ISIS Nukes Brussels, The Seljuks Beats the Mongols, and Stalin Joins The Axis

Although I'm still self-banned from posting on the biggest alternate-history forum on the Internet, I do visit the public sections to see what interesting actual alternate history (as opposed to the endless political arguing I quit the forum to avoid) is being discussed.

This led to my finding three more interesting timelines in recent weeks. One takes place in the modern day, the second in the days where Turkish power expanded into Asia Minor at the expense of the crumbling Byzantines, and the third during World War II.

The Sultanate of Rumistan: An Alternate Anatolia-The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum was established after the defeat of the Byzantine Empire by the Seljuk Turks, which began the process of Turkifying and Islamizing Asia Minor and the Byzantines' long decline. The Sultanate was eventually defeated and forced to pay tribute to the Mongols after their defeat at the Battle of Kose Dag, but in this timeline, the Seljuk sultan listens to his experienced commanders and waits for the Mongols to come to him rather than attack them immediately. The Mongols are defeated and the decline of the Seljuk Sultanate--which ultimately led to the rise of the Ottoman Empire--is averted. This is going to make life rather difficult for the Byzantines, but the author knows a whole lot about the workings of the Seljuk Sultanate, the neighboring Kingdom of Georgia, and the Byzantine secessionist regime in Trebizond and it's really quite interesting.

The Maw: When the Lights of the World Went Out-This story begins with agents of the infamous Islamic State somehow getting hold of a nuclear weapon--just how they got it hasn't been explained yet--and they smuggle it from the Middle East into Belgium. They set it off in the downtown area of Brussels, killing tens of thousands (if not more) immediately and provoking France to nuke ISIS's capital of al-Raqqa in reprisal. A straight-up World War II level obliteration of ISIS soon follows. It looks like the author was setting up a much darker scenario based on the hints he was dropping, but the timeline hasn't been updated in some time. Given how the real-life migrant crisis in Europe has been, well, a crisis, a world where ISIS agents snuck into Europe via Greece and ripped a chunk of a major EU city out with a nuke, I suspect the people getting the worst of it are going to European and refugee Muslims.

The Twin Vipers-Stalin joins the Axis. Although given Hitler's ultimate desire to conquer the Soviet Union, exterminate "Jewish Bolshevism," and turn the Slavs into helots for German Spartans and how in general fascism and Communism are opposed ideologies make this sound absolutely insane, there were talks to that effect. Rather than refusing to deal more than the bare minimum with people whom he viewed as racial enemies, the Germans were actually willing to admit the Soviets to the alliance to help defeat Britain. That would have made life very difficult for the Western Allies, since the Soviets could menace the Middle East and India in a way the Germans could not.

However, this timeline begins somewhat earlier than the real-life talks that took place after the defeat of France when the 1939 border conflict between the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan that ended with the Battle of Khalkin Gol escalates into a full-blown war. This leads to Mussolini getting sidelined, the British and French fighting the Soviets in Finland, and even Operation Pike, an Anglo-French plan to bomb the Soviet oil fields that didn't happen in real life.

What If Stalin Had Survived His Stroke?

My self-ban from the alternate-history forum won't expire until the end of this week and I might re-ban so I can avoid unnecessary distractions from finishing and submitting Little People, Big Guns over the summer. However, I can still read the forums and I found something else you guys might appreciate...

Twilight of the Red Tsar

There's a book called Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar that compares the Communist absolute ruler of the Soviet Union with the Russian monarchs of old and I'm guessing that's where the user whose handle is Napoleon IV derived the title. The gist of it is that Stalin survived the stroke that killed him in our history.

That's not a good thing because he was apparently planning another Great Purge, this one with a particularly anti-Semitic focus. Given Russia's history with Jew-hating, there's the possibility of a second Holocaust within a decade of the first one.

Highlights of this timeline include the use of nuclear weapons, poison gas, and weaponized germs, rifts within the Communist movement (that usually followed Moscow's line), a Chinese messianic movement in the vein of peasant millenarian revolts that occurred in the dynastic past, and Richard Nixon. And there are a lot of allusions to the Book of Revelation in the chapter titles.

Enjoy!

The Imperious Chairman, Or Someone Other Than Stalin Takes Command

My alternate-history forum has produced another interesting road not traveled. It's called "The Imperious Chairman" and diverges from our history when Yacov Sverdlov, one of the early leaders of the Bolshevik movement, survives rather than dying in 1919. The author (whose handle is Napoleon IV) goes with the idea that the official story of his death--he got the Spanish flu coming back from a trip to Kharkiv--was accurate. He doesn't go to Kharkiv, and so he survives.

