Ekatarina Anhalt-Zerbst-Romanov: Born 2nd May 1963 from East German parents in the Kaliningrad Oblast of the Soviet Union, her talent, charm, and her political dedication, beginning in youth from her membership to Komsomol, helped her rise as one of the very few women in the Soviet political apparatus. Her profile rose further with her role in defeating an attempt at a coup by Communist hardliners, leading to her place in the cabinet of the first President of Russia following the USSR's dissolution, Karl Petrovsky. However, Petrovsky's incompetence and embarrassing infatuation with American President Fred Hohenz, appearing to lead to one-sided trade deals which wreaked the already shocked Russian economy, caused his brief popularity to plummet with the people.
Leveraging her popularity among women for leading the Soviet-era campaign against alcoholism and social democrats and reformist Communists as Minister of Health and Social Development, and her covert alliances with other members of the cabinet and in the FSB, she arranged the revelation of a corruption scandal between Petrovsky and media oligarchs, minted by his privatisation schemes, to run hostile stories against Petrovsky's opponents for the '96 Presidential election. Petrovsky, his allies, and the oligarchs were pushed out or imprisoned, and Ekatarina edged out a win for herself in the election promising a controlled transition away from the command economy and rebuilding of Russia's social services.
Her policies to combat and reverse the creation of the oligarchs did succeed in reducing their power and providing Russia with desperately-needed funds to re-equip the army and carry out her 'New Cities' projects, construction programmes to build new towns, cities, and neighbourhoods to replace Soviet apartments and to encourage and handle immigration from the other former Soviet republics and even from the West. Policies of tolerance and rapprochement with the post-Communist world (sometimes backed with force), leading to immigration to Russia, as well as reforms to healthcare, family planning, and the marginalisation of vodka in the Russia diet, halted Russia's demographic collapse, and fiscal reform enabled state investments into new businesses to increase the government's revenue further.
Her rescuing of Russia's economy and its great power trappings, as well as her social reforms and her personal projection of sobriety and confidence in her often-voiced "idea of Russia" had won her enormous popularity with the Russian people, leading to a crushing win in the 2000 election, but her programmes to promote participatory budgeting and politics on the local level has been matched with a much-criticised tendency to intolerance of opposition at the federal level, only enhancing the already large degree of power that resides in the Presidency as of the '93 Constitution and employing strategies ranging from conciliatory to nakedly authoritarian to remove the chance of serious challengers for her office. She justifies these measures by stating her role in Russia's history is to serve as an "educational dictator", claiming that power can revert to the Duma when Russia's society has solidified responses to the potential encroachment of "poisonous ideas" like neoliberalism and extreme religious fundamentalism.
Combined in President Anhalt-Zerbst-Romanov is a complex and controversial pattern of championing of Russia's Tsarist and Soviet past, as well as an embracing of (some of) the modern movements from overseas, incorporating everything from social justice in her promotion of indigenous and women's rights, to environmentalism in leading the global movement to reduce carbon emissions, to patronising art movements like Excessivism and even a home-grown subgenre of synthwave termed "Ekatwave". She has proliferated the global profile of Russian culture, from old excellence in ballet to new frontiers in videogames.
Just as she asserts Russia is a modern republic, expressing her admiration of Voltaire and Lincoln in her diplomatic visits to France and the US, she takes on imperial trappings at home, resurrecting the Table of Ranks for the military, politicians, lawyers, and civil servants and merging the state with the various faiths of the empire, having the government sponsor Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist churches and a rise in attendance to those faiths, while prosecuting and removing clergy that rebelled against her modernising decrees of "Abrahamic Socialism". A G8 summit might on paper have put her around fellow presidents and prime ministers, but her red velvet dolman worn over a gold-embroidered muslin tunic, accompanied by diamond jewels and the sashes of reborn orders of nobility, as she condemned with a commanding countenance the "inevitable failures of underregulated capitalism" in the wake of the financial crash, all made it clear that she was something very different to the suited heads of state of western liberal democracies.
