The History of the Yrillian Revolution: The "Short" Version
Reproduced with permission from the blog of Dr. Harzi Poyr
I originally started this blog to keep in touch with my work gang at the Pell Educational Collective while off planet and pass on some of what I've been learning in a more accessible form for the general Yrillian audience, but it seems I've been picking up Federation readers looking for a fresh perspective on their own history. I pretty routinely talk about such and such feature of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the events of 1848, any of the various Rigelian revolutions and slave revolts or whatever else has caught me attention by making comparisons to some aspect or other of the Yrillian revolution, and I'm getting comments asking me to explain from people who aren't well versed in Yrillian history. I apologize to my Yrillian readers, and suggest that anyone who doesn't feel like a lengthy refresher just skip to my next entry.
We're pretty proud of the revolution and it is probably the most important event in our cultural heritage these days, but we've never been big on the kind of over the top patriotic mythology you get in polities with a government trying to whip up nationalism or convince the people they still live in some kind of worker's state when they don't. Even so, we talk about it enough that I'm a bit surprised an audience interested in my field has to get this information from me. Anyway, there are plenty of other, better sources out there for a more full treatment, but this should do as a broad summary for a general audience. I know I am going to do this a disservice, since much of the really interesting stuff is charting the mood of the population in individual cities, looking at what different people and parties where arguing at any particular time and that sort of thing. If you want all of that and more besides, I suggest "The Yrillian Revolution", a 37 volume set and associated media archive put together by the Yalryanai City Historical Collective.1 For a more approachable single volume treatment, I recommend "A Fire in the Garden: The Revolution Years" by Himyrall Ardru, or perhaps "A Political History of the Yrillian Revolution" by Yimuy Gaaryii if you want something with more of a focus on the emergence of the new society.
1 This may seem excessive, but consider how much Trotsky wrote on Petrograd in 1917, and multiply that by every city in a multi-planet civilization.
Setting the stage: Before The Collapse
Okay, first, some ancient history to set the stage. You're probably aware that we've been in space a long time. A very long time. We traded with the Orion Empire in their prime. We've got archaeologists digging Gorn trade goods out of burred ruins on Yrillia and Garpaaz that we've only identified recently with the renewed contact. We've also had a pretty nasty early history, to which those same burred, faintly radioactive ruins can attest. Anyway, the really early stuff doesn't matter here, but to tell the story of the revolution I also need to sketch out the proceeding centuries so you understand the situation at the time and who the major players were.
Let's begin our tale with the decline and fall of the Yrillian Concordat. Though theoretically a loose federation of the minor powers and planetary governments that had emerged after the Osmium Wars, the Yrillian Concordat was in practice a closely knit single entity controlled by an oligarchy of planetary leaders and an appointed head of state with extensive executive powers. Constituent governments were by a narrow majority republics of some sort, but with plenty of constitutional monarchies and the like and more than a few outright autocracies. They operated on a mixed capitalist and state-capitalist system, with the state (on both national and sometimes planetary levels) managing large parts of many industries deemed of strategic importance and private entities running everything else. Living standards were generally decent, but no more than that. The leadership wasn't particularly expansionist or imperialist, but more due to the abundance of garden worlds in easy reach and the money they made off of trade than anything else.
Existing on the margins of that society, a thriving spacer culture made their homes in starships, space stations and asteroid colonies. These guys handled essentially all space travel and off-world industry and, in the form of armed merchant ships and the like, formed a reserve navy that dwarfed the more conventional official one. They called themselves Upsiders, as opposed to planet-based "Downsiders".2 They largely kept to themselves, paying lip-service to the government and in turn being ignored so long as they paid their taxes. Though theoretically organized as a set of corporations, a complex network of legal constructs and social expectations allocated shares in a particular ship, station or colony to all residents and crew members, with ownership percentages slightly modified by seniority, personal popularity, and decision making competence as indicated by the relative success or failure of winning proposals voted on in the past. By the standards of the larger society they were radically democratic in how they managed their internal affairs, using complex decision support software and computerized referendums of "shareholders" instead of hierarchical leadership structures. Remember these guys. They'll be important later.
By the 1650s or so, the Yrillian Concordat was starting to decline, with chronic budget shortfalls and the network of alliances that held together the leadership starting to fray. In 1683, this led to what was nominally a difference of opinion about tax policy spiraling out of control until a cluster of primarily agricultural and mining worlds attempted to secede, taking almost a third of the fleet with them. Despite the Concordat's founding document explicitly permitting succession, the remainder of the Concordat's leadership came up with an aspect of the proper procedure to argue hadn't been followed and declared them to be in unlawful rebellion. The details of the resulting war aren't especially important, and when the dust settled in 1688, the secessionists had been brought back into the Yrillian Concordat, half the regular fleet was gone and a massive amount of damage had been done to industrial and military infrastructure across a large swath of Yrillian space. On the other hand, the core industrial worlds and the Upsiders (who had largely been kept out of the war to keep trade flowing) where mostly untouched, and the many of the same people who engineered the succession were still in power and now had a score to settle.
Motivated in part by internal political considerations and sensing weakness, the Republic of Rigel invaded Yrillian space in 1694. The Concordat was initially caught off guard, but rapidly organized an effective defense based around the Upsider reserve navy. Despite more or less successfully holding off the Rigelian navy until 1701 and severely damaging the Rigelian economy with large-scale commerce raiding, however, the Concordat's luck eventually ran out. A massive Rigelian offensive took the Ethur system3, destroyed the shipyards and the majority of the orbital infrastructure, and obliterated four successive counterattacks before surrendering to a fifth. Faced with growing turmoil at home, the admiral in charge of the Rigelian fleet, Eltor Hattava, was able to secure the release of his fleet in exchange for an end to the war with all captured territory being returned. He went on to orchestrate a military coup in support of ongoing popular uprisings.4
With the war over, the Concordat set about rebuilding. This task was severely hampered by the still unreplaced losses of the previous war, the destruction of many Upsider ships which performed important peacetime functions and the destruction of many important mining colonies during the early stage of the war, but especially with the influx of trade from the new Rigelian government things would likely have returned to normal within perhaps twenty years if nothing else had happened. Unfortunately, however, resource scarcity following the war brought many of the same conflicts that had led to the succession crisis back to the forefront of Yrillian politics, soon joined by a handful of untouched industrialized core worlds displeased with tax increases meant to pay for the reconstruction of other systems. Tensions steadily built, exacerbated by a slower than predicted economic recovery, and by 1708 or so the Yrillian Concordat was once again slipping towards civil war.
