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The Great Politics Mess-Up

560 statements
108 feature instances
32 referencing feature instances

The Great Politics Mess-Up	type	FeatureClass
The Great Politics Mess-Up	label	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up	page	TheGreatPoliticsMessUp
The Great Politics Mess-Up	comment	This trope is under discussion in the Trope Repair Shop. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_1'); })Many events and changes in history catch almost everyone by surprise. One of the most notable of these was Christmas Day, 1991: the end of the Cold War. Prior to World War II, it was common to hear experts claiming that the Soviet Union was about to fall in a matter of years. During the first five months of the Soviet-German War, some in the U.S., Britain and Germany believed it would collapse within months. But from the winter of '41–'42 onward, the Soviet Union acquired most of its fuel and war material from the U.S. via UK/USSR-occupied Iran, and by the war's end the opposite mood had set in. Many thought the Soviet Union would last forever, or long into the foreseeable future, and maybe even win the Cold War. It was thus assumed that the end of the USSR could only come as part of the general End of Everything — most likely as a result of nuclear war. The relatively peaceful end that took place at the dawn of The '90s was unexpected and even mourned by some. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_2'); })Naturally, there will be many references to divided Berlin and divided Germany in any genre of fiction set 20 Minutes into the Future but written before 1989. A lot of fiction written shortly before the unexpected events and set 20 Minutes into the Future without those vital events in place can seem funny in hindsight. Of course, the Soviet Union isn't the only major political entity subject to this trope. Because of the constantly-fluctuating nature of the world political stage (and even domestic political stages), there's bound to be a large number of works whose assumptions about politics in the future will end up becoming woefully obsolete within due time. Consequently, they accidentally become Alternate History stories by the sole virtue of having gotten their predictions about history wrong. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_3'); })Compare Science Marches On, Future Society, Present Values, and End of an Age. See also I Want My Jet Pack, Failed Future Forecast, and Zeerust. See also Make the Bear Angry Again if the mess-up is somehow reversed, and Jossed if this trope applies to canonical changes. Contrast Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell and Dated History. Note: This trope has been subject to a fair bit of misuse; it is not a synonym for the Cold War, or the transition period between the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. This is for when writers make assumptions about political situations when writing works about the future, only for that situation to change, retroactively turning the work into an Alternate Universe. The main reason why the Soviet Union gets so much focus here is because it is simply the most prominent example, the reasons for which are explained above. Examples:
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_188709f8	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_188709f8	comment	Averted in A Good Day to Die Hard, which includes a scene where John McClane and a friend talk in an NYPD shooting range with a picture of President Obama in the background. The film was released in 2013 but filmed prior to the 2012 presidential election. Therefore a second version of the scene was shot with a picture of Mitt Romney in the background as insurance in case of a Republican victory.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_194eb14e	comment	Strikeforce: Morituri managed to get things wrong in both directions at once. The story is set in 2072, but the Soviet Union still exists under the "Paideia" One World Order. However, a memorial seen in one panel implies that South African apartheid collapsed in 1989, a few years too optimistic a prediction.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_198091c2	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_198091c2	comment	Logan's Run: In "Man Out of Time", the Soviet Union seemingly still existed in 2119 as a newspaper headline reads "Eastern Bloc Demands Time Travel Controls."
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_1c34acd2	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_1c34acd2	comment	Parodied in Rocketship Voyager, a Star Trek: Voyager fanfic written In the Style of... a 1950's sci-fi magazine pulp. Not only is there still a "Sino-Soviet Union", it's racing ahead of the West in the development of electronics, computer technology and the safe production of atomic energy (a riff on the Failed Future Forecast of Mack Reynolds that a centrally-controlled Soviet economy would be more efficient than a Western capitalist one). Some members of the crew come from countries that no longer exist in the year that it's set, including East Germany, South Vietnam, and Yugoslavia, while Seska is an expatriate Soviet Communist and suspected KGB agent.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_1de3a79c	comment	While the present day period of Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja is never established, it's suggested to be on or near 1989, when the first issue was published. Reading it in hindsight can feel rather anachronistic, given how much of the story relies on Cold War tensions and the Red Scare (particularly an exchange of warheads between the US and the USSR).
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_1fcaed79	comment	Patlabor, created in the late '80s but taking place in the late '90s has this. The Brocken military mech that shows up to cause trouble for the Mobile Police in every continuity was said to have been commissioned by West Germany's border guards and the OAV episode featuring it has it "accidentally" falling into the hands of communist sympathizers as part of some kind of ill-conceived War for Fun and Profit scheme by the manufacturer. A memorable episode of the TV series involved a Soviet defector bringing an experimental mech to a Japanese seaside resort town where everybody was actually a spy of some sort. The second movie mentions the end of the Cold War, but it's uncertain if this is a Retcon or if it happened sometime between 1998 and 2002 in the movie-verse.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_20fda983	comment	The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, originally published in 2008, has a meeting 20 Minutes into the Future between a former American secretary of defense and an aged Islamic fundamentalist hiding out in Afghanistan who is clearly intended to be — but not named as — Osama bin Laden. The English translation of the book didn't appear until 2015, meaning that the mess-up was baked into it from the start.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_21e43f3a	comment	The PBS game show adaptation of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? had the misfortune of being launched just as the USSR was on the verge of collapse, meaning that by the second season, anything related to it or Eastern Europe in the first season reruns was already outdated. This, combined with chronic instability in the third world, prompted a disclaimer to be added: "All geographic information was accurate as of the date this program was recorded." It also necessitated constant updating of the maps used on the show, sometimes overnight according to Defunctland.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_222a8847	comment	RoboCop (1987), set at some unclear future date after 1987, implies that the Cold War is still going on, with references to SDI and the MX missile. The latter, which became the Peacekeeper, has now been scrapped. References are also made to the South African apartheid government which is not only still in power (albeit reduced to a single city-state), but actively threatening to deploy a Neutron Bomb against insurgents, thus promoting them from racist assholes to cartoonish supervillains (although, in Real Life, they did have nukes).
