Muscovia

Muscovia, officially the Republic of Muscovia, is a sovereign state that compromises the entire island of Assinawa and several smaller islands in the western Atlantic Ocean. It is located 200 kilometers east of mainland North America, just south of New England. Stratford is the capital and largest city; other major urban areas include Hudsonia and Port Bourne. Muscovia has a population of just over 9 million people and an area of just 5,472 square kilometers, making it the sixth most densely populated nation on earth. English is the official language, owing to the island's 325 years of British occupation. Two thirds of the population descend from British colonists or other Europeans while just over one fifth of Muscovians are native Assinawans descending from the Nokor civilization. The nation is a unitary one-party socialist republic currently led by Chairman Dakota Carpenter, who has ruled since 2012.

Archaeological records suggest that human activities on Assinawa began as early as 2000 BC. Before 892 AD, little records exist of life on the island. It was in that year that Izan I united the residents of the island that would become Assinawa and declared the land "Anawassi." The island under Izan flourished, developing a militaristic society that accumulated immense wealth and influence, even in mainland North America. The formal Nokor Kingdom was organized in 1296 AD. It was characteristically isolationist and its reign was marked by strict adherence to their local religion, Yeetism. Many grand temples and cities were constructed during this era. Europeans first arrived in 1607, but were not able to fully conquer the island until 1621. The British would remain in power until 1947 when the communist totalitarian Operationist Party seized control.

The Operationists ran an Orwellian-esque government that policed daily activity and collectivized labor. Daily life in the capital consisted of shouting phrases such as "Long live Big Brother!" Industries suffered when western markets placed embargo on Muscovian goods and starvation was widespread. Other internal problems included corruption, purges, and strict campaigns of "reeducation." A coup d'etat in 1984 formed the Republic of Muscovia, led by the Muscovian Communist Party. The MCP slowly opened up the nation to foreign investment and embargo was lifted. In the 21st century, Muscovia has consistently seen economic growth rates around the 10% threshold. Manufacturing is the largest sector, particularly of automobiles for North American markets.

Assinawa First Nation
The island today known as Muscovia has been inhabited for over two millennia by the Assinawan peoples, a people group loosely related to the Algonquins of mainland Canada and New England. Until the ninth century AD, they were largely a hunter-gatherer group that participated in maritime trade with their mainland neighbors. This began to change rapidly when Izan I united the island and scholars created a written language and a decidedly more sophisticated society. Thanks to extensive written records, scholars have deducted that the formal Nokor kingdom was organized in 1296 AD. The island was referred to as Assinawa and it contained several cities which began to expand, primarily along the coasts. Emtogwat, in present-day Harpenden, was a city constructed at the kingdom's height that was thought to have housed five hundred thousand people.

The Assinawans became isolated during this era and severed trade with the mainland. They practiced a strict form of Yeetism, which is a form of animism. Unlike their mainland neighbors, they were keen documenters and saw value in preserving the past. While they were never violent to their neighbors, it is believed that they were often hostile and wary of attackers. They constructed four huge temples as monuments to their deceased family relations; one in north, south, east and west; three of which still stand today (the western temple was destroyed during the Operationist Era).

The native Assinawans composed a diverse workforce of scholars, fisherman, farmers, artisans, and engineers. They independently created their own 365-day calendar and devised a zero. From 1300 to 1600 the island's population grew to nearly three quarters of a million inhabitants.

European contact
Henry Hudson and the Muscovy Company of England were hired in 1607 to find a northwest passage to the Pacific with the ultimate goal of reaching Asia. On October the 6th, 1607, Hudson and his crew narrowly landed on the north tip of Assinawa and made contact with the Mi'kmaq people early in the morning hours. Though the natives were at first very skeptical of the strange men they encountered, they were fascinated, and welcomed the British as honored guests. They treated them to a traditional dinner and gave them tour of the Northern Temple, Ge'gowat. Hudson was captivated by the sophistication and grandeur of Mi'kmaq society, which, in his words, surpassed even the wealth of England. Hudson and his company were allowed to stay for a week before returning to their voyage. His visit cultivated trust with the native Assinawans, who would later view the British as kind and well-intentioned visitors with whom they could flaunt their wealth.

