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CHAPTER 30

Resolutions


Ufa

March 14, 1638

The iceboat docked at Ufa and Nikita Ivanovich Romanov stepped down onto the docks. He checked his USE-made pocket watch and looked around. Nikita was clean shaven and dressed in a combination of German and up-timer clothing. His coat was down-filled; it wasn’t polyester; actual up-time-made polyester was impossible to get. So Nikita had had to make do with silk. But it was a very tight weave, and almost as “wind breaking” as polyester would be. At least, the experts in the Dacha insisted that it was. He meant the real Dacha, the one located outside Moscow. So his coat did an excellent job of keeping his body warm, even though the temperature was 5 degrees below freezing. His boots were brown leather lined with fox fur, as were his gloves. And his shaved face was protected by an angora scarf.

The place was busy. Nikita had to give it that. Also the docks were well-made hardwood and mostly ice free. Whether that was because of salting or the constant heavy traffic, he couldn’t tell. Instead of pondering the matter, he set off down the docks looking for a cab. He found one pulled by two Russian ponies. Fifteen minutes later he was dropped off outside the palace. There were guards. He walked up to one and said, “I’m here to see Cousin Mikhail.”

“Cousin?” the guard asked.

“Czar Mikhail Romanov, my cousin.” In point of fact, Nikita looked rather a lot like his older cousin Mikhail. Both were dark-haired stocky men, though Cousin Mikhail was eleven years older and his face showed more lines.

And finally, Nikita liked his cousin. He hadn’t been fond of Filaret. A more hidebound old curmudgeon than Filaret, Nikita never wanted to meet. But Mikhail had always been nice to him. Ineffective, but nice. Always under the thumb of one of his more forceful relatives and now, to hear Father tell it, under the influence of the Gorchakovs and the up-timers.

Nikita was coming to believe that that influence was a good influence. His father didn’t share that opinion. He didn’t in fact know that it was Nikita’s opinion.

The door guard called his sergeant and in due time, Nikita was allowed entrance and escorted to an office. The door opened and Mikhail waved him in. “Come in, Nikita. What brings you out of your imitation Western Europe?”

Not only was Nikita clean shaven, he insisted that his servants and retainers were clean shaven and dressed in Western styles. He had paintings and knickknacks in the style of the West and since the Dacha had been established, he’d been collecting equipment and knickknacks from the Ring of Fire. He had three Barbies, a Spock doll and one of the only three in the world 16-inch Michael Jordan dolls. He also had over ten thousand serfs on his lands. Or, at least, he had had that many serfs before Mikhail’s Emancipation Proclamation.

It was those serfs and the land they farmed and forested that allowed him to buy the various toys he enjoyed and to turn his private estates into an imitation of the West and, since the Ring of Fire, an almost imitation of Grantville. He didn’t have a microwave, but he did have a generator, record players, electric heaters and other such devices.

“Father sent me to insinuate myself into your councils and try to persuade you back to the path of reason,” Nikita said.

Mikhail laughed aloud.

“Officially, I have defected.”

“In that case, were you supposed to tell me that first part?”

“Probably not, cousin. But the truth is, I’m not as convinced as Father is, that you’ve been led astray by the up-timers.”

“You know why kings are so resistant to giving up power?” Mikhail asked.

“Yes, Your Majesty. It’s what happened, or would have happened to Czar Nicholas II, in that other timeline.”

“And what’s happened to any number of other kings throughout history who just seemed weak,” Czar Mikhail agreed. “And what your father’s buddy, Sheremetev, had in mind for me. But a constitutional monarch might get fired without getting executed.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Nikita said.

Mikhail looked surprised, then waved at him to go on.

“Lebedev didn’t take Kazan. You did. And you did it by flying there in the Czarina Evdokia and then walking into Kazan with very few guards to convince them to join your side.

“Then you got back in the dirigible and visited cities from the Caspian Sea to the Ural Mountains to convince people to trade with you and send delegates to the constitutional convention. When Birkin went after Perm, you got in one of the Heroes and flew to Perm. There you persuaded Stroganov to go with you, then you did the next best thing to landing at Birkin’s supply dump, getting out and counting the canned pork.”

“Hardly that, Nikita,” Mikhail laughed. “You have apparently learned to flatter. Father never thought you would.”

Nikita felt his face go stiff at the mention of Patriarch Filaret. “I never saw anything in your father worthy of flattery.”

Mikhail just looked at him, and after a few tense moments, Nikita went back to his earlier point. “You’re not a coward, Mikhail. A coward would have assigned someone to go to Perm and Kazan. There’s another reason. There must be.”

