Road to Revolution and War

The Events that lead to the formation of the UASR and thus lead to the divergences of the Blue Alert timeline thanks to the removal of Hitler from the standard equation as a whole are of great importance for understanding how and why this world has become as different as it is.

## Reds!

The most important event in the Internationale's early history is quite likely the American and Russian Revolutions. A more aggressively imperialistic America, with a progressive movement that had largely been consigned to political irrelevance, and whose Socialist movement had grown increasingly more unified as a result of disillusionment with the ailing progressives; sought to commit itself to the first world war early in the conflict. Joining the Entente against the Central powers, America had hoped to "make the world safe for democracy." However, the war proved massively unpopular at home, with record lows in volunteer service strangling what the Entente hoped would be a flood of American troops.

American soldiers died far from home fighting for causes not their own in southeast Asia, the near east, and in Western and Southern Europe. Though the Republican and Democratic party had some disagreements here and there; both Taft and Wilson agreed that the war should be fought to the "destruction of Prussian militarism." Though there was a seeming crisis strong enough for the Taft administration to step aside and allow Wilson to push his dream of American semi-presidential Parliamentary democracy through via amendment, neither would consider allowing "our boys to come back home" until "the job was finished". Even as a hundred thousand soldiers died at Gallipoli against Central Powers soldiers, even as Americans expended their lives in vast numbers for no gain at the Neville offensive and even as the debacle in the Indopacific unfolded; there was no move for withdrawal.

Meanwhile in Russia, the Tsarist Bear; essentially encircled by enemies and cut off from meaningful outside aid, with poorly led, poorly equipped, and poorly trained soldiers whom their commanders regarded as peasant fodder lost vast numbers of people. Successes tended to collapse upon themselves as other jealous commanders would outright sabotage the efforts of their comrades to prevent them from stealing their glory, and the Tsar and his deputies proved to be deeply incapable commanders at every level. And yet the Tsar would not countenance giving up until the battle was won; so eager was he to avenge the deeply humiliating loss of his ships at Tsushima and other international debacles that cost Russia huge amounts of prestige.

Russia would eventually have enough. The Tsar, sensing which way the wind was blowing, abdicated the throne and exiled himself and his family to neutral Scandinavia and with none foolish enough to take the Russian throne, Kerensky declared the short lived Russian Republic. But Kerensky made the grave error of continuing to prosecute the war, and his republic would be overthrown by the Bolshevik revolution which in great need of an out; accepted Germany's harsh terms to fight in Russia's burgeoning civil war. This allowed troops once busy with Russia to pour to the other direction to combat the western portion of the Entente, and with the crisis of the Manhattan commune in full swing, the situation looked bleak.

America had grown tired of the war, and the city of New York declared itself an autonomous republic citing disgust with having to send soldiers to fight for Imperialist causes, forcing America to tend to the home front to try and defuse the situation. With an incredibly tense stand off, eventually New York City rejoined the Union after a few months, but only after some concessions that the U.S Government was already looking for ways to reverse. This disruption in American troop flows allowed the Central powers to leap forward and make their move. Though this spring offensive was eventually beaten back, and the exhausted central powers eventually acceded to surrender, the price was high. Almost one point eight million Americans had died; the bloodiest war in American history. And the American Socialist movement would take this time to start growing and growing.

Even during the so called roaring twenties of the post-war years, the Socialist movement grew, but it would be the great depression that proved to be the straw that broke the camels' back. After predictions of permanent economic highs, all of a sudden everything came crashing down on that fateful day in 1929. Out of all the nations of the world, America was hit hardest, and Hoover's government seemed ill suited to do anything. In 1932, the Great Depression was approaching its worst point, and it was in this climate that elections would sweep the Worker's Communist party into power in a landslide electoral victory with its allied parties in the Democratic Farmer Labor Party. With Hoover's hopes of the Democrats stepping aside to avoid splitting the Anti-communist vote dashed by Democratic candidate Huey Long's apathy to whether Socialism or Capitalism was the word of the day, and the magnitude of the Socialist electoral victory so great as to make such a hope futile anyway, it seemed that there would be nothing stopping a Red Dawn in America.

