East-Meg Two

East-Meg Two is a Soviet Russian megacity wrapped around Lake Baikal. It is the central power of the Sov Block and a rival to both Mega-City One and the Sino Block.

History

By 2070, the communist states had formed the Union of Soviet Mega-Cities. At the dawn of the Atomic War, they were one of the loudest foreign voices ordering the US to stand down. As a result, the subcontinent was bombarded in the Atomic Wars and East-Meg Two was one of the few survivors, facing mutations, diseases, and the Sino-Sov-Megacity Wars in the remaining 2070s.

While allied to East Meg One, they had separate governments and agendas - by 2101, East-Meg Two was interested in glasnost with Mega-City One while its sister-city was planning open warfare. Both sent their top assassins, Orlok (EM-1) and the Black Widower (EM-2), to Oz to capture psi artist Jiri Rasputin in 2101, with Orlok's mission to kill the Widower and keep Rasputin out of Two's hands so he could not be used by them as an asset in arguing for detente.

At some point before the Apocalypse War, East-Meg Two had a Neo-Perestroika explosion of insane hyper-capitalism: much of it out of the reach of the average worker. This credit-driven frenzy and obsession with (outdated) Western culture was panicked, an attempt to mask the reality of its situation as a giant, impoverished refugee camp. After a few years, the movement collapsed. Their economy decayed and died. Long queues for basic food were the norm, with black marketeers selling basic Mega-City One junk food.

When the Apocalypse War broke out in 2104, East-Meg Two stayed out but the threat it might join in was used by EM-1 to keep out Mega-City Two and Texas City. After the war, the survivors of EM-1 headed to the second city. East-Meg Two would continue to try and act as a great power, though in reality the Sov Block was finished as a cohesive mahor force from this point. Several high-ranking Judges, led by Judge Selznik, seized control of the Sov Block with the backing of the Black Guard secret police to "rescue" the nation. The Black Guard were aware Selznik and several cronies were rapists and ignored it.

East Meg Two's Justice Dept HQ

With the tacit approval of East-Meg Two, various survivors would attempt revenge attacks against Mega-City One. This changed in 2112, under Supreme Judge Josef Traktorfactori; a new spirit of glasnost broke out and Orlock & his followers were denounced as terrorists. The Sov-Block and Mega-City One began to team up against mutual threats such as the Deros, Judgement Day, and the Face of Mars. In 2113, Traktorfactori and Chief Judge McGruder had direct talks about restricting Sino-Cit expansion into deep space. There were also goodwill exchanges of citizens that gave MC-1 a large minority of Sov and Sov-descended citizens, and the Sovs joined the Global Lunar Partnership and sent Judges to Luna City One. Unknown to the Block, Mega-City One also had a mole in the East-Meg Two Diktatorat

Judgement Day almost saw it overrun by zombies, and it carried out two of the five nuclear attacks on the cities that had fallen. A large number of its clairvoyant PsiKops were left deranged by the events.

Briefly used green Sov Judge uniforms from The Inspectre, late 2110s

Glasnost ended abruptly in 2115 when Jonny Kis whacked Traktorfactori.

East-Meg Two spent part of the late 2110s trying to build a new city on East-Meg One's ruins, and discussed this with Chief Judge Hadrian Volt in 2117. Construction on "Megagrad" began in 2118 with aid from Mega-City One, but the site was plagued by ghosts, a problem for the PsiKop Direktor Vassilli Chertnoy.

The Black Guard removing senior Judges

Eventually, the Megagrad project would be abandoned but one significant thing it caused was that in 2119, Inspectre Viktor Zadek learned one angry ghost had been raped in the Academy of Law by Judges who were now high-ranking figures. The Black Guard admitted they'd known and covered this up, but now decided those men had outlived their usefulness and agreed with Zadek they could be executed for their crimes. Zadek considered that the system "exists solely for its self-preservation" but the attackers had believed they were the system rather than "merely one more expendable part.

During the 2126 World Sex Championships, East-Meg's Svetlana Avitoy and Igor Putin were close to victory before losing to MC-1 in the Mixed Pairs heat.

In the mid-2120s, the Sov Block was resurgent. It cracked down on separatists in its remote areas (who the Sinos backed as deniable proxies) In 2125, Sov forces invaded anarchic Mongolia and engaged in the Mongolian Clearances; over half a million people died in the storming of Ulan Bator. The following year, the Block used deniable assets to destabilise Luna-1 so they could send military forces to 'assist' and take control of the colony. Judge Dredd thwarted this. The clone Anatoli Grigorivich Kazan was allowed to use 'forgotten' MC-1 prisoners to draw Mega-City Judges into a trap, sparking a shooting match between the two Judge forces; and after that, use Sov spies and assassins to target Dredd through his niece Vienna.

That last attempt spooked the Secretariat. Fearing Kazan was pursuing a private vendetta that could start a war, they tried to have him executed. He fled to Mega-City One custody and informed them that the Sovs were secretly backing a coup attempt in wartorn Ciudad Barranquilla. Mega-City One prevented this coup at the eleventh hour in 2128 by decapitating Judge Supremo Sangrenegra themselves and convincing Judge Cholo to be their man instead of the Sovs. The Block complained to the global community, trying to present Mega-City One as the only aggressor.

The separatist war was won near the Mongolian border, only for the authorities to lose interest until the rogue Samizdat Squad started hitting their assets in the area.

