Question, but As I was reading part #205, I saw this:
What does this sentence mean, because I'm having a hard time understanding it?
Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
I have been meaning to ask, how do you 'do the research' for your timeline?
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the typo corrections everyone, my usual computer has finally given up the ghost so I wrote that update on a laptop, which is probably the reason why there were more typoes than usual (I can't use spell check because of TTL having so many obscure or nonexistent in OTL names).
Of course when you're long after the POD then you don't have to worry about so much strict accuracy in terms of getting an individual's character right, because now everyone is 'fictional', but you do have to worry about geography, the limitations of technology and so on.
I can give more details if you want, but my usual practice is to set up a feedback loop between browsing Wikipedia for shallow stuff, checking dates and connections etc., and dedicated history books to develop in-depth concepts and ideas - helped by the fact I lived in Cambridge for some years, and older history books are easy to pick up cheap secondhand there.
Of course when you're long after the POD then you don't have to worry about so much strict accuracy in terms of getting an individual's character right, because now everyone is 'fictional', but you do have to worry about geography, the limitations of technology and so on.
I'd say that even OTL, due to a combination of population density and disease environment, India and China weren't under any real risk of settler colonialism. (Iran, OTOH: in TLs where Iran somehow gets conquered by Russia before the late 19th century, I certainly can see Russian settlement taking place, at least to the extent central Asia was Russified OTL under the Czars and Commissars. )
Serious modernization requires some sort of literate class: besides sending the sons of nobles to European schools, how and when did the Matetwa state becoming a literate society? Did they develop their own writing system, or did they borrow one from somewhere else?
(Apologies if this has been covered earlier)
Anti-Matetwa campaigners who accuse the Matetwa of being historically pro-societist: could it be that the modern Matetwa state promotes a national identity at the expense of regional cultures, precisely to keep that steerable from popping?
294.1
Thande
Donor
Part #294: Breakthroughs
“Amateur astronomers as far afield as Guinea and China will today watch the skies for a solar eclipse. Our space correspondent, Dr James Macclesfield.”
“Thank you, Mr Roberts. Yes, as you can see in this archive footage, what the people of certain nations in Africa and Asia will be able to see today is an annular solar eclipse. This rare form of eclipse leaves a ring of the Sun visible around the Moon, due to variations in the distance between the Earth and the Sun. This is different to a standard solar eclipse, in which the Moon entirely blots out the Sun and leaves the latter’s corona visible, which our viewers will remember seeing a great example of three years ago.”
“Indeed I do remember seeing that magnificent sight, Dr Macclesfield. Which is better, would you say, a standard or an annular eclipse?”
“Well, sir, the rarity of an annular eclipse makes them noteworthy; but a standard eclipse is more scientifically useful, as it makes solar phenomena visible that would normally be overshadowed by the light of the Sun itself. Of course, I would remind all our viewers to exercise extreme caution whenever looking at the Sun, as blindness can result from making direct eye contact. Modelling suggests we will be able to see an annular eclipse of our own three years from now, so it is important to remember to take appropriate safety precautions…”
*
From: “The Black Twenties” by Errol Mitchell (1973)—
At the Battle of the Goodman Sea, October 3rd 1924, the Empire of North America won a qualified victory over the Russians. Admiral Crittenden’s force defeated Admiral Urusov’s in Gavajski waters, albeit with heavy and almost commensurate losses. Though the Americans then retreated without making further attempts to attack the islands, the battle was seen as an Imperial victory largely because Urusov lost his life and flagship, the Poltava. While hailed as such by American newspapers and the public, naval circles were divided by the controversy that this act had been achieved by Julian Worth and aero power, something which many naval theorists had long minimised or dismissed. Some did change their views in response to the battle, but many others doubled down and called the evidence into question. Which groups took which response would play a key role in the closing conflicts of the Black Twenties.
One person was possibly more incensed at the American semi-victory at the Goodman Sea than any Russian, all the way up to Tsar Paul. That was Admiral René de Chambord, commander of the French and allied fleets in the Pacific. Chambord’s fleets, with Mauré support, had made an attempt to attack Gavaji in July 1923, only to be repulsed. Chambord had had to fight more cautiously than he would like, due to fear that disabled ships would be left behind in Gavajski waters where the Russians could sink or capture them at their leisure. He had also spent much of the last two years complaining to Paris in Lectelgrams that the Americans were not pulling their weight, in a naval theatre where they had more to lose than the French. It had been Frenchmen who had been sacrificing their lives to bottle up Urusov in Gavaji and prevent him reinforcing Kolomenkin’s naval forces fighting the Americans in the Pacific Northwest of North America.
Now, the Americans had launched an attack which was (he argued) less successful than Chambord’s earlier one – they had never managed to attack any targets on the islands themselves, for example. Yet the sinking of the Poltava and the Russian withdrawal meant that the Americans had not feared losing ships in Gavajski waters as Chambord had; indeed, they had been able to take disabled Russian ships left behind. It was the loss of Urusov and the Poltava that had made the difference, and Chambord fell firmly into the camp that this had been nothing more than a lucky fluke. Indeed, one of his aides recorded at the time the assumption that the Poltava had sunk because some of its crew had panicked and accidentally touched off its own magazine, so ingrained was the assumption that aero power could not sink lineships.
As 1924 drew to a close, then, Chambord was in the unenviable position of having complained for two years that the Americans were not pulling their weight in the Pacific, only for Crittenden to finally turn up and then promptly upstage him. His conservative views on aero power coloured his perception that the Poltava’s destruction had been an undeserved fluke, the fortune of war. He grew incensed as the tone of Lectelgrams from Paris began to imply that France’s lack of such a victory against the Russians in Gavaji was down to Chambord’s lack of courage or capability. Feeling his honour – and possibly his position – threatened, Chambord retaliated by having plans drawn up for a new assault on Gavaji. This time, to upstage the Americans, he would finally land troops on the islands – not for a mere temporary raid, but to take and hold territory, to dislodge the Russians from the islands as Wehihimana had before him.
Chambord has his defenders in accounts of naval history, but they are few and far between. Most regard Opération Quiberon, better known simply as ‘The Veliky Landings’ or ‘Gijlo Sanguinolent’ (‘Bloody Gijlo’), as one of the greatest strategic missteps in French history. Not only was it a military failure, but it did more to poison relations between France and her largest colony than anything a dozen Changarnier plans to cede territory to Cygnia could have. For Chambord was forced to work with the resources he had; at this time, as the stalemate on the Oder bridgehead grew ever more desperate (in July 1925, Shuvalov would finally resort to death-luft) there was no chance of any further support from the metropole.
Chambord was, however, granted extraordinary powers to requisition whatever he needed from Pérousie, something which its people became increasingly resentful of. The Pérousiens had campaigned hard in their Autogovernance campaign in the 1900s and 1910s, and had been granted parlements-provincial and representation in the Grand-Parlement. Chambord routinely overruled the parlements’ protests as though he had been appointed Dictator, and – while praising Pérousien soldiers’ prowess in battle – generally regarded their political leaders with contempt as rustic colonials. Pérousien parlementaires repeatedly drew attention to this at the Grand-Parlement, receiving a sympathetic ear from Héloïse Mercier, who (along with her husband) had visited Pérousie to negotiate the settlement in 1908.[1]
However, Cazeneuve was a different story. When he had become Prime Minister in peacetime, in 1920, he had been careful to apologise to the Pérousien people for how his party had rejected their calls for Autogovernance. But now, in the midst of apocalyptic war and plague, he was under incredible strain and now dismissed Pérousien complaints as nothing more than an additional minor grievance on top of everything else. The Ligue d’Émeraude, the Verts’ youth organisation speaking for thousands of young men in the trenches, was now calling for a negotiated end to the war. In June 1925, just as the wheels were coming off Opération Quiberon, Cazeneuve was embattled with the scandal that Emerald League-sympathetic Vert parlementaires, such as Roger Marin, had been caught discussing an alliance with Pichereau’s Opposition Diamantines. The combined war opposition group eventually became known as the Parti rubis or Ruby Party. By analogy, though they did not actively collaborate at this point, the Noirs who rejected Vachaud’s leadership became known as the Parti jais or Jet Party.[2] A month later, Shuvalov would let the death-luft genie out of the bottle. Amidst all this, we can perhaps understand, if not justify, Cazeneuve’s refusal to become involved with the Pérousien dispute. But by doing so, as Mme Mercier warned, he was sowing the seeds for what had once been an unthinkable cleavage between France and the dream of La Pérouse.
Since the start of the war, young Pérousien men had signed up for the army, if less enthusiastically than in some territories. Some had been sent to Bisnaga or other territories, but most found themselves sitting bored in camps in Nouvelle Frise, unable to return home due to the threat of the plague.[3] Pérousie had managed to control the spread of the plague better than most parts of the world, in part due to its isolated cities and easily-controlled arteries of trade between them, and her parlements-provincial were deathly afraid of a Black Homecoming scenario – even though her soldiers in their camps had not been exposed to plague. For this reason, some of the Pérousien parlements had more mixed feelings about Chambord’s plans than later historiography would imply; indeed, even Jean Conraux, First President of the Parlement of Nord Nouvelle Gascogne, privately wrote that he would be relieved not to have to answer any more letters from mothers about why their sons were not home yet.[4] He would, needless to say, go on to change his mind.
Opération Quiberon has been particularly criticised because of factors in Gavaji that, in fairness, Chambord was likely unaware of. ‘Fortress Gavaji’ had always had the weakness of lack of self-sufficiency in food. The native Gavajskis were already becoming mutinous as rations were cut again and again, and Urusov’s loss had damaged the Russians’ image of invincibility; many Gavajskis remembered the brutal crackdown on collaborators after the reconquest from Wehihimana after the Pandoric War, but some now wondered if the embattled Russians were still capable of it. When the Americans would go on to launch the naval Operation Cavalier in May 1925, the remaining supply convoys from Yapon would become even fewer and farther between. If Chambord had known, perhaps he might have realised that a better approach was to blockade the starving islands and finally force them to surrender. But, of course, Chambord was not in communication with the Americans, and he did not want to work with them; he wanted to outdo them, as they had seemed to outdo him. So, for the sake of one man’s ego, French power in the Pacific, an empire that had lasted more than a century, would begin sliding towards its end.
Chambord did realise that the island of Oakhu had become heavily fortified after the Pandoric War; the Russians had no intention of allowing another surprise attack like Weihimana’s to succeed. He believed that what the French needed, more than anything, was to establish a base elsewhere in the islands from which ships and troops could then stage for further attacks, not operating on the end of an impossibly-long supply line. This was sound logic, but Chambord’s choice for an alternative was less so; the biggest and most mountainous of the Gavajski islands, known simply as Veliky (‘big’ or ‘great’ in Russian).[5] His reasoning has been hotly debated ever since, as the whole operation has been a Heritage Point of Controversy between French and Pérousiens. Some believe Chambord simply made the quixotic logical leap that it was the last place the Russians would expect them to land in. There was also the point that Veliky’s best harbour, Gijlo [Hilo] was in the north-east, well away from the most obvious direction for the French to attack.
