Съ нами Богъ (Russian) ("God is with us") | |||||||
| Anthem | "Bozhe, Eurasiya khrani! " | ||||||
| Capital | Saint Petersburg | ||||||
| Largest city | Moscow | ||||||
| Other cities | Helsinki, Kiyv, Vladivostok, Omsk, many others | ||||||
| Language official |
see Languages of Eurasia | ||||||
| others | thousands | ||||||
| Religion main |
Orthodoxy | ||||||
| others | Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism, Tengriism, many others | ||||||
| Ethnic Groups main |
East Slavic | ||||||
| others | Finnic, Ugric, Permic, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Far Eastern | ||||||
| Demonym | Eurasian | ||||||
| Government | Constitutional Monarchy, Confederated state | ||||||
| Legislature | Soviet of the Nations | ||||||
| Tsar | Alexander IV? | ||||||
| royal house: | Romanov | ||||||
| Prime Minister | Ilya Ponomarev (Communist for Moskva-Kapotnya) | ||||||
| Population | 514,000,000 people | ||||||
| Established | January 5, 1926 | ||||||
| Currency | Eurasian ruble (₽) | ||||||
| Time Zone | UTC +2 to +12 | ||||||
| summer | yes | ||||||
| Internet TLD | .er | ||||||
| Organizations | CoE, UN, L-BTO | ||||||
The Eurasian Union (Russian: Евразийский Союз, Evrazijskij Soyuz), shortened to Eurasia, is a confederal monarchy located in north Eurasia. The Eurasian Union is the largest state in the world, as well as one of the most populated and wealthy ones. Eurasia has land borders with the most nations in Earth, including Norway, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Assyria, Mazandaran, Afghanistan, Kashmir and China. Eurasia spans many different time zones, and is a monumentally large nation.
Eurasia has a loosely bound union of quasi-independent states, that act with differing levels of autonomy in economic, political, cultural and sometimes even military issues. The Eurasian states have, in several cases, different rules and constitutions of their own, as well as powerful devolved parliaments. Eurasia also goes an extra mile to protect the titular nationality of each province, granting wide benefits to natives and promotion of local cultures over general Russian. This controversial policy has had wide success, with, for example the State of the Union of Saamiland, where, native Saami speakers currently outnumber Russians about 60% to 40%, even though they were outnumbered almost 5 to 1 in 1920. However, it is heavily controversial.
Economically, the Eurasian Union is the largest economy on earth, but, despite its high human development index and GDP per capita, high levels of inequality exist. This leads to huge numbers of social problems, such as gang violence, crippling alcoholism and divided families. It is estimated one in five children in Eurasia has been adopted (mostly by a native family, if not in a Russian state). This leads to the existence of large-scale social movements to "Save the nation!", as the most common slogan pleads. However, the EU has successfully enriched many, if not most of its citizens, in periods of well-being, and save them from extreme stress in periods of recession.
History[]
The composition of the Duma before and after the 1920 election. The 1920 elections sent political shock waves throughout Eurasia.
Eurasia's government reforms came under a period of control by a government extremely different from the one under Aleksey Brusilov's provisional military government. After the end of the war, after the massive student protests in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, Brusilov's government (approved by weak and indecisive Michael II, under incentive by KDs and regionalists in the Duma) led to a massive change, as it was the first election with universal suffrage in both sexes and nationalities, as well as equally along all levels of income, for all citizens aged over 17 (the youngest age of suffrage in the world at the time, due to the fact that the revolution was mostly protest-led) along mostly proportional outcomes. This led to the collapse of the Conservative government and its representation in their government; the left-wing Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) and Trudoviks (Labour Party) won most of the Russian electorate vote, while nearly 30% of the population, comprised of ethnic minorities, banded together in a grouping of allied nationalist parties that wished for representation for all the minorities. These three radical parties, together with the Communists, controlled more than two-thirds of the Duma, and were able to modify the Constitution to their will.
An openly federal autonomy was created. A committee was created to map the different States for all the ethnic minorities, and was mostly controlled by the members of the Party of Regions (infamously, the Committee was disproportionately Mordvin, leading to the large and united Federation of Mordovia in contrast with other smaller and less populated regions). Many of the territories, considered useless for little more than native use of land, were given away to small ethnic groups as "Native Reservations". The regions were given varying levels of authority, from the upper extreme of the Affiliated States created by former vassal states of the Russian Empire to the Oblasts' controlled by native Russians (and organised mostly according to regional branches of the Constitutional Democrats).
Ethnic Ingrian Georg Elfengren was the first actual Prime Minister of the Eurasian Union.
Constitutional Democrats and Trudoviks allied with the minority parties to elect the first Prime Minister after the end of the Constitutional Convention. After a short leadership struggle, they chose young, fresh-faced war hero and ethnic Ingrian Georg (Yrjö) Elfvengren. Elfvengren was a right-of-centre candidate, but decided on alliance with the leftist parties to continue because of the commitment to democratisation amongst the government rather than just the mild and begrudging reforms given by the Conservative manifesto. Rather than centered on economic reform, which was mostly managed by Parliament without interference of the First Minister of Eurasia (a new title of which Elfvengren was the first), centered instead on constitutional and foreign issues. Firstly, the administrative divisions of Eurasia were made to abandon first-past-the-post, with the adoption of the division of the D'Hondt proportional system on a region-by-region basis. Every region elected a number of MPs by direct proportionality.
