Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

If you ever get a chance to read Marshal Law, (graphic novel by Pat Mills and Kev O'Neill), that mentions an ongoing military situation in South America known as "The Zone".

The novel post dates TTL by about 5 years or so, so no one will use it as the inspiration, but I can see "The Zone" coming into use, initially in regards to security operations around the Panama Canal zone and later to group together "Security Operations" and "Police Actions" throughout South America.

Like a combination of OTL's Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan but without the nice bits.

A lot.
I have no idea. I'm sorry: calculating such things is just beyond me!

(Epilogue)

America’s Wars through Latin America would be regarded in most circles as taking place through the rest of 1985, throughout the following year and finishing midway through ’87. Others would disagree in the forming of putting an end to the series of multiple yet interlinked conflicts either at the close of ’85 or all the way far into the Nineties. It depended upon one’s definition of an ending… with other opinions stating that they were still ongoing to this day.

The conflicts which the United States fought, aided by some of its wartime partners in the Allies though certainly not all of them, and also joined at times by others which had remained neutral during the Third World War, began as that war closed. America’s Wars started in Mexico and against Guatemala before rapidly expanding. Neither Cuba nor the countries in Central America surrendered and the terms of the New York Armistice Accords didn’t cover anything like that. They were meant to stop fighting as well as return Allied-held territory. Guatemala had opposed such a loss of Belize and suffered a joint American and British attack to force them out of Belize. Both Cuba and Panama handed over Guantanamo Bay and the Canal Zone respectively with the intention that they would see some sort of post-war political settlement over the future of each where they would get what they had taken by force of arms the next time around by diplomacy. The Soviets had forced each into agreeing before promptly abandoning the whole of the Western Hemisphere. The United States regarded those regimes as not honouring the agreement struck at Orangetown outside New York and acted accordingly using various excuses. There was plenty of unfinished business to be done with these matters in addition to the mess of the situation in Mexico plus Nicaragua as well. President Glenn might not have been wholly committed to addressing this unfinished business yet he authorised it all. There was a lot going on back home domestically with regards to ‘completing the job’. This concerned many factors ranging from punishing those surviving regimes to the south to securing the peace to an – ultimately futile – attempt to locate ‘the missing’ and those responsible for the fates of so many of those initially unaccounted for who had turned up dead. Not everyone in the United States was hell-bent on this crusade but the loudest voices and many of those in important positions were. In the end though, when Glenn did what he did, it was he that everyone turned on in the end because no one was satisfied that it was enough.

Mexico broke into several different independent and semi-independent nations. The wartime Tijuana-led Democratic Mexico was only one of these. Entry of American forces into Yucatán at the end of April ’85 spearheaded a separatist movement there which exploded. It was one which started out favourable to the United States. There were two more big, long-lasting nation states in the form of the Republic of Mexico based in the north of the country and the Mexican Federation in southern regions of the country. These two, like the Yucatán Republic, each had no allegiance to Tijuana. There was also the Chiapas State which never fully-gained independence when fighting against Yucatán and the Mexican People’s Federation (they added the 'People's' bit later surely just to gain more American attention!) as well as internal indigenous Mayans who they brutally supressed; in addition, the Veracruz State sprung up and lasted for some time before eventually falling apart. The Republic of Mexico was soon the one in most favour with the United States. Based in Monterrey and controlling a large area – albeit one with several nuclear holes in it –, this area a-joined the United States. It was beset with chaos once the Soviets pulled out and there was a lot of weaponry left behind along with many foreign soldiers (those from Latin America) who didn’t go home when they were supposed to as so many had deserted. The Americans supported the foundation of this state in defiance of Tijuana while at first claiming it had no control over what occurred. That was a lie. Monterrey and Tijuana were meant to be played off against each other. Democratic Mexico (retaining the formal name of the United Mexican States) would do nothing to stop what emerged. America airheads for their wars to the south were set up in the Republic of Mexico like they were in Yucatán and joined those already established in Democratic Mexico too. Overland supply routes, which then ran southwards through the radioactive ruin of central Mexico, were used by the Americans to fight the communist-inclined Mexican People’s Federation and then Chiapas eventually when that little regime opposed the Americans. Yucatán ended up with quite the right-wing government in the end: a country supported by Chile and Paraguay with less and less American involvement in its affairs apart from the logistical hubs there which were important in the later stages of America’s Wars. Several years of fighting internally, fighting against the Americans, fighting against each other again, eventually saw three nations finally emerge: Democratic Mexico (struggling to control what had once been that semi-communist federation in the south when they ended up trying to take over there), the Republic of Mexico, and Yucatán. An American military presence within all there of them would remain but, contrary to many expectations, no direct territorial transfers were ever made to the United States. There were those who wanted to see such a land-grab yet it never occurred in the end.

The rule of the Ortega Brothers in Nicaragua didn’t last very long. The United States found reasons to see El Salvador and Honduras were wrestled away from them and then Nicaragua itself was attacked. Nicaragua didn’t stand a chance. The regime tried everything to stop what came but failed. The Americans were only interested in bringing them down and seeing ‘democracy’ return to Nicaragua along with the two smaller countries it neighboured too. It was Guatemala next. They went through ruler after ruler in the post-war chaos of the wider war and then the Second Belize War. The United States struck eventually. While London declined to assist directly in what occurred, the complete use of transport links through Belize was made available: Guatemala was already near surrounded beforehand so this was not that important in real terms. In Belize, Britain was rebuilding that nation for a second time and struggling with such a task. The nearby wars didn’t help in that at all. Then it was Panama. Noriega and his regime fell with only a few shots fired, unable to put up even the smallest form of real resistance. The United States was thus left with only one wartime opponent in the region remaining after moving against the others one-by-one: that being Cuba. Once hurricane season ended, October ’85 saw Operation Freedom’s Sword occur. Charges were laid that the Havana had broken the terms of the armistice in terms of military activity in its skies and waters: America’s wartime allies weren’t in agreement with this but there was no real opposition to getting rid of Castro’s regime. The actual war though brought stirrings of discontent from some allies and also a break between New York and Madrid over the brutality of it once underway. Freedom’s Sword was a war where the Americans battered the island and then once they landed on Cuba, they used a lot of excessive fire power in their fight. American casualties were light whereas Cuba’s were certainly not, especially in the form of reported civilian deaths in the face of all of the air strikes, artillery bombardments and such like often against lightly-armed irregulars. Fidel Castro was taken prisoner – as the Ortega Brothers and Noriega had also been – and taken to the United States as another war criminal to be tried for his actions in trials that were only going to have one ending for those involved.

This was only the first stage of America’s Wars though and where the Glenn Administration had hoped to see the conflict concluded. That wasn’t to be. The running sore of the occupation of parts of Mexico – which was something that the United States didn’t regard as an occupation due to it only being military sites – increased due to guerrilla activity there. The Mexico Massacre, that morning in March when seven further cities had received the same nuclear treatment that Mexico City had previously done, was remembered by many people. There remained many weapons in civilian hands and ineffective national governments in some parts while a brutal one in another. The fighting increased. The United States looked for outside support but there was little. So many guns and so much ammunition had been left in Mexico and there was more which came up from the south as well. All the way down through Central America, there was fighting. The new governments that the United States had installed in all of those countries were incapable and even worse than those up in the divided Mexico of keeping their people under control. Initial hopes for the United States to stay out of this everywhere apart from Panama were dashed when the previously stable Costa Rica was hit by violence too. American intervention in mid-1986 came and that was no easy task when it came to re-establishing order in Coast Rica. Cuba was occupied after Freedom’s Sword. The country was ‘de-communistfied’: an odd term but one which was used a lot in the United States. Communism had been in Cuba for longer than elsewhere and needed rooting out. Acts of violence occurred against the occupiers and this was combatted. Overall, this was nothing on the scale of violence as seen in Mexico yet that didn’t mean that a lot of people didn’t die. American forces would stay in Cuba on occupation tasks through ’86 and to June ’87 before the Republic of Cuba was fully established. They didn’t all go home either. For ‘security purposes’, the United States added to their pre-war presence at Guantanamo Bay with further permanent military bases at Mariel (near Havana) and another on the Isle of Pines. Cuba, like Panama and Yucatán, were all helpful as forward staging sites for another conflict in the midst of the occupation of Cuba where America’s Wars went beyond its wartime enemies. Ecuador’s left-wing government came to the specific attention of the United States starting February ’86. The United States had acted against Ecuador’s oil shipments during the Third World War yet never got around to their unfinished business with that country and the material aid that it gave the LAComs during the war. There had been an issue with wanted fugitives reportedly getting to Ecuador, something which President Roldós {note 1} denied. Quito categorically stated it had done no such thing and the American charges that by vocalizing opposition to America’s Wars in Central America it was therefore ‘opposing democracy’ were a flight of fancy. Due to long-standing issues, but certainly pushed behind-the-scenes by New York and also Santiago, Peru found an excuse to start border corrections with Ecuador… border corrections which soon became a full-scale invasion. Pinochet sent Chilean troops to aid Peru and Columbia intervened too. To top off this unequal fight, the Americans joined in soon enough where they could provide further help in toppling Ecuador. Roldós had spoken out too much in the post-war era and those wartime links with enemies of the United States, even tenuous, were exploited. He ended up dead during the short conflict and his democratically-elected government brought down. As to wanted war criminals in his country, such people were found and removed though there would be those who said that they were hardly the big-fish being sought as justification for American action.


America’s Wars to the south took place while the United States was recovering from the wider war which it had fought. They had repulsed an invasion which had come with nuclear attacks made and led a global alliance (though one of two) against those who had attacked them. There was that unfinished business from the conflict though. The military kept increasing in size and conflicts continued away from Latin America. The Second Korean War was fought to an end. Rather than an invasion, the United States joined with many of the Allies – those in Asia and Australasia – in keeping the war ongoing until Pyongyang agreed to an armistice. That took until November 1985. North Korea was blasted to bits in the meantime. Kim Jong-il gave in externally though told his people that he was won. North Korea really had lost though and this was worse than 1953. The issue with China was a big focus for the United States where the Soviets had their massive presence. The Allies and the EDA had forced them to the negotiating table during their conflicts yet China was a different matter: they had won there. Glenn oversaw support for the expansionist Taiwan in keeping what it had taken, aiding the British in Hong Kong and doing most of the work where Portugal re-established its lost control over Macau. A major military commitment was kept in South Korea even after the conflict with North Korea came to an end and there was too an increased presence in Japan. Countries such as Thailand and Pakistan – in negative favour with the United States during the war for not joining the Allies – were given American support post-war due to both being regional powers near to China. The issue over the lack of a peace treaty with the Soviets following the global armistice was behind this. A concern was that should the armistice fall apart, from out of China would come a renewed Soviet war against the United States. This was an opinion which not everyone shared, domestically and internationally, due to the how the war had ended for the Kremlin. However, the American military presence in Asia as well as its military might deployed in Latin America, continued to remain where they were.

Large parts of the American South-West were left absolutely devastated by the war fought through them: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas were each declared ‘disaster areas’. There had been fighting & occupation too in parts of Alaska, Oklahoma and Florida… to say nothing of Southern California. Where Washington had once stood along with sites in Maryland and Virginia had been hit in the D.C. nuclear strikes with Maryland having suffered especially from fall-out. Smaller nuclear blasts had occurred inside Kansas City, outside Omaha, near Rapid City (at Ellsworth AFB) and over in Hawaii on Oahu (that aborted hit on NAS Barbers Point). To top all of that off, western parts of North Dakota had been blasted with Soviet nuclear weapons to strike the ICBM fields which then covered the Upper Plains – and across into Canada too – with worse fall-out than seen elsewhere due to the size of the blasts and their ground bursts. If the conventional fighting and nuclear strikes hadn’t been enough, there had been air strikes and commando activities across further parts of the nation too. Civilian internal refugees, waves of criminality and ecological damage had occurred. The war had been felt coast-to-coast amongst all Americans. There had been upheavals everywhere with misery and violence nationwide. Traitors – real and imagined – had been punished. There had been ethnic conflict with Hispanic-Americans targeted but smaller migrant communities such as Americans of an Arabic background (due to the terror attacks which opened the war having a visible Arab face to them) and Korean- & Vietnamese-Americans (those two groups had long been known for their hatred of the communist regimes of their homeland yet people forgot that in war when focusing on skin colour). Existing pre-war tensions between the left & the right in politics, the rights of African-Americans in the country and so many more social matters which on paper should have had no bearing on the war had all been affected by the conflict fought. The stability of the United States hadn’t been endangered in many manners as it had fought on through everything yet in other ways it really had. This war was unlike anything which the country had ever faced before. The casualties were horrendous. These included civilians as well as military ones and wasn’t just limited to the dead. There were the injured and the ill (the latter with the effects on basic sanitation as well as hunger) from fighting and occupation… plus all those who’d been exposed to radiation and gases. There was the financial upheaval with the markets, the loss of much of world trade – especially early on in the war – and domestic economic effects when the country switched to a full wartime economy.

