Guest Post: Death of the Tzarevich

This article first appeared on Today in Alternate History co-written with Allen W. McDonnell with input from Thomas Wm. Hamilton, Robbie Taylor and Jeff Provine.

23 June 1914 - Tragedy in Saint Petersburg transforms the World Crisis

Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia, breathed his last as Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic Czech wife Sophie Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg, departed Vienna for a tour of Sarajevo, the provincial capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Partly due to the archduke's recent promotion to inspector general of all the armed forces of Austria-Hungary, Slav nationalists misinterpreted this as a preparation for another war in the Balkans. This was despite Franz Ferdinand's cherished dream of reforming the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire.

Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph I but had become heir presumptive when his cousin, Crown Prince Rudolf, committed suicide with his mistress Mary Vetsera at his hunting lodge in Mayerling. The emperor had ruled since 1848 but would be dead within two years.

The Romanovs had even more pressing dynastic problems than the Habsburgs with their sole male heir, Nikolaevich, succumbing to his final haemorrhage dying less than eight weeks short of his tenth birthday. Needless to say, this family tragedy devastated his father, although the tsar took some comfort from a visit by his royal cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, who attended the boy's funeral. Nicholas would be distracted from affairs of state in the Russian court for many months, and the kaiser himself seemed to experience something of an epiphany about the value of human life.

One reason for Wilhelm's upbeat mood change was that during the short visit, the magician Grigori Rasputin regenerated his withered arm. Having outstayed his welcome in the Russian capital, the Mad Monk decided to return with the delighted kaiser back to Berlin. After all, his mission in Saint Petersburg was over because Nikolaevich had died while he was in the loving arms of the Tsarina.

Meanwhile, back in Sarajevo, a Serbian-formed anarchist group known as the Black Hand Gang had decided the timing and circumstance was against an assassination attempt on Franz Ferdinand. Public support for the tsarevich even in a nation as discontent with their royals as the Russian Empire convinced them that it may well make a martyr rather than a show of force.

Nevertheless, the archduke correctly sensed that the city was highly agitated and war with Serbia was imminent.  Even with military preparations and diplomatic urgency, the Austrian-Serbian War would not be long in coming. Rather than the spontaneous outbreak of a European war that many had feared, the conflict widened and spread to the south and into the Balkans. Emperor Franz, who had mandated the German language in the Armed Forces to suppress Czech nationalism, used multi-ethnic tension as a weapon, gaining covert support from the Ottoman Empire to stir up trouble in the Islamic segment of the Serbian population. It was a heart-breaking, brutal decision that drove Franz Ferdinand and Sophie to despair.

This approach back-fired for another reason: the Kingdom of Italy had been in two very recent wars with the Ottomans, first taking Libya and making it an Italian colony and then secondly in the Baltic supporting people there who wanted independence and/or revenge on the Ottoman Empire. Italy was drawn into the conflict on the side of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans on the side of Serbia, resolving some of the religious tension out of necessity largely due to the old emperor stirring it up. This alignment kept the Russian Empire neutral, which was certainly a sensible move for the Romanovs given the country's instability.

However, it created other problems for France, Great Britain, and Germany. Germany had a tacit agreement with the Ottomans and with Austria, so Wilhelm had a fateful choice: either to stay neutral or fight one of its planned allies. War was hardly in their interest at all. German desires in the west had been secured by their victory in the Franco-Prussian war in the 1870's that expanded their western flank, so there was nothing further to gain by attacking France, Great Britain, and Belgium. Their  empire's interest was always a big land grab in the east, but Russia had remained neutral. Based on advice from Rasputin, Wilhelm ultimately sold his fleet to the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and other interested international friends like Argentina to stress the British navy and concentrated on building his most efficient army, deploying the bulk to Africa to secure the German Empire there.

Also during this expansionist period, Great Britain had annexed Kuwait, which was at this time an exporter of pearls because no oil had been drilled there yet, and had sought oil concessions from the Ottoman Empire to develop oil fields in Kurdistan, i.e. "Mesopotamia," based on ancient oil seeps still in use in the region. The British plan, partly sponsored by the young Winston Churchill, was to develop Kurdish oil resources and ship it down the river or by pipeline to Kuwait, where it would be the supply source for the Royal Navy Indian Ocean fleet. In 1914, the Royal Navy was the world's largest with enough ships to secure separately the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans in order to protect the sea routes across the world empire back to the home island.

As Germany turned to strengthening their position in Africa, it left Great Britain in the position that they should be helping the Ottomans against Italy and Austria-Hungary as they formerly did during the Crimean War as a bulwark that could cut off Germany from its colonies in an emergency. This military effort dragged a reluctant France into the war with them. The Mitteleuropa of Imperial Germany then sat in the middle, neutral, happily selling arms and munitions to anyone who wished to buy.

By the time Emperor Franz died in 1916, both Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Italy were bankrupt. The bloody fighting through the mountains of the Balkans like the Carpathian Alps has killed the "flower of their youth" because advancing against a machine gun holding a mountain pass was in effect a human wave attack that kept going until it overwhelmed the machine gunners defending the pass at terrible cost. Serbia had been beaten down, slowly ground under, but the price in blood and treasure was immense. Out of this crisis would emerge the young resistance leader Josip Broz Tito, son of a Croat father and Slovene mother.

Tsarist Russia had earned a much-needed breathing spell by staying out of the fight like Imperial Germany. This allowed the Romanovs to regroup, letting them finish restructuring the army based on their losses in the 1905 Japanese war. There was enough food for even the poorest peasant since there was no massive enlistment to fight Germany and Austria-Hungary, so farm labor was available and food prices strong selling to the war-torn Balkans, eliminating the main source of revolutionary desires. The Tsar concentrated on conceiving a male heir with his wife in the hope of another son being born, hopefully without the hemophilia. That child would emerge with more than a passing resemblance to Rasputin. 

Meanwhile, Vladimir Lenin cursed his ill-luck kicking around Switzerland, finally deciding to seek a sponsor for a fateful trip to meet the young man Tito.

Author's Note:

In reality, the Tsarevich survived until the executions in Yekaterinburg.

Provine's Addendum:

Flush with cash, Germany sponsored the rebuilding of the Balkans. The move was popular, but cynics pointed out that it was clearly a move of propaganda and colonialism. Emperor Franz Ferdinand realized his dream of bringing together a multi-ethnic empire by improved rail and roads, though he would soon be considered a puppet of the Kaiser. As the glory days of the economic boom faded, the Balkans would again become a hotbed of problems, and international efforts routinely went out to stamp out calls of collectivism and communism. Many experts feared whether the next great war would be something like the Seven Years War with action both on the European continent as well as the growing colonies abroad or a mass-uprising of workers across the world.