Not that it will, you know, succeed.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

"Power to the Councils, Peace to the Nations, Land to the Peasants, Factories to the Workers."

That was the slogan under which the Russian Social-Democratic Worker Party (Bolsheviks) have taken power in Russia in 1917, storming the government in then-capital St. Petersburg and taking over the lines of communications.

By 1918, the Bolsheviks have, one could say, fulfilled the first half of their slogan. One could also say that they didn't.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk have ended the participation of Russia in the disastrous for it Great War. Yet, years would pass until something resembling a real state of peace.

The democratic Russian Constituent Assembley was organized by the Bolsheviks to lay the foundations of the new government. In it, the Bolshevik Party have lost the democratic election. Subsequently, the the Assembley was dispersed under the aim of the guns held by Bolsheviks and their far-left allies. Soon, there was no far-left allies, and the Bolsheviks' Soviet (a different word for Council) stood alone, on the shoulders of the local Bolshevik worker Soviets; which will systematically be made more Bolshevik and more subservient to the center by the campaign of Red Terror.

This same year, Rosa Luxemburg wrote:

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of "justice" but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom" becomes a special privilege. [...] But socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism.

Back then, back there, none have listened, as none have listened to earlier warnings of Marx to the workers about the inevitable betrayal of the revolutionary party.

This was also projected to be the year of the first instances of Huxley Flu in Russia. Faster than the infection, rumors have spread, rumors of miraculous abilities displayed by some soldiers and some children in Great War. Though, of course, they were quashed like any other superstition by the new culture of the new economic order.

1920s-1930s: The Years of Folly.

Across the world: Mechanized agriculture. Synthetic fertilizers. Vaccination. Scientific testing of drugs. Global transport and global market. Mass media.

Immediately after the Great War, come the new technologies, new investments, new worldwide economic boom for all of the 20 years.

The worldwide population boom continues, Great War barely a dent in the trends.

New sorts of human beings appears in Europe, seemingly out of nowhere. Healthier, stronger, smarter, freer people who can do physically impossible. Child prodigies, child war heroes, child athletes who beat the adults, then adult athletes who beat everyone. Miracles, they are dubbed, celebrated champions of their nations, borne by a new rare disease.

For a while, for a decade, only very few people foresee the upcoming catastrophe. Back then, back there, none have listened.

Cool setup, right? 

They probably looked something like this image on the left.

You could say I made them "in my image". Get it? The joke is, I don't have an image.

But the Russian Federative Socialist Republic is, initially, ten steps to the side from all of that.

The transfer of power is over by the end of 1918, but the region will remain a warzone for the next four years. The civil war with the "white" anticommunist faction, the mad escalation of Red Terror and White Terror, the expansionist revolutionary "wars of liberation" in Eastern Europe and Caucasus, the defense from numerous foreign interventions, the suppression of internal strikes, rebellions, and anarchist communes require the "military communism" policies to fuel them: rejection of prior state debt, expropriation and nationalization of all enterprise, mass requisitioning of food from peasants for nominal price, martial law. The military victories are bought by famine of millions; millions are saved by foreign humanitarian aid. The state bans all private business and private trade for ideological reasons, but in conditions of total disarray and disrupted communications, only the black market keeps the economy from complete destruction - still, total production volume halves and the currency plummets into hyperinflation.

The athmosphere is not so much repressive as it is destructive and chaotic. If you are not terrorized by the Soviet government, you are terrorized by some group of resistance against it; from the ground, the high-minded ideals of communism or liberalism or anarchism or monarchist traditionalism don't look much different when they all come down to famine and rule of brute strength - yet this similarity makes the content of the ideals all the more important.

And so, at the same time, the cultural revolution is underway. The newly formed Commissariat of Education starts a massive campagn of eradication of illiteracy in what used to be a backwater agricultural state. The language they will teach will be radically grammatically reformed. The Orthodox Church, just recently a near-monopolist on the nation's intellectual life, is battered down by constant persecution and asset seizure. Fully equal rights for men and women are all at once proclaimed in what used to be a zealously patriarchal culture. By the wave of popular wrath, by the propaganda both centralized and spontaneous, and by the force of arms, he old values are put to rest, and the new values taken to the forefront. The New Man aspires to be selfless, yet free; tirelessly laboring, yet intellectually developed; fanatically devoted to his ideology and Party, yet only for the good of all humankind. It is is a heroic and aspirational archetype, but just a normal human being, the result of the same material, technological and cultural conditions that would produce millions of others like him.

Despite all ongoing strife and material repression, this is, for the first time in many centuries, the time of real freedom, of self-governance, of rushed immigration and emigration, of purehearted left-wing ideas becoming mainstream. Spiritual liberation, national liberation, sexual liberation are in full swing, and the people are, for a time, free from censorship. In the vanguard leftist circles of the time there's a belief that, for the New Man (or New Woman, for that matter), the paragon of rational self-determination and pragmatism, sex is akin to drinking a glass of water.

And it is in this athmosphere that the first few Soviet miracles are born and raised. Tyranny next to anarchy, progress next to disaster, and a momentary taste of freedom intellectual and interpersonal. They are yet too few in number, too young and too weak to be a major influence on anything. In a society motivated by violent enforcement of equality, most escape or hide their exceptional nature, and most who do not are killed and become figures of myth. But this society, for a time largely ignoring the issue of their nebulous existence, is an influence on them, and they will be an influence on the next generation of Miracles both born and turned.