Great to see this back in action. Ominous stirrings in Central Europe as far as the post war order is concerned. Never good when German ultranationalists start mucking about in Nuremberg…
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I'll be talking more about that next update. Suffice to say there about to some frictions among the allies as they realize the last check on Zachad geopolitical ambitions has just been removed.
Yup, that part was just way too coincidental not to include
We'll be seeing more of them, too. I'm looking forward to switching from the slow pace of analysis during the war back to a macro approach for the last decades of the game. Fun note that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Sevres which partitioned the Ottoman Empire, and from which I nabbed a photograph for the last update.
Just to say, I’ve nominated your for the highly prestigious WritAAR of the Week Award! Go and enjoy your time in the sun!
Part VII: The New Order
Part VII: The New Order
Approximately one month after the declaration of the case fire in the Ruhr Pocket, the leaders of the Albin Empire, German Empire, Roman Republic and Republic of Iran signed the terms of their surrender to the Paris Pact. The negotiations were relatively swift given their enormous scope, and while the Paris Pact imposed an indemnity and military force limitations upon the Albin Empire, its leadership did not attempt to take apart the vast Albin colonial empire. Minor demands made included the transfer of the Empire’s Mediterranean base at Benghazi to Zachad Egypt, as well as the cession of land in West Africa to France and Spain.
Chancellor Fairfax, having largely succeeded in his goals at the negotiating table, nevertheless came home to withering criticism. Chief among the complaints levied at him by critics was accepting the measures of the Chantilly Accords that would limit the size of the Imperial Navy for the foreseeable future. What good was the point of an empire, the opposition asked, without a strong bluewater navy to police it? Fairfax eked out a narrow win when the parliament motioned for a vote of no confidence, but spent the final year of his administration battling constant populist insurgencies from both secessionists and leftists before being unseated by the Bigeneres Gade labor movement in 1920. Though the Empire’s territorial legitimacy was secured for the immediate future, storm clouds were brewing on the horizon.
The Paris Pact was considerably less amenable when it came to the future of the German Empire, though at any rate their diktats were almost impossible to enforce. By the time Crownprince Johann had signed the papers neatly dissolving his imperial birthright, Germany had already fragmented into first two, then three warring factions. Leftwing militants who had brought an end to the war found themselves partnering with liberal reformists against a fascist uprising in much of the nation’s south, but the loose coalition quickly splintered as soon as the reactionaries were on the back foot again. Even within the left, vicious battles - not always verbal - were waged over ideology.
The Communist Worker's Party (KAP) found a broad base of support by borrowing much of the right’s revanchism and coupling it with an easily-digestible socialist platform.
Without a stable government to address, the nations of the Paris Pact contented themselves by completing their territorial adjustments to Germany with military force. In the west, the Kingdom of France directly annexed the border region of Alsace-Lorraine, where a small francophone minority lived, and installed a member of the de Tournus family in the Duchy of Luxembourg, formerly a constituent part of the German Empire. Germany lost considerably more territory in the east, however. King Charles and the entire Zachad government were adamant that Germany must never again be able to surround the heart of the Federal Kingdom, and supporting rebels in the former Kingdom of Austria provided the perfect avenue for creating a weak state to the south of Bohemia and Moravia.
While the other members of the Paris Pact accepted the need to separate Austria from the rest of Germany, they were less ready to tolerate the idea of Zachadia adding to her already-sizable collection of vassal states in Central Europe. After a week of debate, a compromise was reached in which a cousin of the current Hispanian Emperor, Enrique II Andrade, would be crowned King of Austria. In early December, Zachad troops once again crossed the German border, this time to assist Austrian nationalists in securing Vienna and driving communist militias out of the country. The new king Manuel Andrade arrived the following week. Already conscious of his position as a figurehead, he would nevertheless throw himself wholeheartedly into the affairs of state, overseeing the drafting of a liberal constitution and making strenuous efforts to immerse himself in the culture of his new country.
The von Rassos, Austria’s former monarchs who had endlessly vexxed Zachadia’s Escherlochs and even came close to splitting the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1848, begged for the restitution of their estates and noble status in the new Kingdom but received only meagre compensation in return. Most of them would settle in Italy and Aquitania over the following years, part of a larger German diaspora that fled the devastation of the Civil War. Much of this diaspora chose to live in the new Kingdom of Austria, where there were minimal restrictions on freedom of speech and a laissez-faire economy allowed emigre capitalists to quickly rebuild the fortunes they had often abandoned back in the German heartland. While the wealth translated to an explosion in patronage of the arts, with Vienna in the 1920s becoming a major European cultural center, it also contributed to highly visible inequality that fueled political radicalism.
