Up With the Star: A different kind of Civil War ATL:

[Snake Featherston]

Very nice. Good to see fascism coming down.

It does not appear that Russia will suffer a collapse nearly as severe as that suffered OTL by the Soviet Union. They may lose most of their overseas puppets, but they will still be very capable of acting as a superpower, albeit a reduced one.

I think it's safe to say that the collapse of Fascism in Russia may not replicate the OTL disintegration of the USSR. The Tsar, after all, has the benefit that no Romanov has been a true autocrat since his grandfather's time and there's very few living Russians who remember what Nicholas II's reign was really like......

And of course unlike IOTL there's never been a USSR and Mao to discredit Communism, while the combination of diplomatic and internal crises mean the Communists in Italy have enough time to consolidate themselves with democracy and fascism both in disarray.....

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Petrograd Coup and Great Restoration:

The Petrograd Coup of 1984 would produce the paradoxical second collapse of fascism. Paradoxical in that in contrast to the hopes of democracy fascism's fall did not produce democracy, but neither did Communism successfully spread in Russia due to the upheavals there and the memory in Russia's leadership of rule by one successful totalitarianism leading to fear of rule by another.

The refusal in January of the Tsar to react to the deposition of the Duce in Italy led to a decision among the hardliners of the Great People's Movement for an attempted coup. This group included the head of the Okhrana and the local Great People's Guards Fighting Squad, who were, however, to be unknowingly up against the quietly-prepared actions of the Tsar and of his Stavka, who across the great empire had organized defense of major communications networks and kept eyes on the switch of the Okhrana to the side of the general fascist movement.

On 1 February the Fascists, seeking to exploit the decision of the Tsar to hold a televised rally outside the Winter Palace, which unbeknownst to them included other cameras outside it were to launch an attack aimed at the Tsar himself including mortars, and trucks armed with machine guns. Then the artillery and machine-guns carefully situated by the Tsar opened fire and the Tsar said to his generals "They have sown the wind", unleashing Operation Whirlwind.

With the collapse of Fascism and the spread of the Communist Great Purge in Italy taking a back burner, over nine weeks in Russian cities a set of running urban battles between Fascist paramilitaries with the Okhrana and the regular Imperial Russian Army began that would culminate in the Tsar's dramatic speech in the Kremlin before the Russian masses proclaiming "the long dark night of the fascist hoodlums and state criminals has passed. The new dawn shines brightly, over every village, over every city, over every dacha of noble and house of the Muhzik. Sleep gently tonight, for the reign of the petty-gangster has ended. Now, as in the days of our forebears we have Russia, one and individual, with the triumvirate of the Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and National-Community triumphant."

Following this a chorus sang "God Save the Tsar" as the Tsar then led Russians in the Great Litany.......

 

[Claymore]

The Post-Atomic Horror in Europe:

<Snip> As in the parts of Japan, China, and the USA and the future Republic of India where nukes were used the use of atomic warfare had left generations to suffer the results of genetic damage and political and economic chaos. <Snip>

I have been away for a little while and much has happened in the TL... At what point did the USA (or parts there of) get nuked?

 

[Snake Featherston]

I have been away for a little while and much has happened in the TL... At what point did the USA (or parts there of) get nuked?

There was one instance of nuclear warfare in the Alaskan Front. It's the only part to get nuked, but by the same token having that as part of the USA's repertoire of wartime experience shades WWII somewhat differently than IOTL.

 

[Darth Revan]

K I might have figure out how to use a paint program on a mac

 

[Darth Revan]

K I did, had to make a few educated guesses that you should correct if incorrect.
-Assumed southern New Guinea would be part of Australia
-Total Withdrawal of US from Central America and Carib.
-Total withdrawal of Portugal and Britain from Africa

Also a few questions
1. What happened to Spain African Colonies? Are they independent, part of spain, or did they merge with other countries?
2. What happened to both German and Dutch New Guinea
3. Panama Canal Zone still US?

Also, I made this map when I was sleep deprived, so please point out any errors or countries I missed either becoming communist or deprocterated etc,.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Romanov Restoration, Phase I:

One of the great ironies of the Second Great Game would be that the return of traditional Russian autocracy marked the first phase in a shift to a second lowering of tensions between the two superpowers. The Russian Tsar, his memory of fascism in power further jaded by the chaotic Restoration by violence had no inclination to aid the spread of fascism elsewhere, lest it embolden the fascists he himself had deposed. However as a Tsar in the spirit of Nicholas I and Alexander III, Alexander IV had no intention of being anything but an autocrat in his own right, and thus in several crucial ways wartime atrocities of the Fascists were covered up due to the possibility this might taint the monarchy.

