Disaster at Moscow - a WW2 TL

By 1975 the Cold War had settled into a relatively short-lived equilibrium.

Sounds ominous.

Nice update, a powerful non-Islamist and non-dictatorial Iran is certainly an interesting change from OTL.

One nitpick, though: you mentioned
M1 Garand bolt-action rifles
but the Garand is semi-automatic. The 1903 Springfield it replaced was bolt-action though, and assuming US small arm development went in the same direction as OTL there would still probably be a lot of those left over in storage to be cleared out in the mid-1950s.

Keep up the good work!
 
Sounds ominous.

Nice update, a powerful non-Islamist and non-dictatorial Iran is certainly an interesting change from OTL.

One nitpick, though: you mentioned but the Garand is semi-automatic. The 1903 Springfield it replaced was bolt-action though, and assuming US small arm development went in the same direction as OTL there would still probably be a lot of those left over in storage to be cleared out in the mid-1950s.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the suggestions :).
 
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1975

How are things in Japan, Korea, Germany, and France by 1975?

The Imperial Federation by 75?

France, Germany may be on the same level as OTL East Germany. Allowed some autonomy in internal matters but closely watched by the KGB. Local secret police and internal security are probably well equipped and trained while the Armed Forces are arms and size restricted. The French may have to deal with a large presence of "Fraternal Allies" to watch the UK. Korea and North Japan will have a larger military since they are near South Japan and an unfriendly China.

The Developed members of the Federation (Australia/UK/Canada) will be undergoing the transition from primary (mining/agricultural) and secondary (manufacturing) to an information based economy (Finance/Insurance/Real Estate). They will also be dealing with industry moving to cheaper labor such as Latin America/Africa and Southeast Asia and increased immigration and demographic changes. South Japan will have a smaller economy and population since they are near Korea and North Japan and a future warzone. Many Japanese may have relocated to the West with West Coast cities boasting a "Little Tokyo".

The developing world (Caribbean/Africa/Latin America) sees changes as more companies relocate manufacturing and more polluting industries. They will be dealing with corruption, economic inequality and pollution.
 
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SE Asia

How about SE Asia, esp. the Philippines?

I am thinking OTL South Korea/Taiwan. The standard of living is growing with investment into shipping, electronics and manufacturing but the political system is under Authoritarian rule and corruption.
 

Ryan

Donor
India conducted a 16 kiloton “peaceful nuclear explosion”, making it the world’s fourth nuclear power after the United States, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China.

have you retconned Britain's nukes? :confused:

also, if you're plan was to make Britain the biggest economy in Europe by the modern day, you've succeeded by making the whole of Europe an economic basket case. :p
 
have you retconned Britain's nukes? :confused:

also, if you're plan was to make Britain the biggest economy in Europe by the modern day, you've succeeded by making the whole of Europe an economic basket case. :p

Oops.

Anyway, here's the grand finale:


Chapter XV: The Soviet Break-Up and Russia’s Resurgence, 1975-2015.

After the mid 1970s the geopolitical situation changed little. It seemed like the Soviet Union and communism were a fact of life, that they would be around forever, and that communism was a viable alternative to liberal capitalist democracy. The Soviet economy experienced growth rates up to 8% until the mid 1970s, rates that are to be understood as the normal growth often shown by underdeveloped economies. By the second half of the seventies Soviet economic growth slowed to 3-4% annually because the Stalinist model of centrally planned economy through five-year plans had developed the country as much as they could have. This economic model was becoming outmoded and besides that oil and gas prices, which had kept the Soviet economy afloat, started to drop.

Economic stagnation resulting from the inefficiencies of a planned economy made the bleak life under the neo-Stalinist police state all the bleaker. In general terms, the Soviet model of planned economy couldn’t detect consumer preferences, shortages and surpluses with sufficient accuracy and could therefore not coordinate production adequately. To be more specific: fixed resource allocation encouraged black-market activities; quality of Soviet goods was low due to shielding from the world market; managers understated productivity because if they overproduced then they would be expected to match that level of production next year, the “ratchet effect”; lack of innovation due to the same ratchet effect; the hurry to complete the plan at the end of the planning cycle, resulting in poor production quality; and scattering of resources.

