(AN: Welcome all you who have waited and you newcomers. I hadn't planned on getting back into publishing anything, but, like with The Dragonborn and the Lioness, my desire to explore another game that I love was denied due to mods and my accursed OS. So instead, I will use my imagination and go into said world: welcome to wickedmetalviking1990's re-telling of the Red Alert series.)
(A few things before we begin: this is just a prologue for the upcoming BIG series, which will focus on characters from all three [yes, you read that right, THREE] sides. There will be some scattered words in Russian [like I did with my Soul Calibur fics, having scattered words from the character's native languages], so I do apologize in advance for butchering your language [and for lack of those special letters with accent marks]. This story is based on the Red Alert 2 game, but with two important caveats. 1] Though I'm not a fan of Red Alert 3, as those events technically do originate from the main saga [the beginning of the intro of RA3 is post-Yuri's Revenge Allied victory], there may be some characters from Red Alert 3 appearing in this story: just don't expect Rick Flair or little anime school-girl Yuriko. 2] This story is slightly AU since I will be including elements of the Mental Omega mod into this story, which I also like [as is the reason I can't play Red Alert 2 anymore]. So final words before we begin the prologue: I don't own anything mentioned in this story from Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge, Red Alert 3 [those belong to EA], nor am I part of the Mental Omega team or affiliated with them in any way. Most references to real-life characters [ie. Josef Stalin and Albert Einstein] are based on their characterizations from Red Alert 1. Now sit back and relax, comrades, because we're going back to the USSR!)
The insides of a cattle car were all that Jozef saw when his eyes opened. The air was hot, stuffy and filled with foul odors: a sickening, stifling miasma of sweat, body odor, cheap cologne, vodka, tobacco and piss. With the exception of faint, pale light shining through the cracks of the car's walls, there was no light. Somewhere in the darkness, Jozef heard someone groan: it might have been him, or one of the others in there with him. Someone else coughed; that certainly was not him. It was a point of personal pride for Jozef Tankian that, though he was rather poor, he was generally in good health.
For how long he was on this train, going where he did not know, Jozef could not comprehend. At some point along the dark, jostling train-ride he had fallen asleep and lost track of time. The last clear memory was of returning to the odpadkydom: a junkhouse typical in the urban ruins of eastern Czechoslovakia that housed anywhere between 20 and 50 people. Curfew came earlier today and he had to race back to the odpadkydom before he was caught: not that Jozef ever tried to get himself into trouble, though trouble certainly found him. After going to sleep with nothing but his growling stomach, he was rudely awoken by armed men in brown suits. They did not ask for his name or state that he was under arrest: they told him to come with them and ask no questions. From the odpadkydom he was shoved into the back of a covered truck and driven across town to the railway, where he was shoved out of the truck and into the cattle car, which was then sealed and locked and the train took off without so much as a single word as to where they were going or why.
Jozef was so weary from being rudely awoken and from hunger that he had almost immediately fallen asleep where the men in brown had pushed him inside the train-car. Now that he was awake, his mind began to wonder why he had been abducted. His first thought was that they were government agents; state police and such. But he hadn't broken curfew, and there had been no incidents that day. He certainly wasn't a traitor, though his ties to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia were nominal at best, as with most people living in Michalovce.
Most people living in his area didn't bother with history: they were either uneducated or had something to hide, and Jozef was a little bit of both. Aside from what accounted to a fourth grade education and fluency in Czech, Slovak and Russian, anything else he knew he gained on the streets of the industrial town of Michalovce. As for something to hide, what Jozef did his best to conceal was so great that, if it got out, it would make him very unpopular or lead to his death.
In the 1950s, another man named Josef led the Soviet Union to begin the Great War. The Georgian premier, who called himself the Man of Steel, brought the nations of Europe to their knees in his attempt to expand the borders of Russia from the Pacific to the Atlantic and enforce the dictatorship of the proletariat in his wake. But his vision ended prematurely as the nations of Europe allied together to end the Soviet onslaught, pushing the Russian forces out of Europe and taking Moscow. What happened next changed the fates of everyone in the Eastern bloc, including that of Jozef Tankian.
While in Russia, Josef Stalin was still respected as a hero of the Soviet people and an effective promulgator of communism - thanks in no small part to his successor as premier of the Soviet Union - many in the Eastern bloc saw him as only a bringer of war and destruction. Towns and cities were devastated by the iron wall of Soviet tanks moving west, then ransacked and looted by the Soviet forces as they were being pushed back eastward. Many farming and industrial towns, such as Michalovce, were already impoverished under Stalin's regime to provide food, weapons, tanks and men for the Soviet war machine. Despite the turmoil that happened afterwards, with the Eastern bloc being shepherded back into the fold of the World Socialist Alliance, Michalovce was still dangerous for those who had ties to the old Stalinist regime, no matter how distant.
