I originally had a long post typed up outlining the key events and policy ethoses of the Romanov rulers ITTL from 1801 - 1920, but a computer crash wiped it. So I will summarize:
- Of the six tsars OTL reigning from 1800 - 1917, not one had a stable transfer of power from one to the next. Paul I was assassinated, with his son seemingly complicit if not intending for death to occur. Alexander I caught sudden illness and died, which coupled with succession uncertainties between Nicholas I and his brother Constantine (plus Alexander's repeated waffling on whether he supported or wanted to quash liberalism) led to an attempted coup by the Decembrist Society amid Nicholas' coronation in 1825. Nicholas himself caught pneumonia amid the end of the Crimean War and seems to have committed suicide by refusing treatment as penance, in spite of this leaving Alexander II to negotiate peace on terrible terms. Alexander II was obviously bombed to death literal hours after approving an extremely primitive constitutional reform for discussion and implementation. Alexander III declined rapidly due to a sudden case of nephritis, leaving the throne to woefully-unprepared Nicholas II. And Nicky stepped down from power only when the situation was so dire for Imperial authority that Mikhail was essentially incapable of stepping in as his successor were he to try.
- Likewise, governing ethos and attitudes towards role in government varied rapidly from sovereign to sovereign in the last century of the empire. Alexander I started out as a reformist and guarantor of human rights, then bounced between suspicion and amicability towards Napoleon's ideals before Metternich finally convinced him to abandon liberalism entirely; the dissonance in his ideals seems to have contributed substantially to his decline in wellbeing near the end of his life, plus the rollback of most government reformation he accomplished by reactionary court figures as he withdrew from political activity. Nicholas II founded the ideals of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, and placed Poland under martial law that lasted over thirty years. Alexander II introduced elected local government amid broad liberalization of the economy and educational structures, which then abruptly segued into the muzzling of all these institutions under the rule of his son and the institution of a nation-wide state of emergency which lasted from 1882 until the dissolution of the empire. Nicholas II is the only one who can really be construed as having continued the policies and relative outlook of his predecessor (a strong belief in divinely-ordained absolute rule), but his inclinations were as variable as the figures surrounding and influencing him.
- A significant factor as to why the empire was able to retain the surface-level veneer of stability that it did through the later decades was through unbelievably harsh suppression of its own population. Alexander III's police state was de jure a temporary set of legal changes, but ended up lasting nearly forty years while granting significant power to the Okhrana and state in suppressing dissidents. Almost every tsar from Nicholas I onward utilized extreme anti-Semitism (the conscription of children into cantonal brigades, banning of settlement outside of cities, the May Laws - another feature of Alexander III which were legally temporary and factually permanent - setting population quotas for inhabitation outside the Pale of Settlement) to shore up appeal from religious figures and unite the population against a bogeyman. Non-Russian language was varyingly suppressed in education and banned from public use entirely, again in every ruling period from Nicholas I's onward.
Between the research I did then and my previous studies of Imperial Russian civic and geopolitical history, the image I have obtained was not of a stable if hardline government, but an autocratic system continually embattled against internal dissent and crippled in reform due to an existential need to appease the higher nobility, the centralization of power behind a single autocrat giving court actors undue influence (ex. Archimandrite Photius, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Grigory Rasputin), and an almost hilariously long streak of bad luck targeting reformist tsars. The Russian republican movement has a large number of factors standing between it and stability, but pointing to Tsarist history as an alternative does not produce much contrast. For every proto-fascist or Bolshevik strongman who could creep to power within the Republic's government, there is a court mystic or charismatic Black Hundredist within earshot of the Tsar. In the context of Russian history, the latter has seen even more examples than the first.
The current emperor, Andrei I, seems to regard the Constitution with some respect, but currently he is not only a very young figure in a sea of reactionary aristocrats, but
de facto subservient to his father - who has expressed interest in removing both the 1906 and 1918 constitutions. Andrei may be the
de jure Tsar and fairly charismatic among the soldiery, but his father is a ruthless figure and very much a "my way or the highway" sort of man, going off his conduct with Kirill and the initial agreement to hand the crown to his son. In the event of a Tsarist victory, I don't really know who is better poised to come out on top.