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Originally Posted by Mohoender
I agree with you on that one and, as I said, I like several of you ideas also I came up with something entirely different while making the same critics. I also have to say that you come down hard on reformers in the communist world.
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Well if the reformers don't get squashed by the hard-liners and Stalinists, then it makes getting to WWIII a bit harder.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mohoender
However, how is it possible that Georgia is on the way to independence as early as 1989? Shevarnadze is dead, Gorbi is dead and the red army is still fully in control. In addition, what about Zviad Gamsakhurdia? Merab Kostava was killed in a car accident on october 13th that year.
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Well I do mention Zviad Gamsakhurdia as an ex-president of the republic who gets run out of office, turns guerilla, gets CIA support, but is eventually hunted down by Soviet security forces... a bit like what really happened.
I realize that I assassinated Shevarnadze along with Gorbachev in 1988, but I don't think that would stop the Georgian pro-independence movement from getting up and running. That motive was building in 1988: remember the massacre of protesters in Tsiblisi? But the hardline coup/assassination of Gorbachev catches them flat footed. Nevertheless, their independence movement is strong and it takes the USSR years to squash it back down.
One of the problems is that Georgia is very anti-Russian, very pro-independence. But if the USSR is going to invade Iran and fight a war in the middle east I'm going to need to keep Georgia in the USSR. I'm imagining that the USSR does so by fostering independence movements in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, so that if Georgia leaves the USSR, they will loose those territories. They end up staying in the USSR so as to keep the country intact, with the USSR deploying internal "peace keepers" to occupy the country. The same sort of thing happens in Nagorno-Kharabakh in Azerbaijian. The USSR uses the ethnic strife as an excuse to occupy both Armenia and Azerbaijian and keep them from seceeding.
Any other suggestions how the post-Gorbachev USSR might keep the Caucasian Republics in line? At least until the Twilight War?
A. Scott Glancy, President TCCorp, dba Pagan Publishing