1939: The Second Great War begins with a massive Russian invasion of Ukraine and Belarus. Unlike the Russian Army of the First Great War, the Russians are now a fully industrialized nation fielding a massive, professionally trained & led and fanatically motivated army outfitted with modern weapons. Deploying the doctrine of ‘offensive deep battle’, Russian armour & air & infantry forces work in perfect unison to cave in the Holy Roman defensive lines on the front and punch ever further west.
The short-lived Ukrainian Principality of Cossack Alexei Ivanovich is annexed by Russia after Ivanovich's death in battle with the Imperial forces, followed by the annihilation of the Ukrainian field armies in a truly bizarre incident in which they attempted to march to Moscow to lynch Fr. Djugashvilli, the man responsible for landing them in that situation in the first place. The Steel Father was so pleased by these developments that he wrote a new song with which to express his joy and torment future generations of Russians.
The Third Great American War begins - but to the surprise of many it is initiated by Britannia, not Columbia. British and Canadian bombers reduce much of Columbia’s obsolete border defences in Maine and the Great Lakes area to rubble, and the general advance of half a million soldiers drawn from every corner of the Imperial Union pushes well past Chicago and the Vermont Military Association before the Columbians are able to stop it.
1940: The Second Great War continues. Russian forces push deeper into Poland and Bessarabia, but their advance grinds to a bloody halt at the more prepared Holy Roman defences here; most prominent among them is the Henneschied Line, which stretched from Konigsberg (OTL Kaliningrad) to Zamosc. The situation devolves into a bloody meatgrinder for both sides.
British forces are still unable to break out of Illinois, Vermont and New Hampshire.
1941: The stalemate continues in both wars. However, the Holy Roman lines are beginning to crack under the pressure of repeated Russian onslaughts, while across the Atlantic the British open up new fronts by launching amphibious invasions of Florida and the Yucatan.
1942: The stalemate in Europe is broken, at least for this year, as Russian forces push past Holy Roman defences in Bessarabia and swarm into Romania. At the same time, a large force of Russian marines and regulars launch a successful amphibious invasion of Bulgaria. In both cases, the Russians were aided by hundreds of thousands of local partisans disgusted with the Empire’s policy of forced conversion to Catholicism and the imposition of Germanic puppet monarchs.
In North America, after their other offensives stall, the British resort to carpet-bombing Columbian cities with the intent of terrifying their population into surrender.
1943: The Balkans (up to Croatia and Hungary) is overrun by the Russians and their local collaborators. From Romania, the Russians launch an invasion of southeast Poland, bypassing and outflanking the Henneschied Line. Said Line predictably collapses, and Poland is overrun by year’s end. However, the Russian offensive bogs down once again on the Oder River, in the Carpathian Mountains and in Croatia.
1944: Britannia unveils her secret weapon – the atomic bomb. The nuclear bomb ‘Rothesay’ is dropped on an unsuspecting Boston on July 4, effectively wiping the capital of the Columbian Commonwealth off the map and killing Lord Protector MacArthur and his entire staff. Before what was left of the Columbian government could even begin to recover from this catastrophe, another bomb was dropped on New York City, on August 30. Emperor Robert, being insane, jokes that he had bathed the cities in ‘holy light’, that from this point onward J. R. Oppenheimer (who had led the Alfred Project that spawned the bomb in the first place) was to be referred to as 'Saint Oppenhimer, anointed in blood', and taunts the Columbians further, mockingly declaring that God had abandoned them.
A rump Columbian government is formed in Denver, with New Model Army Chief of Chaplains Gerald L. K. Smith as its Lord Protector. Smith immediately surrenders to Britannia, and the gloating Emperor Robert demanded the transfer of a full quarter of Columbia’s industry to Canada, the disarmament and reduction of the New Model Armed Forces into a fifty-thousand-strong military police force, coast guard and air rescue service, and the Puritans accepting all blame for starting the war. With the threat of nuclear annihilation looming overhead, Smith has little choice but to accept these terms.
1945: Russian forces break through the Oder and capture Berlin, and then proceed to ransack the city. A panicking Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII asks for British aid, and Robert seemingly agrees; Anglo-French troops are greeted with good cheer as they march through Alsace-Lorraine – until they shot a Habsburg flag full of holes and demanded that Holy Roman Emperor Charles submit to Robert, Emperor of Europe. Robert demands Karl recognize him as ruler of all Europe and to give up his title of 'Holy Roman Emperor', retaining only his kingships. Karl refuses such an insane demand at first, but caves in after Russian forces appear to be on the verge of a breakthrough in the Carpathian Mountains and Robert threatens to send his 'fire of heaven' down on all of Germany.
Upon being crowned Emperor of Europe by Pope Pius XII (and having an apoplectic fit at the following feast), an exultant Robert orders the Russian 6th Army destroyed by nuke and deploys British & Imperial forces on the continent. The Russians are initially unable to retaliate with equal force, and the 8th and 15th Armies are destroyed in further nuclear strikes by the end of the year. However, after pushing Russian forces past the Vistula, Father Djugashvilli is able to mobilize sufficient reinforcements to stop the European advance, and while the Europeans are unable to roll out new nukes in time to destroy the Russian defenses, Djugashvilli drops his own nuclear bomb on the Imperial European 11th Army.
Robert, unfortunately for him and fortunately for everyone else, dies on September 9th. His son and successor, Malcolm Prince of Wales, is crowned Richard I of Europe and proves to be both sane and extremely capable, to everyone else's surprise; for one, he moves quickly to open negotiations with the Russians, and arranges a truce by Christmas.
Columbia dissolves into civil war between the Smith government and multiple revolutionary factions, ranging from other Puritans convinced that the Commonwealth’s defeat and the obliteration of Boston & NYC were signs from God, to supporters of the remaining Roosevelts, to militant atheists, to outright Satanists who agree fully with the Mad Emperor – God has indeed abandoned Columbia, so Columbia should abandon God.
1946: The Congress of Prague sets down the European-Russian border as it exists at the end of the war, running from Poland to Hungary and from Croatia to Greece. Hokkaido would also be returned to the British Dominion of Japan, in exchange for British Korea going to Russia.
Europe’s internal map is redrawn. The Holy Roman Empire proper is renamed the Kingdom of Germany, with the Habsburgs as the ‘Kings of the Germans’. Hungary is separated from the main Habsburg crown, being given over to German King Karl’s brother Maximilian to rule as a separate kingdom that also included Croatia and Bosnia. A Kingdom of Poland is created, incorporating both German Poland and Poland proper as well as Lithuania and what little of Belarus had been conquered by Europe, with Emperor Richard's cousin Amelia and her husband Jerzy Josef Potocki, a Polish aristocrat, being crowned as joint rulers of Poland. Lastly, Ravenna is made into the capital of all Europe – it was, after all, capital of the Western Roman Empire from 402 to 476 – and a crown fief.
