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Well that's bleak. Killing a player-led great power is hard but man I'd at least hoped Makarov himself would die. Imagine a world order led by Russian fascists with a ton of German IC... shudder. If this goes to Stellaris that'd be authoritarian/fanatic xenophobe + dictatorship? Or maybe auth/xenophobe/militarist? That can be a fun rampage through the galaxy. The universe must be kept safe for (Russian, Jewish) humanity! And somehow space fascism is less immediately depressing.
Man though, one of these days my Red boyz are gonna win one on these boards. I live in hope.
Man though, one of these days my Red boyz are gonna win one on these boards. I live in hope.
Makarov has a nasty, nasty habit of surviving, doesn't he? I'm still hoping for him to meet a sticky end, but it is looking increasingly unlikely.
The AI was going so well I was completely convinced it could be work of no AI
apparently I was wrong. Now it's all reversed and the reds are on the backfoot and once again my mind is split. Maybe my belief that you're actually running VSVR was my coping mechanism 
If you want a good Communist victory megacampaign I'd recommend the Andalusi megacampaign on the Something Awful Forums's LP archive. Spoilers obviously, but al-Andalus goes red and achieves a lot of success, though it's a pretty nasty form of leftism.
link is here: https://lparchive.org/Al-Andalus-Paradox-Mega-LP/
Man, typing that out made me realise just how hard the Papacy has fallen in the last decade, from being a European Great Power and maintaining Crusader States in the Holy Land well into the 20th Century to... well, the aforementioned.
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Also, seriously, ten years... Europe is going to be devastated. And we thought the OTL lost generation was bad.
Much appreciated, I didn't know about that one! There's a few strong Red AARs, IIRC there was a Kaiserreich socialist Italy one a few years ago that was lovely, and there's an HOI4 TNO Anarchist one going on right now, but they're relatively rare.
Been kinda looking at this AAR on and off since it came into V2, but it's nice to see one move into DH for her WW2 section
1943-1944 – Death of a Dream
1943-1944 – Death of a Dream
While the power of the International waned in Europe, fighting continued across Africa and Asia. In East Africa, the initial successes of the anti-imperialist rebellions in the region when the Papacy began to move the bulk of its army to counter their advance. From the end of 1942 the area under their control would slowly dwindle until the rebels were left isolated in the mountains and jungles that their European masters could not reach. In South Asia, the Indians succeeded in capturing Kabul and bringing an end to Papal rule in Asia in late 1942, but found their frontline with the Russians almost completely stagnant as both sides found offensive operations almost impossible in the Hindu Kush mountains. The one area where there was notable fighting was around Kashgar – with the city trading hands five times between mid 1942 and the end of 1943.
Of greater world-historic significance were events in China. After invading South East Asia in the winter of 1940-41, the Japanese had hoped to turn their war with China in their favour. Yet the deadlock that had held for years by that point, with the Japanese holding the coast but unable to push into the interior, remained stubbornly unmoved. This situation caused immense frustration and hardship in both Japan and China alike. In China, anger at the foreign invader accelerated the development of a militant ethnic nationalism that modelled itself on Russian Radicalism – pursuing a future of Chinese freedom from foreign oppression and Han domination of China’s myriad minority populations. These nationalists were well organised under the banner of the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Party, or CPRP.
With the popularity growing among the masses and the military in particular, the nationalists seized power in January 1943 and proceeded to unleash a wave of revolutionary fury against minorities and symbols of the old liberal elite that had failed in the war with Japan. The Revolutionary Party rallied millions from the villages into vast militia armies and embarked on a great offensive along the Yangtze River. To the shock of observers, the Japanese army broke in the face of this fervent assault and in June the Chinese flag was restored to its rightful place over Shanghai while upwards of 200,000 Japanese prisoners were taken. After years of attritional warfare, these losses were devastating for the Japanese and through the rest of the year they lost control over all of their enclaves in mainland China – although the Chinese failed in their attempts to push southwards into South East Asia as well.
On the Eastern Front, the capturing of dozens of International divisions in the early months of 1943 had left huge haps in the socialists’ lines in the southern and northern sectors of the frontline – although they retained a great deal of strength in the centre. Seeking to maintain the momentum of their previous victories, the Russians resumed their attacks in May after a short pause of a few weeks. In the north, Russian armour punched through the depleted German lines along the Baltic and reoccupied Prussia, Gdansk and the Vozhd’s home region in Pomerania – reaching as far west as Rugen by the end of the month before the Germans were finally able to slow their progress to a crawl as they grew disconcertingly close to Berlin, the greatest city of northern Germany.