Andrade Austria reacted to the horrors of the Great War and German Civil War by embracing a nihilist and bacchanalian culture in which young people lived for the present, not the past.
While democracy quietly sputtered out in Anatolia, the Paris Pact busied itself with dividing up the corpse of the Roman Republic in the Middle East. Deprived of their connection to resources from Constantinople, the Arab Republics were falling into chaos, and it was clear that intervention would be necessary to prevent destabilization of the region. King Henri was particularly concerned about the plight of the large Francophone Coptic Christian minority in Palestine, a fragment of the former Kingdom of Jerusalem that France had long taken special interest in. Members of the Zachad military were also wary of calls for Arab unity undermining their hold on Egypt or on the Trucial States Protectorate, a vital source of oil. A stable, conservatively-minded monarchy in Arabia would quash such nationalist movements. Thus, in March the Zachad Minister of Foreign Affairs Székely Kálmán met with his counterparts from the Kingdom of France and Armenian Caliphate in the city of Jerusalem, where the three diplomats sketched out the future of the Middle East over a long afternoon.
By the end of the week, the three states had authorized military detachments that rapidly overcame the remnants of the Arab Republics and installed new governments in their place. France annexed a long strip of Palestine directly to herself and crowned a member of the noble Hashemite family as the Sheikh of Syria. In Arabia, Zachadia elevated the House of Saud back to its former royal position, redeclaring the Sultanate of Arabia and giving it free reign - as well as arms - to deal with Arab nationalists and liberal reformers. Finally, Armenia annexed Mesopotamia as a protectorate, at last enabling its long-sought access to the Indian Ocean.
Back in Europe, the summer of 1919 came to an end with the resolution of the German Civil War. Over the half year of war, the KAP had coalesced under the leadership of a charismatic orator and former factory militia leader named Nikolaus Brandler. As Party Secretary, Brandler successfully organized the myriad militias and unions throughout Germany under the leadership of the KAP, establishing party cells that served to ensure the diverse factions of the Red Army adhered to a unified doctrine - one that was both as nationalistic as it was anti-capitalist. In early September, the Red Army overran Nuremberg, headquarters of the German fascist movement. Much of the fascist leadership - which included a number of former Imperial militarists - was captured alive, and Secretary Brandler broadcast their speedy trials over the wireless, so that the rest of Europe could know the fate of all those who opposed the will of the people.
On September 14, Secretary Brandler and the KAP announced the birth of the German Socialist Union in the capital of Brunswick. While the communists initially rejected any connection to the former German Empire and refused to sign the Chantilly Accords, they reluctantly accepted the responsibility of paying war reparations after Zachadia and France hinted at returning to military occupation. Finally, with their rule secured for the time being, the KAP set about rebuilding the shattered German nation.
Proclamation of the German Socialist Union in front of the State House in Brunswick, September 14, 1919.
Although Secretary Brandler may not have realized it at the time, Zachadia’s threat to the German Union was almost entirely an empty one. After the end of the Great War, the Federal Kingdom was rocked by successive internal crises. Millions of soldiers demobilized just as the labor market was contracting, the result of a small recession caused by governments throughout Europe slashing their spending in an effort to restrain deficits run up during the war. The threat of communism lurked just over the border in Germany, and more than a few soldiers had been radicalized by their time in the trenches. Worst off, however, political extremism was exploding out of the papers and into the streets. In the runup to the 1920 elections, the Hegemonist Stronnictwo Narodowe formed a paramilitary organization to violently suppress strikers and union activists it deemed guilty, as its young leader Korneliusz Patyk put it, “of carrying the red brand of communism into the nation’s heart.”
The Białe koszule, or “White Shirts” began a violent campaign of intimidation that escalated after the formation of the German Socialist Union. A response by the state was complicated by the fact that Patyk appeared to have allies at the highest levels of government - even, it was whispered, the Royal Family, as King Charles once mentioned to Prime Minister Láska that “the White Shirts generally seem to have the right idea about things.” Regardless of the King’s private views on the Hegemonists, the White Shirts had a penchant for effectively skirting the law and for courting sympathizers within the local constabulary that prevented concerted investigations into their crimes. Veiled, anonymous threats and beatings in dark alleys often served to convey their message without attribution, even though it was obvious to all who the perpetrators were.
On October 12th, however, the Hegemonists firmly stepped over the line when a group of Czech White Shirts cornered a Hungarian member of the Partia Socjaldemokracja outside his home in Budapest and shot him to death. Not only did the assault on Láska’s own party push him to act, but the murder highlighted a dangerous and delicate topic within the Federal Republic: that Hungarians seemed to occupy a secondary status compared to Zachadia’s Slavic majority. Hungarian resentment had almost torn the country apart before, and the prospect of ethnic conflict was enough to catalyze a massive government reaction. Prime Minister Láska authorized a broad investigation into the activities of the Stronnictwo Narodowe and asked for the resignation of the party’s chairman, which he received the next day.