The French fleet, including countless civilian ships requisitioned as troop carriers and packed with Pérousien soldiers, set sail in May 1925 to take the islands. January 1926 would see a fraction of that strength being withdrawn in defeat, countless Pérousiens occupying shallow graves on the deceptively lovely beaches of Gavaji. The operation began to go wrong almost immediately. With the death of Urosov, Admiral Sergei Repin, who had brought the remains of the Russian fleet from Ceylon to Gavaji, had been promoted to take his place. One might imagine a rivalry with or resentment from Golitsyn, but in fact the two worked well together. Repin had learned under the Belgian Admiral Van de Velde about using hit-and-run tactics when outmatched by an enemy force (as the weakened Russians now were by the French). This approach dovetailed well with Golitsyn’s development of his ironshark ‘shoal’ tactics. It remains unclear just how the Russians were aware of the attack in detail before it arrived – as with Urusov’s response to Crittenden and also Chambord’s own earlier attack, some attribute this to broken codes or spies, while others argue that both French and Americans still underestimated the value of the Russians’ Photel-equipped Burevestnik spotter dromes.
Regardless, Russian ironshark shoals send hundreds of Pérousien soldiers to a watery grave before they ever reached the beaches of Gavaji. Many of Golitsyn’s ironsharks were lost in the battle, a textbook example of a ‘Trafalgar Sacrifice’.[6] Repin and Golitsyn understood that it did not matter so much if they sunk a French lineship at this point, but if they robbed the French of troops, Chambord’s plans would fall apart. Nonetheless, many Pérousiens did reach the beaches, captured the port at Gijlo and dug in. General Bignon was waiting for more supplies, aware of how current warfare was favouring the defender in the absence of protguns or aerocraft. (Unlike the Americans, Chambord did not have any hiveships, and would likely not have used them if he had). But with hindsight, Bignon was too cautious, missing an opportunity to steal a march on the Russians. The Russians were able to bring in troops that turned the mountains of Veliky into a miserable struggle for the Pérousiens. Nindzhya forces, and others using similar tactics, would infiltrate Pérousien trenches and slit throats or blow up munitions dumps. Fundamentally, the French were never able to silence Russian artillery based amid strongpoints on the volcanic mountainside, which continued to rain down shells (soon to include a few death-luft ones after Shuvalov’s move on the Oder) on the trenches with impunity.
And, perhaps most importantly, the French had shot themselves in the foot when it came to local morale. The Gavajskis had, perhaps, been ready to rebel; but now they were threatened in their own homeland by a foreign foe. As before, Chambord brought along Mauré forces as well and deliberately invoked memories of Weihihana’s attack, an attempt at intimidation that backfired. Too many Gavajskis blamed the Mauré for the inevitable Russian reprisals at the end of the Pandoric War. Many Mauré warriors were lost, especially when Bignon tried to use them as a counter to the nindzhya troops and often sent them deep into the hinterland with promised support that never materialised. Plague also spread through the Pérousien troops (exactly how it got there is unclear, and some claim it was deliberately introduced by the Russians as a ploy) while the Russians’ quarantine system generally continued to protect them.
Chambord’s grand plans to quickly take Veliky, then use it as a launchpad to attack other islands in the chain, came to nothing. He spent a countless (and disputed) number of Pérousien lives to achieve precisely zero, all to satiate his own offended pride after the Americans’ victory at the Goodman Sea. Or at least, that is the usual narrative; some more sympathetic biographies have come out.
As far as the Pérousiens were concerned, though, this was the end of the road for their identity as a mere French colony. It might have been different if external powers (such as the Societists in the Nusantara) had been seen as a serious threat, one which still required French military protection. Instead, Pérousiens had been sent to die on a distant island for no real reason; many families had lost sons. In Pérousie, a place where the plague was milder and more controlled than in most, this was a particularly bitter blow and made the losses seem proportionately much worse than similar losses in other theatres. When Chambord discussed the idea of conscription in September 1925, as an attempt to tip the balance, protest marches were held in many Pérousien cities and all the Parlements signed a condemnatory resolution refusing to participate. But Paris kept Chambord in his position until the end of the war; the final breakthrough of Operazione Fulmine had consumed all the attention of the French government.
It is important to remember that, while French and other western accounts tend to focus on Bloody Gijlo as the birth of the Pérousien national consciousness, in many ways it was also the birth of the modern Gavajski consciousness. Gavajskis, formerly resigned to apathetic resentment of being a pawn in a game between the Russians and the French (and at one point, Wehihimana’s Mauré) had now fought for their own homeland. Their contribution was so great that the Russians would likely have lost without Gavajski support, illustrating Chambord’s most serious mistake; if he had approached the Gavajskis and offered a more equitable deal than what they had as a member of the Vitebsk Pact, things might have gone differently. The Gavajskis had demonstrated they could fight, and that would ultimately spell the death knell for Russian rule in their isles. It is interesting to note that, despite the bitterness of the conflict, there is very little ancestral hatred today between the Pérousiens and the Gavajskis; rather, there is mutual respect, with both governments typically attending each others’ war remembrance ceremonies.
Nor would that example end with Gavaji and Pérousie. Bisnaga had already become restive and resentful earlier in the war as her resources were stripped to support Admiral Rochefoucald’s fleet, with industrial strikes and stoppages. The ‘Bisnagi Mutiny’ broke out in earnest in July 1924 as the plague ravaged the country, crops rotted and people starved. This was bloodily put down by French colonial troops after four months of unrest, alienating many formerly apathetic moderate Bisnagis and privately convincing King Chamaraja Wodeyar XII of Mysore that he should clandestinely support the rebels. Biographies of the King disagree, but many believe that the mishandled French action not only disgusted him morally, but also convinced him that French India’s days were numbered. If he were to keep his throne, he must align himself with a rebel movement which, he was convinced, would eventually be victorious.
There was no strict representation for Bisnaga in the French Grand-Parlement (though the Bisnagi community in Bordeaux had elected Thomas Coumar Joseph as the famous ‘Parlementaire for Bisnaga’ as he was known) but Pérousie did have such representation since the first Autogovernance controversy. Formerly, the Pérousiens had seen little in common with the Bisnagis (and indeed they would continue to block or severely limit Bisnagi immigration for years to come). However, a shared distaste for the colonial rule of Paris would lead to links being formed to threaten trade boycotts, and Pérousien parlementaires speaking in support of the Bisnagi opposition movement at the Grand-Parlement.
Bloody Gijlo had assured only one thing: that the 1930s would be an era in which the biggest issue facing the French government, whether they liked it or not, was decolonisation…
[1] See Part #275 in Volume VII.
[2] Jet in the sense of jet black. The use of precious stones or minerals to name parties comes, of course, from the Diamantin/Adamantine Party, though the name never matched the party’s colour of red. The Verts’ youth league being named Emerald was in deliberate imitation of this, to attack the idea that the more cobrist (left-wing) Diamantines were automatically the party of the youth. Of course, the fact that the ‘Rouge’ Diamantines didn’t actually use a red stone for their name has left a gap in the market for Pichereau’s opposition Diamantine faction to steal ‘Ruby’ for their own use.
[3] Nouvelle Frise (New Frisia) roughly corresponds to OTL Queensland, being a part of Antipodea that was Dutch/Batavian before the aftermath of the Pandoric War led to Nieuw Holland (northern Antipodea) being divided between Cygnia and Pérousie.
[4] Nord Nouvelle Gascogne (North New Gascony) is a province centred on the city of Espérance (OTL Newcastle, New South Wales). The old and unwieldy colony of New Gascony was divided in 1914 as part of the Autogovernance reforms. It is considered either the second or third most important province of Pérousie, depending on whom one asks, with the other two near the top being Sud Nouvelle Gascogne (centred on Nouvelle Albi, OTL Sydney) and Nouvelle Vendée (centred on Béron, OTL Melbourne). Note that most Pérousiens will drop the ‘Nouvelle/Nouveau’ in these names, or sometimes slur them if the following name is followed by a vowel, e.g. ‘Nalbi’ – compare New York and New Orleans being pronounced as ‘Nyork’ and ‘Nawleans’ in OTL.
[5] OTL usually known as Big Island, to avoid the confusion that its true name is Hawaii and it gave its name to the whole island chain.
[6] Recall that in OTL an earlier battle at Trafalgar was a British tactical defeat, but one which saw the sinking of many French and Spanish ships carrying soldiers to South America.
“Amateur astronomers as far afield as Guinea and China will today watch the skies for a solar eclipse. Our space correspondent, Dr James Macclesfield.”
“Thank you, Mr Roberts. Yes, as you can see in this archive footage, what the people of certain nations in Africa and Asia will be able to see today is an annular solar eclipse. This rare form of eclipse leaves a ring of the Sun visible around the Moon, due to variations in the distance between the Earth and the Sun. This is different to a standard solar eclipse, in which the Moon entirely blots out the Sun and leaves the latter’s corona visible, which our viewers will remember seeing a great example of three years ago.”
“Indeed I do remember seeing that magnificent sight, Dr Macclesfield. Which is better, would you say, a standard or an annular eclipse?”
“Well, sir, the rarity of an annular eclipse makes them noteworthy; but a standard eclipse is more scientifically useful, as it makes solar phenomena visible that would normally be overshadowed by the light of the Sun itself. Of course, I would remind all our viewers to exercise extreme caution whenever looking at the Sun, as blindness can result from making direct eye contact. Modelling suggests we will be able to see an annular eclipse of our own three years from now, so it is important to remember to take appropriate safety precautions…”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 21/06/2020
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 21/06/2020
*
From: “The Black Twenties” by Errol Mitchell (1973)—
At the Battle of the Goodman Sea, October 3rd 1924, the Empire of North America won a qualified victory over the Russians. Admiral Crittenden’s force defeated Admiral Urusov’s in Gavajski waters, albeit with heavy and almost commensurate losses. Though the Americans then retreated without making further attempts to attack the islands, the battle was seen as an Imperial victory largely because Urusov lost his life and flagship, the Poltava. While hailed as such by American newspapers and the public, naval circles were divided by the controversy that this act had been achieved by Julian Worth and aero power, something which many naval theorists had long minimised or dismissed. Some did change their views in response to the battle, but many others doubled down and called the evidence into question. Which groups took which response would play a key role in the closing conflicts of the Black Twenties.
One person was possibly more incensed at the American semi-victory at the Goodman Sea than any Russian, all the way up to Tsar Paul. That was Admiral René de Chambord, commander of the French and allied fleets in the Pacific. Chambord’s fleets, with Mauré support, had made an attempt to attack Gavaji in July 1923, only to be repulsed. Chambord had had to fight more cautiously than he would like, due to fear that disabled ships would be left behind in Gavajski waters where the Russians could sink or capture them at their leisure. He had also spent much of the last two years complaining to Paris in Lectelgrams that the Americans were not pulling their weight, in a naval theatre where they had more to lose than the French. It had been Frenchmen who had been sacrificing their lives to bottle up Urusov in Gavaji and prevent him reinforcing Kolomenkin’s naval forces fighting the Americans in the Pacific Northwest of North America.
Now, the Americans had launched an attack which was (he argued) less successful than Chambord’s earlier one – they had never managed to attack any targets on the islands themselves, for example. Yet the sinking of the Poltava and the Russian withdrawal meant that the Americans had not feared losing ships in Gavajski waters as Chambord had; indeed, they had been able to take disabled Russian ships left behind. It was the loss of Urusov and the Poltava that had made the difference, and Chambord fell firmly into the camp that this had been nothing more than a lucky fluke. Indeed, one of his aides recorded at the time the assumption that the Poltava had sunk because some of its crew had panicked and accidentally touched off its own magazine, so ingrained was the assumption that aero power could not sink lineships.
