How does your nation define terrorism? Have there been any major terrorist attacks in your nation in the past 20 years? How are captured terrorists punished? How does your nation react to terrorism abroad? Does your nation engage in state terrorism?
- The Mechanocracy of Russia is very careful in how it goes about defining 'terrorism', since the State regularly employs terror tactics to subdue its enemies, both within and without. Generally, terrorism is defined in the Mechanocracy as the usage by non-state actors of violence, or threats of violence, to create a climate of fear with the objective of achieving social and/or political change.
- The highest-profile terrorist attack in recent Mecharussian history was the Razorback Incident, which occurred in 2138 when pro-Frenkish cyberterrorists created an extremely sophisticated trojan and set it loose in Vladivostok's computer networks.
Razorback plagued Vladivostok for nearly three months, and got its name because afflicted computers would display the countenance of a red-eyed pig on their screens before they were terminated via data overload. It got much more serious when the virus began to infect cybernetic systems and started to shut them down, having achieved human contact via software installed in newly-arrived prosthetics. This typically resulted in the death of the unfortunate victim due to organ failure. There were many computer viruses that affected cybernetics before, but Razorback was the first, and so far only, to kill the infected outright.
By the time we were able to isolate the virus and destroy it with the assistance of an orbital EMP, nearly a third of Vladivostok's population of 18 million had been infected, and of those around 300,000 were killed. This makes the Razorback Incident not only the Mechanocracy's deadliest epidemic yet, but by far the deadliest terrorist attack to ever strike the nation, and it caused a revolution in how cybernetics were constructed and distributed to the general populace. Nowadays it is mandatory for antivirus software to be installed into every prosthesis by default, with the most expensive ones having military-grade encryptions to prevent such a lethal outbreak as Razorback from ever occurring again.
- A terrorist, whether planning or having already carried out an attack, can expect to be hanged or beheaded for high treason if caught. The worst terrorist attacks are met with the ultimate punishment in the Mechanocracy's legal system: immurement, i.e. being locked inside of a large steel crate and left in the wasteland to die from malnutrition. In the exceptionally rare circumstance that clemency is granted to the terrorist, he or she will be given a life sentence in a Gulag (which for all intents and purposes is a death sentence anyway). The People's Commissariat of Internal Security will also flag the area from whence the convicted terrorist came as a potential source of subversive activity and an extra eye will be kept on that area's inhabitants until officially cleared of malignant intent.
- The Mechanocracy remains largely indifferent to the conduct of terrorism abroad, having no interest in foreign domestic affairs unless it affects the Mechanocracy. That goes for terrorist attacks that occur in that country: the story will barely get a mention in the Mecharussian news if it happens in some backwater like Ardavia or South America.
If, however, a terrorist cell that is openly hostile to the Mechanocracy is found to have a base of operations in a foreign country, the Spetsnaz or an air raid will be deployed to destroy it in earnest - and the Mecharussians are notorious for their preference to weather complaints and even threats of war from said foreigners rather than accept a base for subversion (it never takes those threats seriously, because it is well aware that said nation won't act on its threat out of fear of being destroyed by the Mechanocracy's gigantic arsenal of WMD).
- Both the Mecharussian Armed Forces and the Committee of State Security (our foreign intelligence service) avowedly engage in terror tactics in wartime, with the objective to destroy public morale and pressure the enemy government into surrender. Such tactics range from covert bombings and assassinations to orbital bombardments on densely-populated areas and outright genocide. Terrorism is an accepted tactic, some military analysts going as far as to say it is a hallmark of Mechanocratic Russia's conduct of warfare.
