Sov Block

East-Meg Two's Envoy Larionov and Judge Pax with their MC-1 counterparts.

The Sov-Block is a political entity comprising of East Meg Two and its affiliated cities and colonies. It's a known rival of Mega-City One and the Sino Block.

Inhabitants are called "the Sovs" by foreigners.

Members

• East Meg One (until destroyed in 2104)

• East-Meg Two

• Megagrad (under construction in the 2110s, possibly never built)

• Glasnost City (new in 2115)

• Chernobyl Collective

• Siberia

• The Solovetsky Islands (aka Gulag Archipelago)

• Space colonies

Original world map from Mega-Special #1

1988's The Judge Dredd Mega-Special #1 said that the location of the Sov-cities was classified by the Block authorities; the "Dredd's World" map shows the Block covering the Warsaw Pact, most of China, the Korean peninsular, Mongolia, and Scandinavia. Most of this was retconned as being seperate polities: Czech Protectorate, Sino Block, Korea, Mongolia, and the Scandinavian Confederacy.

History

In 2044, a Russian organised crime group called the Sovs was operating in America. An investigation by Psi-Division's forerunner discovered that the Sovs were a front for Russian military intelligence, who were trying to cripple Justice Department as it was the one American institution they struggled to place agents within.

In 2045, Russia finally applied to join the World Aeroball Association.

By May 2047, Russia and possibly other states had undergone a communist revival. Judge Charlotte Clarkson compared America favourably to the "militaristic Soviet Empire reborn".

The USSR entered the world aeroball championships in 2050, with the Siberian Wolves team narrowly losing to the Harlem Heroes. The Heroes were the first foreign team to play in the country - and despite that, the USSR had built a giant and intricate Palace of Aeroball for matches.

Soviet representative (first left) at the UN

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. Following the war's devastation, the survivors became known as the Sov-Block and, until after 2100, Sov-Cities. Moscow-St-Petersburg was renamed "East Meg" after the war, starting a trend.

The post-war Sov Block suffered from mutations, diseases, and conflicts with the rival Sino-Block. They also gained a reputation for cheating at international sports events.

The Sino-Sov-Megacity Wars raged in the 2070s as a result of the post-nuclear chaos. Open conflict had ended by the end of the century, but covert assets like Orlok were used to fight a covert war. The Sino Block quietly armed separatist militias along the Sov Block borders.

The notorious terrorist Ula Danser would be born in the Chernobyl Collective in 2089. Her mutant brothers and both her parents would die in the harsh climate. She would go on to see megacities as the root of all evil and work to 'demeg' the world.

At some point, PsiKop Victor Zadek put down the Salyut Uprising and ended the Siberian Oil Wars.

While the East-Megs were allies, they had separate governments and agendas - One for conflict with the West, Two for detente. Both sent their top assassins, Orlok (EM-1) and the Black Widower (EM-2), to Oz on the same mission in 2101, with Orlok there to ensure the other agent failed to prevent any potential gain for the detente side.

End of East-Meg One

Cold war tensions grew between the Sov-Block and Mega-City One, growing to encompass the American moon colony of Luna-1. Sov Judges had encompanied their athletes to the 2100 Lunar Olympics and when one of them was killed, the Sovs declared war. They lost and Luna-1 gained control of Sov-Block territory. Following that, East-Meg One - the dominant Sov city - stepped up its espionage against Mega-City One in preparations for the Apocalypse War. They ignored a psi's warning that this would end in disaster.

When the Apocalypse War broke out in 2104, the rest of the Sov-Block stayed out in order to keep Mega-City Two and Texas City from joining. East-Meg One lost and was nuked out, leaving East-Meg Two in charge (and besieged by survivors). In a discussion in 2127, the destruction of East-Meg One was considered to have ended the Sov Block as a "coherent geopolitical force". Several high-ranking Judges, led by Judge Selznik, seized control 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.

Gulag 101

Before his death, War-Marshal Leonid Kazan had been stuffing various dissidents in a series of gulags (including Victor Zadek, who had tried to kill him before the war started). After his death, East-Meg Two would continue to find various gulags that had been purged of inmates; one, Gulag 101, was left ignorant of the fact the war was lost and East-Meg One destroyed, with fanatical Kazan loyalist Direktor Eva Primakova refusing to let it be known.

With the tacit approval of East-Meg Two, various survivors would attempt revenge attacks against Mega-City One until 2112, when Supreme Judge Josef Traktorfactori began a new glasnost and Orlock & his followers were denounced as terrorists. For three years (until Traktorfactori was killed), 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 (this involving a top palaeo-archaeologist from Glasnost City), and 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 even the construction of a city (New Glasnost City). Under the Global Lunar Partnership Treaty, the Sov-Block became one of multiple city-states involved in Luna-1. They sent cosmonaut judges and agreed to protect its independence.

