The Russian Empire

The Russian Empire is the largest state on earth by area, and since 25 October 2028 a constitutional monarchy under the House of Romanov. It occupies the Russian heartland, the black-earth south, the Caucasus, the whole of Central Asia and all of Siberia east to the Pacific and the Bering shore, approximately 22,100,000 square kilometres across eleven time zones, and holds approximately 350 million people. Its government sits at Moscow and its crown at St. Petersburg. Its sovereign is the Emperor Paul II, proclaimed at the Tauride Palace on the night a referendum restored the dynasty, and its President, Dmitri Gromov, governs beside him until a constituent assembly writes the constitution that will abolish his office.

For the century before that it was the Russian Republic, the great adversary of the constitutional world: proclaimed in 1917, taken by Admiral Kolchak in 1922, and for a hundred and six years afterwards a state whose head was a President, whose legislature was a National Assembly, and whose constitutional form was a republic that conducted real elections with results settled in advance. Most of what follows describes that republic, because it is the state the century knew.

The first thing to establish about the republic is the thing it was not. It was not a communist state and never had been. The revolution that broke the Romanov empire in 1917 produced no Bolshevik seizure of power, no Marxist experiment spanning a continent and no union of soviet republics. What rose in their place, out of the same wreckage and after a long civil war, was a nationalist authoritarian republic that answered the monarchical order not with the workers’ international but with the sovereign nation, the strong hand and the wounded pride of a great people who had lost an empire and meant to be a power again. In a world of constitutional governments, Russia became the one great nation that chose the strong hand instead, and made that choice the banner of a fifty-year cold war.

That is the axis the modern age turned on. The long confrontation was not capitalism against communism but constitutional government against an authoritarian republic, the Allied states, kingdoms and republics alike, on one side and the Russian Republic on the other, each convinced it held the future and each certain the other was a mistake the century would correct. The Realm and its friends built their alliance, their doctrine and half their sense of themselves against the fact of Moscow, and Moscow returned the compliment. For two generations the Russian Republic was the necessary other, the pole every compass in the Allied world pointed away from.

By the 2020s that confrontation was over, or nearly. The cold war had cooled, the balance of terror had slackened, and the Russian Republic was, in the word every foreign ministry used, in flux. Its founding purpose had faded, the monarchical enemy it defined itself against had stopped fearing it as it once did, and the republic found itself a great power that had outlived its confrontation and did not know what it was for. It was built to oppose. The opposing was done, and Russia was left holding a vast, tired country, a wounded memory and an open question about what it would become.

The question was answered in two days. On the night of 23 to 24 October 2028 the President, Pavel Yermolov, put the troops in their barracks and decreed a free election. On 25 October, in the first free election since 1922, Russia chose Dmitri Gromov; his first decree, within hours of his swearing-in, put the question of the crown to the people that evening; more than three in four of them voted to restore the Romanovs; and late that night Grand Duke Paul landed at St. Petersburg and was proclaimed Emperor. The republic built to refuse the dynasty took it back, and the constitution that is to say what the restored empire is has still to be written.

Etymology

The name descends from Rus, the term applied to the Varangian and Slavic polity that formed along the river roads between Novgorod and Kiev in the ninth century. Its origin is disputed between a Norse derivation, from the rowing crews who came down the rivers, and a native one, and the argument has never been settled to the satisfaction of both schools. The Greek form of the name, Rhosia, passed through Church Slavonic into Rossiya, and it was that learned form, rather than the older vernacular, that the Muscovite state adopted as it gathered the inheritance of the Rus and claimed to be its sole legitimate continuation.

Russian keeps two adjectives where most languages keep one. Russkiy means Russian in the ethnic and cultural sense, the language, the people and the faith; rossiyskiy means Russian in the civic and territorial sense, of the Russian state and all the peoples within it. The republic used the civic form in its own style, Rossiyskaya Respublika, and the choice was not an accident of grammar. A state that governs Turkic Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Volga Tatars and the peoples of Siberia cannot describe itself in the ethnic adjective without conceding that a large part of its territory is held rather than owned, and the civic form is the grammatical companion of the founding slogan, Russia, One and Indivisible. Critics of the republic observed that the distinction was scrupulously kept in the statute book and steadily blurred in the speeches.

The noun Republic was the one word the state kept from the government that first proclaimed it. Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government abolished the monarchy and declared Russia a republic in the autumn of 1917, and Admiral Kolchak, who destroyed everything else that government stood for, kept its title and emptied it. He meant the word as a claim rather than a description: Russia would be a republic and not a monarchy, sovereign in its nation rather than in its crown. The state was pointedly not styled a union or a federation, since either name would concede that it was an assembly of parts that might in principle be disassembled, and it was not styled an empire, since the dynasty was refused along with the throne. What was left was the plainest possible title, a single adjective and a single noun.

The restoration of 2028 changed the noun and kept the adjective. On the day of the proclamation the state took back the style of the old empire, Rossiyskaya Imperiya, the Russian Empire, which had used the civic adjective long before the republic made a point of it, so that the grammar Kolchak’s slogan leaned on survived the end of his state.

In ordinary use Russians say Rossiya. Official prose said the Republic for a hundred and eleven years and has said the Empire since 25 October 2028, and Russians had begun calling the Emperor the Tsar before the proclamation was over. Foreign chancelleries said the Russian Republic in full when the distinction from the vanished empire mattered and simply Russia when it did not, and the adjective served both. The old capital kept its name through the change of regime, no revolutionary renaming having followed the fall of the dynasty, so that St. Petersburg stands on the Baltic under the name its founder gave it while the government sits in Moscow.

History

The empire and the revolution of 1917

The Russian Empire entered the First Great War allied with France and the Ottomans, bound to them less by common cause than by a common fear of Germany, and the strain of a war it could not win cracked the Romanov state. The tsar fell, and in 1917 the empire collapsed into revolution. Power passed to a provisional government of liberals and moderate socialists, and its dominant figure, the lawyer and orator Alexander Kerensky, gave the new Russia the word it would never afterward surrender: in the autumn of 1917 Kerensky’s government abolished the monarchy outright and proclaimed Russia a republic.

