OBT Forum

Hello, this work is meant to supplement a bigger project I've been working on for years, 'The New Sphere', but I think it has enough relevance to BT in general that it stands on it own. The Second Soviet Civil War is one of the major foundations of the Battletech universe and critical to how the universe's timeline developed, but we know very little about it. We know even less about the aftermath, but this essay hopes to give a little more depth to it. Hope you enjoy it.


        To get a better understanding of the situation that confronted the people of the former ‘Second World’ that emerged in the aftermath of the Second Soviet Civil War and the formation of the Western Alliance, we have provided a brief overview of the political states that were formed from the former territory of the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact members, and other Soviet Client States. We hope that for those looking almost a thousand years into the past this document will give clarity to how the former Soviet zone evolved in the context of the Terran Alliance. Starting from West to East we have the following entities:

   Warsaw Pact Client States: East Germany was merged with West Germany. The other five states became independent nations within the frame work of the Western Alliance. Most of these states were reliable bastions of Anti-Russian sentiment within the Alliance Parliament for the better part of two centuries, until the fallout from the Outer Reaches Rebellion and the greater Liberal/Expansionist Party conflict began to overshadow traditional political arrangements in the mid-23rd century. Bulgaria was a notable ally of the Russian States in defiance of the greater trend. With the exception of Bulgaria, these countries provided few volunteers for the Novaya Rossiya fleet, but the Polish Moniusz family rose to notability as a clan of soldier-statesmen that persist to the present day.

   The Baltic States: A special case, the occupation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in 1940 by the USSR had never been officially recognized by neither the United States Government nor NATO. During the Civil War, the three nations made a desperate bid reclaim their independence, leading to ruthless fighting and much starvation in the region. With Western military support, Riga declared itself an independent city state in 2013 during the last months of the war, only to be destroyed in a dastardly chemical attack in early 2014 that killed half a million people (ironically more than half the victims were ethnic Russians). Considered separate from the rest of the old Soviet Union by the Western Powers, the Baltic States were considered independent on April 21, 2014. The three nations joined the Western Alliance as founding members. They spent the better part of a century rebuilding, and bitter feelings between the Baltic, Finnic, and Slavic inhabitants would endure for even longer. By 2200 however, a gradual merging of the survivors’ descendants and a burying of the hatchet with the Russian States in the face of new political developments would create a measure of stability in the Baltic before the outbreak of the Outer Reaches Rebellion. The majority of those who did choose to leave with the Novaya Rossiya fleet were Russian-speakers of one ethnicity of another, but smaller contingents of other groups did come along as well, having felt betrayed by the course of Alliance politics.

   Democratic Republic of European Russia: Formed from the Western and Northern European Oblasts (Provinces) of the Soviet Russian Republic, and the whole of the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Moldavian Republics with its capital in Moscow, the DRER was the main representative of the Russian States in the Terran Alliance, being the most populous and industrialized of the seven, despite the internal friction of the many ethnic groups that inhabited its vast lands. Despite becoming a full member of the Western Alliance in 2027, it was always treated with some caution by the other major powers of the Alliance. Many a voting bloc in the Terran Parliament was built around thwarting the political aims of the DRER, but in one area it did find common cause with the USA and Western Europe: the promotion of space exploration and colonization. Many notable early space explorers were from the DRER, although they surprisingly were little involved in the colonization of Tikonov and the surrounding region. The DRER would become the major source of colonists for Novaya Rossiya, forming some fifty-nine percent of the total. The unity of this mostly Russian-speaking group provided the backbone on which the expedition fleet survived on in its first years of travel and settlement in the deep reaches of space.

