UDBA Files

[Northern Cooperative Unions]

You must be registered for see medias

Patriotic Latgalian music plays on an outdated radio, singing of the exploits of the so-called Revolutionary Guard. General Boguslaw Miazga has fallen asleep at his desk with a bottle of potato vodka clasped in a hand. The smell of alcohol lingered on the General naturally. His room had a single light and was built industrially - mass-produced. The furniture was cheap and worn. Wallpaper was peeling off. Like the housing blocs of Rurikgrad, the Northern Realms followed suite in their utility, not looks.

"General! Wake up! Comrade General!" A second-lieutenant aide bellowed from the wooden doorway of the army headquarters.

The General stirred and groaned, reclining in his chair. Opening his eyes with a plaintive look on his face, General Miazga peered at his beanpole aide and took a long swig of his vodka glass. "What the hell do you want, Anatol? Can't you see I was sleeping?"

"Comrade General, an agent from the UDBA has flown in urgently for a request. He claims to have found a discrepancy in the garrison armory, Comrade General."

The General's eyes widened. He stood and nearly tripped over his own fat legs. He tuned the radio down and adjusted his tie, fumbling around the room while the aide watched in minor bemusement. The General very narrowly managed to stash his supply of vodka in his desk. The sound of a steel-toe boot striking the floor soon followed, and a uniformed UDBA agent stepped inside. The aide offered his salute. The General looked lazily in the UDBA agent's direction, draping his arms over the back of his chair in anticipation.

The UDBA agent coughed into his wrist and removed his cover, wearing a large windbreaker with the markings of Internal Affairs - the highest law enforcement agency of the Union.

The lanky intelligence agent soon called for the General's attention, "Comrade General."

"Yes? What? Can't you see I was busy with paperwork?" The general's desk was covered in troop movement orders - deployments of the territorials to the coast brought plenty of bureaucracy. And cooking the books was necessary for the Mafija's no-shows.

"I am remanding you to the custody of Internal Affairs effective immediately for charges of revisionism and corruption." The agent almost immediately reached for a set of handcuffs around his waistband. Soon enough, two uniformed agents with "UD - AP" markings - military police - stepped into the room with their rifles.

The General offered a hollow laugh nervously. "Surely you must be joking, Agent! What was your name? Anatol, what's the name of our friend? I've had an arrangement with your office for years! The payments came through two weeks ago, certainly this has to be a joke?" The General shot his gaze back and forth between his aide and the agents.

The agent scoffed and continued, "Agent Koziol is my name. General, there's a new UDBA director. Any arrangement you believed you held is null and void."

The General look horrified and licked his mustache once again nervously. The two UD - AP officers immediately hauled the General to his feet and secured him in handcuffs, manhandling him towards the front door. The agent followed closely behind. Instead of taking the route to the front door, the agent and his policeman took a detour to the alleyways of the officer's barracks. Colonels and other officers of the general staff watched closely - partly to ensure they were not the next target, and partly for their own morbid curiosity.

The general whined, "Where are you taking me, you fool? This won't last when the Council finds out! I make money for the Union!"

The two policemen dragged the general into the dark alleyway behind the officer's barracks, leaving him on his knees in the corner. The agent motioned for them to come back and withdrew his service firearm from his pistol holster, flicking the safety off.

"The Premier has ordered us to track down old members of the council for adherence to the old doctrines. We don't need the old guard anymore. Your death warrant was already signed."

The General tried to turn to face the Agent in an effort to beg and plead for his life, but the trigger was already pulled. A waterfall of blood accompanied the gunfire of the three internal agents.

So would begin a new reign of red terror.

 

[Northern Cooperative Unions]

You must be registered for see medias

"Samizdat" mafija music plays in the background - popular, professionally produced low-level commoner music for much of Latgalia-Wendland, the hub of organized crime in the Northern Realms. The government doesn't care much about the anticommunist message, as there are no hardliner communists in power anyways. In contrast to the Latgalians, in Teutonia, although the so-called "North-German" mafijas exist in bulk, they are white collar in nature - they are not glamorous, they stay out of the limelight, and they do not sit outside of the communist housing blocks with striped tracksuits peddling heroin. Two allies, albeit for selfish reasons. Two groups of different peoples meeting at a dinner table in a remote, cold northern compound. The room was like that of a house's dinner room - an isolated pocket of the almost paramilitary compound of mobsters. It had a large wooden dining table with comfortable chairs, lit by two lamps. The floor was mosaic. The room was decorated with Christian symbolism, taking care to avoid Orthodox icons due to the Catholic nature of the Northern Realms.