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_230b3240	comment	Jack Ryan: The Sum of All Fears is a close one-written in early 1991, months before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and revolves around a "hoaxed" Soviet attack on the US in January 1992, by which time the USSR had been formally dissolved for a month. The film adaptation was aware of this, with the main villain changed from an East German to a neo-Nazi. His portrayal of the prominent Afghan viewpoint character, a mujahideen, in Cardinal of the Kremlin also uses the "tragic, noble victims of the invading Soviets" political Historical Hero Upgrade common in those times as he was stated to have been nothing but a peaceful teacher who only became a ruthless killer after the Soviets had ruined his life and killed his family and that he wouldn't have even picked up a gun if it were otherwise. Played with in that the other mujahideen viewpoint character is Ax-Crazy, but it still didn't stop the novel ultimately laying the fault on the Soviet invasion and the American interference in it:
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_24931627	comment	Ghost in the Shell: The Soviet Union is still going in 2030, though revisions and reprints made after 1992 by Shirow Masamune himself changed this to reflect their downfall. The establishment of the Soviet Union still existing in the future was made in the Appleseed series during the 80s. Ghost in the Shell is a sister series that takes place almost a century before Appleseed, but was written in the early 90s. There were some other mess ups in-universe that were mostly corrected. There was a World War III during the mid 90's, and a Non-Nuclear World War IV in 2019-2020, and the United States was separated into three countries after a civil war that took part during World War IV (of which most of the main characters are veterans).note The American Empire AKA Imperial Americana makes up the largest part of the country, with all the states east of New Mexico, south of South Dakota, and south of the New England area, including Washington D.C. The still democratic United States of America was reduced to the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. The New England states, California, Oregon, Alaska, and Hawaii became the socialist Ameri-Soviet Union (revised to the Russo-American Alliance after 1992). And as a side note, Berlin was mostly bombed to pieces in the latter two wars.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_24eb97b7	comment	This is why Black Widow was Retconned into possessing slowed aging. Marvel wanted to keep her Cold War ties and her back story as a Soviet super spy without having to retroactively make her appear decades older.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_2593d5ed	comment	The Space Odyssey Series: The book 2061 not only has the Soviet Union still around, it has South African apartheid continue until the 2030s, when it is destroyed by a violent revolution that scatters the Afrikaners across the Earth and Solar System. They more or less become the new Jews. The 2001 series had a sort-of double mess-up. In the first book (and movie), though the USSR is still around, it and the US are cooperating and have friendly relations (as shown by Floyd chatting casually with Soviet citizens, who are also clearly friends, on the space station. They even inform each other that they're always welcome to come by to visit whenever they just happen to be in each other's countries). When Clarke wrote 2010 (in 1982), it was obvious the real-world US and USSR were not quite being so friendly, so he decided that there should be conflict between the Soviet and American astronauts because of their respective countries' rivalry (though not as blatant as in the film, where the two countries are at the brink of war). Of course, fast forward to the real year 2001, where Soviet Union is gone, the US is supreme, and where, in fact, Russia and the US are building a joint space station, though not one as big and fancy as the one in the book.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_3558eaa2	comment	The introduction to 'Kickpuncher' in Community episode "Romantic Expressionism".
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_36ee2abe	comment	Paranoia has some kind of world-ending catastrophe in its Backstory, and though the details are vague and obscured by time, secrecy and misinformation, the main culprits that The Computer suspects are Communists, hinting at World War III. Not surprising, since the game first came out in The '80s, but not the first people you'd blame these days. On the other hand, records of the past are so mangled and manipulated that it hasn't affected the setting. In fact, the core drives behind the setting have proven remarkably resilient. As the Kickstarter for the 2015 edition says, "The original Paranoia was a product of, well, Cold War paranoia. Today, we have no need to be paranoid! The NSA and GCHQ work tirelessly to ensure that we are all safe and secure against the pervasive threat of Commie mutant trai.... Uh, I mean, evil, crazed terrorists."
