NationStates Jolt Archive

Armand Domalewski’s murky blue eyes stared out of the window in an expression of intense scrutiny, as if he was trying to find something that was far away. Rain dribbled upon the Kremlin office window that was still Vladimir Putin’s, and tremendous bolts of lightning fractured the sky into jagged black plates. The Moscow skyline gleamed in the night, but it was the pale, cold shine of moonlight upon tombstones. The streets were empty now, as it was far beyond curfew time under martial law, and it lent the city an almost ghost like quality. For some reason Armand’s face failed to contort to its trademark grin when the small electronic message flashed onto his laptop, and he found that he could not even speak. Something in the air changed, as if an era of certainty and light had passed and new, uncertain times full of murky shadows were once again upon the land. Domalewski was swept up by a wave of an emotion that he could not define, and he wondered for a moment if his efforts had truly been worth it.

But his doubt passed when his greed and ambition took over, and as church bells mournfully signaled the passing of the hour, a few simple words left his lips.

“It is done.”

But no; there was still much work to be done.
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The procedure for the death of a President in Russia was actually quite simple; all authority would be handed to the Speaker of the House. However, George W. Bush was currently away on a mission with the A-Team, attempting to exploit France’s burgeoning revolution. With civilian authority decapitated in this way, the office should have landed in the hands of the military’s top official, the Secretary of Defense. But she was dead, killed by Vladimir in a bitter struggle aboard his private jet. This conveniently left the nation’s top military official as the co-Commander in Chief of the Russian-Estenlands Joint Imperial Command---Tsar Wingert the Great.

Thus after hours of wrangling over the exact wording of the announcement, with aides coming up with notes that built upon each other in their eloquence and complexity, a frustrated General Domalewski simply threw them out of his office and issued a short notice.

“This day, President Vladimir Putin and our Secretary of Defense were killed during an enemy ambush in an undisclosed location in the Baltics by enemy insurgents. Our current Commander-in-Chief is now Tsar Wingert of the Estenlands.”
___________________________________________________________________

“Goddamit! We’re f*cked! F*cked up the ass! Royally f*cking f*cked to the f*cking power of f*ckitude! F*CK!” screamed a drunken fat man.

In any other place these mutterings would be completely disregarded. After all, this was Russia: drunken fat men were not exactly in short supply.

But this was no ordinary drunken fat man. Oh no.

This was Sergeir Borodvich, one of the ROP’s main bosses. And his sentiment was largely echoed in the small, smoke filled room. Dozens of the ROP’s major party bosses sat in the dank bar, filling the air with thick, hazy smoke, frustrated curses, and spilled vodka. The news of Putin’s death had thrown them into a panic, for it could not have come at a less opportune time. The elections were to be held in days , and with both of conservative Russia’s major political players out of the picture (No one had any idea where the hell Dubya was, and he was too deep undercover to return anyway.) the specter of electoral loss loomed above their heads like a cloud of doubt. Putin had filled his cabinet with enigmatic specialists like Schwarzenegger and The Boss rather than career politicians, never even appointed a Vice President, and dominated by force of personality all of the media’s attention on his party, so only the Speaker of the House had managed to gain any decent form of national recognition within the ROP.

Even more troubling was the fact that Russia’s opposition forces, recognizing an important opportunity with Putin’s death, had finally gotten their act together and united under the banner of the “Liberal Democratic Alliance” with the charismatic and media savvy Minority House Leader Sienna Brown as their candidate. With a campaign platform calling for international reconciliation with the world’s progressive elements, the release of Nigeria (although not the Baltics—they had cost too much to be surrendered, at least in the view of the Russian populace), increased domestic social spending, more liberal social policies, and, most ominously (for some) a repudiation of all military alliances with the Holy League, the Russian left wing seemed (for the first time in a decade) to be within reach of electoral victory.

Numerous names flew through the cigar smoke filled air, but they either lacked recognition (the time span left required someone with an instantly recognizable name) or was simply unsuited to the task (“Zlad!”, no matter how good his music was, could barely remember his name, much less serve as President). Desperation filled their minds as surely ad vodka filled their bellies, and they argued for hours, until a sudden thud drew their attention to the double doors of the bar.
With a crash the wide doors swung open. There in the rain stood the young General Armand, his lean silhouette outlined by a flash of lightning. His long, tan Soviet era officer’s uniform was dripping wet, and the black brimmed, red topped cap Soviet general’s cap he bore concealed his face. He held a pistol next to his head and raised towards the ceiling, and he slowly raised his face to stare down the now silent room. His murky, grayish blue eyes now held an almost demonic intensity as he glared at the assembled political bosses. Behind the general stood a row of elite troops eerily reminiscent of Putin’s praetorian guard-like Black Scarves, except for two major differences: their scarves were red with white trimming and they no longer used the modified Ak-101s and Russian submachine guns of Putin’s reign.

