Hi, guys, want to put my two cents in this discussion.
As was already mentioned, I hope too that the faction lore and mechanics are flexible enough for everyone to imagine the society they're building however they want, after all Sid Meyer himself mentioned iirc that it's part of his game-building philosophy to engage the players imagination as much as possible.
Going back to Slavic Federation in particular, many interesting ideas were proposed here how the faction could be imagined without the Orwellian cliches and Soviet "klyukva" on one hand and also without the leading role of Russia on the other hand. I personally tend to think that a fresh take on the matter is a good thing after all, because this is how Firaxis treated the rest of the factions anyway, and more importantly, speaking of Russia in particular, despite being overdone in gaming industry, in fact Russian culture and history has too many facets that have never been represented in computer games yet, not to mention that other Slavic peoples have barely been represented at all, so falling back on the familiar cliches would be a waste imo.
The latter can also be a good reason for letting Russia take a rest from the job of the leader of a faction for once, since it's been hundreds of years and the Great Mistake after all, and new superpowers such as Brasilia are getting their place in the limelight and Russia already resigned from being a superpower once in our irl pre-BE history already, so dragging it back on the stage would be like someone just can't let go of the past. So there are tons of good reasons why SF does not equal Russia in fact. Moreover, I would like to suggest that not only other existing Slavic nations could take a leading role in the Federation but some new (or well forgotten old) Slavic identity could (re)appear by the time of BE, since this is also kind of what the rest of the factions are about too.
Being Russian myself though, I'm of course not ready to accept the SF without my own country completely, but even I can say that even if in one of the variants of my personal lore SF will be Russian based, the bulk of the Russian traits are going to be omitted and anything from the other Slavic nations will be a welcome addition.
On the other hand I'll say that the first game I will play I'm going to imagine SF based on the culture of cossacks, which not only is an antithesis to the 1984-esque society but is also somewhat distinct culturally from Russia itself. Cossacks are even arguably more of a Ukrainian concept than Russian, and in fact are somewhat ethnically diverse with non-Slavs often included in their communities, while united more by culture rather than ethnicity. Cossack are a perfect image to describe something like an expedition to another planet imo, since this is exactly what they were doing historically, living on the frontier of their civilization, pushing it's borders outwards and trying to survive in a hostile environment. And notably one of the reasons that drove them to remote places and all these hardships was the oppression of the Czars. So, while quite traditionalist with Orthodox Christianity being an indispensable part of their culture and militarized out of necessity to fight for their lives every day cossacks are in fact freedom loving sometimes to the point of anarchism.
Speaking of which, I also wanted to mention Makhno and Kropotkin, but
Detroitdregs did it earlier, thumbs up. Tradition of anarchism is another possible direction that couldn't be further from the 1984 cliches.
Going back to cossacks and the tradition of exploration though it should be noted that many of the famous Russian explorers come from this group too, and I have to strongly disagree with the statement someone made here or in some other thread that no Slavic nation has a history of exploration. If it was true Russia simply wouldn't have all this land which amounts to 1/8 of all Earth's landmass. In fact such traditions date back as far as
Afanasy Nikitin of the 15th century. To name someone of a Polish heritage there's
Nikolay Przhevalsky. And again many of them came from cossacks like
Semyon Dezhnyov, and most notably
Yermak, whose conquest of Siberia I personally fancy as a sort of a role model for the SF expedition to the Planet in my first BE game. And by the way, all these people and others I could but didn't list for the sake of conciseness are all off the top of my head and I'm not a specialist in history or anything, so all of them I known from the school course and watching a couple of educational programs on TV (and this is also the reason why I only mentioned Russian explorers since I only know what is taught over here, so no offense), so make your own judgement if the Slavs have a history of exploration or not.
Also, this frontier democracy factor opens another possible interpretation for Slavic Federation: SF as a state might in fact be quite Orwellian, but the SF space expedition might just be an exact opposite of that, comprised of the people who got fed up with dictatorship and old Earth in general and used this opportunity to go look for their freedom on another planet just like cossacks of the past.
This is not even the only scenario I'm planning to play out, there are others with more or less prominent roles for Russia and other Slavic nations in the Federation as well as higher or lower concentration of klyukva (I might go full Red Alert 2 in one of my playthroughs if only for laughs).
Imperial Russia is also an obvious source of inspiration, but that was already mentioned.
Also first post on this forum, but I've been lurking for a while. Sorry for the wall of text, and sorry if these versions were already mentioned. I've been following this discussion for a while but it's been so long that I forgot if cossacks were mentioned or not.
At the moment, Poland enjoys 95-98% ethnic homogenity. Political (and Silesian) disputes don't really matter. I know they might matter in the next 100 and 200 years, but currently Poland is pretty much a solidified, unitarian country. A poorly-run one, but whatever.
