Ah! The Author has revealed that Sweden will still be independent after this!
The obvious question (yes, current politics) is whether any NATO country would vote no on Sweden joining? What is the situation with Sweden and Armenians at this point?
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
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The obvious question (yes, current politics) is whether any NATO country would vote no on Sweden joining? What is the situation with Sweden and Armenians at this point?
I wonder if the Soviets will finally properly fund their navy and build a surface fleet with aircraft carriers.
A photo of PM Falldin flipping them the bird.
"Do you see that Soviet Baltic Fleet there?"
"Yes, Prime Minister."
"Well, I don't want to."
"Yes, Prime Minister!"
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
I'd imagine it has to do with Turkey and the Armenian genocide, which would be an obstacle for Swedish membership.
Ah, well, I have a feeling that Turkey could get over it, maybe without having to be strong-armed into allowing it by some of NATO's bigger fish.
I see that your endgame now is building to Sweden in the modern day being seen as this badass country that gave the Soviets a bloody nose at the apparent height of their power
In regard to whether the Swedes consider the Armenian Genocide to happen, thus leading to Turkey vetoing entrance into NATO...
This is going to be even worse disaster for USSR with many ways. Sweden is more stable, its government is universally accepted and for Soviets there is very few if all of support. And the countries have not even common land border.
Just wondering will Ustinov be kicked from his office when Soviets realise how stupid idea this was.
And I expect an international shitstorm against the Soviets, the NATO almost certainly is putting its forces on alert as if they attacked neutral Sweden it is fair to assume NATO is worried this hostility could lead to an attack against Germany. Or the GIUK gap could become hot for subs. Main concern intelligence wise is this could be an atmosphere for a coup in Moscow if the war goes bad.
Finland put her forces on alert the minute the war started. Probably worried the Soviets will invade them again, plenty people who fought the Soviets in the Winter War are still alive at that time.
In the Pacific, Japan and South Korea would be worried as Soviet subs pass through or close to them. This conflict may get bad if the OTL plane crash that wiped out the Soviet Pacific fleet still occurred.
The Chinese will be watching closely.
Soviet allies may, quietly, wonder did Andropov and the Politburo in Moscow loose their minds?
But diplomatically, expect sanctions and a ceasing of all grain imports to the USSR until hostilities stop.
Finland put her forces on alert the minute the war started. Probably worried the Soviets will invade them again, plenty people who fought the Soviets in the Winter War are still alive at that time.
In the Pacific, Japan and South Korea would be worried as Soviet subs pass through or close to them. This conflict may get bad if the OTL plane crash that wiped out the Soviet Pacific fleet still occurred.
The Chinese will be watching closely.
Soviet allies may, quietly, wonder did Andropov and the Politburo in Moscow loose their minds?
But diplomatically, expect sanctions and a ceasing of all grain imports to the USSR until hostilities stop.
I think this episode demonstrates the Russian historical tendency to use brute force, given that the Soviets see 1000+ dead Swedish civilians and troops as 'proportionate force' for a crew of 60+ submariners alive in custody.
Indeed, an attack on Sweden, regarded as a Western, European democracy is going to go down worse than Afghanistan 1979 IOTL.
Indeed, an attack on Sweden, regarded as a Western, European democracy is going to go down worse than Afghanistan 1979 IOTL.
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And to be precise, the big fear of the Finnish government would, in this situation, be the initiation of security consultations as per the Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1948, possibly followed by demands to allow Soviet forces to enter and use Finnish territory. (See the Note Crisis of 1961) That was the nightmare scenario for Finns during the Cold War, and the whole of Finnish cold war security and foreign policy was built around the central purpose of avoiding that scenario.
I see an advantage to the Soviet Air Force to run over Finnish Territory. I don't think there is an advantage to either the Soviet Navy or Soviet Army. (With sabotage on the road/rail along the Gulf of Bothnia (the northern end of the Baltic), the Soviet Army would get there *after* the peace treaty had already been signed.)
Situation is not really easy for Finland. Soviets probably will ask firstly politely if they could send troops to Northern Sweden through Lapland. Finnish government surely wants stay out and offers mediation between Soviet Union and Sweden. Soviets might anyway think that Finland is betraying treaties and then there is Second Winter War. Probably Russians had already better air forces than Finns but not idea about land forces. But probably their qualifities were closer of each others than in 1939/1940.
And such war would make any "friendship treaty" with Soviet Union very unpopular.
