Chapter 10: A World in Conflict: The Red Dawn

29 September 1945, Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Flying through the city of Belgrade from the air, the ancient city along the Danube exudes the vicissitudes of history. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 infoFrom the Celts to the Romans, to the Slavs, the Huns, the Goths, the Turks and the Serbs, this ancient city has changed rulers frequently over the years. The flames of war have never really been extinguished. In the last half-century, it has become a powder keg in the Balkans – the trigger for the last world war. And in this world war, this land is also a river of blood.

Fortunately, the recent chaos is now finally over: after four years of anti-fascist war and chaos among various ethnic groups in the country, the ancient cities of Belgrade and Yugoslavia finally ushered in a new master: the general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the Croatian Josep Brown. Broz. Tito.

At this time, Tito, who had just finished attending the Comintern summit in Moscow, was walking out of the capital's airport with a tired face and boarding his special car.

For Tito, the latest Comintern summit, which ended only yesterday, was not a pleasant experience, and the brutal style of the Soviets was really a little uncomfortable. At present, however, there are still hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops stranded on Yugoslav soil, and many things can only be endured by pinching their noses for the time being...... After initially agreeing that "all socialist countries should assist each other in post-war reconstruction, strengthen economic cooperation, and work closely together to cope with the counterattack of Western capitalist forces" and won a sum of aid, Tito left his foreign minister to go to Leningrad to attend the follow-up conference on economic and financial cooperation among various countries, and hurried back to Belgrade to deal with the mountains of mess in Yugoslavia.

As a geographical term, the history of "Yugoslavia" is actually very short, it is a country that was forcibly co-opted after the First World War, and it lacks neither sufficient cultural heritage nor a strong sense of internal identity. It can hardly be called a national concept, it can hardly be called a geographical concept, and even the dynastic traditions of the Habsburg House Austro-Hungarian Empire are absent. In this hard-pinched country, the Serbs, who considered themselves the supreme rulers, the Croats, who were dragged out of the Austro-Hungarian system as trophies, and the Bosnians, Macedonians, Slovenes, and Albanians, all looked down on each other. Moreover, almost every nation has its own fascist extremist organization, which has begun to fight and kill each other before the war, and after the German invasion and the collapse of the country, they have killed corpses all over the field and rivers of blood in one go.

As a Croat, Tito's position in Yugoslavia was actually awkward. Because the majority of the country was the Serbs, and in Tito's youth, the Croats were loyal subjects of Austria-Hungary and enemies of the Serbs. During the last world war, the Croats fought the Serbs for several years. Now it is necessary to accept such a "foreigner" on the head and make a Croat the supreme ruler of their own country really unconvinced many Serbian nationalists.

- How so? It's probably like having a Pole as General Secretary of the Soviet Union!

Fortunately, now that the war is over, the people's minds are at peace, and everything is in ruins, the vast majority of the entire Yugoslavia is full of ruins and starvation, and the common people are dying of the cruel war, and they are tired of war to the extreme, and even the most radical "Great Serbs" cannot incite the people to rebel in vain. In addition, there are still hundreds of thousands of Soviet Red Army troops sitting in various parts of southeastern Europe, and there should be no chaos in the short term.

However, the Soviet Red Army also brought as many troubles as they brought benefits: the smoke of the fall of Nazi Germany had not yet cleared, and the Soviet Red Army had already fought with the British in order to maintain the Red regime in France. In order to demonstrate the unity of the socialist countries, Yugoslavia also had to send an international column to France to participate in the war to help exterminate the French White Army...... This is still a trivial matter, the real trouble is that the United States and the Soviet Union are now facing each other in Rome not far away, the British Mediterranean Fleet and the American Atlantic Fleet are already cruising in the Adriatic Sea, and Greece in the south has also become another battlefield for the confrontation between the Eastern and Western camps within the Central Powers, and Yugoslavia is standing on the edge of this war vortex, and it may fall into the flames of war again at any time!

Thinking of this, Tito couldn't help but sigh, took out a few newspapers from his briefcase that he didn't have time to read on the plane, and read them carefully.

In the international news section of the newspapers, the headline was the fall of the Indian port of Mumbai, and the British seemed to lament that the last outlet to the sea had been blocked by Indian insurgents, and the Governor of Wavell, who was trapped in Delhi, was completely isolated. And the British Royal Navy, which had just received two Soviet atomic bombs in the Netherlands, obviously could not have the strength to launch an expedition to the Indian Ocean...... The loss of the British Indian colonies seemed to be a foregone conclusion.

