I'm reposting here something Lafinur wrote for Yakutia in WIAF:
1. Independence
In the beginning, there was the Russian Civil War.
The November Revolution of 1917 proceeds as IOTL, but there is a key factor that plays a big role ITTL: China. On March 11 of 1918: In Harbin, General Lu Yongxiang meets with Dmitri Horvath, manager of the Chinese Eastern Railway and governor of the Russian railway zone, and offers to make him leader of the White Russian forces in Siberia, in exchange for his support for Chinese deployment. An agreement is reached, smoothed by a hefty kickback. By late march, the first Chinese forces enter Siberia (a cavalry regiment seizes Khabarovsk. Blagoveshchensk is likewise occupied a few days later) and in April they secure Vladivostok with a division, transported by train from Harbin thanks to Horvath’s cooperation. On May 4, Horvath formally becomes commander of the White troops in Eastern Siberia. The Chinese provide him with funding.
On June 21 of 1918, Horvath appoints a Provisional War Cabinet, its members being a diverse group including former Duma members, among them a Constitutional Democrat, two socialists, Kerensky's former Vice Minister of Communications, a director of the Russo-Asiatic Bank, and General Flug, the former Military Governor of Vladivostok. On July 5th, he transfers his seat of government from Harbin to Chita. A few days later, he appoints Mikhail Khanzhin as his Commander-in-Chief so he can focus on political issues. At the same time, Lu Yongxiang, who has realized that the Czech Legion is now the single most powerful military actor in Siberia, meets with Mikhail Diterikhs, its commanding officer. An agreement is reached for the Chinese to provide the Legion with funds and supplies in exchange for coordination of their respective operations.
During the war, the Chinese work with the Japanese, who will ultimately deploy some 12,000 men at Vladivostok and other parts, somewhat uneasily, and with the Czech and the Whites, who are junior partners in this venture. By February of 1919, the Whites have retaken the northern Caucasus and Poland enters the war against the Soviets, but the Chinese are nevertheless uneasy about White prospects and are ultimately proven correct when Yekaterinburg is captured by the Bolsheviks and the French attempt to take Odessa is defeated, both on March of 1919.
At the same time, Tang Shaoyi, minister of foreign affairs in Liang Qichao’s government, meets with Japanese Prime Minister Hara Takashi. The Chinese, who have begun considering the option of setting up a puppet state in Eastern Siberia, require the tacit approval of Japan, which also has strategic interests in the region. Tang, in exchange for Japanese approval of the scheme, offers Chinese recognition of Japan’s sovereignty over the entirety of Sakhalin—at that point divided between Russian and Japanese zones at the 50° parallel—as well as Japanese privileges over the exploitation of Kamchatka’s resources. The Japanese accept, but also demand, and obtain, the right to create an extraterritorial settlement in Petropavlovsk. Over the following years, Kamchatka will become a de facto Japanese colony, and will be annexed by Japan between 1934 and 1943.
Between 1919 and 1920, the Soviets have taken the initiative and are on the offensive, the White fronts are being crushed one by one; The Chinese begin setting up defensive lines across Siberia, while working on the creation of a puppet-buffer state in Eastern Siberia. By September of 1920, China has annexed Outer Manchuria and Western Xinjiang, and by January the Reds have reached Omsk, in Western Siberia.
On November of 1921, the Soviets reach the Krasnoyarsk line, the last defensive line set up by the Chinese, Czechs and White forces, and the bloody
Battle of Krasnoyarsk takes place, ending in a carnage with heavy losses for both sides, forcing an armistice and the signing of the
Treaty of Krasnoyarsk: The delineation of the Sino-Soviet and Soviet-Yakutian borders is settled. Yakutia is officially declared an independent country, and Yakutsk is chosen as its capital. Kang Tongfu, third daughter of Emperor Jianguo, is crowned as Queen Khongordzol I; Dmitri Horvath becomes Prime Minister, and Mikhail Khanzhin becomes Chief of Staff.
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2. Dimitri Horvath and the 1920s
A wily politician and quick-thinking technocrat, General Horvath surrounds himself with a cadre of capable man, including Chinese advisors, Czech Legion officers, local Siberian talent and even some Russian exiles. With his right-hand man, Radola Gajda, he recruits the help of men like Siberian regionalist and writer, Ivan Serebrennikov, and founds the People's Prosperity Party, Yakutia's ruling party for 24 years. The party is large and heterogeneous, but largely a tool for Horvath to control Parliament and use it as a rubber-stamp. Serebrennikov is elected to Parliament and becomes Speaker of the Lower House, whereas Buryat Bato-Dalai Ochirov becomes Speaker of the Senate.
