Red (in tooth and claw)
"My young friends and comrades,
Today is the twelfth anniversary of 'Bloody Sunday', which is rightly regarded as the beginning of the Russian revolution.
Thousands of workers—not Social-Democrats, but loyal God-fearing subjects—led by the priest Gapon, streamed from all parts of the capital to its centre, to the square in front of the Winter Palace, to submit a petition to the tsar. The workers carried icons. In a letter to the tsar, their then leader, Gapon, had guaranteed his personal safety and asked him to appear before the people.
Troops were called out. Uhlans and Cossacks attacked the crowd with drawn swords. They fired on the unarmed workers, who on their bended knees implored the Cossacks to allow them to go to the tsar. Over one thousand were killed and over two thousand wounded on that day, according to police reports. ...
Such is the general picture of January 22, 1905— 'Bloody Sunday'."
- Lecture on the 1905 Revolution, V.I. Lenin
Russia greets General Winter's yearly advance through his lands as he would the return of any old friend: with a smile, and a question.
"How long will you be staying this year, then?"
The General tips his cap. His smile is a jagged shard of ice splitting his smooth white face.
Splash.
Smoke rose from the sagging remains of the Russian fleet. Metal creaked as it gave way, the iron skeletons bowed and buckled, warped and riddled with holes.
A hunk of a ruined ship's carcass crashed into the ocean.
Splash.
"I am not certain you want to do this, friend," says Russia.
Japan raises an eyebrow. "I'm sorry."
It's not an apology; it's a challenge.
"So am I."
Russia turns his head into the wind, arid air painful as it scorches through his lungs. He tries to hide his smile; it is more bitter than the smoke on his tongue.
"We will win," murmurs Japan with surety. "You're ill prepared for such conflict. After Crimea-"
"Which ended in eighteen-fifty-six."
"Apologies, Russia-san, but my point still stands. You cannot hope to claim victory."
"Maybe not," Russia concedes. "But you will not win."
Japan is, at times, worse than Russia's Westerly neighbours. To have so much, and to see so little- Russia cannot imagine it; he knows he is half-blind, snow and smog and the Tsar clouding his vision, but in knowing and acknowledging this he has managed toovercome. He and China used to talk about it often, but China is reticent now, frightened of him for reasons Russia cannot fault him for. Russia saw it coming- he had mourned the loss of a friend.
But Russia does as his Tsars command, because he loves them dearly, even if they hurt him and starve him and cut him to the bone. (He forgives them because they are human and young, but he does not forget.)
Russia may not be able to see everything, no, but he sees the important things:
Victory is fleeting. It melts like ice in the sun.
"Uncle Vanya!"
Ivan can't help the happiness that swells in his chest as the pitter-patter of small feet across carpeted floors draws steadily closer.
"Tanushka, kotyonok," he beams, hefting her tiny body into his arms. "You've grown so quickly!"
"I'm almost taller than Olga now," she declares proudly.
Ivan smiles. "I don't doubt it." He thinks she probably has the makings of real beauty, the melancholic kind that will completely eclipse her sisters' less refined, less delicate features. She takes after her mother (perhaps too much). "Where are your sisters,kotyonok?
Tatiana's eyes go wide, and she turns in his arms to crane her neck and see through the doorway. "I thought they were following me," she says, the neat line of her eyebrows drawing down into a frown.
"Ah, maybe we can just-"
Tatiana takes a deep breath, and Ivan sighs with the resigned despair of a man who's been in this exact situation innumerable times.
"Olga! Uncle Vanya came to visit!" screams the tiny princess with impressive volume.
"-Ouch."
Tatiana peered up into his face, grey eyes tinged with worry. "Are you well, Uncle?"
"I'm fine," Ivan says manfully, ignoring the ringing in his ears. "Don't worry."
"Uncle!" Olga smiles at him, bright and a little cheeky. "You're late!"
"Ah, is that so, Olishka?" Lowering a reluctant Tatiana to the ground, Ivan regards the pair with a serious expression. "I apologise most profusely, My Imperial Highnesses-"
Tatiana buries her head in her hands, cheeks burning with the force of her blush. "O, Uncle!"
"Don't call us that!" cried Olga through a fit of giggles.
Ivan continues on blithely. "But I have misplaced my calendar, and so-"
The terrible twosome gasp.
"-I don't know whether I'm coming or going-"
"Oh, be quiet you- you foul fiend!"
Ivan blinks and sticks out his lower lip in an approximation of a pout. "Ah, Olga, you wound me!" She glares at him, and he can't help smile at her cute little face scrunched up into an expression of such fierce outrage. His Great Yekaterina would have adored her (or brutally murdered her; Yekaterina was fun like that). "Well, if that's how you feel, then I shall have to take my presents elsewhere, and give them to little girls who don't call their uncles terrible names-"
"Presents?" Tatiana brightens considerably.
Olga, however, is still annoyed. She stomps a foot at him. "You said nothing about presents!"
"Olya," Tatiana hisses, and then whispers something furious into her elder sibling's ear.
Rolling her eyes, Olga gives Ivan her biggest, brightest smile. "I apologise, Uncle. That was unspeakably rude of me."
"There is nothing to forgive," he says, gently patting her head with a gloved hand. "I need to visit with your mother and father, though, before I can give you your presents. Are they in the gardens?"
"No," says the younger girl, grimacing. "Mother is unwell, so she has taken to bed early. Father is in his study."
Ivan nods. "Ah, it is a shame to miss such good weather, though. Why don't you ask your carers to take you outside to play in the sun?"
"Will you come play with us when you're done, Uncle?"
"Of course," replies Ivan. He hesitates for a second, then adds, a little reluctantly, "Though I may be a while."
Thoughts of War are always bitter in the wake of children's smiles.
