The mid-70s, a time of wonder, and a time of woe
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
Russian State-era flag during the period of temporary compromise with National Liberals and Monarchists.
National People's Federal Republic era Flag, adopted after the full consolidation of Savinkov's autocracy with the Night of Cold Blood in 1936. A bit anachronistic sure, but cool.
World of the Red Morning, 1975
The great beast of the fascism of the second quartet of worlds, the NPRFR (though many translations truncate it to National Republican Federation of Russia or People's Republican Federation of Russia due to the peculiarities with the term "narod") is a colossal entity that spans three timelines and encompasses a sum of souls that threatens to reach over eight hundred million thanks to the apparated and its own natalist programs. Initially native to timeline "Red Morning" before spreading to "Cold Snow" and "Eve of Terror", the NPRFR looms large in the Communist International's strategic calculus as the dreadful bear. The Narodnist behemoth to the Ziz bird of Fascist Italy and the Leviathan of Imperial Japan.
The overlord of the Moscow Accord and the Mutual Pact of Fraternal Nations, Russia boasts of a massive army comprising of tens of millions of men at arms or under its labour army to create vast public works under the direction of the almighty Vozhd. The Vozhd is a napoleonic figure, who rules with plebiscites, sweeping reforms, a compact body of reformed civic law, and a spirited privy council that helps to advise and carry out the will of the boss of Russia; while the Kombinats and Siloviki help to arrange the economy under a balance of peasant, worker, entrepreneur, business, and state. At least, in theory anyway.
Theirs was a domain built upon enormous military power. An almost unprecedented amount of raw force concentrated under a singular nation, a military juggernaut that had more men at arms than many country had people in their entirety. Mighty warships and vast air armadas would project Russia's enduring and unbreakable might to other continents, from the submarine bases in Dominica beneath the nose of the Socialist Communal Commonwealth of America (SCCA) to air patrols operating out of airbases in Australia in the South Pacific to monitoring stations off the shores of the National People's Republican Federation of Great Swahililand to the endless rows of tanks waiting in the standoff positions in central Europe and Northern Asia.
It was built in the image of the Great Founder and the Supreme Liberator, Boris Viktorovich Savinkov. From anti-monarchist terrorist to the overthrower of the short-lived Russian Republic, Savinkov had formulated the "fourth political thesis" in opposition to "Liberal Capitalism, Internationalist Syndicalism, and Primeval Reactionarism" in his book "Voyna". Viewing his new model of politics as above traditional forms of racism of "biology and ancestry" or the "old antisemitism of blame dodging emperors", he formulated a vision of Russia as a country that blended the best of both Asia and Europe into a unique civilisation that could straddle the East and West and had been unfairly denied its place in history by a jealous Germany and fearful "Thassalocratic Masons" that feared its strength.
Through a combination of guile and some manufactured crises, he had swept into power at the helm of the Union for the Defence of the Motherland and Freedom (Aka Soyuz Zashchity Rodiny i Svobody aka SZRS) which would later rebrand itself as the National Populist People's Republican Party of Russia (Nacional'naja populistskaja narodno-respublikanskaja partija aka NPNRP) and oust the tumultuous Federal Democratic Republic of Russia. The Republic that had shamed the motherland by bending knee to reparations, that had shamed the people by failing to take control of the Marxists, Anarchists, and Syndicalists who held sympathies to the degeneracy in Paris and London, that had dishonoured the soldiers by simply accepting the loss of western Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, Crimea, and Armenia.
Savinkov would declare the Russian National People's State when he declared, in perpetuity, the establishment of emergency powers following the Petrograd riots blamed on "competing German sabotuers and their Parisian rivals as well as Liberal Cosmopolitan third parties", and then subsumed the Prime Ministry into the Presidency to make himself the Vozhd of all Russians; placing upon the Russian Flag the Kornilov regiment banner to honour its military accomplishments in the great war. But despite his initial rhetorical hostility to Liberalism and Syndicalism, he would still look to the Americans, Japanese, and the Syndintern for industrialisation support, to modernise and expand the economy even more than had already been done as America pumped capital into the motherland in opposition to the Reich.
All efforts would be prepared for a war of revenge against the German Reich and its allies. To minimise any possible disruption in the industrialisation of Russia, Savinkov extended recognition to the revolutionary CSA of William Haywood and Jack Reed and sought to secure the Americans' renewed industrial commitments to build up Russia; as opposed to his counterpart in the world of the Cold Snow that sought to back the southern populists instead out of a greater anti-syndicalist commitment; presaging that Savinkov's absorption of the Entente.
In the World of Cold Snows following the secret accords between Valois and Boris following the former's takeover of France, Savinkov would wait for all of his potential enemies to be distracted before he made his decision to enact operation Nevsky, the invasion of Eurasia; pressing into the spheres of the Syndintern, the Reichspakt, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere simultaneously with the support of the Entente, the Italian Legionary movement, and Yiguando movement.
Countless millions would die in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen as his forces at their apex bestrode half of Europe and had occupied much of China and the Middle East before finally being pushed back when they had over-extended themselves fighting as far afield as North America in support of Canada, Cascadia, and New England the heat of the Levant in offensives against the Turks.
Brutal battles to push Russia back on all fronts would see the bear and its allies overwhelmed in a devastating slog that would see tens of millions of Russians die and many cities laid to waste in barbaric scorched earth tactics. When the Russian people started acts of passive resistance to a regime asking them to die trying to conquer the world, the police slaughtered them with machine guns and mortar rounds to force compliance, and dragged its prisoners from the depths of the Russian hinterland to the frontlines to die.
