Россия
TSARS OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1919 - present)
1919 - 1929: HIM Nicholas III (Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov)
1929 - present: HIM Cyril I (Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov)
PRIME MINISTERS OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1919 - 1939)
1917 - 1923: Alexander Kerensky (Trudovik)
1923 - 1923: Alexis Aladin (Trudovik)
1923 - 1925: Alexis Aladin (Trudovik-Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaya-Narodnyy Truda coalition)
1923: Vladimir Purishkevich (Soyuz Russkogo Naroda); Pavel Milyukov (Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaya); Alexander Martynov (Narodnyy Truda); Sergei Bulgakov (Khristianskaya Partiya); Grigori Sokolnikov (illegal)
1925 - 1932: Vladimir Purishkevich (SRN majority)
1925: Pavel Milyukov (K-D); Alexis Aladin (Trudovik); Alexander Martynov (NT); Sergei Bulgakov (KP); Nikolay Vasilyevich Ustryalov (Natsional'noye Respublikanskoye Dvizheniye Rodiny)
1932: Pavel Milyukov (K-D); Fyodor Dan (NT); Nikolay Vasilyevich Ustryalov (NRDR); Alexis Aladin (Trudovik)
1932 - 1934: Vladimir Purishkevich (SRN-NRDR coalition)
1934 - 1935: Andrei Shingarev (K-D minority with NT supply and confidence)
1934: Alexander Lvovich Kazembek and Mikhail Diterikhs (NRDR-SRN); Fyodor Dan (NT)
1935 - 1939: Alexander Lvovich Kazembek (NRDR-SRN majority)
1935 (February): Andrei Shingarev (K-D); Fyodor Dan (NT)
1935 (June): Andrei Shingarev (K-D); Fyodor Dan (NT)
VOZHDS OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1939 - present)
1939 - present: Alexander Lvovich Kazembek (NRDR-SRN)
1939: none (NRDR-SRN sole legal party)
PARTIES
Trudovik - Labour (center-left, reformist)
Soyuz Russkogo Naroda - Union of the Russian People (rightist to far-rightist, monarchist)
Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaya - Constitutional Democrats / Cadets (center-left, reformist)
Narodnyy Truda - People's Labour (left, socialist)
Khristianskaya Partiya - Christian Party (single-issue, clerical)
Natsional'noye Respublikanskoye Dvizheniye Rodiny - National Republican Motherland Front (far-right, monarchist, revanchist, fascist)
With Fanny Kaplan's assassination of Lenin in 1917, the nascent Soviets were dealt a blow that they could not recover from. Without Lenin, they quickly began infighting, allowing the way to be paved for the Provisional Government, under Alexander Kerensky, to emerge victorious. To repair relations with the more rightist groups that had helped him defeat the Soviets, Kerensky invited Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich to assume the throne as a constitutional monarch, in the British model.
Kerensky, despite his promise to continue the war effort, was ultimately unable to do so, and ultimately, Russia emerged as one of the losers following the Treaty of Versailles. Kerensky's party, the Trudoviks (Labour), moderate, pro-government socialists, were blamed for the loss. Come the first Imperial General Election, held in 1923, the Trudoviks, who, after Kerensky's resignation from the Premiership that year, so that he might have a peaceful retirement, were now led by the other leader of the Trudoviks, Alexis Aladin. The Trudoviks were unable to hold their majority in 1923, although they remained the governing party. Still, Aladin had to take the Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaya (Constitutional Democrats, also known as the Cadets), and the moderate Mensehviks, who had formed Narodnyy Truda (the People's Labour Party), into coalition to preserve a majority against the rightist Soyuz Russkogo Naroda (Union of the Russian People), led by the notoriously reactionary Vladimir Purishkevich, a former leader of the Black Hundreds, who had helped to orchestrate the death of Rasputin.
By 1925, when Aladin held new elections, he knew that the Trudoviks would suffer, and suffer they did - their former coalition partners, the more moderate Cadets, surpassed them in seat count. With the Trudoviks damaged permanently, and the Cadets damaged in popular opinion because of their time in coalition with the now-unpopular Trudoviks, Purishkevich's KSR soon grew to a narrow majority in the Duma, which, although narrow, was still very much a workable one. Meanwhile, the fascistic Natsional'noye Respublikanskoye Dvizheniye Rodiny (National Republican Motherland Front), led by the charismatic Nikolay Vasilyevich Ustryalov, began to gain a few seats in the Duma. Their revanchist, anti-Semitic, and fascist politics, far in excess of even the URN, made them something for the leftist and moderate parties to fear, but they were too small to be taken seriously.
Even if he was hated by practically everyone who was not a member of the SRN, Purishkevich led Russia. He infamously met with President Leonard Wood in 1925, and the two leaders, unified by a mutual hatred of communism, formed an alliance to oppose the German communist state "in perpetuity, with the American and Russian peoples the best of friends." Meanwhile, as anti-Semitism grew in the Empire, the "Old Man," Tsar Nicholas III, died in 1929, at the age of 72. The Empire mourned, and, inasmuch as Nicholas had no children, the heir apparent was Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, who took the regnal name Cyril I. While Nicholas had been fairly apolitical, Cyril was in support of the rightist parties in the Duma.
In 1932, a brief recession turned into a great depression, and Prime Minister Purishkevich was forced to call an election. The always-narrow SRN majority was finally lost, but, at the Tsar's suggestion, Purishkevich asked Ustryalov's NRDR to form a formal coalition with his government, so that he might maintain his majority. Finding a great deal in common with the Prime Minister, Ustryalov agreed to the offer. Still, the coalition government was met with many difficulties, and Purishkevich held another election two years later. Purishkevich, wishing to retire, made a deal with the new, youthful, and extremely charismatic leader of the NRDR, Alexander Lvovich Kazembek, to enter into "permanent coalition" - in essence, the two parties would become one, with the NRDR led by Kazembek, and the SRN led by Mikhail Diterikhs, a former general who had long been Purishkevich's presumptive successor.
Pledging a Russian version of President George Dern's Great Reform, which was helping the United States recover from the depression, the Cadets, led by old warhorse Andrei Shingarev, narrowly got into government, with supply and confidence from Fyodor Dan's Narodnyy Truda. The NRDR-SRN, now led solely by Kazembek, became more and more militant, and with a brief downturn in the economy, Shingarev was forced to hold another election.
The NRDR-SRN, vocally supported by Cyril I, swept into power, with Kazembek pledging a return to the old ways of "Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie i Narodnost" - Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Character. Kazembek held two elections in quick succession to soften up the two remaining parties in the Duma, the Cadets and Narodnyy Truda, so that the NRDR-SRN would have the necessary majority to declare all other parties illegal. In 1939, Kazembek declared himself Vozhd, or Leader, for life.
It has often been remarked that Russia has always had an autocrat to rule her, and, indeed, as blackshirts perform the Roman salute to the countless portraits of the Tsar and the Vozhd, this could not be truer.
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