Another excellent political and diplomatic analysis - you make it all seem very real. Did you have any major aims for Zachadia in this post-war period, or was it just a matter of keeping primacy, propping up the economy and keeping the peace?
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Thanks!
With the lack of time remaining in game, I am pretty much just playing things out and trying to avoid another big war (hence using the console to stop Smolensk) as I like the current setup a lot. This coincides well with the current, rather uninspiring PM - someone who has no coherent vision for what the postwar order should look like.
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Good question. There is definitely going to be a final war, but mainly due to the limitations of how Vic2 portrays modern, mechanized combat I'm not going to have it out here. I would like to move the story to HoI4, but that will require some time and effort. Depending on my limitations I may write it.
Also all, I have finally completed this save up to 1936. Expect the final in-game update soon.
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Just been looking back over this and reminding myself of how good it is. Hope things are good with you, @Kienzle. Would love to see more.
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Just been looking back over this and reminding myself of how good it is. Hope things are good with you, @Kienzle. Would love to see more.
Hey, thanks so much for the kind words Densley! I will admit that for the last couple months, my motivation / creativity have been... flagging a little bit while I've been focused on academic stuff. As an American living in DC, the time around the general election recently was also fairly tense and distracting. But you've motivated me to go back and keep writing. Watch this space!
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Yes absolutely, a very distracting period of late…
Glad to hear you are well and super excited to see more here soon! This really is one of my favourite projects on these boards. Was shocked to realise just how long it had been since we'd heard anything, so thought I'd check in.
Glad to hear you are well and super excited to see more here soon! This really is one of my favourite projects on these boards. Was shocked to realise just how long it had been since we'd heard anything, so thought I'd check in.
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Excellent news. The US election has been massively distracting for months (literally) all the way over here in Australia too, so I can only imagine the degree of tense distraction in DC.
Which lingers. Good luck with the studies and hope to see another episode of this great story as soon as you can manage it.- 1
Chapter IX: the Past and Future
In the summer of 1932, Russian conflicts were far away from the minds of the Zachad people as society focused on the issue of royal succession. King Charles, now 72 years old, was suffering from heart issues that had steadily worsened in his latter years. While the advent of the radio allowed the monarch to maintain some presence in the public sphere by addressing the nation from the comfort of Prague Castle, his appearances outside the castle grounds became increasingly infrequent after 1930.
In his place, the Escherlock dynasty’s heir apparent, Princess Maria, increasingly took up royal duties. Born in 1905, Maria was the eldest of Charles’ two daughters, both of whom were the results of his second marriage to the Swedish princess Louisa Eleonora after the first Queen, Margaret, had perished in childbirth shortly after his accession to the throne. The two girls had a level of relationship with their father that was unusually close for royal families, as whatever Charles may have lacked as a monarch, he by all accounts made up for as a parent. Some close to the family even remarked that fatherhood brought about a change in the King, as the attention he brought to his two young daughters was part of the process by which he transitioned away from the indiscretion that had characterized his youth, and towards a more measured sobriety during the Great War.
Marie and her sister Anna, younger by two years, grew up during the rigors of the Great War and blossomed during the heady years of the 1920s in which Zachadia was buffeted by political extremism. Now, as the nation entered the 1930s, liberal reforms promised an era of economic prosperity, and the heir apparent seemed to represent the desires of a new generation that was prepared to enjoy the hard-won peace.
Colored photo of Princess Maria, c. 1933.
For a public which had become somewhat inured to King Charles’ lack of charisma over the previous decades, Maria’s youth and charm quickly proved popular. Her events, which started off as quiet affairs such as ribbon-cutting ceremonies and small speeches to government ministries, began to attract greater attention by the press as King Charles’ health faded and she was thrust into the public sphere with greater regularity. This became especially true after Maria’s first radio address, delivered on New Year’s Day in 1932. The event, which had not been widely publicized, surpassed expectations both in the size of its audience and in its reception. Radios had become increasingly common household items in the late 1920s such that approximately one fifth of the country listened to the princess. Her speech, a simple 10-minute message of goodwill in the new year, struck a warm and unpretentious tone. The experience, many felt afterwards, was a surprisingly intimate one. “It was as if the Princess had stepped into our parlors for tea,” wrote the Katowice Evening Chronicle.
