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Russian Federation
Russiamap
Russia
Country
Continent: Europe and Asia
Capital: Moscow
National Language: Russian (official with 35 other recognized languages)
Government: Federal semi-presidential constitutional republic
Status in OTL: Active

The Russian Federation, known as Russia, is a semi-presidential republic extending over much of northern Europe and northern Asia. It comprises 83 federal subjects, and is the largest country in the world in terms of geographical borders.

After a period of rule under various smaller kingdoms, the 18th Century saw the rise of the unified Russian Empire as the center of a substantial land-empire under the absolute rule of the tsar. However, after its disastrous 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 constituent of the Soviet Union, which emerged from World War II as one of two global superpowers, and was locked in a Cold War with the United States and its allies.

The Soviet Union fell in 1991. Russia became the center of a (more or less) democratic federation, and re-emerged as a major economic power on the world stage throughout the beginning of the 21st Century. However, Vladimir Putin has dominated Russia's political system since 2000, serving as president from 2000-2008, and again beginning in 2012. He served as prime minister between 2008 and 2012. This period has been described as authoritarian, due to the lack of civil liberties and corruption. Reforms to the Russian Constitution in 2020 allow for Putin to run for re-election in 2024.

Russia in Alpha and Omega[]

Russia had been involved in the civil war in Syria. However, after a series of supernatural interventions in world affairs, Russia began pulling its troops out of the conflict.

Russia in Atlantis[]

In the mid 18th century, Russia was on the losing side of the global conflict which included fighting in Atlantis.

In the mid 19th century, the Russian government perpetrated massacres of the Jews.[1] Russian propaganda demonized the Jews by accusing them of practicing ritual murder. British detective Athelstan Helms looked into this matter and found all such assertions to be completely baseless.[2]

Literary comment[]

Pogroms are hinted to be common in Russia by 1852. In OTL, there were hardly any during that time period. This is probably a butterfly effect of this timeline.

Russia in "The Breaking of Nations"[]

Under Vladimir Putin's rule, the Russian Federation wielded an insidious influence on American politics from 2016 onward, including efforts to rig Presidential elections.

In 2031, Russia was one of the first nations to grant recognition to the new republic of Pacifica, to use as a catspaw against the United States. Sergei Khloponin was the Federation's first ambassador to the new nation. Pacifican President Nicole Yoshida was not so deceived as to believe that Putin's intentions were friendly, and resolved never to let Pacifica become a Russian puppet.

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.[3] It also wasn't above arresting people for political crimes, but that wasn't something it did much.[4]

Crosstime Traffic was aware of an alternate in which the Spanish Armada conquered England in 1588 and Spain created an empire that bordered Russia. Footage taken in this alternate was shown to Jeremy Solters and his fellow students in US history class.

Russia in Curious Notions[]

In the alternate designated as 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.[5] Russia lost its territory in Poland, Finland, Courland, and the Ukraine, which were set up as nominally independent nations in the German sphere of influence. 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 participate in that war.[6]

In the late 21st century, Siberia, now fully under German control, was used by the Feldgendarmerie for one of their harsh "penal colonies."

Russia in The Disunited States of America[]

The Russian Empire was one of the world's great powers.[7] Nonetheless, it was sufficiently "backward" to still use land lines at the end of the 21st century. In 2096, Russia still owned Alaska.[8]

In the 1940s, Russia was damaged in the War of the Three Emperors.[9]

Russia in Gunpowder Empire[]

Agents of Crosstime Traffic who secretly explored the Agrippan Rome alternate found that 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.[10] Neither Lietuva nor Persia or China - all of which bordered on this region - considered it worth the trouble of conquering and garrisoning.

See also[]

Russia in A Different Flesh[]

Russia fought a terrifying war against Prussia in the 20th century.[11]

Russia in "Drang von Osten"[]

In the early 2040s, Russia had been overrun and occupied by China. A German-led coalition attempted to drive the Chinese out, but failed bloodily.

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 their North American dominions, and captured Vancouver and Winnipeg, the Russian government became alarmed. Realizing that they would never be able to defend their Alaska territory if it was invaded, they chose instead to sell it to the US.

One of the supplies provided to the Confederate Army by the Rivington Men bore the Russian writing CCCP. This translated as "the SSSR," which was incomprehensible to all Confederates.

Russia had freed its serfs while the Second American Revolution was ongoing. This fact was one of the elements contributing to Robert E. Lee's growing distaste for the institution of slavery after the war's end.

Russia in The House of Daniel[]

After the Russians rose up and killed their Czar, many outsiders wondered if vampires were running the show, as the rhetoric used in Russia was similar to the standard vampire line. They also used a red flag, which many saw as more proof of vampire rule.[12]

Russia in Joe Steele[]

People from the Russian Empire, before it became the Soviet Union, had a considerable effect on American politics during the 20th century, as many of America's most powerful men were either children of immigrants from the defunct Empire, or immigrants themselves. These included Joe Steele, Vince Scriabin, Stas Mikoian, and Andy Wyszynski.