✧ ✧ ✧

There was another reason, though Mikhail wasn’t sure that he knew how to express it. At sixteen he honestly hadn’t felt that he’d had the right or ability to rule a nation. At this point in his life, he doubted that anyone had that right or that ability. And he knew from the experience of the last year that the more ideas in the room the more likely you were to find one that would work. Often those ideas were ones that he hadn’t liked when they’d first been proposed.

He changed the subject. “What does your father want?”

“The best deal he can get,” Nikita said. “He can read a map, Mikhail. So can the other members of the Boyar Duma. At least those that aren’t blinded by their anger.”

“How many of those are there, Nikita?” Mikhail asked.

“Too many. I’d guess about half will keep fighting until they are killed or captured. That includes the Sheremetev family, by the way.” Nikita shook his head. “Down to the last baby born, the best I can tell. And it’s not just the boyars. At least a third of the service nobility will die before they will give up their serfs. Even if you offer to pay them.”

In Muscovite Russia, the system of paying service nobility in land and the peasants to farm it was still in full swing. In the Sovereign States, bureaucrats and soldiers were paid in cash. Paper money issued by the national bank. Though most of them had owned land back in Muscovite Russia and got land deposits in the bank based on their rank, they didn’t get the serfs to farm it. So they ended up having to either make a deal with former serfs to farm it, or take the land in cash and invest or live on the cash. At this point, a good number of them were living “paycheck to paycheck,” as Bernie put it. Others had gotten filthy rich. “What about you, Nikita? Your family owns a lot of land and a lot of serfs.”

Nikita grimaced. “We’ve had a lot of runaways. The new tools, the new plows and seeding machines have helped but not enough. A lot of fields went fallow last spring and more will go fallow this spring. Also, a lot of wild pigs running around are causing mischief, and ending their lives in a peasant’s stewpot rather than as salted pork on a ship to Sweden.” Russia had been a major exporter of wheat and other foodstuffs to Sweden even while Russian peasants starved.

Sheremetev’s government had continued that tribute, which was a large part of the reason that Sweden was accepting the Muscovite Russian ambassador as legitimate, in spite of the recent military gains of the Sovereign States. That meant that there had been food riots in Moscow and even more serfs running away east, meaning more fallow fields and less grain available.

There was a knock at the door, and Mikhail said, “Come.”

The door opened and Natasha Gorchakov came in, followed by Bernie Zeppi. “Hello, Nikita. Why aren’t you under arrest?”

“Why, I’m coming over to your side. To keep my lands,” Nikita said. He smiled a smile that looked a lot like Mikhail’s.

Natasha snorted in disbelief. Natasha and Nikita were age-mates, closer to age-mates than Natasha and Mikhail, anyway. Still, most of what she knew about Nikita was from Evdokia, who called him a horsefly. “Always buzzing around looking for a place to bite or a plate of food to ruin.”

“Do you believe him, Your Majesty?”

“Yes, actually, I do. Come in, Natasha. We were mostly catching up on family matters. I hadn’t started the debriefing yet.”

“Debriefing?” Nikita asked.

“Over the next few days, you’re going to tell me and certain members of the Embassy Bureau everything you know and everything you think about what’s going on in Muscovite Russia,” Mikhail said. “As well as anything you know about my uncle’s military location, morale, supply, everything. It will then be correlated with other sources, which will tell us how valid it is.”

“I don’t actually know that much. Father gave me a briefing before he told me to defect, but I don’t know most of it from personal knowledge.”

“Your father—” Natasha started.

“Yes, Natasha. Try to keep up,” Mikhail said, smiling. “Uncle Ivan is looking for a way out and Nikita here is his emissary.”

“I have a couple of questions of my own. We heard through the radio network that you’ve opened up an air route to the USE? Is that true?”

Natasha looked at Mikhail and he nodded, so she said, “Yes. We just got back a few days ago. As more planes are built, there is going to be a regular flight schedule, and airports no more than a hundred and fifty miles apart. Probably less, because we want to tie in the weather stations we have with those in the west. And that means we are going to need radios within contact range.”

“What is contact range?” Nikita asked.

“It depends on the radio,” Bernie said, “the position of the antenna, and the shape of the antenna. If you get a good directional antenna so that your signal loss is less, you can have them reach over a hundred miles even with the crappy tubes made down-time. But a system like that needs a crew to operate it. You need generators, batteries, aqualators with tuning modules. The installations that have any real reach aren’t cheap.

“The good news is even though you want your radio on the top of a hill or a mountain, you can often put your airport near it. Which aids navigation and makes supplying the radio telegraph station easier. That was part of what we were doing on the way home. What we are going to be doing over the next few months is transporting equipment to the airports and radio telegraph stations along the route between Ufa and Prague.”

“Prague? What about Grantville?”

