The Siren
Extract from 'The Reconquista of the Caucasus' by Levan Galogre
As American troops entered Dagestan, they faced very little resistance from the local population, who were used to living in a secular environment and vastly preferred it to the Dark Age savagery that accompanied the rule of the Emirate. Places, where only a few years ago were entirely avoid of even hijabs, were now the site of mass burnings at the stake of ‘blasphemers’ (atheists), of heads on pikes, and women who were studying to be professors getting stoned to a bloody public death entombed inside a burka. Many troops were shocked to find ethnically Russian girls (the youngest being nine) from inside Russia who had been kidnapped by the Jihadis in raids to be used as Jihadi brides, sometimes literally brought into Dagestan by being forced to walk while being with their arms tied up behind a horse to be force marched to slave markets to be publicly auctioned. While the Jihadis were forbidden from doing this to Muslim girls (girls of different Islamic sects were typically just murdered) the Christian girls captured in Russia were considered acceptable. To the American troops, many of whom grew up in the suburbs playing Nintendo games and watching the Simpsons, could not only not fathom that there were people who could engage in such ancient barbarity, but that it could be imposed upon a people perhaps even more secular than they were. Besides, the Americans were only equally as foreign as most of the Islamists themselves - Basayev himself being a ‘Reject Chechen’ according to the popular local insult. Americans are regarded very positively today in Dagestan as a result, much as in Grenada, Bosnia and indeed most of Eastern Europe. But while it was easy enough to liberate the flat and open northern sections, the real issue, even with Azerbaijani cooperation, was how to crack the Jihadist strongholds within the mountains.
America’s hopes of an easy victory over the Jihadis would be dashed by the Caucasus Mountains, where the worst elements of the Emirates continued to hide away, including Bin Laden and Basayev. Buried inside underground military complexes, the two continued their plans of Islamic conquest in the ways they knew how. While Basayev had been on bad terms with Bin Laden, the extremity of the situation forced the two to work together. This culminated in the February 29th Euro Disneyland Hostage Crisis, where hundreds of families were held hostage in Paris after an attack by Al-Queda operatives who were actually instructed by Basayev, saying they would execute the hostages, starting with the children, if the Americans did not leave the Emirate and re-surrender the locals back under the endless night of foreign Islamist domination. The First Régiment de Parachutistes d'Infanterie de Marine would be used in the retrieval operation, much to the outrage of the Americans who insisted on there being a significant component due to a large percentage of the hostages being American. Mercifully, the French proved excellent and were able to retrieve several hundred hostages with only four hostage deaths (tragically two being children) and total elimination of the kidnappers. The event would further undermine the anti-war movement in America, as well as lead to a reappraisal of the ‘Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkey’ stereotype. Following the attack and long-running economic issues of the 90s, Euro Disney would formally close in 1998.
At the same time, Bin Laden’s master plan was in its final stages. He had acquired a number of nuclear devices from a Soviet commander by bribing him in heroin to sate his addiction. The actual number of devices taken by Bin Laden is unknown and hotly debated, but given events it was clearly at least four. But by far the most consequential of these nuclear weapons was under the command of Arbi Barayev, operating deep in Russian territory. They did their best to blend into the surroundings and laid low until the moment was right. Discussions about bringing the nuke into Dagestan to blow it didn’t work because American control of the region was too intense to allow it. However, as Barayev hated Russians as a Chechen Islamist, he was most agreeable to the idea of exploding it in the heartland of Communist Russia. This was indeed the central premise of Bin Laden’s master plan. He would wait until a moment of maximum tension between the nuclear powers and then explode a nuke right in the heart of one of their territories. This would cause the attacked power to instantly assume, in panic, that the other side had launched first and so without thinking throw their missiles at the enemy, thus tricking them into unleashing a nuclear holocaust upon themselves. Bin Laden’s hope was that the Russian states would throw nukes at the West as they realized what was going on. This would lead to a world where the Western powers were crippled, and lead to Islamist Revolution around the Middle East, resulting in a revived Islamic World ready to conquer the ashes of the infidels.
There were two things, however, that Bin Laden didn’t count on: one was the nature of Soviet command, and number two was the Zass Plan.
