Yeah, uh, looking at richardbethel's account, they joined ten days before this thread was made, have made only two posts on SV (both of which were in this thread), and before that, a total of five given reactions across a few fanfic threads. And then zero activity since. Weird.
Nation/Entity Name: Finnish Socialist Worker's Republic
Commonly Known as: Red Finland, FSWR
Government: Marxist Republic
Capital: Helsinki
Technology Level: WW1
Year ISOTed from: 1918
Territory ISOTed: All of red controlled Red Finland
Population: 2 million
Religions: Lutheran
Languages: Finnish, Swedish
Head(s) of State: Kullervo Manner
Brief History:
WW1 would see the collapse of the Russian Empire and its lands plunged into civil war in every corner. Relatively autonomous Finland was no exception as Finnish socialists rose in revolution like their Russian counterparts and seized control of most of the South. Unlike the Russian Bolsheviks however they would be crushed by the Finnish whites with the help of the Germans; but now they are whisked away before such a fate could befall them.
Nation/Entity Name: Navajo nation
Commonly Known as: Dinè Navajo Reservation, Naabeehó Bináhásdzo
Government: Reservation Tribal Council
Capital: Window Rock
Technology Level: 1930s
Year ISOTed from: 1934
Territory ISOTed: Entire Dinè reservation
Population: 100K
Religions: Traditional Dinè beliefs, Native American Church
Languages: Navajo, English, Spanish
Head(s) of State: Chee Dodge
Brief History:
The Dinè are one of the few Native American people to still live in a reservation that overlaps with their ancestral homeland and it would be one of the few to actually expand over the years. This is not to say that the reservation's people haven't suffered regular oppression and attempts at cultural genocide at the hands of the American Government, with the latest example being a planned culling of their prized sheep herds. But the reservation and the souls within it find themselves in a new world after a flash of light.
West Asia
The People's Republic of Palestine experienced a year of relative calm.
The campaigns against reactionary/aristocratic holdouts on the borderlands are successful, the republic's enemies are too disunited and lack the guns to be any real threat to the the nascent Palestinian Liberation Army and are either forced to give up and accept life under this strange new system or they simply begin moving farther and farther from the Levant, hoping to find someplace where the PRP won't follow.
The effects of the first five year plan begin to bear fruit as irrigation systems, improved agricultural techniques and tools combined with new world crops (provided by Fiume through trade) and good weather lead to a prosperous harvest and food distribution ensures all are well fed and provides a boost of legitimacy to the PFLP. The education and healthcare systems are also started to take proper form, with the former being crucial in forming the nation's future technical experts and ideological cadres and enough laborers are trained that rotation of workers in Cyprus and Hatay helps to lessen possible discontent as the former begins to shift from being a mere resource colony to a proper part of the PRP as the party now has enough resources to provide rewards for those willing to move there, helping lighten the logistics issue.
New downtimes cadres of all religions are joining the party and helping spread their ideals among the people, though these newer cadres show a tendency to be more unorthodox whenever it may be useful in winning more downtimers over.
But not all is well in the Palestinian state.
The appearance of Fiume and the Dalmatian portion of the Roman Empire has caused much contention and worry among the PRP's leadership even if both are harmless for now; the former's unpredictable and rapidly shifting politics mean that they may yet turn on the Palestinians in the future even as they sing praises of anti-colonialism today, and they are better equipped and more numerous than the PRP; meaning any war would likely end in the nascent socialist state being crippled if not outright destroyed. Furthermore, their existence and appearance in this world under similar circumstances means that the possibility of hostile more powerful reactionary factions appearing suddenly on the PRP's doorstep is quite likely and the prospect is terrifying for a leadership that had yet to forget what it is like to live under a genocidal regime.
This served to make the question of industrialization even more urgent, as the state began to expand coal extraction efforts and work on establishing heavier industries while debating implementing a system of universal conscription whether into the armed forces or a civil labor/service system but the move remains hotly contested as many believe it would cause unneeded societal unrest and suffering. All agree to expand the republic's gun-making and bullet-manufacturing capacity, however.
North America
In a flash of light, the workers and revolutionaries of Finland find themselves in a strange position, as their sun suddenly rises from the north and sets in the south, and the climate is noticeably different.
More importantly, all the lands beyond the area they secured in the revolution are now devoid of life and full of strange creatures, including mammoths, and the Finnish White Army is nowhere to be seen, nor is Russia or any other of Europe's nations.
The event beggars belief and no explanations exist but the leaders of the FSWR are glad that at least they are safe from enemy attacks for now and work quickly to prevent panic from spreading. Chairman Muller announced that regardless of the bizarre circumstances they are in, the Finnish proletariat is now free to build socialism in peace and the ad hoc dictatorship of the proletariat could now finally build a proper framework for itself even as it organized food production and distribution programs to prevent famine from setting in.
Further to their south Pittsburgh and Tlaxcala remain at peace but only barely.
Ever more frequent raids by the Americans inspire the Tlaxcala to form self-defense bands to counter the attacks, and more than a few begin reprisals of their own using captured American weapons which in turn fuels a cycle of raids and counterattacks that is only kept from reaching the level of outright war by the fact that the leaders of both cities know a conflict would be crippling for both sides even in victory.
The Tlaxcala are preparing for such a conflict however should it become inevitable; attempting to produce their own guns and gunpowder and training men, while the people of Pittsburgh are suffering from internal conflicts as the preferential treatment received by the white population evolves into outright discrimination as the NAACP finds its increasingly sidelined and ignored by a government that's growing comfortable in the powers granted of emergency and the social peace starts to breakdown as a protest by the city's colored population is violently dispersed.
Though Catholic and Protestant churches grow closer though true unity and reconciliation remain elusive for now.
Europe
The last remnant of the Spanish Empire in this new world buckles under the combined dual assault of internal revolt and external attack, some isolated bastions manage to hold out for now but their fall is only a matter of time.
Meanwhile, the Cuban and Dominican Republics can finally sigh in relief as they experience what can be considered respite as their agricultural techniques begin to adapt to their new climate and a new harvest manages to be sufficient for the time being (complemented by trade with the Peasant confederation).
The two nations are ideologically similar and friendly enough that they begin to cooperate more closely and both societies begin to focus on more civilian matters as the threat of the empire is no longer so menacing as plans to elevate the people's standard of living and establish democratic institutions begin in earnest, with the Cuban style used as the model naturally.
Cuba itself enters a period of cultural flourishing, as uptimer ideas begin to mix with the cultures and peoples of the colonial Spanish caribbean, as Cubans, Spaniards, Mestizos, former slaves, mulatos, moriscos, Asian workers, former crypto Jews, and the Taino remnants mix freely and turn Havana into a new cultural hub for the North Atlantic region.
The Peasant Confederation is having its own period of peace. Still, the growth of the cities begins to fuel a divide between urban and rural areas, the former becoming more influenced by ideas from the north. At the same time, the latter remain relatively more conservative. Still, this is an age of abundance of resources and land, meaning there is little reason for quarrels to escalate beyond the heated debate level, for now.
To the South, the situation was anything but peaceful for the fledging Fiume-Roman hybrid nation.
D'Annuzio's leadership is not made coherent and consistent by the new situation; if anything his views now seem to oscillate even further, much to the increasing frustration and anger of his more ideologically committed subordinates who hunger to enact their own visions of the Fiume experiment, with Giovanni hoping to see what would have been called fascism in our world be realized while the likes of De-Ambris hoped for a more leftist order of things.
Meanwhile, the refusal to commit to a single course of action begins to also anger the common people, in Fiume and Dalmatia alike with the latter beginning small isolated rebellions, which may yet grow into something greater.
Oceania
The Navajo nation's people wake up one day to find their world has been irrevocably changed. All signs of civilization beyond the reservation's borders are gone: no roads, railways, buildings, or any trace of the US that surrounded them for so long; all they find is a strange land filled with even stranger creatures.
Once news of their new circumstances became known, there was a mix of joy and fear among the people. Joy because their oppressors had somehow disappeared by some divine miracle and they were free once more. Fear because of their strange new surroundings and the implications of what had just happened, and the potential fallout.
The fear is even more palatable among the reservation's non-native population; who are now left stranded and at the Dinè's mercy. Though the reservation's current leader, one Chee Dodge is keeping the peace for now, his reputation as a federal patsy and collaborator means that he may not be in his position for long.
Even so many eagerly begin freely exploring the land around them, for if nothing else it is bountiful.
Nice seeing things pan out! But there are some things worth considering for future plot points:
- Seems likely Fiume will unite with Dalmatian Rome into some "Second Roman Empire" or "New Roman State" and will try to establish a foothold in Italy.
