Union of Socialist Republics

The Union of Socialist Republics, also known as the USR and previously called the Union of Socialist District States (USDS) was a state existing primarily on a single island due north of the Spawn Continent. Its capital and primary city was Moscow, and it was the dominant power on the cold war server for much of its existence.

Blockhaven Crisis
Shortly after the founding of the USDS, what would become the Blobfish Republic settled in the village of Blockhaven. The USDS had a preexisting claim on the settlement, but were willing to negotiate. However, talks broke down since, while the USDS was willing to offer shared sovereignty or even give up the contested lands they were not willing to return items taken from the area.

Territorialist War
While talks were continuing, Blah_Yak crept north to the USDS's temporary headquarters where he set fire to the wooden structure without a declaration of war. USDS troops found and shot him, but not before the headquarters was severely damaged.

Thunder Runs

Following the skirmish, the USDS declared war upon the nascent Blobfish Republic. The 1st Guards Cossacks deployed against the Territorialist troops in the city of Blockhaven, which they captured in a pair of "Thunder Runs" in which Cossacks simply galloped through the city streets firing assault rifles at any enemy that moved.

Aftermath of the Battle of Blockhaven

Following the Battle of Blockhaven, Xion proposed several resolutions in the United Nations demanding a cease-fire. However, before the vote could be held, USDS troops skirmished again with Territorialist rebels who had reclaimed Blockhaven.

Second Battle of Blockhaven

Unlike the First Battle of Blockhaven, the USDS forces this time were infantrymen of the 30th Rifles Division who had orders not to eliminate a terrorist threat but rather to occupy the city. Several hours of brutal urban combat ensued, but the 30th Rifles were triumphant.

Resolution

Following the Second Battle of Blockhaven, the Territorialist rebels were finally forced to the negotiating table. Talks stalled for some time, with the Territorialists making the same demands they had before the war (supported by Xion) and the USDS insisting that the terrorists be punished for their unlawful attack.

Great Northern War
But the peace was not to last. Territorialist insurgents soon struck again, destroying a major biodiesel refinery. Not long after, the capital building and primary storage site of the USDS was attacked and most of the minerals stored there destroyed. Following this, the USDS offered to cede the contested provinces in exchange for being permitted to evacuate unmolested but were refused.

This set the theme for some time. The insurgents would launch a highly destructive attack, often unarmed and unarmored, and be killed but not before dealing serious damage to the city. The USDS began heavily fortifying Blockhaven (renamed Moscow) with fences, concrete walls, and land mines.

Invasion Scare

During this period, the USDS was at its weakest yet. The entire rest of the server was united in the Southern League, which inched closer to an invasion every day. Its domestic industry was in ruins, and its military was badly damaged by the long-term counterinsurgency it had been fighting. Therefore, the USDS considered invasion to be imminent and inevitable, and was preparing to fight a full-fledged war with the entire population of the world. Finally, the USDS obtained intelligence that the invasion would be happening soon.

Xion Medina Incident

At this point, with the world balanced on the verge of war, the USDS was extraordinarily tense. Several incidents were misconstrued as a build-up to the planned invasion, and the USR deployed a commando team to Xion Medina to prepare an explosive device for the event of war. The team, unfortunately, encountered and killed Gidthullu. Thus, the USDS and Xion nearly went to war before negotiations successfully defused the tension and even managed to broker a lasting peace with the Blobfish

Kekistani Insurgency
During the Kekistani Crisis, the new-minted USR provided major support to the UN intervention forces including several aircraft and arms and ammunition for the entire army.

However, no actual combat occurred between UN and Kekistani forces during the conflict, despite large expenditures of munitions in clearing potential hiding spaces for insurgents.

Election Crisis
The USR began their first election cycle, and a tense three-way race ensued between the incumbent Mocpages, the hard-line communist RBNOW, and the industry-focused Inventor. Inventor seemed likely to win the elections, until the Xionites revealed that he was one of their agents. Later, it was discovered that he was in fact working for every faction. His true loyalties remain unclear.

