Left to right: Iulien Niculescu (1st Premier), Veaceslav Tanase (3rd Premier), SSPC flag from 1922-1979, Ion Ardelean (4th Premier), Costel-Ghorghe Popa (final Premier)
The People's Socialist State of Caminia
Statul Socialist Popular Câminia (SSPC)
Background and the Red Rising
The rule of Marcel II "the Liberal" (b. 1845, r.1878-1910) came to an abrupt end on the day before New Year's Eve, 1910, after a stroke at roughly 2am resulted in his death several hours later. Marcel's rule had been liberal, progressive, and democratic in character, seeking to pluralise the sources of power, modernise the role of the monarchy into a more constitutional setting, and oppose extremes while trying not to intervene or make his specific politics known.
King Ștefan I (1867-1933, pictured on right) in 1915
His first son had died the previous year, and his second son was largely estranged from him. Nevertheless, the conservative-nationalist Ștefan I (b. 1867, 1910-c. 1922) was crowned the following week in January 1911. Ștefan's first five years of rule were somewhat muted, and although he did intervene in national politics and support partisan candidates and policies far more than his father, which also revealed a deeply conservative nature to his way of thinking, many liberals and progressives in the country still hoped that the democratic reforms his father had passed - most notably, the extension of the franchise, the de facto supremacy of the Camera (legislative chamber), and alleviation of socioeconomic pressures on the working-class poor and peasants - had become consensus.
On 6 June, 1916, the
Steaua Galbenă (Yellow Star) group of anarchist revolutionaries ambushed King Ștefan's motorcar during a trip in Gătaia, leading to the death of his pregnant wife, and critical injuries to two of his three children, as well as suffering a punctured lung and protracted stay in hospital himself, giving him significant breathing difficulties for the remainder of his life. This event deeply scarred the King, and by his own admission, radicalised him against "tolerating the deliberate, insidious undermining of the system our nation was founded, and continues to be run, upon."
Following around three months in almost total isolation, Ștefan intervened heavily in his nation's politics. At first relying on his advice to conservative politicians, he increasingly became at odds with the Camera, who viewed his intrusions as undue and whose patience and sympathy with him was worn thin by his increasingly poor temperament and erratic manner of rule. The Camera censured him by a majority of 550-30 of 610 members in 1918, while a brief Yellow Rising in 1919 from liberals and democrats was brutally suppressed with the help of the military, which the King largely rewarded with de facto control of the instruments of government following its quelling, with mass imprisonments, democratic backsliding, the reversal of liberalising social and economic reforms, and censorship following.
The following three years was largely uneasy, and while Ștefan himself had little reason to believe that lawlessness was inevitable, left-wing forces and parties had increasingly begun to train militia arms of their party memberships, originally to counter the use of the military to prevent demonstrations and strikes. This slow buildup eventually became open, with the King's forces and a variety of communist, socialist, anarchist, and labourist forces continually suffering skirmishes in the streets of major cities in the country. Ștefan originally attempted to mediate the situation, having been rattled by its apparent suddenness, however frustrations with what he perceived as unreasonably onerous demands from socialists - the main issue being to separate the role of the military from that of the civilian state, which he viewed as a personal attack on his authority and structures that kept him in power from 1919 - resulting in the
Decapitare (lit. decapitation), in which military forces stormed a funeral of Nicu Rădescu, a key trade unionist, to murder much of the top rank of the left-wing resistance movement. The King is said to have regretted his action shortly after ordering it, and to have sent for the detachment to be called off, however proved too late.
The response was swift. Estimates of how large the communist movement ballooned from the public outrage of state-sanctioned murders at a funeral were somewhere between an increase of half to a full doubling of active membership numbers, while workers' councils were convened rapidly across most of the industrial region of the country to centralise a power structure in opposition to the military. While the military initially regained control of the capital in Brașova and some minor cities rapidly, the continued expansion, training, and militarisation of the Reds during this period, as well as discontent within the military over the King's apparently toxic unpopularity, resulted in the power command of the King crumbling rapidly around New Year's Day 1923. Until this period, the order by Communist Party to seize control of urban, industrial and agricultural centres of the country was only partially fulfilled. The New Year's Day coup not only failed to unseat Ștefan, but drove him so irate that he abdicated and "sarcastically welcomed" the Reds into the Camera and palaces on 2 January.