It doesn’t help either that October 28th 1981 was in OTL the day Urho Kekkonen tendered his resignation as his health started failing, so Finland is a bit like a ship without its captain here
I don't think the particularly cautious (as described by the author) leader of the Soviet Union, who is already broaching the idea of a ceasefire with Sweden, is ever going to intentionally make a problem with Finland now. That being said, overzealous/idiotic/fucking insane subordinates way down the command ladder somehow instigating a border war is not outside the realm of plausibility and would just be icing on an already shit covered cake that the USSR is looking at on its plate right now 
That's my read on Andropov, at least. Cautious =/= moderate, he was 100% a hardliner of the Brezhnev school, but everything I've read on Andropov suggests a man who did not make rash decisions, contemplated his moves carefully (he was by some accounts opposed to entering Afghanistan), and was fairly sanguine about some of the issues facing the USSR post-Brezhnev and open to ideas on how to sustain the system via reforms, rather than pursue reforms to change the system a la Gorbachev.I don't think the particularly cautious (as described by the author) leader of the Soviet Union, who is already broaching the idea of a ceasefire with Sweden, is ever going to intentionally make a problem with Finland now. That being said, overzealous/idiotic/fucking insane subordinates way down the command ladder somehow instigating a border war is not outside the realm of plausibility and would just be icing on an already shit covered cake that the USSR is looking at on its plate right now
In other words, not somebody who wants to let a stupid shooting war with Sweden escalate further than it has to, but also has a lot of personalities in the Politburo (Suslov, Ustinov, Grishin, Chernenko come to mind...) he needs to manage and keep happy
The Soviet-Swedish War - Part II
The Soviet-Swedish War - Part II
Across Europe the morning of October 28, 1981, the feared scenario that leaders had gone to bed worrying about had materialized - the Soviet Air Force had launched precision strikes across southern Sweden, targeting military infrastructure with a particular focus on Karlskrona and her environs, and left perhaps as many as a thousand dead. As midday approached, American leadership was rustled awake early in the morning in DC and Secretary of State Katzenbach put on a plane to Brussels as a show of solidarity with NATO, but it would be hours until he touched down in Europe in the evening. It was immediately unclear what, exactly, Moscow intended to do next.
The uncomfortable truth was that Moscow didn't quite know either. Andropov had had to be talked into the "bloody nose" to begin with and was fuming at Ustinov and, to a lesser extent, Mikhail Suslov for assuring him that Sweden would fold immediately. The Baltic Fleet was now out of port, heading towards Gotland, and an even larger wave of fighters and bombers being fueled and armed to be put on standby in Estonia, Kaliningrad and East Germany. Sweden had very loudly refused to cooperate with Ustinov's vision of a quick strike that would leave them reeling and Moscow looking confident and triumphant, and now it was unclear how, exactly, the two sides would deescalate without grievously losing face. It was the USSR that had snuck a sub into neutral waters and had it run aground, after all, and according to Swedish claims being aggressively announced around the world it had been Soviet sailors who opened fire first while trying to destroy sensitive onboard equipment, and now the Soviet Union had dramatically escalated by bombing merely a day after the incident had begun.
Ustinov proposed an even more aggressive course of action. The Baltic Fleet would attack the Swedish Navy and sink it, under cover of air power that would strike at Flygvapnet bases across Sweden, with particular focus on the Uppland Wing outside of Uppsala [1] that was position to defend the capital at Stockholm and Sweden's chief international airport at Arlanda, roughly halfway between the two major cities, as well as strategic rail and air assets across Lappland, which were to close to comfort to Murmansk. Additional strikes would be concentrated on the island of Gotland, a major point of defense for the Swedish coast, and Ustinov was confident that a regiment of paratroopers could be put ashore there by November 1st at the earliest. Once Gotland was captured, the Soviets would offer its return as a trade for its forty men. Ustinov boasted that the Swedes were soft and would never threaten the physical safety of the captured sailors, and that continued attacks would bring them quickly to heel.
Andropov was less certain. His immediate successor at the KGB, Vitaly Fedorchuk (now Minister of the Interior), and the current chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, were more focused on internal matters but nonetheless had plenty of good contacts across Europe, particularly in France. Of the "Big Three" of Britain, France and West Germany, it was Valery Giscard d'Estaing who was thought of as the most sympathetic to the USSR and thus his Presidential administration, particularly after the hectic election in France earlier that year, that was most sluiced through with Soviet spies; that France was independent of NATO central command authority also left if more exposed to infiltration, as did the massive Russian emigre community in Paris. Andropov had thus over the last eighteen months, particularly after the election of the rabidly anti-communist "Sauerkraut Nixon" of Franz-Josef Strauss in Germany, come to regard his cadre of spies on French soil as a good barometer of NATO leadership's thinking. By the early afternoon of October 28th, his highest-level spy in France - code-named "Paul" and to this day unidentified but believed to be extremely close to Giscard - reported that French political opinion, even amongst the Eurocommunist Parti Communiste Francaise, was firmly against Moscow's attack on southern Sweden. Giscard had apparently already spoken with both Denis Healy and Strauss multiple times over the morning and put French forces on high alert; the Royal Navy was scrambling to move assets to Denmark perhaps as early as the middle of the night.
