MarshalBraginsky
Banned
(Part Two)
China’s descent into civil war alarmed no foreign power as the entire world watched carefully at the turmoil which unfolded in the Middle Kingdom. Massive casualties piled up on the two Chinese factions fighting each other between August 1940 and December 1940. The last four months of 1940 was also eventful in the Caucasus and Central Asia as the Turkish Army entered Azerbaijan by September 12th, triggering a pro-Memleket uprising in Baku. As the USS forces were being pulled back into the North Caucasus, the Turkish Army encouraged the Muslims living in the North Caucasus to rebel against their Russian masters. Though the Chechens and Dagestanis heeded the call, the mainly secularist Tatars, Bashkirs and Central Asian Muslims didn’t obey the Memleket order for jihad due to a larger USS presence in their territories. So on October 10th, Chechen partisans joined the Turkish Army in attacking the USS troops in Georgia. More atrocities were committed by the MIT security forces once they conquered Georgian territory, and Georgia’s Armenian population was deported into Anatolian concentration camps. Like all Armenians who were rounded up in Armenia itself, the Armenians from Georgia were subjected to inhumane treatment, with all the inmates killed on open ditches. However, once the Turkish and Chechen forces descended into the Ossetian region, they launched a new wave of pogroms against the Ossetian population. Russian post-war sources claim that over 32,000 Ossetians were killed between December of 1940 and February of 1941.
1941 – A New Theater Arises:
USS losses in the Caucasus and Central Asia continued to pile up, as British success in the Tajik territories prompted the British High Command to send General Auchinleck to lead the British Army in occupied Tajikistan. Thus by January 16th, King Edward VII ordered the British Army to withdraw from Finland and Sweden and to join the Germans in attacking the Baltic Sea. The Danish Navy escorted the 3rd British Fleet into the Baltic, where they joined their compatriots in attacking Liepaja. Most German troops were still battling the Polish Army in cities like Warsaw, Lwow and Krakow by January 18th, even as both sides suffered losses. Finally on January 20th, Krakow and Warsaw fell to Krebs’s forces as the surviving Polish troops retreated rapidly into Belorussia and the Ukraine. An even bigger disaster fell upon the USS on January 26th, when British troops finally took Liepaja after several months of naval bombardments. Now that Liepaja is under British control, the Royal Navy’s newer aircraft carriers joined their compatriots in the Baltic Sea. Petrograd, Novgorod, Vyborg, Pskov and Polotsk came under British carrier based bombing raids, while German bombers targeted Kiev, Minsk and Odessa. Most of the USS’s military industry had already been relocated, while a new naval base on the site of the former Mangazeya outpost was being built to serve the new USS Arctic Fleet, which also set up its shipyards to construct new submarines, carriers and destroyers.
Novo Mangazeya (1) emerged as the USS’s newest settlement, and one that was at first off limits to civilians. Russian sailors and soldiers often stayed in hastily built apartments overlooking the Ob River’s sanctuary, and a new aircraft factory was being constructed in the town of Salekhard. At the same time, Chancellor Rodzaevsky was given provisional powers and a bigger authority in delegating wartime production of materiel and training of new soldiers. He used his newly acquired powers to implement conscription for every able bodied men from the age of 18 to 35. Universities were closed down in order to redirect the students into factories and in many cases, induction into the USS Army. In the meantime, the garrison troops fighting in Central Asia and the Caucasus were ordered to dissipate into the mountains to live as guerrillas, harassing the occupying forces. Unfortunately, 2,400 Russian soldiers were caught up in the Turkish advance in the Chechen city of Grozny and were forced to surrender on February 17th. Vengeful Chechens began to march the Russian prisoners into a Turkish POW camp on the outskirts of occupied Tbilisi, and the Turkish troops assigned to oversee the prisoners often abused them. On one occasion, a Russian peasant was shot by an MIT officer when he was caught giving food to a hungry Russian prisoner. The march took a whooping two and a half months to complete, due to the delays occurring, which took form of dumping dead bodies into ditches or cliffs when the prisoners were too tired to walk. MIT security troops then replaced their Turkish Army counterparts by April 2nd, and the death rate increased. Russian prisoners were shot without any reason, and any protests were met with machine gunfire. Inside the Tbilisi POW camp, the MIT camp guards separated the officers from the rank and file soldiers, so the camp was divided into two sections: an officers’ section and the soldiers’ section. Most Russian officers caught by the MIT were directed into an underground bunker where other MIT soldiers began to execute them, one by one. Escape from the Tbilisi POW camp was impossible since the MIT guards had taken precautions to prevent any POW from escaping. To decrease their chances of a successful escape, the Turkish Army and the MIT gave the Russian POWs only a small portion of food.
