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Description
A somewhat old (and somewhat crappy-looking) map, a Sovietwank inspired by Turtledove's "the Gladiator"...

his is a TL in which the Soviets were a bit luckier in their post-Lenin leadership and the US stayed out of the war in Europe. The Soviets took most of Europe, the British moving in to liberate France, S. Italy, and another few bits: this rather alarmed the US, which quickly moved into Cold War mode. However, with a. a slower Manhattan project, and b. the Soviets getting pretty much _all_ the German rocket scientists, and c. a USSR with a bigger resource base for building air defenses, and d. a USSR which made a genuine effort to support science even when it wasn’t a matter of catching up with the other guy (Lysenko in this world never got past teaching 5th graders in Omsk), there was a brief moment in the 60’s in which the USSR had a first-strike edge. And during the Iranian Missile Crisis, they took their chance.

In the immortal words of General “Buck” Turgidson, the USSR “got its hair mussed” - especially it’s western European and far eastern regions - but they survived. And after occupying the US and the remains of Western Europe, they set about Communizing the world, at atomic gun-point if necessary.

Today, the USSR stretches from Canada to Japan (rather badly depopulated in WWIII, if not quite so badly as the UK). The huge complex is a bit shaky, but relentless ideological indoctrination, an army still loyal to the state, the omnipresent secret police, and the fear of a nuclear civil war manage to keep things together (although there is something of a split between a “Latin” block and a “Slavic” block within the political leadership. Germans still have a hard time breaking into the higher party echelons). There has been a great deal of movement of population: Slavs into Canada and the UK, Germans to Siberia and Central Asia, etc. Its roughly as authoritarian as OTL under Brezhnev, but less cynical: there is no West to show by comparison how shitty a job the Soviet economy is doing, no elite-only special stores stocked with western goods, and still a fair deal of belief in the perfectibility of the system, although things are currently fairly crappy.

And there are worrying signs: even with the inherited wealth of the conquered west, even with the resources of half the globe to exploit, the planned economy is reaching it’s limits: productivity growth remains sluggish, living standards have been stagnating for almost a decade, and the pollution is ghastly. The standard of living is higher than it ever reached in our USSR, and there’s enough to eat (with US farmers rather less productive post WWIII, the Soviets had to bite the bullet and seriously reform their agriculture starting in the late 60’s), but people are still standing in line for shoes and such a lot of the time. A million square miles of taiga are dying as a result of the rerouting of a large part of the Siberian rivers to water Central Asia and refill the Aral, and the “environmental” movement started by powerful party officials who enjoy the Great Outdoors is only slowly making headway.

Life is fairly dull as long as you keep clear of the secret police: TV is bland, the best music comes from India and Latin America, and there is currently a banana shortage. The military parades in Red Square happen less often, now that there are no longer any serious competitors to impress.

Morocco to Syria is OTL Syria writ large, with extra repression: the tightly-controlled puppet states of Iran, Greater Iraq, and the Shi’a People’s Republic are even more repressive than the USSR proper, and have largely crushed their Islamic rebels, but low-level unrest still seethes. (Afghanistan, never invaded in this world, is theoretically under the control of a Communist regime in Kabul, but half the country is essentially run by local warlords bought off by the government on Mondays, shelled heavily on Tuesdays, reconciled on Wednesdays.)

India is an irritant: the Congress Party is more socialist than OTL, but allows an alarming amount of press freedom, and even allows weak (socialist and communist) opposition parties. Still, India is too poor and weak to be an alternate model for anyone, and the USSR has too much on its plate to bother occupying the place.

The Chinese, too, would be alarmed: the Chinese generally dominate in SE Asia, and would consider a Soviet occupation of India an intrusion on their “space.” And the Chinese, who developed nukes with Soviet aid a few years before WWIII, are the only other power on earth the Soviets allow to have nuclear weapons: a small, national-pride sort of arsenal, to be sure, but after WWIII the Soviets are rather allergic to the notion of nuclear war. And the Chinese are allies: there never was a Sino-Soviet split in this TL (some tensions, to be sure, but fortunately Mao died of radiation poisoning shortly after WWIII), the Chinese suffered even worse than the USSR in the war from US attacks, and the Chinese are both important for the Soviet economy as a source of labor and location of investment, and increasingly provide warm bodies to keep order worldwide. Still, the Soviets don’t entirely trust them, and the feeling is mutual. China has followed a more conventional “Soviet” model in development, (greatly aided by cheap access to Soviet raw materials wealth), and looks a bit like the 1970’s USSR, although a small-scale free market exists.

Africa, the Americas, and some parts of SE Asia are a bit of a mess - Communism managed to make the USSR a superpower, but seems to have done rather little for a number of third-world countries. (The USSR blames the local leadership). Indonesia essentially collapsed economically in the 90’s, and is currently being economically “restructured” under close Soviet supervision. Africa is worse: a number of the Communist regimes set up by the USSR after the collapse of the West have failed so badly that the USSR has moved in to bring order, industrial employment, and better roads with a heavy hand and the frequent use of impressed labor. (The Soviets call it modernization: the more-or-less functional African regimes call it a return to colonialism).

