Seinfeld's take might be fun, in a dark sort of way, if the writers can pull it off.
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The Death of Russia - TL
- Thread starter Sorairo
- Start date
Seinfeld's take might be fun, in a dark sort of way, if the writers can pull it off.
I have been thinking about Halifax. There are two bases, the naval CFB Halifax and the air CFB Shearwater.
CFB Halifax is located squarely in the middle of the city, just across the harbour from the chief suburb of Dartmouth. If it is hit with anything like a strategic weapon—not ten kilotons or so like the Halifax Explosion, but something larger in the 100 kilotons range—then the whole conurbation will go up. I have two cousins and their families living in Dartmouth at this time and another cousin starting his university career at Dalhousie; they would surely be killed.
Things would be less dire if it was CFB Shearwater, located to the southeast of the city. I would think that Shearwater would be more germane to Soviet warplanners than Halifax, especially if the Fascists were planning a strike not aiming to maximize civilian casualties, but I think that thought might be more of a hope.
One thing is for certain: With Halifax, at least, taking heavy damage if not being destroyed outright, Atlantic Canada as a whole will be badly out back. I would suggest that the city of Moncton, in southeastern New Brunswick in the heart of the Maritimes, might well take up the slack as a hub while Halifax recovers.
We have been given clues that China survives and remains a major power, though no details.
I would suggest that the negative example of Russia's implosion would have a huge impact on the domestic politics of China. Consider that the Soviet Union was a role model for China and a natural model, even throughout their long rivalry. What will it mean for China that its rival/model ended up imploding spectacularly in a disastrous civil war that culminated in an even worse nuclear conflict?
Certainly official China's care to try to get the economy right will be reinforced by the Russian example. It that country had not imploded economically, the catastrophe would never have occurred. I would also suggest that the politics, in which radicals were given an opening and took advantage, will also impact China. I would suggest that anyone trying to rock the boat will be crushed all the more thoroughly. Political quietism will become the status quo.
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Interesting.
The comment about the admins is especially noteworthy since YOU NEVER EVEN BOTHERED TO REPORT ANYTHING. You've been her for close to six years, simply by osmosis you should have long since realized that A) the report system exists AND B) the reporting system is the only way that "admins" know to look at a problem.
However, from you regarding this thread
chirp
Your post is an insult to the poster author, to the rest of the Board Members who post/read this thread, and, lastly to the Mod Team.
See ya in 7.
We All Become Silent
We All Become Silent
President Clinton's 'Because' speech, in full (Broadcast from the Oval Office on the evening of April 10th 1996)
President Clinton's 'Because' speech, in full (Broadcast from the Oval Office on the evening of April 10th 1996)
“My fellow Americans, the longest day in our nation’s history has come to a close. Because of this day, thousands of brave American men and women who made this country great will not be with us tomorrow. They were from diverse walks of life - Black and White, Jew and Gentile, Republican and Democrat. They fell not just around the world, but here at home. Anchorage, Knoxville, Denver and Forts Bragg, Benning, Bliss, Stewart, Campbell, Knox and Hood, which were all struck by the greatest attack on this nation since Pearl Harbour. At Cheyenne Base in Colorado, our servicemen and women saw the missiles coming in from Russia on their monitors. They saw that there was no way to stop the missiles heading straight to them from exploding. Instead, they spent their last moments doing everything they could to save their fellow countrymen. They showed the bravery and courage of their forefathers at Bunker Hill, the Alamo, and Bastogne. Because of those brave men and women, New York City is still here. Lady Liberty is still here. The Twin Towers are still here. The Empire State building is still there. And the Lincoln Memorial, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Rushmore, and the Constitution of this Republic that has stood as a beacon to the Free World for two hundred and twenty years, all that is still here. America is still here, and with its allies from around the world, is ready to exact vengeance on those who caused this calamity.
"But just because we have experienced these tragedies does not mean we are alone in those tragedies. Both the Fascist and Communist governments have struck our allies in Britain, Canada, Ireland, Italy and Israel. Our friends are hurt, some worse than us, but all the hurt that we have taken is only a fraction of what we have visited upon them. The nuclear arsenals of both rogue Russian states have been destroyed - the armies of Fascism and Communism have been vanquished as they were at Berlin in 1945 and 1989 respectively. The destruction that Russia has experienced is unparalleled in human history, and while we are not proud of that destruction we are grateful that we have defeated the twin evils of the twentieth century once again. As I speak, the armies of the Free World, from Europe to Latin America and even the free Russians of Siberia are rolling into European Russia to minimise civilian casualties and bring to justice whatever perpetrators of the crimes we have witnessed for the past few years have survived.
"Today was a bitter day, perhaps the most bitter in our history, even more so than December 7th 1941 at Pearl Harbour. And it must be our mission to ensure it remains the most bitter day in our history, by never allowing something like this to happen again. For all the tragedy, this day has the potential to change many days in the future. We have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes that got us here to forge a new future, one where we will not only never have a day like this again, but never a day when we would even fear it. As we approach the new millennium, we must approach it with the determination that the twenty first century must not repeat the mistakes of the twentieth.
