Chapter 1152: Tsarist Russia in Turmoil
Several flowers bloom, one for each flower.
However, the news that Tsar Alexander Nikolayevich and Empress Maria Alexandrovna were killed by the Assassins with bombs along with their six children soon spread throughout Tsarist Russia, and the Tsar's most capable brother, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, was also assassinated almost at the same time, and the assassination method was exactly the same, which was to kill them with high explosives, which made people wonder if it was the same group of people.
Undoubtedly, after the death of the tsar, the two sons who were left behind began to snatch the inheritance without accident. The two sons were both seventeen or eighteen years old, and they were said to be adults and minors, and they both listened to the persuasion of the people around them or the instigation of the interest groups around them, and began to fight fiercely.
The two princes were specially sent out of St. Petersburg by the tsar for exercise, which was to avoid disaster, but as soon as the news of the assassination of the tsar came, the two princes who were not in St. Petersburg began to form different camps and used various means to compete for the position of tsar.
The slightly older second prince Nikolai Alexandrovich joined the Semenovsky Regiment of the Janissaries of the Russian Empire and was stationed in Yekaterinburg in the eastern foothills of the Ural Mountains, while the younger third prince Alexander Alexandrovich was also in the army, but he was the commander of the "Opryniki" Guards Army stationed in Moscow. After more than half a month of arguments, in the midst of the brutal and fierce struggle for the throne, the two sides launched a war in disregard of the fact that Tsarist Russia was already somewhat fragmented, serf uprisings broke out everywhere, and the nobility was in danger of independence.
The two warring sides are armies of different factions that support the prince and are not accustomed to each other, and they are competing for the position of tsar, so they are doomed to life and death, and there is no room for relaxation. The two sides accused each other of being the source of civil strife in the entire Tsarist Russian Empire, saying that the assassination of the Tsar and the Grand Duke was instigated by the other side.
In any case, the nobles and commoners of Tsarist Russia were onlookers, believing that one of the princes must have been the black hand. The thought of killing so many of their parents, brothers and sisters makes them disgusted. For such a person, once he becomes the tsar of Tsarist Russia, it will be a disaster for the entire country, whether it is a nobleman or a commoner. Therefore, they felt that no matter who these two princes were, it was better not to become the tsar.
With the struggle for the position of the tsar between the two princes, the core army of the Tsarist Russian Empire, the Imperial Janissary was divided, and the entire tsar began to be in internal strife everywhere, and the situation was chaotic.
Most of Siberia had been occupied by the Chinese Empire, and the Western Siberian Plain, near the Ural Mountains, although still in the hands of Tsarist Russia, began to break out in numerous serf revolts.
The serfs there only knew that the tsar had announced a policy of emancipating the serfs. But now that they have come to their side, they have become serfs, and although they have been liberated, all the land still has to be purchased by them, and the serf reform has not changed any class essence, nor has it changed the landlord land tenure system itself. Throughout the vast and fertile land of the West Siberian Plain, the aristocratic landlords continued to hold the local government and still controlled a large amount of land.
Ninety percent of the land in the entire West Siberian Plain belonged to the aristocratic and large landowners, and even because of the sale and purchase of land, some commoners' land was bought by the landlords, who occupied the fertile land and the whole piece of land, and distributed the scattered land and sandy land to the peasants, and the landlords' land was wedged into the peasants' land like a wedge, so that the peasants had to rent this wedge-shaped land of the landlords at a high price. In order to survive, the vast number of serfs who became freedmen bore the ransom for the redemption of their land, and thus bore the burden of high loan interest and redemption fees, as well as the burden of various exorbitant taxes such as land tax, self-government tax, and village community tax, which were more painful than the original life of simple serfs.
At this time, they suddenly found that they had rented the landlord's land and earned some meager food, barely able to support themselves and even their families, but now they borrowed a lot of money to buy land, and the repayment of high loan interest made them unable to continue, and even the land they borrowed and bought had to be mortgaged at a low price to repay the debt. In desperation, I had to rise up and rebel!
As soon as hundreds of thousands of serfs in the West Siberian Plain were instigated, the rebellion became vigorous, just like the Pugachev Uprising nearly a hundred years ago, which ignited and grew rapidly, and even more rapidly than the original Pugachev Uprising, in less than a week, it developed into an insurrectionary army of more than 50,000 people, seized the weapons of the local garrison, looted the grain and wealth in the surrounding landlords' farms, and swept the entire West Siberian Plain.
At this time, the Janissary Guard, which was defending Western Siberia, paid all its attention to escorting the second prince Nikolai Alexandrovich from Yekaterinburg to attack the Eastern European Plain, having already occupied Ufa and attacking Kazan, and hurriedly marched westward in preparation to rush back to St. Petersburg as soon as possible to take over the Tsar's throne.
And the third prince Alexander Alexandrovich, who was in Moscow, with the help of Opryniki Guards, marched directly to St. Petersburg, and left several units of the Tsarist Standing Field Army in Yaroslavl to build several lines of defense, preparing to prevent the second prince who was in Semenovsky's army from entering St. Petersburg.
The two sides fought fiercely on the Eastern European Plain between Kazan and Yaroslavl, despite the serf uprisings that were already raging around them.
At the same time, news of the assassination of Tsarist Russia also reached Chechnya in the North Caucasus. Under the leadership of Imam Haji, nearly 20,000 Chechens began to hold a massive rebellion, and with the support of neighboring Ottoman Turkey, they quickly occupied the city of Tbilisi and occupied the entire Caucasus.
Turkey, which had lost the Crimean War, heard of the assassination of the Tsar and began to move, deploying troops on the Black Sea coast and posing as if it was ready to attack.
The Grand Duchy of Finland also began to be turbulent, and many Finns secretly joined forces, each brewing and fermenting, preparing to rebel against the rule of Tsarist Russia and fight for the independence of the Grand Duchy of Finland.
And Poland, the source of the civil strife in Tsarist Russia, has already been turbulent, and the rebellions everywhere are magnificent.
Against this background, tens of thousands of Cossack troops of the Tsarist Siberian Legion stationed far away in Orenburg immediately realized that they might not be able to wait for reinforcements from the Tsarist Empire for a while. And many of their compatriots' armies were captured by the troops of the Chinese Empire, so they could only wait for death, and at the same time, they were powerless in the face of the loss of the entire Kazakh Khanate.