Stagnation started in the late 1970s and by the late 1980s the shortages produced by the planned economy were blatantly obvious. Rationing was instated by the government in 1984 with each household being assigned fixed amounts of food, fuel, water, electricity and, controversially, liquor. Rationing of liquor helped to reduce alcoholism in Soviet society, but the effect was partially undone by the black market. The rations never increased; they either stayed the same as last year in a good year or they were reduced further. When rationing was introduced adults for example got 2.4 kilos of meat and 250 grams of cheese per week, which by 1989 had been reduced to 1.5 kilos and 60 grams respectively. Official guidelines were issued on how to eat nutritiously while reducing calorie intake by 20% and an “anti-obesity campaign” was launched to discourage “overeating”. Electricity was rationed to supply heavy industry and to preserve oil and natural gas production for export. In 1984, the monthly maximum was set at 40 kWh per family and was reduced to 25 kWh by 1990, with everything over it being taxed heavily. Besides the chronic shortages produced by inefficient distribution, there was also the fact that the USSR wanted to keep up exports in order to fund the armed forces and the prestigious space program.

The aging Malenkov and Kaganovich had no illusions that their control over Europe was founded on the USSR’s military muscle and its willingness to use it, and to prestigious technological advances that showed the Soviets mattered. As a result the Soviet space program undertook a successful manned mission to the moon in 1977 to match the US’s lunar landing of 1969. Many rubles were also wasted on a manned mission to Mars, which did actually manage to beat the US to the punch by a few weeks in 1985. The same year an 84.000 tonne nuclear-powered super aircraft carrier, the Ulyanovsk, was commissioned by the Soviet Navy. Such successes held up a façade, maintaining the image that the Soviet Union was strong and thriving rather than stagnating and crumbling. By 1990, the Soviet Union was an impoverished country with a $4.000 dollar GDP per capita, stagflation, a largely obsolete industrial base, decaying infrastructure, declining wages contrasted against opulent inner party members, rationing of even basic goods, bad and insufficient housing, and a tremendously bloated military-industrial complex.

In 1988 Malenkov died, aged 86, leaving Kaganovich the sole leader of the country and the last survivor of the Stalinist old guard. He died in July 1991, aged 97, without having designated an heir, begging the question which of the potentates of the post-Stalin generation could rally the most support in the Central Committee and the politburo. Viktor Grishin, party leader in Moscow and an uncompromising neo-Stalinist hardliner, favoured by the Soviet Army, won and became Secretary General and Premier in September 1991. Grishin’s impact as a leader, however, was negligible because he died after eight months in office in May 1992, aged 77. His death was symptomatic of the fact that the established gerontocracy of leaders, all in their sixties and seventies, was dying off. By 1990, the average politburo member was 75 years old and the politburo now hoped that a younger figure could revitalize the country.

They elected Boris Yeltsin who, at age 61, was relatively young. Yeltsin had been drafted like other men and had served in the Red Army from 1949 until demobilization in 1952 with distinction, reaching the rank of Captain and commanding an infantry company. He first studied the Ural Polytechnic Institute in his hometown of Sverdlovsk and got a degree in construction in 1958. Instead of accepting a job as a foreman in construction, he chose to attend the Moscow State University and obtain a master’s degree in engineering in 1963 (one year of his academic career was actually spent at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute as an exchange student, allowing him to establish contacts within the Leningrad party). Simultaneously he had gotten a job in Moscow’s urban planning department, where his stellar rise began: in 1966 he became head of the sewage department; in 1970 he was appointed the city’s chief engineer; by 1975 he was in charge of the Moscow region’s industrial development; in 1980 he became a full voting member of the politburo and the youngest politburo member at the time; and he became First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee in 1991 when Grishin gave up that post to lead the country.

