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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

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Got some OK reductions to infra costs from that Aggregate plant, but I am surprised the automatic housing and dams didn't get a cost cut. Did that project get 'first pick' of concrete with our manual projects paying increased price for what's left? Also interesting the Canal doesn't get a cost cut.

Vi'Talzin said:
I think we should be more conservative with policy from now on, Kosygin is taking some real flak for the first time, doing literally all reforms we possibly can in a single turn seems awfully risky... especially with the co-op reform, I think that if we pick it, we should focus on that and nothing else, since its going to be a politically thorny issue. Personally, I would be happy on Kos spending political capital on that and not us though, I think he can come to a good enough outcome on his own and preserving our for things like our cybernetics program and consolidating in order to be able to pass actual 36 hours work days would be a good play.
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I do share some worries, Malenkov got in some hot water because we held the reform pedal to the floor on a "what else will we use those dice for?" basis, and that was despite is having a rough indicator for SupSov's enthusiasm. But in the leading plan only two of five bureau options are Supreme Soviet reforms with the rest being internal reforms that presumably Kos doesn't get involve in under normal circumstances. Keeping it to that amount on average will hopefully be safe.

[X] Plan Lean Mean Reforming Machine
 
Drieder said:
Its good to see that alcohol chemicalization is finally being done, turning the drinking habits of the soviet man away from vodka to good state sponsored beer! I think it is likely as when people are living under better condition (as they are now) and have more hope than they used to, they have less reason for drinking their lives away and more reason to share a nice beer with some friends instead.
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The plan we are voting does not...
 
Drieder said:
Its good to see that alcohol chemicalization is finally being done, turning the drinking habits of the soviet man away from vodka to good state sponsored beer
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As much as I would like to shiv the vodka industry I would like to keep the government out of the brewery business as much as possible. Historically that never ends well for the Russian populace. Who knows maybe the demand will lead to a rapid increase in craft brewing as small enterprises supply local regions.

[X] Plan Lean Mean Reforming Machine
 
the alcohol project is to basically brute force a foothold in Russia for low abv drink. Yes the gov being in the booze business has bad incentives but it's a hell of a lot better to sell knock off lambics or whatever than hard liquor
 
Drieder said:
Its always the talk of a perverse incentive, but its not like buisnesses dont also have a perverse incentive to sell more alchohol. Im just saying "better the devil you know than the devil you dont" or maybe more like "better the devil you have complete control over than the devil you dont".
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The private sector doesn't get to set health policy and make laws, the government does. A private distillery has the same incentives to keep alcohol consumption high as a state distillery, yes, but the private distillery owner doesn't get to personally sit down with major government officials for lunch every day. State enterprise managers DO have that kind of access and influence over national policy, so keeping the people making alcohol policy and the people making a profit off alcohol separate populations does reduce the incentive the policy-makers have to let alcoholism run rampant.

This is the reason Mal made a huge effort to get the state out of the vodka market during his tenure, something that made a serious dent in our budget and never happened OTL. Getting the government back into profiting from alcohol, even if it's softer than vodka, is still compromising probably the most effective anti-alcoholism action we've managed all game.
 
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The best thing we can probably do for the alcoholism problem is to increase the standard of living. Although more disposable income may aid alcoholics in buying alcohol, alcoholics are often willing to use indisposable income to feed the addiction, so it's a wash.

I still think LSD communism would do the trick, though! Given how much Voz hates alcoholism specifically, he might even be willing to go for it with appropriate levels of grumbling about how true communists don't need drugs to replace their other drugs. If only we knew about the effect. We'd probably need regular academic interactions between American and Soviet psychologists for the info to make its way here. Maybe in the 70s.
 
Man, what i wouldn't give to have an omake or two that compares the differences between this 'world' and events in real life in an easy-to-digest format.

Perhaps something along the lines of an isekai into this world, or perhaps a rebirth *(Knock off brand Tanya the evil?), or perhaps a government experiment found a way to examine alternate dimensions. just something to highlight how events and other things are better or worse.

Hardly any of the side stories have an outside perspective or character looking in and gauging the current country and events, not even as a tourist.
 
sired22 said:
Man, what i wouldn't give to have an omake or two that compares the differences between this 'world' and events in real life in an easy-to-digest format.

Perhaps something along the lines of an isekai into this world, or perhaps a rebirth *(Knock off brand Tanya the evil?), or perhaps a government experiment found a way to examine alternate dimensions. just something to highlight how events and other things are better or worse.