The USR, however, did not know this at the time. Angered both by the infiltration and by the Xionite intervention in their free elections, the USR demanded that Brenin Llywd, Prince of Xion, be brought to trial by the United Nations.

A three-day trial ensued. At the end Brenin was found not guilty on all charges, by a vote on strict alliance lines. The USR felt betrayed by the UN and dismayed at what they saw as a vast injustice.

Withdrawal from the UN
Following the trial anti-UN sentiment ran high in the USR. The UN had always been seen as pro-Xion, but the verdict made the people of the USR feel as though the UN would never support them, even in times of desperate need. Worse, mere days before, the USR had essentially bankrolled the entire anti-Kekistan UN effort.

Due to these sentiments, the USR formally withdrew from the United Nations and announced that they would not be bound by UN resolutions.

Founding of the Comintern
Having left the UN, the USR was faced with a major dilemma: what to replace it with?

The answer was the Comintern. Made up of the USR and allied communist states, the Comintern preserved the ability of the UN to settle disputes but did away with the corruption and infighting.

Comintern also followed a policy of blanket support for any communist revolution in the world, which would later lead to the threat of USR intervention in the Second Kiro Crisis.

AXE Crisis
Shortly after and spurred on by the secession from the UN, a USR internal task force brutally put down an internal dissident group, the Anarchy of Xyn Effort. AXE later seceded and formed their own nation.

Purchase of Danzig
During the Election, the USR purchased the lands previously belonging to the Free City of Danzig, for the purposes of a central railway node for the main continent.

Election of RBNOW
The Election Crisis was finally resolved with the election of RBNOW as president of the USR. RBNOW was a hard-line Communist who believed in containment of the Southern Powers via outposts and allies. He was a major champion of autarky and competitive economics, but also a firm believer in the "falling dominoes" theory, and therefore championed an assertive foreign policy and refused to give up anything he viewed as the rightful territory of the USR, while simultaneously building up and strengthening the industrial and energy sectors. This was a major success and beneficial change of pace of Comintern diplomacy by substantially weakening and distracting the UN, and economically successful as well, allowing the Comintern to pull decisively and permanently far ahead of the rest of the world combined.

First Kiro Crisis
The first test of the new president was the illegal Xionite colony on the continent of Kiro. Hours of tense negotiations back and forth finally settled the borders with the northern half of the continent belonging to the USR and the southern half a Xionite province.

International Law Controversy
On the heels of the USR secession and the first Kiro Crisis, the UN began flexing its muscles and passed or threatened to pass two laws which it claimed applied retroactively and to all nations, even those in the Comintern.

Firstly, the U.N. imposed a new and far more limited system of land claiming. They intended for this land claim system to be used not only by the U.N, but also by the Comintern, and to apply to existing claims as well as new ones. To the Comintern, this represented an unacceptable loss of territory. Much of the Comintern lands had been bought at significant price, and significant portions had been developed. To the USR, this seemed to be directly targeted at their recent expansion.

Second Kiro Crisis
Soon afterwards, however, a communist revolution occurred in the new-founded Kiro colony, with the governor of Kiro declaring the lands under his oversight an independent country. The USR enforced an immediate cease-fire on the continent with the threat of war, and ended up buying the southern half of Kiro from Xion and giving it to the new People's Republic of Kiro. This offended Xion greatly, and from then on Xionite-Comintern relations were far more strained.

Kiro War
But even this peace did not last. A Xionite soldier mistakenly shot and killed several Kiro civilian NPCs before being killed by Kiro troops, and war immediately broke out between Kiro and Xion.

Battle of Xion Medina

The PRK was not content to defend or negotiate. Rather, they launched an all-out assault upon the capital of Xion, then destroyed the city with powerful explosives. This was one of the most controversial and tragic moments of the server, and it severely impeded the peace program. In reprisal for that attack, several other UN nations became involved in the war against the PRK.

