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Description
Let's start off the New Year with COMMUNISM

These are new flags for the original twelve polities on Venus. The Soviet colony, the Confederation of Veneran Republics; the East German colony, the Neu-Dresden Democratic Republic; the Polish colony, the People’s Republic of Hevelia; the Cuban colony, the Republic of Santamaria; the Romanian colony, the Socialist Republic of Înfloria; the Mongolian colony, the Republic of Shar-Tsetseg; the Czechoslovak colony, the Czechoslovak Republic of Novy Usvit; the Bulgarian colony, the Republic of Nadezhda, the Vietnamese colony, the Socialist Republic of Mauvang; the Hungarian colony, the Confederation of Borostyan; the Afghan colony, the Democratic Republic of Bactria; and the Indian colony, the Shukra Federation.

The flag of the KVR (Konfederatsiya Veneranskikh Respublik) evokes the basic imagery of the Soviet banner, and includes the red star/hammer-sickle imagery, but also a wreath made from a gear and wheat, surrounding the visage of the Venera-4 probe, the first man-made object to reach Venus (“the industry and agriculture of the Soviet Union nurturing the future of socialist scientific ambition”). The two dates flanking the red star of the Communist Party, 1967 and 1978, respectively represent the arrival of Venera-4 to Venus in 1967, and Valentina Tereshkova’s 1978 mission to Venus - the first human to “land” on the “Yellow Planet”. The yellow-white stripes, meanwhile, represent the clouds of the upper Venusian atmosphere. The initials “KVR” are also present in Cyrillic as “KBP”.

In 2021, the KVR is the largest and most populous single polity on Venus, with forty-six major aerostat habitats and a population of 5.3 million people. The population is overwhelmingly ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, with smaller numbers of colonists from Central Asia, the former Baltic republics and the Caucasus countries, as well as a broader international population, including Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Western Europeans, Americans, Arabs, Africans and more. Whereas the USSR back on Earth managed to successfully liberalize and reform into a social-democratic federation, the KVR became a time capsule of sorts, and yet also a divergence. Communism died out in the USSR, but persists in the KVR, albeit with a healthy dose of “market pragmatism” - the realities of central planning don’t always lend themselves to adaptation on a hardcore world like Venus, where productivity and innovation can mean the difference between life and death. This, alongside extensive use of vacuum-tube computers for resource allocation and inventorying; while not terribly efficient, the KVR old guard still want their economic planning and insist that it works if you computerize everything.

Whereas Mars was advertised to prospective colonists across the Free World as a traditional frontier where you could get rich, start a family, and become a big fish in a small pond, Venus was simultaneously a great hopeful sky for idealistic socialist experiments away from capitalist aggression, and, after the end of the Proletarian Experiment around the world, a nostalgic redoubt for those who missed the discipline of older authoritarianism. Indeed, the KVR served as a pressure-release valve for the more ideological and zealous elements of Soviet society, displeased by the Kosygin, Andropov and Gorbachev milieu of reforms of the 70’s and 80’s. While for younger generations of (very online) leftist colonists moving to the KVR from cushy Western countries in the 2010s, they come for the (literally) lofty idealism, but end up getting used to the realities of living on Venus, and assimilating into a world that has only known red banners.

The flag of Neu-Dresden (Neu-Dresden Demokratische Republik) features the insignia of the East German National People’s Air Force, on a black field (representing space), over gold stripe (representing the Venusian atmosphere), with a red stripe (representing Neu-Dresden’s aerostats in the habitable zone) in between.

Neu-Dresden is the second-largest Venusian polity, with a population of 2.3 million, thanks to East Germany’s zealous colonization program. Because the NDDR held so much propaganda value to the East German regime, colonists were typically selected based on how loyal they were to the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). So when reunification came in 1989, most of the diehard SED partisans in the NDDR weren’t having any of it, and Neu-Dresden became the first offworld polity to formally secede from the Earth. Well. They were already de facto independent of East Berlin, just by virtue of having a huge gulf of space in between them, but Neu-Dresden for about a decade took a very hardline “anti-Earth” party line, condemning the capitalist-fascist conquest of East Germany by the West. While there was a brief moment where the NDDR claimed to be the true successor to the GDR, including its claims over former West Germany, by the end of the 90s, this was dropped in place of simply writing off the Earth entirely and treating Neu-Dresden as a socialist ark, encouraging as many former East German citizens as possible to migrate to Venus. For a while, on Earth, there was a trend of Hollywood action movies in the 90’s with East German terrorists from space as the bad guys.

