The novel is an alternative history of Russian America, with elements of steampunk.
Initial Point-of-Departure: 1723. Alexander Menshikov, the all-powered minion of Peter the Great, falls into great disgrace, and in the hope to win back the tsar's favor masterminds the colonization of the Pacific Coast of America by forces of Old Believers, persecuted for religious reasons in Russia (similar to Puritans and Huguenots elsewhere) and thousands of his own serfs (which could be transported anywhere with or without). Menshikov and his Old Believers establish the city of Petrograd (on the site of present-day San Francisco), find the California Valley with its excellent conditions for agriculture, and almost immediately discover gold. (In reality, the Spanish colonization of California started much later, in 1781). Connection with the mother country is immediately severed, and California is left to its own devices, while the tsarist government has no power or opportunity to interfere directly with the life of its overseas colony, keeping it as a kind of protectorate, with its own "freedoms and laws."
The Russian-Spanish-Amerindian (in population composition) California realises an old Russian dream: the Free Rus', heiress to the Hanseatic Novgorod Republic, which was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible and which could have led Russia by the European path of development. A very peculiar corporate state is established in California, ruled by Conference of Twelve formed from representatives of competing corporations. It has no representative government, but has a quite high, for its time, level of private freedom, absolute religious tolerance, no racism, some social guarantees (such as free school education) and impeccably working social mobility. It is a country with a high level of industrial development, advanced science and education (in the real Russian Empire Old Believers were in fact the main drivers of trade, industrialization and education); it is small but equipped with a "steampunk" army and highly professional private intelligence services of its merchant's Houses.
The main action of the novel begins in 1861, the year of the Emancipation Manifesto in Russia and start of the war between the North and South in the United States. Californians refuse to recognize the Tsar's Manifesto, and the 'freed' serfs are precisely the ones who protest: 'serfdom' in the paternalistic California has long mutated into a system of important social guarantees for the rural population, and the 'serfs' have no desire whatsoever to lose those guarantees in exchange for some unknown 'freedom'. All things clearly point to the prospect of some kind of the Petrograd "Tea Party" and Declaration of Independence.
The action begins with a series of enigmatic deaths of high-ranking officials in St. Petersburg, seemingly masterminded either by the intelligence services of some the Houses of California or by competing forces in the ruling elite of the Russian Empire. Rittmeister Rastoropshin (an operative of the James Bond sort, a veteran of the Great Game between the Russian and British intelligence in the East) returns from the Caucasus and gets involved in a brutal secret war between the Topographic Service of the General Staff (military intelligence) and the Third Department (the tsarist secret police)...
The four principal characters (Rastoropshin; Vetlugin, explorer and naturalist from the Russian Geographical Society; Rivera, bounty hunter employed by the Russian-American Company; and Padre Ignacio, prefect of the Jesuit mission in Texas) are introduced as 'units' from classical strategy games by Sid Meyer, i.e. Civilization and Colonization: 'Scout', 'Adventurer', 'Assassin' and 'Jesuit...