Even as Savinkov's Great Russia collapsed around him, he refused to accept any possibility of negotiated peace or surrender, not wanting to be the next coward of Brest-Livotsk even when enemy forces crossed from Ukraine and into Great Russia itself. Not even when the Japanese had seized greater Amuria or when the Socialists had broken through the lines at Afghanistan or the Turks had linked up with Austro-German forces in Russia.
Russia was a vast country with deep manpower reserves and plenty of space to give to any invader, and Savinkov and his party cared very little for the collapse of the Entente on other fronts. Even the surrender of Integralist Brazil to American forces or the fall of Pretoria to the German Empire and the surrender of the very last Millenarian and Qing forces to KMT and Fengtien forces.
The war and all of its madness would not end until the combined Swedish, Turkish, German, and Danubian army reached Moscow and Savinkov would die buried beneath the rubble of the shattered Kremlin; upon which Russia would shatter into warlordism that few had the energy to try and resolve, with Imperial Germany settling for establishing a puppet Empire at the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line and returning to a war-ravaged Europe.
In the Red Morning world however, a more unified America would lead to Savinkov deciding to maintain his economic ties with the Syndicalists for the time being and withdraw his ties with the Entente altogether and instead focus on confronting the Turkish and German Empires. Russia would offer its support to the International Concord established by America, France, Britain, Japan, Bharat, Egypt, Iran and China; the big nine of the new international order to be established in the ruins of the great reactionary empires of the world.
As Imperial Germany's attempts to close off the Parisian corridor and reach Rome and take Petrograd and Savinkovgrad** in the east and make amphibious landings in Iberia to support Portugal in the far west faltered, Russia would crush the two pronged offensives of the Reichspakt with the flanks of their central offensive after conceding some gained territory in eastern Poland and Northern Ukraine.
After repelling the "thrust to Moscow" offensive made by Erich von Manstein in the hopes of trying to solidify the situation on the Eastern Front before the Western Internationalists could push the Reich out of the low countries, the already far progressed Southern front of the Russian army would; with the aid of a treacherous Bulgaria, thrust into the soft underbelly of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while Russian forces broke into heartlands of the Turkish Empire as Arab forces had broken through the Golan Heights.
The disorganised means with which the Reichspakt had to pull its Army Group Centre from the closing jaws of the Russian Northern and Southern fronts allowed Savinkov's forces to capture vast numbers of German personnel as they tore through the slavic countryside, throwing men, women, and children into the grinder to try and keep the Imperial war machine going. Russian forces would break the Ottoman army, already decisively defeated by Egyptian forces at Antioch; at Manzikert and storm into ancient Constantinople. With Italian, American and British Troops having broken the Isonzo and the last German troops forced out of France and even the Netherlands, the end of the reich was nigh.
Even in the farthest corners of the world; the Federalist-Fengtien coalition had defeated the Qing, the Island fortress campaign of the Reichspakt and Entente had failed to defend the German-occupied Dutch East Indies (seized since the Batavian revolution). The Combat Squads of the National Populist Party, the War Legion of the Black Guard, and the National People's Revolutionary Republican Army of Russia would rush to be the first to seize Berlin as all remaining reserves were committed to the fray.
While the extensive in-depth fortifications in the west would slow the Syndicalists for the time being, German arrogance regarding the east allowed the forces of Kaminski's Black Guard troops to; after massed nerve gas bombardment of Imperial German positions; breach into the heart of the Kaiserreich. Chancellor Schleicher would commit suicide rather than face the Black Guard's troops, while Kaiser Wilhelm 3 would die choking on his own blood after being shot six times and suffering the effects of exposure to Chemical weapons by the gas mask and steel bib clad shock trooper formations ripping through the capital.
With the fall of the Kaiserreich and the collapse of the Entente to internal rebellion and the mop up of its remaining holdouts around the world, Kaiser Karl of Austria-Hungary, moved by the senseless slaughter in his provisional capital in a Czech village; would order Manstein in the west and Model in the east to agree to the unconditional surrender of the Kaiserreich, bringing Germany's brief time in the sun to a bitter end. Savinkov would sit in the ashes of Potsdam as one of history's great victors, sipping his Sbiten between meetings with the other eight great leaders of the world and touring the wreckage of the vanquished German Empire.
Savinkov would reign until 1955, breathing his last with a feeling of invincibility on top of the world, the great tyrant to many, the great liberator to others. Whereas his alter had found himself defeated utterly, he would be buried in a Mausoleum with his body preserved as a mummy for all of time for the world to gawk at in awe. The body of a giant who had conquered the world and achieved military greatness unmatched since Genghis Khan in his own words. And while the shoes he left behind were quite big indeed,d they would be filled all the same by Mikhail Spasovsky, who aligned with the modernist wing of the Nacpop party; or to the enemies of the regime; the "Voynists". Though an old man already, Spasovsky would preside over the launching of the space age and the solidification of the National Populist regime of the victorious motherland.
Inheriting the legacy of Savinkov, he would preside over surprisingly few major conflicts in Eurasia. Savinkov's stint in the early cold war having already seen the Sino-Russian border war that had lead to the birth of a Heilongjiang based National People's Republic of Manchuria to complete the ring of client states that ensures that Russia borders virtually no possible foe. Including the National People's Republics of Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkiye, Yugoslavia-Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Finland, and Xinjiang as well as the Kingdom of Romania, the Moscow Accord was safe from virtually all directions from any foes that would be able to directly threaten its motherland, save for a small sliver of contact between the Japanese and Russian spheres at the minuscule Russo-Japanse border at Northeastern Korea.