As of 2021, like the KVR, Neu-Dresden is still a cultural and political time capsule of the old East German regime, which is why most Ostalgie-stricken Germans from the former GDR have opted to move to Venus. However, in many ways, Neu-Dresden in 2021 has evolved into a country and culture increasingly unlike either Germany. The locals still speak German, for sure, but their dialect is filling up with Russian and Indian loanwords; the bureaucratic nomenclature of the East German state has simply become the normal way Neu-Dresdeners talk (you call them “coffins”, Neu-Dresdeners call them “Erdmöbel” or “ground furniture”); and in fact, more and more Neu-Dresdeners are naming their kids according to a bizarre gender-neutral spin on Russian patronymics (ex: Erik Schwarzkopf and Tanya Schwarzkopf are good and law-abiding citizens of the NDDR, and have two children, Gretchen Tanyaskind Schwarzkopf and Linus Ericskind Schwarzkopf). Additionally, whereas both East and West Germany had common German traditions to fall back on, the ideological zeal of the SED colonists of Neu-Dresden mean those born and raised here have mostly red banners, socialist mythology, and the peculiarities of East Germany (fascination with Native Americans and so-called “Red Westerns”, the state-approved rock band Puhdys, Schlager music, Der schwarze Kanal), as the clay with which to mold and shape their own culture from.

The flag of Hevelia (Republika Ludowa Hewelia) is a simple but elegant design, consisting of the red-white Polish bicolor, defaced with a triangular device featuring the colony’s name in Polish, a stylized rocket ship, and the flags of the USSR and Poland.

POLAN CAN INTO SPACE! Named after the 17th century Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius, Helvelia’s a lovely little colony which is still running on the retro socialist OS, but is also still tight with its motherland, Poland, where much of its Terran immigration still hails from, and Hevelia is also the most democratic and non-authoritarian of the Venusian countries mentioned here, in no small part thanks to this influence.

The flag of Santamaría (República de Santamaría) is essentially a re-interpretation of the original Cuban flag, with a more “revolutionary” vibe. The half-red, half-stripey star is taken from the Cuban Interkosmos mission of our timeline.

Santamaría is named after Cuban revolutionary martyr, Abel Santamaría, and while Cuba itself transitioned from communist authoritarianism to multi-party social democracy in the early 90’s, Santamaría still has a decent number of old school commies running the show, a number which grew when a bunch of guys with skeletons in their closets decided to skip planets ahead of Cuba’s truth and reconciliation commission in the late 1990s, along with a number of American fugitives who fled to Cuba during the Cold War and wanted out before they could be extradited to the US, such as Nehanda Abiodun, Robert Vesco, Víctor Manuel Gerena and Assata Shakur. There are still fairly close ties between Santamaría and Cuba, or at least, as close as ties can be when you live on different planets, but the perception among the Santamaríans is that Cuba has spread her legs too wide for the Americans. Havana, as they see it, is becoming another suburb of Miami. Joining the communist old guard are younger radical Cuban and Caribbean youths nostalgic for an era they weren’t around to see, and therefore romanticize.

The flag of Înfloria (Republica Socialistă Înfloria) essentially does what Neu-Dresden does, by reinterpreting an old Earth tricolor for a Venusian context; blue represents either space or the uppermost layers of the atmosphere, yellow the sulphury clouds, and red the Hellish surface of Venus. The flag also has a variant of the emblem of the Socialist Republic of Romania, only instead of the Romanian landscape, it features three aerostats and an airship, just above the clouds of Venus, with the sun and its rays above them.

Înfloria (from the Vulgar Latin “inflorīre”, meaning “blossom” or “to flower”) is certainly an odd bird. A bit like Venusian Florida, as the name might imply. Despite the rather tenuous relationship between the USSR and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, the latter was able to participate in the Interkosmos program on Venus. The colonization of Venus by Romania was pursued enthusiastically by the Ceaușescu regime, and many followers of his cult of personality settled the original aerostat, Înfloria-1. Back on Earth, Ceaușescu narrowly avoided execution in 1989, when anti-communist revolutionaries executed his body-double on TV, and then he and other top Romanian officials fled the country to Switzerland, before escaping to Înfloria on a Thai spacecraft by the end of 1989, arriving in early 1991. For Înflorians who were born and raised in the colonies since the early 1980s, this was an exciting time: meeting the “Conducător”, whose youthful picture hung in every room in the colony. However, the functionaries and leaders who actually called the shots and the day-to-day operations of the Romanian aerostats, had cultivated their own political culture and balance of power, far, far away from the prying eyes of Ceaușescu’s police state. The dictator thought he would be able to live like a king on Venus, but in truth, he became a prisoner in a pretty glass display case. He adopted the formal title of Conducător, complete with a new presidential scepter, and even a throne, but no real political power. Despite being the idol of the Înflorian masses, true power rested in the hands of the real movers and shakers within the Înflorian Communist Party, the so-called “Breasla” (“Guild”), and the office of the Colonial Governor. Ceaușescu would become the ceremonial head of the Party, and after his death in 1995 at the age of 77 (some say it was in reaction to learning that, back on Earth, Romania had restored Michael I to the throne of a new constitutional monarchy), Nicolae’s son, Valentin, became the new Conducător, who still fills the office to this day.