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_3aabfec3	comment	Captain Planet and the Planeteers ran straight into this. The show began airing September 1990, at which time Linka (wind) was from the Soviet Union in the introductory opening. When they finally got around to updating the intro (it took a while), she was from Eastern Europe. note The USSR covered a big chunk of Asia as well as Europe, but Asia was Gi's continent of origin. Also, most of the USSR's population lived in the European part of it.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_3cd31075	comment	GunBuster, made in 1988 but set in 2023, had Jung Freud, one of the Soviet Union's ace pilots. Presumably she was from East Germany.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_3d22c14b	comment	Mobile Suit Gundam 00 has a brief mention of the IRA declaring a ceasefire in the far future (after 2300). This already happened in real life, in 2005, 2 years before Gundam 00 was even announced, however, the organisation that declared a ceasefire was the "Real IRA", presumably some sort of spiritual successor, although there is a real "Real IRA". Same with the Sri Lankan Civil War. In the series, Celestial Being did an intervention to stop the war... which basically just ended in 2009. But it's one of those wars that may or may not come back with new force after a few years, depending on whether the Sri Lankan government is magnanimous in victory and helps the Tamils get back on their feet and addresses the grievances that caused the conflict.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_42810c2c	comment	Angel Densetsu: When Kuroda catches sight of Kaburagi Kiyomi crawling rapidly and sneakily across the grass in an attempt to get a picture of Kitano, Kuroda gets increasingly paranoid and comes up with the theory that she's a Soviet assassin sent to their high school to help start an invasion of Japan. Kitano points out that the Soviet Union isn't around anymore (this episode was written in the mid-90s, several years after the fall of the USSR). Kuroda then speculates that she was with the KGB instead, only for Kitano to note that they are obviously gone too. It's all meant to emphasize that Kuroda is a Dumb Muscle with a very poor grasp of history and current events.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_4388e597	comment	The musical Chess was originally released as a Concept Album in 1984, at the height of the Reagan-era Cold War tensions. Set in the "current day", the plot relied heavily on those tensions. By the time it reached Broadway in 1988, glasnost was in full swing and the impending fall of the Soviet Union was already visible on the horizon. As a result, vast swathes of the story — and several of the songs — had to be rewritten to accommodate the new political reality. (For instance: in one of the dropped songs, the civil servants of the British embassy complained that so many Russians defecting to the West "makes you wonder what they built the Berlin wall for"; in a newly written song, a CIA agent and a KGB agent agree to cooperate to the point where "the Berlin wall becomes a backyard fence.") Modern revivals of the show seem to be getting round this by more-or-less sticking to the plot of the album, and simply making the whole thing an early-80s period piece.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_468bebb0	comment	In the Discworld, canonically there is an under-developed fringe of states and regions in the general region of further Überwald where a language not unlike Russian is spoken. Such back-story as there is tells us there was once an Evil Empire that was once powerful and vigorous and ruled all the way across the Central Continent, from the Siberia-like Vortex Plains to the borders of Klatch and Muntab. But war and catastrophe happened and the Empire is no more. In The Compeat Discworld Atlas, it is noted that its most coherent remnant states, Borogravia, Zlobenia and "The Former Überwaldean Republic of Mouldavia" are tentatively considering an economic and customs union for mutual prosperity, described in terms of an, err, "Russian Confederation". As the Discworld's "Russia" revives, next door some prime real estate is being developed as The Great Outdoors by war-torn refugees and huddled masses who have washed up on the shores of Dawn...
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_46d48eba	comment	The original James Bond novels were primarily about Bond fighting agents of the Soviet spy organization SMERSH. But Ian Fleming began to worry that the Cold War might end at some point and leave his stories feeling dated. So when writing Thunderball, he decided to come up with SPECTRE, an apolitical, multinational terrorist organization with a tendency to play both sides of the Cold War and other conflicts for their own schemes who could fit into any political context imaginable.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_4b13f12b	comment	"Let's Get Together": There are two superpowers who are usually referred to as "Us" and "Them", who maintain a delicate stalemate. It's supposed to be America against Russia despite being set decades into the future, where Deceptively Human Robots are used as weapons of infiltration designed to explode when they get together. It is, however, mentioned that They are no longer called "Russia" or "the Communists" or even "the East", because none of those are particularly accurate descriptions (as well as using the same "pastel shades" bit as Fantastic Voyage). It also correctly predicts the reunification of Germany.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_4c095a1f	comment	The Soviet Union somehow exists in the third season of The Transformers, produced in 1986 and set in 2006.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_4ed9d17f	comment	American Flagg! dances on the verge, but still manages to fall into this pit, though it falls very gracefully. The sight of ultra-capitalist Soviets and "Stalinland" theme parks fifty years in the future (in a mid-to-late 80s comic which ended just as the Berlin Wall fell) seems almost like a foreshadowing.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_513f5832	comment	In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, during a global loss of power, Leningrad's power grid is described to have collapsed. Leningrad reverted in 1991 to its pre-revolutionary name, St. Petersburg. The name of the oblast, on the other hand, is still Leningrad. If the power grid includes the entire area, the statement is technically correct.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_5141197f	comment	The Soviet Union is still going in 2030, though revisions and reprints made after 1992 by Shirow Masamune himself changed this to reflect their downfall. The establishment of the Soviet Union still existing in the future was made in the Appleseed series during the 80s. Ghost in the Shell is a sister series that takes place almost a century before Appleseed, but was written in the early 90s.