An Examination of Extra-Universal Systems of Government

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My ox is fine, thank you. I just am troubled when I see a seemingly sensible poster getting all huffy and injured about nothing - is this the start of a long, sad descent into banning? Hopefully they just used rough toilet paper today or something.

Bruce

Yes, I realize your own ox isn't being gored. That was the point.

Dunno if I call you a sensible poster--your scenarios are too original and fun to be the product of a wholly balanced mind--but fwiw I doubt that your overreaction to one off-hand line of feedback is an omen of progress towards your getting banned. Just to be safe, though, I recommend bidets.
 
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Interesting. Of course, White Russia in 1918-1919 didn't have a vast overseas empire of military bases...

(I see the AOR includes a Republican party, so I imagine this isn't supposed to be a possible future. :p )

Bruce

I'm glad you like it.:)

No it's not really meant as a possible or likely future, although it stands to reason that just as liberal moderates fled the communists you would have conservative moderates fleeing right-wing extremists.

The scenario isn't 100% plausible, but as I see it the multiverse is infinite so all implausible scenarios exist somewhere. I just wanted to explore the AOR.

the base idea is really cool

Thank you.:)

but its hard to see how you could have such a significant divergence between the homefront and the homefront military and the troops and embassies abroad such that the folks abroad near-universally decide to go it alone.

I figured that the revolutionaries focused on recruiting military personnel stateside rather than those overseas for practical reasons. Also the Americans abroad did not join the AOR with anything near universality, as my post mentions most of those in Africa and the Middle East either became loyal to the new government or just didn't join the Republic.

It's also oddly American-exceptionalist: it tends to assume that America is evolving in this really weird direction but the rest of the world remains pretty much the same kind of place.

Well my focus for the update was on the American Overseas Republic, and I largely ignored the rest of the world. The rest of it changed as well- particularly after the revolution- but I didn't talk about that.

Really, it sounds like an ISOT scenario where the mainland US was suddenly replaced by some kind of US from another TL that is still recognizably American in some way but pretty divergent from what OTL is comfortable with.

You're right for a reason, when I first conceived of the AOR I was sitting on a bench in Bayeaux wondering what would happen if the EU were ISOTed to an ATL. Of course I couldn't include something so blatantly ASB ITTL, so I altered the scenario a bit.

Also, specifying that the coup was 'right-wing' was an egregious political shot. I don't want to get into details, but thinking that the right wing is uniquely prone to extraconstitutional violence is a baseless slur.

After looking back over this thread I can certainly see how it would look that way. What I was trying to do was have a reflection of the Russian Revolution- instead of conservatives fleeing a left-wing revolution I thought it might be amusing to have liberals fleeing a right-wing revolution. Certainly extremists on either the left or right are capable of extraconstitutional violence and establishing dictatorships, my goal was not to make any political shots. I have edited my post to remove the 'right-wing' reference and make the ideology of the revolutionaries more open to interpretation by the reader.

A very interesting concept.

Thanks.:)

A very interesting take on the common "United States goes crazy" scenario. You've managed to take a somewhat tired and cliche scenario and make it something new and refreshing. I expected more global instability, though, or did that happen and it's just not the focus of the piece?

Well I do try, *bows*.:p

There was a great deal of global instability, the creation of the AOR was itself intended to help mitigate that. I just really didn't touch on it. At the current time there's a three-way cold war going on between the EU, China, and the USA with Russia playing everyone off against each other. Plenty of senseless violence.

Interesting, I see you've been thinking about the Hesperia idea that I talked when we met up last year.

Remind me what that idea was again?

It's good to see this come back, regardless of political bent.

And it isn't going away. The next update will be a country in the Middle East as soon as I find time to write it (I may do a Zion Lies West update first).

In the meantime please check out my dark hard fantasy TL over on the ASB forum as it is updating daily and could use more comments!

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=210317
 
Somewhat similar to this concept, but with a later start date, the revolution having a different political orientation, and the civil war being much larger, longer, and bloodier.

Would you believe that I've actually forgotten about that idea completely?:p

Very interesting update, Ephraim!:)
What would be the AOR's support inside the USA proper?