Hardly any of the side stories have an outside perspective or character looking in and gauging the current country and events, not even as a tourist.
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Ultimately it's still a very mundane world is why. If your dimension traveller were from the west they might not even realise that TTL Soviets are more competent than the OTL Soviets. They might notice that all the post-Stalin leaders are different to OTL.

As a quick bullet point thing though:
  • No forced collectivisation/Holodomor
  • Soviets crashed the German coal economy before WW2, weakening the Nazis
  • The Red Army was reorganised to be more professional before WW2
  • The Nazis only reached Kiev/Riga on the Eastern Front due to the above.
  • Soviets got all of Germany/the entire Balkans at Yalta, re-gauges railway of entire block to Russian gauge. Tragically a few hills in Yugoslavia were left untouched, a permanent black stain upon our honour.
  • Stalin dies earlier, Soviets move to a semi-market economy rather than pure command economy
  • Cold War is much less 'hot', Soviets invent lead-free paint and sell it to America for lots of money.
  • Churchill tries to invade India post WW2, gets owned. United India remains capitalist but is much closer to USSR/China.
  • PKI actually gets to power in Indonesia rather than being massacred. Kenya and Uganda also go red at some point.
  • Mao dies earlier
  • China-Vietnam war pushes Vietnam more firmly into US/France sphere as a dominion-type colony.
  • Cuba goes SocDem rather than socialist and is friends with the US.
  • Soviets go for a different kind of rocketry program to OTL and manage to invent a somewhat (?) working space plane in the 60s.
  • No anti-nuclear treaty between US and USSR because the Soviets want to use nukes to dig canals.
  • The Soviet MNKH is obsessed with trains and has a strange phobia of road vehicles
  • IIRC we also stopped whaling in the Pacific at one point but I do not remember when.

I think that's the main stuff but I am sure I am forgetting something important.
 
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Nevis said:
  • The Red Army was reorganised to be more professional before WW2
  • The Nazis only reached Kiev/Riga on the Eastern Front due to the above.
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Weeeeeeell... not exactly. As far as I remember, stopping Nazis early happened almost entirely because the economy and the army were actually mobilized before the war begun, and so the Union had the overwhelming advantage in war material sooner. The reforms actually kind of fucked the Red Army over as far as the actual fighting was concerned, at least for the first few years.
 
Yea, those cavalry officers we purged... turns out they were important to make sure the winter offensives were not as painful as they were. It was not as bad as it could be since we did the max amount of officer academies and rolled well for them, but it still cost us a lot.
 
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Quick Summary of Political Events in the Quest from 1928-1950
  • Informational
    • Sergo-Stalin Era 1st 5yp (1928-1933)
    • Timeline proceeds as per historical before 1928, with no changes.
    • Rather than the elevation of Kuybyshev to the VSNKh and Sergo to the control commission, Sergo is instead elevated to take charge of the VSNKh, setting the course for massive political changes.
    • First plan targets are prioritized more towards capital goods rather than heavy industry directly, biasing the construction of less steel and more things that can achieve a greater number of capital goods.
    • Sergo, as per OTL rapidly realizes how out of his depth he is even for basic material balance planning and starts to stockpile academic personnel at political cost, figuring keeping them around is cheaper and easier than dealing with a bunch of party members.
    • To an extent, this is also done to build up his political base separate from the party and give him a degree of stability, but the narrative of course mentions none of that.
    • These scientists lead him to strike against Lyshenko, and to a far greater extent their various enemies in the party and academic structure as they each scrambled for power and saw Sergo as a tool for their own advancement. Sergo went along with this willingly and I don't think anyone so much as called it out.
    • This followed with the coal dumping, as you weaponized your significant increase in coal production against the German state, coordinating with the Stalinist line of the KPD via Thälmann it was believed by your foreign office that a German economic stumble would empower communists to take over.
    • Further, such a path was combined with a view by Thälmann that there was no scale of repression that would bring down the left wing and that it would come back after a short period of repression. This was obviously wrong, and you ended up partially justifying the destruction of the KPD early.
    • This gets into the matter of collectivization, for all that Sergo personally saw it as going too far and too fast, he couldn't say that to Stalin or the party bodies. This then led to him justifying the entire thing as a deliberate program of sabotage by the left wings to break the peasantry off of the party.
    • The broadest consequence of this was Stalin tilting against the hyper-industrializers first rather than second and taking in some ways a more conciliatory line. A lot of the OTL survivors of Stalin also died here as he was more than willing to swing on them first, being provided with an easy excuse to consolidate power from someone he trusted and with enough seeming momentum backing it up.
    • As relocations and forcible de-kulakization were still proceeding(nothing you could do to stop it) just under different guidelines. Sergo, moving to take his chance as a combined economics system, took charge of the prison labor reserve, planning to utilize it for mass construction and seeing it as an easy bureaucratic power grab now that the party was deep in re-organization.
    • All the various peasant reformatting mostly allowed you to collect a greater portion of harvests as you continued to do your best to stab agriculture out of ideas of correct socialist organization and nothing really stopped you. The proliferation of better methods and capital equipment helped, but you would not really do functional agricultural intensification until the Mikoyan years.
    • Doing nothing here would have been better disregarding politics, but no one in the party had any trust for the peasantry, and relocations and reorganization were in a lot of eyes viewed as necessary for the reduction of their reactionary character.
    • The plan was also far more balanced in a lot of ways, allowing a considerable degree of latitude to continue buying up American capital goods with things that weren't a collapsing grain price. This let you buffer the industrialization a lot, and its impacts would start hitting more in the second plan, as wealth let you build more wealth.
    • The first five-year plan was not completed in four years or really in five years, but enough lies were put down to make sure that it was "completed."

