1944-1945 – Black Star In the East
In January 1944 the frontline between India and Russia was still in the same static position along the Hindu Kush that it had been in since 1941. However, as the Russians redeployed their veteran troops to the east in their millions and moved their aerial strength to the region, the deadlock would finally start to break. Between January and May the Russians fought a long campaign in these mountains that would meet with slow, hard fought, but steady progress. In April Kabul fell to the Russians and through the following month the Indians were pushed out of Kashmir – bringing their enemies within striking distance of the lowlands of the Indo-Gagnetic Plain. Reaching flat land finally gave the Russians an opportunity to make use of their armoured power – which had proved so decisive on the Eastern Front the previous year. In June, the Russian tanks were unleashed in a major offensive, capturing great swathes of densely populated territory including the capital city Delhi and Lahore. Nonetheless, the Indians had fallen back in good order, avoiding major encirclements and slowing the pace of the Russian advance by the end of the month.
While Russia achieved its breakthrough against India, the strategic balance of the world was upturned by that very thing despised by the Radicals – the grubby, unstable, world of democratic electoral politics. Across the ocean in America the nation was divided into two main political tribes – the Party of Liberty and Justice Party. The Party of Liberty was liberal, secular, wedded to free markets and the interests of the urban bourgeoisie. It was seen by many as a party of the elite and old money, as well as the interests of those of established Andalucian stock. It also enjoyed the support of America’s substantial Sephardic Jewish population, a community tracing its origins to the first Iberian settlers in the New World, Christian minorities, sizeable in the handful of states that had originally been colonised by other European powers, and African Americans – with the party having taken up the cause of their emancipation during the contests over slavery in the nineteenth century. For decades the liberals had been the dominant force in American politics, and had led the party to war in 1940.
The Justice Party was very different. Conservative, strictly Islamic, suspicious of unrestrained unrestrained capitalism in general and finance in particular, the party was based on an uneasy alliance between rural interests and new immigrants. The ancestors of American conservativism had been the defenders of slavery in the preceding century, an ultimately losing battle that had come to a close through peace compromise and compensation for slave-holders in exchange for emancipation. As America had grown more urban, conservatives had been forced to look beyond their strongholds in the countryside and the South towards new electorates. They had found one among the disaffected millions Arab and Tatar immigrants, many of them refugees fleeing violence in the Papacy and Polish empires, and their descendants who had drastically changed America’s demographic makeup since the mid-nineteenth century but largely been cut off from political power.
During the war the incumbent government had done all it could to keep its distance from Russia, denying any direct involvement in the Damietta Accords of 1943. This had not had the desired effect. Pamphlets and reports circulated around Tatar communities of a Corrupt Bargain between the sitting President Abdul Nasr, and his Party of Liberty, and Boris Makarov. This anger mixed with existing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and class resentments that targeted the power of Jewish Americans, who made up an outsize part of the leadership of the Party of Liberty, President’s Nasr’s cabinet and the industrial and financial elite, many of whom were prominent voices in favour of peaceful co-existence with Russia. This anger was channelled by the man who would win the presidential nomination of the Justice Party for the 1944 election. Mesut Beyraktar was born in Novgorod in 1891. At the age of 20 he had emigrated to America in search of a better life. Like many immigrants, he left his family behind in the old country, hoping to first become established in the New World. He would never see any of them every again. His wife and son were killed in a blackshirt pogrom in 1913, while both of his parents died during the Felaket in the late 1920s. This was a man who understood the rage and tragedy of the Tatar people like few others. In 1929 he had been elected to the National Assembly for a working class district in Ohio, gaining a substantial backing among the more proletarian and populist wing of his party.
