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"Extract from recorded lecture on “The Second Interbellum: The Electric Circus” by Professor George Greening, recorded October 10th, 2020—

The age of plenty was long enough to lull people into a false sense of security. Surely history, that shelf of dusty books full of kings and dates and battles, was over. The world had changed. When the night was banished by the harsh, arrogant light of science and industry, the Spirit of Man, we could turn our backs on the mistakes of the past. Atlases were frequently updated to show new post-colonial nations, the legacy of past European domination now being swept aside. A woman sat on the American throne. A whole generation had grown up never knowing anything but artificial daylight on command, a global economy stabilised by the Passau Gold Standard and the Oleic Equilibrium, peaceful relations between nations old and new managed by the nascent ASN and a grab-bag of celebrity diplomats. Of course, even at the time, much of that was an illusion. When conflicts and disasters happened, there was a perception that they were comfortably far away from most of the people who defined the sense of the era. This was a popular age, as I’ve discussed, and the people were consumed with their own internal affairs, whether as high-minded as political reform or as trivial as the latest zig-and-zag record. It was as though the wealthy nations were insulated from the darker realities of the world by a warm layer of cotton wool, in the words of Elspeth Kennedy.[39]

In some ways it’s remarkable just how resilient that cotton wool was. Even well into the 1950s, which today in period fiction is usually presented as a period of misgivings and a gathering storm, in reality most people remained almost wilfully ignorant of those storm clouds. Events which might seem to strike a wrong note in the idyllic ‘symphony of summer’ – as the Russian writer Mironov put it – were ignored, or filtered through complacent newspapers and Photel broadcasts. The Societists were dismissed as yesterday’s news, having turned inward and consumed themselves with their own disagreements, while the proto-ASN was held up as having held them back in Africa. Counter-examples like the attempted Societist coup in Formosa in 1945 were allowed to slip to the bottom of popular awareness, or else brushed aside as being unimportant precisely because that coup had failed.

Probably the thing that came closest to penetrating the comfortable illusions of the people came in 1950, when Romulan Italy successfully launched Sol Invictus 1, the first artimoon. That was a sufficient shock, especially after years of failed rocket experiments and more years dismissing rockets as a dead-end technology, to topple major governments and radically shift scientific policy. This is probably the origin of the impression, as I just said, given in period fiction that the 1950s were a time of growing perception of trouble. But this is exaggerated. Even as the nations, and the Combine, raced to put their own artimoons in orbit, and began building up their war rocket arsenals anew, it was usually dismissed as just another kind of WorldFest or Global Games contest by other means. Obviously none of those would actually be used in a real war. That sort of thing didn’t happen anymore. Just as, because the Black Twenties were something from the last generation, clearly pandemics could never return. (Audience reaction) Exactly. I think all but the youngest of us in the audience will remember how foolish our assumptions lay a decade ago.

What was the trigger of the Sunrise War, as it later became known? There were several, from an anti-Chinese alignment in the East and reawakened border disputes, to the aftershocks of decolonisation in India, to the patient and long-term planning of revolutionaries in Persia seeking to free their country. The Arab and Mesopotamian revolts over ownership of oil, as well as other disputes concerning rule from Alexandria, were an enormous part of the war. So, of course, was the subtle return of the Societists as a threat, flying under the Photrack – another new dice-loading war technology – of all but the most insightful analysts across the world.

But, of course, the one that played the most central role in tipping the world towards war came in Europe.

In some ways, it had not been a surprise. It had been clear to everyone at the time in 1926 that the post-Black Twenties settlement, the Treaty of Vienna, was nothing more than an attempt to formalise lines of control at the end of a long and ruinous war that both sides were now too exhausted to continue. Madame Mercier cited in her diaries of the congress that, while she did not agree with a cobrist politician named Thierry Vachaud much, both agreed that this was not a true peace – merely an armistice for one or two generations.[40] In the end, it lasted longer perhaps than Mercier had feared. Long enough for Mercier to conclude her own long life, for she passed away in 1954 at the remarkable age of 86. All France, even her political opponents, turned out in a state funeral to mourn her passing. Few other than royals had ever enjoyed such a level of public mourning. She was recognised as, not merely France’s first Prime Ministress, but one of the greatest heads of government the nation had ever enjoyed. Perhaps she was lucky to rule during economic good times, but her legacy in helping to create the ASN is recognised far outside the borders of France.

