The Committee for Dialectical Extrapolation

The Committee for Dialectical Extrapolation derives from the Committee for Psycho-Physical Unity (CPPU). The CPPU started out as the USSR's sunder-guard and almost immediately became its Circle as well. It was founded in 1920, in response to an attempt on the life of Joseph Stalin by Polish necromancers allied with patriotic Polish ghosts. At first, it presented itself on the model of the British Psychical Research Society, with the mandate of making the world philosophically safe for dialectical materialism, but with true goals more along the lines of ghostbusting, making Joseph Stalin safe from supernatural attack.

Ghostbusting soon brought the CPPU into conflict with the Court of the Tsar-Patriarch, the pre-Soviet Circle of Russia, now abandoned by Hell but unaware of that and still active. The CPPU's first and greatest triumph was the destruction of the Court in 1942, killing the last Tsar-Patriarch and looting his greatest treasure, the Stepmother, a powerful infernal djinnia from the djinnish kingdom of Ararat, captured or enlisted by the Court (it is unknown which) in 1883.

The Stepmother served the CPPU just as willingly as she had the Tsar-Patriarch, either because of the terms of a Geas on her or simply on orders from the Russian Tyranny. But setting up the Stepmother in the USSR and extending her reach to Soviet satellites meant that the CPPU had to deal with agents from many other Soviet agencies, who became formally or *de facto* CPPU members. Cliques and frictions developed.

The higher levels of the Soviet government wanted more spectacular successes like the first one. The old hands of the CPPU and their disciples saw to it that the mere "genie-handlers" were separated off into the Committee for Dialectical Extrapolation (a deliberately obscure name) in 1943, while they went off trying to develop gestalt telepathy, clairvoyant espionage, psi weaponry, etc. The CDE retaliated by making sure they were elevated to a peer rank with the CPPU and that they were the ones plugged into the espionage network ~ easy, since most of them were spies from other networks to begin with. This effectively created a theory/practice separation which basically pleased both halves of the division. However, the CDE's efforts to shoulder the CPPU *out* of the espionage networks failed, thanks to the CPPU's infernal backing, including the collusion of the Stepmother.

Through serving and protecting the Stepmother, the CDE became the Soviet sunder-guard ~ it did the functions of a sunder-guard, using the Stepmother as their trump card against lesser supernatural annoyances, and the Tyranny did not use it for the cultural-steering projects that it used the CPPU for. It remains true that the Russian sunder-guard and Circle are unusually close, though often rivalrous.

With the Stepmother's death in 1988, the CDE had to work hard to justify its continued existence. But it could point to all the monster-hunting, monster-recruiting, and ghostbusting it had done since its founding, done without recourse to the Stepmother.

The CPPU survived more easily, having distanced itself from the CDE and the Stepmother, but when the USSR fell in 1991, it deliberately "disbanded" itself so as to go underground. The CDE knows of its continued "rogue" existence, though, and so do many other espionage agencies, both Russian and foreign. The CDE also lost all official existence, but is now a secret society, continuing to act as Russian sunder-guard with tacit government permission. It uses a think-tank, the Institute of Pan-Slavic Cultural Psychometrics, as its front. It is still rabidly, jingoistically patriotic, but not quite as vicious as formerly, thanks to the growing distance between it and the infernal CPPU.