East-Meg One

East Meg One by Carlos Ezquerra

East Meg One (or East-Meg One) was a Mega City built around the Moscow/St Petersburg sprawl. It was the de facto leader of the Sov Block (or "Sov-Cities") until its destruction.

It has a sister city called East Meg Two.

The Sov-Cities were introduced in prog 50 of 2000 AD (1978), with East-Meg One and destroyed in prog 267 (1982).

History

In 2070, before the Atomic War broke out, the city was called Moscow-St-Petersburg and part of the Union of Soviet Mega-Cities. Following the war, the city started to be called East Meg. As before the war, East-Meg One entered a Cold War with Mega-City One.

East-Meg One was part of the Sino-Sov-Megacity Wars that raged in the 2070s. In later decades, it was part of the Sov Block's covert war with the Sino Block and fought Sino-backed separatists.

Sov lunar troops in 2100

In 2097, the Teknological Institute, led by Administrator Dvorak, chanced upon the discovery of a pacifist, socialist 'Counter Earth' while doing interdimensional studies. It was noted that the city could be used to show communism worked; the Judges instead saw the military value, first that the other Earth could be a safe haven if East-Meg One was ever destroyed.

Belikov, "the Thin White Duke", ran the anti-dissident paramility Omon Division until he backed the wrong faction in a schism. He was smuggled to Euro-City by some of his loyal friends and became a crime boss, "die Weiss Russe".

The assassination of a Sov athlete at the 2100 Luna Olympics sparked off a brief war between the Sov-Cities and the Luna One - luckily for all concerned, at this point in time wars had been turned into a sporting event, with a few soldiers monitored by a referee, to reduce collateral damage. The Sovs hoped to seize the Apollo territories. Thanks to Judge Dredd, Luna One prevailed and was awarded some Sov territory.

Orlok was East-Meg One's prized assassin and in 2100, while all eyes were on the Olympics crisis, he pilfered a MC-1 laser defence system from Brit-Cit, a city easier to penetrated. East-Meg One had a number of intelligence assets in Brit-Cit's intelligence and organised crime, but many were lost in this mission. Later in the year, Orlok was ordered to kill Belikov and lure into the light Khukov, the 2nd in command of Oman who'd assisted him - a mission that meant using up a number of other Brit-Cit assets to fake that Orlok was a rogue agent.(Zhukov "died in his sleep").

Orlok in 2100 East-Meg One

The Intelligence Directorat ordered Orlok to capture a psi artist called Jiri Rasputin to keep him out of East-Meg Two's hands: the city's independent strike and push for detente with the West was irking them. Rasputin's repeated predictions of East-Meg One in flames was dismissed, even when 're-education' methods failed to work.

By 2101, gargantuan East-Meg One antipol ships were 'officially' working to decontaminate the Black Atlantic (someone Dredd didn't fall for). One, under the control of Judge Molotov, operated just outside the 40 mile-limit marking the perimeter of Mega-City One’s jurisdiction. Its real purpose was to help the Sovs commit espionage and maintain contact with their secret agents. Dredd pursued one agent & stolen anti-missile defence plans to the boat but was nearly killed by pollution. After Doctor Rodnina flushed the poisons from him, Dredd recovered and arrested the entire boat.

The Cold War heated up in 2103 when East-Meg One neared completion of the apocalypse warp defence system: using dimensional warps to send missiles to the Counter Earth. In order to hit their enemy without being caught, they used a robot - the psychotic pirate named Captain Skank - to hijack MC-1 nuclear weapons and bombard the city with them. This was intended as a deniable asset but Mega-City One made the Sovs aware that they knew about the deception. Unable to go to war yet, East-Meg One nuked one of its own sectors as repayment.

By 2104, the city had 500 million inhabitants.

The Apocalypse War finally broke out between East Meg One and Mega-City One in 2104. Orlock spread a "Block Mania" chemical throughout the city, causing citizens (and even Judges) to become aggressive & territorial. By the time Mega-City One was aware of the threat, the East-Meg forces were already attacking space and sea assets before launching a barrage of nukes. Once the city was weak, Supreme Judge Bulgarin ordered his most trusted War-Marshal, "Mad Dog" Kazan, to launch an invasion. (East-Meg One convinced Mega-City Two and Texas City to remain out of the war, in exchange for East-Meg Two remaining out)

East-Meg One forces overrun most of Mega-City One, while Kazan - disgruntled that he never had a seat on the Diktatorat - had the government killed and took command as Supreme Judge. The war was still lost when Judge Dredd led a covert commando team into East-Meg One, seized control of a missile silo, and then personally pushed the button to launch a TAD. The entire city was destroyed and the Sov Judges lost heart, surrendering.

