The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
- Thread starter TastySpam
- Start date
Venditg
Banned
@TastySpam how do you feel about Bose? I have mixed feelings for him as an historical figure but Indians in general (regardless of political orientatation) seem to have an high opinion of him.
@Kennedy Forever thanks for the likes mate!
@Kennedy Forever thanks for the likes mate!
Wow . Bose is certainly controversial internationally , but in India he is a very popular figure - people seem to think of him as a person who would initially take authoritarian measures for a while and then restore democracy as soon as the country stopped being on the verge of famine and economic growth was underway . That's the gist of how most people I talk to about Bose think of him tbh.
I think we need an update dealing with the reactions of the East European governments of Warsaw Pact member countries to the political developments in the Soviet Union. Considering that they all wanted Beria out (though there were of course) because they couldn't stand his lack of ideological commitment to orthodox Marxism-Leninism, their reaction to the rise of Cosmocommunism must be something to behold. And then there's the matter of Japanese "Pure Socialism" and Korean Juche, though since IOTL the Eastern European Communist regimes tended to be very ethnonationalist in practice, they might not mind the former all that much, all things considered.
One amusing parallel I realized is that in The New Order, stuff starts hitting the fan across the world in 1962/1963, which is roughly the same time when stuff starts hitting the fan in this TL. The French coup, the Mediterranean War/British collapse, Beria falls, the return of Chiang Kai-Shek to Chinese politics, etc.
I have to ask, in TNO things were mostly stable until the time of the mod right?
It seems like ITTL that things have had a lot more "stages" to the madness. The 3 Years War comes to mind, as well as all the colonial conflicts between then and the 60s.
Depends on the place. In the main areas of the Mod (Russia, Germany) then not really. Massive economic collapse and famine in Germany almost broke them in the 50's while dozens of tiny warlord statelets fought over scraps in Russia. Also, in the 1950's, most of Russia and Central Asia teamed up one last time to repel Germany, which almost worked, if the ROA and several German back expeditions into Russia were commissioned, which broke the back of the Soviet/Russian advance.
The Communists mostly, Kaganovich from West-Siberia and Voroshilov from the West. Anyone else was someone they recruited because they liked them, either as a friend or as a good general. Ultimately, it fell apart not only due to Fascist Russians but also due to Mikhail Suslov backstabbing the coalition to secure control of the Komi Republic.
Chapter 190 - The Death of Beria
The Death of Beria
The March on Moscow failed. With the streets of Moscow barricaded by industrial workers and radical students who had rallied to the cause of the Moscow Commune and the supporters of the Moscow Commune having seized control of almost every nationwide communication network in the Soviet Union (which was only made possible by the paranoid Beria concentrating all communications in the capital of Moscow under tight NKVD control - a fact that doomed the generals when the NKVD threw their support in with the Commune as the lesser of two evils), the Moscow Commune was able to broadcast its propaganda and side of the story across the nation. The Red Army marching on Moscow lost cohesion as entire units mutinied instead of sieging the city. Only a few dozen soldiers and Commune militia were killed before the Red Army retreated from its push on Moscow.
With Soviet-wide radio calling on workers, students, and peasants across the entire nation to rise up and seize militias to emulate the model in Moscow, the ringleaders of the planned March on Moscow realized they had nowhere to retreat - and simply chose to fled the country, generally choosing Poland, still ruled by the traditionalist President Rokossovsky. In many ways, this signaled the ultimate triumph of what quickly became known as the "Psychiatric Revolution Group", the loose alliance between radical academics and NKVD officers who had essentially seized control of the state apparatuses, albeit it for different reasons. The academics wanted to see radical reforms, while the NKVD officers were merely afraid of conservative military officers rolling back Beria's reforms - which meant that they differed on generally what to do with regards to Beria's repressive policies. However, they generally agreed on how to deal with enemies - force, often justified on a psychiatric basis.
Snezhnevsky rose quickly among the academics precisely because of his extremely close relations with the NKVD during the Beria era - it was generally Snezhnevsky who wrote up the fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses that justified NKVD arrests of political dissidents in the late Beria era, and some reports even suggest that Snezhnevsky suggested to Beria that he could afford to close down the "gulags" on paper, as long as he replaced them with identical "psychiatric wards" located on the same premises with the same inmates (who would simply be given bogus psychiatric rationales for why they were there). The old student leaders quickly cannibalized each other in the fight for power, leaving the Snezhnevsky group essentially in power in Moscow.
