The summer of 1914 was a season of madness. As the great powers of Europe, bound by their intricate web of alliances and ultimatums, stumbled one by one into the abyss, Mikhail watched from St. Petersburg with the clinical detachment of a physician observing a terminal disease. Frantic telegrams arrived daily from the ambassadors of France and Britain, their tone shifting from confident expectation to desperate pleading, begging him to honor the old Entente and mobilize Russia's millions against Germany.
He let them plead.
From the rostrum of the State Duma, Mikhail delivered the most consequential speech of his Regency. He spoke not of treaties or honor, but of pragmatism. "The battlefields of France will be watered with the blood of a generation," he declared, his voice broadcast by telegraph across the globe. "Russia's fields will be watered by rain, to grow grain that will build our prosperity. We will not join this bonfire of European vanities."
The reaction was immediate. The French ambassador stormed out of the gallery. A jubilant message of thanks arrived from the German Kaiser's office within hours. In the streets of St. Petersburg, the news was met not with protests, but with a palpable sense of relief from a populace that had no desire to fight another war.
With the declaration made, Mikhail unleashed his true economic strategy. The teletypes in the offices of the Russo-Imperial Bank began to clatter with new life, not sending military orders, but trade proposals. Contracts, drafted months in advance, were dispatched to London and Paris. Russia would not send soldiers, but it would gladly sell the shells, the steel, and the oil they needed to continue their fight. The nation's great industrial engine, once primed for its own defense, was now retooled to profit from the conflict of others.
By the autumn, as the Western Front ground down into the static, bloody horror of trench warfare that Alistair's memory had perfectly predicted, Mikhail decided it was time to make his first move.
In a secret session of the State Council, Mikhail pointed to the southern portion of the map. "The Ottoman Empire has foolishly hitched its wagon to the German war machine," he explained. "Their weakness is our opportunity. They control the Black Sea straits, the artery that has choked our navy for centuries. With the great powers distracted by their slaughter in the west, that artery is, for the first time, vulnerable."
Captain Orlov's Directorate then presented "uncovered" evidence of a plot by Ottoman agents to incite rebellion among the Muslim populations of the Caucasus. The evidence was flimsy, likely fabricated, but it was the necessary pretext.
"We will not declare war on Germany," Mikhail announced to the council. "But we will undertake a limited and necessary police action to secure our southern frontier against Ottoman aggression."
The three elite armies he had secretly mobilized months before stormed across the Ottoman border in a lightning campaign. The Turkish forces, ill-equipped and poorly led, collapsed before the onslaught of General Denisov's modern, well-supplied troops. The primary objective was not Anatolia itself, but the prize Russia had craved for centuries: control of the Turkish Straits—the Bosphorus and Dardanelles—which would give Russia's Black Sea Fleet permanent, unrestricted access to the Mediterranean.
The chapter concluded in the new War Room Mikhail had constructed deep within the Winter Palace. It was a modern command center, with massive, detailed maps, dozens of telegraph and telephone operators, and a steady stream of real-time information from his commanders and agents.
He received two reports simultaneously. The first was from Witte, detailing the astronomical profits from the first quarter of wartime trade—Russia's gold reserves had already surpassed those of Great Britain. The second was a telegram from General Denisov. "Turkish resistance in Eastern Thrace has collapsed. Our forward cavalry units have reached the outskirts of Constantinople. The Straits are within our grasp."
Mikhail looked at the large map on the wall. In the west, millions of men were dying over a few feet of muddy French soil. In the south, his armies were seizing the most strategic waterway on the continent at minimal cost. His empire was not bleeding; it was growing richer and stronger with every passing day.
He was not a participant in the Great War. He was a vulture, feasting on the carcass of a dying world. And his appetite was just beginning to stir.