1971-1982: Alisa Rosenbaum (Free Democratic and Liberal)
The Iron Lady who brought her country in from the cold
In the 18th Century - Russia was a nation dominated by strong female rulers, with the male monarchs providing brief and unhappy interregnums. Anna Ioannovna, Elizaveta Petrovna and Catherine the Great all left far greater legacies for their vast realm than the likes of Ivan, the two short-reigning Peters and the incompetent Paul.
At the same time, the Jewish people had known only two women rulers during their long history. Athalia, daughter of Jezebel, ruled the Levant in the 8th Century BC, whilst Salome Alexandra governed as the last independent Queen of Judea seventy years before the birth of Christ. When Alisa Rosenbaum rose to the leadership of the struggling Liberal Party in the late-sixties, few would have assumed that the former Minister for Education would embody both heritages.
Were it not for her gender and ethnicity, Rosenbaum’s political career would have been considered unremarkable. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Petrograd in 1905 - the young Miss Rosenbaum excelled at school, where she became firm friends with the future-Premier Nabokov’s younger sister. An instinctive liberal, she was a young admirer of Alexander Kerensky over the Tsar during the Revolution, seeing the latter as a reactionary, anti-Semitic block on future constitutional reform.
Soon after Wrangel had consolidated his hold on power, Rosenbaum entered Moscow University, where she read Law. Although Wrangel’s government was not the best place in the world to be Jewish, the Directorate’s internal security police did - at the very least - put a stop to all but the most serious Pogroms - and with figures such as Trotsky, Pasternak and Kantorovich (the latter of whom would serve as Rosenbaum’s brilliant Minister of Finance) brought into the National Unity government, the Russian Jewish community slowly began to see an end to the institutional prejudice that had persisted since Catherine the Great had established the Pale of Settlement. After a brief period as a lecturer at the Pedagogical University of Perm - she entered the city council, where she gained a reputation as a fierce anti-corruption fighter. Following a three-hour interrogation of the local Mayor at a fractious meeting in October 1934, where the indicted politician finally broke down and confessed to mass embezzlement, she gained the attention of the national press. A storm of media attention followed and she was soon appointed to a senior position at the Interior Ministry, where she became a member of the so-called “Objectivists” - single minded government officials who went from town to town to root out cases of fraud.
By the end of the war, Rosenbaum joined the Progress Movement, and later the Social Liberal Party. In the first post-Wrangel elections, she entered the Duma as one of only six female representatives and was instrumental in throwing the “Moderate” faction of the movement behind Trotsky during the Denikin Coup. Her commitment to democracy was rewarded by a place in the government, and she ably served as a Junior Whip under Stravinsky, eventually rising to the Education Ministry during Nabokov’s final administration in the early 1960s. One of the few Ministers to stand out in the “Pigmy Cabinet” - Rosenbaum became very popular for her determination in improving school standards. In 1961, she promoted the teaching of the Symplified Cyrillic Alphabet, removing almost a dozen archaic letters from the curriculum. When the government fell at the general election two years later, she was one of the only Liberal Duma Members to increase her majority in her central Petrograd seat.
Nevertheless, Rosenbaum was a surprise victor in the post-election leadership ballot, narrowly beating Nikolai Podgorny to become Leader of the Opposition. Facing Solzhenitsyn across the Chamber, she constantly harried the government on a number of issues, although she was unable to prevent the escalation of the Vladivostok Crisis. The Prime Minister’s reference to her Jewish heritage shortly before polling day in 1971 backfired spectacularly, and a late swing towards the Liberal Party allowed Rosenbaum to become Russia’s first female leader since Catherine the Great. Catherine, a Baltic German minor noble who rose to become one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe, was a personal heroine to Rosenbaum and had clearly studied her idol’s diplomatic lessons carefully.
“Our Republic must come in from the cold,” the Prime Minister stated as she walked into the Kremlin for the first time. “To stand outside, waving a sabre at your neighbour, is nothing but chutzpah of the highest order!” - to a cacophony of cheering and jeers. Such a turn of phrase was typical Rosenbaum, arousing ire and laughter in almost equal measure. It would serve as a perfect example of the uncompromising and brisk way that she would conduct her administration throughout her eleven year term in office.
Rosenbaum’s time in office is seen as the time when the so-called “Bear Economy” finally started to come into being. Between them, Wrangel, Stravinsky and Nabokov brought Russia up to a standard of living equitable with that of the likes of Bohemia, Danubia or the North Chinese Federation, but as the seventies began to dawn, many commentators had begun to turn around and ask where their Cosmos Programme and Atomkraft Reactors were. For the new Prime Minister, such technologies could only come through co-operation. Soon after taking office, she established her “Grand Embassy” (the term chosen in deliberate homage to the Petrine effort that took place just before the Great Northern War.) Although Rosenbaum’s age prevented her from taking as involved a role as Peter the Great, over her first term in office, her diplomats, lecturers and business-leaders travelled around the world, flying the flag to show that the Russian Republic was finally open for business. In 1973, she enjoyed a fruitful meeting with President George Kennan to discuss proposals for a joint mission to the moon (Von Braun having already masterminded a Scando-German orbit of the satellite the previous summer.) Although the proposals came to naught, it was nevertheless a firm indication that the new government desired a fresh beginning after the Solzhenitsyn years.
With the “Rosenbaum Thaw” came the popular support necessary for the Prime Minister's long-cherished constitutional reforms. After consultations with her coalition partners – the government won three referenda shortly after being returned to office in 1976. In order to curb the power of executive, a semi-appointed second chamber of the Duma was established as a means of scrutinising legislation and better representing the regions (functioning as a combination of the Reichsrat and the British House of Councillors), whilst other plebiscites created a popular-elected presidency and an independent National Bank. Under Kantorovich’s ‘Cybernetics’ policy, long-term economic planning was increasingly left to engineering students beavering away in the basement of the Ministry of Finance, whilst the increase in the scope of the National Hospital Service contributed to life-expectancy reaching parity with central Europe by the end of the decade.
However, Rosenbaum’s health went into a rapid decline during her third term. Kantorovich’s resignation following a heart attack in 1979 left her increasingly conscious of her own mortality, and although still popular with the electorate-at-large, by 1981, the seventy-seven year-old Prime Minister decided that she was unable to lead her fifth election campaign. The following year, she shocked the country by announcing that she would not contest the party leadership at the annual congress. Her successor, the young Gregori Trebek, was unable to properly tie his own campaign to Rosenbaum. In 1982, the FDLP slumped to a narrow defeat at the polls, where the resurgent Conservatives eked out a narrow majority.
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