It shouldn't have happened. Even if no one knew how close we were to a collapse, everyone could see our industrial and transport capacity was stretched tight. Everyone knew they had a lot to lose, but they all thought the other guys would back down first. The only ones seriously considering the possibility of how far it might go were a small sub-faction in the industrialists block, who were under the impression that they were best placed to rule over the ashes if the worst happened, and the Upsiders, who quietly set up several off-planet vaults of seeds, technical information and cultural works as a sort of off-sight-backup for Yrillian civilization.
The spark that finally ignited this powder keg was the still-unsolved assassination of the Minister of Industry, an unpopular but effective figure known more for exacting planning and a willingness to make hard choices than likability or personal diplomacy. She had made a number of minor enemies over the years, but most recently had angered the Industrialists Block with outspoken advocacy for reconstruction taxes they viewed as excessive, the agricultural planets for deprioritizing reconstruction efforts, and Yrillia itself where it was commonly felt that not enough was being done, and too much of it aimed at militarily useful industries. As might be expected under the circumstances, everyone blamed everyone else, most sides denounced the official investigation as one type of cover-up or another, the central government's position relative to the various factions was significantly diminished, and tempers grew steadily hotter until the Industrialists Block withdrew their delegates from the Concordat senate in a gesture of protest. An improvised coalition involving the Agriculturists, most of the mining planets that had baked the secessionists and a handful of independent industrialized worlds used this window to push through a range of legislation furthering their interest and an amendment to the rules for assigning senate seats which would have weakened the Industrialists by allocating an increased number of seats to sparsely populated planets. The Industrialists declared this to be illegitimate and tantamount to a coup, the new governing coalition demanded that the recognize the government or be considered in rebellion, and a tense stand-off held for several weeks until a spontaneous battle between a pair of planetary guard cutters watching the Garpaaz-Orga 9 spacelane tipped things into open war.
The first chaotic weeks saw different Upsider crews answering the calls of both sides, which in turn saw Upsider shipping and orbital infrastructure being targeted by commanders confusing the stance of a particular ship with society-wide official support. For their part, Upsider society generally saw the war as a waste of lives and scarce resources, but with some elements sympathetic to the Industrialists due to shared interests and others remaining loyal to the nominal Concordat central government. To attempt to avoid more attacks and to try to minimize overall bloodshed by denying transportation and naval assets, the Upsiders as a whole soon voted to declare neutrality and keep out of the war, with many choosing to go a bit farther and avoid shipping cargo or materials with a significant military use for the duration. The combatants, meanwhile, were forced to make due with a handful of planetary guard ships, the last few scraps of the regular navy, and whatever independent civilian ships they could hire, impress or confiscate, soon supplemented by a trickle of ships purchased from, among others, the Orion Syndicate.
2 Those not reading this in Yrillian should be aware that in Yrillian, this references a common metaphor analogous to "gravity well" in English for example
3 The Yrillian home system. Confusing, I know, but we at least have the common decency to have species and home planet names that are somehow related to each other. I'm looking at you, Humans. Millions of sophants all across known space probably assume you come from the planet Hume or some such thing.
4 For once in the history of the galaxy, this actually turned out to be an honest attempt to help rather than the counterrevolution sneaking in to restore order and replace a few figureheads. He actually instituted a number of vital reforms, even if they were largely limited to basic legal and social equality and a more democratic flavor of parliamentary "democracy". He's an interesting and complicated figure, and the fact that we built a statue of him along the Trail of Heroes even though he burnt our shipyards should probably tell you something. The fact that the statue has been voted to be taken down and later voted put back up a total of three times now should probably tell you even more. Make sure to check out his memoirs if you get the chance.
Setting the stage: The Collapse
Paradoxically, the Upsiders declaring neutrality significantly contributed to the eventual collapse. The combatants were forced to funnel their increasingly scarce resources and limited industrial capacity into military spending when civilian infrastructure desperately needed a larger share. Moreover, while they were unable to mass enough ships to enable ground invasions, they were also unable to muster the forces to effectively defend against lone raiders, and the war soon devolved into individual ships trying to sneak through the lines to torpedo orbital infrastructure or bombard a handful of ground targets, then leaving before anyone could stop them. In this type of war, the destruction of the antimatter production facility at Siffri III, the last industrial scale one remaining in Yrillian space, was very likely inevitable. This was soon followed by the military deflector works on Garpaaz, warp coil factories on Darboo, the most of the remaining repair bays and shipyards outside of Upsider hands, and the reactor plant on Etinjur, to name only some of the most significant losses. Targets soon grew to include items more tangentially connected to the war effort, like factories producing prepackaged meals for the Industrialist Block's army, as well as mines and refineries for duel-use raw materials like high-strength steel alloys, boron and titanium.5
Rather than ending suddenly, the war simply faded away as both sides increasingly found themselves unable to fight it, with their industrial capacity in ruins and many of their last few ships out of service awaiting parts they could no longer produce, or in one case impounded in a Rigelian yard for non-payment. An indefinite ceasefire was signed in 1721, but by that time the damage was done. Yrillian civilization no longer had the industrial base needed to support itself, and many planets struggled to provide for their own basic needs. The Upsiders, with more ships and a somewhat better-off industrial base, were not in a position to help with more than a small amount of trade in essentials like food and medicine, especially with planets affiliated with the remnants of the Concordat government sometimes trying to seize ships under the pretense of the Upsider neutrality vote being treasonous.
