Literature / The Death of Russia

"With the death of Boris Yeltsin died Russia’s last chance of becoming a normal democracy. Though many prayed that the violence would now finally relinquish, it was unimaginable how wrong they would be. Though there were so many stages and parties that's it’s almost impossible to say definitively when the war began, most historians are in general agreement: The moment the first tank’s shell slammed into the Kremlin, the Second Russian Civil War Era began."

The Death of Russia is an Alternate History timeline on AlternateHistory.com written by Sorairo, the author of The Footprint of Mussolini.

In 1993, Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoy and his supporters in the Russian Parliament, led by the National Salvation Front, launched a coup against Boris Yeltsin. In our timeline, this was stopped due to the military remaining loyal to Yeltsin. In this timeline, the National Salvation Front's supporters managed to storm the main television station where they denounced Yeltsin, resulting in the military defecting to their side. Emboldened, they overthrew the government and Yeltsin was killed in the aftermath.

Unsurprising for an alliance between the far-left and the far-right only united in reversing Russia's decline they blame on both Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the National Salvation Front eventually comes to an explosive end, unleashing the collapse of Russia onto a horrified world.

It can also be found in book form on Amazon, having been self-published by the author.

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Tropes include:

Tropes # - H

• 0% Approval Rating:
  • Admiral Ugryumov, even before his death in a mutiny, is hated universally across Russia for abandoning the city of Vladivostok to a North Korean invasion with even the Stalinist regime he was nominally loyal to condemning him for "failing to negotiate Vladivostok's surrender" while the Petrograd Government decried him as a symbol of how the Communists "sold out Russia" and Lebed seeing his action as the "most cowardly in Russian history". Suffice to say, no one missed him when his sailors mutinied and threw him overboard before turning the fleet back to save Vladivostok from the North Koreans.
  • The ultranationalist/neo-Nazi Alexander Barkashov was already loathed for being the public face and leading member of the Petrograd Nashist government, which committed countless atrocities during the Second Russian Civil War to conquer and 'purify' Russia, but his central role in conceiving 'Plan Zass' - The nuclear extermination of all non-Slavs in Russia ala the Turner Diaries, which he read - and ordering nuclear strikes against the Russian Soviet Republic and NATO in the April 10 nuclear exchange just so they could take everybody down with them solidified him as one of the most hated figures in TDOR-verse history, with tens of millions of casualties within and beyond Russia attributed to him and leading to him being reviled on the same level as Hitler and Stalin.
• A Lighter Shade of Black:
  • While the Chechens are allied with Islamists in their fight for freedom, the Russian Army's actions in Chechnya are simply nightmarish, most infamously in the village of Vedeno, with the entire male population down to roughly twelve years old in the village of Vedeno was executed before most of the remaining females were raped.
  Christopher Hitchens: "I remember the strange horror, of realising that this must have been exactly how Gareth Jones had felt when he became the Cassandra of the Holodomor. Of ringing the claxon as desperately as your arms could carry in warning, and of no one coming to heed it. Even if they’re Islamists, they’ve got to win this war.”
  • Alexander Lebed has a low opinion of democracy, but he's merely a charismatic military strongman which makes him a much better contender in the Second Russian Civil War compared to the Communists and Fascists, nor is he a Politically Incorrect Hero. Combined with intending to restore access to resource deposits in Siberia, this serves as incentive for him to get under-the-table support from corporate sponsors.
  • China is an authoritarian state that suppresses democracy but most reasonable people see their rule of North Korea as better than rule by Kim Jong Il .
• Alas, Poor Villain: Discussed. The massacre of Russian POWs by Chechen forces is at least somewhat considered a tragedy in later years despite being met with schadenfreude and cheers in the 1990s. In the words of an in-universe history book "There was only so much 'It's okay to punch Nazis' or 'Reds are better Dead' that one could repeat to themselves before the sight of teenagers pleading for their mothers as their throats are slit would break one's soul".
• The Alliance:
  • With a far more belligerent post-Soviet Russia, NATO becomes even more important to Europe. While Latvia and Estonia are kept from joining thanks to Russia exploiting a rule regarding disputed territory, the NSF's rule is enough to get Finland and Sweden on board almost thirty years early.
  • The FEK forges close ties with South Korea and Japan (who put aside their differences to face the greater threat) to stand against North Korea's invasion and later against China's influence in the region post-war, with Taiwan eventually likewise joining in.
• All for Nothing:
  • The reforms put into place by Gorbachev and thought to be solidified by Yeltsin died with the latter, as Russia goes through their own Yugoslav Wars that shatters the nation. Even worse is Gorbachev surviving his time in NSF (later Fascist) captivity and being bartered off to the West for food and medicine, living to see what failure had brought.
  • Expressed during a "One Soldier’s War in Russia" segment, where a nameless old World War II veteran is captured while trying to desert from the Red Army. The old man cries to Babchenko's commissar that after surviving the Eastern Front and years of praise he got from it, he simply can't bring himself to shoot at fellow Russians even if they are fascists and bemoans how Russia was reduced to the state it's in.
  Old Veteran: "I can’t stand knowing all the work I did, my friends who died, the lives that were lost, that it was all in vain. Moscow is gone. The Fascists run Leningrad after we starved for a thousand days to make sure they’d never have it for one. The Union is gone. Ukraine and Belarus are gone. Even Siberia is gone. Why did we even bother fight Hitler if this was what it would all come to anyway? Why? Why?!"
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • Russia invades Ukraine and seizes Crimea on irredentist grounds, driving Ukraine into the arms of the Western world... in 1994 instead of 2014.
  • Aleksandr Dugin serves as an advisor to the right-wing dictator of Russia, to the point where he's being compared to the original Mad Monk himself... only that dictator is Alexander Nevzorov instead of Putin.
  • Mike Tyson endorsing and openly admiring Alexander Lebed echoes how Dennis Rodman is a close friend of Kim Jong-un in our world.
• Apocalypse How: By late 1994, Russia is at a Class 0. Famine runs rampant across the nation, the NSF has turned on each other and are tearing European Russia apart in a violent ground war, ethnic conflicts have spiraled out of control, and the loss of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Uralic partisans sees anarchy spread in Siberia and the Far East thanks to a lack of supplies coming in. The world economy has taken a hit as well thanks to the sudden loss of Siberian resources. And that was before the April 10 nuclear exchange which finally ended the Second Russian Civil War.
• Armies Are Evil: Zigzagged. The NSF and later Communist and Fascist Russian armies in the Chechen and Second Russian Civil Wars committed many terrible atrocities and are led by either psychopathic or incompetent generals in the front or pushed forward by ruthless cold-blooded commissars in the back. However, many of the soldiers were also depicted as hapless conscripts who didn't want to fight and became victimized by both their commanders and fellow soldiers.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Ukraine inherited some of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in 1994 and while it sounds like it'd be a hell of a saving grace, in reality they won't be able to use immediately if it came down to it. The missiles they had were made in mind for America, meaning if they were turned east it'd be more likely to hit somewhere near Mongolia rather than Moscow, in addition to needing 12-18 months to take full operational control of the missiles, time they do not have in order to keep Russia from taking Crimea. They eventually do secure Western help in rewiring their nukes (a deal also reached with a democratic Belarus), but only after Crimea is taken.
• Badass Native: When the time comes for various ethnic minorities to rise up against the NSF, the natives fight ferociously against the Russians whether it be in the Caucasus, the Urals, or in Siberia, all for a chance at freedom that may never come again.
• Back from the Brink: As Russian control over the North Caucasus collapses following their catastrophic loss in Chechnya, Circassian partisans inspired by Dudayev seize control of Kabardino-Balkaria and declare the reconstitution of a Circassian nation, the first of its kind since the 19th century Circassian genocide, the proclamation being met with jubilation and Tears of Joy from the native peoples.
  Unamed Israeli Reporter: “I saw visions of my own country, crawling out from the dirt and the rock amidst fire and carnage to defy the world, defy the odds, and to pull a nation from its grave. I was witnessing a resurrection before my eyes, of a people long thought vanquished, returned to defeat their captors. Circassia had risen again.”
• Balkanize Me: With a name like "The Death of Russia", this was pretty much a Foregone Conclusion, so much so that the story is more about how severely Russia breaks apart instead of who puts it all back together by the end:
  • Various ethnic minorities break off thanks to the hardline rule of the NSF and by late 1994, Primorsky Krai, Tuva, Yakutia, Komi, Chechnya, a revitalized Circassia, the rest of the former Russian Caucasus, and a Gaidar-ruled Kaliningrad have all broken away while Alexander Lebed sets up a "Provisional Siberian Government" at the start of 1995.
  • By the end of the civil war only eight nations are left standing: the rump Russian Federation in Kaliningrad, Ichkeria, Dagestan, Ossetia, Circassia, Siberia, the Far Eastern Kingdom and Kalmykia. Tuva ended up annexed into Mongolia thanks to Shoigu's monumentally bad military leadership, Buryatia ended up split between Siberia and the Far East, and Yakutia was (largely) peacefully reincorporated into Siberia. Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Udmurtia, Mari El and the Komi Republic all meet their tragic ends following the 4/10 nuclear exchange while European Russia is a UN Mandate nominally under Kaliningrad's rule.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Russian Pacific Fleet return to Vladivostok to save the city from the North Koreans after a mutiny at the high seas has Ugryumov tossed overboard.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • While the minorities of the Russian Caucasus are able to achieve their independence, the Dagestani Islamists are on the run, and Kalmykia is finally freed from the shackles of Communist rule, many more ethnic separatists are not so lucky. The Altai Republic and Khakassia were put down before the civil war really began, Buryatia was partitioned between Siberia and the Far East with the natives kicked over the border to Mongolia, the Tuvans end up annexed by Mongolia, and the native Uralic and Komi peoples are nearly exterminated after the 4/10 exchange killed millions of their brethren and turned their homelands into an irradiated mess.