However, such a distant place was meaningless to the South Slavs, who had no overseas colonial traditions, and Tito glanced at it after a few glances.

Then there was the latest development of the Soviet Red Army in France: following the liberation of Paris, the workers and peasants all over France rose up in response to the revolution, and Marshal Petain's Vichy French regime collapsed. Lyon, Marseille, Toulon and other major cities in the south launched uprisings one after another, establishing the Soviet revolutionary regime, and the liberation of the whole country seemed to be just around the corner. De Gaulle's Free France movement had also lost its footing, and he himself was forced to go into exile in England once again, having just delivered a tearful speech to the House of Commons in London, begging for more aid, but unfortunately there were few responses and boos.

Next came the news from Spain, which surprised Tito that under strong pressure from the United States and Britain, General Franco actually sent troops to intervene in the French Revolution! Fifty thousand Spanish interventionists and a few thousand Portuguese crossed the Pyrenees the day before yesterday and assisted Marshal Petain in suppressing the civil revolt in Toulouse...... But considering that the steel torrent of the Soviet Red Army was close at hand, the fate of these Spanish troops was estimated to be very worrying.

In fact, even the remnants of Vichy France considered Toulouse unsafe enough and were ready to go to Corsica to establish a government-in-exile.

On the other hand, however, even if Franco did not move, the socialist camp would not necessarily spare him after the liberation of France. Many of the exiled politicians of the Spanish Republic are now active in Paris and Moscow...... Tito also met several of them while he was in Moscow.

Everyone knew that Comrade Stalin wanted a complete red Europe, and the Iberian Peninsula was naturally among his goals.

Further down the line, the news is less rosy, as on the Greek battlefield, the Greek White Army, supported by the British Mediterranean Fleet, successfully attacked the island of Salamis, interspersed with the Greek hinterland. At the same time, a British cruiser formation bombarded Athens fiercely, and the Greek soldiers and civilians suffered heavy casualties, and a mass exodus was taking place. In terms of troops, the current Greek White Army is only one-tenth of the Greek Red Army, and occupies only a few marginal islands, with a very weak population and strength. Helplessly, with the support of the British Mediterranean Fleet behind it, it could use the sea route to maneuver freely to raid, while the Soviet fleet was stuck in the Black Sea by Turkey and could not get out. Although the Soviets managed to transport a batch of torpedo boats to the Greek Red Army by rail, the effect was better than nothing.

Fortunately, the key to victory over the British was not in the Mediterranean, but in London: the belligerent Prime Minister Churchill was clearly on the verge of losing his hand. The latest opinion polls show that the British public is already deeply dissatisfied with the endless long war, and it is common to hear someone imitating Churchill's tone and making a sarcastic speech: "In Singapore, we have failed." In the Low Countries, we failed. In France, we failed again...... Even in Australia, we didn't make it! And next, it's India! …… I have nothing to offer you, only my tears, my toil and my stupidity......"

A few days ago, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was voted in parliament for reproach, and a wave of cabinet toppling is already brewing. Overall, this old colonial empire, like the French Empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, has been drained of its last strength and courage by the war, and can no longer fight.

At that time, the crisis of the Greek Red regime will be solved, and the entire Balkan Peninsula will be calm for a while......

Seeing this, Tito rubbed his eyes, raised his head, and through the car window, swept through the ruins on both sides of the road, the depressed and dilapidated street scenes, recalled the scenery he saw on the streets of Moscow, and couldn't help but shake his head and sigh: Even before being destroyed by war, neither Belgrade, the capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, nor Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was as grand, magnificent and magnificent as Moscow.

But Tito, who was a prisoner of war on the Austro-Hungarian Eastern Front in the last war and spent some time in a Russian prisoner of war camp at that time, knew very well what the Soviet Union was like in the past. In fact, at the time of Lenin's death, the situation in the Soviet Union was not much better than in Yugoslavia today.

At that time, the Soviet Union, which had just ended the civil war, inherited almost all the good and bad assets of the Russian Empire: a vast territory, rich natural resources, a harsh environment in the cold and cold, chaotic ethnic relations, and countless lazy people who indulged in vodka all day long...... Although in the tsarist era there was the glory of the "gendarme of Europe", it was still essentially a backward country where peasants used wooden plows to cultivate the land.