Over the following decades, governments beyond planetary scale became less and less relevant as contact between planets shrank to just subspace communications and a trickle of Upsider trade. A minimal level of self-sufficiency in food, medicine and the most essential industries had been restored on most planets, but very limited access to things once produced off planet and the destruction of some of the most advanced and important industries greatly hampered the rebuilding process. Many industries lacked the tools to build the tools they needed, or couldn't produce specialty materials that are prerequisites for a spacefaring civilization.
For their part, the Upsiders faced many of the same problems, with no local source of essentials such as antimatter, warp coil elements, high temperature superconductors, refined duranium or even artificial gravity. Moreover, the imports of food, consumer goods and industrial products they had depended on were no longer regularly available. Food supplies were were secured with intensive photobioreactor-based algae farming, soon supplemented with purpose built agricultural stations, but the industrial situation could not be fixed as simply. Accepting that many technologies they had taken for granted were beyond their reach for the moment, they found lower tech ways to meet their needs. New in-system mining, construction and cargo ships were constructed, propelled by nuclear thermal rockets and built out of steel and aluminum. Slow and inefficient but incredibly simple and versatile refineries were constructed built on the same basic principles as the venerable mass spectrometer. A new, low-tech industrial base began to take form, built on a foundation of a system of 3D printers and computer controlled machine tools that, taken together, can build most of its own parts.
Trade with nearby polities, which should have helped pull Yrillian civilization out of technological collapse, instead slowed to a trickle due to the Yrillians having little to trade and Orion Syndicate-affiliated pirates using this trade as a cover to attack Yrillian space and what little shipping existed. The Upsiders were forced to tie up many of their most capable remaining ships fighting this piracy, taking losses they could not afford that were hardly mitigated by the resulting salvage. However, the trickle of trade that did get through was of tremendous importance, eventually resulting in the Upsiders acquiring long-obsolete equipment from a shut down warp coil manufacturing plant.
The next few hundred years were marked by a complete disintegration of the old multi-planetary governments, a slow climb back towards space on the more industrialized worlds, and a number of coups and changes of government in the now-isolated colonies. During this time, the Upsiders gave up all but the last vestiges of corporate structure in their society, became steadily more capable and confident with their lower tech industrial base, and took a somewhat isolationist stance towards non-Yrillian powers due to continued attempts at slave raiding and piracy, focusing on their own society and on facilitating some limited trade between Yrillian planets.
This time frame also saw a new generation of Upsider star ships being produced, powered by inertial electrostatic confinement fusion reactors, capable of no more than perhaps ten times the speed of light, and propelled by nuclear thermal rockets or "medusa drive" nuclear pulse propulsion while moving slower than light. Alongside these ships, a handful of heavily armored dedicated combat ships were also produced to discourage Syndicate raiding. These ships, propelled by the more robust pusher plate variant of nuclear pulse propulsion6, armored in up to a third of a meter of steel surrounded by layers of aerogell, diamond nano-coating, boron fiber and an aluminum whipple shield7 and armed with a mixture of nuclear missiles and high-power conventional lasers, were tough enough to stand a good chance of fighting off anything the Syndicate was likely to field despite vastly inferior technology, even if they lacked the speed to do more than respond to attacks in the same system.
5 Note that this isn't quite as odd as it sounds. Yrillian starship design even in this period made relatively heavy use of materials like boron fiber, magnesium alloys, carbon composites and chromium-vanadium steel that, though inferior to some of the more advanced alternatives, are not dependent on scarce elements from the island of stability or anything else you can't dig out of the average rocky planet or asteroid belt.
6 The translation system wants to translate our name for this as "Orion drive" in English, but so far as I can tell the Orions have never even seriously considered building one. I'm not sure what that's about.
7 A physical rather than energy barrier used to protect unshielded spacecraft from small, hypervelocity impacts like micrometeorites or the high-speed, low-mass version of rail gun fire. Literally just a thin layer of material to flash it to plasma with the impact energy, separated from the main hull by empty space or aerogell.
Setting the stage: The Garpaazian Conquests
By 1978, situation had started to stabilize. Darboo, Garpaaz and Etinjur had regained the ability to produce limited numbers of simple starships8, with Yrillia not far off. Basic needs were largely being provided for, industrial capacity was improving across Yrillian space, the Upsiders were doing reasonably well, and the Syndicate raiders had almost completely backed off from attacks on the more built-up systems. Garpaaz in particular fielded a relatively large fleet, and had begun to bring smaller neighbors under its control.
Garpaaz, at the time the second most populous Yrillian world after Yrillia itself, had been a major Industrialists Block world and had managed to hold on to more than typical amounts of industrial and mining capacity. Though the Grapaazian government had remained intact during and after the collapse, society had had gone through significant changes. When the dust settled, several competing alliances of mega-corporations controlled most of the economy and, effectively, the government. These alliances, built around personal connections and often centered around a country club or the like, cooperated closely towards shared goals while members maintained full control over their own assets. They were commonly refereed to simply as "clubs", though whether it stood for "business clubs" or "plutocrat clubs" depended on the speaker's politics.9
After regaining a useful amount of warp transport capacity, Garpaaz rapidly brought Sifri 3, Orga 9 and Kebril under its control with a mixture of direct conquest, implied threats of violence and promises of industrial support. Neighbors looked on in concern and built up their armed forces, but for a time the clubs appear to be content with building up their forces and integrating their new vassals, a process that included more than a bit of outright looting. When the dust settled, the clubs had replaced the local political and business elite with their own flunkies and had far more control in practice than they were supposed to in theory. With things largely settled for the moment, Garpaaz used the newly gained resources to further grow its army and navy in preparation for future conquests.