Thanks.:)

Limited. The revolutionary government has done a fairly good job of stamping out dissident groups backed by the AOR and there's a significant resistance by American organizations that reject the AOR on the grounds that the Republic is just an EU pawn (which in some ways it is). How much anti-Communist support existed in the USSR during the Cold War? It's more than that but not much.

Speaking of which, here is a belated map and flag for the AOR.

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Sovereign Association of the Great Bitter Lake

The Motor Ship Melampus is an aging former cargo ship that first entered use in the 1960s- although her current function is no doubt far from what her one-time owners envisioned. Decades of sand blowing from the Egyptian desert have rendered her a uniformly yellow color, except for where the bright outlines of artwork and murals stand out from her sides and structure. It is evident that a restoration project is ongoing, there are catwalks along the Melampus’ sides and those of her thirteen sisters and there are divers busy at work in the water. I step off the long pier that was constructed in the late 70s to facilitate movement to and from the ship and I am onboard.

It is crowded, little has ever been done to regulate the habitation of the ship beyond communal efforts to clean up garbage and maintain facilities, the former cargo hold is a riot of people crowded together with a density similar to that of Kowloon. There are roughly six hundred people living on the MS Melampus, in apartments made by marking off the interior of shipping containers or in tents set up on unclaimed bits of floor. In one out of the way corner a tie-dye clad young woman is selling candles and marijuana, and also brightly colored handkerchiefs. I trade a pair of sunglasses for half a dozen handkerchiefs and a chance to talk.

“So you’re from another universe? That’s groovy.” I can follow the young woman’s dialect of English fairly well and I guess that she’s American, but she shakes her head.

“I’m a person.” She tells me. “Not an American. National identities were invented by The Man to split people up and make them easy to finger. But I bugged out of there- got enlightened before Ed’s Boys got too hacked at me.”

Why come to the Bitter Lake?

“Why the fuck not?” She laughs. “It’s the blueprint, the outline for the world!” She says something in Esperanto that I’m unable to follow. “Dig it?”

Not so much.

“There’s people in the YF from a hundred so-called “countries”, praying to their own little tin gods, and everyone’s just hanging easy. We can lay it on each other without fighting, without money, without any of that junk. Righteous, isn’t it?”

I’m not really sure how to respond to that one.

“The point is.” The Bitter Laker explains, “that if we can do it why can’t everyone? Why can’t the world just hang loose?”

The Sovereign Association of the Great Bitter Lake has its origins in fifteen civilian cargo ships that had the misfortune to be passing through the Suez Canal (connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea) between June 5th and June 10th in 1967 when war erupted between the State of Israel and the United Arab Republic, Syria, and Jordan. The canal was closed- temporarily it was intended for the duration of the conflict. However as the Israeli army advanced through the Sinai desert the UAR realized that they might not be able to hold what was one of the most strategically important waterways in the world. In order to prevent Israel from getting any use out of it, ships were sunk at both ends of the canal, along with bridges, dredges, and other floating craft. Large numbers of mines were laid and all possible measures were taken to deny the Suez Canal to the enemy. When the Six-Day War ended it did so with Israel on one side of the canal, the United Arab Republic on the other, and the canal itself as no-man’s land separating them. A war of attrition subsequently commenced between the two countries, with sporadic clashes between their respective armies.

It was clear that the channel would not be opened again any time soon and the fifteen ships who had been passing through it were trapped. Other than one vessel that was caught in Lake Timsah by obstructions, the ships anchored in the Great Bitter Lake which was the widest part of the canal to wait. And wait. After four months had passed the captains and crew of the ships of eight nations belonging to opposing geopolitical alliances, met onboard the MS Melampus and founded the precursor to the SAGBL, the Great Bitter Lake Association to assist each other. The GBLA organized communal events, including picnics, yacht races, football games, and church services. Movies were screened and in 1968 the Great Bitter Lake Olympic Games were held parallel to the World Olympics. Handmade stamps issued by the Association were recognized by UAR authorities and thus subsequently by postal authorities worldwide. Gradually however, as it became clear that the issue would not be resolved soon, the ships’ crews were increasingly withdrawn by the companies who owned them. The truncated Association survived, but in much smaller numbers. The ships became known as the “Yellow Fleet” after the blowing desert sand that gradually colored them yellow.