Hudson's stories of immense wealth on Assinawa became a well known truth in England that carried a sort of mythic nature. Beguiled by the legendary tales, King James I sought to conquer this territory and seize its wealth before the French thought to do so. The British theorized that this would bolster their holdings in the Americas and that Assinawa could become their flagship colony in the New World. On 6 September 1621, a force of 49 ships and nearly 5,000 men landed at the same point where Hudson had landed fourteen years prior. Taking the Mi'kmaq by surprise, they countered the northern city of Ge'gowat within a day. On 7 September, they immediately changed the name to "Hudsonia."

The British, however, were vastly outnumbered by the Mi'kmaq's standing army of around 100,000 troops, though most of these troops were stationed in the south at Emtogwat, nearly 200 kilometers from the British. It took a month for the remainder of the army to reach the northern city, and by then the British had installed formal armaments to protect themselves and nearly doubled their manpower. The Mi'kmaq forces attacked on 4 October, and at first had great success in pushing the British further back to the coast. After two weeks of hard fighting, however, the natives' resources were exhausted. The British had far superior modern weaponry and armor. It is estimated that nearly eighty percent of the Mi'kmaq's army perished in the fighting, which lasted for four weeks. On 1 November, 1621, the last Mi'kmaq king was dethroned and the British flag was raised over Ge'gowat.

Early days of British Assinawa (1621-1776)
Phineas Pett became the first governor of British Assinawa, and oversaw the monumental task of ruling an island where he and his comrades were outnumbered nearly sixty to one. Though they had the dominant military power, Pett was notoriously ruthless in his leadership style. He envisioned British Assinawa becoming the most profitable agricultural colony in the Empire, built on the backs of native Mi'kmaq slaves. He also aimed to populate it with English colonists who would help ruler over the other colonies on the mainland. British rule was slow to encompass the entire island, but the wealth brought back to England convinced the King to send more troops. British presence on Assinawa numbered 30,000 by 1635.

Pett crushed any trace of revolt among the native people. His legions were anabashedly cruel to the Mi'kmaq, executing anybody guilty of more than petty theft. Many native women were sold into prostitution while the men were forced to work in the tobacco fields introduced to Assinawa by the British. This kind of treatment was commonplace until Pett's death in 1653, and it was largely continued by his successors. Nearly 100,00 Mi'kmaq men had been trafficked into the southern colonies of mainland North America by 1700. By then, the native population, once numbering 750,000, was counted at 379,000. The British population had risen to almost 500,000.

At that time, the British sought to expel the natives from the urban areas of the island entirely to make room for new arrivals from the homeland. The four Mi'kmaq cities which housed the sacred temples, once known as Gegowat, Emtogwat, Egsitwat, and Sagawigan, were renamed to Hudsonia, Harpenden, Bond, and Port Bourne, respectively. From 1701 until 1984, natives were not permitted to live in any of these urban centers. Most were sent on forced marches to rural work projects, while other retreated to the hills in the center of the island where they were undisturbed by the British.

The native population dwindled proportionally to the arriving British population well into the eighteenth century. As the tobacco market of the American colonies surpassed Assinawa's in quantity and general quality, the island colony's position changed from a labor-focused economy to an administrative and industrial one. Many of the natives were freed, but were propelled into poverty and entirely disenfranchised. Much like their counterparts on the mainland, the crown charged exorbitant tax rates on the British colonists without granting them a voice in parliament. However, due to Assinawa's position as the administrative center of the colonies and distance from the mainland, the embers of revolution that would later erupt into the American Revolution did not burn as strong.

An evolving national identity (1776-1891)
When the Americans declared independence in 1776, colonists of British Assinawa sympathized with their concerns but were not yet moved to revolt. They were generally given a more fair treatment from the crown than was the case on the mainland, and enjoyed that position. They had hoped that the crown would reward their loyalty with representation, but by the War of 1812 this still had not happened. The local population was not even able to vote in the election of their own governor. As the British launched attacks on the young United States in 1812, an unsuccessful coup was led by Damon Hulick II, the mayor of the new capitol, Stratford. This illustrated to the British crown that a discontent was building in their prized colony in the New World, and a shared cause was building behind the mayor's failed coup.

