Chamberlain Grows a Spine and a German-Soviet Truce: Two WWII Alternate Timelines

The premiere alternate history forum on the Internet once again doesn't disappoint, with two interesting new timelines for your entertainment. Both are set during World War II, one beginning before the war actually starts and the other in 1942 or so. Here goes...

Defying The Storm-The mighty CalBear, the gear-head who wrote a post on this blog about the failure of the Iraqi Army against ISIS and a book-length alternate history on how the Nazis taking Stalingrad could have extended the war into the 1950s, came up with a somewhat more subtle scenario. The divergence is that Dr. Morrell, Hitler's doctor who was feeding him all sorts of drugs, is killed by Allied bombing and Hitler's new doctor discovers just what his predecessor was doing. Hitler is weaned off the various drugs and is much more clear-headed and not so nuts. Meanwhile, Stalin develops a kidney infection, ignores his doctors' advice, and dies just as the Soviets win the Battle of Kursk. As a result, the vague talks of a separate peace in 1943 that didn't go anywhere result in a compromise peace. Germany keeps the Baltics and parts of Ukraine and returns some territory to the Soviets, who in turn resume their pre-war trade with Germany. There's also some puppy-kicking by both sides--the Germans agree to return all Soviet prisoners of war, with those who fought for the German army specifically identified, while the Soviets in turn deporting all Soviet Jews into German-occupied Poland (!!).

(Just in case we forgot just how malignant the totalitarians were. CalBear's book depicts what the Nazis wanted to do to the Russians if they won, which would have been vastly worse.)

Now Germany is able to rely once more on Soviet oil and grain and can move its forces into Italy to contest the Allied advance and into France to deter a large-scale invasion. But the United States is about to unleash the atomic bomb and neither the Germans nor the Soviets think this peace will last. Things are about to get very interesting. This whole scenario was inspired by this depiction of a naval battle between the 1945-level U.S. Navy and what the Germans could have had if they'd won--or at least not lost--the war in the East, so we might be seeing that scenario at some point.

(EDIT: Owing to some forum drama about whether the USSR would have made such a peace treaty, the thread may have been moved to a members-only section. If you click on the link above and you go to a log-in screen, that might be what happened.)

Munich Shuffle: 1938-1942-This one diverges from our history during the Sudetenland Crisis. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is injured in a plane crash upon returning from a diplomatic visit to Germany. This delays the Munich Conference until after the Nazis' infamous Kristallnacht, which disabuses Chamberlain's notions that Hitler could be reasoned with. Although Czechoslovakia cannot be saved, British rearmament starts earlier than in real history and this has consequences, most obviously when the Germans attack Norway. The Germans also don't get Czechoslovak assets in British banks, something that will likely have some negative economic consequences for them.

(The book Wages of Destruction describes just how much of the early Nazi economy was smoke-and-mirrors nonsense kept going by loot from their earliest conquests, like the Austrian and Czechoslovak gold reserves.)

So if you're interested in World War II and in particular things that could have gone differently, these are both worth a read.

Lions Will Fight Bears: Britain In WWIII

I still check on the alternate history forum for interesting stories even though I'm still self-banned (and intend to stay that way). Most recently I checked out the section dedicated to finished timelines (content only, no reader comments like in the main forums) and found the scenario Lions Will Fight Bears: Britain In WWIII. The gist of it is that the hard-liner coup against Mikhail Gorbachev happens in 1988 rather than 1991 and rather than causing the Soviet Union to collapse as it did in our history, it imposes an unstable regime that soon goes completely paranoid and launches an attack on NATO thinking that NATO is going to attack them. Although the conflict only lasts a month or so and no nuclear weapons are used, it's still a pretty ugly situation, especially if you're a West German or a Dane.

I don't know the author, but he (when I was there the forum was very male-dominated) seems to know quite a lot about British politics and his focus is on the British, although obviously there's plenty about the US and Soviet Union too. And there's a lot of stuff in here I haven't read in the WWIII fiction I'm familiar with like The Third World War, Red Army, or Red Storm Rising.

*Something I'd never read before in WWIII fiction but should have been more obvious based on what happened with the COVID lockdowns is how disruptive war preparations would be to the societies in question even before the shooting starts. The author devotes several chapters to the problems the "transition to war" process causes the British public, problems that escalate into armed confrontations between cranky British civilians and American soldiers and even rioting due to transportation restrictions, business and school closures, etc.

*It was my understanding the British had lists of people to intern in the event of WWIII, which I assumed were people like British Communists who would be security risks. However, just who is on this list and why becomes a major issue.

*Also a 1988 WWIII is in the middle of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Not only did the Soviets support various factions of the IRA (which is, unbeknownst to enthusiastic Americans of Irish background in Boston, a Communist organization), but part of their pre-war destabilizing plan involves encouraging them to attack British and Loyalist forces more aggressively. This includes, among other things, killing future UK Prime Minister John Major. Between that, the stuff I referenced above, and the fact that most of the British military is fighting the Soviets, Northern Ireland collapses into civil war. And it gets ugly--Nationalist and Loyalist paramilitary groups routinely commit crimes against civilians from rival communities and it escalates into open ethnic cleansing, with the understrength British Army unable to do much to stop it. Prominent republican Gerry Adams ends up being tortured to death by Loyalist paramilitaries, for example.

*The scenario also includes Soviet attacks on the United States itself even though the war stays conventional--Soviet bombers operating from occupied parts of Scandinavia and even the Soviet mainland and Soviet naval forces are able to strike New England, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii. Soviet and Cuban forces raid the Florida Keys and even Florida itself. Usually in WWIII fiction the war doesn't come to the American homeland until the nukes start going off (think the film The Day After, in which there's fighting in Europe that soon leads to strategic nuclear use, or the novel Alas Babylon where the fighting starts in the Middle East). However, given the ranges of Soviet aircraft, the fact Soviet submarines and long-range aircraft would be equipped with cruise missiles, etc. that makes a lot of sense.

(In one of the "SDI Punk" blog posts, author Ken Prescott makes the point that cruise missiles made virtually every US Navy ship a potential threat to the Soviet homeland and thus the Soviets would need to hunt down all ships, not just the carriers and submarines carrying nuclear missiles. There's really no reason the Soviets couldn't do the same. And given the US's open society, it'd be a lot easier to infiltrate spies, commandoes, etc. in the fashion of the television series The Americans than the reverse.)

*And then there's the fun the KGB and other secret-police organizations get up to in occupied areas. Americans generally don't have to live with the concern that they'll be targeted on an individual level by an occupying army, but I imagine that was a very real concern for Europeans on the frontlines of the Cold War. It would be very easy for Soviet agents in open societies like West Germany, Sweden, Norway, etc. to assemble lists of people to arrest or kill in the event of Soviet occupation--local businessmen, politicians, clergy, retired soldiers, etc.

(The third of S.M. Stirling's Draka novels features American soldiers deploying into fallback positions in the Appalachians right before the balloon goes up. It's made explicit they've been erased from military records to forestall exactly that.)

In particular, American General John Shalikashvili--born in Poland and viewed by the Communist Poles as a traitor and son of a traitor despite becoming a U.S. citizen as a child--finds this out the hard way. And at a macro level there's the Nightmare Fuel of what the East Germans soldiers do in occupied West Germany, which they intend to absorb into a united Communist Germany. We're talking mass killings of captured military officers, removing books from libraries, civilians and captured enlisted men put to forced labor, etc.

