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CHARACTER INFO.
NAME: Vasiliy Yegorovich Ardankin. The diminutive he's used all his life is Vasya, but he doesn't disclose this to nonspeakers because he doesn't trust them to use it correctly.
CANON: Original.
CANON POINT: 2019 - 3 years after he woke up in the modern world, 1 year after he immigrated to the US.
AGE: 33.
GENDER: Male.
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. ME AND THE DEVIL, WALKIN' SIDE-BY-SIDE
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).
APPEARANCE: The first thing most people notice about Vasiliy regardless of time or place is his height—if "people" are early 20th century Russians, it's because he's pretty tall at 5'7". If "people" are modern Americans, or even those of the 1960s, it's because he's short. He smells very strongly of cigarette smoke even when he's not smoking; it's in his clothes, his hair, his car, his furniture. More often than not there's a (filterless) cigarette hanging between his fingers or in his mouth, and it shows - his teeth and nails are both faintly yellowed by the habit, although this hasn't progressed any since 1940.
Vasiliy's manner of speaking also stands out. He's relatively fluent in English, which he chooses to speak instead of Russian even in situations like this one, where it'll be automatically translated to a character's native language, because his patterns of inflection and word choices are anachronistic for a man allegedly born in 1985. Put simply, he just sounds like someone from the 1930s when he speaks in his own language. He speaks English with a very heavy Russian accent and his speech is often marked by pauses as he tries to think of the word he's looking for, but he's trying. He barely even received any instruction on writing in the Cyrillic alphabet, and despite good hand-eye coordination, his handwriting with the English alphabet is pretty damn bad, with the clumsiness and crooked lines that characterize the lettering of a kid around the age of 7 or 8.
Upon closer observation, another thing some people from societies where modern dental care is normalized will notice is his teeth: not only are they moderately yellowed from smoking, they're also uneven, and at the right angle one can see multiple dark gray alloy crowns and fillings on his upper and lower molars, all of them replacements of shoddy and non-standardized dental work performed in the early Soviet Union.
Physically, he's in good shape, with above average muscle tone and pretty impressive cardiovascular endurance for a chainsmoker. He jogs and works out in the privacy of his home, partly to maintain physical condition for the physical demands of his job as an EMT, partly because it relieves stress and gives him a small degree of control over his life and a sense of normalcy. He carries himself well, a lot more upright than most people who grew up in later eras, with an air of confidence that somehow carried over from his past life, even though the feeling hasn't.
ABILITIES: Vasiliy doesn't have any supernatural abilities, but he's uncannily good at manipulating people if he chooses to. He's excellent at reading body language and adjusting his own accordingly, playing a role, making people trust him. Even though he was never a field agent, he was trained to shoot and to rapidly subdue people, so he can drop someone a lot larger than himself and is a good aim. He's trained as an EMT-Basic, though he'd only been practicing for about three months before arriving here. He also has a very high alcohol tolerance thanks to multiple years of socially enabled borderline alcoholism and is a pretty good dancer.
SUITABILITY: The theme of socially enforced conformity as its own horror is intrinsic to much of his backstory; despite having lived in a society that was in many ways the antithesis to Santa Rosita, there was still extreme pressure to blend in and avoid attracting undue attention to oneself during most of his twenties. He's also from a very violent time, and although he doesn't think of himself as such, he's pretty damn brave - although he feels fear like anyone else, his collectivist mentality is strong enough to push him to take personal risks not many others would take.
PERSONALITY.
NAME: Vasiliy Yegorovich Ardankin. The diminutive he's used all his life is Vasya, but he doesn't disclose this to nonspeakers because he doesn't trust them to use it correctly.
CANON: Original.
CANON POINT: 2019 - 3 years after he woke up in the modern world, 1 year after he immigrated to the US.
AGE: 33.
GENDER: Male.
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. ME AND THE DEVIL, WALKIN' SIDE-BY-SIDE
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).