The horrors of Chaos Day, caused by Sov terrorists, led to East-Meg Two offering food aid to the stricken Mega-City One. As part the deal, MC-1 was going to deport its Sov citizens (who were now in interment camps for their own safety) back to the Block but Dredd proposed a compromise deal: sending them to a reclaimed "Sovsec" in former Mega-City Two. East-Meg was unhappy but allowed it.

When the ex-Judge convict colony Enceladus was on the verge of collapse in 2137, Aimee Nixon surrendered it to East-Meg Two. A Sov force arrived to take control of the moon and, once there, slew many of the inhabitants before being destroyed. In the process, Sov forces had captured the former MC-1 Chief Judge Martin Sinfield and hoped to gain intelligence from him. A deniable MC-1 force raided the Sov bunker holding Sinfield in 2138 and retrieved him, as well as killing Sov Judges in deliberate retaliation for the Enceladus massacre.

In 2139, the Miska ore processing plant in northern Siberia was attacked by a criminal force. Due to intense and contradictory bureaucracy in East-Meg Two's judiciary, a Judge squad wasn't sent to deal with it for a week - by which point a Mega-City One team had got there first. (One Sov Judge, acting without orders, planted a bomb on the MC-1 H-wagon so it would be stranded)

By the 2140s, East-Meg Two's Zersetzung (their Psi-Div equivalent) was headed by a figure called Buratino: apparently a child with an oversized head, who was far older than he appeared.

In 2142, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse manifested on Earth and the Sov nuclear arsenal, as well as everyone else's, tried to set itself off - however, the Zersetzung had been prewarned by a precog. When the Horseman War took form around the ruins of East-Meg One, it was restrained at the cost of almost four thousand Sov soldier lives. The Direktorat planned to drop it on Mega-City One. Against orders, Buratino had War killed and, with Izaaks, assisted Dredd in his mission to kill the final Horseman at Luna-City One.

Sov Block Two

In the possible 2170s shown in Red Razors, the Sovs of East-Meg Two - renamed Sov-Block 2 have gone hyper-capitalist and worshipped American cultural icons like Elvis as if he was Jovus; the aging communist terror group the OAP-KGB fought back with bombing campaigns. Convicts like Red Razors were brainwashed into being Judges and genetic engineering led to talking horses. The Chief Judge was Ricky, a rich thirteen-year-old who'd bought the former East-Meg Two,until he was murdered by the OAP-KGB.

The new Chief Judge Yeltsin offered the neurosurgery process that created Razors to foreign megacities in 2176. In return, he wanted Mega-City One's ultimate weapon, Armageddon X (a cryogenically frozen Dredd). Razor's programming was damaged and he ran riot, spreading death and chaos throughout Sov-Block Two until Dredd was released and executed him.

Government and Judges

Sov Judge

As with all the major powers, government, law, and military is run by the local Justice Department.

Nominally, the Sov-Block is run on communist lines and it condemns the western megacities as decadent imperialists. In practice, the Sov-Block is often more oppressive than Mega-City One - famously, on the eve of the Apocalypse War, the Supreme Judge asked "The people? What have they got to do with it?"

The ruling body is the Diktatorat, also called the Direktorat; also mentioned is the Secretariat. These bodies are made up of the Inner Party, who are able to exploit their powers for corruption with apparent ease - but are also capable of losing their power sharply, if they cross someone stronger.

Military forces include the robot Sentenoids, the Nu-Spetznaz, and a conventional military force; Judges are also used.

PsiKop and Teks wearing green, from The Inspectre. Note lack of cloaks and helmets, following on from "Shamballa" which dropped those to make Sovs 'friendlier'

The Omon Division are an elite military force that wipe out internal dissidents. Another internal group seen as the Black Guards.

Psi-Judges in the East Meg were called PsiKops since at least the early 22nd century. The city artificially creates some of its psis out of already loyal Judges. Their parent organisation, at least in 2142, was called Zersetzung, with a base in one of Kazan's old camps.

Mongoose RPG

In the early 2000s Dredd RPG from Moongoose, extra details were invented for East-Meg Two:

• It has a nickname of Mayexa, "the stepmother"

• The Diktatorat has 32 members

• There is a secret police, B Division, who crush dissent alongside Psi-Korps

Volgans

2000AD's other near-future Russians were the Volgan Republic of Asia, from Invasion! and ABC Warriors. In the early days, a few of the early strips were linked together by background references but no Dredd strip ever showed the Volgans. However, their existence and the Volgan War would be mentioned in an Annual text feature, the Games Workshop RPG (saying the war ended in 2023), and a Megazine text feature in 1992.

By 2006, Origins would not make any mention of the Volgans and the contemporary ABC Warriors: The Volgan War strip would explicitly contradict Wagner's timeline, retconning the Volgans out of continuity.

Trivia

• While there were mentions of Sov cities before, East-Meg Two was only mentioned by name in the very last part of The Apocalypse War.

• When the Sovs of East-Meg One were created, nobody was aware the Soviet Union would dissolve in December 1991. The comics politely ignored this development and the The Judges novellas would say a Soviet revival happened in the 2040s.

• Megazine 2.01-07'sArmaggedon was originally meant as a Dredd prequel story and depicted the Soviet Union assisting the Islamic Federation against Israel in 1994 - unfortunately the story started in May 1992, six months after the USSR ended!