uprising in the city was used well by the Germans, who began an offensive into the heart of the city not long after the first skirmishes began. Many of the surviving Lithuanians surrendered in the following days, others fled or deserted, total losses being counted up to 80 000 people, and a gaping hole in the front was opened. Although that hole was swiftly blocked by the arriving regulars, setting up a wide perimeter around the left bank of the Dnieper, the worst case scenario had happened - communications with the southern front were severed and the Kursk-Azov Line was soon lost.
Battle of Kiev, June 1942
Of course, both of them had their own personal thoughts on the matter. Garšva, a patriot as much as a republican, feared that a prolonged two-year war will result in a harsh peace treaty on whatever remained of the Lithuanian nation - White Russia, Ingria, Estonia, maybe even Latgale, would be lost. Sidabras knew that unless Lithuania is able to negotiate, any Lithuanian successor state will be propped up by the Germans - and such a state would obviously be thoroughly demilitarized, putting him out of a job. It was thus perhaps obvious that both Antanases would come to the same solution - overthrowing the Revivalist government and making peace was necessary, even if cooperation with the other side was required. Fortunately to the conspiracy, many both across the anti-Revivalist underground and across the Lithuanian Army were receptive to the idea - defeatism had already been firmly ingrained in the military, many officers were extremely disappointed with the meddling, arrogance and lunacy of the Front, and others hoped to retain their comfortable seats in a postwar Lithuania.
The day was July 19th, 1942, in Vilnius, under the former Imperial palace, whose large basements were turned into a makeshift bunker and military command centre for the Lithuanian government. The top cadre of Army generals, a number of junior officers and important members of the Revivalist civilian government all shared a room with the Vadas, with a very uneasy atmosphere. The discussion revolved around the collapsing war effort in both the Eastern and the Western Fronts, the fall of Kiev, Germans crossing the Nemunas River and threatening Vilnius directly, and the Russians approaching the city of Smolensk. Telesforas Gelažius, a junior officer and a witness of the meeting, later a politician, wrote in his memoirs that "during this time, Stankevičius had turned more and more erratic. During the meeting, he first stayed calm, then lashed out at a Jew and nearly stabbed him with his pencil, apologized for his actions, suddenly turned friendly and optimistic, before starting to cry, and so on and so forth... He had no mental stability. Nobody would say it out loud, but we knew that he was aware of the results of the war, and feared what would happen to him. We all feared what could happen to us - optimists studied German and pessimists Russian.". Among the people in the room was Lieutenant Algimantas Čekuolis, who brought a suitcase, supposedly filled with paperwork and other junk. Not long after his arrival, he received a planned phone call and left the room, leaving the suitcase under the Vadas's mahogany table. After bluffing his way out of a few guard posts in the palace and meeting up with fellow conspirators outside, an explosion underground shrieked. The assassination plot was a success. Out of the 25 people present in the room, 18, including Augustinas Stankevičius, perished.
The government of Lithuania was immediately thrown into chaos, because not only was the supreme leader now dead, but the line of succession became murky. This was where Antanas Sidabras and the rest of the conspiracy came in. Presenting himself as having been unaware of the plot and shocked by the news, he and military units loyal to him moved to Vilnius and, through the local Sengupta station, declared the general to be the successor to Stankevičius and thus the new leader of Lithuania. This part of the plot happened much like the conspirators hoped - the existing power structures, still shocked by the event, recognized Sidabras's fame and gravitas as one of the most decorated commanders of the war, and the transition of power ended up as mostly bloodless, at first. As the new supreme commander, Sidabras set out to make two things - first, remove the Revival Front from power, the easier of the two tasks, as without the Vadas and his closest associates, it was practically defanged; and make peace with Germania. The Sąjūdis was legalized. However, this was where events unsuspected by the conspirators came in. Although the Sąjūdis had made a "non-aggression pact" with Sidabras to not interfere with his actions at the beginning, not all members of the underground movement were made aware of the fact, and they took the death of Stankevičius as a sign to begin a revolution. Sporadic protests and violence began across the country. In Ruthenia, matters were worse, as the already existing anti-Lithuanian action turned into an outright rebellion.
The biggest surprise, however, came when Lithuania proposed peace talks to Germania. Augustina Sternberg was well aware that this was not being given to her government out of goodwill - the militarists now in charge of the government hoped to save the territories they had conquered as well as their seats in the top of Lithuanian society. Neither one was preferable to Germania, thus she simply declined the offer - unfortunately to her, public opinion struck in the back. After being informed about the negotiations by recently captured Lithuanian officers, Helmuth Adenauer, a German war correspondent, leaked the news of potential peace negotiations to the media. Although Adenauer was quickly detained for leaking disclosed military information, it was too late - the war-weary and peace-hungry public went wild, letter campaigns stormed the German government demanding an immediate peace with Lithuania, and the matter soon reached the Congress of Vienna, which, threatening Sternberg with a vote of no confidence, forced a beginning to peace negotiations.