  • The timeline as a whole is this when the dust finally settled. NATO managed to avert nuclear armageddon and escaped the April 10 exchange mostly intact, and Siberia, the Far Eastern Kingdom, the Caucasus states and the other freed nations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia had also survived with many of them being well on their way to democracy and/or prosperity. European Russia however had been virtually destroyed as a civilization and tens of millions both in and outside Russia had also perished thanks to the Second Russian Civil War and the nuclear holocaust. The timeline ends with a hopeful note however that given time the rebirth of Russia as a nation may still be possible.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The Second Russian Civil War features brutal, child-killing, genocidal fascists, Stalin-idolizing totalitarian communists, and a megalomaniacal Kim Jong Il vs. ethnic separatists who aren't afraid of giving as good as they get, the autocratic but still honorable Alexander Lebed, and even Gaidar's relatively benign regime in Kaliningrad isn't above authoritarianism while the Far Eastern Kingdom is not known for its tolerant policies towards religious minorities.
• Black Shirt: In the immediate chaotic aftermath of the 1993 coup, NSF aligned militias (with the Neo-Nazi Russian National Unity under Alexander Barkashov and Alexander Nevzorov's right-wing "Nashis" being the most prominent) assist police in putting down Pro-Yeltsin demonstrators. They later become the backbone of the armed forces of both the far-left and far-right factions when the civil war kicks off.
• Bookends: Republicanism in Russia begins and ends 80 years apart. It started with Provisional Government proclaiming the Russian Republic in 1917 and ended in 1997 with the coronation of Prince Nicholas Romanov exactly eighty years after the Bolsheviks first took power.
• Boomerang Bigot: Vladimir Zhirinovsky was a proud member of the NSF's right bloc despite his half Jewish heritage. All that gets him is an early death in 1994 done by his own NSF allies.
• Bring It: Dzhokhar Dudayev, President of Chechnya, refuses to back down even when the NSF assume power in Russia.
  Dudayev: "If the ‘Rashist’ regime wants to rob the Chechen people of their freedom, they are welcome to try and take it’."
• The Caligula: During Lebed's campaign in Siberia, he encounters Nikolai Kuryanovich, effective warlord of Irkutsk and the surrounding countryside, ruling over an area from Krasnoyarsk to Buryatia and one of the few NSF warlords to align himself with Nevzorov's Fascists as opposed to Anpilov's Stalinists. Nicknamed "the Warlord", he was notable for his cruelty and insanity with how he was someone who carried out massacres of all non-Slavic populations under his authority and was rumored to turn the skulls of his enemies into cups or ashtrays while wearing their skins.
• Cannon Fodder: The Russian Fascists create "Honorary Russian Battalions" for ethnic minorities still in their territory. It's a glorified death sentence since these Battalions were not given training, clothes, or even weapons because their main task were either to walk over minefields, act as bait for Communist artillery, and/or to be tortured for the amusement of Fascist troops.
• The Cavalry: When the Chechen government's capital is nearly overrun by Islamists, Americans from the 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed the "Screaming Eagles", bail out the Chechen loyalists, forcing the Islamists under Basayev to retreat.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: In one of the more heroic moments of the Second Russian Civil War, the Russian Pacific Fleet turned back to save Vladivostok and the Far Eastern Republic from the invading North Koreans after the sailors mutinied and threw their corrupt and uncaring admiral overboard, turning the tide using their ships' firepower with Western intelligence feeding them targets.
• Child Soldiers: To meet the strict quotas imposed by the Stalingrad government (with failing to meet them meaning death), the Red Army in particular have taken to recruiting entire villages of all able bodied males, young boys included. For many, this forced service at least nominally ensures a meal, even if the rest of their families would parish in the famine.
• Civil War: The main draw of this timeline is the Russian Federation collapsing into a second civil war that that outdoes the first one in terms of death toll and atrocities. The civil war has two theaters, the one in European Russia mainly pitting the Fascist "Republic of the Russians" against the Stalinist "Russian Soviet Republic", while out in Siberia and the Far East, the collapse of order and lack of supplies lead to more warlords emerge in comparison.
• Claiming Via Flag: When NATO intervenes in Russia following 4/10, the Americans plant their flag on the ruins of the Moscow Kremlin when they reach the city seven days later. The morality and taste of the act would go on to be greatly debated as whether it was a moment of triumph or rubbing salt in the wound, not in the least due to a Polish-American soldier tying a small Polish flag halfway up the flagpole.
• Co-Dragons: While Anpilov is the one calling the shots in the Russian Soviet Republic, Alksnis, Ilyukhin and Kryuchkov are in charge of various important government positions within the Communist factions and enforce the Stalinist orthodoxy.
• Commie Nazis: The general Western public thinks of the new NSF government as "Communazis" as this trope is likely to be called in this world, although it's somewhat more nuanced as the NSF is actually a hodgepodge of communists of various strains, far-right figures, and moderate right-wingers. Ironically enough, the OG Nazbols Eduard Limonov and Alexandr Dugin end up aligned with the Fascists in the civil war.
• The Coup:
  • The 1993 coup resulting in Yeltsin's death results serves as the POD for this story.
  • Alexander Lebed begins his Siberian campaign by launching a coup against the local NSF leadership in Chelyabinsk.
• Crapsack World: Russia by 1995 is a hellscape of genocidal massacres, rapes, child soldiers, famine, and WMDs.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Russian soldiers captured by Chechen forces were often brutally killed en masse, most notably being decapitated with blunt knives (or in some cases with pens). Others were disemboweled, their guts used to write warnings on the walls for incoming Russian troops while the victims were still alive and screaming.
  • Igor Strelkov, who started the Makhachkala massacre, meets his end after someone tears his lower jaw off with their bare goddamn hands.
  • The Al-Qaeda operatives who attempted to detonate a nuke in Ashgabat are executed by exposing them to nuclear waste bought from China and preventing them from killing themselves as their bodies fall apart.
• Cult of Personality: Part of Anpilov's rule of the RSR involves not only creating a cult of personality around himself, but reestablishing the one Ol' Uncle Joe once had. It comes complete with Volgograd going back to Stalingrad and Stalin’s face appearing in public for the first time since the 1950s.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The NATO intervention against the Army of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia is one of the most one-sided fights in European history with a complete NATO victory. An in-universe YouTube documentary even calls it "the international equivalent of gangbang pornography".
  • While the Chechen War is still a very brutal affair that was compared to the war of extermination that was World War II's Eastern Front, the demoralized, decrepit, and corrupt Russian Army (corrupt as in their guns were often sold to the Chechens themselves for food and money) gets their shit kicked in by a Chechen force armed and backed by the West. It's determined through what records survived the civil war that more Russians died in Chechnya than Soviets died in the entirety of their time in Afghanistan.
• Darker and Edgier: Not that Footprint of Mussolini was a fun family friendly romp, but Death of Russia ups the brutality as it documents the collapse of Russia, a nation of approximately 150 million people burning to the ground with all the horror such a tragedy entails.
• Deadly Gas:
  • As the Battle of Vladivostok rages on, a humiliated Kim orders the use of mustard gas, nerve agents, and sarin on the defenders. This is mentioned to be the first use of WMDs in the Second Russian Civil War, but far from the last.
  • During the Battle of Moscow, the Communists end up using VX nerve gas on their enemies during the fighting for the ruins of the city in a desperate attempt to break the stalemate.
  • The use of nerve gas in the Battle of Moscow proves to be the start of mass use of chemical weapons in the Second Russian Civil War with the Communists, Fascists, and secessionist rebels all using chemical weapons in the aftermath of said chemical attack, most notoriously when every major settlement in Udmurtia was bombarded with chemical weapons by Fascist forces.
• Death by Irony:
  • Ramzan Kadyrov was killed twenty miles behind the front lines by a Tomahawk missile while filming a propaganda video pretending he was shooting American soldiers.
  • Dugin, Barkashov, Nevzorov, Shafarevich and Dobrovolsky, surviving members of the Petrograd Nashist regime and co-instigator of the April 10 nuclear exchange and nuclear-genocidal 'Plan Zass', ended up having their plane shot down by a NATO jet as they fled the nuclear destruction of European Russia and their remains so thoroughly incinerated in the flaming wreckage that only a hand identified as belonging to Nevzorov was ever found, just like the tens of millions they had consigned to nuclear fire.
  • Commissar Vladimir (Heavily implied to be Vladimir Putin), as recounted in Arkady Babchenko's memoirs, ended up putting a bullet in his skull following the 4/10 exchange just like the countless poor hapless 'deserters' and 'cowards' he had shot.
• Death or Glory Attack: By April 1996, both the Communists and the Nationalists were running out of steam and supplies, forcing the Petrograd government to make a mad dash down the Volga to capture Stalingrad, hoping the Communists would collapse upon kicking down the door. Both sides pour everything they had left into the second Battle of Stalingrad, with the real risk of nuclear Armageddon on the line, but in the end, the Al-Qaeda nuke that went off in the city makes it a moot point.
• Death Seeker: The One Soldier’s War in Russia extracts is essentially the brutality of the conflict stripping Arkady Babchenko of his will to live to the point he becomes envious of maggots.
• Decisive Battle: The Battle of Vladivostok is this for the DPRK's invasion of the Far Eastern Republic, with its failure being the beginning of the end for not only Kim's dreams of nuclear weapons, but the end of the Kim family's rule of North Korea.