However, an opportunity for Russia would arise in the Cuban putsch of 1957 against the loosely Americna supported Social Democratic government which they accused of selling the country out to the mainlanders and giving the Communist and Syndicalist movements power they had never earned and letting the Anarchists run rampant. The Caudillo put in power, Rafael Cruz Sr; a Spanish immigrant and an advocate of an "Authentic, Christian Cuba" requested the might of Russia's atomic sword be placed nearby to defend the island nation from atheistic revolutionaries, and the resulting confrontation; coupled with the endorsement of Trujillo's regime, was enough to alarm both the Japanese and the Americans for its brazenness.
Though riding high from managing to achieve a fait accompli of nuclear armament in Cuba, the attempted Israeli gambit in Egyptian Palestine would result in a publicised enough failure to end Spasovsky's career as the Privy Council of the Nation and Peoples of Russia rescinded its confidence in the sitting Vozhd and demanded his replacement. The attempt to create a Jewish state that Russia could use as both a dumping ground for Poland and East germany's undesired Jews and to gain a new ally in the region had resulted instead in the unravelling of the GRU's spy rings within Egypt and the open detonation of the first Egyptian Atomic Bomb; the Ramesseum Tentyris to demonstrate to Russia that there would be consequences for any further such antics.
After just five years as the Vozhd of all Russians, Spasovsky would make way for Sergey Bunyachenko. The "hard man of the army" would take over and seek to cement the reign of Russia throughout the Moscow Accord, focusing on the Dominican-Haitan war and the Cyprus conflict. Though unable to stop the Cypriot revolution, Dominica would push a bit farther into Haiti before the conflict was mediated into a Dominican favouring agreement. Ethiopia, to his pleasure, would also sign an agreement with Swahililand to expand Russia's growing toeholds in the young countries of Africa. Even better, Australia would sign a number of military basing agreements with Russia; though still allowing influence from the Zaibatsu.
When confrontation between the INFOR and MOSACC seemed ready to spring over the Greco-Yugoslav border though; the worldmerge came, bringing the world of the Red Morning into contact with that of the Eve of Terror; and then later finding that they were also in contact with the world of Cold Snows and the Crimson Typhoon. Taking advantage of a fortuitous death of the alter-Russia's reactionary despot's demise and the clamouring by the more modernistic sorts; he would gain the great diplomatic coup of annexing the Eurasian State into his great Russian Republic, launching Operation Kupalnitsa to deal with the warlords of the Cold Snows to bring them under the aegis of the state and to avenge the death of that world's Savinkov by once again putting the German monarchists to threat.
He would build up his Russia to immense heights, putting the apparated to work wherever he could, to create new cities in the hinterland, to expand on existing divisions or add new regiments to the enormous Russian military. All while ensuring that the Russian Nuclear arsenal was nothing short of apocalyptic. Enough to ensure that if Russia were to be threatened with being overrun as Cold Snow Savinkov's was; there would be nothing but ashes for any victor.
He would achieve greater heights of power and popularity through the diplomatic success in convincing the Australia of the Red Morning to sign treaties with Russia to allow the presence of its mighty pacific fleet and the investment of the Kombinats and Siloviki. In the Eve of Terror reality, he would preside over the agreement with Lehi dominated Yeretz Israel that would see the issue many Moscow Accord members had with their jews favourably resolved with a series of "all expenses paid tickets and cheap homes" for people squeezed into ghettos by actively antisemitic governments.
Some would say this was at the expense of relations with the Arab community in the world of the Eve of Terror, which largely preferred to embrace either Tokyo's communism or "Alphapolis" as the Technate renamed D.C. But in his eyes, it was an adequate solution to the issue of the Jews without "wasting" decent capital, even when it came at the deaths of many an Arab and the forcible displacement of many an Eastern European Jew.
Even the failure of the attempted Nationalist Insurgency in his own native timeline's Vietnam; with the last of the National Populist movement in the country seeking to rise against the Japanese supported monarchy being crushed by 1970; had done little to diminish his spirits. The bear had its other victories.
He himself is unlikely to remain in office for much longer, as the now seventy three year old despot was on the look for an heir to his throne in the Kremlin. So far though, the old man of the army remained an old man firmly in charge of his current office. If time was weighing on his shoulders, he wasn't showing it yet, attending the various parade days in Moscow with the same vim and vigour he did in the past.
"The patriot does not fear opportunities." He declared in 1975 to his audience as the second worldmerges started to cool down into a status quo following a year of interaction. The economies of the world had to be strongly massaged back into shape by vigorous state action to control the runs on gold markets and the fluctuations of currencies that followed. And Bunyachenko had squashed attempts to squirm out of the value for the ruble he dictated with all the bluntness one could expect out of a tank commander under the brutal voynist regime. The ruble was worth what it was worth and that was that.
The Russian order would be brought together by his new cabinet to replace the old guard he felt were no longer up to the task of managing the Bear Order in the new situation foreign minister, the young but promising Yevgenev Primakov and his rising star of a Marshal in Alexander Lazarenko and the...reliably loyal Yelstin. Talented men and Yelstin had formed a solid basis for the growth of Russia's status as a superpower and a state that bestrode the eight worlds like a colossus.
Opposed to the "fluidic semi-friendly association" of the Technate, the Union of the Soviet Republics of Labor and Virtue, and Accelerationist France, the members of the Socialist International whether they be of the Syndicalist Association or the Marxist League, and to the loose understanding between the Allies, Reichspakt, and Oriental Treaty Organisation; Russia pushed an image of itself as a mighty nation. With the best troops and the greatest machines and the most ambitious space programs to further demonstrate the unconquerable might of mother Russia.