Then, Comrade Stalin, a professional crunch from the Georgian seminary, with a tyrannical method far superior to that of the Tsar of the Liedai and comparable to that of the Mongol Khan, ruthlessly spurred these drunks who were half-awake and half-asleep by vodka, and dragged them onto the road of blood and tears of high-speed industrialization.

- "If you can't do it, shoot it, and watch it yourself!" "Whoever dares to oppose it should send him to Comrade Lenin!" "Rather than allowing potentially dangerous elements to drag their feet when the war is unfavorable, it is better to physically eliminate them before ♂ the war"......

When Westerners learned of the horrific news of the Soviet purge, a bunch of international commentators celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But they don't know that the Slavs represented by the Russians have extreme M genes hidden in their bodies, and it is useless to talk to them in a good voice, only the bullets of tyrants, nooses and gulag labor camps can turn them from slugs to Tyrannosaurus rex...... In order to control this nation to the top, the leader must be cold-blooded and brutal enough, and his will must be as indestructible as a special alloy!

Therefore, under the thorny whip of Comrade Steel, the productive forces and development of the Soviet Union have been growing faster and faster, and the national cohesion has become more powerful than ever, so that those European and American experts who are waiting to see the jokes have dropped their glasses and shouted that the evil empire of the Soviet Union has violated the scientific principles of the law of economic development.

In short, in just over a decade, this Iron Uncle Comrade has succeeded in reversing the situation in one fell swoop under the extremely bad domestic and international situation, relying on his own will, prestige and brutality, stepping on countless corpses and bones to establish the world's second strongest military industrial system, making the once poor Soviet Union grow into a real monster, and then bulldozing the entire European continent in one breath with the rolling torrent of steel!

Thinking about the incredible explosive pace of development of the Soviet Red Empire over the years, Tito couldn't help but feel in a trance.

Perhaps, Yugoslavia should also learn from the advanced experience of the Soviet Union, first send hundreds of thousands, millions of unruly bastards to God, and then stuff the rest into labor camps, work day and night until they die, at least until they have no time to think nonsense, and then solve all problems......

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USSR, Leningrad

Although the war on the European continent has not yet been completely extinguished, the old capital of Tsarist Russia, formerly known as St. Petersburg, is already a bustling and prosperous scene.

Unlike the desperate frustration, hunger and deprivation of the last world war, the people living in Leningrad did not feel a very noticeable shortage of supplies during this world war, except for the worst months of the war.

On the contrary, as the red iron stream continued to advance on the European continent, the shelves of the Leningrad state stores became more and more abundant: Oriental teas of all kinds, colorful silks, cigarette rations doubled, and sugar was sold without tickets as never before. There are also a number of tropical specialties that were rarely seen before, such as pepper, dried coconut, palm oil, candied pineapple, coffee beans, canned tropical fish, and many strange spices that cannot be named...... In particular, chocolate is the most popular seller, because due to the long-term blockade of the imperialism of the world powers, cocoa powder from the tropics has always been a rare luxury in the Soviet Union!

Although no one knows where these good things come from, it does not affect the citizens to rush to buy them in rubles. The girls were excited to dress up in smooth and colorful silk dresses, and the children were happily licking the candied chocolate and tropical fruits.

In addition to the increasing abundance of material life, the successive brilliant victories of the Red Army at the front were in sharp contrast to the bad news during the last world war, and made the Soviet people feel great joy in their spiritual life. Some homes and shops even hung large maps on their walls, and planted small red flags on the newly liberated cities every day, watching the continent gradually be flooded by the red tide from east to west.

Today, after the Red Army entered Paris half a month ago, there is new good news from the front: the Red Navy's Arctic Ocean Fleet has successfully captured the port of Narvik in northern Norway, eliminated the last British invading army entrenched in Northern Europe, and declared the liberation of Scandinavia!

To this end, Leningrad announced that all primary and secondary schools in the city would have a half-day holiday, organize celebratory parades, and distribute candy.

All of a sudden, the streets of Leningrad were crowded with people, laughter and laughter, red flags were waving everywhere, and songs full of confidence were fluttering everywhere.

At the same time, in a lounge on the third floor of the Winter Palace, diplomats from various socialist countries in Europe that had just been established were looking through the windows at the sea of red flags on the street, as well as the model of the Soviet national emblem carried out by elementary school students, and their eyes were very complicated.