Blobfish Crisis
The collapse of the PDRDB and the cession of their lands to Xion led to a major internal crisis in the USR, as the PDRDB had held an important strategic location. A treaty was finally signed demilitarizing vast swathes of the USR's continental holdings and paying a large indemnity in exchange for holding the PDRDB lands. This indemnity was not paid as the Endwar broke out before it could be shipped.

Endwar
The Endwar began on 02/07/18 with the detonation of an antimatter bomb in Red Square by the rogue criminal Inventor, who had illegally constructed an antimatter factory. An estimated 400,000 USR citizens were killed in the attack, and many of the most important structures such as the Comintern headquarters, the Kremlin, and the GNVT headquarters building were destroyed in this strike.

Federation War

Shortly thereafter the Federation of Nassau declared war over the radio. The USR response was swift and brutal, detonating an antimatter bomb in their base and one inside their backup bunker. Since the USR survived with much of its industry and military intact in hidden bunkers while the other major powers, aside for the New Welsh Church, had been destroyed, it is widely considered to have "won" the Cold War server.

Post-Endwar
After the Endwar, the USR suffered tremendously. Moscow was utterly destroyed in the fighting, and has yet to be rebuilt. Instead the city of Leningrad has been constructed west of where the original Moscow was.

The Winter War
The NKVD soon received word that a coalition of monarchist nations had formed, with the intent to destroy the world revolution and dominate the continent. Rather than wait, a preemptive attack was prepared. Comintern troops attacked into Kuninkaama with tanks, APCs, and air support, utterly annihilating the Kuninkaman military and forcing their demilitarization.

Controversy
The USR has often been the target of controversy.

Support for the PRK

The USR supported the PRK, which was widely considered to be a criminal regime. This was often seen as tacit support for their brutal attack on Xion, as well as for their claiming of Kiro during their secession, which Xion considered land theft with no legal backing whatsoever.

Gunboat Diplomacy

The USR was known to use the threat of war to force other nations to their will diplomatically. This was evident especially in the Second Kiro Crisis, where the USR threatened to use its military to enforce their unilateral declaration of a cease-fire.

Imperialism

Many accused the USR of imperialist land-grabs, often mischaracterizing the peaceful and legal expansion of the USR into nearby land, mostly far far from other factions under President RBNOW's policy of containment as neocolonialism. The USR's lands expanded rapidly under RBNOW's rule, until the northwestern quadrant of the world was almost completely dominated by Comintern and USR factions. This policy while useful and highly cost effective, wasn't able to be used to its full effect due to the nature of the End War. The land expansion resulted in a substantial increase of strategic depth, which would have allowed Comintern factions to operate normally when at war, and to greatly expand their industrial operations in a dispersed and highly defensible while at peace. Had the End War not been decided with antimatter attacks, and rather with conventional weaponry, this may have proved the decisive advantage, though still served its economic purpose regardless.

Repression

The USR's attack on the AXE secessionists is often seen as repression of free speech.

Alternative Perspective: During the making of the decision to leave the UN, the Anarchy of Xyn Effort( a fledgling group whose public intent had always been to secede from the USR when feasible, a plan of which the President of the USR was aware and supported) informed the rest of the USR that they could not be part of a group that refused to cooperate with all other nations and remain in the United Nations. They stated in no uncertain terms that, were the Comintern to leave the UN, they would be forced to secede ahead of schedule and without sufficient manpower.

The Comintern, after deciding to leave the UN anyway, privately decided to disown the Anarchy. They did so without telling them. Immediately thereafter, military units invaded the Xyn jungle and slaughtered many of the people of AXE. Those who survived fled towards Xion lands, but were cut down. Others instead fled to UN territory, where they remained prisoners, but were eventually resettled.

Espionage

The USR was known to have a truly incredible number of spies in every major faction, to own taglocks of every major player, and to have prepared numerous contingencies for a war with any faction. The possession of these taglocks alone, to Xionite planners at least, was a major provocation, and the violations of privacy that this espionage entailed angered many Xionite citizens.

Conspiracy Theories
I bet they were the ones that started the Dirt War.