Chapter 2: The Cold War is over
The 90s and early 2000s looked like the cold war would continue forever. The internet age would arrive and soon become taken over by the cold war. The Soviets reaped the rewards of liberalization while the Americans had creeping authoritarianism under Rumsfeld. Still as the 2006 election came, both superpowers looked like that things would be continuing forever. Then the economy in America crashed. With that economic crash it would see the end to the Cold War. Communists and Socialists would win in Europe and America would denounce them. And the seeds of one of the bloodiest conflicts would be set by the onset of the depression.
The Liberal Georgian
With the death of Gromkyo, it would bring Eduard Shevardnadze into power. Eduard Shevardnadze was the first Georgian since Stalin to rule the Soviet Union. Though he was firmly on the liberal camp, there were some concerns whispered among his rivals that he would be a second Stalin, most of which were from the conservatives and hardliners. No more so disliked him and his policies than Gennady Zyuganov.
Socialism has a Human face
The grip of the Stalinist terror of the 40s had long faded by the Turn of the Millennium. The reforms and policies that Khrushchev put in place had only been deepened as the years went on. Freedom of Speech, press, assembly, including the holding of mass meetings, and street processions and demonstrations and more were all Guaranteed by the Constitution. However, it took decades of slow liberalization for this to be reflected in practice. Yet still by the turn of the Millennium, this has begun to be realized.
While the KGB did loose power with these reforms, to which their rivals in the Soviet government were grateful for. The KGB did adapt. Certain things were still treasonous and anti-soviet, the big one being seperatist groups, which also meant Nationalist groups. Those that wanted to break away from the Soviet Union were heavily spied upon. Nationalist groups were seen as little better.
What was not challenged was the role of the Communist party in Government. The Communist Party was the leadership of the Soviet Union, and that was enshrined in the Constitution. The liberals were fine with granting the freedoms that the constitution provided that the Communist Party remained the governing body.
The Computer Revolution
[Project Sphinx]
In the early 60s, Khrushchev began a focus on computerization which both Kosygin and Gromkyo continued as a way to modernize the centralized planning system. The key part of the early computers was OGAS or National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing(Общегосударственная автоматизированная система учёта и обработки информации). In essence it was the Soviets attempt at creating the Internet similar to the Americans ARPANET though with a much grander scope. As the goal was to automate as much if not the whole economy. While that reality would fail to become real, the focus on computers did help modernize the Soviet Economy.
In the late 80s, as part of this automation drive, Project Sphinx was drafted up by Dmitry Azrikan. The system was designed to replace all the devices that one had in a home. This included: computers, telephones, Televisions, radios, and so on. The core of the system was a modular “memory unit” consisting of a CPU to which three triangular memory expansion modules could be connected. Such configuration was intended to allow different users – each member of a family, for example – to use different programs at the same time, in multitasking.However Project Sphinx was being designed for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Five Year Plans, the plans of the 2000s.
For the 90 though both the Americans and the Soviets brought the advent of computers as another part of the cold war. The American IBM and Macintosh were up against the Soviet Kronos and Electronika. The question as to which computer was better was something that both superpowers claimed. The advent of the Internet would be used both sides for their own projects, as well as various civilian personal sites. However, the advent of the Internet would have unforeseen consequences to both the Americans and the Soviets in the 90s.
Moreover, with the cold war still in full swing, this was not just a peaceful competition as to see whose computer technology was better. Cyber Warfare played a major role for both nations during the 90s and especially after the turn of the Millenium. Related to this was the fact both the Soviets and America on their own people via the internet, and everyone else if one is being honest.
Rapprochement with China
When the Soviet Union began a process of De-stalinization, that begun the Sino-Soviet Split and it would last until the cultural revolution was over. Without the Great helmsman for a couple years in the late 70s, China was a different. Between the PLA and the Gang of Four, hardliners and reformers, those favoring closer ties to the Soviets and those favoring closer ties with the Americans. Of the many men vying for power after Mao’s death, Zhao Ziyang, would emerge as the new leader of the People’s Republic of China.