Nikoslaw Podponk is the mob boss for the Sikora Bratva and a renowned drug dealer. He's got all kinds of people in his back pocket. Compared to the national syndicates, though, his syndicate is small-fry and low level. What makes his syndicate unique, though, is his connections to generals of the territorials. Most of the other syndicates nationwide have never paid much attention to the territorial guard, assuming quite childishly that no war would ever come to the Northern Realms. Nikoslaw found his niche.

The North-German delegation led by Dugoman Wenk was interested in procuring no-show positions for their own people. Although bastards in the eyes of the Sikora Bratva simply on the basis that the North-Germans were Teutonians, they were still to an extent blood brothers due to the mixing of races over time. So it was selfish to hold them at arm's length - especially when they had the same goals.

Nikoslaw and his comrades sat on one end of the table, drinking heavy potato vodka and eating bread. The North-Germans, dignified, drank less heavy vodka throughout the night. The negotiations were proceeding well.

Unbeknownst to the delegates at the wooden table in the compound room, outside balaclava-clad men with special forces carbines prepared to make entry. The guards throughout the compound were all killed at about 11 PM. The targets were not the guards - they had no info that was useful, so they were extra-judicially killed, even if they surrendered.

The special forces group dressed in casual clothes sprinted over hedges and cut through fences to the final isolated pocket of the compound, surrounding the room from adjacent rooms. Plastic explosives were planted in the meantime on all exterior doors - a meticulous plan had been set out for months already. The UDBA showed their attention to detail.

Finally, it reached 12 AM. Explosives rocked the compound and echoed around the cold tundra of the countryside. A light snowdrift had already begun. Inside the room, those closest to the doorways were hit by wooden shrapnel and incapacitated. It was pure surprise. Mobsters were blown off of their chairs and onto the ground, some simply doing so as a natural instinct. Some stood and tried to run, only to be forced to the floor with loud shouting and flashlights in their faces. The two lamps had been destroyed in the blast, so the room was pitch dark. Two mobsters instinctively tried to draw on the special forces but were dispatched with precision shots to the chest. Their agonal breathing filled the room as the rest of the mobsters were hauled up with speed and dragged to unmarked vans. The bodies were left behind.

Then the local police arrived. The federal police. Then the propagandists. The UDBA was known to have raided the compound, and that was what it was reported as - but the deaths were made secret, covered up. The local police were deeply disappointed, as their second source of income was gone.

 

[Northern Cooperative Unions]

A plump man with a thick pencil mustache sat with a loose tie around his neck and cigar poking out between two fingers. He was old, his hair gray, and his face wrinkled. He had several chins protruding from his neck. The dimly lit Eastern office had the typical signs of Northern architecture - dilapidated, peeling paint, and sealed asbestos insulation. The man was a chainsmoker. An ashtray sat on his desk and was filled with cigarette butts.

Outside, a raucous wind blew snow down in a massive blizzard A lanky man entered with the hat of a Colonel tucked under his arm and the uniform of an intelligence officer.

"Comrade Jaroslavas." The Premier stirred. Jaroslavas, in his mountain dacha in the far northern reaches of the Realm, had come to clear his head in the days to come. The insertion of special forces into Virumaa succeeded without issue, but news was sparse, just as the country was.

"Vadic, news of the south, I presume." Jaroslavas coughed briefly into his wrist and took another puff of the cigar.

"Yes, news from the South is that the Gallo-Germanic war ended. The Sereniens won out with the treaty." The intelligence officer relaxed his shoulders.

The Premier seemed cold. He dug into his desk drawer and pulled out the typical office tool - potato vodka. He set two glasses down and laid them out, pouring one for both men.

"Adherence to doctrine is what will inevitably cause the downfall of the capitalist. Just as it will to us. I know not what the Serenien parties think of radical revisionism, but it is necessary. Cut the formalities, sit, let's talk."

The Colonel nodded cautiously and took a seat. He downed the vodka in unison with the Premier. The Premier gargled briefly and then continued, retrieving a Catholic cross from the same drawer as the vodka.

"Stability... that's the ticket. You're too much of a zealot, son. Throwing the comrade word out at your own father. Relax, take a load off. The business is going well, no?"

The Colonel, the Premier's son, peered at a wall with a military demeanor. His glance was equally as cold and calculating as that of his father. He stared into open space in deep thought, although he snapped back to reality with his report.

