The Nastavak Drought (1914–1918) was a period of persistent rainfall deficit and recurring harvest failure that affected the island continent of Nastavak during the final years of the Vosti Empire. The drought reduced grain yields in the imperial interior for four consecutive growing seasons, exhausted the Empire’s financial reserves on food imports, and left the landlocked imperial core dependent on deliveries routed through the ports of its western rival, the Kingdom of Kruhlstutt.
Because Nastavak is completely surrounded by ocean, the drought could not be offset by overland trade. When Kruhlstutt halted agricultural exports in late 1917, the remaining food system collapsed, producing the famine known as the Turnip Winter. Historians across the successor states treat the drought as the shared environmental driver — the “Year Zero” condition — behind the collapse of the Vosti Empire and the political reordering of the continent between 1918 and 1921.
Climate and course
The drought began with a failed autumn rainy season in 1914. Instrumental records kept by the observatory at Creuzholz and by Sanctian monastic houses in the north indicate that rainfall over the continental interior fell roughly one third below the 1900–1910 average in each year from 1914 to 1917, with the 1916 growing season the driest ever recorded. The headwaters of the major rivers — including the Kambel, which rises in the Alandir Confederacy — ran low for three successive summers, reducing irrigation along the central lowlands.
The three grain harvests of 1915, 1916, and 1917 all failed against the imperial five-year average; the 1917 harvest reached barely half of the pre-drought yield. Dust storms were reported on the eastern margins of the steppe, and municipal authorities in Sinj and Novi Otonik imposed water rationing from 1916 onward. Coastal strips in the west received marginally more rain, which allowed Kruhlstutt to keep its own fields in production at reduced yields while the interior failed outright.
Impact on the Vosti Empire
The Empire’s agrarian economy was concentrated in exactly the regions the drought struck hardest: the central lowlands around Vost, the mixed farming districts of the north, and the western edge of the eastern steppe. Livestock herds were culled in 1915–16 for want of fodder, and rural distress pushed large numbers of seasonal labourers into the industrial cities, where they joined bread queues that municipal charities could not supply.
The eastern province of Kaskiv, whose deep steppe soils retained moisture better than the loams of the centre, suffered shortfalls but continued to produce exportable surpluses. Provincial authorities in San Branik restricted grain shipments westward from 1916, a policy that preserved Kaskivian food security and later strengthened the province’s hand in its peaceful secession.
Imperial response
The government of Imperator Valerian IV treated the drought as a temporary emergency rather than a structural crisis. Its measures combined internal grain requisitioning, priority allocation of rail capacity to food traffic, and large-scale purchases abroad. Because the Empire lacked deep-water harbour capacity independent of its neighbours, foreign purchases had to be landed and transshipped through Kruhlstutt’s western ports, whose owners charged rising freight and handling fees as scarcity deepened.
Between 1915 and 1917 these imports consumed the bulk of the imperial gold reserve and required loans secured against state timber and mineral concessions. Court factions in Vost disputed whether to ration the capital first or the garrison towns first; the resulting inconsistency left both undersupplied by the winter of 1916–17 and undermined confidence in the ministry. By the time Kruhlstutt imposed its total embargo in October 1917, the Empire had neither reserves to buy food nor credit to borrow for it.
Regional effects
- Kruhlstutt: Coastal harvests fell by perhaps a fifth, and food prices in Creuzholz rose sharply through 1916–17. The kingdom’s ability to purchase grain on world markets from its own deep-water ports — an option closed to the landlocked Empire — shaped the political decision to conserve domestic supply, culminating in the export embargo.
- Alandir Confederacy: The mountain cantons closed their passes to grain transit in 1915, citing their own short alpine harvests and a longstanding policy of armed neutrality.
- Kaskiv: The eastern steppe became the Empire’s only reliable internal granary, and control over its surplus gave the provincial administration practical independence from Vost well before November 1918.
Historiography and memory
Every successor state frames the drought differently within its founding narrative. Kresimirian historiography subsumes it into the sacred chronology of liberation, treating the years of hunger chiefly as the prelude to the November Decrees. Bosken national historiography folds it into the catastrophe of the Great Fracture, emphasising that the imperial core starved while the Emperor’s government failed to act. In Kruhlstutt, the drought is remembered mainly through the moral argument over the famine decision, which divides the kingdom’s politics to the present day.
Demographic reconstructions carried out in the 1950s and revisited since estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 deaths across the former Empire were attributable to the drought years, the great majority of them occurring during the Turnip Winter rather than from crop failure alone.