    Mikoyan-Stalin Era 2nd 5yp (1933-1938)
    • The second plan started the militarization of the party as the fascists consolidated their power in Germany and a far greater sense of paranoia was present over the existent threat rather than capitalist infiltration.
    • This paranoia was accompanied by a strong increase in spending built off the increased economic yields and a drive toward a balanced buildup.
    • This time, the balanced system of construction was more intentional rather than unintentional, as a moderate degree of cooking the books was inherent to everything rather than just the heavy industrial sector. Mikoyan was also entirely alright with this.
    • The decision to commit to diesel rail was made here, which had a number of initial fuckups, but in the mid-long term let you further expand the rail network in the Mikoyan era and to an extent pioneer the technologies that have gone into your every rail project.
    • Cooperation with the Americans and French only deepened this plan at risk to Mikoyan, but it was considered a core feature of the early industrialization, and trading expertise for resources was an accepted fact of early planning, despite consistent de-emphasis of it.
    • From here the decision was made on how to induce the peasants to stop being reactionaries that were simply waiting came from. The program decided by Mikoyan was a forced economic scissors, learning from the NEP and deliberately collapsing the valuation of grain internally.
    • The army at this point also started taking shape, though in a different form. All speed to mechanization and the production of armor was de-emphasized in favor of filling out infantry divisions, with Vasilevsky choosing to not gamble on new concepts and enhance what worked. Mikoyan cooperated with this because men and their training were seen as a far cheaper expenditure than the buildup of armor.
    • Trade continued being built up, with tentative economic access through government-owned enterprises to the American market. At a time when US firms were desperate to sell anything and at the height of the great depression, massive quantities of equipment were purchased and brought to use. Actual importations were consistently downplayed but formed a large portion of the early supply of capital goods in lieu of domestic production as per OTL.
    • Every effort to fuck with the peasants generally mostly just fucked with them rather than increased production with the exception of fertilizer and mechanization compensating for it. They did however make the collection of grain far easier, creating an impression for the center that grain stocks were improving and justifying what Miko called an increase in production.
    • The second plan also saw far greater spending on industry and practically constructed the industry with which you'd be building everything else more than anything else, maintaining a mostly balanced spread and still able to show the increase in production, at least relative to the production at the end of the first plan.
    • Broadly speaking the biggest changes in military procurement stemmed from the different priorities of Vasilevsky, as more funding was provided towards getting the infantry up to standard and a cadre of capable officers was steadily constructed.
    • To expand on the purge, and what happened, a lot has to be investigated into the mindset of Mikoyan himself, and to an extent the actions you took here have shaped what he was like later.
    • Mikoyan saw that this would only expand in scale and thus came to the decision that it would be better to point it at the army than it would to have it pointed at his own cadres. It was still expected to hit him, but he had enough influence to make sure that Yezhov himself pointed away.
    • The logic behind this decision was simple, better the army gets shot at more than my own people, and there would be no major losses from a few cavalry-centric regressives. (This would come back to haunt you in 1941-42 winter offensives)
    • This of course partially formed a Yezhov-Mikoyan alliance as work was done towards ensuring Stalin was pleased in the course of his paranoia spiral and that the enemies of both of them ended up in front of a firing squad.
    • This also caused the higher and mid-level military purges to be expanded, actively hindering you through the war, but letting you keep more of the bureaucracy under control and not shot.
    • Better officer education to some extent compensated for it as massive cadres of younger officers were ready to take up the burden, but they were unskilled, leaving you with a few decent front commanders and acceptable divisional commanders, but an utterly gutted operational command level.
    • Purges to an extent continued as they were, with the plan finished out with a far more balanced Soviet economy, if still severely heavy industry biased and dependant on some US imports for continuing high-speed growth.

