The Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth

I've mentioned it casually in the past. I've derped about it before. But since I've never actually said it yet, I may as well say it now: Poland exists.

It's a simple thing to say, because we're used to Poland existing - but for a long time IRL it didn't. Andalusada changes that; Poland survived the early-modern era, and has continued its existence uninterrupted to the present day. And even more importantly than that, it survived without significantly changing from the awesomeness of its IRL early-modern form.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth. Social science doesn't get much more steampunk than this, people.

Poland-Ruthenia 101

The big question for Poland-Ruthenia is "Why?" The answer to that is simple: Rule of Cool. Every allohistorian has their own pet nations, the lost causes and might-have-beens - and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is one of mine.

So with that rationale out of the way, let me summarize Poland-Ruthenia in a nutshell:

• Who: Poles and "Ruthenians," however so defined. (The definitions are pretty vague.)
• What: The most steampunk monarchy
• When: Not exactly sure when it starts off, or even if it has claims to Lithuania; but in the form of Poland-Ruthenia it definitely lasts to the present day.
• Where: Most of IRL Poland (possibly incorporating IRL's Ducal Prussia, possibly not), less a swathe of the Pomerelian region which has been Germanic since the Teutonic Ordensstaat and broke away during the Burning Thirties. "Ruthenia" is a bit harder to define, but it includes at least the Eastern Borderlands and Galicia, and probably some other assorted bits and pieces of what we'd call Belarus, Lithuania, and the northwest Ukraine.

Polish-Ruthenian history in outline

Note: this section, while it's relevant to Polish-Ruthenian history, predates Poland-Ruthenia itself, and therefore belongs in a different post. It's being kept here because that different post hasn't been written yet.

• Medieval-era relations between the Teutonic Knights and Poland are, predictably, bad enough that the king of Poland decides to aid and abet a peasant revolt in Livonia that gets... out of hand. (At some point, that support falters; the Poles manage to arrange a peace agreement before their stinging defeat becomes a crushing one.)
• When the dust settles, most of the former Ordensstaat has been normalized as a feudal vassal of the Kingdom of Poland. The relations between the Güntherites, the Poles, and the Holy Roman Empire remain kinda tangled ever since.
• Poland plays an early part in the Hanseatic Wars, but it's not a major one, in no small part because it, alongside Hungary, bears the brunt of the Turkish menace throughout the modern era.

I'm still not sure when or how Poland (and Lithuania?) manages to transition to the infamous electoral monarchy of IRL. All I can say for certain is that it does happen. It happens at about the right time, too, because they manage to elect a fair number of decent, stable kings.

• For the century after the Hanseatic Wars, the crowns of Poland and Ruthenia supplant that of the Holy Roman Empire as the important ones in continental Europe. (France would disagree, but every French king since about 1646 has been anti-Emperor of the Romans.)
• In the 1600s, once the Orthodox dark age is well underway, Evgeny I of Russia reforms the calendar, causing a massive schism within Slavonic Orthodoxy. The autonomous Metropolitan of Kiev is left absolutely impotent, leading a fair swathe of his flock in Poland-Ruthenia to become a Uniate church.
• Again as per IRL, ethnoreligious issues are going to be a problem for the Commonwealth. (There's a reason that the IRL Union of Brest included a lot of completely political requests.) Fortunately for Poland-Ruthenia, they have an important ally in the form of the Sodality, who redeem themselves (and find their true charism) making sure that the various churches of the Roman Communion don't consume one another.
• The Pomeranian Reductions: After the Turks stop menacing Lechistan, the problem becomes Pomerania, which is increasingly independent, prone to alliances with the Tsardom of Tver, and has attitude problems. Over the course of a few wars, Pomerania is partitioned between Saxony, Brandenburg, and Poland-Ruthenia.
• This establishes the oft-mentioned Baltic diaspora in the New World. Kaspar and Oskar, who went on to found Cabralia and Mexico, respectively? Both first-generation and born to exiled Pomeranian parents. So were all the others who broke away to form Hispano-Baltic Texas.
• This also reverses itself spectacularly during the 1830s, when (after an abortive attempt in the 1780s) Pomerania once again breaks free of Poland-Ruthenia and establishes itself as an aggressively plebeian republic.
• The Russian Wars: Poland-Ruthenia manages, at tremendous cost, to stop the Russian advance westward into Poland itself. (Lots of land changes hands in the Ukraine, though.) They get a lot of credibility for it, in part because Great Russia has an undeserved reputation for being unstoppable.

