Eurasia in the 20th Century

For most of its recorded history, the Eurasian landmass -- stretching from northern China to the eastern frontier of Poland and the Baltic States -- has been a central area of interaction and trade between the civilizations of Europe, India, and China. By the beginning of the 20th century, control over Eurasia was neatly divided between the Russian and Chinese empires, which collectively controlled almost a third of the world's population and land mass. Neither China nor Russia initiated the great period of economic and military expansion that characterized first western Europe in the early 18th century, then central Europe and Japan in the 19th century. The plight of China was particularly bad, since its traditional isolation from and supremacy over Europe and Japan led the tottering Qing dynasty and its supporters to discount the possibilities of modernization, but even Russia remained backward in relation to the states of western and central Europe. Plagued by internal dissent and external pressures, the Chinese and Russian empires collapsed in 1912 and 1917 respectively. More advanced neighbours -- some like Poland and Japan operating independently of the established Great Powers, others like Iran operating with the support of one or more of the Great Powers -- annexed large swathes of territory, while borderland nationalities such as the Balts and Armenians of Russia and the Tibetans of China established their formal independence.

Russia was the first of the two Eurasian empires to recover from its weaknesses, under the totalitarian dictatorship of the Communist party, after 1925 under Josef Stalin. The Communist party came to power in the course of a bloody civil war fought between the Communist Party and the remnants of the imperial regime, promising the vast peasantry to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Although Russia was excluded from such vital regions as the Baltic States, Ukraine and Baku by anti-Communist neighbours, Stalinist Russia nonetheless managed to develop one of the largest industrial economies in the world by the end of the 1930's. This vast industrial development came at the cost of fifteen million people who died as an indirect result of the forced industrialization, the formation of a totalitarian cult of personality centered on Stalin, and the sharp decline of living standards. Russia was one of the world's most isolated countries, rejected by the liberal democracies of western and central Europe and by the illiberal German and Japanese dictatorships.

After the failure of the Republic of China under Sun Yat-sen to transform China into a republican democracy, China fell into anarchy for most of the 1920's and 1930's. A half-dozen warlords controlled most of China under military rule, while the Great Powers maintained their colonial enclaves along the cost of China and the Japanese Empire made increasingly large incursions into the northern region of Manchuria. Although the Nationalist Party remained in nominal control of most of China, the Chinese Communist Party began to gain an increasing amount of support from the rural population. Under its leader Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party rejected traditional Communist doctrine, which held that no Communist government could be installed without the support of the population of urban workers. Mao Zedong succeeded in creating a version of Communism suitable for largely rural countries such as China, by proposing that the Chinese Communist Party gain the support of the vast peasantry through land reforms. An attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to establish a stable coalition with the Nationalist Party against the Japanese failed, following the decision of the Nationalist Party to abandon most of northern China and seek a cease-fire with Japan in 1939. As a result, disaffected northern Chinese rallied to the Chinese Communist Party, making it the most important force in the Japanese-occupied territories of China.

For Russia and China, the coinciding Second World War and the Pacific War were respectively responsible for great changes in the internal structure and external position of both states. Stalin had allied with Germany in occupying and annexing Poland, and gained all of Ukraine for Russia in the first time in a generation, but he was so shocked by the sudden 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union that he died mysteriously. A coalition of bureaucrats of varying political persuasions took control of Russia only after weeks of infighting, and were able to halt the German army only at the line of the Volga river, losing almost all of the European territories of the Soviet Union to the German occupiers. The Soviet Union eventually managed to retake all of its European territories, and even imposed satellite regimes in Poland and the Baltic States in the goal of creating a glacis guarding against a third German invasion. The restive Ukrainian population was reintegrated into the Soviet state, but the benefits of these wealthy territories were more than offset by the increased disunity of the Soviet Russian leadership.

Throughout the second half of the 1940's and the 1950's, the Soviet federal state began to destabilize, as restive non-Russian nationalities such as the Ukrainians, the Georgians, and the Tatars began to establish locally autonomous regimes, and as Russia itself was divided between a liberal and reformist European west and a reactionary Asian east. By 1960, these regional, ethnic, and ideological tensions led to the outbreak of the two-year-long Soviet Civil War. Although four million Soviet citizens, most ethnic Russians, were killed in the fighting, the far more important outcome of the Soviet Civil War was the fragmentation of the Soviet Union into a confederacy of liberal European Russia, the dissident non-Russian nationalities of Ukraine, the middle Volga, and the Caucasus, and the neo-Stalinist Siberian Federative Soviet Socialist Republic.

