I have comrade Shady’s personal presidential seal of approval for this!
Comrade Shady
Man in Red
Biography of a man who changed the world
© 2017 Worldwide One Network. A Universal Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
His face is everywhere: on TV-screens playing worldwide satellite news and on the front pages of newspapers, on the covers of little children’s books, on cans of his own soda brand Commie Cola, and projected onto the sides of ubiquitous propaganda zeppelins cruising the skies low over Stasograd.
He has his own fan site on the Internet with fifty-three million members from all over the planet. His every action is discussed on bulletin boards, in discussion groups and in chat rooms. His choice of clothing and manner of speaking ignited a persistent subculture in the Shinran underground rave scene. But he is also the co-architect of CATO, the first president of the Union of Crimson and Shadow Republics, the man who turned the word ‘comrade’ from a slur into an accolade.
He is Comrade Shady Sirah. And sometimes it seems as if everybody knows him. But who is the man behind the medals and the goatee? Worldwide One sent its finest reporters into the UCSR to find out more about the gentleman who became a living communist legend. Slowly but surely they delved into his mysterious past, pieced together anecdotes and hearsay and separated fact from fiction, to arrive at the definitive story of the Man in Red.
This is his story.
In this Worldwide One special report, we will in four comprehensive chapters trace the comrade’s meteoric career from its humble beginnings on the outskirts of Sarajevo to the highest office in the Kremlin.
From Humble Beginnings: Youth and Army Service
Sarajevo, ca. 1975Shady Sirah was born in 1966 in the municipality of Stari Grad, the old city of the USSR capital of Sarajevo. He grew up near Baščaršija, the old town market sector where the city was founded by the Ottomans in the 15th century. His parents were devout Muslims and almost every week visited Gazi Husrev-Beg Mosque, bringing Shady with them. But although he went along to appease his parents even at a very young age he realized his heart was not in religion.
Playing football on the streets of Sarajevo, his eyes and those of his friends would continuously be drawn to the colorful, omnipresent propaganda posters of the Shadow regime, to the uniformed soldiers who marched through the streets, and to the camouflaged helicopters surging low over the city rooftops.
To Shady these were not signs of just how unstable the Central Committee of the Shadow Republics was at the time. They were instead the tell-tale signs of a fascinating, exciting world that existed beyond the tumbling houses of Sarajevo. At school, he soon showed an unusual interest in anything that had to do with his country and the state of the world. It was there that he first learned of the Allied decision to partition the Shadow Empire after the War of the World, and how it had left the USSR a mere specter of its former self and the Border States little more than lobotomized, ineffective rump states.
Fuming with righteous indignation at the unfairness of it all Shady returned home to tell his parents of what he’d learned. Warily his father and mother, who had grown up before revisionist Shadow propaganda had hit schools, explained that the War of the Worlds hadn’t
quite been a matter of unjust and unprovoked Allied aggression. But still, a ten-year-old Shady argued, that was no reason why the people of the Border States should live in abject poverty. His father could do little more than agree -- something which would leave a lasting impression in Shady’s mind.
At age 18 a young Shady Sirah, who had recently graduated high school and obtained the
Matura, chose to joint the army of the USSR. His parents, who had hoped he would go on to study at one of the government academies, were disappointed with his choice, although as always they supported his decision.
As a soldier he for the first time encountered the grim reality of the situation in the Border States. He had not been a man of religion previously, but the terrible inhumanity of that region shattered what little remained of his faith, and he would describe himself as an atheist and devout believer in man's responsibility to man ever since. Posted in the Sargonia-Zagor-USSR triborder region he found himself chasing slave traders and drug smugglers, rogue military outfits, mercenaries and other scum of the Earth. He distinguished himself in combat and earned a battlefield promotion to lieutenant during the 1988 border war with the pompously named Zagor Empire. Faced with the wanton cruelty displayed by the Zagor soldiers instilled a lasting hatred in him not necessarily for all Zagoris but definitely for their leader, the tyrant and self-appointed emperor Marek the Cruel.
During a hard-fought and bloody campaign in the Sava River valley against Zagor forces Shady valiantly lead the attack at a set of enemy fortifications near Kostajnica that broke the back of the Zagor resistance. In a stunning act of heroism he charged through a hail of Zagori artillery and machine gun fire to throw a satchel charge through a pillbox firing slit, then ran back halfway to drag a wounded comrade to safety under heavy fire from counter-attacking Zagori grenadiers, only to rejoin his brothers in arms as if nothing had happened. Emboldened by this stunning display of unswerving socialist heroism the outgunned USSR riflemen rallied and repulsed three attacks by the elite Gray Skulls, the personal guard of Emperor Marek, before they were relieved by the armor of the 113th Shadow Guard Regiment. In the aftermath Lieutenant Shady was awarded with the Order of Filipović to go with the title of ‘Hero of Socialist Labor’ bestowed upon him by the USSR government. The Order is one of the medals that can still be seen prominently displayed on Shady’s chest during most official occasions.
