Full Name: The Tsardom of Amuria
Short Name: Amuria
Capital: Irkutsk
Irkutsk (1,520,340)
Population: 87,542,220
National Language: Russian
National Religion: Russian Orthodox
Government: Constitutional Monarchy
Head of State: Tsarina Maria
Head of Government: Count Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky, Chairsaur of the Council of Ministers
Legislation: State Duma
National Anthem: Bozhe, Tsarya khrani! (God Save the Tsar!)
Land Size: 3,992,920 sq mi
<>National Animal(s): Double-Headed Dragon, Tarbosaurus
History: The region of Siberia has been, for the longest time, a vast land of semi-tropical taiga, vast open steppes, and rugged, often volcanic, mountains populated by nomadic Mongol, Turkic, and Iranian tribes. In the 17th century, the expanding Russian nation clashed with the Khanate of Sibir, a local Turkic nation which dominated western Siberia as it expanded eastward. Eventually, the Khanate was crushed and the Russians continued expanding eastward until they were stopped by the edge of the vast Pacific ocean; even then, that didn't truly stop their lust for land as they eventually established settlements in Alaska and various islands that dotted the stormy Arctic Ocean.

Following the overthrow of the Tsar in the 1917 October Revolution, the nobles, conservatives, and monarchists banded together to form the White Army to resist the Bolsheviks and reinstate the monarchical government which had ruled the nation for nearly three hundred years. A bloody civil war ensued which was eventually fought to a standstill, despite the Reds being better organized and the Whites having the support of several foreign armies, by 1920; the two factions subsequently split the Russian nation into two: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (which included the Central Asian territories that had been controlled by the former Empire) in the west and Amuria (named after the Amur River) in the east. At first, the surviving Whites had no clear idea on what their nation would be, would it be a republic, a kingdom, a dictatorship of some sort? However, by New Years Day 1921, they finally reached an agreement: they would found a Tsardom with Cyril Vladimirovich, grandson of the former Tsar Alexander II; because he had become de facto head of the Imperial family following the deaths of Tsar Nicholas and his brother Michael in the Revolution, he would be the perfect choice. And so, on August 22, 1921, Cyril was crowned Tsar Cyril I, first Tsar of Amuria in a grand ceremony in the Epiphany Cathedral, after the former Grand Duke and his family traveled from where they had stayed in western Europe after fleeing Russia, traveling by boat for several weeks through the Arctic, skirting the northern shores of the Soviet West, before they arrived in the town of Dudinka on June 15 and made a long trip through the vast forests of Siberia first by Hadro-drawn wagon and then by train till they arrived in Irkutsk by late July.

After his coronation, Cyril and his family stayed in the Governor's Mansion while architects were brought in from France, Germany, and Britain to build the official Imperial palace, the Siberian equivalent to the great palaces at St. Petersburg, construction of which took six years. In the meantime, the government and its institutions had to fully established, a constitution ratified, local governance and authority erected, and a military formed out of nearly scratch. By 1924, the government itself took shape, modeling itself on the government of the Empire prior to the Revolution only the Tsar had less powers than his Imperial equivalent (but not to the point that he was a mere figurehead) with the same said for local governance in the Royal Provinces. The military was a little trickier, as it was originally a ragtag conglomeration of local militias, veteran White soldiers who had fought in the Civil War (particular members of the defunct Volunteer Army of South Russia), and foreign units (primarily American, British, German, and Japanese troops) who remained behind after their armies left in the aftermath of the Civil War. The veteran units formed the core of a number of divisions that were formed in the Army, the militias were either disbanded or were absorbed into the regular army units, and the foreign volunteers granted Amurian citizenship and were subsequently made to swear allegiance to the Tsar, after which they either formed separate Foreign Volunteer Battalions or they too were merged with the regular Army divisions and regiments. The Royal Amurian Air Service (later to become the Royal Amurian Air Force in 1936) was quickly formed out of surviving aircraft utilized by the White Armies during the Civil War with more aircraft purchased from the French and British over the course of the decade (in addition to numerous surplus German aircraft left over from the Great War). The Navy was the quickest to found as the Whites already had the ships of the former Imperial Navy's Arctic and Pacific Fleets (which they had seized from the Bolsheviks in the Civil War) which they had anchored in the harbors of Vladivostok, Magadan, and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The truly difficult part in forming the military was getting the personnel needed to fill out the Naval ships and the aircraft in addition to filling out the greatly-expanded ground forces and establishing the bureaucracy, logistics, and organization needed to clothe them, feed them, pay them, and maintain their discipline. The first problem was easily solved by conscripting the local population as well as forcibly drafting immigrants arriving in Amuria (at first mostly Russian nobility and Cossacks moving to the Tsardom and then later, Chinese and Koreans fleeing the civil war and, in the late 1930's, the brutality of the Japanese invasion) and even Red Army prisoners of war left over from the civil war (provided they swear complete allegiance to the Tsar and totally reject the tenets of the Bolshevik movement). The latter, however, took time and, for the next decade, the Amurian military became infamous for its disciplinary problems and for officers being left to their own initiatives when it came to dealing with these issues, often resorting to draconian punishments that harked back to the brutal old days of the 18th and 19th centuries with flogging and other forms of brutal beatdowns on personnel accused of disciplinary infractions.