“We’ve made a deal with Royal Dutch Airlines. They are going to set up regular flights from Grantville to Prague. Actually, Magdeburg to Grantville to Prague, and back. We’ll be carrying passengers along our route from Ufa to Prague. With a stop in Kolozsvár, where Gretchen Richter has been made Lady Protector of Transylvania.”

“Gustav ate Transylvania. Is he trying to conquer the world?”

Bernie grimaced. “I think he might well want to. We don’t want a war with the USE, but I’m not at all sure that His Imperial Majesty is going to give us any choice.”

“That’s why Vlad and Brandy are out east,” Mikhail said. “If we are going to expand, that’s the direction open to us.”


Ufa

March 29, 1638

The Ufa River was still frozen when Vladimir landed on it and taxied to the hangar next to the tower. The plane was looking a bit ragged, but it was still flying well. It had been a rough couple of months, but they were back. And, with them, they brought Pyotr Beketov, who was acting as the representative of the eastern tribes. Pyotr wasn’t a great flier. He’d spent the first couple of days with his hands clamped to the chair arms from takeoff to landing, only removing them to empty his gut into the airsick bag.

He was less frightened by it now, but he still got airsick. On the upside, he had rare furs, some gold, and quite a few jewels either collected by the natives or bartered for with the Chinese to the south. It wasn’t the full tax train that would be coming by pack mule, and would take most of the summer to get here, but it was a sample. More importantly, he brought a proposal.


Ufa Kremlin

March 30, 1638

Pyotr Beketov was making a fairly good showing of himself as he sat in front of the States Committee. “The confederated tribes are concerned about the Qing, and want to join the Sovereign States as a state, ‘Eastern Siberia.’ It will stretch from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Arctic Ocean, and west to the Vilyuy River.”

The capitol building was located in the Ufa Kremlin. It was a domed building and the paint was dry, but there was no doubt that it was new. For one thing, it used a lot of concrete in its construction. But it had paintings on the walls and statues in the mezzanine. This room was one of the offices located in the south wing. It had a high ceiling with an electric fan hanging from it. The fan was off at the moment, but it was still as impressive as heck to a man whose only experience with electricity had been in the last couple of weeks. Still, Pyotr was doing well. He was presenting the case of the tribes clearly and as favorably as he could.

Brandy watched as he presented the case of a united people condescending to join out of a reasonable concern. What was really out there were a bunch of tribes that disliked each other rather a lot, and were terrified that the Qing might turn north instead of south, as they did in that other timeline. There were good reasons for the Qing to do that. The other reason that most, but not all, of the tribes in Eastern Siberia wanted to join the Sovereign States of Russia was that they wanted to grab as much land for themselves as they could and were afraid that if they didn’t join, other tribes could and would claim their territory.

Unfortunately for Pyotr Beketov, the States Committee, which was the initial point that a prospective state presented its case, was made up of representatives of states that already existed. And many of those states had pulled exactly the same shit that Eastern Siberia was trying to pull.

The questioning started gently enough about how many tribes were in the confederation and how many tribes occupying the territory weren’t. Then they got into how much of the land in the proposed state of Eastern Siberia was going to be owned by the state of Eastern Siberia and how much by the federal government. Also, how much was owned by individuals.

Turned out that not a lot was owned by individuals. It was mostly owned by tribes, and if that was the case, the federal government of the Sovereign States should, in the committee’s opinion, own quite a bit of it.

About an hour in, Vlad and Brandy left the meeting. They knew that Pyotr Beketov’s instructions from the tribal leaders was to make the best deal he could, but make a deal. They really were terrified of gunpowder-armed Qing armies eradicating them on their way to the north. Vlad and Brandy had done all in their power to instill that fear in them.

✧ ✧ ✧

Fifteen minutes later, they were in the czar’s living room in the palace. The czar and czarina were there, and there was coffee from Turkey and tea from China, as well as French pastries with orange marmalade from North Africa. Brandy warmed her hands on the fire, then picked up Mikey and sat him on her lap. Little Mikey immediately wanted down. He was still angry at them for leaving him for months.

“So, how’s it going in the committee?” Evdokia asked.

“Well enough. Unless the committee gets really stupid, we’ll have a new state of Eastern Siberia in the next six months or so. After that, I suspect we’ll get a petition from Western Siberia and then General Shein.”

“General Shein has already applied for statehood,” Czar Mikhail said. “We got the news two days after Tim took Nizhny Novgorod. It will be going before the full congress in a couple of weeks and is expected to pass with no more than a few rude comments. Mangazeya is also applying for statehood, mostly so that Shein won’t annex them.”

“That gives us a port on the arctic ocean at lease for a couple of months a year. And from what you’ve been saying, we’re going to have a port in the Pacific?” Evdokia asked.