Latin America is a mix of nasty leftist one-party states and Juntas and Communist regimes on Soviet leashes of various length. The Mexicans are one of the more successful regimes, having heavily industrialized since WWIII: Mexico city is even more polluted than OTL, although the secret police are cheaper to bribe. Brazil is weak, corrupt, and threatened with Soviet intervention if it can’t get the apocalyptic Christian resistance movement in the back country under control. (Some parts of Latin America are actually a little better off than OTL: as in Cuba, there has been some serious efforts to improve health care, education, etc.).

Australia-NZ, reorganized as Communist regimes under the nuclear gun in the late 70’s, are rather grim, gritty sort of places, like OTL Czechoslovakia in the early 80’s, but the beaches are still nice and the beer remains palatable.

The US is a headache. The NE, rather depopulated and incorporated into the USSR, is fairly quiet, but the rest of it managed to make things ungovernable for the previous puppet regime, and the USSR has been forced to move in troops again. Currently the main focus of resistance has moved from the Appalachians to the Rockies.

The Soviet leadership continues to struggle with the economy. Around and around the abyss of capitalism they circle, and so far have refused to look into it: there must be _some_ proper, collectivist way to solve the problems that plague the world. Science, surely, can solve the problems of poverty: but robot labor, free power, endless vat-grown sausages, whatever, so far fail to materialize. In spite of the USSR’s fascination with science, technology is generally behind OTL: it’s a poorer world, with less resources and less free transfer of information (the USSR makes decent supercomputers, but no PCs, and there is no internet). After unmanned probes convinced the leadership that it would be a money hole, manned space exploration has been called off. There have been a lot of mega-engineering projects, some of them (such as the irrigation of Central Asia) with some bad side effects: but the Bering Straits Bridge will be opened any decade now…(roads and bridges and railroads, the Soviets have a lot more than OTL: endless highways along which buzz crappy but easily repairable little cars and huge trucks driven by truckers usually on at least two kinds of pills).

On the bright side, the leadership has accepted the problem of global warming, and is moving vigorously to deal with the problem. Let a thousand almost-safe nuclear reactors sprout! Let ten billion carcinogenically-manufactured solar panels bloom!

Description
A somewhat old (and somewhat crappy-looking) map, a Sovietwank inspired by Turtledove's "the Gladiator"...

his is a TL in which the Soviets were a bit luckier in their post-Lenin leadership and the US stayed out of the war in Europe. The Soviets took most of Europe, the British moving in to liberate France, S. Italy, and another few bits: this rather alarmed the US, which quickly moved into Cold War mode. However, with a. a slower Manhattan project, and b. the Soviets getting pretty much _all_ the German rocket scientists, and c. a USSR with a bigger resource base for building air defenses, and d. a USSR which made a genuine effort to support science even when it wasn’t a matter of catching up with the other guy (Lysenko in this world never got past teaching 5th graders in Omsk), there was a brief moment in the 60’s in which the USSR had a first-strike edge. And during the Iranian Missile Crisis, they took their chance.

In the immortal words of General “Buck” Turgidson, the USSR “got its hair mussed” - especially it’s western European and far eastern regions - but they survived. And after occupying the US and the remains of Western Europe, they set about Communizing the world, at atomic gun-point if necessary.

Today, the USSR stretches from Canada to Japan (rather badly depopulated in WWIII, if not quite so badly as the UK). The huge complex is a bit shaky, but relentless ideological indoctrination, an army still loyal to the state, the omnipresent secret police, and the fear of a nuclear civil war manage to keep things together (although there is something of a split between a “Latin” block and a “Slavic” block within the political leadership. Germans still have a hard time breaking into the higher party echelons). There has been a great deal of movement of population: Slavs into Canada and the UK, Germans to Siberia and Central Asia, etc. Its roughly as authoritarian as OTL under Brezhnev, but less cynical: there is no West to show by comparison how shitty a job the Soviet economy is doing, no elite-only special stores stocked with western goods, and still a fair deal of belief in the perfectibility of the system, although things are currently fairly crappy.

And there are worrying signs: even with the inherited wealth of the conquered west, even with the resources of half the globe to exploit, the planned economy is reaching it’s limits: productivity growth remains sluggish, living standards have been stagnating for almost a decade, and the pollution is ghastly. The standard of living is higher than it ever reached in our USSR, and there’s enough to eat (with US farmers rather less productive post WWIII, the Soviets had to bite the bullet and seriously reform their agriculture starting in the late 60’s), but people are still standing in line for shoes and such a lot of the time. A million square miles of taiga are dying as a result of the rerouting of a large part of the Siberian rivers to water Central Asia and refill the Aral, and the “environmental” movement started by powerful party officials who enjoy the Great Outdoors is only slowly making headway.