APPEARANCE: The first thing most people notice about Vasiliy regardless of time or place is his height—if "people" are early 20th century Russians, it's because he's pretty tall at 5'7". If "people" are modern Americans, or even those of the 1960s, it's because he's short. He smells very strongly of cigarette smoke even when he's not smoking; it's in his clothes, his hair, his car, his furniture. More often than not there's a (filterless) cigarette hanging between his fingers or in his mouth, and it shows - his teeth and nails are both faintly yellowed by the habit, although this hasn't progressed any since 1940.
Vasiliy's manner of speaking also stands out. He's relatively fluent in English, which he chooses to speak instead of Russian even in situations like this one, where it'll be automatically translated to a character's native language, because his patterns of inflection and word choices are anachronistic for a man allegedly born in 1985. Put simply, he just sounds like someone from the 1930s when he speaks in his own language. He speaks English with a very heavy Russian accent and his speech is often marked by pauses as he tries to think of the word he's looking for, but he's trying. He barely even received any instruction on writing in the Cyrillic alphabet, and despite good hand-eye coordination, his handwriting with the English alphabet is pretty damn bad, with the clumsiness and crooked lines that characterize the lettering of a kid around the age of 7 or 8.
Upon closer observation, another thing some people from societies where modern dental care is normalized will notice is his teeth: not only are they moderately yellowed from smoking, they're also uneven, and at the right angle one can see multiple dark gray alloy crowns and fillings on his upper and lower molars, all of them replacements of shoddy and non-standardized dental work performed in the early Soviet Union.
Physically, he's in good shape, with above average muscle tone and pretty impressive cardiovascular endurance for a chainsmoker. He jogs and works out in the privacy of his home, partly to maintain physical condition for the physical demands of his job as an EMT, partly because it relieves stress and gives him a small degree of control over his life and a sense of normalcy. He carries himself well, a lot more upright than most people who grew up in later eras, with an air of confidence that somehow carried over from his past life, even though the feeling hasn't.
ABILITIES: Vasiliy doesn't have any supernatural abilities, but he's uncannily good at manipulating people if he chooses to. He's excellent at reading body language and adjusting his own accordingly, playing a role, making people trust him. Even though he was never a field agent, he was trained to shoot and to rapidly subdue people, so he can drop someone a lot larger than himself and is a good aim. He's trained as an EMT-Basic, though he'd only been practicing for about three months before arriving here. He also has a very high alcohol tolerance thanks to multiple years of socially enabled borderline alcoholism and is a pretty good dancer.
SUITABILITY: The theme of socially enforced conformity as its own horror is intrinsic to much of his backstory; despite having lived in a society that was in many ways the antithesis to Santa Rosita, there was still extreme pressure to blend in and avoid attracting undue attention to oneself during most of his twenties. He's also from a very violent time, and although he doesn't think of himself as such, he's pretty damn brave - although he feels fear like anyone else, his collectivist mentality is strong enough to push him to take personal risks not many others would take.
PERSONALITY.
●Your character has a chance to undo a terrible mistake, but in doing so, there could be unintended consequences for everyone they know. Is it worth the risk? Or should the dead stay dead?
Vasiliy would leap at the opportunity to undo his involvement in the Purge, even if it harmed himself and others. It occupies his thoughts almost constantly, and he would see that choice as being one that he doesn't have any right to say no to: in the interest of the victims, taking that opportunity is the only morally acceptable course of action, because that is, in his mind, the choice they would make if they were around to make it. To a much smaller degree, some of it also comes from a desire to escape the guilt and self-loathing that bears down on him 24/7: three years of this has been intense psychological strain only amplified by how hard he pushes himself in his career as an EMT, and while he wouldn't see bringing back the people whose deaths he played a part in as a way to completely erase these feelings—after all, he'd still have to live with the fact that he did that to other people, innocent people—he would see it as a hope of at least doing something good, something directly beneficial to them, and at this point he'd do just about anything to escape the feelings that plague him provided he didn't see it as a morally inexcusable 'easy way out'.
● If your character had the option to permanently lose the ability to feel certain negative emotions like fear or grief, or permanently forget certain memories, would they take it? What if they will never know that something has been taken from them? Does loss only matter if it's known what's missing?