It doesn't get more steampunk than this

When I said that above the cut, I wasn't lying. Every state has weird legal quirks and political conventions - it comes with history - but the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth is made of them. It's eccentricity all the way down. There's no way to explain the whole without saying, each and every step of the way, "It made perfect sense at the time."

Case in point: democracy. Other states (well, maybe not; in some republics, especially the Baltic ones, citizenship means service) have enacted comprehensive, if not universal, suffrage. Not Poland-Ruthenia. Faced with the fact that the masses were restless, and only the titled had any say in affairs of state, what was their solution? Rank inflation.

At this point, it bears noting that by all rights this shouldn't be possible. (Never mind that I do live in a kludgy dysfunctional state myself.) It certainly doesn't seem plausible; I can already hear people objecting that it should've been annexed by Russia or something already. In response to this, I reiterate: a lot of things about Poland-Ruthenia made perfect sense at the time, for two reasons:

• The szlachta are reactionary. They've been powerful enough, long enough, that at key points in Polish-Ruthenian history the great reformers simply sighed, shrugged their shoulders, and worked around them, rather than wrecking the ship of state on the rocks of aristocracy. There's a lot of compromises and a lot of half-solutions in the Polish-Ruthenian past, enough to set a precedent for the Poles and Ruthenes who have to live and work in its present.
• They had an excuse. Poland-Ruthenia is well aware of its problems - but as a rule of writing, I mean to give them plenty of very good reasons to defer dealing with them. (Case in point: its current military modernization, and its discontents.) Delaying means that things get more serious, of course, but in a lot of cases they can claim that dropping everything to fix the problem then would have been their undoing. At this point, Polish-Ruthenian society has bugs so old that some of them have been turned into features.

That said, I'll be the first to admit: the country is dysfunctional. Its government is a Rube Goldberg machine, held together by inertia and duct tape and prayers; its military is the Funny New Guy of Europe; there is a special providence (quoth Bismarck) that looks out for idiots, drunkards and the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth. Hungary is more likely to break down violently if it doesn't break up peacefully, but at least the Saxon diplomats can guess about how that would play out; with the Commonwealth, everybody's waiting for the next surprise - which makes for hilarious screwball comedy and hellish foreign policy.

Which is, of course, exactly the way I'm okay with it being.

The Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth today

As of the present day, the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth looks something like this:

• Languages: Polish, Latin, and Ruthenian are co-official.
• "Ruthenian" is a Dachsprache, with both a Cyrillic and (Polonized) Latin orthography. I think. Not totally sure on this.
• Religion: Poland's as primarily and devoutly Catholic as it ever was. For national reasons, the Ruthenians are a bit more diverse, but Polish hegemony (and a less successful Russian conquest of the Ukraine) leaves most of the Ruthenes some variety of *Uniate Catholic too.
• The Sodality's work is very important here.
• Historically, Poland or Ruthenia have been pretty decent places to be Güntherite; the Commonwealth, here as IRL, was "a state without stakes." Now that the Burning Thirties are over (in which the Holy Church discovered that it thrives as revolutionary chaplains), that tolerance is rather lost.
• Government: Still an electoral monarchy of some form.
• Following the Baltic republican lead, Poland-Ruthenia has been experimenting with service-based suffrage. It's been problematic, and very much like the Baltic republics has led toward a militarization of their politics. Its labor party isn't called "the Angry Order" for nothing - most of them are knights, and they could field paramilitaries.
• Poland-Ruthenia's Sejm is the most violent such body in continued existence on the planet. (Not the most lethal, though; a dozen CRC regimes claim that honor.) Fighting in session has become a point of perverse national pride, like Taiwan IRL.