In 1934, the palace decided the time had come for Princess’ debut outside of Zachadia. A royal tour of the colonies was prescribed for Maria to goodwill visits throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and she set off for her two-month tour in March. “I must admit I find the heat rather unpleasant,” she wrote in a letter to her sister Anna from Cairo, “but on the whole the people here are very kind. The more I learn of the history of Egypt, the more I come to realize it is our good fortune to be the custodians of this ancient, complex land.”
Princess Maria at Luxor, 1934.
The trip was interrupted by a small diplomatic incident midway through, however, when King Khalid bin Saud of Arabia requested Maria assist his government by convincing Zachadia to further pressure the Albin Empire over a territorial issue. Kamaran Island in the Red Sea was the site of an Albin naval station, a strategic territory which the Arabs wished to be returned. Perhaps expecting that a direct appeal to a member of the Royal Family would elevate his case, bid Saud “discussed the issue at more length than was strictly necessary,” a member of the Princess’ staff commented.
Though Maria wisely demurred on the matter, stating that such topics were above her station, she nevertheless maintained excellent rapport with the Middle Eastern royalty and colonial administrators she met along her trip. It was a promising start to her career in governance - one that she would be taking a more central role in soon enough.
Rebuilding and Rearmament
Once the beating heart of central Europe, Germany spent most of the 1920s eking out a desperate survival. In many cities of the Rhineland, industrial districts had been reduced to blackened ruins being leveled by Paris Pact artillery during the long siege of 1918. Mass starvation and displacement following the ruinous harvests of the 1919 Civil War led to mass migration that the KAP was hard pressed to staunch, even after authorizing its border guards to use deadly force against refugees. The loss of manpower - especially those persons skilled in scientific and industrial enterprises - was considerable, complicating the rebuilding process immensely.
Although the KAP had initially embraced agricultural collectivization, early experiments in 1921 and 1922 led to widespread protests by farmers in the breadbasket regions of Saxony and Bavaria. The regime, fearing a continuation of the process might bring broad mobilization by the masses, quietly backed away from the policy in favor of more restrained reforms that distributed land on an equal basis to households. While the state established quotas for agricultural production and set prices, it also guaranteed households the right to sell their excess production at community markets, as well as the right to establish private plots for their own consumption. These policies proved immensely popular, and by 1924 agricultural production was climbing back to its prewar levels, alleviating most food shortages.
With the rural situation beginning to stabilize, the KAP turned back to industrialization. The first Five Year Plan, initiated in 1922, focused on rebuilding the heavy industry sector along with the military. In the former of these tasks the communists made strong progress, as much of the nation’s productive capital, such as rail lines and coal mines, could be salvaged with repairs. The latter issue proved more challenging, as the Red Army that had won the Civil War was little more than a highly decentralized band of militias, and much of leadership of the former German Imperial Army had either fled to Austria or was considered politically undesirable. Therefore, throughout the 1920s the German Socialist Union maintained a skeleton force that was used more for internal suppression than for deterring capitalist aggression.
A new automobile factory in Hesse, 1932. Manufactories like these helped build out the supply chain for Neue Rote Armee (New Red Army).
The lack of a standing army had its own benefits, namely that in a time of weakness, the Socialist Union was able to credibly claim to its neighbors that it harbored no expansionary desires. In an abrupt departure from Secretary Brandler’s revolutionary zeal at the end of the Civil War, the Union’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Klaus Baader quietly promised to restrain its support for the European labor movement in a number of meetings with heads of state. Zachadia’s social democratic government was the first to reach a diplomatic accord with the Union in May of 1921, recognizing the existence of its government as the lawful continuation of the German state and reaffirming the borders signed at Chantilly. The Albin Empire and France followed suit later that year.
Equally important to the KAP was the fact that the poor state of the Red Army allowed the military to be reconstructed tabula rasa. Officer training academies provided heavy doses of political instruction, ensuring the new model army would be far more trustworthy than the unorganized People’s Brigades that had triumphed against the fascists. Moreover, once rid of the noble and well connected generals that had led the former Heer, the new cadre of military leadership was free to experiment with novel tactics and strategy, utilizing what the Great War had proven effective and discarding much of the defensive-focused strategies of the past. With an eye on the mobility tactics developed by Russia in the East, the Red Army experimented with tanks and motorized infantry, maximizing firepower and men at critical points in a way that would circumvent resource deficiencies vis-a-vis its neighboring states.
