![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
HISTORY.
I. ONE OF THESE DAYS THESE BOOTS ARE GONNA WALK ALL OVER YOU
Vasiliy was born to a lower working class family in St. Petersburg—then known as Petrograd—in 1910, 6 years after Tsarevich Alexei, 7 years before John F. Kennedy. He grew up in crushing poverty with a near-constant state of food insecurity and no access to proper medical care, which nearly led to his mother's death when she miscarried due to malnutrition - one of his most traumatic early childhood memories, and one he associates deeply with the pre-revolution state of affairs. He was four years when his father was drafted at the outbreak of the First World War; Yegor, like thousands of other Russians, returned from the battlefront a radical Bolshevik embittered by what he'd been forced to see and experience in the name of a distant king.
Although he learned to read and perform basic math, Vasiliy received no formal education until the Party sent him to college at 27 years old; from the age of about six years he worked alongside his father, a welder. He was in Petrograd working in a factory when the 1917 women's march blossomed into multiple strikes, showing him the power of collective action at a very young age - as well as the brutality the monarchy was capable of. By the time that Tsar Nicholas II abdicated that year, over 1,000 people had been killed in Petrograd alone, and he'd watched the government that was allegedly there to protect him open fire on civilians in the street. He and his peers came up desensitized to violence to an extreme degree; by the age of seven, Vasiliy had stood in touching distance of a fresh corpse, witnessed multiple industrial accidents, and seen widespread gun violence. This was not unusual for his age cohort.
When the Russian revolution took hold, both parents were followers of Lenin, then Stalinists—which would later be their saving grace during the purge—and raised Vasiliy in the image of what would eventually be dubbed the 'Soviet New Man': atheism, work ethic, stoicism, self-betterment, and willingness to sacrifice. The church had already left a sour taste in his mouth—during his time, Tsar Nicholas' rule was justified not by competence but by the institution of the church, which was perceived as inseparable from the monarchy—so Bolshevik ideals of secularism were hardly a big leap.
Vasiliy started at the bottom of the party hierarchy as a local party clerk cataloguing enrollments and party cards at the age of eighteen, and by 1930, he was a member of Orgraspred, a deceptively powerful department responsible for staffing every position connected with the communist party. When Nikolai Yezhov, also an Orgraspred alum, was promoted to head of the NKVD, Vasiliy was part of the cohort that he took with him to fill the countless positions that had just been violently purged to clear away all of his predecessor's influence.
II. THE CROWD YOU LIKE IS DANGEROUS, I HEARD THEY'RE JUST NO GOOD
He started as a record-keeper in 1936; after about six months of this he was promoted to interrogations. He was initially tasked with playing the 'good cop' typical to the Soviet interrogation style because it was seen as a way to ease an outsider into the rougher work of interrogations involving physical force, but his charisma and perceptive nature made this a role that he excelled in, so there he stayed. Over the next four years Vasiliy successfully talked hundreds of fellow Soviets into signing false confessions against the backdrop of the Great Purge, a horrifically violent period of mass-murders in the hundreds of thousands — a daily task he rationalized by a) telling himself that he was sparing people who were doomed anyway from being tortured and b) silencing any apprehensions with immersion in the extremely cultlike environment of the NKVD as a whole.
Without realizing it, Vasiliy became used to the mixed deference and fear civilians regarded him with. During the early Yezhovschina, the NKVD was revered and seen in a sort of extreme amplification of how soldiers were perceived in the US during the early to mid 2000s. Slowly, however, the tide turned, and when Yezhov's days as commissar became visibly numbered, so too did Vasiliy's—and those of every other staff member he had appointed.
III. LIKE SATURN, THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS CHILDREN
On a chilly April night in 1940, the knock finally came. Vasiliy was arrested in his nightclothes and shuttled to temporary holding, all while in complete shock and denial — he had spent the last three years living in the shadow of a nebulous sort of foreboding while simultaneously believing the things he witnessed daily could never happen to him. When another interrogator assigned to play the "good cop" finally came in to question him, Vasiliy initially tried to refute the charges, all while feeling as though watching himself in a mirror. He knew the subtle tricks his own interrogator was using, he knew that the plea deal being held over his head was a mirage — and that one way or another, his imprisonment would end with his signature on the fabricated confession he'd been presented — so, ultimately, he falsely confessed to the standard battery of charges applied to members of the NKVD who had been unfortunate enough to outlive their usefulness: sabotage, espionage, immoral conduct.