The United States had taken all of this and was still standing… not just standing too but up and fighting afterwards where it did what it did to the south and in Asia. The military build-up didn’t suddenly stop once the New York Armistice Accords were signed. Finishing off what those regimes in Latin America had started, flattening North Korea and being prepared to restart the war with the Soviets – this time from a far better position – was all on the cards. The issue with ‘the missing’ continued post-war. There were bodies found and some captives rescued yet of others there was no trace. This was something that addressing became an American priority. Congress wouldn’t let it go and made sure that the people were aware of it. Media restrictions were lifted after the end of the fighting and so there was no chance of this dying down. What had happened to all of those people was something which the United States refused to leave unanswered. More that that, those who had killed or kidnapped so many people were going to be punished too. Returned POWs (ones held in Cuba and Central America plus from out of the Soviet Union) and civilians freed from living under an occupation told their stories. There was news from Mexico of the POW camps there which hadn’t been liberated in time and thus where captives were slaughtered. Mexican refugees who’d come to the United States before the war had been massacred en masse just for being refugees as well and while that was brushed aside by some people, others took notice as an indication of the fates of Americans. Where were ‘the missing’? If they were dead, then the United States wanted their remains back. If they were still alive, there was the determination to rescue them wherever they might be. Events elsewhere in the world not directly tied to ‘the missing’ were of little importance. Who gave a damn about those when the oft-quoted number of half a million missing Americans was still unresolved. The actual number varied though was close to three hundred & seventy thousand – half a million worked best coming out of the mouths of politicians and the media though – and while wartime deaths were far higher, that was still a staggering number. The not knowing of the fate of such people was what drove the issue.

When elected in November 1984 on that National Union ticket, the Democrat Glenn and the Republican Baker had said nothing in public about whether they would run for re-election in ’88. It was taken as a given that Baker wouldn’t and that was the same with the fusion of both parties in the general election. ’84 had been a special case, just as 1864 had been. Politics hadn’t been cancelled during the war and wouldn’t be afterwards. A Democrat had been in the White House at the start of the war and one had retained the presidency throughout it to continue afterwards. The Republicans had allowed Baker to run alongside Glenn only because of the urgency of the situation. Both parties fought each other once the war was over. Bipartisanship was present in some areas yet absent in others. At times, the accusations back and forth were of the most-outrageous nature with Kennedy but also Ford before him both being blamed by members of the other party. Each party took a strong national defence line, trying to outdo each other. Isolationists and anyone perceived as being ‘weak’ on such matters were vilified. With so many pre-war existing politicians killed during the nuclear strike on Washington, then the return of others to politics from retirement followed by wartime feelings had all combined to shake things up greatly leaving the domestic political scene unrecognisable after the war. The Senate and Congressional elections of ’84 had been restrained but special elections through ’85 for Senate seats where appointees from ’84 were up for election and then the ’86 mid-terms were dirty in terms of how they were fought. The war had made many careers and broken more; others would shine post-war. Glenn made it clear in January ’87 during his State of the Union address that he wouldn’t be running for re-election to the presidency. He wouldn’t have won if he had and his party weren’t going to let him anyway. The race of the presidency had its twists and turns and a lot of that was to do with issues such as ‘the missing’, America’s Wars and the fall of the Soviet Union in addition to the nation’s post-war recovery. Two candidates emerged to fight it out, both of whom won seats in the US Senate back in ’86. For the November ’88 presidential elections, the Democrats put forward four-term Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton {note 2} who’d later taken one of his state’s Senate seats. The Republicans ran John McCain: he’d won two terms as a congressman before moving to the Senate too. Both of them were from the South-West, where the war had been fought in terms of much of the public perception and also where so many of ‘the missing’ had vanished from. Each ran a similar campaign in terms of foreign affairs and national security though with difference domestic outlooks.