- If Ireland isn't claimed anytime soon, I suspect Cuba will colonize it. it's right there and it's very possible small outposts and atleast fishing boasts have already started doing stuff there (Plus, it's not really an ISOT to Virgin Earth if there isn't some land grabs).
- Spain likely has an outpost on the remnants of Orkney and the Faeroe Islands (Maybe some ships off the coast of Norway), which they'll likely use to try (and fail) to reclaim the Iberian Homeland.
Nation/Entity Name: Kingdom of Syracuse Commonly Known as: Syracuse Government: Monarchy Capital: Syracuse Technology Level: Hellenistic Year ISOTed from: 214 BC Territory ISOTed: Entirety of the kingdom before the siege of syracuse by the romans Population: 100.000, roughly half on Syracuse itself and the other half on the sicilian hinterlands Religions: Greek Paganism (Majority), Sicilian Paganism (Minority), Semitic Paganism (Minority) Languages: Greek, Sicanian, Elymian, Sicelian Head(s) of State: Hiero II of Syracuse Brief History: Syracuse is the most succesful of the greek colonies in the western mediterranean. Once rivaling Athens in size, even in the times of the ISOT it was powerful enough to challenge carthaginian hegemony on sicilly.
For the last 50 years it has been ruled by king Hiero II, a tyrant in its original meaning of the word, who has brough the island so much needed stability. His Lex Hieronica has made agricultural taxes far more efficient than elsewhere in the mediterranean, and without doubts contributed to the city's richness. It is thus no surprise, that in this atmosphere has the genius of Archimedes flourished.
Nation/Entity Name: Golden Ambrosian Republic Commonly Known as: Republic of Milan, Milan. Government: Directorial republic Capital: Milan Technology Level: 15th century Year ISOTed from: 1448 Territory ISOTed: The city itself plus the lands of the old duchy and the recently conquered cities, Population: 100.000 on Milan proper. High density on surrounding cities and towns Religions: Catholicism Languages: Lombard Italian Head(s) of State: Not a singular one, the country is lead by the 12 "Captains and Defenders of the Freedom"
Brief History: After the death of Visconti, a succession crisis fell upon the rich city of Milan, as factions warred over influence in the former roman capital, merchants and learned men, seeing in the republic as a rich and glorious form of government, engaged in a coup, taking control of the city and established a council of 12 "captains of the people" to lead the new republic.
Shortly after this coup there came war, with many cities declaring independence from Milan and venice warring on the young republic, only with the help of condottieri like Francesco Sforza, the Piccinino brothers or Bartolomeo Colleoni could these threats be put at bay. Now however it is these condottieri who are the republic's biggest threats.
Year 7
Mediterranean
- Just as the syracusans expected the Roman Fleet to initiate its siege a winter breeze darkens the sky, it doesn't take long for them to realize that is no longer spring, and more strangely, neither the romans, nor any other italian states of trinacria seem to currently exist. This all seems quite worrying to the superstitious greeks, but with the threat of war non-existant, and the sighting of two giant swans being interpreted by the augurs as a good omen, the city is currently quite stable. As for Archimedes, he was quite disappointed he didn't get to see his inventions in action.
Still, Hiero II would order in Spring for several exploration expeditions to be sent, to see if the non-roman peoples were still present, or if instead they had truly become the last men on Earth. Each sent at roughly the same time, they ordered to explore the spanish coast, italy, and of course Hellas, the Greek homeland.
The first expedition to return came back after seeing that neither Gadir, nor Saguntum nor Emporium nor Massalia were found. Instead they brought as gifts to Hiero several pelts of lions, bears, rabbits and bison, talking about the great richness in animals of Iberia.
The second came long after the first, having returned from the Illyrian Coast with news good and bad. They saw other human beings (romans with a weird accent, annoyingly enough), but what truly astonished them came from Fiume, a city far smaller than their native syracuse, but far stranger. In their arrival they told tales of horseless chariots, of ships made of iron, and even of weapons that roared like thunder. In other occasions this would have been dismissed as just tall tales, but this wasn't a normal occasion, and at least for the later, they brought evidence.
- In the city of Fiume proper this year was much like the ones prior, that is to say; highly chaotic. Chaos comes in many forms, and this time it presents itself as violence. D'Annunzio might be charismatic enough to keep himself in power, but not so much as for the various factions not to struggle over influence. Giovanni's Legionnaires often start fights with socialists and futurists, these later are commonly on the offensive too, while the socialists, anarchists and communists took their fair time in finally organizing as to not always be in the receiving end.
These brawls take place mainly in bars and restaurants rather than openly in the streets, they finish as soon as they begin, and the deathcount is barely 3 people by the end of the year, but it showcases how the situation in the city-state is deteriorating. Though not deteriorating enough to prevent the migration of latins and illyrians to the Carnaro, looking for a better life as promised by modernity. The roman countryside surrounding Fiume thus emptying.
It is at this time that a group of greek speakers arrive to the shores of the Carnaro, sailing in a genuinely ancient birreme they seemed to have come here to search for any humans, and instead have found more than they bargained for. Communication was possible thanks to the few greek journalists trapped in the city since the event. The fiumans themselves are surprised to see archymede's syracuse around, but the important part is how De-Ambris saw in this an opportunity.
While the greeks were being hosted as guests, De Ambris made use of the fact that D'Annunzio was in one of his left-wing days to convince him of Giovanni's danger to the city, and the possibility of sending him as a diplomat to syracuse as a way to remove him from the city's politics. D'Annunzio agrees, and while Giovanni is initially reluctant of being sent outside the city, the chance of seeing the glory of the ancient peoples of Italy, and the possibility of gaining foreign support for his faction results in him to agree, legonary leadership of fiume thus being left to Riccardo Gigante.
As the greek ships finally sailed back home, Giovanni accompanied them, bringing with him gifts of guns to King Hiero the II. The king was quite surprised by these weapons, and immediately sent them to archimedes, so that he may discover how they work and thus may the city be able to create moreso.
Finally as for the last of the syracusans expeditions, they searched all through the hellenic isles, finding not even a single sign of human life, defeated in spirit and preparing to return they became caught by a large storm - those so common in the mediterranean autum - which sent them off course, instead arriving at canaan's shore.
- In the People's Republic of Palestine state building continues slowly but steadily. The five years plan continues on schedule, the many irrigation projects have mostly put and end to the continuous medieval problem of starvation, and the new modern hospitals starting to cure otherwise life-ending or life-altering injuries and sickness.
The primary hurdle nowadays thus falls in matters of education. The literary on Jerusalem pre event was through the floor, as expected from a medieval feudal state. And though new schooling programs have been established there are simply too many illiterate people for it to make significant progress in such a short amount of time. Furthermore, these education programs mostly affected the urban communities, with the rural majority barely hearing of them.
To solve this issue the creation of "wandering schools" was proposed, led by teachers these wandering schools would traverse the countryside staying at villages with the purpose of teaching both kid and adult the most basic concepts of reading, allowing future education opportunities to go smoother. When the issue of language was raised (as standard arabic wasn't invented yet) it was decided to be done in the current palestinian dialect of arabic, with teaching in other levantine languages being relegated to a nebulous "future".
The sudden arrival of the syracusan greeks onto the shores of the Palestinian People's Republic took place shortly after this was decided, and these few greek survivors were brought to the Republic's capital at Jerusalem, communication was done through the few greeks still inhabiting the holy land
The fact the syracusans had arrive just this year made many a party members nervous, it meant their worse fears were true, that every year new arrivals came to this world, and worse of all, they might come from any point in time, some in the party have become outright paranoid that next time there will be a highly advanced hostile nation at their doorstep.
There is also the matter of fiuman influence, if the syracusans have arrived at palestine they must certainly have done so at Fiume too, and if the later manages to influence the city they would have both the manpower and weaponry to devastate the levant. Thus as the greeks finish their recovery they are sent to return alongside a full-fledged diplomatic hosts, which would arrive on the Syracuse just as the year was ending.
Though the syracusans surveyed most of the mediterranean, they missed an important appearance in the northern part of italy.
- For Milan the event was seen initially as a godsend. Their venetian enemies were gone, and the rebellious cities of the po valley lacked the means of launching significant revolts by themselves. But as days turned to weeks, the city's merchant and manufacturing classes realized that if they didn't find reliable trading partners soon their fortune would be worth naught. Of course, they were entirely surrounded by wilderness and swamp, so any exploration will take ages.
In this situation the classical Italian intrigue began its work. Afraid of Sforza's success, the Piccino conspired, asking the council to appoint Francesco to the east, to "protect" it from a now non-extant threat.