A policy that was immediately pursued, however, was to begin tilting Russian offensive to more sensible, less ideologically guided strategic areas and the beginning of overtures to the United States to indicate that Russia was now far less an ideological rival and more a traditional member of the family of nations. The Russians would again begin overtures for co-operation with the Ottoman Empire, this joint effort of traditional enemies finally ending the Yemeni Wars and the scale-back of Russian support to the Republic of Sindh, a particular focus of Great People's-directed foreign policy, all combined to indicate to Russia's neighbors that the Russian Bear was starting to shift to a return to its older nature as a conservative force.

As the Communist movement and Comintern slowly amassed growing power, the Tsar's overtures to a truly joint-superpower military bloc began to seem steadily more attractive, however the proposals to make the Congress of Nations more efficient tended to lead to an idealistic view of a simple, easy end to rivalries and militarization that led to a distorted overall view of Russia's actions and goals. Russia was beginning to seek a means for a renewal of the older alliance systems designed to shore up a conservative world system, the United States was interested in a purely military sphere of co-operation, and those Europeans proposing a continental united economic bloc found their voices marginalized amidst Russian unwillingness in the words of Alexander IV in 1985 "to tie the great monarchy of my fathers to a system of states that wish to have all the benefits of wealth but none of the actions or will required to sustain it."

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Miller Administration, Term II and Miller's Assassination:

The first US President to be assassinated, Chester Arthur, had been assassinated by a disgruntled jobs-seeker, and this one assassination had enshrined in the United States a sense that any would-be assassins of US political officials were not politically motivated, but instead the acts of disgruntled individuals. For President Miller, re-elected on a comfortable margin on the basis that "the changes in Russia mean we have the chance to build a world safe for democracy", this rule at one sense was true and at another was not.

A film series made in the 1980s that marked the revival of an older, serial genre had led to a famous set of actors and actresses. One of these, an Italian woman named Carla Belluci, was then in her early 20s and was an unbeknownst to her focus of the delusions of a schizophrenic who felt that Bellucci was an incarnate leader of a New Matriarchy, based on a film she had starred in which was one of the raunchiest films of the 1980s. He viewed the murder of President Miller as ensuring his re-incarnation as a leader in this New Matriarchy, and in a USA whose leader was the least protected of any in the free world, there having been only unsuccessful attempts with the exception of Arthur, this Henry Newton thus shot President Miller as he was giving a speech at a memorial dedicated to President Blaine.

Ironically the very expectations of damage done by guns created due to the films of the 1980s meant that initially when Miller was shot precious few who watched it realized what they had seen, until he started bleeding from a corner of his mouth and fell on-camera. The assassination stunned the United States, and it would lead to the second accidental President, Peter Wayne, who was to find himself in an unenviable situation of facing a Russia that was beginning major political changes when he had been deliberately selected by Miller to provide a united Democratic Party and excluded from political influence in the entirety of Miller's first term due to Miller's pique at having had to conciliate the more conservative wing of the Democratic Party in choosing Wayne.

The result was to magnify an uncertainty and division in the highest levels of US civilian and military policy in a decade of unprecedented social change, a pattern that helped contribute in its own way to the rise of the Communists just as much as Russia's mistaken view of Communism as a temporary flash in the pan sure to dissipate was. The USA was to have an uneasy four years, an uncertainty magnified by skepticism in a good deal of the US body politic that Russian changes were legitimate and the strengthening in the United States of a Neo-Isolationist bloc consisting of a mixture of libertarians, more leftist Republicans, and the hardcore Leftist bloc as well as the most left-wing Democrats.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Japan, Australia, and the Pacific Rim in the early 1980s:

For the East Asian and Pacific Rim countries, the fall of Indonesia to Communism was to mark a steady growth of a new, unlikely set of alliances. For the countries of Indochina and Malaya the fear that Communist Indonesia might begin influencing domestic issues began to lead them to seek a general alliance with both Australia and Japan. For Japan this came concurrent with a slow push for a more-modernized Japanese Navy, in the wake of political upheaval in both China and Russia. For Australia this marked, together with New Zealand, some of the first steps to a full, regional hegemony.

The Australian occupation of part of southern New Guinea was further strengthened by the Communist takeover in Indonesia, and one of the first instances of aggressive Communist actions was to happen when the Indonesian regime began to prop up the Red Front, a mixture of tribal forces and nationalists in New Guinea that proceeded to fight a desultory guerrilla war with the Australians.

