Warm Water Russia
- Thread starter Rishi
- Start date
ASB forum mate. Also what time period? Because in order to really make this practical before the Livonian War, you'll need to melt the arctic. Which... oh boy. And you can't really say the how is irrelevant because they wanted the Warm Water Ports for trade. Doesn't matter if Finland is suddenly tropical if no one can get to those ports
Well, you've melted the Arctic ice in so far as it impedes navigation of the Northern Passage so you now have an all-year-round easy route from Murmansk to the Bering Sea. In OTL this could be done in Summer with help, as with some Nazi raiders escorted through during the NazI-Soviet Pact, but now it is permanent. That also means that towns at the mouths of the Ob and Yenisei rivers can support much larger populations and will quickly grow into sizeable cities. In fact, Russia will view its Northern coast as the one vital coast, giving access as it does to settlement and exploitation of Siberia
Putting aside the fact that melting the Northern Ocean would probably put a considerable territory (Russian and not) under the water and that the premise as formulated is ASB, what exactly in your opinion would make a fundamental difference for Russia (as in “Russian Empire”)? Since the early XVIII it had an ice-free port of St.Petersburg. Riga is being frozen on average 30-40 days per year so for all practical purposes it is pretty much ice-free. The warm water ports on the Black Sea are available since the late XVIII. Murmansk (city status from 1914 or something like that) is ice free.
Did Russian Empire develop a major merchant marine using the warm water ports it had? No, it did not.
Would an ice free Arctic Ocean make a fundamental difference? Not unless you are changing overall climate fundamentally from a permafrost to something much more accommodating. Without this ASB condition the Northern part of Russia remains pretty much uninhabitable and sailing along its coast does not give you too much. How about the Far East? The same issue of the land climate all the way at least down to Okhotsk. The areas obtained from China in the second half of the XIX are much better but without a good land link to the rest of Russia and considerable growth of population in Siberia they do not make too much of a practical economic sense. Vladivostok is located on the ice free Golden Horn Bay.