    Mikoyan-Stalin Era 3rd 5yp (1938-1941)
    • The new plan came at the height of the purge with entirely achievable targets and a slightly smaller funding commitment. No one at this point in the ministry thought it could be finished, but Mikoyan was gambling that enough numbers could be re-interpreted to deliver a passing result.
    • To discuss the result of the Spanish civil war, a more evenhanded treatment and the support of a popular front/lesson learned from semi-imploding German politics early allowed the ones on the ground to consider the various factions' future targets.
    • This continued with more and more equipment sent, and while the Republicans were losing at every point of the war, they were not decisively losing and Spain steadily became more and more of a quagmire.
    • In terms of the army, any form of regimental gun you tried to make failed badly until effectively the later ZiS guns, which caused no number of issues with armor and lead you to cram in a poorly optimized AA gun as a standard anti-armor weapon. For this reason, your mid-range anti-tank was a bit better at worse HE performance. Overall a downgrade in every role but anti-armor for your tanks, but such was a necessity.
    • The lesser focus on inline engines and more fuckups with licensing with the French led you to instead push for radials, as that was also to an extent what your US engineering teams also pushed for reliability and durability reasons. Arguing that resistance to fire and acceleration were more important frontline characteristics than straight speed.
    • The light tank failure just hurt you with the cancelation of the plant and the waste of funds. Even producing a cursed T60 would have in the post-1941 term helped considerably as it would have been rapidly converted to an assault gun along the guide of a Su-76, just due to your "regimental gun" one more suited to a semi-tank destroyer role, creating a cursed hybrid of it and something like a Maurder 3.
    • At a certain point you got to attempt to push through statistical planning as Mikoyan, this to an extent was driven by Mik himself not knowing how bad the situation was with lies on every level, and assuming it was mostly controlled.
    • Fortunately for you statistical planning failed, the failures at Magnetogorsk were saved by its failure and your lower cadres scrambling to do their best to fix the situation.
    • In terms of Yezhov himself, Mik could see the writing on the wall and that he was tied to an incredibly toxic asset that Stalin would rapidly shoot. So instead of accepting his lumps and having Yezhov use him as an excuse, he backstabbed first in a subtle way, implying that Yezhov had done counter-revolutionary deeds at a point he suspected he was under investigation.
    • A roll of under 40 or above 80 at this point would have killed you, no questions asked. The main goal was to give Stalin an impression that while you were involved, you were not that involved and were more than happy to burn the counter-revolutionary traitor without coming out as desperate or having anything to hide.
    • This then protected you from the fairly incriminating testimony of Yezhov for being to useful to Stalin and also Stalin himself seeing the obvious blackmail on Mikoyan that would allow him to shoot him at any future time, providing you some protection in your position, the same way Beria was protected.
    • To Mikoyan, this was more than acceptable as it got him through the worst points of the purge and to an extent was a problem for future Mikoyan rather than anything current.
    • After this came the big surprise of statistical planning, which despite all that is talked about it as a revolution in planning is more of the same. It's a break from material balance planning in that it assumes that the production of a factory will vary and can be statistically measured from a series of random samples, generating a relative comparison of efficiency.
    • This change further changed the dynamics of the internal economy as things started to be mostly derived from a few statistics rather than the practical vibes-based planning that was previously utilized.
    • Mathematical overviews of production did however cause further issues with the immediate revelation that most everyone involved was guilty of cooking the books in some way, using Tolkachi, or just not documenting expenses and grey marketing things.
    • To Mikoyan, this was an existential threat like no other, as he was to some extent in his mind already deeply compromised by the previous Stalin scandal and scrambled hard to find something with which to cover his ass and save the situation.
    • In the aftermath of the no-good years of 39-41 for Mikoyan, WW2 starts with a German invasion of Poland and he is left trying to figure out what the fuck to even do in a political situation that is actively falling apart and a poor support base that could move on him.
    • Litvinov at this point is still in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and convinces Stalin to take a more wait-and-see stance on the Germans, signing an equivalent treaty of dividing Poland and opening trade as long as they were fighting the capitalists.
    • This is in some ways similar to OTL done on entirely cynical grounds, expecting the Germans to expend themselves in the West and then producing room to maneuver in the long term.
    • The French southern army, not wanting an unstable frontier in the South went into peacekeep in Spain, fearing being surrounded by the Italian-backed nationalists and fighting a 3 front war. This rapidly collapsed both factions and quickly allowed a French puppet/occupation regime to be made from the remnants of Republican forces.
    • No one, of course, expected France to actually fall, not IC, not OOC. It was something like an 8% chance of actually falling historically and it managed to somehow do even worse with a more aggressive variant of plan D selected. Predictably, this caused a collapse of the French lines.
    • This worse collapse caused a greater dunkirk pocket along with a far greater effort on dealing with it, as it was seen as too much of a threat to the flank of the German advance and containing the best French units.
    • The pocket liquidation brought the French government some time, allowing a more general retreat to Algeria that was coordinated, without a collaboration government forming in any real sense.
    • Mikoyan at this time is scrambling to secure every smidgen of political support he can get, weighting the chance of war as relatively low and practically having a pre-made mechanism to justify shooting his political opponents for lying on production. Those he brought into the conspiracy act with him because he is the only option for survival, and at this point, no one is too impressed with their chances of survival if they rat him out to Stalin as Mikoyan would make sure everyone involved would be in front of the same firing squad.
    • The more cynical basis for the German pact shows up here, with them starting to win in France immediately causing a hardening of terms, judging that the German army is far too free for the security of the USSR. Oil started to be held hostage for advance payments and high prices, judging that the Germans are too ahead and that they needed to be cut back.
    • This got to such an exploitative point that the Germans broke off the treaty by failing to deliver advance payment, leading to the order to start mobilizations in the mud season, the largest factor that allowed you to do so well in the war.
    • The winter war and continuation war were also further averted, with more of an organization of a DMZ between both parties and far more reasonable terms for effectively giving up some swamps to make a neutral land. Allowing Finland to internally politically maneuver that they gave up an unpopulated swamp for border security and time to mobilize if need be.