It was as though Madame Mercier’s death heralded the end of an era, and finally removed the eerie frozen pause of the Black Twenties’ end. For a generation and more, there had been two Polands, divided by a fortified border known as the Frozen Front. At many points in the Electric Circus, tensions had fallen, and young French soldiers rotated into the lines would surreptitiously cross the increasingly overgrown no-man’s-land in order to trade their cigarettes with their Russian counterparts’ vodka on the other side.[41] There had been occasional ramp-ups and incidents of brief bursts of fire being exchanged across the fortress trenches, but nothing that had ever seriously threatened to disrupt the peace. The French had been fortunate that the Russians were still reeling from their defeat in Pendzhab in 1937 when the Duc de Berry passed away; before war could threaten, they seized the alienistic moment and installed the Duc de Broglie instead as King of West Poland. Some wondered if it would be a similar incident that would finally reignite conflict, as the Polish people suffered, hating both the status quo and anything that might end it.

In the end, those predictions were almost correct, yet had the geography slightly incorrect. It was not the Frozen Front through Poland that would herald the end of the Electric Circus, but the equally contentious situation in Bohemia.

Bohemia was founded as a Slavic state more than a thousand years ago, but had been bound up in the history of the Holy Roman Empire since 955. Nonetheless, for the next four centuries they were still ruled by their own native Slavic dynasty, the House of Přemyslid. I won’t go into the full details. In 1310, having died out in the male line, they were succeeded by the German House of Luxemburg, and Germans became increasingly important in the region. John the Blind, the first Luxemburg monarch, actually enters English-speaking history, as he fought on the French side at the Battle of Crécy and lost his life there in 1346. (A few audience murmurs) After a number of other incidents, including staging both the Hussite Rebellion and the start of the Thirty Years’ War, Bohemia became part of the Danubian Hapsburg crownlands and remained that way up until the Popular Wars in 1833. The people had become angry by the Hapsburgs’ failure to protect them either from Jacobin French invasion or the potato famine of the 1820s, and rose up in revolt. The character of the revolt was both Slavic and German (More audience murmurs) but the revolutionaries were uncertain whether to invite the High Saxons, Danubia’s enemy, in to protect them. The decision was ultimately made unilaterally by German-speakers in the mountainous Sudetenland region, and this dissonance would go on to define the tensions between the two groups in the country for the following century and more.[42]

Following the Congress of Brussels, Bohemia – also including Silesia – became part of the new German Bundesliga, which later evolved into the German Bundesreich after the Unification War a decade or two later. Prince Xavier Albert, who had originally been lined up as King of Bavaria (Audience reaction) Yes, well, at this time it seemed possible that Bavaria might become part of Germany...the prince became King Albert II of Bohemia instead. For a long time, Bohemia remained a fairly quiescent part of Germany. The number of German and Slavic speakers were comparable enough, with the latter given a substantial role in society, that tensions remained low. Increasing industry offered new jobs and urbanisation, which helped further mix the two groups. And, sadly, we must concede that there was the old strategy of divide and rule, pulling out other minorities to unite both groups against – most obviously the Jews.

