Savelrnya
Federal Republic of Savelrnya | |
|---|---|
 Flag | |
| Motto: For your brothers, for your sisters, for your motherland | |
| Capital | Rukabozhdol |
| Ethnic groups (2017) |
|
| Demonym(s) | Savelrnyy, Savelrnyan |
| Government | Federated Semi-presidential Republic |
• President | Anatoly Suvorov |
• Chancellor | Dimitry Tsybukov |
| Legislature | The Sborka |
| Establishment | |
• Grand Duchy of Savelrnya | 1783 |
• SFR Savelrnya | 1941 |
• Federation of Savelrnya | 1997 |
| Area | |
• Total | 197,839 km2 (76,386 sq mi) |
| Population | |
• Estimate | 3,131,951 |
• Density | 15.83/km2 (41.0/sq mi) |
| GDP (PPP) | 2017 estimate |
• Total | 6.48 trillion odochek (£54.9 billion) |
• Per capita | 2,068,997 odochek (£17,537) |
| Currency | Savelrnyy odochek |
Savelrnya, officially, the Federation of Savelrnya, is a country in northern Hesperida situated in the Norkazha river basin and Sheyatigrask peninsula. Its capital is Rukabozhdol, a port city on the Northern Ocean. Savelrnya was a socialist federation (SFR Savelrnya) consisting of three semiautonomous republics, until its liberalization in 1997 following a coup d’etat by the statesman Yuri Nikoleyvich Tikhonov. The nation spans roughly 198,000 sq. kilometers, is home to 3.13 million Savelrnyy, and generates a meager £54.9 billion in GDP, equivalent to 6.48 trillion odochek, the national currency. Despite its harsh climate and lack of infrastructure, Savelrnya has many natural resources, including rare earth minerals, oil and natural gas deposits, and vast forests. Most Savelrnyy belong to one of two ethnic groups, the Savelrnyaks and Norkazhken, though the nation also hosts a sizable Taragai minority. As a semi-presidential federated republic, the nation is led by President Anatoly Rozanovich Suvorov. Its unicameral legislature, The Sborka, is helmed by Chancellor Dimitry Fydorovich Tsybukov of the National Liberal Party (NLP).
History[edit | edit source]
Descendants of the modern Norkazken peoples have inhabited northern Hesperida for at least 2500 years, living primarily as nomadic horse and reindeer herders. From the 11th to 14th centuries, the Moznikum Khanate, an ethnic Norkazhken pastoralist nation, quarreled frequently with the Taragai Khanate, losing significant territory in the 1320s. In 1740, a host of military adventurers from eastern Liberalia led by Taras Pysarenko landed on the Sheyatigrask and founded a series of trading posts, exporting furs and horses back to their homeland. Eventually, they came into conflict with belligerent native groups and engaged in a campaign of pacification over the next two decades, culminating in the surrender of Kalgale (now Kalganosk) in 1783. The same year, Vsevolod Kuzmin took the regnal name Vsevolod I, assuming domain over the newly created Grand Duchy of Savelrnya from his seat in the newly founded Rukabozhdol.
For a century, the Kuzminid dynasty maintained a hands off approach towards governance, periodically extracting tributes in-kind from natives and newly formed settler towns and outposts along the northern shore. Over time, settlers and missionaries ventured deeper south into the taiga, trading and, in the case of the former, intermarrying with the local population. Some of these remote settlements attracted political and religious refugees, bolstering their populations throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but repeated brutal winters, recurrent famines, and rampant disease outbreaks prevented meaningful population boom across the Grand Duchy.
Without a year-round warm water port, Savelrnya’s economy was initially seasonally constrained. Ships could only depart from the port at Rukabozhdol from April to October and southbound merchant caravans faced a perilous journey aboard keelless watercraft through mostly uncharted waterways. Between 1879 and 1887, the Kuzminid Knyaz Nikolai II utilized significant public debt to fund the construction of a rail line through the nation, directly connecting Savelrnya to the broader Hesperidan economy. In order to offset the cost of this project, once insular and isolated communities in the nation’s arid south faced steep additional taxes and seizure of pastureland. Emboldened by the newfound economic connections, a number of once sleepy outposts and hamlets rapidly industrialized, often refining steel and other ores mined from the rolling Savelrnyy hills. As the nation’s wealth grew, Rukabozhdol and other cities on the Sheyatigrask developed an opulent high society; the household of the Knyaz was all too willing to invest heavily in public infrastructure as a show of this wealth, building palatial libraries, universities, and the Basilica of Saint Yaroslav in 1896. Many of these structures remain intact today.
