bio.

[m1895]

VASILIY YEGOROVICH ARDANKIN as the spaceship hurtles out toward the stars, the earth a star behind it, the earnest dog eyes fixed on black space like a door the masters have walked through and will return from, surely. Surely they'll come to get me. Surely they didn't love me all that time for this. vasiliy—vasya to those on that level of familiarity—was born in 1910 and executed along with 36 others on a chilly april night in 1940. his three years in the nkvd had made him a liability—he was by no means a man of any meaningful rank; the position of interrogator was an undesirable one, even those such as himself who specialized in the deceptively rational, compassionate approach that prefaced the use of violence to extract false confessions: please, comrade, it will be so much easier for you if you simply tell me what you have done. all men break under torture, the end will be the same. so, like the rest of yezhov's cohort, vasiliy was shot in the base of the skull in a dim room with a sloped floor. and then he woke up. at first he believed that the coldness was a result of blood loss. he 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 75 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 - then obtained a work visa and fled to america, the last place anyone who knew of his past would think to look. -- vasiliy's personality is inseparable from the time in which he lived and came of age. he was born in the city then known as petrograd in 1910, 6 years younger than tsarevich alexei, 7 years older than john f. kennedy. he was exposed to violence and food insecurity from birth and was four years old at the outbreak of the first world war; his father, like thousands of other russians, returned from the battlefront a radical bolshevik. he was in petrograd working in a munitions factory when the 1917 women's march blossomed into multiple strikes, which demonstrated the power of collective action to him 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, which served to desensitize vasiliy and his peers to violence and death to a degree that is not normal. when the russian revolution took hold both parents were followers of lenin, and stalinists-which would later be their saving grace during the purge-and raised vasiliy with bolshevik moral values: 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 and was perceived as inseparable from the monarchy - and bolshevik ideals of secularity were hardly a big leap. vasiliy started at the bottom of the party hierarchy, a local party clerk - 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 which had been purged. as it stands in 2019, vasiliy does not fit in with russian or american society. his wariness and unwilligness (and, often, inability) to share unnecessary details, traits which kept him alive during the great purge, are now perceived as unfriendliness or extreme introversion. a great deal of the impulses that were rational and understandable during his time — answering the door with a gun tucked into his waistband, refusal to break even small laws through activities like jaywalking — now resonate as paranoia, and they're reflective of a very real pathological lack of trust in the government. he gives police officers in particular a very wide berth because he understands their mentality to a degree that most civilians don't, and he knows from personal experience how deep corruption can run — but this makes him seem slightly 'off' and aloof in his near-daily social interactions with the police through his career as an emt. vasiliy speaks english well enough to communicate basic thoughts, but his english is awkward and he struggles with articles and pronunciation to a glaringly obvious degree. he has a pretty good vocabulary, but it's not extensive enough to properly articulate what it was like living during his time, so he wouldn't talk about it even if he was comfortable sharing it. despite all of this, he refuses to speak russian around native speakers because he knows his russian is very dated, identifyingly so — the effective equivalent of a modern american speaking with a transatlantic accent and WWII-era colloquialisms. he's still unlearning a stalinist mentality even despite coming to learn more and more about what went on behind the scenes, and remains a communist. he's extremely uncomfortable with a lot of modern american consumer culture, which is obvious in the way he conducts himself - vasiliy can't justify spending much money on things like clothes, especially given his salary as a municipal EMT and the cost of rent in chicago, so he mostly shops at thrift stores; he doesn't really go out to eat and his apartment is very sparsely furnished. vasiliy hasn't truly processed the shock, betrayal, and grief of being abruptly disposed of by the same political machine that made him feel valued because it's too much for him to take in — while he's able to acknowledge that he was a part of a cruel and flawed system and is trying to (in his mind) repent for his role in the purge, accepting that he was just as disposable as all the members of the NKVD that came before him is too much of a disruption to his reality to be digestible. ▊