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The Decembrist Revolution(Dinmeizori Daizhengdang)
Overview:
The Decembrist Revolution, also known as the 1987 Coup and the Glorious Soodean Revolution, was a brief military coup and civil war that resulted in the fall of the Democratic People's Republic of Menghe and the rise of today's Soodean government. It began on 21 December 1987 and officially ended on 5 May 1988, though sporadic patches of Loyalist forces continued to resist until the fall of 1988. The Decembrist Revolution is a topic of great national pride in the Soodean Imperium, and was the namesake of the country's first supercarrier, Dinmeizori Daishinsheng.
Causes:
While the government of the DPR Menghe had been fairly popular in its initial decades, by the early 1980s it was clear that the country was entering a period of decline. The country's economic growth, having made a surprisingly rapid recovery between 1965 and 1977, slowed in the late '70s, and from 1982 onward there were frequent shortages of key goods. Corruption, once a minor problem for the Menghe government, also ran rampant, leading to a decrease in the popularity of the regime. These problems, combined with a lack of work opportunity, led many people to resort to theft and banditry, which became so severe that by late 1986 there were areas of the countryside which even the National Police would not patrol.
In an attempt to alleviate these problems, the Menghe government loosened restrictions on business ownership in 1985, hoping that private ownership of the means of production would spur the economy back into growth. Due to the aforementioned problems of corruption, however, the new enterprises were often run by the politically well-connected, who used their new power to cut wages or hoard goods. It is not clear how widespread this abuse of power was, as the Soodean movement had (and still has) a strong incentive to exaggerate the internal danger of Capitalism. Nonetheless, there is widespread evidence that the privatization of the economy proved a deeply divisive issue, attracting outrage from more radical Communists who were already dismayed with the growing problem of corruption.
Gemin Square:
The final straw came in late 1987, when an unusually dry summer and a cold autumn resulted in one of the poorest harvests the country had seen since the Great Occupation. Speculators in the main semi-private enterprises responded by buying up large stocks of wheat and rice, driving the price of food even higher. On the morning of 12 December 1987, a small group of protesters appeared in the central square at the capital of Tianking to request that the central government confiscate food stocks from the private storehouses and distribute it to the people. These protesters were quickly detained, but by the next morning a larger group had gathered in their place to make the same demands. Over the next week, the size of the crowd occupying Gemin square continued to grow, with thousands of people braving the cold winter to submit their demands to the national authorities.
[to be continued]