The red revolution that did not come

The decisive fact of the following months is a negative one. There was no Bolshevik seizure of the state, no October, no union of soviet republics, and the doctrine that might have produced one never took the country. What broke the young republic instead was the frailty of the one man holding it together. The strain was inhuman, a bankrupt country at war with itself and half the map in revolt, and Kerensky, who had carried it almost alone, could not carry it long. Within months of proclaiming the Republic he suffered a physical and nervous collapse, a breakdown so complete that he could not rise from it to govern, and rather than cling to an office he could no longer fill he gave up power.

He survived it; his republic, in a sense, did not. His sudden absence at the very moment the country needed him most tipped the fragile new state into a long, many-sided chaos, a fractured Russia of rival governments, breakaway nations and marching armies, with no single victor and no single idea, and into that vacuum, in time, the strong men marched. Kerensky himself lived on, and lived long, through decades of quiet European exile in which he watched from afar as the republic he had founded in the name of liberty was gathered up and hollowed out by other hands. He is remembered, by those who mourn what Russia might have been, as the great hinge of its tragedy. If Kerensky had not fallen is the eternal lament of the country’s liberals, and the democratic republic his collapse cost them, before it had fairly begun, is the one they mean when they speak of the republic Kerensky meant.

The loss of the western fringe

Out of the fracture the western lands went for good. Finland broke free of the collapsing empire and declared itself a republic under German and Scandinavian protection; Poland made itself independent in the same season, and the Baltic provinces became the United Baltic Duchy under German patronage, both drawn into the German-ordered west; and the great imperial body was left without its European limbs. For a time it looked as though Russia itself might simply dissolve, a weak and quarrelling ruin with no centre, too broken to be a threat to anyone, which is exactly how the Allied powers preferred it and exactly what they expected it to remain. They were wrong, but it took a generation to find out.

Bessarabia did not. The province between the Prut and the Dniester, taken from the Principalities in the nineteenth century, stayed Russian through the collapse and the civil war and is Russian still, and the United Principalities of Romania renew their claim to it by a resolution of their federal Diet every session. Russia does not answer the resolution. It has never treated the frontier as an open question, declines to discuss it at the meetings where it is raised, and regards the annual vote as evidence that the claim is rhetorical, which Romanian diplomats privately concede is the most effective thing Russia does with it.

Kolchak and the civil war

The man who proved them wrong was a naval officer with no love of politics and no patience for chaos. Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak had been a polar explorer and a fleet commander before the collapse, and in the wreckage he became something the fractured country had no other source of: a centre. Against the revolutionaries who wanted to remake the nation and the separatists who wanted to leave it, Kolchak raised the banner of the whole, and the banner had four words on it that the republic still shouts today: Russia, One and Indivisible.

He did not inherit an army. This is the fact that most accounts of the period skip and the one that explains everything after it. The imperial officer corps did not survive the collapse as an institution; it came apart, and its men scattered into a dozen private commands, national armies and warlord retinues, each with its own claim and none with a country. There was no machine waiting for a hand. Whoever meant to reconquer Russia would have to build the instrument first, out of a population that had already been conscripted twice and had stopped believing in anybody.

Kolchak built it with three things, and none of them was popularity.

The first was the gold. The imperial reserve, one of the largest holdings of bullion in the world, came into his keeping in the confusion of 1918 and never left it. It made him something no other Russian faction was: a buyer. And he was a buyer in the best market that has ever existed for the purpose, because the world had just finished the First Great War and was dismantling it. Europe and America were scrapping the greatest arsenal ever assembled, selling rifles by the hundred thousand, machine guns, field pieces, boots, telegraph wire, aircraft and locomotives for whatever they would fetch, to anyone with metal to pay. Kolchak had metal to pay. Where his rivals negotiated for patronage and got promises, he sent agents to Stockholm and Shanghai and Yokohama with gold and came back with ships. Men who will not follow a cause will follow a paymaster, and the admiral’s army assembled itself around the one commander in Russia whose wages did not fail.

The second was the railway. He held the Trans-Siberian, the only line on the continent still capable of moving a division from one end of a war to the other, and he understood what he was holding better than his enemies understood what they had lost. His opponents moved at the speed of a marching man across distances that break marching men. Kolchak moved at the speed of a train. He could arrive anywhere along four thousand miles in overwhelming force, destroy whatever was there, and be gone before a second enemy could concentrate against him, which meant that he chose every battle of the civil war and his enemies chose none of them. It was not brilliance. It was arithmetic, applied by a man who had spent his professional life on the one arm of service that thinks in terms of lines of communication.

The third was the fear. Finland was gone. Poland was gone. The Baltic provinces were gone. Every Russian who read a newspaper could see the body losing limbs one season at a time, and could not see where the cutting would stop. Against that, a man promising the whole did not have to be loved or even believed. He had to be the only one saying it. Towns opened their gates to Kolchak not out of enthusiasm but out of arithmetic, on the calculation that any centre was better than no centre and that the alternative to a hard Russia was no Russia, and the republic has been making that same argument to its own people ever since.

The alliance intervened in the war as well, and its contribution is the subject of the longest-running quarrel in the republic’s foreign policy. American, British and Japanese contingents were landed; they achieved less than their governments hoped and more than those governments later admitted, and Kolchak’s victory owes something to them. It does not owe everything, and the distinction matters in both directions. The Allied powers did not make him and did not want what he became. They had wanted a Russia weak enough to be harmless and had expected to get one, and they gave the admiral just enough to go on fighting the revolutionaries without ever intending to hand him a country. He took the country anyway, with their surplus rifles and his own gold, and they spent the rest of the century opposite the thing they had half-built. Moscow has never forgiven the intervention and has never mentioned the surplus.

He crushed the revolutionary factions and the breakaway armies one after another, not gently and not cleanly, and by 1922 he had done what everyone said could not be done. He had put Russia back together by force.

The coup of 1922

What happened next was a coup, and the republic has never seriously pretended otherwise.

Kerensky’s republic still existed on paper in 1922. It had ministries that met, a body of law nobody had repealed, officials drawing salaries, and above all the promise on which its whole legitimacy rested: a constituent assembly that would be elected once the emergency allowed, and that would give Russia the constitution it had never had. That promise was the only asset the provisional structures had left, and it was worth something precisely because Kolchak had won the war in the name of the nation rather than in his own.

