It is the spring of 1949. Nearly six years after the end of the second great European war. Europe has been largely rebuilt under united socialism but cracks are beginning to form in the alliance. The Soviet Republic was founded in 1936 from the ashes of the Russian empire. After the assassination of Kerensky socialist protests in urban centers proceeded a Bolshevik takeover of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Rather bloodlessly, the Communists came to power in Russia.
The infancy of the Soviet state was characterized by the rivalry between the "dueling Mikhails" Frunze and Tukhachevsky. At the first people's congress in 1936 , the committee of commissars decided that the Soviet state needed strong military leadership and a list of potential candidates for premier was laid out before the council. After days of wrangling, the committee settled on Frunze as premier and Tukhachevsky as general secretary and people's commissar for defense. General Mikhail Frunze was an old Bolshevik, a favorite of Lenin, and a superb commander of Red forces during the civil war. However, at the end of the conflict he switched sides to the Whites and fledged his loyalty to the Kerensky government for whom he helped implement a series of successful reforms in the 1920s. In contrast, general Tukhachevsky was was much more openly socialist following his capitulation after the civil war and spent time in a series of prison camps for red officers in the Russian Far East. After being pardoned in 1925, he joined the newly reestablished Russian Communist Party. His political affiliations kept him from advancing into the highest echelons of the Russian army but he remained the most prominent openly communist Russian general.
The following few years saw the two men's competing ideologies repeatedly take center stage at the highest levels of the Soviet government. Frunze favored looser restrictions on private capital and investment, a focus on domestic production, and national pluralism. Tukhachevsky continually pushed for Russification policies, economic centralism, and international revolution. By late 1938, Frunze had been forced out of power by the primarily Russian central committee members and Tukhachevsky immediately allied with the western socialist states of Italy and France in preparation to take on the Mitteleuropan alliance.
However, the alliance with the western syndicalists leads to war sooner than projected. In the spring of 1939, the Commune of France declares war on the German Empire. Russian troops liberate Ukraine and parts of the Baltic states but unpreparedness bogs down offensives further west while the French lightning campaign knocks Germany decisively out of the war after 18 months. The lack of a total Soviet commitment to the conflict provokes bitter resentment in France while the French decision to jointly administer White Ruthenia and Baltic states provokes resentment in Russia. The distrust only deepens when, in 1947 plebiscites are held in the joint-occupation zones and four new countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia, are born, all of which are former Russian territories.
A year later, in October 1948, a bomb exploded under the car of Marshall Tukhachevsky in Red Square, killing him instantly. The great leader of the Second Russian Revolution was gone without an heir. From the political maneuvering arose Sergei Kirov, party boss of Petrograd and a renowned old Bolshevik, one of the favorites of Lenin. However, Kirov believed that world revolution was impossible while ideological fractures within the socialist block remained. The western leaders of the bloc, France and Germany were firmly syndicalist while Britain had strong trade unionist leanings.
Together with their puppets and allies, they presented a strong, united front in western and central Europe.
During the reign of Marshall Tukhachevsky, ideological differences were largely ignored in favor of the larger goals of world socialism but with Germany defeated and converted and the remaining capitalist nations protected by vast gulfs of ocean, the theoretical differences have moved to the fore. The Soviet Republic of Russia and Eurasia (CPPE) its allies took a collectivist approach with total of production and distribution in the hands of the state rather than congresses of trade unions. With Premier Kirov, the Soviet state has a leader who has put ideology above international socialist cooperation.
In January of 1949, the fourth communist internationalle conference was held in London. One of the first issues on the docket was how to approach and integrate the non-aligned Balkan states into the growing European socialist community. During the lead-up to the conference, Soviet intelligence picked up on a Franco-Italian plan to invade and divide Greece and Turkey between them. On the fourth day of the conference, Soviet diplomats revealed the intelligence and denounced the plan as "neo-imperialst" and serving primarily French interests. Three days later, Kirov walked out of the conference and instead launched an invasion of the Balkan states and the crumbling Ottoman Empire. As the Western heads of state were still gathered in London, Soviet tanks and mechanized forces rolled through Romania, Bulgaria and Greece while marines and paratroopers descended on the Turks
By mid-spring totalist governments had been set up in Sofia,
Bucharest,
and Athens
During the invasion of Turkey, a coup toppled the Sultan and a radical national socialist party took power which prompty allied itself with the CPPE to avoid extermination.
The Eurasian totalist bloc now stretches from Damascus to Vladivostok and from Helsinki to Langzou.
In Russia itself, Kirov's government is rapidly gearing up for war with the West. Manufacture of modern equipment, especially tanks and aircraft, has taken over nearly all of the state's substantial production capacity and produced an army that is possibly the equal of the combined forces of the Syndicalist nations.
Sheer numbers of men and equipment tell only half the story, as the Soviet war machine is backed up by a techno-industrial complex that may be without equal. Experts from all fields have gathered in research complexes from Petrograd to Krasnodar to imbue Russian ground, sea, and air forces with the best equipment available.
The disposition of forces on the Western Front is designed to quickly crush the bulge of White Ruthenia and drive into Poland and Germany before syndicalist commands can unite and mount a coherent defense. Both sides have small stockpiles of nuclear weapons and both are driven by leadership that will not hesitate to use them.
The two alliance blocs in 1950. On the French side, Norway, Italy and Britain are the staunchest allies, having all fought Germany together a decade earlier. Germany and Austria have syndicalist sympathies and their governments are tied to France but the French have blocked the Anschluss that a large number of German speakers want for fear of a united Germany. Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are all grateful for their independence from the Hapsburg Empire but remain resentful of their place in the alliance. Poland, Ruthenia, and the Batlic states have been occupied by French troops and remain in the alliance as protection from the Soviet Union. Of these, only Poland has a hardened army and is politically reliable.
On the Soviet Side, Turkey alone retains some measure of foreign policy independence. The Balkan states all operate under Soviet occupation but the populations of Bulgaria and Serbia are heavily socialist and pro-Russian. Romania is a hotbed of dissent, but the army remains largely loyal to the state, and the state to Soviet Russia.
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