History!
My affinity for history started with those alternate-history videos you see on Youtube. To this day, I still love what Possible History does and the stuff he makes. Since then, I have become very affixed with the history of borders and stuff like that? I find the history behind regions like Transylvania, Dobruja, Alsace-Lorraine, Galicia and Lodomeria etc. VERY interesting! I LOVE maps and can stare at them for HOURS. In my room, right now, theres a map from 1920 hung up on my wall (it doesnt show Chinese Warlords, :sigh: but how do you even map that lmao someone tell me if they can find accurate maps of the Chinese Warlord Era). My main interest is on Europe but I have also have had a long time interest with post-1900 USA and now, recently, the People's Republic of China.
Below, I'll just detail some countries I have particular interest in! :3
Weimar Germany!
1918-1933
Weimar Germany was born from the ashes of WW1. From the German Revolution, deligates from the SPD, the CVP and the DDP (what would soon be known as the Weimar Coalition) decided on a constitutional framework from which the new Republic would lie on for the rest of its short existence.
I find Weimar Germany very fasciinating because the state was so fragmented and yet had so much potential. In my book, Weimar Germany: Promise and tragedy, its author, Eric. D. Weitz, argues that "A less divided society, and one with a more expansive commitment to democratic principles, could have made the [Weimar] constitution work." It was certainly not a state ruined by its upbringing. Sure, the revolutionary years were chaotic and caused fragmentation. However, how could many other countries prosper with similar proportional voting methods if they were so innefective?
The answer is clear: the government had failed the people through inadequate responses to the Great Depression, the hyperinflation crisis, ever declining standards of living, etc. The austerity government under Brüning made the German people disillusioned with liberal democracy and had made them seek far right alternatives instead. In my belief, if the German government had gone through with something like the Lautenbach Plan or the WTB Plan instead of following the bourgeois parties' disastrous austerity policies, the Republic would have survived maybe even to this day.
If you, too, are interested in this, a truly FANTASTIC webgame I'd recommend is Social Democracy: An Alternate History! It lets you play as the SPD during the rise of the NSDAP. VERY fun!!!
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia!
1945-1992
Whilst I admittedly don't know as much about Yugoslavia than with Weimar Germany or some other nations that I will mention here, I still have a deep fascination with Yugoslavia! Though, particularly with the Socialist regime that freed itself from the Nazis in 1945.
As Yugoslavia had practically freed itself from the Nazis without Soviet assistance during WW2, it did not become one of the Soviet sattelite states in the Warsaw Pact. Rather, it was the only socialist regimes independent from the USSR in the Cold War (check this sick af quote out). Under the leader, Josip Broz Tito, he founded the Non-Aligned movement in 1961. These were a group of nations who neither alligned with the West nor the East.
For most of the Cold War, Yugoslavia thrived and workers, especially, had high living standards compared to Second World countries in the East. However, when the leader, Tito, died, the Serbian regime ( and so, the economy began to unravel and rising nationalism within the Federal Republics foreloomed the eventual collapse of the state into civil war.
Yugoslavia formally ended when Montenegrin independence was finally won in 2006, ending a nation of "one country which has two alphabets, three languages, four religions, five nationalities, six republics, surrounded by seven neighbours, a country in which live eight ethnic minorities".
Russia!
1547(?*)-
Wow, real shocker россия-мама, the land of wheat, grain, cold and Shaman (I LOATHE this dude). I HATE Shaman and his stupid songs and his stupid- UGH! I'll rant about that in the music section sigh,,,
Russia interests me a huge ton! Whether its the Russian Empire, (mostly after 1800s tho) the Soviet Union, or the modern Russian Federation, i find this country to be extremely fascinating! First off, I love to explore how Conservatism was so well entrenched in the Russian Empire and how the forces of Liberalism were so fiercely combated. Stuff like the Decembrists, Tsar Alexander II, the many Polish Uprisings, etc. Russia truly was a backwards state! It had some of the strictest serfdom laws and had them enacted until 1861! This was at a time that not many other European nations had serfdom laws, save some minor Ottoman vassals and some tiny German principalities.
When tensions boiled over between the stagnant ruling class who were unreceptive to change and the increasingly frustrated lower classes who were increasingly radicalised by this Conservatism, tensions eventually boiled over on the eve of the October Revolution and the ensuing Civil War saw the Bolsheviks come to power. Every part of Bolshevik history interests me! Whether it's the idealist early revolution, the brutal Stalinist Era or the Cold War and ensuing Glasnost and Perestroika [mention Grazhdanskaya Oborona at least once here], I feel as if there are very interesting events that can always be analysed in Soviet History.
And then, at last, there's the Russian Federation. I would be hesitant to call it yet another autocracy like the rest of Russian history and yet, the title doesn't feel all too estranged from truth. An Authoritarian Democracy, I'd call it. With a strong presence of an Oligarchy. I love to look into Putin's centralisation of power, Alexei Navalny, and the War in Ukraine.