Indeed, the master of the MAFN had continued the policy of tightening the grip on the absorbed Russian State from the timeline of the Eve of Terror and the National Populist remnants of the Cold Snow timeline, to make them fully part of Moscow's behemothic sphere of interest and influence and use the leverage of their resources to impress non-aligned countries with Russian might. Natalist programs to populate the endless hinterlands were of course, pushed as hard as ever under the aging Bunyachenko, and new towns all named for glorifications of their ideals of Russian history cropped up rather regularly in an effort to tame the wild wolf of the motherland's orient.
Expanding the alliance was sometimes a fraught endeavour, but deemed a necessary one to secure the motherland's footholds abroad. Eurasia is not enough for Russia's ambitions. Not even two of them. And the black and gold banner would frequently find itself being planted in deepest Africa and Latin America in the hopes of finding new allies to expand its reach.
Bunyachenko himself looks upon his would-be successors with apathy, disdaining talk of replacing the Vozhd when he feels that he has plenty of time left in his old bones. Replacing the Vozhd now was at best hasty, at worst seditious talk by those who thought more of themselves than their stations warranted. Bunyachenko was the master of Russia, the wielder of the iron fist, the keeper of the great bear.
So it was to the disappointment of many that his health check up in 1975 turned out to be simply a case of a particularly unpleasant cold rather than anything more serious. Still, that didn't mean he didn't have aspirants circling around him. There were a great many he couldn't care less for; Moderate suck-ups like Nikolai Petlin, bland technocrats as embodied by Igor Shaferevich, bizarre nutjobs like Valery Yemeylyanov, bloodthirsty warhawks of the ilk of Evgeny Savintsev. Heterodoxical deviants the lot of them, and he wasn't sure how to keep them out of the line of succession without giving his preferred successor any ideas to speed up succession.
Such questions made Bunyachenko's stomach more upset than any illness he had, the sheer audacity to presume that he could be replaced when he was merely in his seventies. Especially when he was now preparing for the planned operation against the Swedes to assist his Finnish allies to establish greater control over the Baltic*.
"Those who yell the loudest for peace are those who in truth, are the most hungry for war. See how many weapons the Swedish king commissions as he begs for peaceful resolutions to lappland's crisis." - Propaganda Minister Konstantin Rodzaevsky
The war in Sweden was the Comintern's first introductions to the politics of the Red Morning. Together with Denmark, it was the last of Europe's monarchies, aligned with the socialist bloc out of necessity and of fear of Russian Finland's territorial claims on the Lappland. It was however, crucially not part of the INFOR military agreement that would bind the nations of Western Europe and North America into the great Transatlantic alliance meant to contain the Russian Bear. And with Russia claiming that this is a local matter to be prevented from suffering the intervention of foreign powers by its nuclear umbrella, the INFOR and its sister organisations such as the Rotfront were scrambling for a proper response. International Volunteers were called, but nobody really wanted a third world war now that the might of the atomic bomb was multiplied by the terrible majesty of the MIRV that would allow a singular missile to devastate a vast area of space.
It was an educating look into the way the International Association of Revolutionary Socialist Workers Movements; Socintern for short; operated. It was not the loose but bonded burgeoning Confederation of the Communist International but rather something more like a United Nations meant exclusively for anti-capitalist governments, parties, and movements. An unhappy marriage of Syndicalists, Anarchists, Popular Socialists, "Maximists", Communists, and even the left wing of Social Democracy, National Liberationism, and Accelerationism; the Socintern often struggled to agree on much.
There were often disagreements between the major alliance blocs within the Socialist International as well as between the various ideological groupings, as clear caucuses within the Supreme Congress of the International had formed. Along ideological, geopolitical, and even economic lines as a seemingly perpetual rivalry between the Spartakists and their communist Allies and the Syndicalists and their assorted partners had been a defining feature of the international since day one. Not to mention those outside the primary two blocs who have always been there at the margins, trying to pull the Socintern in one direction or the other.
Not only was the issue of the war in Sweden a matter of grave concern, but the new worldmerge brought about a fear by those who were outside of the Marxist line that they were soon going to be marginalised in the socialist movement. The Anarchists were somewhat less concerned, already used to being a smaller movement, but there was clear worries from the Syndicalists being voiced by the "officially unofficial" leader of the Syndicalist Caucus within the International; Lane Kirkland and the current Secretary General of the International; Albert Camus.
While they weren't unhappy to have partners, the talks between Lyndon Baines Johnson, Pyotr Masherov*** and their second-quarter counterparts; Chairman Tony Benn of the Union of the Socialist Commonwealth of Britain**** and Leonard Woodcock of the Socialist Communal Commonwealth of America revealed a substantive ideological divide.
Simply put, the Socialist International had a rather strong tradition of tolerating divides in the socialist movement in the name of preventing splits in the movement; whereas the Comintern was much more used to laying down an overarching vision of the path to Communism derived from the experiences of the Bolshevik, Maximalist and Red Guard movements in Russia, America, and China filtered by the local conditions and analyses of the on the ground revolutionaries and cadres.
While Tea and Coffee were shared in the relatively neutral meeting ground of The New Order's Ireland and a relaxed attitude was observed in the halls of Dublin, from the rather prominent failure of initial efforts to bring the Syndicalist major powers into the Communist International early and worry about the details later and the similar blunt rejection of offers to involve the communist bloc in the syndicalist system it was clear that not all was perfect under heaven.
It wasn't acrimonious or spiteful, more a simple attempt to offer the biggest thing they can straight away in full expectation it'd be shot down and then finding where the floor was in negotiations. Standard negotiation tactics really. But it did show where people just weren't going to budge.