"In 1814, a great American, Francis Scott Key stood as a prisoner on a British Warship off the sea from Fort Henry. His jailers told him to look upon the American flag flying from the fort, and told him that soon that its inhabitants would surrender and pull down their flag. They said it would happen because the entire British navy had assembled, ready to demolish the fort and everyone in it, if they did not surrender. But as twilight came, their flag was still there. And so the greatest navy in the world began to fire with every canon they had upon the fort. For hours and hours Fort Henry took every shot. They had no reinforcements, no hope for victory. But despite the red glare from the rounds, despite the deafening explosions all around, the American flag was still there. And all below the ship, where Key’s fellow prisoners were interned, every soul prayed that that flag would not fall. For twenty-five hours, Fort Henry took the might of the strongest navy in the world. Finally, the next day, at the early morning light as the smoke cleared, over the ramparts still waved the flag of the republic. And so he would write, “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?” And so even today, for all the destruction wrought upon this country, the same Stars and Stripes that Francis Scott Key saw waving nearly two hundred years ago wave still. For all the hardship we endured, as we have for centuries, we have held on. And so does that star spangled banner yet wave, because the land of the free is the home of the brave.”
Extract from research interview for 'Denial: Why People Deny Genocide' by Charles Keane
Interviewer: “Hello [REDACTED], thank you for conducting this interview. You were a soldier in the British army stationed in Lithuania, is that correct?”
Soldier: “Yes, that’s correct.”
[...]
Interviewer: “It was dawn on April 11th when you crossed the border, right?”
Soldier: “We got permission to move from Lithuania into Latvia, which at the time wasn’t in NATO. Pretty soon after that, we rolled past the border and into the territory that Russia occupied in 1993. The idea was that we’d be the spearhead but the Latvian troops would take care of occupying the territory. So we were on the front side of things but at the same time we knew we had to get a move on. A lot of people were going to die if they didn’t get medical help and, well, a lot of people were going to die even with the medical help too.”
Interviewer: “Did you meet much resistance on the way?”
Soldier: “That’s what shocked me. Even up to and including Dagda, I never heard a single bullet fired. People were just too horrified. Even though there really hadn’t been any nukes on occupied Latvia apart from maybe one near a military base, the place was essentially in order. Certainly more in order than anything we found when we entered Russia proper. God almighty, there was just nothing.”
Interviewer: “How did the people greet you?”
Soldier: “It depended - many actually didn’t do anything. They just went about their day like nothing was happening. Babushkas were in the store complaining about bread, old men played chess in the park. I couldn’t believe it since we were all scared out of our minds but I think that something in their minds had broken and they just switched off, because facing the horror of what happened was just something they couldn’t comprehend. Others greeted us almost like liberators, not because they liked us, but because they worried that the whole world had been completely destroyed in the exchange. So when they heard that, for the most part only Russia was destroyed, at first they were like “Yes! Only Russia was destroyed!” before realising “Wait, only Russia is destroyed” and then crumpled to the ground. Their country was gone. Their history, their culture, everything. It was like they’d lost all their parents and children. It was a horrific blow to them - many never recovered.”
Interviewer: “What did you know about Dagda before you arrived?”
Soldier: “We’d heard about the rape camp rumours, the brainwashing camp rumours, but to be honest a lot of people, especially the ones who weren’t reading the broadsheets didn’t believe it. A lot of people assumed they were exaggerating how bad it was to justify why we kept the sanctions despite the Depression. I didn’t really know what I believed, but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t what I found there.”
Interviewer: “I know it’s difficult for you to remember but due to the rise of the online denial culture about things like the rape camps and the Zass Plan, can you just say what you saw in the camp when you arrived?”
Soldier: “We arrived in Dagda ‘Holding Camp’ pretty early in the morning - the orders apparently came from pretty high up to confirm some of the rumours that were going on there. The guards had all left - ran before we came because they knew what we would find. We arrived at the gate and, you remember those images of Auschwitz and the Nazi camps with the emaciated inmates waiting around the gate? It was like that, but they were all women and girls. Most but not all looked slightly different from native Russians, and our translator said that’s because they were Caucasian - Georgians, Chechens, Azeris and so on. Others looked a bit more Asiatic, and they were Tatar. A few were blonde - they turned out to be ethnically Ukrainian. Some were bald because they desperately tried to make themselves less attractive to get less attention. Almost all of them had bruises or black eyes, even bite marks. A lot of them actually ran in terror from us because after what they’d all been through they were terrified of the sight of a man, any man. So we already knew what had happened and were shocked - even though we’d heard all the rumours, they don’t prepare you for seeing what had happened. We went inside the barracks and then we all become silent. We opened one room to find lines of women literally chained to the wall, some of them dead and most of the ones that were alive wishing they were. The floor was just awash in shit, because they had been chained in some cases for weeks and just repeatedly raped there, in front of all the others, and now no one was left to clean up. The women’s legs were just red from bruising, rashes and inflammation. We later found out that one of the women had been raped by a HIV-positive convict as punishment for resisting too much - I’m grateful I didn’t know it at the time because it was already too much to take.”
Interviewer: “What was the age range of the women in that room?”
Soldier: “... Can we skip that question and come back to it?”
Interviewer: “Of course - were any of the camp guards left?”
