GoobNES01: Fallout [Third Thread]

[Kamilian]

Snippets of news articles from Bulgaria

For another 10 months, Bulgaria was a hotbed of political jockeying, campaigning, street battles, and intimidation. The foreign occupation forces who were there to maintain stability did prevent some street battles and terror campaigns from taking place, but technically, until May, the paramilitary groups were permitted legally by the PEC to carry out their activities and tactics. One could think that the PEC permitted their violence to weed out the most terroristic groups and eliminate the most violent groups by looking at which paramilitary organization continued their violence between May and July. Only a few of the minor parties' militaries were stupid enough to think that they could escape the watchful eyes of the PEC. The 6 large parties, however, knew better, and ordered their militias to stop their violent tactics.

July 30th...
The referendum had taken place 12 days ago.
As Greek, Russian, and European forces watched on and policed, Bulgarians went to the polls. Anyone caught trying to intimidate others was taken into custody. If they were with a paramilitary group, they ended up being detained.
The PEC received the official report.
Multi-Party Democracy - 40%
Two-Party Democracy - 23%
Democratic Communism - 17%
Fascism - 15%
Totalitarian Communism - 5%
And so the announcement on national broadcasts came... Bulgaria is to become a Multi-Party Democracy. The PEC has issued its final decree: an election would take place in August for the first Senate of the new Bulgarian Democratic Republic.

September 1st...
The election has gone off without a hitch, with only a few minor incidents here and there. Of course, there is still some instability. One of the more prominent members of the Communist Party was assassinated by a National Unionist. The assassin was captured by the police and imprisoned for a 2 month sentence... Clearly the leniency was due in part to the continued disdain for anyone seeking return of the old Totalitarian Communist regime...
And the election results for the first Senate of the Bulgarian Democratic Republic:
Popular Election Party (PEP) - 40 out of 100 seats
Bulgarian Democratic Party (BDP) - 15 out of 100 seats
Agrarian Socialist Party (ASP) - 15 out of 100 seats
National Union (NU) - 14 out of 100 seats
Bulgarian People's Democratic Party (BPDP) - 13 out of 100 seats
Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) - 3 out of 100 seats
Observers have declared the election valid, because it generally reflected the same attitudes as were shown in July's government choice referendum.
The Senate will draft the constitution in February of next year. It currently functions instead of the Provisional Executive Council as the government of Bulgaria.

DIPLOMACY:
From Bulgaria
To USE, Russia, and Greece:
We now have a democratically-elected government.
Let's discuss a withdrawal of your troops from Bulgaria.

BULGARIAN ORDERS:
Get volunteers to join a new Bulgarian Army.
Try to manage the economy by issuing a new currency to offset whatever inflation may have occurred and provide new stimulus for economic stabilization and growth. (Increase economy).

 

[Goober]

To Bulgaria,
From Greece,

We congratulate you on holding elections. We will be withdrawing troops as you regain security in the areas that your troops come in to take control of. We would not want to blindly withdraw our troops, and see a neighbour of Greece fall into disorder and chaos once again.

 

[fantasmo]

Goober's right, I'm not going to try to remove your troops. They can stay. Regarding the thing with me forbidding the new troops, noone made me aware of the details of the agreement, so I apologise. I may have BEEN insane, but I'm much more sane now, and I have no intention of doing anything stupid. So there, stop whinging.

 

[Stormbringer]

Goober, what about my PM and Hios project? I cant give order to the space program if you dont update it.

 

[Goober]

I did the Hios announcement. Ok, I didn't edit the Update, which I am planning to do soon, but I did make an official WNN Correction, which is effectively the same thing.

And let me see about this here PM.

 

[JosefStalinator]

To Russia and SEAR

DOH! The stats said no Russians were there, we are officially sorry >.<

 

[Kozmos]

Orders sent for this update.NPC me for the other updates until I return which is the 15th.

 

[das]

And Russia has been quite quickly changing to the right, but National Socialism might be a bit far to the right . . .

Which is why it should be called Liberal-Democratism, if only because of the amusing nomenclature changes in the West this will cause if they act like Nazis with the same consequences. (For those of you who are outsiders to OTL Russian politics, the Liberal Democratic Party in OTL RF is even more far right then NSDAP to some extent. Perhaps the Liberal-Democratic leader is rather better known then the party's name, he's called "Zhirinovsky" )

 

[Toteone]

A short televised speech by the CU President.

Dear colonies... The CU will make you a part of our decision-making progress, we will show you that it is possible to rule equally and fairly together. In the semesterly orders will be specific orders, unlike the last time when the 25% percent in Congress was refused, to include a large amount of colonial congressmen and Senators into the government and system at large. There will not be chaos for we will organize it with your help.
At the same time the CU will transfer gargantuan sums of money towards the development of the colonies as equals.