What changed matters, principally, was the Kulturkrieg policies of Bundeskaiser Johann Georg. The Bohemian and Silesian Slavs were not his primary target, but they nonetheless suffered alongside the Jutes and others. The secret movement of Slovanská Vzájemnost – pardon my pronunciation – meaning ‘Slavs Together’, began to grow, aided of course by the Russians. Towards the end of the Pandoric War, the Russians – who had conquered Poland – managed to break through the Moravian Gate and the local Slavicists rose up in support of the invasion. King Charles III fled the country for his house’s native High Saxony. At the Treaty of Marseilles, not to be confused with the Marseilles Protocol, the Russians created a new, Slavic-supremacist Kingdom of Czechosilesia, to be ruled by John II (Ivan or Jonas), younger brother of the Grand Duke of Lithuania.[43] This encompassed most of pre-war Bohemia except a part of western Silesia, which Germany retained and appended to High Saxony.

Many German-speakers fled the new Czechosilesia, either from real persecution or fear it would come in time. But things were not exactly rosy for the Slavic Czechs as well. Any idealistic ambitions for Russian-backed Slavic rule in Czechosilesia soon received a rude awakening. 1904 saw the Prague Potato Riots as the people starved following a bad harvest, and the King had to temporarily flee to Vilnius to escape. Something that was not widely recognised at the time was that, despite the persecution of German-speakers, the ringleaders of the Potato Riots protests had been from both Czech and German communities, working together. It was ignored in Germany and Russia, but was noted by the leaders of the Vienna School Societists in Danubia, who would go on to eventually grow and dominate the country during the Black Twenties. (Audience murmurs) Of course, the immediate consequence of the Potato Riots was that the Russian army bloodily and indiscriminately cracked down, and Czechosilesia became the testbed for the Dalekodeon system of broadcasts which allowed the Okhrana to listen in on private conversations.[44] Any goodwill the Russians had obtained soon began to evaporate.

The disillusioned people of Czechosilesia thus granted their homeland a vulnerability towards attack when the Black Twenties came around. In a war mostly characterised by rigid, bloody fronts, it’s all the more remarkable that Czechosilesia, despite its mountain protections, fell so quickly. But let’s not forget that the Russo-German front of the Black Twenties was effectively an escalation of the Khivan War triggered by a failed assassination attempt on King John.[45] The German-speaking opposition leader Roderich Kreuz became a hunted man as the regime cracked down, but he was able to flee to Danubia, which refused to give him up. Danubia was able to maintain neutrality, forcing Russia to back down, and came under the control of the Grey Societists, as I said. This act of defiance began to influence how the state was seen elsewhere.

Anyway, as I said, Czechosilesia was mostly reconquered by the Germans by February 1923 following Case Charlemagne, with John fleeing to Bavaria.[46] But this is where the trouble started again. The Germans proclaimed a new Kingdom of Bohemia and, in revenge for the years of Russian-backed rule, began counter-persecuting the Czechs, even though many of them had refused to aid the Russians. Exiled Bohemian Germans who had fled to the rest of Germany were now moved back, sometimes against their will, with the Czechs who had moved onto their property now forcibly and publicly evicted. It was all another round of Kulturkrieg, and the people were sick of it. The exiled King Charles III had died during the First Interbellum and his son, Albert IV, suffered from a chronic illness which meant he was essentially just a cipher for whatever the German government wanted. Even with the forced returns of people, the German population of Bohemia had dropped so significantly that the German government implemented legally questionable restrictions on voting to exclude the Czechs from power. They could have guaranteed a larger German component if High Saxony had returned the western part of Silesia that had been annexed after the Pandoric War, but this was refused.

Post-war, industry and culture therefore failed to recover without a genuine Bohemian voice in the Bundesdiet. Bohemia was seen as a place simply to pack the Diet with sycophants elected in rigged elections. Despite the best efforts of some Hochrads and Niedderads, ultimately even the cobrist parties in Germany mostly felt it was more in their interests to make corrupt bargains with the unrepresentative placemen than to allow Czechs to vote and (it was thought) probably vote in Russian sympathisers. Bohemia never rose to its nineteenth century heights again under German rule, and once again the people were disillusioned – both German and Czech speakers.

