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A tiny tweak to history that changed everything.
Queen Victoria was quite likely a bastard. She was a carrier of hemophilia, but her mother's side of the family had no history of hemophilia, and her father was not a hemophiliac. (The hemophilia gene lives in the X chromosome. As women have two copies, they can carry hemophilia without expressing it. Men cannot).
This little quirk in history changed everything.
Victoria had 34 surviving grandchildren, many of whom sat on the thrones of Europe: including Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Alexandra, the wife of the last tsar of Russia. It was this connection that would have lasting affects since Alexandra passed on her hemophilia to her son Alexei, the heir to the Russian throne.
Alexei's hemophilia caused him to almost die many times and caused Alexandra to seek out the help of Rasputin, a charismatic cult leader type from Siberia. At one point, Rasputin was banished, but then Alexei almost died again, and Rasputin was recalled. The boy miraculously improved. Rasputin's presence at court was toxic, as he seduced the wives of many high ranking people. Eventually, some noblemen were able to off him by poisoning him, shooting him, then wrapping him in a carpet and drowning him in the Neva River. But the damage to the reputation of the imperial family was done. In this weakened state (and of course due to WWI) Nicolas was forced to resign, creating the opening for the Bolsheviks to take power.
If Queen Victoria's mother didn't cheat then... no hemophilia, no Rasputin, no Bolsheviks, and probably no Mao either. Who knows what the world would look like if China hadn't been mired in communism for 40 years post WWII.
Ehhhh this seems pretty dubious. Firstly because type-B hemophilia has been known to occur as a spontaneous mutation in the children of older fathers. Victoria’s presumptive father, the Duke of Kent, was 51 at the time of her conception. She’s also a spitting image of him, and of his father George III. Among plausible proposed alternatives for her paternity, such as John Conroy, I’m not aware that we have any record of hemophilia in their ancestry.
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