In 1986, a blatantly Garpaaz-backed coup on Yrillia installed a pro-corporate, pro-Garpaaz government, which promptly arranged to unify with Garpaaz in a supposed reconstituted Yrillian Concordat. The mass protests this generated on Yrillia were violently suppressed, and once again Garpaazian clubs moved in to take over as much of the economy as they could get away with, though this time many of the existing corporations retained their control and eventually arranged themselves to fit into the club system.
Using the supposed legitimacy provided by the New Yrillian Concordat, the clubs arranged quickly arranged for the conquest of Arthan 3, Thayril 3 and 4, and a number of minor mining worlds, which proceeded very much like the first Garpaazian conquests but with generally stiffer resistance. An attempt to claim Upsider facilities in the Ethur system resulted in the loss of a sixth of the Concordat navy and an armistice guaranteeing Upsider independence. Darboo, Etinjur and Duryi 5 formed a defensive alliance to deter aggression, but the new Concordat continued to attempt to bring the colonies under its sway, next getting Cheth to voluntarily join under a heavily implied threat of orbital bombardment.
By 1991, the Concordat had largely run out of minor or poorly defended colonies to conquer, finally targeting the defensive alliance, which had grown to also include Dyrith 8 and Pell and was now calling itself the "Coalition of Free Planets". The Concordat army, initially overwhelming due to being able to draw from the two most populous Yrillian worlds, was beginning to grow war weary and depleted, but the Concordat leadership believed that their superior numbers and larger fleet would allow them to secure a quick surrender. The result was anything but. After scattering the CFP navy with considerable losses, the Concordat landed troops on Darboo, Duryi 5 and Pell but were met with heavy resistance from dug in opponents. Though Pell fell relatively quickly, large guerrilla forces remained active that made it difficult to properly hold, and the other two planets remained heavily contested. The navy moved to blockade the other CFP worlds pending troop availability, and the Concordat began to scrounge up what forces they could for a renewed offensive.
By this point, the situation on Yrillia and Garpaaz wasn't great either. Rationing, already in place in a limited form to preserve resources for the military, increased greatly, as did conscription. Companies increased work hours to make up for conscripted workers and provide for the needs of the war, simultaneously using it as an excuse for cuts to pay and benefits. What little social services the Concordat had where significantly cut. Things in the already conquered smaller colonies were even worse, with prisoner-staffed work camps being set up. All of this was fertile ground for revolutionary propaganda, but the handful of small groups in any position to take advantage of it like the League of Revolutionary Industrial Workers and the Yrillian Worker's Party had to tread carefully due to extensive police repression.
A renewed offensive succeeded in taking most of Darboo and gaining footholds on Etinjur and Dyrith 8, but rapidly bogged down again. The fighting was especially brutal on Etinjur, characterized by fierce urban combat against a well equipped army backed up by volunteer guerrilla forces in the countryside attacking supply lines. Morale was incredibly low all across the Concordat army, and socialists who had been preferentially drafted as troublemakers where obtaining a significant audience for their ideas in the enlisted ranks.
At the same time, workers in labor camps on Pell went on strike, soon spreading across the planet and then to Kebril, Theyril 4 and the occupied portion of Darboo. Attempts to suppress them largely failed, since many of the soldiers involved where sympathetic to the workers of the occupied worlds and did not support the war. Radical political ideas cross-fertilized, secret meetings where held, soldiers openly participated in revolutionary study circles, and officers could not count on orders to repress demonstrates actually being followed.
The Concordat responded by rotating many units occupying planets back to Yrillia, Garpaaz and the most solidly controlled minor colonies, replacing them with garrison units and fresh conscripts. This had the unintended result of spreading revolutionary ideas back home and putting a new batch of dissatisfied conscripts who didn't want to be there in contact with an anti-Concordat mass movement they had every reason to sympathize with. Though there was some temporary success suppressing demonstrations on Darboo using front line units temporarily pulled back from the fighting, the Concordat soon found itself facing general strikes on Pell, Kebril and Theyril 3 and 4, with smaller scale mass demonstrations and labor unrest on every significant Yrillian world. Revolutionary groups began to recruit widely, a series of large anti-war protests were held on Grapaaz, and strikes paralyzed the steel industry on Yrillia for 17 days before a quarter of the workers were replaced with prisoners and the rest forced back to work.
Though this time period saw the Concordat army complete the conquest of all but Etinjur, their hold on the occupied planets in practice had never been weaker. Strikes and demonstrations were widespread, soldiers were deserting or simply ignoring orders they didn't like, the supply situation was stretch very tight, and there was a widespread sense that even if they could conquer, they weren't able to rule. Of course, the government and corporate elite would never admit any of this, but their private records show they were becoming increasingly worried, even if they saw no path forward except to keep going.
8 though still largely limited to low speed, fusion powered designs due to lack of substantial antimatter production.
9 Comparing the social and practical function the clubs performed for their members to those of the various forms of modern work gang is a common essay topic for collective psychology, sociology or workplace organization undergrads who feel the need to be a bit edgy.
The Revolution Begins
Things came to a head when soldiers ordered to disperse a crowd of demonstrators in front of the planetary governor's mansion on Theyril 4 instead joined them, leaving an officer who tried to stop them beaten, disarmed and tied to a lamp post. With the aid of the threat of their guns, the crowd pushed back a line of riot police who had been preventing a group of striking administrative workers from joining up with them, stormed, looted and burnt down the nearby Office of Internal Security10 planetary headquarters, and with the aid of ever-growing crowds swarming in from all over the city, eventually over took most of the administrative district over the next several hours. Police and OIS forces could not contain the uprising, soldiers refused to fire or went over to their side, and by the end of the next day the entire capital city was in the hands of the people. Within days the entire planet was in rebel hands.