This pattern further consolidated a push for a military alliance of Pacific Rim states, an alliance formed in the pivotal Treaty of Tokyo, where the Japanese, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaya, Singapore, Australia, New Guinea, and in a significant instance of Korean autonomy not in this case challenged by Imperial Russia due to the enemy targeted formed a Pacific Alliance of Free States. To form the alliance was one thing, to make the alliance into a functional, viable military bloc would be something else again and took the duration of the 1980s to establish a Joint Command, and to work out such basic issues as a common language of command, how leadership would be structured, avoiding potential neo-colonial friction between Japan and Indochina, and the necessity on the part of Australia and Japan in particular to build up more formidable, more technologically advanced military machines.

In the later 1980s the Philippines would join this bloc when an Indonesian-backed group of Communist revolutionaries on Mindanano and Samar led them to see this alliance as serving their own interests, thus further expanding one of the first independent military blocs in the world. Ironically the military and economic recovery of China in the 1990s and particularly in the 21st Century would lead to a more, not less, militarized view of the purpose of the PAFSJC.

 

[Snake Featherston]

European Unity, Promises and Limitations, early 1980s:

As Fascism fell in Italy to be replaced by Communism and Russia began its steps to replacing fascists with a technologically upgraded version of traditional autocracy, the French attempts to create a unified Europe were to start to see some steps toward a further, stronger progress. This, however, was to be limited to one sphere where France had no true ability to contend with other European states: the military sphere. Russia's steps to Romanov Restoration and its view of politics as returning to a more traditional, civilized-Machiavellian fashion meant that the joint Russo-Ottoman victory in the last of the Yemeni Wars led to some of the first, serious talks for a new Congress of Europe, this time seeking to limit the potential of Communism as seen in Italy to destabilize the continent.

Ironically in this sense the French proposal for an economic union instead of a military alliance would not be given serious thought, though the memory of the Second World War and the legacy of the Second Great Game made joint action with Russia or a joint conservative bloc more difficult to actually discuss or find a means to make functional. It would take another serious Communist revolt, this time in Hungary, to make the European Powers alter their hesitations and begin more serious planning, but this was after a decade in which their internal divisions and hesitations to act against the Communist regime in Italy emboldened it to begin its first attempts at creating a World Revolution, figuring that as Italy had been the heartland of European Fascism, so would it easily be a heartland for European Communism.......

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Second and Third Yemeni Wars, 1968-72 and 1976-87:

The Yemeni Wars would be a type of warfare with its only equivalent the war waged by General Ho Chih Minh against Japan during the Second World War. It was a blend of regular and irregular warfare fought with a brutal ideological purpose, aided by the difficulty of Ottoman generals, trained to fight a conventional war against European armies in the more flat country of the northern Balkans in adjusting to this kind of warfare in tropical Yemen.

Despite a vast military superiority in a conventional sense, the poor adaptation of Ottoman tactics and strategy between the two kinds of wars led to increasing frustration and occasional atrocities committed by Ottoman troops. Ironically the decision of Yemeni rebels to attack headlong into superior Ottoman firepower, trusting in the ability of willpower to negate firepower ultimately proved destructive and disabling and in the last year of the Second Yemeni War a massive attempt at a conventional offensive produced one of the most lopsided victories for Ottoman arms in the entirety of the 20th Century.

The Third War would produce in the wake of Russia's turmoil during the Springtime and the Restoration a joint Russo-Ottoman action, after a Yemeni-affiliated group of soldiers from Central Asia, who had taken a detour to Yemen during their Hajj were to launch a short-lived putsch in Russian Samarkand. This war saw a short-lived Communist insurgency as well, and the bitter divisions between secular nationalists, Islamists, and Communists and a bitter, mutually self-destructive infighting meant that the third Ottoman victory of arms was to be the start of a final peace in Yemen that would last into the 21st Century, due to the three bitter wars exhausting the military capacity of all sides and the willingness of any of the sides to wage another protracted war culminating in defeat.

With the final triumph of the Ottoman Empire the ideology of militant Islamism seen in the wars of Imam Shamil and in West African jihads in the 19th Century would meet its final defeat on the battlefield. The Ottomans would spend the next few decades seeking to restore and repair infrastructure in Yemen, establishing Neo-Islamic mosques, schools, and Sufi orders in the region. For a peasantry and elite both alike exhausted by ruinous, bloody wars this was a time that by comparison to what preceded it was one of restoration and recuperation, as well as the emergence of a truer, stronger, indigenous Yemeni liberal class who were to begin to seek a different kind of political co-existence with the Ottoman Empire.