John S. McCain III won out. He’d win again in ’92 as well. Later replacing him in the presidency, and living in the residence within the President’s Park complex in Manhattan (the US Government remained in New York), was Henry G. Cisneros. The wartime Mayor of San Antonio, a Latino and a Democrat also crucially from the South-West, was only president for two years though. It wasn’t a nuclear assassination which saw Cisneros leave the presidency early, but rather a hush-money payment made to a former lover. Cisneros, being a Latino and being a Democrat, had his enemies because of those factors though he’d messed up himself in doing what he had and lying about it to the FBI. A political scandal enveloped his presidency and he resigned in ’99 to be replaced by his Vice President: John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts liberal who was certainly a different character from Cisneros, McCain or Glenn before him. The new millennium came and Kerry was in office while at the same time there were still American soldiers fighting in Latin America. Some of them were toddlers when the Third World War had started; following them within a few years, there’d soon be American forces there who weren’t even born when it had all begun.


The Soviet Union fell apart starting in August 1987. It didn’t go quietly into the night.

Swallowing China whole was the defining factor which could be pointed to as bring down the USSR though there was a lot more than that behind the collapse of the country into the violent mess which came. No matter what was said at home, there had been a defeat in two of the three simultaneous wars which the Soviet Union had felt. Instead of admitting that defeat, victory had been declared in what was said were repelling foreign attacks from both the Americans & the Allies plus later ones from Western Europe. Getting them to give in and give up to see victory occur was the message put out internally. Some mistakes had been made and there were people to blame, the Kremlin conceded that, but otherwise the Soviet Union had won overwhelming victories in fighting off Western aggression. As to China, the fake communists there had acted in concert with the West and got their comeuppance. However, wartime domestic sacrifices would have to be maintained in many areas of life unfortunately. On the back of those lies and the extreme internal measures taken, the Soviet Union hoped to carry on. They were going to exploit China for everything that it was worth, and more, in addition to signing peace deals with the West which would come with trade ties too. In hindsight, the delusion was obvious yet at the time, Moscow thought that they could pull it off. Many outside the country did too, especially those who claimed that the Soviets had gotten away with the war, won it and their own governments were going to do nothing about that.

It was the wars which it fought, despite them being over, which did the Soviets in and brought their whole house crashing down around them. They had been hit with nuclear attacks of which the long-term consequences were something they couldn’t recover from. Soviet behaviour when it came to launchings its wars of aggression plus all of the other activity made the majority of the world their enemy or refusing ties with them. The strong myth of Soviet military invincibility was shattered into a million pieces. At the end of its war with the Allies and the EDA, there was a return to the country of POWs to add to the public knowledge of all the dead and all those who were injured. Much could be done to try to keep a lid of what people talked about and wider knowledge but not everything. Those trade agreements with Western Europe didn’t come. The Americans built an alliance throughout Asia against Soviet control over China and expanded that to the Middle East too. Iran became what Afghanistan might have been: a scene of guerrilla warfare after many years of peace and stability internally there. The situation in Iran got worse and Gromyko cut and run eventually. At the same time as Iran, Soviet control over Eastern Europe fell apart with violence and Gromyko pulling out of there too. His ‘retreats’ were devastating for the image which the Soviet Union was trying to reassert internationally and brought about issues at home.