While communism is gone on Înfloria, Ceaușescu’s old cult of personality persists on the aerostat in the form of well-maintained murals and old propaganda posters, coexisting alongside adverts for the Nintendo 64 or Coca-Cola - or rather, Venusian-made knockoffs of both. The portraits of both Ceaușescus, Nicolae and Valentin, are in nearly every room and in every public space on Înfloria’s five aerostat colonies. It’s still an authoritarian regime run by the Governor and only has one legal political party, but the economy has that familiar “market pragmatism” flavor you’ll get used to on Venus, if more cronyistic than usual. Everyone abides by a North Korea-style dress code for men and women, which, while by itself not unusual for a Venusian sky-colony even in 2021, the bit with the radios in every home that can’t be turned off, and weekly “community-strengthening” exercises that totally don’t resemble “Five Minutes of Hate”, and the belief among many Înflorians that Nicolae Ceaușescu’s soul boarded a UFO bound for Aldebaran...well, at least they’re friendly people.

The flag of Shar-Tsetseg (Bügd Nairamdakh Shar-Tsetseg) is a red-yellow bicolor with the Interkosmos logo surrounded by the red flower of the Mongolian Communist Party (ironically, “Shar-Tsetseg” means “Yellow Flower”); the Interkosmos logo has the colony’s name in Mongolian Cyrillic, and this whole device sits beneath the Mongol and Soviet banners.

Mongolia has had a fairly lax commitment to colonizing Venus, due in large part to Ulanbaatar not seeing space as especially important for Mongolia. As such, Shar-Tsetseg consists of only one eponymous aerostat. The most use Mongolia saw for its Venus program was as a convenient place for Mongolian leader Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal to relocate his political opponents during his erratic purges of the party leadership in the early 1980s. When Tsedenbal was forcibly retired in 1984 and Jambyn Batmönkh replaced him, Shar-Tsetseg was a bit of an awkward reminder of Tsedenbal’s senile tyranny. This changed very briefly in the late 1990s, after the collapse of communism in Mongolia and the arrival of nostalgic/guilty Mongol communists...many of whom were Tsedenbal supporters. Life’s funny that way. Anyhow, Shar-Tsetseg’s a pretty chill, sleepy little Venus colony, locals are friendly and low-key. The sounds of throat-singing and horsehead fiddles fill the halls, which still have faded murals of Comrade Tsedenbal telling you to think about why you’re there.

The flag of Novy Usvit (Československá Republika Nový Usvit) consists of the colony’s official emblem - a gold hexagon with the Czechoslovak and Soviet flags, the Interkosmos logo in Czechoslovak colors, and the dates “1948” and “1984” commemorating the founding of communist Czechoslovakia and the establishment of the Novy Usvit colony. The asahi-style “rising sun” motif is a callback to the name of the colony, “Novy Usvit”, which means “New Dawn”.

Like Hevelia, Novy Usvit has maintained close ties with its Czechoslovak motherland, and is a bit more liberal for it. Novy Usvit’s system is a bit less bureaucratic and more technocratic than a lot of the other Venusian polities, being run mostly by engineers, a policy they adopted from their Shukran comrades. Indeed, it was Novy Usviti scientists who developed the Adamski-Vacek Process together with their Hevelian and Veneran counterparts in 1987, which allows for low-cost energy-efficient synthesis of carbon nanotubes, making this space-age wonder a cheap, commercially-viable building material for all mankind, an accomplishment celebrated in East Bloc propaganda at the time as “Mastery of the People’s Molecule”.

The flag of Nadezhda (Republika Nadezhda) is based on the Bulgarian white-green-red tricolor, with the white and green stripes on the hoist and a large red field, defaced with the insignia of the first Bulgarian colony mission to Venus: a yellow globe, the Bulgarian and Soviet flags arcing over it like a rainbow, below a rampant lion (a symbol of the Bulgarian nation since at least 1294), with a red star above, and the dates 681, 1944 and 1982 representing the foundation of the First Bulgarian Empire, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and the Bulgarian colonization of Venus, respectively. The emblem is surrounded by a “wreath” of vacuum tubes, symbolizing Nadezhda’s leading industry, electronics.