Of course, the savvy Prime Minister was not done yet. Despite the peace negotiations, Germania still held a firm upper hand in the war, and she knew that Lithuania and its leader Sidabras could not afford a breakdown of peace negotiations. In the first meeting on August 1st, the German diplomats presented their initial demands - a restoration of democracy in Lithuania, limited demilitarization, restoration of independence for Krajina and a status quo peace with Russia. Both the militarist government and the few remaining Revivalists were outraged with this proposal. Alexei Krutov, whom information about peace negotiations was forwarded to, was also dissatisfied - after all, a Greater Russia was one of his desires. However, much like Sternberg presumed, the negotiations did not break down, and from August 1st onward, discussions and amendments to the proposal continued, on and off, while military operations on the Western Front stopped. Despite holding the upper hand in peace talks, Sternberg was pressured by anti-war public opinion back home and thus had to sweeten the deal to hasten the negotiations - demilitarization was no longer demanded, although the other three cornerstones of the treaty were retained. In early September, after demands to be present, Russian and Volgak diplomats were brought in to the negotiations, and, albeit begrudgingly, approved the deal. Many members of the Lithuanian government still resisted the "democratization" part of the treaty, but this is where Sidabras gave his word - after the peace is approved, he shall step down from the position of leader and organize free elections.
It was a sudden jump from totalitarian dictatorship to democracy that many were not at all comfortable with, and which would divide Lithuanian politics for years to come. The final treaty was signed in Vilnius on October 4th, marking an end to the Russo-Lithuanian War and war in Europe in general. While the conflict was over, few were satisfied with it. Lithuania would struggle to remove the shackles of the memory of Revivalism and militarism, many of the upper echelons of society learning little from the war. Russia would turn bitter at the results of the war and the lack of justice served for the brutality inflicted on its people, and this hatred would direct itself not just to Lithuania, but to Germania as well. And Germania would realize that the difficulties of building peace in Europe do not end with the final victory over the dictatorships...
The War of the Danube, the Russo-Lithuanian War, both of these conflicts were over in Europe (of course, conflict continued in East Africa and the Middle East), but unlike in the Great European War, few held the view that it was the peace for our time.
Map of the world in late 1942
Special Chapter
Boris Zhdanov - The White Death
Zhdanov's biography had been a mystery for many years, but through a combination of archive searches, information gathered from the man and some of his surviving relatives, as well as popular stories, writer Sergei Sereikov managed to cobble it up in 1997. Boris Viktorovich Zhdanov was born as the oldest child to a family of seven in the outskirts of Nizhny Novgorod, in the year 1907. His parents and family, much like the majority of Russians at the time, were Volanite Orthodox, and his father was a logger and hunter. According to Zhdanov himself, this was where he gained his first practice in shooting - while he didn't exactly live in poverty, hunting was necessary both for food, for acquiring money in trading furs, and as a way to pass time. Later, in his teenage and young adult years, Boris would bring additional money to the family by participating in various shooting competitions - his room was reportedly full of various trophies, brought from as far as Vostovsk.
Being the oldest son, Boris was set to continue his father's logging business, and even entered the University of Tver to study forestry, paying for his studies from his own small account - and because he was a student, he was exempt from military service during the general mobilization order upon the beginning of the Russo-Lithuanian War in 1939. Reportedly, Zhdanov was among the refugees fleeing Tver during the famous siege of the city, but this is questioned - his account of the battle does not match up with the known facts about the event. Regardless, after leaving Tver, Zhdanov returned to his home village, but now with a deep, though tranquil hatred against the Lithuanian invaders, stemming from the first-hand sight of the attacking forces, in his heart. Soon, he signed up to join the Russian Army and was assigned to the hastily organized Russian defending forces during Operation Jogaila in the summer of 1940.