Ivan prefers to spend his winters out in the tundra, the most Easterly reaches of his domain (of himself- it's so very hard to know the difference). It has been a long time, however, since he has had the freedom to roam his furthest borders. Longer still since he has breathed the biting air of the untamed, cruel wilderness, or visit with the peasants in those villages pock-marking the face of his heartland. He is vast, and yet he is chained to one corner of himself, to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, one his heart, one his head.
America likes to talk about frontiers, to boast about his conquered lands, but he is haunted by their ghosts, the lingering death of possibility.
Ivan is snow and ice and barren wastes; he is oil and tar and dead men's screams.
Russia thinks America is too European by far.
Wandering through the hundreds of empty rooms, Ivan watches the first snow falling softly on the grounds of the Winter Palace. Gold leaf glitters in the low-lighting, the happy tinkling of a chandelier as it sways gently in a draft catches his ears; a cascade of water, of gold, ice and money, falling, falling, tinkling and chiming and singing as it vanishes.
"Planning on staying long, General?"
The cold wind rattles a the window panes. It's answer enough.
Winters in Russia can last a very, very long time.
"I have spoken to him," says Russia. "The Tsar is doing his best to rectify the situation."
"There is nothing!" the man shouts, gesturing to the frozen streets of the capital. "Surely His Imperial Highness can see our suffering!"
Russia sighs. Always dying, always starving, always more bodies for the ground. Russia is red, red, red all over. Men and women and children lie unmoving in the soil, and he can feel their bones, the dry crunch, under his skin. But it has always been this way.
Russia considers the man before him, who is fallible, and corrupt, but he tries so hard for the hungry masses, tries so hard to helpthem. It warms Russia like a small campfire in a blizzard.
Can the Imperial Highness see their suffering? Perhaps. But he cannot understand it. He lives well. The Tsar has never had to worry for food nor employment.
Looking into the man's hopeful face, Russia feels the words wither on his tongue.
"We are at war," he replies, instead.
Father Gapon's black eyes narrow into a fierce glare. "There shouldn't be a war."
The marching of General Winter's unstoppable army echo in Russia's heartbeat; his heart and his head, two capitals where there should only be one- a division that is literally tearing his body apart, rending fragile human tissue and flesh and bone; the empty stomachs of his people twist and turn and gnaw at his own insides; and, far, far away, he can feel his people, his good, honest, frostbitten people, dying in the oceans near Japan.
This priest knows nothing.
"Shouldn't be at war?" Ivan smiles. It is bitter (read: it is Russian). "My friend, we are always at war."
The other Nations distrust Russia, often for good reason. He is unstable and dangerous; unpredictable, and cruel. Russia is cold.
Russia is red.
When he was just a young thing, the soil and earth that was him barely bloody enough, inhabited enough, to summon him, Russia was not called Russia. Russia was not even a country.
The other Nations distrust Russia because he loved his Imperial Family more than anything. To love your leaders- well, it is part of being a Nation. (Though not all of them took it as literally as England, who once played the part of Husband to his Faerie Queene.)
No - Russia has never been in love with his leaders, though perhaps his Great Yekaterina came closest to that.
But that is not the point.
Russia loved his Imperial Family because they were a part of him. The Tsar is Russia; the Tsar is the Russian people; the Tsar is Orthodoxy made flesh. The Tsar is ingrained on every single living cell in Ivan's body, on his heart, his lungs, his muscles and his bones; every fibre of Ivan- of Russia- sings for the Tsar. For Russia.
(It was Ivan III who made him Great with ravished land; it was Ivan the Terrible who anointed him in dead men's dreams. Russia is red.)
And, the real reason that the Nations distrust Russia? (The single most important reason among many?)
Russia took that love, his Tsars, to whom he sang and worshipped and adored, and cupped it in his large, callused hands. And crushed it.
Two days later, and there are bodies all over Saint Petersburg. Riots. Blood. There is... There is so much blood.
It is as familiar to him as snow.
He cradles a child in his arms and whispers to her as she thrashes and screams for her mother, a bullet in her gut.
She is human. She is weak, and breakable, and bright and precious and his- and she is writhing, choking, blood on his gloves and his scarf and his coat-
Ivan breaks her neck.
She dies.
The People wail.
Russia howls.
"Who gave the order?" IvanRussiaThePeople asks, voice barely audible under the screeching, deafening roar of blinding, seething black rage in his ears. "Who gave the order?"
The soldiers, who dare call themselves men, look at him, and look away.
No one answers, and that's answer enough.
The unnamed girl's corpse is cooling in his arms. Limp, like a doll woven from cloth and wool. Her eyes stare up at a dark grey sky. It is winter.
On a tattered scrap of paper in his pocket, scratched out in dull brown that once blushed crimson, a phrase:
Да здравствует Россия.
He will carry this with him until he dies.
Something deep inside Russia, something he thought long since broken and shattered and lost to the screaming winds- snaps. Like brittle wood. Ice. Thin and human.
And- There's jagged pieces everywhere, thawing ice, permafrost burning up under the onslaught of molten heat and pressure from beneath.
Melancholy. Resignation. The characteristics of the Russian soul. Everything tempered and hardened and solid, like bedrock; battered, weathered, but something permanent. Something to hold on to.
This is Russia; this does not change.
But Russia is more than land, more than a family, more than a ridiculous man who fancies himself Emperor. Russia is more than love, and loyalty and history.
Russia is people, and blood, and the stench of death. Anger and hate and the desire to burn it all down, burn everything-
And build it better.
Russia is living, and dead, and ready to fight.
Russia is red.
A/N: I love Russia, and I love Russian history- I'll probably expand on this idea more at some point in the future. Apologies for any history!fails :D
*Title from In Memoriam A.H.H. by Tennyson.