Guilt and fear drive most of Vasiliy's actions, and at this point in his life not a day goes by without him encountering something that reminds him of his past. His memories from that time are very painful and intertwined with deep trauma, but he would never take that option — he would see it as the easy way out of a burden he is morally obligated to bear. He fully sees what he did as unforgivable, but it would be even worse to shuck off the comparatively minimal consequences of his actions, especially the memory of going through the exact ordeal he was a part of for countless other people.
In Vasiliy's worldview, loss absolutely matters even if people don't know what they're missing. Many of the people he knew prior to the Russian Revolution were so deeply entrenched in the brutal reality of life in crushing poverty that they couldn't fully conceptualize how the aristocracy lived, but they were still robbed of even basic standards of living. That concept remains core to the political ideology he was and is willing to ultimately die for: most of the oppressed aren't even aware of the wild luxury their oppressors live in and may not even fully recognize that they have an inalienable right to a much higher quality of life, but it's still evil that they're kept in such conditions and they are still worth fighting for.
● Could your character ever forgive themselves for something morally wrong that they've done? No matter how much time has passed? No matter how much penitence has been done? Is being sorry enough to be a good person?
This is the set of questions at the core of Vasiliy's story and his existence. 79 years have passed since he was executed, though he's only been awake for 3 of them. He's a firm believer that sorry isn't enough, that literally nothing short of undoing the actions themselves would be enough, but he still tries - so he's an EMT, he saves lives, he keeps a count in his head despite knowing it means nothing and can't erase the suffering he had a hand in. He doesn't think it's ever going to make him a good person - in the mental universe he lives in, once you've done something truly horrible, that's it. There is no redemption. You've been permanently tainted and are now a Bad Person no matter how much good you do, but you owe it to the victims to try to be the least awful bad person you can be.
This sort of mentality can't be separated from the environment he grew up in; although a lot of it is an effect of his own remorse, he was preconditioned long before this to see the world in a binary of good and evil. It was only natural that the stream of his own personal experiences took the channel that Soviet ideology had long since dug.
● Your character has a secret they have been sworn to, but revealing this secret could save the lives of countless others. Is it worth breaking the promise to save others, or is betrayal never justifiable?
Vasiliy prioritizes the greater good to a very extreme degree, and he would absolutely break the promise even if it was something his own parents had asked him to keep to themselves. Though not every 1930s Russian actually was a collectivist, Vasiliy is a true believer - he finds individualism to be appallingly selfish and prioritizes the wellbeing of the herd over any one individual, even if that person is himself. This isn't to say that he wouldn't feel bad about betraying the individual - just that he wouldn't feel moral guilt over it.
Vasiliy still grapples with very deep feelings of betrayal stemming from having been disposed of without so much as a second glance when he felt valued and important up until that point, so it would definitely hit a nerve, but on the other hand, something like simply revealing a secret would be hard for him to take seriously as far as betrayals go. Ultimately, just about anything, to include betrayal, is justifiable to him if it's done for the right reasons: for instance, he's able to see at this point that the Purge was deeply wrong, but at the same time, he doesn't have a problem with the mass executions of Tsarists.
● Has your character ever gotten joy out of hurting others, physically or mentally? If they have, does it scare them?
Out of the hurting itself, no. However, for multiple years he felt that the harm he was doing to other people was in the service of his country and the greater good of other people, so he wasn't ashamed of his role in the Purge and managed to repress any guilt that came up pretty damn well. He liked feeling useful and important, like he was helping other people, and the mechanism through which he was able to feel that way was by playing his part in the NKVD death machine.
Wearing the uniform, having that authority, getting respect from civilians that he never would have dreamed possible as a child far below the urban poverty line made him feel wanted and special, and he did take joy in that. He enjoyed the consequences of hurting other people, and the fact that he was capable to become so entrenched in the NKVD mindset that he was able to justify four years of participation in the Great Purge does scare him. Rather ironically, though, Vasiliy was too faint of heart to actually carry out the violence he was enabling and certainly to take any enjoyment from them: he only witnessed beatings a few times, and all of them managed to break through his intense compartmentalization enough to leave him deeply disturbed.