• Did Anastasia Survive?:
  • Referenced in what became of the town of Shaitanka, where it turned into a microstate called the "Kingdom of Russia" lead by an old woman who claimed to be Anastasia despite not being nearly old enough and had somehow convinced the starving town to along with the delusion.
  • On another note, with what has become of Russia, there is little if any hope for the remains of Nicolas II and his family to be found like they were in our world, likely giving this trope more of a shelf life.
• Different World, Different Movies: While no doubt the horrific collapse of Russia would deeply impact the pop culture of the 90s and beyond, what is known is:
  • The Far East's alliance with Japan would, among other things, result in a new anime character archetype in the form of the cute and pure blonde Orthodox foreign-exchange girl who ends up in Kabuchiko through "zany consequences". According to the author, the first series to use this archetype was Love Hina.
  • The atrocities of the Second Russian Civil War openly influence some of the most horrid scenes to come out of Berserk in this world.
  • One Piece still appears on time, only now with Oda admitting to writing it in order to try and remind the world that good things still existed within it, despite the horror coming from Russia. Among noted changes is the island of Ohara openly being based off of Moscow (with the "main research centre"/Tree of Knowledge looking similar to the destroyed St. Basil’s Cathedral) in order to further amplify the island's destruction and Nico Robin proving popular with readers among the Russian diaspora.
  • Over in the west, a new archetype emerges called the "Wandering Russian," either taking the form of A) an original member of the Russian Diaspora trying to find and reconnect with the people they knew back before the Second Russian Civil War or B) a 2nd generation Russian trying to figure out their identity while having never known Russia before the 2nd Civil War.
  • In the US, many of the Russian Diaspora refugees end up getting involved in the growing IT industry, effectively becoming the timeline's version of Indian tech support. By the modern day, it's mentioned as being difficult to imagine anyone working in IT without having at least a slight Russian accent.
• Dirty Communists: Once Anpilov and his Stalinists are in total control of the Russian Soviet Republic, they seem hell bent on recreating the bad ol' days of Stalin's rule. This ranges from the KGB having power not seen since the 1930s to adopting Stalinist policies for the economy that send the nation further down the toilet. The famines caused by their policies are actually stated be worse than the ones in Siberia or North Korea.
• Disaster Dominoes: The outcome of the Russian Civil War and Al-Qaeda nuking Tehran ends up unleashing this onto most of the world's remaining dictatorships.
  • Slobodan Milošević's Serbia falls to protests from democratic dissidents and Russian refugees horrified by 4/10 and Milošević's open support of Petrograd. Democracy takes hold following a brief revolution although thanks to Milošević taking in the entire Serb population of Croatia and Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro remain a part of Serbia.
  • Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, scapegoating White farmers for a calamitous drought and an imploding economy in 1996, is overthrown by South Africa. Although Nelson Mandela was given the choice of either overthrowing his old friend himself or having Executive Outcomes, mercenaries connected to the old apartheid regimes, do it and leave Mandela with the bad PR of letting them overthrow an African leader.
  • Iran itself falls into a civil war between the Islamist government and Iranian dissidents lead by army mutineers, the conflict not ending until January 1999 in an Islamist defeat.
  • Hafez al-Assad dying of a heart attack on the same day Tehran blew up lead to his son Bassar ascending to power, later caving to demands for democratic reform. The Muslim Brotherhood win Syria's first elections, only to get in a conflict with Lebanese Christians and secularists in occupied Lebanon due to fears of imposed Sharia law, the conflict paving the way for a military coup in 1999 and being unable to impose Islamism in Syria would discredit the Brotherhood in other Middle Eastern countries]].
  • A failed assassination of Saddam Hussein in April 1997 lead to a Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq. After the USAF annihilates the Iraqi Army sent to "finishing what [they] started in 1988", a Shiite uprising occurs and turns the ensuing Iraqi civil war into a religious war after Saddam fanned the flame of sectarianism. Iraq's civil war ends in a ceasefire in 2000 after following a three year long stalemate, with a Shiite south, a rump Saddam regime in the north, and Iraqi Kurdistan getting its independence only to be occupied by Turkey until they withdrew over a decade later.
  • Muammar Gaddafi threw in his lot with Anpilov, later abolishing his WMD program following the beatdown Pakistan got and is now desperate to hold off demands for him to step down after dissidents smelled blood in the water. Over in neighboring Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, hoping a military victory against Libya would save his own dictatorship like the Argentines before him in the face of the implosion of the tourism sector, declared war on Libya and overthrew his regime with Western backing. Gaddafi dies via firing squad, the victory only buys Mubarak a few more years and Libya's future is defined by a merry-go-round of coups driven by oil money.
• Distinction Without a Difference: To celebrate their victory over North Korea, Aksyuchits renames the Far Eastern Republic to the Far Eastern Kingdom. Of course, with Jesus being the country's King, it's still a republic in all but name.
• Downer Ending: The timeline lives up to its name as 38 million people are left dead by the end of the civil war, the nuclear exchange between the Nationalists and Communists that extended to the rest of the world saw Russia take the brunt of the damage, which was further aggravated by the Fascists within the Nationalist government having usurped power near the end to implement a genocidal plan against minorities that involved using nukes on civilian centers. Over 25 million Russians fled the country and many refused to return to either Siberia or the Far Eastern Kingdom. Russia as a culture lives on in some shape or form, but is gone forever as a united nation, with many of its landmarks and artifacts burning in nuclear fire.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Matvey Buriakov, head of Russian troops in Germany, is inspired to declare fealty to the Kaliningrad government after having a bad dream of a Moscow paved with human corpses. This act saves not only his own life, but those of the troops (about 25% of them) that followed him there as well.
• Driven to Suicide: Babchenko's commissar Vladimir blows his own brains out following the nuclear exchange between Petrograd, Stalingrad, and the West due to refusing to live in a world without a Russia in it.
• Dwindling Party: By April 10th, 1996, the only two members left of Babchenko's Red Army unit are Arkday himself and commissar Vladimir. After the 4/10 nuclear exchange, Babchenko is left as the Sole Survivor after Vladimir shoots himself.
• Eagle Squadron: Timothy McVeigh, along with Željko "Arkan" Ražnatović and his "Tigers", are among the most infamous foreign fighters in Russia, all of whom aligned with the Nationalist government.
• Emergency Authority: Kaliningrad under Gaidar is effectively a republic under intense emergency powers in order to deal with the chaos caused by the rise of the NSF. What was left of Russia's young democracy was effectively taken away by his government in order to save the very idea of Russian democracy.
• Empty Quiver: The Aum Shinrikyo were stopped from getting their hands on a Russian nuke, but not Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, making off with at least four of them by paying a Red Army colonel with heroin. One went off in Stalingrad, kick starting 4/10, and two others go off in Almaty, Kazakhstan and Tehran in 1997; the fourth, meant for Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, is a dud and fails to detonate.
• End of an Age: After the civil war, Russia goes from a continent spanning nation at the forefront of history and culture for centuries, to a bombed out wreck that will never reach its old heights again. Though her people and culture live on in the sucessor states and around the world, Russia's story as a united and influential power is over.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Islamist and Mujahideen volunteers are among the Chechen forces fighting the Russians during the Chechnya War and the liberation of the Caucasus during the civil war. The secular Dudayev accepted their help to prevent a genocide at the hands of the Russians, but (correctly) predicted an eventual confrontation between him and the Islamists for the fate of an independent Ichkeria.
  • Even with the Russian collapse, Armenia and Azerbaijan are still far from friends but both are equally outraged over the genocide of their brethren still in Russia. This outrage is enough for both of them to support America's intervention in Chechnya.
  • Forces of the Komi Republic, the Idel-Ural rebels, and the Russian Soviet Republic form a short-lived alliance against the Fascists during the fighting for the Perm Oblast during September 1995.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: While evil might be too strong a word for Alexander Lebed, he is legitimately proud in how Tatars and Chechens fought alongside him, has a Jewish second-in-command who he trusts to oversee an important war front in Lebed's bid to restore sanity in Russia, and allowed the Yakuts a degree of autonomy under his leadership, despite being an authoritarian militarist.
• Everyone Has Standards: Alexander Lebed, a popular Russian general within the army who spent the first quarter of the timeline in Transnistria thanks to the NSF, isn't the biggest fan of democracy, and is either Russia's Napoléon Bonaparte or its Augusto Pinochet depending on who you ask. That said, even he finds the communists and the fascists to be repugnant excuses of human beings for what they've done to Russia and forms his own government in southwestern Siberia to usurp them both.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Subverted. Sergei Shoigu, who was a member of Yeltsin's cabinet, was also notoriously corrupt, even by Russian standards. While his corruption was least partially the reason he was fired by the NSF, his Tuvan ancestry was also a factor.
  • Played straight with German Ugryumov abandoning Vladivostok to the North Koreans because the city couldn't meet his price tag. Not even Anpilov could defend him, denouncing him on grounds of "failing to secure Vladivostok's surrender", and the Fascists used him as anti-communist propaganda.
  • Chinese troops invading North Korea are horrified at the level of famine in the country, even officers old enough to remember the Great Leap Forward and troops fresh off the Tiananmen Square massacre are disgusted by the starvation and the level of indoctrination among North Koreans.
  • Nevzorov, upon reading the "Zass Plan", is explicitly stated to have been utterly horrified by it with Shafarevich being the only one who joins him in opposing said plan.
• Evil vs. Evil: The two main factions of the civil war, communists and fascists, both wish to impose some kind of brutal totalitarianism on the Russian people.
• The Famine:
  • A combination of recruiting male farmhands into the army to fight in Chechnya (later being recruited by the communists to beef up their numbers) and Western embargoes ensures that a lot of people are going to starve to death in 1994 and 1995.