Until General Douglas MacArthur; a vehement anti-communist, strongarmed Hoover into declaring a national emergency so that his forces could restore proper order. This proved to ironically; be Capitalism's undoing in America. He found that figures like Omar Bradley, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George S. Patton, who had fought in the mud and trenches of the first world war from start to finish, had become Socialists right under his nose, and he found that many national guard units, the Bonus army, soldiers who refused to fire on their comrades, and innumerable Socialist militias rose up to oppose his putsch. Turning to forces such as the Klu Klux Klan and the Sons of Liberty paramilitary groups to bolster his forces, MacArthur fought a brief civil war.

Worker's Communist party presidential candidate; Thomas Norman, was executed as a traitor, and Democrat Party candidate Huey Long would soon follow as the KKK stormed his place of residence, turning them into martyrs for the cause as Earl Browder, Jack Reed, William Foster, Upton Sinclair, Emma Goldman and more rallied to defend America from MacArthur's suspension of liberties for the sake of security. But as the war dragged on, the nature of the anti-putsch movement changed during a meeting of the provisional government, with figures such as Leon Trotsky making powerful supports in favor of not simply defending America; but bringing about the revolution at last. In one of history's great ironies, by launching his attempted coup to contest the Socialists' electoral victory, MacArthur had doomed American capitalism.

Though Stalin was initially reluctant to support the revolution, when it became clear that MacArthur was going to lose and with the USSR hardly caring if the international community made it more of a pariah, the Soviets would send in the blood and treasure needed to speed up the victory, aided further by Mexican revolutionaries such as Zapata and volunteers from countless communist, anarchist, and socialist movements around the world. Finally; MacArthur was forced to flee to Cuba with his supporters, his ragtag fleet defended by British forces moving to defend British interests in the Caribbean by reminding the new American government not to step too far. The United States of America; save for MacArthur's sham of a state labelling itself as such in Cuba, was dead, the Union of American Socialist Republics was born.

### A Red Dawn

With a new government headed by President Upton Sinclair and premier William Z. Foster, the Capitalist world watched as more and more governments followed suit. Trujilo found UASR troops ousting him out of power to block his attempted rebuffing of Haiti's sibling revolution, Mexico would go red, followed by much of central America, then came the conversion of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Overnight the comintern had gone from being a tool of the Soviet Union into an actual community of socialist states. Stalin's "socialism in one country" ideology was now dead in the water. With his ideology discredited, Stalin was forced to accede to a lessening of his power, no longer master of his country and with his cult of personality deflated considerably.

Still, the Soviet Union had not supported America's revolution for no gain, and by the time 1933 was out a great flow of trade between the USSR and the Socialist states of the Americas would begin, with vital American aid in industrialization and technical expertise being offered. And despite fears that the UASR would see its own Stalin like figure arising, the UASR remained a vibrant multi-party democracy with strongly participatory and direct democratic elements. Extremely progressive moves for equality including the tearing down of racial barriers and racist institutions, the whole hearted embracing of feminism and challenging established norms of sexuality and decency, the great steps forward in the acceptance of those of nonstandard sexuality and gender were all made.

To some other countries, this would be a terror of a different sort than that of the Soviets; the terror of a lack of moral decency, with lurid reports of the new country embracing public nudity and orgies being made to scare other countries. But the movement worked, and the USSR and its client states of Tannu-Tuva and Mongolia would follow suit in embracing America's social as well as economic policies; however much grumbling Stalin made. In China, the left segment of the ruling party, dubbing itself the Guomindang; increasingly turned to the Comintern for support, becoming an increasingly socialist movement and making peace with the Chinese Communist Party as it received vitally needed supplies for industrialization.

