The Imperious Chairman-A TL

fasquardon

Are the Soviets making all the conquered countries SSRs in this TL? I can sort of see Sverdlov sticking to the original vision of the USSR being a great Federal brotherhood of all Communists... On the other hand, it will look more expansionist that making the same countries puppets (maybe this is how WW3 starts?)

fasquardon
 

Napoleon IV

Lorgar said:
Cool update. A shame the Soviets didn't keep going from Austria to kick some Fascist ass in northern Italy too..
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They really couldn't, since the Allies were able to take much of Austria as well.
guinazacity said:
This is going to happen on round three ;)
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Maybe.;)
fasquardon said:
Are the Soviets making all the conquered countries SSRs in this TL? I can sort of see Sverdlov sticking to the original vision of the USSR being a great Federal brotherhood of all Communists... On the other hand, it will look more expansionist that making the same countries puppets (maybe this is how WW3 starts?)

fasquardon
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The issue is that in the long term annexing Eastern Europe would require a lot more Soviet resources, while with puppets the Soviets can shift much of the effort and cost onto the puppet state. Plus as you said it looks imperialist. However that might be a long term goal.
 

Pete The Cat

I may have missed this in a post, but would it be possible to get a map of the what Eastern Europe looks like at this point?

I'm curious to see how the borders have shifted and what Eastern Germany looks like in this timeline.

Also, Great timeline!:D
 

Napoleon IV

Pete The Cat said:
I may have missed this in a post, but would it be possible to get a map of the what Eastern Europe looks like at this point?

I'm curious to see how the borders have shifted and what Eastern Germany looks like in this timeline.

Also, Great timeline!:D
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Thank you.

I haven't seen a map. Can someone please make that?
 

ObssesedNuker

Napoleon IV said:
Thank you.

I haven't seen a map. Can someone please make that?
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I'll try to whip something up when I get home using that HOI map posted earlier.

EDIT: Roight. Here we go.

UR4kAl7.png


Rough post-Second Great War boundaries. I wound up drawing a red line through Germany and Austria to denote their division because MS Paint kept filling all the stupid boundaries lines in when dealing with all of those small provinces inside Germany and it drove me crazy. This is also why Memel and that one part of Czechoslovakia are just red and white, respectively, blotches. I got fed up trying to fill them in and just wound up using the brush tool.

Looking at it now, I just noticed that I have majorly borked up on Hungary and Romania's borders too. But I'm a touch too tired to correct that. Maybe when I wake up tomorrow...
 
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ruth

ruth

I did my own little mockup of the borders, going off of the new borders given. I think Silesia and Pomerania are still part of Germany. Wasn't sure quite what to do with Moldavia—SSR or autonomous oblast?—or the exact division between Belarus and Ukraine, so I made a couple guesses as to the borders. All I've got to say is, that is possibly the saddest, most starved-looking Poland I think I've ever seen.

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tuxer

Napoleon IV said:
Between July 1942 and the start of the Third Great War in December Soviet occupation was formally ended and power transferred to the local Communists[2]. There were no elections to legitimize the new order; as Sverdlov put it “The reactionaries are too strong in these countries, and thus an election would only serve to move us backwards.”[3] The governing structures of the new states was almost a perfect copy of the Soviet structure. Like the USSR power rested in the Central Committee and the Politburo, which were elected by a party Congress. While in every state except for Czechoslovakia the leader was the Chairman of the Secretariat (known as the 1st Secretary in Czechoslovakia and Romania) they didn't rule alone. The tradition of collective leadership was to Sverdlov a fundamental principle of Leninism, and he ensured that the other states followed the same model[4]. The other principle of Leninism the new rulers followed was that of the vanguard party. The parties were not mass movements, but rather comprised a small percentage of the population (from a low of 4% in Romania to a high of 15% in Germany).