“Technically, yes,” Vladimir said.

“But practically, no,” Brandy added.

“Explain?” Evdokia demanded.

“It’s going to take fifteen or twenty years to build a rail line from here to the Pacific,” Vladimir said. “And even after it’s built, it’s going to be a bitch to maintain. It’s a very expensive way to put a port in Russia, and we aren’t going to get it anytime soon.”

“What about the Heroes?” Mikhail asked.

“They are great, Your Majesty, but they have limited cargo capacity,” Brandy explained. “Very limited. Yes, we can move people a few at a time from here to the coast in a week or two, and as we get more planes that will improve a bit. Even a lot. Fuel dumps with lots of charcoal or oil available will make it easier, and faster, but you’re still talking a lot of planes to fill a single ship. We still need a port on the Baltic.”

“The problem is that Sweden gains rather a lot by controlling our access to the Baltic,” Czar Mikhail said. “He has been getting a wheat subsidy from us every year for over a decade, and Sheremetev paid it, and Uncle Ivan is doing the same. Also, anything we sell to Europe has to go through him, and the port is only open for a few months every year. That goes for both Arkhangelsk and Mangazenya.”

“What about Arkhangelsk?” Brandy asked.

“It freezes up for six months out of the year, which makes it better than Mangazenya, but not good,” Mikhail said.

“Even so, I would focus on putting a railway to Arkhangelsk rather than the Pacific,” Vlad said. “We can do that in a couple of years, not a couple of decades.”

“You suggest that we abandon Siberia?”

“No. Keep the air route, and start on a land route. A rail line, but don’t expect anything from it soon,” Brandy said.

“What we will get from Siberia is a frontier to absorb the people escaping from Poland,” Evdokia said.

“Poland?” Brandy asked.

“Even with Muscovite Russia in the way, we’ve been getting serfs escaping from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth,” Evdokia explained, “and with the expected collapse of Muscovite Russia, that trickle is going to turn into a flood. Peasants are running from the huge estates in Poland and Lithuania looking for a better life in Russia. They know about the czar’s Emancipation Proclamation. ‘Get past Smolensk and you’re in Russia, and your master can’t get you back. Then you go west to Ufa and Czar Mikhail will give you land.’ That’s not what it said, but it’s what Polish peasants showing up here over the winter thought it said.”

“What did you do with them?”

“My idiot husband gave them land in the land bank, just like the Russian peasants running from Muscovite Russia. Some of them took it in land. A lot of them got jobs in the factories. But there are Polish villages just east of here.”

“How many?” Vladimir asked.

“Not all that many, so far. Most of them get grabbed up by the serf hunters in Muscovy and get planted on some boyar’s estate in Muscovy. Darn few are being returned to Poland or Lithuania, though.”

“How are the Poles reacting to that?” Vladimir asked.

“The Polish government isn’t doing much of anything. It’s almost paralyzed by the Sejm. Besides, they have Gustav sitting in what they consider to be Polish territory, and what amounts to a revolution in southern Poland. But the Lithuanian magnates . . . at least some of them are sending serf-catching raids into Russia to bring back serfs, and they don’t much care if those serfs are Polish or Russian.”

At that point, Little Mikey decided to throw a temper tantrum. The conference was delayed until the child was consoled.

A couple of hours later, Mikey was down for his nap and they were discussing the political and economic situation in the Sovereign States and Muscovite Russia.

“Not all of the boyars are going to accept Uncle Ivan giving us Moscow and the rest of Muscovy in exchange for his head,” Czar Mikhail said.

“And most of his property,” Evdokia clarified with a bit of rancor. She wasn’t as forgiving of Mikhail’s uncle as he was, and would have left Ivan Romanov a great deal less wealthy if it had been up to her.

“Anyway,” Mikhail said, “the issue is going to be Gustav. I really don’t want a war with Sweden, especially if there is even a small chance that the USE will come in on his side. But we need access to the Baltic. In a smaller way, it’s the same problem we have in the East. The planes work, but ships carry a great deal more. So between Sweden and Poland, our access to the West is badly restricted. We’re not going to fall back into the Time of Troubles, and we’re not going to turn into the sort of dictatorship that caused the Communist Revolution in 1917 in that other history. At least not this year.”

“I know,” Vlad agreed. “But you still sound worried.”

“Russia can’t remain cut off from the West with the advances it’s making in science and engineering. We have to have trade.”

“We will have,” Brandy reassured him. “The situation in Poland is profoundly unstable and whatever happens there, it’s going to mean that Gustav is going to need us. If for no other reason than to keep them from focusing all their forces against him.” She looked around the room. “We’re not quite out of the woods yet. But I can see the edge of the forest from here.”


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