In 1971 the UAR underwent a change of leadership that saw it replaced by the Republic of Egypt. The new President, Anwar el-Sadat clamped down on the leftist supporters of the former government, realigning Egypt geopolitically. He supported the country’s Islamist movement and later in the same year a group of about a hundred pro-socialist officers and enlisted men in the Suez contingent of the Egyptian Army fled in fear that they were about to be purged by Sadat. Initially they had planned to defect to the Soviet Embassy, but their plans were discovered and they ended up fleeing to the Yellow Fleet. The remaining civilian crewmen of the ships were in no position to refuse the Egyptians who claimed asylum onboard the Bulgarian, Polish, and Czechoslovakian ships.

The communist governments under which those ships were registered announced their willingness to allow the defectors to remain, as they (and their hegemon the Soviet Union) were unhappy with Egypt’s switch from left-wing to right-wing. When Sadat made moves to potentially occupy the Fleet he faced widespread protest by the Communist Block and by the western governments (including the United States) whose ships made up the majority of the Yellow Fleet. Notably Israel indicated that it would resist any moves by Cairo to expand its military presence in the canal by force. As a result the status quo remained, with Israel and Egypt continuing to spar and the socialists safe. The defectors participated in the GBLA, revitalizing it by virtue of their numbers, and developing permanent habitations as unlike the original ships’ crews they could not leave. They also operated an anti-Sadat radio station that broadcast from the MS Lednice and moved between both Eastern and Western flagged components of the fleet. Egypt withdrew its recognition of Association stamps and refused to allow relief for the crews to pass through its territory, as a consequence Israel extended recognition to GBLA stamps and permitted Yellow Fleet personnel to pass through the Israeli-occupied Sinai. The left-wing governments of Iraq and Syria similarly made gestures of support towards the Great Bitter Lake Association as they now fell on the other side of the communist/capitalist divide.

Both countries would set aside that division two years later in 1973 when a coalition of six Arab countries with support from the USSR attacked the State of Israel on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Egyptian forces smashed through Israeli lines at the canal and advanced virtually unopposed into the Sinai desert. Once there they discovered large numbers of Israeli civilians who had moved in to settle the region after 1967 and founded a number of communities. Some of these communities fled east with their country’s army, others were occupied and poorly treated by the Egyptian government. The town of Yosef Ramon existed only a few kilometers inland from the canal, where it had provided services for the Israeli troops stationed nearby and established a small farm. Cut off by approaching Egyptian forces the better part of Yosef Ramon’s population (mostly women and children as the men had been drafted) fled south and west to the Bitter Lake. Despite initial resistance by the previous Egyptian defectors who now made up the majority of the Yellow Fleet’s inhabitants, the mostly civilian refugees were allowed onto the American and British ships where they took up residence. Although Sadat considered occupying the Fleet again, he refrained due to threats by the United States to supply Israel with military supplies if the neutrality of the Great Bitter Lake Association were violated.

It is unlikely that America would have actually carried out this threat as the European countries had stated their unwillingness to permit American supply planes to use their airfields in such an operation, but it was sufficient to convince Sadat to back down. Although Israel was able to establish a temporary stalemate, shortages of ammunition saw their forces forced on the defensive and on October 18, facing utter disaster in the field and its possible destruction, the Israeli government authorized the use of a 20 kiloton tactical nuclear device on the advancing Egyptian troops. In the aftermath both the United States and the Soviet Union (who feared that this might lead to a greater nuclear war between the major powers) forced a ceasefire and an armistice that left Syria controlling the Golan heights, Jordan with a strip of territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt holding once again the Sinai peninsula.

For the Association and the Yellow Fleet this meant trying times. The Siege of the Great Bitter Lake, undertaken by the Egyptian government, involved an attempt to totally isolate the fourteen ships and their inhabitants. Members of the neutral crews were permitted to leave but not to return and the companies that owned the ships ordered their personnel to return home. A surprising number stayed with the refugees and defectors who were trapped their, including a significant portion of the remaining communist block ships. Food and medical supplies were not permitted to pass to the Fleet, nor was any communication allowed in or out. Efforts to reopen the canal were halted by fears of sparking a new confrontation and it remained closed, despite Sadat’s admitted desire to clear it.

