Grand Duke Mikhail of Russia

Tsar Mikhail II, or Michael as he was called in the English-speaking countries, was the ultra-reactionary leader of the Russian Empire during the Second Great War. He ascended to the throne in the late 1920s following the death of his older brother, Nicholas II. The end of the Russian Civil War and the crushing of the Bolsheviks -- the city of Tsaritsin, being led by Josef Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, was one of the last Bolshevik strongholds to fall -- followed not long after.

Mikhail's regime was weak as it attempted to rebuild following the disastorous Red rebellions. As the Young Turks had done in Ottoman Turkey a few years before with the Armenian minority, the tsarist regime sanctioned state-sponsored massacre as a tool of power -- the Black Hundreds led peasants and workers against Jewish communities on pogroms reminiscent to race riots in the Confederate States. With pogroms, Mikhail provided an outlet for the anger and discontentment of the lower classes and preventing them from unleashing another rebellion against the regime.