Ziyang for his part inherited a broken country. The cultural revolution, as well as other policies like the great leap forward, had left the chinese populace disinterested in the CPC. Not to mention the entire country’s economy was a mess. Under his authority he would begin a process of reforms to modernize and even democratization of the CPC as a way to renew support from the people.
Despite these reforms, the Sino-Soviet Split was deep and long lasting. Still Ziyang began a process to mend the relations with the Soviets. He was well aware that through the conflicts would take time to mend. Despite taking power in the late 70s, it was not until the 90s when things finally started to be resolved with China.
No more Stalinists
Modern Socialism regarded Stalin’s views generally as backwards and no longer keeping with the principles of socialism. As the Leader of the Socialist world, the USSR was able to influence others to follow their brand of Socialism, From revolutionaries in Cuba and Portugal to democrats in Chile and France. Even China had begun to look to the USSR’s policies to fix the issues following the Cultural Revolution and since the death of Hoxha, Albania began to turn away from Stalinism.
That is all but the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. They were the last Stalinists on earth. They looked around and saw revisionists everywhere. Worrying for the Soviet Union and China, they seemed to have rejected Socialism in exchange for Juche, which began to resemble the bastardization of Stalinism and Fascism.
As with Romania, the various factions in the Soviet government were largely aligned that North Korea must go for similar reasons. However, Kims, they also had little desire to get involved and upset the balance of power in the Korean Peninsula. While the Americans were losing the Cold War, they were not just going to hand over the Korean Peninsula to them.
The North Korean Crisis
While most in the USSR did not like the Kims, they also had little desire to get involved and upset the balance of power in the Korean Peninsula. However, their hand along with the others were forced when the Kim Il-Sung died in the midst of a terrible famine in the country. Turmoil spread throughout the region as Kim Jong-il attempted to consolidate power. Adding to the conflict was a massive famine that affected North Korea. A number of Generals who were opposed to Kim Jong-il decided to attempt to coup him and install someone that they supported. Kim however had plenty of supporters both in the army and outside. This broke the North Korean regime into different factions, one for the generals and the other for the Kim.
The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact would intervene in the conflict on May 15th 1996. Officially they were there to provide aid and restore order. However, the Warsaw Pact was also using this as a way to support the military against Kim Jong-il. They also were using this as a way to prevent the crisis from leading to a Second Korean War. They wanted this conflict over as soon as possible to prevent the South from restarting the conflict.
By 1997, the crisis was over and the famine was declared over. Ri Yong-ho would begin their own process of de-stalinization, to end the cult of personality that existed in North Korea. As part of this process it also meant adopting modern socialism. This combined with the aid from the Comecon, helped to improve the living conditions of North Korea. Without the insanity of the Kim dynasty in charge of Korea it lead to improved relations between the two Koreas.
Creeping Authoritarianism in the Land of the Free
[President Donald Rumsfeld 1988 to 1996]
Meanwhile in the United States which prided itself as being the land of the Free; freedom and democracy were its watchwords. Despite these watchwords, in the 90s and early 2000s it was becoming words that had very little actual practice.
While COINTELPRO ended in the 70s, it would be brought back with a vengeance. In the early 90s there would be a series of terrorist incidents in the early 1990s, from the Okhalama city bombing to the World Trade Center Bombing to the bombing of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld in 1993 would pass the PATRIOT act with bipartisan support he would also create the Department of Homeland Security.
It is important that the 90s continued the Red Scare of the 80s, and as such those advocating for left wing positions were consistently spied upon and looked into for ‘potential terrorism’. This included Labor leaders, anarchists, communists, people wanting to advocate for civil rights, and actual terrorists.
There also was the religious right that had a strong voice both in Government but in the media, who got to get their way. As some of the terrorists were muslims, their would be more and more distrust and disdain for muslims in the American Society. The Religious Right also turned their ire to athiests and agnostics.
