The Breach and the Civil War (1919–1921)

When the sky changed over Germany, Trotsky's westward offensive was three weeks old. He signed a truce with the Poles on the Vistula, loaded the Red Army onto the Berlin trunk line, and went to fight the end of the world beside the Reichswehr. Red rifle units held the eastern perimeter at the Battle of the Rift; Commissar Larissa Reissner, twenty-four, was in the vanguard and inside the Zone for eleven days, and came out Touched. The Soviet republic was not invited to Versailles and has never been bound by it.

What the Red Army brought home from the Harz was an understanding of what it already owned. Trotsky's Commissariat of Special Requisitions tore Rasputin's ward-plates from their frames and bolted them to the armored trains and the Volga gunboats, and the White armies, which had the mystics and never used them, lost Omsk by November. By 1921 the Civil War was over, the Union was proclaimed the next year, and the arcane was, by decree, the property of the people.

The Succession (1924–1930)

Lenin died in January 1924, and the struggle for the Party began as it did in our timeline: Stalin and the apparatus against Trotsky and the Left. But in this timeline Larissa Reissner, who died of typhoid in 1926 in ours, was cured by the Requisitions laboratories and lived, and she was the most famous writer and the most famous commissar in the country, and an outspoken enemy of the machine Stalin was building. In 1925 she was found by a teacher: a witch, name unrecorded, who had worked for the Revolution since before 1917 and did not intend to see it inherited by a bureaucrat. What the Rift had left in Reissner became, under instruction, an art. By 1927 she could change minds, and in the space of a year the Party turned on its General Secretary in a sequence of votes nobody present can explain. Stalin was expelled in January 1928 and exiled to Tbilisi, where he died in 1934; Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov followed him into obscurity. Trotsky was restored to the War Commissariat. Reissner became General Secretary, and in 1930 Premier.

The Reissner Directorate (1930–1939)

There was no Great Terror; a General Secretary who can read the Politburo does not need show trials. There was collectivization and famine, as in our timeline, and the First Five-Year Plan, with an arcane directorate: the Institute of Pavlovian Psionics in Leningrad, the Xenographic Institute in Kharkov, and the Special Requisitions expeditions that have dug, since 1929, at Tunguska, Baikal, the Altai, the Tarim Basin, the Gobi, northern Persia, and under the noses of the British at Nineveh and Mosul. The Soviet Union does not restrict the arcane; it nationalizes, trains, and uniforms it, and in 1935 raised the first practitioner regiments, the Night Witches, from Touched women of the Civil War generation. The United States broke relations the same year.

Reissner said of Falkenhorst's election in 1932 that the Reich had found the one general in Europe who would not make a mistake, and that this was the worst possible news. She signed the Reissner–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 to buy time, said so to the Politburo the same evening, took eastern Poland and the Baltic states under its protocol, and invaded Finland in November.

The Waiting War (1939–)

Finland did not fall. The Winter War is in its third year, the Mannerheim Line has been breached and rebuilt twice, and a German "volunteer corps" with cryo-gear holds the Karelian flank. Khalkhin Gol (1939) destroyed a Japanese army in Mongolia and produced, in April 1941, a neutrality pact that both sides signed to free their hands and broke by proxy in China within a week: the Soviet Union backs the Chinese Communist revolution with weapons, advisers, and two "expeditionary" corps, on the theory that Soviet technology and Chinese manpower will make the ally the West never will. The fall of France tripled the Night Witches; the fall of Kuwait put Red Army garrisons on the Soviet digs in Persia and Mesopotamia; the Pacific Accord confirmed, in Moscow's reading, that the United States will never fight the Reich. In the spring of 1942 the Soviet Union is at war with Finland, at peace with everyone else, and preparing, with nine million men and a corps of practitioners, for the day the man who was on the Brocken with Reissner does what she knows he is going to do.

Thin places

The Soviet Union has more thin places than any country on earth, and has surveyed all of them. The Tunguska site, where something fell in 1908 and left a glass that the Requisitions laboratories are still trying to classify; Lake Baikal, whose depths the Institute describes in reports that are not circulated; the Altai and the frozen Scythian kurgans of Pazyryk, whose ice-maidens the Soviets have learned to wake and to ask questions of; the Kunlun gates in the Tarim Basin; and the Siberian taiga at large, where the Civil War's arcane dead were never all accounted for. The Carpathians, on the new western frontier, are thin for reasons that have to do with the Romanov court.

The frontiers

The western frontier runs along the Bug and the Baltic, facing the Reich's bases in the General Government and the Baltic states. The northern front is Karelia and the Finnish war. The southern sphere is northern Persia, Soviet Azerbaijan's oil at Baku, and the Mosul garrison. The eastern truce line is the Mongolian border and the Amur. All four are fortified. The country that is at peace with everyone is dug in everywhere.

