Gaming - Worldbuilding, Homebrew, "The Road To Moscow"

I have elsewhere covered the United States, Germany, and Britain in what I have increasingly started thinking of as the Electric Age.  Today, we shall be discussing Russia.

As the meetings of Tesla and Rice, and Hülsmeyer and the German admiralty, more than show, sometimes small changes can lead to great outcomes.  Sometimes, however, events cannot be left to small changes.  Thus it was that, on March 13, 1881, no fewer than three bombers of the Russian domestic terror organization Narodna Volya (The People's Will) attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II.  Their failure was due to a combination of providence, poor bomb-making skills, and the swift, decisive action of Frank Joseph Jackowski, a Polish nobleman who had been riding with the Tsar in his carriage.  Jackowski bodily covered the Tsar until his guards could whisk him away to the Winter Palace, and in so doing doomed himself.  Jackowski was one of more than a hundred and twenty killed or injured during the assassination attempt, which decisively turned Russian public opinion against the nascent anarchist movement.

There were two consequences to the Tsar's survival.  The first was pure irony - on the Ides of March, the Tsar publicized the first draft of Count Loris-Melikov's proposed constitutional reforms.  This created a firestorm among the upper classes, who protested that any dilution of the Tsar's autocracy would be a dilution of Russia itself; in the middle classes, especially given the failed assassination attempt, it was hailed as bringing Russia into the modern age just as strongly as the abolition of serfdom or the reforms of Peter the Great.  In the great mass of the lower classes of Russia, it was viewed as a matter entirely above their ability to influence.

The second immediate consequence was much more sinister.  The Tsar, unnerved by a string of assassination attempts even as he promulgated reform, strengthened the Okhrana, the secret police, and turned them loose on his domestic enemies.  For all that lenient sentences were generally given to those revolutionaries who were brought to trial, only those the Okhrana believed were capable of rehabilitation and moderation even came to trial.  Russia's universities, previously the prime recruiting ground of anarchist organizations, developed a closed, insular culture of secret societies and clubs.  Revolution, once discussed publicly, retreated to the fringes of Russian thought, replaced among the intelligentsia and cultural leaders by circumspection and paranoia, typified by the retirement from public life of Count Tolstoy in 1894 after his arrest for sedition for his book The Kingdom of God is Within You.

Loris-Melikov's reforms continued, hotly debated in the Council of Ministers, but the end result was the Russian Constitution of 1885, closely modeled on the German Constitution of 1871.  Its main difference from the German model was the addition of a property requirement for suffrage, where Germany had universal male suffrage from the age of 25, and the delineation of classes of citizens on a religious basis, where German imperial citizenship was a patchwork of member-state laws.  In practice, the Tsar remained in control of the ministries and the military, and, as with Bismarck in Germany, a strong chancellor could dominate the Zemtsy Sobor through legal and quasi-legal maneuvers.

Still, Europe's last autocracy breathed its last breath with the installation of Loris-Melikhov as the first Chancellor of All The Russias, a position he held until his death in 1889.  The Tsar outlived the father of Russia's Constitution, and indeed his own son and heir-apparent, Tsesarevich Alexander, and died three days before the new year of 1896.  He was succeeded by his grandson, Nicholas, as Nicholas II.  Carl Heinrich von Siemens, head of the German company's St. Petersburg office for most of Alexander's reign, spoke for most of Europe when he said of Alexander in reference both to his reforms and his electrification of the Russian cities, "he came upon a Russia benighted, and left behind a Russia enlightened."

The new Tsar had come of age in a Russia transformed by his grandfather's reforms, but was himself a remarkably conservative man.  He was also uninterested in the mechanics of government, unlike his grandfather and indeed his father, though he did reassure his subjects upon his coronation: "It has come to my knowledge that during the last months there have been heard in some assemblies of the zemtsvos the voices of those who have feared that their participation in the government of the country shall be curtailed.  I want everyone to know that I will devote all my strength to maintain, for the good of the whole nation, the principle of constitutional government, as firmly and as strongly as did my late lamented grandfather."  From a grandson of Russia's last absolute monarch, this was heady stuff indeed.

Still, Russia was one of the most backward countries in Europe, and attempts to industrialize and electrify had met with only limited success.  The completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1903 was a triumph, but it led to Russia being heavily committed in China, directly provoked Japan, and did not alleviate Russia's dependency on foreign industry - the battleship Tsesarevich sunk at Tsushima in 1905 was built in France, the Russian telegraph service was operated as a subsidiary of Siemens until 1914 and Marconi afterward, and even the rail stock that served the railroad was built by a mix of English and German manufacturers.

Russia was therefore intensely conscious of her condition of being both a Great Power, and generally backward compared to the other nations.  After the Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Russian public was completely unprepared for the shock of being defeated by a nation they viewed as vastly inferior.  For the first time since 1881, Russia teetered close to revolution, but in the end, Chancellor Sergei Witte managed to restrain the impetus for reform to mainly military and industrial subjects, though the abolition of religious citizenship categories meant that he lost the confidence of the pious Tsar Nicholas.

The Imperial Russian Navy came out of the campaign with very different lessons from those learned by the British; while they did build six dreadnoughts, of the Tsar Nicholas II class, none were ready by 1914, and the Russian Admiralty emphasized cruiser-sized torpedo boats to rebuild rapidly from the shattering defeat of Tsushima.  They concluded that more agile vessels were both a lower individual risk if lost, and harder to hit at long range.  The choice to rely on the torpedo was a curious one, given the poor state of Russian manufacture, but it was the only way to give the light cruiser the range to compete with a dreadnought's guns.

The Imperial Russian Army, however, went a completely different route.  Russia's great strength, traditionally, had been manpower and artillery.  There was nothing they could do about manpower, but they could certainly work on the artillery part.  The first units in the Russian military to be motorized were artillery units.  This allowed artillery to keep close behind the infantry, but more importantly it led to the concept of a mobile gun platform.  Conservative voices in the army dismissed the idea, but it gained traction in 1914 after the shocking collapse of the Russian front in Poland, and in 1915, the first functioning prototypes of the Tsar tank were produced.

The first armored offensive in the war was conducted by an ad-hoc battalion assembled as part of Brusilov's 1916 spring offensive.  The shock of these vehicles led to the wholesale retreat of the Austro-Hungarian force, and Brusilov managed to advance as far as Lemberg (modern Lviv) before the Austrians and Germans managed to close the salient.  In the process, all fifty of the Tsar tanks that Brusilov had assembled were lost, mostly due to mechanical failure, but the use of the tank as a battlefield implement had been proven.

In Germany, the success of the Brusilov Offensive gave new impetus to the formation of the Haber Regiments.  In the West, Winston Churchill took note of the weapon the Russians had used to achieve their breakthrough.