Internationally, Elfvengren, coming from the west, internationalist part of Eurasia, was committed to international relationships with several select nations in his government. The most clear example is the joining of the Concert of Europe, the precursor to the European Union, which was devised as a method to solve disputes between nations without war. Elfvengren's internationalist perspective was especially close to his relationship with Germany and Sweden, and less so to either Poland or Hungary, two other major members in Eastern Europe. To the south of the nation, Elfvengren also began expanding his web of allies, most clearly with Assyria and Judea in order to incentive the relationship with ethnic minorities in the Middle East with high presences in Eurasia.
By 1922, Elfvengren had decided to call a new election, feeling that the time for mandate should be set at three years. The first election to go by the D'Hondt method, the election was about as greatly important as the one three years before, not only by setting Eurasia's presidential standards (three-year term, no consecutive terms) but also by giving the largest share of the vote to the Trudovik (Labour) Party, which tripled its vote from 8 to 24% of the vote. Securing an alliance with the nationalist parties and the Kadets, the Socialists got a majority of about 55% of the seats in Parliament, which led Viktor Chernov, leader of the left wing of the Trudovik Party, to become First Minister.
The First Socialist Government[]
"The Trudoviks lead the Worker to Progress" - electoral slogan of Chernov and later Kerensky's government.
Chernov's left-wing policies, however, came into direct conflict with the rest of Parliament, which was mostly to the right wing of the Government. Chernov's ideologies were openly Marxist, unlike the political ideology both in the Trudovik Party (and unlike the Communists) and most Socialist parties of Eurasia. To try to please these parties, he named Kerensky, to the right of the party, his Minister of the Interior. Even as a Marxist, he was of the view that a proper developed bourgeois economy had to develop before Communism could arrive, which meant that he supported some capitalistic development in Russia. His view was based on weakening the traditionally powerful Russian feudal class by begin creating high taxes on land value (something based on Georgism rather than Marxism) and redistributing the earnings of this wealth amongst the peasants. Industry began to be rapidly created in the cities, driving many to the large cities, especially Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where state-funded industry began to rapidly develop. The amount of people not involved in the agricultural community rose from 7.5% in 1913 to 19% by 1930. Even then, the Russian economy remained highly agricultural.
Chernov came under heavy opposition by part of the rest of the Duma over the issue of decreased military spending. A vote of no confidence (the first in Russian history) and a dismissal by part of a threatened Michael II, led to the resignation of Chernov and the rise of rightist Alexandr Kerensky to the premiership. Kerensky shifted the direction of the Socialists rightwards, towards agrarianism and social democracy rather than overt Chernovian socialism.
Kerensky launched himself for re-election in 1925, and he was re-elected with a slightly increased share of the vote (from 20 to 24%). Officially his first term in the First Ministership, he felt it appropriate to launch a new government with him under power. An alliance with the regionalist parties led to a party with an openly agrarian, centre-left policy.
Kerensky's agrarian proposals and his alliance with the regionalist parties began the government's policy to overlook the policies by part of nationalist minority politics in the States of the Union, which massively enforced the discrimination laws against the ethnic Russians within these territories. Rather than being actively supportive of these, Kerensky's government turned a blind eye, instead focusing on foreign viewpoints. Kerensky joined in in a period of increased internationalisation, joining in closer in tariff unions with the rest of the Concert of Europe. Internationalisation included monetary reform to get rid of Great War inflation, as well as heavy transaction and attraction of foreign investment, which were waiting to tap into the reserves of the Russian population.
Native Siberian peoples. Siberians were the cause of the collapse of the Trudovik government.
However, soon enough, this internationalist perspective began to contrast with the opinion of several states. In the "Tariff War" of 1928, the governments of Komi, Mansia and the Nenets Tribal Reserve refused to lower their tariffs along with those of the rest of the Eurasian Union, instead starting to claim tariffs towards foreign business. This was due to the perceived fear from part of the native Komi population to begin losing their lands of ethnic majority to large numbers of immigrants from the rest of Russia and abroad as they moved towards the extremely abundant reserves of natural resources located in their nations. For nearly one hundred days, this crisis moved on in Duma, locking down any legislation as members of small regions and minority parties took the Komi side, destroying Kerensky's government. However, finally, by Gregorian Christmas of 1928, a compromise was achieved. Rather than permitted unrestricted foreign immigration into Ural mines, the government agreed to protect the rights of the native populations through the Five-Points Agreement, which established a specific group of politics which gave native peoples preferential treatment in their titular territories.
This agreement, however, came to the outrage of the population of Russia, which thought they were being betrayed by the government. The Duma came into tense argument, and, just a few months before the election, the ten-year electoral coalition fell apart as a portion of the Trudoviks refused to support the ruling government. With the left-wing under full collapse, the Conservatives in the election went back into power, as a razor-thin majority through alliance with the Octobrists and the Moderate Progressives.
