Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

The **Union of Soviet Socialist Republics** or just **Soviet Union** is a country in Europe and Asia and the main global superpower of the 21st Century. After winning World War II in 1945 and the Cold War in 1988, the Soviets became the most powerful country on Earth, enjoying a sphere of influence in much of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, the supremacy of its military and economy and facilitating the spread of marxism-leninism worldwide.

## **HISTORY**

After the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, the Soviet higher-ups erupted into power struggle:
There was a military faction emerged from the Great Patriotic War led by Nikita Krushev. This faction was concerned with keeping the military budget high, seeking detente with the West, developing the nuclear arsenal and solidifying influence over Eastern Europe.

There was a revisionist NKVD faction led by Lavrentiy Beria, a sociopathic pedophile mass-murder, who wanted to liberalize the USSR, cut down the military and abandon

Eastern Europe up to the Baltic States.

There was an orthodox marxist-leninist faction, mainly embodied by Vyacheslav Molotov, concerned with continuing projects initiated by Stalin in his last days, such as the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature, and solidifying the Eastern Bloc for the Cold War.

Among these three, the winner was the closest thing Stalin had to a right-hand man, one of the few he trusted, Georgy Malenkov. Malenkov had been a powerful figure for all of Stalin’s administration, but had reached its glory during the Great Patriotic War, when he was one of five men (counting Stalin himself) to make up the committee with supreme authority over the war effort. As one of the most powerful men in the country, he stressed efficiency and meritocracy above all else, supporting the development of the so-called Technocrats, technical experts that wielded power by virtue of efficiency rather than ideological orthodoxy.

This phenomenon, which was very helpful during the war effort, continued afterwards as Malenkov was one of the main men tasked with developing missiles and nuclear missiles from the German V2 rockets, and he made sure of gathering the best talents from the universities of the Union with as little interference by political commissars as possible.

This brought Malenkov to conflict with Andrei Zhdanov, propagandist-in-chief and considered Stalin’s most likely successor, who fanatically pursued ideological purity and distrusted the Technocrats, but Malenkov was able to discredit him and the man died in 1948.

Right after the death of Stalin, Malenkov took over his position as Premier of the USSR and leader of the party, de facto becoming the new overlord of the Soviet Union, but he had to contend with the other factions.

The orthodox marxist-leninists led by Molotov and Kaganovich were supportive of Malenkov, the revisionist Beria negotiated with him while the militarists of Krushev were hostile, as Malenkov had fought bitterly against Marshal Zhukov’s reputation.

To maintain peace, a brief Troika (triumvirate) was formed among the three leaders, with Beria becoming Deputy Premier and Krushev becoming General Secretary.

Beria pushed for reforms such as the liberation of over a million prisoners from the Gulag (most of whom, however, would later be arrested again), increased autonomy for the SRs, abolition of torture and tried to push liberal economics in the USSR and East Germany. This, however, was vehemently opposed by the orthodox faction, which warned about Beria being plotting to wipe the slate clean and abandon the Socialist bloc (a suspect well present among both orthodox and militarists, even though the latter agreed with many reforms, due to Beria’s terrifying reputation), Molotov even claimed he had assassinated Stalin.

Malenkov removed Beria from his position, well aware that he would attempt a response, and promised it to Krushev.

When the NKVD attempted a coup, the Red Army successfully repelled it. (Note: irl, Malenkov only turned on Beria after revolts in East Germany)

Beria was arrested, put on trial with accusations of treason, counterrevolutionary programs and pedophilia, sentenced to death.

In just a couple months the diarchy collapsed too, Malenkov had seized the opportunity immediately after giving Krushev the position of Deputy Premier to take the title of General Secretary upon himself. This concentration of power worried his enemies, leading them to attempt a coup, which however failed thanks to the support of Marshal Ivan Konev, who led orthodox generals, and the switching-side of militarist Mikoyan right at the last moment. Krushev was removed from positions of power and he and Zhukov were relegated to lesser roles, before the latter joined Malenkov.

With this, by 1955, Malenkov had established himself as undisputed leader, absorbing elements from all factions, primarily the orthodox, into a single technocratic government.

With the Party Congress of 1956, he outlined the new program that would characterize his administration:

1 A massive shift in industrial policy away from heavy industry to lighter one, and, as a result, a slash to the military budget. Probably the most controversial policy.