During the next two years, armed with a modified long-range Tobolsk limo, equipped with an iron sight, he would kill upwards of 1500 Lithuanian soldiers, in an average of 2 per day (although the average is distorted due to him being out of commission for much of the time). However, the accurate number of kills is impossible to determine, as, while the Russians kept count of the killed made by their sniper teams, the numbers were often inaccurate or distorted for propaganda value. Still, despite that, Zhdanov's extremely impressive skill as a sniper cannot be underestimated. As he preferred winter warfare and was more adept in it, he gained the nickname 'White Death' (Lith. Baltoji mirtis, Rus. Белая смерть). Lithuanian soldiers were extremely terrified of the White Death, and the high command did not hesitate at using anything to get rid of him - counter-sniper teams, artillery and aerial bombardment, even an attempt to assassinate him with a spy. Zhdanov ended up incapacitated three times - first, at the end of Operation Pacas, with a sniper bullet puncturing his jaw; second time, during the battles of 1941, with a shot to the foot, and the third and final time, with a shot to the shoulder during the recapture of Tver. Each one of these times, after some time recovering, the sniper would return to the fray, and Russia built this up as a sign of Zhdanov's invulnerability, much like Russian spirit is invulnerable even in the face of superior opposition. The White Death was practically turned into a symbol of heroic Russian resistance against the Lithuanian invasion, even if Boris himself didn't like the heroization of his deeds. In his eyes, he was just doing his job as a soldier.
The third incapacitation appeared as if it will take down the sniper for good, he ended up locked to a hospital bed for months - however, Zhdanov underwent a practically miraculous recovery and went back into service on October 4th, which, as an interesting coincidence, was also the day when Lithuania and Russia signed the final Treaty of Vilnius, ending the war. However, the two years of warfare and fighting while injured took a toll on the man's stamina, and not long after the end of the way, in 1944, he gave his last breath. Despite his early death, Zhdanov was immortalized by the Russian government as the prime hero of the Russo-Lithuanian War, and a near constant reminder that no matter the size of the adversity, the Russian will always prevail.
Official photo of Boris Zhdanov, taken in 1941
Phew, this one took too long.
The White Death wasn't going to be the only special chapter attached to this post, I had one planned about Jewish unit participation in the Green Berets, the atrocities committed by them and the postwar tension between Russia and the Litvaks, but I decided to not make it because...
you know...
...reasons.
The White Death wasn't going to be the only special chapter attached to this post, I had one planned about Jewish unit participation in the Green Berets, the atrocities committed by them and the postwar tension between Russia and the Litvaks, but I decided to not make it because...
you know...
...reasons.
Symbolically declared war on the Commonwealth in late 1941.
The fall of the Revivalists was kinda anticlimatic but considering that you've foreshadowed the Russians developing a dislike for the Germans, it's still okay for me.
The description of the Vadas's mental state was very interesting-- did he act madly because he was crazy, or because he was completely lucid and knew what would happen to him when he inevitably lost? I guess TTL's historians will have a fun time with that one.
And while I do agree that the fall of the Revivalists was a bit sudden, the sense of tension that's built up from all these untied loose ends (the undecided fates of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Africa, Indochina if France is still trying to fight there) is palpable. Even the quick resolution of the German-Lithuanian War is a kind of loose end, because it lets Lithuania skip any kind of serious reckoning with the legacy of Revivalism in the short and possibly long term.
That song by the Russian-Vespucian band is starting to make more sense now.
And while I do agree that the fall of the Revivalists was a bit sudden, the sense of tension that's built up from all these untied loose ends (the undecided fates of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Africa, Indochina if France is still trying to fight there) is palpable. Even the quick resolution of the German-Lithuanian War is a kind of loose end, because it lets Lithuania skip any kind of serious reckoning with the legacy of Revivalism in the short and possibly long term.
That song by the Russian-Vespucian band is starting to make more sense now.
Something tells me the Russians will soon develop relations with Nijasurist India due to a shared hatred of the Germans.
Snow Country: Xiboliya
Snow Country: Xiboliya Before and After the Chinese Conquest
A datsan, or Buddhist monastery-university. Many of them can still be found in the cold expanses of Xiboliya.
A datsan, or Buddhist monastery-university. Many of them can still be found in the cold expanses of Xiboliya.
At the turn of the second millenium, Central Asia prospered. Under the rule of the Abbasids, Tahirids, and Samanids, the land was irrigated intensively, allowing miles of farmland to stretch outward from the Amu Darya on land that had once been desert. But when bad harvests hit, the rulers of Central Asia used Uighur and Mongol intermediaries to buy wheat from the land “beyond the northern mountains." We now know this land as the upper valley of the Gorlog [1].
The lands “beyond the northern mountains” have always made their own unique contributions to the story of humanity. During the 1600s and 1700s, the North Asian lands now collectively named Xiboliya (a Chinese transcription of a Volgak name for a state that once existed in the far west of the region) built on prior interactions with the wider world to become an integral part of the great Eurasian network of culture, politics, and trade, while avoiding the influence of rapacious nation-states until the 20th century.