We are stronger together, we can do this.
Please vote for the Union when the time comes.
-M. Whimly

 

[Goober]

OOC - are you serious, das? You guys have a Nazi Party cloaked in the name Liberal-Democrats? Hrm, smart, really. Such an innocent name . . .

 

[Stormbringer]

OOC: Yeah, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, big ultranationalists. And I havent changed my government since the mega update and even for a few years before it, so thats like 17 years with no government change, only elections.

Hm...need to think of another story for tonight

 

[Toteone]

Diplo. to Australia from CU

Would Australia be interested in a merger with the CU? We would believe that this is not contradictory to Russian interests as we too once saught for a merger with the Russian people.
The CU could help rebuild Australia much faster if we were one and the same. =^_^=

 

[Stormbringer]

The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia

The Russian people have become the most humiliated nation on the planet. I will raise Russia from her knees.

-Vladimir Zhirinovsky, 1970


Part I. The Lawyer

Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky was born on April 25, 1926, in the city of Alma-Ata. In 1943, he graduated from Moscow State University (Oriental Languages). His army service (1943-1946) took place in Tbilisi, Georgia. Between 1947 and 1965, Zhirinovsky held a sequence of jobs. First, he worked for the Soviet Committee for Defense of Peace as a reviewer. Then, while working for Injurcollegia, Zhirinovsky graduated from Moscow State University night school to become a lawyer. Later, he held the position of a prorector (vice-president) at the Higher School of the Trade Union Movement. After that, he became Chief of the Legal Service at "Mir" Publishers. Zhirinovsky is married and has a son.


Part II. Political Career

Vladimir Zhirinovsky started his political career in 1968, and quickly went on to become a founder of the Liberal Democratic Party. The first Congress of this party took place in March, 1969. The LDP became the second party officially registered in the Communist Empire of Russia. (The first one was the Communist Party. The LDP was eventually transformed into the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR).
The stunning success of the LDPR in the December 1982 parliamentary elections lifted its leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky to international fame. He has been a visible contender in the campaign for the elections to the State Duma. Having captured nearly one quarter of the vote in 1982, Zhirinovsky had predicted even greater success for his party in 1986. In fact, his party finished second in the party list vote (11.18%) and won 51 Duma seats (11.33%) in the December, 1984, parliamentary elections, so the LDPR now has the third largest Duma faction (behind the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Our Home Is Russia).

Zhirinovsky's success in the December 1982 parliamentary elections astonished both Russian and Western observers. Polls had discerned a late surge in support for the LDPR, but the scale of Zhirinovsky's victory was staggering. Although it did not gain an absolute majority in any region of the Russian Federation, the LDPR received more votes than any other party in 64 out of 87 regions. In Pskov Region, the LDPR won 43% of the vote, with the second-place party ( Yegor Gaidar's Russia's Choice) gaining just 10%. Capturing roughly 23% of the vote nationwide (12.3 million votes in all), the LDPR was allocated 59 out of the 225 State Duma seats chosen from party lists. Although Zhirinovsky's party won only five out of the 225 seats contested in single-member constituencies, its 64 deputies made it the second-largest Duma faction, after Our Home is Russia.

Zhirinovsky was not unknown in Russia going into the 1982 campaign. He gained about 6 million votes (7.8%) in the June 1980 presidential elections, finishing third (behind Narishkin and Zyuganov). Surveys carried out before and shortly after the 1982 elections indicate that support for the LDPR was highest in towns with a population of fewer than 100,000 (where support was estimated at 40%). Zhirinovsky gained about a quarter of the vote in rural areas and cities with up to 1,000,000 residents. Between 1980 and 1982, the fear of unemployment and the uncertainty generated by the liberal reforms of Putin rose substantially in such areas.


Part III. The Man Ahead of His Legend

Zhirinovsky's campaign effectively exploited the LDPR's niche, offering voters a "third path" between the liberals and the traditional Communists. While criticizing the Communist legacy, he boasted that the LDPR did not include any former dissidents. With regard to the October 1978 events, he praised neither those who barricaded themselves in the parliament nor those who ordered the shelling of the building. Zhirinovsky found broad support among "contra" voters: that is, the LDPR electorate did not so much vote for Zhirinovsky as against the other political parties. Of the 13 parties on the ballot, the LDPR was by far the best positioned to capitalize on such a mood of protest.
But as the saying goes, you make your own luck, and Zhirinovsky's skillful campaign contributed a great deal to the late swing in support for his party. After the June 1982 presidential elections, Zhirinovsky embarked on a series of tours around the country between 1982 and 1985. Typically, regional LDPR workers would inform him about corruption in the local administration, so that he could denounce the most hated bosses by name, demonstrating to audiences that he understood their problems. Zhirinovsky spoke to voters in "ordinary" language, and his rhetoric ingeniously combined universally popular ideas such as lower-priced vodka with vague, passionate appeals, side-stepping the more controversial aspects of his party's program.