"We've been apprehending some of the classicals here and there throughout the countryside. It's proceeding well enough, but it's clear they're aware of something larger at work. The Mafijas have been assisting some of them, but not the Doburovs." Another round was poured and dark bread offered. They both took another swig and a quick bite of the bread as a chaser.

The old man continued, coughing once more lightly into his wrist, "Good. No indications of leaks about my health, correct? Naturally they'll be suspicious regardless."

Vadic nodded with a solemn gaze, "How much longer have they given you?"

"It'll be a few more months. We'll try to leave it for as long as we can. It doesn't matter anyways - what matters is the future, Vadic. And you're the next in line. It's always been that way. Rurikgrad shouldn't give us any trouble so long as it goes along in a stable manner. And this business in Virumaa will buy us goodwill. But at the end of the day, you know this thing will crash down someday. I don't want it on your shoulders, Vadic, or your children's. That's why these steps are necessary."

The old man got into a terrible coughing fit. He used a hankie to wipe blood away from his cheeks following. He staggered upwards to peer out the window at the terrible blizzard.

"Morality, that's what matters. You need to do what's good for the people when it comes down to it, Vadic. Rehabilitate people, bring back programs, special economics... you've been west. It's no good here, and it's no different in the South or the East. I raised you Christian. That's what I've always drilled into your head. The countries will tear at eachother's throats without it, Vadic. The old guard, the classicals, they'll win out if you're too far consumed by doctrine. The liberationists? They'll kill eachother if there's a lack of either trait - morality and stability."

Vadic sat with two arms draped over the arm rests of the chair, sullen and almost as if he had shrunk in the chair itself.

"At the end of the day, morality and stability."

The personal talk continued for some time, before the Colonel departed to continue the purges prior to his father's passing.

 

[Northern Cooperative Unions]

The Far North of the Northern Cooperatives was very sparsely populated and afforded barely any representation in the Central Council. The arctic islands of the Northern Realms were generally unknown, host to scientific stations, weather stations, and fishing villages. The natives of these lands were unlike the typical Northern Realm ilk. Dissimilar language, isolated, pale, and rough. The north-most point of the Northern Realms was the Isle of Whyte, named out of respect for an Englisc explorer who landed there when attempting to reach the North Pole. Isolated, however - only connected to the other nearby islands briefly through the winter by ice sheets.

Even though there were no typical natives to the Isle of Whyte, the Northern Realms took care to ensure there were also no migrants to the island. Surrounded by constant patrols of ice breakers, diesel submarines, and helicopter patrols, the isle was thoroughly locked down to any outside contact. Rumors of shipping vessels going missing when crossing into the exclusive closed territory were common in many social circles.

Satellite imagery from the most advanced nations of the world would have an easy time spotting the purpose of this isle. Chemical plants, rocket research, and massive bases with their own special runways. The northern-most landmass was dotted with all of the North's most profoundly dangerous and secret creations.

Activity just began to pick up.

 

[Northern Cooperative Unions]

You must be registered for see medias

Rigustad Port bustled with activity. The various shipping unions functioned as independent businesses, effectively private industries with their own cliques and "companies" subsumed under them. This was capitalism in all but name. The Northern Government's "Market Socialism" was not strictly enforced here, for many of the businesses and cliques operated with impunity. The reason? Bribery and the criminal underworld. The criminals of Rigustad had many connections to the UDBA and beyond. Rather than focus on enforcing laws broadly, much of law enforcement in the North focuses on taking down the enemies of the main party. Criminals are relatives of party members.

The port has begun to slow down the last several days, with many rumors of undercover UDBA agents with criminal cohorts shutting down dock warehouses. The reason remains unknown.

 

[Northern Cooperative Unions]

It had been a month since the death of the Premier, and behind the scenes of the constant politicking within the Council, the first moves had been made on the chess board to establish dominance over the power vacuum Vadic Jaroslavas was the popular candidate among the mainline socialists of the Council, but the Teutonians began to have different ideas shortly after the death of his father. Spurred by the new money brought in by the liberal economic zone of Rigustad, the Teutonians did not want solely liberalization. They saw the profit of Rigustad being siphoned off into the pockets of corrupt men who knelt to the Latgalian-Wendish crime families, or spent on inane infrastructure projects from the minority Northerners to build paths out to remote towns with handfuls of residents. The criminals killed leading up to the death of Diethelm Jaroslavas further galvanized the Teutonians, as many of those criminals were closely related to government officials by blood or oath.

Among the black market and criminal sphere, whispers or conversations about the vacuum were dominant. Some international criminals would know very well that there was trouble brewing, but more than that, money to be made.