He was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head a week later.
And then he woke up.
IV. STOP WHERE YOU STAND / YOU HAVEN'T A CLUE WHO I AM
At first he believed that he was cold from blood loss. Vasiliy kept his eyes shut and waited to die — but seconds turned into minutes without a loss of consciousness, and when he began to feel tiny pinpricks of cold wetness on his face, he dared to open his eyes and looked up not at the cement ceiling of an execution chamber but at the pale grey sky, squinting to keep tiny snowflakes from landing in his eyes. He had, for reasons unknown, awoken exactly 76 years after his death.
Perhaps more miraculous was that he had a documented presence as a young man born in the city now known as St. Petersburg in the April of 1985. As he slowly adapted to modern life over the next two years, Vasiliy kept a low profile and trained as an EMT; although he's an atheist, he feels strongly compelled to do something to at least balance out the harm he did in a cosmic sort of way. After two years of this he obtained a work visa and fled to America out of fear of being discovered and executed for what he did, figuring it was the last place anyone who knew of his past would think to look, all the while trying to make sense of how unceremoniously he'd been disposed of and how society's perception of the Great Terror had shifted.
Three years has been enough time for him to very gradually begin to unlearn his Stalinist programming in a psychological process highly similar to the experience of former cult members, but he's still undeniably a white, ethnic-majority male from 1930. He believes that things in the Soviet Union went horribly awry, but he still sees it as a bad thing that it collapsed/that its satellites gained independence; he still carries the deep resentment of the West that he was conditioned to have (and over time it has grown stronger as he's experienced life in an unapologetically capitalist society); his attitudes on women are very progressive for the era but often fall short of modern leftist perspectives (very narrow definition of what's attractive, reacts more strongly to crass behavior when it's on the part of a woman, etc etc).
Vasiliy was born to a lower working class family in St. Petersburg—then known as Petrograd—in 1910, 6 years after Tsarevich Alexei, 7 years before John F. Kennedy. He grew up in crushing poverty with a near-constant state of food insecurity and no access to proper medical care, which nearly led to his mother's death when she miscarried due to malnutrition - one of his most traumatic early childhood memories, and one he associates deeply with the pre-revolution state of affairs. He was four years when his father was drafted at the outbreak of the First World War; Yegor, like thousands of other Russians, returned from the battlefront a radical Bolshevik embittered by what he'd been forced to see and experience in the name of a distant king.
Although he learned to read and perform basic math, Vasiliy received no formal education until the Party sent him to college at 27 years old; from the age of about six years he worked alongside his father, a welder. He was in Petrograd working in a factory when the 1917 women's march blossomed into multiple strikes, showing him the power of collective action at a very young age - as well as the brutality the monarchy was capable of. By the time that Tsar Nicholas II abdicated that year, over 1,000 people had been killed in Petrograd alone, and he'd watched the government that was allegedly there to protect him open fire on civilians in the street. He and his peers came up desensitized to violence to an extreme degree; by the age of seven, Vasiliy had stood in touching distance of a fresh corpse, witnessed multiple industrial accidents, and seen widespread gun violence. This was not unusual for his age cohort.
When the Russian revolution took hold, both parents were followers of Lenin, then Stalinists—which would later be their saving grace during the purge—and raised Vasiliy in the image of what would eventually be dubbed the 'Soviet New Man': atheism, work ethic, stoicism, self-betterment, and willingness to sacrifice. The church had already left a sour taste in his mouth—during his time, Tsar Nicholas' rule was justified not by competence but by the institution of the church, which was perceived as inseparable from the monarchy—so Bolshevik ideals of secularism were hardly a big leap.
