Like the UoE flag! I'll let Finns deliberate over the Finnish flag. The Red base of the UoE flag is a definitive break from the Tsarist look, which is good. Not sure the stars should be green but there needs to be some green somewhere I think; the sun should definitely be gold. The alternating sinuous rays might be a bit much for flagmakers but hey, not nearly as tricky as say lion emblems, and it definitely helps for the sun not to have just angular triangular rays for a nice organic look; a simpler sun would look too much like the ROC flag of OTL. Mind, I think the Reds would want a little more and such symbols as hammer and plow (former ambiguous between SR/Narodniks and Social Democrats, the latter clearly underscoring the peasant majority's predominance, though that could be done with more OTL symbols the Communists appropriated such as wheat sheaves of course) might fit in well, but alas we don't want it to be too busy!
Searching for Narodnik symbols myself I found an image of clasped hands in an oval (with words around it, something the Bolsheviks in the Revolutionary/Civil War period were somewhat addicted to--but I think verbal slogans will be points of contention and so agreeing to disagree involves omitting them, just as well). And an intriguing reference to the folklore witch figure Baba Yaga--her symbolism involves a house on chicken legs (it walks around) and she flies around in a mortar steered or propelled or something with her hands on the pestle. But I can't say that would resonate.
One fact about the February Revolution OTL, carrying over here as pre-POD, is that the actual insurrection was triggered by women protested lack of bread in Petrograd. So perhaps this carries over among the SRs, and thus encouraging less Leninist-disciplined radical Social Democrats too, to take a strong feminist line that might get Baba Yaga or other Russian peasant feminine imagery carried over. The way Western stories carry over Russian folktales, Baba Yaga is a scary figure, but maybe that is exactly what strong Russian women's movements would want--a quasi-matriarchal vibe in Russian peasant culture, which I think the Bolsheviks did capitalize on a bit. While largely shoving women into auxiliary roles in practice, but honoring them in theory--much as the cosmonaut program would eventually launch one token woman into orbit before the Americans had gotten one man up there, then not again until Sally Ride's first-American-astronaut-woman mission was scheduled, and they quickly sent up the second woman into space in the early 1980s twenty years later--and the men in the Salyut space station her mission joined gave her the traditional woman's greeting gift of an apron--for in Soviet society as it developed OTL, women worked two shifts; on paper, they were exact equals of men and supposed to work full factory shifts, and on paper their traditional household duties were to have been supplanted by communal rationalized centrally organized institutional organization, with individuals designated as cooks and cleaners and everyone eating from central kitchens cafeteria style, central baby creches and so forth--but a) the regime always skimped on actually providing these dormitory facilities, it was always "build the factory first, then later we'll get around to the worker housing," by which time the workers had long ago improvised primitive, largely traditional lodgings of some sort, and b) nobody actually liked the idealized Communist central living options and took every chance they could get for individual household kitchens, cleaning, raising their own babies, etc. (And the highly pro-regime Bolshevik novel Tsement, "Cement" in English, was actually kind of blood curdling in how they presented the idealized good Bolsheviks handing their kids over to centralized care--the kids do not prosper, they suffer badly from neglect, and somehow this is a good thing, for it shows the parents were dedicated revolutionaries unmoved by bourgeois sentimentality and accepted the suffering of their children as part of the sacrifices of building the new worker's order!) So in reality, Soviet housing turned into separate family dwellings, as much as possible, and guess who did all the housework? Not most of it--all of it. No second shift of domestic maintenance for male "comrades!" Eventually, after the collapse of the USSR, an interesting memoir by a young left wing Tejana (Latina Texan that is) American published in the mid 2000s called Around the Bloc, about her travels in post-Communist Russia, Cuba and the PRC, described an incident where she is hanging with some Russian women and they are bustling around cleaning and cooking and so on while the man of the house sits around being waited on, and when this young American with US feminist sensibilities asks them why they don't try to get Vasily to get up and help them at least a little, they explain while vigorously working, "Because...he's...incompetent!" So apparently just by responding to any desperate pleas to please help a little bit by screwing up the housework royally, Russian men exempt themselves whenever there is a woman around to do it all for them. The Soviet regime of OTL never really addressed this apparently. Hence the highly insulting aspect, as I interpret anyway, of the "gift" of the apron to that second woman cosmonaut!
So perhaps one effect of the multiparty split of power will be for women of several major tendencies, including both revolutionary branches, the SRs and the SDs, to hive off strongly feminist chapters of their respective movements and gain some serious electoral and other political clout for some serious feminism. Hence my wondering whether Baba Yaga imagery might turn up, if not on the national flag, then anyway somewhere in UoE political culture. Or some other strong female imagery?
