Modern Russian history begins in 1917, when Russia's disastrous performance in the First Great War allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power. But not for long: in 1918 the White Armies succeeded to liberate Russia step by step from communist rule, and in 1919 the czar's fourteen-year-old son ascended the throne. He was nothing more but a puppet, however; real power remained tightly in the hands of the White generals. After his premature death in 1934 the throne remained vacant.
In an effort to mobilize popular support, the generals founded a party, the SNOR, with an ideology that was a mixture between ardent nationalism and conservative Russian Orthodoxy. The SNOR government ruled Russia, and after the Second Great War several Eastern European countries, with an iron fist for 72 years, spending vast sums on militarisation, enforced modernisation, propaganda and experiments in mass-scale reconditioning. Eventually, the empire outspent its economic base and collapsed of its own rigid ideology. Since then, numerous governments came to power and were overthrown. Several factions in the country favour the return of the Czar, though the heir to the Imperial throne has yet to entertain the suggestion. Most of the constituent regions declared their own independence after the fall of the SNOR, and currently they form a rather loose federation of 29 semi-independent states: