Chat with The Mikado about cool history topics that interest you

[The Mikado]

This thread is going to be my answer to the threads on the Religion and Philosophy board.  Bring up a topic, let's chat about it for a bit.  I am best qualified to talk about subjects relating to 19th and 20th century European history, but have wide-ranging interests.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Ok, I'll shoot and mention something that has interested me recently, what do you think would have been the history of Marxism after WWI had the Russian Revolution never happened/been a failure?

[The Mikado]

Ok, I'll shoot and mention something that has interested me recently, what do you think would have been the history of Marxism after WWI had the Russian Revolution never happened/been a failure?

That's (like all counterfactuals) not something that is easily answered, but here we go anyway.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the failure of the revolution doesn't end the crisis for Kerensky's provisional government.  The Kerensky offensive had petered out but Kerensky was in hock to the Entente to stay in the struggle, something that the Russian soldiery had had enough of.  If Kerensky still responds to the whispering around Kornilov by freaking out and sacking the popular head of the Russian military at a time when his popularity was at its lowest like he did IRL, it's not clear how the Provisional Government survives some sort of hostile coup, if not from the Bolsheviks then maybe actually from Kornilov to set up a military dictatorship in Russia (which would likely then capitulate to the Germans under similar terms as Brest-Litovsk because seriously the Germans were marching near-unopposed on Petrograd).  Russia restoring its place as the head of global reaction rather than becoming the head of global revolution has rather mixed results for revolutionaries elsewhere.

So...socialist parties elsewhere were torn between larger pro-government, pro-war factions out of fear and smaller factions that tapped into the popular anti-war attitude.  (See the unsuccessful communist coup in Germany in 1919 and the successful communist takeover in Hungary that same year that lasted all of four months for cases of figures in those smaller parties).  Even without Moscow's presence trying to Leninize all the communist parties into their own revolutionary vanguard parties, massive splits after the war were always likely.  The old guard like Karl Kautsky, despite studying at Engels' feet, were never going to be radical enough in their later years to make up for their utter failure to resist the First World War in the eyes of the communists.  I think you still get the splits in Germany and France and other places between a Socialist Party, rooted in those who had reluctantly supported the war, and a Communist Party rooted in those who opposed it.  However, these communist parties would not be bound by the Third International's absurd mood swings and would be better able to try to relate to the people of their individual countries without going social fascism->popular front overnight and pretending that they had never had the previous position.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's possibly so, but then wasn't the extreme/messianic end of the socialist spectrum given a massive boost by the events of 1917? There would surely still have been splits, but for the Communist Parties the influence of the Soviet Union cut both ways.

[Хahar 🤔]

Somewhat related:

Obviously the fact that the first country in which socialists came to power was Russia of all places seemed like an aberration, given Russia's level of industrialization, but as it turned out that was the norm. Certainly the most industrialized societies where socialist governments came to power were East Germany and Czechoslovakia, but in both cases that was by Soviet force of arms. The most industrialized society where socialism took hold without being forced from without was what, Cuba?

[Mopsus]

What do you know about the interesting historical case of the Khazars?

[The Mikado]

What do you know about the interesting historical case of the Khazars?

Other than the famous stuff?  Turkic tribe whose ruler, like so many other rulers in the era of the great migrations, decided to adopt a new religion, but unlike all of the other Turkic tribes converting to Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or (for the early Uyghurs) Manicheanism, their ruler picked Judaism.  The tribe's ordinary members didn't heavily Judaize, but their elites did.  The Khazars aligned with the Byzantines but lost many wars with the Rus principalities and were finally crushed by the pagan Cumans.

I don't think I'm telling you anything new.

There's a long-standing view that today's Jews are mostly Khazar descendants, but given how very few (relatively speaking) Khazars actually converted to Judaism, while it might be possible that later Jews have some Khazar blood in them, they're clearly not the source of Jews elsewhere.

[Mopsus]

What do you know about the interesting historical case of the Khazars?