1947-1949: The Chinese Civil War enters its final phase. Chiang Kai-shek, supported by Russian arms imports and advisors, defeats his rival Wang Jingwei (as well as de-facto independent Tibet) and unites China under the ‘White Sun on Blue Sky’ banner. The Republic of China is proclaimed as the only legitimate government of China, and aligns itself with Russia. Despite its name, Chiang’s government is just another corrupt dictatorship run by the military, and will be troubled for years on end as Chiang violently suppresses the various warlords who have carved out parts of the country for themselves.
1948: The Columbian Civil War comes to its bloody conclusion, with the victory of the Luciferans – those who have lost their Puritan faith after the Seventh Columbian War, who feel that since God has abandoned Columbia then Columbia should abandon God, and who look up to Lucifer as a heroic rebel who will shatter the tyranny and superstition represented by God (and Britannia/Europe) and replace it with an age of enlightenment and freedom. Of course, what they actually do is establish a totalitarian theocratic regime, known as the ‘Popular Syndicates of the Americas’, only cosmetically different from the old Commonwealth.
The Satanists invade and overwhelm the remaining South American countries, working off their massive army of Civil War veterans and total-war industry, moving so quickly not even the Europeans could intervene in time.
Gerald L. K. Smith escapes to Hawaii with some of his most loyal supporters, and proclaims the New Commonwealth of Columbia there. His stated objective is to destroy the Satanists now controlling the mainland and set himself back up in Boston.
1950: The Chinese begin funding the Viet Quoc, a group of Vietnamese nationalists who desire independence from the Imperial European yoke - the VQ is unique in being the first genuinely nationalist rebel movement on the planet, motivated by a desire to create a strong and independent state that was ruled by and for the Vietnamese people; however, they are far from democratic, and indeed the aim of the organization was to create a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ whose leaders would guide the Vietnamese nation to Chinese-style democracy with an iron hand, ‘extirpating’ the ‘taint’ of ‘interlopers’ (from white settlers, to mixed-race Vietnamese, to other Indochinese ethnicities such as the Cham) along the way.
The Europeans’ retaliation, besides forming a two-hundred-thousand strong ‘Oriental Expeditionary Corps’ composed of soldiers from all of Europe to support local Indochinese loyalists, was to implement the ‘Population Transfer Program’ that forcibly moved rural Indochinese villagers with only as many rations and belongings as they could carry, in order to deny the VQ recruits in the countryside; while the villagers were supposed to be receive financial compensation, in effect the compensation money was often pocketed by IU officials instead, and while the compounds were supposed to be on par with living standards in the rest of the IU, in reality they were more often than not managed by corrupt officials and became dens of crime, poverty and squalor, where food and clean water were scarce, medical supplies a precious commodity and basic utilities such as electricity or running water nonexistent. Needless to say, these squalid compounds (all too often little better than concentration camps), originally meant to cut off the VQ from its supply of new recruits, became excellent recruiting grounds for the VQ instead.
Also in retaliation to the Chinese backing of the VQ, the Europeans begin funding Tibetan independence fighters.
1950-1951: The Russo-Turkish War of 1950-51/the Tenth Crusade. The Ottoman Empire is partitioned between the Eastern and Western European empires, with the former grabbing Asiatic Turkey and Constantinople, and the latter taking Iraq and most of Syria. The Russian Tsar Michael II is crowned Holy Emperor of (Eastern) Europe in Constantinople and claims dominion over the continent, then dies less than a week later, to be succeeded by his son Georgy.
1952: The Free Egyptian Army, an Islamist and nationalist organization seeking the formation of an independent and Islamist Egypt, begins operations against the European authorities with clandestine Syndicalist support.
The Europeans retaliate by supporting the Legion of the Blessed Virgin, a fanatical Catholic organization in Mexico seeking the creation of an independent Mexico aligned with Europe.
1953: Father Iosif Djugashvilli dies and is succeeded as 'Special Adviser to the Tsar' by his right-hand man and Principal Commander of the Black Hundreds, 'Black Monk' Lavrentiy Beria.
1954: Eurasia and the PSA begin funding independence movements in Sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from Luciferans in Angola to Hutu extremists in Rwanda to Orthodox zealots in Kenya. Europe, of course, returns the favour by supporting persecuted Christians on PSA soil and Catholic dissidents in Russia.
The IU suffers its first major battlefield defeat against the VQ at Dien Bien Phu. A 10,000-strong mixed Imperial contingent of Irish, German, Spanish, Croat and native Vietnamese is trapped in a number of fortified but isolated airheads in the vicinity of Dien Bien Phu by over fifty thousand VQ fighters for nearly two months, and are eventually forced to surrender due to the near-total depletion of their rations, the defeat of several relief columns sent to save them, and increasingly effective VQ artillery bombardments. At home, the Imperial government’s tight control of the media and the efforts of the Inquisition ensure that nobody hears about this debacle, and more troops are flown in to crush the Vietnamese rebels.
1955: Tsar Georgy dismisses Beria, a sadistic torturer and rapist largely unpopular with the Russian court and the people, from his post, and retakes absolute power with the aid of Secretary of Agriculture and ex-Ukrainian governor-general Nikita Khrushchev. The Black Monk is later executed, and the office of Special Adviser to the Tsar disbanded entirely.
1956: The Syndicalists begin supporting the ‘Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola’, a revolutionary organization fighting for the creation of an independent and Luciferan Angola from the Portuguese Crown.
1957: The Eurasians are the first of the Great Powers to enter space, sending the satellite ‘Sputnik 1’ into orbit. The Space Race begins between Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the PSA.
The Free Egyptian Army is integrated into the ‘Ilkhwan’ (‘brothers’), a jihadist organization privately financed by the Syndicalists to cause mayhem for Europe; as the oldest and largest resistance group, the FEA forms the core of this new organization. The Ilkhwan aimed to create a pan-Arabic, Islamic caliphate stretching from Iraq to the Maghreb and the Sudan and quickly grow as popular resentment toward overt European oppression and ‘Catholicization’ efforts builds up, but suffers heavily from interconfessional rivalries (the biggest and most troublesome being the conflict between the Salafi extremists and more moderate Sufis).
The Europeans begin supporting the ’United Front for the Liberation and Reorganization of La Plata’, an Argentine organization seeking the formation of an independent and Catholic Kingdom of La Plata (OTL Argentina + Uruguay + Paraguay) from the PSA.
