Fifth Global War (Byzantine Glory)

Background
To go back to the beginning of the Fifth Global War, the story goes back to after the Fourth Global War, and those countries who had one, and those who had lost. After the loss of the war, Russia was devestated, it was forbidden from having an army greater than 500,000, and could not longer develop tanks or planes, stopping Russia's war industry in its tracks. The Russian economy was ruined by repiration payments, they were constantly trying to pull out loans from some of the richer country's in the area, but failed as no one wanted to give money to a country who likely couldn't pay it back. The battle for control of the government after the war was dominated by socialism, and the head of the Russian Socialist Party, and president of the country from 1920-1928 was the Socialist Leon Trotsky. But there was one figure that omnisciently threatened Trotsky and his Socialist admnistration, the head of the Russian National Socialist Party, and Trotsky's main rival in the government, Josef Stalin. Stalin had served in the Imperial Russian Army from 1909-1917, when he was wounded fighting in Riga, and had achieved the rank of Major, and became known as Major Stalin during his political career. Although everyone knew Stalin's real name wasn't Josef Stalin, no one cared to challenge his name, as Stalin meant "man of steel," a tittle befitting his reputation and politics.

His organization stayed small up until 1929, when the Great Depression hit, and his organization went on the rise. But between that time, opposition to Stalin's control in some parts of Russia was threatened by the Народный комиссариат внутренних дел Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del (NKVD), meaning the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Stalin's secret police, and private enforcers. The Great Depression was preceded by a short period of propserity from 1925-1929, which occured after many countries lifted repiration payments on Russia. The Natseoys (short for национал-социалистической, Russian for National Socialists), as they became known, prominently in the west, controlled politics up until 1929 in areas that were hardly hit by the war, mostly in the west, but had very few large cities where they were prominent.

But with the stock market crash, and subsequent depression of 1929, the Natseoys took power in the 1931 election in Russia, winning them control of the executive and legislative branches of Russian government. This forced Trotsky, along with hundreds of his supporters to leave Russia, and go to the Byzantine Empire, where Trotsky became a very popular unionist in the heavily-industrialized area around Thessaloniki, and became a personal guest of the Byzantine imperial government, often staying in the imperial residence in Constantinople. And with his leaving, the Stalinists took the government, and Stalin declared on February 27, 1933, the Greater Russian State, as a single-party, totaltarian state, ending 14 years of Socialist control. To celebrate this great victory, Stalin delcared National Day for Russia on February 27, and the day was first celebrated in 1933, along with his election in the streets of Moscow with the first of the National Russian Grand Parades, where the thousands of members of the NKVD, along with many senior party members, marched through the large streets of the city, and were greeted and cheered on by their supporters, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The parade was followed by a large group of similar parades in other large Russian cities, and showed off the power the Natseoys' had in the new Russian State.

The Byzantium Pact, by this point having been transformed into the International Military League, the military and security arm of the League of Nations, and began sending in military inspectors into Russia to make sure they were keeping up with the Treaty of the Winter Palace. But they found no signs of tanks or planes, and they were presented with the entire Russian Army, a small force of 200,000, all of which were just NKVD members, not officially even an army, just Stalin's bodyguards, which the inspectors found as acceptable. But after the inspectors left, the Russian began secretely rebuilding their military, they built new tanks of the бронированный автомобиль I and бронированный автомобиль II models, and began making them into and practicing in their new броня Divisions (броня is pronounced Bronya, with a rolled r). Meanwhile, tank development differed between the two political sides of Europe, where Britain, France, and Spain all developed what they called Cruiser tanks, tanks that put a higher emphasis on protection and defensive capabilities, rather than firepower and speed, like the Russians. In Russia, in 1939, they developed the new T-34, a perfect combination of all of the developments Russia had made with their tank development in the preceding years. It had excellent firpower, sloped frontal armor, for protection from shells, and had an operating speed of 33 mph, making it a very much feared tank.

The Russian Air Force also entered a rapid period of development with the implementation of the Air Power Act of 1935, where multiple new design boards were made to upgrade the old Russian Air Force. The highest and most prominent design boards was the Yakovlev and the Tupolev Design Boards, who began building prototypes for their designs in just 2 years, with the Yakovlev Yak-1 in April 1937, and the Tupolev Tu-2. The Tu-2 was developed intothe Petlyakov Pe-2, their new dive bomer, in 1938. These new designs went into mass production, and the Russian industrial machine went into mass production on a scale never before seen, producing their new planes in the thousands. But the enemies of Russia soon took notice, they felt threatened by Russia's remilitarization, but with the Byzantine Empire or the US, the League of Nations had very little power to enforce sanctions on a power as large as Russia was becoming, but the Byzantines had taken notice of their allies' fears and asked them to take on a policy of appeasement towards the Russians.

Following in this policy of appeasement, the Russians were easily able to retake and remilitarize the Ukraine, in a swift war, they retook the independent Baltic states, and then moved in to retake Belorus from the lightly-armed soldiers, most of which easily surrendered and supported the Russian's move. The Allies attempt to make their former occupied zones in Russia into independent states had failed and Russia was were it was just 20 years before 1938. The heavily ethnically-Russian areas in Eastern Poland was, by treaty, unavailable to Tussian annexation, but that didn't stop Stalin. Russian soldiers enterred Eastern Poland, and annexed it as Russian territory, but with almost all of the Polish Armed Forces in the east, Russian soldiers then attacked into Wetsern Poland, and took Warsaw in 1939, and nobody tried to stop them. But the one territory the Russians still wanted was Western Courland, which had been directly annexed by the German Empire after the last war, and was heavily guarded by a German garrison in the area, which had been connected to German territory or allies until Poland was annexed by the Russians.

Meanwhile, in Asia, the Republic of China, which replaced the Qing Dynasty of China after the Chinese Revolution of 1919, came under fascist rule after the National Union Party of China came to power under President Wang Jingwei in 1923. They promised to rebuild China to its former glory and make sure the Japanese paid for their humiliation of China, and very soon the Chinese Armed Forces began going on a massive production campaign, equaled only by Russia's campaign of expansion in the 1930's. But with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the production stopped in its tracks, and the Chinese economy again fell into a slump, but then Jingwei turned war production into industrial production and product making, the Chinese industrial machine allowed the country to at least float above the average economies of the Great Depression. But as time went on, and Japan arose from the Great Depression, both countries put their industrial capacity to war production, but Japan was at a disadvantage when it came to room to build its industry in, and somewhat fell behind in the arms race.

Also, in South America, with the Incan Empire dead, Argentina grew to become the main power in South America along with Brazil, along with Argentina's Nasocon allies, Chile, and Colombia. Meanwhile, the Aztecs began to shift to a policy of neutrality as their economy fell into the Great Depression, and struggled to recover, leaving a power vaccuum in the region to be filled wither by Argentina or Brazil. But the two countries also struggled with the Depression, althoug Brazil lesser so than Argentina, as it had a more industrialized economy prior to the Depression.

And as country after country across the world fell under National Socialist control, the tensions with the world's democratic powers grew and grew, eventually to the point which peaked at West Courland. The Russians set an ultimatum to Germany, either give them West Courland, or face invasion, Germany defied them, and so Stalin sent the Russian Army to take it by force.