*Speaking of him, since this is written well after the end of the Cold War and is intended to be faux history rather than an action thriller, we see a lot of real-life personalities. At the political level there's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and Vice-President George H.W. Bush, but there's also the British Michael Jackson (who prevented escalation between NATO and Russian forces in Kosovo in 1999 in real history), American Wesley Clark (who gave the orders in that situation), Colin Powell, and the victor of the Persian Gulf War Norman Schwarzkopf whom I remember being the great hero when I was a little kid.

The main problem I have with the scenario is that it's incredibly, incredibly detailed. We're talking beyond Clancy level in terms of descriptions of military movements, technology, etc. Although this reflects well on the author--he clearly knows his stuff--it's very dense and kind of a slog to read. Even though this sort of thing is ordinarily something I enjoy reading, I was skimming a lot. It took me three-odd days to finish reading the whole scenario.

Thoughts On Ken Prescott's Proposed "SDI-Punk"

I'm a member of an online networking forum for writers and a fellow forum member is Ken Prescott, who'd served as a Marine and wrote the Cold War thriller Not By Sight. In a discussion online, he proposed a new sub-genre called "SDI-Punk," in the vein of cyberpunk and its derivatives like steampunk. If one is going with "imaginative history," steampunk is Civil War to WWI, dieselpunk is WWI and WWII, and then you get into atompunk in the 1950s. Prescott's aesthetic is very late Cold War and derives its aesthetic from things like stealth technology, Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly described as "Star Wars"), and the mysterious Aurora aircraft. There are also plenty of "roads not taken" in regards to the space program in this period, like the X-30. Finally, "SDI-Punk" features a more muscular approach to the Cold War, as befitting someone of his background. He suggested that the best example of this genre is the Clint Eastwood film Firefox, in which an American pilot infiltrates the Soviet Union to steal a prototype Soviet jet controlled directly by the pilot's brain. However, it's not just all cool aircraft--there's culture stuff like cable TV, yuppies, and rap and social movements like the anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid movements. More on them later.

(Here's a guest post he wrote introducing the concept and here's a follow-up post on works of film and literature set in this genre. Firefox is just the beginning.)

This is something I found very interesting, considering I had recently blogged about adapting Dean Koontz's 1980s-set Watchers into a television series and both of us agreed that Stranger Things and The Americans fit in. Having discussed the concept with him and read his blog posts, here's my spin:

One criticism of steampunk is that it's all parasols, Victorian fashion, and a very rosy-eyed view of imperialism and doesn't take into account things like the labor movement, agitating for women's suffrage, and the ugly reality of imperialism epitomized by, "We have got the Maxim gun and they have not." Dieselpunk's politics tend to be a bit more obvious, with both Indiana Jones and the Rocketeer fighting the Nazis, the Shadow fighting Shiwan Khan (a stand-in for Imperial Japan?), and an older Indiana Jones dealing with both McCarthyite G-Men and the genuine Communist menace of Irina Spalko. Part of "punk" is being subversive of social norms and conventional morals and a big part of cyberpunk is hackers fighting corporate domination and high-tech street gangs and criminal organizations. Although Prescott acknowledged elements of this setting that would subvert the overall neo-Reaganite ethos on display with "morning in America" and Communist and terrorist villains with the anti-nuclear movement and the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" panic that led to a bunch of innocent people being jailed (I'd forgotten about that), I'm going to go a bit further down the rabbit hole.

So if I were writing an "SDI-Punk" story, I'd include more of a "punk" angle much like how I bring labor politics and racial issues into my steampunk fantasy novel Battle for the Wastelands and its companion novella "Son of Grendel." As mentioned in the original post, the 1980s had lots of rebellious movements against the anti-Communist/pro-capitalist consensus--the anti-nuclear movement, the green movement, and the growing agitation for world governments to do something about AIDS. There's also the anti-apartheid movement and the resulting plethora of villainous Afrikaners in films like Lethal Weapon II. Even the conservative Bill Cosby wouldn't let NBC remove anti-apartheid posters from the kids' bedrooms in The Cosby Show.

Since Prescott's goal was to create an aesthetic and setting for writers to play in, here're a couple "SDI Punk" scenario of my own creation that could work:

Sometime in the mid-1980s, South Africa's border wars with its neighbors escalate into a full-blown proxy war in the Arab-Israeli sense of the word. Perhaps South Africa's "destabilization" policies backfire, creating a united front of black-ruled left-wing states that's a conventional military threat rather than real history's seething messes. The US backs South Africa (albeit they're The Friend That Nobody Likes) against the "frontline states" backed by the USSR and Cuba. Worries about another Vietnam (and the massive political blowback the Reagan Administration would get from openly supporting the most flagrantly racist regime in the world) keep the U.S. from sending in troops to prevent a potential Soviet takeover of "the mineral treasure house" of southern Africa (which would also menace the "energy treasure house" of the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, the sheer distances involved, the growing sinkhole of Afghanistan, and the threat of South African nukes prevent the Soviets from intervening openly. 

However, the US and the Soviets both use the conflict as a chance to test out their newest and fanciest technological toys (either by letting their local proxies use them or sending in their own personnel on a very small scale like the Soviets did in Korea and Vietnam). There's also all sorts of black ops/intelligence skullduggery going around, including attempts by both sides to manage or manipulate popular protest movements. And although AIDS does not appear to have really gotten big in South Africa itself until the early 1990s, more US, Cuban, Soviet, and other Eastern Bloc personnel in Southern African more broadly could provide another victor for HIV to spread either locally or back into their home countries. Such a scenario could inflame the debate about the United States' association with South Africa and the possibility of getting pulled bit by bit into another war and even lead to cross-pollination between the antiwar, anti-apartheid, and anti-AIDS movements. 

(Depending on the personalities involved, one might also see changes in conservatives' attitudes toward AIDS sufferers--they might be more likely to sympathize with a deployed soldier given a bad blood transfusion to save his life or who made one bad decision with a local woman than with a drug addict or a homosexual. And bonus points if some dumbass starts attacking soldiers deployed in Southern Africa as AIDS vectors. Remember this would be around a decade after the controversies over Vietnam, which included instances of disrespect toward veterans. Even if it's not in the movement's best interest, there's always some idiot somewhere and people will talk.)

And although this is not as well known due to the Soviet Union being a closed society less tolerant of domestic political dissent, Afghanistan spawned a Soviet antiwar movement and a growing manpower drain in Africa might add fuel to the fire. The problems that prompted Gorbachev's reforms are still there, even if Prescott's vision requires a stronger USSR, plus internal Soviet politicking is more interesting (and more congruent with reality) than a purely monolithic "Evil Empire."

The Middle East could be another theater for an "SDI-Punk" story...there's Israel's war in Lebanon, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and the Iran-Iraq War. Charles Stross's novella "A Colder War" features the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Iraqis in Iran using Lovecraftian horrors, ultimately culminating in a World War III that features the US deploying atomic-powered bombers carrying Project Pluto nuclear-powered nuclear-armed cruise missiles against none other than Cthulhu. The more cautious/conservative/still-have-PTSD-from-WWII factions of the Soviet leadership aren't going to want an unstable third force on their border and the more aggressive and zealous-for-the-Revolution types might see this as the chance to get warm water ports at long last and put the West's oil supply under Soviet guns. Meanwhile, the US isn't going to want the Soviets to attempt the latter while claiming the former. And it was a war in Iran that spirals into the nuclear holocaust depicted in the amazingly depressing film Threads.

