I don't know what I've got left that's Russia-centric in my pile of Cthulhu-stuff, so this might be it except for the wrap-up.
Delta Green: Countdown (1999) is basically a collection of threats for
Delta Green, and includes a thirty-page chapter devoted to the GRU SV-8.
Like
Achtung! Cthulhu or
The Laundry,
Delta Green is a third-party spinoff game, sort of X-Files meets the Cthulhu Mythos. There's a government conspiracy to suppress the Mythos, and you're part of it, Agent. This is, by itself, a fairly decent approach to a contemporary Mythos game - it helps to explain why you can't find R'lyeh with GoogleMaps, and it spins directly off the government raid on Innsmouth in Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth." It works. Except when it doesn't.
Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie Spetsialni Viedotstvo 8 is the Russian counterpart of
Delta Green; for those that remember the GPU/OGPU/NKVD argument that you ran across before, those are all successor agencies to the
Cheka, or the (sometimes not so secret) agency concerned with state security, policing the Russian people, hunting out counterrevolutionaries (and I guess, just revolutionaries at some point), etc. The GRU, by contrast, was concerned with foreign intelligence and affairs. So if the NKVD were the FBI, the GRU were the CIA. (More or less; it gets complicated because the Cheka and successor organizations had some foreign intelligence assets as well, and the GRU is part of the military kind of like the British Military Intelligence agencies, and the Spetsnaz were originally GRU...fuck it, too much minutiae, read up on it on wikipedia). The two branches of intelligence services have typically been rivals (you caught a glimpse at that in
Guide to the Eastern Front).
Anyway, the GRU got involved with the Mythos during the Russian Civil War; an outbreak of cannibalism turned out to be ghouls, and had to be put down. From there the rabbit hole got deeper and darker...
kinda like that Templar cave they just found. This was followed up by some more encounters, and in 1928 they found the lost library of Ivan the Terrible, complete with a Greek translation of the
Necronomicon (this is, as was mentioned previously, riffing directly off of
Secrets of the Kremlin, since Delta Green is basically the home campaign for the main writers). The GRU caught wind of the whole thing and founded a secret group - SV-8 - to keep tabs as to whether or not Comrade Stalin was still fiddling with the
Necronomicon. The NKVD, meanwhile, became host to Stalin's occult research division.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Russian-style
Which worked out great until Stalin purged the GRU and Red Army in 1937.
The GRU rebuilt to deal with the Nazis, and SV-8 was reactivated to counter the Nazi's occult interests, principally the
Anhnenerbe.
I'm not going to go over all the history, but let me put it this way: this is kind of the occult/Mythos history of Russia you always wanted, right down to a split during WWII where some of the younger ghouls stopped worshipping Nyogtha and Mordiggian and began worshiping Stalin as the Great Provider. It doesn't hit every beat or operation - how could it? But assuming you have a relatively small (SV-8 in 1940 was supposed to be ~100 members) but long-lived organization, you get some high points: the three-way conflict between SV-8, Delta Green, and the NKVD-affiliated
Smersh to destroy/deny/loot (respectively) Nazi occult resources and personnel, the SV-8 investigation into the Roswell incident, and Delta Green's Operation SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS aimed against Soviet Mythos-based life-extension research - but ran into Spetsnaz, were captured and interrogated by the GRU, who promptly re-armed them and sent them back on their mission (score one for interagency rivalry!)
Yadda yadda, more Cold War stuff, spy games, breakup of the USSR - like I said, it's all fun stuff. Better, or at least more coherent, than anything Chaosium ever produced. There's also a catalogue of the SV-8's "Mythos & Occult Library" - New Mythos tomes, basically - and stats and bios for a bunch of SV-8 NPCs. Buried in the appendices are basic rules for creating relevant player characters.
The following chapter is sort-of-related, as it details the
Skoptsi: "the modern remnant of an ancient Shub-Niggurath cult from the Caucasus Mountains of Asia." However, they were almost exterminated by the Bolsheviks and live in the United States now, so not
much of a Russian connection. (Also, apparently they like to aim the "Wither Limb" spell at the penis on male victims. Ooohkay.)
Gameplay Perspective: This is a pretty solid chapter. It doesn't give you a lot in the way of active threats to combat, but it foes give much-needed history and background for maybe creating and playing Russian Mythos scenarios.
Russian Perspective: Also pretty good.
Much less bleakfest than most of the others, but that's because the main focus is on inter-agency rivalry and occult spy games.
Mythos Perspective: A little lacking. Delta Green likes to play cutesy with some of its Mythos threats (like the Germans getting their hands on the formula for Re-Animation serum, or trying to contact the Deep Ones), calling a rabbit a smerp and all that.
It's not that this
can't work - the Laundry series can go entire novels without calling a Cthonian a Cthonian and it works - and putting the pieces together is part of the fun with these RPGs, but it remains that there's just not a lot of Mythos threats relative to the size of Russia.
I mean, keep in mind that in the Miskatonic Valley alone, just in Lovecraft's stories, you had the Whateley Cult; Keziah Mason and the Witch House; the Thing on the Doorstep; a Colour from Out of Space; a Re-Animator; and a Deep One colony, etc. Go a little farther and you have Richard Upton Pickman and his ghouls, and the Church of the Starry Wisdom. The point being, that's about as much Mythos activity in
eastern Massachusetts just in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft as there is in the entire Soviet Union according to this book. You really feel like maybe we need a Russian counterpart to Lovecraft Country.
Obvious Gaps: The Skoptsi highlight one of the major issues with the GRU SV-8 as conceived: you're still getting a very skewed, partial view of Russia in the Mythos. There's just not enough cults, not enough threats, not enough...anything. Granted, the focus is on the GRU and its NKVD rivals as the main "players" in the Russian occult scene, but that just leaves...a lot to be desired. Centuries of possible cult activities, artifacts, alien crash sites, Cthonians, running across Deep One fossils...anything. It's a solid chapter, but that's all it is: a chapter. You could do...and kind of want...a whole book to do it justice.
Anyway, I'll do a hunt for any more obvious Russian references and if not, then tomorrow is the sum-up/closing thoughts post.