Extract from 'Ultimate Evil: Petrograd's Genocide' by Adrian Brown
Though not conclusively proven due to the unparalleled destruction of a country that likewise destroyed much evidence, historians believe that the culprit behind the explosion of Makashov’s plane in November 1994 was Barkashov. While various parties have been blamed for the killing (including some fringe theories that there was no explosion at all and that the plane simply collapsed), ranging from the Americans to Anpilov to Ichkerians to Islamists, Barkashov’s quick response to the crash and veiled threats to the Left Bloc in the weeks leading up to the crash place him at the forefront of historians’ suspicions. From Barkashov’s statements as recorded by surviving colleagues, he was angry that the war had become so destructive, as so many ethnic Russians were being killed – he had hoped that the Left Bloc would quickly collapse after the initial surge. With that, both Nevzorov and Barkashov had grown sick of the war – the former due to the mass killing in general, and Barkashov only because the Russian race was being bled white. This was the environment in which the Zass Plan was formulated – the plan to combine the discriminatory element of the Jewish Holocaust with the indiscriminate destruction of Nuclear Holocaust to plan a discriminatory nuclear genocide of Russia’s ethnic minorities.
The Zass Plan had been the brainchild of Barkashov ever since his reading of the Turner Diaries in early 1994. The Turner Diaries was a piece of American White Supremacist literature that was notorious in its psychopathy, depicting a global race war in which the entirety of the world’s non-White and Jewish population was exterminated with nuclear weapons. It was generally relegated to a limited circuit of extreme far-rightists, primarily within the United States. But over time, the book became more broadly published and found an audience in the wild days of early 90s Russia. Barkashov, much like Hitler, didn’t base his racial complexes off the American model of ‘Whites’ as a master race, but believed that the Russians (which he considered all Slavs to be whether they liked it or not) were a people chosen and destined to rule over the Earth. The book had made him think in terms of race war and final conflict, which greatly affected his evolving mindset on Russia’s ethnic minorities. He had gone from supporting a Russian-supremacist state to a Russian-exclusive state. The talk from Nevzorov about reaching an accommodation with the Urallic and Caucasian nations due to the exhaustion of Fascist forces was laughable to him: all they needed to do was drop some nukes on them and keep the West at bay with their own missiles. The bulk of the work would be accomplished by heavy bombers moving in formation like the Four Horsemen, as the fear was that the West would believe a missile launch might be aimed at them and given the limited time would be forced to launch their own at the Russians. Yes, millions of Russians would likely be killed in the exchange, but given the final result would be the creation of an exclusively ethnically Russian state, it was considered a goal worth almost any price. According to one RNU member at the Hague, Barkashov had told him, “I would rather a mere fifty Russians survive this war if they were the only life left from the Baltic to Bering than see the seeds of Mongol wombs begin to sprout across my child’s inheritance.” Inspired by the methodology of the Turner Diaries, Barkashov planned nothing less than the extermination of Russia’s entire non-Slavic population from Circassia to Yakuia by means of nuclear weapons, leaving their lands uninhabitable, and leaving the Russians the sole survivors of the race war. Lebed and Aksyuchits would be spared from the carnage, with only Yakutia and Tuva targetted under Barkashov’s planning sessions. Ichkeria and Dagestan were likewise written off due to the fear of American retaliation and were thus considered lost forever. The Urallic states, including Komi, and Circassia were on the list for extermination, including the Kalmyks despite their refusal to seek independence from Russia - their existence, not their actions, was the problem. Environmental impacts were completely ignored, including of radiation working its way down the Volga.
He found a willing audience in Dugin, who was convinced that Russians were descendants of the lost Hyperborean civilization discussed by the Greeks. The Greeks had said that beyond the coldness in the North lay an advanced, bountiful kingdom of blue-eyed people living in temperate climates. While scholars debate whether the Greeks had run-ins with the Nords as a result, Dugin went as far as to believe that Hyperborea’s depiction was literal and perhaps understated, while Finns joked that Dugin believed in the existence of Moominvalley. He believed that the Hyperboreans were so advanced that they retreated underwater to build their own kingdoms there while their descendents on the land were the Russians, whom were consequently the inheritors of that advanced bloodline. This further ‘explained’ to Dugin why the north of Russia had opted for the Fascists while the South had stayed with the Communists, as the Northern Russians would be closer to the Hyperboreans and thus maintain a higher % of Hyperborean DNA. He hypothesized that once a Hyperborean Kingdom had been established in Russia, that their underwater cousins would reemerge and unite to fight the ‘Modern Atlanteans’, whom Dugin considered the seafaring West to be.
