Crossposted from my recent update to my TL.
Anthena Petronia (among the halians, family name comes first), born 2396, Chairwoman of the Federation of Solar Soviet Republics from 2438 to 2458. She was the daughter of halian exiles who had fled the initial government crackdowns in the 2390s. Ironically, the Halian Republic experienced a brief cultural revolution when a communist faction led a coalition in the Governing Senate, and began instituting land reform and collectivization in the mid-2410s, before the Terran Federation blockaded its worlds and jump gates, and forced capitulation as a Terran protectorate. By that point, the Anthenae were well-established in the Soviet Federation as a notable bureaucratic family. Petronia gained early recognition as a diplomat and scholar, publishing a monograph on Halian naval politics. She served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2430 to 2438, and was one of the architects of the peace treaty with the Terrans in 2432. Her experiences in diplomacy convinced her of the necessity of peaceful coexistence with rival nations if the Soviet experiment was going to endure.
She came to lead a populist reform faction in the Communist Party of the Federation, and in the 2438 Party Congress, she made her move. They compelled the ailing general Taz ra Layra, chariman of the State Committee and the military council, to step down from effective power; he was elected as Precentor, the formal head of state, but this was largely a symbolic role. She was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party and Chairwoman of the Federation in his stead, and began a series of reforms. While certainly the ideological guide of the next era in Soviet politics, she refused dictatorial control and instead restored the civilian collective leadership after decades of military rule. Demonstrating her commitment to socialist pluralism, she invited ideologues of previously-repressed factions into the Central State Committee. For the first time in a century, the committee included Trotskyists, Orthodox Marxists, Anarchist Syndicalists, Traditional Leninists, and varying democratic socialists, alongside Mackenists and her own partisans. Notably, she directed political assignments among the ministers in accordance to their ideological commitment to that area of expertise-- nominating, for instance, a Syndicalist to the position of Minister for Trade Unions, and an eco-socialist as Minister for Environmental Protection, and so on. She did act to limit the influence of more belligerent factions, however, believing that ceding too much power to Trotskyists or Maoists would bring her ideals of peaceful coexistence crashing down as they hungered for conflict with the capitalist Terran and "old alien" states. It was largely by their influence that the Soviets backed the viridian rebels in their civil war that erupted in 2448, over her strenuous protests, though she managed to effect restraint to avoid a full-blown proxy war. Her primary foreign policy concern was the theory of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist and feudalist states of the galaxy, provided that Soviet territorial integrity allowed for appropriate time and space to develop socialism within the federation; much of her contributions to theory would be to justify this
détente. For the most part, she succeeded, and while the Soviet defense forces assisted in joint peacekeeping operations, they avoided direct conflict with rival nations; this proved controversial among communists within the capitalist "first galaxy" nations, many of whom saw her policies as revisionist betrayal of Connor Mackenzie's ideals.
In domestic politics, she espoused a "Third Way to Socialism", liberalizing local government so that each member world of the federation may pursue the form of socialism that best suited their material conditions and demography. A moderate degree of government control at the federal level, mainly for the military and core industries and trade, would be combined with a hands-off approach to the Soviet Republics as "laboratories of socialism", believing that scientific socialism required room to experiment to find the best path. Thus crafting a system that was neither authoritarian nor libertarian, and devolving economic planning horizontally to the member worlds. Part of this was the transformation of the Federative Communist Party into a federation
of parties, rather than a single party, composed of affiliates unique to each world; some planets may have multiparty elections between different socialist factions, while others might be led by a vanguard party of varying ideologies, from Leninism to Trotskyism to Maoism, depending on the planetary demographics. This reduced the power of the military and bureaucracy, which previously dominated the Federation under the ideology of Mackenzism, though they still were represented in the state and military committees and plenty of worlds still were governed as Mackenzist one-party republics.
She retired after the Party Congress in 2458, after amending the Soviet Charter to place fixed term limits on the main offices of state and the collective leadership. This would force the state to have "new blood" enter politics and ideally prevent stagnation. She died peacefully in 2489 soon after acting as diplomatic backchannel to broker peace in a proxy war between the Terrans and Soviets in the Perseus Arm.
