That honestly surprises me. Switzerland has a long history of holding out quite successfully against the tyrant of the decade. Because they're happy to work with you and won't undermine you, but will be a colossal pain in the ass to invade, subdue, and occupy because they're heavily armed, mountainous, and kiiiinda xenophobic.
The banking industry did not survive the Great Collapse. Commerce in general did not. Switzerland didn't fall to invasion. It's just that a place with so heavy a service-oriented economy is not going to survive something like the Collapse.
The timeline's bold text is Word of God for this quest.
I mean, I'd expect there to still be a Switzerland in that case. It's just a miserable impoverished place with a small surviving population of bitter heavily armed nationalists, instead of being a cheerful prosperous place with a large surviving population of relatively happy heavily armed nationalists.
Strictly speaking, Switzerland exists, but it's not entirely locally-governed. The government did not survive its crisis. In the wake of the government collapse, one thing led to another, and France, Italy, and Germany would up jointly administering the place in order to prevent mass starvation. It wasn't a military invasion -- the official presence was aid workers, and the main supply line was food. Officially, the nation is now a trust territory while the responsible powers work to restore local order and governance.
It did not survive. Some would like to change that, but there has been no luck as of yet.
They have survived, as they always have. Reduced in some areas, yes, but stronger in others. Nothing yet has destroyed the Church. Frankly, it tends to flourish when exposed to persecution. I doubt that anything ever will kill it.
A possible avenue of getting some type of educational aid for the masses might be to request some Jesuits to come by, guys are pretty smart and have experience working in 3rd world environments. They'd just have to get over to us somehow. Granted I wonder what happened to the University of San Francisco (which is a Jesuit run college) in the NRC. I wonder if the Russians kicked them out.
I have an omake still in the process of gelling describing a piece of international Catholic involvement that (in a fragmentary manner) made it to Chicago.
Hey works for me. Maybe I'll write something up later about Jesuits heading towards Chicago once we survive the first few turns.
The big issue the UN would face is that one of the Security Council members no longer exists in recognizable form that can send relevant delegates, and another probably considers the whole thing to be a silly joke and doesn't care except insofar as UN agencies are a useful tool to funnel aid to places they want it to go.
I'm honestly surprised that re-establishing a federal government wasn't one of the surrounding nations' top priorities, in that case. Policing and administering the cantons themselves almost has to be more work than letting the locals do it, and it sounds like the locals aren't being so xenophobic that the surrounding nations have reasons to fear the outcome.
If you read over my Catholic World News omake, you'll get a hint.
Actually, this is Poptart's verse, which happens to contain a little cyst called "Victoria" within which Lind's power fantasies are the official party line of a totalitarian hellhole-state. Meanwhile, from the outside, a giant Poptart is looking in at them going "heh heh puny retroculturalists" and having their real mover-and-shaker nation, Russia, does whatever the fuck they want.
I mean, yes, basically; the UN wouldn't function as a peacekeeping organization.
Alexander's heir is his son Vasily. After that, Alexander's daughter Alena. And in and around all of that is his legion of bastard children complicating matters.
Plus, of course, it's really hard to convince people to actually honor the hereditary succession of a huge new empire you just forged for yourself and of whom you are the founder. There's no tradition of a peaceful transfer of power to one of your children, so if the children aren't very forceful characters in their own right, they're apt to lose all power to someone else who is.
Gutted shell that only still exists to transfer its sizable archives into a revival or a worthy successor much like the crippled League of Nations during WW2 is my guess.
Would they? I thought the Russians removed the true reactionary believers and presumably replaced them with more stable puppets. It is obvious that Victoria is a puppet state but it is not totally clear the degree of the puppetry. Based on the OP's comments, I assume it is Manchukuo levels as both are artificially created states forced onto a part of an once great country with a new artificially created culture that the foreign master puts up a decent effort of respecting and allowing independence while not allowing anything to block their objectives. I am sure that the Russians can now make the Victorians do and say anything that serves Russia after they killed the original believers just like how the Japanese killed Zhang Zuolin and replaced him with the pliable Puyi instead.
The New Russian Empire is bloated and unstable. I imagine a new Russian Civil War between the successors and the generals to be reasonably likely. If Russia crumbles, that is our cue to do more daring things.