Just as importantly, between 1921 and 1922, Kang Tongfu, daughter of the Chinese Emperor and future Queen of Yakutia, is touring Eastern Siberia on a good-will tour that also allows her to meet her future subjects and ingratiate herself to them. It is at this juncture that she meets her husband and King Consort, Innocent Alexeyev, and achieves her first PR coup: she travels to the capital, meets with Parliament in the midst of the debate on the monarchy and the royal residence, and refuses to be lodged at a grandiose palace to be built at the expense of the people, and instead asks to reside in the most modest government building that they can afford to give her, insisting that no royal palace should exceed in height, size or cost those of Parliament or the ministries. Thus she gains a reputation as a Citizen Queen who eschews pomp and protocol in favor of a no-frills lifestyle and frequent informal interactions with ordinary people. She also makes a point of staying out of the business of governance.
Around the same time, the White March of Death marks the end of the Russian exodus to Yakutia, which poured tens of thousands of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Mongols and Central Asian nomads on Yakutian soil between 1918 and 1921. The last march of exiles, doomed by the cold, merciless winter of 1922, the soviet post-war repression and the Yakutian desire to normalize relations with Moscow and prevent further violence, ends with the death of tens of thousands, only a few hundreds/thousands reaching Yakutia by the end of the winter.
Geographically, the new country has formal control over most of Eastern Siberia east of the Yenisei, with the exceptions of Kamchatka, under legal and official Yakutian control, but under Japanese economic and political "administration/supervision", thus officially making the peninsula a Japanese protectorate; of Sakhalin, formally annexed by Japan and of Outer Manchuria and Tuva, both annexed by China. The remaining territory is divided into four provinces (Aldan, Angara, Buryatia, Sakha and the Japanese supervised province of Kamchatka), the Federally Administered Military Region of Sayan, the federally administered territory of Chukotka (later a province, in 1945) and the Autonomous Municipality of Irkutsk.
Demographically, Yakutia's population ( 3,039,418 people, of which 40% is Russian, 25% is Turkic, 12% is Mongol, 9% is Yakut, 4% is Chinese and 5% is Jewish) has been boosted by tens/hundreds of thousands of displaced and exiled people from across the Russian Empire, from the steppes of Central Asia to Moscow, from former Russian politicians, writers and artists to thousands of Mongolians and other central asian ethnicities displaced by the Soviets during the war. So it's possible that Yakutia's population at the end of the war is between 3 and a half million and 4 million people, the Chinese, Mongol and Turkic populations being the fastest growing.
Politically, Horvath is somewhat of a strongman with a rubber-stamp parliament, but he mostly acts benevolently and without abuses of power, although accusations of being a Chinese puppet and a autocrat abound. His detractors would even call him "Napoleon of the Arctic", "Little Tsar" and "Ruler of All Icefields." The People's Prosperity Party rules supreme through the 1920s, being stronger in the countryside, where most of the population lives, and with the lower classes than in the cities.
In the cities, we see former Socialist-Revolutionaries led by Mikhail Lindbergh or Pyotr Derber found a Socialist Party, whereas a faction of more moderate Socialist Revolutionaries led by Ivan Yakouchev found the Social-Democratic Party. Russian conservatives led by Vasily Boldyrev, a former officer of comparatively liberal leanings, form the Liberal Party around the same time in the early 1920s, absorbing many Kadets and other moderate exiles from Russia throughout the decade, including the Kadet organization that Pavel Milyukov and Vlamidir Nabokov Sr. found in Irkutsk in 1920.
The 1920s also see the development of the Ethnic and Provincial Parties, created to represent the many actors that play a part in Yakutia's rather complex ethnic framework. A first step is taken when the former poet and now Governor of Sakha, Aleksei Kulakovsky, founds the Yakut/Sakha's People's Party in 1923, as an instrument to cement the position of the Yakut people within Yakutia and better represent their interests in Parliament. Every governor of Sakha for the better part of the century represents the Yakut People's Party, and the same applies to the majority parliamentary representatives to the Lower House and the Senate.
Similarly, the other Turkic peoples, although related to the Yakuts by common ancestry and ethnicity, are separated by religion (Yakuts are Shamanistic, while the other Turkic peoples are Muslim), form their own parties, to provide a voice for the strong local Kazakh population (10% of Yakutia's total population) which has been boosted by the thousands of displaced men and women from central Asia. The Muslim Kazakh party (name pending) eventually forms closer bonds with other Turkic organizations and form an Ethnic Turkic party in the 1920s, which eventually enters into alliance with the Yakut People's Party in the late 1920s, becoming the second largest entity in Parliament after the government People's Prosperity Party.
The third major Ethnic and Provincial Party is the Buryat Party, which effectively controls the southern province of Buryatia, the only province other than Sakha where a single ethnicity is a majority and thus enough to control the entire province.