2 Moderate relaxation of censorship.

3 Infrastructural program to solve homelessness by building massive apartment blocks.

4 Possibly the most important one, a shift towards meritocracy and technocracy for the management of the economy. This was justified ideologically via a variant of the Stakhanovite Movement.

The scientific, industrial and bureaucratic management of the Union would be now dictated chiefly by competence and results, with the importance of manifesting loyalty reduced, and with it the power of the secret police and political commissars. One of the first manifestations of this change was the complete humiliation of Doctor Lysenko, a scientist with very stupid ideas that had been influential under Stalin.

The policy of giving professors and technicians high positions in the state led to the meteoric rise of Anatoly Kitov, the main responsible of the country’s computer development and visionary cyberneticist. The vanguard of professors was, after 1956, tasked with the hard task of finding a way to increase production as to not leave the army behind too much while refocusing on civilian production. Kitov, in 1958, came to the conclusion that the future stood in using computers to create a national network for economic and military planning, the so-called Project Red Book.

The Project immediately exalted Malenkov, who ignored the preoccupations of conservative bureaucrats and approved it, beginning the construction of a comprehensive network between all the factories of the Union.

While very costly, this would prove tremendously successful in a few years, beginning the Soviet Economic Miracle in the sixties. Red Book was only the beginning, however, as Viktor Glushkov would, ten years later, propose a perfected form of the same, by introducing more advanced technology and ambitions: The National Automated System for Computing and Information Processing, OGAS, which would further transform the Soviet Union into a completely automated economy.

Before the Miracle, however, Malenkov did other important things, in particular:

1 He signed the Warsaw Pact, also known as the Alliance of the Fourth International.

2 He established a common currency in the countries of the Comecon, the International Ruble.

3 He had to deal with the increasing tensions with China. Mao was, at the time, pushing for a rapid industrialization called the Great Leap Forward, whose goals the Soviets found unrealistic.

Malenkov, however, couldn’t risk losing such a precious ally after halving his own military, so he made sure of reaching an agreement with Mao:

The Soviet Union would send China quite a large amount of funds, technical experts and material to help the creation of heavy industry, producing weapons. A good fifty percent of these weapons, however, would be handed to the Soviet themselves as payment for the next fifteen years. Mao didn’t like this a lot, but he needed outside support for the Leap.

His projects would prove awfully optimistic, as floods, bureaucratic incompetence and excessive requests caused massive famines in China, forcing it to abandon the plan. The only factories to be successfully built were the ones where Soviet aid was actually used. Malenkov also made sure the funds were given in International Rubles, thus introducing them to China and extending its competitive power.

In 1962, he moved nuclear missiles on Cuba, but agreed to withdraw them in exchange for the Americans doing the same with Turkey and Italy and stopping the embargo. After this latter condition was violated, he signed a mutual-defense agreement with Castro.

Malenkov concluded his career in 1974, when he decided to resign due to health issues, leaving the titles of Premier and GS to Alexander Shelepin. Shelepin kept on the track virtually unchanged, and with little reason to change, as the Miracle was only accelerating by the year.

The seventies saw the USA descend deeper into recession, until in 1977, on the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, it wasn’t announced that Soviet GDP had officially outdone the American one, and so had done the Soviet industrial output, making the USSR the biggest powerhouse in the world.

Development wasn't limited to the Soviet Union, OGAS was very soon implemented in all of the Comecon, leading to economic booms in each of them.

The more telling stories are those of East Germany and North Korea:

The DDR was the first country aside from the Soviets to adopt OGAS in 1970, under the initiative of Eric Hoenecker, and saw such a sharp acceleration in growth that the constant migration to the West virtually stopped by 1977. By 1990, the year of unification with the recession-torned West, East Germans had visibly better standards of living than westerners.

The DPRK was the first non-Comecon country to adopt OGAS in 1972, and the result year was equally as impressive. In the eighties, the economically growing but extremely unequal South saw a crisis of migration towards the North, which led to continuous skirmishes, and, after the collapse of the USA and massive recession, resulted in the complete collapse of the fascist regime and the unification of Korea.