As 1924 drew to a close, then, Chambord was in the unenviable position of having complained for two years that the Americans were not pulling their weight in the Pacific, only for Crittenden to finally turn up and then promptly upstage him. His conservative views on aero power coloured his perception that the Poltava’s destruction had been an undeserved fluke, the fortune of war. He grew incensed as the tone of Lectelgrams from Paris began to imply that France’s lack of such a victory against the Russians in Gavaji was down to Chambord’s lack of courage or capability. Feeling his honour – and possibly his position – threatened, Chambord retaliated by having plans drawn up for a new assault on Gavaji. This time, to upstage the Americans, he would finally land troops on the islands – not for a mere temporary raid, but to take and hold territory, to dislodge the Russians from the islands as Wehihimana had before him.
Chambord has his defenders in accounts of naval history, but they are few and far between. Most regard Opération Quiberon, better known simply as ‘The Veliky Landings’ or ‘Gijlo Sanguinolent’ (‘Bloody Gijlo’), as one of the greatest strategic missteps in French history. Not only was it a military failure, but it did more to poison relations between France and her largest colony than anything a dozen Changarnier plans to cede territory to Cygnia could have. For Chambord was forced to work with the resources he had; at this time, as the stalemate on the Oder bridgehead grew ever more desperate (in July 1925, Shuvalov would finally resort to death-luft) there was no chance of any further support from the metropole.
Chambord was, however, granted extraordinary powers to requisition whatever he needed from Pérousie, something which its people became increasingly resentful of. The Pérousiens had campaigned hard in their Autogovernance campaign in the 1900s and 1910s, and had been granted parlements-provincial and representation in the Grand-Parlement. Chambord routinely overruled the parlements’ protests as though he had been appointed Dictator, and – while praising Pérousien soldiers’ prowess in battle – generally regarded their political leaders with contempt as rustic colonials. Pérousien parlementaires repeatedly drew attention to this at the Grand-Parlement, receiving a sympathetic ear from Héloïse Mercier, who (along with her husband) had visited Pérousie to negotiate the settlement in 1908.[1]
However, Cazeneuve was a different story. When he had become Prime Minister in peacetime, in 1920, he had been careful to apologise to the Pérousien people for how his party had rejected their calls for Autogovernance. But now, in the midst of apocalyptic war and plague, he was under incredible strain and now dismissed Pérousien complaints as nothing more than an additional minor grievance on top of everything else. The Ligue d’Émeraude, the Verts’ youth organisation speaking for thousands of young men in the trenches, was now calling for a negotiated end to the war. In June 1925, just as the wheels were coming off Opération Quiberon, Cazeneuve was embattled with the scandal that Emerald League-sympathetic Vert parlementaires, such as Roger Marin, had been caught discussing an alliance with Pichereau’s Opposition Diamantines. The combined war opposition group eventually became known as the Parti rubis or Ruby Party. By analogy, though they did not actively collaborate at this point, the Noirs who rejected Vachaud’s leadership became known as the Parti jais or Jet Party.[2] A month later, Shuvalov would let the death-luft genie out of the bottle. Amidst all this, we can perhaps understand, if not justify, Cazeneuve’s refusal to become involved with the Pérousien dispute. But by doing so, as Mme Mercier warned, he was sowing the seeds for what had once been an unthinkable cleavage between France and the dream of La Pérouse.
Since the start of the war, young Pérousien men had signed up for the army, if less enthusiastically than in some territories. Some had been sent to Bisnaga or other territories, but most found themselves sitting bored in camps in Nouvelle Frise, unable to return home due to the threat of the plague.[3] Pérousie had managed to control the spread of the plague better than most parts of the world, in part due to its isolated cities and easily-controlled arteries of trade between them, and her parlements-provincial were deathly afraid of a Black Homecoming scenario – even though her soldiers in their camps had not been exposed to plague. For this reason, some of the Pérousien parlements had more mixed feelings about Chambord’s plans than later historiography would imply; indeed, even Jean Conraux, First President of the Parlement of Nord Nouvelle Gascogne, privately wrote that he would be relieved not to have to answer any more letters from mothers about why their sons were not home yet.[4] He would, needless to say, go on to change his mind.
Opération Quiberon has been particularly criticised because of factors in Gavaji that, in fairness, Chambord was likely unaware of. ‘Fortress Gavaji’ had always had the weakness of lack of self-sufficiency in food. The native Gavajskis were already becoming mutinous as rations were cut again and again, and Urusov’s loss had damaged the Russians’ image of invincibility; many Gavajskis remembered the brutal crackdown on collaborators after the reconquest from Wehihimana after the Pandoric War, but some now wondered if the embattled Russians were still capable of it. When the Americans would go on to launch the naval Operation Cavalier in May 1925, the remaining supply convoys from Yapon would become even fewer and farther between. If Chambord had known, perhaps he might have realised that a better approach was to blockade the starving islands and finally force them to surrender. But, of course, Chambord was not in communication with the Americans, and he did not want to work with them; he wanted to outdo them, as they had seemed to outdo him. So, for the sake of one man’s ego, French power in the Pacific, an empire that had lasted more than a century, would begin sliding towards its end.
Chambord did realise that the island of Oakhu had become heavily fortified after the Pandoric War; the Russians had no intention of allowing another surprise attack like Weihimana’s to succeed. He believed that what the French needed, more than anything, was to establish a base elsewhere in the islands from which ships and troops could then stage for further attacks, not operating on the end of an impossibly-long supply line. This was sound logic, but Chambord’s choice for an alternative was less so; the biggest and most mountainous of the Gavajski islands, known simply as Veliky (‘big’ or ‘great’ in Russian).[5] His reasoning has been hotly debated ever since, as the whole operation has been a Heritage Point of Controversy between French and Pérousiens. Some believe Chambord simply made the quixotic logical leap that it was the last place the Russians would expect them to land in. There was also the point that Veliky’s best harbour, Gijlo [Hilo] was in the north-east, well away from the most obvious direction for the French to attack.
The French fleet, including countless civilian ships requisitioned as troop carriers and packed with Pérousien soldiers, set sail in May 1925 to take the islands. January 1926 would see a fraction of that strength being withdrawn in defeat, countless Pérousiens occupying shallow graves on the deceptively lovely beaches of Gavaji. The operation began to go wrong almost immediately. With the death of Urosov, Admiral Sergei Repin, who had brought the remains of the Russian fleet from Ceylon to Gavaji, had been promoted to take his place. One might imagine a rivalry with or resentment from Golitsyn, but in fact the two worked well together. Repin had learned under the Belgian Admiral Van de Velde about using hit-and-run tactics when outmatched by an enemy force (as the weakened Russians now were by the French). This approach dovetailed well with Golitsyn’s development of his ironshark ‘shoal’ tactics. It remains unclear just how the Russians were aware of the attack in detail before it arrived – as with Urusov’s response to Crittenden and also Chambord’s own earlier attack, some attribute this to broken codes or spies, while others argue that both French and Americans still underestimated the value of the Russians’ Photel-equipped Burevestnik spotter dromes.
Regardless, Russian ironshark shoals send hundreds of Pérousien soldiers to a watery grave before they ever reached the beaches of Gavaji. Many of Golitsyn’s ironsharks were lost in the battle, a textbook example of a ‘Trafalgar Sacrifice’.[6] Repin and Golitsyn understood that it did not matter so much if they sunk a French lineship at this point, but if they robbed the French of troops, Chambord’s plans would fall apart. Nonetheless, many Pérousiens did reach the beaches, captured the port at Gijlo and dug in. General Bignon was waiting for more supplies, aware of how current warfare was favouring the defender in the absence of protguns or aerocraft. (Unlike the Americans, Chambord did not have any hiveships, and would likely not have used them if he had). But with hindsight, Bignon was too cautious, missing an opportunity to steal a march on the Russians. The Russians were able to bring in troops that turned the mountains of Veliky into a miserable struggle for the Pérousiens. Nindzhya forces, and others using similar tactics, would infiltrate Pérousien trenches and slit throats or blow up munitions dumps. Fundamentally, the French were never able to silence Russian artillery based amid strongpoints on the volcanic mountainside, which continued to rain down shells (soon to include a few death-luft ones after Shuvalov’s move on the Oder) on the trenches with impunity.
And, perhaps most importantly, the French had shot themselves in the foot when it came to local morale. The Gavajskis had, perhaps, been ready to rebel; but now they were threatened in their own homeland by a foreign foe. As before, Chambord brought along Mauré forces as well and deliberately invoked memories of Weihihana’s attack, an attempt at intimidation that backfired. Too many Gavajskis blamed the Mauré for the inevitable Russian reprisals at the end of the Pandoric War. Many Mauré warriors were lost, especially when Bignon tried to use them as a counter to the nindzhya troops and often sent them deep into the hinterland with promised support that never materialised. Plague also spread through the Pérousien troops (exactly how it got there is unclear, and some claim it was deliberately introduced by the Russians as a ploy) while the Russians’ quarantine system generally continued to protect them.
Chambord’s grand plans to quickly take Veliky, then use it as a launchpad to attack other islands in the chain, came to nothing. He spent a countless (and disputed) number of Pérousien lives to achieve precisely zero, all to satiate his own offended pride after the Americans’ victory at the Goodman Sea. Or at least, that is the usual narrative; some more sympathetic biographies have come out.
As far as the Pérousiens were concerned, though, this was the end of the road for their identity as a mere French colony. It might have been different if external powers (such as the Societists in the Nusantara) had been seen as a serious threat, one which still required French military protection. Instead, Pérousiens had been sent to die on a distant island for no real reason; many families had lost sons. In Pérousie, a place where the plague was milder and more controlled than in most, this was a particularly bitter blow and made the losses seem proportionately much worse than similar losses in other theatres. When Chambord discussed the idea of conscription in September 1925, as an attempt to tip the balance, protest marches were held in many Pérousien cities and all the Parlements signed a condemnatory resolution refusing to participate. But Paris kept Chambord in his position until the end of the war; the final breakthrough of Operazione Fulmine had consumed all the attention of the French government.
It is important to remember that, while French and other western accounts tend to focus on Bloody Gijlo as the birth of the Pérousien national consciousness, in many ways it was also the birth of the modern Gavajski consciousness. Gavajskis, formerly resigned to apathetic resentment of being a pawn in a game between the Russians and the French (and at one point, Wehihimana’s Mauré) had now fought for their own homeland. Their contribution was so great that the Russians would likely have lost without Gavajski support, illustrating Chambord’s most serious mistake; if he had approached the Gavajskis and offered a more equitable deal than what they had as a member of the Vitebsk Pact, things might have gone differently. The Gavajskis had demonstrated they could fight, and that would ultimately spell the death knell for Russian rule in their isles. It is interesting to note that, despite the bitterness of the conflict, there is very little ancestral hatred today between the Pérousiens and the Gavajskis; rather, there is mutual respect, with both governments typically attending each others’ war remembrance ceremonies.
Nor would that example end with Gavaji and Pérousie. Bisnaga had already become restive and resentful earlier in the war as her resources were stripped to support Admiral Rochefoucald’s fleet, with industrial strikes and stoppages. The ‘Bisnagi Mutiny’ broke out in earnest in July 1924 as the plague ravaged the country, crops rotted and people starved. This was bloodily put down by French colonial troops after four months of unrest, alienating many formerly apathetic moderate Bisnagis and privately convincing King Chamaraja Wodeyar XII of Mysore that he should clandestinely support the rebels. Biographies of the King disagree, but many believe that the mishandled French action not only disgusted him morally, but also convinced him that French India’s days were numbered. If he were to keep his throne, he must align himself with a rebel movement which, he was convinced, would eventually be victorious.