Japan's defeat in the Pacific War forced that country to withdraw from the Chinese mainland, leaving the Communists as the only major legitimate political force in China. The Communists won the ensuing Chinese Civil War (1944-1947), and the largest country in the world became a Communist state. Attempts by the Communist government to restore Chinese sovereignty in Tibet and Indochina failed due to the continued integration of these regions into the reformed European colonial empires. His government's foreign ambitions rebuffed, Mao Zedong chose to focus China's energies on its internal modernization.

In the 1950's, China gained the support of the reactionary segments of the Soviet Union, and began to develop a large industrial base on the Stalinist model. Mao promoted the Great Leap Forward program (1958-61), a single-minded attempt to establish China as a fully modern industrial state through the exploitation of popular revolutionary enthusiasm in everything from the construction of backyard ore smelters to the murder of supposedly capitalist former landlords and businessmen. The Great Leap Forward not only failed in achieving its goals of a substantially larger industrial base, but the disruption of the peasant economy led to a terrible famine in which as many as 30 million Chinese died.

The end of the Great Leap Forward marked a brief period of consolidation and relative liberalism on the part of the Chinese Communist Party. As early as 1963, though, Mao's concern over the expulsion of the conservative Stalinist faction in the Soviet Union from any influence in the European republics had combined with his fear that Chinese revolutionary zeal was giving way to the general bureaucratization of country caused him to initiate the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was a bizarre and frightening ritual that soon gripped all of China, as revolutionary students -- organized in the infamous 'Red Guards' -- followed Mao in waging violent warfare against factions and individuals supposed to be Western or Japanese agents. The consequent political chaos devastated Chinese society and economy; at times, conditions in China came close to civil war. As the 1960's progressed, the Cultural Revolution became steadily more radical. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, so-called 'class enemies' were only imprisoned and tortured, but an increasing tendency towards the mass murder of 'class enemies' became apparent. Fragmentary documentary evidence suggests that Mao had grown to recognize the potential danger that the Red Guards posed even to his rule by 1970, but in that year Lin Biao -- commander of the Chinese army, a political radical, and supporter of the Red Guards -- staged a coup against Mao. Within a month, Lin Biao had secured his position as the Chinese head of state.

Following the conclusion of the Soviet Civil War, the different regions of the Soviet Union underwent sharply divergent paths. The associated republics, for instance, rapidly adopted relatively liberal social, economic, and political policies. The Ukrainian republic made the most notable progress. Throughout the 1960's, Ukraine gradually became a democratic state -- although the Communist Party maintained its formal monopoly on power until 1974, elections quickly took on the tone of any democratic election in the League, with competing candidates supported by publicity-hungry factions of the Party. The Ukrainian economy was similarly liberalized, with the agricultural communes transformed into profitable and productive cooperatives, with state-owned heavy industry newly operated by parapublic corporations, and with investment from the European Confederation increasing rapidly. Despite Ukraine's precarious position, living standards among the general Ukrainian population improved sharply in the 1970's.

Though the Russian and Tatarstani republics were allied with the associated republics in the Civil War, they were considerably more conservative than any of the autonomous republics. While Ukraine approached the level of a First World economy, Russia and Tatarstan remained poor and impoverished. With the lifting of visa restrictions with the European Confederation, the city of Leningrad gradually became the largest port in the Soviet Union, through which Russian and Tatarstani natural resources were exported in exchange for hard currency. The tragic poverty in Russia caused eight million Russians to emigrate to the European Confederation over the 1970's in search of work.

The Siberian Federative Republic remained decidedly Stalinist in orientation. A racist regime was imposed on the Muslim and Buddhist areas of Turkestan and Mongolia, limiting Turkestani and Mongolian access to decent jobs, higher education, and political power, with the goal of making Turkestan and Mongolia sources of cheap labour. Living standards for the ethnic Russian population of Siberia -- in 1975, numbering 43 million -- remained low, even by the standards of the Russian republic, due in no small part to the Siberian emphasis on military-oriented heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods. By the end of the 1970's, two million people who were deemed as having committed an infraction against the conservative regime had been sent to the reopened gulags of Yakutia and Magadan. Interestingly, despite the independent development of Gridney technology by a Siberian in 1959-1961 -- one André Zipenkenzy, of Novokuznetsk -- Siberian paranoia was such that news of this technology never reached the outside world, or even the vast majority of the Siberian population.