For all the destructiveness of the wars, much of this brutality was small-unit guerrilla v. conventional platoons and squads actions limited by terrain and geography, only some of it was the large-scale conventional warfare seen in other wars. The simple duration of the war and the use by the Ottomans in the Second and Third Wars both of a strategy of concentration and search and destroy, as well as sustained, brutal targeting of guerrilla-friendly regions meant that the wars became a matter of desperate terror for the peasantry and tribes, this ultimately contributing to exhaustion and a dramatic tapering of fighting after the second and third wars.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Spanish Morocco and independence:

In Spain, which had managed to avoid much of the upheaval that had characterized 20th Century European history, de-colonization had proceeded relatively more slowly than it had elsewhere. In part this was because Spanish officials saw the bloody wars caused by it elsewhere and did all possible to avoid war, and in part the anti-colonial movements, of which two were democratic, and one was fascist, were all three divided amongst themselves and against each other and were never able to form a united bloc. An ironic result of these two factors was that alone in Spanish Morocco did de-colonization follow an orderly path of transitioning between European and native leadership, and Spanish cultivation of the foundations for democracy in the region meant that the new independent former Spanish colonies provided an ironic counterexample to other de-colonization processes in Spanish and European history.

Morocco would sign trade agreements with the Ottoman Empire and Algeria, though it would mostly pursue a policy of limiting contact with the outside world and attempts at trade protectionism to foster domestic industry, which would by the 21st Century see some full-scale success.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Decline and Fall of Apartheid, 1980s:

In South Africa post-colonial history had been followed by the institution of the Apartheid system. With its origins in South Africa's history of rival Boer and British conquests of Black South Africa and then the British of the Boers, Apartheid had co-existed uneasily with broader democracy but found an odd kinship with the United States, which felt serious opposition to Apartheid was against the interests of the US Trialist system until that system had fallen in its own right.

South African apartheid had involved attempts to completely segregate four races, White, Colored, Indian, and African, and had brought massive, sweeping relocations which had drawn increasing criticism. The decisions to criticize Apartheid had also come to involve the fascist states, as both Russia and China had developed a distinct, multiethnic blend of nationalism and statism which viewed Apartheid as a repugnant and primitive policy. Thus one problem had emerged between Italian and Russian and Italian and Chinese Fascists, as Italian Fascists had tended to be more emphatic on racism, particularly where Africans were concerned..

The 1980s, however, brought a successive tightening of the embargo of the regime, as both China and Russia for their various reasons cut off trade and Italy, the one go-to for South Africa as far as trade was no longer interested after the Communist revolt, and the Apartheid regime for its part was no longer interested in preserving ties with a Communist dictatorship. The Apartheid regime's claims to order, too, were starting to fall apart in the 1980s as the growing isolation and economic depression caused a steady rise in violence throughout South Africa.

By the end of the 1980s the Apartheid regime was facing up with a reality that by the standards of other states and by its own the regime and its concepts were failing, and so a new government would rise in 1989 seeking to replace Apartheid with a new, race-neutral framework of government.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Origins of the African Union of States:

The concept of an African Union had appeared as far back as the 1950s, when de-colonization had begun in the region but both South Africa and Rhodesia had strongly opposed the concept, due in part to both refusing to accept non-white ambassadors. Difficulties in transitioning from colonialism to the new states had further complicated the process, as did Lumumba's dictatorship in the Congo and the emergence of a Congolese continental great power in Africa.

Another complication was that Africa to a great extent was a bit of an abstraction with little relevance to leaders of states who viewed individual state interests as more meaningful than some continental union. However the experiences of the Great Game in terms of superpower meddling and intervention and a resultant desire for security and ability to forestall such intervention and meddling helped spark discussions among various African states. In this process it would be the Communist regime in the Congo, under Lumumba and his successor, Francois Lumumba, which would take the lead, as Congolese Communists became increasingly disillusioned with the more radical and destabilizing forms of Communism appearing in other parts of the world.

Progress in the negotiations, held in Mogadishu, were slow and complicated by questions such as the roles of the Ottoman Empire, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, as well as whether or not war crimes and punishing them would be handled by the proposed union.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Chinese Reconstruction, 1980s:

One consequence of the Time of Transition was the Chinese shift from rule by a single, autocratic hardliner to a progressive, staggered move to rule by committees and rule by a more constrained, though powerful, President of the Republic of China. Too, military and political power were separated, and a principle was established of military subordination to civilian leadership. This, ironically, in its own right was a step that marked a Chinese equivalent to Russian neo-traditionalism, the Committees marking a more technocratic successor to the old Guanhua system and the Chinese Fascist movement becoming increasingly simply a clique of various patron-client networks that linked together major Chinese cities.