However, a more limited conflict might involve chronic troublemaker Moammar Gadhafi in Libya (who was parodied in the animated Transformers show), since he's so outlandish the Soviets aren't going to go to the mattresses for him. There were real-life skirmishes between Libyan and NATO forces and Gadhafi repeatedly meddled in Chad, so there's plenty of opportunity for "fun" that wouldn't necessarily risk World War III. Hmmm...Libyans as real-life Bond villains with some kind of oil-funded superweapon like Saddam Hussein's Project Babylon? Or, to justify the deployment of something more outlandish, perhaps something more sci-fi oriented like an anti-satellite laser weapon or an independent space program? You could tie in the cultural elements of the 1980s--CNN is reporting live on the early deployments of such things in Chad, devotees of "rap culture" fall for Gadhafi's pan-African schtick and agitate against US intervention, there're more mainstream concerns about another Vietnam, and so instead of an open invasion, you have some kind of balls-to-the-wall covert operation to steal or destroy this weapon like Firefox.

Anybody got any more ideas...?

Guest Post: "SDI-Punk" Literature and Film

(This post is the second part of an earlier blog post introducing the concept of "SDI-Punk" as a retrofuturist genre in the vein of steampunk and dieselpunk. Now we continue with existing works of fiction and non-fiction that would actually fit in this genre.)

RESOURCES

The core era of this genre is the 1983-1988 era, but antecedents could be found in the 1970s. Below is a partial list of works I would consider to be in or relevant to the genre.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION

SDI never really made its way to the big screen--or the small one. So, in addition to one piece of actual SDI-punkness, I offer other relevant movies and TV shows set in that era.

The Americans: This series focuses on the lives of Soviet illegals operating in the US during the 1980s. Sometimes, the plot deals with technology theft (which was a recurring theme throughout this period).

Firefox: The one truly SDI-punk movie entry. Underrated Clint Eastwood movie based on a novel by Craig Thomas. An American pilot, haunted by the demons of his time in Vietnam, must infiltrate a Soviet flight test facility and steal the ultimate warplane--and then get past Soviet defenses to get it to the West. An atmospheric score by Maurice Jarre, a decent adaption of the source novel into film (not an easy task at all), excellent flight sequences, and one of Clint Eastwood's more complex performances make this a worthwhile movie.

Robocop Trilogy: SDI plays a background role in the news updates, and some of the punk themes play out into the movies' "Delta City" arc.

The Hunt For Red October: Tom Clancy's debut novel made its way to the screen in 1990, and the results were outstanding. Excellent performances by Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery, excellent use of Navy support, and a storyline that conveyed the tension of the setting (1984) make it well worth watching.

No Way Out: Possibly the best spy movie of the 1980s. Paranoia you can cut with a knife, and multiple surprise-but-perfectly-logical twists keep you guessing beginning to end.

The Soldier: A fun romp that ends up with rogue agents (East AND West) conducting a nuclear standoff, with tons of action throughout. The soundtrack is by Tangerine Dream; it's a time capsule of the early 1980s. (Pay attention during the opening credits; you will see that material again.)

Stranger Things: 1980s period drama with government conspiracies meeting Middle America. (I haven't actually seen this show, but I've heard good things about it from various people I know.)

NOVELS

The pickings are MUCH better here. Below is a mere sampling of the riches to be found.

Dale Brown

Flight of the Old Dog: High-technology weapons, including a B-52 refitted with stealth technology(!), SDI plays a role.

Silver Tower: This one is another core SDI-Punk entry. The American Armstrong Space Station, armed with various weapons including a hyper-powerful laser, may be the only thing that can stop a Soviet invasion of Iran.

Tom Clancy

Cardinal of the Kremlin: Jack Ryan is at the focus of the race between the Americans and the Soviets to develop high-energy lasers for strategic defense, with espionage playing a core role. Ends with what would be an absolutely LEGENDARY covert operation. Definitely core SDI-Punk material.

Jim DeFelice

Coyote Bird: Published right at the end of the Cold War, it posited a US-Japan rivalry and hypersonic superplanes. Technology, pilots, and the interaction between them are the central themes of this novel.

David Drake

Skyripper: Former NSA agent Tom Kelly is called back in to service to manage the defection of a Soviet scientist who has the secret to powering space-based lasers. The kicker: The Soviet scientist is defecting because little voices are telling him that aliens are about to invade Earth. The protagonist isn't a very nice guy, but he has a definite sense of right and wrong, and he is brutally competent at his job.

Fortress: In an alternate history, JFK survived and put into motion Fortress--a space station armed with thousands of nuclear bombs. Problem: Nazis in flying saucers have hijacked it. (No, really.) Tom Kelly (yes, the same guy from Skyripper, different universe) to the rescue! (Oh, dear, the body count is going to be spectacular.)

Payne Harrison

Storming Intrepid: A Soviet agent hijacks a space shuttle carrying the first SDI satellite. America wants it back. Hilarity Ensues.

Donald Kingsbury

The Moon Goddess and the Son: Expanded version of the Analog serial from the late 1970s. The Soviets go into space in a big way in the late 1980s, and the US launches a crash program to beat them. SDI plays a core role. The punk elements revolve more around what happens when one man can become his own military-industrial complex, and how that could interact with strategic forces. In some ways, it hasn't aged well; in others, it's aged so well it's moved from "that's an interesting idea" to downright disturbing.

William Lovejoy

Black Sky: A joint US/Soviet suborbital stealth aircraft program goes up against their Japanese counterparts.

Delta Blue: An elite USAF spaceplane squadron must take on a resurgent Germany before their geothermal power project causes a global calamity.

Delta Green: Renegade Soviet hardliners steal a USAF spaceplane. Sequel to Delta Blue.

Janet Morris 

Warlord: Someone is killing former operatives of a CIA black project aimed at colonizing Mars. The two remaining survivors must navigate a covert war between the US and the USSR for control of space and flush out the killers. 

MEDUSA (With Chris Morris): Pure SDI-Punk. A CIA operative and a hotshot Air Force test pilot must stop a Soviet provocation aimed at American orbital defenses. Superplanes, lasers, and old-school spying and mayhem all play a part.

Active Measures (with David Drake): More SDI-Punk. The American President is a  Soviet mole, and things are cheerfully going to hell at home and abroad--and in space. Multiple spy plots crash into each other. First description I ever saw of a self-forging projectile charge (published in 1985).

M. E. Morris

Alpha Bug: A new Soviet space weapon threatens America's nuclear arsenal. A medically retired astronaut may be the only guy who can stop it. Action ranges from infiltrating Baikonur Cosmodrome to a dogfight over the Black Sea, with a final confrontation in orbit. SDI-Punk core material.

Ralph Peters

The War in 2020: Published in 1990, as the Cold War was waning, and America was fearing Japanese economic warfare. The US 7th Cavalry Regiment, equipped with the latest high-tech tilt-rotor gunships, is fighting a Japanese-backed Islamic invasion of Soviet Central Asia. The author described it as a novel of nightmares, and the description fits. SDI is in the background, as space-based defenses make central nuclear war impossible--and all manner of mayhem inevitable.

Gary Allen Ruse

A Game of Titans: Published in 1976. The USA and the USSR are squaring off in a remote corner of the Pacific for high stakes. The Soviet Navy sends their (then-new) V/STOL carrier Kiev; the United States Air Force sends a nuclear-powered airship(!), the Grand Eagle. The airship carries drones (then called "remote-piloted vehicles," or RPVs), a laser weapon(!), and Harrier jump-jets. Ruse takes an incredible premise and sells it well.

