Tough. Probably impossible without some extreme outliers of events and/or meteor strikes.
The Anglo-Saxon cultural and jurisprudential and political inheritance is an enormous asset, as is the economic and financial ties with England, as is the exploitable interior that is emptier and climatically more favorable than Russia's, as is the oceans that separate the US from rival powers and European land warfare.
*A* possibility is to have the CSA "win" the Civil War by exhausting the North, limiting overall US growth by comparison to OTL and putting it in a more difficult overall position for expansion, while having Russia "win" an equivalent to the Russo-Japanese War (obviously the butterflies of the first will have an impact on something like the second) that leaves it looking just intimidating enough to forestall a WWI equivalent. Thus by the 20th Century the USA winds up re-absorbing a basketcase CSA that collapses and is plunged into an economic downward spiral and having to stamp out violence that is a CS legacy from both ex-CS whites and blacks, where Russia collapses into a Kerenskyite regime that by the late 20th Century is a liberal-democratic military juggernaut on Europe's periphery and the strongest single state in Europe.
How probable this set of possibilities would be is a different question, and a weaker USA is not a precise guarantee of a Russia that is a Bizarro-USA.
Couldn't Russia somehow reform itself earlier to a more liberal democratic with a POD starting in the 1700s? Or is this just not possible?
*A* possibility is to have the CSA "win" the Civil War by exhausting the North, limiting overall US growth by comparison to OTL and putting it in a more difficult overall position for expansion, while having Russia "win" an equivalent to the Russo-Japanese War (obviously the butterflies of the first will have an impact on something like the second) that leaves it looking just intimidating enough to forestall a WWI equivalent. Thus by the 20th Century the USA winds up re-absorbing a basketcase CSA that collapses and is plunged into an economic downward spiral and having to stamp out violence that is a CS legacy from both ex-CS whites and blacks, where Russia collapses into a Kerenskyite regime that by the late 20th Century is a liberal-democratic military juggernaut on Europe's periphery and the strongest single state in Europe.
How probable this set of possibilities would be is a different question, and a weaker USA is not a precise guarantee of a Russia that is a Bizarro-USA.
Russia collapses into a Kerenskyite regime that by the late 20th Century is a liberal-democratic military juggernaut on Europe's periphery and the strongest single state in Europe.
But isn't the Russian Federation the single strongest state in Europe IOTL?
Couldn't Russia somehow reform itself earlier to a more liberal democratic with a POD starting in the 1700s? Or is this just not possible?