Inspired by Balkan Dave's recent post about a Russian Civil War book, I finally took the plunge on a box of WW1 Russians from Wargames Atlantic.
Ever
since I got a Count Casimir variant sculpt from Pulp Figures, I've
been thinking I should make a White Russian emigre faction for him to
lead. As mentioned in the blog post above, the anti-Communist side of
the Russian Civil War was politically and temperamentally very much in
the same ballpark as the silver shirted and white robed factions I've
already assembled. Historically, after losing to the Bolsheviks these
jerks mostly relocated to the future Axis powers, and would participate
in WW2 in both the German and Japanese armies. But some did end up in
the US, including Boris Brasol who became buddies with Henry (*spits in
disdain*) Ford, so this is a plausible faction for my interwar US
setting even if it's not strictly a historical one. "Cossacks" also make
an appearance as henchmen in an early Batman comic, so there's some
"authenticity" from the fiction side as well.
Thusly
untethered from the iron grip of historicity, I decided to have fun
with the uniforms. I've got the RCW White Armies book by Osprey, so I
basically painted a sampler of those uniforms. I guess the idea is that
when Brasol or Bermont-Avalov or Vonsyatsky calls up them to join the big reactionary
alliance, each one just gets his old uniform and Mosin-Nagant out of
storage and reports for duty.
In
both Pulp Alley and my homebrew system, antagonists can be single
miniatures or groups of five. So in addition to "fire teams" of four
rifleman and one sword-wielding officer each, I have also assembled a
few "specialists": a sniper and spotter, a mad bomber, a submachine
gunner and a melee expert, to provide some tactical variety and pulpy
feel. The Pulp Figures guy is here too, in the white jacket.
The minis are
mostly the aforementioned WW1 Russians, but I mixed in some partisan
bits from the same manufacturer, some Gripping Beast hairy heads, and a
handful of Warlord Games WW2 bits (eg the katana arms, and both
binoculars). Finally, there are a couple German and a couple US bodies,
reflecting how the Whites were often supplied by foreign powers.
A pretty intimidating bunch, all told! I'm
still trying to decide what to call them in my game. The Russian
All-Military Union (RAMU) and the Russian Imperial Union-Order (RIUO)
are both appropriately sinister-sounding real orgs, and there were also a
couple of explicitly Fascist Russian emigre groups if I want to be
especially on-the-nose with it. But I can always make something up
instead.