With regards to China, the Soviet Union started breaking it up through the latter half of 1985. Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet and Xingjian all became independent countries while the Chinese Socialist Republic – with its capital in Beijing and its territory being the ruined eastern half of China – was established as well. Each was meant to be a puppet of Moscow and they were all to be played off against each other. They were supposed to be allied at the same time to Moscow too. Taiwan with all of its ‘stolen’ parts of China, Japan, Korea (divided but treated as one) and Vietnam were all the enemies of the various Chinese people, not their benevolent and fraternal Soviet partners. The fracturing came with that exploitation of everything from out of China: manpower for Soviet purposes, minerals for extraction and land for an ambitious agriculture programme like no other. There was the intention to keep Soviet troops in China though slowly remove them as the Chinese took over themselves. What a disaster this was. Gromyko was thinking of the long-term and also into a Siberian future for the Soviet Union with more oil and gas extraction too done so as to sell that all to the Western Europeans. The scheme was one which he hadn’t dreamed up himself but what the whole Politburo supported. It was supposed to be something which would take generations to achieve and be stable long after he and the rest of them were in their graves. In Eastern Europe, the regimes there had all survived the war that their Soviet masters had led them into against the West. The troubles which the Soviet Union had were mirrored in many ways afterwards in these countries too though. Their armies had been beaten and this was clear with all of those who never came home as well as those that did. The stories which the returned POWs told were matched by propaganda coming from the West. Other families didn’t get their loved ones back: most were dead on foreign battlefields yet many more had defected. Stringent economic conditions post-war came with the Soviets giving them nothing and demanding anything that they did have. It was Hungary first where the crescendo of falling regimes started. Food riots got out of hand and soldiers were ordered to turn their guns on the people. Budapest erupted in violence. Then it was Czechoslovakia, beating a Second Polish Revolt to the punch only by a day. Bulgaria fared much better and didn’t see any serious violence. East Germany did though. Not so much appreciated at the time, the fighting on East German soil where the border guards had been involved had done the nation crippling damage more than anything else. People left. They gave the West Germans problems with all those refugees to deal with yet also cut the heart out of the regime in terms of the people’s faith in it… plus their fear. Military conscription in East Germany began with a twice annual call-up. Late 1986 saw the last of these occur. Each preceding time there had been those who refused to answer the call but with this one, the numbers of absentees was huge. Rumours were abound among the rest that they would be going to China. This was a lie, one spread by a French intelligence effort. The spark was lit in an incident involving an arrest of protesters in Dresden which turned violent. Everything spiralled from there. Cities like Leipzig and Magdeburg were seeing violence soon enough before it was then East Berlin. The post-Honecker leadership ordered a crackdown, one which didn’t work. There were too many protesters and not enough will in the form of the men on the sharp end holding their guns to kill their fellow people. A bug-out from East Berlin occurred with the leadership: if only they had kept Mielke around, the apologists for the regime would later say, then this wouldn’t have happened for the Stasi would never have let the regime fall to the mob! Among all of this, the Soviet Army stayed in their barracks on orders from Moscow. No one of significance assumed power in East Berlin and anarchy took hold. The EDA took a decision and acted upon it. From out of West Berlin and also across the shattered Iron Curtain, French and West German troops entered urban areas of East Germany. The East German military didn’t stop them. Gromyko would order Soviet forces to start leaving not long afterwards though by air and sea, not overland through Poland. Like East Germany was, the trio of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland were all lost to the Soviet Union by the year’s end. The regimes folded and the Soviet Army left. Keeping these countries last year when the armistices had been signed had been so important for Moscow yet now they just no longer cared. A big part of this was the agreement between Mitterrand and Gromyko where there would be no EDA troop deployments beyond East Germany. France, leading Western Europe in every way, kept its word and elsewhere while the regimes fell and new ones rose, all seeking the friendship of Western Europe, none saw the entry of EDA troops once the Soviets departed.