In 1992, he found himself in charge of the country and backed up by the younger members of the politburo, who multiplied in number quickly as Yeltsin retired older members. The party, which had been merely a tool in the hands of its leader, sighed in relief as some semblance of true collective leadership was restored, a leadership with strong convictions about adapting socialism to current conditions. A plan was introduced to gradually privatize the kolkhozes and sovkhozes, arguing that the poor peasants they were supposed to emancipate no longer existed, therefore eliminating the necessity of party control in agriculture. Small businesses had already been allowed provided that they were family businesses, but Yeltsin lifted that restriction and stimulated small to medium sized businesses not governed by the five-year plans. He kept key industrial sectors under government control, but aimed to create a light consumer industry sector that was supervised but not controlled by the government. The establishment could tolerate this “socialist market economy” but had more trouble with accompanying cutbacks on defence policy and the aerospace industry. An anti-reformist opposition started to form.

Yeltsin also introduced decentralization policies, such as the regional economic councils intended to decrease Gosplan’s workload and improve its efficiency. These reforms were part of sincere attempts to give the republics’ governments some actual responsibilities. They were also intended to speed up decision making by the otherwise sluggish bureaucracy by allowing the Moscow apparatchiks to devote their full attention to national issues, letting regional governments worry about the rest. Yeltsin, partially inspired by Lenin, also allowed and even encouraged local culture, which had its background in his Russian nationalist sympathies. A rebel at heart, he relaxed censorship to allow others to speak up, which in hindsight was a bad decision. There had been resentment about the Russian nationalist tone the regime had adopted in the 1940s for a long time now, but anyone openly expressing such resentment had been sent to the gulag until the 1980s. Moderate nationalisms had been ignited for the first time when the republics had gotten autonomy in 1992, but censorship had kept a lid on nationalists advocating confederal ideas or, God forbid, independence. After censorship laws were relaxed in 1993 there was a true and lively public debate going on for the first time in more than seventy years. Nobody really wanted to get rid of the union yet, but plenty wanted to reform it. That would all change in a matter of two years.

In April 1995, one of the reformists, known as Mikhail Gorbachev, went too far by proposing a completely new executive body he called the Congress of People’s Deputies. All the candidates would still need to be members of the communist party, but a requirement would be that multiple candidates would run for each seat. Such elections would be the first real elections since 1917. Gorbachev pointed out widespread corruption in both the planned sectors of the economy as well as the private enterprises under “market socialism.” In practice the established bureaucracy jealously guarded its control over the economy and had the teeth to do so, using every regulation and every possible interpretation thereof to do so. Private entrepreneurs mostly got tired of it and chose the path of least resistance: they paid bribes to make these meddlesome bureaucrats go away. Despite less censorship and more regional autonomy, repression and monitoring by the KGB (former NKVD) was also still omnipresent; prominent dissidents were still weeded out, tortured and wrongfully imprisoned. Gorbachev highlighted and criticized all these issues as well. Under Yeltsin the USSR was still vastly corrupt and rather authoritarian, as exemplified by the fact that Gorbachev found himself hounded in the politburo. Unlike in earlier times he wasn’t stripped of his offices, tried and sent to Siberia or executed, but just lost his politburo seat. He remained a member of the Central Committee and became politically neutralized, which wouldn’t even have been a headline a decade earlier, never mind a cause of public outrage.

On April 16th 1995, coincidentally the anniversary of Lenin’s April Theses, tens of thousands of students gathered on Red Square demanding true freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of gathering and the enacting of Gorbachev’s proposed executive reform. They protested against corruption, repression, nepotism and limited career prospects and occupied the square for six weeks, while others organized sit-ins and hunger strikes elsewhere, most prominently in Kiev, Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius. On May 29th, Yeltsin tried to put the genie he had unleashed back in the bottle by sending in 15.000 police officers in full riot gear, armed with tear gas, batons, rubber bullets and water cannons to Red Square. A battle resulted in which the police were overwhelmed, causing chaos in parts of Moscow while simultaneously protests spread to major cities in other parts of the Soviet Union. In some parts of the country there was ethnic violence. The most serious example was the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the Azerbaijan SSR that was dominated by ethnic Armenians. They now rose against Azerbaijani rule and demanded that their autonomous oblast would be allowed to join the Armenian SSR, resulting in hundreds of casualties. Yeltsin felt gave in to the demands of the protestors because he feared any further escalation could lead to civil war.