Democracy was soon becoming more and more of an oligarchy. A number of supreme court case such as Citizens United allowed for unlimited campaign contributions by corporations, helped further increase the power of the American Oligarchs. Like Reagan, Rumsfeld would continue the deregulation policies, including repealing various laws that were put in place in the 30s and 40s to prevent another Great Depression.
Still Rumsfeld was popular throughout his presidency. The terrorist attacks brought sympathy to him, and the economy was doing great even though most did not know what was in store for the future. Even when the democrats took by the Presidency under Paul Tsongas, they did not scale back the DHS or the Patriot act. Tsongas, while pro-business on one hand, was notable for his environmental policies on the other.
Space Travel at the new Millennium
While the Americans had largely given up on Space Travel, preferring to focus their efforts on outlandish plans such as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or as the Media called it Star Wars. This was not the case for the Soviet Space Program. The Soviets focused on building space stations, Lunar Bases, and exploring mars.
Space Stations
The Success of the various Salyut Stations lead the Soviets to begin planning for something more ambitious. Thus began the Zvezda program to create a space station that would orbit the Moon. Zvezda would follow on from the Salyut program, specifically Salyut 9 and be a modular design. Using the Buran Shuttles, the pieces would be designed on earth but assembled in Space. The Buran Shuttle would also be how most cosmonauts got to and from the station.
While, there were a number of successes, one must not discount the near misses and issues that arrived. The most serious issue would be in 1997, when a fire broke out on the station that threatened the lives of the cosmonauts on board. The fire began from a faulty oxygen generator. These devices, informally called candles, were about the size of a spray paint can, and they produced by burning lithium perchlorate, a salt made of lithium, chlorine, and oxygen. Generally they are pretty safe, but this one malfunctioned. It was so hot that one cosmonaut reported seeing what he thought was dripping wax, but it was actually molten metal because the fire was so hot.
Thankfully, the blaze wasn't pointed at the station's outside walls, where it could have damaged the hull. Moreover, the crew had recently cleaned up the mess in the area, so they had an escape path and could put out the fire. New safety standards would be put in place following this near-miss disaster to avoid making sure that this did not happen again. The first and most immediate result was better candles, as the engineers wanted to avoid that from happening. Later stations, particularly on the ISS would be equipped with better insulation.
Eventually after 12 years of study, Zvezda 1 would come to an end and it would drop into the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet Union Learned a lot about from Zvezda 1, from its successes but also the issues and challenges. The lessons learned from Zvezda 1 would be used not just for Zvezda 2 that would orbit the moon, but also for the later ISS.
Lunar Stations
Since Komarov first set foot on the moon back in 1969, the Soviet space agency had begun to dream of plans of creating a base on the moon. A number of plans were drawn up such as the DLB Lunar Base and the Lunar Expeditionary Complex. However, internal politics and technology of the time prevented that. However by the turn of the Millennium, the technology had gotten there that it would be possible to build a station on the Moon.
This station, Mir 1, would be designed modular as had previous orbital stations been designed. The location for the station would be the South Pole of the moon. This way the station would be able to get plenty of sunlight. On 2002 Mir was launched and it would take several months to be constructed, but on September 21st 2002, the first lunar base was in operations.
While previous plans, such as the Lunar Expeditionary Complex suggested that power would come from a nuclear reactor on the moon, Mir would be powered by Solar energy; hence the need for a polar location to get plenty of sunlight.
The first station on the Moon wasn’t the largest station, though it was slightly larger than the Salyut stations. It allowed for roughly 8 people on board. It also required for supplies to be brought to the station at regular intervals. Most of it was designed for scientific study and research. Mir would later be expanded as a station to allow for a telescope to observe the galaxy with more easily, as well as a launch pad to go to mars. Since there was no atmosphere it was much easier for rockets to travel to mars from the moon then directly from earth.