Sforza saw exactly what they were trying to do - removing him from the city's politics - and as much as he wanted to march onto Milan and take it for himself, in his current situation, without external support, it would fail. So he took the feud, and the riches of Cremona and CassalMaggione now in his possession, and began his own scouting operations for any sign of human life. It was a day just before New Year that one horseman would tell him of a shining city beyond the italian coast.
North Atlantic
- With the Spanish remnants vanquished the peoples from the north atlantic can finally rest at peace.
Exchange between the up and down timers have resulted in the export of new world crops, towards the peasants confederacy (maize in particular growing popular), while the more cold-resilient old world crops are exported in mass towards the caribbean isles.
The Cuban healthcare program has been pretty successful all things considered, mortality rates amongst Tainos and former slaves have sharply declined, even if they are still higher than most are comfortable with. Likewise there have been minor successes in both industry and education, paving the path for a great free cuba.
In the peasant's confederation the urban-rural divide grows deeper, particularly as cuban ideas of governance and society begin to further take root in these new cities, funnily enough some of the main spreaders of this ideology are newly ordained monks, who have found the ideas of the uptimers interesting if anything and wholly necessary to live a godly life in occasion. These divisions aren't causing tensions, not important ones at least, but its a growing issue which will need to be addressed.
American West Coast
- The continuous tensions between the tlaxcalans and the inhabitants of pittsburgh finally reaches a breaking point. A particularly large raid from Pittsburgh resulted in not just the destruction and stealing of a large amount of crops (as Pittsburgh has faced food shortages ever since the event), but the death of several native peasants. This of course angered the tlaxcallan populace, and though the leadership would have preferred to walk the path of peace, this and previous raids have made it so they were now forced to declare war.
The situation in Pittsburgh was tense, they lacked an army, only barely a militia of disorganized gun-owners, and though they had access to modern technology they lacked the ability to replenish it just yet. Still, the city's leadership thought that, with one or two desicive victories, they would be able to force the tlaxcalans to sue for peace. From the various gun owners and policemen of the city some 2000 men were thought of as disciplined, accurate and fit enough to form the first column of pittsburgh's "military", who were ordered to march south and camp where they could see an enemy city, without much of a plan afterwards.
The tlaxcalans weren't unaware of the destructive potential of white weaponry, they fully saw what it could do to an unprepared enemy if confronted head on, so once scouts reported to Cuitlixcatl of Ocotelpo of the appearance of the white army he put his plan into action.
Rather than meeting the enemy on the fields, he hid the brunt of his forces in a forest nearby to the camps, while keeping a smaller detachment in view of the whites, who were ordered to run if the whites approached them. This detachment would keep the whites distracted during the morning and afternoon, as well as awake during the early evening. Only once at the dead on night, once the whites were forced to rest, did the rest of the army descend.
This strategy worked wonders, with most of the militia captured, and those who weren't fleeing for their lives into the wilderness, only a quarter would return to Pittsburgh over the following days, and soon enough tlaxcala began its own siege.
On only slightly unrelated topic, this state of warfare becomes the las necessary push for the protestants and catholics to unify in the "New Unified Congregation" Wether this state of affairs will last only god knows.
- As this was taking place in the Southwest. The finns in the northwest were quite enjoying their lives. Forests were being cut down, swamps drained, rivers diverted, farmlands increased in number, and game was hunted in abundance. Without any white army or foreign nation to threaten the peace, finland was growing socialism slowly but steadily. Socially the event resulted in an increase of religiosity, but the People's delegations hoped that to be just a temporary event.
At the same time, several expeditions were being launch by the finns to find exactly where they were and if other humans existed. If not for the same firmament some may have thought to be in an alien planet.
Despite what i said beforehand fishing was the main source of regular food, and it was one of these fishing vessels which found evidence of other civilizations south of Finland, two civilizations at war. Something reported to the people's delegation just as the year was ending.
Oceania
- For the Dinè this has been another good year. Neither droughting nor flooding food is plentiful and their sheep herds grow in vast numbers. It has become quite clear now that the US won't return and this has also meant the revival of often suppressed indigenous practices, even many natives who converted to christianity have begun to return to their ancient ways.
The presence of dangerous wildlife - which does focus mostly on attacking livestock for now - has resulted in the creation of various local hunting and warrior bands (for the reservation lacked any kind of prior military), keeping their precious animals safe from megalanias, thylacoleos and wonambis.
As for the whites living inside the reservation, they are deeply divided in how to act, the plurality opinion says to collaborate with the Diné, at least for the time being, as otherwise they would suffer with little food or manpower to achieve much of anything. Some whose racism overrides their sense have opted to self-segregate, creating remote miniscule villas either inside or outside Diné territory, which they hope to make self-sufficient. A few have even begun to develop a sense of deep paranoia, convinced that the navajo are lying about what happened to the outside world and riding into the scorching australian desert, never to be seen again.
Yep, definitely allowed! Just be sure to take up your turn when it comes around.
Speaking of my turn, I'm working on it; should be done later this week. Did you know that on the map, the Hebrides have been missing for the past few turns? Don't worry, I out them back.
Would love to claim a turn too!. Any estimate when mine may come around if there's room? Seems like it might be a little while. Either way have the thread watched and will keep my eyes peeled.
I definitely won't be getting my turn in today. However, I am making progress! Over five thousand words! I've talked with Star already, and been granted a one day extension; I should have things done and posted by tomorrow. Y'all are gonna love it.
Government: Appointed "Council of Elders" under a colony of a single-party fascist dictatorship
Capital: Grzybowska Street (Council of Elders), Saxon Palace (Commissariat of the Warsaw Ghetto)
Technology Level: Late Industrial Era/Second World War/1940s
Year ISOTed from: August 5th 1942 CE
Territory ISOTed: The ghetto proper, as well as the Nazi ghetto administration headquarters in nearby Saxon Palace, and connecting city blocks (Saski Park, Mirowski Square, the rail yard, etc)
Population: approx 400,000
Religion(s): Rabbinic Judaism, Atheism, some Catholicism
Language(s): Polish, Yiddish, Modern Hebrew, German
Head(s) of State: Marek Lichtenbaum (head of Council of Elders), Heinz Auerswald (commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto)
Brief History: Before 1939, the Polish capital of Warsaw had a substantial Jewish population, at around three hundred thousand, of over a million people living in the city. True, many Polish Jews had been emigrating due to the antisemitism permeating the Polish Republic, but Warsaw remained the second largest concentration of Jewish people in the world. At least until 1939. For with the Nazi invasion and colonization of Poland, the several hundred thousand Jews of Warsaw were concentrated into a section of central Warsaw less than four square kilometers in area, which was walled off from the rest of the city. This process of ghettoization repeated itself across German-occupied Europe, but the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, and even with mass death from disease and starvation, it only grew larger as other ghettos were liquidated and had their populations deported to Warsaw. And come the summer of 1942, the Nazis had found their Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Starting in late July, every day thousands of Warsaw Jews were rounded up and taken by train to the nearby death camp of Treblinka. Many inhabitants of the ghetto are unaware or refuse to acknowledge what the Germans intend for them. Some left wing youth groups, both Labor Zionist and Bundist, have recently united into a single resistance organization- the Jewish Fighting Organization. However, even if this new group is already larger than the Home Army-sponsored Jewish Military Union, the Council of Elders still has legitimacy, the Nazis still have total monopoly of force, and two weeks on from the start of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, it only seems to be accelerating.