1958: Not to be outdone by the Syndicalists, the Eurasians help organize and fund the Hezbollah or ‘Party of God’, a Shi’a Islamic organization aiming for the creation of a Shi’ite caliphate spanning from Morocco to Iran. They clash almost as frequently with the Ilkhwan as their do with the Europeans.
The Europeans counter by backing the ‘Alash Orda’, an organization of liberal Kazakh revolutionaries, and the Basmachi, an organization of fanatics who sought to recreate Tamerlane’s empire by freeing Central Asia from Russian rule as an Islamic state. Needless to say, the two organizations often fought each other as well as the East Europeans, just as planned by Britannia – they did not need anyone attempting to recreate the Timurid Empire, after all, and merely wanted to irritate Petrograd.
1959: The Europeans implement a scheme to annex Ethiopia – firstly, they help start a Satanist movement in the country while blaming the PSA, then prevent any Eurasian aid from reaching the Orthodox Ethiopians by blockading the Red Sea, and when Emperor Haile Selassie is finally forced to ask for Western aid, they give it only on the condition that he adopt the title ‘King in Ethiopia’ and place his realm under the suzerainty of Ravenna. With this done, all of Africa is now under European rule.
The Eurasians are not happy with the loss of their only potential ally and Orthodox brother in Africa, and begin funding the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ethiopia and the Restoration of Holy Orthodoxy’, a militant Ethiopian nationalist and extreme-Orthodox group opposed to the Imperial Union. The IU retaliates as they have in Indochina, by moving the rural population into walled compounds (which soon become havens of poverty, squalor and crime) and designating everything outside the major cities & said compounds as ‘red zones’ where anyone without clear identification as an IU official or soldier is to be killed.
1960: The Electric Canberra Incident. An European Electric Canberra spy plane is shot down over Siberia and its pilot detained; he is later exchanged for a Eurasian spy being held in Zagreb, and both powers agree to never mention either incident.
The Congo War begins as the Eurasians and the Satanists support various paramilitary groups seeking Congolese independence; the Eurasians back the ‘Alliance des Bakongo’ while the Syndicalists throw their support behind the ‘Mouvement pour la Liberation du Congo’. Both movements differ only in name and tribal affiliation, and end up fighting each other as much as they fight the European authorities.
The Europeans begin funding the ‘Royal Army of Peru’, a counterrevolutionary organization seeking to bring Peru (actually OTL Peru + Chile + Bolivia) back under Spanish rule.
1961: The Europeans are first to get a man into space – Scotsman James Graham – on June 1st. The Eurasians, meanwhile, begin fielding soldiers armed with electrical weapons capable of frying their opponents alive and disabling tanks, the fruit of Nikola Tesla’s work.
1962: The ‘Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola’, a revolutionary movement seeking independence for the colony of Portuguese West Africa, enters operation with covert Eurasian backing.
In response, the Western Europeans begin supporting the ‘Mongolian People’s Movement’, theoretically a revolutionary organization agitating for Mongolian independence but in effect a horde of bandits and plunderers who devastated their own people just as badly as they do the Eastern European authorities.
1963: The ‘Front de Pandore du Quebec’ (Diabolist Front of Quebec) begins operation with Syndicalist backing. This terrorist organization aims for the creation of an independent Quebec as a Luciferan client state of the PSA, and kicks off its campaign by bombing an Imperial Canadian barracks.
The war in Indochina takes a turn for the worse, as the brutality of the Imperial Indochinese Army and the ferocity with which the hyper-Catholic Viceroy Ngo Dinh Diem persecuted native Buddhists drives more and more of the population into the arms of the VQ. Worsening matters was the formation of the Pathet Lao and the Kanapac Khemara Ponakar (‘Khmer Renewal’) movements, the Laotian and Cambodian ideological clones of the VQ, which also operated with extensive Chinese and Eurasian support.
1964: The Cyprus Crisis begins as the native Orthodox population violently resists Catholicization efforts by the IU, while receiving clandestine Eurasian support.
China successfully tests its first nuclear bomb in Xinjiang.
1965: After an ecumenical council, Pope Gregorius XVII declares that Jews are not responsible for killing Christ. The Inquisition immediately relaxes its anti-Semitic policies, though Jews are still ‘encouraged’ by the IU to migrate to Imperial Madagascar.
The Battle of Buon Don in Vietnam begins on October 30th, and does not end until December 2nd. It is the single largest and bloodiest individual battle in the war, involving an entire Imperial Oriental Expeditionary Corps division (made up mostly of Englishmen, Poles and Frenchmen) backed up by several Imperial Indochinese regiments for a total strength of 40,000 on one side, and up to 60,000 VQ fighters with 10-20,000 Laotian and Cambodian auxiliaries on the other. The IU triumphs but suffers a total of 1,900 killed and 2,500 wounded, to 15,000 VQ and allied dead.
The Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army is formed to fight Imperial Rhodesian authorities with Syndicalist support; at the same time, the Eastern Europeans finance the creation of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army for the exact same purpose. Both organizations are fighting for the end of white minority rule in Rhodesia and the severing of all ties to the Stuart Crown.
1967: Nigerian Uprising begins as the poorer Muslims of the north, facing severe persecution and poverty, revolt against the Christian elite ruling the colony from the south.
1968: Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The VQ springs it single biggest and most violent offensive in the entirety of the war on the holy Vietnamese holiday of Tet, involving 500,000-600,000 personnel (including Cambodian and Laotian auxiliaries) striking at sixteen major targets throughout the colony (with the largest force concentrations directed at the major colonial capitals of Saigon, Vientiane and Phnom Penh, as well as the old Annamese capital of Hue.
European forces are initially taken by surprise, the VQ having assumed a lower profile and toned down its raids to create the impression that they were losing the war when they were anything but, and the colonial auxiliaries in particular are hard hit, many of them having been demobilized so that they could enjoy the holiday. Large parts of the Indochinese countryside were overrun and both Hue & Hanoi temporarily captured.
The offensive was brought to a halt by the arrival of European reinforcements, and under the overall command of Field Marshal Henri d'Alencon resumed an offensive throughout the entirety of Indochina. Chemical weapons were used liberally both to deforest large swathes of the rebellious colony and to decimate the ranks of the rebels, followed by large and highly coordinated air-land offensives in which European forces moved largely by helicopter or, if they absolutely had to move on ground, in armoured vehicles. Hue was recaptured on January 30th, Hanoi by February 2nd, and Phnom Penh by February 15th.
