Union of Socialist Republic of the Plains

The **Union of Socialist Republics of the Plains,** or just the Plains or Plainsian Country, is a country in North America founded in 1988, upon the Collapse of the United States, between the States of Wyoming, Arkansas, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Missouri and, initially Idaho, as well as the majority of the Indian Nations in the USA. The country is a founding member of the Assembly of Democratic Communists.

## **HISTORY**

### **Background:**

The Union of Socialist Republics of the Planes was born in 1988 upon the collapse of the United States of America. It's origins can be traced back to two movements:

The first one is the Red Power Movement, a civil rights group of socialist and communist leanings active both in Canada and the US which used a combination of legal and illegal methods. They were primarily active among the 70% of natives who had left their homes and relocated urban centers in the hopes of finding a job, after the Indian Termination Act in the forties and fifties had shutted protections of the federal government on Indian tribes, now considered assimalitable. They made sure of making the federal government know that they were not going to assimilate, they formed community councils and action squads to protect themselves from police violence.

This same years were seeing the upmost levels of violence of the Bloody Decade, the Indians weren't particularly considered compared to Blacks, but they immediately looked with solidarity and admiration to them, and particularly the ever more influential Black Panthers.

One of the leaders of the Red Power Movement, Dennis Frank, after lecturing on the teachings of Mao and personally building a relationship with Huey Newton, was convinced of the necessities of a structure similar to the Panthers.

His idea was welcomed by the movement, which sponsored the creation of the Red Bisons. They would copy the Panthers' playbook of integrating themselves in a sort of welfare state for their community, as well as being more militant.

The Bisons immediately joined the Rainbow Coalition, and started to sponsor their ideas among Whites of the Midwest, preaching the liberation from capitalist exploitation over the small farmers. The intellectual leader of the Red Bisons was a Metis from Canada who had studied in California and possessed a English name, Howard Adams. He would be in charge of acting both as unifier of the Bisons and spokesman of them to Whites. The attempt to build a White Midwestern anti-capitalist organization paid off, but only slowly. The first to be convinced were young people from the cities angered at the Vietnam War, as well as workers and the first War veterans to return home. The former veterans brought with them organizational and combat experience as well as propagandistic power in their stories of how effective the Vietnamese farmer soldiers could be, and how if they could do It, Americans could stand up to their own government too. The Tough Riders took almost complete control of the oil industry workers via their trade union, the Middle West Workers Front. This industry had grown exponentially due to trying to compensate for the crisis and so this new union held basically half the country's cars in their hands by threat of striking.

Since neither the Tough Riders nor the Bisons aimed at being an electoral party, they both threw their support to the CPUSA. This resulted in 1982 with the shocking seizure of Wyoming, considered a solidly conservative state, in the midterms. Of course, while the governors elected in the Midwest were from the CPUSA, they were all more closely linked to the Bisons and Riders than the Northeastern CPUSA. Their original program included nothing of separatist. Much lime the Black Panthers, they wanted America to be a confederation of nationalities, but still America. Slowly, however, they started to develop the idea of a new entitity, called by Howard Adams "The Country of the Plains", a new identity for both Indians and Whites, as well as Blacks and any minority, to share a country that could be separated from America's sins. This idea was fringe, but it was fueled by the differences between the Midwestern CPUSA, which was maoist and agrarian, from the Northeastern, industrial and following Gus Hall's Bill of Rights Socialism, as well as the theories of the long dead American socialists Daniel DeLeon and Eugene Debs.

A major point of explosion for the popularity of the CPUSA in the region was the Great Chemical Disaster in 1983. The farmers, desperate to increase production, started buying new and cheap fertilizer from the LSB Industry and pesticide from the Mosanto Industries.This two giants saw the opportunity and mass produced cheap products. However, too keep up with the low prices, they resorted to low quality material. Together with the excessive quantity, this caused mass crop failure in 1983, and bankrupted milions of people. After the Great Chemical Disaster tarnished trust in big corporations and milions of farmers were left unemployed and abandoned, or forced to work for agribusinesses, the popularity of the CPUSA skyrocketed. Except for Iowa, Colorado and Utah, untouched by the disaster for the most part, the whole region was dominated by them in 1984 and 1986. When the USA finally collapsed and the People's Union of America was proclaimed, the governors of the Midwest called in Kansas City the General Congress of the Plains. Together, on March 1 1988, they agreed not to join the PUA, but rather form their own country: The Union of Socialist Republics of the Plains was born.

### **Independence and Cultural Revolution:**

As the effects of the chemicals were finally going away, the country started out already with the luck of seeing production skyrocketing. The new state immediately instituted a land reform, confiscating everything from the Agribusinesses and making their properties Collective Farms. They also encouraged poor people from the cities to migrate into new state founded collectives, and encouraged private farmers to form cooperatives, but never forced them. Dannis Frank was elected as Union Chief in a landslide against a Republican candidate. While he would retain the position for decades to come, It was a moslty symbolic status, as real power lied with the Union Directory, essentially a council of ministers, and with the General Congress of the Plains. he most important even in the history of Plains after independence was easily the Plains Cultural Revolution from 1991 to 2000. In this nine years, there was an intensive program to build up the new identity via the introduction of new educational norms, the encourgament for revival of Indian culture and languages, which many Whites started to take as well, and an increasingly ferocious denounciation of the crimes of the United States of America against the people of the Plains. With a lot of hypocrisy, the White people were however almost considered victims of this, despite being descendants of their perpetrators.