Historians often wonder what sort of mark a stronger Ming Dynasty might have left on North Asia. Even in the 1600s, when it was well past their prime, it still managed to conquer the Jurchen tribes and add their lands to the Chinese patrimony. The murder of the upstart chieftain Nurhaci, blown to bits by a cannon the Ming bought from the Dutch, was a significant achievement. A resurgent Ming might have built upon it by conquering Tibet, Yarkand, the disunited lands of the Mongols, or more [2]. However, Li Zicheng’s Shun Dynasty, founded in 1665, would have no such ambitions for many centuries. The reign of the Dashing King was spent on reclaiming the borders of the Ming Dynasty and eliminating the Ming restorationists. All of this gave the fractured realms of the Mongols ample time to stitch themselves together.
The eviction of the Mongols from China in the late 1300s tore open the tribal divides in their society. In the Northern Yuan, as the Mongol rump state of the Yuan was known, the Tantric Buddhism of the old Yuan elite fell by the wayside, and a tribe’s prestige could be quantified by the number of wives it provided for the princes of the Chinggisid ruling clan. By such measures, it is possible to track the rise of the Oirats over the early 1400s. Though the Oirat were practically identical to the Mongols in language and lifestyle, they were not considered to be “Mongols” since they could not prove their ancestry, adoptive or otherwise, to Chinggis Khan. The Oirat were classified as descendants of Khasar, one of Chinggis’s brothers. Those who could prove a connection to Genghis himself kept the title of “Mongol” for themselves, and regarded the Oirat as part of the Hoy-in Irgen—the “Forest People” of the North Asian taiga. Despite this, the Oirats built up such close links with the ruling Chinggisids that they effectively took over the state, ruling in the name of the true khans. Oirat power reached its peak under Esen Taishi, the de facto ruler of the Mongols under he was killed in 1455 for, among other things, failing to properly ransom the Ming emperor captured during the Tumu Crisis. His death opened up a vacuum which many ambitious rulers tried and failed to fill. The most successful was Dayan Khan, who successfully made the Northern Yuan state into a meaningful entity between 1479 and 1517. He organized the Mongols into six tumen— armies of pastoralists with roughly 10,000 men and their families. The tumen of the north or Left Wing were the Khalkha, Chahar, and Uriyangkhan. Those of the south or Right Wing were the Ordos, Tumed, and Yongshiyebu. Dayan Khan led the administration of the Left Wing from his seat in Chahar, while his son managed the Right Wing. The Oirats were not counted as Mongols, and were left to form four Oirat tumens of their own. This arrangement took into account the pastoral nature of the Mongols by creating administrative units of moving people, not static territories, and it had the weight of Chinggisid tradition behind it. However, by 1590, the tumens of the Northern Yuan began breaking down, giving way to smaller, more independent units known as ulus, or nations. The Northern Yuan had become a symbolic entity, and it could not stop the ulus from migrating, dispersing, bullying their neighbors, or even receiving subsidies, trading rights, and grand titles from the Ming Dynasty. The southern Tumed strongman Altan Khan, ruling from his stronghold at Koke Khota, temporarily reversed this process by conquering much of Mongolia, including Chinggis Khan’s old capital at Karakorum. Some of Altan Khan’s policies would have long-term impacts— his construction of the Erdene Zuu Monastery near the site of Karakorum secured a place in Mongolia’s future for Tibetan Buddhism, and he gave the title of “Dalai Lama” to Sonam Gyatso, who was then the head of the Gelugpa Buddhist sect and ruler of Tibet— but his empire would not long outlive him. The attempts of Ligden Khan, the last strongman of the Northern Yuan, to create a pan-Mongol state were stymied by the hatred which the south Mongols of the former Right Wing held for him. He died in 1634 as a thoroughly disappointed man.
The Mongol world in the early 1600s.
Meanwhile, the Oirats had been forced to retreat to the far west, and their Four Tumens fended off attacks from the Mongols to their east until they developed the strength and unity for an offensive. The Dzungar tribe of the Oirats, which had been responsible for protecting the eastern frontier, came to assume a leadership role in an increasingly cohesive confederation. By 1635, Baatar Khuntaij (also known as Erdeni Batur), chief of the Dzungars, defeated his domestic enemies [3] and declared himself Khan of all the Oirats. Baatar Khuntaij had pan-Mongol ambitions, but it was up to his son Galdan Khan to realize them. Galdan’s biggest enemies were the Khalkha tribes of north-central Mongolia, who were united by Altan Khan’s gift to Mongolia: Buddhism. Zanabazar, the son of a Khalkha khan, had been identified as a reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist scholar. As the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu (a phrase of Tibetan origin meaning “Precious and Holy Master”), Zanabazar stood as the spiritual and eventually political leader of the Khalkha.