European reprisals were swift and brutal. On top of the 300,000-400,000 VQ casualties sustained over the course of the offensive, a further 1 million civilians were killed in the crossfire, or by one or both sides as they struck at anyone they deemed to be enemy collaborators. The Mekong Delta was depopulated and actively colonized by the Europeans in an effort to construct a stable powerbase from which they could project soldiers throughout the region without fear of treachery or enemy ambushes, or to which they could retreat and regroup in the aftermath of a failed pacification campaign. Over the next six months, a further three hundred-thousand Indochinese civilians were killed or detained by the European authorities, mostly on poorly-founded accusations of treason and sedition in cooperating with the VQ rebels.
Nevertheless, the offensive deeply shocked the Imperial European establishment. Having previously felt their position to be secure, even the European aristocracy were surprised at the overwhelming numbers and ferocity of the VQ rebels, and were further disturbed as resistance stiffened across the colony in the aftermath of their retaliatory attacks – their colonial policy was making them more enemies, not friends. As the rebellion continued with no end in sight, and in spite of there being well over a million European boots from Portugal to Poland and from Scotland to Rhodesia planted on Indochinese soil, even the Emperor’s inner circle began to wonder if they could win this war.
1969: The Europeans and Syndicalists both plant men (Neil Armstrong for the Europeans, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin for the Syndicalists) on the moon at around the same time; both would insist that their man made it first. Regardless of who succeeded in planting whose flag first however, the populations of both countries are jubilant at the news, and celebrations break out from Boston and New York to London and Ravenna.
On a more sombre note, Emperor Richard I of Europe passed away, having suffered from cancer for the past two years. He was succeeded by his son Charles, Prince of Wales and Archduke of Ravenna. While initially a charming and intelligent young man, Charles was suffering from a severe case of borderline personality disorder at this time; his legendary fits of manic rage, which could come and go like the wind, would not do him any favors when combined with his already reactionary tendencies, and both friend and foe soon learned to fear him.
In Eurasia, Tsar George I of Russia dies of a heart attack. He is succeeded by his son, the Tsesarevich Nikolai.
1970: Emperor Charles of Europe burns his father’s plans for a withdrawal from Indochina, and instead orders the deployment of a further hundred-thousand troops; however, the war still shows no end in sight. In Africa, he clears the usage of chemical and biological agents on rebel forces and positions, and when questioned about the risk of ‘collateral damage’ simply stated that whatever happens to the ‘inferior Negroes’ was of no concern to him. Closer to home, he resists calls for liberalization and continued to stubbornly cling to the absolute power handed to him from his father.
Canada is temporarily paralyzed by the October Crisis, in which the FPQ kidnapped and held hostage a number of government ministers. Viceroy Alexander Hutchinson, Earl of York overrides Prime Minister Robert Stanfield’s call for calm negotiations and instead orders an Imperial raid on the FPQ, which resulted in all but one hostage being killed alongside all of the kidnappers. The incident severely weakens the popularity of the viceregal House of Hutchinson in Canada.
Emperor Charles's second son, John Duke of Cambridge, goes to fight in Indochina as a front-line infantryman. His wife, Spanish princess Margarita of Bourbon, had already served six months in Indochina as a nurse by this time. (The Emperor's eldest son, Robert Prince of Wales & Grand Duke of Ravenna, is mentally retarded and unable to fight)
Emperor Charles, upon visiting Croatia, is disgusted and horrified by the atrocities committed by the ruling Ustasha his father installed. When Croatian Prime Minister Vjekoslav Luburic laughed in his face upon being told to cease his horrific campaign against the Serbs and Bosniaks in Croatia, Bloody Charles promptly lost it and attempted to strangle the Croat on TV. Nevertheless, Luburic actually did follow his orders after the normalization of relations between Ravenna and Zagreb.
1971: Upon the fall of Kampala to Ugandan independence fighters backed by the Syndicalists and led by rogue ex-Imperial officer Idi Amin, Emperor Charles orders the colony carpet-bombed and further attacked with chemical weapons, with Kampala singled out as a target for VX gas and incendiaries. Needless to say, the colony was devastated, its capital destroyed, its population fully cut in half and its economy & infrastructure rendered inoperable for decades to come; the move drew sharp condemnation from both Eurasia and the Syndicates, and the Imperial Union’s population at large as well.
Richard, Duke of Cumberland and Arthur, Duke of Kent join their older brother John in Indochina, serving as a combat medic and a helicopter pilot respectively.
1972: Bloody Friday in Arnhem. A number of Dutch Calvinists who had chafed under the higher taxes and school restrictions imposed on them by the Imperial government solely because of their Protestant faith attempt to bomb a post office; upon the plot’s discovery, Emperor Charles has a thousand of the city’s Protestants executed without trial to ‘dissuade future heretical plotters’. Needless to say, this is not received well by the IU’s Protestant population, and the Union is briefly consumed in riots and even some local revolts – all of which are crushed swiftly and without mercy. A large number of Protestants emigrate to Sweden and Denmark-Norway.
Emperor Charles's youngest son Edward, Duke of Gloucester joins his older brothers in the Indochina War as a sniper.
The VQ attempts an offensive starting on Easter in Indochina. However, Imperial forces were already mobilized and prepared to face the threat (unlike the Tet Offensive of ’68) and break the VQ’s attack with their usual brutality and ruthless efficiency.
Notably, the Stuarts suffer many personal losses in this conflict; the young Duke of Kent was shot through the scope and eye at the conclusion of an eight-hour duel with an unknown VQ sniper, the Duke of Gloucester was only slightly luckier in that he lost both of his legs after his helicopter was shot down and exploded, and the Duchess of Cambridge was murdered by VQ troops while tending to a patient. Following this triple tragedy, the Emperor and Empress (both maddened with grief) call their surviving sons back home, no ifs or buts. The Duke of Cambridge is sent on a rocket spiral to insanity by the death of his wife, and quickly came to resemble his father and great-grandfather in terms of mental stability.
Upon visiting Serbia and witnessing firsthand the brutality of the Chetnik governors toward Croats and Bosniaks, Nikolai III of Russia is every bit as shocked and terrified as his counterpart Charles was in Croatia a few years earlier, and orders an immediate stop to their campaign of genocide. When the Chetnik Governor-General Pavle Durisic flatly refused this 'Muscovite intrusion into our local affairs', the Tsar threatened to hand Serbia over to the Europeans, leading Durisic to reconsider immediately and put a stop to his genocidal anti-Croat and anti-Bosniak campaign by the end of the year.
1974: Bloody Sunday in Britain. Labour leader Arthur Scargill leads hundreds of thousands of workers on an illegal but largely peaceful general strike, paralyzing Britannia’s economy in their demands for better working conditions and benefits. In response, Emperor Charles ordered the Army and Imperial Guard to strike down the strikers with live ammunition, armoured vehicles and even attack helicopters. Approximately 20,000 unarmed strikers are killed, and up to 70,000 others hospitalized.