  • The North Korean famine of the 1990s still happens in this world, only made worse with the total collapse of Russia and the DPRK's invasion of the Far Eastern Republic.
• Fictionalized Death Account:
  • Boris Yeltsin dies within the smoldering Russian White House during the 1993 Coup, the building being set alight by pro-Parliament forces under General Pavel Grachev, who shelled the building in order to merely force him out.
  • General Grachev is gunned down by masked gunmen in a drive-by, having outlived his usefulness to the NSF.
  • After starting the Makhachkala massacre by running over protestors with a tank, Igor Strelkov is Torn Apart by the Mob after being forced out of his tank.
  • Makashov, Ilya Konstantinov, and Alexander Rutskoy all die in the same plane crash caused by a bomb on board.
  • Gennady Zyuganov, Sergey Baburin, and Mikhail Astafyev all meet the hangman's noose after separate show trials done by the Stalinists.
  • Vladimir Zhirinovsky is found dead in Moscow, largely agreed to be a hit ordered by Barkashov due to Zhrinovsky's half Jewish heritage.
  • The Castro Brothers are murdered by "unknown assassins" (read: members of the Army) after Fidel tried to send troops to fight for the Communists in Russia during a brutal economic crisis.
  • German Ugryumov is thrown overboard off the coast of Kamchatka during a mutiny sparked by him leaving the people of Vladivostok to die.
  • Kim Jong Il is overthrown and killed in a military coup led by his brother-in-law after the Battle of Vladivostok and the Chinese invasion of North Korea.
  • Gennady Yanayev is the only figure from the 1991 coup to die, as Anpilov had him killed by the KGB fearing he'd try to usurp him from power.
  • Ruslan Khasbulatov became just another piece of cannon fodder for the Fascists as part of a "Honorary Russian Battalion" following his detainment and was unceremoniously blown up by a landmine in 1995.
  • Ramzan Kadyrov, Abu al-Walid, and Zemimkhan Vandarbiyev all die anti-climatically during America's intervention in Chechnya against radical Islam.
  • Sergei Lavrov is named as Foreign Minister of the Russian Soviet Republic and executed by the KGB on the same day.
  • Viktor Anpilov, Vladimir Kryuchkov, and Arkan all die when Al-Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in the middle of Stalingrad during the battle for the city. Ilyukhin dies when Petrograd government forces bombard Stalingrad with their own nuclear weapons in response.
  • Babchenko's commissar, all but outright stated to be Vladimir Putin, shoots himself after seeing the nuclear devastation wrought on Russia.
  • The plane containing Dugin, Barkashov, Nevzorov, Shafarevich and Dobrovolsky is shot down after NATO intervenes in Russia following the 4/10 nuclear exchange.
  • Arkady Babchenko is mentioned to have died of cancer in 2005.
  • Osama bin Laden fries on Old Sparky at Sing Sing.
• Fighting for a Homeland: At the time of the POD, Chechnya was the only ethnic minority state to break off from Russia. With the rise of the NSF and the beginning of the civil war however, the Chechens are joined by various other minority groups that start to fight for their own freedom.
• Final Solution:
  • As the war drags on, both the Communists and the Nationalists take the opportunity to purge ethnic and religious minorities (namely remaining Jews) from their shares of Russia, with the former utilizing a combination of camps and Cannon Fodder duties while the latter merely draft them into the Red Army.
  • The fighting in Udmurtia is infamous for how Udmurts, at times on horseback, are hunted by Nationalist forces with a goal of wiping out the Udmurts as a nation with a chemical weapons attack on major cities in Udmurtia being the culmination of this campaign of genocide against the Udmurts.
  • The Zass Plan involves raining nuclear bombs on those considered non-white by the Petrograd government.
• First-Name Basis: Babchenko's commissar is only ever called Vladimir but modern readers can easily tell who he's meant to be.
• Forbidden Zone: Many parts of European Russia become uninhabitable or at least untraversable as a result of use of chemical warfare between Fascist and Communist regimes during the Second Russian Civil War, with many cities becoming depopulated and tainted by residue toxins, the most notable of which is the ruins of Moscow itself. Gets much worse when much of European Russia are reduced to irradiated wastelands following the April 10 nuclear exchange.
• Frontline General: During his campaign against NSF loyalists in Siberia, Alexander Lebed personally leads his armies during the Battle of Novosibirsk, being amongst those who charged into the city, something that he argues was necessary to ensure that he could be seen as a brave leader worthy of reunifying Russia.
• General Failure:
  • While the Communists were able to get the loyalty of numerous generals, it turns out most of them got their positions through bribery and backstabbing with little skill to back it, ordering Zerg Rushes against entrenched Fascist troops in Moscow who mow down Red conscripts with machine gun fire. Barkashov's RNU militia fighting in the remains of the city is, at the very least, mentioned to be more meritocratic than the entire new Red Army.
  • Sergei Shoigu proves to be one during the Battle of the Three Armies, which leads to his overthrow by the Mongolians for his incompetence and corruption.
• Going Native: After the Aiyy Yeurekhé movement lead an uprising against the NSF administration in Sakha, it's shown that some ethnic Russians have already become a part of the movement since it first sprouted up in 1994. Its adherents dressed in tribal clothes while dancing and chanting in the middle of the woods to the rhythm of Shamans.
• Government in Exile: Yegor Gaidar, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia under Yeltsin, ends up making a government in exile in Kaliningrad after Yeltsin's demise and the NSF assuming power.
• Gunship Rescue: Just when all hope is lost for the defenders of Vladivostok, the Pacific Fleet returns right on time to virtually annihilate the North Korean military and rout them, saving the Far Eastern Republic.
• Hero-Worshipper: The Stalingrad Government is notable for how it is a regime which idolizes Stalin with an in-universe history book even saying that its solution to every problem was found by "imagining what the demon on Stalin’s shoulder would tell him to do".
• Hired Guns: Lebed's Siberia enlists foreign mercenaries, particularly South Africa's Executive Outcomes, to bolster their numbers.
• Historical Badass Upgrade:
  • Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first President of Chechnya who has been overshadowed by the likes of Ramzan Kadyrov in our world, is a heroic Rebel Leader who leads Chechen forces against a far more genocidal Russia and lives to see his homeland free from Russian rule.
  • The Aiyy Yeurekhé, better known as just the Aiyy Faith, is just a peaceful neo-Tengrist religious organization based in Yakutia in our world. In this timeline, the Aiyy Yeurekhé take up arms to oust the NSF from Yakutia/Sakha to establish their own nation.
• Historical Downgrade:
  • Arkady Babchenko's KGB commissar is all but stated to be none other than Putin himself, spending the rest of his life far from any position of political power.
  • Dmitry Medvedev is only mentioned as one of Boris Nemtsov's aides who was present during negotiations between Lebed, Nemtsov, and the FEK in New Delhi, witnessing Aksyuchits' reaction to the agreement between Lebed and the Neo-Pagans in Yakutia first-hand.
• Historical Hero Upgrade:
  • Because of the way he died and dying before his economic policies and alcoholism would ruin his reputation further, Boris Yeltsin enjoys a lot of sympathy in the West, painted as a democratic martyr backstabbed by ex-Soviets and Fascists. Subverted in later years when it becomes clear to the public at large just how bad Russia had gotten by 1993 just because of him.
  • Played with. Yegor Gaidar, who was the Acting Prime Minister of Russia and the mind behind many of the shock therapy economic policies that screwed Russia over in our world, is instead the head of the Russian Federation in exile in Kaliningrad. He's still a greedy Corrupt Politician and the former Eastern Bloc still hates his guts, but setting up the Kaliningrad government nets him a somewhat better legacy after what Russia becomes over the course of the timeline.
  • Played straighter with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Already famous in the West for writing The Gulag Archipelago, he gets another accomplishment in leading to the peaceful end of Gaidar's emergency rule of Kaliningrad.
• Historical Villain Upgrade:
  • Albert Makashov, who's presidential aspirations went up in smoke after 1993 in our world, becomes the face of the NSF after they assume power, ushering in a new era of tyranny in Russia.
  • Viktor Anpilov, a Stalinist who was merely part of Putin's controlled opposition in our world, becomes the leader of the Russian Soviet Republic that emerges once the NSF collapses, allowing him to enforce hardline Stalinist ideals onto Russia for one final time in the 20th century.
  • Alexander Nevzorov is a journalist, director and member of the Duma who supported the State Committee that lead the 1991 coup, the First Chechen War and Putin's rise to power while opposing the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and predicting that the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war would end in disaster for Moscow at a time when stating such could get you a one way ticket to Siberia. In this timeline, Nevzorov is in too deep with the NSF's right wing to disengage, ending up as the "moderate" face of the "Republic for the Russians", who is later outplayed by Neo-Nazis within the ruling council.
  • Aleksandr Dugin, in our world, is seen by many in the West as "Putin's brain" and the man behind Putin's ideology and foreign policy, even if, in reality, he has relatively little influence over Putin's decisions or beliefs. In this TL he is amongst Nevzorov's top advisors and one of three architects of the Zass plan.
  • Dmitry Utkin, best known for founding the Wagner Group (described as either PMCs and/or Putin's private army) and accused of Neo-Nazi sympathies, is an out-and-out Neo-Nazi aligned with Barkashov's faction within the Fascists.
  • Anton Krasovsky, in our world a mere television presenter and journalist for Russia Today who promoted genocide against Ukrainians as the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war went on, is able to act out on his claims, becoming a commandant of Camp Dagda, a "Women and Children Holding Centre" who is called "Monster" by both prisoners and guards.