D. J. Savage

The Glass Lady: A prototype American orbital laser has malfunctioned and destroyed a Soviet research satellite. A joint US/Soviet space shuttle mission is the only chance to deactivate the weapon; if the mission fails, the shuttle crew will be "terminated with extreme prejudice."

Craig Thomas

Firefox: As mentioned above, American pilot Mitchell Gant must steal the ultimate warplane from a test facility deep inside the Soviet Union--and make it back out.

Firefox Down: Takes up right where Firefox ended. Forced to land on a frozen lake in Finland due to battle damage, Gant must escape Soviet capture while the British seek to recover the aircraft itself.

Winter Hawk: Gant is back, flying a stolen Hind helicopter gunship into the Soviet Union to rescue a CIA agent with information on Soviet space-based lasers, vitally needed to close a loophole in a soon-to-be-implemented arms treaty. But there is far more at stake. Complex plot and characterization, shifting alliances, and the stifling environment of Baikonur Cosmodrome make this one of Thomas' best novels.

ANTHOLOGIES

Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War: Ten volumes published from 1982 to 1990. Many stories and nonfiction essays about SDI and its potential impact on the world.

Dean Ing

Firefight 2000: Fiction and technology essays. Some interesting technology notions that are related to SDI.

NON-FICTION

Dean Ing & Leik Myrabo

The Future of Flight: A 1985 book on potential future aerospace technologies, most of which revolve around using high-energy lasers to beam energy to aerospace craft. Some math, but the authors do their best to keep it accessible to the layman.

David Pahl

Space Warfare and Strategic Defense: Large-format hardcover with gorgeous full-color art and photographs examining SDI from multiple angles; the author examines both the promise and the perils of orbital warfare and ballistic missile defenses.

Curtis Peebles

Battle for Space: Published in 1985. Examines the history and prospects for development of military space programs, including anti-satellite weapons and the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Jerry Pournelle & Dean Ing

Mutual Assured Survival: A 1984 book discussing (and advocating) ballistic missile defenses. Discusses technologies, project management, and places the argument in a larger context of renewing American space exploration.

TABLETOP GAMES

Steve Jackson Games

Orbit War: Originally published in 1984 in the SJG magazine, The Space Gamer. Interesting game of orbital warfare; the game gives a somewhat realistic model for orbital movement and even the Earth's rotation, creating a very dynamic battlefield. Units include space shuttles, space stations, killer satellites, nuclear weapons, mines, etc. Somewhat complex, but worthy of study. (The time I used orbital mechanics to slingshot a nuke into my opponent's space station was a thing of beauty.)

About the author: Ken Prescott is a Marine Corps veteran. He has worked as a management analyst, medical coder, and human resources specialist. His novel Not By Sight is available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon. He lives with his wife in San Diego, California.

Guest Post: Introducing SDI-PUNK, Or The Once And Future 1980s

It's morning in America, it's high noon in the Cold War, and America is on the HIGH-WA-AY TO . . . THE DAN-GER ZONE!

(Admit it, dear reader: you sang that last bit along with me.)

SDI-Punk is yet another form of retrofuturism, just as Steampunk reflects the Victorian vision of the future with its airships and steam-powered hardware, Dieselpunk represents a weird World War II, and Atompunk gives us the future as seen from a time when we really did vaporize entire islands as physics experiments.

SDI-Punk crosses the line of departure in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is focused on the military, intelligence gathering, and the military-industrial complex. The centerpiece of SDI-Punk is right there on the label: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and advanced aerospace technologies. The purpose of SDI was two-fold; first, to do research and development on ballistic missile defense, in order to invert the calculus that favored offense over defense; second, to help open a new "technological front" in the Cold War, outflanking the entire Soviet military industrial complex.

In our history, SDI was, arguably, the killing blow to the edifice that was the Soviet Union. German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once quipped that the USSR was "Upper Volta with missiles." Without missiles, the USSR was a ramshackle imperium where the bosses pretended to pay the workers, and in return the workers pretended to work. SDI eventually died quietly in 1993, barely a decade after it began, apparently no longer necessary because the Cold War was over.

But what if the USSR had been made of somewhat sterner stuff? SDI may have been championed by a Republican President, but it had bipartisan support in an era where "conservative Democrats" still existed. Had the Cold War still been going by the time a Democrat moved into 1600, SDI might have had a bureaucratic and legislative momentum of its own, perhaps eventually leading to deployed weapons.

SDI was just one piece of a much larger scheme of technological flanking maneuver in both the military and civilian realms. Other pieces included stealth aircraft (which would render most of the USSR's very expensive air defense network useless), smart weapons (more targets killed per sortie flown), advanced communications and intelligence systems (making the entire force more responsive and agile), Tomahawk land attack missiles (making US Navy surface ships--which had, since the end of WW2, been relegated to carrier escort missions--into lethal threats that would need to be tracked just like the carriers; this would overload the Soviet ocean surveillance system by giving it too many things to do at once), and using the KGB's penchant for technological theft to pass sabotaged equipment and unworkable designs to the Soviet Union.

The result of all that military investment played out on American television screens during Operation Desert Storm, when a U.S.-led coalition took only six weeks to turn the fourth-largest army in the world into the second-largest army in Iraq.

But enough of geopolitics and grand strategy. Like all literary punk, SDI-Punk is as much about the aesthetic and zeitgeist as it is about story and characters. So, what do we have to work with?

MORNING IN AMERICA

We were coming out of the post-Apollo, post-Vietnam, and post-1974 oil shock doldrums. NASA was returning to manned spaceflight with the Shuttle; it was easy to envision successor systems that would have a lower cost per pound to orbit. We actually started doing blue-collar stuff in space--fixing busted hardware in low orbit instead of simply writing it off.

High-end sports cars were almost universally wedge-shaped. (This is the way! I have spoken!)

Women's shoulders were padded, and women's hair was big. The mullet was popular among men, although not actually called that at the time; sometimes it was called "helmet hair," or the "Tennessee Tophat." Lee Iacocca made the white collar on a colored shirt the power fashion statement for men.

Personal computers were in their infancy (most home computers through the period had less memory than a typical CPU has for cache memory today), and networking was even more primitive (2400 baud over a dial-up modem was considered extremely quick until about 1988 or so). Nobody had any real idea what would happen, so predictions were all over the place, and almost nobody foreseeing anything like the World-Wide Web, social networking, online shopping, or Netflix. Computers and their impact on culture were trivial compared to today, and most of the impact was hype as opposed to substance. Computer networks, when they did appear and did play a role, looked like over-glorified USENET, without much in the way of graphics or video.

In Maryland, an insurance salesman named Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt For Red October, which became a sleeper best-seller, was praised by President Reagan as "the perfect yarn," and finally gave an identity to a genre known as the "technothriller," which fused real-world political and military strategy, operations, and military/law enforcement tactics into (usually) readable popular literature.

Music was . . . well, it was the 1980s. (You really did have to be there.) MTV actually played music videos. Hair metal, synthpop, rap music, punk rock, album-oriented rock, heartland rock, and many other genres coexisted happily, cross-pollinated one another, and even (in my never humble opinion) reached their peak expression in this era. 

HIGH NOON IN THE COLD WAR

Detente was dead, mostly because Ivan didn't play nice in the 1970s. The Cold War fell to a nadir in 1983, with the following events:

March: In a televised speech, President Ronald Reagan asked, rhetorically, if it would not be better to save lives, rather than to avenge them? That speech was the beginning of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Critics labeled the idea "Star Wars" and joked about "Ronnie Raygun." Most ordinary folks thought it was a good idea.