North Korea became a beacon for technological visionaries of the whole world, and changed in its every facet, up to architectury, to the point of looking like a sci-fi movie to others and generating the so-called Koreapunk genre. It wasn’t all good, the relative relaxation of political control caused the development of revisionist factions inside the CPSU, in particular a nationalist one spearheaded by Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was young, charismatic and attracted the youth vote of Russians. In the aftermath of the retreat from Afghanistan in 1985 and the rise of the Talibans, he waged fear about the reactionary nature of Islamic communities inside the USSR and the growing population of Central Asian SRs, but more importantly the threat of Iran, which, while war-torn, had accumulated a large number of US left over weapons.

His nationalistic populism wasn't well-appreciated by the Technocrats, but it was pretty popular and was well-liked by the secret police, the military and what remained of the bureaucracy. Moreover, he got personally close to an aging Shelepin and drew him closer to his own ideals. By 1995, Yeltsin was the one pulling the strings of the living carcass, and the one behind the Bering Strict Crisis. As soon as Shelepin died, he took over, decreasing the power of the Technocrats in favor of that of party officials loyal to him alone. This resulted in stagnation of the Soviet economy, and the invasion of Iran shocked the world, leading to the Second Cold War against the Assembly of Democratic Communists.

Yeltsin's tyranny was ended by the Kremlin Attack of 2000, which killed him and many of his closest, leaving Gorbachev, one not of his faction, to be voted quickly as new leader. The Attack was brought on by Al Jabhat Aljana, an islamist terror group led by a Chechen, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Gorbachev was an ADC sympathizer, and sought to implement in the Soviet Union a similar system, but met resistance from all sides, being isolated by the Yeltsinite majority Supreme Soviet, which got him ousted in 2002 in favor of general Dimitry Yazov. He doubled down on the surveillance apparatus and the climtate of martial law, particularly in Chechnia, where violence culminated in de facto deportations of hundreds, or even thousands, of families away from the region due to being related to terrorists or terrorist supporters, similar to the Volga Germans. Yazov failed to negotiate the extradition of Kadyrov and invaded Turkey in 2004, only for the terrorist to escape in Afghanistan and leave the Warsaw Pact in a long war. As the war stagnated and instigated a mass opposition movement, Gorbachev rallied back support, leading in Summer 2005 to the resignation of Yazov, further harmed by a lacking economic record. Gorbachev was finally able to organize in-party direct elections for the General Secretary in 2005, which he won easily, then again in 2010.

His main adversaries in 2005 were the technocrat Viktor Tyulkin, wishing to restore the pre-Yeltsin situation, the nationalist Vladimir Putin, head of the KGB, wishing to continue on a softer version of Yazov's track, and the compromise candidate Gennady Zyuganov, who was then chosen by Gorbachev as President of the Supreme Soviet. The economy continued to stagnate, leading many to long for the days of the Miracle. These were the Orthodox Marxist-Leninists, first led by Viktor Tyulkin, but then, in the early 2010s, by the young and populist Konstantin Syomin. He was the first candidate to truly employ the Freenet for an effective campaign, leading to him winning the youth vote and the whole election in 2015 against Gorbachev's successor Andrei Bogdanov. Upon entering office, Syomin launched the Green 5 Year Plan, a plan for green transition and controlled degrowth in line with previous policies by Gorbachev, and restored much of the influence of the Malenkov-era technocracy, investing more into scientific research, particularly nuclear fusion, leading to a first successful reaction in 2019 and several more in the following years. The hope is to achieve nuclear fusion on a national scale by 2040.

## **ORGANISATION**

The Soviet Union is a dictatorship of the proletariat and a one-party state, controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. meant, at least on paper, to act as the vanguard of the interests of the working class. The country went through three different phases in terms of its electoral system:

From 1922 to 1936, local Soviets (meaning Councils) were elected by working people regardless of gender or nationality and then elected the Congress of Soviets, which nominated a Central Committee of 371 , the Soviet of the Union of 414 members and Soviet of Nationalities of 131 (5 per Republic and 1 per authonomous region). Deputies could be called back by their electors and were around 1 per 125 000.

From 1936 to 2005, elections were held with universal suffrage and secret voting to local elections and to the Supreme Soviets of each republic as well as that of the whole union. Candidates were to be put forward by the CPSU, trade unions, the youth group Komsomol, the cooperatives, the workers' organisations and other mass organisations approved by the state.