They bore the colors and weapons of the Estenlands.

Armand’s elbow straightened as the gun dropped down and was aimed directly at one of the bosses. The row of soldiers followed suit, and armed their bayonets as well.

“Ladies and gentlemen. I am a soldier, not some political orator, so I’ll be quick and to the point. Tomorrow you will announce me as your candidate. My aides will send you your new party platform shortly, but our main point will be the this: the era of Vladimir Putin and democracy is over. The era of Tsar Wingert the Great and holy monarchy has begun.”

A fat, balding man reached for his handgun and tried to shoot Armand, but before he could even get a shot off a bullet smashed through his skull, and it was followed by a hail of machine gun rounds which threw him into convulsions. The young general blew the smoke off his pistol, and then drew his gaze around the room.

“This is how we will handle complaints from now on.”

As soon as he had appeared, the aggressive young man vanished into the thick Moscow rain, leaving the ROP’s bosses to stare at the double doors and ponder their fate.
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“One cold night in the early 1900s one man led a band of murderers and thieves in a charge against God and country. He exploited the weakness of the Romanov bloodline to rouse the anger of the people and turn them against the most holy of institutions, and to bring upon a Godless reign of horror that ruined this country up until the 1980s. This man was Lenin, and his reign of horror was called Communism. The Russian people tore down this man’s evil, but by then our nation was so corrupt and weakened that it needed a commoner to rebuild it, because only a commoner could repair the corrupted and broken national spirit. Only a commoner could rejuvenate the morals of commoners.”

“Only a man who understood what it was like to be at the bottom knew how to bring us up from there. This man was Sir Putin, knight of the Tsar of all Russias and the greatest servant Russia has ever had. We will always honor his sacrifice and the brilliance of his economic reforms, but now that he has returned Russia to its rightful position of strength, we need a leader who can rule with strength. Now that we have one of the world’s finest militaries and a booming economy, we are finally ready to restore a truly powerful leader.”

“Not only are we ready to wield that strength, we need to wield it. Sir Putin, God rest his soul, always spoke glowingly of Congress, but did not his greatest achievements come when he single handedly wielded the power of the people’s will, rather than wait for some glorified bureaucrats debate endlessly? The reborn KGB, the liberation of Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and the Baltics, the economic reforms…All were the products of our late leader’s swift and decisive decisions, not the b*tching of politicians. Now, with a China that mobilizes on our border, a Progressive Bloc that fumes over the Baltics, and atreasonous and increasingly powerful Aidarov, we need a powerful leader who can make these decisions more than ever.”

“Sir Putin was suitable for raising a nation from the ground with his decisions; but to rule a Divine Empire we need someone who knows how to wield might. We need someone who has power coursing through his veins, a leader who God Himself chose to lead other men.”

“We need…Tsar Wingert. Sir Putin brought us out from an era of socialism, corruption, and weakness, and now the Tsar will bring us into an age of prosperity, Christian morals, and strength. Russia will once again take its rightful role in the world as a major power, and the Tsars will once again take their rightful place as rulers of Russia! The President is dead; long live the Tsar!”

Sweating and exhausted after giving what was the longest and most eloquent speech of his career, General Armand Domalewski delivered a swift salute, and ended with a quick departing phrase.

“May God bless the Divine Russian Empire.”
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Although the media waged an all out war against Armand and the ROP (it realized that if Armand won their free reign in the Putin era would prove short lived), playing endless reels of footage of the Lavragerian War, pumping out Putin’s old anti-Tsarist statements, and letting loose rumors that perhaps Putin hadn’t been killed by Baltic rebels, the results were practically predetermined. Opinion polls showed massive bleeding off from the ROP to the Alliance, as desperate Putinian democrats forsook economics and foreign policy in favor of democracy, but it wasn’t nearly enough to take down the ROP’s massive lead. The final nail in Brown’s Presidential coffin was the fact that the few remaining hardline Communists, viewing the economic differences between the two parties as minimal, rejoiced in the possibility the Wingert’s rule could bring about a return to the extreme style of law and order they preferred. Sienna, no friend of Putin, became so desperate as to invoke his name in plea to preserve Russian democracy, and even offered to abandon the more controversial parts of her economic and social program, but it was to no avail.