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_51f345f6	comment	The original Strider (Arcade) assumes that the Soviet Union will still be around by the year 2048. In fact, the first stage is set in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, a former Soviet state now known as Kazakhstan. In most of Strider's sequels, the political future of the world is not addressed, but in the 2014 remake the developers simply ran with the original idea and you're still chopping up Cossacks and proletariat dragons all while a a man over a PA system spews vaguely socialist-sounding idioms.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_52378df	comment	In IDW's Transformers: Escalation, much of the plot during the second half or so consist of the Decepticons trying to stir up conflict between the Soviet Union and a breakaway republic called Brasnya. This was written in 2006. They started referring to Russia (and Brasnya as a "former Soviet republic") from issue 5 onward, and Simon Furman admitted the Soviet references in the earlier issues were errors.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_54a7dc07	comment	The first episode of Space: 1999 has a news report referring to Yugoslavia. Technically, Serbia and Montenegro still called itself Yugoslavia until 2003 (although they had a hard time getting the rest of the world to do the same), but Yugoslavia as it was known in the 70s ceased to exist in 1992.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_58c7b20a	comment	Idoru, written in 1996, has Russia transform into a kind of criminal empire run by the The Mafiya, which was a fairly common speculation of Russia's future in the West during the Yeltsin years.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_5d354f8	comment	A poster in Red Dwarf, on board on a ship that left the solar system in either the 21st, 22nd or 23rd century depending on the series, features a rather prominent Soviet flag. There was also an episode in which the characters become convinced they're in Bulgaria, and seem to think it's still part of the Communist bloc.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_5e90f278	comment	009-1 the anime takes place in an alternate world where the Cold War continues... because the original manga was made in the 1960s and used the Cold War.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_5eb940e6	comment	The Eclipse Trilogy by John Shirley happens in an early 21st century with a Third World War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact bloc. It was retconned later to a revived Soviet Union.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_6535218b	comment	The war outlined in Red Storm Rising is purely conventional with no nuclear or chemical weapons causing massive civilian casualties, making an immediate postwar return to the status quo more plausible. Lampshaded by the US ground forces commander in Europe during the ceasefire talks; his Soviet counterpart points out that "both sides can still lose" if NATO advances into the USSR itself. Also, the novel ends with the ceasefire; the survival of an oil-starved and war-weakened Soviet Union in the aftermath is open to the reader's interpretation.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_674f5fd3	comment	Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium: A world government evolved out of cooperation between the US and USSR in the 1990s. When the real 1991 came around, Pournelle retconned the timeline so the CoDominium was founded in 2000. Not to mention also adding a Soviet coup to reestablish the USSR 20 minutes into the future, which had collapsed in reality. Interestingly, novels set later in that universe—like 1974's The Mote in God's Eye—avoid the problem. In the far future, a post-communist Russia venerates both its Communist and its Imperial past—so there's a Russian (and Eastern Orthodox) world named "Saint Ekaterina" with a battleship named Lenin. Under Putin in recent years, Russia has been doing just that.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_694ab80	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_694ab80	comment	Batman Beyond: When studying Presidents with Max, Terry has trouble remembering who came after Clinton, which Max describes as "the boring one." Unless something even bigger than The War on Terror occurred between 2001 and the time of Beyond - which, at least as of 2021, it seems to have - boring is not a word to describe Bush's tenure. This is certainly a reference to Al Gore, Clinton's vice president who at the time the episode was made was believed by the writers as likely to succeed Clinton as president and who had a reputation for being perceived as boring. Then again, there was that time Lex Luthor ran for President...
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_6c5725a2	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_6c5725a2	comment	Transformers: Super-God Masterforce refers to Ginrai traveling in West Germany; Masterforce was made in 1988 but set some time after 2011.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_6ddef913	comment	This hit the game Twilight: 2000 particularly hard, as the premise of the game was that it was set during or just after World War III, after the Soviets had rolled over the Fulda Gap... in the year 2000. They tried a Retcon that only ended up torking off the Germans (predicating the war on Germany's invading Poland...) before reverting to the original plot, throwing up their hands and declaring it an Alternate Timeline.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_741e3a46	comment	Played straight in 2007's Planet Terror, in which the leader of the infected soldiers claims his team had already killed bin Laden, but the circumstances would've embarrassed his superiors, so they kept it quiet.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_7460586f	comment	Archer, being the Anachronism Stew that is, has the Soviet Union as a recurring villain, despite being ostensibly set in the present day.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_77f41d89	comment	The Saga of the Exiles by Julian May takes place both in the 21st century and in the Pliocene. The Soviet Union plays a prominent, but peaceful, role in psychic research. The author has had to dodge the Soviet issue in the sequels.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_791f9a4a	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_791f9a4a	comment	An episode of the original Bubblegum Crisis revolved around a stolen super weapon that a minor villain had been going to sell to the East Germans. On the other hand, supplemental materials references to the fall of the Soviet Union and other political changes are pretty much spot-on (though, BGC OVAs being in development in from 86 through 92, it might've just been a later addition).
