And he, like Bernie, had been forced by circumstances into a role he wasn’t well prepared for when he had been dragooned into becoming czar of Russia.
Come to that, Vladimir wasn’t a trained spy. Still, the young prince was doing an excellent job—aided and abetted by the up-timers’ free way with their knowledge. He and Boris had kept Russia from the Smolensk War, even before Boris brought Bernie to Russia. Vladimir had married a up-timer girl and was well situated in their community. And quite openly, for the most part, sending tons of copied books to Moscow, along with information on innovations made since the Ring of Fire as down-time craftsmanship had combined with up-time knowledge. That part was harder, from what Mikhail understood, because some of the new businesses were much more secretive than the State Library of Thuringia-Franconia. Still, Boris had left Vladimir a good core organization and Vladimir had expanded it. So the Dacha and the Gun Shop, Russia’s industrial and military research and development shops, were well supplied with up-timer knowledge.
That knowledge, combined with Russian ingenuity and a willingness to go with simple, workable solutions rather than slavishly copy everything the up-timers were doing, plus a brute force approach that involved putting lots of people to work on projects that the up-timers could probably do with a lot less, had stood Russia in very good stead. Both industrially and in the recent battle over Rzhev. Russia had the beginnings of an electronics industry at the price of several people accidentally electrocuted. Telegraphs and telephones in the Kremlin and spark gap radios. And they were experimenting with tubes and transistors, Mikhail was told, although so far unsuccessfully. A test dirigible built and used at Rzhev and a much larger one under construction. Plumbing at the Dacha and starting to appear other places, including parts of Moscow. New rifled muskets with replaceable chambers for the army and a few new breech-loading cannon as well. New pumps for clearing mines of water and for creating vacuums. Which apparently had a myriad of uses. Improved roads, steam engines . . . the list went on and on. Sucking up labor almost as fast as the new plows and reapers freed it, perhaps faster. The free peasantry—what was left of it—had been among the first to go to the factories and set up their own, along with the Streltzi who were Russia’s traditional merchant class.
Mikhail was less happy about some of the policy changes that Sheremetev had come up with. Selling to the Turks especially bothered him.
Moscow, the Grantville Section
Boris filled out paperwork and tried not to think about what was happening. “Director-General” Sheremetev was an idiot who had no concept of how to treat people to get the best work out of them. He couldn’t inspire or motivate, save through threats. But, for now at least, the threats seemed to be working. Sheremetev had complete control of the Boyar Duma through a combination of bribes and coercion. Worse, he was what the up-timers called a micromanager, and his decisions were wrong more often than not.
It wasn’t that Boris disagreed with Sheremetev’s assessment of the general situation in Europe. The Swede was much more dangerous than the Pole. That had to be clear to anyone except an idiot. Boris had studied the history of the world on the other side of the Ring of Fire and one thing was clear: Poland had always been a nuisance to Russia and usually an antagonist, but never a mortal threat. Only twice since the Mongol yoke was thrown off had foreign powers come close to destroying Russia. First, the French; then the Germans. Never the Poles.
The key was economic development. The Poles had been too backward themselves to pose more than a middling danger. The real peril came from western and central Europe, not eastern Europe.
But economic development presupposed financial reform, and Boris didn’t think Sheremetev really understood paper money. Boris didn’t really understand it himself that well, but he’d seen it work in Grantville and knew it was the way forward. True enough, Sheremetev was supporting the new currency, at least officially. But where Czar Mikhail’s support had been genuine, Boris figured that Sheremetev was just using it to lure people into giving him gold and working for nothing.
The end result was likely to discredit the new money altogether, and so Russia would remain mired in poverty and ignorance. Sheremetev understood the threat from western Europe—but was making it worse, not better.
Grantville
“The”—Vladimir held up his hands and made quote marks in the air—“‘Director-General’ is teaching us a lesson,” Vladimir explained. “He’s also tempting us, putting pressure on to see if we will defect. Well, if I will defect. You hold dual citizenship.”