On election day the voters overwhelmingly made their voices heard in Armand’s, and thus Wingert’s, favor.

As the newspaper Pravda bitterly stated in the fashion section its last uncensored edition, “Democracy, freedom, and human rights are out---Monarchy, slavery, and oppression are in”.
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-Republican Lavrageria-

The treaty ending the Lavragerian War now placed the twenty thousand troops still deployed in that miniscule nation in quite a quandary. The treaty stated that no Estenlands troops could be allowed in the borders of the nation without triggering NATO’s immediate reaction, yet at the same time it mandated the presence of Russian peacekeepers. Now that Russia and the Estenlands were one, international law demanded they stationed troops in Lavrageria---yet threatened war if they did so. Without any major regional sponsors and a massive Estenlandian blockade that slowly threatened to destroy all the progress towards modernity Lavrageria had established, it seemed that all the small nation could expect was war, economic collapse, or both.

And so in this setting a tired, middle aged blonde woman with bags under her brown eyes and a scar across her cheek sat down opposite what remained of the Lavragerian leadership.

“Look,” said the strong but weary and stressed voice of Natalya Lublanka, the current Russian commander of peacekeeping troops in Lavrageria, “you all know what the situation is. The Tsar has a stranglehold on you. He has the full resources of the Russian and Ukrainian armies encircling you and choking off your economy, and twenty thousand, well entrenched, well equipped, and well trained soldiers occupying a string of strategically placed bases within your nation. Your leader has fled with your country’s resources and left you to die. You have one of two options: you can fight another devastating war, and lose. And you will lose. Our twenty thousand alone, while outnumbered, are trained and equipped enough to win when you have no foreign support. And we will fight. We may not like the Tsar, and we may have grown close to our Lavragerian allies, but we will always fight for our country. Or you can choose the second option: surrender. Look, either way Lavragerian democracy is not going to make it; let’s face it, it was a pipe dream to try and turn this swampy, nomadic hellhole into an Athenian democracy in the first place. So you’ve got to be realistic…If you surrender now , before the Tsar’s troops come in, you can spare your country endless destruction and make sure that my troops simply take over as the Tsar’s agents. We’ve worked and fought with you Lavs for years; I’m pretty damned sure you’ll get better treatment from us than Wingert.”
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-Tsarist Russia-

After news of the Tsar’s inevitable election came to his attention, Igorij Romanov realized which way the wind was blowing. There was no way his five thermonuclear weapons could intimidate the Russians now, with Wingert at the reigns, and thus the monocled Romanov began to make frantic preparations. As Russian troops marched onto the territory of Tsarist Russia, where they were greeted with cheers and flowers (the hapless Romanov had proved inept at economics and his various schemes had simply run the small nation into the ground, despite generous Estenlandian subsidies) Romanov released a statement to all news stations that would receive it. With the sounds of gunfire echoing around him, and appearing rather harried and disheveled in his dirty crimson WWI officer’s uniform and cracked monocle, the Tsar read a succinct statement.

“I, Igorij Romanov, relinquish not only my claim to the title of Tsar, but also my entire bloodline’s claim, and bestow it upon the true and right leaders of Russia, the Grozny line.”

With that bit of insurance to hopefully ameloriate any of the Tsar’s potentially deadly plans for Romanov taken care of, the once-Tsar of St. Petersburg departed on a private jet with a contingent of his loyalist troops in tow, heading for parts unknown and seeking asylum.

The extremely short lived (about 5 years) Kingdom of Tsarist Russia came to an end as the Estenlandian banner was hoisted over St. Petersburg, and Russia was whole once again.
__________________________________________________________
-Undisclosed location-

Racing to publish as much as possible before the inevitable Tsarist crackdown, Fox Newski suddenly switched from Igorij’s quick statement to a shot of leftist candidate Sienna Brown standing on a windswept runway in an undisclosed location.

“Ladies and gents, what you’ve seen today is the death of Russian democracy. The same bastards who terrorized Europe and Asia for centuries are back.” said the short haired young chocolate skinned candidate. She wore a long black trenchcoat that flapped in the wind in a manner eerily similar to Putin, and the a flat, almost Mafia don-like hat lay just above her perpetually bemused violet eyes.

