Dev Diary - Soviet Union Historical and Common Branches

Здравствуйте товарищи! - Greetings comrades! And welcome to a new Hearts of Iron 4 Dev Diary! I hope that you are all having a great summer, and that you are prepared for a little reading, because today we’ll be talking about the last country left to show for the upcoming expansion, a country that, in the direst of times, did take No Step Back.

As you all know, the Soviet Union is huge, and we’ve had to form our own Content Design Soviet to properly implement all the cool stuff we wanted to represent. So today I’ll be talking about my main responsibility, which has been the historical and the common branches for what is one of the most interesting countries in HOI.

I’d just like to mention a couple of things before we start: First of all, yes, everything we’ll be talking about today will be coming for free with the Barbarossa update, although some content might vary if you don’t own some of the previous DLCs. Secondly, our beloved Motherland is still WIP so you might see content, values or even art that’s not final and is subject to change before release. You will also see a fair amount of debug decisions that we use in order to test the new systems. And with that said, I suggest you make yourselves comfortable and ready for a long read, and let’s get started!

This country entered World War I as the Russian Empire, but got out of it as Soviet Russia, having lost substantial territory in Eastern Europe as a result of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, where the Bolsheviks in Petrograd ceded control of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland and other areas to the Central Powers. Since the Allies did not recognize the Bolshevik government, no Soviet Russian representation attended the Peace Conference of 1919 at Versailles, where the former Russian territories previously ceded to Germany became independent states.

In December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed. The term soviet means “council”, and they emerged in the 1905 Revolution as groups or assemblies of Russian workers, soldiers and peasants, in opposition to the Tsar. These soviets disappeared after the (failed) revolution of 1905, but re-emerged under socialist leadership during the revolutions of 1917, which overthrew the Tsar. Through the Soviets, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, constituted the political structure of the new regime.

Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Iosif Stalin came to power and soon began to suppress all political opposition inside the Party, starting with Trotsky and his followers, but turning against many of those who supported him in his political struggle shortly after (such as Zinovyev or Bukharin), developing a climate of political paranoia and carrying out the Great Purge, with its massive arrests and extremely harsh repression to citizens, military and even party members.

But that’s enough history for now, let’s take a look at how the Soviet Union looks when you start the game in 1936.

As you can see, a few things have changed: Initial War Support has been significantly reduced, aiming at making it a bit harder to get to War Economy super early on, something that the Soviet Union was not really ready to do in 1936. Stalin has finally got a trait (and as you’ll see, this is not the only trait he’ll be getting). There are far more starting National Spirits than before, we will take a look at them later, but the first two of them you might recognize: Home of the Revolution and Trotskyite Plot?