The perpetrators of the attack were swiftly brought to justice, but the investigation revealed other murders and intimidation of municipal politicians connected to the same group. As the months passed, it became clear that a rubicon had been crossed. Leftist political groups began to form their own armed units - initially to defend themselves against attacks from the right, but soon to conduct their own brash demonstrations. Across Zachadia, opposite political sects chose to battle in the streets. Frustration at the state of the nation in the post-war era was seeping into the mainstream.
Prime Minister Láska led the Partia Socjaldemokracja in attempting to combat the political violence head-on. Over the winter and spring of 1920, the party passed a series of bills expanding the pension system and unemployment subsidies in order to accommodate the many jobless workers in the nation. The receipt of war indemnities from the defeated Occidental Alliance financed public works projects, particularly the improvement of rail lines and roads in impoverished areas of the Carpathians. Nevertheless, the trend of the election was to further political polarization, and despite the shocking revelations about the Hegemonists, a late surge of support for the Stronnictwo Narodowe in May of 1920 made up much of the ground they had lost in the fall of the previous year.
When the elections were held in September, the Social Democrats retained their control of the government. Despite the difficult election cycle, Láska’s track record of leading the nation through the Great War coupled with the peacetime stimulus policies proved to be a popular platform. In a sign of the times, though, the new parliament saw an increased number of seats go to the communists, while the monarchist Konfederacja Targowicka was effectively overtaken by the Hegemonists. In the years ahead, both the extreme left and right would continue to build their platforms from fringe movements to leading voices within Zachad society.
Over the next four years, Láska and the Social Democrats presided over the gradual reestablishment of stability throughout the Federal Kingdom as the economy normalized and the unemployment rate fell. The resumption of the Olympic Games, held in Helsinki in 1921, along with the Prague World’s Fair in 1922 provided welcome distractions for a population still recovering from the war. The Zachad-Yugoslavian football match at Helsinki underscored how far the two nations’ relationship had come when Yugoslavia managed a surprise upset, winning two to one against Zachadia in overtime. No longer was the southern Slavic state merely a hanger-on of its northern liege; for while the Yugoslavians had started the Great War serving as Zachad reserves, they had finished as equals, with one of their generals leading the largest battle of the war. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some voices within Yugoslavia now called for greater autonomy in foreign affairs.
The Yugoslavian national football team at Helsinki, 1921. After a strong showing against Zachadia, the team ultimately lost to Aquitania in the final match.
The Eastern Sun Rises
After centuries of isolation, the Empire of Japan reentered the world stage in 1865, when the Kameyama Emperor led a successful coup against the Tokugawa Shogunate that paved the way for a rapid industrialization and exchange with the West. After reforming their military with the help of European advisors, the Japanese grew increasingly ambitious and subjugated the nearby Kingdoms of Ainu Mosir and Middag in 1872. When the era of imperialism arrived in the 1880s, the Japanese were willing participants, conquering Korea in 1886 before turning southwards to take Cambodia and Lan Xang by the end of the decade.
The Japanese, it seemed, were determined to be seen as the equals of the Europeans, and when treaties failed to guarantee the respect they sought, they did not shy from war. In 1892, the Kameyama government defeated a western power for the first time when the Dutch refused to surrender their concessions in Hiroshima. In 1916, the Paris Pact and Occidental Alliance had attempted to entice the new Emperor of Japan, Morihito, to enter the war with the promise of colonies in Southeast Asia. Both sides were ultimately rebuffed, however, for Morihito’s advisors realized a far greater prize was available while the Europeans were distracted: China.
Woodcut painting depicting the inhabitants of the aboriginal Kingdom of Middag. Much like the Europeans, Imperial Japan saw it as a sacred duty to “civilize” the rest of Asia.
The Qin, who had emerged from the chaos of the Manchu Civil War in the 1500s, were an isolationist regime that had achieved stability by following a form of strict Confucian legalism. They modeled themselves both in name and in spirit on ancient China’s first emperor, Qinshi Huangdi, a ruthless authoritarian famous for his persecution of intellectuals. It was not an empire well suited to the tribulations of modernization that awaited in the 19th century. By 1896, the Kingdom of Manchuria had conquered all of Western China, reaching as far south as the Himalayas and as far west as the Gobi Desert. The Qin seemed on the verge of permanently losing power.
The situation changed dramatically in 1910 when the young Yongle Emperor ascended the throne in Zhengzhou. Following the Japanese model, the new Emperor mandated industrialization while conducting reforms that centralized the state’s administration. After crushing provincial warlords in southern China and better integrating minority regions, Yongle even acknowledged the forces of nationalism at play by changing the name of the country to the Empire of China and introducing a new national flag. All of these changes, it was hoped, would allow the country to more effectively resist the Manchu onslaught.