Honorably discharged from the army not soon after the end of the Third Zagor War in 1989 Shady was recruited by the Politburo. At least one enterprising bureaucrat had been following the career of the young hero with interest and was hoping to use him, and by extent the relatively popular ‘short, victorious’ Third Zagor War, for propaganda purposes in order to prop up the ever-ailing government in the eyes of an apathetic populace. Shady had never considered a career in politics before, but after the army it seemed like a good way to further serve the country he loved. And so, at age 23, he joined the Communist Party.
It would turn out the bureaucrat, whose name has been lost to the mists of time, was to get more than he bargained for.
Rising Red Star: Early Political Career with the Politburo
Secretariat of the USSRIf the army had shown him the worst of what the partitioning of the Shadow Empire had done for the people of the Border States, then surely it was the Politburo that showed Shady what it had done for the people of the USSR. The news media of the Shadow Republics were controlled by censors, and anything that didn’t befit the official party line was ruthlessly suppressed. Few people therefore knew how bad a shape the USSR was in.
The War of the Worlds of the forties had ravaged the Shadow homelands, leaving the country a bombed out husk. The victorious Allies then indiscriminately partitioned the Shadow Empire. That by itself was bad enough, but the division they had chose was selected purely for geo-strategic reasons with no regard for practicality. The result was that the USSR was cut off from many vital resources and industries. To make matters worse the Allies demanded steep reparations that the ruined country was utterly unable to afford, and the unstable Border States left on the USSR’s doorstep soon proved a constant source of armed conflict which sucked money from the country’s coffers like a black hole draws in matter. All these factors combined sent the collapsed economy of the USSR spiraling into a decades-long depression from which the country seemed perpetually unable to recover.
The first thing Shady learned when he joined the exalted ranks of the Politburo was that his country remained afloat primarily due to a trickle of emergency funds from the Crimson Star Republic. Many in that neighboring country felt they had to support a brother Slavic and communist nation, but by 1989 the economy of the CSR, too, had come groaning to an almost complete halt. A series of elderly, weak-willed rulers and ill-planned economic reforms had plunged the once-vital republic into recession and though for the first time in over a decade a relatively young and energetic leader – Stanislav – had been elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the CSR the results of his sweeping reforms were at that time still a very long way off. Consequently over the course of several years the USSR had seen the flow of CSR funds dry up almost completely.
The second thing Shady learned was that the Politburo was night-irretrievably corrupt. The premier of the time was practically senile, all his speeches were actually read by a body double, and many of the highest echelon had private accounts in Cayman banks and were busier filling their own pockets by pilfering the country than finding a way to rescue the Union.
As an idealist and avid believer in the core tenets of communism this state of affairs utterly repulsed Shady. The sheer rampancy of corruption unsettled him perhaps more than the Republics’ financial woes, and he was to become one of the greatest enemies of graft the USSR had ever known. And had the establishment first profited of Shady’s newfound status as a war hero to bolster the credibility of the Party, they soon found out their puppet was anything but. The former lieutenant began speaking out against the way the USSR was being run in an ever more vocal manner – and worse yet, some people were beginning to listen. Some in the Politburo soon became convinced that comrade Shady, hero or not, was more trouble than he was worth.
And so, plans were made to dispose of him.
Unfortunately for the conspirators a great deal of support is needed to facilitate the ‘removal’, either through trumped-up charges or an ‘unfortunate shaving accident’, of a famous war hero whose face is plastered across propaganda posters Union-wide. And the bigger the conspiracy, the more likely it is that word of it will get out to people who can ruin the entire undertaking. Which, predictably, it inevitably did.
It was at this stage that Shady, himself yet oblivious of the fiendish plots that was being hatched against him, one day found himself approached by an unassuming man who introduced himself only as ‘Kane’. This Kane proved to be the elusive leader of the Network for Observation and Dissuasion, a shadowy intelligence organization that answered directly to the premier and
only the premier. Since the current premier of the USSR was an 86-year-old bumbling senile fool, the Network hadn’t really answered to anyone in particular for a rather long time.
Luckily for the Union DIRNOD Kane had an unusual sense of loyalty to his nation; rather than enrich himself or otherwise use his unchecked position for personal profit he had instead been looking for a way to lift the USSR out of the morass of political ineptitude and economic malaise. Recognizing in the young Shady something of himself he had come to believe that the young, idealistic war hero might perhaps be capable of achieving his goal of national restoration.
Kane proposed a simple solution to the problem posed by the conspiracy against Shady’s person: his organization would simply bushwhack the ringleaders, decapitating the organization and causing the rest of the plot to simply bleed out. It would be a comparatively simple matter for him to arrange too; after all, here was a man who had begun his career in intelligence under the Shadow Empire and had somehow survived every purge of the organization by zealous communist witchhunters. Plotting and counter-plotting from the shadows came as natural to him as breathing.