  • Alexander Barkashov, in our world a relatively obscure figure outside of Russia, is in this timeline a major figure in the Nationalist side of the Second Russian Civil War and ends up being a figure that has been stated to be a figure "put on the same level as Hitler" owing to his genocidal brutality, culminating in the nuclear genocide of Plan Zass.
• History Repeats:
  • Once again, Russia is torn apart in a civil war between communists and a right-wing government. Only difference this time is that it doesn't end in reunification and kills far more people.
  • Similarly, Gaidar's situation as the leader of the Kaliningrad Government bears a striking resemblance to Chiang Kai-shek's regime in Taiwan, which is even mentioned in-universe as well.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Ruslan Khasbulatov started the timeline as Chairman of Russia who stood against Yeltsin in '93. By 1995, he's been reduced to cannon fodder likely begging for death as part of a "Honorary Russian Battalion", being unceremoniously blown up by a landmine he was assigned to clear with his corpse.
  Khasbulatov: "I’ve saved Democracy from a buffoon only to hand it over to Demons."

Tropes I - Z

• I Did What I Had to Do: In order to get the 20,000 or so Jews still living in Fascist controlled Russia out of there, Yitzhak Rabin agrees to trade them vital resources in exchange for their freedom. It gets him criticism when its declassified in 2008, but maintains it was the right thing to do.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • North Korea actually invaded the Far Eastern Republic while in the middle of a horrific famine intensified by the collapse of Russia. The KPA were marching on empty stomachs and when their own rations run out, their fallen comrades start to look like a good meal...
  • The town of Muzhi is mentioned to have had human meat publicly sold in the marketplace as food became more scarce. It's likely not the only place in Russia doing so, especially as during his return to Russia, Lebed comes across a town in Siberia where a sign mentions that eating one's child was a crime liable for prosecution.
  • The corpse of the Mayor of Novosibirsk was found by Lebed's troops in the fridge in his office, with the local NSF officials intending to use his corpse as an emergency food supply in case even the leadership began to starve.
• In Name Only: The Far Eastern Republic that Aksyuchits establishes in, well, the Far East is far different from the short-lived 1920s socialist republic it shares the name with.
• Kangaroo Court:
  • Viktor Ilyukhin is appointed Prosecutor General after the NSF take charge, turning Russian courts into a modern version of Roland Freisler’s own courtroom. One of the first major cases Ilyukhin announces is Gorbachev, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and Viktor Yerin being put on trial for high treason, while Gaidar was trialed in absentia on "economic genocide".
  • Once the NSF collapses, Ilyukhin switches over to the communists wholesale. Among the show trials he presides over are the ones for Gennady Zyuganov, Sergey Baburin, and Mikhail Astafyev which are merely throwbacks to show trials of the Stalin era.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: After Syria becomes a democracy, the new pro-Western government hands over Alois Brunner, who becomes the last big Holocaust case.
• Keystone Army:
  • With the NSF having both far-left and far-right elements within it, Makashov is able to use the fame he got from leading the storming of the Ostankino, in addition to being considered Anti-Semitic and Stalinist enough to unite both factions, to become the face of the NSF. Once he, along with President Rutskoy and Administrative Chief Konstantinov, dies in a mysterious plane crash, the NSF's unity goes with him.
  • Anpilov centered so much power onto himself that when he dies following the Al-Qaeda nuke goes off in Stalingrad, what remains of the Communists begin to collapse into disarray, with the commanders of some nuclear weapons refusing to launch without Anpilov's orders or not doing so to prevent more bloodshed.
• Laser-Guided Karma: German Ugryumov, the Fat Bastard in charge of the Pacific Fleet only because of cronyism who left the people of Vladivostok to die because they couldn't bribe him, is thrown overboard by his own disgusted men.
• Last Stand:
  • Everyone had written off the Far Eastern Republic as a dead man walking in the face of the DPRK invasion, yet the city's defenders and Aksyuchits himself were willing to fight to the end for Vladivostok. It was thought to be hopeless until the Pacific Fleet came back home...
  • The Battle of Stalingrad was this by April 1996. Both factions were running on fumes with their supplies at a critical low, the Nationalists had nukes and Anpilov had centered so much power onto himself, that killing him would've toppled the entire Soviet Republic and end the war. It didn't really pan out well for anyone involved.
• Lesser of Two Evils: How Kalmykia justifies remaining with Anpilov all the way to the end, even to the point of turning down American support. The Nationalists want to oppress if not exterminate ethnic minorities while the Dagestani Islamists unambiguously want to exterminate the majority Buddhist Kalmyks. At least Anpilov isn't openly genocidal towards them, although the Kalmyks fear he to will try to exterminate them should they express even a hint of disloyalty. The goal to survive is why the Kalmyks are among the most motivated troops in the Red Army, and after 4/10 they split from Russia at the first chance, having been mostly spared from the nuclear exchange.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste:
  • The NSF use the chaos in the aftermath of the 1993 Coup to get in power in the elections that follow Yeltsin's death.
  • Militant Islamists are able to use the collapse of Russia and their war in the Caucasus to spread their ideology, setting up shop in Dagestan alongside moderates as part of the Dagestani Restoration Council, later taking over the region wholesale.
  • Seeing an opportunity to get his nation some nukes, Kim Jong Il has his armies invade the newly founded Far Eastern Republic in Primorye in order to secure abandoned Russian nuclear weapons in the region, although it backfires on the DPRK following their defeat in the Battle of Vladivostok.
• Lifesaving Misfortune: The only reason Eduard Limonov is the Sole Survivor of the Petrograd regime is because he resigned from the government months before 4/10 due to ideological disagreements, which kept him in the dark about the Zass Plan. He's captured by Swedish troops after 4/10 and still gets a life sentence at his trial for his involvement in the mass deportations of Karelians and Balts in addition to the formation of the Honorary Russian Battalions.
• The Mafiya: The Russian Mob took over the cities of Norilsk, Urengoy, and Dudinka and executed the local NSF officials there with the harsh Arctic conditions making it hard for Lebed's forces to flush them out of the cities they had taken.
• Make an Example of Them: To reflect the new world order following the aftermath of 4/10 and the subsequent Hiroshima Treaty that places strict limits on existing nuclear arsenals, Pakistan's nascent nuclear program, stopped by the civilian government briefly continued by the subsequent military regime that replaced Benazir Bhutto, is obliterated by US airstrikes and completely dismantled.
• Make the Bear Angry Again: What little the NSF is able to accomplish involves seizing territory from Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine which prevents them from joining NATO due to standing policy regarding members with disputed territory. The world is alarmed at this resurgent Russia up until the moment the Russian Army shits the bed in Chechnya.
• May It Never Happen Again: The treaties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which reduces existing nuclear arsenals and bars other nations from making their own was done in the aftermath of the 4/10 exchange, a tragedy that changed everything on a domestic and international scale.
• Meaningful Name: The Zass Plan is named after Grigory Zass, the main architect behind the Circassian genocide. Ironically, with how it was meant to eliminate Russia's minorities via nuclear genocide, the Zass Plan was named after a Baltic German serving the Russian Empire as opposed to an ethnic Russian.
• Meaningless Villain Victory: The NSF are able to ascend to power in 1994, smothering the hope of democracy in mainland Russia in the crib, all in the name of reversing the damage done since the fall of the Soviet Union. All they do is seize minor amounts of territory from three different countries, do nothing about their deteriorating food situation, and kick start the civil war through brutality against minorities and eventually turning on one another.
• Military Coup:
  • When the portion of Siberia that's still nominally loyal to the NSF asks Alexander Lebed to take over their provisional government for the duration of the civil war, he responds by denouncing the Fascists and Communists alike and having his forces arrest all the local NSF officials, taking over the region as a military dictator.
  • When the Cuban military gets word of Fidel Castro wanting to send soldiers to Russia to fight on Anpilov's side in exchange for resources to alleviate a worse Special Period (with spare resources being something no Russian government has for obvious reasons), the army kills both Fidel and his brother and installs a Junta that sees democracy return by 1996.
  • Kim Jong Il is overthrown and killed in a military coup led by Jang Song-Thaek, his brother-in-law who feared a US/ROK invasion that would see everyone flung against the wall.
• Minimalist Cast: In the "One Soldier’s War in Russia" extracts, the only named characters of note are Arkady Babchenko (who documents his time as a Red Army conscript and Fascist POW in a memoir) and his sociopath commissar Vladimir (ironically, the only other survivor from Arkady's original unit).
• Mirroring Factions: In the end, neither the Communists nor the Fascists are above violence and brutality to achieve their goals, and both sides have incredible disdain for the non-Russian minorities.
• Monumental Damage:
  • When the NSF finally turn on one another and fight to control Moscow, both St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin were destroyed by communist forces in order to keep the Fascists from getting a propaganda victory by capturing them. Its later mentioned that the entire city of Moscow including all remaining landmarks were destroyed in the fighting, existing only in memory after the Communists unleash Sarin gas.
  • After the events of 4/10, many more of Russia's cultural treasures west of the Urals are lost to the fighting or the nuclear exchange. Petrograd was largely spared because the Nationalists had the foresight to put the city's own treasures in a bunker.
• Multinational Team: Among the defenders of Vladivostok are a small IDF unit originally sent in to get the city's remaining Jews out of there, members from South Korea's Unification Church (which included a Roof Korean that survived the LA Riots), and Japanese ultranationalists that really wanted to kill Korean communists.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: The Russian nuclear stockpile is split between the two NSF breakaways once the civil war kicks off, with many more left stranded in bases east of the Urals thanks to corruption and the chaos of the civil war. In fact, the arsenals of the Petrograd and Stalingrad governments was a huge elephant in the room until MAD is broken on 4/10.