Back on Earth, communist Bulgaria used to have a reputation for churning out computers, earning it the monicker of the “East Bloc Silicon Valley”, and indeed, Bulgarian administrative practices were the envy of the Warsaw Pact. Nadezhda has inherited this reputation to an extent, and is where most of those knock-off Nintendo 64s come from. They’re also deep into cybernetic socialism; no, not red cyborgs (Venusians are actually rather skeptical of transhumanism), I mean computerized economic planning. While computerized economic plans are common across Venus, Nadezhda practically fetishizes its computer networks.

The flag of Mauvang (Cộng Hòa Xã Hội Chủ Nghĩa Màu Vàng) evokes the colors of the Viet Cong flag, the star from the first flag of North Vietnam (used from 1945-1955), a yellow circle to represent Venus and a pair of wings, because aerostats.

Not a lot to say about Mauvang, honestly. Vietnam was unable to really contribute a lot to Interkosmos besides leasing Phạm Tuân Launch Center to the Soviets on Hon Khaoi Island. This was mostly because after conquering the capitalist southern half of the country and dismantling the southern economy, surprise, surprise, there was a ruinous economic crash. However, Vietnam’s experience with market reforms would go on to inform Mauvang’s own flavor of “market pragmatism”. Yeah, Venusians use that phrase a lot, because they don’t want to admit when they’re being capitalists.

The flag of Borostyan (Borostyán Szövetsége) isn’t terribly inventive. It’s a Hungarian flag with the Borostyan-1 mission patch used by the first colony mission to Venus.

Of all the Venusian countries to adopt “market pragmatism”, Borostyan has been the most enthusiastic. Like most of the other guys here, Borostyan is a single-party state, run by the Borostyan Socialist Worker’s Party, but aside from a general lack of political freedoms, the economy is impressively deregulated. At least by Venusian standards, Borostyan is ancapistan with communist aesthetics. Like with Hevelia and Novy Usvit, this is heavily-correlated with continued contact-by-migration with Borostyan’s motherland, Hungary.

The flag of Bactria (Jmhwra Dmwkeratake Bakhtrah) reflects the fraught status of the Afghan communist government in its rushed simplicity - a red banner with a coat of arms slapped on it, nothing more to say here.

Bactria is an interesting place, because it’s, proportionately, much more diverse than its motherland, Afghanistan. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan encouraged the settlement of Afghan Shias, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Baháʼís, Zoroastrians and Christians in addition to the Sunni majority, along with ethnic minorities like Hazaras, Balochis, Uzbeks, Arabs, Pashais and more, besides the dominant Tajik and Pashtun ethnicities. The key to social harmony across Bactria’s three habitats has been the promotion of socialist solidarity, as well as eclectic melting-pot policies using Buddhist meditation as a means of building a common Bactrian culture. Conservative Afghans kinda hate it, but Bactria and Afghanistan aren’t really on good speaking terms anyway.

The flag of Shukra (Shukra Phedareshan) consists of a bicolor and diamond in the colors of the Indian national flag, along with a seal depicting Surya’s seven horses pulling a space-age chariot into the heavens, alongside a modern spacecraft, with India’s national symbol, the Ashoka Chakra, proudly emblazoned, alongside the flags of India and the USSR.

India’s something of an odd-country-out, for while she certainly flirted with socialism, French-kissed it even, she never took the full plunge. Still, India was in the Soviet sphere of influence after the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, and what India lacked in high-tech industries, she made up for in providing cheap labor and raw materials for the Interkosmos program. Shukra is the third-largest of the Venusian polities in 2021 in terms of population, coming in at 1.2 million people. A not-insignificant percentage of Shukra’s population are Indians more recently displaced by the tragedy of the Punjab War of 2008-2010, but these are fairly few in number, simply because living space on Venus is at a premium, and every square centimeter has to be built from steel and carbon fiber, and held aloft by lifting gases which need to be synthesized at a cost. While the Pravasi (Indians displaced by nuclear war, predominantly Indian Muslims) have been dispersed across the Earth and beyond, to the colonies all over the Solar System, it weighs on the Shukrans of Venus that they have been unable to bring in more of their countrymen.

Shukra differs from the other countries here in that it doesn’t have that classic commie aesthetic, rather, it’s got more of a...technocratic thing going on. There are Nehru jackets everywhere, engineers and scientists dominate the political hierarchy. Shukra, on paper, is a democracy, but experts are given positions of power in the political system, as a low-key new caste of technologist Brahmins.