In 1898, the Kuzminid dynasty imploded upon the accidental-poisoning death of Knyaz Nikolai III during a failed necromancy ritual (Nikolai became obsessed with the occult after the loss of his son and brother). Nikolai was succeeded by his great-nephew Boris, who was only five years old at the time of his succession. The epoch that followed came to be known as the Regency-period, as Igor Lukashev, Nikolai’s father-in-law, ruled the nation by default from 1898 until 1912. Even after Boris came of age, Igor orchestrated a number of internal political crises within the court to keep himself in power long past the appropriate tenure of his regency. When Igor ultimately died, he left his grandson with a court turned against him, virtually empty coffers, and minimal legitimacy. Boris spent his reign struggling to keep hold of the nation, leading to further crackdowns on local autonomy in the south and attempts to double down on major infrastructure projects in the capital region.
In 1919, a host of irate farmers around Kalgale led by Timur Ildarovich Yusupov staged an armed uprising, demanding assurances by the Knyaz of protections against unfair seizure of property and unreasonable taxes. The rebellion, brutally suppressed by the Knyaz’s soldiers over the next 18 months, came to be known as Nebol'shoy obval (the “little collapse”), and culminated in summary executions and unprecedented seizure of traditionally independent lands. For their participation in the uprising, thousands of Norkazken farmers and pastoralists were forced into the nation’s deep and inhospitable south, or exiled from the country altogether, while loyalist soldiers were granted land and control over extractive enterprises in and around Velichinsk. For the time being, total political crisis was averted, but the nation’s population was left fragmented and hostile towards the affluence and ostentatious lifestyles of the elite in Rukabozhdol.
During the Taragaian civil war, Lukashevid Knyaz Konstantin I backed the Khanate in order to maintain commerce and curb the spread of socialist ideology across the region, leading to the death of thousands of conscripts, mostly impoverished workers from the mines and factories of the Savelrnyy southern regions. Although the brief alliance was intended simply to stop the spread of communism in Central Hesperida, it had the opposite effect. Thousands of Savelrnyy, disillusioned by oppressive treatment, taxation, and conscription, increasingly viewed dismantling the monarchy favorably, and this era of discontentment attracted socialist instigators from around the region.
In 1939, a series of strikes crippled the Savelrnyy industrial base. Soldiers sent from Rukabozhdol to end the strikes defected in droves, while loyalists were easily routed or, hopelessly outnumbered, disbanded in order to avoid bloodshed. A mob of nearly 50,000, led by former colonel Andrei Galitzine, attorney-turned-public-intellectual Pyotr Nechaev, and firebrand Yefim Zyryanov marched on Rukabozhdol, laying siege to the city on March 15, 1940. Konstantin and the royal family fled the city by boat, and escaped to Ostrogvod, which became the base-of-operations for loyalist forces. The Savelrnyy civil war raged on for another year and half, but Konstantin, unable to rally international support, was ultimately forced to abdicate the throne and surrender Ostrogvod (which was then renamed to Zyrynovgorod) in 1941. He was sent into exile, but was later assassinated when Savelrnyy intelligence services caught wind of a credible plot to attempt to retake the nation in 1947.
In 1941, SFR Savelrnya was formed as a federation of three constituent socialist republics led by a unicameral legislative body, The Sborka. Until 1988, only members of the NPN, the communist party of Savelrnya, were allowed to hold office. In reality, most power in the nation was held by the General Secretary of the NPN, who governed with dictatorial powers. Pyotr Nechaev was the first officeholder, but he died under mysterious circumstances in 1949.
Throughout the 1950s, the nation underwent a painful process of collectivization, though the decade did witness the completion of massive public works projects and increased economic output. Norkazhken pastoralists, traditionally the most ardent opponents of the former Lukashevid regime, often mounted significant resistance to the new communist authority, preferring to maintain their customarily decentralized, kinship-based communities. Economic mismanagement led food shortages across the nation, necessitating crackdowns on political dissidence to prevent open rebellion in certain regions.
In support of bilateral treaties with other socialist and communist nations, the NPN contributed troops to the Allies during the great war, an unpopular move given extant resource shortages across the nation. In 1965, Artyom Strygin, a bureaucrat within the Ministries of Agriculture and Natural Resources, was named General Secretary of the NPN by the then-controlling political faction, but he went rogue, installing his own loyalists in critical ministry roles and consolidating power around his own cult-of-personality. He withdrew Savelrnya from the war in 1966, noting little practical upside to committing the country’s small armed forces to an increasingly-Caxcana oriented land war.
