Monsoon Revolution
The Monsoon Revolution was the attempt to separate the Banner of the Greater West from the imperial crown in Terophan in Empery 1888, and the period of respublican rule that followed until the destruction of the revolutionary government with the conclusion of the Consistence War in 1891. The Revolution broke out in response to the increasingly reactionary policies of Chistin Kyazimov, a wealthy Noble-Profiteer who was the effective regent of Terophan under Emperor Ratibor. In Nollonger 1887, Kyazimov's sixth Supremacy Decree had revived the 18th-century Office of Land and Slaves with a view to finally putting an end to the rising power of the Serim class and re-establishing High Noble rule over Terophan. The result was several months of furtive plots in the capital, Axopol, which broke into a general uprising on 26 Empery 1888 after an inflammatory address by the Scholar Prorkamen at the High Mokykla of Axopol. By the early hours of 28 Empery, the Terophatic Court had fallen to the rebels, Kyazimov was dead, and the Emperor was under arrest. A group of Scholars constituted itself as the Debates over the Greater West, rejecting the legitimacy of the realm's established Elector Scholars, and solemnly proclaimed the restoration of the Banner of the Greater West from the office of Emperor with Prorkamen as its Standard-Bearer—though at this stage, with a view to securing recognition from abroad and especially from the notionally reformist Universal Prophet, Tarmo, they allowed Ratibor to continue as a figurehead monarch. The self-proclaimed Elector Scholars themselves remained as Prorkamen's government, taking over the administrative functions of the much-restricted Imperial Court.
Recognition was not forthcoming. At the height of their power the Scholars of Axopol attained only a vague promise of 'due consideration' from Prophet Tarmo, and though the agitations of Mstislav Lazarov abroad had not yet aroused any concrete action, the opinion of the courts of the rest of Vaestdom of the Scholarly upstarts was rather cool at best, despite their shared contempt for the weakened Terophatic Emperors. Finally, on 26 Sation 1888, a coterie of High Nobles at the city of Rozniv declared their solemn intent to remove the purported Debates and restore the rightful authority of the Emperor. They were met with a brutal response by the local populace, who perceived them to be insulting their cherished Banner and rose up in arms across the province to massacre the hated nobility and their supporters, egged on by the lower Scholarchate. The distant depredations of the Kainish Civil War appeared at last to have arrived in the very heart of Vaestdom, and the Great Powers of Azophin, Agamar, and Lacre soon declared an entente against the profaned Debates of Terophan and began to formulate a collective military response.
As the Vaestic Powers started to mobilise and any prospect of recognition by the Prysostaia receded, paranoia and panic set in among the Scholars at Axopol. They realised, increasingly, that they had crossed a point of no return, and their continued sufferance of Ratibor's office as Emperor appeared to have set up a rallying point for reaction in the north and the south-east, where noble conspiracies against their government were now well in train. The triple coalition began its slow but inexorable advance into Terophan, met by both willing collaborators and desperate popular resistance. Febrile controversies wore on at Axopol throughout 1889 as the Debates frenetically commissioned dozens of roving character tribunals, charging them with expunging domestic resistance to their government and raising whatever funds they could to prosecute the war effort. In the face of a naval blockade by the Powers, shortages of food and other resources had by this point set in. On 16 Nollonger 1889, the Debates, led by Prorkamen, were brought at last to a fateful decision: Ratibor's deposition as Emperor and the permanent extinction of the Tirfatsevid crown. The Debates became less and less cautious in their radicalism, issuing proclamations that called on Vesnites across Joriscia to free their Banners from the oppression of noble courts and to institute the authority of Knowledge as the supreme and only principle of governance. The result was a form of state that was entirely unprecedented in modern Vaestism, except, perhaps, in Kiy: a Banner without an Emperor, led only by a Standard-Bearer presiding over permanent Debates—in some respects an experiment that was never to be repeated, but also a foreshadowing of the Debates states of Azophin and Agamar that emerged in the 20th century (which, however, continue to be 'empires').
In 1890–91, the short-lived regime progressively collapsed. With the help of the occupying Powers, in 1890 the great High Nobles of the Dekoral seized the empire's south-east in the Malarat Affair and seceded from Terophan. By the spring of 1891, Prorkamen and his Debates controlled little more than Axopol itself, now bristling with cannon, and this the triple coalition put under siege. At length, on 13 Estion 1891 Prorkamen fled to Serania, beginning the extended farce of the Axopolitan Banner in Serania, and Axopol itself fell to the invaders, who set up Mstislav Lazarov as their regent and installed Krasimir III as Emperor through a more traditional session of the Terophatic Debates later in the year—in the process, however, affirming the deposition of Ratibor and providing the opportunity by which Prince Vsevolod twenty years later could present himself as both a reformer and the vindicator of the House of Tirfats. Prophet Tarmo, in the meantime, had formally pronounced the Debates at Axopol heretical shortly before his death in 1890, and it was with an eye towards the Monsoon Revolution that the scientific societies known as Pechet Boards were, in name, dissolved by Tarmo's successor Yorsephor in 1898. Lazarov, for his part, established the Contrafactional Board upon his assumption of the reins of government in 1891 in order to unmask the Scholarly factions that had plotted the Revolution, and purge them from the Hierarchies.
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