ChalkLine's Desiderata

[ChalkLine]

Originally Posted by Homer

Wow, that’s total national mobilization. With measures like those in place being the domestic norm, I wonder how the poles would view civilian populations in neighboring (western) states?

Well, the weird thing is most people don't realise how the Eastern Bloc and especially the Soviets saw The Cold War.

The Soviets saw the Cold War as essentially a tradition going back to the Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War¹, on their side Western aggression never really stopped and the West simply used them to bleed out the Nazis in The Second World War. The Soviets had endured eight million dead and had demanded that Germany be demilitarised (like Austria) but instead the West re-armed them, a serious red line. This is largely due to the fact that for the entire Second World War the Nazis had been saying they'd make peace with the West and then combine with the USA and Britain to crush Bolshevism and as far as they could see this was exactly what was happening. So when the West created NATO it was the sum of all their fears; their view was that the West was going to crush them while they were weak after fighting the Nazis thus the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Treaty Organisation (fun fact: they called NATO "The North Atlantic Pact" )

So this gives you an idea how they saw Western societies and their peoples as well as their readiness. In Communist perspectives the workers of the West were too fragmented to resist being mobilised for war so mobilisation would only occur on a cost basis but that the West, as usual being suspected of being uncaring of workers lives due to their belief in eternal class war, would use their troops right up the point it looked like the economies would suffer too much.

So in game terms you can expect communists to see the West as eternal enemies, always ready to invade and always trying to undermine their 'perfect system'. Soviet troops especially will be distrustful of British, German and US troops. This is odd because in GDW's game those are the only troops that see combat in Poland so T2K is a worst-case scenario for the Soviets.

¹In Britain's case the antagonism really goes back to the 1820s, something we called The Great Game and something they see as just some sort of weird Russophobia