In early 1996, the plan was approved by the Petrograd Council, to even Nevzorov’s horror. Missiles would face America and the broader West, but crucially, due to a highly successful disinfo effort from the British, the Fascists massively underestimated the scale and sophistication of the Belarussian, Ukrainian and Kazakh nuclear programs. They furthermore underestimated the amount of NATO infrastructure in Finland, pointing at the nuclear missiles placed in Murmansk. Tne Northern Fleet was monitored day and night by the US Navy, with Anpilov’s Black Sea Fleet under watch as well. They thought that the Post-Soviet states didn’t have the money or ability to keep their arsenals and update them to be able to go toe-to-toe with the Russian arsenal. Those missiles were now ready to unload on the remnants of the National Salvation Front, while Lebed had his own missiles ready to destroy what was west of the Urals without compunction. Aksyuchits had publicly announced that he would respond with nuclear weapons once attacked with said weapons but privately instructed missile crews to not fire back if one of the NSF nations (or even China) were to launch an all out assault, as the consequences would be ‘as incalculable as they are unchristian’. Aksyuchits would never have to worry about this being exposed as he would survive the crisis without his own territory being hit, an extremely lucky fate given the fate of his former NSF fellows.
Mercifully, preparation was already taken in the event of a nuclear strike. Unlike Moscow, Petrograd had time to prepare for the destruction of culture and had consequently been extremely careful with it, giving it a near-religious significance. The decision had been made primarily by Nevzorov with Shafarevich’s support, and is widely considered the only commendable act the two committed in the war, which is admittedly superior to most of their contemporaries in the Petrograd Council. The Hermitage had been stripped to the bone, its exhibits locked away in a nuclear bunker just outside of the city, entrusted to a collection of Orthodox monks who literally regarded the works as holy relics. The Bronze Horseman himself would be added to this collection, though upon his return he would find no Thunder Stone on which to stand. Consequently even today the city maintains significant elements of its historical culture, unlike Moscow. Moscow still maintains mysteries with respect to its artifacts though. In 1997 official excavations of the rubble were taken by a United Nations team in the region who were surprised to discover that Lenin’s body, long assumed to have been destroyed and buried under the rubble, was completely missing even in fragments from his tomb. The mystery of the fate of Lenin’s body remains today, and though the standard explanation is that RNU units took it and destroyed it, this hasn’t stopped it being used in fiction as a shrine of underground Communist cults. The missing body has been a symbolic trope to define the potential return of Communism as a global ideology.
Extract from ‘A Continent of Fire’ by James Melfi
On April 4th 1996, forward elements of Fascist forces could make out Stalingrad in the distance from the north along the Volga. Arkan and the Serbian Tigers formed the vanguard, moving down the child soldiers and pensioners that made a significant bulk of the Anpilov regime’s last line of defence. Stalingrad had been made into a deathtrap, with commissars placed around the city to halt anyone trying to leave - including children, under the pretext that adults would be more motivated to fight to protect their children. As was sardonically joked, it would mean the commissars, many being the true believers, would not be part of the battle until the end. However, like Stalin before him, Anpilov vowed not to leave the capital city, saying that the Soviet Republic would die with him. This encouraged the Fascists, who hoped to knock off Anpilov and perhaps implode the Soviet state after a decapitation. The elephant in the room, of course, was the nuclear stockpiles of both governments. Anpilov’s paranoia had led him to stripping all other commanders of the possibility to use nuclear weapons - he and only he could give or rescind the order to fire. Soviet missile crews worked day and night knowing that the decisive showdom was only weeks, perhaps days away, and the moment would come if the Fascists prevailed when Anpilov would have do decide to let the city fall or fire the first nuclear weapon since 1945. The fact that Anpilov had never decided to use the weapons previously showed just how monumentous the gravity of the situation was. Even to someone as delusional and murderous as Anpilov, the visions of mushroom clouds made him tremble.