By all accounts, Strygin was a legitimately popular and (initially) somewhat effective leader, who worked to restore order to the country and alleviate the ongoing resource shortages. Unfortunately, he maintained this image of a popular, effective leader through massive propaganda campaigns, election rigging and political assassination to keep loyalists in power, and the deployment of a robust surveillance state. By the 1980s, Strygin’s political apparatus began to crumble, and he was forced to roll back the most egregious civil rights suspensions.
Between 1988 and 1997, the nation began a process of liberalization, accelerated greatly by Strygin’s death in 1995. Realizing that their authority was eroding out from under them, members of the NPN attempted to autocoup their own regime in order to oust members of the newly legalized National Liberal Party from The Sborka, but NLP statesman Yuri Tikhonov used extensive connections within the Savelrnyy military to stage his own counter-coup and install himself as the first president of Svalernya free from NPN influence.
Over the past 30 years, the country has continued to liberalize. Most national industries have been broken up and handed over to the private sector, though this process has been rife with regulatory capture and corruption. Tikhonov explicitly sought to use the privatization process as a means of keeping de facto power in the hands of his own political allies, but Tikhonov’s own fall from power in 2006 has diffused ownership of major industries to some extent. Since the Tikhonov coup, the National Liberal Party has maintained at the helm of the majority coalition in The Sborka, but has at times been forced to make major legislative concessions to other liberal parties in order to maintain a majority. Since his election in 2006, Anatoly Suvorov has served as the president of Savelrnya. His administration has been characterized by an earnest attempt to open the nation to further international trade and resource exploitation, but also democratic backsliding, election-rigging, corruption, influence-peddling, and cronyism.
Etymology[edit | edit source]
Savelrnya is a corruption of the words “severnyye” and “narody,” meaning “people of the north.” The origin of this phrase is sometimes misattributed as an exonym, given the extreme northern location of Savelrnya. However, the name is actually an endonym. The Pysarenkid Host, maritime adventurers who navigated the open ocean, closely associated themselves with the north star and used the symbol as an element of their own heraldry. Thus, “Savelrnya” is actually derived from the moniker, “people of the north star.”
Savelrnya, a difficult word to pronounce and phonetically spell for English speakers, has developed a number of generally accepted spellings, including the official Savelrnya, but also Savelernia, Savl’rnya, and Savelrnja. The official demonymic form for Savelrnya is Savelrnyy.
Geography[edit | edit source]
Savelrnya lies between latitudes 46° and 59° North and longitudes 32° and 39° East. The nation is located in central-Hesperida, occupying roughly 197,839 square kilometers or 122,927 square miles and bordering the Northern Ocean to the north.
Savelryna features a varied geography, following the Norkazha river from its origin out of Lake Kolskoe north to its outflow in the Northern Ocean. Nearly the entire nation lies within the Norkazha watershed. Savelryna’s north and eastern regions tend to be more humid and densely forested, while rolling hills covered in deciduous trees gradually give way to badlands and prairie in the more arid south. Accordingly, the Savelryy population tends to be concentrated in the north and east (particularly around Rukabozhdol and Ostrogvod), where construction materials were historically more abundant and travel was made easier by the large number of navigable rivers and streams.
Wildlife[edit | edit source]
The most biodiverse regions of Savelrnya are found in less developed regions of the Savelrnyy taiga in Yaroslavlesok. More than a century of deforestation, pollution, and heavy industry has severely damaged the nation’s biosphere, leading to the local extinction of many species. Common species of mammal include wolves, foxes, reindeer, lynx, snow leopards, mountain sheep, moose, and wild horses. The Savelrnyy tiger (Tigris gelu), the nation’s national animal, is critically endangered.
President Anatoly Suvorov made “conservation” one of the core pillars of his political mission in 2014, but conservation efforts have been lethargic in reality. Savelrnya has three nature reserves, all of which are located in Yaroslavlesok and were established during Gosudarstvo President Sasha Voznesensky’s term from 2008 to 2014.
Climate[edit | edit source]
The 19th century essayist and cultural historian Lyman Beecher provided the following pithy description of the climate of Savelyrna during a brief stint managing the books of a Sanctarian shipping company’s Rukabozhdol office. “The Savelern [sic] weather is nothing if not bleak. In the seasonable months, a melancholic gloom pervades that might afford one chance for quiet rumination; in the winter months, the biting frost numbs even the mind.”
If Beecher had ventured further south, he would have encountered far less predictability in the Savelrnyy climate, but his allusions to persistent overcast skies and biting cold winters have come to define non-Savelrnyy perception of the country.