September: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down after intruding into Soviet airspace (the West maintained the intrusion was accidental; the Soviets insisted that the plane was on an espionage mission). A false alarm in Moscow occurs when an early warning satellite over North America gives false indications of an American strategic missile launch. The duty controller overrides the false alerts.

October: The US invades Grenada to prevent it from becoming a Soviet satellite. This freaked out the Soviet Union, because up to that point their understanding of the rules was "What's mine is mine, and if I can grab it, what's yours is mine, too." The Americans weren't supposed to grab stuff off of the Soviets! 

November: A NATO command post exercise, "Able Archer," is much more extensive than usual. The Soviets interpret this as a sign of a possible first strike by the United States, and go to nuclear alert in Eastern Europe.

Doctrinal revolution was underway inside the military, as the American way of war changed radically in the air, land, and sea domains (much of it coming out of the lessons of Vietnam--failure is a very good teacher), and space becoming a potential fourth domain to military operations. 

The 1980s aerospace future was stealthy (manned) combat aircraft; easy access to space with a manned space station, and eventually a moonbase; laser battle stations would patrol the cislunar void; and hypersonic airliners would fly to the other side of the world in just two hours. (Implied in that last bit: hypersonic bombers would deliver conventional or nuclear weapons to the other side of the world in just two hours, or the Pentagon would take $4,000,000,000 off the price tag. Avoid the Noid!)

POLITICAL HORIZONS: THINKING GLOBALLY, ACTING LOCALLY

The political arguments of this era are interesting because we can see the hazy outlines of today's politics that are driven by global economics, viral videos, and the 24-hour news cycle.

CNN went on the air during this time, and began building the 24-hour news cycle.

The big SDI-related tie-in was the nuclear freeze movement, which arguably spawned SDI as a response. People were made uneasy by talk of building up US nuclear forces, and a wide swath of the political spectrum--generally left of center, but some on the right were at least sympathetic to the idea--settled on the idea of freezing nuclear weapons acquisition and research in place. Whether or not this was a good idea, it became very popular. A counterpart movement arose in Europe due to the impending deployment of improved theater-level nuclear forces by the United States. SDI came about in response to these ideas; perhaps defenses against ballistic missiles would make them less useful.

Political activism ranged from benefit concerts to fight famine in Ethiopia to calls for American schools and pension funds to divest themselves of companies based in or with significant business interests in South Africa as a means of fighting against apartheid. The rise of satellite news and modern telecommunications meant that local activism and non-governmental entities could begin to affect global issues, continuing a process that had begun in Vietnam, with the war being brought to American living rooms every night. A truly "punk" SDI-Punk would take this into account.

The flip side of this was that moral panics could be started in the same way. The 1980s saw a great deal of fear of "satanic ritual abuse" of children, arguably started by the McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California. Sloppy analysis and even sloppier questioning of children (frequently involving the children being led by their questioners to the desired answers) led to convictions and plea bargains; eventually, the case petered out in a series of acquittals and hung juries years later. The sensational allegations are much better remembered than the final results.

Rural America was starting its decline; the farm foreclosure crisis began in the early 1980s as a decline in commodity prices hit heavily-leveraged farmers hardest. Further exacerbating the crisis was the rise of globalization, with maquiladoras (foreign-owned factories in Mexico) taking over production from factories located in small towns all across rural America. Losing a small factory in Chicago is bad enough for those who work there; losing that same factory in a town of 10,000 is a regional economic calamity. This made for a one-two punch that sometimes turned what had been thriving communities into near ghost towns where the only remaining industries were growing marijuana, cooking meth, and/or facilitating trafficking, whether in narcotics or people. Farm Aid was a benefit concert in 1985 to help family farms that eventually evolved into a permanent fixture as the artists and the sponsors realized the problems weren't going away.

Urban renewal and gentrification had been topics of discussion in policy and academic circles prior to the 1980s, but the rise of "Yuppies" (Young Urban Professionals) and entrepreneurship brought the conflicts inherent to these efforts from the back rooms of city managers and local community news to the big screen via the Robocop films. Homelessness, gentrification, and urban crime were all examined through these lenses.

BADDIES, BIG AND SMALL

The big scale antagonists are those devious, never-to-be-fully-trusted Commies in the Kremlin. Even in the very endgame of the Cold War, and absolutely no one expected the entire edifice of Soviet Communism and its satellite states to just collapse as they did. (I was on active duty in 1989; if you'd told me on January 1st that by the end of the year, the Berlin Wall would be torn down and German reunification would be on the negotiating table, I would've laughed in your face.)

Lesser antagonists would include various flavors of terrorist (transnational terrorism was a much different beast than today; Moscow funded terrorism in the Free World on the theory that the enemy of their enemy was, at the very least, a potentially useful idiot), drug lords, and regional powers. 

One notable omission from the rogues' gallery of the era: China. They weren't expected to ever be a major player outside of low-end manufacturing. 

(Shows you how much we knew.)

Other possible antagonists, especially for a noir/gritty story, might include devious defense contractors falsifying test results (this has always been a problem, particularly among low-end "schlocker" subcontractors supplying components to larger firms). 

Near the end of this era, Japan began to appear as a potential threat, with several novels focusing on the nature of changing technology and the fear of losing entire economic sectors to Japanese competition; a few of these posited that Japan's increasing economic power might lead to military conflict with a (relatively or actually) declining America.

The 1980s were the decade of the corporate raider, leveraged buy-outs, junk bonds, and insider trading. This could potentially affect military contractors. One could even have Soviet-financed corporate raiding . . .

The current wave of 1980s nostalgia shows no real sign of ending anytime soon; the tropes of the SDI-Punk genre and the 1980s in general are a fruitful vein just waiting to be mined by creators in all fields.

Up next...existing works of "SDI-Punk" in film and especially literature...

About the author: Ken Prescott is a Marine Corps veteran. He has worked as a management analyst, medical coder, and human resources specialist. His novel Not By Sight is available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon. He lives with his wife in San Diego, California.

What If The Paris Commune Had Survived, Expanded...?

A couple weeks ago one of my church friends clued me into the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan, which has been going on for awhile and has episodes on the various intricacies of the American, French, Haitian, and Mexican revolutions and a lot of discussion of the different strains of Marxism and anarchism as they build toward the Russian Revolution. I haven't had a chance to listen to all of them yet, but over the last few weeks a lot of driving (especially during my trip to Hypericon--driving from Atlanta to Murfreesboro and back plus a jaunt from Murfreesboro to Nashville to see about getting my books in the city library) meant I could listen to all of the episodes about the Paris Commune. For those of you not in the know, it was a brief Communist-anarchist takeover of Paris that got gruesomely suppressed and the lessons learned from it were quite influential on the Communist revolution in Russia.

One of my big interests is alternate history and although I had myself banned from the premiere AH discussion forum online, I do check in now and then. I decided to see what I could find on the Paris Commune and found a full alternate timeline called "The Spectre of Europe" written by the user whose handle is Reydan. It diverges from real history when conservative politician Adolphe Thiers has a stroke just before the revolt breaks out, preventing him from playing the instrumental role he did in crushing it. As a consequence, the revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui isn't preemptively jailed and able to make it to Paris and provides the necessary leadership for the Commune to avoid being crushed, although they do have to make a deal with the Prussian devil to do it.

Highlights of the timeline include...

*The division of France into a very left-wing republic (seriously, most conservative parties are outlawed, although given certain recent circumstances I wouldn't blame them for worrying about the Bonapartists) and a restored monarchy. When said monarchy is defeated in a later war it goes into exile in France's North African colonies, which the monarchy retained when France was partitioned.

*William Jennings Bryan becomes the president of the United States.

*Reform and partition in China.

*One of Kaiser Wilhelm's character flaws is that he was, in addition to being an erratic blowhard, is that he had some very Yellow Peril ideas about the rise of China. Since our world's WWI doesn't happen, we get to see these tendencies flourish and the results are not pretty.

*The rise of a sort of militant agrarianism (in Scandinavia of all places) as an analogue to our timeline's fascism.

The timeline is so popular that it even has a TVTropes page. I would definitely recommend checking it out. Also, don't forget to check out The Revolutions podcast or his History of Rome podcast, all of which are really interesting.

ISIS Nukes Brussels, The Seljuks Beats the Mongols, and Stalin Joins The Axis

Although I'm still self-banned from posting on the biggest alternate-history forum on the Internet, I do visit the public sections to see what interesting actual alternate history (as opposed to the endless political arguing I quit the forum to avoid) is being discussed.

This led to my finding three more interesting timelines in recent weeks. One takes place in the modern day, the second in the days where Turkish power expanded into Asia Minor at the expense of the crumbling Byzantines, and the third during World War II.

The Sultanate of Rumistan: An Alternate Anatolia-The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum was established after the defeat of the Byzantine Empire by the Seljuk Turks, which began the process of Turkifying and Islamizing Asia Minor and the Byzantines' long decline. The Sultanate was eventually defeated and forced to pay tribute to the Mongols after their defeat at the Battle of Kose Dag, but in this timeline, the Seljuk sultan listens to his experienced commanders and waits for the Mongols to come to him rather than attack them immediately. The Mongols are defeated and the decline of the Seljuk Sultanate--which ultimately led to the rise of the Ottoman Empire--is averted. This is going to make life rather difficult for the Byzantines, but the author knows a whole lot about the workings of the Seljuk Sultanate, the neighboring Kingdom of Georgia, and the Byzantine secessionist regime in Trebizond and it's really quite interesting.

The Maw: When the Lights of the World Went Out-This story begins with agents of the infamous Islamic State somehow getting hold of a nuclear weapon--just how they got it hasn't been explained yet--and they smuggle it from the Middle East into Belgium. They set it off in the downtown area of Brussels, killing tens of thousands (if not more) immediately and provoking France to nuke ISIS's capital of al-Raqqa in reprisal. A straight-up World War II level obliteration of ISIS soon follows. It looks like the author was setting up a much darker scenario based on the hints he was dropping, but the timeline hasn't been updated in some time. Given how the real-life migrant crisis in Europe has been, well, a crisis, a world where ISIS agents snuck into Europe via Greece and ripped a chunk of a major EU city out with a nuke, I suspect the people getting the worst of it are going to European and refugee Muslims.

The Twin Vipers-Stalin joins the Axis. Although given Hitler's ultimate desire to conquer the Soviet Union, exterminate "Jewish Bolshevism," and turn the Slavs into helots for German Spartans and how in general fascism and Communism are opposed ideologies make this sound absolutely insane, there were talks to that effect. Rather than refusing to deal more than the bare minimum with people whom he viewed as racial enemies, the Germans were actually willing to admit the Soviets to the alliance to help defeat Britain. That would have made life very difficult for the Western Allies, since the Soviets could menace the Middle East and India in a way the Germans could not.

However, this timeline begins somewhat earlier than the real-life talks that took place after the defeat of France when the 1939 border conflict between the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan that ended with the Battle of Khalkin Gol escalates into a full-blown war. This leads to Mussolini getting sidelined, the British and French fighting the Soviets in Finland, and even Operation Pike, an Anglo-French plan to bomb the Soviet oil fields that didn't happen in real life.

The Imperious Chairman, Or Someone Other Than Stalin Takes Command

My alternate-history forum has produced another interesting road not traveled. It's called "The Imperious Chairman" and diverges from our history when Yacov Sverdlov, one of the early leaders of the Bolshevik movement, survives rather than dying in 1919. The author (whose handle is Napoleon IV) goes with the idea that the official story of his death--he got the Spanish flu coming back from a trip to Kharkiv--was accurate. He doesn't go to Kharkiv, and so he survives.

The main thrust of the timeline is that someone other than Stalin becomes leader of the USSR. I find the notion that Stalin's horrors were necessary to defeat Hitler rather aggravating--the book Bloodlands shows Hitler actually used the horror stories coming out of Stalin's USSR as fuel for his demagoguery and I posted a friend's essay on Bukharin (part one here, part two here) to show another realistic path--and Napoleon IV gives this leader a chance to prove his mettle against the Great Evil One.

Some highlights...

*With a surviving Sverdlov, the internal factional politics of the Bolsheviks are rather different. I did take a class on Modern Russia at the University of Georgia, but I don't remember if we ever got into that much detail.

*Sverdlov's survival in turn causes some other earlier Soviet leaders to die--not due to anything he does specifically (like warning them about an assassination plot or inviting them all to dinner some night so they avoid a doomed plane), but due to the butterfly effect (changes spawning more changes). This makes the period between Lenin's death and what would have been the rise of Stalin more complicated.

*The Soviet Union pursues a more aggressive foreign policy during the interwar period. Although the isolationism of "socialism in one country" is greatly exaggerated--in We Know Now, historian John Lewis Gaddis describes it as something more akin to Russian imperialism than something truly international--someone other than the very cautious Stalin at the helm could done some serious meddling. This will have its consequences, both in the short-term (the lead-up to WWII) and presumably in the long term.

*Hitler still comes to power in Germany, albeit rather differently than in our history.

*With no Stalin we have no purges, meaning the Soviet military isn't the "stumbling colossus" that the Nazis spent the first years of the Eastern Front kicking around. There's still collectivization, although it's done in a more competent and less insane fashion. Many, many people still die, but no Holodomor. Not only does the USSR have millions more soldiers to fight the Nazis, but there won't be so much hatred for the regime for the Nazis to gather allies with.

*There's no cult of personality comparable to Stalin's--the alternative leader seems to view the adulation he gets as kind of a joke.

Guest Post: The Bukharin Alternative, Part Two

It is a common belief in some circles that Stalinist policies were necessary for the Soviet Union to industrialize sufficiently in order to defeat the inevitable genocidal Nazi invasion. In particular is the Holodomor, in which grain was exported to the West to purchase industrial equipment and the like while millions starved to death. Ukraine was hit particularly hard, but Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and other places suffered as well.

However, my Internet cohort Scott Blair doesn't agree with this theory and wrote this essay--which I broke into two parts--to elaborate. Part One can be see here.

The Bukharin Alternative Part Two: Stalinist Complicity in the Rise of Hitler

By Scott Blair

It is also worth considering whether or not Hitler would have risen to power without Stalin’s support. In 1928, the Comintern leadership in Moscow took a much harsher stance against collaboration with Social Democrat parties in Europe, on the belief that the collapse of capitalism was imminent. In Germany, the results were disastrous. From 1928 onward, the German Communist Party (KPD) “party directed its venom principally against the Social Democrats”, while the Red Front-Fighters League became a paramilitary force. The KPD were particularly vocal in attacking the Social Democrats, who they denounced as “social fascists”, and by the end of 1932 Germany’s military was worried that a crackdown on the Nazis or Communists would result in civil war. Initially, Josef Stalin and the KPD welcomed the rise of Nazism, believing that he was a crazy fool whose rise to power was a sign that the German revolution was at hand. History has proven how wrong this belief was.

In these circumstances, one may well wonder if Nikolai Bukharin would have made a difference, and the answer is an emphatic yes. In contrast to Stalin, by 1928 Bukharin had become notable for advocating collaboration with the Socialist parties of Europe, and as the KPD followed the line set down in Moscow, it would have followed Bukharin’s policy as well. While it is unlikely that the Social Democrats and KPD would have collaborated in any meaningful way, if the KPD had emphasize on stabilizing the Republic the German military may have been more willing to crack down on the Nazis. This would not have resulted in a shiny, happy German democracy, and the possibilities range from an authoritarian state run by the military, to an unstable democracy, to a German civil war.

All three alternatives would have been preferable to the Third Reich. Even a militarist dictatorship would have been unstable, possibly annexing Austria and warring with Poland, but it is unlikely to have been as aggressive or uniquely successful as the Third Reich was. It must also be remembered that before the rise of Hitler Germany and the USSR had been close, with joint military exercises and discussions about a partition of Poland. Thus, in the Bukharin alternative the Great Patriotic War may never occur.

Even if one assumes Hitler still rose to power, and that things are the same until the beginning of Barbarossa, then it is possible Bukharin’s policies would have still let the Soviet Union win. On the one hand, the Soviet Union would have a smaller industrial base. First, it is unlikely that Bukharin would have been caught by the surprise the way that Stalin was, which may have resulted in a different outcome in the opening stages of the Great Patriotic War. It is also unlikely that the purges would have taken place, with their well known effects on the Soviet officer corps. Finally, peasant disenchantment with the regime, so obvious in the summer of 1941, may have been much less significant in a USSR that followed Bukharin’s policies. All told, even if we assume a somewhat smaller Soviet industrial base, there is good reason to think that the USSR would ultimately prevail in the war, as it did historically.

Thus, Bukharin would have emerged from the Great Patriotic War as the head of a USSR with a much more vigorous agricultural sector, and one with millions of more citizens than had died in the famine. Perhaps Bukharin’s Soviet Union would not have turned the former breadbasket of Europe into an importer of American grain. Perhaps calls for increased autonomy in the economy would have been more successful in the 1960s, and the USSR’s economy would not have stagnated and ultimately crumbled.


At the risk of being speculative, in such a scenario it is possible that the Soviet Union would still exist today. If so, Stalin, far from being necessary, may have ensured the USSR’s ultimate demise.

Guest Post: The Bukharin Alternative Part One

It is a common belief in some circles that Stalinist policies were necessary for the Soviet Union to industrialize sufficiently in order to defeat the inevitable genocidal Nazi invasion. In particular is the Holodomor, in which grain was exported to the West to purchase industrial equipment and the like while millions starved to death. Ukraine was hit particularly hard, but Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and other places suffered as well.

However, my Internet cohort Scott Blair doesn't agree with this theory and wrote this essay--which I broke into two parts--to elaborate...

The Bukharin Alternative Part One: Collectivization and the Great Terror

By Scott Blair

In order to answer whether or Stalin was necessary, it is necessary to consider who could have replaced him. In order to do so, let us posit that in 1927, at the height of the debate between Josef Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin dies from a bad batch of borscht. Thus, Bukharin, considered to be a more moderate leader, assumes control of the Soviet Union. What would the USSR, under the command of a man who said, “we have to tell the whole peasantry, all its strata: get rich, accumulate, develop your economy,” look like? Bukharin’s policies would have entailed a modification of the NEP, and its continuation. It is therefore worth asking how the USSR would have industrialized under him. Stalin’s industrialization is often held up as an example of his success, and so it is worth asking if Bukharin could have done the same.

To begin with, it is clear that collectivization, the cornerstone of Stalin’s policy, was a disaster. Gross farm output declined 20% between 1928 and 1933, and this is allowing for a recovery after the initial great famine. It has been estimated that “not until the mid 1950s did agriculture regain the level of output achieved in the last years before the Great War”. The number of livestock in the Soviet Union also fell dramatically, and it is estimated that half of the nation’s cows, pigs, and horses were killed between 1928 and 1932. This is especially tragic as the last years of the NEP witnessed increased crop diversification and access to new equipment such as horse drawn plows. 

Admittedly, the NEP had problems. The Revolution, by breaking up the large estates and farms of prosperous kulaks who had produced for the market, ended up producing millions of subsistence farms which were simply less efficient. This meant that while agriculture production recovered and surpassed the 1913 Russian levels, grain sales actually declined during this period. Thus, collectivization did have some benefits, by forcing peasants to provide grain for the Soviet Union’s burgeoning cities. It has also been suggested that the famine caused approximately twelve million Soviet citizens to flee the countryside for work in the USSR’s new cities between 1928 and 1933. 

In addition, the NEP years saw marked instability in pricing. 1922 witnessed high prices for grain and low prices for manufactured goods, while 1923 witnessed the “scissors crisis”, in which peasants refrained from buying industrial goods because the price of grain was low while the price of manufactures was high. Grain prices offered by the state in 1927 were low, while industrial consumer goods were in short supply. As a result, peasants simply withheld their grain from the market. As the state needed grain to industrialize, these problems have led to the belief that the NEP was essentially a dead end, and it is therefore worth asking how Bukharin could have come to terms with them. 

First, by by December of 1927, even Bukharin wanted “to speed up the tempo of industrialization and put pressure on the kulaks, though [he] believed the free market had to be maintained”. Secondly, by 1927 Soviet investment in industry had already surpassed investment by Russian and foreign capital in Russian industry in 1913, and industrial output slightly exceeded prewar levels. Thus, even without any modifications, industrialization and development would have continued, albeit not at the pace of Stalin’s Soviet Union. However, a variety of mechanisms to stimulate agricultural production, and thus industrialization, present themselves. For instance, the Soviet government forced peasants to sell a certain amount of grain to state procurement agencies or to machine tractor stations for their services. The state also imposed a high sales tax on goods but not on food, ensuring that what money peasants received by selling crops would go to the government. 

Thus, Soviet policy ultimately consisted of taking grain from Soviet peasants at artificially low prices, and selling them industrial goods at extremely high ones. There is no reason to assume such policies could not have been followed sans collectivization. This would have resulted in a system that squeezed the peasants, but allowed them to maintain a profit on what was left of their crop, but need not have entailed collectivization. Such a system would probably have squeezed less grain out of the peasants, meaning that industrialization would go less rapidly than historically. However, it would have provided better long term prospects for Soviet agriculture once industrialization had been achieved. 

It is also worth considering Bukharin’s historical plan provide more grain for the cities. Bukharin historically proposed selling manufactured goods at low prices and buying grain at high prices to encourage peasants to market more grain, but it is unclear if this policy would have worked. However, when the People’s Republic of China began paying peasants more for agricultural products in the late 1970s and early 1980s, agricultural production and the sale of agricultural products boomed as peasants responded to the new demand. China’s economic success is well known, and this suggests that Bukharin’s policy may have let the state have its cake and eat it too. The Soviet Union may have been able to build an industrial base which, if not as large as the one it possessed historically by 1941, was not significantly smaller. 