Horvath's rule also sees a political dominance of Russians, Czechs and Chinese (since Yakutia is basically a vassal of the Qian Dynasty), although Buryats, Mongols and Yakuts are also invited to government. This dominance is extended under Radola Gajda's government.
The years of consolidation and stabilization are mostly peaceful and prosperous for Yakutia, but the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression puts a damper on East Asia and the world at large. Weakened and aged, Horvath has begun delegating matters on his right-hand man and protégé, the Czech Legion officer, General Radola Gajda.
Gajda and Horvath make a deal with the Ethnic/Provincial Parties: the Yakut People's Party and their Turkic Party allies join the Buryat ethnic party to form the
National Rebirth Party, effectively an umbrella party for provincial-level native political formations, and a junior partner to the ruling People's Prosperity Party, which continues to rule thanks to their new-found allies for another 16 years.
Come 1933, Dmitri Horvath retires at the age of 76, leaving General Radola Gajda as Prime Minister of Yakutia, at the age of 41.
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3. Radola Gajda and the War against Japan
Young and ambitious, an aggressive officer and Major-General of the Czech Legion at age 26, he was the highest-ranking officer to stay behind when the majority of the veterans left for their new country in Europe, keeping a cadre of talented Czech officers around him. Unlike the conservative, hands-off Horvath, Gajda cultivates a populist streak and takes advantage of the war to implement ambitious policies of industrial development. Gajda, who was IOTL a Czech fascist inspired by Mussolini, is also somewhat more authoritarian than Horvath, as the war forces him to take an unprepared Siberia and turn it into an efficient machine capable of defeating the Japanese. Just how much of Gadja's authoritarianism is due to his personality and how much due to the difficult circumstances that forced all war leaders to make hard decisions later becomes a hotly debated subject for Yakutian historians. Government control over the economy and the populace, conscription, war propaganda and a personality cult of sorts ensue, as does industrialization, militarization and repression of dissident elements and anyone who could be considered Pro-Japanese or Pro-Soviet.
Militarily, Yakutia is a secondary theatre for the war. The Japanese use Kamchatka as a springboard to occupy Chukokta, Chukotka and the entirety of Yakutia's coasts at the Sea of Okhotsk, including Naval Base of Ayan, where most of the Yakutian Navy is destroyed. The Japanese are stopped at the Battles of Nel'kan and the Okhota River, but otherwise the theatre quickly becomes a sideshow. Outside of the occasional Yakutian attempt to retake Ayan or create a diversion to help the Chinese, the front sees little action between 1934 and 1943, when the Americans liberate Kamchatka and the Yakutians liberate Kolyma (which provides the Japanese with rich Goldfields and a great source of funding )and Chukotka.
Demographically, the war sees the migration of tens and hundreds of thousands of people from the countryside to the big cities, as the needs of conscription force people to join the army, and the new factories offer more opportunities than the old farms and mines. Thus cities like Irkutsk, Cita and Deede-Ude experience a demographic and economic boom, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s the mostly rural and agrarian population and economy are replaced by a brimming industrial economy and a working class of proletariats where none was there before.
Politically, there are no elections between 1931 and 1946, and thus we see the Gajda government start as dynamic and populist, but with time grow stagnant, conservative and somewhat authoritarian. Liberals and Social-Democrats support the war and the People's Prosperity Government, even if they're critical of certain measures, whereas the Socialists might be generally more critical. The growth of a strong, urban worker class also has important effects later on, chiefly among them, the formation of a strong labour movement and unions/syndicates.
The most important effect of the war, however, might be the role it had in shaping the Yakutian National Identity and Conscience, turning a hastily formed and chaotic patchwork of ethnicities, religions and peoples and turning them into a single nation, a single identity by which every Yakutian can identify, rather than as a Buryat, a Russian, a Yakut, a Mongol, a Kazakh or a Irkutskian or the like. The threat of the common enemy, the adversity and misery of the war, the mood of general cooperation, the great internal migration from the countryside to the cities, the mass conscription putting Buryats, Yakuts, Mongols, Jews and Chinese into single units and forcing them to bond and face the hardships of war, the war propaganda of the Gadja Government hammering in the idea that "we're all Yakutians, we're all in this together", etc. all contribute to making all Yakutians feel like actual Yakutians, and not like Buryats or Yakuts or Russians living in a rump-pseudo-Russia.
