Haven't been able to find much, though I do suspect a lack of interest and care from the US and UK could be a factor. As Australia really doesn't like to conduct operations without one of them being a participant or being part of a large peacekeeping force.
A Blunted Sickle - Thread II
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Haven't been able to find much, though I do suspect a lack of interest and care from the US and UK could be a factor. As Australia really doesn't like to conduct operations without one of them being a participant or being part of a large peacekeeping force.
I have a few Fijian mates (an occupational hazard in the British Army!), one of them used to laugh about the number of coups. His uncle had been Defence Minister for a few days at some point in the 90s.
Errolwi
Monthly Donor
The Fijian Army was/is not tiny nor incompetent. The coups had significant backing from the populace. Going in would have been a quagmire.
Ukrainian Victory
Banned
Does the USSR survive up to the present-day in this TL in one form or another?
I agree with 1 and 3, but with regards to 2 I'm not so sure if that's really the case given that between 1939 and 1947 the USSR in OTL took Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (ethnicities which prior to 1939 weren't even major constituent nations/nationalities with the USSR), annexed Moldavia (when prior to 1939 the Moldavians/Romanians were a very small minority in the Moldavian ASSR located mostly in what was then the Ukrainian SSR), readily pushed for and accepted the absorption of the Tuvan People's Republic (with Tuvans being a Turkic group that speak a Turkic language with Mongolian, Russian and Tibetan influences) into the USSR (and into the RSFSR itself) and ended up at loggerheads with the West over northern Iran where they had not withdrawn their forces and instead had supported the establishment of satellite Kurdish and Azeri communist states, where both ethnicities were present in the USSR and especially the Azeris as a constituent nation.
It would seem that rather the USSR was never exactly keen on ethnicities it thought would cause trouble internally (Poles, hence the likely revision of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's territorial divisions) or whose absorption would be of no net-gain to the USSR (and indeed likely a net-negative) in relation to key neighbours and powers (hence why both Mongolia's and Bulgaria's request to join the union kept getting rejected since accepting Mongolia's request would bring trouble with China and Bulgaria's absorption would not offer the USSR anything it didn't already have via Bulgaria's alliance and instead only give the USSR a direct outpost on the borders with Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia).
ctayfor
Monthly Donor
I concur. Your position here is as an unpaid volunteer and we are grateful for what we receive. Our only leverage, should we become impatient, is to threaten to cut your salary...
In a word, yes.
Even an India that will be much more self-confident and outward looking is going to be markedly different from the European powers and European derived powers like the ones in Australasia. As others (notably @Stormsword) have pointed out earlier in the thread India will almost certainly be a very anti-colonial and anti-apartheid power and one key facet of this will likely be an India that is more strident about non-intervention but more likely to champion non-interventionist actions (such as economic sanctions, boycotts, international pressure and coordinated international diplomatic overtures). Besides which, the idea of Indian intervention in Fiji is based on the misconception that there are some rather strong ties between India and its diaspora. There are most certainly ties, and some very important ones at that, but this misses the fact that in many cases the ties are stronger in one direction (the diaspora's ties towards India) than vice versa. This is not something likely to be changed by having a single federal Indian state rather than OTL India-Pakistan (and Bangladesh) since pretty much all political actors in OTL India and Pakistan seemed to have similar views on the concept of citizenship (which at its core speaks to who belongs to the national community). In both cases, neither successor state to the Raj even seemed to seriously contemplate including persons whose ancestors had left India during indentureship as automatic Indian citizens since in both cases they basically frown upon (or outright banned) dual citizenship. One could register as a citizen, but that would basically involve giving up the previous citizenship (which for those residing in the West Indies, Uganda, South Africa, Fiji and the UK would essentially mean giving up their lives in order to apply for permanent residency in a place that they had lived in their entire lives from birth). To give some context, Indian indentureship ended in 1920. So by the time of the 1987 coup in Fiji most persons who could actually remember having lived in India would have been over 67 years old (and likely have been older to have any but the vaguest memories). By way of example the leader of the Indo-Fijian party, the NFP, at the time of the coup was Harish Sharma who was...born in Fiji..in 1932. His predecessor, Siddiq Koya was born in...Fiji..in 1924 to Malayali/Malabari immigrants. You have to go back to the founder of the NFP, A.D. Patel to find a political leader who was actually born in India, and even then Patel died in 1969 (a year before Fiji became independent) and he himself wanted in independent and racially integrated Fiji, not for Fiji to be suborned to India or anywhere else.