To quote at length from the works of Ezekiel DeLeon, the right hand man of D.C's foreign policy apparatus:
"
The Syndicalist system in the Red Morning and Cold Snow timelines has in its half-century of life, generally enjoyed hegemony in the socialist movement with only some dissent on the fringes of global politics until the onset of the worldmerges. To them, Lenin is a fairly obscure cause celebre among those dissenters who had met an unfortunate end after being swept up in the crackdowns against the Socialist Revolutionaries and Russian Social Democrats following the end of the great war. A Luxemburg of the east if you will.
Now we see that this system is not without flaw. In the cold snow it produced a rather particular form of fascism when nationalist revanchism latched onto the particularisms of the Syndicalist movement and directed them to an outright alliance with the Parafascism of Russia rather than a simple understanding of convenience in the face of the Deutsche Kaiserreich. But it's also one that produces a consistently high level of engagement and proletarianisation, having continually enjoyed a rather horizontal political hierarchy and a direct tie to the working class.
However as a form of organisation post-revolution there is a clear tendency towards workerism in the French Orthodoxy of Syndicalism. Though they proudly proclaim themselves to be free of party politics, examination of the Orthodox Syndicalist model shows that the CGT and TUC of the French Communards and British Red Flagists has created a party by other means. But instead of a Politburo or a Central Committee of the Congress they call it a Trade Union Congress or a General Assembly of the Communes.
The maintenance of the labour union form post-revolution however means that there is a tendency towards creating material organisations to reflect the specialisations of those unions. The Community Union of British Steelworkers for example, has essentially taken over the management and production of steel within the "Union of Britain" to use its shortform name. In that capacity not only does it serve as an organ through which the will of the demos can be channelled through to the TUC and the Worker's Parliament, but also the means through which that the production of steel can be managed in a way that directly accounts for the desires of those workers.
However, using the Iron and Steel Trade Confederation (ISTC) as the primary vehicle of that representation means that the ISTC is predisposed to avoiding things that may reduce its influence within the TUC that has come to serve as the second house of legislature. As such it has used the replenishment of Iron and Carbon through means that the Glide provides that are as of yet, unknown to physicists; to argue that there is no risk of steel shortage at any point in the Union's future and has had some difficulties coming to fair agreements with the IWW's Steelworker section or the FTM in France out of fears of competition or loss of power amidst its membership. Something further augmented by the traditional divisions between the IWW's "one big union" structure and the union federation espoused in Europe.
To continue our example, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation in essence serves as a lobby, a party, and a corporation, even if it is ultimately opposed to Capitalism and seeks to minimise the amount of work its members have to do and ensure their best of conditions, it's also not in its interests to do things that would reduce its overall membership in the TUC. When conducting negotiations with my Syndicalist counterpart I found that they were often not as enthusiastic for integration of our steel economies as I thought, as the Community Representative would often question me on how it would affect the livelihoods of her constituents.
It is not without reason, and she was not acting with malice. But it does present an obstacle towards our plans to move towards glide based materials which are stronger and superior, but made with differing processes. Not an obstinate obstacle, but one nontheless that refuses to be left out of negotiations for the future of the workers movement. Which while a fair play, makes me somewhat concerned as to whether they would ever be willing to legislate themselves out of existence and assist in the planning of their own dismantling."
...
The South American War of the World of the Red Order was now reaching a potential end in a triumph for the Argentines and the Union of Sovereign Latin Nations over the South American Treaty Organisations and Brazil. Backed by a wide array of powers, including the Alliance of Free States as well as the August Blood Coalition in a more under the table manner and even the Zollverein to some extent; the armies of Peronism were starting to push directly into Brazil itself. The Brazilian army, gutted by privatisation efforts and "private-public partnerships" under the free market fundamentalist administration of the UDN is in retreat as the Argentine army advances up its southern states.
With a disastrous private-public procurement system and a heavy; and growing; reliance on weapons procured from abroad with lowest bidder training, the UDN's army has been gradually forced further and further back over the course of years of warfare in some of the bloodiest standing army conflict since the second world war. With The New Order's Argentine bloc pouring in what assistance it can into the war effort, including entire divisions joined by the Argentina of the Cold Revolution; Brazil's numerical superiority was not quite as solid as expected, and the contributions of Eddna Lott's Brazil in the New Order are not enough to shore up the collapsing fronts in the south of the country.
Rio itself is under peril, and Sao Paulo is under siege following the capture of Curitiba and the Rio offensive. While Brazil may be a vast country, its strategic depth is not without limit thanks to its population concentrations. And while the SATO is a fundamentally liberal organisation with anti-communist history, the Union of Sovereign Latin Nations is considerably more committed to the liquidation of communism, even under the more conciliatory regime of Carlos Menem. For all the Peronists' smiling ways when dealing with Communist diplomats to get investment, aid, and cooperative intelligence; Peronism was literally born to quash any room for communist, fascist, or liberal appeal in the fourth positioning state.
Such a position is advocated most prominently within the Communist International by noted Popular Frontist and a longtime architect of plans to warm over relations with the IPTO; Mikhail Gorbachev of the Red Revolution Realised***** world. Gobrachev said that helping to reverse the fortunes of Brazil may help both empower the socialist movement in the SATO and encourage divide in the Liberal movement between its Neo and Retrocolonial halves. The current progressive dominance in US-American politics, seemingly set to be further confirmed by Walter Reuther's America in the Crimson Typhoon World; may be jeopardised with a string of foreign policy defeats and setbacks. And as he notes, the track record of counter-insurgency successes of the IPTO are dismal anyway so it may allow for greater success in the future.
In firm opposition to this though was a rising young star in the Communist Party of China; Wang Hongwen who had been a major supporter of the second cultural revolution and associated strongly with the student radicals.