Two additional points suggest that Stalinist policies harmed industrialization. Collectivization and the ensuing slaughter of livestock also harmed the Soviet textile industry as well as exports of wool and leather. As money from exports was used to finance purchases of machinery necessary for industrialization, a more benign policy may have helped the Soviet Union purchase more foreign technology. It is also worth asking what the effect of the famines the ensued from collectivization was. Estimates put the number of deaths from famine between four and nine million, and the birth rate declined in the mid 1930s, ultimately rebounding by the end of the decade. It is therefore worth asking what the net economic effect of the loss of six million Soviet citizens was. One of the purported benefits of the famine and collectivization was that it drove peasants to the cities, where they worked in the USSR’s new factories. 

Would the number of migrants from the countryside have been significantly less in a Bukharin led USSR if we assume that at least some of those peasants would have immigrated to the city? Furthermore, many of those purged were among the USSR’s intelligentsia, and it is evident that the Soviet economy would have done better if engineers, instead of chopping wood in Siberia, had been able to use their skills productively. It is unclear how much of difference fewer purges would have made, but it may have been significant. 

Part Two will cover the role of Stalin in Hitler's rise to power in the first place...

A Very, Very Bloody Accident: WWIII In 1983

Today on my message-board I decided to take a look at ABLE ARCHER 83: Timeline of a Third World War in 1983. In real history, the Able Archer military exercise frightened the Soviet leadership into thinking a Western attack was imminent, but nothing ended up happening. Here things get ugly--the Soviets launch a pre-emptive "bolt from the blue" assault on completely unsuspecting NATO forces.

It's really interesting, although it'd be unbelievably horrific to live through if you lived in West Germany and other areas being fought over.. Thus far it's staying conventional and the author is saying it won't end up like the British movie Threads (in which civilization is bombed to hell and gone and only reaches roughly Victorian levels again 20 years later). Some interesting bits:

*The Soviet Union, rather than keeping occupied territory under military government (the most sensible option in my opinion), sends the KGB in almost immediately and starts murdering political opponents, collectivizing economic assets, etc. This could have some interesting consequences--with most of Austria's political elite liquidated, someone suggested Austria might be more inclined to join a united Germany if and when the USSR and its allies are defeated.

*There are Soviet attacks on Alaska in the early days of the conflict and the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk is destroyed off Korea. U.S. forces in the North Pacific bounce back and the Soviet Pacific Fleet pretty much ceases to exist. Some more detail on actual Soviet attacks on the U.S. mainland would have been nice.

*There's also a lot of space-war going on, with Soviet killer-satellites attacking American ones and the U.S. shooting down a Soviet satellite with a modified ballistic missile. And space-mines.

*Given how strong the anti-nuclear/peace movement was in the early 1980s, there are a lot of protesters hanging around military bases when the attack does come. With hundreds of peace activists killed by chemical weapons intended to make airfields and tactical nuclear stockpiles unusable, that pretty much strangles the Western anti-war movement in its crib. Oops.

With the exception of a left-wing Italian member taking offense at Italy's relatively quick capitulation to the Soviets, the depiction of Soviet infiltration of the 1980s peace movement and the trade unions (something that in the former case happened to be true), and acting all incredulous South Africa's black neighbors would attack it (regardless of who attacked whom first, I still think that's possible), the thread hasn't really gotten contentious. The closest thing to an argument that's taken place involved a Finnish member who seems very knowledgeable about the Finnish Cold War military correcting the writer's mistakes in the area. The Austrian issue is touched on (someone claimed the terrain would make much of Austria difficult for the Soviet Union to occupy), but much more briefly.

The timeline is still going. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

The Death of Stalin and a Different WWII

Here's a alternate timeline from my message-board for your entertainment. It's entitled "Funeral Games" and was written by the user whose handle is Gemellus. It begins with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin suffering a pulmonary embolism soon after the German invasion of Poland, an invasion made possible by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and dropping dead. The new Soviet government repudiates the deal Stalin made and things get interesting...

I'm not going to give away details, but the timeline features...

*A short Nazi-Soviet War instead of our world's swift annexation of the Baltic States and the Winter War with the Finns.

*A peace treaty ending said war that involves a population swap of three million Jews for millions of ethnic Germans living in Soviet territory. The one time I have ever actually used the phrase, "good job Commies," considering what would happen to these Jews if history had continued as it did in our world.

*Japan's land empire in Asia is dealt with a few years ahead of schedule.

*Germany still manages to pull off Battle of France in a similar fashion to our history and establish their Vichy puppet regime. However, the Italians do something rather unexpected...

*The Soviets don't ignore all evidence of the coming German attack and take certain steps...

*The German Resistance is about to do something. Let's hope it works out better than in our history...

I think it's pretty interesting and well worth a look. I'd definitely read a book set in this timeline.

Whiskey on the Rocks: The Soviet-Swedish War of 1981

I had myself blocked from posting on my alternate-history forum for a month to avoid distractions from Battle for the Wastelands, but I do swing by from time to time to see if scenarios I like have been updated and to send personal messages if I just have to comment.

Here's something I found the other night.  It's called Whiskey on the Rocks: The Soviet-Swedish War of 1981.  Basically a Soviet intrusion into Swedish territorial waters leads to a skirmish, which escalates.  So far the Swedes are doing surprisingly well, but the Soviet Union outweighs them so massively that unless the war is brought to an end pronto, they're going to get gorilla-mauled.  Considering the hit the Swedish surface forces have taken thus far, one could argue the gorilla-mauling has already begun.

(And they're not part of NATO, so it's not like the U.S. is going to go to war to protect them, like we would in the case of West Germany.)

I don't know a whole lot about Swedish military gear or the Soviet equipment of that era, so I wouldn't have a whole lot to say even if I could post.  I think my personal-messaging will be restricted to encouraging Jim Smitty to continue the timeline and perhaps start writing fiction (or a fake history book like For Want of a Nail) set in it.  There's not a lot of Scandinavia-centered stuff.  Even if it's not mainstream enough for U.S. audiences, perhaps Swedes tired of their history being ignored might like it.

There is a paying alternate-history magazine accepting this type of fiction now: Alt Hist.

Why The Black Widow and Hawkeye Should Get Their Own Film(s)

Here's an idea I had the other day on the next Marvel movie, since we've had films about each Avenger depicted in the movie except two.  Spoilers for The Avengers are coming...

In The Avengers, when Black Widow goes to talk to Loki, she describes her history with Hawkeye and how he "made a different call" when he was sent to kill her.  Although she makes a Suspiciously Specific Denial about them being in love, she does describe how she "owes him a debt" and wants to clear the red off her ledger.

A prequel film depicting the Black Widow as a villain and Hawkeye being sent to kill her before changing his mind for whatever reason would be really interesting.  I'm not familiar with Scarlett Johansson's career, but I don't think she's ever played a full-blown villain.  And the amount of character growth/development on her end could be a good exercise for her acting ability.

Hawkeye makes an appearance in Thor and the Black Widow in Iron Man 2, but unlike the rest of the team, they haven't gotten their own films.  The situation I'm describing could even be done in two films.  The first movie could be called Hawkeye and feature him being sent after her and end with him bringing her back to SHIELD rather than killing her.  The second film could be called The Black Widow and feature the fallout from Hawkeye's reinterpreting his orders.  Perhaps as "the price of redemption," SHIELD requires her to kill a former employer or mentor?

(She makes a reference to killing for anyone for money.  Given the comic character's Soviet back-story, she could be an unemployed KGB agent who became a contract killer the way many ex-Soviet military-intelligence types got involved in the Mafiya.)

In the second film, she could undergo an "evil detox" and realize just how bad she'd been before.  This could be the beginning of her "quest for redemption."  This article here makes a good case too.

Y'all like?  I personally would love to see this.  Hollywood types, take note.