The hardliners now rallied around their own fairly young leader Gennady Zyuganov, a fierce critic of Yeltsin’s reforms and an opponent of Gorbachev. With the support of KGB Chairman Vitaly Fedorchuk and high-ranking Soviet military officers, the hardliners in the politburo ousted Yeltsin and made Zyuganov the new Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on June 4th 1995 (Yeltsin “retired” due to “health reasons”). The new Premier’s first order of business was to declare martial law in the capital and to order the military to enforce it, if need be. The Soviet Army sent troops with assault rifles and tanks into Moscow to break up the protesting students, resulting in a crackdown that killed hundreds. The public response was one of outrage and demonstrations in other major Soviet cities were bolstered, but Zyuganov kept on stonewalling reform plans. He was willing to allow “market socialism”, which meant allowing small and medium sized businesses producing consumer goods while the state continued to control strategic industries like steel, petrochemicals, aeronautics, armaments and so on. Instead of more federalization and democratization, however, he wanted to return to the repression and censorship of the pre-Yeltsin era. He was a modern neo-Stalinist, wanting to maintain the communist police state with a Greater Russian nationalist streak and Yeltsin’s mixed economy.

Russians only formed half of the USSR’s population and many non-Russians no longer accepted living in what had de facto become a new Russian Empire. A trend emerged with protests being the most severe in the SSRs while the RSFSR became fairly quiet as a siege mentality took hold that made the Russians band together. On July 21st 1995, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared their independence from the Soviet Union, which they were legally allowed to do according to the Soviet constitution. Technically, however, the constitution had been suspended by martial law and the Moscow government debated how to deal with this. On August 21st they decided to use martial law as a pretext and occupied the Baltic SSRs, upon which soldiers and officers of Baltic descent deserted and formed the beginnings of an insurgency. On August 22nd, the Ukrainian SSR, citing its constitutional right to secede from the union, also declared its independence under Leonid Kuchma, who announced that democratic elections would take place within six months.

In the Byelorussian SSR a coup d’état quickly put an end to ideas for a referendum about independence, and as a result it isn’t thought of as ever having been independent (its provisional government lasted only 72 hours, and hadn’t officially proclaimed independence). Its Central Committee and Politburo thought that going with the independence wave was the best course, but as it turned out national identity hadn’t developed very strongly among Belarus’ populace. Alexander Lukashenko, one of the few in the Byelorussian parliament to vote against the referendum, was put in charge by Soviet tanks rolling into Minsk. This move met with negligible opposition in the Byelorussian SSR, which soon joined the effort against the “fascist separatists” in the Ukraine.

Demonstrations in the Ukraine had been dealt with by riot police at first, but it quickly became clear that that wouldn’t be sufficient, especially with Ukrainian policemen reluctant to fire upon crowds containing relatives, friends and, especially, countrymen. When Soviet troops tried to enforce martial law, there was a lot of opposition in the western Ukraine and many Ukrainian officers, troops and policemen defected to the government in Kiev, taking their weapons with them. In the eastern Ukraine the populace was very pro-Russian (11 million ethnic Russians as well as many Russified Ukrainians lived there) and pro-Russian militias joined the Soviet Army. This became a civil war: the Soviet Army and pro-Russian militias were on one side and Ukrainian insurgents and Ukrainian units defected from the Soviet Army on the other. With the eruption of chaos in the Baltic States and Ukraine, the Central Asian SSRs, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova also took their chance and declared independence in late August or early September.

Belarus remained loyal and so did Azerbaijan. In Azerbaijan’s case that came as a relief because with the Baku oil securely under its control the Soviet Army wouldn’t have problems with its fuel supply. The next major headache was the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. The missile silos weren’t a major issue since without the launch codes the missiles couldn’t be launched. There were, however, many free fall bombs that could be used, although the rebels didn’t have the air superiority to start bombing Soviet cities. The greatest concern was that they’d be used as nuclear landmines or that the fissile material would be used to build dirty bombs which could be smuggled through the frontlines for terrorist attacks against Russians. Western concerns were that Soviet atomic bombs would show up on the black market were criminals and terrorists could buy them. By September most nuclear warheads were accounted for and under Moscow’s control, but some were “missing in action.”