The founding years and Civil War
Map of the blue-red split in Caminia and Silenia, as of 1 January, 1924 (right)
The first two years or so of the SSPC, led by Iulien Niculescu, was largely focussed on the consolidation of power and fraught establishment of total control. Derenia was, while at first agitated against the Niculescu government, quickly placated by the Declaration of the Rights of Caminians, which held that self-determination was owed to all nations and peoples within the Caminian domain. However, the Silenian "Blue" movement continued to rage unabated, although to some extent fragmented and handicapped by continued internal dissent from working-classes connected to the Communist Party of Caminia, and General Kajetán Čelko became the
de facto head of the "Blue State," largely set up in opposition to the Reds as well as implicitly supporting Silenian secession. Attempts by Niculescu to crush the Silenians by cutting their connections to the Auburn Sea were only partially successful, and the fiercely Silenian port city of Nováky held against PCC forces for long enough for Niculescu to view such an occupation as unworkable. A large number of nobles fled west during this period, emulating the fleeing of Old Szlavic nobles during the Revendicarea 500 years earlier, although General Čelko viewed the King's presence unhelpful and only tolerated him reluctantly.
Meanwhile, the decision by Niculescu to call an election was initially beneficial - the 1923 elections resulted in an absolute majority for the Communist Party, beating challenges from the Left-SD and Agrarian League - however the rapid decentralisation of power that resulted proved highly unhelpful to Niculescu's democratic-centralist vision. Furthermore, many voters were largely single-issue, voting Communist or Agrarian to ensure land and wage reform, while the Derenian Section of the Communist Party (PCC-D) often held the deciding votes. Uprisings, sometimes against communism, sometimes against Niculescu and democratic centralism, and sometimes for a more single-issue reason like regionalism, land reform, or industrial disputes, peppered much of the country, especially in the more distant south where agrarianism and Caminian Orthodoxy were far more important to voters and militias than class identity.
These issues obstructed the development of a comprehensive national planning programme that Niculescu had initially hoped for, although two core tenets of his plan were executed rapidly - the violent
Epurare (lit. Purge) of opposition forces from politics and toleration of widespread public violence against establishment or conservative politicians and representatives, and progressive plans such as universal healthcare, universal franchise for women, universal pensions, and universal education. The economy in Caminia suffered dramatically from both the background before, and the war to form, the creation of the SSPC, resulting in Caminian industrial output being roughly 40% of its 1915 value in 1925. This forced Niculescu to tolerate a limited degree of private enterprise, as well as targeting the electrification of the country and building of national transportation infrastructure, as well as to federalise the nation beyond the extent to which he wished originally.
General Kajetán Čelko's forces approached the outskirts of Braşova, which is situated in the western half of Caminia, during February 1925; the Battle for Braşova, though named after the city rather than the external suburbs it was almost exclusively fought in along the western frontier of the city, lasted around two weeks and resulted in a Red victory. It fairly rapidly became apparent that Čelko's forces were rapidly depleting their stores and ammunition thanks to increasing Red pressure on the port of Nováky and reduced capacity, and a harsh pushback the SSPC's Ion Anghul led from out of the
Regiunea Capitalei forced the Silenians into two separate forces, with Kajetán Čelko stranded and landlocked in the south-west. Efforts by northern Blues to re-establish a link to Čelko failed, and while General Čelko's army held for around six months, the lifeline of the Blue state to the coast capitulated far quicker, dooming the Silenian military state's chances. Čelko eventually surrendered to Anghul in Modrý Kameň, the final outpost of the southern pocket, on 9 September, 1925. The southernmost pocket, cut off from the rest of Caminia by a part of the Călăuzuri mountain range, persisted unhindered until the middle of 1926, when the SSPC's Ghorghe Bucur successfully forced his way into Tlmače, the main town of the southernmost pocket of Silenians.