The pre-conquest planetary governor, a man notorious for corruption and a bombastic, larger than life, unintentionally comical persona, returned to the capital from his country estate where he claimed he had been "hiding out", gathered a handful of removed officials, and attempted to address a large crowd in a public square. He began by praising the courage of the demonstrators and soldiers, pledging that this would be the end of the Garpaazian tyranny and so forth, but soon transitioned to thanking the assembled crowd for restoring him to his rightful office and appealing for a return to order, asking that everyone go back to their homes and return to work. As this went on, he struggled to be heard over a growing chorus of booing and shouting, and he was eventually forced to rush off to a waiting car after portions of the crowd started throwing things. At this point, it was clear to everyone paying attention that a return to business as usual was not on the agenda.
In the coming weeks, the situation on Theyril 4 was in flux. The Concordat and the old government clearly no longer ruled, but it was unclear who exactly did. A random collection of local politicians, bureaucrats, corporate executives and the like soon begin trying to put together a provisional government, and to some extent the surviving machinery of state even answered to them for a time, but in practice no one was in control. In individual workplaces, business owners and upper management were often nowhere to be found, with especially those affiliated with the Garpaazian clubs having gone into hiding or even fled off planet. To ensure essential services were provided, some workers began occupying their workplaces and resuming work under their own control, with decisions made democratically by workplace councils often derived from strike committees or per-existing unions and social clubs.11 As time went on, these groups came to play a larger and larger role in the basic functioning of society. This situation provided fertile ground for a wide range of ideologies, from apocalyptic religious cults to groups pushing completely unregulated capitalism. However, the two main polls of attraction where reformists in favor of a kinder version of the old society, and socialists and anarchists seeking to build a better, new one. The former aligned themselves with the provisional government, while the latter came to see the worker's councils as the building blocks of the society they wished to build.
Things were not stagnant elsewhere in Yrillian space. The events on Theyril 4 kicked off a new wave of mass demonstrations, strikes and uprisings. Prisoners in the Acryni 212 work camp, by this point in large part political dissidents, deserting soldiers and the like, successfully rioted and took over the complex. Workers on Pell called an indefinite general strike that shut down virtually all production planet-wide, soon joined my a majority of the soldiers supposedly occupying the planet. Soldiers on Theyril 3 refused to board the transports meant to take them to suppress the revolution on Theyril 4. Over five hundred thousand people marched for an end to the war on Yrillia. An originally peaceful march turned into a city-wide uprising on Kebril after private security forces started shooting into the crowd. Every single day brought more news than anyone could keep track of from all across Yrillian space. Within the first week, all of Pell, Orga 9 and Acryni 2 and several cities on Kebril were in rebel hands.
The Concordat (or, really, the government of Garpaaz and more importantly the clubs) had difficulty coping with the sudden tessellation of resistance. As they came to realize that they couldn't depend on most of the army, more and more often they found themselves depending on police and private security brought in from Garpaaz and equipped with military weapons. Attempts to suppress demonstrations and mass strikes with violence tended to escalate them, insufficient loyal forces were available to effectively retake planets or cities in full revolt, and no compromises or reforms the Concordat would possibly consider would do more than embolden the crowds. Eventually they settled on a strategy of trying to draw back what forces they still thought loyal in order to concentrate them to thoroughly secure a smaller number of targets one after another. Supposedly reliable units where gathered, while unreliable ones where pulled back from positions where they were likely to defect. Entire planets where abandoned on the ground, with the navy instead keeping them blockaded and attempting to eliminate their capacity to resist through limited orbital bombardment. Having learned their lesson from the collapse, major industrial targets remained largely off limits, but transportation and logistics choke points like ports, bridges and warehouses where heavily targeted in an attempt to starve the revolutionaries into submission, or at least out of the cities.
Kebril was the first target in this new strategy. After landing in a firmly Concordat held region, most of the massed forces settled in to besiege Archaffi City. While the local provisional government tried to negotiate a series of minor reforms in exchange for the city's surrender, socialists and anarchists began organizing worker's militias stiffened with the soldiers who had gone over to their side. When the massed army, police and private security forces attempted to take the city with the provisional government's under the table approval, they were met with a series of ambushes, communications jamming and running battles with surprisingly well equipped and competent forces. The advance ground to a halt, the Concordat forces pulled back to limit their losses, and when a captured officer revealed what had the provisional government had done, a crowd of angry workers and soldiers marched on city hall, which they had taken for their headquarters, seized the building, and hauled off the self-appointed leaders. Leaving behind a small force to intercept food and supplies going in to the city, the Concordat forces shipped off to Acryni 2 to go after a a softer target.
Simultaneously, unrest was intensifying on Yrillia and Garpaaz. Peace marches became a regular occurrence despite routinely being met with riot control weapons, a series of strikes temporarily crippled important industries, and the unreliable army units that had been rotated home to be out of the way were increasingly hotbeds of radical politics. In an attempt to curtail things before they completely lost control, a set of laws were passed essentially allowing striking workers in critical industries, identified political dissidents and anyone involved in a protest deemed to be a riot to be summarily arrested and conscripted into the army or shipped off to a work camp. This did the job of mostly halting in the strike wave and the largest mass demonstrations, but it angered the general population more than its creators had anticipated rather than just cowing them with fear.
10 A Grapaazian institution encompassing secret police, counterintelligence and riot control functions, in addition to overseeing local police forces, prisons and work camps.
11 It is at this point well established that, under the capitalist mode of production, ad-hoc bodies of approximately this sort tend to be a key development during the most intense periods of mass struggle. They have been independently arrived at time and time again across known space.
