Evgeny the Old

Dates: 1820s-1905. 
Succeeded by: Position abolished; see elsewhere [where?] for the pretenders.

I'm not sure how many kings Russia has. Truth be told, I'm not sure about a lot of Russian history. But I do know a bit about Russia's last tsar. His name is Evgeny IV, and at the beginning of his reign he was styled "the New" after the legendary Evgeny I.

By the end of it, having outlived the empire itself, he was Evgeny "the Old."

A short outline of the life of Evgeny IV

Evgeny is born sometime in the late 1820s [when?], making him about 80 when he finally gets shot against a wall. Coming of age during the tail end of the Great Realignment, Evgeny's biographers will always and forever comment that he was very much a child of the reaction to the Burning Thirties.

• The Regency: This deserves its own page, and will get it once there's something to say. What matters is that the Tsesarevich is too young to rule when his father [who?] dies, and a typically corrupt regency council is set up to govern for him while he comes of age.
• It's typically corrupt and ineffectual, and rather unpopular by the time Evgeny ascends. On the other hand, it's also started some reforms of the Tsarist bureaucracy, which Evgeny purges after it starts resisting them. [details?]
• From the Regency's mess, Evgeny learns an important moral: nobody can be trusted to act in his interests. Time and time again across his long life, Evgeny makes bad decisions second-guessing his inner circle.
• When he inherits the crown of Tver, he becomes Evgeny IV, and starts with an ambitious set of reforms to make his sprawling empire a little more effectual.
• The Pacific Wars: After the end of the Great Realignment, England (which had, less than a century before, lost most of its American continental holdings east of the Great Lakes) is in a mood for monumental works of engineering - specifically a trans-American railroad. This, of course, necessitates some claims to Russian North America, and Evgeny IV fights (and loses) a small war over it, ceding a fair stretch of the Pacific coastline to England-Scotland. With that interruption, he sells the points south of Canada* to the UCNA, which is more than happy to buy it.
• The Pacific Wars really hammer home the importance of railroad technology to Evgeny IV; while he's not enormously coherent or standardized about the matter, he does make a point of laying an enormous amount of track in Russia over the course of his life. (This comes back to bite him in the ass hard: the railroad workers are a critical core of the Vechist cadre.)
• Evgeny IV has a fair number of children. He outlives all of them. [This is the stubbiest part of the entire stub.]
• Several of his daughters are married off to some interesting families, however, and even though that usually involves converting to Catholicism (or at least raising their children Catholic) Evgeny IV is very close to a number of his grandchildren. At least two of them eventually get pulled into the chaos of the Civil War as Tsarist pretenders.
• The Russo-Korean Alliance: One of Evgeny's big diplomatic successes is establishing the Russo-Korean Alliance in the 1860s. While China goes to pieces, and the newly-united Japanese Empire falls into Anglo-Japanese lockstep, Russo-Korean friendship leads to mutual defense pacts and so forth. (This also leads to a permanent turn toward the East, serving European interests quite nicely.)
• The Russo-Japanese War: Evgeny botches the Russo-Japanese War in its initial stages, but has enough inertia going that if he could have prolonged it he probably would have won. Unfortunately for him...
• The Easter Revolt: ...some drama within the family during Bright Week leads to an uprising that sees his government toppled, and ends with him getting shot against a wall.

Legacy

Evgeny IV doesn't exactly leave a legacy. When he dies, there's nobody clearly in line to succeed, which is why the pretenders ultimately lose out to the Vechists. [This is a stub.]

• Because Evgeny I and IV bookend modern Tsarism, the shorthand for the entire period (as evidenced by, for instance, Tversky's book on the dire state of popular literacy) is "the two Evgenies."
• Russian polytechnical education: The last century of Tsarism saw a number of on-again, off-again efforts at education, repeatedly interrupted by finances and wars. After a few such interruptions [details?], Evgeny the Old was responsible for the only thing Vechist Russia will praise him for: the Russian polytechnical system.
• The first fruit of that educational system crashed into politics in Great Russia, giving rise to the Technical Censors and their effort to dieselpunk the world.

Evgeny IV has a lot of PODs spinning off him, simply because he was the longest-reigning king in Russian history. The ones I'm listing here are simply the ones that I'm certain about the existence of, given what little I know about him already.

• The Regency is less corrupt: The Eugenian Regency was notably hostile to Evgeny, and the lesson he learned from it (that he couldn't actually trust people responsible for acting in his name) haunted him to his grave. If somehow he hadn't learned that lesson as tsesarevich, the entire shape of Russian history would've been significantly different.
• Grand Duke Nikolai doesn't pull the trigger: What went down in the last hour of Grand Duke Nikolai's life was essentially a fluke. Any number of smaller changes could have stopped Nikolai from committing suicide - derailing the Vechist slogan of "There is no Tsar!" and very likely the Revolution itself. "Long-term" is perhaps the wrong word (it's only been 25 years since the Paschal Rising), but the consequences would've been enormous.