Although they are all members of the socialist camp, few Europeans will like Russians. There are so many countries in the world, and it is true that many countries have become a nightmare for their neighbors at some point. But Russia is probably the only country in Europe that has been the biggest nightmare for all its neighbors since its founding. In modern Europe, one of the biggest themes of foreign affairs is the management of various anti-Russian alliances.

However, despite the fact that Europeans have stubbornly looked down on the Russians in recent history, they have tried to expelle them from the category of civilized Europeans as uncivilized barbarians. But in fact, the Russian nation is really an extremely excellent nation, although it has only been three or four hundred years out of the history of ignorance, but in almost all aspects of science, technology, humanities, military and so on, there have been world-class geniuses.

In the eyes of the vast majority of European intellectuals, the Russian nation is a great nation; The land of Russia is a magnificent land; But the country of Russia is a terrible evil empire, insatiable and brazen. Almost all of Europe hates Russia, hates Russia, fears Russia, and even unites against Russia...... But this is useless, Russia is invincible. Even if he occasionally knocked him down, he only went through the baptism of fire like a phoenix, and then crawled out of the ashes to make trouble, making the whole of Europe tremble, but there was nothing he could do.

-- In this world, I am afraid that only the Soviets dare to imprint the entire earth on their national emblem and dare to take the liberation of all mankind as the core purpose of the nation's founding, and only the Soviets dare to use their own country as the largest social science experiment in the history of mankind......

Now the Soviets are going to take the whole of Europe for social science experiments again! Well, this time it's financial.

The theme of the Leningrad Conference was the issuance of a single currency for all the countries of the socialist camp on the entire continent: the euro!

In this regard, the first reaction of diplomats from various countries is to lie down and then meow: since the beginning of modern times, how can there be a large number of countries using the same currency? It's no longer the time of the Renaissance when all of Europe used Italian ducats and florin coins!

Judging from the experience of the unification of the German Empire, this is simply a prelude to the annexation of the open fire, right?

In the face of the arrogant Soviets, the small countries of Eastern Europe could not stand up, and the German Communist Party and the Italian Communist Party were representatives of the defeated countries, and they were not qualified to speak out against them. However, the representative of the French Communist Party, who had not yet unified the whole country, slapped the table on the spot, saying that he must not give up the historic franc...... When the representatives of other countries saw that there was a leader, they also joined in groups, but at the same time, they couldn't help but have cramps in their legs, lest they annoy Maozi and make a fuss.

This time, however, the Soviet delegates were rarely able to speak, and seeing that the opposition was so strong, they took a step back and said that if the situation did not allow it, the introduction of a unified socialist national currency could be put on hold for the time being...... However, as an alternative and minimum requirement, each socialist country could issue its own banknotes, but it had to use the same uniform design as the ruble, i.e., the cruiser Aurora......

This is another request that makes people want to roll their eyes, since the first two years of the Soviet-German war, under the sole arbitrariness of Uncle Steel, all the ruble banknotes in the Soviet Union, from large to small, and even the design of the kopeck, have all been changed to the cruiser Aurora!

As a result, just as the Americans called the dollar Franklin, the Russians bluntly called the ruble Aurora......

Then, the most widely issued stamp in the Soviet Union was also the cruiser Aurora, and the most awarded low-level medal was the cruiser Aurora...... A bronze statue of the cruiser Aurora was erected on Red Square in Moscow, and models of the cruiser Aurora of different materials and models were standard in government buildings in every Soviet city. Looking at Stalin's deranged appearance, it was almost like trying to turn this antique cruiser from the Russo-Japanese War era into a holy relic and artifact of the Red Camp, similar to the level of the "True Cross" and the "Ark of the Covenant" of the Catholic Church......

Well, although you Russians know that you Russians have a short history and little knowledge, and you Russians have not seen what the sea is like when your Nordic neighbors have been playing pirate games vigorously for hundreds of years, and finally they don't want to do it and turn to the right. As a result, when I saw the sea, I was excited as if I had been injected with chicken blood, and I must drive a warship to the sea to play, and for hundreds of years, I have been thinking about the outlet to the sea that leads to the warm sea...... Then, the cruiser Aurora is indeed an important symbol of the October Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union, as well as the most famous warship in the entire socialist camp: as everyone knows, the cruiser Aurora burst into the Winter Palace that night with a cannon shot!