Other than the famous stuff?  Turkic tribe whose ruler, like so many other rulers in the era of the great migrations, decided to adopt a new religion, but unlike all of the other Turkic tribes converting to Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or (for the early Uyghurs) Manicheanism, their ruler picked Judaism.  The tribe's ordinary members didn't heavily Judaize, but their elites did.  The Khazars aligned with the Byzantines but lost many wars with the Rus principalities and were finally crushed by the pagan Cumans.

Of course, the remarkable thing is that they chose Judaism. I suppose that it's possible that King Bulan really did convene a debate between representatives of the three major Abrahamic faiths and happened to choose Judaism as the superior religion, but it seems more likely to me that the faith was seen as a middle ground between Christianity and Islam.

On a related note, what do you think would have happened if Vladimir I had chosen Judaism?

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Yes, I've encountered that theory among Christians who want to maintain the Hebrew roots of their faith while simultaneously being anti-Semitic.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

What do you know about the interesting historical case of the Khazars?

There's a long-standing view that today's Jews are mostly Khazar descendants, but given how very few (relatively speaking) Khazars actually converted to Judaism, while it might be possible that later Jews have some Khazar blood in them, they're clearly not the source of Jews elsewhere.

I believe Genetic evidence has ruled out this as a serious theory (i.e. The Khazars are the origin of European Jewry).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't think it was ever something that you could politely describe as a 'serious theory'.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I don't think it was ever something that you could politely describe as a 'serious theory'.

Ah right. This is not my field (to put it mildly) so I thought it taken at least semi-seriously. But then again Arthur Koestler believed it, which isn't always the best sign (attitude to Stalin excepted).

[The Mikado]

I don't think it was ever something that you could politely describe as a 'serious theory'.

Ah right. This is not my field (to put it mildly) so I thought it taken at least semi-seriously. But then again Arthur Koestler believed it, which isn't always the best sign (attitude to Stalin excepted).

Yeah, I only mentioned it to dismiss it.  I don't think it's too absurd to think that modern Jews might have some Khazar ancestors, to the extent that everyone is descended from everyone else in some way.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

The most industrialized society where socialism took hold without being forced from without was what, Cuba?

Probably Yugoslavia, if you consider the Partisans the ones who established the socialist government rather than the Red Army.

To ask the reverse of Gully's question, what if the Spartacists had succeeded in Germany along with the Bolsheviks taking over Russia? Given their ideological differences and Luxemburg's open anti-Bolshevism, could there be cooperation between Berlin and Moscow or would they lead two  opposed socialist blocs?

[The Mikado]

The most industrialized society where socialism took hold without being forced from without was what, Cuba?

Probably Yugoslavia, if you consider the Partisans the ones who established the socialist government rather than the Red Army.

To ask the reverse of Gully's question, what if the Spartacists had succeeded in Germany along with the Bolsheviks taking over Russia? Given their ideological differences and Luxemburg's open anti-Bolshevism, could there be cooperation between Berlin and Moscow or would they lead two  opposed socialist blocs?

That one's even harder to answer, mainly because it leads to questions about the willingness of the Entente to allow a revolutionary state on France's border.  On the one hand, the Entente was utterly exhausted militarily, on the other hand, Germany's military had completely and utterly evaporated after the armistice (something that allowed the Spartakists to be as successful as they were) and a revolution in 1919 would have been seen as creating a state irreconcilable with the aims of the Paris Peace Conference (good luck convincing Revolutionary Germany to hand over Poznan and West Prussia to Poland).  Actually, the Entente would likely have had a particularly vigorous anti-revolutionary ally in Poland, a state bound and determined to get its share of the spoils from the First World War.

Even in the situation where revolutionary Germany took over, it was simply too much of a threat to the post-war eastern European status quo under design in Paris to be allowed to stand, much like Bela Kun's Hungary was on a smaller scale.  With Hungary, the Entente merely turned a blind eye as Romania took them down, but with Germany a more active policy would be likely, especially if the revolution succeeded in January 1919 when a large amount of American soldiers were still available on French soil.  Revolutionary Germany would be, almost by definition, in violation of the armistice, especially if/when (when) it refused to comply with the Paris Peace Conference's edicts.

[The Mikado]

Could we have a non-hypothetical question?  More "what" or "why" and less "what if?"

[Enderman]

Why didn't the U.S. intervene during China's Communist Revolution?