"Partnership with these "treaty organisations" is partnership with devil who smile rather than bare their fangs. To fight the wars of the capitalist class for them in the face of more openly hostile members of that same class is to in essence; reduce the heroic Revolutionary International Volunteer Army comrade to a cheap mercenary." - Wang Hongwen
Further complicating matters was the new worldmerges. With relations so new with the new worlds; it was uncertain what they would do. Certainly they were under no actual obligation to follow the Comintern line, and there were other powers introduced to the fray who would likely all seek to throw their particular piece into the ring. What effects might spiral outwards from that were largely unpredictable. Nobody had a firm gauge on the likely actions of the major powers and blocs of those new Earths and new realities, which was more than a little problematic for planning any sort of intervention.
Wang Hongwen suggested focusing on encouraging revolutionary defeatism, that communists in both blocs should organise against both Peronismo and Market Liberalism with equal fervour and make themselves a third faction, and to prepare for rising up against their masters and demonstrate to the people that this war was fought for little more than empty pride and the wealth of a select few of the owning class to crush scapegoats and force the workers and peasants to sign away their rights in the name of the war effort.
Gorbachev countered that with the expansion of the anti-capitalist bloc that this may lead to liberal consolidation against the rise of socialism, and that the strength for such action was simply not there at the moment. Progressive reforms should be used as a toehold that future revolutionaries could rally against in the full knowledge that they would be eventually repealed, and given the reported atrocities of the Argentine army as it was purported to purge people who were considered "ideological extremists" by the Argentine armed forces that it was imperative to protect the stronger Brazilian communist movement against the advance of Peronismo.
A third faction however, arose from Simon Levy, prominent Moroccan Jewish communist stalwart, who suggested a path similar to Hongwen's but more moderated, stating that the communist movement in the Red Order's South America was presently somewhat nascent and that they should focus on building a movement rather than taking action for the moment. Something backed by Congolese revolutionary fighter Mambou Aimee Gnali who also believed that neither overt aggression nor taking sides was in order at this point in time. Though of course, these were only a few of the opinions being suggested.
...
International sport was in a somewhat odd place, not only with each bloc having its own particular games, but also with every world having its own set of such games. Eight different Olympics Committees had become two through mergers, and with shocking speed; now one. With the thought that they could just have a Winter and a Summer Olympic literally every year with all the worlds contributing to it (and make a lot of money in the process), there were concerns from the Comintern committee that humouring the IOC's plans for not only more games but bigger games with bigger venues was in essence; fueling grift.
The IOC's allowance of money into the olympics and increasing drift towards more and heavier corporate sponsorship was castigated by many in the Spartakiad committee as a "capture of the spirit of gaming by the most grotesque forms of individual consumerist capitalism" to quote Mannfred Hoppner of The Red Order's East Germany.
This was of course, done in response to protests that the Communist Bloc's "Soviet Sportsman" complex was in essence cheating by allowing amateurs to dedicate themselves to preparing for major sporting events. They argued that the ideal Olympian should be someone who does it as a hobby off of their usual working days, nevermind that the olympians of other blocs were themselves, rich people who could afford to simply not work to practice and prepare for the games.
"You know, the commies, they have a system. They'll call their athletes "amateurs", but the state provides all their living expenses and they get a break off of work during training season. Most of them are soldiers or steelworkers or negroes, who all have an innate biological advantage. They set up these special training facilities and have their "Spartakaids" to buff up this advantage, making them superior to any capitalist funded operation could ever hope. As you have strenuously tried to convince the IOC, the communists have cheated the honorable amateur system that these games were built on. They however refuse to act. I suspect possible subversion within their ranks, a possible communist agent or two
[...]
It is thus my firm belief that the Olympics provides a wonderful venue for advertising. Endorsements by athletes and advertisements during television broadcasting could provide a steady revenue stream. And I would hope Maggie Pie leads the charge in sponsoring these games…" To quote Richard Finlay in his letter to Avery Brundage, discussing selling television rights to the 1968 Olympics in Lahti and Tokyo, and Maggie Pie sponsoring the Olympics, c. 1967
Perhaps the most pertinent reason for the flare up in this thinking was the decision to host the 1976 Summer games in Germania-Deutschstadt in the Greater Germanic Reich without any reconsideration of the bidding brought about by the second quartet of world merges through what was suspected to be no small amount of bribery by Speer. That alone would be controversial enough, but the 1976 Winter games would be hosted in Tromso in the Norwegian Reichskommissariat; implicitly recognising Norway as a part of The New Order's Germany and rewarding the Organisation Todt and the Konzern's involvement in bulldozing through poorer but less "scenic" parts of the city to make room for an Olympic megaplex and featuring a slate of athletes who included the infamous offspring of dubiously consensual at best marriages between occupying German soldiers and Norwegian women.
In other news of general international sporting shitshows, the IOC's recognised sporting federations were planning to begin a slew of "bloc neutral" world cups to fill the air waves with a bounty of international sporting events to join the old standbys of the FIBA and FIFA world cups in Basketball and Football for sports such as Rugby, Cricket, Handball, Baseball (even if all the countries that played Baseball were variants of America or had the American tradition imported into them by the circumstances of world wars and American cultural influence), Squash, Badminton, and more.
With a world cup for something just about every month, the potential for money into the pockets of the IOC was great, especially as they pitched campaigns of the fantasy of seeing the best professional athletes from countries around the world. Alters going up against Alters, the imagination deliberately allowed to run wild. Many of course, made comparisons of Icarus' doomed flight towards the sun, expecting exhaustion to set in if there were games every year. But then, many sports had yearly events already, and yearly Olympics had been the norm since the world Merges in 1962 in any case, with athletes taking a largely rotational system in response.