    Mikoyan-Stalin Era GPW (1941-1944)
    • Barbarossa starts with a large-scale Axis attack on every front, with a slightly delayed joining of Romania, as per OTL. The largest changes in the state of the Union were the far more built-up infantry units and lower officers that had experience in rank and could do their jobs.
    • To an extent, these lower officers are what inspired future doctrinal reforms of allowing lower units to act outside of tight coordination and maneuvers/exercise their own initiative in the period after the war, but for now, they allowed the Germans to not style on you as badly in the tactical.
    • Despite the claims of practically every encounter you have had with the German armor, you didn't manage to decisively damage it basically ever, with massive over-claims between the airforce and the ground forces.
    • Your own tank force was organized in the OTL poorly supported regimental scheme, leading to it getting thrown into counter-attacks without much screening and very little support. The units unlike OTL were equipped and had their ammunition stocks due to mobilization already having started, but they were basically expended for halting sectoral advances for a week or two, with fields littered with burning pre-war tanks for few results.
    • The production of new airframes also was deeply inadequate in 1941, with I-16s taking up a large number of front-line duties as a consequence of the initial shock. You for a time had more pilots than quality airframes and were willing to fly near anything over friendly lines, as a good amount of the time you got a pilot back and could stick them in another I-16.
    • Operational commands for practically all of 1941 were your weakest point and it showed, you could have the front commanders blunt an offensive, but armies simply fucked up and fucked up constantly. Staff experience was lacking, corps commanders were inadequate, and informally a large number of roles were given to more experienced divisional commanders that came from the academy system, as while they were rushed up the ranks they at least had a solid understanding.
    • The battles at Minsk followed from this, with you basically feeding entire armies into a salient and getting fuck and all out of it while fucking over the other fronts. The only positive note was that it was mostly older reserves getting thrown into the cauldron that formed. Effectively recreating the battles around Smolensk from first principles, but in worse terrain that forced more attritional losses on all sides.
    • Lack of German total air domination also hit here, as while you were losing, it was still open season on non-protected German convoys from the air, while you lost hundreds of thousands of men achieving materially little, you basically really unproductively fucked the Northern German timetable by expending reservists.
    • The Sothern front was, ironically your most intact formation, with as per OTL the best troops sent there along with the greatest number of prepared hard points. The defense here never went well without a real ability to form a solid line that could be hit, but time and time again, you lost formations at the divisional scale to attacks rather than armies, and it was a constant grind on the armor assigned here.
    • By the start of September and in the immediate time before things got more stabilized, your commanders were basically defending through counter-offensives on the local scale. Divisions were sent in with the intent of liquidating beachheads and these would practically become the model for later small-scale infantry offensive actions.
    • You can also see some of the model armored counter-attacks with re-organized units making their first appearances as a kinda hybrid between an OTL Motorized division and a tank brigade. These prototypical armored cores were still short on infantry allocations and trucks were constantly short, but soldiers riding on the backs of tanks were considered to be fine.
    • Then comes Typhoon and the following winter counter-offensive. Despite the experience with small-scale attacks, there was simply no armored reserve for the planned operations or any other real form of mobile unit. The infantry was capable of doing smaller operations, but nothing of the scale needed.
    • Ambitious operations were proposed to knock the Germans out of the Ukranian bend in the South and to push them back in the North, but broadly speaking they all almost entirely failed. The transfer of the mobile reserve to the central area of fighting was the only reason small gains were made there.