[The Mikado]

Why didn't the U.S. intervene during China's Communist Revolution?

Well, USA was only really on a fully Cold War footing by 1947-48 and Mao had already made significant progress by then.  I don't have that strong a background on that angle, but I do know that a significant faction in Washington viewed the Nationalists' failures as their own damned fault (rightfully so, of course) and were hesitant about committing to a land-war in China that soon after the Second World War.  The actual reality of Mao's victory in 1949 really cemented the hawks and the Kennan Doctrine of containment and refusal to accept any future communist advances, but only after years of communist victories (the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia was as late as February 1948).  In some ways you could argue that the Truman Administration's all-out backing of South Korea in 1950 was a strange about-face from what it had done towards China, but the fall of China itself was the wake-up call that indirectly led to the Korean War.

[Хahar 🤔]

To what extent were Russian and British goals and methods in Central Asia in the late 19th century equivalent to each other? At first glance it seems that they would be fundamentally different, since India was merely a colony of the British Empire while Russian holdings in the area were part of the Russian state proper, but on the other hand the Russian strategy with regard to Khiva and Bukhara seems to be analogous to the treatment of Indian princely states.

[The Mikado]

To what extent were Russian and British goals and methods in Central Asia in the late 19th century equivalent to each other? At first glance it seems that they would be fundamentally different, since India was merely a colony of the British Empire while Russian holdings in the area were part of the Russian state proper, but on the other hand the Russian strategy with regard to Khiva and Bukhara seems to be analogous to the treatment of Indian princely states.

The first thing to question is the extent to which Russia's transuralic holdings aren't "colonies" simply because they're contiguous to Russia proper.  Prior to the 19th century, Russia's big settlement was Orenburg (near the Russia-Kazakhstan border today), pushed in Catherine the Great's time, and even that settlement had to rely heavily on cooperation from the traditional Muslim elite.  Russia's larger cities in Western Siberia, cities like Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Omsk, etc. were all products of the mid-late 19th century (as something more than frontier forts, at least).

The early 19th century brought the Russian Empire both into the Caucasus (and Transcaucasia into Georgia, Azerbaijan, etc.) and into Central Asia, the former and parts of the latter at the expense of the dying power of Qajarid Persia, which couldn't protect its northern dependencies.  A century before, the British had utilized the chaos of the late Mughal period (especially after Nader Shah's sacking of Delhi) and the inability of the Marathas to cement India to pick off more powers hostile to them (first Bengal, then famously Mysore), coopt their native opponents' enemies (notably Hyderabad), and finally finish off the isolated and chaotic and vulnerable Marathas (in a twenty-year period culminating in 1818) that left them the undisputed masters of India.  Following that, they conquered Sindh and Punjab and exerted significant influence over Afghanistan and Persia. 

At this point, the British and Russian spheres directly conflicted.  Much like with the Ottomans in the 1850s, the Russians would have loved the chance to annex Persia, but allowing them to do so would critically threaten British India, so the British attempted to sink their claws into the dying Qajarid state, thus preventing it from meeting the fate of so many other Asian empires and allowing it to limp into the 20th century.

As for the comparison between the princely states and Russia with Khiva and Bukhara, the Russians did divest both states of much of their territory and treated them as mostly irrelevant rump states.  With Khiva especially, Russia had little interest in directly administering modern Turkmenistan, which was even more outlandishly back-of-beyond than it is today.  In the territory it took from the two states, the Russians had seized (excepting Bukhara itself) all the great settled cities of the old Silk Road, with their settled, somewhat better educated, and often literate in Arabic (to read the Koran) populations, and left the actual emirates in question with irrelevant rump states that were, in any case, in no geographical position to break away from Russian overlordship.

http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Empire-Multi-Ethnic-History/dp/0582234158  This is a fascinating (if somewhat overpriced) tome on the topic of minorities and expansion in Imperial Russia and talks to some length about Central Asia. 

I think you could make the case that the British princely states that did remain (especially after 1857-58) were both to reward powerful local clients of the British for their loyalty and to create some degree of native collusion and "partnership" in the imperial project while the Russian frontier's states were more that Imperial Russia had little interest in or ability to directly administer the deserts of Turkmenistan.