The Yongle Emperor upon his accession to the throne, 1910. Though inexperienced, Yongle was surrounded by advisors who were willing to bring China into the modern age.
Japanese troops enter Tianjin, September 1916.
There was little to be done about it, however. Even after rebuilding, Zachad naval forces were woefully outnumbered in the Pacific by the Japanese Imperial Navy, and strategic planners were forced to conclude that the ports of Qingdao and Hong Kong, not to mention all of Siam, were now at the mercy of the Japanese should they decide that further rollback of the European presence in Asia was necessary.
At any rate, by the middle of the 1920s, Zachadia’s attention was redirected back to Europe, as events closer to home were beginning to become concerning. The seeds planted by the Great War were already beginning to show their first green shoots, and just as it had before, 10 years ago, the trouble would start in the East.
Alright! Well, that was the longest update yet so far. I hope people don't mind the East Asian tangent - I happen to be a bit of a nerd for the time period IRL, and there were some very interesting things that happened there this game (seriously don't know how Japan got a puppet CB on China? Bizzare. But cool!) I think it will be relevant down the line.
Also - if a native German speaker is reading this, can you let me know what the correct preposition would be in the propaganda poster? It's been a while since I spoke and my grammar is... pretty bad now
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Very happy to see an extended look at the effects of the treaties. The interwar period is endlessly fascinating, and so ripe for alt-historical speculation in our own world (hello successful UK general strike 1926), so to see it mirrored in this world is a real treat. Very credible all round, really captures the anxiety of the period.
Usually it’s the other way around, so this is encouraging enough. Although considering that it ends up with:
I get the feeling that we’ve got some horrific Red–Brown convergence going on anyway.
Ah. Plus ça change.
Usually it’s the other way around, so this is encouraging enough. Although considering that it ends up with:
I get the feeling that we’ve got some horrific Red–Brown convergence going on anyway.
Ah. Plus ça change.
Oh of course not! Peace in our time, my friend.
In all seriousness - I think it is inevitable. The question is where and when.
Agreed on all fronts! Although I was a little disappointed at just how quickly the revolutions and coups happened in this game. The result of too much occupation I think.
On the note of the left coalition in Germany - I saw it as the communists starting with a *much* stronger hand in 1918 than the one the Spartacists were dealt with IOTL. Military occupation of more than half the country left Germany in a destitute state similar to Russia at the end of WW1, plus the fact that it was a communist strike that finally brought an end to the war left the KAP far better organized when the post-war fighting began. The liberals probably thought they could exercise a moderating influence on them, but as you correctly note they are likely to find out the hard way that it's too late.
Anyway, speaking of leftist politics, it's time for me to go catch up on your AAR
-- In other news all, as of today grad school has officially restarted for me. Between doing statistics problem sets, econ readings and my normal job, this AAR may slow down a bit. I anticipate there are around 3-4 updates left, after which I am still unsure how I will proceed. While I would like to port things over to HoI4, I don't own the game nor do I own a computer capable of handling it, but after delaying an upgrade for eight years, maybe it's time.
Just catching up again - very much enjoyed that post-war update. I do hope your studies allow you to at least finish off this excellent AAR.
Hello all! Apologies on the lack of update this month. I am still writing, albeit at a much slower pace. I expect an update to be out within the next couple of days!
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Part VIII: Black Flags
Part VIII: Black Flags
While Zachadia and Germany wrestled with domestic issues such as demographic contortions and the rights of labor, to the east, a much older conflict was entering its final chapter. Of the three main Slavic groups in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, only the eastern Slavs had yet to unite under a single government, having been divided by dueling kingdoms of Russia and Smolensk since the 16th century. In 1706, the Duke of Yaroslavl had crowned himself “King of the Russians,” taking advantage of Yaroslavl’s hereditary position as the seat of the Orthodox Church to establish a strong power base and absorb many of the small duchies in northeastern Europe. Although the Kingdom - later Empire - of Russia would expand far to the west for the next century, ultimately reaching the Pacific Ocean in the early 1800s, it was never able to overcome the southern Kingdom of Smolensk’s significant advantages in manpower and wealth.
During the 19th century, while the Germans and the western Slavs gradually established unified states, neither Smolensk nor the Russian Empire managed to gain a significant lead on the other. Smolensk struggled with the feuding of its constituent minority groups - Ruthenians, Tatars and Great Russians - a problem that ultimately led to the Great War. Russia, at the same time, found its largely illiterate population of serfs poorly prepared for the rapid transitions of the industrial age. In the wake of the Great War, Smolensk adopted greater protection for minority rights and a constitutional government, yet the Russian Empire maintained the absolute rule of its Tsar, Nikolai Konstantinov.
