Alternate History Ideas and Discussion

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WolfBear said:
@ATP @Marduk @sillygoose What if Poland would not have gotten Lower Silesia (as opposed to Upper Silesia) in the post-World War II peace settlement?

So, the dark black territory on this map remains a part of Germany after the end of World War II:

Vertreibungsgebiet.jpg
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Buba pretty much nailed it. The other impacts that could have been would be substantially less German deaths during and after the war since the ethnic cleansings would be more limited, not as much food would be cut off from the east (Silesia was a substantial food producer), and fewer people would be dumped in the west and other parts of the east without housing and public services (this caused a lot of deaths from starvations, disease, and exposure). In the long run it would of course not help the Polish economy compared to OTL, but not be crippling to them either. It would be more helpful for East Germany and could make that state more stable and more populated compared to OTL post-war. Finding the copper and silver would of course be very helpful to them. It would of course create a greater economic imbalance against Poland once Communism collapses and the surviving bits of Silesia here would likely be a place of greater Polish economic migration. It would also make it easier to sneak through Czechoslovakia during the Berlin Wall period to escape into Bavaria (which was a route in the 1980s). The other big impact is that maps would look funnier with that little tail of territory jutting into Poland.
 
sillygoose said:
IMHO yes, but then I'm not an expert. Seems pretty obvious though that a massive defeat against what was considered a lesser power would severely undermine the regime.


Sure...but I was talking about East Germanys trying to get out.
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That makes sense. Of course, Russia could still suffer a revolution after a defeat in an alt-WWI that stems from a crisis in A-H in 1916-1917 even if WWI doesn't break out in 1914, right?

Ah. That makes much more sense.
 
Skallagrim said:
There would be a resource extraction boom. Saying "it won't happen unless a thing that would definitely happen actually happens" is a weird caveat.

The notion that a non-communist Russia would only develop European Russia and a bit around Vladivostok contradicts all pre-war trends, and runs counter to elementary logic. Here's some relevant maps showing development in OTL:

soviet_pet_deposit_82.jpg


az-Soviet-Coal-big.jpg


russia-natural-resources-map.jpg


t0vdbqadfgr41.jpg



Anyone with even half a working brain can see the obvious axes of development after a simple glance at these maps. Now, once you take into account how utterly terrible communism is at allocating economic means, and then consider what the USSR still managed to do, the conclusion can't really be missed. A non-communist Russia would have developed the relevant regions to a far greater degree.



....all that being said, I still don't actually think that the Russian interior would become "more developed than the Raj" (assuming, of course, a Raj that stays intact and continues its own pre-war developmental trends). Nor would such a scenario as this yield the (frankly ridiculous) outcome of massive South Asian migration into Russia. A non-communist Russia would be so much better off that Russia's own pre-war demographic trends would continue. This means that there would be many, many more Russians. A fair number of them would be settling the Russian interior.
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Skallagrim, I have a question for you: Is there any realistic non-white group other than Central Asians that you could actually see settling in a non-Communist Russia (or at least ending up in Russia through annexations) by the tens of millions in this scenario? Could the Chinese quality for this, for instance?

I'm inspired to ask this question by the extremely massive migration of Latin Americans into the US over the last 120 years.
 
A different Iraq

If there was no 21st century invasion of Iraq by the USA or Iran, but the Saddam Hussein regime fell, parties representing the Shia Arab majority came out on top of the government, and the government and populace faced an intractable Sunni terrorist insurgency, would the global media be more sympathetic to the Shia majority government's position and less sympathetic to Sunni's charges of Shia oppression than it has been in OTL, or the reverse? Or about the same as OTL?

Without the imperial stink of being installed by the USA, would the Shia be seen as more like the ANC in South Africa, the long-oppressed majority, who finally got to govern, and the Sunni rebels as privileged reactionaries trying to turn the clock back, as if Afrikaners were still fighting to reinstall white minority rule? Did the tie to the US cost the Shia 'underdog sympathy points' they would have otherwise gotten?
 
What if the Sassanians moved their capital after their wars with Heraclius from Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia to someplace in the Zagros mountains or behind them?

Someplace like the old location of Persepolis or nearby Estakhr? Or Isfahan/Spahan? Or Tehran? Tabriz?

Could this have enabled the Sassanids to hold back the Arab-Muslim Rashidun conquest?

Or at least resist conquest and/or conversion for decades longer?
 
What if the 2008 financial crisis happens in late 2005 and the Great Recession starts then?

What if the economic negative trends, the drop in real estate values, sub-prime mortgage crisis and so forth that culminated in the fall 2008 financial crisis had come together to cause a late 2005 financial crisis, with it becoming clear by the middle of 2006 or so that a lasting Great Recession is on?
 
raharris1973 said:
A different Iraq

If there was no 21st century invasion of Iraq by the USA or Iran, but the Saddam Hussein regime fell, parties representing the Shia Arab majority came out on top of the government, and the government and populace faced an intractable Sunni terrorist insurgency, would the global media be more sympathetic to the Shia majority government's position and less sympathetic to Sunni's charges of Shia oppression than it has been in OTL, or the reverse? Or about the same as OTL?

Without the imperial stink of being installed by the USA, would the Shia be seen as more like the ANC in South Africa, the long-oppressed majority, who finally got to govern, and the Sunni rebels as privileged reactionaries trying to turn the clock back, as if Afrikaners were still fighting to reinstall white minority rule? Did the tie to the US cost the Shia 'underdog sympathy points' they would have otherwise gotten?
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Depends by whom. Anti-Iran hawks in the US and Israel might support the Iraqi Sunnis if they will clearly repudiate Saddam Hussein and his legacy. They would have viewed as a useful counterweight to Iran, after all.