Notable Figure(s): Mordechai Anielewicz (leader and co-founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization), Marek Edelman (co-founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization), Zivia Lubetkin (co-founder of and noted fighter in the JFO), Simcha "Kazik" Rotem (head courier of the JFO), Dawid Wdowinski (political leader of the Jewish Military Union), Janusz Korczak (owner of Warsaw Ghetto orphanage), Simon Pullman (conductor of Warsaw Symphony Orchestra), Alexander Friedman (Rabbi and secretary-general of the Polish section of Agudath Israel), Kalonymus Shapira (Grand Rabbi of Piaseczno), Marceli Godlewski (Catholic priest of the All-Saints Parish), Emanuel Ringelblum (leader of Warsaw Ghetto chroniclers), Nathalie Zand (neurologist), Ludwik Hirszfeld (microbiologist), Yitzhak Gitterman (director of the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Poland), Lidia Zamenhof (translator and Esperantist) Abraham Gancwajch (Nazi collaborator and crime lord), Odilo Globocnik (Gruppenfuhrer of the SS, architect of the extermination camps, perpetrator of the Holocaust, war criminal, and all around despicable human being)
And here, I've drawn out the parts of Warsaw that got ISOTed, for visual reference:
Name: Babylonian Satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire
Commonly Known As: Babylonia, Lower Mesopotamia, Persian Empire
Government: Semi-feudal subdivision of a multi-state empire
Capital: Babylon
Technology Level: Early Antiquity/Iron Age
Year ISOTed from: September 484 BC
Territory ISOTed: The entire satrapy
Population: approx 1,000,000
Religion(s): Babylonian Paganism, Zoroastrianism, Second Temple Judaism
Language(s): Imperial Aramaic, Elamite, Old Persian, Attic Greek, Late Biblical Hebrew
Head(s) of State: Xerxes I (de jure/in absentia), Shamash-eriba (de facto)
Brief History: It has been over half a century since the Neo-Babylonian Empire was conquered by the rising Persians. Babylon remains somewhat rich and influential in the Achaemenid Empire, with the Iranian kings showing respect for Mesopotamian culture- even making Babylon one of the empire's four capitals- but the pressures of taxation, alongside decreasing funds for Mesopotamian temples, still provides an incentive for revolt. Two such revolts, both led by (claimed) descendants of the old Chaldean dynasty, have been crushed by Darius I already. With the recent proclamation of Darius' successor, Xerxes I, and increasing taxes, Babylon's network of urban elites has coordinated an uprising, crowning one Shamash-eriba as king of Babylon and of the lands. However, there are no contemporaneous revolts to split Iranian attention, and support from the southern cities is tepid at best. Shamash-eriba's revolt is surely doomed.
West Asia
Another flash of light, with none awake to see it, heralds the new year. The Satrapy of Babylonia is in one moment the beating (if rebellious) heart of an Empire, and in the next, is surrounded by undeveloped wilderness as far as the eye can see. Ordinarily, it would take some time for Shamash-eriba and his developing court to realize what would happen, given travel times of the era. In this case, though, the reports of victories against Iranian armies coming from the north and east, attributed to the supply trains behind them simply vanishing overnight, cannot be ignored. And an even more obvious sign of something being afoot is the overnight appearance of an impossibly densely populated hellscape of a city to Babylon's northeast, just off the west most bank of the Tigris.
The Warsaw Ghetto, after its most peaceful night in years, awakens to a land somewhat colder than it should be, and much drier than what its inhabitants are used to. The Nazis, from their headquarters outside the ghetto walls, immediately understand the depth of their situation, if not the particulars. Ghetto commissioner Heinz Auerswald- when he isn't struggling for leadership with brigade leader Odilo Globocnik, architect of the death camps- has perhaps a dozen or so combat-capable SS men, a few dozen more German clerks and bureaucrats, and a hundred or so Poles that could be conscripted into a militia (most having been in Mirowski Square at the time of the ISOT). The vast majority of SS the Nazis had been using to organize the mass deportations to Treblinka hadn't come with the Ghetto when it was transported, leaving Auerswald in quite the pickle. Of course, there was also the twenty-five hundred Jewish Ghetto Police, but Auerswald did not even countenance arming them, and rebuffed an offer from collaborator crime lord Abraham Gancwajch to raise a militia from within the ghetto itself. The Nazis could only barely keep the Council of Elders under control with threats, invocations of the sunk-cost fallacy, and wild lies about the state of the world outside the ghetto walls. A city of several hundred thousand could only be kept compliant by a force of mere dozens for so long.
The uprising was inevitable. All the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto could tell that something was off by the air alone. Patrols by the ghetto police were ever more frequent, keeping people away from the walls, away from the tops of buildings, away from the bridge that crossed over Mirowski Square. Rations were cut down to the bone, even for the ghetto "elites". The day's deportations were throttled down to mere tens of people instead of thousands, for the Nazis had to keep the killings going, but without dedicated death camps, could only take so many people out beyond the walls, to be murdered hands on, at one time. Not without inciting a panic, or being overrun by their victims. Rumors quickly spread that the world outside the ghetto had vanished. Mostly importantly, rumors spread that the SS men keeping them locked up were all that was left of Germany. They were weak. They were panicking.
The Council of Elders, behind closed doors, furiously debated whether to try and slip leash. However, after the suicide of Lichtenbaum's predecessor a short time before the ISOT, the Council was well and truly cowed. It was the Jewish Fighting Organization that led the revolt with the dawn of the fourth day- only taking so long because of the need to reconnoiter Warsaw' situation, and to scrape together a militia large enough to absorb weapons fire. A strike at the textile factories in the center of town attracted the attention of the ghetto police, who otherwise would have been able to bog down the JFO's militia. Instead, with the thugs occupied, those militia, armed with clubs, knives, molotov cocktails, and the odd smuggled pistol, stormed key locations throughout the ghetto. The Council of Elders' offices in the southern part of the ghetto fell easily, with the elders being detained for future trials, and more likely than not execution. The gates leading towards Saxon Park were breached, Auerswald's non-Aryan militia surrendered en mass, and the Nazi headquarters was besieged. Auerswald committed suicide rather than give the JFO the pleasure of killing him. Globocnik tried to lead a breakout, but died screaming after being caught in the spray of an improvised firebomb. The remaining SS and collaborators- those that didn't die in battle, follow the commissioner's example, or flee into the desert on foot- were captured to be interrogated and inevitably executed.
Mordechai Anielewicz, leader of the JFO, has found himself saddled with the task of setting up a government. The gates are thrown open, the walls are torn down, and the Nazis are dead, but Warsaw is still stuffed to the brim and then some with people, all in varying states of starvation and/or disease. Seizing the hoarded food stores of the ghetto elite, as well as the pantry of the Saxon Palace, can help with the food situation, but rationing must remain in place for now. Some ghetto institutions, such as the orphanage ran by Janusz Korczak, Pullman's Warsaw Symphony Orchestra, and most importantly, most of the doctors of Warsaw. However, others, such as the Polish priest Marceli Godlewski's administration of the Catholic churches in the ghetto, refuse to subordinate themselves to Anielewicz's ad hoc revolutionary government. Prominently, the Jewish Military Union (another resistance group, small and unpopular but well-armed thanks to Home Army sponsorship) and the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (responsible for running must of the soup kitchens in Warsaw, and a major channel for food smuggling) presented a united front to the JFO, demanding a proverbial seat at the table before they would cooperate. What's more, the JFO's still-new coalition was on the verge of tearing apart. Labor zionists, bundists, and communists could be kept together in the face of annihilation, but without the pressures of the Holocaust, ideological disagreements and personal rivalries are coming to fore.
It is this chaotic environment that Babylonian scouts from Sippar- the home of Shamash-eriba's uprising- stumble upon, perhaps two weeks from the sudden transition that changed everything. With the Polish Jews not speaking Aramaic (Persepolis having only been excavated just before the start of the Second World War, and Warsaw's few history professors having different areas of focus anyway) and the Babylonian cataphracts, some of Shamash-eriba's finest, not understanding Polish or Yiddish (neither language having yet evolved from their respective Proto-Slavic and Proto-Germanic roots, and the Persian Empire not penetrating that far into Europe anyway), communication proves difficult. Eventually, however, a solution is provided: Hebrew, though a minor language in Achaemenid Persia after Cyrus' reversal of the Babylonian Captivity, is still spoken by the Jewish diaspora who chose to not (or couldn't afford to) move to Achaemenid Palestine. Shamash-eriba and his court are untrusting of the Jews of Mesopotamia, viewing them a potential Persian fifth column, but do manage to secure some translators. Meanwhile, the JFO sends a delegation to Babylon to negotiate for food aid. By necessity, most of this delegation comes from labor zionist segments of the JFO, as they are the ones most familiar with Hebrew as a spoken language rather than a liturgical one. These delegates are also armed
Once in Babylon, negotiations are tense. The Warsaw Jews are not the only group Shamash-eriba is entertaining; also there are representatives from the cities of the southern marshlands, most prominently Uruk. Additionally, there are representatives from the remnants of the Achaemenid armies, which had managed to consolidate themselves in the northeast, around the village of Eshnunna. With the fragments of the Persian horse mail service caught in the ISOT, and sections of the famed Immortals on top of other Achaemenid military units from outside Mesopotamia, they would be difficult to dislodge. However, cut off from reinforcements, and demoralized by the clear divine favor Babylon's rebellion has, the Achaemenid remnants have chosen to negotiate a place in Shamash-eriba's new order, versus being crushed entirely.
The Warsaw delegation only barely talks themselves down from outright demanding food from the rest of Mesopotamia, with those arguing against it being a combination of more levelheaded zionists and the socialists among the diplomats. Even disregarding basic concern for other humans, Warsaw was too brutalized to conquer and hold all of Babylonia. Begrudgingly, the other diplomats agree- they are not eager to kill Warsaw's Jews while trying to save them- and the delegation as a whole presents a united front to Shamash-eriba.