In 1951 the chronically ill Albert IV died and was succeeded by Charles IV who, like his distant cousin Christian II of Germany, was something of a playboy wastrel. Public protests increased after his coronation, with ineffectual attempts to put them down – Christian even attempted to claim to that colourful figure Eljiso that the Societists were behind them. Ironically, what was a wild claim then...

In February 1957, both men were embattled. In the case of Christian, this was in the usual political sense, as he was seen as grotesquely unpopular in the country for his high living and fast mobiles at a time of economic crisis, the public failure of his marriage through his own adultery, and his general inability to live up to what the people expected from a constitutional monarchy. Since he came to the throne in 1940, politicians of all stripes had been increasingly working around him, and providing the money kept flowing, he did not seem to care. That had sufficed for a while in the days of plenty, where Christian was more of a public embarrassment than an object of envy. After all, Germany had enjoyed a golden age of art and entertainment, with German actors and artists being noted the world over for their innovative work in theatre, Photel-plays and now pioneering Motoscopy. It was simply that, rather than patronising and investing in such success as his predecessors might have done, or honouring those who contributed to it, Christian had been concerned only with wining and dining the prettier actresses at the public expense. No-one had approved, except possibly the tabloid press who sold more papers on the basis of endemic scandal. But now, amidst the economic del-para of the Crash of 1956, the German people began to openly question whether the country could afford such a liability as monarch.

Indeed, at a time when public welfare had become means-tested, the radical Darmstädter Komet newspaper published an editorial, playing on a recent speech by Vereinspartei Bundeskanzler Friedrich Renn railing at ‘scroungers’ falsely claiming benefits. The Komet stated that it agreed with Renn’s fiery rhetoric, but asked why the state did not act against the biggest scrounger of all, the one named Herr Christian Wettin squatting in a fine house named the Rezidenschloss? It was like something from the Popular Wars, and led to the Komet’s press being seized by the federal police – who were then promptly driven back by an angry mob of Grand Hessians calling on the name of their spiritual founding father, Pascal Schmidt. It was, the passing English writer Mary Wrekin observed, as though some scientific romantic with a chrononautic device had conjured the return of a past era into modern Germany.

Others, such as the theorist Matthias Lehman writing in the moderate Dresdner Zeitung, argued that by failing to live up to the example of his ancestors, Christian had allowed the lid hammered down on the Popular Wars spirit to be blasted aside by the increasing pressure – the old steam metaphor. He concluded his article, tellingly, with the same Biblical words from the Book of Daniel that had heralded the fall of Francis II of Danubia at the commencement of the Popular Wars: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting; your days are numbered; your kingdom is divided and given over to your enemies.[47] For such rhetoric to be found in the pages of such a mainstream paper was a shock to the system, and illustrative of just how few friends Christian had left for himself. Many of his fair-weather companions from his playboy days had quietly decamped for less volatile climes, such as the casinos of Navarre.

When I say they were both embattled, Christian and Charles, well in Charles’ case that was rather more literal! His ill father had been, at least, an object of sympathy among the Bohemian people of both stripes. Charles himself, meanwhile, discovered that once the Pandora’s Box of political assassination attempts has been opened, it is very difficult to close it again. To his credit, he did understand the important of publicly showing himself to be unruffled when a parcel bomb exploded near the Prager Burg in 1954, but he allowed himself to be swayed by advisors who told him to lock himself away. The chance to rescue public perception of him had been missed, and he was accused of showing insufficient sympathy to the inspectors and guards who had died whilst examining the bomb.