To the Zionist Israelis and the Nasserite Egyptians their acquaintance was an unusual one. Initially the hostility had been overwhelming and there had even been incidents of physical violence. With prolonged contact however the two groups came to tolerate each other, and with the beginning of the Siege they found that they were literally in the same boat. They co-operated to produce fresh water and to ration food and to cultivate a number of gardens throughout the Fleet. Relying on Israeli seeds and agricultural expertise and Egyptian labor they worked to supplement their limited supplies and increasingly became the focus of the community’s existence. Toleration turned into respect which turned into genuine friendship, particularly where the children were concerned and the two groups came together. They caught fish that passed through the canal where ships could no longer go, and survived for the next year until sufficient pressure on the Egyptian government forced it to permit the Red Cross to bring emergency supplies to the Yellow Fleet. But in that time the Great Bitter Lake Association had become something much more serious than it had been previously.

To call it a government would be a bit of a stretch, there was no official leader and communal decisions were made communally. But it was more than just a group of people trying to wile away the months. In 1978 the Fourth Israeli Arab War saw the Sinai back in Israeli hands and some of the Association’s Israelis left, others however, stayed as they disagreed with the right-wing government that had taken power in Jerusalem since the last war and preferred to remain outside its influence. World attention was riveted to the Yellow Fleet again, at a time when Jewish-Muslim conflict was at its bitterest it was an example of a place where members of both faiths lived in harmony. Immigrants began arriving, primarily young people who belonged to the counter-culture movements in Europe and America. They were welcomed by the Bitter Lakers and the population of the Yellow Fleet grew as peaceniks and hippies made their homes in the aging ships. The original owners of the Western ships finally gave them up as lost and transferred ownership officially over to the Great Bitter Lake Association- now a loose organization of 700-odd people from dozens of different countries speaking dozens of different languages. Most of the immigrants left after a while or simply came to visit, but others remained. A tourism based barter-economy slowly developed, catering to visiting radicals who supported what they hoped would become an ideal commune. A community of Esperantists developed and promoted the language.

The step from quasi-statehood to full sovereignty came in 1984 in response to the Papuan Revolution. None of the world powers were willing to recognize the rebels in West Papua, but the revolutionaries were the darling of the counterculture movement whose members now made up a majority of the members of the Great Bitter Lake Association. In a communal vote a majority of the Bitter Lakers voted to declare themselves sovereign for the purpose of extending recognition to the Republic of West Papua and the Sovereign Association of the Great Bitter Lake was born. It issued passports, certificates of citizenship, and continued to issue stamps, but attempts to issue money were defeated in several votes and the Yellow Fleet remained a currency-less society. The United Nations refused to recognize the SAGBL, and both Israel and Egypt rejected its existence, but several countries, beginning with the Republic of West Papau (later the Republic of Papau), Biafra, Ambazonia, Cuba, and the Tibetan Government-In-Exile extended recognition.

The biggest triumph of the SAGBL came with the world’s greatest tragedy. In 1985 a glitch in the Soviet computer system caused radar reports of nonexistent American ICBMs to be forwarded to the Kremlin, triggering the Third World War. A week and 20 million lives later the badly battered superpowers were unable to agree on a suitably neutral location to negotiate an armistice, until the Yellow Fleet was proposed as a place for the diplomats to meet that was neither capitalist nor communist. The nuclear war (but not the Cold War) ended onboard the MS Melampus, the Association’s unofficial capital.

Today the Sovereign Association of the Great Bitter Lake counts over 10,000 citizens hailing from all over the globe and some even born within the fleet. Donations poured in from left-wing organizations around the globe to pay for a restoration of the decaying ships and now that the Suez Canal is finally open again (bypassing the Great Bitter Lake) there is talk of brining in new ships to replace them. New immigrants replace those who leave and continue to inject fresh resources into the Association, that coupled with heavy tourism and UN aid keeps it viable. The only real government institutions of the SAGBL are its Postal Service and Foreign Affairs Co-Operative, the former continues to issue stamps and deliver letters and the latter issues passports and keeps in touch with its handful of ambassadors. Over two dozen internationally recognized countries recognize the Association, another ten unrecognized countries do and six official embassies are operated by the SAGBL with financial assistance from their host countries.