First decade
Poster from 1933 SSPC-run Caminia praising the quelling of the Second Silenian Revolution (left) in the prelude to a period in Silenia now known as the "Great Disgrace"
A power struggle slowly formed between pluralisers, pragmatics, and leftists in the party, and opposing centralists, dogmatics, and Communist rightists, while Iulien Niculescu represented a third position in the party, which was both somewhat pragmatic and pluralist, but opposed to widescale federalism. Niculescu continued to demand fairly free elections were maintained, in which multi-party elections were held every four years, however an increasing amount of power was centralised in workers' councils rather than the democratically-elected government, which many within the Biroul Politic (lit. Politburo) viewed as a mere formality by the 1930s, allowing them to maintain control even when the Communists were reduced to a minority government in the Camera.
The Niculescu government was, initially, conciliatory towards Silenians. A general amnesty was declared for all those who had declared for the Blues, and it was forbidden to treat Silenians as second citizens, although the reality of this policy was more mixed insofar as local governments were less willing to enforce this decree unless Niculescu or another senior PCC leader demanded their reversal. Nevertheless, agitation against the Red government from Silenians remained the main source of social unrest in the nation, particularly as the economic wellbeing of the nation gradually improved into the late 1920s and 1930s elsewhere. Furthermore, Niculescu demanded that press freedom - while interpreted through a communist lens, insofar as the editorship and "membership"/subscription of the press would steer the press rather than single owners - was interpreted in a relatively free lens, although into the late 1920s and 1930s increasingly used the role of the central government as an overbearing influence, reduced permitted insight into government workings, and increased the use of both propaganda and censorship on media in the country.
Silenians would, in the end, protest following increasingly conservative and centralist approaches to rule in Silenia, especially the refusal of the central Communist Party sections to allow for the education of young Silenians in public schools to be done in the Silenian language. Sections of the Communist Party in Silenia broke off in unison from the party on 30 March, 1932, in protest to increasing intrusions from the national government into workers' council permissions and powers, as well as outspoken prejudices against Silenians - who were popularly still perceived as scapegoated elitists, a perception dating largely from the Revendicarea era - being tolerated and fostered amongst much of the Biroul Politic. The port city of Nováky again became home to a serious secessionist movement, this time explicitly Silenian nationalist, and Silenian Communist Party sections demanded an independent Silenia to be set up entirely separate of the Caminian state after some initial agitation for a larger, formalised constitutional role for Silenia in the first months prior to their radicalisation.
The Second Silenian Revolution was short, sharp, and brutal, and backlash from the central government was swift and bloody. Silenian revolutionaries were declared revisionists and reactionaries, while historic allegations of harbouring the elites from the Blue State era were levelled against their forces, and the Niculescu government executed a plan of mass incarceration, engaging in widespread torture in order to force false confessions. The nominal leader of the Silenian Communist Party, Ivanka Mišurová, refused to confess to any offences during three weeks of intense torture and inhumane treatment from the Reds, to the extent that she died during the twenty-second day of incarceration; the national government was forced to apologise for the treatment of Silenians as a part of a wider apology for actions during a period now known as the Great Disgrace. Paranoid of a third revolution, Niculescu ordered the unprompted and unprovoked arrest and execution of much of the Silenian intelligentsia and elite, the forced dissolution of the Silenian Courantist Church, the settlement of Silenian towns with ethnic Caminians, and the institution of martial law in the region for three years. Propaganda during this period stoked fears and prejudices deeming Silenians as responsible for economic malaise, the backsliding of the nation during the reign of King Ștefan - who himself grew up in Silenia - and as being emblematic of a political elite that the Red Rising had overcome. Over 20,000 Silenians died during this period, while there was a unique decline in Silenian living standards with Caminia deliberately refusing to fund infrastructural and industrial development in most of the region, causing more premature deaths and resulting in the stunting of Silenian regions even into the modern day. The legacy of Caminians living in Silenian-majority areas remains fraught, while tensions in communities created during this time have yet to fully reconcile. The 2SR is also attributed to a shift in the makeup and power balance of the Biroul Politic towards more centralist figures, with Niculescu using the opportunity to sideline those who sympathised with Silenian federalism, though rarely was the brutal treatment of Silenians extended to members of his own Biroul Politic when they were removed. King Ștefan himself was also executed publicly on 2 December, 1933, as a part of this Great Disgrace, with his final words being "the Communist Party is truthfully Red, Red with the blood of its own murdered citizens."