Fascist forces were now just as tired and demotivated as their Communist enemies. They had struggled through the Spring mud, were harassed by Tatar forces on the other side of the river and were increasingly devoid of supplies. Scavenging from the Communist corpses, they trudged along to the capital of the Soviet Empire, where the final confrontation of the war was to be fought. Attempts to flank the city by going on the opposite bank of the Volga were defeated with heavy loss of life. Newly motivated Soviet units were putting up a significantly better fight than the Red Army had done in the course of the war. The reason was that they feared Anpilov would use nuclear weapons and thus took upon themselves the mission not just to save the city, but save the world. Fascist troops, RNU brigades, Nashi paramilitaries and even Tiger assault teams crashed into a desperate but rigid defence of the city. On April 8th, Barkashov was told by Arkan that at the casualty rate they were taking, their assault would fail. That day, the Petrograd Council would move to an underground base near Gatchina, just south of Petrograd. They feared that at any moment Anpilov would launch an attack, and so took precaution, though their movements were caught by US spy satellites. The Council debated whether it might be best, given the difficulty of the assault, to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Nevzorov was vehemently against it, but by now the sense of imminent Apocalypse already felt too close to be avoided. Barkashov had grown convinced that it would be the only way to save the situation, but mercifully his motion failed, albeit with an agreement that if it appeared that defeat was imminent in the Second Battle of Stalingrad, a full nuclear assault would be ordered. In the meantime, tactical nuclear weapons would be prepared just on the outskirts of the city, ready to begin Armaggedon at a moment’s notice.
Instead, an intensification of the chemical assault was undertaken, with Sarin and VX dousing the city from above, causing horrendous suffering of the imprisoned population, fighting for no ideology but their survival and perhaps the survival of the whole world. Anpilov was in his command bunker in the rear of the city, ordering scores of men from all around into the meatgrinder. The commissars were told that the city was one-way traffic. You could come into Stalingrad but you couldn’t leave. Waves of soldiers, including Kalmyk platoons trying to ensure their nation’s survival, poured into the city in fresh waves of sacrifices. It was estimated the average survival time of a Red Army conscript to Stalingrad was forty-five hours. The battle was every bit as horrifying, bloody and savage as the First Battle of Stalingrad, and looked little different. The few surviving photos and vidoes of Stalingrad just before April 10th looked like if someone recorded 1942’s battle on a VHS camcorder. It was into this chaos that a truck snuck its way into one of the inbound columns to Stalingrad, narrowly missing being shelled along the way by Fascists. Naturally, we can’t know precisely who was the driver, what difficulties they had along the way, or whether they attempted to disguise their faces. The only thing we know, as per waterboarded Al-Qaeda members at Guantanamo, was that on this truck was Arbi Barayev, and in the back was one of the nuclear devices he had stolen from the Red Army.
In the early hours of April 10th 1996, the likely dazed and exhausted Red Army Commissars waved through the truck into the city, before it stopped just beside the Motherland Calls monument, a gigantic statue dedicated to the First Battle of Stalingrad that has vanished into history like the empire it belonged to. Five minutes after the truck stopped, the first nuclear explosion in hatred since Nagasaki shattered the capital of the Soviet Empire - an Al-Qaeda nuclear suicide bombing. While it was the end of Barayev and his cohorts, tens of thousands would be dragged with him in death. The imprisoned population was indiscriminately incinerated, Fascist troops eyes melted at the blinding flash if they weren’t lucky enough to have been killed in the initial assault, and most importantly, Viktor Anpilov, the final dictator of Soviet Russia, was killed in his underground bunker before he could give any orders to the nuclear forces. Anpilov was simply flattened by rubble from above, including everyone unlucky enough to also be entombed there. Also killed was KGB chief Kryuchkov, doing a PR stunt in the rear of the city, awarding medals to KGB commissars for bravery for shooting deserters. He was reduced to an anonymous pile of blackened, smouldering bones along with his cohorts. Arkan was the most famous casualty of the Fascists - he was mid-communication to headquarters before screeching in agony on the other end of the line before it went dead, along with most of the Tigers. From a distance, the Red and Fascist armies both gazed upon the mushroom clouds in stunned horror, with one Red Army survivor recalling ‘I remember looking upon the mushroom cloud, and then turning to the man beside me to see that he was literally pissing down his leg in horror.’