Any governing that has to be done is done in regular monthly community meetings on the Melampus in which any issues are resolved by majority vote. For serious concerns a referendum of the entire population is held, these usually occur once a year. There is still no official currency, although various different currencies may be used. Esperanto serves as an unofficial lingua franca and is spoken throughout the fleet.

“I won’t pretend that we don’t have our challenges.” Nikolas Booram is an old man, one of the few original crew members of the fourteen ships to remain and former captain of the MS Lednice. He is one of several unofficial leaders in the Association and commands a great deal of respect. “How do you organize a society with no government? But I like to think of it as trailblazing, this is what True Socialism will look like when the state whither away. We‘re just ahead of the curve.”

I ask if he’ll elaborate about some of those challenges.

“Drugs is the big one.” He tells me. “Not so much the marijuana that the young folks like to smoke, but hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. Criminals take advantage of our lax rules to make deals here and bring the stuff in and out and we don’t really have a way to stop them. I’m organizing voluntary opposition, but it’s slow going.”

What about the condition of the fleet? Didn’t one of the ships actually sink a year ago?

“That we’re dealing with.” The Czech mariner folds liver-spotted hands. “The restoration ought to help and I’m a proponent of bringing in new vessels to ease the overcrowding. We’d have to get the canal co-dominium authority to go along with it though, and getting the Israeli and Egyptian governments to agree to anything is almost impossible.”

Does he really believe that the Great Bitter Lake’s system can be applied to the world?

“Of course I do!” Nikolas’ eyes blaze with idealistic fervor. “I believe that it’s the only alternative humanity has to another war- and this one might be final.”

(please forgive the roughness of this update, I will edit it later)

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Really glad to see that you're coming back to this one. I live little anthology type things, just throwing us a bunch of ideas scattershot style.
 
That's really neat stuff.:)

Thank you.:)

Good update, Ephraim!:)

Glad you liked it.:)

Really glad to see that you're coming back to this one. I live little anthology type things, just throwing us a bunch of ideas scattershot style.

I don't know that I'll ever abandon this entirely as it is- as you noted- me throwing ideas scattershot at you guys. It may go on hiatus for a while, but only until a new idea strikes from the blue.
 
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics​

Pyongyang is a grey city. Grey blocks of apartment complexes, grey concrete government buildings, grey sidewalks with people wearing grey unisex suits under a grey sky. The odd red in a monument or statue or propaganda mural is either faded to its own shade of pinkish-grey or is so shocking that it emphasis the absence of color around it all the more. This is a country of thirty-five million people and growing, large city complexes powered with large, (slightly unsafe) nuclear plants and fed on processed algae grown in huge factory vats. Every street corner has its watchful camera and every person is tracked by the state’s computer database. It is the pinnacle of Juche, the local ideology of self-sufficiency.

My guide (assigned to me upon my entry into the country) leads me up to a large, poorly maintained complex. Large parts of it seem to have been converted to a school, other parts lie disused entirely. Over the door is the hammer and sickle symbol of the Soviet Union and a legend in Cyrillic, paint now peeling and flaking away. This is the Soviet embassy- formerly the largest embassy in Pyongyang and now a relic of former days. It still operates however, and after we ascend a staircase whose handrail has begun to rust at the edges I find a light is still on in Ambassador’s office. A query in Korean answers my guide’s knock and he replies in the same language. The door opens.

Georgy Speransky was a young trade attaché at the time of the events of 1990, now he is a choleric ambassador in his fifties- sensitive to any slight or imagined slight to his office.

“The U.S.S.R rejects the ridiculous claims to legitimacy by the capitalist regime, including their use of the term “Russian Federation” to describe their oppressive dictatorship.” Speransky starts right off when I ask him about the government in Moscow. “They are a puppet government of the United States and the European Economic Community- a temporary setback in the face of the inevitable revolution.”

He considers the restoration of the Soviet government on Earth to assured then?

“Absolutely.” The ambassador bangs a fist down on the table in front of him. “Either in the form of a revolution calling for the return of a Stalinist state or in the form of the world socialist revolution itself.”