The main thrust of the timeline is that someone other than Stalin becomes leader of the USSR. I find the notion that Stalin's horrors were necessary to defeat Hitler rather aggravating--the book Bloodlands shows Hitler actually used the horror stories coming out of Stalin's USSR as fuel for his demagoguery and I posted a friend's essay on Bukharin (part one here, part two here) to show another realistic path--and Napoleon IV gives this leader a chance to prove his mettle against the Great Evil One.

Some highlights...

*With a surviving Sverdlov, the internal factional politics of the Bolsheviks are rather different. I did take a class on Modern Russia at the University of Georgia, but I don't remember if we ever got into that much detail.

*Sverdlov's survival in turn causes some other earlier Soviet leaders to die--not due to anything he does specifically (like warning them about an assassination plot or inviting them all to dinner some night so they avoid a doomed plane), but due to the butterfly effect (changes spawning more changes). This makes the period between Lenin's death and what would have been the rise of Stalin more complicated.

*The Soviet Union pursues a more aggressive foreign policy during the interwar period. Although the isolationism of "socialism in one country" is greatly exaggerated--in We Know Now, historian John Lewis Gaddis describes it as something more akin to Russian imperialism than something truly international--someone other than the very cautious Stalin at the helm could done some serious meddling. This will have its consequences, both in the short-term (the lead-up to WWII) and presumably in the long term.

*Hitler still comes to power in Germany, albeit rather differently than in our history.

*With no Stalin we have no purges, meaning the Soviet military isn't the "stumbling colossus" that the Nazis spent the first years of the Eastern Front kicking around. There's still collectivization, although it's done in a more competent and less insane fashion. Many, many people still die, but no Holodomor. Not only does the USSR have millions more soldiers to fight the Nazis, but there won't be so much hatred for the regime for the Nazis to gather allies with.

*There's no cult of personality comparable to Stalin's--the alternative leader seems to view the adulation he gets as kind of a joke.

Guest Post: The Bukharin Alternative, Part Two

It is a common belief in some circles that Stalinist policies were necessary for the Soviet Union to industrialize sufficiently in order to defeat the inevitable genocidal Nazi invasion. In particular is the Holodomor, in which grain was exported to the West to purchase industrial equipment and the like while millions starved to death. Ukraine was hit particularly hard, but Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and other places suffered as well.

However, my Internet cohort Scott Blair doesn't agree with this theory and wrote this essay--which I broke into two parts--to elaborate. Part One can be see here.

The Bukharin Alternative Part Two: Stalinist Complicity in the Rise of Hitler

By Scott Blair

It is also worth considering whether or not Hitler would have risen to power without Stalin’s support. In 1928, the Comintern leadership in Moscow took a much harsher stance against collaboration with Social Democrat parties in Europe, on the belief that the collapse of capitalism was imminent. In Germany, the results were disastrous. From 1928 onward, the German Communist Party (KPD) “party directed its venom principally against the Social Democrats”, while the Red Front-Fighters League became a paramilitary force. The KPD were particularly vocal in attacking the Social Democrats, who they denounced as “social fascists”, and by the end of 1932 Germany’s military was worried that a crackdown on the Nazis or Communists would result in civil war. Initially, Josef Stalin and the KPD welcomed the rise of Nazism, believing that he was a crazy fool whose rise to power was a sign that the German revolution was at hand. History has proven how wrong this belief was.

In these circumstances, one may well wonder if Nikolai Bukharin would have made a difference, and the answer is an emphatic yes. In contrast to Stalin, by 1928 Bukharin had become notable for advocating collaboration with the Socialist parties of Europe, and as the KPD followed the line set down in Moscow, it would have followed Bukharin’s policy as well. While it is unlikely that the Social Democrats and KPD would have collaborated in any meaningful way, if the KPD had emphasize on stabilizing the Republic the German military may have been more willing to crack down on the Nazis. This would not have resulted in a shiny, happy German democracy, and the possibilities range from an authoritarian state run by the military, to an unstable democracy, to a German civil war.

All three alternatives would have been preferable to the Third Reich. Even a militarist dictatorship would have been unstable, possibly annexing Austria and warring with Poland, but it is unlikely to have been as aggressive or uniquely successful as the Third Reich was. It must also be remembered that before the rise of Hitler Germany and the USSR had been close, with joint military exercises and discussions about a partition of Poland. Thus, in the Bukharin alternative the Great Patriotic War may never occur.