Soldier: “We went to camp headquarters, expecting, like everywhere else, that it would be completely empty. Instead, as we went in we saw, crawling across the floor, the first male that we’d seen in the camp the whole time. It was a boy - couldn’t have been more than ten years old. Like a lot of the Ukrainians he was blonde, very naturally innocent looking, and he was crawling across the floor, really cautiously, looking at us and then back to the room behind him in terror. His face looked okay but we could quickly realise he was in severe pain. It turned out that both of his legs were broken and that he’d been ordered to walk around on them for the amusement of his abuser for months. Not just his legs, this boy had essentially been tortured daily by the man who was just behind him in that room. Now, the man who did, turned out he was actually quite infamous. His name was Anton Krasovsky, and he had the nickname of ‘monster’. He took particular delight in abusing and torturing the children in the camp, particularly but not exclusively the Ukrainians. We walked, guns at the ready, right into the room to see Krasovsky at a desk just reeking of vodka. He’d had a nervous breakdown - not about what he’d done, but because of 4/10. When he woke up he saw three guns practically in his gob. What blew my mind was how young he was - he would have been a uni student at home, but here he was committing things that were beyond even what the Latvians thought of Russians.”
Interviewer: “How hard was it not to kill him?”
Soldier: “Well, the funny thing is that when I saw those women before, I said to myself that there’s no God. So when I realised that I sort of had the choice of killing him right there, punishments be damned, I realised how stupid it would be to kill him. He dies, then nothing. That’s why I never understood why the American were so mad about the idea of Timothy McVeigh getting tried at the Hague. “Oh if he didn’t have a trial in America, they wouldn’t have given the death penalty” - exactly, he’d die and then he wouldn’t get to suffer. If he was going to suffer, as I wanted him to, I wanted him to live as long as possible - in that sense, it was a good thing he was so young. We beat the shit out of him, obviously. I think we must have taken half his teeth out.”
Interviewer: “What do you think about the denial of not just the rape camps, the idea that the camps were just holding camps that gets spread by some far-right and even sometimes far-left types on the internet?”
Soldier: “Well, it’s like the Nuclear Holocaust, the idea that the nuclear bombings of Komi and the Ural countries were actually done by the West to discredit the Nashis. We can’t use facts and logic to untangle that mess because no adult in a society with access to information has ever been a Nuclear Holocaust, or Jewish Holocaust denier out of facts or logic. The only thing I can say to the people who say the rape camps didn’t exist, that it all was made up to justify the nuclear strike, I wish you were right, mate. I really wish you were right.”
Extract from ‘A Continent of Fire’ by James Melfi
Thirty-eight million. That was the final death toll of the Second Russian Civil War, which made the conflict the second deadliest in world history after World War Two. The final day is usually seen as April 17th, when an American unit in hazmat gear in Moscow raised Old Glory above the rubble where the Kremlin used to be - a scene whose morality and taste has been hotly contested since, not in the least due to one of the soldiers tying a small Polish flag halfway up the flagpole due to his Polish ancestry. However, the climatic effects of the ‘Nuclear Autumn’ that lasted until the dawn of the new millenia so depressed crop outputs that some argue the resulting excess deaths from mass hunger throughout the Third World should be counted. This isn’t to mention the sky-rocketing rates of thyroid cancer across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia that continues to affect the regions - this would be more than enough to push the tally towards that putrid prize of the deadliest war in history. The toll was overwhelmingly composed of the dead from the nuclear strike and the famines that shattered the once almighty Russian nation - the conventional violent deaths still stood in the millions. It would, of course, have been much more, if the combined forces of the planet had not moved in to try and rescue the situation. With NATO troops wearing their protective material, the Ukrainians, Siberians and Belarussians wearing their Soviet material, the desperate mission to relieve the shattered country was under way. Some treated the battered population better than others. The Finns and Balts in particular had no love for the residents and never made any attempt to hide it, while the Anglo-Americans were the best the Russian civilians could reasonably hope for.
When it came to troops, the Red Army soldiers generally surrendered vastly easier - they had lived through the 80s and knew that Communism was not a system worth fighting for. The Fascist troops had more holdouts and ambushes, and by the end of 1996, it was estimated that nearly 4,000 intervening troops had been killed by Fascists, as compared to about 1,200 killed by Red soldiers. The war against Al Qaeda was put on hold, and it wouldn’t be until early 1997 that it was definitely determined that it was Al-Qaeda, not Petrograd, who fired the first shot in the nuclear conflict. European Russia was put under UN administration with Kaliningrad now stuck with having to pay reparation to Russia’s many enraged neighbours and genocided minorities. The occupation was primarily a NATO job, and certainly NATO would be the first to go anywhere in the stricken country. Eventually, the occupation duties would be increasingly spread around other UN states, like Brazil, Indonesia, even China. While everyone wanted to put to justice the people who did this, they were almost all dead due to the nuclear strikes. The highest ranking Fascist official alive was Eduard Limonov as he had resigned due to differences in economic policies as a National Bolshevik, before going to live in the countryside. He was captured by a Swedish army detachment and eventually taken to the Hague where he was successfully imprisoned for life for atrocities.