In fact, biographers have since reappraised Charles, arguing that he has been unfairly tarred with the same brush as Christian. While he had been a rake in his youth, it has since been widely recognised that he did settle down and attempt to govern as a more sober and serious monarch after acceding to the throne. But it was too little, too late. Furthermore, he was in an impossible position due to pressure from the German government – usually the elected government, I should say, not Christian. Uncomfortable as it may be for the simple historiographic pictures we like to paint for ourselves, the drive to persecute the Czechs came much more from the Bundesdiet, usually whitewashed by history, than any of the monarchs. (Audience murmurs) I gave the example of Charles’ attempt to recover from an earlier assassination attempt before. What about his attempt to marry a Czech noblewoman, Lady Žofie Czernin, in 1953 to try to bridge gaps with the estranged community? Lady Žofie had been a strident defender of the movement to protect Czech culture and celebrate the work of Czech-speaking poets. It might have made a difference, but the plan was vetoed by the German government – showing the influence that they could have wielded over the monarchs at this stage if they had chosen to.

By February 1957, it was too late. Bohemia was once again a seething mass of discontent. The Russians, who had been stoking the flames with their spies and sympathisers, sensed an opportunity. Colonel Gantimurov, consumed with his vendetta against the Imperial Soviet over his father’s legacy, had obtained Tsar Fyodor’s ear as a trusted advisor.[48] (More audience murmurs) He would go on to play a larger role in world history, yes, but for now Gantimurov was best known for his advocacy of aero power, a position that had been largely vindicated with the increase of aero flight’s importance both in the armed forces and civilian sphere during the Electric Circus era. After the Treaty of Vienna in 1926, Russia and its allies and vassals no longer shared a border with Bohemia, meaning that sending troops to support a revolt there was problematic. Whereas some generals advocated an attempt to quickly overrun West Poland – largely driven by wishful thinking, given the French fortifications there – Gantimurov, even he influenced by the values of the Electric Circus, believed that war could still be contained to a quick, self-contained coup de main that did not spread further. He argued for a mass flight of heavy transport aero craft bearing tens of thousands of aero marines, able to quickly descend and seize key locations and choke points in Bohemia to prevent a German reprisal.[49] While some early plans still envisaged an overflight of French forces in West Poland, with the hope they would not shoot first, Gantimurov instead drew up a plan by which the aero armada would stage from East Poland, take a long rounded course overflying neutral Danubian territory, and approach Bohemia from the south. Again this was influenced by Russian perceptions of Societist Danubia as Pacifist, and assumed they would not announce the operation as soon as it was detected by Photrack, but it was still more realistic than the other plans.

But it was not to be.

Bundeskaiser Christian’s stock was at a low point, even for him, in February 1957. After a loud and unconvincing public reactions campaign to persuade the people he had cut back on his lifestyle amid the economic downturn, he had then returned to the news for crashing his high-powered Sauerbronn Gepard mobile whilst returning from a drunken party. While the two young women whose mobile he’d collided with were dying in hospital, Christian’s off-the-cuff response of irately complaining that if they hadn’t made him dismiss his chauffeur, this wouldn’t have happened, served to drive even moderates among the German people to open protest.

At the same time, the government was growing even more concerned with the situation in Bohemia. Between 1952 and 1954, the Vereinspartei ministries in the Bundesdiet had been briefly interrupted by a minority Niederrad-led ministry under Gunther Köditz. Köditz, desperate to shore up his government and lacking scruples, had broken the cordon sanitaire in the Bundesdiet on Bohemia and had pushed through a law which liberalised elections there, allowing the Czechs for the first time since 1900 a free and fair vote.[50] As a ploy to remove the Vereinspartei’s pliable and reliable sycophants who ‘represented’ Bohemia in corrupt ‘elections’, it worked. However, if Köditz had hoped the Bohemian Czechs would elect Niederrad-supporting representatives out of gratitude, he received a rude awakening. Since the change was made in 1953, Bohemian Czechs – and some Bohemian Germans – began increasingly electing parties (and independents when those parties were banned) who criticised the federal government in Dresden and began arguing for greater autonomy. Greater autonomy, or even...

In 1956 the people of Prague, for the first time, were able to directly elect their Mayor. They elected Václav Stránský, a Bohemian Czech minor nobleman but one who enjoyed support across the people for his support of agriculture and good industrial relations. Tellingly, though something not picked up on at the time, he was married to a Sudeten German, Maria Magdalena von Dietrichstein. Stránský became wildly popular and, though he was a moderate on relations with the Dresden government, it was clear to the latter that he was beginning to enjoy more real authority among the people than either that government or King Charles.

