Comments by "Voryn Rosethorn" (@vorynrosethorn903) on "Japanese attempts to Create a Colonial Empire in 1600" video.

The fact that he was crowned tsar was largely due to duplicitous boyars, the reason the poles failed largely thanks to the polish acting highhanded, superior and free from law while in Moscow plus the peerless efforts of the Russian church in coordinating nobles and rallying the deeply religious lower classes. The poles were largely invited in as many boyars wanted to be rid of the responsibilities and limits on their powers and looked greedily at the highly oppressive and decentralised system that the commonwealth had set up. Paternal autocracy runs deep in Russia however and many nobles learnt that the tsar was as much a protection as a limit on their power as without him the social contract was null and the peasants were free to answer abuses directly and insofar as force rather than any sense of justice or due process would allow.
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Plus the clan system would make them as troublesome to run as the highlands and religious issues would lead either to internal or external problems depending on the response to the demands of the Roman church. They would probably go in a very different direction but as far as we know could end up with anything from getting included in the Union Jack earlier to becoming part of the Habsburg empire's border gore.
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