In the end, Uruk, Eshnunna, and Warsaw in theory bend the knee to Babylon. In practice, the Third Babylonian Empire is a decentralized affair, with the aforementioned cities granted a lightened tax burden and rough spheres of influence. Uruk is free to take full advantage of an un-silted Persian Gulf; the Achaemenid remnants can practice Zoroastrianism in peace, and have colonization rights to the Iranian Plateau. The JFO receives a guarantee that none of the Jews in Babylonia will be dispossessed, trade rights with the rest of Mesopotamia, and even a sphere of influence in the northwestern lands of the empire; towns like Rapiqum and Hitum have their own farmlands and resources, especially bitumen in the latter, but it's nothing that isn't elsewhere in the lands, and the region of Suhum has always been difficult to control. Finally, the cities of central Babylonia- Sippar, Borsippa, Kish, and Babylon itself- have freedom from the tax pressures of foreign rulers, and confirmation of their political and religious hegemony throughout Mesopotamia.
It's not an agreement that makes anyone truly happy. The leftover Persians (and Greeks, and Egyptians, and Assyrians, and so forth) are still bitter and demoralized over having their homelands seemingly wiped from existence. The noble families of Babylon seethe at having the give up even the slightest bit of control. When the Warsaw delegation returns to Warsaw, they are met with confusion, insults, and demands for explanations. The sorghum and millet harvests of Suhum (originally earmarked for export to Syria and Anatolia), alongside trade with the rest of Babylonia, avert a total famine, but the four hundred thousand strong city is still dancing on the edge of famine. Some, such as the JMU and the more radical zionists in the JFO, accuse the diplomats of selling Warsaw out to a new Babylonian Captivity. However, despite these tensions, a war nobody is confident they can win is averted.
Culturally, Warsaw is entering a period of crisis. The city-wide trauma of ghettoization, the revelation of just what the Nazis has planned for every last Jew (courtesy of very public show trials for the remaining SS, as well as the now-published diaries of the Elders), and the full reality of being cast not just across space and time, but to a world where seemingly nothing existed outside of Babylonia but beasts right out of a natural history museum, all of that results some pretty serious shit. Suicides spike. Several people just shut down, while others throw themselves into public works projects like building new housing, renovating existing buildings, reorganizing downtime farms with uptime agricultural techniques, and digging oil wells that- with the knowledge of polymerization and synthetic rubbers wrested from the corpses of German industrialists- could keep Warsaw's industry going. Some Jews leave Warsaw to find a new life among Babylonian Jews, but the differences between Rabbinic practices and the only-just-codified culture of Second Temple Judaism is distressing for those not expecting it. Meanwhile, with in the halls of government, even as a constitution along socialist lines is being hashed out, the JFO experiences its first fracture.
Simcha Rotem and Ziviya Lubetkin, both significant leaders in the JFO, were also both people who, in another time, might have dedicated their lives to funneling the remaining Jewish population of Europe to the nascent state of Israel- and to getting the Palestinian Arabs who already lived there out of the way, using methods eerily similar to what they themselves had experienced at the hands of Nazi Germany. They were utterly dedicated zionists, convinced that the only way for the Jewish people to survive was to carve out a sovereign Jewish nation-state, and that the nation-state must be founded on the land of Israel. They, and a few other "hard" zionists in the JFO, secretly met with members of the JMU, who were similarly dedicated zionists. Together, they planned a plan to make the state of Israel a reality, and presented it to the rest of the still coalescing government. That plan was for the entire Jewish population of Warsaw, together with all the downtime Jews of Babylonia, to up and leave Babylonia, trekking across the harsh Syrian desert, and settling the surely empty land of Israel. Any supplies they needed would be seized by force.
Furious arguments erupted. Bundists and communists, the former including the JMU's nominal allies in the AJJDC, tear into the "hard" zionist group for trying to enact a colonialist scheme even now. The "soft" zionists, though applauding the concept, question whether such a scheme would even be feasible. The few rabbis in government, having been reluctantly dragged in, rage over the blasphemous implications of trying to return to Israel before the messiah comes. Inquiries of how the still physically weak populace of Warsaw, fighting off the aftereffects of starvation and disease months on, would survive the arduous trek are unsatisfactorily answered with exclamations that the weak would be winnowed out, leaving the strong behind to cast off the feminine trappings of diaspora Jews to become masculine Israelites. In truth, Rotem and Lubetkin do not make nearly as well of a case as they could. The man and the woman are fighters, not rhetoricians. Allying with the JMU doesn't help their case, as the smaller resistance group is widely seen as a puppet of the quite antisemitic Polish Home Army. Dawid Wdowinski, the political leader of the JMU, is in fact the one who presents the poorly received Social Darwinist argument. The "hard" zionists have crippled their argument from the beginning, but are utterly vicious in castigating the rest of the JFO for not following their mad scheme. Even with these missteps, perhaps Anielewicz could have been brought around had they had Yitzhak Zuckerman, the could-have-been husband of Lubetkin, an important leader in the JFO on their side. However, though Zuckerman was a committed labor zionist who would have helped the "hard" zionists better plan and present their scheme, he was also in Krakow at the time of the ISOT, and thus wasn't brought along. Instead, Anielewicz is advised by the antizionist union organizer Marek Edelman, who talks the JFO chairman (upgraded from the more informal and distinctly military "commander") past his own zionist sympathies to reject the Rotem-Lubetkin proposal. From there, the meeting descends into an all-out brawl as ideological disagreements, conflicting traumas, and petty teenage disagreements are unleashed.
After the fight settles down, the "hard" zionist sections of the JFO are expelled from the organization- in absentia, as Rotem and Lubetkin had already stormed out. As well, the JMU as a whole is cut out of government, also in absentia, though their former allies in the AJDC remain part of the post-ghetto coalition. The whole farce may have immediately discredited and dis-empowered the rightmost edge of Anielewicz's government, but the cracks in the united front have only grown larger. When Rotem, Lubetkin, and a handful of other "hard" zionists gather a small group and set out on their mad Aliyah, few are all that disappointed to see the back of them. Most expect the group to die. After all, they are poorly supplied, not experienced with desert travel, and setting out just as the summer heats approach. The Syrian Desert is not kinda at the best of times, which the middle of the year is not.
Some months later, in the middle of the first post-harvest, few make the connection between the departure of the "hard" zionist band to the west and the arrival of an Arab caravan from the west. A caravan that is well armed with bolt-action rifles and Maxim-type machine guns. A caravan that is dressed in clothes of medieval make but modern styling. A caravan whose leader greets the people of Hitum in stilted Polish.
-
And now, we go back in time to the beginning of the year, and to the other end of the Fertile Crescent. Palestine's industrialization program was going well enough. Sure, there's some unavoidable harshness and the occasional misstep, but the introduction of new world crops and the institution of functioning hospitals provides a buffer that can prevent famines. Additionally, the People's Republic is provided vital tools and industrial expertise by Fiume, and even at cut-rate prices thanks to Alceste de Ambris' current ascendancy in Dalmatian politics. The man may have been a national syndicalist, but he did see communists as allies. More cynically, many in Palestine's leadership suspect that Fiume is only investing in Palestine as a potential gas station, expanding Palestinian oil extraction and refining that could fuel the Fiuman air force- or more ambitiously, an ironclad navy. Fiume did sport functional dockyards, after all, and a varied enough industry that the only thing keeping the city-state from building outright dreadnoughts, as it had under Austria-Hungary, was shortages in both raw materials and manpower.
Otherwise, as the first five-year plan continues ahead of schedule, Palestine claws its way out of the medieval era in culture as well as technique. Lelia Khaled, an uptime PFLP member, begins to spread messages of liberation along gender lines as well as class lines, using the wandering schools as a vector to spread feminism along Marxist lines. Contact and trade with the outside world has shocked the Levant out of its nation despair, and the common people are growing increasingly invested in public and political life. Cyprus is settled enough to ascend from a mere resource colony to two full blown provinces, fully integrated into the People's Republic. While immigration from Syracuse and Dalmatia is restricted- everyone is fearful of another Crusade, or a Nakba- an exception is made for the Croats of Fiume at Habash's insistence, and trade and tourism between the three Mediterranean states is booming.