As the third decade of the 20th century began, the disciplinary issues lessened as the Amurian military structure gradually found its footing with commanders who had experience in the Great War and Civil War, either officers in the former White Army (the most notable being Admiral Kolchak, commander of the Amurian Pacific Fleet, and Generals Alexander Kutepov and Anton Denikin) or former members of the Allied intervention forces that participated in the Civil War and volunteered to remain behind with the forces that would become the Amurian Army. The old World War I-era equipment they were still using began being replaced with newer equipment purchased from the Americans, British, and French in a military-wide upgrade effort that lasted from 1931 to 1934. The early 1930's was also a time of economic and social reform as the Royal government sought to modernize the nation as its major industries were still logging and farming and so, the Ministry of Economics began encouraging European businesses to set up shop with subsidies and lowered taxes for their operations in addition to encouraging local business owners and landowners to build factories. This worked for the most part, as factories opened up all across the country, particularly in the major cities and industrial towns were quickly built in the more sparsely-populated north by the end of the decade; so, by 1940, heavy industry and mining had become the dominant industries in the Amurian economy. The government also encouraged farms to be established with the aid of farming subsidies in order to ensure Amuria had a stable and ready supply of food to feed the nation with farms concentrated in the region around Lake Baikal, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and Primorsky.

The death of Tsar Cyril, and the subsequent coronation of his son Prince Vladimir Kirilovich as Tsar Vladimir, in 1938 marked a new age for the Tsardom, one of great peril and trouble in addition to continued prosperity and development. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the Tsar and the Chairsaur, Count Ivan Anatolyovich Suvorov, elected to remain neutral as they deemed it 'Europe's Problem'. However, in 1941, they watched Hitler's invasion of the USSR with great interest; especially in the wake of a secret telegram that was submitted both to Count Suvorov and His Majesty from the office of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, the previous December that requested that the Tsardom join the Axis in smashing the Bolshevik menace once and for all. At first, they thought the Germans were mad in taking on the Soviets, as they themselves barely survived their civil war against the Reds but the initial results of the German offensive surprised them especially since Amurian spies in the Red Army reported on the chaos wrought by the advancing German army. However, the halting of the Germans outside Moscow greatly disappointed the Amurian High Command but it wasn't until the disaster at Stalingrad before they were truly dissuaded from aiding the Nazi regime. Over the course of 1943 and 1944, the Americans tried repeatedly to persuade the Amuria to assault Japanese forces in Manchuria and force them to relieve troops fighting the Chinese and the Western Allies elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific but the Amurian government have repeatedly refused. This was much to the ire of the British, whose secret service spies in Siberia had indicated on the German telegrams to the Amurians back in 1940 and who thus distrusted the Royal Amurian government. Of course, at first, the Tsardom had no interest in fighting the Japanese as their armies had already battled them back in 1939 in a series of border skirmishes that culminated in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, where the Amurian forces commanded by Generals Kutepov and Denikin soundly defeated the attacking Japanese army attempting to cross the Khalkha River near the Mongolian village of Nomonhan. The clash was notable for a number of reasons; first, it was the first major engagement of the fully-formed Amurian Army; second, it was the last time Denikin commanded forces in battle before he retired the next year; third, it deterred the Imperial Japanese from considering the Army's plan of acquiring oil via striking at the Siberian oilfields in the north, setting the stage for their attacks on the Western colonies in Southeast Asia and the attack on Pearl Harbor; and fourth, the engagement proved the fighting capability of the Amurian military, which until then was thought of but a ragtag bunch of Siberian Native and Cossack militias. Historians consider on the possibility that Khalkhin Gol convinced Hitler of the capabilities of the Royal Amurian Army much as the Winter War convinced him of the Red Army's weaknesses, leading to the Ribbentrop telegrams.