There was no strict representation for Bisnaga in the French Grand-Parlement (though the Bisnagi community in Bordeaux had elected Thomas Coumar Joseph as the famous ‘Parlementaire for Bisnaga’ as he was known) but Pérousie did have such representation since the first Autogovernance controversy. Formerly, the Pérousiens had seen little in common with the Bisnagis (and indeed they would continue to block or severely limit Bisnagi immigration for years to come). However, a shared distaste for the colonial rule of Paris would lead to links being formed to threaten trade boycotts, and Pérousien parlementaires speaking in support of the Bisnagi opposition movement at the Grand-Parlement.
Bloody Gijlo had assured only one thing: that the 1930s would be an era in which the biggest issue facing the French government, whether they liked it or not, was decolonisation…
[1] See Part #275 in Volume VII.
[2] Jet in the sense of jet black. The use of precious stones or minerals to name parties comes, of course, from the Diamantin/Adamantine Party, though the name never matched the party’s colour of red. The Verts’ youth league being named Emerald was in deliberate imitation of this, to attack the idea that the more cobrist (left-wing) Diamantines were automatically the party of the youth. Of course, the fact that the ‘Rouge’ Diamantines didn’t actually use a red stone for their name has left a gap in the market for Pichereau’s opposition Diamantine faction to steal ‘Ruby’ for their own use.
[3] Nouvelle Frise (New Frisia) roughly corresponds to OTL Queensland, being a part of Antipodea that was Dutch/Batavian before the aftermath of the Pandoric War led to Nieuw Holland (northern Antipodea) being divided between Cygnia and Pérousie.
[4] Nord Nouvelle Gascogne (North New Gascony) is a province centred on the city of Espérance (OTL Newcastle, New South Wales). The old and unwieldy colony of New Gascony was divided in 1914 as part of the Autogovernance reforms. It is considered either the second or third most important province of Pérousie, depending on whom one asks, with the other two near the top being Sud Nouvelle Gascogne (centred on Nouvelle Albi, OTL Sydney) and Nouvelle Vendée (centred on Béron, OTL Melbourne). Note that most Pérousiens will drop the ‘Nouvelle/Nouveau’ in these names, or sometimes slur them if the following name is followed by a vowel, e.g. ‘Nalbi’ – compare New York and New Orleans being pronounced as ‘Nyork’ and ‘Nawleans’ in OTL.
[5] OTL usually known as Big Island, to avoid the confusion that its true name is Hawaii and it gave its name to the whole island chain.
[6] Recall that in OTL an earlier battle at Trafalgar was a British tactical defeat, but one which saw the sinking of many French and Spanish ships carrying soldiers to South America.
You know, with this in mind I wonder how much of the early days of Diversitarianism, from the standpoint of the French and the Russians, is putting a brave face on decolonization. "Oh, of course Gavajski and Perousien independence was inevitable, they're distinct nations with their own culture and their own traditions and attempting to rule them directly from a distant foreign capitol was a grave offence against the rights of nations, but of course in order to preserve those rights against the Societist Menace they have certain understandings with their former mother countries and they're members in good standing of the Assembly of Sovereign Nations."
I've noted before that part of why the Societists stick out so much like a sore thumb is that they're basically the only group in the world right now carrying out something like the New Imperialism of OTL's 1880s and 1890s, so it makes sense that part of the anti-Societist backlash is going to be decolonization. I guess the question here is, how many of the places which will win their independence in the 1930s are going to wind up getting swept under by the impeding Combine invasion of The Entire World?
The nindzhya seem to come up a lot; are they still all Japanese forces, or has it become more of a catch-all term for Russian special-ops type units?
Though I'm still catching up with the latest chapters, I must commend the author on the latest Combine-focused chapter (#290, to be precise). It presented exactly the kind of general overview I was looking for, and created a good sense of what life for the average amikon must be like. Of course, in reading this chapter, comparisons between the Combine and OTL's USSR were quite inevitable. While making this comparison myself, I noticed two peculiar things.
First, the Combine seems better at living up to its own ideals than the Soviet Union at basically any point in its history. Where communism always seemed a generation away, the kind of 'equality of necessity' the Combine is aiming for seems far easier to attain; that's merely social democracy turned up a notch. Even its programs of cultural genocide and mass re-education seem far more attainable from a centralized state perspective than the general abolition of private property. This isn't to say that such programs are in any way desirable; they're simply easier to imagine and implement, with a greater range of OTL and TTL examples to pull from. On top of this, the explicit promotion of a kind of 'doublethink' in societist propaganda seems like a far more pragmatic approach to one's ideology than the awkward hypocrisies of the Soviet system. For example, the fundamental tension between the USSR's party-state and the proletarian democracy it was meant to establish seems to have no parallel in the Combine. Of course there are the celatores, but they are somewhat external to the domestic situation, a necessary inconvenience that would 'wither away' once the Last War had been won. Even if that outcome is hardly realistic, at least it doesn't distract from the internal building of societism. All in all, the value of the Final Society can be more closely appreciated in the here-and-now than was the case for communism within the USSR.
This brings me to my second point. If we compare these systems for what they are, instead of what they're trying to be, then the Combine still appears to be superior. Again, this is not any kind of endorsement, merely an observation that both societies reduce to some kind of 'welfare technocracy'. In other words, these are states which value a certain degree of 'scientific' expertise in their statesmen, while also taking a paternalistic attitude towards their people's well-being. From this minimal perspective, the Combine clearly outperforms the Soviet Union, if only because it's more honest about the society that it is. This sounds somewhat strange, perhaps; we know quite well that the personality tests this technocracy is based on are pure and utter nonsense. Even so, the societist mission to create a universal and hierarchical society mostly accords with its institutions, whereas the creation of a classless and stateless society is clearly incongruent with the Soviet party-state model. In the end, it is this factor of ideological congruence which might make societism a far more potent force than even soviet socialism. The upcoming parts of the Black Twenties will likely make this all too evident.
Taken together, my comparisons may well be unintentional on the part of the author. I just think it's fascinating how this fictional ideology has been morphed by its in-universe implementation, and how this process can be read as a commentary on the OTL development of state socialism. Speaking of socialism, it's been a while since mentianism had a prominent role in TTL's history. Has this ideology just been completely crowded out by societism? Or would its prominence simply be too much of a parallel to OTL? Either way, I wouldn't mind seeing its proponents take over a country here or there, if only as a curious fringe phenomenon. Would also be interesting to know its proponents' position in the eventual societism-diversitarianism cold war. Seems like that could go either way!
First, the Combine seems better at living up to its own ideals than the Soviet Union at basically any point in its history. Where communism always seemed a generation away, the kind of 'equality of necessity' the Combine is aiming for seems far easier to attain; that's merely social democracy turned up a notch. Even its programs of cultural genocide and mass re-education seem far more attainable from a centralized state perspective than the general abolition of private property. This isn't to say that such programs are in any way desirable; they're simply easier to imagine and implement, with a greater range of OTL and TTL examples to pull from. On top of this, the explicit promotion of a kind of 'doublethink' in societist propaganda seems like a far more pragmatic approach to one's ideology than the awkward hypocrisies of the Soviet system. For example, the fundamental tension between the USSR's party-state and the proletarian democracy it was meant to establish seems to have no parallel in the Combine. Of course there are the celatores, but they are somewhat external to the domestic situation, a necessary inconvenience that would 'wither away' once the Last War had been won. Even if that outcome is hardly realistic, at least it doesn't distract from the internal building of societism. All in all, the value of the Final Society can be more closely appreciated in the here-and-now than was the case for communism within the USSR.
This brings me to my second point. If we compare these systems for what they are, instead of what they're trying to be, then the Combine still appears to be superior. Again, this is not any kind of endorsement, merely an observation that both societies reduce to some kind of 'welfare technocracy'. In other words, these are states which value a certain degree of 'scientific' expertise in their statesmen, while also taking a paternalistic attitude towards their people's well-being. From this minimal perspective, the Combine clearly outperforms the Soviet Union, if only because it's more honest about the society that it is. This sounds somewhat strange, perhaps; we know quite well that the personality tests this technocracy is based on are pure and utter nonsense. Even so, the societist mission to create a universal and hierarchical society mostly accords with its institutions, whereas the creation of a classless and stateless society is clearly incongruent with the Soviet party-state model. In the end, it is this factor of ideological congruence which might make societism a far more potent force than even soviet socialism. The upcoming parts of the Black Twenties will likely make this all too evident.
Taken together, my comparisons may well be unintentional on the part of the author. I just think it's fascinating how this fictional ideology has been morphed by its in-universe implementation, and how this process can be read as a commentary on the OTL development of state socialism. Speaking of socialism, it's been a while since mentianism had a prominent role in TTL's history. Has this ideology just been completely crowded out by societism? Or would its prominence simply be too much of a parallel to OTL? Either way, I wouldn't mind seeing its proponents take over a country here or there, if only as a curious fringe phenomenon. Would also be interesting to know its proponents' position in the eventual societism-diversitarianism cold war. Seems like that could go either way!
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments, analysis and praise everyone, that is greatly appreciated.
I emphasise this is from the perspective of the western observer, of course, not the people actually living under such a system. The point is I've sort of gone for the opposite approach here, where many nations act as though the Combine is just the UPSA/Hermandad under a different regime and fail to recognise that its ideology is at the core of its actions and they really mean what they say. (In that sense, I suppose perceptions of Nazi Germany in the 1930s might be a better analogue).
Inasmuch as it is a commentary, I would say the meta-narrative is based on this: I grew up in the dying days of the Cold War and was only ever vaguely aware of The Soviet Menace, my main reaction on the fall of the USSR being annoyance that I'd have to buy a new atlas. Years later, mostly through reading Turtledove's Worldwar series, I actually found out what Communism was supposed to be and its ideological basis. What boggled my mind is that this seemed to have almost nothing to do with what the USSR actually did (from the perspective of the western man in the street) and why it was perceived as a threat to the Free World, and indeed one can see this in how both the war hawks and tankie apologists have smoothly switched over in their talking points about Putin's Russia, even though it now lacks that theoretical scary ideological foundation to either fear or identify with. The Societist Combine is, therefore, in a sense a sort of 'USSR as it 'should' have been if the Cold War was a fictional story', i.e. the guiding ideology actually underwrites many of its practical actions, rather than being 'take Generic Evil Russian Empire from the Great Game, Ctrl-X Orthodox Panslavism, Ctrl-V Red flag and calling each other comrade, that'll do'.
I emphasise this is from the perspective of the western observer, of course, not the people actually living under such a system. The point is I've sort of gone for the opposite approach here, where many nations act as though the Combine is just the UPSA/Hermandad under a different regime and fail to recognise that its ideology is at the core of its actions and they really mean what they say. (In that sense, I suppose perceptions of Nazi Germany in the 1930s might be a better analogue).
They're all Japanese still (or at least all non-ethnic Russian, probably with some other ethnic minorities recruited) but they wouldn't be what we would recognise as 'ninjas' anymore, so you are right to say the term has somewhat lost its original meaning.
I'm wondering if this is where the ATL term for commando comes from.
Thande
Donor
Yes, that was another typo for the reason I mentioned above - thanks.
(Said computer has now been fixed by a bloke in a shed, so hopefully I can go back to writing LTTW on Word 2007 again now).
I think that the term for commando TTL is "Strike Marine". Commando entered english from its use during the Boer War, so obviously that context wouldn't exist in universe.
It's similar to "kleinkreiger" being used instead of guerilla. I think nindzhya has too much of an association as special forces working for the Russian state, similar to cossacks, to have a generic usage meaning special forces.