In fact in some ways the differing balances in terms of ties would likely be accentuated in some respects since diaspora Indians generally (but not always) tended to have a more generalized Indian identity whereas in India itself both the Indian and regional identity would and are important and in this TL India will now include all of OTL Pakistan and Bangladesh (adding yet more important regional identities). This is a similar (but weaker) phenomenon to the how the African diaspora in places like the Americas tends to have a more cohesive group identity than the group(s) from which they originated and how West Indian/Caribbean and Pacific Islander diasporas in places like the UK, Canada and the USA tend to have a slightly more cohesive group identity than the regions their ancestors hail from. When you are in a sea of strangers, the person whose parents come from that village/state/region/island that would be traditional rivals with your parents' village/state/region/island is now much more acceptable as a social contact because in that environment the commonalities get a chance to outweigh the differences. Hence the Indian diaspora are just that, Indians. Very few will be able (and fewer still will bother) to identify themselves as diaspora Biharis, Punjabis or Assamese unless there is a really large community from a given area.
India is very, very unlikely to intervene in Fiji except to perhaps push for suspension from the Commonwealth and really pushing diplomatically for a reversal of the coup.
Given that at the time the person in charge (and who would be in charge until 1953) was most certainly not a Slav (but at best a Georgian with perhaps some Ossetian heritage) and pretty much only put in place policies that were in essence pro-Russian (dropping The Internationale in favour of a patriotic song for the national anthem; tolerating the Russian Orthodox Church a bit more, promoting pan-Slav sentiment, appealing to Russian history) and which were rather major reversals of previous policies because of Operation Barbarossa (which remember does not happen in TTL) I think you are in danger of mixing up post OTL 1941-USSR with OTL pre-1941 USSR and assuming that in your own TL that the character of the USSR will converge to OTL post-1941 USSR even though a major catalyst for such a change is actually butterflied away. The USSR taking the Belorussian and Ukrainian areas of eastern Poland can be very much explained by Stalin's desire to:
1. obtain strategic depth
2. obtain territories that he thought should have belonged to the USSR by right (hence Moldavia; the designs on the very much non-Russian and non-Slav Finns; the initial border claims in eastern Anatolia (which were centred around the territories ceded to Turkey in 1921 but which according to Molotov needed to be legitimized through renegotiation since they were initially made at a time of Soviet weakness) that followed the old pre-1921 Russo-Ottoman border (the more extensive claims were actually pushed by the Georgian SSR and Armenian SSR themselves rather than the Union government and the Union government seemed to not discourage such claims on the chance that it could obtain further territories through those republican claims); and gaining Western recognition for retaking southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands - also note that southern Sakhalin also did not have Russians or Slav inhabitants at the time; also note that even the final Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact border followed both the 1919 Curzon Line south of Brest as well as following the 1919 border proposed by West Ukraine concerning the division of Galicia along the San River and of course since West Ukraine claimed itself to be an autonomous area of the Ukrainian People's Republic and the predecessor Soviet Ukrainian entities of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic claimed to be the legitimate governments for all of Ukraine...)
3. ensure that there were no competing styles of government that nationalities within the USSR could look to through their co-ethnic brethen living across the border (so no examples of non-communist Ukrainian or Belorussian society to fuel anti-communist sentiment in the Belorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR - this would also partly explain the desire to obtain eastern Anatolia from Turkey (although obtaining a deeper buffer against Turkey and any moves from Anatolia seemed like the primary motivation) and the reluctance to withdraw fully from northern Iran (ensure all Azeris lived under a communist society), but why withdrawing from northern Norway and Bornholm mostly proceeded as agreed).
For starters, The Internationale is very very likely to remain the anthem of the USSR in your TL with its very internationalist lyrics referencing and urging all the workers of world to unite and rise up, versus the OTL post-1943/1944 state anthem with its explicit references to Great Rus'.
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I wonder if ITTL India will be more interested in developing its own armaments industry. I could easily imagine it adopting a position of 'muscular neutrality' akin to Cold War Sweden.
Hadn't really considered it since 1940 to 2022 is a very, very long time. Overall structurally I don't see why the USSR shouldn't continue into at least the 1980s and even into the present day*. Stalin will likely live to 1953 as in OTL, if not perhaps a little longer. I suggest that because looking up his death, he died from a cerebral haemorrhage that was likely related to atherosclerosis...and atherosclerosis can be triggered by multiple factors including smoking (which Stalin was famous for), poor diet, inflammation, hypertension (which he had as well) etc. Now the thing is, in TTL pdf27 has just removed a major, major source of stress on Stalin that in OTL lasted at least 2 years, if not the nearly full 4 years of the Soviet-German War. How much less smoking due to stress and inflammation might Stalin experience leading up to 1946 in TTL? Might it stretch out his life to say 1954 or 1955? Who knows. He might not even have the mild stroke he suffered in OTL in May 1945 or the heart attack in October 1945 (or these events might come later).