I ask if the rumors that the USSR’s systems are beginning to break down are true.

“Complete and utter fabrications.” Speransky assures me. “Socialist engineering will be able to overcome any technological hurdles that we are forced to confront.”

The rest of the interview follows along these lines- I ask questions and he provides me with answers right out of a propaganda broadcast.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was originally an authoritarian communist state that took control of much of the former Russian Empire after the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922. It subsequently expanded following the global conflict known as the Second World War and by the 1950’s had become one of the two most powerful states on the planet with a worldwide sphere of influence. On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to launch an artificial object into space, the satellite Sputnik 1 was short-lived but the subsequent period of intense competition in space that it sparked was not. New accomplishments followed Sputnik, the first man in space, the first woman in space, then the first space station. The United States of America (the capitalist federal democracy that was the USSR’s primary rival) established its own space program and vowed to be the first to reach the moon. Meanwhile the Russian program plowed ahead with its own projects.

Salyut 1 was the first human space station in this universe, with a crew of three it remained in orbit for 175 days before de-orbiting. It was followed by Salyuts 2 through 9 which were used to perform a variety of scientific research… and also to cover up the existence of the secret Almaz program that constructed military space stations. From its inception the “Space Race” (as it was called) was heavily militarized and the peaceful American Skylab stations were replaced by their own military stations (known as the “Archangel” system) after the Almaz program was revealed. Following the successful landing of United States astronauts on the moon in 1969 General-Secretary Leonid Brezhnev ordered the decentralized Soviet Space program concentrated under the control of the military- specifically the Soviet Air Force.

Having been beaten to the moon the communists turned abruptly away from pure scientific research and the space program began to funnel its resources into military development. The ironically named “Mir” (Peace) program replaced the Salyut and Almaz series and launched increasingly bigger and bigger space stations. It was a brute force project that cared little for developed new science and overcame the growing technological gap between the USA and the USSR by creating primitive yet robust and effective spacecraft. Experiments at the BIOS-3 facility into life-support systems resulted in a selectively bred strain of Chlorella algae that could produce enough oxygen to support a single person with 6 m^2 of exposed growth. This, combined with miniaturized nuclear reactors developed initially for use in submarines, meant that beginning with Mir-3 Soviet space stations were 85% self-supporting and above. Both sides in the Space Race installed nuclear and conventional missile systems in their stations (a treaty was proposed to outlaw military presence in space but it was vetoed by the USSR) and the initial Mir station network was intended to serve as a second strike weapon in the case of a thermonuclear war.

Mir-5, launched in 1984, was meant to survive on only its own resources for six months without re-supply following a nuclear exchange. Designed after the revelation that the American nuclear arsenal vastly outnumbered Russia’s own, Mir-5 (and the subsequent Mir-6 and 7) was to hold back its warheads should the USSR be obliterated and target attempts by surviving Americans to reconstitute their government in minor population centers that had been unscathed by the initial exchange. As “third-strike” weapons the last three Mir stations had crews of twelve personnel each, the largest of any space station, as well as sizeable algae culture operations, and Soyuz spacecraft for emergency evacuations. To ensure the reliability of the third-strike system the cosmonauts stationed on Mir-5 through 7 were carefully chosen and vetted by the Soviet secret police and were among the most trustworthy members of the USSR’s armed forces.

Then in 1990 the Soviet Union fell.

The country’s economy was in shambles, bankrupted to pay for the world’s largest military and for expensive ventures in space. A cynical population that was only half composed of Russians had grown increasingly unsupportive of the state and an enormous criminal underground undermined government authority at every turn. After going through three general-secretaries in one year (all three died of old age, the Politburo of the Communist Party consistently refused to appoint general-secretaries who weren’t members of the revolutionary ‘old guard’) a combination of mass protests over the economic situation coupled with mass unhappiness in the military (which deserted to the protestors en masse, largely because their salary was fixed and inflation had made it worthless) brought down the USSR which dissolved into its constituent republics. The nominally democratic Russian Federation became the new government of Russia and the cosmonauts in space were recalled.

But they refused to come.