Left to Right: Abdul Nasr and Mesut Beyraktar
The 1944 election was an intensely emotional affair. The Party of Liberty called upon voters to rally around the flag and re-elect Nasr to finish the job of the war, secure a lasting peace and keep the extreme Beyraktar out of power. The Justice Party focussed heavily on the Corrupt Bargain with Kiev, with the occasional nod to the conspiracy theorists and re-emphasis of traditional conservative themes. Perhaps the most decisive moment of the election came in a public address by Beyraktar that was broadcast to millions by radio in which he spoke of his Russia policy “He killed my father, he killed my mother, he killed my son. A Godly man does not deal with the devil”. Benefiting from a surge in Tatar turnout and generally weak liberal enthusiasm for a tired administration, Mesut Beyraktar was elected President of the United State on September 3rd 1944.
The election of President Beyraktar had immediate consequences for the emerging political settlement in Europe. The outgoing American administration had already begun to bring its troops home from the continent in large numbers, but the new President moved to reverse this. Permanent American bases were established in Germany, France, Italy, Skotland and Andalucia with garrisons running into the 100,000s – providing the security from Russia that Western Europe could not provide on its own. Notably, the President took every opportunity to tangle with Kiev. In the Aegean, Allied forces had occupied a number of Greek islands in the closing months of the war including Crete and Rhodes. The Americans tore up previous negotiations towards a withdrawal in favour of a newly implanted, Kiev-aligned, Greek Republic, and made clear their intention to stay in the region – enraging the Russians.
Another area of agreement that was reneged on was Germany. At Damietta, it had been agreed that Germany would be divided into several smaller states. The Russians had upheld this accord in eastern Europe – establishing distinct Republics in Austria, Bohemia and Brandenburg by 1945, all under the heavy handed grip of Russian military occupation. It had been expected that the larger American-occupied portion of Germany would be divided along similar lines. However, believing a united Germany to be a necessary counterweight to the Russians, the Americans instead created a unified German Federal Republic (although its traditional appendages in the Low Countries were separated from it), even going to far as to allow them to rearm under close American supervision. This move in particular did not only anger the Russians, but caused a great deal of unease among America’s European allies.
Elsewhere on the continent, Europe’s borders were being redrawn. The most notable change from prewar Western Europe was the continued existence of France – the United States holding up the principle of self-determination and the need for the new Europe to be built on the principles of democracy and the consent of the governed to convince its allies to abandon any restoration of old claims over the country. In the east, the Russians made small annexations on its western frontier and in Lapland, while creating a network of small subservient Republics across Scandinavia, the old German lands, Greece and the Middle East. Notably, the re-establish Pannonia suffered significant territorial losses – Russia annexing Bratislava while Serbia, rewarded for fighting alongside Russia to the last and in a manoeuvre designed to bind it more permanently into the Russian sphere of influence, was given control over territories in Transylvania and Zagreb that it had coveted from generations. From the ashes of Crusader Anatolia a new Greek Republic was born with broadly the same boundaries as before, although its Syrian territories were divided between Israel and Serbia.
Back on the battlelines in Asia, after being halted in the late summer the Russians unleashed a renewed offensive in late August 1944 with three key aims – pushing down the Indus to Karachi, along the Ganges to Calcutta and deserts of Rajasthan towards the Bombay. If all three fell then Indian power would be completely broken. Although the Russians made great territorial progress, their attacks proved costly, with the Indian army proving itself to still be a formidable foe – having particular success in beating the Russians holding the Russians back from Bengal through a series of hardfought battles between September and November, before they finally cracked in December and the Russians entered Calcutta. On other fronts, they offered less resistance. The advance along the Indus was incredibly successful, leading to the fall of Karachi in late September. This, combined with the race across Rajasthan towards Ahmedabad, saw two dozen Indian divisions cut off from the rest of the country in Baluchistan and Gujarat – breaking their ability to effectively defend the west of the country. These successes gave the Russians free reign to swarm into southern India in the winter months with only token opposition, preventing the Indians from taking advantage of the harsh terrain of the Deccan Plateau. By the new year the mainstay of the Indian army was retreating into Burma, while most of their core territories were already lost. With little hope of victory, the Indians slowly retreated into the desolate Burmese jungles and Himalayan foothills while those lost enclaves in southern India fell. In South East Asia, the fight against the Japanese took a turn when the Papacy and Skots launched an ambitious operation in the Gulf of Thailand that saw the city of Bangkok fall in October 1944. However, thereafter the Japanese were able to regroup and hold the Allies back from breaking out and rapidly reconquering the region.
