Part 69: Turn 10 - Soviet Org Phase: A Major Offensive
German Detraining Phase
The Axis deploy their reserves in the south to bolster their flanks. The Hungarians secure the supply lines of the Panzer forces, while the Luftwaffe garrisons Dnepropetrovsk.
The Soviets play Major Offensive and discard Stavka to do it.
The Stavka command decides to perform an all-out offensive all across the front line. They requisition unprecedented amounts of men and materiel in order to perform a push west, driving back the invaders as far as possible. The precise goals are still a well-kept secret, but not for much longer.
The Soviets draw 4 cards.
They begin by moving two entire fronts further north, around Kalinin. The whole operation is carried off in deepest secrecy, with troops heading into the area only in the night and through regions as far east as the Urals. The trains are guarded by NKVD regiments and their conductors receive nothing but three sealed envelopes to be opened in order: one telling them to go to Gorki, the second one to Moscow, and the third one to their proper destinations. The ruse works, however, and the Germans are incredibly surprised to see a major upsurge of Soviet forces on the northern parts of the front.
The Soviets draw 4 more cards. One of them is General Winter. Since the next turn does not have variable weather, it is discarded to no effect.
Everything is in order on both sides of the front.
The Soviets may now Upgrade any one of their Overland-supplied units for free as well as Fortify any Regional Infantry unit at a cost of 1 card discard.
They also get back their Ostatky 1 Cadre unit as reinforcements.
They may also pay cards to bring their Destroyed units back on the board in any Soviet-controlled City in the USSR. These units return Disorganised, but the Disorganised markers can be removed at a cost of 1 card each.
I need all these decisions from The Sandman. The deadline for them is Wednesday, April 16, 6 PM GMT.
On November 6 1942, a soldier named Saveli Dmitriyev attempted to assassinate Stalin as he rode in his limousine across the Red Square. However, what Dmitriyev did not know was that the car's passenger was not the generalissimus, but the Minister of Foreign Trade, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan.
Mikoyan was Stalin's ally - and friend, as much as Stalin could have been said to have any - from pretty much the very beginning, back when the man was just a Yosif Dzhugashvili, a Communist rabble-rouser in Georgia. Unlike the dictator, Mikoyan was a man who knew when to cut his losses and just settle on what he had, which allowed him to stay at the highest levels of Soviet power structure from the late days of Lenin in 1923 until the early days of Brezhnev, when, in 1965, he was forced to resign for having defended the freshly-ousted Khrushchev.
For most of his time, Mikoyan managed a large part of Soviet consumer economy. He became the People's Commissar for External and Internal Trade in 1926 and from that point on was the man in charge of Soviet cuisine. It was he who introduced several western products and ideas to the Soviet Union's food industry, including hamburgers, popcorn and ice cream. Stalin was even quoted as saying that Mikoyan cared more about ice cream than about communism. Mikoyan also ordered an official Soviet cookbook to be published, which sold 2.5 million copies. His memoirs show an incredible amount of micro-management that the top Soviet brass performed in the economy: the man who ran half of it frequently had to settle disputes about stuff like assigning trucks to a beetroot farm in Bumfuckovgrad, Siberia before the entire harvest rots.
He wasn't all fun and games, though, the man was sly as a fox and ready for anything to keep his position. He was part of the committee overseeing the purge of the Communist Party of Armenia, frequently approved executions of real and imaginary dissidents and publicly praised show trials. It was said that when it rained, Mikoyan could walk all across the Red Square without getting wet, because he could dodge even raindrops. He was immortalized in the saying "From Ilyich [Lenin] to Ilyich [Brezhnev] without a heart attack or a stroke".
@up: Sudden Death does not trigger on turns not marked by the Sudden Death icon, i.e. until Turn 12. And you're still in the USSR, the game is far from over. You should see what I mean soon enough.