In a sharp departure from Kane’s jaded worldview Shady however disliked the idea of simply murdering his opponents in their sleep and blaming it on ‘an accident with a pillow’. He proposed another and altogether more public way of dealing with the approaching assassination by ‘Zagori sympathizer terrorists’, which was what the plotters had by that point settled upon.
For what came next we switch directly to Shady’s own words. The following excerpt is copied from Premier Shady’s own personal diary, written in the days when he still ruled the USSR and smuggled – at great personal risk to our reporters – out of the Forbidden Section of the Red Star Library in Sarajevo, across the street from Temple Prime.
In Service of the State - Personal Diary of Premier Shady, USSR wrote:I cleared my throat and the room fell silent. It wasn’t often lately that I had the capacity to address a joint session of the Secretariat of the Politburo. The official excuse was that the Secretariat was ‘busy’. I knew the real reason: I had become a nuisance, something to be gotten rid of. But today I was here, and these people were damn well going to listen. I had no doubt they would.
I launched into a lengthy speech about the evils of corruption and the sad state of the Union, and the entire room hung onto my every word. Things had not changed much over the last year, the entire Politburo was as corrupt as ever, but they listened intently all the same, applauding at all the appropriate intervals. None of the two-faced scumbags wanted to look out of step with the party line, even though few of them didn’t already know what I was going to say.
Even fewer of them, of course, knew what was going to happen next.
The shot rang out just when it was supposed to, when I was making my traditional plea for all inhabitants of the realms of the former Shadow Empire to put aside our differences and unite against our common foes. It hit me square in the chest, knocking me to the ground and sending a shower of red fluid cascading about me. Instantly the hall was in chaos.
I hadn’t thought it would hurt so much. The Network operatives had tried to tell me, but I had ignored them. I could hear the sirens approaching somewhere off in the distance as unconsciousness took me.
I woke up in my bedroom in my seaside Dacha, surrounded by people and machinery. There was a brief commotion for a moment as I awoke and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Kane stepped forward to talk to me.
“That was a close one there, lieutenant” he said, addressing me by my old army rank. “For a moment there we thought… Well, that despite our best efforts…” His voice trailed off as he contemplated a notion even the hardened intelligence operative found hard to swallow.
“There now, Kane” I said and mustered all the confidence I could. “It all worked out. The assassination attempt went off without a hitch and I’m feeling fine.” As I emphasized the last words I winced at the aching of my ribs. I looked up at Kane questioningly.
“Nothing’s broken. You’ve a clean bill of health.”
“Well, then. Why hasn’t this thing been taken off me?”
“The doctor felt it best to leave it on until you awakened.”
“Well I’m awake now. Please, help me get this thing off.”
Competent hands reached forward and undid the straps on the bulletproof vest. Kane grinned. “You’ll want to take a shower to get all that red stuff off.”
I smiled in return. “It really looked real, didn’t it?”
“You fooled everyone.”
“And the results so far?”
“The reaction has been just as you predicted. The people are rallying behind you stronger than ever before. We’re rounding up the conspirators as we speak – the evidence of ties to Marek the Cruel and the Zagor Empire we planted on them is going to be damning. What’s left of the Politburo will have no choice but to follow your lead.”
I favored Kane with a wan smile. “Let’s hope so. I’d hate to have to go through this again.”
In a single maneuver as brilliant as it was dangerous Shady and Kane had turned the whole plot against Shady’s life against the conspirators. By planting evidence linking the conspirators to Marek the Cruel himself, Shady could harness the assassination attempt against his person and use it as a means of proving the corruption of the Politburo to the people. Lead by Kane and other loyalists within the security apparatus a massive purge – the Last Purge, as it would become known in Shadow history – began. In the following weeks the ringleaders of the conspiracy, all highly influential members of the Shadow Communist Party, were rounded up and sentenced to either many decades of hard labor or a swift execution by firing squad.
The rest of the Politburo turned out to be remarkably pliable. The innocent were ecstatic at the survival of the war hero Shady, whereas those who had knowledge of the coup yet were not worth purging themselves were easily intimidated into keeping quiet by stony-faced NOD operatives. Finally the drooling idiot of a premier suffered ‘an unfortunate lethal heart attack when he heard of the rampant corruption’, and then there was nothing left standing in the way of Shady’s glorious return six months after the shooting. In a remarkably swift and unanimous vote, Shady Sirah was elected as the new, and as it would turn out last, Premier of the USSR.
This concludes Part One of this fascinating insight into the life and times of Comrade Shady, Hero of Socialist Labor and Friend of Frequesue. Stay tuned to Worldwide One, and be sure to watch again next week when we air Part Two of his intriguing biopic!