Selected for their fanatical loyalty, the vast majority of Soviet cosmonauts rejected the capitalist government of Russia and swore to preserve the Soviet Union in exile. Between the five Mir stations in operation they numbered forty-five individuals and in a vote conducted by radio the cosmonauts chose one Yuri Nosenko (the radar operator and political officer on Mir-6) as their provisional general-secretary. A lone dissenter who wished to return to Earth had his execution for treason broadcast to the planet below. The next 72 hours were of panicked confusion as Russian authorities tried to talk the cosmonauts into coming down and it looked as if Nosenko might make use of the nuclear weapons at his disposal in an attempt to force the Federation to restore communism. At the same time a handful of minor communist states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere who had relied heavily on the USSR for foreign aid recognized Nosenko in the thin hope that the Soviet Union might somehow be resurrected. In the end however, a stalemate developed and nuclear war was prevented.

But the cosmonauts remained.

It was anticipated that starvation and system failure would eventually force the “Soviet Union” to surrender but through jerry-rigging and tight rationing they were able to stretch resources meant to last six months for twenty-three years. The Chlorella algae used for oxygen production was edible and they successfully increased cultivation throughout the different stations until it provided some 500 calories per person- insufficient even in weightless conditions but better than nothing. Meanwhile on Earth other diehard Soviet communists advocated in favor of the space-borne USSR and maintained a skeleton diplomatic corps in the few communist states that recognized Nosenko’s government. By threatening to make use of his arsenal the General-Secretary successfully coerced the United Nations into providing food aid to the tiny state (carried by American shuttles) and in he 1994 came to an agreement with the small communist country of Korea. Nosenko would provide designs for missiles and spacecraft as well as for the efficient Russian reactors and algae cultivation system in exchange for regular supply missions to supply his government in exile. In 1998 the first Korean rocket was launched into orbit, based on the Soyuz design it successfully docked with Mir-5 and offloaded electronic and machine parts (the subsequent death of the Korean astronauts during re-entry somewhat dampened celebrations in the communist state).

As of the present time only 30 aging cosmonauts remain, the rest having died from starvation, sickness, or been executed for treason against the state (rumours of cannibalism are staunchly denied by Nosenko) whilst on Earth some twenty-thousand devoted Stalinists continue to issue Soviet passports and identity documents and maintain that the USSR continues to exist. Four countries still recognize the Soviet Union in space, the Peoples’ Republic of Grenada, the Republic of Cuba, Democratic Kampuchea, and the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (North Korea). None of the four have relations with the United States and two (Kampuchea and North Korea) are considered rouge states. The DPRK in particular has profited from its continued relationship, gaining access to technologies that have allowed it to attain considerable self-sufficiency and operate a limited space program that launches supply missions to the Soviet Union once every six months.

“Oh they’re a bunch of insane ruskis, don’t get me wrong.” Daniel Cameron- former American astronaut and now an administrator for the National Aeronautics and Space Agency- laughs. “But there’s not a person in the space business anywhere in the world who doesn’t respect them. What they did! It’s been twenty three years since the Soviet Union fell and still they’ve kept their stations operational- and themselves alive.”

What does he think of their politics?

“Well as I said they’re insane, and Stalinists- but I repeat myself!” He chuckles at the joke. “But I suppose I can understand why they did what they did, their country had disappeared and loyalty is something that anyone gets.”

I mention that I’ve heard rumors about growing problems with the Mir stations.

“Yes.” Cameron agrees. “Even with the Norks”- I assume he refers to the North Koreans- “sending them aid the Mirs are decaying. If it weren’t for the exhaustively redundant systems the Russians built into them they would have failed a long time ago. The big problem is the reactors.”

The reactors?

“The miniaturized nuclear reactors the Nosenko government has were designed to last for twenty-five years and they’ve reached the end of their operational lives.” The ex-astronaut turns grim. “We have the Mir stations under tight monitoring and it looks like Mir-3’s reactor is leaking radiation. If it fails completely… let’s just say that the Soviet Union’s time is ticking. And a radioactive space station breaking up over the Earth’s atmosphere, raining down enriched uranium is everybody’s nightmare.”
 
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That's quite a unique, and quite realistic, take on the government-in-exile in space. Excellent work as always. :) I wonder what other non-traditional states are up your sleeve. Given the nature of this TL, perhaps a multiversal state?
 
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