Certainly I think if the UoE were ever in straits comparable to the OTL USSR under Nazi attack, we would definitely see lots of women fighters; OTL they did all sorts of things--snipers, fighter pilots, night bombers, tank operators. I remember glancing at some BBC documentary made in the '70s, World At War I believe it was called, and seeing translated accounts narrated by female Red Army generals.
OTOH, the universal conscription for Soviet military service (mostly Red Army, some to Navy and other services, and while in theory the service was universal there were "soft" postings reserved for Party privileged people's offspring and promising rising Komsomols and so on that were much less brutal than standard Red Army stints) was universal manhood service; between major wars women were not generally wanted quite so much, though I suppose that until Western forces started allowing women to serve more comprehensively between the 1970s and 2000 it was still more women in Soviet bloc forces than in Western ones, and with a lot less concentration of them into clerical and medical service almost exclusively.
I know that at least some of the OTL Left SRs in brief alliance with the Bolsheviks for a year or so after the October Revolution were women, including some chief leaders, but I don't know how typical or atypical they were.
Weeks ago I tried to start formulating a general response to the thread focused on the USA scene, and it turned into rather monstrous recounting of pre-POD US political factions. I wanted to stress strongly that OTL, prior to the POD, way back in the later 1880s and early '90s, the US People's Party was in fact in some communication with Russian Narodniks, and took some rather sophisticated ideas from some of the Narodnik intellectuals, such as a scheme for formulating a new basis for US money based on government warehouses accepting delivery of various commodities--agricultural produce, metal ores (miners being part of the Populist coalition) and basing the value of the dollar on the basket of goods produced by US industry across the board. (The eventual "free silver" platform championed by William Jennings Bryan in his successive failed bids to become the second Democrat after Grover Cleveland elected President since the Civil War was a grotesquely dumbed down version of the actual People's Party platform on money).
My more recent searches for Narodnik symbols confirmed what I suspected--the straight Russian to English translation of Narodnik is in fact--"populist." Note that that word did not exist in English until the People's Party coined it to describe themselves, and they may well have simply been taking the Russian word literally.
Suffice it to say, I don't think the USA will be quite identical to OTL in the 1920s. To an extent, the Red Scare of OTL was one of those things where if the Bolsheviks did not exist, people like Wilson and Comstock and that advertising guru Wilson hired to run US WWI propaganda would have invented them--but the reality of the hard Leninist line I think gave Wilson and his Republican successors leverage they might lack if the face of revolutionary Russia is more plural and less unequivocally scary. The fact is, the multiple UoE factions will find many American counterparts, and something like a revival of the old People's Party program, hopefully updated to be more inclusive of at least sectors of less agricultural interests, would be in the cards, as in fact the early 1890s heyday of the People's Party itself is well in living memory, and here their Russian counterparts have made something more or less great of themselves. The diversity of the American left in various somewhat mutually exclusive but also vaguely fellow-traveling forms might serve to undercut the legitimacy of sweeping repression, and call forms of repression that were accepted by leading elites with little comment OTL into more controversial question, and permit local bastions of various factions--agrarian neo-Populists,but also more Social Democratic or more radical still (Wobblies that is Industrial Workers of the World, and yes some Leninists, some Trotskyists and some followers of yet other OTL Bolshevik leaders who in the ATL run various splinters of the far left of the UoE SD movement, also non-Marxist anarchists and syndicalists) taking some root in various communities. The more extremely revolutionary will be repressed piecemeal, but the less overtly extreme or more cannily opportunistic might well put down roots, elect some Congressmembers, run towns and even bid for control of, or anyway established minority presence (based on strongholds where they are not minorties) in various state governments and perhaps with several such states neighboring, regions.
As someone deeply interested in electoral reform, I can also point out that these early decades of the 20th century involved the adoption of Single Transferable Vote in many city governments, and while as a rather radical advocate of what I call "positive representation" I have some quarrels with STV, it certainly closely approaches what I consider proper proportional representation. It involves ranked choice voting, the same as one uses in Instant Runoff (advocates of which seem lately OTL to be avoiding that once-popular label) but as it elects multiple members in larger districts instead of just one in each, the practical dynamics are quite different. But the electoral mechanism is the same. STV cities grew in number OTL until reaching a peak in the 1940s, then a concerted campaign to shut it down on the claim it was "Communist" somehow largely swept it away. While it operated though, voters on the whole seemed quite capable of handling the ranked choice votes to their advantage, and the outcomes were greater diversity--multiple parties, and also much closer to proportional representation of ethnic and "racial" groups.