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4. Ivan Kirillov
Young, handsome, tall and charismatic, General Ivan Kirillov (b. 1902) made his bones fighting the Japanese in the 1930s and became a household name after he and General
Fyodor Okhlopkov led the liberation of Kolyma and Chukotka in the summer of 1943. The feat conquers the heart of the nation and catches the eye of Prime Minister Gajda, who appoints Kirillov as Minister of War and Okhlopkov as commander of the Yakutian theatre. As Minister of War, Kirillov uses his popularity to build a strong base of support among the military brass and the soldiers, who already worship him as the "Hero of Kolyma." He might also be appointed Deputy Prime Minister to Gajda, if Gajda tries to further sponge off Kirillov's popularity.
Kirillov nevertheless proves too popular and too independent for Gajda to handle and the breaking point comes in mid-1945; the war now over, the nascent worker's movement in the big cities demand for their rights to be recognized and their voices be heard, as well as several concessions including ending martial law/state of emergency /emergency economic measures/salary freezes during the war, etc. Gajda of course wants to hear nothing about this and threatens to end the strikes by force and even forcibly conscript the strikers if necessary and send them to Kolyma, Kamchatka or Japan on occupation duties.*
Faced with the possibility of a general strike and national upheaval, Gajda is cornered and this is where Kirillov steps in, negotiating with the workers and assuring that no military measure would be taken against strikers, neither arrest, violent break-ups nor conscription. Already the hero of the people and the lower classes, Kirillov is now also the hero of the workers, whereas Gadja sees this as an act of open betrayal and thinks that Kirillov has sided with the workers. Paranoid and insecure, Prime Minister Gajda works to isolate Kirrilov and his clique, eventually forcing the young and popular General to resign his post as Minister of War/Deputy PM and announce his intentions of running for Parliament in the next general elections, which Gadja still refuses to call.
The Queen has thus far been neutral in all of this, although rumours persist that she prefers Kirillov to Gajda. 12 years in government have left Gajda as paranoid, authoritarian, polarizing and growingly unpopular, as the good-feelings left by the end of the war and the victory over Japan have ended and made way for a sense of resentment against Gajda's authoritarianism, refusal to end the emergency measures and call for elections, and especially, his very public confrontation with the idol of the masses, Kirillov. Cornered and increasingly unpopular, Gajda asks the Queen to dissolve Parliament and calls for an election to be held on February of 1946. Emanuel Moravek, a Czech legion officer and Gajda's right hand man (could be his Chief of the General Staff, personal Secretary or just a prominent minister) becomes Gajda's appointed successor and leader of the People's Prosperity Party for the upcoming 1946 elections.
Standing against him is Kirillov, around whom massive support begins to coalesce as the days and weeks pass. The first party to proclaim Kirrilov's candidacy is the Yakut People's Party, the Ethnic-Provincial party that dominates Sakha Province, effectively meaning that the provincial party has left the National Rebirth Coalition and thus, the Gajda government. To this support one can add that of the Yakutian Labor Party, funded in the midst of the 1945 anti-Gajda crisis/strikes to oppose the PPP and Gajda government, and then that of a faction of Yakutian conservatives that leave the Liberal Party to form the National Liberal Party. Completing the picture is the Independent Socialist Party, formed by a breakaway faction of the mainline Socialists. Thus these
United Parties form a Kirillovist Front against Moravek and the
People's Prosperity Party/National Rebirth Coalition. The mainline Liberals, Socialists and Social-Democrats might choose to support Kirillov by not presenting candidates in certain provinces, as they see their chances to oppose the two big coalitions as null, anyway.
While officially a race between Kirillov and Moravek, the election quickly becomes an issue of Kirillov versus Gajda, resulting with a considerable victory of the United Parties under Kirillov over the Gajdaists, thus ending 24 years of PPP rule in Yakutia. Kirillov's personal popularity also means that hundreds of thousands of Buryats, Kazakhs, Kamchatkans, Jews and Mongols now identifying as Yakutians rather than as Buryats, Kazakhs, Kamchatkans, Jews and Mongols vote for Kirrilov and his coalition rather than for the National Rebirth Party or the local ethnic-provincial parties. Thus the share of the vote of the Ethnic-Provincial parties is nearly halved, their parliamentary representation reduced and left only controlling the province of Buryatia. All the other provinces see the election of Kirillovist governors.
The 1946 Election, the first in nearly 12 years, also sees hundreds of young men being first elected to Parliament, most of them on the Kirillovist ticket, thus making this the greatest changing of the old guard in Yakutia's electoral history. Before the election, the medium age for an MP would have been 50-60, whereas in 1946 it would be 35-45. Among the prominent men first elected in 1946 there are four future Prime Ministers of Yakutia: Vladimir Novikov (39, a Kirrilov man) the social-democrat Dmitry Khodulov (34), Vladimir Borsoev (40, elected on the PPP ticket, later switches to the Socialists) and Vsevelod Pepelyayev (33, elected as a Kirillovist National Liberal).
Public works, government reforms, workers' rights are all landmarks of the Kirillov Government.