The mobilecade of February 17th, 1957 was always an act of desperation. History students today may criticise it as horribly vulnerable. But Charles, at least, was fully aware of the prospect of assassination. He saw it as just one last final throw of the dice, an attempt to rescue Bohemia from an impossible situation of endemic unrest and nonfunctional government by rallying the people around him. Charles, Christian and Stránský shared an open-topped mobile – a Leupold Elefant, a grander and more stately vehicle than the ones Christian usually drope – and drove through the streets of Prague on a mission to open a new, modernised railway bridge across the Vltava River.

It would probably not have achieved its aims regardless. But we all know how it ended. It doesn’t matter how many cooler-headed analysts pointed out – even at the time – that Bundeskaiser Christian could scarcely have had time to see a bullet heading towards him and deliberately yank Stránský into its path to act as a shield for himself. (Audience murmurs) All that mattered was what the cameras at the time saw, and only still image asimcons, misleading still images, were available, for the film cameras had failed to keep up with the mobilecade. Who knows what would have happened if the Motoscopy live cameras had not broken down?

I don’t need to go into the aftermath. We’ve all seen the films, misleading as many of them are. In the space of a month, Christian was in hiding in Bavaria, Charles was missing, the German Bundesdiet had declared the throne vacated and appointed an Interrex to manage the succession – few would have dreamed that they would continue appointing Interrexes to this day, as de facto republican heads of state – and Bohemia was in open revolt against German rule.

Everything seemed to be going the way that Gantimurov and the other Russians had hoped. He was ready to launch his troops at the Tsar’s command. But then something unexpected happened.

Few commentators had noted how bipartisan, how bisectarian public discontent in Bohemia had become. The Bohemians, both German and Czech speakers, had experienced German rule and Russian rule and liked neither. Even when one group was theoretically privileged over the other, its actual experience was poor, constantly watching out for reprisals and struggling under a nonfunctioning state. Germans and Czechs were too intermixed for any kind of partition to work, at least without racial purging on a scale that not even extremists would countenance.[51] But another option remained.

Before it had been German, Bohemia had been part of Danubia. Now Danubia was ruled by Grey Societists. Yes, they publicly suppressed expression of distinct culture. But, unlike the Combine, they permitted it at home in private spaces, and did not actually prevent the teaching of Czech or German in schools, just alongside Martial Latin. Despite some criticism from the more hardcore Societists in the government, Danubia had also continued the practice of separate rotating ethnic court systems and parliaments, though the system had grown more centralised over time. Danubia was not a place where either a German could be solely German and surrounded by Germans ruling the place only for Germans, nor a place where a Czech could be solely Czech and surrounded by Czechs ruling the place only for Czechs. But given that both those prospects had been tried in Bohemia and had ended in misery for both, suddenly some people were advocating compromise. (Audience murmurs)

Not actually that suddenly. It just seemed that way to those who hadn’t been paying attention. Those Russian agents were widely outnumbered by Grey Societist sympathisers – not some sinister horde of Agendes and cadres from the Combine, but Czechs and German speakers who genuinely believed that the only way their homeland would enjoy stability and peace was as part of the Danubian Confederation. As such, the rebel Bohemian government that had seized power in the Prager Burg – led by Mayor Stránský’s brother Karel and his widow – now announced that they sought admission to become part of Zonal Rej Franziskus Habsburgus’ Zone 6. In fact, not all of Bohemia was even in what the Combine Societists regarded as Zone 6, showing how irrelevant that had become for how Danubia was governed.[52]

What came next...lies beyond the scope of this lecture. Perhaps, in the end, it did take a lot of things falling out exactly correctly – or wrongly – for the Electric Circus age to come to an end. Certain people were in the right, or wrong, place at the right, or wrong, time. Colonel Gantimurov as the Tsar’s confidante in Russia; Lucidonius Abramus as Zonal Rej of Zone 11, or effectively ruler of Spain; Luigi Garavaglia as dictator of Romulan Italy. And also people who weren’t there, the whole generation of titans that had shepherded the world through the Black Twenties, for the most part. Most were not simply retired like President Washborough, but had passed away altogether like Madame Mercier.[53] The lessons of the past had been forgotten, and the world was ready for war.