First Iran and then Eastern Europe had gone. Soon enough China all came to a head once 1987 arrived. The troubles with the first two and the results were nothing like those in the third. Chinese guerrilla activity exploded to a level worse than anything seen during wartime. Moreover, all of those Chinese slave labourers – volunteers sent by Beijing and the other capitals of the puppet states – rose up in rebellion once on Soviet soil through Siberia yet also Central Asia. The Soviet Union couldn’t take all this on the chin, not when combined with everything else. There were flashbacks of Ustinov in Moscow when just like that leader before Vorotnikov, the aged Gromyko had a heart attack and died in the middle of this crisis. The Soviet Union would need yet another leader. The Politburo couldn’t agree for some time though and ran things as a committee. They fiddled while their empire burned. Events were moving beyond their control and it wasn’t out to the east but in Moscow where the issue came to a head. For a long time there had been protests in the city’s centre where the mothers of the dead gathered in peaceful demonstrations. The KGB had done everything it could against this but it wasn’t a centralised organisation which they could break apart with the usual means of subversion. Arresting the women had often occurred but others would turn up. It was a weekly thing, always on a Tuesday night where with silence, these mothers would hold up candles for their dead or missing sons lost in the wars which had ended and the wars which continued. They weren’t armed nor organised and while an issue, they weren’t a danger. The summer of ’87 saw their numbers grow though and no longer was it just mothers anymore but sisters, wives and daughters along with some fathers and fewer sons. These people were no longer just remembering the dead in silence but here for their serving relatives too. Placards appeared and singing was done. The drip-drip fashion of an increase picked up. The Tuesday Gatherings were there on the next night and then the next night. More people turned up on the last night. These were people not connected to anything it was all about. They saw the protests, took what they wanted from that sight and made it their own. Again, nothing was properly organised.

Moscow was full on a Friday night of people angry at everything: the wars, the shortages and the system. Taken by surprise and acting in haste, KGB Chairman Kryuchkov gave the order for the protesters to be dispersed as their numbers grew and the crowd was out of control: he was told there were no candles and silent women there but a mob instead. That mob was in Red Square too. Violence was supposed to be kept to a minimum. It wasn’t and things exploded. Gunfire came, confusion reigned, the crowd pushed forward and the lines of the pretend soldiers were overrun. There were ordinary people soon in the Kremlin with blood and bodies on the streets outside. In anger, but maybe some malice too, the Kremlin was put to the torch. Up it went in flames in images that were later broadcast around the world. The Politburo wasn’t there but that was their base of power. The Burning of the Kremlin set off the Soviet Uprising. From Moscow things spread. The news couldn’t be kept quiet. Troops were sent against protesters throughout August and into September. Many fired on the crowds yet others refused to do so. When the armed organs of the state will not obey orders, that is the end of the state. Western Russia and then the various SSRs next to Eastern Europe were all gripped with violence. As can be expected, various people tried to take charge of this protest movement. The anarchy didn’t suit many. A Napoleon emerged: a senior Soviet Army general {note 3} who’d long had enough and took this moment to do something. The Politburo was in the city of Gorky where the protests had been put down as it was one of the places where the KGB and Interior Ministry troops obeyed orders to do so. Gorky wasn’t that far from several military bases and the Soviet Napoleon sent troops there. The Soviet Army hadn’t been involved in shooting civilians. They went to Gorky to shoot some politicians and the Chekists with them there though. The Politburo was taken into custody, lined up and shot: the images were broadcast across the country by the military. Into Moscow the troops went next, engaging those attacking civilians. We are here to protect you, the people were told, and we bring our guns to do that.

As the Soviet Uprising had radiated from Moscow, so did the effects of the military take-over. There was a lot of success in this yet it was also contested. Civil war broke out in places. A civil war in a nation armed with nuclear weapons frightened many. It didn’t come to that, even when the country broke apart in the following months. Parts of the nation were cleaved off along nationalistic lines and the Soviet Napoleon in Moscow let them go. He was a Russian nationalist at heart, a complicated man who had for so long let hatred burn in his heart against those who had sent so many Russian soldiers off to their doom all over the world. Key parts of the collapsing Soviet empire in the form of Belarus, the Ukraine and much of a portioned Kazakhstan were kept as the Russian Republic emerged yet others were let go including the Baltics, the Caucasus and much of Central Asia. Soviet troops abroad would come home from China, Afghanistan and the last of those in Eastern Europe. There was a Russian Republic to be built over the graves of every last communist which could be found and punished. As to the West and their issues, those were something else for later on. Killing communists and their lackeys was what the general in Moscow focused wholly upon.