   Soviet Socialist Republic: Formed from the Southern, Ural, and Volga region Oblasts, the whole of the Caucasus (including Armenia, Georgia, and the Azerbaijan), and Siberia, the SSR had its capital in Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Oblast. Novosibirsk was its largest city. Its vast and varied territories contained the most diverse group of ethnicities in the Former Soviet Union, Russians barely formed the majority, but the Western Alliance had felt it was necessary to have a large ‘Keystone State’ in place to keep many of the more volatile groups from lashing out at one another. Despite its awkward position between the DRER and the Confederation of Free Orient Peoples, its great mineral resources and industrial base allowed it to thrive in time. In spite of its sponsorship by the alliance, it was often seen as ‘the best of many bad choices’, for the world saw the SSR as the Russian state closest in spirit to the old Soviet Union. This attitude persisted despite the adoption of many aspects from Western Democracies. The SSR was the major source of immigrants to Tikonov and its surrounding worlds, where many settlers thought they could rebuild the Soviet Union’s lost glory. Because of this, the number of settlers it contributed to the Novaya Rossiya colonization fleet was somewhat small in proportions to the SSR’s overall contributions to the First Exodus, although still impressive at twenty-two percent. What was notable is that just over one-half of those citizens who did embark with the Novaya Rossiya fleet came from minor ethnic groups. There were Chechens, Georgians, Mordvins, Kalmyks, and scores of others; groups that otherwise contributed few representatives to the colonization of the Inner Sphere. These communities contributed much to the character of “Russia among the stars” as a nation of surprising diversity, but also a justification for a continuation of the imperial tradition by rulers wary that the “others” might want to strike out on their own.

        People's Union of Kazakh: Formed from the whole of the Kazakh SSR and three other neighboring Central Asian Republics, the People’s Union was initially marked by the conflict between the Slavic-Germanic and Turko-Persian populations. When the Soviet Union was broken up, the Western Alliance required the populations of the new republics to stay put for their probationary period in order to prevent a massive flood of refugees overtaking the Western European states, which were still in a fragile economic condition from liberating the Warsaw Pact. Trapped in place, the ethnic Russians attempted to assert their dominance over the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kirghiz and Tajiks, resulting in much civil strife. With the inclusion of China into the Alliance after the Osaka Agreement of 2024, a large peacekeeping force was installed to keep the groups from attacking one another, and within a few years the People’s Union was allowed to join the Alliance as well. It became a dynamic state with a booming economy centered on its capital Alma-Ata, but it was hindered by a huge wealth gap between different groups, and the delicate question of which language should dominate in government, business and education. Despite constitutional guarantees for the Turko-Persian languages, Russian slowly won out the battle. That changed during the period of space exploration. Ethnic Russians from the People’s Union formed a disproportionate number of settlers during the first century of colonization. Tikonov was initially settled by a People’s Union of Kazakh resettlement fleet, and remained a favored destination. Back on Terra the balance of the population in the Union became Kazakh and Uzbek. Citizens of the People’s Union formed about seven percent of the Novaya Rossiya fleet, about one quarter were Russian, another quarter Kazakh, Germans and Uzbeks a fifth each, and the final tenth from other groups, including the Kirghiz. To this day continents and even whole worlds settled by citizens of the former Union tend to be monoethnic, the scars of the past preventing their descendents from blending easily with other groups.

        Islamic Republic of Turkmen: The smallest of the Russian states, and the most homogenous, the Islamic Republic was formed from Turkmen nationalists out of the old Turkmen SSR. They based their identity around a “moderate Islamic Turkic Program for the masses” which became a highly oppressive but remarkably stable dictatorship that shared many elements with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Most of the ethnic Russian population and their supporters had moved out of the new country within 20 years of its creation, leaving the Republic only nominally a “Russian” state, but it continued to have close trade links with its neighbors, and many of the more educated and liberal segments of Turkmen society often traveled to the DRER and the Siberian states for business and education. The Islamic Republic suffered greatly in the breakdown of the Alliance’s government during the 23rd century, as the Liberal Party was highly suspicious towards national governments that promoted strong ethnic and religious unity, and employed force to “open” them to direct Alliance administration. Turkmen citizens formed about three and a half percent of the Novaya Rossiya colonists, although there were a few hundred other ethnic Turkmen from other Russian states that joined them. About eighty percent were rural farmers and herders, and they played a critical role in taming the wilds of Petera Mir in its first decades of settlement. In the centuries since, their descendents have settled in packets throughout Novaya Rossiya, but they are found in their greatest numbers on both Petera Mir and their “homeworld” of Turkmenistan.

