Dissidents, Splinters and Unification

1. Overview

The Romulan Star Empire does not tolerate open opposition, and it does not admit that it has any. Dissent there lives underground, in private houses and coded letters, and its history is mostly a history of what the Empire chose not to say. Even so, the Federation knows of several movements that have stood against the Empire’s rulers or its way of life, and some of them matter a great deal on the Neutral Zone.

This article covers four of them. The first and most important is the Unification movement, the underground that seeks to reunite the Romulan and Vulcan peoples, which Starfleet has known of since 2368 and now quietly supports. The second is the Lyreth Shiar, a sect of the 2380s that called itself the True Empire and grew far too fast. The last two are smaller circles known to the Federation from the years since the Silence. The article ends with how the Tal Shiar treats dissent of every kind.

Almost nothing in this field is documented in the ordinary sense. Where this article relies on report rather than record, it says so. For the government these movements stand against see Government of the Empire, and for the service that hunts them see The Tal Shiar.

2. Dissent in a Watchful State

Romulan society prizes discretion, loyalty to house and Empire, and the careful keeping of secrets. A Romulan who disagrees with the Senate or the Praetor learns early that the safest thing to do with that disagreement is nothing, and the next safest is to share it only with people whose families are bound to one’s own. Open protest, as the Federation understands it, has no place in Romulan public life.

That does not mean Romulans agree with their rulers. It means that disagreement takes the forms that secrecy allows: a house that is slow to carry out an order, a senator who abstains, a book copied by hand and passed between friends, a meeting that is never written down. Most Romulan dissent never becomes a movement at all. The few that do are the ones the Federation hears about, usually long after the fact. For the houses and customs that shape this see Society, Houses and Customs.

3. The Unification Movement

3.1 What it is

Romulans and Vulcans are one people by descent. The Romulans are the descendants of Vulcans who rejected the teachings of Surak and left Vulcan many centuries ago, in the era when Surak’s path of logic was taking hold. The Unification movement holds that the two peoples should be reunited, and that the way to do it lies through the Romulan people themselves, by their coming to know Surak’s teachings and the Vulcan heritage they share. It is not a plan of conquest, nor a plan to bring Vulcan under Romulan rule or Romulus under Vulcan. It is a slow, patient effort to change minds.

3.2 What Starfleet learned in 2368

The Federation’s knowledge of the movement dates from 2368. In that year Ambassador Spock of Vulcan, one of the most respected figures in the Federation, was seen on Romulus, having gone there without the knowledge of the Federation government. Starfleet, uncertain of his purpose and concerned for what it might mean, sent officers to find him.

What they found was an underground: Romulans who met in secret to study the teachings of Surak and who hoped one day to see the two peoples reunited. Spock had gone to Romulus to help them. He had been encouraged to come by a Romulan senator, Pardek, whom he had known since the Khitomer conference of 2293 and who appeared to support the cause.

The underground was real, but the invitation was a trap. Pardek was working with Proconsul Neral, who had presented himself as a supporter of reunification, and with Sela, a Romulan commander. Their plan was to use Spock’s name to cover a Romulan force carried aboard stolen Vulcan ships and sent to Vulcan under the pretence of a peace mission. The plan was exposed before the force reached Vulcan, and the ships were destroyed.

Spock chose to stay on Romulus and continue his work with the underground. He was clear that it would be slow, and that it would be the work of many years.

3.3 Since 2368

Spock’s work on Romulus since 2368 has not been made public by the Federation, and this reference does not report on it. The movement itself has survived. It has outlasted the Dominion War, Shinzon’s coup and the Silence, and the Federation believes it continues in 2393, smaller than its hopes and larger than the Empire admits. Its members are drawn from many walks of life, as they were in 2368. Its meetings are still secret. Its texts are still copied by hand, or carried in memory.

The Empire has never acknowledged the movement’s existence. The events of 2368 showed that at least some of the Empire’s rulers knew of it and were willing to use it. What the Restored Senate knows of it, or does about it, is not known.

4. Starfleet and Unification

For many years Starfleet kept its distance from the Unification movement. In 2368 the Federation had not sanctioned Spock’s journey, and Starfleet’s first concern on learning of it was what his presence on Romulus might mean for the Federation’s security. In the years that followed the official view was cautious: the movement was a private matter of Vulcan conscience, a long way from policy, and too fragile and too dangerous to be tied to Federation interests.

That view has changed. After the Dominion War, after the coup of 2379, and after watching the Empire turn inward and then outward again, Starfleet has come to regard the reunification effort as wise. The reasoning is plain enough. The Romulan Star Empire has spent two centuries behind a wall of secrecy and suspicion, and every Federation attempt to reach it as a government has ended where it began. A change that comes from within the Romulan people, slowly, by their own choice, is the one kind of change that the Empire’s rulers cannot simply refuse. Starfleet now quietly backs the effort.

What that backing means in practice is not public, and this reference does not speculate on it. It is enough to say that Starfleet regards the effort’s survival as a Federation interest, and that it treats anything that threatens the effort as a serious matter.

