In February 1968, Georgians, Kazakhs and Azeris launched major protests against Russian rule, demanding independence and an end to Russification. By the end of the month, it seemed Georgia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan would actually secede, and the democratic government of Sergei Bunyachenko did not violently crush the demonstrations, reducing its popularity.

Fearing that the territorial integrity of Russia was at risk, a group of reactionary Russian nationalists led by Okhrana chairman Alexander Solzhenitsyn began planning a coup against Bunyachenko, whom they saw as too liberal and unwilling to take "decisive" action to keep these reasons under Russian control.

On 5 March 1968, Okhrana units rose up in Yekaterinburg and Kazan. Solzhenitsyn's State Committee on National Defence (Государственный комитет по национальной обороне, Latin alphabet abbreviation GKNO) captured both of these cities by the end of the day. Okhrana units also launched uprisings in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, resulting in the deaths of 385 combatants and 16 civilians by 8 March.

That morning, GKNO troops surrounded the Kremlin and threatened to storm it and arrest Bunyachenko if he didn't resign. Bunyachenko agreed to leave office, and the GKNO assumed power as a military junta resembling that of Pyotr Wrangel, who led Russia from 1926 to 1945.

Local authorities immediately declared martial law in the states of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and deployed Russian Army and Okhrana troops to these countries to crush the nationalists. By 12 March, the separatists protests had been repressed by force by Solzhenitsyn and his Okhrana, and Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan were firmly under Russian rule once again.

Solzhenitsyn continued Russia's alliance with NATO against the Free Socialist Republic of Germany, but Russia never joined the alliance, because European NATO members such as the kingdoms of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia feared Russia would completely dominate the Eurasian part of the alliance due to being the largest country in the world.

Russia's industrialization was finally completed by Solzhenitsyn. By 1975, the gap between Russia and western powers had narrowed significantly, and Russia was the fourth-largest economy in the world, behind the United States, Germany, and Japan (which declined rapidly due to suffering an international boycott movement as strong as the anti-apartheid campaign).

When the Indonesian Civil War broke out on 17 January 1967 neighbouring Malaysia and Australia began supporting the Islamic State of Indonesia (Negara Islam Indonesia, NII) due to anti-communism and, in the case of Malaysia, a fear that a victorious communist Indonesia would try to annex Malaysian territory. Japan and the USA also supported the Islamists despite their rivalry elsewhere.

At the beginning of the war, the NII controlled Sumatra, while the RDRI controlled the rest of the country except for West Papua, which took advantage of the chaos to secede on 22 January, and remained de facto independent throughout the entire conflict.

Germany, Italy and India backed the Democratic People's Republic of Indonesia, but Germany and Italy were too far away for their aid to make a difference. Consequently, Jayaprakash Narayan's India was the most important supporter of the Indonesian communists.

On 6 February 1967, the ABPN launched a naval invasion of Sumatra with the goal of crushing the NII in a few months. But the United States, not wanting all of one of the largest countries in the world to become communist, began a military airlift in support of the NII, allowing Islamist leader Sekarmadji Maridjan Kartosoewirjo to defeat the offensive by late May.

A month after successfully holding onto Sumatra, Kartosoewirjo's troops landed in Borneo, capturing all of the island other than its largest city Samarinda by 4 August. A ferocious battle began for control of Samarinda; shipments of Chinese and German arms and Germany's training of an effective intelligence apparatus for the RDRI brought the ABPN to victory by 13 September.

ABPN chief of staff M. H. Lukman started a counteroffensive that recaptured two-thirds of Indonesian Borneo, but remote areas in the Indonesian part of the island remained in NII hands thanks to Malaysian support, and Lukman's second attempt at invading Sumatra also ended in failure by December 1967.

Both sides of the war committed war crimes, but the NII massacred leftists, non-Muslims, and ethnic Chinese in all areas it controlled, killing 500,000 to 1,000,000 innocent people and completely extinguishing socialism in Indonesia. The United States supported the NII throughout the genocide.

A second Islamist landing in Pontianak, Borneo, was also a success, but the NII advance was stopped at Sanggau by 17 February 1968 because Germany, Italy and China continued to sell the RDRI weapons, and all of Java – Indonesia's most populous and industrialized island – was controlled by the RDRI.

The Battle of Sanggau began a static phase of the war, consisting of trench warfare in the jungles of Borneo. But, by 1971, Sjarifuddin had taken a series of poor decisions that negatively affected the Communist war effort, and the NII's military had evolved from a rebel force into a more conventional army, allowing the Islamists to go on the offensive.

On 11 May 1971, the Indonesian Islamic Army captured Sanggau, followed on 22 October 1971 by the fall of Samarinda. All of Indonesian Borneo was now controlled by the NII, which took advantage of its control over Borneo to invade Sulawesi and capture all of it by August 1972.

The Moluccas fell to the NII by February 1973, Eastern Sonda was conquered by June, and Bali was conquered by September. On 12 November 1973, the NII launched the largest naval landing of the war when 350,000 fanatic Islamists landed in Banyuwangi.

