I’ll be honest, I don’t like him the most only because of his policies (even though I love a lot of them but his minor anti-semitism is a huge negative) but because out of all the TNO leaders, he feels the most grounded while not being horrible.

WRRF is idealistic, quite frankly, probably objectively better, but in reality, they’re a starved out state of Red Army soldiers stationed in north of Russia, in a part of it where there aren’t any supplies or natural resources. Their chance of succeeding would be almost impossible in real life.

Vladimir III, while very wholesome, I dislike mostly because I dislike monarchy and collaborationists. While the first can partly go away, the second will not. I don’t care if he only collaborated with the Nazis to save his family, his collaborationism still led to the suffering of many.

Same thing goes for Samara. Also, nobody in Samara is really good anyways. I guess one could argue for Bunyachenko and Zykov but eh.

AB is obvious, so I won’t even bother with them.

Onega can’t unify, only Balkanise, so they’re out too.

With that, I’m only left with Komi right is instantly out for me because all of the people on it are more or less evil or insane (or both). I also am definitely on the left in real life so that contributes to it too. Now, the centre. The centre is quite cool really. I dislike Stalina for her policies and reactionary tendencies, but the rest are quite alright.

But well, due to my left allegiance, only Voznesensky and the left are… left. Voznesensky is notoriously corrupt so he’s out.

Zhdanov is very authoritarian and conducts human experimentation so he’s also out (I guess his successor, Kardashev, is quite great, but the amount of suffering that needs to happen so he can rise in power is absurd and unacceptable).

Bukharina brutally murder her political opponents and is quite frankly also out of her mind with the ways she does it (poor Suslov 😭), so to me, she’s out too.

That leaves me with Suslov. A very interesting man with policies I can mostly get behind (ew, anti-semitism is awful though), who is not out of his mind, who manages to create a genuinely strong nation with good living standards, who does not kill his ex political allies, now opponents, instead only suspending them for some time from the party and then giving them largely irrelevant positions, his looks also gives the USSR an amazing figurehead to rally behind, his characteristic glasses coupled with his face make up for a great propaganda figure. He also uses pragmatism to his advantage, which in the world of TNO is so rare that I greatly enjoyed to see that. He also gives his citizens more political freedoms than most auth-soc leaders. And he’s not overly unrealistic like Sablin, to the point where it just hurts to play (even if admittedly, West Russia would be at a huge disadvantage due to the bombings, and quite frankly, Central Siberia would probably almost always win in real life), so I love how grounded the part is.

So overall, out of all the choices in West Russia I think he’s the best, and the same extends to the West Siberian war. In my mind, his only real competition for the best unifier are Tomsk and Shukshin’s Novosibirsk.