Russia

The Russian Federation is a presidential republic extending over much of northern Eurasia (Europe and Asia together). It comprises 83 federal subjects, and is the largest country in the world in terms of geographical borders.

At one point, Russia was the center of a substanial land-empire under the rule of the tsar. However, after is disasterous defeat in World War I, Russia fell into revolution in 1917, and then a civil war that raged into the 1920s that saw the fall of the monarchy and the rise of a communist state. In short order Russia became the leading constituient of the Soviet Union, which emerged from World War II as one of two global superpowers.

The Soviet Union fell in 1991. Russia became the center of a (more or less) democratic federation.

Russia in Crosstime Traffic
In the Home timeline, Russia was more or less functional, but was rather out of step with the rest of the world. In 2097, it released a tailored virus into Chechnya, but didn't properly immunize enough people in the bordering areas to keep it from spreading. It also wasn't above arresting people for political crimes, but that wasn't something it did much.

Crosstime Traffic was aware of an alternate in which the Spanish Armada conquered England and Spain created an empire that bordered Russia.

Russia in Curious Notions
In the alternate designated "3477" by Crosstime Traffic, Russia and its allies Britain and France were defeated by Germany in the brief war of 1914. Russia was the key factor, as it was slow to mobilize, allowing the Schlieffen Plan to work. France and Britain went to war with Germany in the late 1930s, but were again defeated, which cleared the way for Germany to take full control of Europe. Russia, which had been in a perpetual state of civil war since 1914, did not join in that war.

In the late 21st Century, Siberia was one of the remote and unpleasant locations worldwide used by the Feldgendarmerie for their harsh "penal colonies". This was clearly done at the Feldgendarmerie's discretion, and there was no need of any consent by whatever government still existed in Russia.

Russia in The Disunited States of America
The Russian Empire was one of the world's great powers. Nonetheless, it was still sufficiently "backward" enough to still use land lines at the end of the 21st century.

Russia in Gunpowder Empire
Agents of Crosstime Traffic who secretly explored Agrippan Rome and its neighbors found the western parts of what corresponded to Russia were here part of Lietuva, with the Slavic population considerably Lithunaised in language, culture and religion. Further east, most of the vast territory corresponding to the rest of Russia was a poor land belonging to no empire. Neither Lietuva nor Persia or China - all of which bordered on this region - considered it worth the trouble of conquering and garrisoning.

Note
For Russia in The Gladiator and The Valley-Westside War, see Soviet Union.

Russia in Southern Victory
During the War of Secession, Russia was the only major European power to favor the United States. After the war, the United States attempted to buy Alaska from Russia, but the price of $7 million was too high for the U.S.'s depressed economy.

In later times, Russia became a member of the Quadruple Entente, which made it an ally of the Confederate States, and an enemy of the US - this, however, was a side-effect of Russian policies mainly dictated by power relations in Europe. Tsar Nicholas II entered the Great War by pledging to protect Serbia when that country refused Austria-Hungary's ultimata relating to the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

However, Russia proved poorly prepared for such a war militarily. Although the country did not lack for manpower, it did lack for adequate supplies. Consequently, when Russia clashed with Germany, Russian troops suffered horrendous casualties. The lack of support for the war in Russia combined with German gains lead to a revolution and the country's withdrawal from the War in 1917. Germany carved the Kingdoms of Poland and Ukraine out of former Russian territory. Russia's withdrawal presaged the eventual collapse of the Entente war effort.

For the next ten or so years, Russia was embroiled in a bitter civil war between socialists and Tsarists. Nicholas was killed early in the revolution. However, the Tsarists won in 1926, defeating the last socialist holdouts at Tsaritsyn, killing the general known as "The Man of Steel" and his second-in-command, "The Hammer" in the city of Tsaritsyn.. The victorious Tsartists installed Nicholas's brother Mikhail II on the throne. Mikhail's revanchism was a good match for his Entente allies, as Britain slid towards absolutism, France itself restored its monarchy under Charles XI, and in the Confederate States Jake Featherston was elected president.

Mikail rejoined the Entente upon consolidating his own power, which included renewed persecution of the Jews. When German Kaiser Wilhelm II died in 1941, Russia joined the Entente in pressing Germany for the return of their lost territory. When the new kaiser, Wilhelm III, refused, Russia followed its allies into the Second Great War.

Despite some initial gains in Poland and Ukraine, where the populations were split in support of Germany and Russia, in 1943 the Germans defeated Russia in the Ukraine. Russian factories and railroads in Petrograd, Minsk, and Smolensk were heavily damaged by German bombers. The remaining Reds from the Russian Civil war adopted the Mormon people bombing tactic against the Tsar's government by 1943.

Early in 1944, Germany warned Russia to withdraw from the war with a vague but hyperbolic threat of destruction. When Russia did not withdraw, Germany destroyed Petrograd, the national capital, with a superbomb. The Tsar's government survived, and retreated to Moscow.

While initially defiant, Russia's ability to prosecute the war was badly hampered by the loss of Petrograd. It sued for peace shortly after Petrograd was destroyed. Almost immediately, Russia's one time ally Japan began making territorial demands in Siberia.

Throughout the war, the Russians refrained from opening a war front on the border of Alaska with US-occupied Canada. Such an offensive, if launched in conjunction with the initial Confederate offensive deep into US territory in 1941, would have created a difficult situation for the Americans. However, potential territorial gains in the frozen north of Canada in no way tempted the Russians into diverting forces from their main enemy, Germany. By the same token, in later parts of the war the US did not feel that a potential conquest of Alaska would justify diverting forces from their front with the Confederacy. In effect, Russia and the US tacitly agreed to treat the Second Great War as two separate wars - an Eurasian one and a North American one - and not to link them up.

It was only after the end of the Second Great War when Russia undertook its own superbomb project that the US started to seriously regard Russia as a potential threat. Germany was, naturally, far more frightened by this course of events, but the US also felt uncomfortable with the prospect of the Russians gaining such weapons. One reason the U.S. decided to liquidate Confederate superbomb expert Henderson V. FitzBelmont was the apprehension that the Russians would get their hands on him.

Russia in The Guns of the South
Russia was the only major power in North America that had stayed neutral during the Second American Revolution and the ensuing conflicts. However, after the US Army defeated the British in the Western Canada's, and captured Vancouver, the Russian government became alarmed. Realising that they would never be able to defend their Alaska territory, they chose instead to sell it to the US.

Russia in The Two Georges
The Russian Empire, along with the British Empire and the Franco-Spanish Holy Alliance, were the three major powers in the mid-1990s. The Russian Empire bordered on the German States and Austria to the east and spread across Eastern Europe and Asia north of the Ottoman Empire, India and China to the Pacific Ocean (excluding the Empire of Japan) and included Alaska on the North American continent.

Russia in "Uncle Alf"
Russia made brief territorial gains against Germany in the brief war which took place in 1914, but once Germany had defeated France, Russia was quickly beaten. In 1916, Kaiser Wilhelm II helped his cousin and former enemy Tsar Nicholas II put down a communist revolution.

In 1929, Feldwebel Adolf Hitler of the German Feldgendarmerie told his niece Angela Raubal that the Tsar "was and is a woolly headed fool of a Russian" for not hanging more revolutionaries in 1905.

Russia in "Vilcabamba"
Some time after the Krolp arrived and subjegated Earth, Russia joined China and the United States in a massive organized uprising. That uprising failed.

Russia in Atlantis
During his visit to Atlantis, Athelstan Helms disclosed that he had investigated the accusations made in Russia that Jews practiced ritual murder, and found all such assertions to be completely baseless.