But Anpilov, in all his paranoia, had made both a lethal, and a blessed decision. Mad with paranoia, he had made himself the be-all end all of the Soviet nuclear system, with no succession plan if he was taken out. When one minister asked what would happen if Anpilov was dead, he was immediately thrown under the bus by sycophantic colleagues and later executed, ensuring there would be no one to turn to in the case of decapitation. Thus, the Red Army’s nuclear stockpile was no longer that of an army’s but of hundreds of individuals, debating in the last minutes’ of their lives what they should do. Some decided to fire, and some did not. But of the Fascist armies before Stalingrad, they didn’t stand a chance. Naturally, all there, including the Fascists, assumed that Fascist forces had launched a nuclear strike due to the difficulty of seizing the city - indeed until it was spat out by Guantanamo detainees in the coming months, that was the West’s primary belief as well. Almost immediately, tactical nuclear bombs began raining down on Fascist positions - three nuclear weapons detonated on top of the Fascist lines, their scale large enough and their aim bad enough that a significant amount of Red Army troops were caught up in the hellstorm. Fascist and Red Army troops alike ran in all directions as the war was now out of their hands, perhaps out of anyone’s hands. The fate of not just Russia, but indeed the entire world would be settled in the next twenty-four hours by the men at the very top. It didn’t matter what the response of the Red Army would be, of course. The moment the nuke at Stalingrad had been confirmed, Petrograd had already sent their missiles in the air - Plan Zass was on.
Extract from ‘Averting Armageddon: The West in the Second Russian Civil War’, by Frank Wolfowitz
Clinton had wanted to be the End of History President and had given little thought of foreign policy on the campaign trail in 1992. He wanted to focus on healthcare, now a distant memory in the fickle life of public discourse. He wanted to be to the White House what the Simpsons was to sitcoms. Now, he was in a situation as serious as had been faced by any American President since Lincoln, where the cities of America stood at risk of being obliterated by psychopathic dictators one button away from the biggest death toll in history. The image of a womanizing jokester had begun to morph into an almost Henry V reincarnation as the resolute leader of the Free World, ready for the final confrontation with the dual evils of the twentieth century. He and the Western allies had in early 1996 devised Operation Allied Force, the plan to eliminate Fascist and Communist Russia’s nuclear arsenals with minimum loss of civilian life, and restore democracy to Russia west of the Urals. China and Kazakhstan had been included in the briefings, given that all help would be needed to take out both nuclear arsenals and ensure that ICBMs didn’t bathe the capitals of the world in nuclear fire. Even Nemtsov, Lebed and Aksyuchits confirmed their interest, though the FEK lacked the ability to help given the primitive level of delivery systems in the country. Every nuclear power, sans India, sat around the same table, trying to work out the quickest and safest way to take out the NSF's last trump card. On April 10th, those awful plans finally had to be put to the test. As Clinton would recall in his autobiography, "The decision [to begin Operation Allied Force] was not a morally good one, but the alternative was a morally bankrupt one."
With the first reports of nuclear explosions in Russia, Western governments leaped into action. Clinton was hurled into the air on Air Force One, Major, Chirac and other Western leaders had likewise been moved to undisclosed locations. The Queen and Prince Philip had already gone to sea on the Yacht Britannia in the proceeding days. For the first time in history, NORAD was on DEFCON 1 worldwide. NATO troops were on high alert, prepared to roll over the Russian border as they’d feared and fantasized all their lifetimes. No one knew what the chain of escalation could possibly look like, but once it became clear that both sides were seemingly launching a full nuclear strike on the other, and the first missiles started to be recorded, it became clear that the time had arrived. There had been much debate among Western policy leaders about when to send out an air raid warning, with some only wanting the traditional four-minute warning when it was clear the missiles were in the air. However, due to the shambolic state of preparedness by most Western governments, the shelters to deal with the situation even to 1980s levels simply no longer existed. Furthermore, as no one was clear how a missile attack would play out in the West, or if both, one or even neither of the NSF governments would fire a missile, there was no clear chain of escalation that could be followed. Thus, with great acrimony, it had been decided in the prior days that once an escalating nuclear exchange had begun in Russia, regardless of the scale or imminency of attack on the West, the air raid warning would begin. A significant reason for that was that the nuclear strike from the West would be about to begin.
On April 10th 1996, the streets of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo were suddenly blazoned with a sound. A sound that had only been heard in their worst nightmares for half a century. On that day, the nightmare became a reality.