Surviving evidence suggests that the Siberian leadership -- concentrated in the capital of Novosibirsk -- viewed the western republics of the Soviet Union as hopelessly decadent, and sought to enter into a full-fledged alliance with China, thought to be the only reputable Communist state left in the world. By 1976, it had become apparent to most observers that this alliance had been largely completed, and a monolithic bloc covering twenty million square kilometers home to almost a billion people had formed.

At first, the Sino-Siberian alliance concentrated on maintaining the peace domestically. As time passed, the aims of the Siberian and Chinese governments became more ambitious. Half-hearted attempts to intimidate Korea into a subordinate political relationship came to naught due to the opposition of the Soviet western republics to the very idea. To compensate for this setback, the Sino-Siberian alliance turned to Indochina. Legally the successor state to the French Indochinese empire, the Indochinese Union was a repressive state dominated by the dominant Vietnamese population with the support of an increasingly illiberal United States. The Indochinese government half-seriously considered the option of reviving territorial claims to parts of southwestern China conquered by France but retroceded to China following the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1969. China, for its part, was certainly not opposed to reviving the nominal sovereignty of the Ming and Qing dynasties over Indochina, and in expelling United States influence from a country so close to its borders. Beginning in 1977 with an armed clash on the Chinese-Indochinese border, Sino-Indochinese relations quickly deteriorated.

By 1980, a clear division of East Asia between two hostile blocs was discerned by outside observers. In the north was the Sino-Siberian alliance, an imposing Great Power hostile to the liberal and capitalist/communalist ideals at least honoured in the breach by the rest of the world. In the south was a United States-led bloc of post-colonial Southeast Asian countries including Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Burma, all hostile to the Stalinism and Maoism that prevailed to their north. Some observers predicted a collision between the two blocs.

On the 18th of February, 1982, this collision occurred when Indochina launched an invasion of the disputed districts of southwest China. The fierce war quickly began to turn against Indochina, but ten days after the war began the United States launched a massive air attack on China. The Third World War quickly escalated when the United States and its Southeast Asian allies launched a massive invasion of southern China, occupying the disputed territories by the beginning of March and seizing large parts of Guangdong and Fujian provinces in a few months. As immense armies battled, the Sino-Siberians began to fear the possibility of their defeat. To forestall this, the first nuclear weapon ever used in battle was used against an American army unit outside of Guangzhou on the 16th of June. Over the next month, retaliations and counter-retaliations eventually broadened into a regional nuclear exchange on the 28th of July. The Chinese metropolis of Shanghai was destroyed, and thirty million Chinese died as a result. After a brief pause, the war progressed to its terminal phase, evolving into a full-blown global nuclear exchange with the United States.

The Sino-Siberian attack on the continental United States did inflict appalling losses of life and wealth on the American state. However, the United States was partially protected from the full attack by anti-ballistic missile networks that had just come into existence, and both the Congressional and the Presidentialist factions were able to construct viable states out of the wreckage. The Sino-Siberian alliance had no anti-ballistic missile systems operative, though; the sheer volume of the American and Indonesian attacks -- specifically designed by Presidentialist military commanders to kill as many people as possible, in immediate and delayed effects -- had a literally genocidal effect upon both the Soviet Union and China.

Following the destruction of every large Siberian city, military installation, and major element of the Siberian transportation and communications networks, the few million Siberians who survived until the spring of 1983 suffered from relentless famine, bloody warfare, and what appears to be localized outbreaks of biological weaponries. Most of the half-million survivors were evacuated to Russia in 1985 and 1986, and separate League mandates were created in the historical regions of Siberia and Turkestan. Historical Siberia is effectively dead; the only surviving Siberian enclave lies offworld, in the independent world of New Siberia, governed in liberal fashion by a Central Committee that traces its roots to the Siberian republican Science Ministry.