He took it in an afternoon. Troops surrounded the buildings, the ministers were dismissed and in several cases arrested, and the constituent assembly was postponed until the emergency should pass. The emergency was then made permanent, which is the whole of the constitutional history of the Russian Republic in a sentence. No vote authorised it. No court reviewed it. No provision of Kerensky’s law provided for it, and none was cited.

The legality came afterwards, and it came in the ordinary way such things come. A congress of delegates was assembled, of men chosen by the men who had done it, and it ratified what had already happened. A decree confirmed the Supreme Ruler in an office that had not existed until he occupied it. A constitution was drafted in due course, and its function was not to authorise the act but to describe the resulting arrangement in the language of law, which it did carefully and at length. Every document is genuine. Every one of them is dated after the fact.

The republic knew this and built its self-understanding on it rather than around it, and that was the deepest difference between the Russian state and the ideological dictatorships the twentieth century produced elsewhere. It did not claim the founding was lawful. It claimed that lawfulness was a luxury a dissolving country could not afford, that the men who insisted on procedure in 1922 were the same men who had lost Finland and Poland and the Baltic coast, and that a nation which had been given the choice between a legal death and an illegal life had chosen correctly. Order first, and law when there is a country left to have law in. It was a confession offered as a credential.

The cost of that argument is permanent and the republic pays it every year. A state founded by a man with soldiers has no founding text to appeal to. There is no charter that a Russian reformer can hold up and demand be honoured, because the charter describes the coup rather than constraining it, and every leader since has therefore governed in Kolchak’s name for the simple reason that his name is the only legitimacy the office has ever carried. It is also why the liberalisers reach past him. When they invoke “the republic Kerensky meant”, they are not being sentimental about a failed politician. They are pointing at the last moment when Russia had a lawful government, and observing that it was taken from them by an admiral with a railway and a mountain of gold.

The republic Kolchak built

What he built was neither of the things the world expected. He did not restore the Romanovs; the Whites had never fought for the tsar so much as against the revolution, and Kolchak had no intention of handing the country he had reconquered back to the dynasty that had lost it. Nor did he permit the democracy Kerensky had promised and his own propaganda had gone on invoking throughout the war. What he kept, of all that Kerensky had made, was the single word Republic, and he meant it now as a weapon. Russia would be a republic and not a monarchy, sovereign in its nation rather than its crown, and it would stand as living proof that a great people did not need a king. That the republic Kerensky had founded in the name of liberty was now, in Kolchak’s hands, a military dictatorship under one man troubled the admiral not at all. He had seen what the alternative looked like, and he preferred order to liberty with the calm certainty of a man who had watched liberty burn the country down.

His shadow has never left it. Kolchak ruled for two decades and died the founder of a state, and every leader since has governed in his name, invoked his memory and measured himself against the one man who put Russia back together. The republic he made outgrew his methods and refined his crudities, but it never escaped him. To understand the Russian Republic is to understand that it is still, a century on, the lengthened shadow of a single admiral who decided that a broken nation would rather be whole than free.

The territorial settlement and its grievances

Kolchak regathered a great deal, and lost a great deal, and the shape of what he kept and what he could not is the shape of the republic’s grievance. He took back the Russian heartland, the black-earth south, the Caucasus, the steppe, the whole immensity of Central Asia, and all of Siberia running east to the Pacific and the Bering shore, so that Russia is by area one of the largest states on earth, a Eurasian giant that touches two oceans and eleven time zones. It is a great power by simple geography, too big and too resource-heavy to be anything else, and its strength has always been the strength of sheer extent.

But the west it could not hold. Finland was gone, and Poland, and the Baltic lands, spun off into independence and gathered into the German-ordered Europe that Russia could not reach past, so that the republic is a giant with its European porch torn away, an amputee on the side that faces the powers it most wants to impress. And beyond even that lay the older loss, the one the tsars had inflicted on themselves: Alaska, sold off a cheap continent away in 1867 by a cash-short empire, and now, of all the humiliations, the forward base of the monarchical enemy staring back across the Bering Strait at the land the Romanovs threw away. The Russian Republic carries every one of these losses as a live grievance, because a state whose founding cry was One and Indivisible can never be at peace with the parts of itself that got away. It is a wounded heir, immense and aggrieved, forever counting what the empire could not keep.

Resurgence and the Winter War

The first sign of it came in the Baltic. In 1941, while the German Empire was fighting for Berlin and could not honour its guarantee, the republic occupied the United Baltic Duchy, describing the act at home as the recovery of former imperial provinces and to the Allied governments as a protective measure on the approaches to St. Petersburg, and deported about 25,000 of its people. It withdrew in 1945 under a joint ultimatum from Germany, Britain and the United Kingdom of America, took the deportation records with it, and has never apologised.

The republic that everyone had written off as a fractured ruin reconsolidated across the interwar years into something no one had planned for, and by the late 1940s it was a great power again, resurgent, armed and hungry to be feared. It announced itself in the north. A Russian ultimatum to Finland and the short, sharp Winter War of 1949 that followed told the world that the wounded heir had recovered its strength and its appetite, and the shock of it drove the five Nordic nations together into the Scandinavian Union, the first shield raised against the new Russia. Others followed, until the Allied monarchies stood arrayed against Moscow, and the long confrontation settled in.

The long cold war

It was a cold war, fought the way cold wars are: by proxy in a hundred small countries, by the slow arithmetic of the arms race, and above all under the shadow of the bomb, which Russia built among the first, so that the balance of terror hung over the constitutional world and the great republic alike and neither dared the war that would end everything. The fronts were two. In the north the border with the Russian Republic was, in practice, the length of Finland’s eastern frontier, and everything else in Europe stood secure behind it. In the far east it was the Bering Strait, where the republic and the monarchical enemy stood two miles and one day apart across the water, the Russians looking out at Alaska, the land their own empire had sold, now bristling with the other side’s radar and its fleets. Between those poles the cold war ran around the whole world, and for fifty years the Realm and the Republic measured each other across it, constitutional against authoritarian, and waited for a war that mercifully never came.

May Day and the war that was not fought

The Republic came closer to war with the United Kingdom of America in the weeks after 1 May 2006 than at any point in the preceding fifty years, and it did so having done nothing at all.

The May Day Bombings killed 2,158 people in New York in a single morning. Moscow offered assistance in the first days and the assistance was accepted. Within weeks the same Realm had concluded that Russia was implicated. The explosive used was military-grade and of foreign origin, its provenance traced partway and then lost; the financing had moved through legitimate banking along routes that admitted a Russian reading. The material was genuine and the analysis was honest, and the shape of what was missing from it was read as the shape of what half a century of rivalry had taught the Realm to expect.

Forces moved. An ultimatum was drafted. Prime Minister Al Gore, in the last weeks of a ministry already collapsing, refused to act on the attribution, and it fell apart within weeks and before any strike when the trail on an escaped attacker ran instead to a third state with no Russian connection.

The Realm issued a carefully worded acknowledgement. It has never apologised, and the absence of an apology is a standing grievance in Moscow, raised periodically and never resolved.

The aftermath is the strangest thing in the whole relationship. Having come that close by accident, the two states drew slowly less dangerous to one another. The rivalry did not end and neither government revised its opinion of the other, but the temperature fell, and the two decades since 2006 have been quieter than the two decades before. Russian commentary treats the episode as proof that the monarchies will believe anything of the Republic; American commentary treats it as the closest the Realm has come to a catastrophic error of its own making. Both readings are held sincerely and they are not incompatible.

One consequence fell on people who had no part in any of it. The Realm’s Russian and Slavic communities, most of them long settled and many of them burying their own dead from the same four sites, bore sustained violence on the strength of the attribution, and then the watch lists that followed it. Ernest V apologised to them. No American government has.

The Cuban partnership

The strangest chapter of that cold war was Cuban. When the Republic of Cuba turned communist after 1959, Moscow armed and supplied an island whose governing creed the Russian Republic despised at home and suppressed wherever it appeared inside its own borders. There was nothing fraternal in it. Russia wanted a lever ninety miles from the UKA’s coast, and Cuba wanted a shield against the power that had occupied it twice, and the two things were enough to sustain a partnership that neither side justified by belief. It produced the Caribbean Missile Crisis of 1962 and the tripartite Havana Accord that ended it. It did not survive Russian retrenchment: the support thinned, the Special Period followed in Havana, and the relationship cooled into the estrangement that persists, a bargain ended without either party ever having pretended it was a friendship.

Geography

Relief and drainage

The country is built on four great structural units laid side by side from west to east. The East European Plain carries the historic Russian core, a low, gently undulating platform of glaciated country and slow rivers that runs from the western frontier to the Volga. The Ural mountains divide it from Asia along a worn north to south spine, low enough almost everywhere to be crossed without difficulty and important less as a barrier than as a mineral belt and a mental boundary. Beyond them the West Siberian Plain spreads out as one of the largest lowlands on earth, so flat and so poorly drained that much of it is bog for half the year. East of the Yenisei the ground rises into the Central Siberian Plateau, and beyond that into the ranges of the far east, the Verkhoyansk and Kolyma mountains, the highlands above the Sea of Okhotsk and the volcanic spine of Kamchatka.

The southern rim is mountainous throughout. The Caucasus wall the country off between the Black and Caspian seas and carry its highest summits; the Altai and Sayan ranges rise on the Mongolian approaches; and the Tien Shan and the Pamir close the Central Asian frontier in some of the highest country in the world. Between the mountains and the forest lies the steppe, the open grass corridor that has carried traffic east and west for as long as there has been traffic.

Drainage is the country’s defining inconvenience. The three great Siberian rivers, the Ob, the Yenisei and the Lena, run north to the Arctic, which is to say away from every market and frozen at the mouth for much of the year, and their spring thaw pushes upstream against ice still locked downstream and floods the plains behind it. The Volga, the longest river in Europe and the historic artery of the Russian interior, runs south to the landlocked Caspian. The Amur runs east along the Chinese frontier. In Central Asia the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya drain inland to the Aral basin and are drawn on hard for irrigation before they arrive. Lake Baikal, in the south of Siberia, is the deepest lake on earth and holds a fifth of the world’s unfrozen fresh water.

Climate and vegetation

The climate is continental to an extreme degree, and the extremity increases eastward as the moderating influence of the Atlantic dies away. Winters are long and severe over most of the territory; the coldest inhabited places on earth lie in the basin of the Lena. Summers are short, warm and, in the south, dry. Precipitation is generally modest and falls away toward the interior, so that the country is at once vast and, over much of its extent, water-poor in the places where crops would otherwise grow.

Vegetation lies in belts that follow the climate. The Arctic fringe is tundra, treeless and underlain by permanently frozen ground. South of it comes the taiga, the coniferous forest that is the largest continuous woodland on earth and the source of the timber trade. The taiga gives way to mixed and broadleaf forest in the west, then to the steppe, whose deep black earth is the agricultural core of the republic and the reason it exports grain. South and east of the steppe the grass thins into semi-desert and then into the true deserts of Central Asia, the Kyzylkum and the Karakum, where settlement follows irrigation and the rivers that feed it.

Permafrost underlies a majority of the national territory and is the single greatest constraint on Russian engineering. Roads, railways, pipelines, foundations and mine workings must all be built for ground that moves as it thaws, and the warming of the last decades has made a settled cost into a rising one, particularly along the Arctic coast and in the older Siberian towns.

Extent and frontiers

The republic runs approximately nine thousand kilometres from its western frontier to the Pacific and spans eleven time zones, from UTC+2 on the Baltic approaches to UTC+12 in Kamchatka. It touches two oceans, the Arctic along its whole northern coast and the Pacific in the far east, and its warm-water access is confined to the Black Sea and the Caspian, both of them enclosed. The western frontier faces the independent states of Finland, the Baltic nations and Poland and, through them, German-ordered Europe. The southern frontier runs along the Caucasus, the Central Asian mountains and the long line with China and Mongolia. In the far northeast the frontier is maritime and famously narrow: the two Diomede islands in the Bering Strait lie a little over two miles apart with the international date line between them, so that the republic and the Kingdom of Alaska face each other across two miles of water and a calendar day.