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_7950b30f	comment	Stephen Colbert insists the Cold War is still going on, and has periodic Cold War Updates whenever anything newsworthy happens in Russia.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_7d5e591c	comment	In the comic Camelot 3000, King Arthur and Merlin are resurrected and their knights reincarnated in the year 3000. Almost nothing has changed politically since the 1970s or early 80s, except that there are now four power blocs. The USA has a Ronald Reagan-esque president who dresses as a cowboy and carries authentic sixguns. The USSR is led by Comrade Yazof, a Brezhnev lookalike; China is led by Chairperson Feng (a lady Mao); and Africa by The Supreme Rakma, an Idi Amin type. Apartheid also still exists, and Gawain is reincarnated as a black South African. And this is after a nuclear war that blasted man back to the medieval period.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_7e05b89f	comment	Aerobiz: The second entry in the series predicted supersonic airliners and 1000+ passenger super-jumbo jets in the 2000s, missing the large scale move from regular airliners to smaller, more fuel-efficient Regional Jets for most small and medium-sized routes. It also failed to portray a large number of very prominent cities that cropped up in the late 1990s & early 2000s, such as Dubai, and the terrible economic impact that the 2000's would have on airlines around the world. On a lesser scale, it also predicted the next Airbus airliner would be the A350 (which didn't even enter design stage until 2004, with the first prototype taking flight in 2010), and that McDonnell-Douglas would produce the early concept "MD-12" (a stretched MD-11) and still be an independent manufacturer.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_83e716b1	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_83e716b1	comment	The Last Man on Earth offhandedly depicts Mike Pence as being the 46th president of the United States, aligning with common predictions in the late 2010's that he'd emerge as a potential successor to Donald Trump, under whom he served as vice president. The actual 46th president would end up being Joe Biden, whose election coincidentally occurred during a pandemic similar to the one depicted in the show.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_84843b08	comment	Star Cops includes a recurring character who is generally referred to as Russian, but clearly has the Soviet flag on his uniform. The premise seems such that the major Cold War tensions have eased and the two superpowers have learned to get along...more or less. Sort of like the way it is now between the US and Russia.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_869872dd	comment	Armageddon 2001: In Superman Annual #3, Superman destroys the nuclear arsenal of several nations in 2001, including the Soviet Union. The USSR was dissolved only months after this crossover event was published in 1991.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_86a4102d	comment	In the universe of The Uniques, the Cold War lasted until at least 1993, thanks to the Uniques replacing conventional weaponry. Among other effects, this has resulted in the Republicans maintaining their hold on the White House; it's mentioned that in 1996, when the story opens, Newt Gingrich is the President. It also resulted in an overabundance of unaffiliated Uniques serving as either vigilantes or supervillains.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_8706e0e0	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_8706e0e0	comment	In Otaku no Video, made in 1991, the Iron Curtain still exists and Gorbachev is still in power in 1997.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_87cf8985	comment	The default setting for Champions displayed a classic great mix-up turnaround. Red Doom, a 3rd edition supplement, was published in 1988, and depicted a pair of official Soviet superteams — "The Supreme Soviets", who were basically loyal to the state, if only because that suited their ambitious leader, Colonel Vasalov, and who thus tended to operate in the range from Worthy Opponents to Dirty Communists, and their auxiliary team, the "Comintern", who were created as something of a dumping-ground for less reliable or more independent-minded supers, and who could thus be more likely to come across as Chummy Commies. (Both included non-Russian members.) However, by the time the characters were updated for the 4th edition in Classic Enemies (1991), they needed major changes. One group, "Red Doom", had gone rogue, with Colonel Vasalov aiming to depose President Gorbachev and take over Russia, thus falling into the Renegade Russian category (though the team still had several non-Russian members); the other characters had become an independent hero team, the "New Guard", albeit still loyal to their various homelands and so potentially able to operate at cross-purposes to western heroes, making them basically Chummy Commies who weren't especially communist.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_8827bf0d	comment	This is a common trope in very old sports games (especially in sport simulations like Football Manager) since you can manage teams from pre-Cold War era and control them until beyond the 90s without any changes.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_883bd0f0	comment	Averted with Licence to Kill, which came out just before the Soviet collapse. The film-makers weren't sure whether the USSR was still going to be around by the time the movie was finished, so they purposely crafted the plot around something completely unrelated to Communism.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_889ea24c	comment	"The Evitable Conflict": When Byerley contemplates the Cold War, he characterizes it as a conflict between Karl Marx and Adam Smith, and how it was destined to be made irrelevant by robots inventing Casual Interplanetary Travel. In the setting of this story, the two sides adapted to new supply/demand concerns, making them economically similar.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_8ae25cfe	comment	The Peace War opens with a prologue set in 1997, featuring a US Air Force recon mission over the still-existing Soviet Union. It's a relatively minor case, though, because then the Peace War breaks out and rewrites all the existing political borders.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_8dea9503	comment	By contrast, the plot of 2010: The Year We Make Contact revolves almost entirely around Cold War tensions between the Soviet astronauts piloting the Alexei Leonov and the Americans who need their help to reach the wreck of the Discovery. Although not the book's, which is why a few lines about peace are tacked on with the message at the end of the film.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_8f1b2b6e	comment	In the novel President's Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth, Cade, the eponymous vampire, assassinated Osama bin Laden as he was fleeing Tora Bora. This could not be revealed to the public without breaking the Masquerade, especially after bin Laden revealed his true form as a Deep One. After bin Laden's real life death, a later book in the series has an offhand mention of the government staging said death for the sake of political capital.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_90e2f673	comment	Most of the relevant parts of the BattleTech timeline are in the middle parts of the 31st century, so it's a petty detail — but the game's timeline includes a second "Soviet Civil War" in the early 21st century, just before the first manned flight to Mars. Newer materials haven't retconned this; presumably, it's just assumed to be an alternate reality. Actually similar to Shadowrun (only logical since both were created by the same company), it was at one point mentioned that an attempted retcon to the Russian Federation was made, before the creators gave up and as much as declared (Particularly joked on on the BattleTech forums) that BattleTech is not our future but rather the future of the mid 1980s. Which actually explains quite a bit, including the bulk of much of the computer equipment in the game in comparison to modern computers and the like.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_9394b77b	comment	Ditto in the surprisingly entertaining Brendan Fraser film Blast from the Past. After emerging from their fallout shelter after three or so decades, the father (Christopher Walken) refuses to believe that the Soviet Union collapsed without a fight. "I bet they asked us for aid!" It's all an Evil Plan to get our money! Dirty Communists! At the end, he's setting up to build another bunker, convinced they never really collapsed.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_95226eb6	comment	The second edition of the Cyberpunk game (Cyberpunk 2020) was published in 1990. The fall of the Soviet Union is mentioned in the timeline (as is Germany's reunification), but the Soviet Union did not split up as in OTL. Instead, it reformed into the Federation of Soviet Republics, which is basically what would have happened if perestroika had led to roughly the same type of economic reforms as happened in China under Deng Xiaoping in OTL.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_95aba2f5	comment	Steve Jackson Games' Illuminati card game (first published in 1982) assigned groups various alignments that (mostly) came in opposing pairs; one opposing pair was "Government" and "Communist". When they adapted the concept into the Illuminati: New World Order Collectible Card Game (in 1995), "Communist" was demoted from an alignment to a secondary "attribute", and the "Corporate" alignment was introduced as the new opposite to "Government".