In 1815 Governor Michael Churchill ordered that Sir Gordon Drummond, the commanding officer in charge of Britain's military on the island, install an additional number of troops to safeguard against any notion of revolt. For the first time in the colony's history, the British Assinawans were no longer the ruling class. Many were believed to be culturally lesser than those born in England and the crown desired to hold onto its western territories for as long as possible. They long hoped that they might retake the United States, but this was largely abandoned after the War of 1812. Even so, independence was not something that Britain wanted to grant to Assinawa.

Since the American Revolution and in the decades following, wealth in Assinawa gradually slipped from the large middle class to the ruling elites and aristocrats. Light industry could be found in the cities, but the majority of the population had taken low paying jobs while the landlords, factory owners, and government officials cut themselves huge paychecks. Military service had also become one of the highest paying fields due to the shortage of troops. Many of the most wealthy individuals on the island were born in England, while those whose families had lived there for generations were generally lower class citizens.

The British gradually granted Assinawans the limited ability to represent themselves in the governing of their island, but they were far from able to govern themselves on a large scale. As the income gap continued to become more pronounced, the hopes of mounting a large scale revolution were dashed. Dissenting attitudes continued to grow ever louder, further deepening the cultural divide between the England born and the island born. The ruling class had become disconnected from the bottom 90% of the population, creating a culture distinct to the island, one born from years of poverty and repression.

Run-up to revolution (1891-1939)
As the mainland United States began to urbanize and industrialize rapidly, British Assinawa remained largely agrarian. Standards of living were low, and the common people felt exploited by their ruling class. The Operationists emerged in 1891 as a simple revolutionary group and used these feelings as their slogans. The common people took keenly to the ideas they championed. Though the British operated a borderline militaristic authoritarian style of government in Assinawa, they never censored the public. The Operationists numbered around 700,000 members by 1900, or 10% of the island's population.

This was further solidified when the British forced 65,000 Assinawans to fight in World War I in a compulsory military draft. Over half did not return home. By 1919, Operationist politicians held mayoral offices (the highest political position afforded to Assinawans at the time) in four of the five largest cities. They campaigned on slogans of "island nationalism" and freedom from inequality and British oppression. Nearly all of the population supported them after the War, with the exception of the ruling class.

In the 1920s, potato and tobacco crops largely failed in the coastal regions of the island. This plunged the rural population into severe poverty and forced many of them to migrate to the large cities. The British restricted migration of the population and cut off immigration into Assinawa. In the 1930s, the Operationists began to compile a standing army using municipal budgets under the mayoral framework. The Soviet Union had funded many of these armament programs. In 1939, the British expunged all mayors across the island and installed compliant politicians, many of them born in England. As Churchill took office, Britain was more motivated than ever to retain its holdings in the Americas, but they were diverted by the war brewing in Europe.

Civil War (1939-1947)
The ousted mayors banned together and gathered their military resources into discreet camps in the countryside. On 11 December, 1939, the Operationists declared independence from Great Britain. Britain, diverted by a costly war in another continent, was only able to fight the war using their remaining forces in Assinawa, which had already been reduced to help the war effort in Europe. Operationist forces numbered 77,000 at the onset of war, compared to the British who had reduced their military presence to just 56,000 in 1939. Even so, the Operationists lacked an Air Force and military while the British had a professional division of both. Britain responded to the declaration of war with bombings of Operationist military camps and many rural communities.

By 1940, however, the Operationists had taken 75% of the island's land and 20% of its population. The British maintained its hold on the large coastal cities, including the capitol, Stratford. The revolutionary military resulted to barbaric tactics and demanded recruits from the territories they overtook. By 1941 ten percent of the army was composed of Mi'kmaq peoples forced into compulsory military service. Infantry losses were slim on the Operationist side, while thousands of British troops were killed in action in the countryside. The revolutionaries took the old capitol, Hudsonia in 1941. Port Bourne and Bond fell in 1943.

Several attempts in 1944 and 1945 to take the capitol were unsuccessful, until finally the capitol, Stratford, was nearly completely surrounded in December 1946. The remaining sympathizers with the British were forced to flee secretly, and many of them did so by the end of the year. The colonial government, in power for 325 years, capitulated to the Operationists on 1 January, 1947.