Megagrad

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. "Project Phoenix's" Megagrad was plagued by hauntings from the angry dead and since they had few sane clairvoyants left after Judgement Day, Viktor Zadek was tracked to Gulag 101 to work on the problem for them. Primakova died trying to wipe out the gulag but her angry ghost would follow Zadek as he took job as Inspectre. With Mega-City One augments put in place by the seconded Tek-Judge Brubaker, Zadek tried to exorcise the many ghosts to get the project on track.

Brubaker was acting as a espionage agent and testing ghost-killer weaponry, however, and when Primakova spotted this he tested his new weapon on her. Driven feral, her ghost would begin murdering rapists - of which there were a depressing number - at the Megagrad site. In the process of exorcising her, Zadek learned that Judge Selznik and other high-rankers had raped Primakova at the Academy.

The Black Guard in action

The Black Guard forced everyone to secrecy but their member Judge Chortnoy, also Zadek's superior, agreed with him to stop protecting Selznik & the others now they'd served their purpose; they were executed, with their survival beforehand justified as "deferred" sentencing. 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.

Devlin Waugh had a final showdown with the villainous Kurt Jester in 2121, on top of a speeding Trans-Siberian Express.

Relations deteriorated with Mega-City One and by 2122, that city had a standing moritorium on any non-essential trade with the Sov cities.

Wars raged in the Sov Block's satellite states in the early 2120s and refugees fled to Mega-City One - with the Sovs taking advantage of this to send criminals and kook cube cases to the city.

In the mid-2120s, the Sov Block was a resurgent power under East-Meg Two: it cracked down on separatists in its remote areas (who the Sinos backed as deniable proxies), invaded anarchic Mongolia and engaged in the Mongolian Clearances in 2125, attempted to destabilise Luna-1 so it could send the army to 'assist' , and planned a coup in Ciudad Barranquilla. This new push ended soon after Anatoli Grigorivich Kazan, a clone of the infamous war marshal, used Sov spies and assassins to target Dredd through his niece Vienna. A spooked Secretariat feared his private vendetta would lead them into a war and they tried to have him executed, which caused him to flee to Mega-City One for asylum; he informed them of the Barranquilla plot, allowing them to prevent it. The Sov Block complained to the global community, trying to present Mega-City One as the only aggressor.

Omon Division war train in Baba Yaga Mode

In the early 2130s, the separatist war had been won only for the authorities to lose interest in the radwastes, except when an Inner Party apparatchik took a liking to a piece of land and had the locals cleared out. The locals were ignored and left at the mercy of bandits and rad-pirates.

Colonel Yevgeny Borisenko organised his plot against Mega-City One from bases in Siberia. In 2133, he tested the Chaos Bug on Uzbek scavengers. Dredd and Mega-City commando forces would raid the Bisyk, Siberia base soon after. This would be a huge diplomatic embarrassment to East-Meg Two.

A military unit codenamed Samizdat Squad was assembled out of prisoners and disgraced military personnel in 2132, and dispatched to the ruins of East-Meg One to steal one of the old warp devices that had formed its "Apocalypse War" missile defence. The Squad would eventually kill their commander and go rogue, beginning a two-year series of guerilla actions against both the government and pirates like the Red Sky Commandos. Now, the government did pay attention to the wastelands. In 2134, the Inner party sent the anti-dissident Omon Division to wipe the Squad out. The town of Zabriskie suffered a clearance so the Samizdat Squad would arrive to rescue the inhabitants, at which point Omon Division hit them with overwhelming force - which they failed to do so, after running into a wrathful supernatural force.

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 which saw Dredd briefly stranded in the radwastes, where he would wipe out a slaver gang.

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. East-Meg One was rebuilt as Sov-Block One but only a group of insane Judges still want to live there. 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

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. While many of East-Meg Judges are true believers, Supreme Judge Bulgarin once famously asked "the people? What have they got to do with anything?". Party officials may take a liking to land and cleanse the locals from it under a pretext.

Sov Judge

As with all the major powers, government, law, and military is run by the local Judges. All of the Sov-Block has the same judicial uniform and equipment.

The ruling elite are the Inner Party, with the top echelon being the Diktatorat (also called the Direktorat; also mentioned is the Secretariat. Military forces include the robot Sentenoids, the Nu-Spetznaz, and a conventional military force; Judges are also used. The Omon Division are an elite military force that wipe out internal dissidents. Another internal group seen as the Black Guards.

Mongoose RPG

In the early 2000s Dredd RPG from Moongoose, the Atom Wars were between the US and the Russian Federation, implying it becomes the Sovs after the war. "Origins" would confirm Russia has gone soviet again before 2070.

Trivia

• 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!

• 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 (though an Annual text feature would refer to Invasion! and a Megazine text feature would reference it as a historical event).