• The Mutiny:
  • In the largest mutiny seen in Russia since 1917, a large force of Russian Army troops in Bashkortostan refuse orders to put down a newly independent Tatarstan because President of Bashkortostan Murtaza Rakhimov offered them one thing that Moscow couldn't: enough food to survive the incoming winter.
  • After German Ugryumov abandons Vladivostok to their fate because they couldn't pay him a good bribe, his sailors turn on him and toss him overboard out of disgust, before turning back just in time to save the city from the invading North Koreans.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Babchenko's commissar, despite being part of the original KGB, is not a committed communist but rather a Russian nationalist who serves only Russia no matter what form it takes. Indeed, he takes to Fascist "re-education" like a fish to water partially because of his nationalism, but also to survive captivity.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: While, for pretty obvious reasons, the Petrograd Government prefers to use "Nationalist" as a label, their radical ultranationalism and genocidal actions towards ethnic minorities makes the Petrograd Government be considered in this world to be a "Fascist" government.
• Never Found the Body: United Nations excavators are unable to find Lenin's body anywhere in the Moscow ruins after an official excavation project began in 1997. While it wasn't destroyed during the battle, Lenin's corpse likely is gone for good after 4/10.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The nuking of Tehran, done by Al-Qaeda due to the regime's "Shiite heresy" kick starts not only the fall of Iran's Islamist regime, but also ignites a far eariler Arab Spring.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • The "Honorary Russian Battalions" are units where people of non-Russian backgrounds are used as cannon fodder.
  • After the end of the civil war, the Russian Federation retains its name despite having become a monarchy once again and only having Russia as a constituent member.
• Nostalgia Filter: Deconstructed to the point where the Central Theme of the timeline may as well be "Trying to bring back the past will only ruin the future".
  • The failure of post-Soviet Russia and its newborn democracy allows for the NSF, the standard bearers of Russia's Imperial/White Army and communist past, to attain actual political power and try to restore Russia to its glory days. The NSF trying to reverse Russia's decline only leads to them throwing away any good relations with the West, instead choosing to exert itself against the Western democracies and the former SSRs, turning most of Europe barring Serbia against them and does nothing for the average Russian, with their country's economy in the toilet thanks to sanctions against the NSF government, and sticking their thumb in the eye of the West doesn't alleviate Russia's lack of food in the slightest.
  • The end result of both the Petrograd and Stalingrad governments, representing the worse traits of Russia's traditionalist/monarchist and far-left past? The civil war that starts between them lasts from 1993 to 1996 and ends in a limited nuclear exchange which kills millions of their own countrymen and practically the very idea of a unified Russian state. Their attempts to bring back Russia's glory days and prior greatness was All for Nothing in the worse possible way.
  • Babchenko's commissar Vladimir is loyal to Russia as a superpower, whether it be communist or nationalist. However, he has clear disdain for Russia as it was under Yeltsin and Gaidar, because they made Russia a mere "supporting character", valuing trying to relive the past rather than deal with the new reality and leave for Kaliningrad. All it gets him is a death by his own hand after 4/10.
  • The remnant Russian Federation restoring the Romanovs to power as ceremonial monarchs is a desperate attempt to celebrate Russia's past by giving the nation something or anything to rally around after the 4/10 nuclear exchange destroyed most of Russia's cultural centers and monuments. At least for the rest of the 1990s, the returned monarchy is one of the only few cultural icons they have left and remaining Russians in the Federation have little reason to hope for the future after everything that's happened.
• Not Enough to Bury: After the plane containing the leaders of the Nationalist faction is shot down by the US Air Force, the largest of the remains found in the wreckage was one of Nevzorov's hands, the others having been reduced to ashes.
• Not Me This Time: Turns out it was neither the Communists or the Nationalists who set off the nuke in Stalingrad on April 10th, 1996. That honor goes to Al-Qaeda, who set off a stolen nuke in the hopes of starting a nuclear war between Russia and the West.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The fate of the town of Sherkaly upon it being reclaimed by Lebed's troops. Not a single resident was to be found and no one ever found even a hint of human remains in the area.
• Nuclear Weapons Taboo: Throughout the Second Russian Civil War the Fascist and Communist Russian factions as well as other breakaway republics possessed large quantities of the old Soviet arsenal, but refrained from using them due to the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. This however was eventually rendered moot by Fascist Russia's decision to enact 'Plan Zass' - unleashing an all-out nuclear holocaust on Russia's non-Slavic populations and communities - and Al-Queda sneaking and destroying the Communist Russian government's capital of Stalingrad with a stolen nuke in an attempt to provoke Russia and the West into destroying each other in a world-devastating nuclear war. By the time the April 10th nuclear exchange is over, European Russia had been reduced to an irradiated wasteland, while the NATO and the West managed to escape most damage with only a few military bases and small cities lost.
• Only Sane Man: In a government dominated by Fascists, out and proud Neo-Nazis, and Russian nationalist mystics, Igor Shafarevich is increasingly becoming one of the saner men among the Nationalists, openly snarking against the insane pseudo-historical beliefs of his colleagues. In addition, he is the only member of the Petrograd Government outside of Nevzorov to vote against the implementation of the Zass Plan when it is formally proposed.
• Please Select New City Name:
  • When the civil war begins proper and the NSF truly breaks down in November 1994, the Fascists based in St. Petersburg rename the city Petrograd, while the communists rename Volgograd back to Stalingrad.
  • Kaliningrad is renamed Pushkingrad in 1996.
  • The world knows the city of Grozny as Sölƶa-Ġala in this timeline after the events of this world's Chechnya War.
  • The Petrograd Government renames the city of Kirov and its associated oblast after Ivan Ilyin.
• Point of No Return: The Venedo Massacre committed by the Russians was the line in the sand for Russia's Muslim population, realizing now that the NSF would either keep them in line through force or put them all in mass graves.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Yelstin dying in the 1993 Coup is what kicks off the chain of events that eventually tears Russia apart.
• The Political Officer: To maintain discipline within the Red Army during the civil war, the Communists bring Commissars back to accompany troops in the field. Among them is a KGB agent that once worked in Dresden that would be very familiar to modern day readers...
• Politically Incorrect Hero:
  • Levko Lukianenko, who becomes President of Ukraine after Russia takes Crimea, is a patriot and a pro-Western figure at a time where they're really needed in Eastern Europe... but tends to put his foot in his mouth when he comments about Jews. He's a bit of a diplomatic embarrassment, but he's one on the side of the West which is what matters more in the face of the NSF.
  • "Hero" is not quite the right word to describe Alexander Lebed, but at least he genuinely averts this trope rather than doing so only for good PR, valuing the lives of the ethnic minorities that make up his armies, in addition to having Russian Jewish lieutenant general Lev Rokhlin lead Lebed's Ural campaign.
  • The Far Eastern Kingdom's policies towards religious minorities are in many ways a continuation of Soviet-era policies with how their officials and soldiers inform indigenous communities that said policies would continue except for Orthodox Christians and villages who do not build or operate Orthodox Churches would not recieve development aid. In addition, the Far Eastern Kingdom's policies towards Buryats amount to ethnic cleansing as well.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • About the only thing the NSF share is their prejudice against Russia's ethnic minorities and the Jews. In fact, it's the Russian Army's war crimes in Chechnya that convinces Bashkortostan and Tatarstan to break off from Russia, their secession being the first dominoes to fall in the Second Russian Civil War.
  • And it doesn't get better after the NSF collapses, the Fascists barters ethnic minorities in their territory as hostages for food and medicine from the West or just puts women into rape camps. Both the Communists and Fascists also use such minorities as cannon fodder for certain death missions such as clearing landmines.
• Post-Soviet Reunion: Very downplayed. The NSF would love to get the borders of the Soviet Union back, but the farthest they get is taking Estonia's Ida-Viru region, Latvia's Latgale region, and Crimea before the civil war kicks off.
• Press-Ganged: How the Red Army bulks up its numbers during the civil war. Young boys and pensioners who haven't held a rifle since the Axis came to town are not spared from being "drafted" and this method is used to further punish remaining ethnic and religious minorities.
• Puppet King:
  • Alexander Rutskoy ends up as the NSF's puppet President prior to how his death, along with that of Chairman Makashov and Administrative Chief Konstantinov, in a mysterious plane crash, leads to the Communist and Fascist factions of the NSF turning on each other.
  • Nevzorov, towards the end of the civil war, ends up "losing his place as Petrograd's decision maker" as more radical elements of the government rally around Dugin, Barkashov, and Alexey Dobrovolsky who push the Zass Plan through against his will.
• Puppet State: North Korea ends up as a Chinese puppet state under the rule of Jang Song-Thaek after the failed invasion of Primorsk and the subsequent Chinese invasion of North Korea.
• The Purge: Just wouldn't be the Stalin Years: Remastered without them.
  • In order to seize control of the communists forces when the civil war does kick off, Anpilov gets to work purging all opposition so that only he can rule the newly reconstituted Russian Soviet Republic, starting with his rivals within the Communist faction with Gennady Zyuganov being amongst the first victims of said purge. It's later revealed that Anpilov's empowered KGB got so busy, some estimates conclude that almost half of politicians in Stalingrad had been executed and replaced by sycophants either truly loyal to the cause or scared for their lives.
  • After the Battle of Moscow becomes the most Pyrrhic of victories for both factions, Anpilov uses the KGB to purge the Red Army for failing him. Vladislav Achalov and Viktor Alksnis are among those killed in the purges and Dmitry Yazov would only be spared thanks to his old friend Kryuchkov warning him ahead of time, surrendering to the Tartars and later handed over to the West after he got the shit beaten out of him.