Having recently returned from Indochina, the Duke of Cumberland and his wife, Polish princess Anna Potocka, establish a positive reputation as the 'Prince' and 'Princess of the People' by famously stepping into the way of an Imperial column about to slaughter two thousand retreating and unarmed strikers & their families, hand in hand, and defiantly announcing that if they wanted to kill the workers, they would have to go through the two of them first. The soldiers, not about to kill the son and daughter-in-law of their overlord, backed down, saving all two thousand strikers.
Just for this, the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland were banished to Canada by an irate Charles, who nevertheless didn't consider this exile a punishment; he merely thought that living next door to the Satanists, in the most heavily militarized dominion of the IU, would make his son 'stronger' and 'a better leader'.
Scargill turns himself in after being promised that his family would not be harmed and that he would be allowed to live in prison – only for him to be hung, drawn and quartered and his family executed by firing squad immediately after his surrender, as Emperor Charles remarked that he ‘was not honour-bound to a filthy sewer rat from Yorkshire’.
1975: Another VQ offensive in Indochina reaches the perimeter defences of Saigon and Hanoi. Emperor Charles was prepared to order tactical nuclear strikes in the Vietnamese countryside, but dissuaded by his advisors from making such a move on the grounds that it would encourage his rivals in America and Eurasia to do the same whenever they are faced with rebellion.
The mentally retarded Robert, Prince of Wales (long known as a harmless lunatic, and popular with the people because of his comedic eccentricities) declares his long-lasting love and secret relationship with his personal caretaker, Dutch nurse Elisabeth 'Ellie' Deutekom. His outraged father threatens to disinherit him if he dares 'pollute' the blood of the Stuarts like that; the furious Robert, in turn, actually does renounce his succession rights and moves to Oceania. Charles's second son, John Duke of Cambridge (who had taken after his father and grandfather in terms of mental stability) becomes heir to the throne instead.
Chiang Kai-shek, President of the Chinese Republic, dies of old age. He is immediately succeeded by his son Chiang Ching-kuo, a reformist who sets the republic on the road to becoming a true democracy and who (quite wisely) gradually liberalizes the economy.
1977: The Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, still in exile in Canada, actively help to foil a Satanist plot to execute a coup d'etat against the Canadian government, going undercover and posing as a harmless playboy and an innocent housewife respectively; together, they infiltrated the conspiracy led by the traitorous aristocrat Francis Calvert, third son of the Lord Baltimore, with Richard inviting Calvert and friends to his chateau while Anna secretly photographed their meetings, and the two had the Inquisition barge in just as Calvert and company were about to begin a Black Mass.
Emperor Charles (now on medication to suppress his wild mood swings and periods of insanity) is so pleased by this that he flew to Canada to personally congratulate his son, and invited him to return to the Home Isles next year.
1978: The Eurasians invade Afghanistan after a border shootout leaves two Afghan soldiers dead and one Eurasian wounded. 40,000 Eurasian troops sweep into the mountainous country, quickly suppressing organized native resistance and annexing the territory into the Empire.
The Imperial Union responds by funding the ‘Islamic Alliance for the Deliverance of Afghanistan’, a loose alliance of religious fanatics, displaced clans and the occasional Pashto nationalists aimed at driving the Eurasians from Afghanistan, operating from safehouses in Imperial India.
In August, Prince John is rejected by his long-term object of affection, Scottish noblewoman Lady Jane Murray, who he had mistaken for his deceased wife Margarita and who was already engaged to her cousin Lord James Maxwell; never particularly sane to begin with, but now possessed with a murderous hatred, Cambridge invited the two to a party ostensibly to 'make up', then killed them there and, upon realizing what he had done, and after his rage was replaced with grief and remorse, turned the gun on himself.
Emperor Charles is killed while welcoming his son Cumberland back in London, shot dead by a Scottish woman whose husband and two sons were killed in Bloody Sunday of ’74. On that same day, Pope Gregorius XVII (Alfredo Ottaviani) – who, like Emperor Charles, was notoriously reactionary, albeit less violent in his methods than the ‘Bloody Emperor’ – dies of old age. Charles is succeeded by Richard, until recently Duke of Cumberland, while Pope Gregorius is succeeded by Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who assumes the name John Paul I; not only were both reformists at heart and personal friends to boot, but the latter had been the former’s tutor when he was a boy, and would now crown him Emperor in the tradition of the European Emperors.
The two would expand their personal friendship into a political alliance, and worked to gradually liberalize the Imperial Union and restore the Crown’s prestige after Charles’s disastrous reign – an ambitious policy the newly-crowned Richard II termed ‘compassionate imperialism’. The European Estates-General was convened for the first time in twenty-five years to hammer out a constitution for the Imperial Union at large.
1980: The Estates-General, with supervision from both the Emperor and the Pope, write up Europe’s imperial Constitution. The Constitution of the Imperial Union of Europe made provisions for the creation of an Imperial Parliament, replacing the unelected Estates-General, to be divided into three new Estates – the First Estate was to be elected only by and from the ranks of the clergy, with 50 seats guaranteed to the Catholic Church and half that number to Protestants; the Second Estate was completely unelected, instead being made up of representatives of and from Europe’s numerous royal families and particularly old & respected noble bloodlines; and the Third Estate was open to all, with its 798 seats open to general elections every six years in which all male citizens above the age of 21 who are either making at least 25,000 pounds/year or own at least 2,000 hectares of land are allowed to participate.
However, while the Parliament would possess the power to pass or strike down laws, it could be dissolved at any time by the will of the Emperor, and furthermore if a bill is vetoed by the Emperor or the Pope it will ‘die in the water’ so to speak, with no hope of salvaging it. On top of that, the Emperor maintained the exclusive privilege of appointing the High Chancellor (the official head of the Parliament and thus the European government), though he had to choose from the members of the largest party in the Third Estate.
The first European imperial election, held on December 15th, placed the Union for European Solidarity, led by Polish union leader Lech Walesa, in first place with 353 out of the 789 seats in the new Parliament; after his appointment as High Chancellor of Europe by Emperor Richard II, Walesa proceeded to reinforce his position by building a coalition with the Christian People’s Party led by Giulio Andreotti (100 seats), granting himself an unshakeable majority.
The new High Chancellor, with full cooperation from both Emperor Richard and Pope John Paul I, immediately got to work. This year, the minimum wage was raised from five pounds to seven, and unions given the right to organize once more.
Considerable cuts to the defence budget were made and taxes were increased to make money for these reforms, causing considerable consternation within the military and general annoyance throughout the populace.
In Eurasia, military spending went through the roof as Tsar Nikolai III saw an opportunity to outdo the Europeans militarily – but only at the expense of civil administration and public welfare, both of which suffer crippling cuts as more and more money is poured into defence projects and the expansion of the Eurasian military.