Tellingly, on April 12th Lebed would declare on radio that he had rescinded his claim to European Russia. He was declaring the independence of Siberia and recognising the FEK as a sovereign state as well, a decision soon reciprocated by Vladivostok. When angrily asked why he had done so by Rokhlin, he frankly told his friend, “After what’s just happened in Komi, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, this country will pay reparations until the sun burns out - I can’t bring back the dead, neither the people nor Russia itself.” The city of Orenburg was abandoned due to the waves of radiation emanating from the north, the ethnic Russian population almost entirely fleeing to Siberia. The reckoning for the Nuclear Genocide would inevitably be fierce, and as the full understanding of what happened began to disseminate, the two nations that were most enraged were Finland and Turkey (owing not just to how badly they had been hit, but that the ethnic groups targetted for extermination were from their sisterly ethnic groups). Finland would consequently become uncharacteristically harsh in its demand for a settlement. The Latvians and Estonians would be equally vindictive, and once Western press could see some of the camps that the Petrograd government had employed, the desire for punishment of the Russian state only grew more. The two Baltic countries now longer demanded the return of their 1993 borders, but their 1939 borders, as both had lost territory due to Russian annexation that had been seen as water under the bridge and not worth the fuss in 1991. Turkey went one farther than the rest. Turkey sent their troops by boat up to the east side of the Kerch strait, then began to march south along the Black Sea while sending troops up from Circassia. Turkey somewhat surprised their partners by informing them that Turkey recognised Circassia’s right to the entirety of the Black Sea Coast from Sochi to the Kerch Strait, a territorial claim endorsed initially only as a starting bid by the Circassian militants to exact concessions. While shocked at the presumptiveness and vindictiveness of the announcement, Clinton could only keep trying to administer over the chaos.
The wave of Russophobia in 1996 due to the strike was short but profound, leading many in the Russian diaspora to move in different directions. Despite the success in getting so many refugees into Western countries, 4/10 completely flipped the script - anti-Russian feeling in the West returned and would last for a few years before the unending images of destruction replaced those feelings with pity and nostalgia. Many of those who wanted to stay in the West did everything they could to remove any traces of their ancestry, or pretended to be another kind of Eastern European. While one could tell due to their Slavic accents that they weren’t born there, ‘Vasily’ became ‘Vince’, ‘Yulia’ became ‘Julia’, ‘Petrov’ became ‘Peterson’ and so forth. Some parents would even smack their child for speaking in Russian and to order them to speak only English. Despite the gigantic influx of people, Russian-Americans would go through a similar form of deep integration as the German-Americans, with second generation Russian children being seen as ‘abnormally American’ by some scholars. The STEM fields in particular ended up being dominated by them. Of course, America was more welcoming of its Russian hosts than many European states, with some refugee centres attacked in the days after 4/10, especially in former Warsaw Pact countries. Of course further still, this assimilationist route was not for everyone. Many wanted to keep their traditions and way of life. This would kick-start the voluntary emigration of Russian citizens to the FEK and Siberia, both of which were in great demand of people given their sheer scale. One somewhat surprising candidate for ‘repatriation’ was Ukraine. Ukraine’s nationalist leadership had taken the view that the fall of Russia left Kyiv as the true inheritor to Constantinople and Rome, a fact that excited mystic sensations in many in the nationalist communities of the country. Consequently, many sought to make Ukraine the leader of Slavic and Orthodox Civilisation. Despite Lilliputian military attempts to create this aura, the cultural victory of Ukraine would solidify over the Slavic world in the coming years. Subsequent immigration by Russians on the condition they ‘revert’ their cultural practices back to ‘the true successors of the Kyivan Rus’ would create a deep labour pool, as well as one possessed by rekindled mission. As Ukraine’s economy soared in the coming years, eventually reaching 60 million inhabitants, the country increasingly threw its weight around. Ukraine has subsequently become the leader of the EU’s Eastern Bloc alongside Poland, primarily in opposition to France and Germany. A big reason for this was, as mentioned, the influx of Russian refugees.
While foreign countries pledged to do all they could to relieve the population, there had been more than enough chaos in the West. On April 10th, the S&P 500 fell by 70% in a single day - and though it very quickly recovered in equally record-setting style, the economic thundershock ripped through the economy. Riots swept the major cities of most major cities that evening as looters and various shades of political fundamentalists tried to take advantage of the chaos. In America alone, one billion dollars worth of damage was caused by ‘The Nuclear Riots’. Martial law was declared nationwide in the UK, Israel, Turkey, Finland, France, Germany, and Poland, as well as a majority of US states. While April 10th is considered the worst day of the Second Depression economically, the recovery would be painfully slow given the geopolitical chaos the war’s effects would soon unleash upon the Third World. Almost all incumbents would receive boosts to their popularity. The most notable was Clinton, who would go on to win his second Time’s Person of the Year for 1996 to complete four straight years of the title given to people due to the events of the Second Russian Civil War. ‘The Russian Refugee’ won in 1995, Dudayev won in 1994 and Makashov won in 1993. Clinton’s approval boost pre-emptively guaranteed a crushing re-election victory over John McCain that November. The only major exception to the incumbent bounce was in the United Kingdom, as there had been a Coalition government formed between Major and Blair, with the former often blamed for almost anything in the response that went wrong and the latter praised for everything that went right. The damage in England while not as humanly costly as Canada, where support for Quebec independence imploded and a new grievance was born in Albertans feeling ignored in that Halifax’s strike was receiving far more governmental assistance than Edmonton. Nor was it as costly as in France or Turkey, but it was still psychologically deep due to a mushroom cloud being visible from the centre of London. While this damage was somewhat healed by England’s subsequent victory in the UEFA European Championship in 1996 (an event wildly called to be cancelled but pushed ahead by the organisers and players to become a cultural event on tier with England’s 1966 World Cup win’), it was not enough to save Major in the subsequent election, leading to Labour’s first return to majority government since 1979. Again, despite protests, the Atlanta Olympics continued under immense security - a failed bombing attempt by a Christian religious fundamentalist attempt intercepted before detonation. As the event was completed and America again performed well, the complaints vanished into history.
