In her 40 years on this God's green Earth, Mary had lived through both world wars, the invention of technologies that would dramatically shift the way she lives, an apocalyptic event, and yet, out of all of them, none would affect her as dramatically, as the Cultural Revolution. When the Communist Party of the USA took control over the State Government of Ohio, few could have predicted what would come next. Under the leadership of General Secretary Eugene Dennis, the CPUSA has faced its trial by fire in a war for its own survival against the fascist Michigan regime in its formative years. It was also this war that has allowed the CPUSA to consolidate its grip over the state. With seditionist groups fully crushed and Michigan's forces shattered, 1958 was the victory lap for the revolution that had proved its merits.

The victory lap would go on to be more disastrous than anyone would think.

The core of the CPUSA supporter base was the urban dwelling proletariat, racial and gender minorities as well as the young intellectuals in the many universities that are public funded around Ohio. These are the groups that first bought into the ideals of the revolution, and it is these groups that are the vanguard of it. The CPUSA had worked to dramatically upend the societal order that had been built upon the Judeo-Christian traditions of America to build its own in Ohio. Racial and gender discrimination are lifted and banned in one fell swoop. The landed gentry, destroyed through the seizure of private property. But dramatic changes also creates dramatic backlashes, as liberals and conservatives around Ohio rally around seditionist groups and work to threaten the integrity of the revolution. It is thus, in 1958, at the Seventeenth National Convention of the Communist Party USA that a new radical line would be set by the party: A Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution in of itself is a struggle. A struggle of class and of race, a struggle against the very chains of bourgeois ideals that continues to weigh down the minds of many including our very own proletariats. The struggle would only be won once these ideals are expelled, excised, and expunged. Revolutionary Military Committees - RMCs, were a crucial part of the subversive revolutionary grand strategy that the CPUSA had employed to come to power, and now, they would play an important role in the revolution for the minds. Recruiting mostly young university students, urban dwelling blue collar workers or blacks, the RMCs would form armed Red Guard Brigades who would patrol all aspects of society. Family and friends were not spared. If a Red Guard brigadier would identify a hint of reactionary and bourgeois thought at family dinner, they would report their own parents to the Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BCI), who would issue an incident reports that would allow the State Police (StaPo) to arrest individuals without warrants or trial. From there, individuals would spend the rest of their lives in worker camps based in the many forests in the hinterlands of Michigan or the Appalachian foothills of Ohio, working themselves to exhaustion and death under the watchful eye of the Red Guards.

A mother of 4, Mary had been no less than a caring, doting mother to her three sons and one daughter. Yet sentiments have no place in this brave new world. A registered Republican and devoted Christian, her eldest son reported her to his RMC after she refused to let her youngest daughter go to university - prepping her for a domestic life. Such an action is a direct offense to the ideals of the revolution, and for that Mary would be sent to the Wayne Forest Detention Camp where she would work for 6 months, with barely a meal a day, dying of exposure in November. Her story is one that is repeated, not once, not twice, not a hundred thousand times, but over three hundred thousand times across the Great Lakes Counties that had been liberated by the May Revolution. Those who were able to escape this fate, fleeing to neighboring Indiana, EMAAS or north to Canada often find all their belongings and properties back home confiscated by the State and their family members taken into questioning for being associates to traitors against the Revolution.

It is with this backdrop that the end of the Great Patriotic War would come in late November, Red Army soldiers discharged after tour of duty would return to their families, hardened both in combat experience - and in ideological conviction. They will be training the next generation of Red Army soldiers who now look south towards the next state that is to be liberated - Kentucky, but also to bring the ideals that they had fight and nearly die for on the trenches of Tecumseh and Adrian.

[Army Tac 10, AFTech 4, IND 1]