And I'm not sure how much of a stink Iraqi Shi'ites got from their association with the US. You gotta keep in mind that the US arguably owed them a huge favor after 1991, when they rebelled as a result of US encouragement only to subsequently receive absolutely no help from the US. Bush Sr., what a dumbass! :( Though in his defense, Democrats were already hostile to the Gulf War as it was. There wasn't a need to give them any more ammo. But still, he shouldn't have actually encouraged the Iraqi people to rebel. If he wanted a military coup in Iraq, he should have just said that and only that.

raharris1973 said:
What if the Sassanians moved their capital after their wars with Heraclius from Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia to someplace in the Zagros mountains or behind them?

Someplace like the old location of Persepolis or nearby Estakhr? Or Isfahan/Spahan? Or Tehran? Tabriz?

Could this have enabled the Sassanids to hold back the Arab-Muslim Rashidun conquest?

Or at least resist conquest and/or conversion for decades longer?
Click to expand...

Probably not since AFAIK the Muslims were very strong and the Sassanians were a bunch of weaklings. But you do have to give Persian culture a lot of credit for surviving so long after the Islamic conquest. Their language, their holidays, et cetera.

raharris1973 said:
What if the 2008 financial crisis happens in late 2005 and the Great Recession starts then?

What if the economic negative trends, the drop in real estate values, sub-prime mortgage crisis and so forth that culminated in the fall 2008 financial crisis had come together to cause a late 2005 financial crisis, with it becoming clear by the middle of 2006 or so that a lasting Great Recession is on?
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I wonder if this would allow Hillary Clinton to win the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination since there might be a need of more of a steady hand to pull the US out of this economic crisis. But of course 2010 should go much better for Democrats due to the economic recovery already being in full bloom by that point in time.
 
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WolfBear said:
What odds would you place on an eventual revolution in Russia without World War I? Because I've heard different opinions about this topic.



Just the eastern part (as in the interwar era) or all of Upper Silesia.
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1.Zero chance.Peasants really loved father tsar,and russians must kill first those most loyal in most possible stupid ways on front to get their revolution.
If those soldiers were still there,all would-be-revolutionists would end in massgraves.

Not mention,that reforms made after 1905 was turning Russia into economical superpower.That is why Wall Street paid Trocky and his thugs for going there and making genocide.They KNEW, that tsarist Russia would become superpower stronger then USA with time,so they must prevent it.

2.Do not matter,althought entire Upper Silesia would be nice.
 
Between 1890 and 1913 Russian GDP grew from 115 to 265 billion 1990 USD. Highest growth rate in Europe.
Without 1905-07 mess it'd been even higher.
 
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ATP said:
1.Zero chance.Peasants really loved father tsar,and russians must kill first those most loyal in most possible stupid ways on front to get their revolution.
If those soldiers were still there,all would-be-revolutionists would end in massgraves.

Not mention,that reforms made after 1905 was turning Russia into economical superpower.That is why Wall Street paid Trocky and his thugs for going there and making genocide.They KNEW, that tsarist Russia would become superpower stronger then USA with time,so they must prevent it.

2.Do not matter,althought entire Upper Silesia would be nice.
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Problem is that the peasants were increasingly realising that the Czar despised them. Ditto with anyone who had any education. You could in theory keep an absolute monarchy reasonably popular by having a largely uneducated population but its never going to be any sort of superpower. Ditto with the way Nicholas did everything he could to go back on his word and remove all the concessions that made reform after 1905 possible.
 
WolfBear said:
That makes sense. Of course, Russia could still suffer a revolution after a defeat in an alt-WWI that stems from a crisis in A-H in 1916-1917 even if WWI doesn't break out in 1914, right?
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If it were defeated again another revolution is pretty much assured. Defeat in big wars tends to cause that and if you couple in the simmering problems within Russia and an autocratic Czar with an unpopular wife things are going to get nasty.
 
sillygoose said:
If it were defeated again another revolution is pretty much assured. Defeat in big wars tends to cause that and if you couple in the simmering problems within Russia and an autocratic Czar with an unpopular wife things are going to get nasty.
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What do you think that the CP war aims are going to be in this alt-WWI which breaks out in 1917? A restoration of A-H's territorial integrity, what else? A liberation of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland from Russian rule? Anything else?
 
Also, @sillygoose, what are your thoughts on this alternatehistory.com thread? :

Could the Treaty of Trianon ever have been made tolerable to Hungary?

The past weekend, I have been seeing more than a few notes commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon. This 1920 treaty, ending the state of war between Hungary and the allies, remains deeply unpopular in Hungary; a very common criticism is that the treaty was fundamentally...
www.alternatehistory.com
 
stevep said:
Problem is that the peasants were increasingly realising that the Czar despised them. Ditto with anyone who had any education. You could in theory keep an absolute monarchy reasonably popular by having a largely uneducated population but its never going to be any sort of superpower. Ditto with the way Nicholas did everything he could to go back on his word and remove all the concessions that made reform after 1905 possible.
Click to expand...

I think that quality of life matters more than democracy, at least for Russians. Russians liked Putin back when he was still able to provide a good quality of life for them, and Putin is essentially a present-day Russian Tsar without the crown.

This article is rather optimistic about Russia's pre-World War I prospects:

daviskedrosky.substack.com

Twilight Imperium?

Modern Economic Growth in Tsarist Russia
daviskedrosky.substack.com daviskedrosky.substack.com
 
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