Violence And the Conservative Era[]
Flag of the "Farmers' Brigades" or Green Armies
Once again, a war hero, general Pyotr Wrangel, became First Minister. Wrangel attempted to roll many reforms backwards despite the overtly pro-reform relationship with the Octobrists. Wrangel's government established a more presidential government, increased the role of the monarchy, and attempted to decrease peasant's rights. This was an extremely unpopular move throughout the board. Peasants rebelled throughout the nation. The Green Armies began rising and killing tax collectors throughout the major oblasts' of Russia. Soon enough, the nation was in a state of crisis.
A U-Turn was soon in order. Wrangel's controversial rule was soon opposed from both inside and outside the party. With open rioting in the streets against the reactionary Wrangel, and revolution from inside more moderate elements of his parties, the Russian government was unable to do much for most of 1928 and 1929. Instead, the Conservative party found itself polarised and in opposition with the rest of the parliamentary alliance, most notably the Moderate Progressives, which started emphasizing an agrarian, pro-small business, pro-parliamentary position, swallowing up much of the Conservatives' support.
Eventually, push came to shove until an important coup de grace occurred in Parliament, as almost half of the Conservative Party's representatives (especially those from ethnic minorities and the urban areas) defected to the Moderate Progressives, thus triggering a leadership crisis in the rightist coalition. Soon enough, Wrangel's government was overthrown, just in time, however, for the 1931 elections.
Wrangel, hanging on to power with the remains of his reactionary Conservatives, refused to enter into a coalition with the "traitors of the Left", and went into unaligned opposition in the cross benches with the minor parties of the Duma. However, this didn't prevent a government, as, for the first time, a progressive and extremely centrist manifesto managed to lead to a coalition arrangement with the KDs, for the first time in Russian history. The alliance with the KDs, plus the fact that the Moderate Progressives became the largest party among ethnic minorities (beating out the pan-leftist Minority coalition to become the largest party in the country), meant that the Right was able to maintain a razor-thin majority of seven against the opposition (while the Left was reduced to only 38% of the Duma).
Vpered! - The Progressive Moderates' Coalition[]
Under the electoral slogan Vpered! (literally "Onwards!), the Progressive Moderates attempted to launch a series of wide-ranging reforms meant to continue the industrialisation of Russia without committing to state Socialism, as the more extreme edges of the opposition (especially the rapidly growing Communist Party) believed. The Progressive Moderates' policies, led from the left wing of the party to which First Minister Alexander Ivanovich Konovalov belonged to, were supposed to closely imitate those being put in place at the same time by John Maynard Keynes' government in the United Kingdom. This was also put in place by part of the Progressive Moderates to prevent the Great Depression launched by the European sovereign default to reach the Eurasian Union, with successful results. The Eurasian Union averaged 3.5% growth in 1931, in comparison with negative growth in the rest of the Concert of Europe. Led mainly by the left-wing of the Octobrists and the Kadets, the Russian opposition followed Keynes' ideologies closely, while not getting far enough in order to establish the full economic bill of rights that was proposed in Britain and Germany, with only an expanded welfare state for those closest to death (food aid for peasants and financial aids for widows).
Konovalov's cabinet was shuffled several times throughout the government. He attempted to slowly shift it to a more Progressive-controlled cabinet, marginalising both Octobrists and Kadets. This led to the alienation of the two liberal parties, which already contrasted with even the left-wing Progressives in their wish for even greater reforms for the economy. Soon enough, this tug of war between the right wing and left wing of Government led to absolute deadlock. No important solution to the encroaching economic crisis that eventually hit Russia especially hard. Inflation soared during the period, and unemployment rose dramatically to almost 20%. Famine hitting the Middle Volga region further worsened things.
By 1934, the Eurasian economy was in a sorry shape. the GDP had dropped by a whopping 21% since 1931, the largest collapse of the GDP in Europe outside of Italy. Industrial production, intricately tied to the international stage, collapsed by nearly 37%. The elections proved to be a massive downfall for most rightist parties. The Progressive Conservatives, for instance, lost seven percentage points, meaning 213 representatives. The Right Faction, which lost KD support and remained without Conservatives, was reduced to a paltry 30% of Parliament, which meant the entire Right Faction had a similar proportion as the Progressive Moderates had on their own in 1931. The Left wing was not only led into power, but also extremely radicalised. In fact, the largest party in power was, for the first time, the Communists.