Fun fact: the Emirs of Bukhara were the last ruling dynasty to explicitly claim legitimacy on the basis of Genghisid descent.

[Nhoj]

Can you talk about how the Hohenstaufens are the greatest HRE dynasty?

[Cranberry]

Since it's the millenium year, what in you eyes would have been neccessary to hinder the break out of WW1, or at least postpone it for quite a while? Just talk of things that could have been done let's say from 1914 on. 

[The Mikado]

Can you talk about how the Hohenstaufens are the greatest HRE dynasty?

I tend to agree with this premise.

The Empire's centralizing tendency seen under the Salians had run headfirst into the reformist movement of the Church of the late 11th century: see the massive, massive struggles between Henry (Henrich) IV and V and the Church that raged over the Church's view that the Emperor appointing bishops who had temporal power was simony, though the Church would later give in and grant the King of France that very same right.  That French triumph and German failure is indicative of where the entire Imperial project was destined, and Henry at Canossa is a powerful image of Imperial failure, but the House of Hohenstaufen that would dominate in the late 12th and early 13th century made a solid effort to reestablish Imperial supremacy through close ties with the Church's many Italian opponents (the Ghibellines). 

When Frederick I Barbarossa took the throne, his whole-hearted campaigns into Italy in support of the Ghibellines who supported the Imperial project first and the Church a distant second led him to disastrous defeat by the Pope in the short term, but recognition of him as King of Germany, Burgundy, and Italy and nominal overlord of the north Italians in the short term, and in the longer term managed to marry his son to the heiress of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, thus guaranteeing that his eventual grandson would rule not only the Empire, but the Kingdom of Sicily, and would be prepared to flank the pope from north and south alike when the Papal-Imperial contest revived.

After Frederick's famous drowning in the Third Crusade, his son Henry VI attempted to further consolidate Imperial power and draw Sicily into the realm, proclaiming himself universal ruler and attempting to make the Imperial throne hereditary.  After his untimely death in 1197, Frederick's talented grandson Frederick II took the throne of Sicily and, following the defeat of the Welf Emperor Otto IV, became Holy Roman Emperor and King four times over: King of Germany, Burgundy, Italy, and Sicily.  An avowed opponent of Papal authority, Frederick regularly waged war against the Papacy and was excommunicated an astonishing four times.  Combining the Norman Sicilian skepticism of Papal authority of his de Hauteville ancestors and the centralizing Imperial drive of his Hohenstaufen ancestors, Frederick dreamed of a realm stretching from the Baltic to Malta completely under Imperial control, with the Pope firmly relegated to a supporting role rather than an equal.  Frederick successfully took Jerusalem in an unauthorized Crusade and added King of Jerusalem to his list of titles.

After Frederick's death, the Papacy authorized an all-out effort to try to stamp out Frederick's heirs to make sure that Sicily and the Empire would never be united again, awarding Sicily to Charles of Anjou and vigorously supporting his efforts to gain that kingdom (Charles of Anjou is an amazing figure in his own right, the ultimate opportunist who attempted to put together a vast Mediterranean Empire out of nothing).  A Hohenstaufen princess married into the Aragonese royal family proved enough of an incentive for the Kingdom of Aragon to snatch the island of Sicily, thus dividing the lands of the Kingdom of Sicily in two.  The end of the Hohenstaufens thwarted the imperial project, drastically increased papal power and weakened Imperial power in northern Italy (and destroyed it in southern Italy) and changed the nature of the HRE dramatically.

[The Mikado]

Since it's the millenium year, what in you eyes would have been neccessary to hinder the break out of WW1, or at least postpone it for quite a while? Just talk of things that could have been done let's say from 1914 on. 

Though it's a bit on the casual side, I highly recommend http://www.amazon.com/Europes-Last-Summer-Started-Great/dp/0375411569/ref=cm_lmf_tit_2

It's a good summary of just how many irons were in the fire in 1914. 