  • Ordinary Russians living under Anpilov's rule are not spared the ravages of the purge either with how life under the Russian Soviet Republic is notorious for its unending terror. At one point, someone could be appointed as Foreign Minister one morning and be purged the same night.
• Rage Breaking Point: After the North Koreans openly defy their Chinese masters and invade the Far Eastern Republic in order to snag nukes only to fail at Vladivostok, the Chinese have finally had enough of the Kim family. With their antics having cost China a zone of influence along their border region, they're more than happy to overthrow Kim themselves.
• Rape as Drama:
  • Male on male rape is depicted as nothing less than a horrific crime used as a means to lord over and humiliate either lower ranking troops as part of the military's "Dedovshchina" culture, captured prisoners of war, enemy civilians and ethnic minorities held in captivity (primarily in the case of the Fascists).
  • Women belonging to ethnic minority communities that are unlucky enough to fall into Fascist captivity are tossed into rape camps to be raped day and night by various guards all in order to produce more ethnically Slavic children. In a tactic copied from the Rwandan Genocide, women who try to escape and are captured are punished by being raped by an inmate infected with AIDS, ensuring a slow and painful death in the conditions of civil war Russia. The use of this punishment by the Fascists was considered so horrible, that it was later used to have rape considered in a genocidal context in war crime tribunals.
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: Kim Jong Il's army brings death and destruction in its march to Vladivostok.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: In 2019, the Russian Federation, Siberia, and the Far East are able to finally work together to launch the first manned Russian space craft since the 1990s. While it's mentioned that the three are beginning to culturally drift apart, they remain on friendly terms and their "Russian Union" alliance (a mini-European Union) has finally gotten off the ground, with the story's final line stating that many hope to see Russia's rebirth after all the death of the 1990s.
• Reassignment Backfire: Viktor Aksyuchits, a member of the NSF who wasn't an extremist (instead being a fairly standard Christian Democrat), was made the regional governor of Primorsky in order to get him away far away from any meaningful position in Moscow. As Siberia and the Far East descends into anarchy, he declares Primorsky's independence as the Far Eastern Republic and becomes a beloved leader after leading the young nation through a North Korean invasion.
• The Remnant: Remnants of the Red Army and various Nashist forces conduct a low-level insurgency against the international coalition which occupies Russia after the April 10 Nuclear Exchange which see 4,000 troops die at the hands of Nashist remnants while remnants of the Red Army claim 1,200 soldiers throughout 1996.
• Revenge by Proxy: In response to Russia being able to keep Estonia and Latvia out of NATO by exploiting one of their own rules, NATO goes much harder on Slobodan Milošević's pro-NSF regime in Serbia and bombs the Republika Srpska in Bosnia out of existence.
• Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman:
  • Igor Girkin/Strelkov, best known in our world for being the culprit behind the MH17 tragedy, ends up being known for massacring otherwise peaceful Dagestani protestors in Makhachkala, which kickstarted the region's war for independence.
  • Viktor Aksyuchits, a Christian Democrat who served in the Russian Duma for a bit back in the 1990s in our world, becomes leader of the Far Eastern Republic and becomes a beloved leader after leading the young nation during the North Korean invasion.
  • Sergei Shoigu, who in our world is notable for being Putin's Defense Minister, becomes President of a separatist Tuvan Republic which emerged as the NSF's hold over Siberia collapsed until his incompetence as a military leader leads to the Mongolians overthrowing him.
  • Instead of perpetrating the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh is among the members of the American far-right to go to Russia to fight under the Fascist banner.
  • Someone who is all but stated to be Ol' Vladdy himself is instead a KGB commissar assigned to some sorry Red Army conscripts before being captured by the Fascists, later blowing his brains out following the events of 4/10.
  • Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine from 2014 until 2019 in our world, is the "Chocolate Warlord" who is notorious for being amongst the Ukrainian oligarchs who bankrolled Ukrainian nationalist militias supporting Circassia.
  • Jang Song-Thaek, notable in our world for being the uncle of Kim Jong-un that he purged in 2013, ends up overthrowing Kim Jong-il after his failed invasion of Primorsky Krai leads to China invading North Korea.
  • Boris Nemtsov, a liberal politician in Yelstinist Russia before becoming a vocal critic of Putin's government before his assassination in our world, becomes the first elected President of the exiled Russian Federation after Gaidar peacefully ends his dictatorial rule over Kaliningrad.
  • Dmitry Medvedev, Russian President from 2008-2012 and Prime Minister from 2012 until 2020 in our world, is one of Boris Nemtsov's aides.
• Riddle for the Ages: While historians point the finger at Barkashov for causing the explosion on Makashov’s plane, it's never proven concisely and after the events of the civil war, it probably doesn't even matter anymore.
• Rightful King Returns: After everything that's happened to Russia, the Romanovs are able to finally return to power for the first time since 1917, with the rump Russian Federation declaring Prince Nicholas Romanov as their choice for Tsar. This is openly mentioned to be a move of desperation from Nemtsov, needing something for Russians to rally around and feel some optimism for the first time since 1993. The only reason his coronation wasn't a miserable affair was due to the Nationalists having the foresight to protect what Russian artifacts they had in a bunker, which included the Russian Crown Jewels.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: 38 million people die in Russia by the time the civil war ends, making the conflict the second deadliest in history after World War Two. Over 25 million Russians fled over the course of the civil war as well, putting extra emphasis on Russia never being able to recover from such a conflict.
• Sadistic Choice: Invoked by Nevzorov and Igor Shafarevich in order to secure food and other vital supplies to combat famine and shortages in the face of an incoming winter. The two of them devise a surefire plan to obtain such resources from the West, with that plan being to kidnap minorities (namely Karelians, Finns, Jews, Estonians and Latvians) and dissidents to be placed in prison camps, where they're brutalized but intentionally not killed, essentially slave trading them to the West for supplies. A monstrous plan that works because of the implication that things might go wrong for the hostages if the West refuses to hand over the resources.
• Sanity Slippage: Implied to be the case with Anpilov, who is later stated explicitly that he made his decision to form a short-lived truce with the Uralic Alliance owing to voices in his head telling him to do so, with his advisors too terrified of being purged to suggest it to him.
• Scrapbook Story: The timeline is told mainly through passages from historical texts and Babchenko's memoirs, with the occasional interview (namely Kentaro Miura, Eiichiro Oda and Hideaki Anno discussing how the Second Russian Civil War affected their respective works), television broadcast, a phone call between Bill Clinton and Slobodan Milošević, and Clinton's speech after 4/10 spliced in.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Gaidar is able to buy the loyalty of Kaliningrad's police and army units in addition to the Baltic Fleet with briefcases full of cash. The amount is never specified but its enough for them to stick with Gaidar instead of just handing him over to the NSF.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • When the Russian Army finally turns on Yeltsin during the 1993 Coup, Anatoly Chubais, considered the mastermind behind the privatization of the economy, fled for the hills before General Grachev even finished his speech of support for Parliament.
  • Most of Yeltsin’s cabinet that manage to avoid arrest follows Gaidar to Kaliningrad as Pro-Yeltsin factions are targeted by NSF militias.
  • After the NSF get elected to power in a sham of an election, many Russians and ethnic minorities (including thousands of Jews still in Russia, with a fair number of them having survived the Holocaust) see the writing on the wall and get the hell out of there while they can, selling everything but the clothes on their back to get a plane ticket out.
  • When the Aiyy Yeurekhé take control of Yakutia and with many having already taken up their practices, many ethnic Russians see it as a clear sign that the world really is going nuts and decide to flee into the wilderness to get away rather than risk sticking around to see if the Aiyy Yeurekhé are benevolent or not.
  • When the Far Eastern Republic is invaded by North Korea, Admiral Ugryumov has the Pacific Fleet abandon Vladivostok for safer ports, seeing the FER as a lost cause. His sailors respond by mutinying against him and returning to provide aid.
  • When the city of Novosibirsk is taken by Lebed's forces, the local NSF officials are caught trying to flee the city in a car for the Tomsk Nuclear Power Plant (with ten found in the wreckage of the car), desperate to flee the firing squads that Lebed had in store for any NSF officials he captured and seeking to use the threat of destroying it to blackmail Lebed into allowing them to flee into exile.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • The timeline is essentially the absolute worse case scenario for Gorbachev and Yeltsin's efforts to introduce reform and democracy being all for naught.
  • The efforts of Uralic nations^note Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Udmurtia, and Mari El. and the Komi Republic are not only rendered all for naught by the 4/10 nuclear exchange through the destruction of their newborn states, but the native ethnic groups are nearly exterminated thanks to the Zass Plan, the Nationalist contingency of using nuclear weapons to extirminate non-Russians within Russia. Their homelands are considered irradiated zones and many are forced to settle in nations such as Finland.
• Shot at Dawn:
  • Firing squads are the preferred method of execution for the communists, whether it be a part of the purges or because one fails to meet their recruitment quotas.
  • Execution in this manner is stated to be Alexander Lebed's preferred method of executing NSF officials he captures during his campaign in Siberia.
• Shout-Out:
  • A map made by a contributor to show the situation in Russia by New Years Day 1995 quips that Komi "can't form alliances" while recapping the Komi Republic seceding and declaring neutrality in the civil war. The author later gets in on it when Komi allies with Lebed's Siberia, with President of Komi Yury Spiridonov telling their new allies that they were "Komi’s first friend" and that they hoped to make a hundred.
  • The climax of the timeline is a chapter aptly named "It All Returns to Nothing".
• Space-Filling Empire: Alexander Lebed seeks to "conquer the most territory of any man that had ever lived" during his Siberian campaign as part of his goals. He changed his mind about reconquering Russia after the April 10 nuclear exchange, partly because there's nothing left to conquer on the European Russian side.