Extract from ‘The Unstoppable Tragedy: The Second Russian Civil War’ by Peter Hodges
The events of 4/10 were so monumental that all parties desired the peace resolution to be of similar significance to Westphalia or Vienna. The choice of location was poignant: Hiroshima. Two major questions arose from the conclusion to the Second Russian Civil War: what to do with WMDs and how to reconfigure Russia? While immense, the first actually proved easier than many feared, with all nuclear powers in the world attending, though Israel declared due to their obscure policy that they were ‘merely observers’. The war had entirely changed nations’ understanding of nuclear weapons, with the weapons of a country now interpreted as potentially being used against their own citizens in the coming years. The presence of nukes also made Russia significantly less safe as it stopped the foreign powers from ending the carnage early. Coupled with widespread renewed opposition to nuclear energy, the World Disarmament Movement was founded in May 1996 by Elie Wiesel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the former having described the events of 4/10 as ‘An Auschwitz as wide as a continent’. The stated goal of this movement was the ‘End of the nuclear menace’ - it was not a group that called for unilateral disarmament, but to reduce the threat of nuclear destruction as had been seen in the Nuclear Holocaust. Thanks in part to Solzhenitsyn, but primarily due to the unspeakable horror seen among the East Slavic states to what had happened in Russia, the movement for global disarmament was strongest in the Russian-speaking world. Aksyuchits announced on April 21st that he was simply abolishing the nuclear arsenal immediately, saying that after seeing what he had seen in Russia that if he could go back in time and had one he could use against North Korea to prevent the invasion, he would not do so. The main push for a deal was America, whose collection of warheads now stood at orders of magnitude above all other countries in the five figure zone. China’s invitation had been surprisingly cordial, as the economic gut-kick of 4/10 and subsequent political chaos ensured all nations wanted nothing more than stability. China itself was eager to make everyone forget about their Siberian adventure and gladly accepted whatever the West was offering if it ensured their place in the new world order. At the final agreement, it was declared among NATO, the Russian successor states, China, India and Israel that not only was nuclear warfare unacceptable, but that it would consider the creation of one by any country on Earth to be a collective declaration of war against them. It was further agreed that America would pledge that by 2000 they would have only 1,000 warheads, with the UK, France and China being given a maximum of 100. India was given an allowance of 40, and Israel of 15. Israel reluctantly confirmed the existence of its nuclear program on the condition that America provided more advanced weapons technology, further entangling the two countries’ military industrial complexes.
Facing immense political pressure from their populations, who were as one psychologist recalled, “Maddened by grief and loss,” the Russian speaking world would unanimously surrender their nukes. Talk of how nukes would protect Russians had fallen on deaf ears given how many Russians had died due to Russian nukes. Nemtsov recalled that his mind had already been made up standing on the ashes of his childhood home in Nizhny Novgorod, and pledged to fully end the nuclear program. Lebed, while illicitly keeping his chemical weapons deposits to act as a minor deterrent, was forced to agree to the terms. Belarus, run by an academic in Pazniak with no stomach for war, likewise gladly agreed to the abolition of nukes. Kazakhstan was flatly told by China to accept the loss of the nukes or be economically cut off. The only country that considered keeping their nukes was Ukraine, with Lukianenko hopeful of making the country the leader of the Slavic world by default. Instead, the population angrily took to the streets of Maidan in what became known as ‘The Peace Revolution’ to demand Ukraine follow the lead of the rest of the East Slav states and end the nuclear program. The most infamous speech came from one of the operators of the missile systems on April 10th, who told the crowd that the nuke he helped launch had destroyed his childhood town in Russia, and that he had killed his school friends in the town. He said that the only reason he would not kill himself was that he had a mission to warn the world to stop this from ever happening again. Another was Arkady Babchenko, a Ukrainian Jew who had served in the Red Army at gunpoint, was captured by Nashis and experienced a nuclear explosion before passing away from cancer in 2005 after writing a bestselling memoir of his time in the war. His retelling further inflamed the crowd, who all demanded something like that never happen to any people on Earth. Unfortunately, some 10% of the Ukrainian and Belarus missile operators that were involved in Allied Force would either commit suicide or die from health conditions brought on by the mental weight of the event. The Revolution had the desired effect, with Lukianenko agreeing to surrender Ukraine’s nuclear weapons. Just like South Africa, the entirety of the Post Soviet space had accepted the total removal of nuclear weapons, though Belarus and Ukraine asked for and received an agreement for NATO membership as a condition, a process that would be joined by Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as one group in 1999.