    • The German penetration of the Southern Front was far more significant than the map shows, with the armored force effectively slicing through the lines in the snow, as many of your forces were depleted by abortive offensives into semi-prepared and decently supplied positions. Kiev was never in full danger, but the necessity of guarding the corridor to supplies basically weakened any attempt for containing a breakout, letting the Panzers getaway at the cost of some hulls.
    • The increasing production of armor and mechanization post this point led to the Southern Summer Offensive of 42, as Germany could not replace its losses from the last year, while you practically obtained a new mechanized and armored force.
    • In terms of the international war effort, while the Japanese had more success in the form of sinking, there were few actual results from this as the US had no problem replacing hulls at scale, and Japan couldn't replace its airmen. The battle of the Atlantic was a bit more intensive with more sinkings, but the overestimation of the impact you had was partially incorrect as your stream of information was deeply imperfect.
    • The 42-43 Winter Offensive was a further breaking of German defenses as even the production increases from their re-organization of French factories were deeply insufficient as the army was breaking at several points and limited fire brigades can only do so much when everything is a fire.
    • This led to a commitment to total war far earlier along with full-scale mobilization of Volkstrum units, as there were no allies to surrender to, and in the view of a significant portion of the senior leadership the war was not going well and they needed the manpower to shore up the line in weak sectors. Thus far more production of lighter weapons and a more rationalized scheme for infantry units. These would only get worse in quality as the war went on.
    • Romania flipping on the Nazis further did not help, as they effectively had a portion of a front arrested and lost with most equipment, collapsing the southern defense and allowing for a Soviet spring into the soft under-belly of Hungary on mostly prepared rail lines.
    • As of the end of the 42-43 Winter Offensive, most of the gains made by the Germans were reversed, with the fight of most of the Germans out of the territory of the USSR. From here the resistance would get worse, but you at this point were fighting in Germany, not in the USSR.
    • Due to the slow speed of the US mobilization scheme, a landing was made in Spain, seeing it as the softest underbelly of the Germans and the easiest place to make gains in. French and British forces made up the majority of units here while the US mobilized more and more.
    • The German counter-attack around Madrid was made in an abortive attempt to get them off of Europe so that forces could be refocused. In practice it was a mildly more successful bulge that was driven further in, but a massive waste of armor, and more of an incidental encirclement of German armor than an encirclement of the British.
    • Your people had a fairly poor view of the allies due to the French fuckups and viewed it differently, but the panzer force there effectively was expended for few gains and couldn't retreat out due to poor terrain and lack of fuel.
    • Your 1943 summer offensive generally went poorly as you under-estimated the Germans, did not expect that many prepared defenses, and were technically at the end of your logistics networks. Effectively in the center, the Germans managed to contain their offensive at the river, but they failed entirely elsewhere as the panzer force at this point struggled to re-commit due to the intensity of the air attack on logistical infrastructure and lack of fuel.
    • By the point of the 43-44 Winter offensive, the tentative efforts by the Germans to put up a defense were bypassed and broken in their positions as the front line expanded and more and more positions were armed with Volkstrum units deployed at scale to hold up your advance. It was bloodier work because this is mostly where you broke the Wehrmacht, but you did make consistent gains in every sector.
    • In the Spring and Summer offensives of 44, there wasn't that much resistance that could be put up. Yes, militias organized and fought you for every city block by block, but it was a mostly hopeless losing fight.