Finally, in the early Spring of 1945, after the Allies invited Chairsaur of the Council of Ministers Alexander Fyodorovitch Trepov to the Yalta Conference (albeit under heavy Soviet guard and surveillance), the Tsardom reluctantly agreed to join the Allies and so, on March 15, the Amurian government declared war on the Empire of Japan. Immediately, the Amurian Second and Third Army Groups, who had been gathering their troops along the Manchurian Border for the past two weeks, launched their offensive across the border which caught the Japanese defenders off guard since their military intelligence had underestimated the sheer size of the preparations made by the Amurians. Striking in a pincer move with the Second Army Group striking across the Argun River and moving along the highway into Manzhouli in the northwest while the Third Army Group struck from the east, storming westward from their original position south of Khanka Lake. In addition, the Sixth and Eighth Armies crossed the Amur River in the area east of Blagoveshchensk, comprising the third element of the pincer move, with the Japanese Kwantung Army and the Imperial Manchuko Army caught in-between and utterly smashed as a result. Despite having seen little action over the course of the previous decade, the Royal Amurian Army was well-trained, well-equipped (its weapons and vehicles, if not domestically manufactured, were of American, British, Czech, and even German origin), and possessed high morale; their commanders had saw how their Soviet neighbors fought the Germans as well as how the Western Allies battled the Japanese in the Pacific and so had devised strategies and tactics mimicking those two schools of thought. As a result of this, the Kwantung Army (which by this time, consisted mostly of lightly-armed recruits) and the poorly-equipped and motivated Manchukoan Army were soundly defeated over the course of merely two weeks with most of Manchuria in Amurian hands by that point. In addition, amphibious landings had been conducted in Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands which saw bloody fighting between Amurian Naval Infantry and Airborne troops and Japanese forces who stubbornly defended the islands till their very deaths which resulted in a high cost for the Amurian invaders as they slowly took control of the islands, with the Kurils being deemed fully secure by July 8 and the Sakhalin garrison continuing to fight on against the Amurians. By late April, the Amurians crossed the Yalu River and pushed on south into the Korean Peninsula though they had to stop at the 38th Parallel due agreements made at the Yalta Conference with an American force landing at Inchon on May 4, resulting in Korea being divided between the Amurian north and the American south. As the Amurians pressed south after crushing the Manchurian defenders and arresting the Manchuko Emperor, their forces started getting bogged down as they headed south towards Peking due to their supply lines getting overstretched, allowing the Japanese to dig in and make the Amurian armies pay dearly for every speck of ground they seized until, by the Summer, a stalemate had broken out with neither side in any position to immediately launch further attacks. Nevertheless, the Amurian offensive in Manchuria was a prime motivation for the Japanese's ultimate decision to finally surrender to the Allies, fearing a mass Amurian invasion of Hokkaido in conjunction with the Western Allies' own plans of invasions on the Japanese Home Islands.