While unthinkable before the war, the mental impact of a near-miss global apocalypse had created a paranoia particularly among Western countries that such an event could never, ever be allowed to happen again. But to many third world nations more used to political instability, the decision was seen as a slap in the face. For the world's superpowers, alongside Israel whose inclusion in the conference’s decision making panel led to countless allegations of Jewish meddling, to tell them what to do was seen as an unacceptable form of neo-colonialism, particularly in the case of Pakistan. Pakistan was in the final stages of their nuclear program and was essentially one crank away from full completion. That a panel involving India and Israel had held a panel where it became the world’s collective duty to stop the spread of nuclear weapons through military means was perfect political fodder. Benazir Bhutto, Pakistani Prime Minister would reluctantly agree to go ahead with international demands and clamp down on the nuclear program, something that the Pakistani military was in uproar about. This culminated on October 20th 1996, with Bhutto being put under house arrest by a military coup just one year after another failed military coup. The coup was led by Naseem Rana, the head of the ISI, who became the interim leader. He announced that Pakistan was withdrawing from the terms agreed to by Bhutto. He had expected that given the Americans had a presidential election soon, that they wouldn’t want to create unnecessary drama, which was perhaps the most foolish mistake of his life. On October 28th 1996 after ignoring calls from the White House to step down or face consequences, American planes from the carrier strike force began to obliterate every nuclear facility in the country. The Pakistanis were mortified that the threats had been real all along, the lower ranking officers immediately throwing Rana under the bus by executing him and restoring Bhutto to power, with both agreeing to downplay the role the other officers had to put all the blame on Rana. Bhutto consequently agreed by diktat to scrap the nuclear program, while also cutting cold all aid to the Taliban and getting its military under control. While India had not participated (an intentional decision of the US), the residents of Pakistan’s neighbour celebrated their enemy’s confirmation as a lower-grade power, on the wrong end of the nuclear dividing line.
The second would deal with Russia’s status itself. Lebed and Aksyuchits’s independence was recognised, as was that of the entirety of the Caucasian states, including Kalmykia, who was relatively undestroyed in the chaos and leapt for the opportunity to escape the great prison house of nations while it still could, as perhaps its final inmate. Turkey forsook economic reparations from Russia in return for its recognition of the establishment of a Circassian state on the Black Sea. Circassia’s independence was confirmed with its territory starting from the west side of the Kuban river on the Azov Sea running down the Laba River and including the entirety of the Kabardino-Balkar and Karachay-Cherkess republics, thus ending the existence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The region was soon swarmed with eager Circassians from around the world, who endeavoured to restore the strength and vitality of their nation’s past, with the Turks helping them stand on their feet. Ethnic Russians were not forcibly pushed out but made to live under conditions that were deliberately alien to them, leading to Circassians being an overall majority in the territory by 2000, a trend that has gotten more prominent since. Estonia and Latvia got their pre-Stalinist occupation borders back, with a far stricter declaration that anyone on these territories would be considered complicit in criminal enterprise and thus inadmissible for Latvian citizenship or aid - as all ethnic Latvians had been expelled, everyone was considered fair game. Estonia copied the approach for Narva. While again not a forced movement of people, it was very deliberately made to make life unlivable for ethnic Russians. Finland would gain their 1941 borders again, but with a catch. This territory would be allotted to the Karelian, Mari El, Udmurt and Komi survivors of Petrograd’s genocide. All these groups were of Finnic origin but many, especially the Udmurts, had been faced with almost total extermination at the hands of the Petrograd regime. To substantial reparations from the Russian state, the survivors would be able to flee the literally unliveable surroundings of their indigenous lands to take refuge inside the expanded Finnish state. The Urallic states and Komi, as well as other hotspots around European Russia, were declared contaminated zones and were the subject of forced evacuations. Almost no Russians still alive within the territory allotted to Finland wanted to face the Komi or Udmurt survivors of the genocide and fled at full pace. Turkic genocide survivors such as the Tatars would be given refuge in either Turkey or Circassia, and Caucasian genocide survivors would reunite with their kin to tell them stories that would form mutual understanding throughout the region.
It was agreed that European Russia itself was simply incapable of sustaining itself for the foreseeable future (with multiple destroyed nuclear plants further contaminating the surrounding environments), leading to agreements to send waves of refugees over the mountains to Siberia and the FEK. The capital of the Russian state would remain in Kaliningrad, as it tried to manage the breakdown of society in the European core. Mandates to launch decommunisation measures would also strain Nemtsov, who had to change his region’s name. Ultimately, to stress the region’s connection to Russia, a presidential committee decided to make ‘Pushkingrad’ the name of the city, a deeply unpopular one with the locals since the writer had no connection to the city. They wanted ‘Korolevets’, which was the Russian version of ‘Königsberg’, but an almost certainly rigged vote would give the Pushkingrad name, since secession like Siberia if committed by the Baltic region would throw the status of European Russia into the deepest confusion, not to mention remove Russia’s sole unspoiled region. While Pushkingrad is still officially ‘The Russian Federation’ on international forms, even in 2020, due to the horrific cleanup cost and mass movements of people, European Russia is a pale shadow of itself, with a lower population than either Siberia or the FEK. But, as one desperate final measure to try and restore optimism of Russian people in the Hiroshima Treaty, it was agreed to restore the Romanov Dynasty to a ceremonial position as Tsars in the obliterated mess of European Russia. It was a huge decision, but Nemtsov felt that the state needed some way to remember her great past. Furthermore, an organisation known as the ‘Russian Union’ was formed, in the mould of the embryonic European Union, though it would be years before significant agreement was possible. The President of this group would be the Tsar, giving some form of unity across former Russia. The battle for who would be Tsar was actually quite fierce, as there were competing claims within the Romanov family itself. Ultimately, owing to his age being just old enough to make people assume he was alive during the 1917 Revolution, Prince Nicholas Romanov was declared to be the government’s choice for the first Russian Tsar in eighty years. While many thought a coronation would be a miserable affair given the supposed loss of the Russian Crown Jewels in nuclear flame, the discovery of the ‘Hermitage Vault’ in northern Russia in June 1997 and the Imperial Crown Jewels within was hailed as a potentially literally miraculous find. Symbolically, the coronation would be on the exact eightieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in November 1997, in the city of Veliky Novgorod, the largest in European Russia that hadn’t been abandoned or destroyed due to nuclear weapons. The Romanovs had after all those years in the wilderness, finally returned to the throne. It was perhaps the one event shellshocked Russian survivors could take some joy in UN refugee camps around the tv screens, to see traditional Russian ceremony and elegance, as if that world had not been destroyed. Others hoped that this ‘Novgorod Kingdom’ would forsake the warlike ways of old Musvcovy and act like the old Novgorod Republic, as a cultured European nation.