Although the Indians had been defeated on the mainland, save for those units still fighting out in the jungles and mountains of the borderlands with China, the government remained safely ensconced on the island of Sri Lanka. Lacking a navy in the Indian Ocean, the Russians had no obvious way to reach the island, while there was a high likelihood that the western Allies might seek to intervene. Eager to avoid seeing such a strategic site fall into the rivals hands, the Russians launched an ambitious airborne assault on in May 1945 – taking the Indians utterly by surprise with the landing of around 10,000 paratroopers in locations across the island while bombers blitzed their positions island-wide. With all defences in Sri Lanka facing out towards the sea, the Indians found it impossible to resist and would surrender the island and accept unconditional defeat in the war just days after the Russian landings.
At the time of the Russian invasion of Sri Lanka, the Japanese were still fighting hard in south east Asia. Although they had been expelled from China and had lost Bangkok and much of southern Burma to the Papacy, they retained control over much of mainland South East Asia from the key hub of Hanoi and had rebuffed all efforts to dislodge them from the Skottish colonies in the East Indies. The Americans had been unwilling to offer anything more than token support to the Europeans in their reconquest of their colonial empires, leaving the Skots and Papacy to fight Japan alone. However the Japanese were far closer to collapse than their strategic situation might have appeared. After almost a decade of fighting on the Asian mainland they had sustained incalculable losses while an effective economic embargo by the majority of the world’s nations was having a ruinous impact upon their economy. The fall of one of the few sympathetic powers in the world in the form of India was a blow they struggled to recover from. In the spring, the Papacy launched renewed offensives that saw the Japanese forced off of the Asian mainland for good by July 1945, while in the East Indies the Allies picked off many of their smaller outposts even as they held firm in Java. The following month, the Japanese made an approach to the Allies and the Chinese offering peace. With their enemies lacking the will and means to threaten the Home Islands, and Japan unable to bear the burden of war any longer, a peace with honour proved more achievable than any had expected. The Japanese withdrew all their forces back to their Home Island, agreed to extensive disarmanent that would drastically reduce the size of their armed forces and pay a heavy war indemnity to the Papacy, Skotland and most of all China for the destruction their armies had caused. After more than twelve years, the last front of the Second World War was closed.
With the war over, a new settlement left Asia dramatically reordered. The Papacy and Skots re-established uneasy control over their colonies in South East Asia, although the former had lost the majority of its colonies on the continent since the beginning of the war. Across their territories far right ethnic nationalist movements taking inspiration from Russia and China were already organising anti-colonial resistance. To the north, a resurgent nationalist China, victorious over Japan and united as never before asserted itself as a genuine great power, with the strength to project itself as Asia’s premier force. In Central Asia, Russia directly annexed significant formerly Papal colonies in Afghanistan and west of the Indus river – creating a finger of territory stretching all the way to Karachi on the Bay of Bengal, accomplishing a long held Polish ambition of achieving an outlet into the blue waters of the Indian Ocean. Elsewhere, hundreds of years of Indian domination over Tibet was brought to an end with the creation of an independent Republic and the parts of Burma occupied by Russian forces at the close of war were organised into another puppet state. Most important of all was the fate of India. Having suffered close to nine million combat losses over the course of the last half decade, and with new strategic responsibilities across Europe and Asia, Russia simply did not have the capacity to dominate the vastness of India as an adjunct of its expanding empire. Another solution had to be found. Makarov hoped to instead construct an Indian regime in the image of his own Radical Party – bringing together Hindu Nationalist groups into the Indian Radical People’s Party. This party was elevated to national leadership and tasked with rebuilding the Indian state along ideological lines, with the close support of Russian advisors, attaches and military support.