While Russia stagnated under authoritarian absolutism, Smolenskii King Rodion Sitnikov extended the suffrage to minority groups and, on January 8, 1921, even to women.
Tsar Nikolai had originally entered the Great War on the side of the Paris Pact not only because his advisors had warned him not to set a precedent for minority independence movements, but also because the Pact appeared to have the upper hand early in the war. The Tsar had hoped that the war might win Russia concessions in India and Africa with which to restore confidence in the monarchy, but the Treaty of Chantilly had quickly dashed these dreams so as to give the Albin Empire more respectful terms. Accordingly, Tsar Nikolai faced immense popular backlash in the post-war era. The poorly equipped Russian Army had fought in the Middle East, Europe and Africa, losing nearly 300,000 men to combat and roughly a third of that to disease and malnutrition. For what purpose then, growled the public, had these heroes lost their lives? It appeared that Russia had sacrificed nearly half a million of her young men just to prop up her greatest enemy - Smolensk.
In the early 1920s, the Russkoye patrioticheskoye dvizheniye or “Russian Patriot Movement” established itself as a font for public outrage, one sanctioned by the Tsarist government due to its rightist and pro-nationalist tendencies. Ostensibly, the movement sought to strengthen the state by encouraging enrollment in the military, patriotic education and reaffirming the role of the Orthodox Church in the public sphere. Its leader, Anatoly Zaytsev, was a charismatic member of the Moscow social elite and a former seminary student. While Zaytsev held increasingly raucous rallies in the capital, he assuaged the concerns of the nobility by suggesting that he was merely channeling the frustrations of the public “in a more productive direction.” By 1923, he had wormed his way into the Tsar’s inner circle, where he began to encourage a foreign policy split with the former Paris Pact nations. Later that year, the Russian Patriot Movement rebranded itself as “the Russian Unity Movement” and began to agitate for a resolution to the “the Smolensk question” that would see the Rodina finally complete its preordained destiny as the guarantor of all Great Russians.
Anatoly Zaytsev, photographed in 1927.
On December 12th, 1923, Tsar Nikolai’s untimely passage from a heart attack at the age of 59 eliminated the final hurdle to Zaytsev’s consolidation of power. With the backing of a small section of the army, Zaytsev gave a radio broadcast in which he declared a “new period of pan-Russian rejuvenation” with himself as the national leader, or Vozhd. A brief civil war then ensued as military units loyal to the Konstantinov dynasty clashed with Unity Movement paramilitaries and other Army divisions backing the coup. With Moscow firmly under the control of Zaytsev, however, the outcome was never seriously in doubt. On January 10th, the new Vozhd called for an end to the “bloodshed among brothers” and promised amnesty for all surrendering Army officers. He crowned Tsar Nikolai’s 15 year old son, Mikhail Konstantinov, as the new figurehead “Tsar” and rapidly installed his allies throughout the various organs of government.
Of primary importance to Zaytsev’s new, ultranationalist regime was the reorganization of the military. The Army, which had scarcely modernized since the Great War, would now be reconstructed to fight against Smolensk. Rather than attempt to fully man Russia’s long and often remote border with its southern neighbor, Zaytsev elevated a group of young officers who believed in utilizing armored vehicles and aviation to fight a new way of war. These technologies had only begun to mature during the Great War and were still far from proven. Yet a concentrated armor corps, the officers reasoned, could move swiftly over the Russian steppe and capture vital centers in Smolensk. The prospect of such a swift victory excited Zaytsev, who knew that despite Russia’s vast size, its manpower was more limited than Smolesnk’s and would not sustain a long conflict. While the mobilization doctrine had its detractors within the Russian Army throughout the 1920s, the theories would ultimately be borne out in practice.
Passing the Torch: The Zachad 1928 Election
The Zachad 1924 election season proved to be nowhere near as contentious as the first post-war elections in 1920. With the economy back on track and seeing low levels of unemployment, neither the murmurs of instability in Russia nor East Asia were able to shake confidence in Prime Minister Láska’s government, now entering its eighth year in power. The Social Democrats maintained a comfortable margin against the opposition, gaining seats back from the communists and ensuring the continued expansion of the welfare system.
The end of the Great War indemnities in 1923, however, posed the first major challenge to the welfare agenda as the government was forced to confront the dual expenses of improving the fleet while simultaneously funding extensive healthcare and pension systems. This proved to be the beginning of the first post-war schism in the Partia Socjaldemokracja as many legislators began to push back against Láska’s platform of a strong national defense. The party, they argued, was becoming a watered down version of its former self, and if Láska chose the expansion of the navy - an imperialist appendage if there ever was one - over workers’ welfare, the Social Democrats would no longer be recognizable as anything other than another faction of the ruling class.