But you can't advertise it like a statue of the Virgin or a cross, right? Is this still a materialist?

Therefore, the representatives of various countries were still reluctant to agree to this embarrassing request. But the Soviets refused to budge any longer...... After a fierce quarrel, the representatives of various countries had to accept this tough "minimum demand" and agreed to turn all the currencies of their respective countries into "warship coins", or "Aurora coins", just like Maozi: in any case, it is much more acceptable to print a "goddess of aurora" on the banknote than to have the head of Indian Stalin (Aurora is a transliteration, transliteration is the goddess of aurora), isn't it?

Think of it as a small sacrifice to satisfy the vanity of the Soviets, and a thank you to the Soviet Red Army for liberating all of Europe!

However, none of them knew what the significance of this seemingly fame-seeking affair was for the Soviet Union and the socialist camp......

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USSR, Siberia, Tyumen oil fields

In the history of another world, this huge oil field was not explored and discovered until the sixties, when it was nothing more than an inaccessible wasteland. However, in this world, something has changed incredibly and wonderfully......

- In the cold wind from the Arctic, a blonde girl in a military coat and a fleece hat stands alone in the wilderness.

I saw that she was silent for a long time, as if she was brewing something.

Then, the girl stretched out a jade hand towards the wilderness...... Then, it's time to witness the miracle!

At her will, the barren earth wriggled like plasticine and quickly changed shape: the turf and shrubs were quickly and quietly leveled by a large, invisible hand, and the trees were silently cut down, skinned, and embalmed...... The sand and gravel were burned to glass by the heat that came from nowhere, the earth was burned to red bricks and tiles, and the thick reinforced concrete walls rose from the ground like bamboo shoots and mushrooms. Even the various metal components, such as copper and iron, are separated from the soil by some wonderful force and flow like rivers on the ground......

Of course, it was not enough to rely on the metal components of the soil and rocks, so the girl ordered a large number of aluminum, copper ingots, iron ingots, and rare metals to be piled up here in advance. Under her power, these metal raw materials melted quickly like candles by the stove, turned into parts of various shapes, and finally assembled into sections of pipes and machines...... Then, a nearby bare rock mountain cracked, and the solid rocks were cut into neat slabs and bricks, silently separated from the mountain, suspended in the air, like well-trained soldiers, marching towards the uninhabited construction site, like building blocks, paved into foundations, roads and embankments......

Pumping units, pipelines, distillation towers, power plants, reservoirs, oil storage tanks, booster pumping stations, management centers, staff dormitories and canteens...... All the construction equipment that makes up the oil fields and refineries emerges from the soil at the will of the maiden. The cables and pipelines buried in the ground are also condensed directly under the ground, and the pipelines that go straight to the oil storage stratum are automatically formed underground without the need for drilling rigs......

Then the most tedious and fragmentary part, the various process documents, equipment manuals, operation guides, billboards, factory maps...... They are made one by one, and placed where they should be, so that future recipients will not be blinded.

In this way, a huge oil base was quietly completed on the frozen soil of Siberia in a way that was completely inconsistent with science and materialism.

Thanks to the fact that this place was not inhabited in the first place, the Red Army had previously blocked the nearby land within a radius of hundreds of kilometers under the pretext of military exercises. Otherwise, if such a large industrial facility appeared so suddenly, anyone who saw it would feel very strange and think that they had seen a ghost, right?

The huge project, which originally required at least tens of thousands of people to struggle for a year or two, was easily completed by the girl in one afternoon.

And the same thing or miracle has happened more than once in the Soviet Union, Nanyang, Australia, and even India in recent years. Let those desolate corners that were originally forgotten by the Western European and American civilization world enjoy the benefits of industrial civilization to varying degrees......

When everything was done, the blonde girl stretched and turned to a nearby off-road jeep, still muttering, "...... The recent increase in the power of faith ...... It's amazing! It's getting easier and easier to get to work. It seems that everyone loves money...... It's a pity that it's not the power of faith that comes from being famous on the battlefield, and it always feels a little unrefreshing to use! ”

Speaking of this, she glanced up at the eastern sky, and the corners of her mouth suddenly raised a bloodthirsty and hideous smile:

“…… All right! The matter of building socialism should come to an end here. Next is the time to destroy capitalism! From now on, I must kill people well and go up every day! Have a good time fighting the Yankees who won't admit defeat! Ulla! ”