Description
Let's start off the New Year with COMMUNISM

These are new flags for the original twelve polities on Venus. The Soviet colony, the Confederation of Veneran Republics; the East German colony, the Neu-Dresden Democratic Republic; the Polish colony, the People’s Republic of Hevelia; the Cuban colony, the Republic of Santamaria; the Romanian colony, the Socialist Republic of Înfloria; the Mongolian colony, the Republic of Shar-Tsetseg; the Czechoslovak colony, the Czechoslovak Republic of Novy Usvit; the Bulgarian colony, the Republic of Nadezhda, the Vietnamese colony, the Socialist Republic of Mauvang; the Hungarian colony, the Confederation of Borostyan; the Afghan colony, the Democratic Republic of Bactria; and the Indian colony, the Shukra Federation.

The flag of the KVR (Konfederatsiya Veneranskikh Respublik) evokes the basic imagery of the Soviet banner, and includes the red star/hammer-sickle imagery, but also a wreath made from a gear and wheat, surrounding the visage of the Venera-4 probe, the first man-made object to reach Venus (“the industry and agriculture of the Soviet Union nurturing the future of socialist scientific ambition”). The two dates flanking the red star of the Communist Party, 1967 and 1978, respectively represent the arrival of Venera-4 to Venus in 1967, and Valentina Tereshkova’s 1978 mission to Venus - the first human to “land” on the “Yellow Planet”. The yellow-white stripes, meanwhile, represent the clouds of the upper Venusian atmosphere. The initials “KVR” are also present in Cyrillic as “KBP”.

In 2021, the KVR is the largest and most populous single polity on Venus, with forty-six major aerostat habitats and a population of 5.3 million people. The population is overwhelmingly ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, with smaller numbers of colonists from Central Asia, the former Baltic republics and the Caucasus countries, as well as a broader international population, including Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Western Europeans, Americans, Arabs, Africans and more. Whereas the USSR back on Earth managed to successfully liberalize and reform into a social-democratic federation, the KVR became a time capsule of sorts, and yet also a divergence. Communism died out in the USSR, but persists in the KVR, albeit with a healthy dose of “market pragmatism” - the realities of central planning don’t always lend themselves to adaptation on a hardcore world like Venus, where productivity and innovation can mean the difference between life and death. This, alongside extensive use of vacuum-tube computers for resource allocation and inventorying; while not terribly efficient, the KVR old guard still want their economic planning and insist that it works if you computerize everything.

Whereas Mars was advertised to prospective colonists across the Free World as a traditional frontier where you could get rich, start a family, and become a big fish in a small pond, Venus was simultaneously a great hopeful sky for idealistic socialist experiments away from capitalist aggression, and, after the end of the Proletarian Experiment around the world, a nostalgic redoubt for those who missed the discipline of older authoritarianism. Indeed, the KVR served as a pressure-release valve for the more ideological and zealous elements of Soviet society, displeased by the Kosygin, Andropov and Gorbachev milieu of reforms of the 70’s and 80’s. While for younger generations of (very online) leftist colonists moving to the KVR from cushy Western countries in the 2010s, they come for the (literally) lofty idealism, but end up getting used to the realities of living on Venus, and assimilating into a world that has only known red banners.

The flag of Neu-Dresden (Neu-Dresden Demokratische Republik) features the insignia of the East German National People’s Air Force, on a black field (representing space), over gold stripe (representing the Venusian atmosphere), with a red stripe (representing Neu-Dresden’s aerostats in the habitable zone) in between.

Neu-Dresden is the second-largest Venusian polity, with a population of 2.3 million, thanks to East Germany’s zealous colonization program. Because the NDDR held so much propaganda value to the East German regime, colonists were typically selected based on how loyal they were to the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). So when reunification came in 1989, most of the diehard SED partisans in the NDDR weren’t having any of it, and Neu-Dresden became the first offworld polity to formally secede from the Earth. Well. They were already de facto independent of East Berlin, just by virtue of having a huge gulf of space in between them, but Neu-Dresden for about a decade took a very hardline “anti-Earth” party line, condemning the capitalist-fascist conquest of East Germany by the West. While there was a brief moment where the NDDR claimed to be the true successor to the GDR, including its claims over former West Germany, by the end of the 90s, this was dropped in place of simply writing off the Earth entirely and treating Neu-Dresden as a socialist ark, encouraging as many former East German citizens as possible to migrate to Venus. For a while, on Earth, there was a trend of Hollywood action movies in the 90’s with East German terrorists from space as the bad guys.