The new elite would consolidate its role by repairing damage done to China's major cities, and beginning outreach to the West that together with Russia's would lead the 1980s to be seen as the End of the Second Great Game in that fascism as an ideology was to become moribund toward the end of the decade, though beginning in the 1990s the world powers began to realize that the Communists had profited greatly from Cold War containment of fascism and the implosion of fascism that created inroads for a new totalitarianism. For China, the memory of the May Fourth Movement created a great unease that some new Chinese Communist movement could in the future try to repeat the feats of Ma Bufang......

 

[Johnrankins]

Interesting for the most part but it has a big weakness, namely the Alaskan Invasion. That is an ASB scenario. With the US, GB and Japan having the strongest navies in TTL how on God's name is Russia transporting huge amounts of weapons and supplies there? It's a Sealion type scenario.

 

[EnglishCanuck]

Just found TTL and I'm really enjoying it! Good work in here Snake!

 

[Snake Featherston]

Interesting for the most part but it has a big weakness, namely the Alaskan Invasion. That is an ASB scenario. With the US, GB and Japan having the strongest navies in TTL how on God's name is Russia transporting huge amounts of weapons and supplies there? It's a Sealion type scenario.

It's a combination of bounce crossing and the great bulk of strength on both sides being in Europe. The Russian strength is larger than that of the Allies due only to the logistical limits the theater imposes on both sides, the inability to sustain troops there means it's one of those Budenny Specials. I might note that in this sense it's a more protracted Dodecanese Campaign/equivalent to Japan's New Guinea Campaign that lasts as long as it does from the simple problem of equipping troops to fight in Alaska and in Europe, if the European theater had gone even slightly better for the Central Powers the Alaska war would have been far shorter and far less glorious for ATL Russia than it actually was.

 

[Snake Featherston]

South America in the 1980s:

In South America the 1980s witnessed the first steps in the emergence of three new Great Powers, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. Careful focus on internal development and ability to remain mostly unaffected by the wars of Europe and avoiding the USA's global commitments enabled these three states to provide a basis for a new industrial economy that began to attract jobs and immigrants in unprecedented numbers. Brazil and Argentina tended to absorb these immigrants better than Chile did, but this had as much to do with geography as with culture. In the rest of South America Venezuela became one of the few petro-states with a fully independent foreign policy, and one of the only Christian petro-states that tilted to the West. Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia remained relatively poorer and more unstable due to problems in overcoming monocultural economies and less-developed industrial development policies. In these states the growth of the new industrial states led to tilts to Chile and Argentina more than Brazil, which emerged as a counterweight to the USA in terms of financial and otherwise investments with countries in Europe and in Asia. Brazil would become one of the first South American states to pursue a more assertive global policy.

These new economies and their growth and increasing confidence in the 1980s, together with the political changes in Europe and Asia due to the Russian spring and Restoration, the Chinese Resurgence and Time of Transition, and the emergence of Communism in place of fascism were to create a defensive mentality in US politics that would help foster the Conservative Resurgence of the 1990s......

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Republic of Sindh, the Beginning of the End:

The fate of the Republic of Sindh would be sealed with the Reunification War of 1991-2, though its doom was sealed in the 1980s. As Russia steadily became less and less inclined to pursue Fascist geopolitics, it steadily tapered off support for the Republic and began clandestine negotiations with the Republic of India to establish a post-Sindh order. Russia's anxieties in particular were that India not try to destabilize the pro-Russian regime in Afghanistan and that the new border not be one of two hostile states each opposed to the other.

For Sindh the gradual cut-off of Russian aid and increasing foreign policy isolation produced a sequence of unstable governments and military regimes, none lasting more than a few months, and all compounding the Republic's problems. To an extent this reflected a polarized political system where the three factions, the emergent parliament, the Fascist one-party civilian government, and the military were all divided into at least two factions and in the older movements individuals added some further complications by themselves polarizing factions. Sindh, due to this, was unable to agree upon or adopt any kind of policy that might have prolonged its existence, and this instability simply further steeled the Great Powers behind Sindh's isolation that their decision was both a wise and a just one.

However the instability in both Russia and China and the different approaches of the Tsar's government after the Restoration, which was the first to make actual, significant points of negotiation gave Sindh a decade-long grace period its political leaders failed entirely to make good use of due to the inherent difficulties in its political system.