Settlement and urbanisation

Population is concentrated to a degree unusual among large states. The great majority of Russians live west of the Urals, on a fraction of the national area, and the density falls away sharply beyond them. Moscow is much the largest city and the centre of government, finance and transport; St. Petersburg is the Baltic port and the second city; and the Volga cities, the Ural manufacturing towns and the industrial centres of the Donets and Kuban belt make up the rest of the western concentration. East of the Urals settlement follows the rail: the towns of Siberia are strung along the Trans-Siberian line and its branches in a ribbon a few kilometres wide with emptiness on either side. In Central Asia the pattern is older and different, a chain of oasis cities on the irrigated rivers, several of them among the largest in the republic. The Arctic north is nearly empty apart from the mining and hydrocarbon settlements built to work it, many of which are supplied by air and river barge for want of any road at all.

Government and politics

This section describes the republic as it stood until October 2028. The constitution of the restored empire has still to be written. The referendum of 25 October settled that Russia is a constitutional monarchy, and the constituent assembly is to settle the rest on the British model: a sovereign who reigns and does not govern, a Prime Minister answerable to an elected Duma, and no President. Until it does, President Gromov governs through the republic’s institutions, with the Emperor as head of state beside him.

The managed republic

Kolchak’s Russia was a naked thing, a Supreme Ruler and an army and a country told to be grateful. The Russian Republic of today is far more sophisticated, and far harder to insult, because it has learned to wear the clothes of the thing it is not. It holds elections, and the elections are real in the sense that people vote and the ballots are counted; they are simply never in doubt. There is a President, the office Kolchak’s power hardened into, who wins his mandate at the polls and governs with the authority of a man the people chose. There is a National Assembly that debates and legislates and represents. There are opposition parties, tolerated and even funded, who contest the seats and lose them. And there is, threaded through all of it and holding all of it up, the security apparatus that decides in advance what the outcome will be, so that the whole apparatus of a republic performs, year after year, an election whose result was settled before the campaign began.

This is the republic’s genius and its brittleness at once. A naked dictatorship can be pointed at and named; a managed democracy is harder to condemn, because it can always answer that its president was elected, its assembly sits, its opposition speaks. Russia has spent decades perfecting the art of authoritarian rule that looks, from the right angle and in a flattering light, like the real thing, and it has fooled a great many people who wanted to be fooled. But a system that governs by managing consent rather than crushing it depends on the management never failing, and management is a more delicate machine than terror.

Moscow and St. Petersburg

The republic rules from Moscow, the old Russian heart, having pointedly left the tsars’ western-facing capital at St. Petersburg to stand as a beautiful reproach on the Baltic, a monument to the empire the republic replaced and the Europe it can no longer reach. The choice of capital is treated as a statement of orientation rather than an administrative convenience, and it is read that way by the republic’s critics and its defenders alike.

The restoration divided the two cities between the two halves of the new state. The Emperor was proclaimed at St. Petersburg, and the crown sits there; the government stays at Moscow, and so do the President, the ministries and the National Assembly. The reproach on the Baltic has become the seat of the thing it reproached the republic for refusing.

The creed

The creed that holds the state together is not an ideology in the way the twentieth century taught the word. It has no scripture, no promised utopia, no theory of history; it offers nothing to the future and everything to the past. What the Russian Republic believes in is Russia: the greatness of the nation, the sanctity of its unity, the order that saved it from the abyss, and the grievance of everything it lost, welded into a patriotism that asks no argument beyond the country itself. It does not promise its people paradise. It promises them that they are Russians, that Russia is great, that the strong hand keeps the darkness out, and that the many enemies who surround them, the monarchical west chief among them, would tear the country apart again given half a chance. After the chaos Kolchak ended, that promise needed no defending. Order was its own argument, and for a long time it was enough.

Foreign relations

The republic holds no alliances. It is the excluded pole against which the whole Allied order was built, and it has never found a bloc of its own to lead, having neither a doctrine that travelled nor allies who shared one. Its relations with the monarchical powers are correct, wary and conducted at arm’s length: trade across the Finnish and Polish frontiers, persistent espionage in both directions, occasional airspace and maritime incidents in the north and the Pacific, and long memories on all sides. The European Concert excludes it by design, and only so long as it remains the authoritarian republic it is, so that the seat kept pointedly empty in Straßburg, and the association agreement the Concert’s Council offered in the spring of 2028 on conditions about elections and the courts, which President Yermolov announced on 24 October 2028 that Russia would open talks on, are at once an insult and a standing offer. The restored empire has inherited the offer: on the night of 25 October 2028 the Concert’s Council said that it stood and that a constitutional Russia might one day take the seat, and the Realm’s Foreign Secretary recognised the Emperor the night he was proclaimed. The next day the Concert went further and opened talks at St. Petersburg on Russian associate status. Its Caribbean partnership with Cuba, never founded on belief, has cooled into estrangement. In the far east it faces Japan and China across the Pacific approaches and trades heavily with both.

Russia was never invited into Concord Station, the permanent station shared by five constitutional powers, and flies its own station, Derzhava, launched in 2001. Moscow’s official description of Concord is “a parliament in orbit, deciding nothing”. An unannounced change in Derzhava’s orbit in 2019 forced Concord’s crew into their capsules for forty minutes, and a Russian anti-satellite test in 2021 put debris across its orbit; Moscow has explained neither.

Armed forces and nuclear status

Russia was among the first powers to build the bomb, and the arsenal remains the foundation of a standing that its economy alone would not sustain. Through the long confrontation the balance of terror held over the constitutional world and the great republic alike, and neither dared the war that would have ended both. The republic’s conventional posture followed its two standing fronts, the Finnish frontier in the north and the Bering Strait in the far east, with the Pacific fleet and the northern fleet as the two arms of a navy divided by the whole width of the country. Command is exercised through the presidency, and the security services that manage the republic’s politics are institutionally distinct from the armed forces, a separation the founder built deliberately and every successor has maintained.

Economy

Structure and allocation

The Russian economy is a state-directed resource economy in which allocation is political rather than administrative. No plan was ever written, because no revolution came to write one: firms are privately owned and prices are set in markets. What the state holds is not the means of production but the power of licence. Extraction rights, export permits, state-bank credit, public contracts and the protection of the courts are granted and withdrawn by the presidency and the security apparatus, so that ownership is secure in law and conditional in practice. It is the economic counterpart of the managed election: private in form, settled in advance.