12 At the time a very minor colony primary important because of uranium and copper mines.
A New Phase
That attack on Acryni 2 initially went well for the Concordat forces due to overwhelming numbers and minimal local defenses. Most of the handful of major settlements on the planet fell quickly, sometimes without shots even being fired. However, the former prisoners at the uranium mining work camps would not be so easily subdued. Retreating into the hills with the weapons they had captured from the guards, bands made up predominantly of former soldiers held out for weeks, inflicting disproportionate losses on the forces sent after them. They were eventually flushed out with the aid of orbital bombardment, with the majority surrendering without additional struggle. However, the officer in charge of the attempts to root them out decided to make an example of them and ordered them summarily executed, followed by the ordering the executions of the leaders of the original work camp uprising who had already been captured.
As the news spread, this kicked off a new wave of resistance in the rest of the occupied planets, along with a massive new set of antiwar demonstrations on Yrillia and Garpaaz. Defections and desertions started to increase again, and in Concordat society even some of those who had been fully behind the wars of conquest began to wonder if they were really supporting the right side. Perhaps even more importantly, this atrocity was what finally convinced the Upsiders to break the armistice they had signed early on.
Even before the revolutions began, there was a significant current in the Upsider population pushing for an entry into the war, both on sophantarian grounds and on the belief that Garpaaz would probably come back for them as soon as they had the forces for it. However, up until this point a coalition of principled pacifists, the most extreme of the isolationists, those hoping to benefit from trade with (or in) a renewed Yrillian Concordat, and those naive enough to believe the armistice was sufficient protection from Garpaazian imperialism had been able to successfully argue against it, though with ever slimmer margins. With the executions on Acryni 2 and the increasing use of orbital bombardment throughout the occupied worlds, however, sophantarian concerns won out. A fleet of six armed freighters, a pair of "LaserStars"13 and a single heavily armored nuclear pulse drive warship were sent to liberate Acryni 2, while other, smaller fleets were dispatched to the rebel-held worlds under bombardment. Typical Upsider warp speeds were slow enough for the pre-collapse subspace sensors many Concordat ships were equipped with to allow plenty of warning for the naval forces. However, evacuating the ground forces from Acryni 2 in time proved harder, with about 10% still on the ground when the fleet arrived in system, and two Concordat transports disabled before they could warp away.
In addition to the military side of things, Upsiders began applying their signature low-tech self-replicating machine tools and specialty microfactories to the task of rebuilding industry damaged in the conquest or even never properly rebuilt after the collapse. Intensive automated algae farming of a type they hadn't had to depend on for over a hundred and fifty years prevented food shortages from turning into starvation. Though upsider manufacturing techniques were not well suited to constructing or repairing buildings under full gravity, temporary structures to house refugees were designed based on pre-existing inflatable habitat modules for airless planets and moons. As an unintended result, down-sider workers, already widely influenced by socialist ideas, got to see in practice what a system of industry based around direct worker ownership and control could look like.
Finally, to better coordinate efforts, the Upsiders began to put together a more formalized alliance between themselves and all the various rebel held regions and planets. To allow things to get done for the moment and make it easy for whatever society and government might develop to do so democratically instead of by fiat, they made their decision support and referendum software available. There was a widespread understanding that this was likely a short term approach to be replaced with whatever form of government might eventually be decided on, but anyone with even a cursory familiarity with Yrillian society has probably guessed that it proved popular enough to stick around.14 Between Upsider cultural elements, worker's councils, computer supported direct democracy and the increasingly widespread socialist political and economic ideas, all the major pieces were now in place that led to the development of modern Yrillian society, though no one knew it yet and they were only starting to be put together.
Perhaps more immediately crucially, the newly forming proto-government got to work organizing the worker's militias, defected army units, veterans from the defeated armed forces and Upsider navy into something resembling a coherent fighting force. Units remained self-selected, at best loosely accountable to anyone else and in general run by elected officers, but significant progress was made towards enabling coordination and allocating surplus supplies where they were most needed, even if there was still a great deal of work that needed to be done before anything like deciding on and carrying out a coherent strategy became possible.
13 A type of primitive warship built around one or more high power conventional lasers with an effective range of tens of thousands of kilometers. These ships were relatively fragile due to the large aperture precision optics and, in examples from before the Upsiders regained the ability to produce subspace heat shunts, the massive radiators, and as such could also not survive the stress of nuclear pulse propulsion, but they had enough range and offensive power to be a successful deterrent against Syndicate piracy.
14 I know this maybe sounds like the Upsiders swooped in and took over or some such thing, but that's really not what happened at all. They felt the need to improve coordination between planets to better deal with the inevitable Concordat counterattack, so they helped set up meetings between delegates, made their software available so the entire population could have their say, and that's about it. They weren't even the ones to suggest sticking with Upsider-style direct democracy until everyone decided what they actually wanted long term, though they certainly recommended it once the idea was out there.
Counteroffensive
This didn't come a moment too soon. To the Concordat, once the initial panic had died down, the obvious next step was to try to bring the Upsiders back out of the war, or at least eliminate their capacity to effectively fight it. Drawing from their carefully hoarded trickle of antimatter production, they reactivated a handful of pre-collapse patrol cutters and the like, sending them ranging around hunting Upsider holdings and shipping in a return to the tactics that led to the collapse. Lacking the speed to respond to them from a distance, the Upsiders were forced to pull back perhaps two thirds of their armed ships to protect their stations and shipyards. The ships left behind were primarily those with the lowest FTL speeds and anything with a medusa drive as the primary sublight engine.15 Taking advantage of this weakness, the majority of the Concordat fleet warped to Dyrith 8, where they smashed the handful of armed freighters guarding it and landed fresh conscripts from Yrillia.