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_969f9b98	comment	The story of SPT Layzner features students from both sides of the Iron Curtain traveling to the moon together on the equivalent of a field trip. At least it actually predicts that the conflict between both sides will end, just much slower than it actually did. Also, the potential end of this Cold War is the stated reason that the aliens show up in the first place, to take over the world before the two sides work together well enough to take over their planet, which they have no idea exists in the first f-ing place.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_9a7088bc	comment	Chekov mentioned Leningrad in two separate episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series and, unlike the Trek example above in film, both are clearly references to the city. On the plus side, Chekov always referred to his homeland as "Russia", never uttering the words "Soviet Union" or "USSR". It's unknown whether the writers imagined the Soviet Union will still exist in the future.note Funnily enough, Anton Yelchin, who later played him in the new movies, was actually from Leningrad before his family emigrated to the US.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_a079a529	comment	The animated series Spiral Zone, produced in 1987 but set in 2007, assumes that the Soviet Union still exists in the early 21st century.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_a2bd35cf	comment	Angel Cop suffers from this as it takes place under the belief that the Japanese economy would continue to grow; instead, the economic bubble popped in the mid '90s.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_a6492af2	comment	In The Stand, written in 1979 and set in 1990, an American general instructs his subordinate to release a virus in each of the Soviet satellite states.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ac5db594	comment	The Dead Zone has a relatively minor one: Johnny Smith's vision of a future nuclear apocalypse ushered in by President Greg Stillson. Smith predicts that the war will originate in South Africa which, at the time the book was written, was pursuing a nuclear weapons program under the direction of the apartheid government. However, South Africa dismantled its arsenal in 1989, three years before Smith predicted Stillson would be elected.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ac614030	comment	GoLion started with Earth being destroyed in World War III, when the east and west finally launched their missiles at each other in 1999.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ae4ad177	comment	Inverted in Cool Runnings, which was made in 1993 and set in 1988. At one point, the flag of The New Russia is anachronistically included amongst the flags of the nations competing at the 1988 Winter Olympics. Period-appropriate Soviet flags and insignia are seen elsewhere in the film, however.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_af23aea5	comment	In Underground, a group of Serbian war refugees is duped into spending 20 years below ground making weapons to fight the Nazis, being told that the war continues to rage above their heads. When a few escape, they're quite confused.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_afc86b0a	comment	Ender's Game: The story had been published in 1985, with an existing Soviet Union. When re-released in 1991, such references were modified to reflect the decline of the Soviet Union. The sequel Ender's Shadow trilogy did not anticipate South Sudan becoming independent.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_b3788a5d	comment	In 2001: A Space Odyssey the Soviet Union was certainly around, evidenced by Dr. Heywood Floyd's meeting with some fellow space scientists from the Soviet side on his way to the Moon. The book also detailed a USA–USSR pact opposing China, which is the opposite of what happened in real life, but was plausible in the 1960s when written due to border clashes between China and the Soviet Union (Hunter S. Thompson was writing about the possibility as late as 1974, although that's partly because of his conviction that Richard Nixon was the Devil).
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_b3e0e2e0	comment	The Sum of All Fears is a close one-written in early 1991, months before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and revolves around a "hoaxed" Soviet attack on the US in January 1992, by which time the USSR had been formally dissolved for a month. The film adaptation was aware of this, with the main villain changed from an East German to a neo-Nazi.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_b6f4562d	comment	In Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth, the map of the Uplifted Animal-controlled post-apocalyptic Earth shows that Siberia is now the "Communi-Bear Silo State". Human civilization has collapsed entirely, but Russia is still communist.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_b8404ba7	comment	In the web-novel Domina, the Soviets are mentioned obliquely a few times even before the reveal that the story takes place in an alternate 2001. The timeline changed in 1970, and apparently one of the effects is that the USSR never fell. The Cold War appears to be long over, though, and the Soviets maintain the space station that serves as the communications hub for the space colonies.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_b92ad66b	comment	An early issue of Ultimate X-Men featured the X-Men foiling a plot by the Provisional IRA. At the time, the 1998 Peace Agreement was still young, and many suspected it might not hold. It did, and the Provisional IRA destroyed its last weapons and ceased to exist some time around 2005.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_bb187d29	comment	Full Disclosure: The novel takes place during the administration of the 41st president of the United States. Israel and the Arabs are allies, China and Japan have become one country, America and the Soviets are allies, and most of the U.S. government cabinet positions have been combined to form consolidated departments (for a total of five secretaries, and the attorney general).
