Great Russia

Seeing that the last two posts have been about details of modern Russian culture, it bears mentioning that Russia's finally gone revolutionist. And because of steampunk social science, it's not the USSR that you know and have feelings about.

Great Russia in a nutshell

Why? Because it's right there in GURPS Infinite Worlds, p. 118:

Other Muslim timelines include:

Andalus (Q4, current year 1930), in which the Muslims of Spain threw back the Reconquista and went on to discover America in 1484, achieving TL6 in rivalry with Japan, Saxony, and Russia.

 The timeline calls for a Russia that's on par with the Moors (albeit in a new interpretation), Japan, and Saxony, and so a great Russia it shall receive. (Honestly, the hard part is establishing a great Saxony.)

• Who? A whole hell of a lot of people. I'm not sure which peoples, but a lot of them anyways.
• What? A cabal of variously romantic, technocratic *Narodnik oligarchs, forcibly dieselpunking the entire world for arcane reasons. Under and around them is a coalition government that's unlikely to ever dissolve, because an entire branch of the military obeys its orders first and Supreme Command's only later.
• Where? Most of what we'd call the USSR, but not all of it.
• When? Celebrating its 25th birthday on the day after Pascha this year, when (with Japanese support) the riots in Tver first got going.

The bigger question, then, is why this Russia?
At the start, this was actually the RSFSR. Once I realized how embarrassingly, impossibly convergent my timeline was, though, I set about rewriting it, and it gradually evolved into what we have today.

A brief history of Great Russia

In the end, there was Evgeny IV. He was very old by that point, and his advisors (and one troublesome Cossack host) managed to drag him into a war against a helpless opponent, which proved not to be so helpless after all.

• The Easter Revolt: In the beginning, there was the Easter Revolt. Despite his best efforts to keep it silent, word of Nikolai's suicide got out, and the consensus was established: there is no tsar. The immediate consequence was, of course...
• The Russian Civil War: In which a fair part of the military launched a concerted effort to restore Evgeny the Old. (It was plausible that he could have been restored, but after they got sick of his hubris the Vechists tried him, frog-marched him out of a church service, and shot him against a wall.)
• The Provisional Government: The Provisional Government was a pretty volatile thing; at the time of its establishment, Russia was in chaos, the Civil War was ongoing, and it had exchanged casus belli with all of its neighbors.
• While I don't know much about the succession, there were some foreign pretenders who could plausibly claim the throne of Tver, plunging the Russias into a civil war.
• The connections of some of those pretenders basically assured
• The Russian Orthodox Church was also split about how to respond to the whole affair; some went Tsarist, some went Vechist, and some went independent.
• Against all odds, ten Old Calendarist priests in Russia came out as Vechists, and were able to put aside enough of their differences to ordain a bishop. The Patriarch of Constantinople opened negotiations about bringing them back into the Orthodox communion, possibly (and implicitly) recognizing the Vechist government that the Turks didn't; this is a big part of why Anatolia's still in chaos twenty years later.
• The Russian Orthodox satellites also went through some fun shakeups of their own, opening relationships with the Tsarist Patriarch and so forth.
• In the end, those consequences boiled down to war:
• The Civil War, fought between the Tsarists and the Vechists; and
• The Vechist Wars, fought between the emergent Great Russia and all of her major neighbors.
• The coup of '21: After all of Russia's neighbors had either sued for peace or collapsed, the last major violence in Great Russia's history was when its most conservative leader (a right-wing general, who'd become something like a National Bolshevik), after losing the first peacetime election, decided to screw peace and attempted to seize power.

Taiga warfare with its neighbors continues to the present day, and its foreign relationships are ambiguous, but the coup of '21 was the last serious violence. By 1933, Great Russia's hoping to celebrate its first decade of uninterrupted peace.

Great Russia today

As of the present day, Great Russia looks something like this...

• Language: Russian as the universal one.
• Religion: In the interests of populism, Great Russia is historically and culturally Orthodox, which is kinda problematic. On the one hand, the Vechist leadership (looking somewhat to the Güntherite experience) would really like to have a Vechist church to back them up, because that's how these things are supposed to work. On the other hand, the Russian Orthodox Church was disestablished for its thoroughgoing Tsarism, and ecumenical politics haven't given rise to any official replacement as of 1930.
• Paraphrasing Robespierre a bit, the official Great Russian line is that "antisemitism is aristocratic." Progress is slow and usually underfunded, but they are making a good-faith effort at engineering anti-Semitism out of Russian culture.
• The Sodality is officially outlawed in Great Russia.
• Government: Great Russia actually looks a bit like the present-day Russian Federation: a (markedly authoritarian) federal republic with a fair number of satellite states. They wouldn't describe themselves like that, of course, and (because it's federal, not confederal) most of the world views them as frighteningly centralized.
• No matter what its name is, the state itself is always called "Autocephalous." (Political autonomy is a pretty general and widespread concept, but autocephaly is a specifically Orthodox term; I thought it'd be a nice way to emphasize that Great Russia's not merely a Westernization of Russia, but something ideologically different.)
• There are a fair number of "autonomous governments" that are part of the Sobor. As a general rule, the bigger they are, the more likely they are to be blatant military satrapies. (One of them [where?], which for quirky reasons is a rotten borough on the federal level, has been called "10,000 Cossacks and a commissar.")
• Currently the Great Coalition [who?] dominates the All-Russian National Sobor. Because it has its own official military dedicated to it, none of its members are going anywhere any time soon.
• Economy: Not Stalinism.
• Foreign relations: Great Russia's on unpleasant terms with most of its neighbors, due to the drama of the Vechist Wars and such.
• Great Russia started with an unlikely peace treaty with Japan, predating Great Russia itself. It hasn't been renewed of late, but there's still a detente cordiale between the two, mostly because the Meammosiran Cossacks have been told in no uncertain terms to behave themselves.)
• Great Russia is also at odds with the Papal State, mostly due to the politics of the Civil War.

There is, of course, more to go on this, but I'm not sure how much more to go.