The Communist Agenda: 1934-1940[]
Makhno's Regime[]
Communist officials soon elected the leader of the Ukrainian wing of their party, Nestor Makhno, as First Minister of the Eurasian Union. While this received widespread opposition from most members of parliament, after promises of moderation by Makhno and his party he was voted in by the Duma by a majority of only three votes (essentially only managed due to his Ukrainian descent wooing the minority parties, and barely scraping by despite the fact that the Left had a parliamentary majority of 55%). Soon enough, he embarked on a wide streak of modernisation and industrialisation. Billions of rubles were poured into the economy, increasing inflation but dropping unemployment substantially. Several key industries, controlled by what Petylura called "the oppressive bourgeoisie", were nationalised by the government, including steel and coal manufactures, armories, and increased the state intervention in other major industries. At the same time, the government also began investing heavily in supporting small industries, as Petylura thought it to be necessary, like Marx, to reach a capitalistic economy before moving towards full Communism. Makhno also strengthened trade unions, as well as the military, and the role of the First Ministership, as well as popular rule. While confronted by right-wing arguments that he wished to control the country away from monarchy, Makhno replied by claiming he was not interested in something that would probably lead to violent revolution, and that "the winds of change are around us... we must not act brashly to counteract something that will eventually happen, anyway".
Internationally, the Communist period was marked by rapidly increasing periods of polarisation between the Concert of Europe and the United States of America. Makhno decried the Marxist and Boulangist dictatorships popping up in the United States' allies, considering them a threat and the opposition to his Bukaninite Anarchistic ideology. While he faced some internal opposition from the Marxist wing of the Communists, which had some boulangist tendencies and thus sympathised to a level with the dictatorships allied with the United States, the Russian Duma, led foremost by Makhno, passed harsh laws against the growth of boulangisme. With the United States of China allying with the United States of America, tensions reached one of their first flashpoints as China began massing troops in the borders with Manchuria, with increased rhetoric by both the Democrats and the Kuomintang to recover the lands (while the Progressives remained mostly neutral in regards to international ideals, and the Communists supported a Han-only state). To prevent this from blowing out into a full out and very costly war (or even worse, a Russian defeat), Makhno was forced to spend into the military. Millions of rubles were funneled into military research, developing things in an arms battle with the Chinese and the Americans. Espionage revealed widespread infiltration of Eurasian scientific circles by American spies, which led to the "Cowboy Scare", an anti-American reaction in Eastern Russia. Soon enough, Russia began developing encryption and de-encryption machines, and radar.
Internationally, however, Makhno was more focused on attempting to conciliate former rivals of Eurasia, which can be most importantly seen in regards to Japan. Relationships between Eurasia and Japan had been extremely frosty since the loss of Hokkaido and the loss of all claims to Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 to 1907. The State of Ezo, which was ruled by ethnic Ainu despite the fact that the majority of the population was Japanese, was seen by many, especially monarchist Shintoists, as an affront to Japan's very national identity. In 1936, however, Petylura met with Japanese Prime Minister Chikuhei Nakajima and arranged for the normalisation of relationships, with the Japanese parliament voting in favour of recognising the loss of the isle of Hokkaido. In return, Eurasia recognised its ownership of Taiwan. This "Island for Island deal" is known as one of the most famous events of Japanese diplomatic history, as the moment in which Japan began to return to its traditional alignment with the West and away from its previous proxy pro-American stance, which placed them awkwardly in the same side as the Chinese. Makhno also helped in the establishment of new national relations; he was the first Russian prime minister to personally visit Poland after its independence, as well as being the one who led the Duma in its recognition of the United Isles in southern China.
In regards to peasant policy, Makhno was one of the leaders in the creation of national communes in many of the region. While they never gained the traction that they had in Ukraine under his rule, Makhno's reforms did help create hundreds of independent communes in large towns and small cities across Eurasia, which were economically independent from their surrounding provinces, as well as tens or hundreds of thousands of collective farms and factories throughout Eurasia that were democratically managed by the workers (the famous soviets). The creation of these soviets, following a watered-down version of Bakuninite anarchism, proved to be his greatest work in regards to reform (as well as the reason why "Makhnosk" is one of the most common town names in Eurasia).
Makhno stood down from government in 1937, holding the first elections under non-extraordinary circumstances since the collapse of the left-wing vote in 1931. Makhno's relative success during his premiership led to the left wing received another mandate, although this time were led by a coalition of many leftist minority and ethnic representatives from across the States of the Union outside Russia, who, in an inner caucus held in Kazan, elected Mari scholar and poet Sergej Čavajn as Prime Minister of Eurasia.
Čavajn's Rule; The Birth of the Mensheviks[]
The tree was chosen as the sign of the Menshevik Party, as a reference to its origins in Oto - the Grove, the Mari regionalists.
Coming from the electoral alliance Oto (meaning "The Grove" in Mari), an alliance of three regionalistic Mari parties with a centre-right pan-Mari one, Čavajn's ideology rested upon the theory that regionalism was a more important ideology than the economic ideologies of the regional parties. Therefore, he began severe lobbying in order to unite all the regionalistic parties, given that vote splitting was a real issue when competing against the also regionalistic and agrarian wing of the Progressive Moderates, something which led to regionalists getting less seats than their votes amounted to. The first electoral alliance success only applied for the States of the Union located in the Middle Volga and Ugra regions, known as the Idel-Ural Minorities' League; however, this league soon disbanded as several smaller parties from other parts of Eurasia began joining. Within a year of the rise of Čavajn to power, Oto had been replaced by the new Minorities Party, officially named the Party of Regions - Mensheviks. Soon enough, the Mensheviks moved sharply to the left, both because of Čavajn's personal ideologies as well as a way to counteract the right-wing position of the Progressive Moderates.