Fierce fighting took place in eastern Ukraine and also in Kazakhstan, where Russians formed 20% and 40% of the population respectively, most of whom didn’t want to be ruled from any other place than Moscow. All sides committed atrocities: ethnic cleansings of Russians took place with massacres that killed thousands of them and often also involved the rape of the women and girls, to which the Soviet Army responded with indiscriminate bombings of civilian targets, mass arrests, torture, rape and ethnic cleansings of their own. Muslim extremists took over in Chechnya and Dagestan and caused trouble in the Central Asian SSRs, but dug their own graves with a few execution videos in which ethnic Russians were either shot or beheaded. Public opinion in Russia was infuriated and the government in Moscow vowed to destroy these extremists by any means necessary. Cities in the RSFSR were subjected to terrorist attacks committed by several parties, which encouraged the armed forces to conduct the war with increasing brutality. The war dragged on throughout 1996 and 1997 and threatened to take on international proportions by rising Sino-Russian tensions on the border concerning longstanding border disputes. The Chinese conducted military exercises and Moscow mobilized the Far Eastern military districts, while the Busan Naval Squadron went to sea with its ballistic missile submarines. Premier Zyuganov flat-out threatened with thermonuclear destruction and the Chinese backed off when it became clear he meant business.

That much became clear in September 1997 when the desperate Ukrainians used an improvised 1 kiloton nuclear device against Soviet troops advancing on Dnipropetrovsk, threatening to cut off river transport via the Dnieper River. Zyuganov retaliated by using a 20 kiloton device against the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, cutting off the electricity to much of Ukraine, putting out of action many communications systems due to EMP or by destroying the dam itself, and irradiating much of its water supply. Direct casualties from the blast were considered surprisingly low, which resulted from the fact that it wasn’t an urban target. However, thousands died in the resulting floods, thousands more contracted radiation disease by drinking poisoned water, countless others got cancer later in life, and Ukraine would continue to suffer from electricity blackouts for years to come. It was the worst humanitarian disaster in Europe in years and the entire world was horrified by this the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945. A motion was put forward in the UN to send peacekeepers, but the Soviets of course vetoed that in the UN Security Council, wherein they had a permanent seat. If anything the Soviet Army’s advantage on the battlefield grew, but in terms of PR it backfired on Zyuganov. His reputation tarnished with some calling him a war criminal and also facing protests in Moscow again for the first time in two years, he was forced to resign. The protests, this time, weren’t against the regime but against the war and war weary Russians in other cities soon followed the example of the Muscovites.

A rising star in Moscow was Alexander Lukashenko, who had become a politburo member shortly after becoming Secretary General of the Communist Party of Byelorussia. His meteoric rise had continued with an appointment to the KGB in the hopes that he’d be able to repeat his successful anti-corruption campaign in Belarus of the late 1980s on a national scale. He was put in charge of the counter terrorism unit, which in the context of the civil war gave him great powers. He was so effective, not to mention ruthless, that he was appointed Chairman of the KGB by 1997, with Colonel Vladimir Putin as his right-hand man. He’d been keeping records on opponents and politburo members for two years now in order to blackmail them, which allowed him to become the new Secretary General at the extremely young age of 44 in October 1997 (Putin succeeded him as head of the KGB).

With his supporters becoming war weary, Lukashenko accepted UN mediation, which also had to with the country’s international isolation. In June 1996, the USSR withdrew all its forces from Europe to fight the separatists and thusly stopped backing up its European communist puppets militarily. Berlin saw major protests which soon spread to all other major cities in Germany and Egon Krenz, who had succeeded Honecker after his death of liver cancer in 1994, was informed by the Stasi that the protests were too large for them to suppress except through the kind of violence seen in Russia. The communist regime was unwilling to go that far and compromised with the leaders of the protest movement, announcing semi-free elections for January 1997. Half of the seats of the Volkskammer (People’s Chamber) were reserved for the ruling Socialist Unity Party, while the other half would be elected through proportional representation. Opposition parties swept up all but one of the available seats. The upper house known as the Bundestag (Federal Diet) had no reserved seats and was elected through district based elections. The regime had gerrymandered these electoral districts to give urban, industrialized areas much greater representation, hoping working class support would win them the Bundestag. The communists had underestimated how unpopular they’d become: most seats were swept up by the social-democratic SPD. Four years later fully free elections were organized. The rest of Europe’s communist countries followed suit with their own peaceful transitions to democracies. Korea and North Japan followed a different path: Korea made reforms toward a mixed economy while the regime in North Japan, which had never enjoyed major support, was allowed to reunite on the condition that Russia was allowed to maintain a major military base on the island.

