Is there a back story to that artwork, fanfics, anything of that nature?
Yeah, a pretty extensive history. Unfortunately, the website with it is down and has been for some time, but you can find most of the creator's images (and some miscellanous pics)
here. There's a few others that I have that aren't in that gallery, but I don't want to hijack this thread. If there's interest, I'll put 'em up in a new one.
Anyways, I'll try to quickly summarize the backstory, but it's been a couple years since I read it, so it's pretty rough.
The Soviet Union never fell in this timeline, but the Allies were growing in power - sooner or later they'd overrun Russia. Both sides had an extensive space program - the Allies more or less owned Earth, the moon and the inner planets, but the Soviet forces managed to establish a colony on Mars, terraforming the Red Planet to be habitable to human life.
On Earth, the situation grew steadily worse for the Soviet Union and they were forced off the planet, falling back to Mars. There's an open state of war between the two powers now; the Soviets basically control the entire outer star system (and have at least one vessel capable of FTL travel - it's implied that other ships can, but this is the only one where the ability is explicity stated), while the Allies have everything sunward of Earth, which is protected by a power planetary defence shield. Allied vessels are smaller and fewer in number, but are more technologically advanced and individually capable than their counterparts in Soviet fleet.
However, the Soviets aren't without advances of their own - i.e they don't have shielding technology, but they developed energy weapons capable of cutting through Allied shields. With more resources at their disposal, the Soviets have been grinding away at the Allies for decades - eventually only Earth is left behind its shield, with but a pair of carrier groups for protection.
And that's where the story ends.