Čavajn's left-wing government, as the leader of the Mensheviks, was far less extreme than previous governments of the Trudoviks and Communists. While pursuing redistribution of wealth, they began to follow it along the lines of the more moderate social democratic states of the West, which at time were emphasizing on raising taxes on the wealthy and spending more on programmes. The Trudoviks were amongst the first parties outside Western Europe to adopt Keynes' economic theory to stave off economic recession (which was starting in 1937, before being slowed down and eventually halted by heavy investment into the economy). While heavy industry languished, small industries boomed with benefits from both the slowly-forming welfare state as well as some pro-business positions in the economy.
Internationally, Čavajn faced the last major period of peace for any Eurasian First Minister until the collapse of the Boulangist allies of the United States in the 1990s. However, even he faced a potentially devastating event with the collapse of the Qajar dynasty and the rise of the National Front party in the Persian state, now renamed Aryanam, which, after entering into a coalition with the Pan-Iranist Party in 1938, became aggressively nationalist in regards to Iranic regions, most notably Afghanistan and the Tajik region of Eurasia. Čavajn was, however, (partially) able to defuse the situation by granting more autonomy to the regions, to a level voiding parts of the Eurasian constitution and making them up to the states. This had the effect of beginning the period of ethnic cleansing in some of the regions that would lead to ethnic majorities, but was able to defuse the situation both in regards to the ticking time bomb that was the complex political system as well as the international issues with Iran. Eventually, this also led to Čavajn being seen as the father of the modern political structure of Eurasia.
The Mari premier's three years, however, were near their end, and Čavajn called for an election in 1940. Despite the many accomplishments and the relatively robust state of the economy, the Progressives made a brutally efficient campaign arguing that Čavajn was not going to be able to stem the tide of far-left Communistic ideology held by the parties of the left. Furthermore, political deadlock between several factions of the Communist Party (most notably the Marxists vs the Bakuninites) led to the Communists losing two further percentage points in the final election. The Kadets, whose leadership was notoriously right wing, were once again wooed by their coalition partners to the right, and joined the "Pan-Rightist" coalition once again, giving the Progressive Moderates the majority in the Duma. Despite the Mensheviks actually surpassing the Progressive Moderates as the largest party, they were unable to stop this, and Čavajn's allies were ousted from power.
Shulgin's Three Years[]
Despite it being the moderate Progressive agenda that won many voters (and the Kadets) over, the Progressive Moderates didn't nominate their leader, landowner Alexander Rodzyanko, considering him too divisive for the coalition (Rodzyanko's time would come later). Instead, they opened a leadership contest, that soon divided itself between its two extremes; Vasily Shulgin in the right, proposed by the Conservatives, and Pavel Milyukov, the founder and long-time leader of the Constitutional Democrats. While Rodzyanko did get a few nominations, they essentially only functioned to break a simple majority, instead requiring a second round. While Milyukov had come first in the first round, eventually those who supported Rodzyanko felt that Shulgin was the necessary result for the saving of the Eurasian population. Shulgin was elected First Minister of Eurasia.
The right-wing government of Shulgin began trying to stop many of the liberal reforms characteristic of previous governments, but he found it very difficult to do so due to opposition from his own coalition, especially the Kadets. Faced with the death of the indecisive (but strongly conservative) Nicholas II in 1941, and his successor, Aleksey II's centrist to liberal tendencies, Shulgin's mandate was not allowed to come from the Tsar either, who was now granting more power to the Duma than ever before. Shulgin found roadblocks in many of his proposals to change Eurasia; when tried to increase the powers of the landowners and defeat the Makhnovist soviets, he was blocked by rebellion from localist Progressive Moderates and the Kadets. When attempting to reduce the powers of the Duma, he was blocked by his own Conservatives, who feared that Aleksey was controlled by "the liberal agenda of his doctors". When trying to censor certain books which he considered subversive to the very existence of Eurasia, the Octobrists and Kadets banded together and threatened defection from the government, forcing his Conservatives to withdraw the bill.
Shulgin, however, did manage to pass through a shocker new bill that increased the power of the Church in power, giving the Orthodox Church and its autocephalous branches representation in the Duma. While slightly mended by the Kadets, allowing all major religious denomination to nominate Members of Parliament, it was one of the most conservative pieces of legislation allowed to pass during the period.
Shulgin's downfall came when, in 1943, he called for elections in which the right wing was strongly defeated by representatives with the Left. A motion of no-confidence in Shulgin's government occurred after the defection of the Kadets back to the Left, and a new government was to be elected.
Petrichenko's Alliance[]
With less than a hundred thousand votes differing between the Mensheviks and the Communist, and only a few million in difference with Labour, at the start of the new parliament it was not too sure who would make the Premier. In fact, the 1943 election remains the most closely-fought election to this day when taking individual parties into account, with three different parties (the Moderate Progressives, Mensheviks and Communists) taking roughly 16% of the vote.