Life is fairly dull as long as you keep clear of the secret police: TV is bland, the best music comes from India and Latin America, and there is currently a banana shortage. The military parades in Red Square happen less often, now that there are no longer any serious competitors to impress.

Morocco to Syria is OTL Syria writ large, with extra repression: the tightly-controlled puppet states of Iran, Greater Iraq, and the Shi’a People’s Republic are even more repressive than the USSR proper, and have largely crushed their Islamic rebels, but low-level unrest still seethes. (Afghanistan, never invaded in this world, is theoretically under the control of a Communist regime in Kabul, but half the country is essentially run by local warlords bought off by the government on Mondays, shelled heavily on Tuesdays, reconciled on Wednesdays.)

India is an irritant: the Congress Party is more socialist than OTL, but allows an alarming amount of press freedom, and even allows weak (socialist and communist) opposition parties. Still, India is too poor and weak to be an alternate model for anyone, and the USSR has too much on its plate to bother occupying the place.

The Chinese, too, would be alarmed: the Chinese generally dominate in SE Asia, and would consider a Soviet occupation of India an intrusion on their “space.” And the Chinese, who developed nukes with Soviet aid a few years before WWIII, are the only other power on earth the Soviets allow to have nuclear weapons: a small, national-pride sort of arsenal, to be sure, but after WWIII the Soviets are rather allergic to the notion of nuclear war. And the Chinese are allies: there never was a Sino-Soviet split in this TL (some tensions, to be sure, but fortunately Mao died of radiation poisoning shortly after WWIII), the Chinese suffered even worse than the USSR in the war from US attacks, and the Chinese are both important for the Soviet economy as a source of labor and location of investment, and increasingly provide warm bodies to keep order worldwide. Still, the Soviets don’t entirely trust them, and the feeling is mutual. China has followed a more conventional “Soviet” model in development, (greatly aided by cheap access to Soviet raw materials wealth), and looks a bit like the 1970’s USSR, although a small-scale free market exists.

Africa, the Americas, and some parts of SE Asia are a bit of a mess - Communism managed to make the USSR a superpower, but seems to have done rather little for a number of third-world countries. (The USSR blames the local leadership). Indonesia essentially collapsed economically in the 90’s, and is currently being economically “restructured” under close Soviet supervision. Africa is worse: a number of the Communist regimes set up by the USSR after the collapse of the West have failed so badly that the USSR has moved in to bring order, industrial employment, and better roads with a heavy hand and the frequent use of impressed labor. (The Soviets call it modernization: the more-or-less functional African regimes call it a return to colonialism).

Latin America is a mix of nasty leftist one-party states and Juntas and Communist regimes on Soviet leashes of various length. The Mexicans are one of the more successful regimes, having heavily industrialized since WWIII: Mexico city is even more polluted than OTL, although the secret police are cheaper to bribe. Brazil is weak, corrupt, and threatened with Soviet intervention if it can’t get the apocalyptic Christian resistance movement in the back country under control. (Some parts of Latin America are actually a little better off than OTL: as in Cuba, there has been some serious efforts to improve health care, education, etc.).

Australia-NZ, reorganized as Communist regimes under the nuclear gun in the late 70’s, are rather grim, gritty sort of places, like OTL Czechoslovakia in the early 80’s, but the beaches are still nice and the beer remains palatable.

The US is a headache. The NE, rather depopulated and incorporated into the USSR, is fairly quiet, but the rest of it managed to make things ungovernable for the previous puppet regime, and the USSR has been forced to move in troops again. Currently the main focus of resistance has moved from the Appalachians to the Rockies.

The Soviet leadership continues to struggle with the economy. Around and around the abyss of capitalism they circle, and so far have refused to look into it: there must be _some_ proper, collectivist way to solve the problems that plague the world. Science, surely, can solve the problems of poverty: but robot labor, free power, endless vat-grown sausages, whatever, so far fail to materialize. In spite of the USSR’s fascination with science, technology is generally behind OTL: it’s a poorer world, with less resources and less free transfer of information (the USSR makes decent supercomputers, but no PCs, and there is no internet). After unmanned probes convinced the leadership that it would be a money hole, manned space exploration has been called off. There have been a lot of mega-engineering projects, some of them (such as the irrigation of Central Asia) with some bad side effects: but the Bering Straits Bridge will be opened any decade now…(roads and bridges and railroads, the Soviets have a lot more than OTL: endless highways along which buzz crappy but easily repairable little cars and huge trucks driven by truckers usually on at least two kinds of pills).

On the bright side, the leadership has accepted the problem of global warming, and is moving vigorously to deal with the problem. Let a thousand almost-safe nuclear reactors sprout! Let ten billion carcinogenically-manufactured solar panels bloom!