    Mikoyan-Stalin Era 4th 5yp (1944-1947)
    • Using a frankly paper-thin excuse of war damage, a total re-assessment of the economy was ordered. In practice, the common view was that the system built wasn't the best at mobilization and that things broke down fairly hard in mobilization. But the war at this point was won and more blame fell on the defense commission than anything else.
    • The immediate post-war situation was ruins across the board, with Germany the worst off shortly followed by Spain and France. As while the latter two endured a long occupation, there wasn't the same extent of heavy fighting for practically every city that Germany experienced.
    • Mikoyan at this point, continuing with the old line on a more balanced industrial plan, toned down the proposed rapid buildup of heavy industry to make up for the war damage and advocated for a new economy, as the current heavy industrial sector was mostly sufficient.
    • Italy at this point rapidly surrendered before getting bombed too much, giving its government figures some protection and ensuring that the country was far less damaged. This would cause many problems later.
    • Operations in China were both wider and narrower than were presented. While you basically collapsed the Japanese forces across Manchuria and Korea actual intervention in China was mostly not you. Instead, the transfer of massive amounts of equipment occurred to the Chinese communists, seeing it essential that they reclaim as much land from Japan as possible.
    • In the years in the aftermath of the war, Churchill won the British elections on the backs of a more successful war performance and a general impression by the public that he led them reasonably well.
    • This fairly quickly led to what to you seemed like an attempted re-neg with India after the arrest of several important politicians for raising unrest and a number of causes, without real commuting of the trials leading to a period of increased tensions.
    • Churchill himself wasn't entirely down to fuck over India to an incredible extent, but the conservatives with him saw a lot of the anti-INC actions as punishing rebellion, and from there the situation only spiraled.
    • A larger naval mutiny then OTL was forcibly put down, leading the situation to destabilize massively while your diplomatic department was sure that this would be the first step in a broad-scale crackdown.
    • The Indian government that did form rapidly repudiated the British and started to secure sovereignty as a united front between the remnants of the INC and the Arab League, seeing the actions that were done as a massive betrayal. British forces also did not take this lying down and then intensified in conventional counter-insurgency doctrine.
    • This is the situation that was left, with a semi-balanced plan that Stalin would suddenly die, effectively relieving Mikoyan of any blackmail above him and giving him a general latitude to politically maneuver, ending the era.