After the official end to the war, the Amurian troops in China returned back to Amuria; all in all, the Royal Amurian Army had suffered 41,561 casualties during the Tsardom's brief time in the war, an estimated 12,350 of those were confirmed fatalities which was an overall light cost for a nation of Amuria's size, especially in comparison to the wartime losses suffered by its western neighbor. Korea was divided between a monarchist north, ruled by Emperor Yeong (son of the former Joseon Emperor Gojong) which is backed by Amuria, and a democratic south, backed by the United States. There have been tensions between the two Koreas, particularly regarding one another's governmental systems though it never has really exploded into actual fighting. In addition, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands were given to Amuria which proceeded with establishing authority over its new territorial possessions during the first few years following the Second World War. Following the end to the war, the Amurian military began another period of military reorganization as it streamlined its organization and implemented universal standardization of uniforms and equipment to prevent the logistical nightmare the army endured during its war with Japan as it had to supply a multitude of ammunition types to different units who used weapons from a diverse array of origins.

The Cold War that ensued between America and the Soviet Union resulted in what would be referred to as a golden age for Amuria but also a time of great fear; as it was a direct neighbor to the USSR, it was a very real possibility that Amuria would be among the first targets by the Soviets. After it became known West Russia possessed a nuclear arsenal, there was no doubt among the Amurian government that, if the Cold War turned hot, the Soviets would immediately launch nuclear strikes on Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Magadan, Peteropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Yakutsk, Anadyr, Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, and other major cities within Amuria and so, over the next few decades, the peoples of Amuria were instructed on how to try to survive a nuclear strike or how to avoid getting obliterated in such an event by evacuating to the hills and forests upon receiving word of impeding nuclear war. Amuria became a nuclear state in the late 1950's with help from the US and Britain, with its first nuclear test conducted at a test site east of the Olenyok River in the sparsely-populated northern part of the Sakha Viceroyalty on September 18, 1958. Since then, the Tsardom had continued to manufacture nukes and still does in order to protect its people and interests, to the point where it possesses the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Thankfully, the fear never came true, though there were occasional border skirmishes between the USSR and China from 1948 to 1989 which raised fears among the military command of the possibility of war breaking out with either of the two nations which, of course, never came of fruition. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991 brought a great relief among many in Amuria, realizing they never again have to worry about the communists coming across the border and executing those who supported the notions of monarchy again and saw a new era for the Tsardom as the country enjoyed great technological and economic progress as an Amurian form of the internet was founded in 1993 which allowed for instant communication between anyone living anywhere in Amuria, even in the remotest of logging or Siberian native villages. While West Russia lingered economically during the decade, Amuria became a renown technological, economic, and even military power as Amurian corporations establish ties with American and European companies and Amurian troops help keep the peace (reluctantly on the part of the High Command) in the Balkans, Haiti, and Somalia; Several dozen Amurians were among the Malaysian and Pakistani relief force that helped American Rangers and Delta Force operatives stranded in Mogadishu during Operation Gothic Serpent, who subsequently suffered seven casualties during the fight (including two KIA).

In contrast to its western counterpart, Amuria has enjoyed relative stability as the government isn't as corrupt as that of the Federation though there has been protestations concerning the monarchical government and the continued existence of the nobility. In addition, Amuria's relationship with NATO, primarily the USA, has become increasingly strained over the past decade for various reasons: disagreements on how to deal with the Middle East, Amuria criticizing the foreign relations policies of American President Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and the West increasingly harsh critique of the Tsardom's conservative social laws and policy in addition to the very nature of the government and social structure. Amuria's military has been ramping up recruiting, building up and organizing its forces, and conducting numerous war games while its navy and air force perform regular patrols over the Arctic Ocean, Bering Strait, and the area of the Northern Pacific stretching from the Sayo Strait in-between Hokkaido and Sakhalin all the way to the Gulf of Alaska which has raised concerns in Japan, the US, Canada, and Russia and many speculators debate as to what is going through the minds of the current Tsarina, the Chairsaur, and the military high command. Of course, domestically, things are relatively calm with the only notable political infighting over the past thirty years being the feud between the relatives of reigning monarch Maria Vladimirovna and Nichalos Romanov regarding who would succeed Vladimir as the next Tsar; eventually, the matter was settled in 2013 when the Patriarch of Moscow, Kiril I, recognized Maria as the true successor to the Romanov line. Maria, who has reigned as unofficial monarch with the Chairsaur officially running the nation since she ascended to the throne in 1992, is now recognized as Tsarina of Amuria and many eagerly look forward to seeing what bright future the nation may march towards under her reign.