The Mensheviks did not want the leader of the Communist Party at the time, Nikolai Bukharin, to assume power; a hardcore Marxist, he alienated the at the time libertarian leadership of most main Menshevik parties, most notably Olyk Ipai of Oto. Sadrí Arsal of United Tatarstan and Jakіv Bljumkіn of the Ukrainian Narodniks, both of which threatened breaking up the Menshevik party if the party agreed to supply a strongly Marxist First Minister. The Trudoviks, having been for the first time eclipsed as the force of the hard left in Eurasia with the Communists, were ambivalent towards an alliance with the Communists, and far less with Bukharin, who had spoken disparagingly of what he saw as "Champagne Communists and false socialists" in the Trudovik party. Furthermore, even if the Kadets were to join the right-wing, the vote had been split amongst some dissenters from the Trudoviks and the Octobrists (who would later join up to create the Green Party); it seemed as if deadlock was the result of the election, and a new one was to be called soon.
However, soon, the balance of power in the Communist Party would change. The anarchist faction, led by Stepan Petrichenko, previously having been defeated and broken apart by Marxist political deals after the withdrawal of Makhno from the Communist Party leadership, and the defection of Makhno's closest ally, fellow Ukrainian Symon Petylura, to the Trudoviks. Petrichenko managed to woo large portions of the party, achieving Aleksandr Antonov's support and getting enough delegates to call for an extraordinary party congress. Further division between Marxist currents (especially those who supported Bukharin and wanted to withdraw from civil politics and launch a revolution claiming a "people's mandate") led to Petrichenko being elected leader of the Communist Party. Soon afterwards, he agreed on policies with the Mensheviks and Trudoviks. The Kadets were forced to cave in, stuck between supporting the Communists or having absolutely no government. Petrichenko was voted in First Minister almost four months after the general election.
With so much time lost, Patrichenko felt that his footing was very weak. He soon began implementing policies in steering the economy, which had not fully recovered in all sectors since the 1931 world crisis and had entered a new recession during the political instability. Inspired by Keynes' model in the United Kingdom, Petrichenko invested massive amounts of money to prop up the industry, while constructing new transports to help with transporting food to soviets dealing with low production. Needing imports to grow at a time of large economic crisis, Petrichenko also tied his country even closer to the European community, signing several free trade deals with the members of the Concert of Europe permitting the importation of more foodstuffs. Eurasia, although never to fully join the Concert of Europe's most integral members, started to participate in the experiment of European integration.
The Business Coup which placed the United States more at odds with Europe than ever before and subsequent Boulangist coup d'etats in Mexico and Brazil led to increased tension between the two blocs. While Petrichenko, as a veteran of combat, did not want to return Eurasia to a second great war with its new enemies, he was forced to act swiftly against encroaching Boulangist influence in China. With Chinese forces supporting brutal nationalist-boulangist guerrillas in the northern half of the Japanese-owned Korean peninsula, Petrichenko authorised a joint Japanese-Eurasian mission, led by brilliant strategist Georgy Zhukov, to crush the Boulangist rebels. Resulting in the 1945 Korean Bush War, which would set off tensions that would end up in the Korean Crisis of 1948.
1944 and 1945 brought steady economic improvement to the Eurasian economy, with the Soviets returning to peak industrial production by the end of Petrichenko's reign. Petrichenko thus embarked on a journey of further Sovietisation of the economy; collectives began taking control of some previously state owned enterprises. The policy of Koreanisation, started with Čavajn's premiership and continued by his successors, was increased, leading to the flourishing of minority culture throughout Eurasia. The first Mansi-language play, for instance, lèbavny lebač was released in June of 1946; Petrichenko assisted to its opening play.
Despite successful economic and foreign policies, Petrichenko was relatively unpopular across Russia, which was a vital source of votes for the Communists. His strongly anti-Marxist policies also lost the Communist Party votes, and the left suffered in the 1946 election. Managing a strong rebound despite a relatively weak election campaign, the right bloc was able to gate a bare majority of ten seats (or only 50.3% of Parliament). A new leader was chosen with only the barest of votes of confidence; Moderate Progressive politician Alexander Konovalov.
Government and Politics[]
see also Eurasian Legislature
The Eurasian Union is a parliamentary monarchy with a bicameral parliamentary system. The current king, Alexander IV Romanov, has reduced executive powers; the majority of the executive power is exercised by the leader of the largest parliamentary bloc, who becomes First Minister of the Eurasian Union.
The Eurasian parliament is bicameral. The First Minister usually hails from the lower house of Parliament, the Duma of Nationalities. With an impressive 3048 representatives (divided more or less proportionally by each country's population), each group is supposed to represent their parliamentary nation, and representatives are differently elected, although they tend to be elected in national elections every three years. Currently, the largest party is the Progressive Union - The Liberals, who act as the Official Opposition. The Duma of Nationalities is chaotic, with varied laws over suffrage and allocation of seats. The church and several soviets also have their representatives in the Duma, which tend to sit in the Russian parliamentary group. While it has the largest amount of legislative powers, the Duma often gets little if anything done due to its huge size, variable composition and lack of unity. One member of parliament famously called it "organised chaos".