She sighed deeply, and then continued, “I hate to do this, but in order to safeguard the fate of the rest of the world, we cannot accept the results of this election. Wingert may promise peace today, but the nature of the Holy League is that of a perpetual declaration of war on all free peoples. Therefore, I plead to the international community to take action now. The Holy League may have been an annoyance before, but now he represents a tremendous danger to the world. We have to fight them now, in Kiev, so we don’t have to fight them later, in Beijing, in London, in Tokyo, in every corner of the---sh*t! F*cking a$$ monkey---“

Gunfire erupted as Brown was seen racing towards her jet, and the camera shook as it revealed an emerging battle between Sienna’s supporters and the Holy Scarves.

Then the feed went dead.

His Imperial Majesty Emperor Royce I has sent a Diplomat to the Tsar to formally recognise his Government (or, in other words, Tag!)

The Igovian Soviet Commonwealth had seen a good deal of debate in its senates, frustrating some as others insisted on spending time talking about the Russias while a minor flood was being suffered in the northeast and a spree of disappearances plagued the south and went largely undiscussed.

There was greater conflict, though, over the Russian LDA, as many flatly refused to lend it any support, calling it a revisionist plot certain to leave tens of millions of people in a quagmire of consumption and minimal progress for as long as the party persisted, or worse yet a wet paper bag unlikely to be strong enough to contain extremist elements. Extremist elements? Said others. What do you call the blasted Tsarists? Those for action were frustrated by traditional disdain for so-called social-democratic parties, and felt that it would have been best to send in GSIC to fight the Tsarists on their own terms and clear the way for the LDA, because, ultimately, they might be bullied into giving up many of the old Russia's territorial gains and ambitions.

But no, the arguing went on and soon it was too late, and half the Commonwealth threw up its hands and let out a frustrated cry, shooting harsh glances at the other half for its dogmatic refusal to engage with the convenient enemy of their enemy.

Private citizens groups uniformly condemned the upheaval in Russia, with the exception of elements included in some statements that urged Russians to begin preparing for a renewal of the revolution. "The Tsar knows that his own people will be the death of him" said one community spokeswoman, "and he will as such use any means at his disposal to restrain them... but he walks with the siberian tiger, and he will be bitten! This time, comrades in Russia, you start with the certainty of ultimate victory, and this time the Bolshevists can not conceal themselves amongst you!"

Ah, if only she knew the real reason for the smiles amongst her assembled comrades.

Mumbai

As has been the case throughout Hindustan's rather short history as a nation, Hindustanis collectively wave the proverbial middle finger in Russia. Says one Hindustani, "All Russia ever gave anywhere else was trouble. If Russians can't themselves see the threat posed by Wingert and his lot, there isn't much we can bloody well do about it!"

Other Hindustanis call on the Russian people to revolt immediately, and advocate a new communist revolution in Russia and the Ukraine, much in line with what many Igovian groups are saying. However, most of those Hindustanis hail from the CPI and are therefore not taken very seriously, at least not yet.

The Baltic Republics, Kazakhstan, and Lavrageria are, of course, different cases entirely. Revolutionary movements there can expect the sympathy of many, if not most, Hindustanis as they are seen as nations seriously wronged by Russia. In the Lavragerians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians, many Parliamentarians see the only continental Europeans brave enough to stand up to Wingert, and Kazakhstan is conveniently close enough to be the site of other operations.

One particularly unhappy Parliamentarian, minus a leg lost in Afghanistan, expresses his disgust in the people of Russia: "It is shameful that, after hundreds of years warding off Tsarist and Stalinist terrorism, the peoples of Central Asia and the Baltic Republics are now sold back into that very same slavery by the coward Putin! This Parliamentarian cannot understand how Russians can be so spineless and apathetic as to let the first inklings of democracy be stolen away from them, right under their noses! One hundred and fifty million Russians being conquered by forty million Ukranians...how can they bear it?"

For a nation struggling to equip its soldiers with modern arms to hold out against the Bedgellens, rolling in money, for forty years, just to have Russians, with modern military equipment enough to conquer many places besides the Baltic republics, collapse nearly without a shot, is incomprehensible.
(A glorified tag)

Ulanger, Lavragerian Republic

Lieutenant-Colonel Dimitar Obradin had continued his work as unofficial marshal of the Republic's defences without pausing to worry about the changes in Russia. After nobody tried to stop him when he ordered unemployed workers to erect barricades and gather information towards the civil defence plans headed by deputies he'd appointed, the young officer thought that he might as well try something else. He'd gone so far as to take control of fuel and munitions dumps, and to take fuel and munitions from the stockpiles of arms that the Republic no longer had sufficient men to operate. He'd even dismounted guns from vehicles and set them up under cover or hidden them in warehouses, attics, basements, holes in the ground, everywhere. He'd shot one man with access to valuable information who was believed to be considering defection. Nobody seemed to care, even to notice, nor even to be aware that Obradin was operating or even that he existed. His draftees were planting explosives, rigging bridges, mining roads. He had drawn-up target solutions for visible Estenlandic positions and for internal Russian bases. Work gangs were now turning makeshift barricades to major earthworks with ditches, mounds, stone and concrete blockades, boobytraps, and machineguns.