• State Sec:
  • It's off-handedly mentioned in an early chapter that OMON, military police under the command of the Russian National Guard, was turned into "the second coming of the NKVD" under Limonov. They presumably retain the role on the side of the Nationalists during the civil war.
  • The KGB come back from the grave thanks to Anpilov, who gives the organization under Vladimir Kryuchkov a level of power not seen in Russia since the 1930s.
• Suddenly Significant City: Veliky Novgorod, a city last relevant as the capital of the Novgorod Republic, is where the first Russian Tsar in 80 years is coronated after the end of the civil war as a result of being the largest city in European Russia spared by nuclear flames, later becoming the new capital of Russia.
• Suicide is Shameful: After he is captured by Serbian "Tiger" paramilitaries following the Battle of Moscow, Babchenko tries to suffocate himself in the mud after several members of his unit are executed in such a way and having long since lost the will to live. One of the Tigers actually stops him from going through with it... only because Babchenko is (as far as they know) an ethnic Russian and the Tigers are fighting for a "pure Slavic country" for people like him and shame him for the attempt.
  Tiger: "You ungrateful shit! After what we’ve just done for you, you decide to throw your life away too?! Don't you know why we're fighting this conflict?! We’re giving you a country where you and your children alone will rule! Not to be shared with some Mongol goat farmer, Chechen bandit, Tatar whore, nor any of their larvae! A Russia where none but the Russians will make the decisions! A Russia for none but the Russians!"
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Once Alexander Lebed returns to Russia, he gives such a speech to the NSF officials stranded in Chelyabinsk for what they've done to Russia and declares himself an enemy of both factions in European Russia, condemning the NSF as a "terrorist organization".
• Toppled Statue: By 2022, it's mentioned that the USSR's legacy has completely disappeared within the former Soviet Union. The Hammer and Sickle is gone, the Lenin busts and statues are gone, even the term "Great Patriotic War" has fallen out of use. Only Georgia still retains a number of Stalin statue.
• Tragic Hero: While Yeltsin wasn't the best leader in the world, the narrative does state how his premature end of dying in the flames within the Russian White House was entirely tragic for a man who had introduced democracy to Russians for the first time in their lives. The only solace being that he didn't live to see what happened to Russia.
  But even if it was true that Yeltsin had perished in such a way, the utter tragedy of a man who risked his life to bring democracy to the Soviet Union, that let the Balts and Ukrainians find their independence, that brought the only form of political freedom that most Russians had ever known in their lives, albeit for a tragically brief moment, is more important than any sneers about what he didn’t do.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Yeltsin's death and the rise of the NSF sees The New Russia go from a nation ruled by corrupt oligarchs to one ruled by Nazis By Any Other Name.
• Undignified Death: Several during America's intervention against Islamist Dagestan:
  • Abu al-Walid dies after a botched suicide bombing that ended with him slipping on the ground during his charge and blowing off everything north of his torso.
  • Zemimkhan Vandarbiyev is blown up by his own side after a fellow Islamist accidentally dropped a mine that killed him and five others.
• The Un-Reveal: Played With. The full name of Babchenko's commissar is never revealed as far as it can be told, but readers can certainly read between the lines and figure out who he is in our world...
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Not even in his worst nightmares could Pavel Grachev had known what siding against Yeltsin would've entailed for Russia...
• Velvet Revolution: Gaidar's emergency rule of Kaliningrad ends after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn leads a pro-democracy protest against his dictatorship and the squalor Russian refugees live in, with police refusing to arrest Solzhenitsyn after being ordered to.
• Vestigial Empire:
  • Even before the civil war is said and done, Gaidar's rump government is a shadow of the Russian Federation that emerged from the ashes of the USSR. Gaidar and his government only controls the Kaliningrad Oblast (with said control being maintained at the barrel of a gun), has no support in mainland Russia thanks to Yeltsin's popularity being in the toilet after the 1993 coup, and the Baltic Fleet only aligned with him because he met their price tag. The Kaliningrad Government, similarly to Chiang Kai-shek's government in Taiwan before them, only have their United Nations seat only due to inertia and the author quips that Gaidar will "fight for it till his last breath".
  • By the end of the civil war, the Russian Federation is de-facto confined to the former Kaliningrad Oblast. While they're nominally the inheritors of European Russia, the United Nations is running things in the region, left a radioactive hellscape by the end of 4/10.
• Villainous Breakdown: While the Petrograd Nashist government was already descending into delusion and madness as their situation deteriorated long before the April 10 nuclear exchange, learning about NATO's intervention in Russia as well as the fact Ukraine, Belarus and other breakaway states still possessed and are now firing their nuclear arsenals to neutralise theirs, the surviving members of Petrograd regime who managed to fle the nuking of Petrograd by plane are stated to have gone 'berserk', leading to them ordering their remaining nuclear arsenal pointed at the West to fire in a final spiteful hope that they would take the rest of the world with them.
• Villainous Legacy: The massive death toll caused by the civil war aside, the NSF's main legacy is being the reason why Russia is split in three, why the rump Federation has no ethnic minorities left, destroying any hope for Russian reuninfication and (possibly) being unable to rise to superpower status.
• War Is Hell: Atrocities, famine, war crimes, child soldiers, Russia's got all that and more once the civil war kicks off, complete with unspeakable crimes that outdo even the worse Yugoslavia or Rwanda had to offer. In fact, it would not be hyperbole to say that the very worst of humanity is on display in Russia.
• War Refugees: Russian refugees who are able to make it out of alive are usually thrown onto the nearest boat or bus going to a Kaliningrad that is at real risk of collapsing under the strain of having to provide for over five million refugees by 1994 after starting the timeline with a population of approximately one million people. By the end of Gaidar's emergency rule of Kaliningrad, it's mentioned that over twenty five million refugees had fled Russia from Yeltsin’s death in 1993 to the end of 1995.
• We ARE Struggling Together:
  • The National Salvation Front is a predictably very unstable alliance of convenience between the far-left and far-right. Once the leadership that united them under Rutskoy was killed in a suspicious air crash, they began to turn on each other like a pack of wolves.
  • The alliance between Dudayev and the Islamists continues to break down as the Russians are pushed further out from the Caucasus. They even refuse to help him liberate Kalmykia unless it was conquered in the name of radical Islam and later turn on him and take over Dagestan completely.
  • Internal dissent is largely averted within the Petrograd government council, as the right-wing/far-right/Neo-Nazi coalition is united in its shared anti-communism. Barkashov and his ilk don't get to outmaneuver Nevzorov until the very end.
• Wham Episode: The chapter It All Returns to Nothing details the events of April 10th, 1996. The date is forever connected to a nuclear exchange between the Nationalists and Communists in addition to a limited exchange between the Nationalists and NATO. In a single day, over twenty-two million people are left dead by the end of the exchange, amplified thanks to the Zass Plan calling for the nuclear genocide of ethnic minorities in a plan openly inspired by The Turner Diaries, with most of the damage being done to Russia moreso than any Western power.
• Wham Line: At the end of We All Become Silent, just when the Second Russian Civil War finally ends following 4/10, the world thought they were in the clear from further nuclear attacks... until a bomb goes off in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
• Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: An event Arkady Babchenko recalls in his memoirs involves the commissar telling how tragic Russia's fall has been for him, a lifelong KGB man that once worked in Dresden and saw nothing but the best of the USSR thanks to him owning a dacha on the Black Sea and the Western powers having to combine their strength to equal the USSR. He says this to the sorry band of scared conscripts he's assigned to, while they're taking cover from Fascist artillery in a basement somewhere in Moscow. Needless to say, Babchenko sees it differently.
  "What makes someone say this? Even as teenagers we knew that life in the Soviet Union was garbage compared to the West. How could the adults think it was a good idea? Because he was in Germany? Because he was in the KGB and never had to stand eight hours in a line for bread? Because he never had to wait ten years for a car? Because he never saw Afghanistan veterans shooting up heroin in the alleys? Because he was allowed to go abroad when we couldn’t? I could look in his eyes. This wasn’t a man at war with himself. This wasn’t a man broken by nostalgia."
• World War III: After Al-Qaeda sets off a stolen Russian nuke during the Battle of Stalingrad, the Communists and the Fascists let the nukes fly across nearly all of Russia, with the West getting involved not long after due to the Fascists openly using nuclear weapons to exterminate minorities. A handful of Russian nukes are able to strike targets in Europe, North America and the Middle East but the vast majority of the damage has been done to Russia.
• Would Hurt a Child: Children are not spared the horrors and violence of the Russian Civil War. If they're not among the casualties, imprisoned in horrid camps to be bartered off for aid, recruited into the army to die or have worse done to them, they're in refugee camps that are only marginally better than what Russia has become.
• Wretched Hive: While Russia isn't that much safer, Tuva is noted to be among the worst places in the nation in 1994 at least east of the Urals with ethnic tensions between Russians and Tuvans being beyond saving, unemployment being the highest in the country, and the crime rate being so sky high that it would have the highest murder rate of any state in the world if it went independent (which Tuva eventually did).^note To put this in perspective, in our world in 1994, both Colombia and South Africa nearly tied at 71.0 and a solid 70 respectively. Evidentially, neither The Cartels or The Apartheid Era went quietly.

---

As my ears slowly began to return to normal, the silence that remained chilled my shattered bones, because the silence was the silence of death, the death of millions. [...] The wardens were dead. The inmates were dead. The wardens in the camp near us were dead. The women in the camp near us were dead. The children in the camp near us were dead. The city was dead. The birds were dead. The country was dead. The world was dead.

Everyone was dead.