Output and living standards

Russia is a great power that is not a rich country. Output of approximately A£8.4 trillion across approximately 350 million people gives approximately A£24,000 a person, against approximately A£80,000 in the United Kingdom of America, a realm of the same 350 million people producing roughly three times as much. Purchasing power raises the Russian total to approximately A£14 trillion, the gap measuring how cheap non-traded goods and services are. Human development is 0.820, below every Allied state, and the Gini coefficient of 0.43 is the widest of any large economy, which is what allocation by licence produces: returns collect where the permissions are held.

Extraction and the economic geography

Extraction organises the geography. Siberia carries the oil, gas, metals and timber that dominate the export account, moved west by pipeline and rail across distances no other economy has to bridge, and east to Pacific terminals facing Japan and China. Central Asia adds gas, cotton and minerals, the Caucasus oil and the routes out of it, and the black-earth south makes Russia one of the world’s great grain exporters. Moscow holds the ministries, the state banks and the head offices of firms whose assets lie thousands of kilometres east. St. Petersburg remains the Baltic outlet, but with Finland, Poland and the Baltic states independent, Russia’s European access is narrow.

Pressures

The pressures are those of a rent economy in a decarbonising world. Hydrocarbons furnish the budget, the export earnings and much of the governing class’s income, and demand for them is expected to fall within the working life of the plant now being built to supply it. Investment outside extraction is thin, because the conditional property rights that let the state discipline one owner instruct every other owner to keep his capital where the courts are not political, and capital flight has been a standing condition rather than an episode. The flux has an economic dimension: the European Concert holds a seat open for a Russia that liberalises, the largest adjacent market available to it, and the price of the seat is the licensing system the governing arrangement rests on.

Demographics and society

Population

Russia holds approximately 350 million people on approximately 22,100,000 square kilometres, which makes it one of the most populous states on earth and one of the most thinly settled. The distribution is extremely uneven: the great majority live west of the Urals, and the Siberian and Arctic territories that supply most of the export earnings hold a small fraction of the people. Something over two-thirds of the population is urban, a share that rose steeply through the middle of the last century and has since levelled off.

Growth is slow and regionally divided. The Russian core has a low birth rate, an ageing profile and a median age in the upper thirties, while the Central Asian and Caucasian regions are markedly younger and still growing, so that the balance of the republic’s population shifts south and east with each decade even as political and economic weight stays in the west. Life expectancy stands below that of the Allied states and well below the northern European figure, and the gap between male and female life expectancy is among the widest recorded anywhere, a pattern of early adult male mortality that the health ministries have acknowledged for two generations without closing. Human development at 0.820 reflects the combination: near-universal literacy and schooling, wide access to basic medicine, and outcomes that lag the republic’s own level of education.

Internal migration runs from the countryside and the small industrial towns toward Moscow and the western cities, and from the Arctic and Siberian settlements back to the temperate belt as the mining towns that raised them contract. Russia also has a substantial diaspora, older and more political than most: the exiles of the civil war and their descendants, the professional and commercial emigration that accompanied each tightening of the republic’s licensing system, and, until October 2028, the imperial house itself, which lived abroad for a hundred and ten years.

Languages

Russian is the language of the state, of the schools, of the army and of business, and it is spoken as a first or second language almost everywhere in the republic. It is written in Cyrillic, and the script is one of the practical instruments of unity, since it is the common alphabet of the republic’s Slavic and many of its non-Slavic languages alike.

Beyond Russian the country is genuinely multilingual. The largest group is Turkic and includes the languages of Central Asia and of the Volga and the Siberian south; the Caucasus holds one of the densest concentrations of unrelated languages in the world; Mongolic and Tungusic languages are spoken in the east and around Baikal; and the small indigenous peoples of the Arctic and the Pacific coast keep languages with speakers numbered in the thousands. Bilingualism is the ordinary condition of the non-Russian citizen and is much rarer in the other direction, and the standing of regional languages in schooling and administration is one of the quieter arguments of the republic’s politics.

Religion

The strangest thread in the republic’s creed was the Church. The Russian Republic was a republic, sworn against the crown, and yet it took up the Russian Orthodox Church as the very soul of the nation, the deepest root of Russian identity and the truest mark of what separates Russia from the Latin west. It was Holy Russia without the tsar, the faith of the empire kept and the emperor discarded, and the republic saw no contradiction in venerating the Church that once crowned the very dynasty it refused to restore. The Church, for its part, made its peace with a republic that honoured it, blessed its soldiers, and asked in return only that it bless the state, and the arrangement suited both. A people who could not keep their empire kept their God, and the republic built a good deal of its legitimacy on being the one thing the tsars were and the monarchical west was not: the guardian of the true faith and the Russian soul. Since October 2028 the Church has had its tsar again, and what it makes of him, and he of it, is for the constitution and the years after it.

Orthodoxy is the national confession and not the only one. Islam is the faith of a very large minority, concentrated in Central Asia, the Volga and the northern Caucasus, and is by numbers the second religion of the country; Buddhism is long established around Baikal and in the Kalmyk steppe; Jewish communities are old, urban and much reduced by a century of emigration; and older shamanic practice survives among the Siberian peoples, often alongside Orthodoxy rather than instead of it. The state’s arrangement with the national Church has no exact counterpart for the others, which are administered rather than embraced, and the difference is felt most in Central Asia.

Culture

Public memory

Public memory in Russia, as the republic shaped it, is organised around three fixed points: the collapse, the reunification and the losses. The chaos that followed 1917 is remembered as the abyss, invoked in every argument for order; the civil war and Kolchak’s victory are remembered as the rescue, and the founder’s name is attached to streets, institutions, warships and a standing public liturgy that every subsequent leader has maintained; and the lost western fringe, together with the sale of Alaska, furnishes the grievance that gives the first two their edge. The Winter War is commemorated as a defensive necessity rather than an adventure. The imperial period is treated with a curious warmth for a republic, admired for its extent and its faith and blamed for its incompetence, and St. Petersburg is the place where the two feelings are meant to be had at once.