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_bcb32dc6	comment	The first edition of Shadowrun had references to the Soviet Union in its future history, while the second swapped these out for the Russian Federation. Later editions said to hell with it and admitted the game's timeline is an Alternate History.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_c0add399	comment	The Third World War: August 1985, a 1978 mock-history book on a World War III, has the USSR collapse in 1985... In a highly violent manner after the nuclear destruction of Minsk, now Belarus, and Birmingham, UK.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_c2297a9c	comment	In early Judge Dredd comics, the Soviet Union is depicted as surviving into the 22nd century, having been renamed as the 'Sov Blok', and is depicted as the main villain in the Apocalypse War storyline. In later comics, it enters a Glasnost period, before reverting back to its previous militaristic self, although it uses the Judge System instead of being communist. By extension, this occurs in other strips which take place in the shared universe, such as Harlem Heroes.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_c25cfc1d	comment	Aleste 2, released in 1989, is set in 2039 and features the skyline of New York in a cutscene that features the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, as no one at the time could've predicted that the Twin Towers would fall victim to a terrorist attack in 2001.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_c3bbb7f7	comment	While not a Sci-Fi novel, the Dale Brown novel Sky Masters was published in 1991 and set in 1994. It makes references to the Soviet Union (which would cease to exist at the end of 1991) and features the Strategic Air Command in a prominent role. The SAC would be abolished in 1992.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_c43df4d8	comment	Doctor Who: While not being explicit about it, the story Warriors of the Deep (set circa 2084) involves two superpowers armed with nuclear weapons that highly mistrust each other. The Doctor even comments that nothing has changed: "There are still two power blocs, fingers poised to annihilate each other." To make things vaguer, Ingrid Pitt's character has an Eastern European accent (she was born in Poland). However this is more a case of Does This Remind You of Anything?, as we're never told that they're the same as the USSR and the NATO countries, merely that the same political situation has arisen. The Novelization doesn't even have the half-assed aversion; the blocs are named as East and West, and the sea base residents (the "good guys") are from the West Bloc, while the East Bloc has a policy of "uniformity, obedience and central control". It was not adapted by the original writer, and shoots any subtlety in the original setup stone dead. Several UNIT stories produced in both the 70s and the 80s also mention the "end of the Cold War" but still have a USSR. This combines The Great Politics Mess-Up with the UNIT dating mess-up, since UNIT stories were notoriously vague and contradictory as to whether they were 20 Minutes into the Future or The Present Day.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_cc50f8c4	comment	Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, first released for the MSX2 in 1990, not only predicts that the Soviet Union will still be around in 1999, it also features a character named Natasha Marcova (Gustava Heffner in later versions) who works for the StB (the Czechoslovakian Secret Police), a real-life organization that was dissolved during the very same year the game was released.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_d0f995a5	comment	In Moonbase 3, the Soviet Union still exists in 2003. It operates Moonbase 2, one of five lunar outposts (the others being operated by the US, Europe, China and Brazil). Furthermore, in the fifth episode "Castor and Pollux", it is revealed that the Soviets are on the verge of sending a manned mission to Mars and that their long-term goal is to launch a manned orbital flight of Jupiter using Mars as a springboard.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_d30b220e	comment	Knights of Buena Vista is a Campaign Comic covering the Disney Animated Canon. When they are playing Wreck-It Ralph, it turns out that Zangief still doesn't know the USSR fell, and no one's had the heart to tell him.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_d7859aa2	comment	In AKIRA, set in 2030, a Soviet Navy helicopter transports scientists to an American aircraft carrier.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_d78e771e	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_d78e771e	comment	Interestingly, novels set later in that universe—like 1974's The Mote in God's Eye—avoid the problem. In the far future, a post-communist Russia venerates both its Communist and its Imperial past—so there's a Russian (and Eastern Orthodox) world named "Saint Ekaterina" with a battleship named Lenin. Under Putin in recent years, Russia has been doing just that.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_e58673ff	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_e58673ff	comment	The miniseries Amerika posits a U.S. that was taken over by the Soviet Union in 1987 and was now Soviet-occupied territory. The reason given in the movie as to why this happens is "American apathy." To contrast, there is also a novel entitled USSA: United Soviet States of America, which is a murder mystery set in American-occupied Russia.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_e5c5bc22	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_e5c5bc22	comment	GURPS Terradyne has a much-reduced (with only five republics left) USSR in the year 2120. Again, this was written in the period where it was expected that some states would peel off from the Union but not that it would break completely.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_e66a25a9	comment	Rifts has a weird example. The Sourcebook Warlords of Russia was written well after the fall of the Soviet Union (the game itself came out in 1991), yet one of the power blocs mentioned in the setting is a group called the "Sovietski." The book explains that they are the remnants of a second Soviet Union that was formed in the 21st Century before the Coming of the Rifts.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_e782b6f4	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_e782b6f4	comment	The Chaos Timeline has its own version for in-universe works done before the Logo and AI-induced abortion of World War III but set 20 Minutes into the Future.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_e97e9ac4	comment	Harpoon was released in 1989 and one expansion pack assumed that the Soviet Union would still exist in 1996. After the USSR's collapse, there was a big scramble to create new scenarios that weren't obsolete. Of course, since it was a simulation the existing ones were still developed.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ebc16967	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ebc16967	comment	The original arcade edition of Street Fighter II was released less than a year before the fall of the Soviet Union and had one of its fighters, namely Zangief, as a Soviet representative. His ending sequence even features Mikhail Gorbachev, who is helicoptered in to congratulate him on his victory, espousing the greatness of the "Soviet spirit". Despite subsequent editions of the game being released after the fall of the Soviet Union, Zangief's nationality and ending remained unchanged, although the SNES and Genesis ports attempted to somewhat fix that by having Zangief address Gorbachev as "Mr. Ex-President". This was justified in the Alpha series, which took place chronologically before Street Fighter II, but other games don't have this excuse. It wasn't until Street Fighter IV that Zangief's nationality was officially changed to the Russian Federation, with the current flag. To make it even less consistent, Hyper Street Fighter II, released in 2004, changed the flag of Hong Kong from its earlier British colonial flag to its current five petal design while keeping Zangief's Soviet nationality. And Hong Kong was under British control for the entire history of the Soviet Union! "Ultra Street Fighter II" for the Nintendo Switch, however, replaced the USSR's flag and voice line with Russia's.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ed0803a7	comment	Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was made as a commentary about the Cold War winding down, though it came out a few weeks before the Soviet Union actually collapsed. Its Star Trek counterpart, the Klingon Empire, does not.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ee384546	comment	Cyberpunk 2077 inherited some of this from its source material.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ef076a36	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ef076a36	comment	In-universe in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Future's End". When Voyager is sent back to 1996, Tom Paris, the ship's expert on the 20th Century, enlists the aid of an astronomer called Rain Robinson, claiming to be a CIA agent investigating a Soviet plot. When she tells him the USSR collapsed five years ago, he pauses for a second and replies "That's what they want you to think!"