Galdan’s Dzungars had significant Buddhist legitimacy of their own. Baatar Khuntaij had helped the Khoshut, an Oirat tribe, establish a new khanate in Tibet that defended the country while allowing the Dalai Lama to maintain his office's traditional control over internal administration and religious affairs. In return for his efforts, the Dalai Lama granted Baatar Khuntaij the title of Khong Tayiji, recognizing him as a spiritual descendant of Chinggis Khan. However, Zanabazar was an actual direct descendant of Chinggis Khan, and his gave him legitimacy among the Khalkha that Galdan simply could not match. Though the Northern Yuan had become a cruel joke as of late, the bloodline of Chinggis was regarded with nothing but reverence. That reverence could not stop war from erupting between the Dzungars and the Khalkha in 1688, and could not secure Shun assistance for the cause of the Khalkhas [4]. It could not prevent the Dzungars from taking over the lands of the Khalkha, bringing the tribes of southern Mongolia into their orbit, and eventually taking the Imperial Seal of the Mongols from the Chahar descendants of Dayan Khan. But it could guarantee a favorable postwar situation for Zanabazar and for Mongolian Buddhism. Galdan Khan, now ruling from Chinggis Khan’s old capital at Karakorum, struck a deal with Zanabazar that resembled the arrangement the Khoshut rulers of Tibet had with the Dalai Lama. The Jebtsundamba Khutuktu and all his successors would continue to rule the Khalkha tribes in the name of the Khan. The rest of Mongolia would remain under the more direct rule of the Dzungar administration, but the Dzungars would support Buddhism in their territories and allow the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu the final say on the policies of monasteries and other religious affairs across the whole realm. The resulting Oirat-Buddhist half-theocracy would rule the Mongols until the Shun Dynasty’s northern conquests in the 1920s.
In the 1600s, however, the Shun were to be wooed, not defended against. In 1691, to appease the Shun emperor’s doubts over the new unified Mongol government, Galdan Khan sent embassies and trade caravans carrying greetings, wishes for the peaceful coexistence of the two nations, and— more importantly— thousands of furs. Fur headdresses had become fashionable among wealthy women of the late Ming dynasty— the increasingly close integration of China into the world economy had increased the local supply of silver and given more people the ability to spend on luxury goods. The rising demand for furs, and the Ming government’s ability to call on Jurchen and Mongol contacts to meet that demand, were important symbols of a “status quo” that the chaotic transition of the 1600s had destroyed. The gift of furs, which the Shun government spun as a tribute payment, showed domestic critics that the new dynasty was capable of maintaining the people’s happiness and the high stature of the nation in relation to foreigners.
North Asia in two time periods. Important trends such as the eastward expansion of Volga Russia and the northward march of the Shun Dynasty should be noted.
Before Mongolia could go hunting for more furs, however, it needed to consolidate. The economy revolved animal husbandry, with most of the population consisting of arad— nomadic, pastoral commoners. However, even before unifying Mongolia, the Oirats had made important steps toward diversification. Attempts were made to develop grain production in Western Mongolia, with a workforce consisting of Kazakh and Chinese captives from the wars with the western tribes. After the wars of unification, arad who had lost their herds of goats and cattle during times of conflict were persuaded to accept work on the farms, growing wheat and processing it into hay. The state’s network of granaries developed in parallel with the monasteries, which in some cases housed farms and tenant workers alongside herds of livestock on their considerable estates. Workshops of Mongol, Turkic, and Chinese craftsmen created some products like saddles, but others— metal kettles and muskets, for instance— were imported in bulk from Shun China. The mining and processing industries needed to produce such things in Mongolia itself did not yet exist, because during the early Dzungar era economic development was overshadowed by cultural renaissance. A new and rapidly growing class of scholar-monks simplified the classical Mongol script into a “clear” version that conformed to contemporary phonology. With this new script, the monks produced masterpieces. They created original works on medicine, philosophy, and history, and produced masterful translations of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. These translations were not entirely faithful— the Mongols, who had gained an understanding of the world from the campaigns of Chinggis, omitted or corrected the fantastical depictions of countries, peoples, and animals in the Tibetan “geography” texts— but this only made them more remarkable in their commitment to understand, to record, and to propagate. Though some critics of the new status quo worried privately about the number of young men who disappeared into the monasteries, creating paintings and writings but ultimately contributing little to the prosperity or strength of the realm, the campaigns against the Volgaks and the emergence of the Northern Fur Road soon showed that the Mongols had plenty of martial prowess and enterprising spirit left.