Even if one assumes Hitler still rose to power, and that things are the same until the beginning of Barbarossa, then it is possible Bukharin’s policies would have still let the Soviet Union win. On the one hand, the Soviet Union would have a smaller industrial base. First, it is unlikely that Bukharin would have been caught by the surprise the way that Stalin was, which may have resulted in a different outcome in the opening stages of the Great Patriotic War. It is also unlikely that the purges would have taken place, with their well known effects on the Soviet officer corps. Finally, peasant disenchantment with the regime, so obvious in the summer of 1941, may have been much less significant in a USSR that followed Bukharin’s policies. All told, even if we assume a somewhat smaller Soviet industrial base, there is good reason to think that the USSR would ultimately prevail in the war, as it did historically.

Thus, Bukharin would have emerged from the Great Patriotic War as the head of a USSR with a much more vigorous agricultural sector, and one with millions of more citizens than had died in the famine. Perhaps Bukharin’s Soviet Union would not have turned the former breadbasket of Europe into an importer of American grain. Perhaps calls for increased autonomy in the economy would have been more successful in the 1960s, and the USSR’s economy would not have stagnated and ultimately crumbled.


At the risk of being speculative, in such a scenario it is possible that the Soviet Union would still exist today. If so, Stalin, far from being necessary, may have ensured the USSR’s ultimate demise.

Guest Post: The Bukharin Alternative Part One

It is a common belief in some circles that Stalinist policies were necessary for the Soviet Union to industrialize sufficiently in order to defeat the inevitable genocidal Nazi invasion. In particular is the Holodomor, in which grain was exported to the West to purchase industrial equipment and the like while millions starved to death. Ukraine was hit particularly hard, but Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and other places suffered as well.

However, my Internet cohort Scott Blair doesn't agree with this theory and wrote this essay--which I broke into two parts--to elaborate...

The Bukharin Alternative Part One: Collectivization and the Great Terror

By Scott Blair

In order to answer whether or Stalin was necessary, it is necessary to consider who could have replaced him. In order to do so, let us posit that in 1927, at the height of the debate between Josef Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin dies from a bad batch of borscht. Thus, Bukharin, considered to be a more moderate leader, assumes control of the Soviet Union. What would the USSR, under the command of a man who said, “we have to tell the whole peasantry, all its strata: get rich, accumulate, develop your economy,” look like? Bukharin’s policies would have entailed a modification of the NEP, and its continuation. It is therefore worth asking how the USSR would have industrialized under him. Stalin’s industrialization is often held up as an example of his success, and so it is worth asking if Bukharin could have done the same.

To begin with, it is clear that collectivization, the cornerstone of Stalin’s policy, was a disaster. Gross farm output declined 20% between 1928 and 1933, and this is allowing for a recovery after the initial great famine. It has been estimated that “not until the mid 1950s did agriculture regain the level of output achieved in the last years before the Great War”. The number of livestock in the Soviet Union also fell dramatically, and it is estimated that half of the nation’s cows, pigs, and horses were killed between 1928 and 1932. This is especially tragic as the last years of the NEP witnessed increased crop diversification and access to new equipment such as horse drawn plows. 

Admittedly, the NEP had problems. The Revolution, by breaking up the large estates and farms of prosperous kulaks who had produced for the market, ended up producing millions of subsistence farms which were simply less efficient. This meant that while agriculture production recovered and surpassed the 1913 Russian levels, grain sales actually declined during this period. Thus, collectivization did have some benefits, by forcing peasants to provide grain for the Soviet Union’s burgeoning cities. It has also been suggested that the famine caused approximately twelve million Soviet citizens to flee the countryside for work in the USSR’s new cities between 1928 and 1933. 

In addition, the NEP years saw marked instability in pricing. 1922 witnessed high prices for grain and low prices for manufactured goods, while 1923 witnessed the “scissors crisis”, in which peasants refrained from buying industrial goods because the price of grain was low while the price of manufactures was high. Grain prices offered by the state in 1927 were low, while industrial consumer goods were in short supply. As a result, peasants simply withheld their grain from the market. As the state needed grain to industrialize, these problems have led to the belief that the NEP was essentially a dead end, and it is therefore worth asking how Bukharin could have come to terms with them. 