The Second Great Depression
All good times come to an end. The economic situation of the past nearly two decades would come crashing down in 2006. This crash would set off a chain of events that saw the end of NATO and the end of the Cold War. It marked the end to the third red scare as more people were concerned about getting food on their table.
This would affect the 2008 election as both Democrats and Republicans accused each other for causing the Crash. In the end, the 2008 election saw Mike Huckabee defeat John Edwards. Mike Huckabee rode on the back of a right wing religious populist wave. Yet he would be unable to solve the crisis. People quickly moved from supporting him to blaming him.
He lost the 2012 election to Joe Biden who in turn would lose the election in 2016 to Newt Gingrich. A cycle had begun with people switching parties to find someone who would fix the mess they were in but hope quickly turned to despair and failure. The American oligarchs that had captured the government were not going to let their power slip. All the while wealth inequality rose exponentially; it had been rising since the Reagan administration but the depression just made everything worse.
The failure of the mainstream american parties to solve the crisis would see extremist politicians on both sides of the spectrum rise to power. On the Far right you would see men like Austin Gillespie take seats in Congress, while on the Far left you saw people like Kshama Sawant win their own elections. With the depression still not solved by the 2020 elections, this just made the people more angry at the government. The 2020 Election would see the beginnings of political violence done by all sides...
The Reds win Election in Europe
The onset of the 2nd great depression also corresponded with victories for Communists throughout Europe. For the first time Communists were able to gain significant majorities in Western Europe. Since Chile elected Allende, a number of communist parties in Europe redoubled their efforts to bring the revolution by the ballot box.
Though it should be noted this victory was not the same everywhere. In some cases, like in France and Finland, the communists would win majorities in their elections and lead the country. While in other cases such as Italy and Sweden they became part of the ruling coalition sometimes as the main party, with a more left wing Socialist or Social democratic party leading the country but relying on communist support.
The American - European Split
Despite the fact that observers both internal and external called these elections as being free and fair, the US would declare that the communists rigged them. It brought a major question though to the role of NATO. NATO was designed to fight the communist Warsaw Pact, but how could it do that if the countries that made up NATO were being run by communists of some stripe; and many within the Right wing from moderates to more extreme far-right would declare even moderate left wing Socialists and Social Democrats as being ‘communist-lite’.
With ties increasing with the Soviet Bloc, this brought NATO to a crisis. Many of the European believed that it was best to leave the Alliance, both for the cost and because they did not believe it contributed to safety both of their nations and of the world. One by one countries like France, Italy, Norway, and Greece would begin to leave the alliance. Following German reunification in 2010, the last meeting of NATO would be in 2012 where it would disband the organization.
Reunification of Germany
With the red wave sweeping Europe, it would finally bring an end to the division of Germany that began after world war two. This process was a long time coming. Starting in the 70s there was the Ostpolitik policy under West German chancellor Willy Brandt that began to increase ties between the two germanies.
At the same time in East Germany, Egon Krenz emerged as the new leader of SED. Kranz was a technocratic reformer. He worked to bring the computerized innovations from the USSR to East Germany to bolster its economy, which had the intended consequences. Moreover, he began to introduce elements of multi-party democracy into East Germany,following the Czechoslovakia model. Technically East Germany had a multiparty democracy, but the issue was that all the parties were part of an alliance dominated by the SED. Thus in 1992 the first free elections were held in East Germany. As expected the SED lost seats, but importantly it did not lose its majority in the volkshammer. Most of which could be due to the fact that the East German economy was doing rather well at the time.
On July 18th 2008 the two germanies would begin the process of reunification. Though it would take some time for the treaties to be written up, and even after Reunification was done on the paper, the division had left scars that would take years to heal.
Officially the new Germany was not a successor state but an enlarged East Germany, thus Germany maintained its position in the UN, the Warsaw Pact, Comecon and so on. In practice it was much more of a new state as it borrowed elements from both east and west Germany. West Germany was by far the larger of the two German States and ironically tended to have greater influence on the new reunified Germany.
