What if the Russian Revolution had failed?

In 1917, Nicholas II abdicates, not to Lenin, not to Bolshevism, but to his brother Michael. The Romanov dynasty staggers on, propped up by generals, priests, and bureaucrats. The Bolsheviks are silenced, Lenin dies in exile, Trotsky fades to irrelevance. And without a Soviet Union, the 20th century unfolds in stranger, darker ways.

Paths Not Taken: The Tsar Endures is the second volume in Alexander Warrick’s acclaimed alternate history cycle. Written with the depth of a historian and the atmosphere of a novelist, it chronicles a century without communism, where:

• Russia endures as a decaying monarchy, held together by oil, fear, and ritual.
• Germany becomes a militarist empire of generals, debt, and order without vision.
• Japan bleeds itself into ruin trying to digest China.
• America becomes Rome without gods, garrisoning the world for oil, restless and weary.
• Britain shrinks into modest survival, trading greatness for ingenuity.
• The rest of the world burns in confusion, with wars of tribe, debt, and hunger replacing ideological struggle.

Told through sweeping narrative, vignettes of ordinary lives, and statistical detail, from bread rations to oil revenues, troop deployments to approval polls, this book is less a romance of “what might have been” than a dissection of fragility, entropy, and unintended consequence.

For readers of Robert Harris, Philip K. Dick, or Timothy Snyder, Warrick offers not comfort but clarity: a grimly believable world where the Tsar endures, but hope does not.