Yet despite the Turkish success in the South Caucasus, they were unable to get past the North Caucasus because of Russian guerrilla activity in the area. What’s worse was that Russian bombers were hitting Turkish factories in the Anatolian heartland from their Crimean base. Even worse, the Crimean Tatars could not be relied on to stage an uprising against the USS because of the Black Sea Fleet’s presence in the Crimea. So the Turkish Army was forced to consolidate their gains in the Caucasus until they have enough troops to conquer the rest of southern Russia. Before they can continue though, Selim Yilmaz was pulled from the Caucasus to command another Turkish Army that is poised to invade Assyria and Kurdistan. Selim Pashluk was confident that 60,000 Turkish troops would be able to hold on to the Caucasus with their Chechen, Dagestani, Ingushetian, and Circassian auxiliaries forming militia units to take up occupation duties. These auxiliaries were often targeted by Russian guerrillas and secularist Caucasian Muslims because of their links to the Turkish Memleket Party and the MIT. Sometimes anti-Memleket Chechens and Circassians infiltrated these auxiliaries to get information, while a few auxiliary troops actually handed their weapons to the Russian partisans. A new method was formed by a pro-Trudoviki Chechen officer named Khanpasha Nuradilov, who led the infiltration into the pro-Memleket auxiliary forces. He got into contact with former Chechen auxiliaries who were disillusioned with the Turkish Memlekets due to religious differences (the Memlekets were nominally Sunni Muslim while the disillusioned Chechen militiamen were from the Sufi branch) and told them to go back to their units so they can grab more weapons and surrender. If they are in danger of being exposed as pro-Trudoviki spies, then they should immediately ‘defect’ to Nuradilov’s unit (2). By June 12th, Nuradilov’s tiny Caucasian unit had grown into a fully fledged partisan army of around 35,000 irregular forces. Not only were the Caucasian troops themselves becoming more divided between Trudovikism and Memleketism, but fratricidal wars broke out throughout these mountain ranges. Rival clans with ties to the Memlekets often killed families who supported the Trudoviki Party, while Nuradilov’s partisans massacred Turkish troops who surrendered to them. In Central Asia, the guerrilla movement there gained much traction by British authorities. Yet they were just restricted to operating in Tajikistan as their forces were needed to help put down various rebellions breaking out in the remnants of the former United Workers’ States of America. The British Army in Tajikistan was plagued by uprisings and deportations of Russian civilians into Kazakhstan, tilting the demographic balance in the Russians’ favor, much to the Kazakhs’ chagrin.
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(1) Novo Mangazeya is TTL’s site for the newly created Russian Arctic Fleet, which will not grow large until they have enough Arctic technology to make newer ships that can travel through the ice. It is also a major submarine base. Not be confused with Ivangorod Prosperous ver. 2.0’s Nizhnyi Mangazeya.
(2) IOTL, the Yugoslav Partisans acquired weapons through the Croatian Domobranci troops who pretended to surrender to the Partisans in order to hand their rifles in. The Partisans would then send the Domobranci troops back to their units to get more weapons. The Chechen action ITTL is a reference to such a tactic.
---
This might be the last update for the Decembrist TL since I plan on addressing a lot of issues that I need to fix for 2.0, though I will post the 2.0 version on counter-factual instead of this site. Here are the issues that I need to address right now:
- the updates are rather too long to complete, plus with a ton of real life issues facing me, the plans for the Decembrist 2.0 TL will have to be shelved. In addition, I now have to focus on getting Ivangorod 2.0 done, and to tackle The Red Baron's Mitteleuropa.
- Countries that I neglected in the current Decembrist TL:
* Bulgaria (I only mentioned Ferdinand becoming the ruler, but I have not mentioned Boris and Simeon due to my lack of knowledge on Bulgarian history at that time)
* Confederate States
* Serbia and Greece (I'll have to fix the main problem too)
* Australia
* United States
- I will need more research on 19th and 20th century history plus I constantly have new ideas popping into my head that I wanted to try out, the most being a planned alliance of France-Germany-Ottoman Turkey against Britain-Russia.
