This is the 'Iron Curtain' in 1921. How did this happen? What will the future hold?

[raharris1973]

I'm going to link to a couple variants of maps where Bela Kun's Communist Republic is able to survive in Hungary and Slovakia, and the Bolshevik invasion of Poland succeeds to some extent or another.

How do you think the Reds in these ATLs managed to achieve such a higher degree of success in these ATLs compared to OTL.

Having achieved this foothold in Central Europe, what is the likely future of Europe over the next half century.

Option 1: With small red Poland:

1b - Soviets also improve Bessarabia border

Option 2- Bigger Red Poland, Plus Red Germany in East Prussia

2b - same, also with Soviet Bessarabia

 

[WolfBear]

I think that Germany's leadership would go ballistic if East Prussia were to go Red. Still, I don't know if they would actually be in a position to stop this. Maybe they could make a deal with the West to get East Prussia back in exchange for agreeing to the restoration of a non-Communist Poland? On the flip side, though, a Communist East Prussia would rather decisively solve the Polish Corridor problem.

I also wonder if there will be open borders between these Communist countries.

As for how to make this happen, I really don't know how Bela Kun's regime can survive, but imagining a Soviet Poland is relatively easy if the Reds win at Warsaw in 1920.

As a side note, I wonder just how many more Jews move to the Soviet interior in the following years and decades. Here, the Soviet Union would have a much larger reservoir of Jews to draw from due to it controlling the Kresy and the Baltic states from the very beginning. Surely life would be better in Moscow or St. Petersburg than it some rural Galician backwater town for a lot of Jews, no?

 

[WolfBear]

As a side note, I wonder if the greater threat of Communism could make the US more willing to remain involved in European affairs after the end of WWI in this TL. Germany has its military power destroyed, Britain has demobilized, and only France and Italy out of the non-Communist European Great Powers actually maintain large standing armies. Could the situation be threatening enough for the US to get more involved? The US did have important business interests in Europe, after all--no?

 

[History Learner]

1 and 1b are the most likely, anything else basically sees the Entente give carte blanche to the Little Entente and Germans to act as they see fit.

 

[raharris1973]

1 and 1b are the most likely, anything else basically sees the Entente give carte blanche to the Little Entente and Germans to act as they see fit.

Well 'acting as they see fit' sounds like a euphemism for a campaign of rollback against the Soviets and Red allies. The Germans, and Little Entente in particular, are going to need some aid for that. How do you see it going?

I imagine the Little Entente members goals will be general 'national' and 'limited' in scope in proportion to their smaller size and wealth. The Yugoslavs I would imagine would push into Hungary west of the Danube to occupy buffer space in 'Pannonia', while the Romanians would seek to achieve their maximum ethnic borders, but would hesitate to deeply invade Ukraine. But for buffer space and security, they would try to occupy red Hungary east of the Danube. So while this is the end of Hungarian communism , it's also going to effectively be the end of an effectively independent Hungarian national state . Czech Bohemia will focus on reclaiming Slovakia, Carpatho-Ruthenia, and possibly also Galicia in general. The German minimum goals will be the 1914 eastern borders, but for greater border security they may be interest in absorbing the Baltics or having the Baltic states and a restored rump Poland as buffers.

If the Germans get all this in the east, it basically kills German expansionist revisionism with kindness, by giving Germany more foreign policy problems than it can handle without trying to expand west or into colonies. Germany will still have its domestic issues to address, with different constituencies pointing in more Social Democratic or conservative or reactionary directions. But with the west letting Germany be a guardian state in the east, the reactionary or radical right wing would have to use mainly domestic social grievances, not international ones, to ride its way to greater exclusive power for itself.

 

[WolfBear]

The German minimum goals will be the 1914 eastern borders, but for greater border security they may be interest in absorbing the Baltics or having the Baltic states and a restored rump Poland as buffers.

The Germans could even compensate Poland for its territorial losses in the West by giving it territories in the East at the Soviet Union's expense in this TL. Better have a Poland that looks eastward than one that looks westward, that's for sure--from a German perspective, of course.