Challenge: An "Oriental" Russia

Red Horse

Give a POD from 1850 onwards that would make Russia more oriented towards the East rather than the West.

Bonus if Russia begin to identify themselves as Asians instead of Europeans.
 
Give a POD from 1850 onwards that would make Russia more oriented towards the East rather than the West.

Bonus if Russia begin to identify themselves as Asians instead of Europeans.

This is ASB. Why turn back the time before Peter the Great? With a PoD 1850s, Asian great powers was as backwards it can get.

If you have Asia more advanced than Europe, then this is possible. However, your PoD just makes it impossible to make this plausible.
 
the latest POD that i can figure would be mongols making a much more complete distruction of the Principlialities, and subsequent death of the Rus' Nobility. And a more presistent Mongol sphere, with the modern day equivalent to Russia growing out of Mongol control instead of Rus' cities uniting out of a distrust of people of the steppes
 
the latest POD that i can figure would be mongols making a much more complete distruction of the Principlialities, and subsequent death of the Rus' Nobility. And a more presistent Mongol sphere, with the modern day equivalent to Russia growing out of Mongol control instead of Rus' cities uniting out of a distrust of people of the steppes
But that would require a POD much further back. OP specified after 1850.
 
Russia goes all out on the Great Game, conquers Afghanistan. War breaks out between Russia and Britain and Russia invades India, eventually managing to force the British to concede that everything east of Panjab is in the Russian sphere. Later on, they push further south until Persia grants them a port in the Indian Sea. I think that's the farthest you can get, in terms of Russia oriented on the east in terms of geopolitics. Even this is a Russia-wank, though. Cultural orientation is impossible though.
 
Give a POD from 1850 onwards that would make Russia more oriented towards the East rather than the West.

Bonus if Russia begin to identify themselves as Asians instead of Europeans.

Perhaps strong Austrian, Prussian, and Ottoman Empires block of any Russian expansion/power projection in Europe, and an isolated Russia decides that focusing on the East is better?

But even so, most of the population is in Europe. I can't see how this is possible; it's just a thought. Russia seems naturally inclined to focus on Europe in this time.

Maybe with a Post-1900 POD this is more possible. But the "seeing themselves as Asian," nah.
 
But that would require a POD much further back. OP specified after 1850.

Your point being... I said that it was the latest PoD i could figure out, not that it met his criteria for when it should be (since i simply doesn't see it as possible within those)
 
It can't be done in a late PoD though. The best way for an "Oriental" Russia to happen is either the following:

- No Peter the Great. Have a Tsar who's convinced that an expansion eastward is way better than the expansion westward.

- If the PoD is during the Mongol times, Muscovy should remain obscure and the Golden Horde should remain pagan, convert to Christianity or Buddhism.
 
The best thing I can think of with a late POD is that some Russian nationalists decide that they are descended from the "noble" and "valiant" Mongols of the Golden Horde, not the "decadent" Romans or any other European power. This belief could arise in response to a strong European power dominating the continent and forcing Russia to look to the East, causing Russia to invent pan-Asian propaganda.
 
Russian Empire conquers Manchuria, Mongolia, East Turkistan, Korea and some portion of North China.
After 1917 Revolution, Ukraine, Belarus and Baltic countries become Independent and protected by Entente. However Soviets manages to integrate its Asian Empire by mid 1930's.
No WW II.
By modern time this Soviet Union has more population in Asia than Europe. Expanding Communism to Europe is impossible but so they focused all attention to Asia and in order to appeal Asians they branded themselves as Eurasians.
 
Some might say Russian governmental culture had been influenced by the shared influences of the Tatars and the Byzantines, althouigh the use of the notion of Oriental despotism has been very polemical.

Give a POD from 1850 onwards that would make Russia more oriented towards the East rather than the West.

Bonus if Russia begin to identify themselves as Asians instead of Europeans.

Make the Tartars stay longer, but even this will need a visit from the Alien Space Bats.
 
Kievan Rus' traded with Byzantium so much that they were inevitable influenced by the Eastern Orthodox culture, and thus they were going to convert to Byzantine-style Christianity. So the main key is, how do we prevent the influence of Byzantium from penetrating Rus'?

If the Georgian and Armenian kingdoms were a lot stronger, they could sway the Rus' to convert to Oriental Orthodox Christianity, rather than Byzantine style Christianity. However, this is easier said than done.

If we absolutely need to look at the Mongol period, it's obvious that Berke has to be killed off before Sartaq takes over. The only alternative would be an Oriental-like Russian state that embraces Islam.
 
Certainly, viewing the Russians as Asians, or more often as "half-Asians" was pretty common in Western Europe. There quite a lot ambivalence in those views actually.
 
I don't think I'd go that far, and it seemed to be a background/wishywashy/back and forth opinion for the most part, but the common phrase was "To Scratch a European Russian is to find an Asiatic Tatar."

Yep. A common view was that Russia was superficially European, but essentially Asian/Barbaric/Oriental Despotism/you name it.
This is not true in politics/diplomacy, where no one seriously questioned Russian pertinence to the Concert of Europe after Peter the Great. But culturally, Russia was not really felt as European by a lot of people in the West.
Of course, the views of most Russians begged to differ, but again, much of cultivated 19th century Europe cared relatively little of what Russians thought.

EDIT: and it can be said to be not so different today, in sense.
 
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Well culturally in the 1850s you did see a few Russian cultural movements that argued that 'genuine Russia' was found in the vast mass of the peasantry, rather than in Westernized St. Petersburg. Novels like War and Peace, for example, pretty much indicate that the peasantry/countryside was where one could find 'true Russian values', whereas French was used for deceitful purposes.

OTL Russian intellectuals embraced the peasantry partly because they saw in them the foundations for a modern state - the communalism of the peasants to form the basis for liberal rule etc. This was pretty much utopianism, and in practice it didn't work out.

After the failure of various reform projects one could argue that this idea of the Russian peasant as some 'proto-19thC European' was abandoned in intellectual circles in favour of the idea of the peasant as an 'Asiatic' being - hence the Russian interest in ethnography in the late 19th C, and arguably the genesis for modernist Russian works like the Rite of Spring.

So a PoD could, perhaps, be that Russian intellectuals perceive this 'Asiatic-ness' of the peasantry earlier and embrace it (a more powerful Slavophilism, if you will), and over time Russia itself begins to perceive itself as separate from the 'moral decadence' of Europe.
 
Russian Empire conquers Manchuria, Mongolia, East Turkistan, Korea and some portion of North China.
After 1917 Revolution, Ukraine, Belarus and Baltic countries become Independent and protected by Entente. However Soviets manages to integrate its Asian Empire by mid 1930's.
No WW II.
By modern time this Soviet Union has more population in Asia than Europe. Expanding Communism to Europe is impossible but so they focused all attention to Asia and in order to appeal Asians they branded themselves as Eurasians.

I do see them conquering some. But there is no way you can make them look and feel Asian. By the time they conquer all of those stuff, Russia would swell to 100M+ even without counting those Asian conquered. You need half of china to conquer for the Chinese to out populate Russians, the Europeans and japs won't allow even a small piece of china to be taken easily just like in otl. So a large portion of china is an impossibility.

I believe it ain't possible to convert a more advanced society into a more backward one. Those conquered like the mongols will probably Russianize instead.
 
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