In the Prime Ministerial building, the old man Kochan gazed back at Lublanka through small eyes that seemed to somehow express calm and quiet. Years earlier, Kochan had worked and watched indifferently to changing circumstances as Kiba Morgan's forces tried to tear-down the first Republican towns, and picked himself up after being beaten down during the raid on Ulanger. Now he was Interim Prime Minister and Morgan was still Kiba, was decorated by the Tsar, and was kicking back in the Presidential building down the road, eating something he shot from the roof and leaving people to wonder if he was on anyone's side but his own.

Kochan eventually shook his head very slowly. He knew that the Republic was in some ways enduring a worse state than the Russians seemed to believe, unless they were merely trying to spare him embarrassment, because Aidarov had not only departed with money, minds, and aircraft, but with such things as modern tool bits required for the production of specific high technology items, especially defence equipment, intending to establish new production facilities in the Balkans without the need to spend years developing the tools and the minds to design them, not to mention the capital. But it didn't matter, in the current context. He couldn't surrender Lavrageria, as he would eventually say in his sometimes annoyingly soft tone, because its people didn't want to surrender. And it was likely that suffering as was bound to come would not make many of them change their minds. It wasn't that he would drive them to resist, he, as a private citizen, was aloof, but now he was caretaker in a public office, and here was acting as but a conduit from people to people.

The old man didn't put it so plainly, of course. He admitted that, since being put to the post of Interim Prime Minister (that is, when Gukov left) he had been trying to educate himself, and that to do so he had to start with the roots of the plants a politician is to cultivate and then to examine all that branches from them. He had been reading western literature, he said (which, to a Lavragerian tribesman, also referenced Russian culture, in spite of the obvious geographical contradiction). He asked Natalya if she was familiar with Emile Zola, and confessed to be over half way through his major work, the twenty-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart. Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire, by which he hoped to understand people and the western political currents through which he was now supposed to captain a ship. Kochan said that the Lavragerian people were like the Montsou miners, having resolved only to free themselves and having lost so much. They were now offered less than they had before, and would perhaps continue in hopelessness when their bones were chilled and their stomachs empty, husbands shot and children sick. Why, even now there was a Russian in the rafters, scuttling about and prepared to bring the whole work down on their heads from inside! Yes, this literacy was more useful to the Glaktahn than the readings they used to get from bones and entrails, when it came to prophecy!

The double doors to what was actually a room rather too small for such ostentation burst suddenly open with a rattle and a bang as the handle of one struck the wood pannel of the walls surrounding Kochan, Lublanka, and helpers attending the meeting. With little further ceremony a young man of fairly small stature and clean presentation took a step into the room, leading with his right foot and facing the meeting table at a slight angle. He wore a dark green dress uniform of the Committee of People's Ground Forces -the Lavragerian army-, including a big belt outside his tunic and quite high on the waist, sporting a large leather ornament around the brass buckle.

Obradin unholstered his Lavragerian-stamped TT-33 pistol and aimed it towards the Russian's chest.

"Natalya Lublanka. The War and Security Executive of the Lavragerian Republic elects to terminate the lease on Republican territory to Russian use. Citing your government's termination of its democratic process and compromise by the forces of the enemy, which we, from the outset fifteen times your numerical inferiors, have resisted for much longer, this is done for the security of the Republic and in order to clear-up the legal and political ambiguity that your nation has created in reference to the post-invasion cease-fire arrangements.

"Further to this, the War and Security Executive has declared a stop on all deliveries of food and supplies of water and energy to Russian facilities on Republican soil. If we are in the cold then you are with us. Let us hope that we shall not need to wear your skins this Christmas."

The officer, whom, as one could tell from the unusual widening of his right eye, Kochan did not appear to be on familiar terms, reholstered his weapon, saluted the Interim Prime Minister, and stepped out, closing the doors rather more daintily than he had opened them. As they clicked shut, so too did pipes and cables running into Russian bases snap under the spades of the Lt.Colonel's drafted workers.