This system has formally remained unchanged, but in 2005 the primaries of the General Secretary of the CPSU was made into a de facto national election with universal suffrage. Indeed, while the head of state is the President of the Supreme Soviet, in real terms, since 1924, real power lies in the leader of the party. Joseph Stalin centralized immense amounts of power in that position, occupying a long sequence of different positions in the state, culminating in that of Chairman of the Council of Ministers, meaning head of government. That position has been inherited by Georgy Malenkov, Aleksander Shelepin, Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dimitry Yazov and Konstantin Syomin, making it the de facto leading office of the state. Given the status of the CPSU as only party and the strong relations between it and most other mass organisations, the General Secretary is all but assured to be granted this office.

## **POLITICS**

Despite being a one-party state, the Soviet Union sees a significant degree of political struggle and divergence, particularly between different factions of the CPSU and, since the early 2010s, the few non-CPSU aligned mass organisations. The main factions in the party include:

The **Orthodox Marxist-Leninists** are the ruling faction, with its leader Konstantin Syomin on top. This name was originally used for the technocratic faction but has since transferred to a more populistic movement built by Syomin in the early 2010s with his platform on the Freenet and which attracted support from a sizeable minority in the Party establishment before the victory in the 2015 elections. They consider all leaders after Shelepin to have been revisionist deviators and are also mildly critical of Malenkov and Stalin and quite critical of Shelepin. They accuse the technocratic system of being undemocratic but praise its great efficiency and are generally considered close to the technocrats, most of whom joined this faction after 2015, and had their power largely restored compared to Yeltsin's disempowerment. They consider the beaurocracy to be a dangerous force always risking to corrupt the proletarian state and thus support cyclical purges of "counterrevolutionary elements", citing the need to prevent a new Yeltsin from arising. They critic Gorbachev's economic policy, but acclaimed the institution of open primaries for the office of general secretary. They opposed Yeltsin and Yazov as both economically revisionist and Greater Russian chauvinists and islamophobes, condemning the war in Turkey, the occupation of Iran and in general Yeltsinite interventionism. They adopted topics previously close the Gorbachevites, such as environmentalism and LGBT rights, and was able to gain dominance in the Komsomol in 2015, as well as most trade unions.

The **Reformers** or **Gorbachevites** are sympathisers of the ADC model, they support the reforms of Gorbachev and want to go further, possibly up to allowing multiparty elections, and support more market oriented forms of socialism. They were the first faction to support Green and Rainbow politics, and dominated the Komsomol from 2000 to 2015. They still retain a large degree of influence in it. They are strongly anti-militarist and opposed to foreign interventions. In 2015 they badly lost elections, which led to a change in leadership from the unpopular Bogdanov to the younger and more charismatic former film-maker Volodymir Zelensky. Zelensky narrowed the gap in 2020 but still lost.

The **Soviet Nationalists** or **Yeltsinites** are the followers of the ideology of Boris Yeltsin. They support more market oriented forms of socialism, military intervention to secure Soviet hegemony worldwide, authoritarian form of governance, Russian patriotism as a form of Soviet pride and the opposition of radical Islam's influence in Soviet society. They hold support of the KGB, several military official, as well as part of the trade unions, particularly industries threatened by Green transition, due to their climate-skepticism. In 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 their candidate was KGB Director Vladimir Putin, who however announced he won't be running in 2025 due to old age.

The **Independent People's Union (INS)** is a mass organisation which includes all kinds of non-communist forces and puts candidates in many elections, but obviously not those for general secretary. It is a big tent organisation which includes liberals, anarchists and right wing nationalists and is in real terms a coalition of different organisations. It formed from a variety of small groups in 2013 under the leadership of Aleksej Navalny, when Gorbachev's reforms had allowed it. Those groups were too small to challenge the CPSU, therefore they chose to form the IPU to not compete with each other in the already uphill struggle. The main groups that formed the IPU were the **NAROD,** a far right islamophobic youth and trade union led by Navalny, the **Free Russia** youth alliance, liberals led by Aleksej Nechayev, the conservative **Civic Platformw**, the libertarian socialist **Black Front** and the duginist **Eurasia Movement.**

Finally, the most successful non communist organisation is the **Alliance of Regionalists** formed by authonomists groups of all over the USSR. It loosely collaborates with the INS and dominates the politics of Hokkaido, Chechnia and Lithuania, while also having influence in Ukraine, Central Asia and the Russian Far East.