Rather than choose one national priority over the other, Láska chose to punt on the issue going into the 1924 election season. The government spent eye watering sums to expand the fleet and welfare systems, running deficits in the subsequent years that led to a depreciation of the Zachad Koruna and increased inflation. The effective elimination of the German economy from the world market after the Great War had meant that demand for Zachadia’s industrial sector had never been better, but now the combination of monetary depreciation and strong domestic demand threatened to overheat the economy.
The collapse of German industry following the civil war and the KAP’s attempts to achieve autarchy left Zachadia in command of the world’s industrial supply chain.
In 1926, a scandal erupted involving the Polish wing of the Stronnictwo Narodowo-Demokratyczne. Zachad’s traditional conservative party was discovered to have been shamelessly paid off by Galician landowners in exchange for diverting planned rail lines and paved roads from their estates. As the scandal unfolded, other forms of bribery gradually came to light, such as the establishment of sinecures in the provincial bureaucracy and unrecorded sales of government wares to local manufacturers, tarnishing the party’s national image. Conservative voters split in two ways, with some ardent nationalists joining the Hegemonists while the pro-business faction largely fell into the liberal camp.
The influx of conservative voters was not the only trend aiding the liberals, however. The Patriotic Party, or Stronnictwo Patriotyczne, had criticized the cost of implementing the Zachad healthcare system, pension plan and unemployment benefits. Moreover, the Social Democrats’ long tenure in power had seen a new bevy of regulations that the liberals argued were preventing business owners from scaling up production. Seeking greener pastures abroad, Zachad firms began to invest more in the neighboring economies of Yugoslavia and Volasea, both part of the Zachad customs territory. In particular, throughout the 1920s Zachad firms began to develop a relationship with Yugoslavian King Stefan Crnojević’s government that often bordered on the corrupt. Corporate tax rates stayed low, while unions were frequently targeted for extrajudicial harassment. While leftists decried Yugoslavia for groveling to the powers of Zachad capital, the foreign investment also had its benefits. By 1930, Yugoslavia had the fifth highest GDP per capita in the world and a lower unemployment rate than in Zachadia.[1]
Capital flight contributed to mounting Zachad electoral fatigue after 12 years of the Socjaldemokracja administration, having an effect that the party proved unable to handle effectively as it waded deeper into internal bickering over ideology and policy platforms. When the elections took place in May of 1928, support for the Social Democrats fell eight percent while the liberals - a coalition made up of the Patriotic Party and their more libertarian cousins, the Radykalny - claimed just under a third of the vote. The results were widely anticipated leading up to the election, perhaps contributing to the Social Democrats’ genteel acceptance of their loss. Prime Minister Láska addressed Parliament one final time, in which he reiterated his pride in Zachadia for overcoming immense challenges during the Great War and establishing a strong social safety net in the postwar era.
“To the people of this Kingdom,” he said, “you have put your trust in me for 12 years. Serving you has been the greatest honor of my life. Together, we have lit a democratic and just path for the nations of Europe.” His speech received a standing ovation from the entire chamber.
Upon acknowledging his party’s loss to the liberals, Láska also announced his retirement from politics. Now at the age of 53, he had served the Partia Socjaldemokracja for 20 years, over half of which had been spent as Prime Minister. As the longest serving Prime Minister in Zachad history, Láska’s time in office had also coincided with an enormous transition in Zachadia’s role on the world stage. When he had assumed office, the Federated Kingdom had been vying with the empires of Germany and Albina for supremacy. Now, she was indisputably the greatest power not only in Europe, but in the world. Her military, industrial might and even cultural contributions were unsurpassed; her influence was felt even as far away as in the Orient and among the republican nations of the Amerigas.
As such, the Prime Minister’s departure was generally regarded as bittersweet. Though the voters had clearly expressed their desire for new leadership, they also recognized Láska’s immense contributions to the nation. As for Láska himself, he seemed content with the results of his work. As he left the Capitol, a reporter asked him what he planned to work on in his retirement. “I have plenty of reading to catch up on,” he demurred. “I think I’ve earned it.”
To lead the country as the new Prime Minister, the Patriotic Party selected Baron Konstanty Nowak, a liberal aristocrat and owner of a complex of textile factories in Warsaw. Widely considered a congenial and approachable man, Baron Nowak’s easy smile belied a shrewd politician, one responsible for engineering the relentless attacks upon the Social Democrats in the early 1920s. These successful election tactics, along with his widespread network of alliances within the liberal camp, ensured him the position of Prime Minister after the election was clinched.