The first truly free Chinese elections are held, and see Chiang Ching-kuo and his KMT returned to power with a considerable majority. Nevertheless, the solid showing of the opposition Progressive Party led by Lin Biao, claiming a third of the seats in the Legislative Yuan and 35% of the popular vote in the legislative election and with Lin Biao himself snatching 44% of the popular vote in the presidential election, is taken as proof that the elections really were fair and free.
1981: Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca attempts to assassinate Pope John Paul I and Emperor Richard II at a parade in Ravenna, but his wild gunfire only manages to injure the former and missed the latter entirely. His death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment by Richard II upon the wounded Pope’s personal request, and he later converted to Catholicism.
China's gradual movement to a regulated liberal capitalism pays off big, as the country undergoes an economic renaissance after years of stagnation due to political corruption, mini-civil wars with warlords, and KMT authoritarianism.
1982: Falklands Crisis between the Syndicate and the Imperial Union & Puritan Commonwealth breaks out. Satanist warships threaten the Falklands; the Europeans respond with a nuclear submarine and a carrier battle group. A tense conference is hosted on Emperor Edward Point, on the Southern Sandwich Isles and featuring Emperor Richard II of Europe, Lord Protector George H. W. Bush of Columbia, and Director Lyndon LaRouche of the People's Syndicates of the Americas; negotiations carried for nearly 18 hours before both parties walked away with a satisfactory deal, in which the Syndicalists would withdraw their ships but maintain their claims to the Falklands, and a demilitarized zone established around the islands.
Emperor Richard opens negotiations with the leadership of the VQ, and successfully engineers a ceasefire in Indochina to boot.
The Silesian Crisis breaks out when Polish and German nationalists clash in Breslau/Wroclaw, and bring their case to the Emperor; the former wanted Silesia added to Poland, the latter for Germany to keep it. Richard is persuaded by his Polish Empress to allow a referendum on the matter, but the Empress Anna (a Polish nationalist herself) extensively employed bribery and gerrymandering to force a Polish victory, nearly leading to the Union's collapse as German King Otto V threatened to declare war on Polish King Jakub I Potocki. Nevertheless, Richard's intervention, awarding 'only' most of Silesia (though including the capital, Breslau/Wroclaw) to Poland while allowing the Germans to retain a small western portion of Lower Silesia, proved sufficient to maintain the uneasy peace within his union.
1983: The Eurasian economy begins to crack under Tsar Nikolai’s ambitious military expansion and space programs. The Tsar, long known to be a fan of unhealthy fat foods, died in the Spring of a heart attack, and for a few months it looked like his more reasonable son & heir, now crowned Alexei II, would be able to reverse his work before an economic meltdown happened; but, unfortunately for Russia, Tsar Alexei died in a freak skiing accident and was succeeded by his younger brother Ivan.
The new Tsar is widely considered to be an ideological clone of his father – though more arrogant, outspoken and definitely not as smart as he thinks he is – and indeed, Ivan VII would maintain all of his father’s policies.
The Saigon Peace Talks begin to bloom, as municipal governments throughout North Vietnam were turned over to VQ control and elections in which the VQ could participate as a political party were scheduled for next year. 250,000 out of the 1,200,000 European troops in Indochina are withdrawn.
1984: Vietnamese elections see the VQ winning with a landslide, snapping up 63.7% of the vote in contrast to the loyalist Can Lao Party. However, while the VQ sweeps the north and most rural areas, the Can Lao Party proves dominant in Southern urban areas (including the colonial capital of Saigon) and the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Pham Van Dong, second-in-command of the VQ, was allowed to take up the mantle of Prime Minister of Vietnam, and further negotiations were opened with the objective of attained Vietnamese independence.
Another 200,000 European troops pull out of Indochina.
No longer able to draw money from cutting public welfare or the civil bureaucracy, Tsar Ivan VII raises taxes on the general populace. When this fails, he begins levying taxes on the Orthodox Church to generate the needed revenue, something no Tsar before him had tried; needless to say, this is not taken well by the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow, both of whom begin organizing protests against the Tsarist regime.
Riots broke out in Constantinople, Petrograd and Moscow (among other cities) after police and the Cossacks fired upon a mass of peaceful protesters led by priests in Constantinople, who were demanding the removal of the Crown’s taxes on the Orthodox Church. Tsar Ivan began to see the Orthodox Church as a threat to his power, an overbearing ‘state-within-the-state’ that had been allowed to run wild for too long by past Tsars and that had to be forcibly submitted to the secular authorities, just as his venerable ancestor Peter the Great had done.
The Kuomintang retain control of the Legislative Yuan in this year's Chinese elections, but Yao Wenyuan of the Progressives unseats Chiang Ching-kuo and becomes the first non-KMT President of China. The defeated Chiang's decision to not attempt any sort of coup or even protest, instead quietly accepting the will of the people, is lauded by the Chinese people and democrats all over the globe.
1985: Tsar Ivan begins passing legislation to place education under state control rather than that of the Orthodox Church, making the revocation of the Church’s tax-exempt status permanent, and eliminating the state subsidy to the Church.
The Black Hundreds' supreme commander, Andrei Chikatilo, is revealed to have been a mass-murdering cannibal rapist, with up to a thousand kills under his belt, all covered up by his underlings. While a furious Tsar Ivan fires him, puts him on trial and eventually has him executed, the Chikatilo Affair was still a PR disaster for the monarchy, as many Eurasians felt that it would have been impossible to hide such disgusting crimes without the active collaboration of the government and by extension, the Tsar.
On top of the Chikatilo Affair, Prime Minister Dmitry Yazov (served 1982-85) also resigned his post in protest of the Tsar's policies. He was replaced by moderate Mikhail Gorbachev, who Tsar Ivan felt would be more pliable to his laicist reforms. This soon proves to be a costly mistake, as Gorbachev revealed his true colours as a liberal reformist and began pushing for the release of a number of political prisoners, a reduction in military spending to generate revenue for domestic spending, the creation of a democratically elected Duma (parliament), and withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Tsar chose to stall all of his requests and hope that he forgets them.
Meanwhile, the Eurasian military establishment begins to recognize that the situation in Afghanistan (in which the Eurasians controlled the major cities and a number of isolated bases in the countryside, but the Afghan Islamic Alliance commanded the loyalty of the rural areas) was becoming increasingly untenable, and advised a general withdrawal and the formation of a puppet state ruled by the pro-Eurasian Barakzai tribe in place of Petrograd’s direct governance. Tsar Ivan rejects the idea out of hand, reasoning that any such move would humiliate him before the Europeans and Syndicalists.