Mongol records in the early 1700s begin to record the appearance of “enormous warships, with decks made of thick planks and bodies enclosed by layers of dense logwood.” The Mongols already knew about the Volgaks and their boats— the Mongols had helped the Volgaks conquer the sometimes-belligerent Kazakhs— but the Volgaks had never sent so many explorers so far eastward. The Volgaks knew how to navigate the steppes, and their boats let them take advantage of the rivers that bound North Asia together. Worse, every man among the Volgak exploration parties was an experienced musketeer and seemed intent on proving it. The Volgaks became fearsome raiders who appeared suddenly, extorted payments of grain, meat, and fur from the local population, and quickly departed to another target. Now, the Volgaks’ boats were on the Gorlog, and Mongolia needed to act. Citing the Volgaks’ violent raids on the populations north of Mongolia as a cause of concern, the Mongols intervened directly in the conflict between the Volgaks and the tribes of the Gorlog. Muskets purchased from the Shun enabled the Mongols to maintain technological parity early in the fight, but the Mongols soon realized that they did not have to fight at all. The Volgak raiders, it turned out, had little personal loyalty to their decentralized and kingless state. A stronger state might have been able to send out more loyal servants and command their loyalty even after their departure, but the Volgak state had very little influence of who decided to be a fur trapper and for what purpose. Most of the raiders would work for anyone who promised lodgings and riches, and were bought out by the Mongols with promises of land and money. The Mongolian silver mines, developed minimally in the time of Altan Khan, now expanded with the help of a Volgak immigrant workforce that faced only minimal taxes on their discoveries. Volgak musketeers and gunsmiths found that the Mongol military held their skills in high esteem. Finally, the captains of the raiding ships were employed personally by the Khan. After the successful conclusion of hostilities with the Volgaks— a treaty signed in 1725 permitted relatively free trade between the two countries along the Kazakh border— the Mongols were the protectors and suzerains of the tribes in a large area to their north that included Baigal Lake and the upper reaches of the Gorlog and Oluone [5] Rivers. Ships based on Volgak models, flying a Mongol banner, and manned by mixed crews charted Baigal Lake and traveled down the Oluone in search of furs to sell to China and Volga Russia. Mongolian and Tibetan monks sometimes followed the fur traders, and most settled down permanently in the new lands they discovered.
The first monasteries in the Buryat and Tuvan lands were large “prayer yurts,” which were owned by one noble or another and could be visited by all under his charge. As the number of monks increased, these nomadic temples put down roots. The first datsan, or wooden temple, was built in 1753 by Damba Dorje Zaya, a Mongolian noble who had studied in Tibet. The Zaya Datsan, and others like it, did not move around with a pastoral population. Instead, populations moved to them. Monks in more remote areas came to the nearest datsan for copies of texts, thangkas (Buddhist religious paintings), and advice. The outlying areas of the datsans hosted increasingly permanent trade fairs, and the monasteries were known to indulge in trade and money-lending to earn their keep. In time, the datsans become production centers for books and artwork of their own, but this was not related to any kind of push for independence from Mongol influence. The main canonical books, the Kanjur and Tanjur, were still imported from Mongolia and Tibet. The monks of the Buryats and Tuvans considered themselves as part of the Mongol sangha, or community, even if the Mongol khans only held their homelands in vassalage and not direct rule. For the Buryat laity, the adoption of a Mongol identity was made easier by linguistic similarity with their southern neighbors. The process was a little harder for the Tuvans, who spoke a Turkic language, but here too the consensus was that Tuva was a unique part of a larger whole. By 1831, 3,645 lamas were recorded in a census of the northern Mongols’ 27 monasteries. Meanwhile, more still had been built further north, in the land of the Sakha [6].
The reasons why the Sakha chose to participate in the Northern Fur Road, and undergo the societal changes that they did, are not immediately apparent. After all, the Sakha had survived and thrived along the banks of the Oluone for centuries before the coming of the Mongol ships. The Sakha of the south, who lived close to the Oluone, got by through a mix of farming and pastoralism like the Buryats, their distant neighbors. The northern Sakha, living in colder climates, generally adopted the reindeer-herding of their Evenki neighbors. They settled down seasonally in winter encampments of earth-covered log huts, but in the summer they traveled again, and set up camps of conical birch-bark tents near fresh pasture fields. Uniquely among the Xiboliyan peoples, the Sakha practiced ironwork and pottery, and other traditional arts included the carving of ivory and wood, and the making of jewelry. The eighty independent Sakha tribes were divided into clans ruled by toyons— chiefs of great prominence and wealth. Although the Mongols could buy furs from the Sakha, who knew where the martens and otters so desired by the Shun lived and in what numbers, the Sakha would seem to require little in return. However, the Mongols could offer silver, animals, and hay. The last two were particularly significant: the Sakha pastoralists could always do with more animals, and the sheep, chickens, and cattle that the Mongols possessed were both new and valuable. Hay, meanwhile, was an absolute necessity for the Sakha during the winters, when the pasture fields were inaccessible or dying. The Sakha sometimes fed their livestock with fish in the winters, but this was a stopgap measure that, with adequate supplies of hay, they would not have to resort to.