    Malenkov-Mikoyan Era 4th 5yp (1947-50)
    • The immediate result of Stalin's death was that the upper party structures were practically gone and there was very little that could be done. Stalin was practically core to the operation of party bodies and there was no sudden fixing that being gone without a massive devolution of the party.
    • At the point of Stalin's death, the highest priority of Mikoyan was to make a government structure that could actually function in lieu of the executive element effectively getting ripped out.
    • Rather than the tentative attempts at collective rule that Kruschev favored, Mikoyan at this point did not trust party institutions, and his entire political base was committed in state bodies, which he did not want to subordinate to the party. Further, almost every important member of the politburo to him had a significant state-side position that could be leveraged.
    • Reorganizing and moving the Supreme Soviet to a governing role was only a logical outcome of this, as it would bring a massive number of mid-level cadres into power, and after all, it wouldn't take that much to ensure that the upper-level ones had the posts that were needed. He had control of the Politburo with all of its Stalinist power and was at a place to practically remake the structures of the USSR.
    • Economically, Kosygin's reforms and structural changes to the economy were seen as the easiest way to present a solution that didn't disrupt too many party posts. For all that it was an introduction of market systems and technically capitalism, it kept the people in charge in the same posts.
    • Disciplining the party was in theory considered, but it would have required massive political compromises that Mikoyan did not have the power or ability to make, not without immediately destabilizing his rule and having to rely far more on the people that would just as readily shoot him.
    • From here his logic was that it was a path of less resistance towards gathering support from the right wings for political reforms and decoupling some parts of the economic-bureaucratic mechanism from direct government control and reducing the role of grey markets.
    • Beria as per historically had compromising information on nearly everyone involved and due to that, a general agreement was almost immediately made to make him disappear at almost any cost. Beria of course knew this and attempted to run, and then was ordered shot before he could talk too much.
    • The Politburo at this point was rapidly re-organized as the CC was still a body that would more of rubber stamp legislation than offer any resistance, allowing Mikoyan to more flexibly move around posts and get his various temporary allies stable in various positions.
    • Churchill getting no-confidenced followed shortly afterward internationally, with a peace signed with India along with a general retreat from the British colonies. This immediately destabilized a large portion of the planet but is the result of a lot of the stranger colonial conflicts.
    • The lack of a British-centered partition plan is also why the Republic of the Levant formed, as the US was able to enforce its own plan for a one-state solution at the end of needing to suddenly take up the slack for pulling out British forces from its own internal interests.
    • After Mikoyan was fairly solid in his power, practically his first action was to clean the mid-level posts of those who lost in the power struggle. Effectively doing destalinization in the apparatus while not calling it as such, effectively consolidating his power base with the support of those around him.
    • The 36 Constitution was further scrapped because while it was very shiny and optimistic, it was in practice never followed in the slightest. Mikoyan instead made a document with clearer and technically more limited off-ramps as a justification for reform and to clarify to the people what their rights were. Technically, the more strict limitations on what could and couldn't get one arrested were an expansion of rights, but no one pushed it as such.
    • The further change was giving the General Secretary position most of the powers that were originally rested in the politburo, effectively giving a single party secretary that would sit on the state and party organs and be the greatest amongst equals in both. While arguably giving up power in the sense that the executive post stopped being overriding, it did codify its powers, unlike the Stalin-era government by vibes.
    • Comecon itself at this point was organized as a deliberate initiative by Mikoyan to tie the economies together and provide standardized exchange between the socialist world.
    • Economic reforms from this point that were undertaken by Malenkov, especially in the early years were centered around a need to not disrupt the apparatus while allowing some form of regulation on the managers. Effectively using the biases it would be easy to win in a market system between each other and it would eliminate most elements of political paranoia.
    • To a large extent, the early Mikoyan era delivered destalinization as an attack on Stalin's cadres rather than as an explicit repudiation of his view on socialist construction. While the latter would have in Mikoyans' view excessively disrupted the party, the former could be done as a logical extension of policy.
    • Vietnam of this era also ended up leaning far closer to the French due to the early French government being more willing to provide autonomy and due to the massive presence of CMEA Indonesia and China, leading it to more and more fall into the American camp.
    • In Europe, there was a general preference for less of Stalinists and more personnel in the guise of Mikoyan, relatively pro-CMEA-integration politicians that would be willing to more gently construct socialism rather than fight everyone in their country on the way towards it.
    • This milder stance prevented a good amount of the fuckery, along with a strong soviet preference for forcing balanced economic planning and a lack of bright agricultural ideas, leading to stability in the socialist block, and building up the current situation where there is a decent degree of willingness to reform.
    • Salary fuckery was brought in as a way to reduce administrative load while profitability was a further step in loosening control of enterprises in the guise of giving some form of control mechanism over them that wasn't themselves.
    • Mikoyan in the course of the plan also continued to clear out older posts and consolidate power, accomplishing the political sharp end of destalinization as masses of lower cadres took up positions with power, practically steadily reconstructing the party from the gaping holes Stalin left.
    • The agro subsidies you deal with to this point in the quest also came as a product of the era, with the highest priority being the increase of food production, leading to you shifting towards increasing grain. This along with chemicalization and a far more broad ability for rural workers to access labor brought the technical start of the green revolution proper for you.
    • Mao died shortly after, with it just a random chance in the tables of him dying, creating a more compromise-based form of the PRC that would not go on to stab itself in the economic gut time and time again.
    • Economically this plan was mostly a success with mostly reasonable goals and a continued focus on balanced reconstruction rather than wild adventures in economic spending.
    • This relative degree of balance would end as the next plan ran into the immediate issue that while medium-quality machinery was being produced domestically, funding for modernization was lacking and so much of the industrial sector was built using practically American cast-offs.


    Authors Note: Generally written with a far more OOC rather than IC perspective on what has happened, to ease catching up.
     
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  • Informational
    • Blackstar said:
    These scientists lead him to strike against Lyshenko, and to a far greater extent their various enemies in the party and academic structure as they each scrambled for power and saw Sergo as a tool for their own advancement. Sergo went along with this willingly and I don't think anyone so much as called it out.
    Click to expand...
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    Listen, if you give a bunch of left-leaning althistory nerds a button that says "PURGE LYSHENKO", they're going to push it.
     
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