Nationalistic awakening begins in Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia, adding to the Eurasians’ list of problems; Finland, meanwhile, had always been a hotbed of nationalist and Protestant agitation since the 1920s, and the problems there were only going to get worse over the years.
Meanwhile, elections in Europe see Walesa and his Solidarists replaced by French intellectual Jean-Claude Dumas and the Radical Liberal Party, who had promised to ‘revolutionize’ the European socio-political landscape. Dumas is heavily opposed by conservative factions at the imperial court, led chiefly by Empress Anna.
A further 300,000 European soldiers leave Indochina.
1986: The Zaporozshe nuclear power plant's catastrophic meltdown, which required half a million workers and billions of rubles to contain, effectively renders the nearby city uninhabitable, threatens to poison the Dnieper, and further ruins the Tsar’s image among his subjects.
Emperor Richard of Europe visits Nanjing and meets with Chinese President Chiang Ching-kuo. Among the topics discussed, Vietnamese independence was on the top of the list.
High Chancellor Dumas broke up the Standard Oil, Monsanto and General Electric monopolies, and moved to privatize as much of the oil, agricultural and power markets as possible. However, his rapid privatization campaign caused prices to rise, to the annoyance of the general populace.
China's GDP surpasses that of Russia for the first time in history.
150,000 European troops withdraw from Indochina. There are no European troops left in Cambodia or Laos now, both areas falling under the jurisdiction of local colonial forces, and only a token garrison a few hundred thousand strong are left in Vietnam.
1987: Tsar Ivan finally concedes to two of Gorbachev’s demands, reducing the defence budget to free up money for reinvestment into long-neglected and decayed social programs and also releasing a number of political prisoners from the gulags, chief among them Andrei Sakharov. However, he refuses to either withdraw from Afghanistan or allow free elections for a Duma, and the Orthodox Church continues to mobilize protesters on a scale never seen before in Eurasia to oppose the Tsar’s secularizing reforms.
Dumas tries to take education away from the control of the Catholic Church, but is blocked by an alliance of conservative and moderate parties in the Third Estate, the unanimous opposition of the First and Second Estates, and the intervention of Empress Anna.
Emperor Richard II opens negotiations with the disparate Ugandan, Congolese, Central African, Chadian, Ethiopian and Algerian insurgents, hoping to strike a deal to withdraw from inner Africa while saving face at the loss of so many colonies.
1988: Vietnamese independence referendum finally held. Two separate referendums were held, one for the North and one for the South, with the city of Hue being the line separating them. The North votes overwhelmingly for independence; in the South, the vote was extremely close, but came down 50.2% in favour of remaining part of the Imperial Union.
The VQ chose not to tap into their many supporters in the South and organize a second insurgency, but rather to respect the results and form their long-awaited Republic of Vietnam with only the northern half of the country. China and the Imperial Union are first to recognize the new nation, and Vietnam immediately enters an alliance with the Chinese. Meanwhile, the last European troops in Vietnam finally go home, marking the conclusion of the Indochina War.
In Afghanistan, a Russian base is attacked and overrun by Afghan Islamists, its garrison of 1,500 sustaining casualties to the tune of 228 dead, 700 wounded and all survivors captured. This humiliating debacle convinces the Eurasian military brass that their position in Afghanistan had become untenable and that a withdrawal was in order.
Kuomintang candidate Mao Anying, son of late Civil War hero and KMT representative for Hunan Mao Zedong, defeats Progressive President Yao Wenyuan's bid for a second term in this year's Chinese presidential election.
At home, feeling that his own position was becoming increasingly dangerous as he had alienated most of his supporters, Tsar Ivan reluctantly agrees to a constitutional convention and to hold elections for a Duma, as per Premier Gorbachev’s demands. A Constitutional Committee was organized and got to work starting in November.
Dumas launches another attack against the Church, this time simultaneously reviving his plans for secularizing education and writing another bill to confiscate some of the Church’s lands and sell them to the underclasses at below-market value, with only token compensation to be extended to the Church. Needless to say, both of these bills met even more opposition than before, and Empress Anna began pushing her husband to take ‘drastic action’ against Dumas.
1989: The Imperial Eurasian Constitution of 1989 is unveiled on April 14th, just a little under six months since work on it started in November 1988. Elections for a bicameral Duma (consisting of the 90-seat Senate, restricted to members of the aristocracy, and the 846-seat General Assembly), open to all males over the age of 21 who make at least 125,000 rubles a year or own at least 15,000 hectares of land, are scheduled for October. The leader of the largest party in the General Assembly would go on to become Premier of Eurasia, and this new legislature would possess lawmaking power independent of the judiciary, the Church and even the Tsar’s authority, with a Tsarist veto still being possible to override with a ž majority vote in the Assembly.
The election propels Gorbachev’s own party, the liberal Democratic Party of Eurasia, into power with 394 seats. Furthermore, Gorbachev constructed a ‘Popular Front’ with Vladimir Gusinsky’s nationalistic Rodina (‘Motherland’), Nikolai Leonov’s conservative and pro-Orthodox Viera i Narod (‘Faith and Nation’) and progressive but nationalist Agrarians of Ion Iliescu, with the express objective of enforcing the Constitution of 1989 to the letter.
In Europe, Dumas’s reforms went much too quickly for Emperor Richard, who felt that he was seriously threatening the traditional institutions of the Imperial Union and was generally just going too far – he wanted a reformation of the European socio-political landscape, not a revolution. His wife advised him to ally with Sir Maximilian Sutherland, a part Scots-Irish and part-German decorated veteran of the Indochina War and the leader of the far-right Christian Social Union (then a relatively minor party with only 23 seats in the Estates-General), who she considered to be the only man strong enough to stop Dumas and restore the traditional social order. Richard, considering Dumas a dangerous revolutionary, soon agreed, and the three plotted to undercut Dumas.
1990: As soon as Gorbachev attempted to force through an order for a full withdrawal from Afghanistan, Tsar Ivan came to regret his decision to allow elections in the first place and, fearing that his power would be completely compromised and his role reduced to that of a purely constitutional monarch, ordered the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky Regiments of the Imperial Guard to storm the Kremlin and arrest all the delegates on charges of treason. However, at this point he had exhausted his support base – conservatives detested him for caving into Gorbachev’s demands, the religious hated him for his secularist reforms, laicists didn’t think he went far enough, liberals were obviously opposed to his attempt to shut down a democratically elected parliament whose creation he himself had greenlighted barely a year ago, and the military saw an opportunity to extract themselves from Afghanistan under Gorbachev – and soon his Guards found their way blocked by a growing crowd of constitutionalists, who had joined hands and shouted at the Guards to turn back or were otherwise singing hymns.