An elderly King Charles photographed with Prime Minister Nowak, 1929.
An Inward Turn: Zachad Foreign Policy of the 1930s
Baron Nowak’s agenda once in office was relatively simple. Content to leave the nation’s various agencies relatively undisturbed, the Prime Minister busied himself with streamlining or altogether eliminating anti-business regulations and slashing taxes across the board. He attempted to reduce colonial expenditures by turning over the Trucial States Protectorate to Arab suzerainty and devolving administration to western-educated local elites in the Far East. At home, while unemployment assistance was sharply curtailed and the Navy was forced to abandon plans for five new battleships, the economy hummed along productively.
Prime Minister Nowak had little knack for international relations, however, something that was soon readily apparent as the world began to slide back into uncertainty in the late 1920s. The death of King Henri de Tournus in 1927 inaugurated a far less stable period in Franco-Zachad relations as the ambitious new King, Louis XVI, sought to counterbalance away from Zachad hegemony in Europe. In 1929, Volasean security services discovered a small ring of gunrunners in Transylvania attempting to arm Hungarian radicals. The weapons were tentatively traced to the Albin Empire, but when Zachadia requested diplomatic condemnations from its allies, Louis instead suggested that the Zachad government was needlessly attempting to inflame tensions.
Furious, King Charles directed Prime Minister Nowak and the Foreign Ministry to make the French abandon their position of unnecessary neutrality. “The damn Gauls would be nothing without us,” he told Nowak in a private session. Zachad diplomats soon smoothed things over with Louis’ government and the episode ended with nothing more than a minor loss of face for the French, but it had badly strained relations on both sides of Europe’s most important alliance.
The following year, fighting erupted in the Caucuses where the nationalist government of Azerbaijan launched an all-out assault on neighboring Georgia. Azerbaijan’s government, under the autocratic leadership of General Firuz Quluyev, had modeled itself after Anatoly Zaytsev’s regime and received Russian military advisors to prepare for the war. While General Quluyev claimed Georgian oppression of Azeris as the reason for war, his propaganda pitched the war domestically as a jihad to cleanse the last Christian holdout from the Caucasus. Several divisions of the Azeri army, mounted in trucks and backed up by Russian-made armored cars, rolled over the Georgian border and quickly captured the capital of Tblisi. The smaller Georgian army was separated and defeated in detail in the space of two months.
When Georgia surrendered unconditionally, General Quyulev announced the country’s direct annexation to Azerbaijan. The Armenian Caliphate, motivated by its own historic tensions with Georgia, offered a weak condemnation of the annexation while the nations of the Balkans looked to Zachadia for guidance. Although Prime Minister Nowak briefly convened a meeting with military leaders, the consensus view held that Azerbaijan was a third-rate nation, incapable of altering the regional balance of power and too far away to make a difference regardless.
Yet Russian influence was spreading further than the Caucasus. In India, the unstable Punjabi Republic, the last non-colonial state on the subcontinent, fell to a radical faction of Indian nationalists that installed a brutal, militarist regime in order to “strengthen the state for liberation from European imperialists.” In order to modernize their armed forces, and with an eye on Smolenskii Baluchistan to their south, the new state of “Khalistan” entered into diplomatic talks with the Zaytsev regime. Finally, radical politics threatened to topple the government of the Republic of Iran, which was struggling to rebuild itself after having served as a battlefield during the Great War. There, Russia hinted at returning the colonial region of Khuzestan in exchange for an alliance.
Though Iran had little love lost for Moscow and such an outcome was far from guaranteed, the diplomatic overture was the final stroke for the Kingdom of Smolensk, which now found itself surrounded on almost all sides by revanchist, authoritarian states. Determined to slap down Zaytsev’s ambitions before it was too late, in December of 1930 King Rodion began to organize a conference that would clearly establish Smolensk’s status as the foremost Great Russian state, stripping the Unity Movement of its momentum.
King Rodion appealed to Zachadia for assistance, but found the Federated Kingdom surprisingly unwilling to provide anything other than token support. Now at the age of 69, King
Charles was rapidly losing what little interest he had ever had for statesmanship while Prime Minister Nowak was disinclined to see Russia as a real threat. After the diplomatic spat with France, Nowak’s Foreign Ministry advisors believed that playing powerbroker in the east would be seen as overreach and invite pushback from the other nations of Europe. With the German Social Union finally emerging from the depths of its collectivization and rebuilding process, the need to preserve a military coalition in the west was paramount.