On the military front, plans for instituting nationwide conscription are shelved. Palestine does have significant natural barriers protecting it from a potentially fascist Fiume, in the form of the Mediterranean at sea and the unsettled Anatolia on land. Nevertheless, fortifications in key spots are built, the native arms industry continues to be expanded, and the beginnings of a standing army is made. Notably, one military commander who rises to prominence is one Hugh du Puiset, the former young count of Jaffa, having converted to communism after his surrender and re-education some years ago. The PFLP leadership keeps an eye on the young man, wary of a Red Napoleon, but Puiset is by all accounts a dues paying PFLP member, and identifies far more with Palestine than with a French homeland he doesn't remember. Some worries are relieved when research reveals that in another time, as Hugh II of Jaffa, Puiset would have worked with Muslim Egyptians to instigate a revolt against the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The more leftist member of the uptime PFLP, intensely suspicious of nobility and military leaders, continue to watch Puiset anyway.
Even as the Adriatic is wracked with political upheavals, Palestine is a beacon of relative stability and prosperity. Things are looking up. Then everything changes when, in the middle of summer, reports come of Jewish Franks stumbling out of the eastern deserts.
Confusion turns to horror as the sheer state of the few dozen trekkers is realized- already half starved before setting out to cross the desert at the height of summer, blasted by sun and sand, and apparently having eaten the horses and camels they started out with. The leadership of the PFLP, many of whom were doctors before turning to revolutionary politics, are called in to care for the mysterious people, who slip in and out of consciousness. Eventually, the people who were saved are coherent enough to talk. The language barrier is quickly crossed with an Arab-to-Polish dictionary a PFLP member had on them at the time of the ISOT all those years ago. And then horror turns to terror. Terror because the remaining leader of the "desert Franks" is one Ziviya Lubetkin, survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and someone who, in another life, was very much a participant in the 1948 Nakba that killed tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, rendered hundreds of thousands more homeless refugees. George Habash, founder and leader of the PFLP, had lost his sister in a death march- a death march he was caught up in while earning the medical degree he would later use to save Lubetkin's life. Ghassan Kanafani, the party spokesperson, had been rendered homeless and destitute at the age of twelve by zionist militias, the very same militias that an older Lubetkin would have joined alongside her husband, Yitzhak Zuckerman. For much of the PFLP, their work to liberate Palestine was personal. And here was a living, breathing representation of the State of Israel that had hurt them and so many others.
Lubetkin isn't killed, or even beaten. However, she, alongside her surviving self-described "ultra-zionist" companions, are imprisoned and roughly interrogated. What the PFLP fears the most- a fully armed and equipped IDF- appears to not be existent, but the news of the Warsaw Ghetto, with a large Jewish population, decent industry, and zionists in government, isn't much better. That bundists like Marek Edelman, an antizionist whose future self would have written in support of Palestinian resistance fighters, are highly placed in that same government does somewhat cool the PFLP's fears, however. Somewhat enough that when a trans-Syrian caravan is put together, guided by downtime Bedouin who have experience in this sort of thing, it's put together a scouting-cum-trade mission, instead of a pre-emptive strike force. Setting out from the coal mining colonies in Hatay, skirting along the Anatolian Plateau until they hit the Euphrates, and then following the Euphrates southeast, the so-called "Babylon Expedition" is shocked when they find not only the expected 1940s Warsaw but also a Classical era Babylonian Empire. When Lubetkin had denounced the JFO leadership as having sold their people into a new Babylonian Captivity, the PFLP hadn't thought she meant that Warsaw was a nominal vassal of a literal Babylonian Empire.
Relations between Jerusalem and Babylon- and the semi-independent city-states under Babylon, including Warsaw- are soon opened. Trade begins to flow, and Mesopotamia, even more starved of mineral resources than Palestine, eats that shit up. But not all is well in the Fertile Crescent. Conscription in Palestine is expanded significantly, with the PFLP still fearful of a such a large and well-armed zionist force. Shamash-eriba finds his vassals growing ever more restless, while the central urban elites that make up his support base are incensed at having to compete with better positioned Iranians and Polish Jews for dominance over trade. Finally, the JFO has put together a provisional constitution for the "Free and Socialist City of Warsaw", while the resistance organization itself rebrands to the Labor Socialist Party of Warsaw. With elections are scheduled for early next year, internal tensions are greater than ever. Representation (or lack thereof) for the downtime towns under Warsaw's influence, the deep-seated city wide trauma, continual issues with space even as new housing in built and over a hundred thousand Jews spread out across Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, Palestine's repeated refusal to grant immigration access, the fact that Warsaw is still a nominal vassal to a feudal empire, the fact that there are still Nazis and Nazi collaborators (most notably the smuggling kingpin Abraham Gancwajch) haven't been accounted for, debates over Zionism versus bundism, debates over the extent of socialism, these are all issues. The newly minted LSPW is the only party of relevance in Warsaw, but is sure to split any day now.
Europe
Among the British-Antillean Isles (the "North Indies" as some call the archipelago), Cuba and her sister republics of Dominica and Puerto Rico are flourishing. With the Spaniards no longer a real threat, the Cuban military can be drawn down, with uptime soldiers finally able to turn to civilian life. This Cuba may be less developed than the Cuba of the 1980s, but it is one that avoided the scars of American imperialism, and Spain's last attempts to keep the island. Baseball, already popular in the 1860s, has its refined form introduced by veterans of Angola, and amateur leagues quickly become widespread across northern Europe. To feed industrialization, Ulster is colonized to advantage of the coal and iron ore reserves that Cuba just didn't have. Adaptations to the more northerly climate are common; heavier clothes and heavier foods, while disturbingly American to some, are a natural consequence of the higher latitudes. Some of Cuba's doctors, with more free time now that the next generation is graduating from the University of Havana, try their hands at environmentalism, helping the animal and plant life of the Caribbean adapt to the North Seas- or at least keeping them alive in zoos. Of special interest are the primeval flora and fauna of what could have been Haiti. Animals such as the flightless giant barn owl, ground sloth, West Indies shrew, turtles larger than any living in the original timeline, and even the Caribbean monk seal (an increasingly rare sight in the 19th century, and extinct by the 20th) are carefully tracked and managed by professors to ensure their survival, by hook or crook.
In lighter news, under Ramon Emeterio Betances and the Revolutionary Socialist Committee, Puerto Rico has been freed from the colonial yoke, and established as a Socialist Republic. The Puerto Rican abolitionists-turned-socialists might use language that infuriates Marxist theoreticians, but their policies are well received. In particular, after his confirmation as president, Betances meets with his Cuban and Dominican counterparts to discuss closer ties, maybe even merging into an Antillean Confederation. Abelardo Colome Ibarra, the Cuban prime minister, is interested (especially given Betances' arguments of a need to protect against any potential American giants), but Gaspar Polanco, the Dominican president, waves off any talks for now. He claims fears of Cuban domination over the other nations of the North Sea- and given how the late, unlamented Ochoa conscripted Dominicans and fed them into Cuba's military industry, these fears aren't unwarranted. These talks are emblematic of Cuban-Dominican relations, and how they were still grappling with the legacy of the red generalissimo.
Across the Channel, the Peasant's Confederation, while prosperous, is facing its own problems. A band of English peasants, rejecting the perceived dominance of Germans, the so-called capitulation of their spiritual leaders to the new status quo, and the growing urbanization, gather and set out to settle one of the last remnants of the English landmass- the Isle of Wight. Cuba had unofficially claimed the island for some time, but after the cessation of hostilities with the Confederation, and increases in food trade, Wight had been abandoned, losing whatever purpose it had as a naval base or farmland. The Confederation leadership is somewhat incredulous, but nevertheless defends the settlement of Wight to Cuba, and Wat Tyler goes to hear his fellow peasants' grievances, while at the same time organizing elections to keep them represented in the Confederation. Back on the mainland, the urbanization crisis culminates in the official chartering of Neu Allgau, long the gathering place of Confederation government, as a city. This a major victory for the political faction led by Gotz of the Iron Hand, the informal leader of the Confederation's equally informal military. However, with the furious debates erupting, that victory may prove a poison pill.
To the north, the remnants of the colonial Spaniards languish on the Shetlands, having retreated there after their defeat on Puerto Rico. Jose de la Gandara, military and now political and cultural leader of the colonials, is only maintaining his position by virtue of having eliminated all other competitors. The captain-general of Cuba was killed early on when the uptime Cubans took the island, Guiterrez of Puerto Rico had been rendered powerless before being left behind on Puerto Rico as an attempt to placate the reds, and Lemoine was pre-emptively murdered on Gandara's orders before the noble could organize a coup against him. The only contender of note left was an aging Pedro Santana, the Dominican general who had first invited the Spanish to annex Hispaniola a decade ago, only to be replaced as captain-general by Lemoine after his failures in crushing Dominican rebels. But even the old fool had a chance against Gandara, the military dictator who, no matter how much he bled the reds white, still oversaw the end of the Spanish Empire.