In the meantime, the peace process that ended the Second Russian Civil War culminated in the Zurich Agreement in 1998, which pretty much followed the military situation on the ground. The Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Crimea and Zaporizhia oblasts as well as the part of Dnipropetrovsk oblast east of the Dnieper River were added to Russia. Belarus remained a part of the USSR as did Azerbaijan and the Central Asian SSRs while Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic States became independent (Georgia did have to cede South Ossetia and Abkhazia). Lukashenko ended the illusions of national autonomy by absorbing the SSRs still under Moscow’s control into the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (RSFSR), which became the official name of the country instead of USSR, colloquially known as Russia to most. The former SSRs were downgraded to “AutonomousSocialistSovietRepublics” (ASSRs), which had no constitutional right to disaffiliate themselves from the mother country. Russia inherited the USSR’s nuclear arsenal and most of the Soviet Armed Forces and Russia kept the USSR’s permanent UN Security Council seat.

That’s where the positives ended for Russia. The country still had a decaying infrastructure, made worse by the war, and an obsolete industrial base. The war had caused the economy to stagnate again and hyperinflation had reached 2000% by 1998, inflation produced a wage-price spiral, interests on loans could barely be paid, government debt had skyrocketed and bankruptcy loomed for the government. After a short period of economy recovery under Yeltsin, Russia had been thrown back to the late 1980s economically, and comparisons to WeimarGermany were made. Many of the small and medium sized business born during the Yeltsin era started to falter as a result of this dire situation.

Lukashenko responded with a set of measures to arrest the economic decline, sometimes disregarding the short term negative consequences for his people. Firstly, he devalued the ruble, which made foreign imports more expensive and therefore directed consumers to domestic products because those were cheaper, stimulating the country’s embryonic light industry and retail sectors set back by the war. In order to combat inflation, however, the government followed a strict monetary policy by setting a high interest rate, the common macroeconomic solution to inflation. That made it unattractive for anyone to take on loans, including those who had plans to start up businesses, slowing economic growth but also inflation. The government also restrained wage growth to end the wage-price spiral, but the effects for the populace were mitigated by the anti-inflation policies. Economic collapse was averted as a result of these policies, but growth in the 1998-2001 timeframe was small. With an increase in oil prices, economic growth suddenly picked up again and grew 8% a year like clockwork from 2002 to 2012. GDP per capita reached $18.000 and things like TV ownership, internet access, possession of mobile phones and car ownership exploded.

Russia’s nationalism grew stronger after the Civil War and somewhat pushed socialism to the background, even adopting some symbols from Russia’s imperial past. This went in tandem with Russia’s economic recovery, which in turn was coupled with renewed defence expenditure to modernize the armed forces. Resurgent Russia found itself with few allies in the post-Soviet world with most of its former European client states orienting itself toward Germany, the most powerful formerly communist economy (before that it’d always been the most independent of the USSR’s puppets). Lukashenko visited Nanjing in 2003 and signed over Zhenbao Island and half of Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island, known to the Chinese as Yinlong Island. The agreement also changed the border demarcation on the Ussuri River from the right (Chinese) bank of the river to the river’s median line. This was the conventional method for demarcating a river boundary and it was in China’s favour, giving them a few other islets as well.