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Nice to know my interpretation was at least somewhat deliberate! I do like this inversion of the regular “revolution betrayed” trope. While societism is undoubtedly morphed by its practical implementation, at least it’s close enough to the intended outcome that the Combine can be an ongoing contribution to this world’s political discourse. As you say, the state’s ideology is not just a facade that can be disregarded whenever it proves geopolitically inconvenient. I imagine many diversitarian states will be more pragmatic in that regard, since they mostly seem to be reacting to the societist menace and thus creating an ideology by necessity. Soviet Russia will probably be the extremist exception to that rule, being true believers shaped by national trauma. This is presuming the Sunrise War works out as expected, of course.
On another note, I’ve been thinking about the industrial state of this world, and how this may work out down the line with regard to anthropogenic climate change. The delay in electrics compared to steam-based technology will likely have a deleterious effect on the world’s climate, especially if the relative progress in chemistry leads to better fertilisers and thereby to greater population growth. Having a state like the Combine be in charge of many of the world’s rainforests also can’t be too good for the planet. And in general, a lot of non-Western areas of the world seem to be industrialising far sooner than in OTL. Taken together, there are many factors which might lead to a significant acceleration of climate change; the only limit might be the increased use of strategic nuclear arms, and that’s a rather disastrous and short-term ‘solution’. I imagine all this environmental damage will lead to greater support for environmentalist movements, but how these might interact with the world’s political ideologies, this is yet to be determined. It could be quite interesting!
Diversitarianism's insistence that everyone is entitled to their own truth seems like it would cause serious problems with formulating a response to climate change (or a global pandemic, for that matter).
Thande
Donor
Good news: the IT bloke has fixed the computer I usually write LTTW on.
However, he did replace the BIOS battery, meaning the date has reverted to when I first bought it.
I made good use out of that temporary VAT reduction of Gordon Brown's.
However, he did replace the BIOS battery, meaning the date has reverted to when I first bought it.
I made good use out of that temporary VAT reduction of Gordon Brown's.
Thanks - as I hope I've said before, I particularly enjoy your analysis and speculation, as well as that of other regular posters on this thread.
294.2
Thande
Donor
From: “To Rule the East: Russia and the Pacific, 1640-1960” by A. V. Aksinin (1998, authorised English translation 2002)—
In June 1908, Viktor Vladimirovich Turishchev was a humble junior surveyor in the great bureaucracy of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company. Almost two decades on, he would be destined to rise through the ranks to a position of authority in Yapon and obtain the titular rank of State Counsellor. Yet this promising career would almost be cut short, as Turishchev was one of only a handful of witnesses – and probably the only one with sufficient literacy, travel rights and social standing to publicise it – to an event that could have changed our world beyond all recognition, yet was doomed to obscurity instead. Turishchev was in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia with the goals of both surveying its mineral wealth and potential for future railway expansion. Instead, he bore witness to what he described as ‘the sky splitting in two’, a brilliant fire in the heavens surrounded by an unearthly blue aura like the sunny sky of day, followed by a terrific thunderclap and explosion of pressure that left him and his assistants partially deaf for the rest of their days.
No-one is known to have directly been killed by the event in the forests near the Middle Tunguska River, but villages many miles away saw windows shattered by the pressure wave. Later studies would uncover that the fireball had been seen in the sky as far away as Paris and London, where reportedly it was bright enough to read newspapers by. Seismologists also detected what they thought to be an earthquake tremor in the region of Siberia, and weather reports show former weather patterns affected by the pressure wave. Some studies even showed an increase in particulate matter in the atmosphere, as usually seen after volcanic eruptions.
Yet all of this is in hindsight. Remarkably, as it seems to us, there was rather little ink devoted to reporting the phenomenon at the time. Most newspapers barely mention it. The world had plenty of the usual troubles on its plate in June 1908. The ENA was suffering trance riots in Nouvelle-Orléans and President Faulkner had just suffered the first of his two heart attacks (the second, a few weeks later, would prove fatal). The new Huifu Emperor of China was dealing with terrible floods and famines. France was gripped by the first Autogovernance troubles with Pérousie and organising the royal visit there to diffuse the tensions. Germany was in the throes of a constitutional crisis as the delusional Bundeskaiser Johann Georg was pressured to abdicate. The Societists were in the process of conquering the former New Granada, with the capital of Santa Fe falling only a few days after the event. If the Russians themselves were focused on anything in the RLPC’s holdings, it was controversy over the annexation of their half of the former Superior Republic as the province of Dolgorukovskaya.[7] Therefore, bizarre as it now seems, this great astronomical event was received with, at most, a shrug.
Due to Turishchev’s relatively junior position, it took him a while before he was able to convince his superiors to launch a mission to investigate, with this finally setting forth in 1911.[8] This would raise more question than it answered: consistent with the pressure wave, the trees of the Siberian forest had been flattened in a circular pattern (more than 70 versts in width at its greatest) spreading outwards from the presumed central event. But just what was that event? Many have proposed it was a meteorite impact, perhaps of a body large enough to qualify as a minor sub-planet [asteroid] or a comet. However, no meteorite mass or other solid residue has ever satisfactorily been identified. Some have instead proposed the object exploded in midair prior to impact, like the airburst of a threshold bomb; models estimate that, if so, the force of the explosion was comparable to the most powerful threshold bombs ever tested or used in war.[9] Then, of course, there are the real lunatic theorists, who opine the event was the result of a crashing ultratellurian ‘star-ship’ with an exploding paradox engine.[10] We need not spend any further time on their ravings.
The supposed wild-goose chase did not do anything for Turishchev’s career, and it would not be for many years until it was widely observed that, if the alleged meteorite had struck somewhere on the Earth that was not in the depths of a barely-inhabited forest in North Asia, it would very much not have been a footnote to history. Most obviously, as famously depicted in the American speculative romantic author Christine Evans’ work All Our Yesterdays (1968, filmed 1972), which set off a post-apocalyptic fiction boom, the meteorite could have struck a major city and ravaged a nation. Less immediately obvious is the notion that if it struck an ocean, seemingly harmlessly, this could have caused tremendous waves that would drown the coastlines of those nations bordering that ocean, potentially causing even more loss of life.[11] Under the right circumstances, it might even lead to an artificial winter if sufficient particulate matter was thrown into the atmosphere, comparable to the use of threshold weapons or volcanic eruptions.
This digression is relevant for one reason., as we shall see At the end of 1925, Turishchev occupied a more exalted position in the RLPC bureaucracy, helping oversee the naval base at Vostochny Krongorod on the bay of Vostochny Pavlovsk.[12] His diary and official writings are a useful source for wartime relations between the Yapontsi and their Russian overlords; Turishchev was far more sympathetic to the Yapontsi than most of his colleagues. He wrote, prophetically, that Russia’s hardline approach to rule – such as forcing Yapontsi serfs to continue their war factory work even when the plague was burning through the country and spreading in the factories – would come back to hurt his country in time. Though none could have guessed precisely how, of course. Somewhat paradoxically, and sadly, it is only through the writings of men like Turishchev that we have any records at all of many aspects of Yapontsi culture, even in its adulterated form under the Tsar’s bootheel.
Turishchev even wrote, briefly, of the Kurohata brigade, which had been whispered of since before his early years in the colony and is worth a digression of its own.[13] When Moritz Benyovsky had left the Japanese Islands in 1823, he had been the most powerful man in that archipelago, with the scattered Yapontsi han domains split in loyalty between the northern emperor Kojimo (truly under the authority of the Shogun Tokugawa Yoshihide) and the southern emperor Yasuhito in Nagasaki. In practice, those two had become little more than two slightly superior warlords among many, as each daimyo lord looked to the survival of his own han.[14] This situation would continue to deteriorate for the next five decades; daimyos were forced into treaties of protection that would see their domain revert directly to RLPC control if they died without heirs, for example, which many of them then conveniently did. RLPC factories were constructed in cities such as Benyovsk [Akita], Fyodorsk [Niigata], and ultimately polite fictions would slowly be degraded as they set up shop in cities as important as Molnarsk [Kyoto] and Vostochny Pavlovsk [Tokyo]. The northern court would split into two in 1839 and fight a civil war in which the Russians backed both Tokugawa Shoguns simultaneously, weakening both and reducing them to a footnote of history. The Kojimo emperor passed away in 1843; the Russians would keep his son around opportunistically as a puppet, but by this time most Yapontsi had abandoned any such loyalty, looking to Yasuhito and his son Yukihito in the south. But the southern emperor of Nagasaki had, by this time, become a puppet in turn of the Coreans’ own trading interests in the islands of Sikoke and Kiushu. Nonetheless, by this point many Yapontsi would take even their hereditary foes of Corea over the Russians.
Up to the 1870s, Company rule in Yapon had focused on making profit, often ruthlessly, but with its policy aimed at this sole goal. Mistreatment of the Yapontsi, forbidding them certain technologies that might aid a rebellion, and so on were all based on this. But the brutal and arbitrary rule of the exiled Prince Dolgorukov, and his inevitable ensuing assassination and the Great Hanran Rebellion, would spell an end to such solely corporate domination.[15] The rebels were brave but foolhardy, and their revolt was crushed by the Company army with regular reinforcements, aided by the Company maintaining control of the railways and Lectel lines. This would not have been possible without a substantial portion of Yapontsi ‘loyalists’ or ‘collaborators’ (depending on whom one asks), something frequently missed out of such histories. After the Hanran, Russian policy would shift towards direct rule in Yapon, with the unceremonious deposal (and often disposal) of the last northern claimant and the feudal daimyos. Each surviving han domain was arbitrarily carved up, along with the Company’s directly-controlled ‘Agencies’, in favour of new oblasts and uyezds theoretically ruled from Petrograd. Yapon had been reduced to a mere extension of the Russian Empire, save for the southern Corean-controlled portions (Sikoke, Kiushu and the western part of Chugoku in Niphon) which still maintained a puppet emperor.
Some Yapontsi still looked to the southern emperor, but few believed Corea could ever seriously challenge Russia. As late as the Pandoric War, there were forces looking to support the Teruhito emperor in a revolt against the Russians (which was quelled before it began). The Panic of 1917 would put paid to this idea once and for all, when wealthy Corean businessmen fled to the Corean colonies in Yapon to escape public unrest in Hanseong.[16] The restored, but shaky, Corean government repaid China for her aid in putting down the unrest by giving her concessions which some claimed amounted to practically handing over the colonies, as Belgium had hers to Russia. One consequence of this was that China was finally able to force a ‘Japanese’ emperor, if only a nominal one, to give up the title – one whose claimed equality which had incensed Chinese Emperors since 607 AD, when a Japanese diplomat had brought a missive ‘from the Emperor of the Sunrise to the Emperor of the Sunset’.[17] Teruhito was forced to reduce his status to that of King, comparable to the King of Corea. Of course, all of this was a legal fiction considering this ‘emperor’ had been a puppet of that ‘king’, but it was seen as a popular symbolic win among the court in Hanjing.[18] Regardless, this was the final nail in the coffin for any Yapontsi nationalist movement focused on Teruhito, who had visibly lost any claim to authority he had.