In the south, the offensive proceeded more slowly, with infantry capturing the mountainous eastern Carpathian region to clear the way from more mobile units to advance rapidly along the Black Sea coast towards the Danube. Only reaching Bucharest in early June, the Russians then rushed with lightening speed to cut Constantinople off from the rest of the front and make progress towards northern Greece. The ancient city was then placed under siege for the second time in the war. In the centre of the front, the International’s strength proved to be something of a curse. Fending off Russians attacks, much of the Russian army being by this stage wearied from months on the front foot, Old Poland and Warsaw remained firmly in their grip. However, the collapse of their lines in other areas left the last sizeable battle ready army group in the International had in the field in Eastern Europe at risk of a grand encirclement as Russian forces made progress all around them.
In late June 1943 something extraordinary happened along the Elbe, south of Berlin near the city of Cottbus and on the North Sea near Hamburg, Russian and American came into contract with one another on German soil. Since their landings in the Low Countries in April the Allies had made incredible rapid progress across Western Europe – capturing the birthplace of the revolution in the Ruhr and sweeping across much of northern Germany and pushing deep into France as far as Lyon and the Rhone Valley and the suburbs of Paris. The International was not yet wholly beaten. The reds had regained a number of the cities that the Andalucian Partisans had captured in the spring, while although their authority was falling apart in much of Europe several strong fighting armies remained in the field – notably in Old Poland and in Italy, where the local socialist regime had made an effort to fortify themselves against invasion. Nonetheless, the final outcome of the war was now inevitable for all to see. Europe would soon come under the domination of the Russians in the east and the Americans in the west.
Although they shared a socialist enemy, the relationship between east and west was deeply hostile. The Americans in particular despised Russia and the dark, totalitarian and racialist ideology that it represented. Not only was this the antithesis of the New World’s democratic ideals, the Russian Radicals horrific crimes against the Tatars haunted the millions of Americans with Turkic ancestry, many of them first generation migrants and refugees from the old Polish empire. This community formed a powerful lobby in New Cordoba committed to implacable hostility to Kiev. As such, the United States did not even recognise the Radicals as Poland’s legitimate government – supporting a Tsarist government in exile.
The Papacy too was anti-Russian – with their having occupied much of their colonial empire in Central Asia in the 1930s, lands now a battleground between Russia and India with the Asian power having taken over the rest of the Papal empire in the region, and large parts of the Papal Middle East during the 1940s. The Danes, a major player in the coalition that had gone to war with the International in 1933 and one of several Allied governments in exile, were also infuriated by Makarov’s move to establish Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish client states across the Scandinavia in lands that had been ruled directly from Copenhagen for centuries. Of the major players in the western alliance, only the Skots had a working relationship with Kiev. With these enmities seething, there were very real concerns that war between the Allies and Eurasian League could break out before the International was even defeated. Indeed, after the initial friendly meetings on the Elbe, American and Russian troops traded fire in a number of locations in northern Germany in late June and early July. In truth, this was an escalation both parties hoped to avoid.
Boris Makarov, having ascended to heroic status in his homeland after standing by Kiev during its darkest hour as the International surrounded the city in October 1942 and then overseen the crushing victories of 1943, took a proactive role in attempting to avert a clash with the West. Taking on the role of the international statesman, one he had largely shunned through his quarter century of goose-stepping aggression, Makarov had extended feelers to the Allied powers as victory over the International grew more inevitable in the late spring and summer. For much of America’s ethnic-Andalucian establishment, the issue of anti-Radicalism was less emotive and there was a desire for some sort of accord with Kiev. Yet, fearing the fury of working class Tatars, contact with Russia would have to come indirectly. At the beginning of July, Makarov flew in person to Damietta in Ascalon, a small Jewish state in the Nile Delta with close ties to Egypt, where he meet a team of Skottish diplomats in the Skottish Embassy. In farciful scenes, the American government expressed concern at their ally’s meeting with the great dictator and refused to allow any representative to attend the meeting. Yet at the same time the Skots passed secret communications between New Cordoba and Makarov. The tense negotiations in Damietta would do much to shape the postwar Europe. Such were their secretive and hostile nature, no formal agreements were created – but there was an acceptance of fact on the ground. The Allies would continue to condemn Russian occupations and its wider regime, but would not fight to overturn them. In return, Makarov committed Russia to only limited annexations and agreed to make no effort to push his armies into Western Europe – in particular leaving Italy to the Allies. Both parties agreed that Germany should be divided into multiple separate states so that it might never threaten European peace again.