Soviet Domination – of this new Russian Republic and anywhere else – was at an end when the collapse came in November 1987, seventy years after the cruiser Aurora had fired her guns to start it. It was finished.



The End



Note 1: In this story, Roldós didn’t lose his life in that suspicious air crash in 1981. He was no Castro, no Ortega, no Noriega: he was though running a left-wing government critical of the United States’ position in Latin America.
Note 2: Clinton didn’t lose re-election in Arkansas in 1981. He thus has had an unbroken string of victories to not disturb his career. This was down to the issue of no Cuban refugees arriving in Arkansas (no Cuban boat lift) and thus no riot at Fort Chaffee to be blamed on him.
Note 3: As to who this Soviet Napoleon might have been, I couldn’t find one to suit my needs. It would be someone whose views were changed by the war which they saw. I hope to find a candidate at some point in the future and edit this.

Good ending!

Thank you James. Brilliant work. As a Cold War kid born just before your timeline started, this really hit home.

just my two cents

Russia:
- Whatever successor state born from the civil war will probably get the OTL border of the Russian Federation plus Byelorussia and whatever can get of Ukraine (even if i bet they will try to get all the place).
- Alexander Lebed can be a strong candidate for the military figure, sure it will be young at the time but between war loss and political elimination he can get the rank.
- The Russian goverment can try to sell Kalinigrad to Germany to get some needed cash (attempted OTL)
- Lviv can be given to Poland in exchange of support in keeping the rest of Ukraine (even that attempted in OTL)
- Once things are back in order we will see Moscow trying to get back what was once her with every mean possible...basically what we have now.

East Germany:
- reunification is unavoidable, war or not war people want to get back to be a single nation and frankly East Germany is no more viable as a independent nation.
- Neighbourgh nations will want some assurance that the actual border will remain intact

Finland
- once the soviet civil war start will immediately go the EDA/EEC to obtain membership, high probability to obtain it as soon as possible

Romania
- Probable on the road to become the North Korea of this world, nuclear weapon included
- Almost assured that Ceausescu will try to inglobe Moldavia once the civil war start.
- It will worry the rest of the continent and will make a lot of military noise against all his neighbourghs

Poland and the rest of the former european communist nation
- not official/full member of the EDA/EEC, stil strong economic tie and a relationships akin to OTL EU/Norway.
- Military not Europeans troops there for political reason, still a lot of military and intelligence collaboration, lot of military aid and common training; strongly implied that there will be a military action if the Russian invade but not officially stated

EDA/EEC
- On her way to become OTL EU with added a military branch and protocol
- Spain and Greece more probable candidate, Finland very possible during the civil war and maybe Bulgaria (even if for some very ironic developement, Sofia become a member by become part of the Jugoslavian Federation).
- She will be never a superpower like the USA and URSS, still she will be a strong regional power with a long reach and in general not someone that can be easily pushed
- Long term relations with the USA probably cold due to the continued war in the rest of the continent and previous war and pre-war problem.
- big political fight at european level between hawk and dove, with the second vindicated by the fall of the URSS.

India
- The new big kid on the block in term of regional power
- Probably occupied in pacify Sry Lanka and stare down Pakistan; Indian eyes now fixed to Tibet.

Albania
- chaos like OTL, probably eat by Jugoslavia or under the italian sphere of influence (OTL Operation Alba).

ME
- chaos and more chaos...but at least they can sell oil to the rest of the world.
- Turkey may try something in the caucaus during the civil war (alliance with Azebarjan?) and to patch things up with Europe aka her biggest commercial patner; jokey with Damascus and Bagdad over being the regional leader

General developement
- creation of various regional military/economic alliance to protect themselfs and in response towards american intervention and the general chaos (ex: Mercosur, Andean community, ECOWAS,ECCAS, SADW, etc. etc.)