Seats of the Duma of the Union.
The disorder of the lower house made it necessary for the creation of an upper house, the Duma of the Union, with only 300 seats. The Duma of the Union is radically different in that it is organised strictly proportionally with party lists, with no local representation. Furthermore, there is a 5% parliamentary threshold, which blocks several small independent parties from participating in the Duma. The Duma of the Union officially has less powers than the Duma of Nationalities, but the Prime Minister can force a vote in the Duma of the Union to be immediately binding if the Duma of Nationalities is stalled, something used very often to pass through important legislation.
Party System[]
Generally speaking, Eurasia has a five-party system, although the number of parties and their names vary radically. There are independent parties in every State of the Union, which almost universally align into one of five major parties. The five major parties are, from right to left, the Communist Party of the Eurasian Union, the New Labour Party, the Green Party - The Mensheviks, the Progressive Union - The Liberals and the Conservative Party of Eurasia.
Communist Party[]
The logo of the Communist Party.
Currently leading the political scene in Eurasia as the official party of government, the Communist Party of the Eurasian Union is one of the oldest and most widely respected Communist parties in the world. Founded after the Autumn Revolutions, the Communist Party unites several different loose patterns of left-wing thought. The Communist Party has been the party in government during five different electoral periods, after elections in 1934, 1943, 1967, 1997 and 2012. The current leader of the Communist Party is prime minister Ilya Ponomarev, and the Party has got 81 seats in the Duma of the Union, roughly 27% of the seats.
The Communist Party is not a monolithic ideological force, however, but rather the collection of several smaller movements of the radical left. The most important two currents are the Marxists and the Bukaninites, advocating different forms of left-wing thought. Some of the more anarchic Bukaninites do not even subscribe to classical Communistic theory, despite still being in the party. A collection of very statist Marxists and anarchistic Bukaninites amongst other ideologies, the Communist Party's leadership tends to be somewhat unstable, especially during periods of opposition. This has cost them a lot of support.
With the lack of major agrarian presences in Russia (the Green Party does not have a strong foothold in any of the Oblasts'), the Communist Party derives the overwhelming majority of its support from Russian agricultural workers. However, the Party also has strong branches in all of the States of the Union, and has mild approval amongst the middle classes in major cities.
New Labour[]
Logo of the Trudoviks
The New Labour Party (Novyy Trudoviki), formerly the largest left-wing party, is now by far the smallest of the three parties that compose the Red coalition. The Trudoviks, as they are most often informally called, are the descendant group from the terrorist organisation Narodaya Volya, but since the days of the Autumn Revolutions and early reforms (in which they composed the second left-wing government under Viktor Chernov and later Alexander Kerensky) they have moderated, first to democratic socialism and then to social democracy. The Trudoviks, ideologically, are comparable to the Social Democratic parties of nations such as the United Kingdom and Germany, as proved by their presence in the Socialist International with these other parties.
The Trudoviks have led Eurasia's government six times, in the electoral periods after elections in 1922, 1925, 1955, 1958, 1961 and 1964. In government continuously for 12 years, they are tied with the 2000-2012 Progressive government as the largest amount of unbroken time as the leading party in government. They are notorious for being able to moderate the Communists economically and the Mensheviks in regards to minority rights, and often are reputed to have the most consistent agenda out of all political parties. The current leader of the Trudoviks is the Minister of Culture and Information Dmitry Gudkov, elected in November of 2014. Currently the Trudoviks are the second smallest force in the Duma of the Union, with 21 seats, or roughly 7% of the seats. However, the Trudoviks are famous for punching far above their weight and size, with large coffers, a dedicated electorate and strong local support.
The Trudoviks' support varies extremely widely throughout Eurasia. They are strongest amongst students and the working class, as their policies generally support both. They are also widely supported amongst immigrants. The Trudovik party is by far the most centralised in Eurasia, with all the regional parties being directly affiliated with Trudovik headquarters in Saint Petersburg, something that is not the case for any other party.
The Green Party - Party of Regions[]
Party logo of the Green Party - Party of Regions
The Green Party - Party of Regions, most often called simply the Mensheviks (after a corruption of the Russian word men'shinstvo, which means "minorities") are the traditionally largest party in the Red coalition of parliament. The current party origins from the alliance of several minority parties that had more or less cooperated for minority interests during the premiership of Sergej Čavajn, the Mari leader of the political party Oto. Originally founded as a party only for minority interests which broke apart on economic decisions, eventually almost all parties took a left-wing ideological twist. In the 1960s an urban party, the Green Party, was founded along other environmentally conscious parties throughout Europe; however, they failed to make much impact in Russia itself, and began competing with the Mensheviks for support in the periphery. In 1972, Andrei Sakharov of the Greens agreed to a coalition agreement with Olzhas Suleimenov of the Alash party, and most local green and localist parties joined together. The Green Party - Party of Regions mixture is traditionally the largest party in the left wing of the Duma, having led the Red bloc into government in 1919, 1937, 1970, 1973, 1985, 1988, 1991, and 1997.