The Damietta Agreement had an immediate effect on the ground, with both the Allies and Russians restraining their militaries to avoid conflict between one another. Notably, when the Russians arrived in Trieste in late July, with the Americans still fighting in Lombardy and Piedmont, they held back from the Veneto to allow the Allies to secure it. On the front, the fighting power of the International had been definitively broken in mid-July with the surrender of the German army in Old Poland. By early August, with all of France and Germany lost, the International fought on only in a handful of holdouts mostly in southern Europe – in Greece, the West Balkans, Italy and Andalucia, while in the north a mixture of Scandinavians and VSVR diehards had built a fortress in the Oresund centred on Copenhagen that had already repulsed numerous Russian attacks.
The last major Russian battle of the war was over the Danish island. Deploying more than thirty divisions, bringing to bear the power of the entire Russian air force and making largescale use of paratroopers for the first time in Russian military history, the fight for Copenhagen lasted almost a month from the middle of August until the final capitulation of the Scandinavians on September 9th. The loss of Copenhagen hastened the end for the remaining socialist armies. On September 21st the VSVR offered its unconditional surrender, although many revolutionary diehards continued the struggle for weeks to come. The Italians in particular remained a viable force even at this stage, slowly engaging the overwhelming power of the Allies in a battling retreat down the peninsula, only losing Rome in early October before surrendering after the loss of Naples in late November.
In an odd quirk of fate, the last men standing in the socialist alliance was the Brazilian expeditionary core and ragtag band of revolutionaries in southern Iberia who were not finally defeated until the end of January 1944 after a last stand in Malaga. The following month anti-socialist elements within the Brazilian military overthrew the government and sued for peace with the Allies – bringing an end to the Second World War in the west, a dozen years from the overthrow of the Archbishopric of Hesse. With that, the revolutionary dreams of the Socialist International were extinguished once and for all.
Although the war in Europe was over, the belligerent powers of India and Japan were far from beaten – with a combined population approaching half a billion and great military resources. However, having by the time of the surrender at Malaga, hundreds of thousands of Russian troops were already en route to Central Asia. Although the Americans kept true to their insistence that they would not fight to preserve European colonialism, the defeat of the International and freed up the Papacy and Skots to begin redeployments of their own to the Indian Ocean.
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VE Day has arrived, but the war in Asia remains unfinished and the settlement in Europe unsteady
The Reds are down, Russia has lost millions and still has the small matter of a major land war in Asia to deal with before it can secure peace while the Americans are still pretty damn hostile at this point. Who knows if that east-West truce will hold in the long run.
Double oh dear now!
We didn't actually get that deep into Germany until the Americans cut us off, so the Ease-West split here is pretty close to the OTL boundaries (with the exception of Scandinavia and Greece of course). The International certainly had a good shake at winning this one, but when it fell apart it did so remarkably quickly.
He's quite the survivor that's for sure. He's come through democratic political struggles, a coup and civil war, plots against his rule a the purges and now the War. But the man is really starting to get on, this is someone who fought in the First World War in 1897-1901 and was elected to the Duma in 1902!
Haha, the AI in DH can be pretty effective at times, especially when it is doing a war it 'knows how to do' if you know what I mean - like Germany invading Russia etc.
In game and in story I reached Trieste when the Allies were still fighting in the western part of Northern Italy and could feasibly have pushed into the Veneto and then deeper into Italy had I wanted to. The likely border gore put me off though. So the idea of an uneasy agreement between Russia and the West made more sense.
No one has declined as much as the Papacy in the twentieth century. In nineteenth century they were one of three global super powers along with the HRE (gone) and Poland (overthrown). Now their empire has crumbled away and their core lands in Egypt just aren't enough to support a global player - even the Skots have a stronger position than them now, while some of the Asian states are close to catching up or may have even surpassed them by this point.