The Treaty of Hiroshima would eventually be signed in front of the Genbaku Dome, the only surviving building in Hiroshima from its destruction on August 8th 1996, fifty one years to the day after Little Boy detonated over the city. It would be a monumental treaty that has defined most of the 21st Century to date, but it didn’t just end the MAD era. It was the moment when a continent-spanning colossus of Russia, an empire that in many forms had been at the forefront of history, of science, of art for centuries, was told that the show was over. Or perhaps more tragically, that the show had to go on, but she could no longer be part of it. Though many have worn her colours and claimed her legacy, few truly doubt that almost in a flash on April 10th 1996 she was no longer with us anymore, and on August 8th we finally accepted that. But while she herself lives no more, her accomplishments and beauty outlast her, and as with Ozymandias before her, it is not her brute military strength but her art and culture that shall live forever.
Extract from 'Unending Torment: From 4/10 to 2000' by Simon Faulkner
The remainder of 1996 would see further deep political turmoil around the world. In Serbia, Western sanctions had created a scenario where starvation was being reported in the streets of Belgrade. Conditions in the country were rough, but the horror of 4/10 left an indelible impression. Many of the refugees that came to Serbia were not patriotic supporters of the Petrograd regime, to say the least, despite Milosevic’s open support. They kept quiet, however, in finally being given a place away from the violence. But when 4/10 happened, the mental collapse that stunned the Russian diaspora led to a gigantic shift in perceptions. Milosevic was now considered a partner in crime with the regime that had not only ‘started’ the nuclear war, but had committed an atrocity that would tie the name of Russians to evil forever in the same way Hitler did for the Germans. For one of the primary victims of Hitler, the outrage was apocalyptic. Suddenly in May there were indeed protests in Kosovo, but not the Albanians that Milosevic had sent the Russians to deal with, but the Russians themselves. Seeing their chance, opposition figures called for a protest on May 9th in Belgrade to demand the resignation of Milosevic, who was widely blamed for the economic catastrophe as well. When one old man in a tractor from a nearby farm drove into Belgrade and accidentally ran into a police barricade when he got lost, the crowd took it as a sign to strike, with a biblical riot breaking out in the streets of Belgrade, and the Novi dvor presidential palace being set in flames. The Tractor Revolution would be the end of Milosevic, who reluctantly resigned on May 10th. Zoran Đinđić, the opposition leader, would take over and agree to Western demands to hand over all war criminals connected to the Bosnian and Croat wars. This would include Milosevic himself, who would be convicted of his knowledge and involvement in war crimes in Bosnia at the Hague in 2001. However, to Albanian chagrin, Kosovo’s independence bid was strangled in the crib due to the demographic inflow of Serbs from Bosnia. While some had predicted Serbia would lose Kosovo or Montenegro in the chaos following the loss in the Bosnian war, both remain parts of Serbia today, albeit with more regional autonomy.