The Red Army was quickly left intact, as the surviving officer corps quickly pledged fealty to the new order. Amusingly, Bulganin was pulled out of his house at night to be told that his retirement was over and that he was being placed in charge of the Red Army, since it was believed that only an apolitical, experienced statesperson could preserve the neutrality of the Red Army in relation with the new revolutionary government. Similar communes quickly erupted around the country, in Leningrad, Stalingrad, Novosibirsk, Kazan, etc. Although each was in theory autonomous within the Soviet Union, in practice, they followed the dictates of the Moscow Commune simply because as mentioned, the Moscow Commune monopolized nationwide communication networks. In practice, this meant four individuals had a tremendous influence on what was published, namely Snezhnevsky, Andropov, Bulganin, and soon an unexpected fourth member, a politically-motivated Moscow auto mechanic originally from Uzbekistan by the name of Yuri Prokofiev, who quickly ended up the most prominent voice of the Moscow labor groups. In particular, most of the behind-of-the-scenes management to replaced the purged bureaucracy was made by Andropov, while Snezhnevsky largely focused on relitigating academic disputes by having his rivals killed off.
One such rival, albeit it not a rival, found his demise in an unusual student group in Moscow. A young of utopian young Soviet engineering and philosophy students envisioned a future technocommunist society where advanced computing would not just automate the economy (as was pushed by the much more mainstream Glushkov group), but also the maintenance of law and order. To this end, they actually wrote extensive essays on artificial intelligence that ended up being read abroad. However, one less well thought idea was that notion that they could hook up the brains of "great and devious" individuals to a massive computer network in order to prevent crime. Like almost every half-baked student research group in the Soviet "science boom", they were given some degree of funding - as a result, they decided to implement their vision.
They broke into the Lenin Mausoleum, extracted Lenin's mostly-dessicated brain, broke into Stalin's Mausoleum, extracted his mostly-dessicated brain, and most alarmingly, discovered evidence in their own testing that confirmed suspicions that Stalin had been murdered. Suspecting his successor, they broke into Beria's house (where he was under house arrest), overpowering the guards and capturing Beria. Pronouncing Beria guilty of crimes on what was essentially a home video camera, they used their home tools to essentially extract Beria's brain from the former Soviet leader (who unsurprisingly perished during the operation), hooking it into their computer-contraption. It did not work, but according to their own reports, the experiment still was a success for the future of Soviet science. The event quickly became a scandal in the Soviet Union, perhaps signifying the breakdown of public order in the Soviet Union more than any other event in the new "Soviet Revolution", but many radicals lauded the students for "advancing Soviet science" and "clearing up untruths of the past with revolutionary fervor." The government simply tried to sweep the incident under the rug, reconstructing both the Lenin and Stalin mausoleums. Even some of those that condemned events such as Red August believed that the huge entry of working-class people into Soviet politics based on the self-governance of their factories and agricultural communes was such a great leap forward for Soviet socialism, they were willing to excuse events such as the "Beria incident."
The reaction to this in the Warsaw Pact to the unfolding of events in the Soviet Union extremely negative, to say the least. They had always viewed Beria as a dangerous reformer - and in their eyes, his efforts had led to predictable disaster. Fearing that the Soviet Union would soon spread their brand of radical populist Communism to the nations of the Warsaw Pact, the nations of the Warsaw Pact quickly discussed alternative plans among themselves, intensifying military, economic, and scientific cooperation. The last naysayers against the covert Project Oliphant, the joint nuclear program between the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact were silenced - and nuclear tests were planned in both North China and Pakistan in hopes of intimidating the "Soviet radicals." Relations between the USSR and the rest of the Warsaw Pact were thought to have hit rock bottom - but they had not yet. Moreover, the "Spirit of the Second Red October" was to spread outside of the Soviet Union.
Remembering his trial scene in "Death of Stalin" but this is more brutal.
Anyways, IMHO it is justifiable. Beria is a monster.
I wonder what Vladimir Chelomei and Nikolai Kardashev are doing ITTL, in that case.
I'm ashamed to have laughed a little at the sheer dark absurdity of this whole thing. Only in this timeline would Beria have his brains scooped up by commie-transhumanists. I can see the memes that'll originate from this moment in TTL's internet.