Gandara was well aware of his fragile position. And it was clear that an undeveloped Shetlands archipelago was simply unable to support the tens of thousands reactionary Spanish troops and colonial elites who fled in the face of revolution. Instead, both to preserve his power and to keep the people under him alive, all without submitting to the revolutionary scum, Gandara would organize an exodus. The Spaniards still had enough ships that they could, theoretically, go by sea to the hopefully uninhabited Iberian Peninsula. There, they could seethe in peace about having their plantations stolen from them. Surprisingly enough, it worked. Despite some losses and an attempted mutiny, the Spanish whites did make it to Galicia, and even had enough supplies (IE, hoarded colonial wealth) to not immediately die, but instead set up a settlement. Gandara declared a new Kingdom of Spain; not having the political capital to outright declare himself king, he instead set himself up as regent "until a suitable monarch came along". Conditions in the reactionary bastion are horrific, especially given the severe gender imbalance, and the rancid culture that comes from being on the wrong side of a revolution. Popular discontent is mounting, and that only contender of note, Santana, is eager to take Gandara's place. However, the Spaniards have wedged themselves firmly into Iberia's northwest coast and seem to be here to stay.
The only wrinkle in the New Spanish Armada comes early in their journey, when they almost run into the unsettled Hebrides. Sometime in the past few years, the island chain and disappeared from the Spaniards' maps, painstaking updated to represent the new geography. Understandable, given the Cubans had been ignoring them. The mistake is recoverable, though damage to some ships results in their later loss in the Atlantic. Most importantly, the blunder alerts the Cubans to Gandara's attempted exodus. Ultimately, Havana decides to let the Spanish go. The decision is controversial, as the reactionaries still hoard a significant amount of the people's wealth, but Cuba is tired of war, and much of the uptime military equipment as been expended. An oceangoing steam ship, equipped with radar and radios salvaged from transport planes, follows the Spaniards from a distance, and notes their settlement of Galicia. On the way back, as they pass by the Bordeaux coast, the communist scouts also note some downright archaic radio signals coming somewhere from the east. Another ship, equipped with better comms equipment and crewed by long neglected uptime signals experts, is sent, and parks itself in the Gulf of Biscay. The communists note that the radio signals are indeed archaic, both in terms of the technology being used to send the signals, and the contents. Who would use an early 1920s-ish radio to send signals in Latin? Nevertheless, there is clearly some sort of civilization in the Mediterranean. After the comms ship returns and gives her report, the Cuban Liberation Army sets to work in organizing a proper scouting expedition, to sail around the Iberian Peninsula and through the Gates of Hercules. The scouts are planned to be sent next year…
-
The events that have progressed around the Italian Peninsula are quite significant. In Fiume, with Giovanni Host-Venturi sent to Syracuse for ambassadorship, Alceste De Ambris and the left wing of the government is in ascendancy. Maneuvering around a D'Annunzio that, at least for this year, is more invested in his writings than in government, De Ambris uses his mastery of Fiumes legal system to enact a syndicalist policy plank. The corporations in Fiume proper go through internal reorganizations; while the basic structure of corporatism remains intact, the corporations themselves are turned into proper worker's syndicates, with authority over their respective industries. The bourgeois are shoved aside, while the Communist Party of Fiume suddenly find themselves in government, represented in the Council of Corporations through the dockworkers' unions they built. FT Marinetti, the "Magister Industria" imposed on Roman Dalmatia by D'Annunzio, is reigned in, De Ambris using the Council of Corporations' authority over labor relations and public works. Marinetti's breakneck industrialization program is moderated somewhat, earning Fiume respect from the plebians of the Roman Empire, and placating the cultural aficionados who would rather not see the symbols of old crushed by the hammer of the new. The Magister himself is furious at being leashed, of course, while Rome's downtime elites are incensed by the uptime city-state stepping beyond a mere Foederati to meddle in the affairs of the Empire proper, just like the Goths did. De Ambris was also Magister Officiorum of the Empire, as well as Fiume's chief of staff, but to those most concerned with laws being enacted to right way, the old syndicallist took the wrong legal channels.
Leashing the Fiuman Legionnaires is a more difficult task. Even if Host-Venturi has been shuffled aside, his replacement as commander of both the Uscocchi and Disperata, Ricardo Gigante, is even more of a snarling ultranationalist. Ordinarily De Ambris' sweeping leftist reforms would have provoked a response from the committed fascist by now. Only the fact that Gigante has been occupied with securing his leadership over Fiume's military has prevented him from couping De Ambris. De Ambris realizes he needs to prevent any sort of reactionary backlash, but he doesn't have enough influence over the Council of the Best, the legislature in responsible for Fiume's armed forces. He can influence the military industrial complex through the leftist control of the Council of Corporations, but De Ambris' only real avenue is to go to the infamously mercurial D'Annunzio.
The reason Gigante hasn't yet overthrown De Ambris is one part respect for D'Annunzio, and another part because he's helping organize a more a complex scheme. Giovanni Host-Venturi, the former Legionnaire commander, is a student of Italian history. His knowledge may be dubious and warped by nostalgia, but the proto-fascist does know that Hiero II, the King of Syracuse, would have died in 215 BCE in the original timeline- and thus, is not long for this world either. Host-Venturi does not warn the Greek king of his approaching death, and instead ingratiates himself with the young prince of Syracuse, Hieronymus. The rumors Ancient Rome spread about him may or may not be true, but Host-Venturi is certain that the fifteen-year-old grandson of Hiero is vulnerable to manipulation. When Hiero II finally dies early in the year, and Hieronymus ascends to throne, the dominant force on the boy-king's regency council is not his staunchly anti-Roman uncles, but rather an Italian fascist from Fiume.
Host-Venturi plans to use Syracuse as a base from which to reforge the Roman Empire, but the Greek colony is not nearly developed enough for that yet. Instead, he contacts his successor as the military leader of Fiume, Gigante, and the two men get to work. Industrial aid is sent to Syracuse not through the left leaning syndicates, but in the form of Uscocchi labor armies and dissatisfied Fiuman bourgeois. Archimedes is a verifiable genius, but is an intellectual and therefore feminine and unreliable in the eyes of fascism; Fiuman industrialists instead liase directly with Sicilian merchants and landowners. Working with instead of against the Lex Hieronica is a bonus, helping maintain Syracuse's political stability. An early achievement in Host-Venturi's scheme is organizing a meeting between Hieronymus and Julius Nepos. While the Roman Emperor is thoroughly unimpressed by the boy-king, he is more than interested in the proposal that comes with him. De Ambris was well known for his republican rhetoric, even outside of Fiume. While the full details of the scheme aren't hammered out (the matter of Sicilian independence of Rome is a sticking point on Hieronymus' part), Nepos and Host-Venturi do agree to a military exchange between Dalmatia and Syracuse, facilitated by Gigante's legionnaires. This is especially important for Nepos, as while in one of his mandated stays in Fiume, the emperor would research his historical fate, and now would like to remove his Gothic generals as a concern. Sicily seems far away enough.
Speaking of Archimedes, the inventor isn't as upset as one would first think at being shut of Syracuse's industrialization. No, the man and his students are far too busy catching up, as it were. Archimedes himself is deemed far too important to be allowed to leave Sicily, but he is allotted his own workspace, which he turns into a university- in part to attract knowledgeable persons from uptime. His most trusted students are sent abroad to Dalmatia and Palestine, and at least in Fiume, the name "Archimedes" carries enough weight for several scientists and engineers to show up at the man's door. With the guidance of Fiume's best and brightest, Archimedes works feverish to learn the latest in physics, mathematics, and other fields- and often working with teachers advance those fields ahead of what they themselves know. In one instance, while working with the physicist Peter Salcher and his student Paul Nemenyi, one of Archimedes' students returns from Palestine. The communist state is rather light on STEM professionals, and those that they do have are too involved in government to leave the country. However, Mohamed Boudia, the Palestinian ambassador to Fiume, does send Archimedes a book from his personal library- a biography of Albert Einstein. The book is rather light on actual science, but the concepts introduced within inspire Archimedes and Salcher to independently reconstruct a theory of relativity. (Boudia had censored the book beforehand, carefully removing every reference to atomic bombs. The man was rightfully paranoid.) Throughout the year, the "Archimedean University of Syracuse" continuously grows, a bastion of free thought on a Sicily increasingly dominated by fascists.