Russia in "Last Flight of the Swan of the East"[]

Like many of the other "great powers" of the world, the Russian Empire participated in the race to build leviathans while pursuing its own aims for territorial expansion. In fact, Russia was one of the first countries to demonstrate the value of air power over sea power when their leviathans defeated the Japanese Empire's wet navy in 1896.[13]

Russia was rocked by tragedy in March 1911, when the Czar and most of his family were killed by assassins, with only Grand Duchess Anastasia surviving. The young woman assumed the throne.[14][15]

In July 1914, Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. Austria-Hungary issued a series of six ultimata against Russia's ally, Serbia. With Russia's backing Serbia accepted five demands, but refused to allow Austrian investigators to come to Serbia to help the investigation. In response, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary, and Germany declared war on Russia. France, another Russian ally, declared war on Germany. Japan, concerned by Russia's ambitions in the Pacific, and still angry over their defeat in 1896, declared war on Russia.[16]

Russia in "Liberating Alaska"[]

Alaska was the Russian Empire's sole North American territory until the outbreak of the Russian Civil War.

Early in the 20th century, a Russian trapper hunting beaver found gold in the region around the minor town of Siknazuak, which almost immediately boomed into a real city as Russians, Canadians and Americans flooded the area, digging for easy gold. However, once the easy gold was extracted, the boom became a bust, and large chunks of the population returned to their respective homes. Gold could still be had, but it required a great deal of work.

During period between 1918 and 1920, the U.S., among other countries, invaded Siberia to combat the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. While the Reds won and established the Soviet Union, their leader, Vladimir Lenin, was forced to cede a number of Russian territories. As the U.S. Marines withdrew from Siberia, they were able to seize Alaska, and Lenin did not contest it.[17]

In 1929, Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, still angered by the loss of the whole of Alaska to the U.S., initiated a surreptitious invasion of Siknazuak, but the U.S. liberated the town at the end of June, 1929.[18]

Russia in "The More it Changes"[]

By the 1770s, the Sabbateans had a toe-hold in Russia.

Russia in "Occupation Duty"[]

Novgorod was a vast land in northern Eurasia. Among their exports were well made assault rifles popular with terrorists around the world. Moabites used these Novgorodian rifles in their ongoing insurrection against their Philistinian occupiers.[19]

Literary comment[]

The reference to "Novgorodian rifles" and their description is an allusion to the AK-47.

Russia in "Slue-Foot Sue and the Witch in the Woods"[]

Due to an accident with an angry horse and a bouncing bustle, the American adventuress Slue-foot Sue found herself in Russia, where she managed to defy the powerful witch Baba Yaga.

Russia in Southern Victory[]

Flag of Russian Empire for private use (1914–1917)

In 1914, the white-blue-red tricolor with a canton of the imperial arms was introduced by an imperial decree on 19 November 1914. It was the Tsar's private Flag and Peter the Great's tricolor continued being the official Flag of Russia.

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 Kingdom of Poland and a Ukrainian state out of former Russian territory. Russia's withdrawal presaged the eventual collapse of the Entente war effort.

For nearly a decade, Russia was embroiled in a bitter civil war between socialists and Tsarists. Eventually, 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". Tsar Nicholas II died in the early 1930s and was succeeded by his brother Mikhail II. Mikhail's revanchism was a good match for his Entente allies, as Britain slid towards absolutism, France itself restored its monarchy under King Charles XI, and in the Confederate States Jake Featherston was elected president.

Mikhail rejoined the Entente upon consolidating his own power, which included renewed persecution of the Jews. When German Emperor Wilhelm II died in 1941, Russia joined the Entente in pressing Germany for the return of their lost territory. When the new Kaiser, Friedrich Wilhelm V, 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, 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 the first superbomb used in war. 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.

While Russia and the United States were at war, neither made any effort to directly engage each other. 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 and his bomb-making knowledge.

Russia in Supervolcano[]

Some six years after the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, Russia, suffering from harsh winters and a complete failure of agriculture, invaded both Ukraine and Kazakhstan, which were somewhat better off. The Russians used the fact that both countries had historically been under Russian rule as a thin casus belli.[20] Both countries reached out to NATO, but the response was limited at best. The U.S. Secretary of State expressed disapproval of the invasion. Russia effectively told the USA that the invasion was none of its business.[21]

The invasion did not go as hoped. In addition to the cost on the ground, Kazakh special forces were able to infiltrate Russia and blow-up two nuclear power plants. While the explosions did not cause a meltdown on the level of Chernobyl, they did raise the background radiation.[22] Russia was very vague about its agricultural production numbers, and began buying grain on the world market, paying for it with oil.[23] Within time, the war became bogged down.[24]

The war and the terrible weather also benefited Chechen rebels, who stepped up their guerrilla war.[25]

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 the Austrian Empire 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, bordering the North American Union provinces of Banksia and Vancouver.[26] During the 19th Century, the British Empire offered to buy Alaska from Russia but the Tsar refused; Colonel Thomas Bushell of the Royal American Mounted Police and others would later comment that "No" was something Russians were very good at.