Sensing Smolensk’s weakness, Zaytsev pressed the issue of unification harder, insisting that the “mongrel Kingdom” bow to Russia’s superiority and holding a series of provocative military exercises on the border of Smolenskii Kazakhstan. On February 19, 1931, the tense situation exploded into open conflict following an exchange of fire between patrols near the Aral Sea. Russian forces, hard-hitting and mobile, quickly shattered the Smolenskii garrison in the southern region and pushed as far as 100 miles past the border in some areas. Both sides engaged in artillery duels along sections of the border in the east, though the spring Rasputitsa muds prevented meaningful Russian advances in the Smolenskii heartland.
After a month of fighting, it was clear the Russians had severely mauled the Smolenskii Army in several engagements and Zachadia stepped in to arbitrate an end to the conflict before it escalated any further.[2] Smolensk made no border concessions, and both sides agreed to table the issue of Russian unification for the near future. Prime Minister Nowak breathed a sigh of relief at avoiding a war, but the outcome only emboldened Anatoly Zaytsev’s regime, now confident in its abilities to fight Smolensk when a better opportunity presented itself. As the world tilted towards authoritarianism and the Paris Pact slowly disintegrated, it seemed he would not have to wait long.
Russian tank column advances on the Kazahk steppe, March 5, 1931.
1: Including colonial populations.
2: I used the console to end this war - didn't seem quite right for it to take place here.
... and we're back. Sorry for the long delay - it's been harder to find time for this project, and I had a bit of writer's block this month as well. I suspect the next update will be the last one. As you can see, I condensed rather a lot of time into this update as the pace of events has slowed down significantly.
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Laska had a very good run of it. Unless any skeletons are discovered in his closet he can be well-pleased.
And at 53 ... only 53 ... I would not be surprised were he not to be quite done with politics-.
And at 53 ... only 53 ... I would not be surprised were he not to be quite done with politics-.
Welcome back! Great stuff for the return. Europe is fast sliding into an all too plausible darkness. I get a strong impression of Eastern Europe in our own interwar: lots of regional powers led by autocrats, populists and ideologues all vying for influence and hegemony. This Russian resurgence in particular feels like a like source of future conflict, and I can imagine Zachadia looking increasingly nervously at the prospect of being hemmed in by nationalistic Russians and autarkic Germans. The best hope is to keep all conflicts outside of federal borders – but for a genial appeaser like Nowak, that might prove easier said than done.
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Potentially. He's not very old, but I think the problem is that he's synonymous with a period of history which the nation is trying to move past by this point. Plus, how does one go back to being an ordinary MP after so long in the driver's seat? Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about Parliamentary systems can enlighten me here (cough cough @DensleyBlair)
Thank you! It's good to be back.Welcome back!
Thanks - sorry about the wait!
Yup, pretty much nail on the head with all of these. The country is at once both a little too confident in itself while also still traumatized by the last war. Nowak, while a solid local politician, has basically been promoted beyond his level of expertise and has no real strategy to maintain the post-war order.
In British history there are plenty of examples of past PMs staying on. Granted, they often aren’t the most well-remembered leaders, but it can happen. (Ted Heath was in office 1970–74, but didn’t leave the House of Commons until 2001.) Often, a patchy PM can mature into a respected elder statesman, who won’t be in cabinet again (though certainly may be) but may be called upon to give their views, and might still hold some level of influence as a party grandee.
The snagging point is where a leader is so popular as to represent a threat of discord within party ranks. I sort of read Laska like Tony Blair: very young, more or less popular among his constituency – but controversial outside of it, and synonymous with a minor era in national history. Blair of course buggered off to his laughable role as a Middle Eastern “peace envoy”, but because the gods of British politics are cruel, he still gets wheeled out to give his views on various things – like Brexit, or the state of the Labour Party. But Blair’s exit, depending on who you believe, was part of a decades-old agreement with successor/rival Gordon Brown about how they’d divvy up power between themselves (and their attendant factions). So Blair left pretty quickly to give Brown space to be his own man. (It may well have been dirtier than that…)
With Laska of course we don’t have the problem of an uninterrupted transfer of power. He hasn’t been succeeded by a protege nor an internal rival, so he’s be well within his rights to hang around and keep sniping from the sidelines – maybe doing the Lloyd Georgian thing and continually trying to wangle himself back into power (Lloyd George would be an excellent case study for Laska, I think), or maybe acting more like Harold Macmillan during the Thatcher years and becoming a strident critic.
So all options on the table. And as @stnylan says, at 53 there’s still plenty of time for a second act. I wouldn’t bet against Laska coming back for another battle yet.
Thanks Densley - that was a good into which I followed up by diving into a Wiki black hole on interwar British PMs. You were right that Lloyd George is a great model for Láska, down to coming from the poorest and least developed part of the country. Well, we shall see what the future holds for the SocDems here. If they come back, Láska might be asked to "assist" as a trusted face with other countries when things heat up in the 1930s.