Reunification saw a number of changes to German politics, a number of parties would merge now that they were no longer divided. The Democratic Farmers' Party of Germany would join with the Green party, while the German Communist Party would merge with the SED.
Demokratizatsiya
The Democracy push began before the crash happened in the early 2000s. A new generation of men and women had been elected to both the Presidium and the Supreme soviet. Now under the Soviet Constitution, the Supreme Soviet is meant to be the central organ of government. However, in practice, it was the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Communist Party Politburo that had monopolized power.
It should be noted that these people advocating for the Supreme Soviet were members of the Communist Party. While this faction leaned much younger then the men who were in the Presidium and Central Committee, they were more bound by the fact they resented being shut out of power. Adding to this was the fact that many of the members of the Supreme Soviet, particularly the ones that were elected in 2004 were far more reformist and liberal then hardline conservative which in turn brought them into conflict with General Secretary Gennady Zyuganov; who took over after Eduard Shevardnadze in 2000.
They started to use a number of rules and procedures that were on the books but not enforced, namely that if a decision by the was decreed by the Presidium but not ratified by the Supreme Soviet then it would be revoked. For the most part this policy wasn’t followed as the Supreme Soviet was a formality, but the democratic faction started to increase its usage.
While Zyuganov disliked this faction and feuded with them, they did have their allies in the Central Committee and Presidium, namely Gennady Gudkov and his protegee, Alexei Navalny. Navalny in particular was supportive as a way to reduce the corruption that was rampant in the upper echelons of the party and government. Following the Crash in 2006, Gudkov and his supporters would force Zyuganov to resign in favor of well Gudkov.
After taking power Gudkov and Navalny would begin work on the Demokratizatsiya platform for the USSR.This was a long process, and with the 2nd great depression beginning in 2006, not even Gudkov and Navalny wanted to completely overturn the communist party’s power. At first they didn’t even allow other parties to compete remaining a one party state, but what they did allow and did encourage were multiple members in the communist party to run for various seats. However, as the Hardliners feared, once this process began, there was no stopping it.
Forming the Fourth International
With Communists winning throughout Europe, Eduard Shevardnadze decided to form the Fourth International. Many of the various organizations that were part of the Eastern bloc, from the Warsaw Pact to Comecon would become part of the Fourth International. The Fourth International was founded on May 1st 2014, the 150th anniversary of the founding of the First International. Its founding members would be all those that had joined the Warsaw Pact, and most of those that had joined Comecon.
It should be noted that even though Trotsky founded a ‘Fourth International’ that would serve as an opposition to the Stalinist Third International, it was not counted by the Soviets as a true International. Trotsky did more than denounce Stalin, he had denounced the whole Soviet system as a degenerated worker’s state. Thus not even with the liberal attitudes of the Soviet Union would Trotsky be rehabilitated.
The creation of the 4th international would be a major shift in foreign policy for the Soviet Union. The goal of the 4th international was to unite the world under the red banner communism. This would be a goal that they would be far more proactive in and supporting.
The Creation of Interkosmos
[The International Space Station]
Of the various organizations that were created by the 4th international after its founding, the most important would be Interkosmos. Interkosmos was to be the Space agency of the 4th international. Most nations that joined the 4th International did not have their own space agency. So by pulling the resources together of various member nations, the organization as a whole would be able to support Space flight.
While most of the members of the 4th International had their own space programs that they supported in addition to Interkosmos, such as the Soviet MoM and India’s ISRO, overtime they would fold their space programs into Interkosmos. When the Soviets eventually merged MoM into Interkosmos, that would greatly increase its own influence and power within the Soviet government.
With the Creation of Interkosmos, one of the first things it proposed was for there to be a space station for all members. While some members also had their own space stations, the ISS was to be International in Scope. Cosmonauts from across the world would be allowed to work on the International Space Station. It would take until 2017 however for the ISS to be launched into space and be fully operational.