As of 2021, like the KVR, Neu-Dresden is still a cultural and political time capsule of the old East German regime, which is why most Ostalgie-stricken Germans from the former GDR have opted to move to Venus. However, in many ways, Neu-Dresden in 2021 has evolved into a country and culture increasingly unlike either Germany. The locals still speak German, for sure, but their dialect is filling up with Russian and Indian loanwords; the bureaucratic nomenclature of the East German state has simply become the normal way Neu-Dresdeners talk (you call them “coffins”, Neu-Dresdeners call them “Erdmöbel” or “ground furniture”); and in fact, more and more Neu-Dresdeners are naming their kids according to a bizarre gender-neutral spin on Russian patronymics (ex: Erik Schwarzkopf and Tanya Schwarzkopf are good and law-abiding citizens of the NDDR, and have two children, Gretchen Tanyaskind Schwarzkopf and Linus Ericskind Schwarzkopf). Additionally, whereas both East and West Germany had common German traditions to fall back on, the ideological zeal of the SED colonists of Neu-Dresden mean those born and raised here have mostly red banners, socialist mythology, and the peculiarities of East Germany (fascination with Native Americans and so-called “Red Westerns”, the state-approved rock band Puhdys, Schlager music, Der schwarze Kanal), as the clay with which to mold and shape their own culture from.

The flag of Hevelia (Republika Ludowa Hewelia) is a simple but elegant design, consisting of the red-white Polish bicolor, defaced with a triangular device featuring the colony’s name in Polish, a stylized rocket ship, and the flags of the USSR and Poland.

POLAN CAN INTO SPACE! Named after the 17th century Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius, Helvelia’s a lovely little colony which is still running on the retro socialist OS, but is also still tight with its motherland, Poland, where much of its Terran immigration still hails from, and Hevelia is also the most democratic and non-authoritarian of the Venusian countries mentioned here, in no small part thanks to this influence.

The flag of Santamaría (República de Santamaría) is essentially a re-interpretation of the original Cuban flag, with a more “revolutionary” vibe. The half-red, half-stripey star is taken from the Cuban Interkosmos mission of our timeline.

Santamaría is named after Cuban revolutionary martyr, Abel Santamaría, and while Cuba itself transitioned from communist authoritarianism to multi-party social democracy in the early 90’s, Santamaría still has a decent number of old school commies running the show, a number which grew when a bunch of guys with skeletons in their closets decided to skip planets ahead of Cuba’s truth and reconciliation commission in the late 1990s, along with a number of American fugitives who fled to Cuba during the Cold War and wanted out before they could be extradited to the US, such as Nehanda Abiodun, Robert Vesco, Víctor Manuel Gerena and Assata Shakur. There are still fairly close ties between Santamaría and Cuba, or at least, as close as ties can be when you live on different planets, but the perception among the Santamaríans is that Cuba has spread her legs too wide for the Americans. Havana, as they see it, is becoming another suburb of Miami. Joining the communist old guard are younger radical Cuban and Caribbean youths nostalgic for an era they weren’t around to see, and therefore romanticize.

The flag of Înfloria (Republica Socialistă Înfloria) essentially does what Neu-Dresden does, by reinterpreting an old Earth tricolor for a Venusian context; blue represents either space or the uppermost layers of the atmosphere, yellow the sulphury clouds, and red the Hellish surface of Venus. The flag also has a variant of the emblem of the Socialist Republic of Romania, only instead of the Romanian landscape, it features three aerostats and an airship, just above the clouds of Venus, with the sun and its rays above them.

Înfloria (from the Vulgar Latin “inflorīre”, meaning “blossom” or “to flower”) is certainly an odd bird. A bit like Venusian Florida, as the name might imply. Despite the rather tenuous relationship between the USSR and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, the latter was able to participate in the Interkosmos program on Venus. The colonization of Venus by Romania was pursued enthusiastically by the Ceaușescu regime, and many followers of his cult of personality settled the original aerostat, Înfloria-1. Back on Earth, Ceaușescu narrowly avoided execution in 1989, when anti-communist revolutionaries executed his body-double on TV, and then he and other top Romanian officials fled the country to Switzerland, before escaping to Înfloria on a Thai spacecraft by the end of 1989, arriving in early 1991. For Înflorians who were born and raised in the colonies since the early 1980s, this was an exciting time: meeting the “Conducător”, whose youthful picture hung in every room in the colony. However, the functionaries and leaders who actually called the shots and the day-to-day operations of the Romanian aerostats, had cultivated their own political culture and balance of power, far, far away from the prying eyes of Ceaușescu’s police state. The dictator thought he would be able to live like a king on Venus, but in truth, he became a prisoner in a pretty glass display case. He adopted the formal title of Conducător, complete with a new presidential scepter, and even a throne, but no real political power. Despite being the idol of the Înflorian masses, true power rested in the hands of the real movers and shakers within the Înflorian Communist Party, the so-called “Breasla” (“Guild”), and the office of the Colonial Governor. Ceaușescu would become the ceremonial head of the Party, and after his death in 1995 at the age of 77 (some say it was in reaction to learning that, back on Earth, Romania had restored Michael I to the throne of a new constitutional monarchy), Nicolae’s son, Valentin, became the new Conducător, who still fills the office to this day.

