Soviet Invasion Novels/Movies/Games

edvader

Here are some more:The Day the Communists took over America, and Point Ultimate.Don't remember much about the first one, but in the second one the hero gets away from the Commies and their American stooges and is put on a spaceship which takes free Americans to Mars.Hero thinks he and his descendants will be back to face the commies!
 

Jesse

Ivan Druzhkov said:
I do have this link for a bibliography Nuclear Holocausts in Fiction, and there are a few titles that deal more with a Soviet conquest than the nukes themselves. I've already got If All The Rebels Die by Samuel Southwell on order from Amazon.
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I assume this is the bibliography you're talking about? Skimming through the "S" section, I spotted another Soviet-occupation novel:
Southwell, Samuel B[eall]. If All the Rebels Die. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, l966. New York: Avon, l968.
The U.S. surrenders to the Soviet Union after a nuclear exchange and is occupied by enemy troops. America is forced to disarm itself of nuclear weapons. Washington D.C., and many other cities are spared because the Russians aim at conquest rather than mere annihilation. The novel is set in Texas, where a local oil millionaire organizes aid and resistance until he is arrested and shot. The protagonist is a professor at a Texas college who overcomes his liberal scruples and those of his colleagues to become a local leader in the underground resistance struggle, coordinated nationwide into an eventually successful revolt. The Russian occupation is ruthless: everyone must register, a curfew is imposed, the young are drafted into forced-labor brigades, all business and industry is nationalized, guns are confiscated as well as second cars; deformed children and the insane are killed, birth control is prevented; censorship is imposed; the colleges are controlled; Marxist study groups are set up; exemplary killings of citizens in reprisal for attacks on Russians are carried out; a Babi Yar-style mass execution is perpetrated, and food is exported from the U.S. to Russia while Americans are fed contaminated meat and vegetables. It is pointed out unlikely the Russians will respond to a rebellion by massive bombing of the cities since too many of their own troops are stationed there.

Most of the book consists of a very detailed and fairly convincing account of the building of a resistance movement. The objections of intellectuals and ordinary citizens who find resistance distasteful are mercilessly satirized, although the novel is not simplistically one-sided. The conclusion is ambiguous: the rebellion seems to be successful, but the last scene depicts the protagonist dying in guilt and despair as he realizes that he has failed to prevent the deaths by nuclear bomb (triggered by the resistance to kill enemy troops) of thousands of teenagers left behind in the evacuated city. He is blinded by the bomb blast just before being shot. His wife is depicted as hysterically foolish, his son and daughter as heroic. Comparable in theme to C. M. Kornbluth's much better known Not This August, but Southwell's book is superior on several counts: it is much more sophisticated about Russia and communism (although still clearly quite biased); it explores the reactions of people to the occupation in a far more detailed, complex, and credible manner; and it takes seriously the moral ambiguities involved in a ruthless resistance struggle.
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the book is available used from amazon for $2.50...
 

Jesse

Here's an extremely schlocky-sounding entry from the "S" section of the nuclear holocaust bibliography:
Stacy, Ryder. Doomsday Warrior. New York: Zebra, 1984
Yet another blood-and-thunder anti-Red combat novel from Zebra. In 2089, one hundred years after a panicky Russian first strike on September 11, 1989, hero Ted "Rock" Rockson, the "ultimate American," leads his band of resistance fighters against the evil Russian occupation forces who indulge in all manner of tortures, including the use of a laser brain-burning device. Conflict between the KGB and the Party is a prominent theme. The Earth's axis has been tipped and 90 percent of all plant and animal species are extinct. Most of the rest have mutated. Ninety million Russians died in the attack that even more severely devastated the U.S. Russian Star Wars technology destroyed most incoming missiles; only twenty-four got through. Cities with large black populations were especially targeted, because the Soviets knew that blacks would make formidable resistance fighters. Radioactive "acid storms" wreak havoc. Contains the most stupid fallout shelter ever depicted: a vast underground city was created by trapped commuters in a highway tunnel outside Denver when it was bombed shut. The novel ends with a particle beam weapon being used to defeat a party of Russians.
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The page also lists a bunch of even sillier-sounding sequels (in one the hero fights a mutant Plesiosaurus!)

And here's another one from the "S" section, written by the physicist Leo Szilard, who worked on the Manhattan Project:
"My Trial as a War Criminal" (University of Chicago Law Review, Fall l949). In The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories. New York: Simon & Schuster, l96l. London: Gollancz, l96l. London: Sphere, l967. Also in Judith Merril, ed. 7th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F. New York: Simon & Schuster, l962. New York: Dell, l963. As The Best of Science Fiction 2. London: Mayflower, l964.
After the Russians conquer the U.S. with bacteriological warfare, all of the scientists who worked on the nuclear bomb are arrested and brought to trial under the principles enunciated at Nuremberg. Szilard's defense is ineffectual, but the trial comes abruptly to a halt when the Russians prove not to be immune to the virus they have unleashed against America.
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Jesse

Jesse said:
Here's an amazon.com list titled "The Soviets are coming!", which includes a bunch of books about Soviet invasions/occupations of western europe:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/281AFG778EJG0/102-2471203-3577760
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Looking over the books on this list, I noticed that one of them, the "future history" Third World War August 1985, written in 1978 by "General Sir John Hackett and other top-ranking NATO generals and advisors", also had a sequel titled Third World War: The Untold Story.
 