Versailles

A great collective sigh emanated from the Grand Chateau and Oeil-de-Boeuf: God Save Tsar Wingert! With the Kingdom of France recovering from a rather nasty rebellion it was of the greatest consolation to know that soon the vast and untapped Russian market would soon be at Versailles’ fingertips. The news was of the best sort. The French economy, taking baby steps since the revolt, now swung back into full gear with the knowledge of Wingert securing the profitable East allaying fears of domestic sluggishness. The Holy League, which but a few weeks earlier teetered on the brink of oblivion, seemed to have been resurrected to full capacity by divine intervention in a few score hours.

Churches around France prayed a constant vigil for Tsar Wingert, with commands from His Most Christian Majesty requiring a twenty four hour realm wide devotional at news the Estenlandian potentate was ill. Nevertheless, the gilded corridors of the fairy tale palace were abuzz with speculation about Wingert soon taking the Russian crown, and becoming the greatest Tsar since Peter the Great. Louis-Auguste and a very pregnant Queen Jillesepone of course would love to be present for that occasion, the greatest coronation since Louis XX ascended in France. The crafty Prime Minister, M. de Maurepas, took the opportunity of Tsarist success in Russia to issue a public statement.

“The glorious accession of Tsar Wingert to Russian Executivity, by the will of the Russian populace, is a testimony to the enduring and appealing call of the Holy League in its mission to restore the world to its proper and natural, divinely sanctioned, order. His Most Christian Majesty Louis Auguste wishes to congratulate His Imperial Majesty, with of course warm sentiments from Wingert’s daughter Queen Jillesepone, on a righteous success. Any marginal sect which opposes this act of Divine Providence, whether it be from Russian malcontents or sinister Lavragerian barbarians must needs be condemned in the strongest terms. Yet any opposition, founded in error and leftist belligerence, will pass away by the Hand of God, which no mortal may gainsay, and is incarnate in His crowned and humble lieutenants Ludovicus Augustus and Wingertus Lavragerianus. Let this time be a time of celebration. The Reclamation of both the French and Russian Monarchies has been to this point tumultuous and fraught with danger. With France secured and whole and with Russia now the same, let the Holy League enjoy its harvest claimed with bright steel in the radiance of the awesome and magnificent suns which have risen to illuminate Europe. Deus Vult!”

The Japanese government extends its warm congratulations to Tsar Wingert the Great and President Armand Domalewski for their stabilisation of Russia after the unfortunate passing away of Putin. Ambassador Tamura Kaoru (she was sent to sign the original NAP between Russia and Restorationist Japan in Moscow, so it's safe to say that she stayed on there) informs the ROP government that Japan is interested in further discussion concerning trade and regional issues.

Privately the new regime is seen with some concern by the Japanese administration due to certain question marks hanging over it, but it is decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

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The Palace of the Sultanate, Ankara, The Ottoman Empire
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The man sped down the corridor, his feet clip-clopping as he strode. It was almost a run, but he was struggling at maintaining his dignity...and his walk. He was obviously holding important information and not only was witholding such information a capital crime, it was also obviously vital to the future security and prosperity of the Empire.

Breathing loudly, arrived at a locked door and swore - loudly. It was in Russian, his mother tongue, but the tone and decibel level were enough to alert the pike-bearing guards at the end of the hallway that something was not right. The man shook his head. Guards were the same the world through, no matter which country or motherland.

It was then, with great reluctance, that he was forced to begin to argue. He did so half-heartedly; it was not in his greater interest to attract attention. He was here to relay communication, not to start a verbal fistfight in the palace of the Sultan. Nevertheless, the two helmeted guards were not interested in seeing him stand there and insulted and berated him in nearly four languages - including his home tongue of Russian.

Then, the man put a stop to the arguement by a simple motion: that of opening the gilded stone door. Overriding and ignoring the protests of the guards, the man hurried through the court, to the steps to the throne of the Sublime Sultan himself. Putting their shocked expressions out of his mind, he placed the sheaf of papers he had had with him in a manila folder under his arm on the throne. "The End is near! Wingert rules Russia!" was all he said, in a low undertone, at that, but everyone present knew the implications of that statement.

There were rumors of an Imperial utrage at the recent information, but there always were, and it was unlikely that any reached Ukraine or Russia.

The new regime is recognised by the PRC with Beijing keen to develop further trade relations with the now Tsarist Russia.

While their policies maybe at odds with China's, Beijing respects the soveriegnty of her neighbours.