First, by by December of 1927, even Bukharin wanted “to speed up the tempo of industrialization and put pressure on the kulaks, though [he] believed the free market had to be maintained”. Secondly, by 1927 Soviet investment in industry had already surpassed investment by Russian and foreign capital in Russian industry in 1913, and industrial output slightly exceeded prewar levels. Thus, even without any modifications, industrialization and development would have continued, albeit not at the pace of Stalin’s Soviet Union. However, a variety of mechanisms to stimulate agricultural production, and thus industrialization, present themselves. For instance, the Soviet government forced peasants to sell a certain amount of grain to state procurement agencies or to machine tractor stations for their services. The state also imposed a high sales tax on goods but not on food, ensuring that what money peasants received by selling crops would go to the government. 

Thus, Soviet policy ultimately consisted of taking grain from Soviet peasants at artificially low prices, and selling them industrial goods at extremely high ones. There is no reason to assume such policies could not have been followed sans collectivization. This would have resulted in a system that squeezed the peasants, but allowed them to maintain a profit on what was left of their crop, but need not have entailed collectivization. Such a system would probably have squeezed less grain out of the peasants, meaning that industrialization would go less rapidly than historically. However, it would have provided better long term prospects for Soviet agriculture once industrialization had been achieved. 

It is also worth considering Bukharin’s historical plan provide more grain for the cities. Bukharin historically proposed selling manufactured goods at low prices and buying grain at high prices to encourage peasants to market more grain, but it is unclear if this policy would have worked. However, when the People’s Republic of China began paying peasants more for agricultural products in the late 1970s and early 1980s, agricultural production and the sale of agricultural products boomed as peasants responded to the new demand. China’s economic success is well known, and this suggests that Bukharin’s policy may have let the state have its cake and eat it too. The Soviet Union may have been able to build an industrial base which, if not as large as the one it possessed historically by 1941, was not significantly smaller. 

Two additional points suggest that Stalinist policies harmed industrialization. Collectivization and the ensuing slaughter of livestock also harmed the Soviet textile industry as well as exports of wool and leather. As money from exports was used to finance purchases of machinery necessary for industrialization, a more benign policy may have helped the Soviet Union purchase more foreign technology. It is also worth asking what the effect of the famines the ensued from collectivization was. Estimates put the number of deaths from famine between four and nine million, and the birth rate declined in the mid 1930s, ultimately rebounding by the end of the decade. It is therefore worth asking what the net economic effect of the loss of six million Soviet citizens was. One of the purported benefits of the famine and collectivization was that it drove peasants to the cities, where they worked in the USSR’s new factories. 

Would the number of migrants from the countryside have been significantly less in a Bukharin led USSR if we assume that at least some of those peasants would have immigrated to the city? Furthermore, many of those purged were among the USSR’s intelligentsia, and it is evident that the Soviet economy would have done better if engineers, instead of chopping wood in Siberia, had been able to use their skills productively. It is unclear how much of difference fewer purges would have made, but it may have been significant. 

Part Two will cover the role of Stalin in Hitler's rise to power in the first place...

AnachroCon Post #1: Christians Should Tip Better

I just got back from AnachroCon, an Atlanta-area alternate-history and steampunk convention, and one of the topics discussed at the panel this morning really stuck to me.

It was a panel about cyberpunk, but at some point, Allan Gilbreath started talking about how servers hate it when certain Christian conventions are in town because they complain about everything and don't tip well, in contrast to the genre fans (people who go to conventions like AnachroCon I guess) who do tip well and tend to be more easygoing. A later conversation with him and another panelist included the claim that many people from these conventions try to game the system by complaining about the air conditioning at hotels in hopes of getting discounts and that they feel they're owed something because of their "long-suffering." The other fellow even made the claim that only 1 percent of the people in those groups are humble, kind, generous, etc.

The first thing that came to mind was Romans 2:24 in which the Apostle Paul said the words, "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you." Although the passage is referencing Jews (who had God's law revealed to them) who did not follow the Law and those brought their faith into disrepute with outsiders, the principle expressed in this passage just as easily applies to Christians today.

For the record, I do not deny having done things that have given people cause to mock our faith. I will not go into detail here, but those who know me will know. That being said, that does not affect the wisdom of my point one iota. Hitler and Stalin, two of the most evil men who ever lived, both thought the other a monster and both were right. And the purpose of this post is not to brag about how good a tipper I am.