Ivan Druzhkov

Thank you, everyone.

Adding to that point about the glut of these stories in the 1980's, I've also noticed that a lot more of this stuff has come from the 1980's than in the other big anti-communist decade, the 1950's. Does this actually mean something, or is the stuff from the 1980's too recent to have quietly disppeared?
 

hoefrh

more books

Eric l. Harry wrote 3 books:

Arc Light
Protect & Defend
Invasion (ok, not a Russian one but a chinese invasion of th us of a)
 

BurningWickerman

Ivan Druzhkov said:
Thank you, everyone.

Adding to that point about the glut of these stories in the 1980's, I've also noticed that a lot more of this stuff has come from the 1980's than in the other big anti-communist decade, the 1950's. Does this actually mean something, or is the stuff from the 1980's too recent to have quietly disppeared?
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Reagan and Thatcher were in power. Thus new wave of cold war paranioa
 

Ivan Druzhkov

I've just managed to acquire a book entitled USSA by David Madsen. Much to my surprise, it is NOT about a Soviet America, but rather a Soviet Union under occupation by the United States! I might as well keep it, just for the novelty value.
 

Peter Cowan

Two others worth considering

Shelford Bidwell - World War Three - this dates from the early 1980s and is a sort of anti-Sir John Hackett view of the war. In this scenario, the Germans decide to research nukes which leads to a Soviet invasion.

Most European powers try to stay out, the British government ordering its troops to remain in barracks. Of course, things don't quite got to plan and as the Soviets open fire on the British,they retaliate. Finally, a British commander uses tactical nukes on a soviet spearhead which rapidly escalates the war to the point of a mutual strategic exchange.


The other

The War that never was - Michael Palmer

This concentrates on the peripheries, Norway and the Balkans with naval/air operations being emphasised. It reads a bit like playing GDW's Arctic Front and Southern Front while (almost) ignoring the main game in Germany.

Both books are out of print but available on Amazon
 

Melvin Loh

TEAM YANKEE

guys, don't forget Harold Coyle's TEAM YANKEE, which IIRC was partially based on THE 3RD WORLD WAR. and of course on the old board I posted about THE WORLDWAR, a fictional AH documentary that came out in 1999 about an alternate 1989 where Soviet hardliners oust Gorbachev and launch a mass Red Army invasion of Germany, resulting in MAD. The PA genre BLADE series by David Robbins and the DEATHLANDS series by James Axtell (?) also involve some stories where there are regions occupied in post-Holocaust America by Soviet invaders.
 

Ivan Druzhkov

Jesse said:
I assume this is the bibliography you're talking about? Skimming through the "S" section, I spotted another Soviet-occupation novel: the book is available used from amazon for $2.50...
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I just finished If All the Rebels Die yesterday. It was actually a pretty good entry. Granted, I wasn't thrilled with the construction of the author's prose, but he actually did make an effort to create multidimensional characters, which is something you don't see often in this subgenre.

Well, off to Amerika I go!
 

ComradeFlyer

I've always enjoy Ralph Peters' Red Army. It follows a Soviet invasion on West Germany. What I found most interesting, it is told entirely from the Soviet perspective.
 
AlanJWhite

AlanJWhite

AFAIK the only really pausible one is

Red Army by Ralphs Peters

(unless you count the alternative end in the THird World War)
 

edvader

Read this in the fifties:Theodora Dubois' Solution 235(title?)Commies take over the US and americans come up with a chemical which when ingested turns the commies into someone out of a Chekhov play-useless and harmless.Villaness named Olga wants to murder some american kids and is eventually disposed of!U.S. wins, BTW.
 

Jesse

Melvin Loh said:
guys, don't forget Harold Coyle's TEAM YANKEE, which IIRC was partially based on THE 3RD WORLD WAR. and of course on the old board I posted about THE WORLDWAR, a fictional AH documentary that came out in 1999 about an alternate 1989 where Soviet hardliners oust Gorbachev and launch a mass Red Army invasion of Germany, resulting in MAD.
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Does anyone have any more information on the AH documentary "The World War" mentioned here by Melvin Loh? Aside from another mention on this alternatehistory.com thread (where Melvin Loh mentions it had the alternate title "Der Weltkrieg") and this one (where he says it came out in 1998, not 1999 as above, and mattep74 mentions it used to appear on Discovery) I couldn't find anything about it on google or imdb...unfortunately the generic title makes it very hard to search for.
 
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