As the year progresses, two new players become involved in the Mediterranean. The first is the could-have-been duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza. Assigned by the Ambrosian Republic of Milan to the east, what was intended to be an exile to remove him from the city's politics has instead turned into an opportunity. Lacking ships, Sforza's scouts are forced to skirt along the Adriatic coast, but they do make contact with Fiume, eventually. When Sforza sends his report to Milan, he sends it alongside Dalmatian trade ships following the Po River upstream. This is a major coup for Sforza, as Lombardy's trade-based economy was near collapse. The uptime city-state isn't giving Sforza nowhere near the political support he wants, with De Ambris (and thus Fiume's syndicated merchants) being wary of the Florentian mercenary. However, they do inadvertently give him substantial economic support, as being the man who brought trade back to Milan- and the man who controls the Po River Delta that trade is coming through- is substantial in of itself.
The second player is the Ambrosian Republic proper. While Sforza is leveraging his newfound economic might into the foundations for a coup, the Captains and Defenders of Milan scramble to undermine his influence. They find an unexpected backer in the very Fiuman merchants that gave Sforza his new power base; the traders themselves don't like having to work through Sforza's monopoly, while up top, De Ambris would rather staunch (and easily divided) republicans be in charge of Dalmatia's new rival. New trade deals undercut Sforza's influence, keeping him from executing his coup.
Across the Mediterranean, webs of trade and intrigue are being woven. Syndicalists and communists struggle to keep the petit-bourgeois leashed, some better than others. Fascists and reactionaries plot their schemes and scheme their petty squabbles. There are bright points: exchanges of culture and science, or late in the year, the reunion of some Jewish families- having made the long journey across the Syrian desert, and then the Mediterranean Sea- with their younger members in Fiume, thought lost to the ISOT or worse. But it's clear that a storm is brewing.
Oceania
Not much can be said about the Dine this year. Chee Dodge's authority over the Navajo Nation is unravelling, as without the threat of Uncle Sam to keep them within their fences, the Native Americans are free to practice their culture and live their lives. Meanwhile, the reservation whites cluster around the US-appointed Tribal Chairman. Chee himself is growing too old to contest the fracturing of his authority, but his son and heir apparent, Thomas Dodge, has designs on reuniting the Dine, and sees the white men, with their wealth and guns, as a path to do that.
North America
Along the Salish Sea, the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic struggles with pulling itself together. The railroads that once bound Finnish cities, from Helsinki to Viipuri, were reshuffled along with the cities themselves in the flash of light that brought them to the American Northwest. Within those cities, the only real industry that exists is the lumber industry. That industry is reorganized along socialist lines, and between Finnish forests brought with them and Oregonian forests around them, keeping the mills fed. However, that industry is not enough to industrialize a whole country, not on its own. On the agricultural front, the reshuffling of the lands of Red Finland has provided an opening for farms to collectivized without much resistance from the peasantry. Those farms are going to take a while to spin up, though, and in its first years the Republic is desperately hunting and fishing to keep a population, ordinarily reliant on Russian grain, from starving.
On the political front, things are similarly rough. Kullervo Manner and the People's Delegation have set up a parliamentary government along democratic socialist lines. The Red Guards, though mostly demobilizing with the threat of the Imperial Germans and Finnish Whites removed, are still a significant political force, and they have a bone to pick with the civilian government. Between more Marxist inclinations than the ruling Social Democrats, and frustration with past incompetency (Tampere, which had been under siege when Red Finland was ISOTed in late March of 1918, was still rebuilding), the Guards had a number of grievances to point to. Taking advantage of the multi-party democracy implemented, more radical Finnish politicians, with support from the Red Guards, split off from the Finnish SDP to form a Communist Party of Finland.
The greatest headache toe FSWR faces, ultimately, is the remaining Soviet Russian forces. Not the ground troops, some ten thousand men (mostly former conscripts of Imperial Russia), who are glad to demobilize after the horrors of the Great War. No, the real problem is the Baltic Fleet. Docked in Helsinki since February of 1918 are over two hundred ships, including all four Gangut-class dreadnoughts, the legendary cruiser Aurora that fired the first shots of the October Revolution, a scattering of destroyers and auxiliary ships, and the remnants of a very confused British submarine squadron that had been in the Gulf of Finland since before the February Revolution. In charge of this force is Flag Captain Alexey M Schastny. Power hungry and always chafing to serve under communists, Schastny refuses to have any part of the Baltic Fleet scrapped, even as most of it is put in mothballs due to lacking fuel and supplies. The sailors who serve under him, devout communists one and all, may clash with their nominal commander on many issues, but they refuse to be disarmed.
When reports come from a fishing boat of a pair of cities on the Californian coast, Schastny jumps at the chance to be relevant. Enough coal is scraped together to fill the bunkers of the Bogatyr, a cruiser designed for long range missions in the Pacific Ocean, and refitted just before the Great War to be one of the most advanced ships in Russia's fleet. She sets out and makes good time towards the San Francisco Bay. This is good, because Schastny's handpicked officers, the cruiser's crew, and the Finnish diplomats do not like each other.
Down south, the war between Tlaxcala and Pittsburgh is not going well for Mayor Flaherty. The annihilation of the police militia by Tlaxcalan forces rant and rave, but he's forced to rely ever more heavily on the remaining police to keep order. That order is not well kept, with the NAACP organizing its own militia, and Pittsburgh's unions- long rendered puppets of the Democratic Party and industrial magnates- struggle to keep their membership under control. With the police too important to be scapegoated, and the city's blacks too tough a nut to crack, Flaherty instead diverts public blame at the intellectuals. The professors and doctors who first facilitated diplomacy with the Tlaxcalan Confederation, and who organized a vaccination campaign that prevented a Columbian plague, are accused of being fifth columns for the "Mexican savages" who "are sacrificing our brave boys in blue to their pagan gods as we speak". Pittsburgh's universities are bloodily purged. A number of professors do escape, however, many with the help of the priests under Bishop Vincent Leonard. What starts as individual moments of mercy turns into a trial by fire for the new union between Catholics and Protestants. Leonard is called into Flaherty's office in a demand to give up those priests that stifled his pogrom, and Leonard refuses. The bishop barely walks away with his life, and when he returns to his congregation, he makes it his first priority to reach out to NAACP and dissident unions, to form a single opposition to the police dictatorship.
In Tlaxcala, the cities' ruling teutcli eagerly grant refuge to Pittsburgh's exiled intelligentsia. The professors may not have much in the way of equipment, but they knowledge they do have, particularly in metallurgy, send Tlaxcala's technology ahead leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the militia that had been captured last year are not sacrificed to the gods. The Tlaxcala are not the famously bloodthirsty Aztecs. Beyond that, enough contact has been had with Pittsburgh that Xicotencatl realizes that was normal business in the Flower Wars would not be well received by the white men. Instead, the prisoners of war are put to work in Tlaxcala's fields, freeing up workers for the ever-growing forges. Meanwhile, soldiers under Cuitlixcatl continue enforcing the siege of Pittsburgh, conquering some of the outlying mines and farms, and raiding what they couldn't hold, keeping up the pressure all the while.
It is this situation that the Bogatyr discovers when she sails into the San Francisco Bay, between the two city-states. With a thunderous roar of blanks that are heard for miles all around, the fighting stops for a moment. The Bogatyr's sailors nearly mutiny when the Finnish diplomats make clear their intentions to meet with the police dictatorship instead of overthrowing them and establishing a socialist government, only calmed by appeals to the lack of proper revolutionary sentiment in Pittsburgh. While the sailors go out on shore leave to find or make some proper revolutionary sentiment, the Finnish delegation- accompanied by a squad of Red Guards- meets with Mayor Flaherty to discuss terms. Flaherty seethes at being talked down to by communists, but he has no other option. A peace treaty is enforced between Pittsburgh and Tlaxcala, with reparations by the former to the later. The state of emergency is ended, with elections scheduled for next year. The Bogatyr's officers meet with the owners of Pittsburgh's coal mines, eager to secure a source of fuel for the Baltic Fleet, while her sailors contact the newly formed "holy opposition". Tlaxcala's prisoners of war are released, but in a trickle, and their arms are seized to be reverse engineered. At the end of the year, the Soviet cruiser sails back north, to be replaced by another ship that will keep Flaherty honest.
Hello! I need to do a minor rewrite of my main bit/addition and also do "the rest of the world" but I am aiming to get the update out within ~~36 hours because I am going into the no internet zone (Deepest Darkest East Lancs) soon. If that doesn't work out then I will probably post towards the end of the week.
Also before I forget that was a really cool update! I will have to give it a reread once or twice to pick up on everything.
Hello! I need to do a minor rewrite of my main bit/addition and also do "the rest of the world" but I am aiming to get the update out within ~~36 hours because I am going into the no internet zone (Deepest Darkest East Lancs) soon. If that doesn't work out then I will probably post towards the end of the week.
Also before I forget that was a really cool update! I will have to give it a reread once or twice to pick up on everything.
