Recent content by Aelita

If there's meant to be an image there I am not seeing it

Since the timeline recently got mentioned on an Alternate History Hub youtube video, I decided to make a final little update for the AH.com version of Reds! A few years ago, some of my cowriters convinced me to begin cross-posting the timeline on the forum Sufficient Velocity to support the...

Since the timeline recently got mentioned on an Alternate History Hub youtube video, I decided to make a final little update for the AH.com version of Reds! A few years ago, some of my cowriters convinced me to begin cross-posting the timeline on the forum Sufficient Velocity to support the...

While the USSR was implementing collectivization, millions of African Americans lived in a system of state sponsored debt peonage as sharecroppers on large estates. Attempts by tenant farmers to organize together to get out of the debt peonage trap were met with both crackdowns by the local...

Export what to who? Everytime this comes up, it's treated like a magical panacea. The PRC's export based economic growth owes directly to the US allying with the PRC against the Soviets. It was that political rapproachment that enabled bilateral trade agreements, and in turn this was a...

Those huge commercial farms exist because of accumulation by dispossession. Millions of people had to be financially ruined and be forced to sell their land, either becoming migrant farmworkers or moving to cities to look for work. The government had a role in this social violence, enforcing the...

Aside from the famine caused during the First Five Year Plan, agricultural production had increased in the Soviet Union post collectivization. It came with mechanization, irrigation projects, and the utilization of more modern farming techniques. The question of the devil's pact is an entirely...

Probably not, but he was hardly alone in that decision by virtue of the people who survived the Great Purge were all people who had similar political instincts and strategies to him. But the Great Break was not some random affectation of Stalin. Stalin became paramount leader precisely by...

That's not what I said. The USSR was devastated by the First World War and the Civil War. They had over a decade of lost growth, with most industrial production only reaching pre-WW1 levels in like 1926. They had no stable trade relations, and had to forge them with powers that were all much...

They were trying that already. You can't conjure steel mills out of thin air. The capital goods and technical know how had to be acquired somehow, and the only way to do that was hard currency. They got that hard currency through exports of raw materials, especially agricultural products but...

Industrial warfare is fought with industrial goods. Coal and iron ore to make steel. Steel to make guns, tanks and trucks. Aluminum to make aircraft, and engines. Copper for electrical equipment. Oil and chemical plants to produce explosives. These things things are made possible, in the USSR...

All of the conciliatory measures that Stalin made to the West changed literally nothing. Stalin abandoned all pretense of proletarian internationalism. He ordered communist militants to stand down in all the areas outside of the areas outside of the sphere of influence that had been negotiated...

Roles that were taken by professional enlisted in the USN were taken by warrant and commissioned officers in the VMF. Something the Soviet Union had no shortage of with its comprehensive military education complex. You're comparing apples to oranges. The VMF was not meant to contest the rule...

It took me a very long time to pull the trigger on this one. I wanted her, essentially the TL mascot and "main character" to be more than just a passive witness to the horrors of the Eastern Front, but I struggled with a way to frame it that wouldn't be prurient.

“The Unwomanly Face of War” Content warning: post-traumatic stress, war crimes, sexual violence It’s July 1941 and I’ve been ordered to present myself for medical examination. It was ridiculous, but I am a soldier and I follow orders. “Come this way Mrs.--” “Lieutenant Schafer,” I said...