China’s descent into civil war alarmed no foreign power as the entire world watched carefully at the turmoil which unfolded in the Middle Kingdom. Massive casualties piled up on the two Chinese factions fighting each other between August 1940 and December 1940. The last four months of 1940 was also eventful in the Caucasus and Central Asia as the Turkish Army entered Azerbaijan by September 12th, triggering a pro-Memleket uprising in Baku. As the USS forces were being pulled back into the North Caucasus, the Turkish Army encouraged the Muslims living in the North Caucasus to rebel against their Russian masters. Though the Chechens and Dagestanis heeded the call, the mainly secularist Tatars, Bashkirs and Central Asian Muslims didn’t obey the Memleket order for jihad due to a larger USS presence in their territories. So on October 10th, Chechen partisans joined the Turkish Army in attacking the USS troops in Georgia. More atrocities were committed by the MIT security forces once they conquered Georgian territory, and Georgia’s Armenian population was deported into Anatolian concentration camps. Like all Armenians who were rounded up in Armenia itself, the Armenians from Georgia were subjected to inhumane treatment, with all the inmates killed on open ditches. However, once the Turkish and Chechen forces descended into the Ossetian region, they launched a new wave of pogroms against the Ossetian population. Russian post-war sources claim that over 32,000 Ossetians were killed between December of 1940 and February of 1941.
1941 – A New Theater Arises:
USS losses in the Caucasus and Central Asia continued to pile up, as British success in the Tajik territories prompted the British High Command to send General Auchinleck to lead the British Army in occupied Tajikistan. Thus by January 16th, King Edward VII ordered the British Army to withdraw from Finland and Sweden and to join the Germans in attacking the Baltic Sea. The Danish Navy escorted the 3rd British Fleet into the Baltic, where they joined their compatriots in attacking Liepaja. Most German troops were still battling the Polish Army in cities like Warsaw, Lwow and Krakow by January 18th, even as both sides suffered losses. Finally on January 20th, Krakow and Warsaw fell to Krebs’s forces as the surviving Polish troops retreated rapidly into Belorussia and the Ukraine. An even bigger disaster fell upon the USS on January 26th, when British troops finally took Liepaja after several months of naval bombardments. Now that Liepaja is under British control, the Royal Navy’s newer aircraft carriers joined their compatriots in the Baltic Sea. Petrograd, Novgorod, Vyborg, Pskov and Polotsk came under British carrier based bombing raids, while German bombers targeted Kiev, Minsk and Odessa. Most of the USS’s military industry had already been relocated, while a new naval base on the site of the former Mangazeya outpost was being built to serve the new USS Arctic Fleet, which also set up its shipyards to construct new submarines, carriers and destroyers.
Novo Mangazeya (1) emerged as the USS’s newest settlement, and one that was at first off limits to civilians. Russian sailors and soldiers often stayed in hastily built apartments overlooking the Ob River’s sanctuary, and a new aircraft factory was being constructed in the town of Salekhard. At the same time, Chancellor Rodzaevsky was given provisional powers and a bigger authority in delegating wartime production of materiel and training of new soldiers. He used his newly acquired powers to implement conscription for every able bodied men from the age of 18 to 35. Universities were closed down in order to redirect the students into factories and in many cases, induction into the USS Army. In the meantime, the garrison troops fighting in Central Asia and the Caucasus were ordered to dissipate into the mountains to live as guerrillas, harassing the occupying forces. Unfortunately, 2,400 Russian soldiers were caught up in the Turkish advance in the Chechen city of Grozny and were forced to surrender on February 17th. Vengeful Chechens began to march the Russian prisoners into a Turkish POW camp on the outskirts of occupied Tbilisi, and the Turkish troops assigned to oversee the prisoners often abused them. On one occasion, a Russian peasant was shot by an MIT officer when he was caught giving food to a hungry Russian prisoner. The march took a whooping two and a half months to complete, due to the delays occurring, which took form of dumping dead bodies into ditches or cliffs when the prisoners were too tired to walk. MIT security troops then replaced their Turkish Army counterparts by April 2nd, and the death rate increased. Russian prisoners were shot without any reason, and any protests were met with machine gunfire. Inside the Tbilisi POW camp, the MIT camp guards separated the officers from the rank and file soldiers, so the camp was divided into two sections: an officers’ section and the soldiers’ section. Most Russian officers caught by the MIT were directed into an underground bunker where other MIT soldiers began to execute them, one by one. Escape from the Tbilisi POW camp was impossible since the MIT guards had taken precautions to prevent any POW from escaping. To decrease their chances of a successful escape, the Turkish Army and the MIT gave the Russian POWs only a small portion of food.