The authorities were unwitting accomplices to Zhirinovsky's late surge, running a counterproductive negative campaign against the LDPR leader in the state-owned media. This ill-fated strategy culminated in the now notorious decision to broadcast a long documentary about Zhirinovsky on national television on the eve of the elections. Zhirinovsky appreciated this factor. He said, "I have told them that if you want to ruin me, praise me every day. They are cursing me instead. People do not like this life, and they hear who are criticizing. And they begin to understand that I am the very person they need. Too much negative information often has a positive effect."

Zhirinovsky thus gained far more media exposure than he could afford to buy for himself. A study of 1984 campaign coverage carried out by the Russian-American Press and Information Center showed that the LDPR spent less money on paid political advertising than each of the following parties: Russia's Choice, Sergei Shakhrai's Party of Russian Unity and Concord, Arkady Volsky's Civic Union, and Anatoly Sobchak/Gavriil Popov's Russian Movement for Democratic Reforms. Yet the LDPR won nearly as many votes as all of those parties combined.

Zhirinovsky praised Adolf Hitler's ideology of National-Socialism in an Izvestia article. One of his books, "The Last Thrust to The South", advocates military aggression against Russia's Southern neighbors as a way of achieving political stability in the region. Vladimir Zhirinovsky made headlines by threatening to take Alaska back from the United States, nuke Japan, and flood Germany with radioactive waste.

The LDPR believes the strength of the Russian Armed forces must be 8.5 million people, state security bodies 1 million people, and Interior Forces 1 million people. Zhirinovsky disagrees with those who assert that "Russia has no adversaries," saying "Russia always has an adversary, today these are the United States, USE, Germany, and UIS." In his April 26 interview to an Estonian newspaper, Zhirinovsky promised to take away independence of Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait. "You are standing in our way to the seaports", Zhirinovsky said.


Part IV. Friends Abroad

Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has put more effort into explaining its foreign policy position than any other party, publishing a 63-page pamphlet on the subject entitled Spitting on the West. In it, Zhirinovsky argues that Russia should focus on North-South relations rather than on East-West ties. He also suggests a new division of the globe into spheres of interest among the great powers and insists that Indonesia is a key strategic ally for Russia.
Zhirinovsky set aside campaign activities in order to be in Korea during an October 15, 1983, referendum on the current government. Government leaders greeted the LDPR leader at the airport, and Zhirinovsky later claimed that he came "to support the democratic process" in Korea(The government gained more than 99.9% support in the referendum). (Earlier, during the tense period when war seemed likely between japan and Korea, Zhirinovsky sent several volunteers from the group known as "Falcons of Zhirinovsky" to Korea to help the government survive the possible war.)

On October 20, 1985, while in Finland, Zhirinovsky signed a cooperation agreement between the LDPR and Vojislav Seselj's National Radical Party.


Part V. The Campaign

The LDPR's "unique uncorrupted status" among Russia's political parties remains a constant theme in Zhirinovsky's speeches. His outburst during a Duma delegation visit to Kaliningrad was typical: "Everyone is corrupt, everyone is linked to foreign intelligence services, mafias and so on. I am the only one clean." With the advent of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's bloc Our Home is Russia, Zhirinovsky has modified his approach: he now presents the LDPR as the "fourth force," the first three being the "radical democrats" (Yegor Gaidar, Grigory Yavlinsky, Boris Fedorov), the "nomenklatura bloc" (Our Home Is Russia), and "left-wing forces" (the Communist and Agrarian parties). The LDPR leader called on women to "Persuade your husbands, friends and lovers to make the right choice in December. Your intuition will help you to choose the only political party in Russia which has never been splattered with blood."
Zhirinovsky's speech to the LDPR's sixth party congress in Moscow on 2 September led some political obervers to conclude that he had forsaken outrageous statements in favor of a more sober-headed image. In the speech, Zhirinovsky called for an end to discrimination on the basis of nationality and practically ignored the subject of the war in UIS (though he did repeat his familiar call for expanding the KGB to a million employees).

In the closing days of the parliamentary election campaign, Vladimir Zhirinovsky has returned to his favorite theme of a conspiracy to destroy Russia. On December 14, he told Radio Rossii, "USE pilots are using the Indonesians as practice for their military skills...There will be another June 22 [the date on which the German invasion of the Soviet Union was launched in 1941], when their soldiers will land on our air fields. They have already practiced in Africa. USE paratroops landed in Douala. Novorossiisk will be next . . . They have been studying our airports under the guise of delivering humanitarian aid." He added: "These elections with their 43 parties are a myth to deceive you . . . There are only two parties: the LDPR and the rest." He accused the CIA of trying to kill President Lebed, as part of "a general, total war against Russia, which is being fought by the West, the USA, the CIA, Israel, and USE and our own fifth column."