Even before Teruhito’s demotion, though, many Yapontsi would-be rebels had turned to symbols farther afield (or, indeed, closer to home). Many revolutionaries embraced the old Japanese identity but sought to divorce it from the rule of the Emperor, a paradox which many more found impossible to resolve – instead vaguely alluding to the true heir coming forth when the time was right. Some commentators claim that the pre-emptive Russian crackdown on a planned revolt during the Pandoric War ultimately empowered the Kurohata brigade. Having decapitated the republican nationalist groups, a large group of footsoldiers – already having made the mental leap of going against the idea of an Emperor – were then sucked into the vortex of a more radical notion. The Kurohata or ‘Black Banner’ was founded in the late 1880s by Shigeru (or possibly Goro) Yamaguchi, better known by his Russian name Pyotr Yamagutsin. Yamagutsin had grown up in Nagasaki and witnessed both the weakness of the southern court and the growing strength of outsiders – including the visiting Meridian traders, who had inherited the use of the former Dutch trading concession when the Batavian Republic joined the Hermandad. Contrary to what one might imagine, it appears Yamagutsin was introduced to the writings of Pablo Sanchez not directly by the Meridians, but by an early Chinese translation. While the old Yapontsi language did partially use Chinese ideograms, the two are not completely intelligible, and some say the precise form of Societism in Yapon derives from this corrupt source. However, many of these are apologists who simply reject the beautiful truth that Societism manifests differently in every nation that tries it, disproving its own core claim.[19]
Yamagutsin initially rejected Sanchezism and joined the 1878 Hanran revolt, but his bitter realisation it was doomed to defeat led him back to the ‘Black Book’. The Kurohata, Yamagutsin’s disciples, accepted his core tenet that the Yapontsi were doomed so long as they sought to recreate a vague, idealised memory of the ‘Japanese’ civilisation. He pointed to decisions that had left the country weak and vulnerable to the Russians, such as the bans on trade and firearms, scathingly arguing that the Japan of two centuries earlier would have had a better chance of resisting Benyovsky’s men. He argued that these were the result of trying to artificially sustain an ancient feudal monarchy into the present day, coming up with half-hearted workarounds like the Shogunate rather than true revolutionary change. If Yamagutsin had not read the fatal book, he might have been the one to create a new kind of post-imperial Yapontsi nationalism; instead, he decided it was Yapontsi culture itself that was to blame for their servitude. Through the medium of poetry, he called attention to the language’s inefficient writing system and complex array of social suffixes, the culture’s historical preference for imperfectly aping China over original ideas (‘a swift-swimming fish that dreams of being a bird will always consider itself a failure’), and, he claimed, a tendency to always look back rather than forward. Rather than considering Yapon in isolation, he also brought up comparisons to other nations which had fallen behind for what he claimed were similar reasons, such as Spain, Francis II’s Austria and so on. Most of his disciples would not have recognised these, but they cemented his reputation as a man of wisdom; almost a prophet.
Societism in Yapon was therefore in existence long before the Pandoric Revolution in South America. For now, it was one of the few places which Alfarus’ cadres had not managed to make contact with; despite so much focus on Africa, there was still a residual prejudice that the Yapontsi were beneath notice. It was the same terrible logic that would inform Operation Covenanter, as Turishchev would soon witness. And, in turn, that operation would affect Alfarus’ decisions on where to focus on. The result was that there would be something paradoxically nationalistic about Yapontsi Societism; the immolation of its own culture was for the purported end of freedom from oppressors. That very act of national suicide was in the tradition of a culture which had so long embraced the idea of suicide for honour’s sake; the whole Yamato people would commit Kharakyry on their own nation to save it, as they saw it.[20]
Yet all of that lay in the future for now. The Kurohata had ensured they would be in the right place at the right time to seize the moment if it presented itself, other anti-Russian movements all having failed or disqualified themselves. That moment had not yet come, but the events of January 25th, 1926 would start down the path to it, more than thirty years later.
The American invasion of Kamchatka Oblast, already somewhat quixotic, had ground to a halt when the Russians under General Zhdanovich repulsed the Americans under General Bissell at the siege of Savelyevsk in October 1925. The bitter winter resulted in the entire coastline of the Sea of Okhotsk, stretching as far south as Edzo Island, becoming impassable due to pack ice. Resupply of Bissell’s forces therefore became extremely difficult, while Zhdanovich could still bring in supplies from the factories of Yapon via the ice-free waters of the Sea of Japan and access to Chinese and Corean railway lines. Admiral Bartley and other war planners clamoured to President Gilmore that the Russians’ resupply operations must be interrupted, or Bissell would inevitably be pushed back. Gilmore tried to put diplomatic pressure on China and Corea and was casually rebuffed, which some biographers claim was a shock realisation on his part of the limits of American power. Plan B consisted of Bartley’s notion of an attack on Yapon itself to interrupt the munition factories’ work and, perhaps, inflict further damage on the Russian fleet. This seeming afterthought, once again, reveals the profound jealousy and rivalry between the French and American armed forces in the Pacific. Though the French were currently engaged in their bloody and doomed invasion of Gavaji, Admiral Chambord’s naval successes were perceived as trying to match or surpass the Goodman Sea qualified victory (as, indeed, they were). Both French and American war plans were being drawn up with goals as vague as one-upping the other, and the results would be the deaths of a lot of young men and America’s fatal vulnerability at precisely the wrong time.
Bartley’s previous plan had focused on Operation Roundhead over the Bering Strait, which had been a great success until stalling at Savelyevsk, and Operation Cavalier, which had sought to take the Aleutian Islands to approach Russian holdings from the sea. This had been not only less of a success (with stubborn Yapontsi conscripts fighting to the death to hold the islands) but had been rapidly obsoleted by the unexpected degree of success of Roundhead. With the Russian fleet ever weaker, Bartley now argued that rather than island-hopping their way to Yapon, the Imperial Navy should now seek a direct attack on the deadly factories. Or so the anodyne American records would put it; despite attempts at censorship and classification, there is no escaping the conclusion that the real targets were the Yapontsi people themselves, dismissed as mere automata, cogs in the mechanisms churning out shells and bombs for Zhdanovich’s army. Though much focus has been put on such an attitude stemming from Russians themselves (Turishchev demonstrating that this was not true of all), it is often forgotten that the same contempt was replicated in other nations. Eventually, the Yapontsi would prove them wrong, something which many writers are still struggling to reconcile with their prejudices.
Bartley’s plan was dubbed Operation Covenanter, after a third faction in the English Civil War.[21] Like his earlier plans, it has been criticised in hindsight for vagueness of objectives; Roundhead’s success had silenced Bartley’s critics, but that success had been born of Russian weakness rather than any brilliance of Bartley. The same would be true of Covenanter. A great American fleet was amassed, once more under the command of Admiral Crittenden, and sent to bombard the factories and other ‘crucial targets’ on the eastern coast of Yapon. Just as he had at the Goodman Sea, Crittenden steadfastly focused on bombardment via the main armament of his lineships, and was reluctant to even use HIMS Cygnia and her dromes until explicitly ordered to. As a waspish insult reflective of the controversy and debate over Julian Worth’s actions at the earlier battle, the Cygnia was assigned to attack the Vostochny Krongorod naval yards where Turishchev worked; as the Russian navy was so depleted, this was not considered a significant target compared to the factories.
Turishchev, from his experience with the mysterious event on the Tunguska, recognised the feel of a pressure wave from a distant drome bomb attack from the Cygnia before his colleagues did, and insisted on reporting the attack in the face of scepticism, others claiming it was ‘only’ a local terrorist bomb. As a result, nearby Vostochny Pavlovsk was forewarned (as the lineships had not yet arrived into position) and the Russian authorities were able to respond, deploying defensive ironsharks and evacuating buildings. However, this act – which undoubtedly saved many lives – ultimately backfired for Russian authority in Yapon. Despite the stubborn Crittenden’s lineship guns being considerably less effective than the bombs from the Cygnia’s dromes, the fleet still inflicted considerable damage on their targets – not merely the factories, but the fragile residential areas of the city, its buildings still largely made of wood. The attack on Vostochny Pavlovsk was not the only one of Operation Covenanter, but it is the one best remembered. The evacuation order saved some lives, families who lost their homes and belongings, but it also created a great number of witnesses to the debacle. The Russians had demonstrated that they had at least some warning, had hastily prepared a response, and had failed. The depleted ironsharks and undermanned coastal batteries failed to inflict more than token damage on Crittenden’s fleet. Almost all Russian capital ships had been sent to help Gavaji (or to escort convoys there), with Yapon seen as a relatively peaceful backwater. The very idea of another power seeking to attack it was alien to the RLPC mindset; the islands had been their near-exclusive playground for so long.
In the end, Crittenden’s fleet retreated back to Drakesland and Californian ports not because it had been driven off by Russian forces, but because his ships had simply expended almost all their ammunition and need to keep a little in reserve for the journey home, in case they ran into a vengeful Russian fleet (they did not). The damage to Yapon, though costly in terms of lives (despite the evacuation) and property, did far less to the resupply of Zhdanovich than the Americans may have rather vaguely hoped. Zhdanovich successfully pushed Bissell back eastward, and by the time the pack ice melted, the Americans had fallen back to Penzhina Bay. This was a welcome, if minor, victory for the Russians at a time when they were facing the success of Operazione Fulmine in Poland, and was widely trumpeted in the Petrograd press – while conveniently consigning the Yapon attack to a footnote.
It had not been recognised by Tsar Paul or the Soviet, but what Covenanter had demonstrated was that his policies had stripped the Company bare and left it vulnerable to attack. And not only from outside; the lesson, slowly internalised by the Yapontsi people as they worked to rebuild through plague and deprivation, was that if the Russians could not fight off the Americans, perhaps, in time, they could also not fight off a rebellion from within…
Yet Covenanter would have even more far-reaching consequences. In order to further build up Crittenden’s fleet before the attack and replace his losses from the Goodman Sea, more and more American ships had traversed the Nicaragua Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific. If the Russians had stripped their Far East bare, the Americans were in danger of doing the same to their own eastern seaboard. But why not? Belgium was defeated, there was no way the Russians could break out of the Baltic to threaten American cities… [22]
[7] See Parts #258, #263 and #266, among others, in Volume VII.
[8] It took even longer in OTL due to the upheavals in Russia over the next couple of decades, with Leonid Kulik visiting the area in 1921 for mineralogical purposes, learning about the then-forgotten event, and returning in 1927 for a more thorough survey.
[9] For comparison, OTL estimates compare it to 1,000 times the blast of the Hiroshima bomb or about one-third of the Tsar Bomba.
[10] Paradox engine is one of two names commonly used in TTL for nuclear reactor, the other being carytic reactor or carytic engine (from ‘caryus’ or ‘nut’, as that term was preferred in TTL for the nucleus of a cell and, by analogy, the nuclear of an atom). The term ‘paradox engine’ is the result of a quip by a classically-educated scientist who objected that one cannot ‘split the atom’ without a logical paradox, because the term ‘atom’ means ‘unsplittable’, so if it was now found to be divisible, it should no longer be called the atom. He did not get his way on that but, as with many scientists trying to create supposedly self-evidently ridiculous illustrations to discredit their opponents (the Big Bang Theory, Schroedinger’s Cat, etc.) he ended up accidentally naming the theory or device he opposed.
[11] Note that this book was written before the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami (referred to in TTL as the Fiesta de San Esteban Massacre) so the author does not draw a comparison to that.
[12] ‘Krongorod of the East’, in reference to the Baltic naval base at Krongorod (OTL Kronstadt or Kronshtadt, a partial victim of the anti-German linguistic Russification policies practised in TTL’s Russia). This base is located roughly where the OTL Yokosuka Naval Arsenal is on Tokyo Bay; recall that in TTL Tokyo/Edo is officially referred to merely as Vostochny Pavlovsk.
[13] See Part #248 in Volume VI.
[14] See Part #155 in Volume III. Note the term ‘Japanese Islands’ is still used geographically, even though their inhabitants are usually referred to as ‘Yapontsi’. The term ‘Japanese’ in an ethno-linguistic sense is usually only employed in an obsolete fashion as when referring to a former civilisation (e.g. Persia vs Iran in OTL).
