Battlefield Alaska

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a Soviet expeditionary force crossed the Bering Strait and and landed on the shores of Alaska in the first phase of a bold military campaign aimed at conquering the United States and Canada; the Red Army high command expected to accomplish their objectives in Alaska with little resistance and establish control over all of North America within 45 days at most.

Instead, however, the Soviet invasion ran into trouble almost immediately -- KGB estimates of US troop strength in the immediate vicinity of the beachheads would prove in many cases to be wildly inaccurate, and to complicate things even further Canadian Please click the

icon to follow us on Facebook.ground forces were deployed to Alaska to back up the US defenders.

Within 48 hours half the initial Soviet landing force had been killed in action and President Ronald Reagan had retaliated by ordering US Marines at Guantanamo Bay to attack Soviet military outposts in Cuba. The Soviet assault on Alaska would later be recalled as the start of World War III and become a major catalyst in hastening the downfall of the Communist bloc as world opinion turned sharply against the Soviet Union in the wake of its unprovoked aggression against America. Soon the Kremlin would also face strong internal opposition as thousands of Russian citizens took to the streets of Moscow and Leningrad (later St. Petersburg to protest the massive casualties resulting from the Alaska invasion.

In the months that followed the failed offensive, the USSR's longtime Warsaw Pact allies would desert it one by one; within a

May 1^st,

Soviet ruler Yuri Andropov marked the May Day holiday in Moscow with a speech justifying the ill-fated Soviet assault on the Alaskan coastline as -- in his words -- "a necessary response to the imperialistic agenda of the capitalist powers".

He also claimed, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that the Alaska operation had been a success. But in reality, most of the Soviet beachheads had long since been wiped out and the few that remained were under punishing US air and naval bombardment. Battlefield Alaska by Chris OakleyFew people, even among Andropov's closest advisors, had any idea that Andropov was in the midst of a psyhchological breakdown or that this breakdown, combined with general distrust of the West and lingering anger over the "Able Archer" incident of 1983, had been one of the primary motivations for Andropov's misguided decision to go to war with the United States.

Papers recovered from the Russian defense archives after the Soviet Union collapses would later reveal that Andropov had been convinced the United States was about to attack Siberia and this delusion had provoked him to order the landings in Alaska.

Within hours of Andropov's speech, his already severe problems would get exponentially worse; China, seeing an opportunity to readjust the Sino-Soviet border to its own advantage and strengthen ties with the Untied States, declared war on the Soviet Union and sent several of the PLA's top divisions into Siberia.

Czechoslovakia's so-called "Velvet Revolution" swept the Communist regime in Prague out of power as a coalition

of students, intellectuals, journalists, clergy, and dissident lawmakers occupied key government buildings in the Czech capital and proclaimed the establishment of a new Czech Republic.

Although at first there were some fears the Soviet Union might try to halt the Velvet Revolution by force just as they had crushed the "Prague Spring" experiment sixteen years earlier, those fears gradually subsided as it became clear Soviet military forces were too preoccupied elsewhere to offer more than token opposition to the bloodless coup.

One of the leading figures of the Velvet Revolution was a playwright and ex-political prisoner named Vaclav Havel (pictured); in the aftermath of World War III Havel became prime minister of Czechoslovakia's first democratically elected government since 1948 and served two six-year terms in that office before retiring from the political arena in the mid-1990s. In an ironic reversal of the German reunification, the later years of Havel's second term as PM would see Czechoslovakia split into separate Czech and Slovak states.

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Imagine what would be, if history had occurred a bit differently. Who says it didn't, somewhere? These fictional news items explore that possibility. Possibilities such as America becoming a Marxist superpower, aliens influencing human history in the 18th century and Teddy Roosevelt winning his 3rd term as president abound in this interesting fictional blog.