Relations between the UASR and the USSR would not always be rosy. Stalin had great misgivings about the American commitment to constitutionalism and "hedonism" and had a distaste for the marriage of American Communists to American Anarchists, while Foster himself was dismissive of Stalin's "austere" preferences, his intolerance for deviating from the Moscow line, and his powerful cult of personality. Further complicating things were China and the Latin communists' own preferences and the later addition of Iran to the Internationale with the fall of the Shahdom, with Iran naturally falling into Soviet orbit. Four distinct camps would come to form in the Internationale, the Chinese faction, the Federalist faction, the American faction, and the Soviet faction; each with their own ideas for the path to world Socialism that made cooperation a frequently teeth clenched affair.

And yet, the Comintern always remained wary. France and Britain were deeply afraid of the Communist revolution spreading farther. A revanchist and expansionist government in Germany took power as the Monarchists and Restructurists were swept into power in the elections, with their chancellor and new Emperor speaking at length about the great threat that the Communists posed to Germany's security and the need to expand Germany's borders to counter the red tide. Italy fell increasingly on the side of extreme capitalism as people who took the ideas of Ayn Rand; a figure who had been driven to near madness by going through both the Russian and American revolutions as a woman with strongly ultra-capitalist and hyper-individualistic ideals; to heart grew increasingly influential. Siamese authorities reported constant worry of Communist subversives expanding into Europe's colonies and the threat of a Red China.

Elsewhere, talks in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway began of forming a new Kalmar Union as a bulwark against the threat of Communism and the danger that revolutionary socialism could pose to their social democracy. Switzerland looked to her neighbors to help guarantee her safety, building herself a large and well equipped army for her size while Portugal made sure its borders and its colonies were kept safely under the lock and key of integralism. Ireland, fearful of IRA agitators potentially dragging it into a new war with Britain, sought to crack down on Communist influence, The humble benelux countries like their scandinavian counterparts; also spoke of a potential political union to pool their resources to better defend their possessions from the red menace and to better craft a powerful military for themselves. Even tiny microstates such as Andorra, Monaco, and San Marino were reportedly intensely worried by the developments in the communist world.

Then came the big shocker; riding on a wave of near hysterical fear of the red revolutions; JFC Fuller and Philippe Petain swept their ultra-rightwing parties into power in France and Britain in 1934 after no-confidence votes and vowed to turn back the tide. The world's two largest imperialist nations were now gearing for a confrontation. But despite the danger, continued squabbling would afflict the Comintern as the debacle of the Spanish civil war split open rifts in opinion. The Soviet faction favored a defensive approach, to try and stir up rifts in the Capitalist nations so that the Comintern could sweep in and bring about the end of Capitalism with little effort on their end, while the Latin American faction believed that the Iron should be struck while it was hot and that the world revolution should begin with all due haste, the Americans favored supporting revolutionary movements until the Capitalist nations would be forced to react and drive them into decisive battles to be won by Comintern industrial output, while China preferred to first deal with the Chinese civil war and crush those still loyal to Jiang Jieshi's Right Kuomintang and then let the capitalists come and discredit themselves as unprovoked aggressors.

This squabbling would turn the efforts at supporting the Spanish in their civil war into a boondoggle. While the Internationale offered ample support to the Spanish Republic and the CNT-FAI, it was incredibly difficult to agree on just who to support. Some believed that the Spanish Republic should be supported, while others favored the CNT-FAI. And even there; there were yet further divisions. Support the Stalinists, the Democratic Socialists, the Syndicalists, the Trotskyists; sideline the progressives, liberals and social democrats or make a popular front with them? Meanwhile, the forces of the burgeoning Alliance knew exactly who to support, giving Sanjurjo and his stooge Franco everything they needed to fight their war. And in the midst of the great depression, there was clamor to focus primarily on internal affairs.

Great public works would be undertaken and the Comintern continued to grow in its citizenry and its economy year after year; despite the setback in the Spanish civil war where Nationalist forces managed to triumph with the aid of the French and the British, all seemed to be going well though relations in the Comintern often were icy, even with the addition of Iran to the communist bloc in 1940. Save for the ongoing Chinese civil war which was increasingly winding down as Jingwei's GMD routed Chen Gongbo's KMT in battle after battle affairs seemed genuinely quiet for more than seventeen years after the American revolution. Then all that was shattered in October 31st of 1950 as Allied forces launched their attacks and the world exploded into war.