[15] See Part #215 in Volume V.
[16] See Part #270 in Volume VI.
[17] The diplomat was Ono no Imoko and the Chinese Emperor in question was Emperor Yang of the short-lived Sui Dynasty. Under the Sinocentric worldview of China, there was only one legitimate Son of Heaven and a ‘barbarian’ kingdom claiming an equal title was seen as a grave insult.
[18] By this point, the Huifu Emperor had already introduced the idea of a rotating capital between four cities, but Hanjing is still commonly cited as ‘the’ capital of China in this context.
[19] A footnote here indicates that the last sentence was added by a Russian censor; it has been retained in the English translation but highlighted to note this.
[20] The Russified form of hara-kiri, i.e., seppuku. This description is, of course, seen through the cultural lens of an outsider’s perception only familiar with a shallow understanding of that culture.
[21] Strictly, this should be the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, as the Covenanters were a Scottish faction.
[22] As we’ll see later, this is perpetuating a fiction that the American military simply ignored the Societists as a threat, which is not entirely true.
In June 1908, Viktor Vladimirovich Turishchev was a humble junior surveyor in the great bureaucracy of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company. Almost two decades on, he would be destined to rise through the ranks to a position of authority in Yapon and obtain the titular rank of State Counsellor. Yet this promising career would almost be cut short, as Turishchev was one of only a handful of witnesses – and probably the only one with sufficient literacy, travel rights and social standing to publicise it – to an event that could have changed our world beyond all recognition, yet was doomed to obscurity instead. Turishchev was in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia with the goals of both surveying its mineral wealth and potential for future railway expansion. Instead, he bore witness to what he described as ‘the sky splitting in two’, a brilliant fire in the heavens surrounded by an unearthly blue aura like the sunny sky of day, followed by a terrific thunderclap and explosion of pressure that left him and his assistants partially deaf for the rest of their days.
No-one is known to have directly been killed by the event in the forests near the Middle Tunguska River, but villages many miles away saw windows shattered by the pressure wave. Later studies would uncover that the fireball had been seen in the sky as far away as Paris and London, where reportedly it was bright enough to read newspapers by. Seismologists also detected what they thought to be an earthquake tremor in the region of Siberia, and weather reports show former weather patterns affected by the pressure wave. Some studies even showed an increase in particulate matter in the atmosphere, as usually seen after volcanic eruptions.
Yet all of this is in hindsight. Remarkably, as it seems to us, there was rather little ink devoted to reporting the phenomenon at the time. Most newspapers barely mention it. The world had plenty of the usual troubles on its plate in June 1908. The ENA was suffering trance riots in Nouvelle-Orléans and President Faulkner had just suffered the first of his two heart attacks (the second, a few weeks later, would prove fatal). The new Huifu Emperor of China was dealing with terrible floods and famines. France was gripped by the first Autogovernance troubles with Pérousie and organising the royal visit there to diffuse the tensions. Germany was in the throes of a constitutional crisis as the delusional Bundeskaiser Johann Georg was pressured to abdicate. The Societists were in the process of conquering the former New Granada, with the capital of Santa Fe falling only a few days after the event. If the Russians themselves were focused on anything in the RLPC’s holdings, it was controversy over the annexation of their half of the former Superior Republic as the province of Dolgorukovskaya.[7] Therefore, bizarre as it now seems, this great astronomical event was received with, at most, a shrug.
Due to Turishchev’s relatively junior position, it took him a while before he was able to convince his superiors to launch a mission to investigate, with this finally setting forth in 1911.[8] This would raise more question than it answered: consistent with the pressure wave, the trees of the Siberian forest had been flattened in a circular pattern (more than 70 versts in width at its greatest) spreading outwards from the presumed central event. But just what was that event? Many have proposed it was a meteorite impact, perhaps of a body large enough to qualify as a minor sub-planet [asteroid] or a comet. However, no meteorite mass or other solid residue has ever satisfactorily been identified. Some have instead proposed the object exploded in midair prior to impact, like the airburst of a threshold bomb; models estimate that, if so, the force of the explosion was comparable to the most powerful threshold bombs ever tested or used in war.[9] Then, of course, there are the real lunatic theorists, who opine the event was the result of a crashing ultratellurian ‘star-ship’ with an exploding paradox engine.[10] We need not spend any further time on their ravings.
The supposed wild-goose chase did not do anything for Turishchev’s career, and it would not be for many years until it was widely observed that, if the alleged meteorite had struck somewhere on the Earth that was not in the depths of a barely-inhabited forest in North Asia, it would very much not have been a footnote to history. Most obviously, as famously depicted in the American speculative romantic author Christine Evans’ work All Our Yesterdays (1968, filmed 1972), which set off a post-apocalyptic fiction boom, the meteorite could have struck a major city and ravaged a nation. Less immediately obvious is the notion that if it struck an ocean, seemingly harmlessly, this could have caused tremendous waves that would drown the coastlines of those nations bordering that ocean, potentially causing even more loss of life.[11] Under the right circumstances, it might even lead to an artificial winter if sufficient particulate matter was thrown into the atmosphere, comparable to the use of threshold weapons or volcanic eruptions.
This digression is relevant for one reason., as we shall see At the end of 1925, Turishchev occupied a more exalted position in the RLPC bureaucracy, helping oversee the naval base at Vostochny Krongorod on the bay of Vostochny Pavlovsk.[12] His diary and official writings are a useful source for wartime relations between the Yapontsi and their Russian overlords; Turishchev was far more sympathetic to the Yapontsi than most of his colleagues. He wrote, prophetically, that Russia’s hardline approach to rule – such as forcing Yapontsi serfs to continue their war factory work even when the plague was burning through the country and spreading in the factories – would come back to hurt his country in time. Though none could have guessed precisely how, of course. Somewhat paradoxically, and sadly, it is only through the writings of men like Turishchev that we have any records at all of many aspects of Yapontsi culture, even in its adulterated form under the Tsar’s bootheel.
Turishchev even wrote, briefly, of the Kurohata brigade, which had been whispered of since before his early years in the colony and is worth a digression of its own.[13] When Moritz Benyovsky had left the Japanese Islands in 1823, he had been the most powerful man in that archipelago, with the scattered Yapontsi han domains split in loyalty between the northern emperor Kojimo (truly under the authority of the Shogun Tokugawa Yoshihide) and the southern emperor Yasuhito in Nagasaki. In practice, those two had become little more than two slightly superior warlords among many, as each daimyo lord looked to the survival of his own han.[14] This situation would continue to deteriorate for the next five decades; daimyos were forced into treaties of protection that would see their domain revert directly to RLPC control if they died without heirs, for example, which many of them then conveniently did. RLPC factories were constructed in cities such as Benyovsk [Akita], Fyodorsk [Niigata], and ultimately polite fictions would slowly be degraded as they set up shop in cities as important as Molnarsk [Kyoto] and Vostochny Pavlovsk [Tokyo]. The northern court would split into two in 1839 and fight a civil war in which the Russians backed both Tokugawa Shoguns simultaneously, weakening both and reducing them to a footnote of history. The Kojimo emperor passed away in 1843; the Russians would keep his son around opportunistically as a puppet, but by this time most Yapontsi had abandoned any such loyalty, looking to Yasuhito and his son Yukihito in the south. But the southern emperor of Nagasaki had, by this time, become a puppet in turn of the Coreans’ own trading interests in the islands of Sikoke and Kiushu. Nonetheless, by this point many Yapontsi would take even their hereditary foes of Corea over the Russians.
Up to the 1870s, Company rule in Yapon had focused on making profit, often ruthlessly, but with its policy aimed at this sole goal. Mistreatment of the Yapontsi, forbidding them certain technologies that might aid a rebellion, and so on were all based on this. But the brutal and arbitrary rule of the exiled Prince Dolgorukov, and his inevitable ensuing assassination and the Great Hanran Rebellion, would spell an end to such solely corporate domination.[15] The rebels were brave but foolhardy, and their revolt was crushed by the Company army with regular reinforcements, aided by the Company maintaining control of the railways and Lectel lines. This would not have been possible without a substantial portion of Yapontsi ‘loyalists’ or ‘collaborators’ (depending on whom one asks), something frequently missed out of such histories. After the Hanran, Russian policy would shift towards direct rule in Yapon, with the unceremonious deposal (and often disposal) of the last northern claimant and the feudal daimyos. Each surviving han domain was arbitrarily carved up, along with the Company’s directly-controlled ‘Agencies’, in favour of new oblasts and uyezds theoretically ruled from Petrograd. Yapon had been reduced to a mere extension of the Russian Empire, save for the southern Corean-controlled portions (Sikoke, Kiushu and the western part of Chugoku in Niphon) which still maintained a puppet emperor.
Some Yapontsi still looked to the southern emperor, but few believed Corea could ever seriously challenge Russia. As late as the Pandoric War, there were forces looking to support the Teruhito emperor in a revolt against the Russians (which was quelled before it began). The Panic of 1917 would put paid to this idea once and for all, when wealthy Corean businessmen fled to the Corean colonies in Yapon to escape public unrest in Hanseong.[16] The restored, but shaky, Corean government repaid China for her aid in putting down the unrest by giving her concessions which some claimed amounted to practically handing over the colonies, as Belgium had hers to Russia. One consequence of this was that China was finally able to force a ‘Japanese’ emperor, if only a nominal one, to give up the title – one whose claimed equality which had incensed Chinese Emperors since 607 AD, when a Japanese diplomat had brought a missive ‘from the Emperor of the Sunrise to the Emperor of the Sunset’.[17] Teruhito was forced to reduce his status to that of King, comparable to the King of Corea. Of course, all of this was a legal fiction considering this ‘emperor’ had been a puppet of that ‘king’, but it was seen as a popular symbolic win among the court in Hanjing.[18] Regardless, this was the final nail in the coffin for any Yapontsi nationalist movement focused on Teruhito, who had visibly lost any claim to authority he had.
Even before Teruhito’s demotion, though, many Yapontsi would-be rebels had turned to symbols farther afield (or, indeed, closer to home). Many revolutionaries embraced the old Japanese identity but sought to divorce it from the rule of the Emperor, a paradox which many more found impossible to resolve – instead vaguely alluding to the true heir coming forth when the time was right. Some commentators claim that the pre-emptive Russian crackdown on a planned revolt during the Pandoric War ultimately empowered the Kurohata brigade. Having decapitated the republican nationalist groups, a large group of footsoldiers – already having made the mental leap of going against the idea of an Emperor – were then sucked into the vortex of a more radical notion. The Kurohata or ‘Black Banner’ was founded in the late 1880s by Shigeru (or possibly Goro) Yamaguchi, better known by his Russian name Pyotr Yamagutsin. Yamagutsin had grown up in Nagasaki and witnessed both the weakness of the southern court and the growing strength of outsiders – including the visiting Meridian traders, who had inherited the use of the former Dutch trading concession when the Batavian Republic joined the Hermandad. Contrary to what one might imagine, it appears Yamagutsin was introduced to the writings of Pablo Sanchez not directly by the Meridians, but by an early Chinese translation. While the old Yapontsi language did partially use Chinese ideograms, the two are not completely intelligible, and some say the precise form of Societism in Yapon derives from this corrupt source. However, many of these are apologists who simply reject the beautiful truth that Societism manifests differently in every nation that tries it, disproving its own core claim.[19]
Yamagutsin initially rejected Sanchezism and joined the 1878 Hanran revolt, but his bitter realisation it was doomed to defeat led him back to the ‘Black Book’. The Kurohata, Yamagutsin’s disciples, accepted his core tenet that the Yapontsi were doomed so long as they sought to recreate a vague, idealised memory of the ‘Japanese’ civilisation. He pointed to decisions that had left the country weak and vulnerable to the Russians, such as the bans on trade and firearms, scathingly arguing that the Japan of two centuries earlier would have had a better chance of resisting Benyovsky’s men. He argued that these were the result of trying to artificially sustain an ancient feudal monarchy into the present day, coming up with half-hearted workarounds like the Shogunate rather than true revolutionary change. If Yamagutsin had not read the fatal book, he might have been the one to create a new kind of post-imperial Yapontsi nationalism; instead, he decided it was Yapontsi culture itself that was to blame for their servitude. Through the medium of poetry, he called attention to the language’s inefficient writing system and complex array of social suffixes, the culture’s historical preference for imperfectly aping China over original ideas (‘a swift-swimming fish that dreams of being a bird will always consider itself a failure’), and, he claimed, a tendency to always look back rather than forward. Rather than considering Yapon in isolation, he also brought up comparisons to other nations which had fallen behind for what he claimed were similar reasons, such as Spain, Francis II’s Austria and so on. Most of his disciples would not have recognised these, but they cemented his reputation as a man of wisdom; almost a prophet.