In the 1990s, Russia sought to dominate the Germanies. The Holy Alliance attempted around the same time to pin them with the crime of conspiring with the Sons of Liberty against the British Empire, doing so by supplying the Sons of Liberty with Russian Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles.

The Tsar's feared secret police were called the Okhrana.

Russia in "Uncle Alf"[]

Russia made brief territorial gains against Germany in the Great War of 1914, but once Germany had defeated France, Germany defeated Russia in short order. In 1916, Kaiser Wilhelm II helped his cousin and former enemy Tsar Nicholas II put down a communist revolution.[27]

In 1929, Feldwebel Adolf Hitler of the German Feldgendarmerie told his niece Geli Raubal that the Tsar "was and is a woolly headed fool of a Russian" for not hanging more revolutionaries in the prior rebellion of 1905.[28]

Russia in "Vilcabamba"[]

Some time after the Krolp arrived and subjugated Earth, Russia joined China and the United States in a massively organized, but futile, uprising.

Russia in War World[]

The Russian Federation was set up in the early 1990s, when the original Soviet Union collapsed. However, less than a generation later, the second Soviet Union was formed. Once again, Russia was the ruling nation in the union.

Russia in "Zigeuner"[]

The Russian Empire fought several enemies on the Eastern Front of World War I, including Germany. Years later as he rose to power in Germany, Adolf Hitler claimed that while his division was fighting the Russians, they also had to contend with the Zigeuner people. Hitler claimed that the Zigeuner stole essential items from the Germans, such as horses, boots and telegraph wires, helping to cause unnecessary German casualties.[29] At the same time, Hitler also saw how badly the Russians treated the Jews they found in the Austro-Hungarian provinces they overran. Hitler already hated the Russians, and their anti-Semitism left him sympathetic to the Jews.[30]

Upon his ascendancy, Hitler declared Zigeuner to be Untermenschen, along with Bolsheviks and homosexuals, and actively sought to eliminate these groups from Europe.[31]

See also[]

  • The Soviet Union, for which Russia served as the nucleus. In most alternate history works with PODs after 1917, Russia is the greater part of the USSR as it was in OTL. The USSR still exists after 1991 in many timelines, and most pre-1991 works "set in the future". As was common (if only half correct) in OTL, characters in these works often refer to the Soviet Union as "Russia".
  • Sorb, a massive empire in The War Between the Provinces series that is based on the Russian Empire.
  • Unkerlant, a Derlavaian kingdom in Darkness whose history is based on the Russian Empire and/or the Soviet Union.
  • Tver, a massive kingdom based on Russia in Every Inch a King.

References[]

  1. Liberating Atlantis, p. 213.
  2. See e.g.: Atlantis and Other Places, pg. 395, HC.
  3. The Disunited States of America, pg. 278.
  4. The Gladiator, pg. 194
  5. Curious Notions, pg 18.
  6. Ibid, pg. 19
  7. The Disunited States of America, pg. 146.
  8. Ibid., 254.
  9. Ibid., p. 242.
  10. Gunpowder Empire, pg 49.
  11. A Different Flesh, p. 288.
  12. The House of Daniel., loc. 1652.
  13. "A Monster in the Sky" by Steven Mohan, Jr., Leviathans: Armored Skies, pgs. 12-41, loc. 129-586, ebook.
  14. "Czar Nicholas Laid to Rest", Bryn Bills, Ibid., pgs. 292-293, loc. 4174-4190, ebook.
  15. See also Inconsistencies (Last Flight of the Swan).
  16. Ibid., pgs. 292-299, loc. 4174-4290, ebook.
  17. Asimov's Science Fiction, July/August, 2018.
  18. Ibid.
  19. See e.g.: Atlantis and Other Places, pg. 248, HC.
  20. Things Fall Apart, pg. 160.
  21. Ibid., pg. 163.
  22. Ibid., pg. 176.
  23. Ibid., pg. 281.
  24. Ibid., pg. 345.
  25. Ibid., pg. 281.
  26. Map The Two Georges, frontispiece.
  27. Atlantis and Other Places, pg. 343.
  28. Ibid., pg. 344.
  29. Asimov's Science Fiction, September/October, 2017, Vol. 41 Nos. 9 & 10, pg. 94-95.
  30. Ibid., pg. 100.
  31. Ibid., pg. 99.
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