[@Pepperm1nts][@Jestocost]

I think if you two go anywhere keep a mind to get Pig, Shyri/Feo, and at least Mihndar on it too. They might have input.

But if I can say anything on my impressions of Russia culture: in some ways it's been described to me as antithetical to western culture. Where there's an emphasis on rationalism in the West there's a de-emphasis on and sneering at Enlightenment or Rationalist beliefs. Or even in that sense democracy. Though the later could be explained with my rather juvenile understanding of writers like Hannah Arendt's study of politics, thought I still need to read it I've heard the thesis of her book On Revolution boils down to "have autocratic leadership before revolution? Get a new one after." Tankies will try to correct me on it but the nature of the Soviet Union wasn't entirely different from the Tzarist model.

But politically too, while Moscow or the Imperial cities are the seat of power, they've been in less ways the same the further out you went from Moscow. Metropolitan, European Russia might be more strictly in orbit around Moscow or Saint Petersburg and its customs and nuances but the more you go out the more autonomous you may get. A particularly extreme or autonomous government may be at the fringes in Russia; ex the Siberian Cossack union East of the Urals I'm using as my Russian antagonist. So in the ungoverned territories there'd be a lot of room for wild, unpredictable, or unforeseen activities; not just because it's distant, but because it also contained a lot of overlapping military and ethnic groups in one small area.

Southern Russia is known to be a major place RL for Cossack activity. The cossacks being formerly an independent half-slavic people, originally they could be described anarchistically in that their organization was as highly democratized and they often flaunted imperial whims to the north and the west, but as time went on they were brought under control. By the time of the RP they'd have evolved into a strictly military identity with a emphasis and identity in the structure of the army. Now-a-days IRL they're infamous as being the government's paramilitary goons of Putin and are literally patrolling the world cup with whips looking for the gay. They occupy a large part of the Russian identity.

A Russian friend also says of Southern Russia as being a lot of white trash cosplaying as Cossacks. So we shouldn't skimp on the  a e s t h e t i c.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtX3-p0ryNU]Cossack choir[/url]
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljExTEPNFnM]A swordfight with a cossack in a 1974 movie[/url]
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQTlT8-qYUk]The hilarious response of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire[/url]

And well, back to the pain-in-the-neck irrationality of the Russians as mentioned, I've heard it as being explained well enough in this Dostoyevsky from Notes of the Underground:

"I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!"

And it's not far off. Russia has a hella wild history of esoteric and wild religious cult if you want to do the doomsday thing. They've cut their balls and tits off for God before.