       The Democracy of Yakut: A sprawling state formed out of the territories of the Yakut ASSR in the Russian Far East, the Democracy was a weak nation, thinly populated and in the thrall of Western Alliance business interests. Its nominal capital was Yakutsk, although it was little more an oversized-trading post for foreign businessmen. European, Chinese, and American mining, foresting, and chemical production companies seized much of the assets in the thinly populated nation, and the natives often found themselves starving and dispossessed. The situation grew so bad that about a third of the population had immigrated to other nations by the end of the 21st century. In a rare show of compassion, the Alliance government intervened in 2124 and dismembered the corporate interests, putting Yakut directly under conservatorship of the central Alliance government in Geneva. This however only slowed the decline, and much of the rest of the population took off for the stars. It is estimated that people from Yakut formed only one percent of the colony fleet, although that represented some ten percent of the remaining population of the Democracy in the mid-23rd century.  About one-half of the colonists were of the native Yakut ethnicity, a Turkic people who are experts in reindeer herding and Arctic survival. They would prove themselves invaluable in helping to colonize many marginal planets over the succeeding centuries.

       Magadan Socialist Republic: The MSR was formed from Magadan and Kamchatka Oblast, along with the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and Koryak Okrug. It was geographically the most eastern of the Russian states, and the one with the smallest population, not even totaling six hundred thousand at its peak right after the end of the Second Soviet Civil War. The population was again mostly ethnic Russian, with a strong Ukrainian minority that eventually blended in with their neighbors over the course of two centuries. The remainder of the population consisted of aboriginal reindeer hunting tribes like the Evens, Koryaks, and several others. Like the other Siberian Republics. While many Alliance mining firms tired to exploit the tremendous mineral wealth of the republic, the harsh climate and the turn towards asteroid farming by the 2080’s rendered this unprofitable. The MSR languished for many decades until it became yet another administrative district of the rapidly consolidating Alliance bureaucracy. It provided less than one percent of the volunteers for the Novaya Rossiya expedition, but only because the population it could draw from was so small. The people who did come along were some of the hardiest pioneers one could ask for. Petera Mir, as bleak as often seemed to other members of the fleet in the early years, seemed like a paradise compared to where the Magadany had left from, and they worked hard to build new towns and settle the wilds. Their decendents are spread across the whole breath of Novaya Rossiya’s worlds, and the raindeer farmers has tamed many alien creatures to domestication.

       Confederation of Free Orient Peoples: Formed from the Far Eastern oblasts south of Magadan, including Sakhalin, and with its capital in Khabarovsk, the name “Orient” was a reference to its geography rather than its demography. Most of the population was ethnic Russian with minorities of Ukrainians, Tatars, Koreans and native Siberians composing much of the remainder. The Confederation was a moderately prosperous state that found itself in a precarious political balancing act between Chinese and Japanese business struggles. The port of Vladivostok was a key wayward point for Western Alliance Naval vessels during most of the 21st century, but declined in relevance as space colonization became the major priority of the government. This eventually led to the nation becoming little more than an isolated backwater, with many citizens emigrating to the DRER and SSR. The Confederation provided three percent of the settlers for the colonization fleet to Petera Mir, including a small minority of rural-dwelling Old Believers, a schismatic community of Orthodox Russians who embrace a pacifistic and normally isolationist way of life. Their skill at developing agriculture in barren, inhospitable environments played no small part in the survival of the colonists to Petera Mir in the first years of settlement.

       Mongolia: A Soviet puppet state, Mongolia was left to its own devices in the immediate aftermath of the civil war. It eagerly joined the Terran Alliance when the offer was extended, but things improved very slowly for its citizens. A few hundred Mongols gladly joined the Romanovs on their fleet, where they found company with various other nomadic groups. They descendents are mostly mixed with the Kalmyks and the Kirghiz, but a few families maintained their isolation on Petera Mir’s continent of Ob.

   North Korea: Reunited with the South as part of a political deal brokered by the People’s Republic of China in 2018 in a bid to create greater unity among East Asian states after the formation of the Western Alliance.  They provided a small number of volunteers for the colonization fleet, often settling with and marrying ethnic Koreans from Russian territories.