The Savelrnyy climate ranges from a warm-summer humid continental climate in the north to a cold semi-arid climate in the dry south. Precipitation is relatively rare across the country, falling most frequently in the north during the spring and summer months. Summer temperatures often average around 18°C or 65°F, and often rise much higher in certain regions of the south. Winters are extremely brutal, with daytime mean temperatures consistently near or below freezing (0°C or 32°F), and occasionally diving to -28°C or -20°F or lower. Due to the presence of permafrost, construction is extremely expensive in many parts of the country, leaving vast swaths of the nation called Zona tishiny (“quiet zones”) relatively undeveloped.
Politics[edit | edit source]
Savelrnya is a federation of three constituent republics, Sheyatigrovo, Yaroslavlesok, and Rodnorkazkha, which all have their legislatures and heads of state.
Based on the 1997 Savelrnyy Constitution, the nation is a semi-presidential federated republic, with a directly elected head of state (the President of Savelrnya) and a head of government (the Chancellor) to lead the legislative body called The Sborka. In reality, the Chancellor holds little real power, and can be removed at any time by the president. The president also possesses the unassailable authority to veto legislation. Consequently, the Sborka often serves more as a rubber-stamp for the president's initiatives, rather than an independent legislative body. Anatoly Suvorov has been in power as president since 2006, and is the second official officeholder, after Yuri Tikhonov (1997-2006). The current Chancellor of Savelrnya is Dimitry Tsybukov. The Sborka has 133 seats, a majority of which are occupied by the National Liberal Party (NLP) and its ally, the United Federation (OF).
International watchdogs have raised serious concerns over the Suvorov administration’s conduct, citing allegations of ballot-rigging and voter intimidation during election cycles. Although elections are held every six years, as promulgated by the Savelrnyy Constitution, the presidency is not term limited.
Savelrnya has been accused of a litany of abuses of authority, and heavily restricts freedoms of the press, assembly, speech, and religious worship, particularly for religious minorities. Journalists, foreigners, and opposition leaders are occasionally detained and harassed by Savelrnyy authorities, but this practice has fallen out of favor over the past decade due to increased international scrutiny on the nation.
Economy[edit | edit source]
Natural gas and oil lead the Savelrnyy economy, though total GDP remains meager, around 55 billion Sanctarian pounds sterling. Savelrnya exports primarily by sea, overwhelmingly out of the Port of Rukabozhdol, but also via overland oil pipelines, such as the Vrata Gesperidy II, which opened in 2018. SVLBenzin is the largest domestic gas company, but much of Savelrnya’s crude oil extraction is conducted by international conglomerates operating under Savelrnyy subsidiaries. Savelrnya also has robust mining and agriculture sectors, each accounting for about 15% of the GDP. Most viable pastureland is in southern Yaroslavlesok and eastern Rodnorkazhka, while mining occurs across the nation.
Savelrnya has long struggled with significant debt and inflation. The Savelrnyy odochek has an exchange rate of around 16000:1 Sanctarian pound. Credit rating agencies have long considered Savelrnyy government bonds speculative-grade, with some risk of default.
Demographics[edit | edit source]
Savelryna has an estimated population of 3,132,000 and birth rates around the replacement rate (2.1-2.2). Much of the Savelrnyy population is concentrated in the Rukabozhdol capital metropolitan area, which includes Ostrogvod and has a population of around 1.8 million. Outside of the capital region, most of the nation is rural, and the population is spread out among small cities, towns, and hamlets.
There are two primary ethnic groups in Savelrnya, the Savelrnyaks, descendents of Liberalian settlers who came to Savelrnya in the 18th century, and Norkazhken, the native peoples of southern Rodorkazhka, who have likely resided in the region for more than two thousand years. Rodnorkazhka is legally defined as the Norkazhken homeland and ethnic Norkazhken are granted perpetual right to return, even if they do not possess Savelrnyy citizenship. The other two constituent republics are majority Savelrnyak, but most major Savelrnyy cities are fairly cosmopolitan, home to Savelrnyaks, Norkazhken, and a host of smaller ethnic minority groups.
Religion[edit | edit source]
Due to the promotion of state atheism during the SFR Savelrnya, around 63% of the nation is atheist or agnostic. The overwhelming majority of non-atheists are Christian, specifically, Orthodox, though some communities in Rodnorkazhka retained their pre-Christian faith. Savelrnyy are notoriously superstitious people, even the agnostics, and many mundane aspects of life are heavily ritualized, particularly in more traditional communities. Years of underground and informal worship during the communist years has produced a number of syncretic belief systems combining Orthodox Christianity, Norkazhken animism, and new-age occultism. A 2001 study suggested that upwards of 30% of the nation believes in demonic possession and vampirism.