Societism in Yapon was therefore in existence long before the Pandoric Revolution in South America. For now, it was one of the few places which Alfarus’ cadres had not managed to make contact with; despite so much focus on Africa, there was still a residual prejudice that the Yapontsi were beneath notice. It was the same terrible logic that would inform Operation Covenanter, as Turishchev would soon witness. And, in turn, that operation would affect Alfarus’ decisions on where to focus on. The result was that there would be something paradoxically nationalistic about Yapontsi Societism; the immolation of its own culture was for the purported end of freedom from oppressors. That very act of national suicide was in the tradition of a culture which had so long embraced the idea of suicide for honour’s sake; the whole Yamato people would commit Kharakyry on their own nation to save it, as they saw it.[20]
Yet all of that lay in the future for now. The Kurohata had ensured they would be in the right place at the right time to seize the moment if it presented itself, other anti-Russian movements all having failed or disqualified themselves. That moment had not yet come, but the events of January 25th, 1926 would start down the path to it, more than thirty years later.
The American invasion of Kamchatka Oblast, already somewhat quixotic, had ground to a halt when the Russians under General Zhdanovich repulsed the Americans under General Bissell at the siege of Savelyevsk in October 1925. The bitter winter resulted in the entire coastline of the Sea of Okhotsk, stretching as far south as Edzo Island, becoming impassable due to pack ice. Resupply of Bissell’s forces therefore became extremely difficult, while Zhdanovich could still bring in supplies from the factories of Yapon via the ice-free waters of the Sea of Japan and access to Chinese and Corean railway lines. Admiral Bartley and other war planners clamoured to President Gilmore that the Russians’ resupply operations must be interrupted, or Bissell would inevitably be pushed back. Gilmore tried to put diplomatic pressure on China and Corea and was casually rebuffed, which some biographers claim was a shock realisation on his part of the limits of American power. Plan B consisted of Bartley’s notion of an attack on Yapon itself to interrupt the munition factories’ work and, perhaps, inflict further damage on the Russian fleet. This seeming afterthought, once again, reveals the profound jealousy and rivalry between the French and American armed forces in the Pacific. Though the French were currently engaged in their bloody and doomed invasion of Gavaji, Admiral Chambord’s naval successes were perceived as trying to match or surpass the Goodman Sea qualified victory (as, indeed, they were). Both French and American war plans were being drawn up with goals as vague as one-upping the other, and the results would be the deaths of a lot of young men and America’s fatal vulnerability at precisely the wrong time.
Bartley’s previous plan had focused on Operation Roundhead over the Bering Strait, which had been a great success until stalling at Savelyevsk, and Operation Cavalier, which had sought to take the Aleutian Islands to approach Russian holdings from the sea. This had been not only less of a success (with stubborn Yapontsi conscripts fighting to the death to hold the islands) but had been rapidly obsoleted by the unexpected degree of success of Roundhead. With the Russian fleet ever weaker, Bartley now argued that rather than island-hopping their way to Yapon, the Imperial Navy should now seek a direct attack on the deadly factories. Or so the anodyne American records would put it; despite attempts at censorship and classification, there is no escaping the conclusion that the real targets were the Yapontsi people themselves, dismissed as mere automata, cogs in the mechanisms churning out shells and bombs for Zhdanovich’s army. Though much focus has been put on such an attitude stemming from Russians themselves (Turishchev demonstrating that this was not true of all), it is often forgotten that the same contempt was replicated in other nations. Eventually, the Yapontsi would prove them wrong, something which many writers are still struggling to reconcile with their prejudices.
Bartley’s plan was dubbed Operation Covenanter, after a third faction in the English Civil War.[21] Like his earlier plans, it has been criticised in hindsight for vagueness of objectives; Roundhead’s success had silenced Bartley’s critics, but that success had been born of Russian weakness rather than any brilliance of Bartley. The same would be true of Covenanter. A great American fleet was amassed, once more under the command of Admiral Crittenden, and sent to bombard the factories and other ‘crucial targets’ on the eastern coast of Yapon. Just as he had at the Goodman Sea, Crittenden steadfastly focused on bombardment via the main armament of his lineships, and was reluctant to even use HIMS Cygnia and her dromes until explicitly ordered to. As a waspish insult reflective of the controversy and debate over Julian Worth’s actions at the earlier battle, the Cygnia was assigned to attack the Vostochny Krongorod naval yards where Turishchev worked; as the Russian navy was so depleted, this was not considered a significant target compared to the factories.
Turishchev, from his experience with the mysterious event on the Tunguska, recognised the feel of a pressure wave from a distant drome bomb attack from the Cygnia before his colleagues did, and insisted on reporting the attack in the face of scepticism, others claiming it was ‘only’ a local terrorist bomb. As a result, nearby Vostochny Pavlovsk was forewarned (as the lineships had not yet arrived into position) and the Russian authorities were able to respond, deploying defensive ironsharks and evacuating buildings. However, this act – which undoubtedly saved many lives – ultimately backfired for Russian authority in Yapon. Despite the stubborn Crittenden’s lineship guns being considerably less effective than the bombs from the Cygnia’s dromes, the fleet still inflicted considerable damage on their targets – not merely the factories, but the fragile residential areas of the city, its buildings still largely made of wood. The attack on Vostochny Pavlovsk was not the only one of Operation Covenanter, but it is the one best remembered. The evacuation order saved some lives, families who lost their homes and belongings, but it also created a great number of witnesses to the debacle. The Russians had demonstrated that they had at least some warning, had hastily prepared a response, and had failed. The depleted ironsharks and undermanned coastal batteries failed to inflict more than token damage on Crittenden’s fleet. Almost all Russian capital ships had been sent to help Gavaji (or to escort convoys there), with Yapon seen as a relatively peaceful backwater. The very idea of another power seeking to attack it was alien to the RLPC mindset; the islands had been their near-exclusive playground for so long.
In the end, Crittenden’s fleet retreated back to Drakesland and Californian ports not because it had been driven off by Russian forces, but because his ships had simply expended almost all their ammunition and need to keep a little in reserve for the journey home, in case they ran into a vengeful Russian fleet (they did not). The damage to Yapon, though costly in terms of lives (despite the evacuation) and property, did far less to the resupply of Zhdanovich than the Americans may have rather vaguely hoped. Zhdanovich successfully pushed Bissell back eastward, and by the time the pack ice melted, the Americans had fallen back to Penzhina Bay. This was a welcome, if minor, victory for the Russians at a time when they were facing the success of Operazione Fulmine in Poland, and was widely trumpeted in the Petrograd press – while conveniently consigning the Yapon attack to a footnote.
It had not been recognised by Tsar Paul or the Soviet, but what Covenanter had demonstrated was that his policies had stripped the Company bare and left it vulnerable to attack. And not only from outside; the lesson, slowly internalised by the Yapontsi people as they worked to rebuild through plague and deprivation, was that if the Russians could not fight off the Americans, perhaps, in time, they could also not fight off a rebellion from within…
Yet Covenanter would have even more far-reaching consequences. In order to further build up Crittenden’s fleet before the attack and replace his losses from the Goodman Sea, more and more American ships had traversed the Nicaragua Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific. If the Russians had stripped their Far East bare, the Americans were in danger of doing the same to their own eastern seaboard. But why not? Belgium was defeated, there was no way the Russians could break out of the Baltic to threaten American cities… [22]
[7] See Parts #258, #263 and #266, among others, in Volume VII.
[8] It took even longer in OTL due to the upheavals in Russia over the next couple of decades, with Leonid Kulik visiting the area in 1921 for mineralogical purposes, learning about the then-forgotten event, and returning in 1927 for a more thorough survey.
[9] For comparison, OTL estimates compare it to 1,000 times the blast of the Hiroshima bomb or about one-third of the Tsar Bomba.
[10] Paradox engine is one of two names commonly used in TTL for nuclear reactor, the other being carytic reactor or carytic engine (from ‘caryus’ or ‘nut’, as that term was preferred in TTL for the nucleus of a cell and, by analogy, the nuclear of an atom). The term ‘paradox engine’ is the result of a quip by a classically-educated scientist who objected that one cannot ‘split the atom’ without a logical paradox, because the term ‘atom’ means ‘unsplittable’, so if it was now found to be divisible, it should no longer be called the atom. He did not get his way on that but, as with many scientists trying to create supposedly self-evidently ridiculous illustrations to discredit their opponents (the Big Bang Theory, Schroedinger’s Cat, etc.) he ended up accidentally naming the theory or device he opposed.
[11] Note that this book was written before the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami (referred to in TTL as the Fiesta de San Esteban Massacre) so the author does not draw a comparison to that.
[12] ‘Krongorod of the East’, in reference to the Baltic naval base at Krongorod (OTL Kronstadt or Kronshtadt, a partial victim of the anti-German linguistic Russification policies practised in TTL’s Russia). This base is located roughly where the OTL Yokosuka Naval Arsenal is on Tokyo Bay; recall that in TTL Tokyo/Edo is officially referred to merely as Vostochny Pavlovsk.
[13] See Part #248 in Volume VI.
[14] See Part #155 in Volume III. Note the term ‘Japanese Islands’ is still used geographically, even though their inhabitants are usually referred to as ‘Yapontsi’. The term ‘Japanese’ in an ethno-linguistic sense is usually only employed in an obsolete fashion as when referring to a former civilisation (e.g. Persia vs Iran in OTL).
[15] See Part #215 in Volume V.
[16] See Part #270 in Volume VI.
[17] The diplomat was Ono no Imoko and the Chinese Emperor in question was Emperor Yang of the short-lived Sui Dynasty. Under the Sinocentric worldview of China, there was only one legitimate Son of Heaven and a ‘barbarian’ kingdom claiming an equal title was seen as a grave insult.
[18] By this point, the Huifu Emperor had already introduced the idea of a rotating capital between four cities, but Hanjing is still commonly cited as ‘the’ capital of China in this context.
[19] A footnote here indicates that the last sentence was added by a Russian censor; it has been retained in the English translation but highlighted to note this.
[20] The Russified form of hara-kiri, i.e., seppuku. This description is, of course, seen through the cultural lens of an outsider’s perception only familiar with a shallow understanding of that culture.
[21] Strictly, this should be the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, as the Covenanters were a Scottish faction.
[22] As we’ll see later, this is perpetuating a fiction that the American military simply ignored the Societists as a threat, which is not entirely true.
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