Press and broadcasting

The press and broadcasting are managed by the same means as the elections, which is to say without formal abolition. Newspapers, channels and networks are privately owned in the main, and their owners hold licences, contracts and credit at the pleasure of the apparatus, so that editorial independence is a matter of standing rather than of right. The result is a media world that is neither uniform nor free: there is genuine reporting on local administration, industry and crime, considerable latitude for entertainment and sport, and a narrow and well-understood band of subjects on which the line is set centrally. Foreign broadcasting reaches the republic freely enough in the cities and is answered rather than blocked, and the contrast with the open information of the northern and Allied states is a standing embarrassment that the republic’s own liberals raise most often.

Symbols

The flag of Russia is the white, blue and red tricolour, the banner of the old empire and of the White cause that Kolchak fought under, kept by the republic that won the war he was fighting and kept again by the empire that succeeded it. The republic’s slogan, inherited from the same source and the phrase the state reached for first, was Russia, One and Indivisible. The double-headed eagle of the dynasty was not carried over into the republic; the tricolour was, and it is flown from ministries, embassies, warships and school yards as the single sufficient emblem of the state.

The Orthodox Church supplies the other half of the republic’s public symbolism, in the blessing of ships and regiments, the attendance of the President at the great feasts, and the restoration of cathedral fabric as a public works programme. Between the tricolour and the icon the republic asserted continuity with everything of the empire except its dynasty, which was precisely the inheritance it claimed.

The restoration did not change the flag. The tricolour had been the empire’s before it was the republic’s, it flew over the Tauride Palace on the day of the proclamation as it had flown over the Winter Palace before 1917, and it remains the flag of the Russian Empire whatever the constitution says about the rest. The eagle came back with the house, on the Constitutional Crown Party’s papers in October 2028 and on the Emperor’s own letters, as the arms of the dynasty and not as a flag, and what place it is to have in the empire’s law is for the constitution.

The political flux of 2028

The end of the confrontation

The cold war ended not with a victory but with an exhaustion. The confrontation cooled by slow degrees, the proxy wars guttered out, the arms race lost its urgency, and one day the constitutional powers looked east and found that the enemy that had disciplined them for two generations no longer frightened them the way it had. The Russian Republic was in flux, and the flux was the story of the age. Its founding purpose, to be the great republic that opposed the crowns, had quietly expired, because the crowns had stopped treating it as the mortal threat that gave the opposition meaning, and a state built entirely to be the necessary enemy does not easily learn to be anything else. By October 2028 three currents ran through it, and two days of October settled between them.

The liberal current

What came next was the open question, and it cut through the whole republic. There was a current within it, younger and quieter and growing, that looked at the managed elections and the endless grievance and the reproach of St. Petersburg and wondered whether Russia might at last become the republic it had only ever pretended to be, might liberalise, might reconcile, might one day take the seat the European order kept pointedly empty for it, since the European Concert excluded the Russian Republic only so long as it remained the authoritarian republic it was, and no longer. Its argument was made in Kerensky’s name and in the phrase the liberals had used for a century, the republic Kerensky meant. Germany’s minor Emperor, Alexander I, publicly kept that possibility open while continuing to treat the Russian state as a genuine security threat.

The founder’s current

And there was the older current, the founder’s current, that heard in all this the same weakness that lost the empire the first time, and answered that Russia had always been saved by the strong hand and destroyed by the soft one, and that the cure for flux was to harden again. It held the security apparatus, much of the officer corps and a good deal of the provincial administration, and it had the advantage of possessing the machine already.

The monarchist current

Strangest of all, and fastest-growing in the last ten years of the republic, was a third current the founders would have thought impossible. For a state built to prove that a great people needs no king, the Russian Republic began to breed monarchists. Because the red revolution never came, the Romanovs were never massacred; the imperial family was let go in 1918 into a long exile in Britain and endured there for a hundred and ten years, at Richmond, a house without a throne, and to that house a swelling number of Russians started to look. Weary of the managed elections and the endless grievance, and unpersuaded by a liberal reform that never quite arrived, they began to say the once-unsayable thing: that the cure for an autocratic republic might be a constitutional crown, and that the very dynasty the republic was founded to refuse might be the one legitimate authority able to stand above the strongman and his party. It remained a minority faith, watched and discouraged and now and then punished, but it was the fastest-rising dissent in the country, and its irony was total. The one great nation that answered the monarchical world with a republic came to contain, a century on, a growing movement that looked at the monarchical world and wondered whether it had been right all along. A restored Romanov Russia would be a monarchy once more, and could take at last the seat the European Concert kept empty for it; the mere possibility, unthinkable a generation before, was openly discussed in the republic’s last years, and in October 2028 it happened.

The decree of 24 October

On the night of 23 to 24 October 2028 the managed system broke, and it was broken from the top. Shortly after midnight President Pavel Yermolov, a career officer of the security apparatus who had risen to the presidency in 2022, and so the machine’s own man, went on the air with the army and the security troops already confined to their barracks on his order. They had obeyed. He said in terms that the managed system could no longer be managed, and that a Russia that waited for it to fail would get the strong hand or the crown.

By decree he ended the security service’s part in counting the vote, ordered the release of the political prisoners, and lifted the restrictions on the press and on the registration of parties. He called an early presidential election, cutting his own term short, to be held within twenty-four hours of the decree and counted by a reconstituted Central Election Commission of judges, with the League of Nations invited to observe, the first time Russia has ever asked. He announced that Russia would open talks on the European Concert’s conditional offer of association, which had gone unanswered since the spring. And he said that he would not be a candidate, which was the sentence that persuaded the country he meant the rest.

The first prisoners walked out before dawn. Dmitri Gromov, a former deputy mayor of St. Petersburg imprisoned since 2025 and the best-known voice of the liberal current, announced at the prison gate that he would stand, in Kerensky’s name. The head of the House of Romanov, Grand Duke Paul, said from Richmond that the house would abide by the result of a free election and would not stand in its way, and the monarchists will campaign anyway. The security service and the general staff, whose troops were in their barracks, had said nothing by morning.

Abroad the frontier states were the first to welcome the decree, Finland before anyone, with Poland-Lithuania and the United Baltic Duchy close behind. The Realm’s Foreign Secretary, Margaret Renwick, welcomed it in a statement careful to claim nothing, and the Realm’s forces did not move; the Atlantic Treaty Organization said nothing. The European Concert’s Council was to meet in the morning.

