People's Republics
The People’s Republics is the common-tongue name for the Superbloc — the 70-republic communist alliance that employs Hershel and runs the Operant Bureau. Officially it’s the Supreme Union of Proletarian Republics. “The People’s Republics” is what citizens and outsiders typically say.
The Superbloc is one of three great powers in the game’s world. The other two are La Luz — a techno-fascist empire on the rise — and EMTERR, an investment bank that owns most of what isn’t ruled by either of the other two.
The state of the bloc in ‘96
The bloc is old and tired. The official ideology is post-historical materialism. The actual situation is:
- 70 republics, “fraught” relationships with each other.
- Hundreds of millions of people, but no recent victories worth bragging about.
- An intelligence service (the Opera) that still pretends it’s playing on equal footing with La Luz and EMTERR.
Hershel’s internal read on the bloc is that it seems “befuddled that the rest of the world has left it behind”. That’s the player POV. You are an operant of a power that is convinced it should still matter.
The Portofiro arc lives in this gap. La Luz is moving aggressively. The Weeping Eye is crackdowning in a former Luzian colony. The Superbloc’s response is to thaw out a disgraced operant, send her to babysit one asset, and then cancel the assignment when the asset gets killed.
Why Hershel is here
Hershel was born in Mircea — outside the bloc. She fled into the bloc as a radicalized student and ended up in the People’s Republic of Kohila, the bloc’s anchor state. The Opera recruited her in ‘82. The People’s Republics is, in other words, her adopted country.
Overview[]
The Superbloc , officially the Supreme Union of Proletarian Republics and commonly abbreviated to the People’s Republics , is an alliance of communist countries in the world of ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies.
Overview[]
The Superbloc is a communist megastate that consists of 70 republics with a combined population in the hundreds of millions. It is one of the three great powers of the world, the others being the burgeoning techno-fascist state La Luz and the global investment bank EMTERR.
Although united by its core ideology of post-historical materialism, the Superbloc’s constituent republics have a fraught relationship with each other. The Superbloc as a whole has also seen its ambitions wane with age, and in recent decades it has accomplished little of note. Comparing the Superbloc’s stagnation to La Luz’s dramatic ascension, Hershel Wilk observes that the Superbloc seems befuddled that the rest of the world has left it behind.
The intelligence agency of the Superbloc is the Operant Bureau, which has agents embedded throughout the capitalist Developed World.
Member States[]
The wiki only lists Kohila by name at the game’s launch — it’s the bloc state most relevant to the plot. The other 69 republics are background.
Why the name matters
The bloc has three names — Superbloc, Supreme Union of Proletarian Republics, People’s Republics — and the game uses the third one in casual dialogue. It’s worth knowing which name each character reaches for. Opera personnel and Mircean exiles tend toward the official version. Locals in Portofiro tend toward “Superbloc”. Kohilan citizens themselves tend toward “the Republics”. The vocabulary shifts tell you where someone stands without anyone having to spell it out.
Why it matters to the player
The People’s Republics is the home team. The Opera owns Hershel’s name (CASCADE). Every off-book move in Portofiro is spending Republic credit. The faction isn’t painted as heroic — its Operant Bureau files an interrogation directorate under HR, and it ices its veterans in cold cities — but it is the only counterweight to La Luz and EMTERR, and the game writes it accordingly. See the canonical Superbloc entry for the full breakdown.