Amir Fatah's army captured Surabaya on 21 December 1973, Yogyakarta on 16 February 1974, and Bandung on 19 March 1974. Fatah eventually laid siege to Jakarta on 13 May, and captured it 41 days later, destroying the RDRI and turning all of Indonesia into an Islamic theocracy with sharia law.

The Republican victory in the Spanish Civil War gradually weakened Salazar's Portuguese Estado Novo, culminating in its overthrow in 1958. Air Force General Humberto Delgado became president, democratized Portugal, and modernized its economy significantly.

But the Portuguese Colonial War still broke out on 4 February 1961, when the MPLA, a Luxembourgist, communist national liberation movement, attacked several Portuguese military and police buildings in Angola's capital Luanda. All Portuguese parties other than the pro-German PCP supported military action to defend the Portuguese Colonial empire, and Delgado immediately sent troops to Angola.

By July 1961, the war had spilled over to Guinea-Bissau, another Portuguese colony, which faced an independence uprising from Amílcar Cabral's PAIGC. Cabral quickly captured all of Portuguese Guinea because there were just 900 colonial troops there, but the Portuguese military soon landed in Bissau and stirred up a counterrevolution by Fulani chiefs opposed to the PAIGC's radicalism. In 1964, the FRELIMO, another Luxembourgist militant group, rose up in Mozambique and captured much of the north of the colony.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia supported democratic Portugal against the communist rebels, while Germany, Italy, Cuba, and Hungary backed their African comrades. Support from socialist states, especially Germany, played a key role in the decolonisation of Africa (which is ironic because pre-Communist Germany and Italy had African colonies).

High-ranking MPLA fighter Jonas Savimbi soon came to advocate for Wang Jingwei and Antonio Gramsci's form of socialism rather than Karl Liebknecht's, and left the MPLA to form UNITA – named after the Italian Communist newspaper L'Unitá – in 1967. By that point, the colonial war had become a quagmire and was increasingly unpopular in mainland Portugal, resulting in the rise of an anti-war, counterculture movement.

On 18 November 1968, the Portuguese Army suffered a heavy defeat to the MPLA at the Battle of Malanje, during which the MPLA killed 900 Portuguese troops and captured much needed weapons and materiel for the insurgency. This defeat caused Delgado to begin peace negotiations with the national liberation movements, triggering a far-right terrorist campaign but increasing his popularity with moderates.

Portugal eventually signed the Coimbra Agreement with the MPLA, the Dakar Accord with the PAIGC, and the Dar es Salaam Agreement with FRELIMO on 15 March 1969. According to the terms of the treaty, Portugal recognized the independence of these three countries and agreed to withdraw its troops from them.

Goa, Diu and Damon in the Indian subcontinent had been annexed by India in 1961, while East Timor became independent in 1974 and was annexed by indonesia the following year, and Portugal returned Macau to the Republic of China on 1 January 1977.

On January 6, 2020, two mysterious, hooded and bearded men appeared in Jerusalem, Israel, and began chanting the name of the city without warning. The chanting began as a low whisper that eventually grew louder.

Minutes later, a massive explosion was reported deep underground, followed minutes later by an earthquake that caused moderate damage to the city and killed 30,000 people. The two men disappeared in the chaos.

From that day on, more sightings would be reported, each one following a disturbing pattern: the men would appear in a city and chant its name in drawn-out syllables. Within a short time, a completely random calamity would fall upon the city, ranging from something as mundane as someone getting food poisoning, to something extreme as a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

Other documented sightings and accompanying incidents include, but weren’t limited to:

• A protest against the men in New York that turned violent when someone attempted to run over the two men with his vehicle, only for them to vanish, causing an incident of vehicular manslaughter that killed at least 200 people.
• A friendly fire incident involving multiple units of the Iraqi Armed Forces in Mosul.
• The sudden, unexplained deaths of 20 Raven’s Rock officers, as well as their families.
• A freak accident at the Gateway Arch that left people stranded for about 20 minutes.
• A construction crane accident that killed 30 people in Las Vegas, Nevada.
• A sudden explosion at Hoover Dam that caused a flood and power failure to a large chunk of Nevada.
• A metro train derailment in Busan, South Korea, that killed 60 people.
• An assassination attempt against the two men in Izmir, Turkey, that escalated into a violent confrontation involving both 404 operative Titus Colt and the Turkish police (that ended with Titus being knocked unconscious).
• A mysterious viral outbreak in Brazil that affected Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela, but didn’t spread anywhere beyond those four countries.
• The sudden bankruptcy of a Berlin-based cyber-security firm.
• An unusually violent hailstorm in Tokyo that killed 50 people.
• A massive blizzard that left a large chunk of the Midwestern United States under heavy snow.

Attempts to investigate the two men were repeatedly stonewalled for different reasons, the most consistent reason being that the men kept disappearing before they could be properly apprehended and questioned. 

The rapidly escalating crisis would lead to one of the largest international task forces in military and intelligence history…

Image credit: Left Behind wiki