The next step was to cement Communist rule. As in the Soviet Union terror played a key role. The case of Germany in particular illustrates the emergence of this system. The Soviets took special interest in Germany, following Lenin's dictum that “the principle link in the chain of revolution is the German link, and the success of world revolution depends more on Germany than upon any other country.” Thus no expense was spared when it came to building the Volkspolizei (People's Police, also known as the Vopo)[5]. As historian Robert Conquest writes the Soviets “combined the infrastructure of the Gestapo with the cruelties of the NKVB to create one of the most brutal secret police agencies in history.” From January 1943 (when the KPD Central Committee issued a decree ordering the use of mass terror) to August 1949 the Vopo was unleashed upon the German population. Given the nature of Hitler's regime almost every German had some connection to the Nazi Party, a fact the Vopo used to justify what amounted to random acts of terror. The prisons quickly overflowed with people; for example in Spandau Prison it wasn't uncommon to see 50 people stuffed into a cell. One prisoner, a former Reichstag Deputy for the Social Democrats, remember Spandau Prison as “the worst place in the world. Us prisoners were stuffed into filthy cells with barely room to breathe the fetid air. The screaming of men in the torture chambers formed the soundtrack to this misery.” To obtain confessions prisoners were put on the Conveyor, a system of constant torment developed by the Cheka. Once on the Conveyor a person could be tortured for days at a time, often while being forced to stand or sit in one spot without moving. The pain was agonizing, and all but the strongest men were reduced to gibbering wrecks after a few days on the Conveyor. Once they confessed the prisoners faced two fates: they were either executed (typically by guillotine, another legacy of the Nazi regime. More people were executed by this method in Communist Germany than during the entire Reign of Terror) or they were sent to prison camps. Concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen and Sobibor were reopened to hold the waves of detainees, while many others were sent to the Siberian Gulags. 700,000 Germans were imprisoned during the time period, and similar waves of terror gripped all the countries under Soviet domination.

The Communists also sought control of the cultural sphere. Control over the media had been easily established, and the waves of terror swept away many of the Communists' intellectual opponents (who in many cases had already been largely destroyed by the Fascists. In Germany for instance many intellectuals were described as having taken “The Sachsenhausen-Kolyma Express”). The Communists also began inserting themselves into every aspect of public life. In a similar process to the Nazi Gleichschaltung clubs and other social organizations were forced to register with the government, at which point Party members and informants joined (in addition only Party members were allowed to be club officers). Other social groups such as youth groups and unions were absorbed into the Party outright. In most cases this was done with little resistance, for the Eastern European populace's will had been broken by Fascism and war. The big exception to this was in the area of religion. For the Communists religious institutions were seen as the gravest threat. This was particularly true of the Catholic Church, with Sverdlov even going as far as to say “The Pope has a secret army, one that is in many ways more powerful than the forces of Hitler”[6]. A campaign to destroy religion was launched in every country. The secret police moved through the religious community like a scythe, killing priests, seizing church lands, and destroying Bibles and icons. Only a small number of churches were left standing. Derisively nicknamed “the Sverdlovist Church” these institutions were made up of priests who had sworn loyalty to the state (and often agreed to become informers). They cut all ties with their colleagues in non-Communist countries and taught a message of obedience to the new regimes. Even attending these churches was dangerous however. For Party members religious affiliation meant being removed from the Party, with the corresponding loss in privileges, while non-Party members risked being seen as politically unreliable and possibly arrested. Communist propaganda also played its part by portraying priests as agents of Fascism and being against reason and progress. As a result by the early 1950s religious practice had largely been driven underground.
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While I don't doubt that the Soviet troika would support extreme measures to stamp out Nazism in Germany, I must say that these actions are completely out of character for the established Soviet Troika.

True, Sverdlov is a firm believer in "necessary evil" and stuff like the state-controlled media being used for propaganda purposes is something that he would agree with. Even the pre-war artistic freedom was limited (I presume) for pro-communist POV and promoting the communist cause. The extreme and authoritarian control would, in Sverdlov's point of view, be merely a temporary arrangement.

But the social clubs, youth organizations and trade unions being directly controlled by the KPD? People who don't affiliate with the party suffer social and legal repression like it happened during the Nazi period? Wouldn't the Troika realize the unfortunate implications of this? And sending 700,000 people into concentration camps? Wouldn't that cause an uproar once the Soviet leadership got wind of it? I mean, really?

I must say, while Sverdlov and his Troika could condone terror and extreme measures to curbstomp Nazism in Germany as "necessary evil", allowing the KPD to become a new Nazi party (because that's basically what it has become) would only be possible if they were completely out of touch with reality.
 

lukedalton

Lorgar said:
That is a serious behemoth. The Anglo-French are so fucked.
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In a bad situation? Yes, but not totally fucked. While the URSS has not suffered the damage of OTL...neither the Anglo-French (hell Italy and the Balkans, plus France and the Benelux are intact), and frankly i see Benny join whatever alliance London and Paris want create as the URSS is too near the italian border for anybody taste.

Not considering that the URSS now had less than OTL (no Bulgaria or Yugoslavia and no 'rettification' of the Finnish border) and need to at least guard Siberia as the Japanese are still a factor
 
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