In a discussion in 2127, the destruction of East-Meg One was considered to have ended the Sov Block as a "coherent geopolitical force".

Survivors and those abroad sought refuge in East-Meg Two. Some of the survivors formed a government in exile at the New Kremlin in the Mediterranean Free State and in 2121, in The Doomsday Scenario, they attempted to put Dredd on trial.

The destruction of East-Meg One would have consequences as surviving Sovs attempted to get revenge on Mega-City One. This finally succeeded in 2134, when Chaos Day wiped out the bulk of Mega-City One.

Megagrad

The Sov Block attempted to rebuild the city in the late 2110s, discussing the issue with Mega-City One to gain aid. "Project Phoenix" would see Megagrad get built in 2118 and stirr up a large number of angry ghosts in 2118. With few active clairvoyants post-Judgement Day, the Psi-Korps dug up Viktor Zadek from a black-site gulag and used MC-1 tek to augment him for exorcism duties. (Tek-Judge Brubaker, seconded from MC-1 to assist with this, was secretly working as a spy) Zadek successfully exorcised several ghosts who'd been killing or terrorising workers in their grief, and also uncovered that the local chaplain had been alerted of the coming Apocalypse War and abandoned his family to save himself - Zadek sentenced him to staying, to "atone". One feral ghost began stalking the depressingly-many rapists, both workers and Judges, at Megagrad.

Megagrad was abandoned and in the 2130s most of it was still ruins, being reclaimed and picked over by scavengers. Corrupt official Kerensky sent a convict suicide squad in to get the dimension warp but was killed in the attempt.

In the Red Razors strips, the city is rebuilt as Sov-Block One by the 2170s but abandoned by most: its few remaining Judges had gone totally insane executing people for such crimes as stepping on cracks, not eating greens and not helping with the washup.

Government

Supreme Judge Bulgarin.

The equivalent of the Council of Five was the three-man Diktatorat, headed by a Supreme Judge. Sov Judge law was harsher than even Mega-City One, with the Sovs sending their athletes to gulags for being caught cheating (even though they'd been ordered to cheat).

Depiction in strip

The "Sov-Cities" were first named in prog 50, with East-Meg One named in prog 128. It was intended to represent the remnants of the Soviet Union (and drawn in The Apocalypse War to remind readers of Moscow). As a Soviet villain during the Cold War, they were presented as brutal, callous, and untrustworthy.

Original world map from Mega-Special #1

In 1988's The Judge Dredd Mega-Special #1, the Block covering the Warsaw Pact, most of China, the Korean peninsular, Mongolia, and Scandinavia, though most of this would be retconed later (with China said to have always been the rival Sino-Block).

Trivia

• When discussing the potential death toll among their civilians in the war, Supreme Judge Bulgarin asked "the people? What have they got to do with it?" Ironically, Dredd had a similar response to Mega-City One's own population.

• It was the first Sov story that made warfare into a sporting event - this setup went completely unmentioned in later strips.

• Maps of Dredd's world (see below) tend to place East-Meg One in the wrong place, as it's intended to be centred on Moscow.

• When the Sovs of East-Meg One were created, nobody was aware the Soviet Union would dissolve in December 1991. The comics politely ignored this development and the The Judges novellas would say a Soviet revival happened in the 2040s.

• Megazine 2.01-07'sArmaggedon was originally meant as a Dredd prequel story and depicted the Soviet Union assisting the Islamic Federation against Israel in 1994 - unfortunately the story started in May 1992, six months after the USSR ended!

• 2000AD's other near-future Russians were the Volgan Republic of Asia, from Invasion! and ABC Warriors. In the early days, a few of the early strips were linked together by background references but no Dredd strip ever showed the Volgans (though an Annual text feature would refer to Invasion! and a Megazine text feature would reference it as a historical event).

Gallery

A map of Notable Regions in the Judge Dredd Universe.