I will end with a condensed version of Jennifer Macallister’s famous poem of 1961, titled – after Elspeth Kennedy’s phrase – simply The Electric Circus. It is a bittersweet celebration of the time, told through the hindsight of what came later.

I lie before the fire and know
Mankind had vanquished every foe

The lamps are lit, the streets are bright,
The people wander through the night.

Never a care or fear, for today
Has banished the strife of yesterday.

In the city we dance and sing
With no more want for anything.

Photel sparks, Motoscope screens
War and plague are just bad dreams.

Tomorrow’s land is brighter still
Can the stars themselves meet our fill?

Yes, I lie before Science’s glow
And trust my troubles will never grow.

The lamps are dim, the streets are dark
How bitter now, how grim, how stark

My thoughts of yesterday now seem
These horrors are no waking dream.

The world has changed, but men remain
As fallen as they once became.

We fight, we die, as once we did
Our love of peace we now forbid.

The comforting glow of the surfino
Now illuminates only Death’s casino

And beneath it all, a new science yet
The Atom’s secrets are our final bet.​

Thank you. (Thunderous audience applause) Any qu—

FOOTNOTES:
[39] The author who coined the name ‘Electric Circus’, as said in the first excerpt from Prof Greening’s lecture in Part #325.

[40] See Part #300 in Volume VIII. Mercier would probably be quite pleased to learn that Greening has to tell people in 2020 whom Vachaud was!

[41] ‘No-man’s-land’ is an authorial translation, as the term is not used in TTL.

[42] See Part #141 in Volume III. Note some anachronisms here like referring to Hapsburg Austria at this time as ‘Danubia’ and the term ‘High Saxons’.

[43] See Parts #246 and #247 in Volume VI, and Part #255 in Volume VII.

[44] See Part #261 in Volume VII.

[45] See Part #278 in Volume VIII.

[46] See Part #280 in Volume VIII.

[47] Daniel 5:25-28. See Part #127 in Volume III.

[48] See Part #280 in Volume VIII for General ‘Black Ivan’ Gantimurov’s actions in suppressing the Tatar revolt during the Black Twenties.

[49] ‘Aero marines’ (named by analogy to strike marines i.e. commandos or special forces) is the TTL term for paratroopers.

[50] Note the significance of ‘since 1900’, i.e. they certainly didn’t have a free and fair vote under the Russians either. Of course, before 1900 not everyone would have had a vote either due to the more restrictive franchise of the time.

[51] Again, the fact this is considered beyond the pale, or simply unrealistic regardless of its morality, should serve as an indicator for some different paths TTL has taken compared to OTL.

[52] Archking Francis III, AKA Zonal Rej Franzikus Habsburgus, succeeded his father Leopold in 1941. Some expected this to lead to a resurgence of core Societist values at how blatant this was only paying lip service to Societist terminology whilst actually being a straightforward monarchical succession, but this didn’t materialise – partly because the Combine was still consumed with the Silent Revolution at the time. What’s a particular headache for the Combine is that Zone 6 (based mainly on the Balkans) now technically has two Zonal Rejes both claiming authority over it, in the form of the Danubian Archking and the head of the Eternal State, neither of whom really take orders from the Kapud (especially the former) or are interested in rotation.

[53] Of course Washborough was not President during the Black Twenties, but this is a common ellision due to him being seen as ‘the only political leader worth his salt’ of the time in hindsight. "