Jozef's father had served in the Red Army as a commanding officer.
As a young man, only the elders knew the truth and they never let him forget. As they died off, fewer people knew and the only ones who cared were those disillusioned ones who liked picking a fight with someone but were too scared to go against the KGB: a young boy could be bullied, or a young man robbed and beaten, if it suited the pleasure of those who felt like hurting the Union that hurt them but were afraid of the KGB's guns. Because of this, Jozef kept to himself for all of his years and had a reputation in the town as a loner.
Now here he was, in a crowded train car, filled with so many people: more than a few of them from Michalovce. He tried to remain calm and force himself back to sleep: bad things happened when he lost his temper or became agitated. Usually these incidents were exacerbated by those disillusioned towns-people who came to him looking for a fight, which was why he preferred solitude. Now there would be no other option but to be around other people; for how, he did not know. Therefore he closed his eyes, emptied his mind and tried to focus on nothing else but the gentle jostling of the train-car along the tracks.
How long he remained in this state, between waking and sleeping, none could guess. But it was over far too soon for his liking. The jostling slowly came to a halt and he could hear the others around him stirring: the train had come to a halt. Suddenly the large door of the train-car was swung open, a blast of bitter cold wind filled the car and Jozef could hear voices shouting in Russian. In the light, he could see many figures standing before him and the open door, but could not make out what lay beyond. One by one they began to move forward, slowly and one at a time. There was a loud gun-shot, whose report reverberated throughout the car, magnified to the deafening roar of a cannon. Now those in front began to move quicker, and Jozef realized that he was moving with them towards the open door. There was no way to move any quicker, for the closer he and the others in the car came to the door, the tighter packed together they became until he was bumping shoulders with people he had never seen before.
Just stay calm, Jozef told himself. No matter what happens, it will only be worse if you lose control.
Suddenly there was another gun-shot, and a cry of pain. Jozef strained to see through the press what it could be, but he was too far away to see anything. Now the press continued moving and Jozef was being pushed towards the door. His eyes were now adjusted to the light and he could see opening before him a bleak, snow-clad compound into which the train had arrived. There were concrete walls lined with barbed wire surrounding the compound, and tall towers where he could see men armed with guns standing watch. Before him he saw several of the men in brown coats who had abducted him from the odpadkydom ushering him and the others out of the cattle-car at gun-point. Off to the right he saw the body of a man being dragged away by several face-less men in heavy brown-jackets: behind the body was a trail of blood staining the mud and snow. Ahead he looked and saw the others being ushered towards a building with a tall statue upon it of a soldier bearing a rifle saluting proudly. Over a mega-phone he could hear someone shouting in Russian:
"Comrades, brothers, the people are truly grateful that you have volunteered to join in our glorious crusade against the capitalist dogs of the west. Rejoice, peoples of the world, for the revolution is at hand. All of you now are marching forward to a brave new world, one where all men will be proletariats; equals in the great socialist utopia that Comrade Romanov and the Union have planned. Together with our brothers in the Latin Confederation and the People's Republic of China, the hopes and dreams of our working class brothers and sisters across the world will be realized!"
Jozef ignored the words and moved forward along with the rest of the people from the train. As he was a loner, he often paid more attention to his surroundings than most others, what with little else to distract him on the long, lonely days. The buildings in the compound, he noticed, all bore the same flag: red with the hammer and sickle in gold on the upper left-hand corner. On every wall he could see posters set up with pictures of men holding up rifles and machine-guns with various titles: Rise Up for the People! Workers Demand Justice: Vengeance for Moscow! The Motherland Fights With You! He had seen posters like these in Michalovce, especially in the past ten years, since he was fifteen or so. Though he did not know for sure, he had a very good guess as to where the train had taken him.
Moscow, the heart of the Union of Soviet Socialists Republic in Russia.
(AN: So here we get a little bit of background on one of the main characters in the story to come. He's a Czech whose father was the Soviet commander in Red Alert 1 [and, in my unfinished story Immortal: Legends of the Tiberium War, Jozef's son Pyotr - now living in Croatia - joins the Brotherhood of Nod]. For future references, I will give a bit of update on the "timeline" of these events so that there is as little confusion as possible.)
(For the purpose of this story, "the Great War" refers to the events of Red Alert 1, which will also be referred to as "the War in Europe". Some have called RA1 "the Second Great War", which doesn't make much sense to me since, accordingly, the War between the Empire of the Rising Sun [-cough- Japan!], China and the US [which in our universe was the War in the East part of WW2] took place between the 30s and 1945, with "the Great War" breaking out between the European Allies and Stalin's Soviet Union in the 50s: two separate events taking place at different times and at opposite ends of the earth, neither of which [in my opinion] warrant being called a "world war" since they weren't take placing more or less at the same time.)