Nothing is settled. The decree is the President’s, the apparatus it disarms is intact, and the officer corps that obeyed an order to stay in its barracks has not said what it would do with an order to leave them.

The election of 25 October

The election was held the next day, as the decree required, and it was the first free one in Russia since Kolchak’s coup of 1922. Dmitri Gromov won it outright, with a clear majority on a high turnout, against a field that the old system could not organise in a day, and with the votes of the Constitutional Crown Party, which had filed its papers the morning before and declared for him as the road to a constituent assembly. The League’s observers, who arrived with hours to spare, called the vote free and the count honest, and said that twenty-four hours was no way to hold an election.

Gromov’s first promise was the price of the monarchists’ votes: a constituent assembly within months to write Russia a new constitution, with the question of the crown put to the people in a referendum. The head of the House of Romanov, who had said for nine years that the crown was the Russian people’s to give, repeated it from Richmond and said nothing else.

By morning the Chief of the General Staff had said that the army serves the elected President, which was the sentence the frontier states had been waiting for. The security service said nothing. The commission of judges certified the count overnight, and Gromov was sworn in on the afternoon of 25 October. His first decree brought the referendum forward: the question of the crown, a constitutional monarchy under the house of Romanov, yes or no, was put to the people that same evening, alone, before the constituent assembly sat, at the polling stations that had counted the election and with the same judges.

The referendum

The referendum was held on the evening of 25 October 2028, the day after the decree that had made it possible and within hours of the swearing-in, on a single question: whether Russia should be a constitutional monarchy under the House of Romanov. More than three in four voted yes, on a high turnout, in a count kept by the same commission of judges. The republic that had been founded to refuse the dynasty voted, a hundred and six years after Kolchak’s coup, to take it back, and it did so by the method of 1613, which was to ask.

From Richmond, Grand Duke Paul accepted the result and left for the airfield. That night the director of the security service resigned, without a statement; the general staff had already said that the army serves the elected President. The European Concert’s Council said that its offer of association stood and that a constitutional Russia might one day take the seat kept empty for it. Finland, alone among the frontier states, received the news with a coolness its government did not trouble to hide.

The proclamation

Grand Duke Paul flew from London as soon as the result was known, on the evening of 25 October 2028, alone. His wife and children stayed at Richmond, to follow when the house at St. Petersburg, the Anichkov Palace, was ready for them. He landed quietly at St. Petersburg late at night, by his own wish with no crowd at the airfield, and was driven to the Tauride Palace, where the old Duma had sat from 1906 until the fall of the empire. There, before the presiding officers of the National Assembly, the result of the referendum was read, and he was proclaimed Paul II, Emperor of All Russia. There was no crown and no procession. The ceremony took less than half an hour and was over before the day was, and Russians were calling him the Tsar before it ended. He took the number after Paul I, whose succession law of 1797 had carried the claim through the exile.

The state became the Russian Empire at once, and almost nothing else about it changed that night. President Gromov remains President until the constitution is written, governing through the republic’s institutions with the Emperor as head of state beside him; the constitution is to be written on the British model, with a sovereign who reigns and does not govern, a Prime Minister answerable to an elected Duma, and the presidency abolished. The government stays at Moscow. The crown sits at St. Petersburg.

The Emperor keeps his British ties as a private matter. He keeps his British nationality, and the house at Richmond stays the family’s for their visits to England; the parliamentary grant the house had received since 1919 stops. From his bed in New Westminster General, Ernest V, who was still not permitted any function of the Crown, sent the Emperor his congratulations by a personal message, on advice. The Realm’s Foreign Secretary, Margaret Renwick, welcomed the constitutional crown and recognised the Emperor the same night.

The Concert talks

On 26 October 2028, the day after the proclamation, the European Concert’s special envoy, Tomasz Wierzbicki, a former Foreign Minister of Poland-Lithuania, came to St. Petersburg to open talks on Russia becoming an associate of the Concert: attending its Council without a vote on energy, on trade and the major economic rules, and on cross-border transport and frontiers. It was more than the association agreement offered in the spring, and every seat on the Council, the eastern ones included, had agreed the envoy’s mandate without conditions. The Emperor opened the session with a few words of welcome and withdrew. Russia’s side is led by its new Foreign Minister, Irina Volkova, a Moscow professor of international law and one of Gromov’s closest allies in the liberal current. No timetable was set. Poland-Lithuania, the United Baltic Duchy and Finland welcomed the opening, Finland as the part of the change it had wanted. The same day the Emperor wrote to the President of Finland apologising for the Russification of Finland from 1899, the first apology in particular his house has made; Helsinki said it would answer.

The open question

Three roads lay open where a generation before there had been only the wall: to liberalise into the republic Kerensky meant, to restore the crown the state was built to refuse, or to harden one last time into the strong hand in the dark. On the night of 23 to 24 October 2028 the first road was taken by the President himself, and the question became whether the country would follow him down it, or the founder’s current, which held the machine and stayed in its barracks, would close it behind him. On 25 October the country followed, electing Gromov on a promise that kept the second road open too, and the same evening it took that road, voting by more than three to one for a constitutional crown; by midnight the Emperor was proclaimed.

What is open now is whether the crown holds. The constitution is unwritten, the founder’s current still holds a good deal of the officer corps and the provincial administration even with the security service’s director gone, and a crown given by three in four in a single day can be asked for back as quickly. The third road, the strong hand, has not been closed, only passed.

Trivia

See also

• The Scandinavian Union: the five Nordic nations driven together by the Winter War, the first shield raised against the resurgent republic
• The European Concert: the union of monarchical Europe, which excluded the authoritarian republic and keeps a seat empty for a constitutional Russia
• Kingdom of Alaska: the monarchical enemy’s forward wall on the Bering Strait, the land the tsars sold
• The House of Romanov: the dynasty the Republic refused, in British exile from 1918 to 2028 and restored by referendum
• Russia’s Two Days: the ABC’s contemporary record of the two days, from the decree to the proclamation
• The German Empire: the continental power whose fear first bound the empire’s enemies, and whose order holds the west Russia lost
• Nations of the World: the powers and nations beyond the United Kingdom of America

Nations of the World · The Russian Empire · The Russian Republic · The Cold War · Monarchies · Republics · Foreign Nations