Concordat forces, aided by orbital bombardment of anything that looked like a fortified position, relatively swiftly took the planet, but they were met with total non-cooperation from the populace and routine ambushes, raids and sniper fire from revolutionary militia forces. It was soon all they could do to hold their own bases ans outposts and send out a few heavily guarded patrols from time to time. As this was happening, revolutionary propaganda was being aimed at the individual soldiers non-stop, and the people were remarkably sympathetic and friendly on an individual level to conscripts, for all that off duty officers had a tendency to disappear if they left the base. Before long, the Concordat forces again had a desertion problem.
While the Dyrith 8 offensive was bogging down, the bulk of the Concordat navy joined up with the forces who had retreated from Acryni 2 and set their sights on Kebril, now entirely in revolutionary hands, where they encountered a stronger Upsider naval force waiting for them. Instead of just armed freighters, the Upsider forces at Kebril included a single modern laserstar and a pair of freighters fully converted to carry missiles. The Concordat forces warped in near the Upsider forces, but outside of their their typical engagement range, but started immediately losing ships to laser fire while a cloud of missiles launched towards them on a long range coast trajectory. The Concordat forces were forced to warp farther out into the system to escape the laserstar. The next three days produced some of the most interesting naval battles of the war, with Concordat forces trying to sneak in to bombard surface targets and Upsider ships trying to prevent them. The Concordat forces were relatively conventional if low tech and were lightly shielded and armed with phasers and missiles, while the Upsider forces where unarmored and often unshielded and much slower at sublight but with vastly better point defense and longer range, higher power weapons due to the laserstar. Engagements often took the form of the laserstar warping in outside of the range of Concordat forces to try to damage or destroy ships before they could flee, or Concordat forces trying to warp in close, launch missiles and leave before they could start taking fire.16 The series of battles finally came to an end when a series of clever feints with armed freighters forced many of the better armed Concordat ships out of position, allowing the upsiders to sneak in a nuclear missile strike calibrated to blind sensors17, which combined with electronic warfare delayed a coherent response when the laserstar to warped into range. A quarter of the Concordat fleet was destroyed or crippled in a single attack, with many of the scattering ships being hunted down as they warped away alone or in small groups. The second Kebril offensive had been defeated.
15 This variant of nuclear pulse propulsion features a large sail that must be retracted or extended in a somewhat time consuming process to switch between FTL and STL flight.
16 I recommend "Like Sparks Rising into the Night: Three Days of Battle Above Kebril" by Garmrin Klyrik for an excellent account of all this. I can't recommend this one enough, combining excellent scholarship with hair-raising first hand accounts of the battles themselves and interviews with crew and officers on both sides. It's a real page turner.
17 Those less familiar with historical space combat may be surprised to learn that without an atmosphere to carry a shock wave, conventional nuclear warheads in space are often relatively ineffective, doing damage primarily through the intensity of the flash and accompanying radiation if they detonate any significant distance from a hull. Nuclear shaped charges, higher yield weapons in the tens to hundreds of megatons range, and trying for direct hull contact on detonation all made them more effective, but conventional and relatively low powered nuclear warheads were primarily used to destroy groups of missiles or unprotected targets, burn off surface features from a hull or to blind sensors during this period. Modern torpedoes to some extent also suffer from this weakness, but are high enough power that it doesn't matter as much and include features designed to more effectively damage shields.
The Beginning of the End
The failure of the Kebril attack forced an end to the new strategy of massed offensives, at least while ships were repaired and new troops gathered. The Concordat raiders pulled back from Upsider space to conserve their limited antimatter supply, while what undamaged ships could be sparred attempted to reinforce the failing occupation of Dyrith 8. The Concordat was on the back foot, and for the first time the leadership began to publicly show signs of losing confidence, with rumors spreading of an attempt to negotiate a peace with the Coalition of Free Planets (at this point effectively just Etinjur). Documents have since surfaced indicating that negotiations were initiated, but foundered after the Concordat realized the CFP wasn't able to realistically establish control over revolutionary-held planets formerly among their members.
This period saw successful revolutions on Darboo, Theyril 3 and a number of minor worlds, while a mass uprising on Sifri 3 was brutally suppressed. Interestingly, despite the fact that the Concordat had pulled back entirely from Etinjur, a number of major demonstrations happened there in solidarity with the revolution elsewhere and protesting rationing and continued conscription locally. However, the war itself was largely quiet for several months, with the Concordat licking their wounds and the revolutionaries and Upsiders focusing on building their new society. The only major military action of this period occurred when a small Upsider fleet chased away the Concordat ships in orbit of Dyrith 8 and secured the surrender of the remaining ground forces.
Things finally ended suddenly and unexpectedly, with no final bit of drama beyond that always found in a revolution. A mass demonstration against conscription on Yrillia linked up with a transportation worker's strike, workers walked out of a nearby electronics factory to join them, police failed to contain them with riot control weapons and began firing into the crowd, and a group of soldiers being brought in to support the police instead turned on them in response. Within a day, police were afraid to set foot outdoors in uniform, most of parliament was hiding in a bunker in the countryside, and crowds filled the street of every city on the planet. Demonstrations sprung up in solidarity on Garpaaz, and the All Garpaaz System Administrators League18 shut down many important government and corporate computer systems before going out on strike. This caught the government unprepared and severely hampered the response, and within two days most major cities on Garpaaz were also in revolt. Establishing full control would take longer, but the clubs and government were unable to gather enough loyal forces to halt things anymore, and for all practical purposes the reign of the clubs, the Garpaazian government and their renewed Yrillian Concordat was now over.