While communism is gone on Înfloria, Ceaușescu’s old cult of personality persists on the aerostat in the form of well-maintained murals and old propaganda posters, coexisting alongside adverts for the Nintendo 64 or Coca-Cola - or rather, Venusian-made knockoffs of both. The portraits of both Ceaușescus, Nicolae and Valentin, are in nearly every room and in every public space on Înfloria’s five aerostat colonies. It’s still an authoritarian regime run by the Governor and only has one legal political party, but the economy has that familiar “market pragmatism” flavor you’ll get used to on Venus, if more cronyistic than usual. Everyone abides by a North Korea-style dress code for men and women, which, while by itself not unusual for a Venusian sky-colony even in 2021, the bit with the radios in every home that can’t be turned off, and weekly “community-strengthening” exercises that totally don’t resemble “Five Minutes of Hate”, and the belief among many Înflorians that Nicolae Ceaușescu’s soul boarded a UFO bound for Aldebaran...well, at least they’re friendly people.

The flag of Shar-Tsetseg (Bügd Nairamdakh Shar-Tsetseg) is a red-yellow bicolor with the Interkosmos logo surrounded by the red flower of the Mongolian Communist Party (ironically, “Shar-Tsetseg” means “Yellow Flower”); the Interkosmos logo has the colony’s name in Mongolian Cyrillic, and this whole device sits beneath the Mongol and Soviet banners.

Mongolia has had a fairly lax commitment to colonizing Venus, due in large part to Ulanbaatar not seeing space as especially important for Mongolia. As such, Shar-Tsetseg consists of only one eponymous aerostat. The most use Mongolia saw for its Venus program was as a convenient place for Mongolian leader Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal to relocate his political opponents during his erratic purges of the party leadership in the early 1980s. When Tsedenbal was forcibly retired in 1984 and Jambyn Batmönkh replaced him, Shar-Tsetseg was a bit of an awkward reminder of Tsedenbal’s senile tyranny. This changed very briefly in the late 1990s, after the collapse of communism in Mongolia and the arrival of nostalgic/guilty Mongol communists...many of whom were Tsedenbal supporters. Life’s funny that way. Anyhow, Shar-Tsetseg’s a pretty chill, sleepy little Venus colony, locals are friendly and low-key. The sounds of throat-singing and horsehead fiddles fill the halls, which still have faded murals of Comrade Tsedenbal telling you to think about why you’re there.

The flag of Novy Usvit (Československá Republika Nový Usvit) consists of the colony’s official emblem - a gold hexagon with the Czechoslovak and Soviet flags, the Interkosmos logo in Czechoslovak colors, and the dates “1948” and “1984” commemorating the founding of communist Czechoslovakia and the establishment of the Novy Usvit colony. The asahi-style “rising sun” motif is a callback to the name of the colony, “Novy Usvit”, which means “New Dawn”.

Like Hevelia, Novy Usvit has maintained close ties with its Czechoslovak motherland, and is a bit more liberal for it. Novy Usvit’s system is a bit less bureaucratic and more technocratic than a lot of the other Venusian polities, being run mostly by engineers, a policy they adopted from their Shukran comrades. Indeed, it was Novy Usviti scientists who developed the Adamski-Vacek Process together with their Hevelian and Veneran counterparts in 1987, which allows for low-cost energy-efficient synthesis of carbon nanotubes, making this space-age wonder a cheap, commercially-viable building material for all mankind, an accomplishment celebrated in East Bloc propaganda at the time as “Mastery of the People’s Molecule”.

The flag of Nadezhda (Republika Nadezhda) is based on the Bulgarian white-green-red tricolor, with the white and green stripes on the hoist and a large red field, defaced with the insignia of the first Bulgarian colony mission to Venus: a yellow globe, the Bulgarian and Soviet flags arcing over it like a rainbow, below a rampant lion (a symbol of the Bulgarian nation since at least 1294), with a red star above, and the dates 681, 1944 and 1982 representing the foundation of the First Bulgarian Empire, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and the Bulgarian colonization of Venus, respectively. The emblem is surrounded by a “wreath” of vacuum tubes, symbolizing Nadezhda’s leading industry, electronics.