China has suffered extraordinarily from the Third World War and its aftermath. Though reliable statistics are uncertain, at best, most League and Japanese sources suggest that by the spring of 1983, only 200 million Chinese (of just over 1.1 billion alive at in 1980) had survived the extensive use of nuclear weapons and chemical depopulants in the final exchanges, and the subsequent famine, cold, and epidemics. The next two years would see an even steeper decline -- the extreme global scarcity of food aid encouraged the redirection of food aid from China towards intact states elsewhere in Asia, and to North America and Africa. Had a working national government existed in China, the worst effects of the famine might have been avoided, but no such government existed. Instead, several hundred independent regimes dispersed across the country engaged in a continuous and self-destructive struggle to secure as many resources as possible for themselves. Perhaps as many as twenty million Chinese succeeded in fleeing the Chinese civil wars, for Japan and Korea, for the League's Southeast Asian mandates, and even for India. For the remainder of the 1980's, the Chinese population declined even more steeply, by 1990 reaching an appalling low number of 45 million people. In the early 1990's, China -- without any protection from the League, and without a recognized national government -- became a seat of new rivalries between factions with different foreign backers.

Chinese reunification occurred as the result of the progress of the Agrarianist Party in Sichuan. Under its leader, Deng Xiaopeng, the Agrarianists had gained the support of peasant radicals in Sichuan and Japanese gifts of armaments to conquer and integrate first all of Sichuan, then most of southern China, into the Agrarianist regime. Northern China continued to resist the Agrarianists, but the two shocks of the Korean conquest of Manchuria in the spring of 1998 and the Holy Alliance invasion in the summer effectively destroyed resistance. By the end of 1998, China had been reunified under the Agrarianists. With a population of some 65 million, China still constitutes one of the most populous nation-states in the world. However, China's has been troubled by numerous political eruptions, not least of which are the secession of south Chinese peoples in 2000 from the Agrarianist regime, and the overthrow of the Agrarianist regime by a Hui-peasant coalition in January of 2002. Though there is the chance that the Chinese situation may improve given enlightened leadership, China is condemned to relative poverty by virtue of its devastation. At very best, an intact China may be a satellite of another, more powerful Asian state; if not, it simply might not exist.

The European republics of the Soviet Union fared best of all Eurasia. In Russia, the United States' attack took the form of the intense bombardment of populated areas -- particularly areas populated by Russians -- with chemical depopulants, and less commonly, nuclear weapons. Of Russia's major cities, only Leningrad was saved, in its case by the East Baltic anti-ballistic missile system of the European Confederation. The attack on Ukraine was focused primarily on the central agricultural areas bordering the Dnepr river -- five million Ukrainians died as a direct result of the attack, and the grain crops that were needed to stave off starvation worldwide were destroyed. In all, some fifteen million Ukrainians -- one-quarter of the total national population -- and one hundred and ten million Russians died in the genocidal attack.

In 1985, Ukraine and the reassembled Federated Russian Republics -- a confederation of nine self-governing states, including the former Soviet republics of Komi, Tatarstan, and Kalmykia -- joined the European Confederation along with Georgia and North Caucasia as independent states. Since then, Ukraine has managed a slow recovery as its agricultural lands have been partially rehabilitated and Confederation regional development funds have laid the groundwork for a renewed burst of modernization similar to that of the 1970's. The process of recovery in Georgia has been slower, but notable progress was made in the 1990's. Russia has languished in a seemingly unending slump, due to the tremendous devastation of the War and its shattering psychological effect upon the modern Russian population.

The recent Deccan Soviet invasion destroyed the Russian federation, as a new Russian Empire including most of eastern Russia, most of the Mandate of Siberia, and Komi as an Imperial Free State has come into being, alongside independent Tatar and Kalmyk states, a Slavic Alliance englobing most of central European Russia, and a reduced Russian federation. The new situation in Russia is highly tumultuous. It is quite possible that out of the chaos of western Eurasia, one or more of the Russian successor states might manage to put Russia on the long path towards recovery. Certainly the presence of prosperous Ukraine cannot but help.

Still, Eurasia's history as a historical and cultural entity is over -- its western periphery is being integrated into the mainstream of the European Commonwealth, while its eastern periphery will join the Southeast Asian region as an impoverished territory open to foreign cultural and political influence, and its central regions are likely to remain without a significant human presence indefinitely. Rather more backward than Europe, Japan, Egypt, or Korea -- or even Turkey and Iran -- barring a miracle Eurasia's long-term future will be little more than that of a nature preserve and source of ambitious immigrants for the countries of Europe and the Pacific.