While STAVKA vacillated and tried to find which side was worth supporting, Vladimir Putin, a Captain in the Imperial Eurasian Army, reached the head-lines as the man who first struck at the Imperial Guardsmen en route to the capitol, driving his tank into their way and threatening to blow them away if they did not stand down – and saving Gorbachev’s government in the process, for his action convinced Field Marshal Pavel Grachev, supreme commander of the Imperial Eurasian Army, to throw his lot in with the Duma and order all army troops on the ground to oppose the Tsar.
In the ensuing standoff, the Imperial Guards eventually caved in and withdrew. Gorbachev immediately organized a countercoup and had the forces loyal to him march directly on the Winter Palace. The Imperial Guard, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned by the mob and the Army, were nevertheless prepared to defend their Tsar to the bitter end; however, at the urging of his wife the Tsarina Elizaveta, Tsar Ivan ordered his loyalists to stand down and conceded defeat. He, his family and a number of servants were promptly placed under house arrest, and held in the Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo where although they were able to live in luxury, their communications with the outside world were heavily restricted and the entirety of the Tamanskaya Motorized Rifle Division, an elite unit of the Imperial Army controlled by officers personally loyal to Gorbachev himself, was stationed in the village to make sure that nobody got in or out without the Premier’s express permission.
With the Tsar neutralized, at least for now, Gorbachev reaffirmed the Constitution of 1989, to the unanimous approval of the Duma. However, the position of the Tsar created an entirely new constitutional question – namely, what should be done with Ivan VII; at this time, the position of the Tsar was in legal limbo, as he was legally still Tsar of All the Russias and Sovereign Master of all Eurasia, even as his own Duma kept him under arrest. Gorbachev’s moderate faction called for another constitutional convention to formally decide on the status of the Tsar, and were prepared to relinquish some powers to the Tsar in return for his cooperation; a more radical faction, led by Boris Yeltsin, demanded a nationwide referendum on whether or not to keep the monarchy, and at best wanted the Tsar as a purely ceremonial figurehead of the Duma; and arch-conservatives led by Aleksandr Rutskoy wanted to see Tsar Ivan retake his position as Eurasia’s absolute ruler.
Gorbachev called for a national constitutional convention to decide the fate of the Tsar. However, the negotiations between his moderates, Yeltsin’s radicals and Rutskoy’s conservatives went nowhere, as the three factions were unable to compromise. Ivan, meanwhile, is granted a little more freedom for his good behaviour in captivity, and immediately moves to open secret communications with Rutskoy, Patriarch Pimen of Moscow and Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople; he promised to repent for his past attempts to secularize Eurasia, to restore the tax exemptions and hunting privileges of the nobility, to restore the full power of the Orthodox Church, to respect the local zemstvo (noble councils), and lastly to close down the Duma in favour of a Grand Senate consisting only of nobles and clergy. Tsarist protests and rallies are held in several major cities, but the largest took place in Petrograd, in Arkhangelsk and in Rostov.
Taking advantage of the chaos in Russia, separatists in the Caucasus, Turkey and Central Asia launch uprisings and proclaim the independence of their respective nations. The Nikolaevichi Balkan governors, as well as the Tsar's illegitimate uncle the Governor-General of Serbia, also 'secede from chaos' and proclaim themselves kings and princes of their domains.
In Europe, the ’90 elections opened, almost literally with a bang; a 'diabolical plot' to bomb the Notre Dame was foiled by the Inquisition, and a cell of 'radical terrorists' (actually Inquisitorial agents-provocateur) 'apprehended' for the crime. Dumas and his Radical Liberals were immediately linked to the 'terrorists' by the Inquisition, and the ongoing price spike was also blamed on Dumas. At the same time, the threat of civil war in Russia – and the possibility that radical groups could get their hands on the Bear’s nuclear arsenal – was fully exploited by Sutherland and the Christian Socialists. Furthermore, imperial funds were secretly allotted to the CSU, allowing them to mount an unusually vigorous campaign.
Needless to say, the CSU won a majority of seats in the Third Estate, and Sutherland was appointed High Chancellor. He immediately undid the social and economic reforms of the Radical Liberals, though he did issue a decree (with the support of his party and the Emperor) to force all nobles to work for either the military or the civil administration for at least five years, if they have not done so already; after all, while it was state-capitalist and zealously protective of the Catholic Church in nature, the CSU was still opposed to the traditional social order and saw the nobility as a bunch of inbred leeches (though they would never dare say that out loud) who should at least have to work for their estates, fortunes and titles. Sutherland further exploits the Eurasian crisis to annex northern Syria and Qajar Persia.
1991-1994: The First Russian Civil War is fought between Tsarists and Duma Loyalists after a total breakdown in order. Both sides soon proved exceptionally brutal and merciless in their conduct of the war, with their powerful extremist factions (the Black Hundreds and Bloody Shirts, respectively) being the worst offenders and, especially toward the end, the most dominant. The war saw the Tsar gunned down in the First Battle of Petrograd, General V. Malenkov of the Tsarists publicly executed by the Duma, General A. Valeyasev of the Duma assassinated by a hitwoman on the Tsarina's payroll, General N. Timichenko of the Tsarists lynched by Bloody Shirts, the destruction of Arkhangelsk and Petrograd by the Duma's forces and the brutalization & decimation of their populations (including, most infamously, the burning of the Cathedral in Petrograd with Patriarch Alexei of Russia and hundreds of refugees within). The situation was worsened both by the defection of Tsarist General Tokarev to found his own faction (the 'Fourth Romans') at a critical juncture for the Tsarists, and by the Eleventh Crusade of Europe coming in about three-quarters of the way into the conflict, assisting Polish nationalists in liberating their homeland and then 'liberating' large parts of European Russia, then doing unto Moscow what the Duma had done unto Petrograd and Arkhangelsk and taking the Duma hostage.
While the war ended in a Loyalist victory and the Romanovs exiled to Europe, it also saw large parts of the country devastated, over a million casualties (mostly civilians) and the Duma backstabbed by its Bloody Shirts after cravenly giving into European demands to save their own skins, leading directly to...
1994-?: Second Russian Civil War, initiated after the Duma's victory and fall from grace within the timespan of two months. This was a multi-sided conflict featuring Bloody Shirt-ruled Executive Soviet fighting anarchists, Tsarist remnants, various separatists, the religious-reactionary Russian Salvific Front, another rump Duma, Ultra-Nationalists and Jewish supremacists, among others. |
[RB] Rule Britannia's Encyclopedia Britannica
) and to write them from any IC point of view, for example I was just talking with Bjorn about how he could write Kieth's character from either a Canadian nationalist or die-hard Imperialist's POV, which would radically differ from each other.