Other factors are, what does having an extra 25+ million people who in OTL died do for the Soviet Union? What does it do for Soviet science, art, literature and society? Who succeeds Stalin in the 1950s? Is the 19th communist party congress actually held before 1952 as in OTL? Perhaps in TTL it will be held in 1945 or 1946 instead? Is the party renamed to the "Communist Party of the Soviet Union" at this congress as happened in OTL's 1952 19th Congress or does it keep the contemporary name? What happens in 1942-1952 as a result of TTLs war in Europe? Clearly with Germany being defeated relatively quickly and the Soviet's own experience in the Winter War, the USSR under whatever leadership is likely to want to draw lessons on the 1939-1942 period of warfare especially given that the victorious allies will now control Germany and its resources and, at least in Stalin's mind, be casting their gaze eastward. Reorganization of the military and further research into weapons and tactics will almost certainly occur.
*If we think about some of the more prominent dictatorship of OTL, many have a lot of staying power. The USSR collapsed and along with it collapsed those regimes that were heavily dependent upon it (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Mongolia) and some that weren't but which were caught up in the collapse of communism in Europe generally (Albania, Yugoslavia). However besides those we have the counterexamples of China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea. For the most part many dictatorships were ended by external force - Idi Amin in Uganda; pretty much all of the interwar European dictatorships (Poland, Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy) except for Spain, Portugal, Turkey and the USSR which then went on to establish new dictatorships in parts of Europe; Saddam Hussein in Iraq; even the Greek junta came to an end in part due to the influence of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. So chances seem fairly high that the USSR could continue to the current day without external force ending the dictatorship or internal liberalization collapsing it.
The major question that I think will affect the Soviet Union is the status of China. With the UK and France functionally being able to drop the *entire* equipment of the German Military (and everything of their own that was made obsolete by the war and the drawdown thereof) into China, *and* with the supplies *far* more likely to end up in the hands of CKS than the Communists, the Soviets aren't likely to get the *WIN* that they got when Mao took control. Worst case scenario for the USSR is a strong, anti-communist China (I'm not going to use Democratic, China would need several decades of working on Democracy to get to a vibrant multi-party situation).
The USSR supported the Nationalists in OTL starting from 1921 up until 1926 at least when Chiang dismissed his Soviet advisers and restricted the Chinese communists. Further Soviet support for the Nationalists came following the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War the USSR supported the KMT even further with credit, supplies, weapons and advisers. By the time of the end of the war in Europe in TTL in early 1942, the Soviets would already have been supporting the Chinese against Japan for over 4 years (since August 1937). Indeed, during OTL August 1937 to June 1941 Stalin offered no help whatsoever to the Chinese communists as he viewed Japan as a potential threat and did not want to weaken China as it faced Japan.
What seems possible is that the Soviets continue to support the Nationalists in China against Japan, the Entente also begin to support the Nationalists and that as the Japanese threat fades, the Soviets will begin to support the Chinese communists again and China then plunges (back) into civil war. A strong anti-communist China seems rather remote. A divided China wracked by civil war seems much more likely.
The question is, when does the Japanese threat fade? At this point the Japanese will be a threat not just to the USSR and China but also to the Entente and their colonial holdings. As long as Japan remains in Korea and Manchuria I would imagine that the USSR and China (whether communist or nationalist) would be more concerned about Japan than each other.
Ukrainian Victory
Banned
Good analysis. One other thing worth pointing out is that it's possible that out of the 1910-1927 Soviet male cohort, which was badly decimated by WWII in real life, there might be one or more future reformers who survive WWII in this TL and who could potentially take Gorbachev's place as leader of the Soviet Union in due time. The sheer number of Soviet males in this cohort who perished in WWII makes this not an unreasonable hypothesis.
Sure. There may also be a future Stalin in that cohort too to give the USSR Stalinism 2: Electric Bugaloo.
Ukrainian Victory
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You don't say!
For whatever reason, the immediate (first couple of decades) post-revolutionary leaders tend to be the most zealous. Then things tend to mellow down a bit. This is also what happened in Communist China, for instance. So, I don't think that the risk of a future Stalin would be too high. Though you never know, right?
You don't say!
For whatever reason, the immediate (first couple of decades) post-revolutionary leaders tend to be the most zealous. Then things tend to mellow down a bit. This is also what happened in Communist China, for instance. So, I don't think that the risk of a future Stalin would be too high. Though you never know, right?
You could use China as an example...or you could use North Korea (who's the reformer there? If anything they've become less mellow with time). The point being that it could go in pretty much any direction and that's up to pdf27 as the author of course.
Ukrainian Victory
Banned
I think that things in NK have also gotten better if one compares it to the 1990s famine there. At least they're not starving anymore, right?
Ukrainian Victory
Banned
@Chris S Do you see the Italian monarchy surviving up to the present-day in this TL?
I think that's more for pdf27 to answer lol! But...why not? The Low Countries and Scandinavian countries still have their monarchies. Spain got theirs back. No reason the Italian monarchy couldn't survive.
Ukrainian Victory
Banned
Then it would suck for the Savoy-Aosta branch!
Their chance to claim the Italian throne--forever gone!