Russia (Alternative Russia)

The Russian Federal Republic, alternatively known as simply Russia, is a transcontinental country in Europe and Asia. It is known for being the largest country in the world.

The current incarnation of Russia was created from the remnants of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was modelled off the systems of the United States, which Russia has a “friendly rivalry” with.

Though Russia is not part of the European Union, it is part of the Schengen Agreement, meaning Russia has open borders with all EU states it borders.

Russia is one of the best countries for LGBT rights (gay marriage was legalized in 1996, and transgender rights were recognized in 2004), the first country to legalize marijuana (in 2002), and has the highest legal minimum wage (25 Rubles per hour), as well as, especially after the increasing police brutality towards people of colour in the US after the end of the Cold War, being a major destination for immigration from other countries.

The Russian currency is the Ruble (₽), which is a popular reserve currency, though it is subject to extreme deflation (a widescreen TV which would cost thousands of US dollars, costs just 10 Rubles).

Recently, Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Caucasia, and will return to host the 2022 Winter Games in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Russia consists of 19 states and several overseas territories. Its mainland has land borders with Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, West Ukraine, East Ukraine, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, East Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchukuo, as well as maritime borders with Japan, Korea, and Canada.

Soviet Union era
The Soviet Union were the second country to land astronauts on the Moon during the Space Race, on February 12, 1970. A Soviet flag was planted adjacent to the location of an US flag. They were then the first to land astronauts on Mars, on June 4, 1978.

Later in the Soviet era, especially the late 1980s and early 1990s, some economic reforms were instituted, known as glasnost and perestroika. This marked the end of widespread state censorship, and also the allowance of private businesses, such as the ViD television network.

Post-Soviet era
It was intended for each SSR to become its own independent state on December 26, 1991, with a rump state formed known as the “Russian Federation” out of the RSFSR and overseas territories. However, referendums found that the only SSRs that actually wanted to leave the USSR were Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, and Moldova. Therefore, throughout the year of 1991, these 5 SSRs were granted independence (Moldova reunited with Romania in January 1992), and on December 26, the date of the intended dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was announced that a new country would be formed immediately, known as the Russian Federal Republic, out of the remaining SSRs and Overseas Territories, with most of the remaining SSRs becoming known as states, and the RSFSR split into three new states: Muscovy, Siberia, and Caucasia.

The new Russian constitution was drafted in secret, and based on the systems of the United States, the long-time rival of Russia since the early Soviet days. As part of the reforms, Belarus lost its separate seat at the UN, as it was argued that it made no sense for Russia to have 2 seats at the UN, when every other country had only one.

States

 * 1) Muscovy is the most populous state, as Moscow, the capital and largest city, is located here.
 * 2) Caucasia seems to be a highly-separatist state, but referendums to leave Russia have resulted in the same thing as the many referendums for Quebec to leave Canada, or Scotland to leave Britain.
 * 3) Siberia is the largest state, but is also the least populated, due to poor weather conditions. The Russian government highly encourages emigration from Siberia to western Canada (especially the Russian-speaking provinces of Alaska, Yukon, and Kaskadiya), or the Pacific Northwest region of the US.
 * 4) Belarus was formerly known as Byelorussian SSR during the Soviet period, and is quite culturally similar to Muscovy.
 * 5) Kazakhstan was formerly known as Kazakh SSR during the Soviet period. Along with the other states with English names ending in “-stan”, it is stereotyped as culturally backwards, much like the Southeastern region of the United States.
 * 6) Kyrgyzstan was formerly known as Kirghiz SSR during the Soviet period.
 * 7) Tajikistan was formerly known as Tajik SSR during the Soviet period.
 * 8) Turkmenistan was formerly known as Turkmen SSR during the Soviet period. Recently, due to the Taliban regaining power in Afghanistan, many Afghan refugees have crossed the border to here.
 * 9) Uzbekistan was formerly known as Uzbek SSR during the Soviet period.
 * 10) Karakalpakstan was split off from Uzbekistan after a referendum in 2002.
 * 11) Tuva is pretty much culturally part of Mongolia, and was claimed by Mongolia as rightful territory until quite recently. It used to be the Tuvan SSR in the Soviet period.
 * 12) Karelia is pretty much Scandinavian, and also speaks Finnish and Swedish along with Russian. In the Soviet era, it was called the Karelo-Finnish SSR.
 * 13) Armenia was formerly known as Armenian SSR during the Soviet period. They do NOT want you to deny the Armenian Genocide, and that’s why Russia and Turkey have poor relations.
 * 14) Azerbaijan was formerly known as Azeri SSR during the Soviet period.
 * 15) Nagorno-Karabakh was created as a “kludge” to resolve a border dispute between the Armenian and Azeri state governments, and is pretty much an extension of Armenia.
 * 16) Georgia was formerly known as Georgian SSR during the Soviet period. There is also an US state called Georgia, which leads to confusion.
 * 17) Novorossiya joined the RFR in 2015, after the struggling Ukraine split into two; EU-backed West Ukraine and Russian-backed East Ukraine. Before that happened, two of the counties in eastern Ukraine, with more Russian-speakers than Ukrainian-speakers, decided to leave Ukraine and join Russia.
 * 18) Crimea is another recent addition, having joined around the same time as Novorossiya.
 * 19) The Jewish Autonomous Republic used to be the Jewish Autonomous Oblast within Siberia, but was given state status in 1998 after a referendum. It’s essentially a Jewish ethnostate, even more so than Israel, where everyone speaks Hebrew or Yiddish, and Russian is a second language at best.

