Recent content by Dan1988

I don't see Russia developing that far, considering how it was historically plagued with all sorts of issues, not to mention how the Tsars preferred that no political activity took place at all and the security services were doing their bit to enforce that. And that's before we get to the...

Hmm, that leaves one question for me: if Finland was even remotely interested, what are the potential chances for a Fenno-Estonian union? Yes, I know, far-fetched as hell (and some could object to seeing Estonian as a Finnish dialect), but stranger things have happened before elsewhere in the...

As long as there's a place to quickly decamp, then it doesn't matter how viable it would seem to be in order to function as a redoubt. So, in that case, the Channel Islands could work out better (now just leaving the choice between Jersey and Guernsey). Canada was already getting rocked by the...

The Channel Islands and Isle of Man are right there; they might depend on the UK for a few things, but they are technically (quasi-)independent countries. So there's certainly potential for a *Taiwan analog/ues just a stone's throw away.

The US certainly got involved with aiding the Whites during the Russian Civil War IOTL, so that's one precedent. In addition, AFAICT there was some sort of resigned sentiment in Whitehall that American annexation of Canada would be inevitable (that it didn't happen, at least politically, was...

And if that ever happened, the US would be trying to invade Canada, Newfoundland (at the time separate from Canada), the Bahamas, the BVI, maybe even Jamaica, Anguilla, and British Honduras (yes, I know the last 4 were colonies, not Dominions, at the time - doesn't really matter for Washington...

Well, all of the exotic names all have a clear English translation in "council", so "All power to the Councils" can fit. What matters more, to me, is absolutely simple - will it remain a monarchy or not? If a monarchy, then there would be some continuity with the existing regime (so a lot of...

Well, it's not like Salazar could have tried - made all the more easier by the fact that there was one main pretender to the throne (Duarte Nuno) and all the other claimants (sorry, Brazilian Braganzas) were largely marginal to begin with. However, by that point, things had changed so that if...

Be that it may, at least to me it certainly shows potential - at least for TTL purposes - to be far more than it became IOTL, hence not a dead end. Having at least one part of the Russia-as-cultural-region that is not autocratic by default, as Novgorod was, is a great start to having at least...

My thinking is basically what if, instead of a single entity that called itself Russia, three was instead a continuation of the preceding situation, albeit a bit more consolidated, where there was more than one principality (or, in Novgorod's case, republic) that covered that same space without...

Even if that was the case, certainly an independent surviving Novgorod Republic would have made a difference and helped shore up its connections with the European world - particularly since (as far as I'm aware) it was never subject to Mongol rule.

Just wondering, as a thought exercise - while it was important to defeat the Mongols and end their occupation of what would ultimately become Russia, part of me wonders what would happen if, say, the Novgorod Republic was still alive and kicking (which would probably necessitate a somewhat more...

The one thing underlying all those options and how they would dictate how Trotsky governs the Soviet Union is path dependency and whether the Communists try to break that or find it comfortable. Many of the USSR's leaders grew up under an autocratic system until 1917, hence having little...

Honestly, for me, to pull that off means having a pre-Revolutionary POD more Puritan immigration to (most of) the other 13 colonies rather than just Massachusetts (including Maine as the Massachusetts Bay Colony held that at the time) and Connecticut. One of the reasons why the Revolution...

The anti-slavery lobby in Britain was still a thing; it could be delayed from OTL, but at some point it was going to happen as a compromise between the slaveholding interests and the anti-slavery lobby. Of course, what made the difference was that a lot of the Caribbean colonies based their...