For context, here are the rough military casualties from the war to this point from the 3 big alliances (taken from the in game stats):
International
VSVR 7.5 million
France 2 million
Others 2 million
Eurasian League
Russia 7.8 million
Others 1.8 million
Allies
Papal States 1.6 million
Skotland 1.4 million
USA 0.6 million
Others 1.2 million
The Russians have suffered far more casualties than the Americans, although the European partners in the Western Allies have their fair share of eye watering losses particularly in the from the earlier phases of the war. The US has really come out of this as the biggest winner - untouched by the ravages of war, with modest military losses and immensely increased political power. Everyone else has lost a great deal more, even if the Russians compensate for that with geopolitical gains.
And not only survive but flourish!
Glad you're enjoying it, and hope you stick along for the rest of the story.
The Reds are down, Russia has lost millions and still has the small matter of a major land war in Asia to deal with before it can secure peace while the Americans are still pretty damn hostile at this point. Who knows if that east-West truce will hold in the long run
. Double oh dear now!
We didn't actually get that deep into Germany until the Americans cut us off, so the Ease-West split here is pretty close to the OTL boundaries (with the exception of Scandinavia and Greece of course). The International certainly had a good shake at winning this one, but when it fell apart it did so remarkably quickly.
He's quite the survivor that's for sure. He's come through democratic political struggles, a coup and civil war, plots against his rule a the purges and now the War. But the man is really starting to get on, this is someone who fought in the First World War in 1897-1901 and was elected to the Duma in 1902!
The AI was going so well I was completely convinced it could be work of no AI
Haha, the AI in DH can be pretty effective at times, especially when it is doing a war it 'knows how to do' if you know what I mean - like Germany invading Russia etc.
In game and in story I reached Trieste when the Allies were still fighting in the western part of Northern Italy and could feasibly have pushed into the Veneto and then deeper into Italy had I wanted to. The likely border gore put me off though
. So the idea of an uneasy agreement between Russia and the West made more sense. No one has declined as much as the Papacy in the twentieth century. In nineteenth century they were one of three global super powers along with the HRE (gone) and Poland (overthrown). Now their empire has crumbled away and their core lands in Egypt just aren't enough to support a global player - even the Skots have a stronger position than them now, while some of the Asian states are close to catching up or may have even surpassed them by this point.
For context, here are the rough military casualties from the war to this point from the 3 big alliances (taken from the in game stats):
International
VSVR 7.5 million
France 2 million
Others 2 million
Eurasian League
Russia 7.8 million
Others 1.8 million
Allies
Papal States 1.6 million
Skotland 1.4 million
USA 0.6 million
Others 1.2 million
The Russians have suffered far more casualties than the Americans, although the European partners in the Western Allies have their fair share of eye watering losses particularly in the from the earlier phases of the war. The US has really come out of this as the biggest winner - untouched by the ravages of war, with modest military losses and immensely increased political power. Everyone else has lost a great deal more, even if the Russians compensate for that with geopolitical gains.
And not only survive but flourish!
Glad you're enjoying it, and hope you stick along for the rest of the story
.
We know this is the worst of all worlds because there is now nothing between Makarov and a peaceful death in his own bed.
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OK Yaroslav come on, you have nothing to lose, take a gun and avenge your gamily
Though if Makarov dies Golikov will probably take power in a horrific mixture of Himmler and Beria so maybe we don't want that
Oh god, Makarov is going to come for India now, isn't he? This is... very not good.
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Fash controlling Russia, India and now China too is a frankly terrifying prospect. Let’s hope no one ever finds an excuse to develop the bomb…
It's tempting to say that the Damietta Agreement will set the stage for the Cold War - but there's been no sign of nuclear weapons being developed, so a Cold War as happened in our history may not come to pass. At this point, a Third World War a decade or two down the line seems just as likely.
Also, genuinely, what's come to power in China seems horrifying- it looks like basically the Chinese Khmer Rouge, combining the worse aspects of Maoism with extreme nationalism and a hatred for minorities.
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My impression was ‘Cultural Revolution, but ethnic’. Big big yikes.
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Well, cultural revolution but both against the traditional elite and ruling class, given that it was said to be against the liberal republican elite as well.