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_f01bdbd7	comment	A major plot point of Eon, the Greg Bear novel written in 1985 and set in the early 21st century, is that the USSR still exists and the Third World War breaks out between it and the USA. On the other hand the plot makes extensive use of the concept of parallel worlds and alternate histories, which handwaves the problem away: The story is not taking place in our timeline.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_f16adb7	comment	An inversion of sorts. The DVD menu for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull includes a shot of a world map. It's a post-Cold War map, even though the movie is set in 1957 and the Soviets are the main villains.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_f37a1662	comment	Islands in the Net: The Soviet Union is portrayed as lasting into the 2020s.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_f4313238	comment	The sequel Ender's Shadow trilogy did not anticipate South Sudan becoming independent.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_f4bc7cf	comment	The early books of the Venus Prime series, being based on old short stories written by Arthur C. Clarke and having been started in the eighties, imply that Russia is still Communist, despite taking place at least a century into the future. The last book, written more recently, clarifies that the Soviet Union is still around (or reformed itself), but the second "S" in USSR stands for something other than "Socialist", and apparently, there are still Russians who want to return their country to socialism; the Soviet colony on Mars featured in the third book was an attempt to pacify them.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_faf0ebf1	comment	The USSR still exists in Blade Runner 2049 as a deliberate attempt to maintain the aesthetic of the first film. The franchise as a whole also serves as this for Japan Takes Over the World.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_fd74a791	comment	The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Eternity Weeps, published in 1997 but set in 2003, features Iran and Iraq soldiers competing to acquire an alien artifact. No one could have foreseen that in 2003 Iraq would be occupied by the US-led coalition.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_fdbace96	comment	In Gravity Falls, Rumble McSkirmish, a character from a Street Fighter II parody brought to the real world, orders Dipper to take him to the Soviet Union, who responds how that's going to be difficult for a number of reasons.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ff9ab17f	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_ff9ab17f	comment	Star Trek: The Next Generation: The second episode featured the SS Tsiolkovsky whose dedication plaque reveals that it was built and launched in the USSR in 2363. In the episode "The High Ground", Data casually mentions that a series of terrorist attacks led to the reunification of Ireland into a single state in 2024. At the point the episode was released (1990), a peace treaty was seen as utterly inconceivable, and many believe the only way for that to happen would be for the United Kingdom to collapse. Of course, reunification in full has still not happened, but time will tell whether this prediction will come true depending on how Brexit goes. Incidentally, the reference to Ireland being reunited due to terrorism led to this episode being banned on British television for years afterward. It was finally shown on the BBC in 2007. It has never been shown on Irish television. With unionist parties winning fewer Northern Irish seats than pro-reunification parties in the 2019 general election, it’s looking like Star Trek may actually have been slightly late in its prediction. It still wouldn’t be right about the terrorism.
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The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_fff2d31b	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Great Politics Mess-Up / int_fff2d31b	comment	Grendel has the USSR still existing in 2120, at which point the simultaneous assassination of both its Premier and the US President at a summit ignites World War III. (After this, the Soviet Union doesn't exist any more, but neither does most of the USA.)
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

The Great Politics Mess-Up	processingCategory2	Ambiguity Index
AmericanFlagg	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Learning To Lie	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Yesterday (2002) / int_e668bd55	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
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The Guardians (Victor Milan) / int_e668bd55	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
ASmallTownInGermany	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
BK-0010	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
ContestOfChampions	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
EastGermany	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Geoduck	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
GeorgeHWBush	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
HeartOfADog	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Hole in Flag	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
IWantMyJetPack	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
KirBulychevWorks	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
NASA	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Political Stereotype	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Ptitle1d213erd	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
RadarSystems	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
RonaldReagan	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Russian Language	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Samhuddy	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
TheChancellorsOfGermany	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The '80s	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
TheGreatPoliticsMessup	sameAs	The Great Politics Mess-Up
We ARE Struggling Together / Real Life	seeAlso	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Wasteland (Video Game) / int_e668bd55	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
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Empire from the Ashes / int_e668bd55	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress / int_e668bd55	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up
Bill Nye the Science Guy / int_e668bd55	type	The Great Politics Mess-Up

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