The planned arcane

The arcane is a sector of the plan. The Commissariat of Special Requisitions owns every relic, book, and reagent in the Union, catalogues them, and allocates them; its expeditions are the Soviet equivalent of a mining industry, and its laboratories (the Institute of Pavlovian Psionics at Leningrad, the Xenographic Institute at Kharkov, the Siberian stations) are the Soviet equivalent of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. The specialties are the ones Marxist materialism finds respectable: Pavlovian psionics, the Noosphere as a field that conditioning can shape and the Night Witches can project through, and xenografting, the surgical integration of Breach-fauna tissue into Soviet soldiers and Soviet machines. The Soviet Union has fewer paraphysicists than the Reich, fewer Veil-plants than the United States, and more practitioners in uniform than both put together.

Industry

Heavy industry on the Urals and the Donbass, as in our timeline, plus the arcane directorate's share: ward-plate foundries, graft hospitals, and the armored-train works at Bryansk that have never stopped since 1919. The Reich's machine tools, traded under the Pact for grain and oil, are in all of them.

Trade

Grain and oil to the Reich under the Pact, both sides cheating. Nothing to the United States, officially, since 1935; a great deal of American equipment by way of Japan and Vladivostok. Weapons, advisers, and money to the Chinese Communists. The Special Requisitions teams buy on the relic black market in Istanbul, Tehran, and Shanghai through "adventurers" the state does not acknowledge.

The arcane and the Party

The Soviet Union has no Veil Act and no quarantine. Its position is that the arcane is a natural phenomenon, that natural phenomena belong to the people, and that the people are represented by the Party; private practice is therefore theft of collective property, and a Touched citizen is a resource the state has not yet allocated. In practice this means that the Touched are not registered and not interned; they are found, trained, and uniformed. Sixty thousand serve in the practitioner regiments and the NKVD Special Department. The rest are, in the Party's phrase, the reserve.

The Premier is Touched, openly, since 1935, and the country has been told it is a distinction. The propaganda shows her on the Brocken, on the Volga, and at the digs; the Red Valkyrie is the state's icon, and what the Rift did to her is part of the icon.

The old peoples

The Masquerade in Russia was always thinner than in the West, and the Revolution ended it two years before the Breach. The Orthodox mystics who had kept the old arts went into the Requisitions laboratories, the camps, or the Whites; the fey of the north made their pact with Rasputin and kept Anastasia; the undead of the old cities were dealt with by the Cheka in 1918 with a thoroughness the Party does not discuss. The Old Academy has no Soviet chapter. The witch tradition of the villages (the vedmy and koldun of a thousand years of folklore) survived collectivization the way everything in the villages survived it, and it is from that tradition, not from the Institute, that Reissner's teacher came.

The Touched

See above: a resource. The children of the Civil War's arcane fronts, the Tunguska villages, and the Baikal shore are tested at ten and assigned at sixteen. The Night Witches recruit from the Touched women of the Civil War generation and their daughters, and their doctrine, which the West has not seen in action except at Khalkhin Gol, is the only arcane military doctrine in the world built on practitioners rather than apparatus. A Touched who refuses allocation is a parasite under Article 58 and goes where parasites go.

Press, radio, and the pictures

The Party's. The Soviet line on the arcane is that the Reich has stolen it, the Americans have sold it, and the Soviet Union has liberated it; the line on the war is that the Little War is a rehearsal and the Soviet Union is the only country that knows it. Reissner, who was a writer before she was anything else, edits Pravda's front page herself when it matters.

The Party

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union governs through the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the Supreme Soviet, and the General Secretary governs the Party. The structure is the one in the encyclopedia. The difference is in who sits in it and how they got there: there was no purge, the Old Bolsheviks who survived the Civil War are mostly alive, and the Politburo is a body whose members have learned, since 1928, that the General Secretary knows what they think before they say it, and conduct themselves accordingly.

The Premier

Larissa Reissner is forty-seven. She was a poet, a journalist, the commissar of the Volga flotilla, Trotsky's protégé, and the Red Army's chronicler before she was anything else; she is the Rift's eastern-perimeter veteran, Stalin's unexplained nemesis, General Secretary since 1928, and Premier since 1930. She is a hard-liner and a true believer: the Revolution is the point, the Reich is Marx's prediction come true, and the Soviet Union is alone because it has always been alone. She is photographed in the red leather trenchcoat on every front, directs the relic expeditions personally, and visits the Finnish line more often than her generals like.

Her power is not only political. The Rift's touch, under her teacher's instruction, became the ability to change minds; the Party learned this in 1928 and has governed accordingly ever since. She does not use it often, so far as anyone can tell. It is the "so far as anyone can tell" that keeps the Politburo honest.

The inner circle

• Leon Trotsky, Commissar for War. The Red Army's founder, restored in 1928; the strategist of the eastern war everyone expects. Sixty-two, and not well.
• Georgy Zhukov, Chief of the General Staff. Khalkhin Gol; the man who will fight the Reich.
• The teacher (TBD). The witch who made Reissner what she is. Name, age, and whereabouts unknown outside a very small circle; the Night Witches' doctrine is hers.
• The Commissar for Special Requisitions (TBD). The relic hunt; the hoard; the Institute.
• The head of the NKVD Special Department (TBD). The arcane secret police, the Comintern, and the "adventurers" abroad.