Vasiliy started at the bottom of the party hierarchy as a local party clerk cataloguing enrollments and party cards at the age of eighteen, and by 1930, he was a member of Orgraspred, a deceptively powerful department responsible for staffing every position connected with the communist party. When Nikolai Yezhov, also an Orgraspred alum, was promoted to head of the NKVD, Vasiliy was part of the cohort that he took with him to fill the countless positions that had just been violently purged to clear away all of his predecessor's influence.
II. THE CROWD YOU LIKE IS DANGEROUS, I HEARD THEY'RE JUST NO GOOD
He started as a record-keeper in 1936; after about six months of this he was promoted to interrogations. He was initially tasked with playing the 'good cop' typical to the Soviet interrogation style because it was seen as a way to ease an outsider into the rougher work of interrogations involving physical force, but his charisma and perceptive nature made this a role that he excelled in, so there he stayed. Over the next four years Vasiliy successfully talked hundreds of fellow Soviets into signing false confessions against the backdrop of the Great Purge, a horrifically violent period of mass-murders in the hundreds of thousands — a daily task he rationalized by a) telling himself that he was sparing people who were doomed anyway from being tortured and b) silencing any apprehensions with immersion in the extremely cultlike environment of the NKVD as a whole.
Without realizing it, Vasiliy became used to the mixed deference and fear civilians regarded him with. During the early Yezhovschina, the NKVD was revered and seen in a sort of extreme amplification of how soldiers were perceived in the US during the early to mid 2000s. Slowly, however, the tide turned, and when Yezhov's days as commissar became visibly numbered, so too did Vasiliy's—and those of every other staff member he had appointed.
III. LIKE SATURN, THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS CHILDREN
On a chilly April night in 1940, the knock finally came. Vasiliy was arrested in his nightclothes and shuttled to temporary holding, all while in complete shock and denial — he had spent the last three years living in the shadow of a nebulous sort of foreboding while simultaneously believing the things he witnessed daily could never happen to him. When another interrogator assigned to play the "good cop" finally came in to question him, Vasiliy initially tried to refute the charges, all while feeling as though watching himself in a mirror. He knew the subtle tricks his own interrogator was using, he knew that the plea deal being held over his head was a mirage — and that one way or another, his imprisonment would end with his signature on the fabricated confession he'd been presented — so, ultimately, he falsely confessed to the standard battery of charges applied to members of the NKVD who had been unfortunate enough to outlive their usefulness: sabotage, espionage, immoral conduct.
He was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head a week later.
And then he woke up.
IV. STOP WHERE YOU STAND / YOU HAVEN'T A CLUE WHO I AM
At first he believed that he was cold from blood loss. Vasiliy kept his eyes shut and waited to die — but seconds turned into minutes without a loss of consciousness, and when he began to feel tiny pinpricks of cold wetness on his face, he dared to open his eyes and looked up not at the cement ceiling of an execution chamber but at the pale grey sky, squinting to keep tiny snowflakes from landing in his eyes. He had, for reasons unknown, awoken exactly 76 years after his death.
Perhaps more miraculous was that he had a documented presence as a young man born in the city now known as St. Petersburg in the April of 1985. As he slowly adapted to modern life over the next two years, Vasiliy kept a low profile and trained as an EMT; although he's an atheist, he feels strongly compelled to do something to at least balance out the harm he did in a cosmic sort of way. After two years of this he obtained a work visa and fled to America out of fear of being discovered and executed for what he did, figuring it was the last place anyone who knew of his past would think to look, all the while trying to make sense of how unceremoniously he'd been disposed of and how society's perception of the Great Terror had shifted.
Three years has been enough time for him to very gradually begin to unlearn his Stalinist programming in a psychological process highly similar to the experience of former cult members, but he's still undeniably a white, ethnic-majority male from 1930. He believes that things in the Soviet Union went horribly awry, but he still sees it as a bad thing that it collapsed/that its satellites gained independence; he still carries the deep resentment of the West that he was conditioned to have (and over time it has grown stronger as he's experienced life in an unapologetically capitalist society); his attitudes on women are very progressive for the era but often fall short of modern leftist perspectives (very narrow definition of what's attractive, reacts more strongly to crass behavior when it's on the part of a woman, etc etc).