The establishment of links between Mongol magnates and Sakha toyons made the Northern Fur Road a reality. The Sakha were natural middlemen. Geographically, they occupy the center of Xiboliya. Culturally, the southern Sakha share similarities with the Buryats (the shamans of both peoples refer to the drum as a “shaman’s horse,” in the belief that playing it is a transcendental experience of spiritual significance) and the northern Sakha shared extensive ties with the Nenets and Evenks. Due to their resistance to a wide range of diseases and other factors, the Sakha were the largest ethnic group north of the 50th parallel. Accordingly, their contributions to the fur trade were immense. Sakha horsemen in the employ of the toyons carried supplies and furs over the trails between the Oluone and Karakorum, and organized sales of gunpowder, lead, and ironware to the Nenets and Evenks of the far northwest in exchange for sable and polar fox furs that could be sold to the Mongols. The poorer Sakha, who did not enjoy the toyons’ beneficence and resented their influence, struck out independently for the lands of the Nenets and Evenks. There, the Sakha adopted the locals’ ways of life, while the locals adopted the Sakha language as a lingua franca. This led to the ethnogenesis of the Dolgans, descended from a group of Evenks who adopted an Evenk-influenced dialect of the Sakha language, in the early 1800s.
Once the Sakha joined the network, however, they could not avoid the northward march of Buddhism. As in the lands of the Buryats, the nobles were the first to adopt the new faith. Enterprising toyons, recognizing the value of sharing a religion with the partners of the south, made a show of conversion and transformed their winter yurts and nomadic temples. It was not uncommon to inaugurate the founding of a temple or the arrival of a scholar from Mongolia with bags of kumys, a drink of fermented mare’s milk common to the Mongols, Sakha, and other Inner Asian peoples. What started out as a smart business move, however, became a societal transformation. As the shamans of the traditional Sakha faith allied with the toyons’ opponents, the toyons retaliated. That which could be adopted or co-opted by Buddhism was integrated into the new faith. For example, the evil spirits which the “black” shamans were tasked with expunging were reinterpreted as Buddhist rakshasas, allowing the growing population of lamas to make the case that they could deal with the rakshasas better than the shamans could. Since the coming of the Buddhists was in at least some way linked to the recent prosperity of Sakha society, few were inclined to disagree openly. Converts to the new faith were rewarded with gifts of horses, cattle, and precious metals. Meanwhile, the irredeemably shamanic elements of the traditional faith were stamped out as best as possible in the south, though they survived more openly in the more independent settlements of the north. Buddhist influence in the Sakha lands reached new heights upon the invention of the Sakha script in the 1790s. Based on the Mongol script, it made the Sakha language the undisputed tongue of trade in the north for the next century. Neighboring peoples who spoke Sakha as a second language paid close attention to this script, which inevitably directed their view to the religious texts that were being written with it.
A map of the major native cultural groupings and Chinese cities in Xiboliya, 1930.
In retrospect, it was all very fragile.
The Khanate of Mongolia was not a strong, rich, or populous country by world standards, and it folded before the Shun in 1919. Upon his arrival in Karakorum, Zhang Xun, the newly-minted Protector-General of the Northern Regions (北方都護, Beifang Duhu) allowed the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu to remain as the spiritual head of the Mongol sangha, but forced him to formally forswear all political power. Armies sent outward from the Jurchen territories conquered all Xiboliya south of the 60th parallel north of the equator, and the lands of the northern fishermen and reindeer-herders fell over the next few years. Some Sakha took to calling the late 20s and early 30s “the Rule of the Samanera,” because as the Shun military administration in the north gave way to a civil one (one in which, notably, the general Zhang Xun still retained his leadership role as Protector-General) the district- and prefecture-level bureaucrats were recruited from the ranks of the Buddhist samaneras, or monks-in-training. These men and women were literate in Sakha, and were thought to be intelligent and ambitious enough to learn Chinese quickly. In time, these novice monks, in an ironic reversal of fates, amassed more power than their monastic masters could have dreamed of.
