Earth in 1993

Since 1945, the world has changed immensely. Following the discovery of Maser Projector technology by the USSR in 1949, the Soviet Union acquired a massive advantage in the developing Cold War, further compounded by their leaps forward in satellite technology. Such developments spurned an era of intense fear and hatred in the United States, known as the Red Scare, where the inadequacy of America's reliance on nuclear weaponry manifested in an explosive military budget and massive domestic surveillance and social ostracism directed against the forces of the left. Civil Rights leaders were dragged out of their homes and detained for months on end, if not dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee and excoriated for hours on end before an audience of millions. In the USSR, a feeling of complacent safety led to an inward turn. Young radicals, formerly the base of the Party's authority, began to thoughtfully and actively question the authoritarian nature of Soviet governance, as well as the idiosyncrasies between the Party's supposed Marxist doctrine and its often antidemocratic and racist politics. Such questioning was often accused as being capitalist propaganda, but those espousing it could not be less socialist. Most advocated for a return to the Soviet system of the early union, and many even managed to get a listening ear in Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, whose leadership in the late 50s and early 60s eased the consciousnesses of the radical youth.   The 60s and 70s, however, changed everything. The forces of reaction took hold, in both America and the USSR. In America, Richard Nixon took the Presidency in 1960 and immediately began turning back what little Civil Rights progress had been made since WW2, resegregating the military and even instituting mandatory segregation in certain spaces in Northern states. His Senate Majority Leader, Joseph McCarthy, helped push through a variety of legislative reforms designed to strengthen the Presidency and American conservatism. In the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev overthrew Krushchev in a coup in 1963, thus reinstituting Stalinist totalitarian rule in the USSR. In 1969, things came to a head. In the US, where Nixon had delayed the 1968 elections, Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. declared a general strike with the intent of either forcing the hand of the US government to enact progressive policies and hold an election, or overthrowing the government entirely and creating a socialist republic. Meanwhile, communist reformists had taken control of Czechoslovakia fairly, leading Breznhev to consider invading the country and forcibly overthrowing their government. Breznhev attempted this, but quickly faced opposition at home for his decision, as well as from Czech and Slovak guerrillas. The Red Square Revolution rose up in the USSR, overthrowing one-party rule and establishing a multi-party socialist republic, the 2nd Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In America, things didn't go so well. Nixon ordered the military to proceed with carpet-bombing the Birmingham and Columbia communes, engulfing vast swathes of the Eastern United States in flame and ash. Millions of lives were lost in the fighting, including Nixon's own, after he was assassinated by a spy from the communes. Spiro Agnew ascended to the Presidency, and, after Congress began voicing support for the Communes, he dissolved Congress by force, declaring martial law in the United States.   The year is 1993. The would-be combatants of the Cold War have spent the better part of four decades in chaos and disarray; anarchists and revolutionaries have swept across Europe and the USSR, while an Imperial Nixonian Presidency has come to dominate the United States and much of the Americas. The forces of democracy and authoritarianism, socialism and capitalism, liberty and oppression churn in the various ancillary conflicts which have flared up in the first, second, and third world, from Revolutionary Communists taking the Japanese Imperial Diet to Reactionary Monarchists trying to take hold in Spain. The world is at a turning point. Who will emerge into the 21st Century triumphant, if anyone?