No what was far more controversial was that they also proposed something that illicited enough of a kerfuffle for Richard Nixon, presently angling for the chief of the Comintern's Presidium; to issue a comment.
"What circle of Hell did Dante Alleghieri imagine for people who proposed the idea of an "All-Professional Olympics"?" In his quote regarding the IOC's proposed "Titanic games" that would serve as the professional counterpart to the Olympics, distinct from the celebration of amateur sport that would be awarded to once again Athens. More specifically the Red Order timeline's Athens in its divided nation of Greece; a snub to the Council Socialist Republic of Hellas which reigned in the northern half of the country.
The Spartakiad by comparison, had grown larger and there were talks of unifying them with their Socintern counterparts, but the participation in the Spartakaid by athletes from non-revolutionary countries was also on something of a decline. Especially the ABC as tensions heated up with the alter-fascist bloc even with Ettore Muti's ousting and replacement by the celebrated century (more than one hundred confirmed kills) Ace and WW2 veteran; Franco Lucchini.
...
The Pan-African Association of Socialist Republics had grown considerably in the decade since its foundation as Felix Moumie and others had brought together revolutionary states from across the continent; particularly Subsaharan Black Africa. The New Order's Cameroon and Ghana, Red Revolution Realised's Congo and Somalia, the Cold Revolution's South Africa and Guinea Federation, the Red Order's Somalia and Ethiopia; the future of African Socialism was bright.
After a decade of cooperation, they had approached the Communist International with the request of a permanent spot on the Supreme Stavka of the Revolutionary Communist International Military Force (REVMIL) alongside the likes of Soviet Unions and United Republics and Zhonggua; on the same basis that the Latin American revolutionaries had collectively gained a spot. One that would be chosen from elected military officials from the PAASR to represent African military interests in the Stavka.
This was a broadly popular idea, especially as the African members of the Communist International had grown fast and developed quickly with the ocean of aid they were being provided by the enormous industries of the communist bloc. Of particular concern was mounting tensions between the Congo of the Red Revolution Realised and Nigeria, as well as signs of not all being well in the South Africa of the same timeline. The ultramilitarist regime of that Ethiopia also showed signs of being of a mind to settle the score with Somalia, bouyed by offers of support from Eurasianist Russia.
With the West African war in the Cold Revolution and New Order winding down, and the iron grip on Africa of the Red Order by the CAFS maintained as a transition towards neocolonial dominions was underway; it was clear that a new era in African history was beginning. The time of the struggle of vulgar decolonisation; of simply rebelling against colonial governments was fast at an end. In the face of contenders to the traditional system, it had evolved into something more sustainable, more flexible.
A plan for the future, particularly with the new, more complicated situation, was needed. One that would help navigate the transformation of the struggle in Africa into its new, more strange phase, as well as the aspirations for rising to the status of industrial great powers fuelled by ample nuclear energy, electric trains, and sprawling networks of satellites that took advantage of the African continent's favourable lagrange points. Already, rocket launches into space were increasingly common place, and it was expected that there would be...military applications based on the aptly named "Proposal for African nuclear armament by the year 2000".
At the moment, the energy production in Africa was mostly Solar, Wind, and Hydro-electric based. Nuclear plants were infrastructure intensive, and the emphasis on developing indigenous talent who could study, build, and maintain Fast Breeder Reactors meant that they would prefer to wait a bit before engaging in a nuclearised electric grid, and there were real concerns about rampant nuclear proliferation if they did start developing atomic weapons openly. Nevertheless, any rocket launch capability necessarily translated into ICBM launch capacity, so the Congo leading the charge in such capabilities lead to the African nuke scare experienced primarily in the halls of London, Germania, and Rome.
...
In the Timeline of the Cold Revolution, Boaventura's takeover of Brazil had lead to an ocean of blood spilled. The Guarda Verde had widened its net of "sexual deviant" purges further and further, consuming as many lives as some iterations of the second world war. Everyone related to homosexuals, transgendered people, bisexuals was not spared either; out of Boaventura's belief that these people could never be cured by any means save death and that the only way to stop more of them from emerging was to purge their contribution to the genepool altogether. Everyone who had provided aid or succor was also a target, as people were rounded up and shot in a gruesome "christly transformation of society" that lead to murder on a scale to surpass the Black Death in Christian Europe.
A pile of bodies equal to a third of Brazil's population at the start of the "Green Devil"'s reign had spread across Latin America. Nearly sixty million dead across the countries that the Green Guard could operate in, not including the Apparated who were not counted in Brazil's citizenry register and doubtlessly contributed many millions more; the nation's intense efforts to socially engineer the highest possible population growth leading to an ample supply of bodies to fuel Cristiano's intensive paranoia. Tens of millions to report on each other, to feed one another into the system that was killing them by the tens of millions every year. A holocaust of bullets, executions, gas chambers, glide-chemicals, and even fire and flame.
The Integralist Regime was always brutal, authoritarian, and cruel. But the possibility of threat from other timelines, other brazils, had lead to the worst impulses of Boaventura and the Guarda Verde being legitimised, validated, and then endorsed by the increasingly decrepit and ugly little man of Salgado. It strictly regulated public behaviour, dissidents disappeared regularly, the apparated were treated as in essence; soulless; non-humans that the Brazilian state could do whatever it pleased to. In essence, demons that they could force into slavery to try and better the lives of god-fearing Christians by taking away the strain of drudge work from to let them focus on more dignified pursuits.