Basically, there are two different questions: Could war between Austria and Serbia be avoided, and could war between Austria and Serbia avoid becoming a World War?  Those two questions are interconnected, obviously, but perhaps a more interesting question is "why did the war happen when it did?"  Fromkin is of the opinion that there was a great deal of fear of growing Russian industrial and economic might in Imperial Germany and that von Moltke the Younger and those around him desired war with France and Russia sooner rather than later because they felt that the situation was rapidly changing in an unfavorable direction and that such a war would be unwinnable if postponed, and that there was much desire among the German high command to turn Austria's pending war with Serbia into that great war with France and Russia.

It's a question that can never truly be answered, because so many players could've averted the July Crisis if there had been true will to avert it, not least of which being the Austrian government, which squandered any goodwill it received from the initial assassination by coming across as unreasonable and looking as if squashing Serbia was itself the goal, not avenging the death of the archduke which, obviously, it was in the ultimatum against Serbia.  Very few actually sincerely mourned Franz Ferdinand, excepting, rather oddly, his sincere friend Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

The two Balkan wars in the previous years had let the world realize how strong the Balkan minors really were.  Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria conspiring to drive the Ottomans almost completely out of Europe and then Greece and Serbia stripping Bulgaria of most of its spoils of war in a dramatically quick process not only highlighted how dead the Ottomans were, but how tiny Serbia packed a punch and obviously, blatantly eyed newly-Austrian Bosnia.  Slapping down the upstart kingdom was a popular policy in Vienna well before the assassination and the Austrian high command was bound and determined to get its war with Serbia out of the crisis.  What few in Austria desired was war with Russia or France or Britain, and they counted on the German blank check to scare off the Entente.

It's a tragic affair all around, and I don't want to place all the blame on the Germans (Russia deserves its fair share, of course), but the Germans were the ones ready and eager for a two front war to try out their new strategy, and were the ones whose strategy involved breaking Belgian neutrality (It's not like the British would've stayed out of the war had Belgian neutrality not been violated, but it was a fantastic excuse to bypass partisan bickering and come to the aid of Plucky Little Belgium).  The easiest way to prevent the war from breaking out when it did in the summer of 1914 would have been for the Germans to refuse to unequivocally hand Austria a blank check with regards to Serbia and to insist on mediation, as the Austrian government would never take that kind of important action without Berlin's approval.  The problem is, Berlin approved for a reason: war now seemed more favorable than war later.

[Beet]

When and why did Charles de Gaulle change his mind about Algerian independence?

[The Mikado]

http://www.amazon.com/The-Invention-Decolonization-Algerian-Remaking/dp/080147454X  It's been a few years since I read this book, but it's all about the topic of Algerian independence.

It's a tough question, because de Gaulle, when he took France over in 1958, was already equivocating.  His famous line "I have heard you" didn't imply that he took the concerns of the pieds-noirs seriously.  De Gaulle knew perfectly well that an Algeria that was 85% Arab Muslim couldn't be ruled by 15% pieds-noirs and Sephardic Jews against the Arabs' consent.  The thing is, originally there was still hope of gaining the Arabs' consent through extensive concessions, and that widespread citizenship and social reform would calm down tension in the colonies (though the French soon realized that granting their colonial subjects the economic benefits of French citizenship wouldn't be economically tenable).

In 1958 there was still a ghost of a hope of keeping the French colonial empire alive, though the 1956 Suez Crisis had proven France's ultimate impotence.  De Gaulle was well aware that the war in Algeria was bleeding France dry and was morally and economically untenable and moved to resolve it swiftly, severing Algeria (which, after all, was an integral part of Metropolitan France and not a "colony" legally).  In 1958 he famously advocated binding referenda in every colony to determine whether or not they'd remain part of France and only Guinea voted for independence, despite the results, by 1960 he was following the British example and shoving countries out the door, putting up a local flag, and proclaiming colonialism over.  Algeria, with its heavy colonist base and deep emotional ties to France, was a harder case, but the war wasn't going to be won because the French army was alienating the Arab public they'd need for a peaceful solution.

I wish I remembered that book better, it went deep into depth about the dramatic sea change of French attitude after the Suez and the 1958 settlement and de Gaulle's desire to somehow get the Algeria crisis behind France no matter what the solution was.