Yet despite the Turkish success in the South Caucasus, they were unable to get past the North Caucasus because of Russian guerrilla activity in the area. What’s worse was that Russian bombers were hitting Turkish factories in the Anatolian heartland from their Crimean base. Even worse, the Crimean Tatars could not be relied on to stage an uprising against the USS because of the Black Sea Fleet’s presence in the Crimea. So the Turkish Army was forced to consolidate their gains in the Caucasus until they have enough troops to conquer the rest of southern Russia. Before they can continue though, Selim Yilmaz was pulled from the Caucasus to command another Turkish Army that is poised to invade Assyria and Kurdistan. Selim Pashluk was confident that 60,000 Turkish troops would be able to hold on to the Caucasus with their Chechen, Dagestani, Ingushetian, and Circassian auxiliaries forming militia units to take up occupation duties. These auxiliaries were often targeted by Russian guerrillas and secularist Caucasian Muslims because of their links to the Turkish Memleket Party and the MIT. Sometimes anti-Memleket Chechens and Circassians infiltrated these auxiliaries to get information, while a few auxiliary troops actually handed their weapons to the Russian partisans. A new method was formed by a pro-Trudoviki Chechen officer named Khanpasha Nuradilov, who led the infiltration into the pro-Memleket auxiliary forces. He got into contact with former Chechen auxiliaries who were disillusioned with the Turkish Memlekets due to religious differences (the Memlekets were nominally Sunni Muslim while the disillusioned Chechen militiamen were from the Sufi branch) and told them to go back to their units so they can grab more weapons and surrender. If they are in danger of being exposed as pro-Trudoviki spies, then they should immediately ‘defect’ to Nuradilov’s unit (2). By June 12th, Nuradilov’s tiny Caucasian unit had grown into a fully fledged partisan army of around 35,000 irregular forces. Not only were the Caucasian troops themselves becoming more divided between Trudovikism and Memleketism, but fratricidal wars broke out throughout these mountain ranges. Rival clans with ties to the Memlekets often killed families who supported the Trudoviki Party, while Nuradilov’s partisans massacred Turkish troops who surrendered to them. In Central Asia, the guerrilla movement there gained much traction by British authorities. Yet they were just restricted to operating in Tajikistan as their forces were needed to help put down various rebellions breaking out in the remnants of the former United Workers’ States of America. The British Army in Tajikistan was plagued by uprisings and deportations of Russian civilians into Kazakhstan, tilting the demographic balance in the Russians’ favor, much to the Kazakhs’ chagrin.
---
(1) Novo Mangazeya is TTL’s site for the newly created Russian Arctic Fleet, which will not grow large until they have enough Arctic technology to make newer ships that can travel through the ice. It is also a major submarine base. Not be confused with Ivangorod Prosperous ver. 2.0’s Nizhnyi Mangazeya.
(2) IOTL, the Yugoslav Partisans acquired weapons through the Croatian Domobranci troops who pretended to surrender to the Partisans in order to hand their rifles in. The Partisans would then send the Domobranci troops back to their units to get more weapons. The Chechen action ITTL is a reference to such a tactic.
---
This might be the last update for the Decembrist TL since I plan on addressing a lot of issues that I need to fix for 2.0, though I will post the 2.0 version on counter-factual instead of this site. Here are the issues that I need to address right now:
- the updates are rather too long to complete, plus with a ton of real life issues facing me, the plans for the Decembrist 2.0 TL will have to be shelved. In addition, I now have to focus on getting Ivangorod 2.0 done, and to tackle The Red Baron's Mitteleuropa.
- Countries that I neglected in the current Decembrist TL:
* Bulgaria (I only mentioned Ferdinand becoming the ruler, but I have not mentioned Boris and Simeon due to my lack of knowledge on Bulgarian history at that time)
* Confederate States
* Serbia and Greece (I'll have to fix the main problem too)
* Australia
* United States
- I will need more research on 19th and 20th century history plus I constantly have new ideas popping into my head that I wanted to try out, the most being a planned alliance of France-Germany-Ottoman Turkey against Britain-Russia.