The Cultural Revolution also served to destroy the traditionally conservative mindset in favor of a new progressive one, favoring the enfranchisement of women, the rights of LGBTQ people to marriage and adoption and so on. This was enforced by the mass organisations, paramilitaries and police with often violent actions and arrests. In 1992, the first detention camp for Conservative propagandists and activists was opened in Wyoming, followed by several others. In 1996, the camps were 11 , with inmates numbering in around 17 thousands. The most tense region was Missouri, where multiple riots occurred. They declined in the following years, with 5 camps being closed by 2000, but the attempted assassination of Frank lead to a brief spike up, but by 2009 they were lower than ever. The apex was reached during and after the Great American War, getting to over 35 thousands in 20 camps, mostly concentrated in Oklahoma and Arkansas. These camps only started to close in large numbers in recent years, by 2023 the active camps are 8 with just below 10 thousand people held in them, and they are expected to be all closed by 2030. The largest armed resistance to the Plains was the Alliance for Liberty in Western Idaho. This group of Libertarians and Dukeists managed to take control of several regions and were supplied by neighboring Canada. The efforts for deamericanization encouraged them and lead to greater public support, ending in the recognition of the Free Republic of Liberty by the Plains in 1992.

This period also saw immigration of native people from the Republic of America, Liberty, Lincoln and Canada. Later, Black people started seeking refuge too.

The Cultural Revolution of the Plains, unlike the way more controversial one of China, is considered a great successs, but not without it's downsides:

Feeling attacked by all sides, a determined minority of conservative Whites would go on to radicalize and join the ORA, collaborating with the Republic and attempting, among others, the assassination of Union Chief Dennis Frank in 2001, killing several civillians in the attempt.

The NRP is however seen with a lot of suspect, with many arguing it should be classified as fascist or chauvinist and banned. Either way, its popularity has started to decline due to the increasing success of the Green Revolution program started in 2016.T In 2009, the USRP was drawn into the Great American War, obviously on the side of the PUA. The Union Army entered Oklahoma and pushed inside It as deep as possible into it and managed to also push into North Texas, before being bogged down in trenches. Unlike the PUA, the Plains refused to keep attacking and take large human losses, which meant the front stagnated.

Towards the end, as the RA collapsed and Texas exited the war, the Plains managed to occupy all of Oklahoma and Arkansas. However, as a last gift, Duke nuked Bismark, Omaha and Saint Louis.

In the aftermath, as economic crisis hit the whole AltCom world, there was a reduction in food sales to the PUA as well as oil consumption.

This led to the rise of the Agrarian Socialist Party, an eco-socialist group, to surpass the UCPP, but also to the growth of the National Revolutionary Party.

The new Congress launched the first large scale ecological programs, which also aimed at disbanding the polluting and failing oil industry. The intial phases were however not perpetrated particularly well and thus only exacerbated fears among the Oil Workers Front, to the point that they launched the first strike in the USRP's history in 2012, forcing a new negotiation.

The crisis continued until 2016, when the newly in power Communists adopted the Green Revolution Program (with iconography intentionally remaining that of the nineties), inspired by the Green 5 Years Plan of Syomin. This program managed to successfully relocated most oil workers to new sustainable industries such as wind, nuclear and solar power, and caused the NRP to decline inexorably.

The shock caused by the Great American War had it's impact on spirituality as well:

For one, the Shining Order of Atruti managed to take root among part of the survivors of the nuked cities, though not as much as in the PUA and New England. This people would migrate to Atrutistan in 2018 anyway. The most important new spiritual movement probably in the entire continent was Plains Christianity:

Developed independently and without a centralized leadership, Plains Christianity merged the basics of the Bible with rituals, concepts and imagery from various Indian religions and deities, to the point of creating something completely unique.

The Plain Christians believe in the absence of a clerical hierarchy in favor of a democracy of the church, in the importance of several rituals and in the idea that joy is what brings men closer to God, as opposed to suffering like some earlier figures (Mother Theresa of Calcutta for one) believed.

Their movement is incredibly successful and the religion in the world that is receiving more converts in proportion to their numbers in the whole world, surpassing Islam.

It's not just a spiritual movement either:

Their anarchist ideals have made the Plains Christians very politically active in support of the Commune of Montreal and the North West Free Army, they have contacts with the Italian MRSA and other anarchist organizations around the world. They have taken over numerous People's Communes, which they have deeply transformed, and have factions inside he Agrarian Socialists and the Republicans.

## **ORGANIZATION**

The Plainsian Constitution was published in 1989:

It establishes the country as a confederation of a number of SRs equal to the number of Indian nations in its borders, plus a Black nation and the so called "Riders nation" for the rest. Each Indian nation's territory was expanded based on various broken treaties signed by the US government during the Indian Wars of the 19th Century, chosen according to willingness by the people to migrate to It, to the amount of White population and to the realistic capacity of providing for them.

The General Congress is divided into two Houses:

The House of Nations, with 2 candidates from every SR, needed to preserve the less numerous nations from being dominated by the Riders.

The House of Delegates, which hosts delegates from the People's Communes in a proportional way.

The People's Communes were instituted already before the collapse of the USA and seized power when law and order broke down. Based on the institutions born in China during the Cultural Revolution, they administrate villages, towns and cities and send delegates to not only the Congress but the Provincial Congress and the Congress of the Socialist Republic.

At the local level, the Communes have a high degree of power, ruling by direct democracy and administrating day to day issues. The Commune has the power to call back the delegates they elect for Congress at any time if its vote so and are capable of finding an alternative candidate to complete his mandate.

The SRs have their own justice systems and have almost complete authonomy, except for the military and for the so-called Union Interest Programs, economic programs voted by a 60% majority of both houses as too important to be left at the SRs devices. Political parties do exist, the largest one is the United Communist Party of the Plains, followed by the Agrarian Socialist Party and Republican Party. Recently, there's also been added the National Revolutionary Party, which has managed to elect a dozen delegates by running on climate skepticism and thus gaining traction in the Oil Workers Front.