Overseas territories
Russia was the first European country to “discover” and colonize North America, and still retains its first colony, Greenland, today.
 * Prussia is a German-speaking territory near Poland, gained by the USSR from Germany after the Second World War. It was initially the Prussian SSR, but as nearby Baltic states had (re)gained independence, leaving it with no land connection to Russia, it was made an overseas territory. Can be compared to OTL Puerto Rico, as it was gained in a war (World War II/Spanish-American War); largely speaks a different language (German instead of Russian/Spanish instead of English); has chosen to become an official state in a referendum between statehood and independence, but the referendums are non-binding; and is often ignored by politicians and considered like a foreign country, despite technically being part of the “motherland” (Russia/the USA). (But in TTL, to make up for Alaska being part of Canada, PR is an US state.)
 * Greenland largely speaks Inuit languages, but there are some Russian speakers. It doesn’t want independence, but the US has tried to buy it from Russia multiple times, all of which have failed.
 * The Russian Antilles used to be one unit, known as, well, the Russian Antilles (formerly Antilles Overseas Soviet Socialist Republic), but as of 2010, consists of 6 separate overseas oblasts:
 * Aruba
 * Bonaire
 * Curaçao
 * Saba
 * Sankt-Yevstafiy
 * Sankt-Martin
 * Jeju is an island south of Korea. It is claimed by Korea as rightful territory, and was claimed by both Koreas before Korean reunification in 2008, but is pretty much Russia’s Hawaii, with everyone speaking the Jejuan “dialect of Korean” (actually scientifically agreed to be a separate language nowadays) as well as Russian.
 * Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) is known for its giant head statues made by indigenous people. It was colonized during the first “true” wave of Russian colonization of the Americas.
 * Russian Polynesia was colonized around the same time as Rapa Nui, and consists of 71 islands within Oceania.
 * Rugen is an island near Germany, named for the city of Rugen. It was one of the concessions other European countries made towards Russia for trading purposes; it initially only contained the northern area of the island, but after WWII, the whole island became part of the Rugen oblast, as reparations for Germany occupying the Russian part of the island during WWII.
 * Cadiz is another historical concession, this time from Spain, which also gave Gibraltar to Britain around the same time. Like Gibraltar, Spain wants Cadiz back, but in 2 referendums, the citizens of Cadiz chose to remain part of Russia.
 * Cozumel is a small island near Yucatan in Mexico, and was one of the early Russian colonial holdings. It is a popular tourist destination, and also contains Mayan ruins.
 * Socotra is an archipelago near Africa and the Middle East. Its purpose for being colonized was to allow Russia to control the Red Sea.
 * Weihai is a port city in China. The PRC wanted it handed over by 2000, like Hong Kong and Macau before it, but this never happened, because Russia recognized the ROC instead of the PRC (a diplomatic decision caused by the Sino-Soviet split in 1970), and when the PRC fell apart in 2002, that point was made moot.
 * Svalbard is one of the northernmost Russian overseas territories, along with Greenland. It contains the Global Seed Vault, and also includes the uninhabited volcanic island, Jan Mayen.
 * Russian/American Antarctic Territory, a condominium of the RFR and USA, was created in 1996 from then-unclaimed Marie Byrd Land, as both Russia and the US were allowed to make their own claims by the Antarctica Treaty. It was inaugurated on live TV in both countries as “a symbol of friendship between America and Russia, as the Cold War is finally over.”
 * The Balleny Islands were the first Antarctic claim of Russia, and are located near the New Zealand Antarctic claim, the Ross Dependency. They are uninhabited and volcanic; given that Antarctica was discovered by a Russian, it’s surprising they settled for this, instead of just claiming the whole continent before anyone else found out it existed.
 * Calsahara, a small plot of land (120 acres) surrounded by the US state of California, given by then-President Bill Clinton to Russia in 1994 in an Executive Order, as a gift to mark the cessation of hostilities after the end of the Cold War. It was uninhabited when handed over, and its current population is mostly Russian homesteaders.

Trivia

 * Russia was one of the first countries outside of the US to adopt the Internet and World Wide Web for commercial use, as well as the first country to mandate Unicode international encoding for computer systems. However, due to ASCII restrictions in domain names, computers had to come with hybrid Cyrillic/Latin keyboards. This was not ideal, so in 1999, IDNs and Punycode were created, along with the TLDs .ком, .орг, .сет, .обр, and .пра (co-official with .co.ru, .org.ru, .net.ru, .edu.ru, and .gov.ru).
 * Russian internet culture can be said to be “stuck in Web 1.0”; though some modern Western sites like Reddit and Twitter are popular, Russia also has its own sites like VKontakte (the “Russian Facebook”) and LiveJournal (originally American, but now only popular with Russian-speakers, and based in Russia). Also, there is a huge demand for personal home pages, to the point that when “Neocities” launched in 2013, once the Russian internet community found out about it, demand skyrocketed, and the non-profit running the site had to buy new servers each day to keep up with demand from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Russophone Canada.
 * During the era when the People’s Republic of China existed, and “one-China policies” were in effect, Russia recognized the Republic of China (now the Republic of Taiwan since 2002) as the sole Chinese state. This was because the USSR started recognizing Taiwan instead of the PRC in 1970, due to the fallout of the Sino-Soviet split turning the Cold War tripolar, and resulting in an “enemy mine” situation. Currently, with no “one-China” policies in effect, Russia recognizes both the Second Republic of China and the Republic of Taiwan, as well as all other states containing former PRC territory: the Restored Empire of Manchukuo, the State of Mongolia (which includes “Inner Mongolia” since reunifying with South Mongolia in 2006), the Islamic Republic of East Turkestan, the Kingdom of Tibet, and the Dominion of Hong Kong and Macau.