Back on Earth, communist Bulgaria used to have a reputation for churning out computers, earning it the monicker of the “East Bloc Silicon Valley”, and indeed, Bulgarian administrative practices were the envy of the Warsaw Pact. Nadezhda has inherited this reputation to an extent, and is where most of those knock-off Nintendo 64s come from. They’re also deep into cybernetic socialism; no, not red cyborgs (Venusians are actually rather skeptical of transhumanism), I mean computerized economic planning. While computerized economic plans are common across Venus, Nadezhda practically fetishizes its computer networks.

The flag of Mauvang (Cộng Hòa Xã Hội Chủ Nghĩa Màu Vàng) evokes the colors of the Viet Cong flag, the star from the first flag of North Vietnam (used from 1945-1955), a yellow circle to represent Venus and a pair of wings, because aerostats.

Not a lot to say about Mauvang, honestly. Vietnam was unable to really contribute a lot to Interkosmos besides leasing Phạm Tuân Launch Center to the Soviets on Hon Khaoi Island. This was mostly because after conquering the capitalist southern half of the country and dismantling the southern economy, surprise, surprise, there was a ruinous economic crash. However, Vietnam’s experience with market reforms would go on to inform Mauvang’s own flavor of “market pragmatism”. Yeah, Venusians use that phrase a lot, because they don’t want to admit when they’re being capitalists.

The flag of Borostyan (Borostyán Szövetsége) isn’t terribly inventive. It’s a Hungarian flag with the Borostyan-1 mission patch used by the first colony mission to Venus.

Of all the Venusian countries to adopt “market pragmatism”, Borostyan has been the most enthusiastic. Like most of the other guys here, Borostyan is a single-party state, run by the Borostyan Socialist Worker’s Party, but aside from a general lack of political freedoms, the economy is impressively deregulated. At least by Venusian standards, Borostyan is ancapistan with communist aesthetics. Like with Hevelia and Novy Usvit, this is heavily-correlated with continued contact-by-migration with Borostyan’s motherland, Hungary.

The flag of Bactria (Jmhwra Dmwkeratake Bakhtrah) reflects the fraught status of the Afghan communist government in its rushed simplicity - a red banner with a coat of arms slapped on it, nothing more to say here.

Bactria is an interesting place, because it’s, proportionately, much more diverse than its motherland, Afghanistan. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan encouraged the settlement of Afghan Shias, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Baháʼís, Zoroastrians and Christians in addition to the Sunni majority, along with ethnic minorities like Hazaras, Balochis, Uzbeks, Arabs, Pashais and more, besides the dominant Tajik and Pashtun ethnicities. The key to social harmony across Bactria’s three habitats has been the promotion of socialist solidarity, as well as eclectic melting-pot policies using Buddhist meditation as a means of building a common Bactrian culture. Conservative Afghans kinda hate it, but Bactria and Afghanistan aren’t really on good speaking terms anyway.

The flag of Shukra (Shukra Phedareshan) consists of a bicolor and diamond in the colors of the Indian national flag, along with a seal depicting Surya’s seven horses pulling a space-age chariot into the heavens, alongside a modern spacecraft, with India’s national symbol, the Ashoka Chakra, proudly emblazoned, alongside the flags of India and the USSR.

India’s something of an odd-country-out, for while she certainly flirted with socialism, French-kissed it even, she never took the full plunge. Still, India was in the Soviet sphere of influence after the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, and what India lacked in high-tech industries, she made up for in providing cheap labor and raw materials for the Interkosmos program. Shukra is the third-largest of the Venusian polities in 2021 in terms of population, coming in at 1.2 million people. A not-insignificant percentage of Shukra’s population are Indians more recently displaced by the tragedy of the Punjab War of 2008-2010, but these are fairly few in number, simply because living space on Venus is at a premium, and every square centimeter has to be built from steel and carbon fiber, and held aloft by lifting gases which need to be synthesized at a cost. While the Pravasi (Indians displaced by nuclear war, predominantly Indian Muslims) have been dispersed across the Earth and beyond, to the colonies all over the Solar System, it weighs on the Shukrans of Venus that they have been unable to bring in more of their countrymen.

Shukra differs from the other countries here in that it doesn’t have that classic commie aesthetic, rather, it’s got more of a...technocratic thing going on. There are Nehru jackets everywhere, engineers and scientists dominate the political hierarchy. Shukra, on paper, is a democracy, but experts are given positions of power in the political system, as a low-key new caste of technologist Brahmins.