For starters, the Bible says that Christians are to be ambassadors of Christ (see 2 Corinthians 5:20). One role of an ambassador is to make the country who sent them look good. If an ambassador acts like a fool, it rightly or wrong reflects poorly on their whole country, not just them. Jesus Himself says in Matthew 5:16 that Christians should let their light shine before men so that people would see our good deeds and praise God.

Secondly, the Bible exhorts believers to be generous. There are many, many Bible verses exhorting us to be generous with our money. There are so many that rather than posting them individually, I will simply post this article here that references a whole bunch.

Thirdly, the Bible exhorts Christians to remember the poor. One account of the coming Judgement Day states that the nations will be judged by how they have treated "the least of these my brethren." Here is a list of dozens of verses exhorting the good treatment of the poor. Servers are not paid minimum wage; instead, they're paid a significantly-lower figure (in Utah, for example, it's $2.13 per hour) and expected to make the rest of the money in tips. If people tip poorly, wait staff do without. In fact, servers rely on food stamps much more than the rest of the population.

Fourthly, if you're trying to get discounts in a dishonest way (like complaining about problems that don't exist or are really quite minor), that's lying and stealing. There are lots of verses condemning such things--here's a selection. Remember, it is written that the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil.

I am not suggesting tipping waiters/waitresses more if they do a poor job. I once tipped a particularly bad waiter $0.10 on a $3.00 Steak and Shake milkshake to make a point. That being said, most restaurant staff who've served me have done a decent job and should be tipped at a proper rate (I was always taught to tip 15 percent).

One objection to my argument I can think of right off the bat is that times are tough and one might not be able to afford to tip as much. Well, if you need to cut expenses, why are you eating out in the first place? If you're already going out to eat at a restaurant where there's a wait staff attending to your needs, you can afford to tip decently. Doubly so if you're going to a religious convention in another city.

And lest anyone think I'm making too big a generalization from the claims one or two people are making, here's an article on why servers hate Sundays. Here's another one with more links.

My Return To Fanfiction.net: A Tale of the Draka

Awhile back, I posted about two alternate Draka timelines I'd written for my alternate-history message-board. Sometime later, I found some people discussing my timelines on another Internet forum and one person complained about how they had to join the site in order to view them.

This morning on a whim, I posted on my Facebook fan page to see if anyone would like to see these timelines and I got three "likes" within thirty minutes. Never being one to disappoint my fans, I started copying and pasting from the original thread, now many years old, and posting them on fanfiction.net.

Behold, "The Dragon and the Bear: An Alternate Drakaverse." The early stuff is up now and I'll be posting the rest of it over the next several days.

Long ago, when I finished "The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot," I said I would not write anymore fan-fiction and would instead focus on my original work that can actually make me money. What I'm doing now fulfills the letter of the promise, since this is material I wrote years ago. Furthermore, I have many, many more Facebook fans now than I did then and providing them with content will keep them interested while I produce more original stuff. Given the popularity of the Draka novels among the alternate-history community, this will also help cement my position among them in preparation for the publication of my original material.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy a world where there's no Stalinist purge, the German invasion of Russia gets stopped a lot faster, Operation Valkyrie succeeds, and the evil Draka get what's coming to them. Robert Heinlein, Carl Sagan, and Pope John Paul II make appearances.

The Death of Stalin and a Different WWII

Here's a alternate timeline from my message-board for your entertainment. It's entitled "Funeral Games" and was written by the user whose handle is Gemellus. It begins with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin suffering a pulmonary embolism soon after the German invasion of Poland, an invasion made possible by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and dropping dead. The new Soviet government repudiates the deal Stalin made and things get interesting...

I'm not going to give away details, but the timeline features...

*A short Nazi-Soviet War instead of our world's swift annexation of the Baltic States and the Winter War with the Finns.

*A peace treaty ending said war that involves a population swap of three million Jews for millions of ethnic Germans living in Soviet territory. The one time I have ever actually used the phrase, "good job Commies," considering what would happen to these Jews if history had continued as it did in our world.

*Japan's land empire in Asia is dealt with a few years ahead of schedule.

*Germany still manages to pull off Battle of France in a similar fashion to our history and establish their Vichy puppet regime. However, the Italians do something rather unexpected...

*The Soviets don't ignore all evidence of the coming German attack and take certain steps...

*The German Resistance is about to do something. Let's hope it works out better than in our history...

I think it's pretty interesting and well worth a look. I'd definitely read a book set in this timeline.