AHC: A Russian capital that is not Moscow/St. Petersburg

Trust me I'm an Engineer

Trust me I'm an Engineer

With a POD of 1700, get the leaders of Russia to move the capital of Russia to somewhere that is not Moscow and St. Petersburg. Switching the capital due to war, conflict, revolutions etc. is not allowed, it has to be done during peace times.

I've heard that Kazan and Ekaterinburg are good candidates for an alternate capital of Russia since they are both big cities located more centrally than St. Petersburg and Moscow. The biggest issue for me is that I cannot come up with a reason what these cities have that Moscow and St. Petersburg don't have besides that.
 

WunWun

Problem is during peace time. Why would they spend so much time and effort for no good reason? The only two capitals I can see in this case are Kyiv and Istanbul/Constantinople/Tsargrad/whatever because of their symbolic meanings. And even then, it's not very realistic to just pack up the entire court and bureaucracy and just move hunderds of kilometers.
 
MrGreyOwl

MrGreyOwl

Trust me I'm an Engineer said:
The biggest issue for me is that I cannot come up with a reason what these cities have that Moscow and St. Petersburg don't have besides that
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Well, you pretty much said it: there are no reasons for that. If you want a reason other than war/destruction, 1700 is too late.

At best, you could have Peter the Great founding his St Petersburg elsewhere than OTL, or not being founded at all (even then, St Petersburg functioned more as an imperial residence than a proper capital city) but Moscow has been the centre of power for centuries at this point.
 
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Vuu

Vuu

Banned
Though a location in Siberia is optimal since it would boost settlement of the region, very few reason to do so unless at some point they go full radical utilitarian with an obsession with efficiency
 

FillyofDelphi

Banned
Trust me I'm an Engineer said:
With a POD of 1700, get the leaders of Russia to move the capital of Russia to somewhere that is not Moscow and St. Petersburg. Switching the capital due to war, conflict, revolutions etc. is not allowed, it has to be done during peace times.

I've heard that Kazan and Ekaterinburg are good candidates for an alternate capital of Russia since they are both big cities located more centrally than St. Petersburg and Moscow. The biggest issue for me is that I cannot come up with a reason what these cities have that Moscow and St. Petersburg don't have besides that.
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Um... question. Can it be a post-war move based on security concerns?
 

alexmilman

WunWun said:
Problem is during peace time. Why would they spend so much time and effort for no good reason? The only two capitals I can see in this case are Kyiv and Istanbul/Constantinople/Tsargrad/whatever because of their symbolic meanings. And even then, it's not very realistic to just pack up the entire court and bureaucracy and just move hunderds of kilometers.
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Nizhny Novgorod - by the early XIX it became the "trade capital" of Russia thanks to its huge fair. Alexander I invested huge sum of money in building the necessary infrastructure (the shops and a canal protecting from the floods). The place was historically important (especially during the Time of Troubles) and located on the place where where the Oka River empties into the Volga (aka, on important river route). It is about 400 km (250 mi) east of Moscow, which adds to the strategic security, and yet still within the important part of the Central Russia.

Another option, Voronez, makes sense only within framework of Peter's consistent and successful drive toward the Black Sea.

Kiev was "out of the way" as far as communications within Russian Empire were involved and did not provide any practical value. Istanbul is a pure fantasy.

Of course, the practical reason for a move was absent.
 

Lampiao

Tsaritsyn/Stalingrad/Volgograd is one of the most strategic cities in Russia IMHO, particularly after a Volga-Don Canal.
 

Max Sinister

Banned
When the Wehrmacht was getting closer to Moscow, they moved many bureaucrats and documents to Kuybyshev/Samara, but that's post-1900.
 

Bison

Banned
The easiest and most obvious is Novgorod, whoch can be as easy as butterflying the rise of Moscow and leaving a power vacuum in Central Russia. This would result in a wealthier, more Western Rus with democratic values and access to the Baltic.
 

telynk

What about a situation where both St. Petersburg and Moscow are ripe with left-wing revolutionaries, and the Tsar moves the capital to a smaller city to protect against the possibilty of revolution. A Tsarist ideology which presents the monarchy as defenders of the rural traditionalists against the urban rabble rousers could see a need for a capital in smaller city?
 

alexmilman

Bison said:
The easiest and most obvious is Novgorod, whoch can be as easy as butterflying the rise of Moscow and leaving a power vacuum in Central Russia. This would result in a wealthier, more Western Rus with democratic values and access to the Baltic.
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Novgorod never was anywhere close to being center of the Russian unification both due to its peripheral location and chronically unstable political situation. An idea that Novgorod was a promoter of the democratic values is rather funny. It was an oligarchy and the only democratic institution was Novgorodian Weche (existed in most of the pre-Mongolian Rus) where the issues had been routinely resolved by physically beating of the opponents (and throwing them into the river). Access to the Baltic is another interesting issue: for the centuries of its existence Novgorodian Republic did not built a single port on the Baltic coast: all foreign trade had been done by the Hanseatic merchants unloading their wares on the coast, loading them into the Novgorodian boats and rowing up the river and across the lake all the way to Novgorod where the goods had been stored in the foreign district. The same, in the opposite sequence, goes for the Novgorodian exports.
 

alexmilman

Mr_Fanboy said:
If they seize Constantinople at any point, wouldn’t there be a strong temptation to designate that city the new capitol?
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Nope. It would be too peripheral even comparing to St-Petersburg. Not to mention that for that purpose Russia would have to annex the whole Western coast of the Black Sea: having a capital disconnected from the rest of the empire is, of course, a fun idea but hardly a realistic one.
 

Lampiao

For an ATL planned capital, I think the best choice would be Samara, it's waterways make it accessible from the Russian heartland but it's also a good gate for Siberia and Central Asia. OTOH if the Turkish Straits are less of a liability, the Russians can make a Saint Petersburg on OTL Rostov-on-Don or Volgogard.
 
GauchoBadger

GauchoBadger

What about Yekaterinburg, near the Urals?
It seems to have been a planned city, and was designated by Peter I to become Russia's first industrial center.
 
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