Sorry for necromancing this thread back from the dead, but I was just about to open a thread asking exactly this question: is the restauration of some kind of Romanov possible ofter 1990? Perhaps an alternate TL Romanov that never existed in real life (for example WI Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia gets permission from his brother to marry Princess Beatrice of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and they have issue...).
But then of course, there is this:
Much more important than the Russian people, a return to the Tsardom (assuming a real claimant could be found) would be completely unacceptable to the Soviet bureaucracy that formed the backbone of the new Russian state
Indeed, the
siviliki (the term comes from "civilian" - i.e. the official bureaucracy) bunch would absolutely hate the idea with a passion. But WI Putin were a more sophisticated strongman than he's in real life and somehow he'd use my hypothesised surviving Romanov in his
siloviki takeover? (The siloviki are the security apparatus people and they generally have no ideological inclination; except that some of them are "loyal to Mother Russia" so to say, whatever that means in their minds, but that would only help the issue.)
Perhaps also, instead of or in addition to just arresting all the oligarchs he didn't like Putin would encourage the return of the exiled White Russians (or their progeny since the original ones are dead), he'd help form a new upper class of returned White Russians that he would be at any time be able to play against the Yeltsin era oligarchs (just as he in OTL plays the USSR nostalgics and the ultra-nationalists against each other).
In any case this would probably require a very different Putin, and perhaps another personality on the stage, someone to help Putin somewhat ideologically, as he's not very good at that (siloviki usually aren't).
As I have stated previously, I don't think Russia could end up anything other than quite centralised, with a rather powerful security apparatus, and struggling to form capital. After I said that, quite naturally I've been accused of being anti-Russian. Well, as much as I might be resenting certain actions taken by the soviets, I'm not anti-Russian, I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian, fot Chirist's sake! My point is that Russian
geopolitics are rather unconductive to the emergence of a wealthy liberal democracy. However, even with a centralised, security apparatus surveilled country that struggles for capital, Russia could have done much much better in terms of justice system, corruption, criminality, social justice, international prestige, actual power on the world stage, infrastructure (and in the case od Russia the more and the better the infrastructure, the less its capital problem comes out).
So I've been kind of exploring, mentally, avenues for a better Russia so to say. What do you guys say?