The attacks on Sweden had badly spooked NATO, which had been watching events in Poland with trepidation as it was. The Carey administration was somewhat less concerned than their European counterparts - even the staunchly Polish-born, anti-Soviet Zbigniew Brzeninski was fairly confident that the action over the Baltic was neither a prelude to World War III or even a Soviet intervention into Poland, even though he was still of the mind that the latter was coming within the next ninety days - but nonetheless, Carey raised the alert level to DEFCON 3 and placed at least interceptors at RAF Lakenheath in England on standby. By early afternoon, after several hotline calls between NATO leaders and with much of the Flygvapnet airborne in anticipation of a second wave, most NATO members had placed their ground and air forces on alert, and the entire alliance stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a clear message: that the USSR's attack on Sweden was an unprovoked act of aggression, and Stockholm may not enjoy the military support of NATO, but it did enjoy its political and, if push came to shove, economic backing.
In Finland, caught between the two warring powers, the crisis struck on perhaps the worst possible day - October 26th was the day that Urho Kekkonen, the country's long-serving and fairly autocratic President, had finally announced his resignation, which would take effect no later than January. Kekkonen's physical and political decline had been clear for some years but it was not until he stared down his Prime Minister Mauno Koivisto, and lost, that it really came about that his resignation would be inevitable. Though he had been on leave since September and Finnish politics was swirling with speculation that he would leave, 10/26/81 had made it official that an era of Finnish history was ending and a newer, hopefully more pluralistically democratic one was beginning. [2] This was important because Kekkonen had always been fairly pro-Soviet, or at least conscientious of Soviet demands in his management of foreign policy, hence the existence of the term "Finlandization." His imminent exit right as Northern Europe plunged into its most severe crisis since World War II created a huge gaping hole in terms of what both Moscow and Helsinki could expect; the Prime Minister Koivisto, and Kekkonen's chief rival and likeliest successor, was a Social Democrat but one thought to be fairly hostile to the USSR, who had recently referred to Soviet-Finnish relations as "nothing to boast about." On his second day as Acting President, Koivisto was suddenly handed a live grenade both in relations with Europe and with Finland's large, demanding neighbor, and he made the fateful decision within hours to announce that Finland's neutral position was "resolute" and that while Finland would not hinder Soviet activities "in any conflict," it would also not "abet them." For Koivisto, such a gamble had major upsides: it established him as his own man in contrast to Kekkonen, it presumed that Moscow didn't want any further escalations with neighboring states, and it got ahead of the nightmare scenario of Finnish politics - a repeat of the Note Crisis of October 1961, exactly twenty years earlier, in which the Soviets demanded security consultations. That said, the message seemed fairly clear to Andropov in a different way outside of the context of domestic Finnish concerns: Helsinki was a potential problem in case Ustinov wanted to send air strikes through Finnish airspace, though to what extent was unclear. Chebrikov was not a fan of such lack of clarity and immediately had KGB agents in Helsinki, who operated with much more openness and impunity than essentially anywhere outside of the Iron Curtain, start feeling out more pro-Soviet politicians and, critically, soldiers in Finland who were not on "the Koivisto Line."
The 28th was thus a day of deep, drawn breaths as the world waited to see what would come next. Soldiers on either side of the fence in Berlin and the German internal border tensed up; troops across Europe wondered if this was "the big dance" they had been dreading for years. Was Andropov really mad enough to launch another attack, having already made his point? Who, exactly, was in charge in the Kremlin? The answer arrived soon enough. Thanks to the reasonable anticipation that many fighters would need to come down to refuel relatively soon after being airborne much of the day, at 1530 in the afternoon NATO reporting stations frantically informed Sweden that Soviet contacts, some above radar level, were over the Baltic Sea again.
The second wave of airstrikes was coming.
[1] My dad's hometown
[2] This is not to say that Kekkonen was a dictator, because he wasn't, but mid-century European politics were a lot more complicated than "Western = democracy, Eastern = communist" binaries. De Gaulle and the multitude of near-miss coups in France is another good example of this.
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Feels like 99 times out of a hundred when someone says something like this it ends up blowing up in their face in a spectacular fashion.