China’s foreign policy interests had been shifting for twenty years by then, with China being alienated from the West. In 1980, China had tried to pass a resolution in the UN in that condemned the Imperial Japanese Army’s actions in China as genocide, but the United States and its allies voted against in order to maintain good relations with Japan. That had offended the Chinese, who pursued their plans for an East Asian sphere of influence more forcefully, for example by settling a dispute with Vietnam about several South China Sea Islands in a short, victorious war in 1982. Attracted to China’s growing wealth and wary of its military prowess, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia joined the East Asian Community or EAC. It was a customs union and economic pact, but got military overtones because China signed bilateral defence agreements with most of its members. As the second economy by 2000 and with its first super carrier in 1990, China was becoming a superpower in its own right and rejected Western, and therefore also American, influence in Asia. Growing enmity resulted in the formation of the Omsk Cooperation Organization, a military defence pact obviously aimed at the West. The US’s short-lived period as a hyperpower was ended by the rise of the Sino-Russian bloc, which engaged the US in a renewed Cold War. Russia’s commitment to socialist brotherhood was reinvigorated as it once again backed Third World countries, reminding it of the Soviet Union’s heyday as an anti-imperialist power. Russia was now a National-Communist empire.

National-Communist Russia no longer challenged the USA for world dominance by itself, but definitely reserved a second place for itself, and held a shared first place in the world via the Sino-Russian bloc. With its impressive economic growth, fancy defence projects like a new class of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, a reinvigorated military, new investment in the space program, a decent living standard, and a stable regime, Russia still had its problems. A low-level Muslim extremist insurgency continued in Chechnya, Dagestan and North Ossetia, where these groups wanted to establish a caliphate. Islamism had risen as an ideology against Soviet as well as Western interference in the Muslim world, and in 2008 Islamists put a dent in the aura of invincibility Lukashenko had conjured up. On December 23rd 2008, the 65th edition of Victory Day, in commemoration of Nazi-Germany’s surrender in 1943, Russia was rocked by terrorist attacks (Germany surrendered on December 22nd 1943, but in Moscow time it was the 23rd of December, which is why that is Victory Day in Russia). Terrorists set off bombs in the Moscow subway, resulting in the response that definitely put Russia and China back on the map. The perpetrators made the foolish mistake of coordinating with Uyghur Muslim militants in China, who released sarin nerve gas in the Forbidden City in Beijing, a museum that attracted many tourists (as a result they automatically earned Western hostility). The Islamist regime of Colonel al-Bashir in Sudan proved to be their sponsor and host, and it therefore was brutally crushed by joint Sino-Russian force in 2009. This sent an unmistakable message: the Russian and Chinese empires were superpowers in their own right and were not to be trifled with.
 
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Cool ending.

You mentioned earlier that India was soviet-leaning. Have be Russians and Chinese brought them into their anti-western bloc or is india doing something else? Basically, is there a BRICS equivalent?

You mentioned that the remaining SSRs lost their autonomy, so are they treated as colonies or do they get to vote in the national elections or what? For that matter, is there national elections?
 
Neither Russia or China can continue this new Cold War. Russia's existing on a government-created economic bubble and China's shackled itself to a ticking time bomb. Not to mention they've challenged the US who isn't going to be all too happy about having aggressive competition. I forsee Russia shambling on until the whole thing collapses in the 2030's latest and China loosing the ME and Africa to the US due to the fact that they have pissed off the Muslim world. You remember how mad people got at the US for Afghanistan? Imagine how they'll respond to a place with actual resources and a decent amount of people.
 

Ryan

Donor
Resurgent Russia found itself with few allies in the post-Soviet world with most of its former European client states orienting itself toward Germany, the most powerful Western European economy (before that it’d always been the most independent of the USSR’s puppets).

do you not count the UK as western European or are they just not interested in involving themselves in Europe? because unless Germany was only pretending to be communist whilst actually practising capitalism I can't see how they'd have a bigger economy than the UK (just look at eastern Europe)

very nice though, any chance of some maps?
 
End

I was expecting a bigger blowup but this was good. I figure most of the Soviet puppets slowly switched over to free elections by the 2010's. I am interested in the Middle East, Iran and India since the Soviets have their problems.
 
do you not count the UK as western European or are they just not interested in involving themselves in Europe? because unless Germany was only pretending to be communist whilst actually practising capitalism I can't see how they'd have a bigger economy than the UK (just look at eastern Europe)

very nice though, any chance of some maps?

Fixed it for you :).
 
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