While the new fighting methods promised to even the odds in a future war with France or Zachadia, Germany’s leadership intended to close the Red Army’s numerical disadvantage throughout the 1930s. The Red Army trained and equipped three new mechanized divisions in the years from mid-1931 to the end of 1935, a 20 percent increase in the number of men under arms. The navy underwent a similar transformation during the same time, adding an average of five new light cruisers per year to the fleet along with significant improvements to dockyards and maintenance facilities along the Baltic coastline.
Red Army soldiers take their oath to defend Germany in 1931. The following year, the oath was amended to prioritize allegiance to the KAP.
Switching Sides: The 1936 Elections
A combination of economic growth and residual electoral fatigue for the Social Democrats contributed to a relatively quiet election season in 1932. The Social Democrats nominated Jarmil Brož to lead the party, a former union boss who brought a populist charge to his campaign. However, Brož failed to resonate with the middle class, which was now learning to enjoy the growth brought about by the more liberal economy, and the polls delivered a strong victory to the Patriotyczne. The stern rebuke to the Social Democrats’ left wing sent the party’s leadership once more into disarray, as representatives of the labor movement claimed they had been backstabbed by petite bourgeoisie members of the party unwilling to fight against the interests of capital. At the same time, the moderate faction responded that died-in-the-wool leftism was a poor message for the current economy.
Ultimately, however, arguments over ideology began to fade away as fears over Germany’s rise slowly reasserted themselves in the public sphere. By 1934, the Social Union’s return to military prowess had become clear, as had the utter inability of the liberals to do forestall it. Suddenly fearful of the political repercussions for inaction, Baron Nowak announced a new diplomatic policy of “mutual guarantees,” or vzájemné záruky, in which he would attempt to defuse any disagreements with Germany well in advance of conflict. The first of these guarantees was acknowledging Germany’s right to “pursuing its own foreign relations with Austria” that “accepted the historical and cultural ties between the two nations.” While the agreement had been intended to clarify Zachadia’s lack of influence over its neighbor, it tacitly conceded Andrade Austria to Germany’s zone of influence. In theory, the new monarchy depended on Hispania for defense, but in practice its military trained with Zachadia’s and its internal security received vital information from the Zachad intelligence bureau. The KAP thus treated Nowak’s guarantee as a signal to begin flooding Austria with communist propaganda and inserting agents to influence the country’s domestic labor movement.
The second guarantee, signed in 1935, was an agreement that Zachadia would not consider Germany’s encouragement of the Dutch Communist Party a breach of the 1921 accords forbidding KAP influence in European labor politics. Although Nowak attempted to suggest the matter was a highly local one unlikely to impact Zachadia, he was roundly criticized for failing to secure concessions. In April, 10 members of the Stronictwo Patriotyczne signed a letter published in major newspapers calling the záruky policies a “strategic mistake.” It was a shocking sign of discontent within the Baron’s own party.
“Our Prime Minister’s admirable desire to maintain peace has caused him to abandon the practices that have guided the nation in the past,” the legislators wrote. “Avoiding hard decisions in the near term leads only to more painful ones in the long term.”
It was amidst these progressively vocal calls for a stiffer response to Germany that the Partia Socjaldemokracja seemed to find itself again. Stump speeches, delivered in its traditional working class heartlands of Silesia, Slovakia, rural Hungary and Galicia, focused on the need to maintain the country’s safety in the face of a rising foreign menace. Communism, rather than a solution to the plight of the downtrodden, was recast as a threat to all that the common man held dear. Social Democrats: For Church, Home and Country advocated posters. Bronislav Láska, though out of politics for nearly a decade, reappeared during a massive stump speech held in Prague in September, reminding his audience of the Kingdom’s tenacity during the Great War and of the need to maintain deterrence.
“For Church, Home and Country - Vote Social Democrats!”
While the platform played well with the working and lower-middle classes, it also chipped away at the bedrock of the Stronictwo Patriotyczne’s support. Business owners and members of the middle class with an innate distaste for leftism were flummoxed by Nowak’s lack of fortitude, and polls in the latter half of 1935 indicated the beginning of a political realignment for these two groups. Nevertheless, much of the public continued to hold out for peace and supported the záruky diplomatic initiatives. As the spring elections neared, there was every indication that the contest would be an extremely close one.