In the weeks and months to come, the remaining Concordat army and navy forces throughout Yrillian space surrendered, all but a few of those few planets not already in revolutionary hands went through their own almost superfluous uprisings, and workers seized their workplaces and formed worker's councils to manage them all across Yrillia and Garpaaz. Many of the leading figures in the government and clubs went into hiding, while others were arrested. A number of capitalists and executives fled to Etinjur on a carefully restored pre-collapse passenger ship, where they were welcomed, if perhaps a bit grudgingly.19 With the rudiments of a functioning society ready to step in, pre-occupation governments, self-appointed collections of wealthy notables and the like were unable to put in an effective bid for leadership on any of the recently rebelled occupied planets, but many of these people were also biding their time. For the moment though, Yrillian space was at peace for the first time in years.
18 Theoretically a professional organization, but in practice increasingly functioning as something like an unofficial, industry-wide union.
19 Karl Marx, a noted 19th century Human philosopher and economist, once described the capitalist class as "band of warring brothers", constantly competing among themselves but ready to unite against any external threat. How well this fits all across the galaxy whenever capitalists are faced with a movement for economic democracy can not be overstated.
Building a New Society
It was like a breath of fresh air. The mood all across Yrillian space was almost festival-like, with spontaneous parties in the streets. Once again, Upsiders brought industrial aid to planets hit hard by the recent fighting. The informal semi-government alliance that had formed to oppose the Concordat expanded to all Yrillian colonies except Etinjur, which remained resolutely in the hands of its old government for the moment. Increasingly, the common sense assumption was that this state of affairs would evolve into a new, unified society instead of being a temporary measure as it was originally intended.
At first, basic changes to society and the economy had a tentative, almost cautious feel to them, motivated more by basic necessity than ideals. Things continued much as they had in many workplaces, just without any upper managers. For a while currency even remained in common use, even if no one would think to withhold food from someone without the ability to pay for it. As time went on though, society grew increasingly unrecognizable. Large scale coordination came to be handled democratically, through the same Upsider referendum software that now functioned in place of most of the government. Resource allocation too began to fall under this system, at least at the level of industries and workplaces. When this proved not entirely up to the challenge, a modification of the same production scheduling software used in Upsider modular factories was pressed into service to help implement the priorities the general population voted on. Some workplaces consolidated or split to improve efficiency, or even just for personal reasons around social compatibility. Groups of like-minded people began asking for and receiving resources for projects they felt necessary, or even just things they had always wanted to do but capitalism hadn't valued.
The Upsider referendum software, for all its advantages, was soon found to be not entirely satisfactory. It was originally intended to mostly handle a single ship or station, a small number of ships cooperating on a task, and only very rarely an entire civilization with a population much smaller than that of many planets. A great deal of experiments had to be done on improving the discussion threads system and adding more finding ways to keep large-scale referendums from getting drowned out and ignored. More fundamentally, it was found that the voting systems it offered were not a reasonable way to handle discretionary resource allocation. The majority of society might not care about funding traditional Darboo-style live-action theater or indoor climbing walls or whatever else, but any particular person might prefer that society provide for many such unnecessary expenses they aren't personally interested in so long as it also enables the ones they care about. The eventual solution to this, which has been tweaked extensively but still remains fundamentally the same, is one of voting society-wide to divide up excess production between individual consumption, superfluous production which may be scaled back to lower work hours, industrial expansion, and a discretionary pool which may be allocated to projects that are voted on. Projects can then receive resources from the discretionary pool if they are voted on by a (generally quite low) portion of the population that depends on the amount of resources asked for, and not specifically voted against (as opposed to abstentions) by a larger portion.
As society continued to hammer out how things would be done going forward, something that would be recognizable today began to take shape. Involvement in the war and reconstruction and the a culture, economy and system of government much closer to theirs led to the Upsiders integrating much more closely with the new society than they had ever before. Worker's councils, project teams and the like started to evolve into something a bit more like the modern work gang system. As the vast logistical snarl created by soldiers trying to return home abated, regular trade resumed between planets and increasingly with neighboring civilizations. The revolution was over, and it was time to move forward.
A Personal Note
Okay, this one kind of got away from me. The reconstruction and the early post-revolutionary years deserve a longer treatment, but this is long enough as is.20 I didn't even touch on the coup attempt many of the old club types put together a bit later on with support from Etinjur and Orion mercenaries. The post-revolutionary years may get their own post in the next couple of weeks if there's interest and I feel up to it. For that matter, the influence of Upsider culture on modern Yrillian society is probably worth talking about, though that isn't specifically in my area of focus.
On a more personal note, many of you may be aware that my time on Earth is coming to a close at the end of this semester. I'll be extending my sabbatical, though, since I've been approached by a project group working on a more... applied project which has caught my interest. Probably best to leave it at that for now. Anyway, expect to see somewhat less frequent posts once I get busy with that. And for the Pell Educational Collective, yes, I am coming back. I'll definitely make time to check in, say hi to everyone and maybe attend a faculty barbecue before I rush off on another adventure.
20 For now, consider "But Who Will Sweep the Floors?!: the Formation of a New Economy" by Parlyr Ladon or "Foundations of Modern Yrillian Society", by Girzak Arnoy and Barlap Kye.
Dr. Harzi Poyr holds a cross-appointment in the departments of history and revolutionary studies at the Pell Educational Collective on Girack's Landing, Pell. She is currently serving as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Earth, where she studies the history of movements for worker's control and economic democracy on Federation worlds. During the Sydraxian revolution, she spent time embedded with the Sydraxian vanguard movement as an advisor and researcher, collecting accounts and stories which were eventually published as "Finding a New Song to Sing: a Ground-Level View of the Sydraxian Revolution". Her research interests include the Yrillian revolutionary period, pre-revolutionary and non-Yrillian radical and activist mass movements, and early Upsider political and economic thought, with secondary interests in post-collapse Upsider industrial development and military history, radical movements operating under conditions of illegality, and the collective psychology of mass demonstrations. When not roaming the galaxy getting into trouble, she lives in the Pell Educational Collective faculty commune.
You think Aurora's got it bad...