So I have to wonder too--can the poorer "grounds" for repression in the USA, as the UoE is less terrifying objectively and harder to spin as some sort of sweeping existential threat, lead to even more widespread and accelerated adoption of STV voting in reformist or semi-revolutionary bailiwicks, perhaps as the established two parties realize they are in grave danger of being pushed out by new parties claiming "majority" rule on grounds as spurious as the mainstream old parties were accustomed to, and caving in to STV reform as a way of preventing themselves from being sidelined completely? STV with 3 representatives per district actually tends to reinforce a two party system--not as strongly as either our current FPTP single choice to elect one rep per district does, or as IRV still tends to do, but pretty strongly gives the upper hand to parties able to muster more than 1/4 of the whole vote, and rather slim opportunities for those not commanding at least a fifth or more. So the devil is in the details, but I would think that if a partial form of proportional representation can be introduced, eventually the electorate will demand more effective PR.
So perhaps, STV can move beyond city government, and become the means of electing some state legislatures and perhaps even state senates. And in this era, unless some special ATL judicial or national-political reaction moves to block it with ATL early measures, nothing stops a state apportioned multiple Representatives to Congress from electing them with STV too. In Australia, hundreds of offices are currently filled in systemwide races in some states or Territories there, or states with big apportionments can create a few large districts for smaller numbers of seats, say 5-7, while many states apportioned more moderate numbers in that range--anything from 2 to 9 or so--can hold them statewide at large. OTL, the US Supreme Court refused to get involved in such matters until the 1950s and '60s, until then holding that state electoral systems were matters for state courts and state politics, and all Federal offices are in fact elected by the various states. Nowadays, a combination of case law and Congressional statue forbid anything but single member district elections for the House of Representatives, but that is not embedded explicitly in the Constitution. So it would be possible, if STV is popular enough, for some states to elect their Representatives that way, and perhaps eventually for a national reform bandwagon to mandate it across the country. (This would leave states with single representatives in effect forced to use IRV, and I can see eventual challenges on equal protection grounds, but perhaps the response to that would be to argue House races are truly national and not properly state at all, and devise ways for votes to be consolidated across state lines, or even nationally--which would lead to what I call positive representation).
I actually have a different approach to PR I much prefer, but as noted, OTL STV had a bandwagon going in these decades, and so it is the best bet for a serious ATL approach to US proportional representation. One grounds it would be opposed on, quite frankly and openly in these pre-Cold War, pre-Civil Rights movement days, would be racist--if STV is in place, as noted, if African Americans and other "minorities" are allowed to vote equally, they can and probably will get their own representatives elected. Not just African Americans of course--Asians in various cities and the far western states, Native Americans in states like New Mexico and Arizona, Latinos in the southern border tiers of states, urban ethnic concentrations in the various big cities notably in the Northeast and Midwest. A lot of things in OTL history have been attributed to efforts to keep these groups out. So I would expect progress, as I see it, on this front to happen in places that are already pretty progressive. But it might be a surprising pattern--in the Jim Crow South, where African Americans are entering a particularly dark chapter (at least OTL, and I fear it would be utopian to hope for much relief in the ATL though I do think, as with possibly feminists in the UoE, they might have some leverage to get some bastions of relative safety or respect in some places, perhaps even in places in the South--overall I think proper comprehensive Civil Rights will wait a generation or two, but perhaps have more traction to be less token, limited and reversible in practice than OTL when that day does come) exclusion of AA from voting, Constitution be damned (Reconstruction Amendments forbid this from being done by direct mention of race, and also give Congress remedies to penalize states that manage by some subterfuge to disfranchise large portions of their adult citizen population, I assume that in the USA by now women are also Constitutionally enfranchised by Amendment). In such states, perhaps reformist movements understood to benefit "whites only" lock in voting and other formats that in later years when AA and other minority voting rights are enforced prove too popular to be reversed just to minimize African American voting impact, not with Civil Rights movements with teeth watching anyway.
So I'm just putting all that out there as possible groundwork for a later harvest of much more deeply established effective democracy in the USA, without the Bolshevik Red scare stick to beat all reformists with. Sure there will be some kind of anti-radical reaction, I'm suggesting though it that cannot be as sweeping or effective with Russian diversity mirroring American diversity.
P.S.: I realized I should have created a shadow or drawn a line around the Finnish ones because, well, otherwise it's white on white here. Anyway, just drafts.