4.1 The threat from the border

The greatest threat to Unification in 2393 is the border itself. The movement depends on the slow growth of trust between Romulans and the Vulcan heritage they share, and every incident on the Neutral Zone works against that trust. Each patrol, each provocation, each accusation hardens Romulan opinion against the Federation and makes it harder for a Romulan to admit an interest in Vulcan teachings without seeming a traitor. The breakaway of T’Met and the attacks of 2391 have made matters worse (see T'Met). Starfleet officers on the Zone should understand that their conduct there, however routine, has consequences far beyond the line. See The Romulan Side of the Zone and Romulans and the Federation.

5. The Lyreth Shiar

The Lyreth Shiar, which named itself “the True Empire”, was a Romulan sect that rose in the 2380s, in the years after the Silence. It held that the Empire had lost its way, and that it alone stood for what the Empire truly was.

What set it apart was how fast it grew. Romulan movements, whether dissident or loyalist, grow slowly if they grow at all, because every new member is a new risk. The Lyreth Shiar grew far faster than that. It gained followers, wealth and territory at a pace that no movement of its kind should have been able to manage, and for a time it was a real power inside the Empire.

The reason became known only later. The Lyreth Shiar had secretly allied itself with the Breen Confederacy, and it was with the Breen’s help that it gained its power and its territory. Why the Breen gave that help, and what they expected in return, has not been made public. The Breen themselves have never spoken of it.

After several years the Lyreth Shiar was dismantled from within. The details have never been made public, and neither the Empire nor the Federation has given an account of how it ended. The Empire treats the whole episode as closed and does not speak of it. Its memory, however, has had a lasting effect. A movement that called itself the True Empire and turned out to be built on a foreign power’s help gave the Tal Shiar a lesson it has not forgotten, and the service’s suspicion of any group that grows too quickly dates in large part from it.

6. Other Circles

The Federation knows the names of other dissident groups inside the Empire, most of them small and many of them short-lived. Two are worth describing here, because they are known from more than one source and because their aims say something about Romulan dissent in the years since the Silence.

6.1 The Quiet Table

The Quiet Table is a circle drawn from the younger members of minor noble houses. It takes its name from the custom of meeting at private dinners where nothing of politics is said aloud while servants are in the room. Its aims are reform rather than revolution: a Senate less afraid of its own security services, limits on the Tal Shiar’s power to act against houses without the Senate’s knowledge, and a voice for the provinces that suffered most during the Silence.

The Quiet Table is not known to have any connection to Unification, and its members are, by the accounts that have reached the Federation, loyal Romulans who want the Empire to be stronger, not weaker. That has not protected them. The Restored Senate is, as Federation analysts have long noted, smaller than the old one and more afraid of its own security services, and a circle that discusses limiting those services is exactly the kind of circle those services watch. Several young members of minor houses believed to have sat at the Table have lost their positions since 2389.

6.2 The Hollow Bell

The Hollow Bell is not an organisation so much as a habit shared among writers, copyists and readers. Its members copy and pass on writing that the Empire has suppressed: poetry, histories of the Silence that differ from the official ones, accounts of the Dominion War from the soldiers who fought it, and, according to some reports, writing on the Remans and on T’Met. The name comes from a line in one of the poems most often copied, about a bell that rings with nothing inside it, which its readers take to describe the official record.

The Hollow Bell has no leaders anyone knows of and no aims beyond keeping the writing alive. That makes it hard to destroy, and it has survived more than one attempt. Some of the writing it carries overlaps with the texts of the Unification movement, and the Federation believes that some readers belong to both, but the two are not the same and should not be confused.

7. How the Tal Shiar Treats Dissent

The Tal Shiar is the Empire’s intelligence service, and dissent at home has always been as much its business as enemies abroad. Its officers have shown in the past that they can outrank and give orders to the commanders of Imperial Fleet ships, and Romulans of every station fear it. It was nearly destroyed at the Omarion Nebula in 2371, and it has spent the years since rebuilding, quietly and with something to prove. The rebuilt service is smaller, younger and more technical than the one lost at Omarion. Its chair has not been publicly named since 2384.

7.1 Methods

What the Federation knows of the Tal Shiar’s methods against dissent comes from report and from pattern rather than from any admission. The service acknowledges no operations of any kind. Its methods appear to include:

Watching. Informants placed in houses, in workplaces and among those suspected of dissent. Romulans generally assume that any gathering of more than a few people may include someone who reports to the Tal Shiar.

Removal. People taken from their homes, often at night, without charge or record. Some return. Some do not, and their families are not told what became of them.

Interrogation. Romulan interrogation is feared across the quadrant. It is effective, and it is said to leave those who survive it a former shadow of themselves. That reputation is itself a weapon: few Romulans who fear interrogation will risk dissent in the first place.

Patience. The Tal Shiar does not always act quickly. A circle it knows of may be left alone for years, watched, and allowed to grow, so that when the service does act it can take the whole of it at once.

7.2 Since the Silence

Since the patrols came back to the Neutral Zone in the late 2380s, the Tal Shiar has come back with them, and the Federation’s view is that its attention to dissent at home has grown in step with its attention to the border. The lesson of the Lyreth Shiar has made it suspicious of any movement with outside help, and that suspicion falls most heavily on the one movement that does have friends outside the Empire: Unification. It is one more reason why Starfleet treats the quiet of the border as a matter that reaches well beyond the line. See The Tal Shiar.

8. See Also

The Romulan Star Empire · Government of the Empire · The Tal Shiar · Society, Houses and Customs · Romulans and the Federation · T'Met · The Remans · The Romulan Side of the Zone · History of the Romulan Star Empire