The Guarda Verde's regime was much worse. Everyone was a suspect, and the secretive regime considered simple association or relation proof of guilt in many cases. Not only out of simple paranoia, but out of a belief that if one liquidated the entire social circle, only then would there be no chance of anyone in that circle desiring revenge on the regime. Where the Integralists would kill one man and his accomplices, the Guarda Verde would annihilate their friends and family to ensure nobody who ever loved that person would want justice for their demise. The Green Guard was obsessed with the cleansing power of chemical and fire; and would host mass burnings where after all the possessions of the condemned were emptied from the building, the flamethrower brigades would light everyone forced into the building on fire while the pet priests of the Guard regime would read out their sermons.
The masked men of the Guarde Verde had their identities kept secret from the public, operating under Nom de Guerres and false identities. They could be anyone and everywhere in the propaganda of the regime. But in truth, the state could not be as omnipresent or as omniscient as it portrayed itself, nor as omnipotent. The economy was miserable, pressure was mounting from without and within. The threat of dissidents once thought eliminated was starting to come swirling back, and enemy navies approached the Brazilian State's territorial waters with regularity.
And as is often said, terror is the tool not of entities in a position of power, but ones who are in a state of weakness. When they feel threatened, when they feel insecure, they will turn to desperation, and through his careful purging of all viable contestants to his ascension; Cristiano Boaventura had made himself the only apparent solution to the problems that Brazil faced. At least, to those who refused to let go of the Integralist way of doing things. All up until the serpent began to bite its own tail in its unending hunger. For the support for the massacres started to waver when the Guarda Verde turned on the army, the bourgeoisie, and even the Integralist Party itself. Without Salgado to check his ambitions, Boaventura was free to kill everyone he pleased to try and create the Kingdom of God in Brazil.
When the massacres started affecting the families of Generals, the friends of the police, and the persons of the wealthy whom Boaventura accused of allegiance with paganism, satanism, homosexuality, atheism, communism, or liberalism the enforcement arms of the integralist regime outside of the Guarda Verde and its pet priests started to fray. Police started to forget details, trying to protect their own; so the Guarda Verde simply started accusing the police of treason and had them purged. The Generals began ordering the army to keep the Guarda Verde out of its affairs, and confrontations began ensuing as the masked and armoured goons of the Guard locked gazes with the Adrien helmed troopers of the Brazilian army. The AIB, having had its Greenshirt paramilitaries ground into pulp by the Green Guard earlier, tried to barricade its offices.
All the while dissent and resistance against Boaventura's increasingly bloodthirsty purges had been growing in many sectors. Militias by underground communist movements, simple survival groups, Liberal dissidents, anarchist mutual aid groups, syndicalist rogue unions, and organised crime had all begun to boil over. When gunfire between the Army and the Green Guard broke out following Boaventura's attempt to arrest the General Staff for refusing to turn over members of their own ranks to his "deranged inquisitions", the pandemonium began.
The inner circle of the Guard sought to look to Boaventura himself for guidance, only to enter his chambers and find nobody there, nor any sign of where he had went. In their time of need, as civil war was starting to erupt and commanders started to turn on each other out of paranoia, suspicion, and uncertainty of who was actually what they said they were and who was just another agent for the madman in the mask.
State governments stopped responding to Rio's calls, army units were mobilised in a confused way as much of the General Staff was killed in the immediate fighting at Rio di Janerio, and the gutting of the command of the Guarda Verde as fingers were pointed regarding the Devil's disappearance lead to the Guard turning on itself. The beast was famished, and tore at its own flesh in confused hunger, while the maggots burrowing in its rotten muscles began to hatch into flies of rebellion and revolution.
The country, quite simply, fell apart, and all eyes were turned to the country as cells evolved into warlord states each seeking to stake their claim to the country as a whole. Millions had died, and millions more may die, while Cold Revolution American Premier Jane Fonda declared a state of emergency as the Sao Paulo Commune shakily broadcast its birth to the world as workers seized its heavy factories and transport logistics, driving out the warring factions of gangsters, soldiers, and guardsmen. Perhaps a Brazilian tragedy could become a Brazilian revolution.
Agenda Setting
You may set a general communist international agenda with a 300 word limit, with a special crisis agenda (Particularly for Latin America's current upsets) with an up to 200 word limit that can be attached to the General agenda. You may attach as many planks as you wish to your agenda. A further 100 word budget for Socintern-Comintern relations will also be offered.Your plan does not need to cover all three things, you can instead endorse somebody else's plan for the crisis or inter-socialist agenda or make a plan for the crisis and/or inter-socialist agenda and endorse somebody else's general agenda. The General agenda will also cover stuff like economic development and social progress of course, though if not specified in this session it will be left to the automated systems determined by the general behaviour of the comintern.
The agenda and its implementation will affect the general makeup of the Comintern due to party elections being rather clunky and requiring things to come to a halt to do them.
BUT, how you argue for the agenda will also affect the final form of how in-universe, it gets implemented and also the make up of the comintern. Your debates matter almost as much as your votes. I will be monitoring the discord and the thread to gauge the general progress of the argument and conferring with my spouse to figure how they factor in, and will periodically make note of how your arguments are affecting things.
Passionate (but not hostile) posting is strongly encouraged, and roleplaying and makes are even more so.
I will also be providing more information on the timelines periodically, and if you're on either my discord or the wordsmiths discord feel free to ping me for information.
*Shuffling the timeline around a bit so the start of the Swedo-Finnish war doesn't happen until after this post.
**OTL Stalingrad/Volgograd
***Pretend all mentions of Suslov or Zdhanov leading the USSR in the Red Order were actually Pyotr Masherov, with Suslov being the Chair of the Politburo and Zhdanov remaining in Foreign politics, with Masherov being elected to Premier of the Sovnarkom and the Soviet Union on a platform of communisation and integration of the communist international.
****This Tony Benn is from Cold Snow but the USCB includes both iterations of the UOB.
*****Name for the Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline
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