Setting the stage of the wider wars to come in Africa in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s response to calamitous drought and an imploding economy in 1996 began to implement drastic solutions. In 1995, Mugabe had increasingly targeted White farmers as a scapegoat for his own economic mismanagement, but as the economy continued to slide, the rhetoric continued to increase. Vigilante violence by Mugabites against these farms skyrocketed, until June 1996 when Mugabe would announce the mass seizure of White farmland without compensation. While violence against the farmers increased, violence in general increased as well due to the imploding economy. But it was what was happening in South Africa, not Zimbabwe, that would determine the country’s future. On July 17th 1996, Eeben Barlow, the head of an Executive Outcomes whose business was exploding due to their shares in Siberia’s mineral wealth, would meet South African President Nelson Mandela. Mandela had been pressured by the Clinton Administration and China to deal with Mugabe’s destabilisation. Mandela, who still thought well of Mugabe due to his role in the end of the Rhodesian semi-Apartheid regime, was reluctant to go after an old ally. This was until Barlow met Mandela, and frankly told him that a collection of Afrikaner and Rhodesian expats with serious money had contacted him to send a military force to Zimbabwe to take down Mugabe, albeit not to bring back a White Supremacist state - he said that at least one neighbouring state to Zimbabwe had already approved using their territory to launch an attack. Barlow told Mandela his choice was either to leave the operation to the SADF, or see White mercenaries connected to an Apartheid-era firm topple a famous African leader. He pointedly told the South African President, “If it’s so awful to say you’re helping White farmers, just say you’re avenging the Gukurahundi (the name of Mugabe’s genocide of the Mathebelle in the 1980s), even if you would be pretty late.” Mandela was furious but was backed into a corner. On August 12th, Mandela launched the South African invasion of Zimbabwe. It was an almost Shakespearean tale of two former comrades in the independence struggle now becoming enemies, with one to be praised by the West as a model of human decency and the other damned to be known as a model of kleptocracy. Mugabe would surrender on August 20th, after a light-speed operation by the finest army in Africa made short work of Mugabe’s vigilantes and unmotivated army. Prominent Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai would become President, charting a frayed but superior course for the young country under the model of Mandela’s South Africa. White farmers would mostly return to their homesteads while Mugabe and his wife were arrested. Barlow’s sneer about the Gukurahundi would actually turn out to be a foreshadowing of Mugabe’s trial in the Hague, where he was put on trial for genocide and sentenced to life in 2003. South Africa further consolidated, and while radical Black Nationalist groups lambasted Mandela for his ‘betrayal’, it further solidified Mandela’s stature in the West as someone on the right side of history and led to a sizeable voluntary repatriation of White South Africans who felt Mandela’s handling of the incident had assuaged many of their fears about what a future South Africa would look like. Due to bad blood between Barlow and Mandela, not in the least due to Barlow's participation in the Apartheid military, Executive Outcomes would fully move to Siberia in 2003, and become a substantial local employer.
But for all the chaos in the Third World in 1996, it would pale into comparison to 1997, where the weight of economic downturn had made many seemingly invincible dictatorships look not that strong anymore. The ‘Arab Spring’ would begin in Libya, after Gaddafi had reluctantly agreed to the abolition of his WMD program following Pakistan’s Near Death Experience in October. That December, Gaddafi announced the process and announced it had been completed by February. This was a sign to discontented groups that Gaddafi felt unsure of his powers. On February 26th, protests were organised in Tripoli to demand economic reform. Realising that he had communicated weakness, Gaddafi deliberately overcompensated and ordered troops to fire on the protestors. When said troops instead joined the protestors and the dictator had to flee to Benghazi, a sudden wave of excitement seized the country that Gaddafi could be thrown out. But it wasn’t just in Libya - in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, economic discontent from the Depression had boiled over and the desperate living conditions led to protests sweeping the Middle East, the protests divided between Islamists and democrats. In Syria, dictator Hafez al-Assad was reportedly lucid for only two hours a day due to ill health and his regime was thrown into turmoil as the Muslim Brotherhood marched the streets. In Iraq the contours of the worst civil war since the Russian Civil War were being made as rival groups circled for power. Even in Iran, devastated by all these events, the population demanded change. The Second Russian Civil War was over, but it would lead to the beginning of many more wars to come.
Then, on March 7th 1997, a nuclear bomb exploded in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
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Still, no one has noticed that on April 10, 2010, the Polish president died in a plane crash in Smolensk, Russia when visiting the graves of the Polish prisoners of war killed by the Soviets in 1940 (April 13 is the anniversary). While largely unnoticed (Poland is rather a small country), the date of April 10 is a major point for the decade in nationwide politics (full of conspiracy theories on both sides of political barricades, especially in 2022), influencing all elections and governmental decisions since that date. So, OTL and ATL 10th of April is inherently linked to Russia.
One small correction: confusingly, Cheyenne Mountain Complex is actually located in the State of Colorado, near Colorado Springs
In full honesty, there was no symbolic significance to April 10th - it was just the first date that came to mind.
I'm not too familiar with the metro but since I'm in favour of not being gratuitously dark for the sake of it I'll say it worked relatively well in protecting people before they were rescued by UN medical workers.
Like at Hiroshima, many people were exposed to radiation and black rain and lived a long time. That said, cancer risk skyrockets.
If I'm going to do a wham line I should probably get the year right - fixed to 1997.
Unironically, the most important date in recent Polish history - influencing politics, society, and the Church. And linked to Russia, so your pick was a lucky (or unlucky, given ATL casualties) one.
Dies slightly earlier due to stress of 4/10 in September 1996 - the succession is identical, and signing the Treaty of Hiroshima is his final act. China's economic potential is desperately sought given the miserable global economy, which has had yet another setback due to the early Arab Spring screwing with oil prices, so it is eagerly sought out by the West and China is eager to re-enter international circles after Tianaman.
The Tsar return, Using little dark age, Russian wars finally over, the Nuclear bombs is going to be disorder completely and finally a cliffhanger of a Kazakths capital nuke to death?
That's what I entertain chapter mate and also thank you for using my term "4/10" for it thank you mate
Fucking Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda again. TTL's 90s truly is a cursed decade.
But why choose Kazakhstan?
Also kind of ironi that's the Tsar simple of the last hope after Russian people wow 80 years ago it was loathe by them
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Finnish borders of 1941? Would this mean the 1939 borders and parts of Soviet East Karelia that were under Finnish occupation from 1941 to 1944? Something like this?
Finnish borders of 1941? Would this mean the 1939 borders and parts of Soviet East Karelia that were under Finnish occupation from 1941 to 1944? Something like this?
Forgive my historic ignorance, I assumed they were the same thing. I've updated now to clarify it was the Pre-Winter War borders.