While Baron Nowak intended to continue leading the Patriotic Party regardless of the discontent within the liberal camp, the Social Democrats had failed to produce their own candidate by as late as December. The leading contender for the position was Németh András, a Hungarian moderate who supported a return to the Paris Pact alliance system without touching the new economy. He was challenged from the party’s left by Marcin Šlesingr, who sought to continue the pre-Nowak welfare policies despite potentially losing support from the political middle. Unions and workers’ rights advocates still often felt ignored by their own party, and until the Partia Socjaldemokracja could piece together a working coalition, its electoral prospects were poor.
As the year ended, there was a palpable sense of tension in Zachadia. The potential for major changes in the direction of the economy and foreign policy was enough for even the politically apathetic to sit up and take notice, while the prospect of another great conflict dawned once more.
In the years to come, new ideologies would test the Kingdom...
Groundbreaking technologies would be employed in powerful and terrifying ways…
And shocking displays of human cruelty would shake the nation to its core.
A new age had arrived.
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Well, thanks for waiting a very, very long time to all those who followed this story to the end. For some reason this final piece was a bit like pulling teeth - as I mentioned above, a mix of RL distractions including some very exciting but attention-demanding developments in my work conspired to drag me away from the forums for a bit. Plus, as you might have sensed from above, not a lot took place gamewise which left me bereft of inspiration.
Where to from here? I have a sense of how things will continue narratively, but I'd like to continue the story of Zachadia into HoI4, as AAR writing to me is about working with what the games give you. The first step for me is to build a new computer, as unfortunately my current laptop is unable to handle the game (yes, it's that old) and then there will doubtless be some technical work to set up the scenario. I'm hoping to do that in the late spring or early summer when I should have a lull in between my studies and work. For now, I'll be on the forums but the story is on a hiatus for now.
For all of you who commented or showed support in other ways, thank you so so much for helping me get over the finish line! Once this next stage of Zachadia is finished (or if it doesn't work) I have plans for another Vic 2 AAR - this time set in our world. Look forward to sharing it all with you when it's ready.
Incidentally, The Heirs to Aquitània mod has recently introduced a large new addition, with a good portion provided by yours truly, so if this story has made you interested in trying out the mod for yourself, there's never been a better time.
Happy holidays to all, and let's hope for a better 2021!
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Congratulations on finishing, and how great it is to see this very fine piece of work given a conclusion – even if it does promise chaos and backstabbing on the Left is just around the corner. I enjoyed the detour into Germany a good deal, and reading about the KAP reforms made me more than a little nostalgic for writing about the CPGB programme way back when at the birth of the Commonwealth. Germany as Europe’s Communist power does still freak me out a little, but it’s much more welcome than the alternative.
Would love to see however you choose/are able to take this forward. Do keep us posted. In the meantime, bravo once again and glad to see you back around the boards. Cheers!
Would love to see however you choose/are able to take this forward. Do keep us posted. In the meantime, bravo once again and glad to see you back around the boards. Cheers!
Finished this today
The ending was the opposite of hopeful
Lets hope that the hoi4 part doesn't destroy the world order too much
Excellent AAR. I will try out this mod
The ending was the opposite of hopeful
Lets hope that the hoi4 part doesn't destroy the world order too much
Excellent AAR. I will try out this mod
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Well done finishing off and congratulations. Done with your customary high quality and realistic style. good luch with everything and I hope Zachadia makes it to HoI4
Just binged it all and I liked it a lot! Hopefully we get to read the continuation and more AARs from you!
Thanks Densley! My challenge with the Germany story is that in my opinion, having a communist power in Central Europe should change everything - politics should shift rightwards in the neighboring countries, revolutionaries should feel more emboldened, and the overall situation should be far less stable than the endgame in this story was. As such, I really tried to play up the "weakness" of the regime, but that in turn makes it less likely to carry out its domestic political agenda... I hope the land reform as detailed seems like an appropriate compromise.
Please do! And thank you. Glad you enjoyed the story. Remember that it's always darkest just before the dawn.
Well done finishing off and congratulations. Done with your customary high quality and realistic style. good luch with everything and I hope Zachadia makes it to HoI4
Thanks! Yes, here's hoping. I actually think that (if all works out) this next portion will play better to my strengths, as I tend to know more about military affairs than domestic politics.
Thank you! I've learned a lot from this experience and look forward to raising the bar in future efforts.
Cheers all!
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