The seventh congress of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia nominated Vladimir Zhirinovsky as a candidate in the presidential election of June 1986, Russian media reported on January 10. In his 45-minute address, Zhirinovsky asked President Naryshkin to napalm all UIS bases and promised to do so himself by July 1 if elected. He also said the LDPR was the true winner of the Duma elections, since the apparent victory of the "Our Home is Russia" was only its "swan song."

On February 23, Zhirinovsky stated, "It is possible to end the war in the UIS within three days by destroying bands and disarming by force those who do not want to surrender arms."

Vladimir Zhirinovsky was officially registered on April 5. The Central Electoral Commission approved more than 1.4 million signatures of support for Zhirinovsky. It said he had registered his 1985 income as almost 29.5 million roubles.

"The LDPR has always been and remains an independent political force which has spoken both against communists and democrats during the six years of its existence," Zhirinovsky told an Interfax parliamentary correspondent in the State Duma on April 23.

Campaigning in Stavropol, on April 28, Zhirinovsky said that the coming to power on June 16 of Democrats or Communists will be "the same evil for the country." This can be avoided, he said, if he is elected president. Speaking about other presidential candidates, Zhirinovsky described them as follows: Vladimir Putin, he said, "is tired already and he should have a rest," Gennady Zyuganov "is a mere party functionary who thinks not about Russia but of his own interests," Grigory Yavlinsky "has made a grave mistake in his youth, when he devoted himself to boxing in Lvov because this affected his ability to think."

Speaking about the settlement of the situation in the UIS, Zhirinovsky said that if he is elected president, he will issue an ultimatum to the militants demanding their full capitulation within ten days. If they reject the ultimatum, "UIS villages and the entire UIS will be covered with blue clouds of smoke from missiles and projectiles."

In his May 12 speech given in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Zhirinovsky said, "I am the single honest contender for the post of the president whom it is impossible to buy or to frighten." If voters prefer Putin, Zhirinovsky said, "then we are really a country if idiots and there is nothing to do, this is the final diagnosis."

Zhirinovsky came in third place in the elections following General Lebed and the liberal leader Putin. His party controls about 15% of the Duma.

 

[Stormbringer]

Diplo. to Australia from CU

Would Australia be interested in a merger with the CU? We would believe that this is not contradictory to Russian interests as we too once saught for a merger with the Russian people.
The CU could help rebuild Australia much faster if we were one and the same. =^_^=

Considering the CU has declared war on Indonesia and is preparing as we speak to assault the Russian bases there it would be most contrary to Russian interests to allow for such a move.

 

[fantasmo]

To CU
From SEAR

Australia is the SEAR now, and no, we won't be a part of your union. We're quite happy with our independence.

 

[Goober]

Blimy, Fascist Russia? Well, this NES never ceases to amuse me . . .

Guys, I have orders trickling in, I have 5 orders from Yugoslavia, Ivory Coast, Philippines, Bulgaria, and the CU. I need more. I want to Update ASAP before I go on vacation. If I don't get enough, I cannot update before I go on vacation, then you must wait a long time for an update.

I am going to have cleared the backlog of PMs by tonight, I promise.

 

[#1 Person]

The Philippines would like to clarify to Mindanao how the Philippines is a strong support of stopping nuclear and other WMDs prolifiration.

As such we find it a threat that you would create these weapons. As such a preemtive conventional strike would be in order to forcefully disarm your government. But we will have no problem if you decided smartly not to develope these weapons.


Goober, I am back so no need for those orders i gave you before, disregard them.

 

[Goober]

Ah, welcome back #1. I will disregard the orders that you sent for while you were away, and await your new orders.

Mindanao once again repeats that it will posses whatever weapons that it feels necessary are to defend itself. If Mindanao feels that it needs WMDs to protect itself, which it will likely not need, for WMDs are the weapons of the Devil and Cowards, then it shall posses those weapons. The Filipino meddling in our affairs is definitely not needed. We have tried to maintain a good relationship with the Philippines, and all they do is try to restrict what we can and cannot do, and try and boss us around. Mindanao is tired of it, and will have to consider displomatic action if this continues. We are not children, and definitely do not need to be lectured by those who oppressed us for so long.

 

[#1 Person]

Very well... We aren't 'opressing' anybody. All I am saying is that the Philippines finds possestion of WMDs withing a short range balistic missile strike, which our missile shield cannot strike down, a threat to ourself.

 

[Storm Rider]

To Argentina, Malaysia, and Germany
From the USA

We would like to open trade routes with your great nations.