Economic development in 1930s Xiboliya was overwhelmingly state-directed, and carried out by the former samaneras and imported civil servants from China. After an attempt to forcibly settle the nomadic reindeer-herders failed, the Shun administration allowed them to keep their herds and their freedom of movement within the boundaries of the new northern provinces. The state’s attention turned to developing industry based on the processing of animal products. Fat could be made into candles and soap, and fur into clothing. Infrastructure, banking, and finance were extended into the north with state assistance, which also aided the development of large farms along the Amur, Oluone, and Gorlog. These state-run plantations would be remembered as the darkest part of early Chinese rule— while most of the other measures made some effort to accomodate and co-opt the local population and its lifestyles, the plantations were completely foreign. The Chinese sought voluntary workers at first, but when these could not be found in adequate supply, years of farm labor become an acceptably punishment for illegal activity. Hemmed in by the snow in the winter and guards in the summer, the plantation workers lost their nomadic ways. The state’s policy of granting land to prisoners who had completed their sentences and needed a way to support themselves was a kind of mercy. Mongol and Sakha newspapers, which developed in the late 1930s as an alternative to Chinese-language media from further south, briefly got away with articles on conditions in the farm, but quieted down after Zhang Xun decreed that any paper found to be violating the lese majeste laws of the Shun Dynasty would be liquidated. The Chinese-language newspapers also suffered under restrictions on press freedom, but in Xiboliya the idea of “insulting the Son of Heaven” was interpreted far more loosely than in China proper.
In the meantime, around 380,000 Chinese, 30,000 Koreans, and 10,000 Japanese migrated to the northern lands. The first target was Haishenwai— which had been a Chinese city since the Ming Dynasty founded it as a frontier garrison— but from there, the initial wave of migrants traveled around the settlements in Bingzhou Bay [7]. Bingzhou and Dongfang had hosted semi-independent colonies of Chinese fisherman attracted by the area’s salmon and crab populations since the early 1800s, but after the establishment of a formal Chinese claim over the area these cities became viable targets for further immigration from the mainland. However, with the notable exception of Lucheng, the Houshan silver mines, and the military outpost of Anbei on the border with Volga Russia, the inland regions of Xiboliya were less heavily settled by Chinese. Small groups of loggers, hunters, soldiers, or bureaucrats might make their way inland, but the cold climate and the lack of opportunities compared to other areas like the Bingzhou Bay cities gave potential settlers pause. However, even if these areas remained native-majority throughout the 1930s, the demographic situation there was not completely static. The provincial capitals of the Nenets and Evenk regions on the northwest, along with the Chukchi lands of the Northeast, were typically small, purpose-built settlements with a plurality or outright majority of Sakha or Mongols. The use of Mongols and Sakha— the “large people” of Xiboliya— as administrators of the “small people” would remain controversial, as would the growing strength of Volgak Volanite Christianity, which emerged in northwest Xiboliya as a counterweight to Buddhism.
From controversy, however, burst forth new ways of thinking. As the 1940s advanced, the small but growing intelligentsia of Xiboliya would attempt to combine faith with modern science, personal achievement with collective enfranchisment, and traditional ways of life with new national consciousnesses.
The Oluone Pillars. These rock formations and their namesake river continue to astonish explorers today.
[1] OTL: the Yenisei River. “Gorlog” is the Buryat name for it.
[2] Sounds a lot like the Qing dynasty. Too bad they don’t exist ITTL.
[3] In OTL, two tribes of these Oirat enemies of the Dzungars migrated to the Volga and became the Kalmyks.
[4] This is where I stop summarizing OTL Mongolian history and start branching off into uniquely-TTL events. In OTL, Zanabazar was able to get the help of the Manchus in 1691 by accepting their suzerainty in an elaborate ceremony in Dolonor, a settlement in Manchu-held Inner Mongolia. When the Khalkhas reconquered their east Mongolian homeland from the Dzungars, they did so in the name of the Qing. The Qing later launched a bloody campaign in the 1700s to conquer the Dzungar Khanate, which held out in western Mongolia beyond the Altai Mountains. The defeat and killing of the Dzungars secured Mongolia and Xinjiang for the Qing state. In TTL, none of that is possible, and the Dzungars have a better shot at supremacy among the Mongols.
[5] OTL: Lena River. Name taken from Yakut.
[6] OTL: The Yakuts. "Sakha" is what they call themselves, and the term is starting to see more usage in English nowadays.
[7] OTL: Sea of Okhotsk.
Last edited:
What OTL site/city is the "New Rotterdam" mentioned in the update where the VFS President (sorry, Democrat) got shot roughly equivalent too location-wise, I may ask?
For some reason, I'm very amused by the possibility of the Japanese repatriates from Korea preferring spicy Korean food to "bland" Japanese fare, and gochujang becoming a fixture on every upper-class Japanese table...
Can this be canon?
Can this be canon?
Good job, @LostInNewDelhi. I really liked this chapter. It's nice to see some details about the backwaters.