The fusion of these two parties still remains a central tenet of the party's ideology. The party is heavily localist, agrarian and egalitarian, things based on the old Menshevik Party. It subscribes to social democracy, with the different parties being at widely different spectrums, although almost always left of the political centre. Fusion with the Greens, however, has also led to the creation of strong social progressivism, environmentalism and social justice amongst the party. The Party has an extremely strong foothold in ethnic minority areas and States of the Union, where it often gets half or more of the vote. Centrist or centre-left parties with no direct affiliation often affiliate themselves in the Duma to the Party, as it permits far more MP independence and decisions than most other parties. The Party is also relatively strong in middle and high-class families and students, especially in comparison with the other two left-wing parties. However, the party is extremely weak within Russia proper, with strong local representation in Moscow and Saint Petersburg only. Nevertheless, it has 78 seats in the Duma of the Union, roughly 26% of the Parliament's representation; representation is even greater in the Duma of Nationalities, although affiliation to the Mensheviks is weak there. The current leader of the Green Party - Party of Regions is the leader of the Ukrainian Radical Party - Batkivshchyna, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oleh Lyashko. The Party is in coalition with the Mensheviks and Communists.
Progressive Bloc- The Liberals[]
Logo of the Progressives
The Liberals are the descendants from several centrist and centre-right parties, which used to compose the most powerful political parties of Tsarist Russia and the early Eurasian Union; the Moderate Progressives (centre-right), the Octobrists (centre to centre-right) and the Constitutional Democrats (centre to centre-left). The three parties tended to be allied with each other in the Blue bloc (with the exception of the Constitutional Democrats or Kadets, which varied their affiliation although tended to stand with the Red bloc instead).
The infamous 1976 wipeout of the left-wing bloc was done, in part, due to the final merger of the Octobrists and Kadets into The Liberals in 1975, after which the new party decisively joined the Blue bloc. In 1991, only a few months before the election, the Liberals once again performed a merger, this time with the Moderate Progressives, adapting their current form. The Progressive Bloc - The Liberals was born, and, in the 1994 elections, an extremely effective campaign led them to get the largest percentage of the vote seen by any party since the 1919 elections, with a whopping 50% of the seats in the Duma of the Union, managing to have the first (and so far, only) one-party government Eurasia has seen. Their vote remained in the high 40s between 1994 and 2012, far outshining the second party (the Green - Mensheviks). The Progressive bloc and its predecessors have ruled for by far the longest out of any party, for a grand total of 14 different Prime Ministers; the Progressive Moderates won 1931, 1946, 1949, 1976 and 1979; the Octobrists got Prime Ministership in 1952 and 1982, and the modern Party won the elections of 1994, 2000, 2003, 2006, and 2009. Even after the 2012 collapse of the vote (they lost 10% of the electorate), the Progressive Bloc remains the largest party in the Duma, with 105 seats, or 35% of the Duma's parliamentary representation.
Classical liberalism and social progressivism are the two principal ideas of the Progressives. The party mainstream is centre-right, with commitment to the private sector and social progress, although there are significant social liberal and liberal conservative groups within the party, which have governed the party before. The party, therefore, is most often seen as very centrist. The party also has support amongst individual farmers (not those on free soviets) and Russian minorities within the States of the Union, as well as in the middle and high classes, and in several urban areas, where they often get the largest parts of the vote. The current leader of the party is Taavi Rõivas of Estonia, who is currently Leader of the Opposition.
Conservative Party of Eurasia[]
Skirting the parliamentary threshold for the Duma of the Union, the smallest party in Parliament is the Conservative Party, often considered a right-wing party. The Conservative Party is a patchwork of small parties, most often Christian Democratic or conservative parties. The Party is the descendant from the royalist faction of Russian society, often based on the aristocracy and the clergy. A strongly conservative party, they have been reduced to niches, most notably amongst the very wealthy, the clergy and the more conservative societies in Bukhara, Khiva, Mongolia and Manchuria. The Conservative Party claims to be the party of the Monarchy (despite the fact that the Monarchy is apolitical and has no party affiliation) and of old tradition, and appeals to socially conservative and religious voters.
Due to the rhetoric of some of their more extreme leaders (which have made the Conservative brand relatively toxic by promoting a return to more absolute monarchy and a reduction of powers) and the great popularity of their coalition party, the Progressive Bloc, the Conservative Party has not been able to develop a lot of support. They have only had two premierships in the history of Eurasia, in 1928 and 1940. Currently, a large portion of their support depends on the far-right royalist parties in the Affiliated States, most notably the Concordia Association of Manchuria, which has had unbroken rule over the state since its creation. With barely 5% of the vote in the 2012 election, the Conservatives were extremely close to being locked out of the Duma of the Union, although their support is stronger in the lower house. The current leader of the Conservative Party is right-wing politician Yulia Tymochenko, who replaced Vladimir Zhirinovsky after an extremely botched attempt to move right after the 2012 election failure to gain votes.