#oc: mykola sokolenko

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🤥 LYING - are they good liars? do they have tells to show they're lying?

Doing this for Mykola Tykhomyrovych Sokolenko from Anthologia Sovietica.

He was not a good liar. He was not a great liar. He was a consummate liar.

To be frank, this is an unwritten requirement in his job, aka foreign intelligence. Yes, Mykola worked as a KGB officer, a Major General upon retirement, so would it be any surprise that he had a co(s)mically big repertoire of false identities? To list his most frequently used identities, in the Centre he was Comrade Smirnov, in Britain he was Sir Alan Ross Norton, in Ireland he was Séamus de Búrca, in Australia he was Scott Hardy, in New Zealand he was Ewan Muir, and in Scandinavia he was Axel Hansen. But his contemporaries, they only called him one thing.

The Virtuoso.

In his personal life, though, Mykola could not hide shit to save his life (he would not have wanted to anyway). Medea had proven time and time again that she could be trusted with secrets (which is, frankly, to be expected for a doctor) and could handle the more unsavoury side of married life, so Mykola saw little reason to lie about his thoughts and feelings in their relationship. As of his children, Mykola did somewhat deceive them, if you call putting on a stern, distant face after the mother's death qualifies as deception. To be fair, lying implied that a party was not aware of the truth; all his kids saw through the act immediately but chose not to comment on it to his face.

All in all, the stage missed out big time on Mykola Sokolenko the moment he entered KGB.

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Happy WBW! What's the harshest part of your world? Be it a place, a law, something character-created or otherwise, what is just HARSH?

Answering for my WIP Anthologia Sovietica. Spoilers ahead, read at your own caution.

Well if Medea Kurauli's life wasn't some harsh shit I don't know what is.

She was born to Nino Chincharauli (a Khevsur Georgian) and Vakha Aldamov (a Chechen). The girl was the result of Vakha's illicit affair with his tachanka driver Nino, which ended in disaster because Nino turned out to be a traitor and a spy. In the end Vakha had to execute his own lover, in the middle of a battle no less, and unwillingly abandoned a newborn Medea.

Otar Kurauli, the ten-year-old son of the local forest ranger, was scouting around the ground when he stumbled upon Nino's corpse, now irreversibly disfigured by a northern goshawk. The infant wrestling with the bloodthirsty bird of prey, so Otar took pity on her and decided to adopt her, as his mother was also nursing a newborn son and would have milk to spare.

When Medea was about to enter secondary education, she had to part with her hometown for a boarding school in Dusheti and, 8 years later, Tbilisi State Medical University. This obviously changed the girl a lot; for the first time in her life, the highlander girl got to experience new ideas and sights, and escape from the oftentimes-unbearable oppressiveness of her parents, who were very much conservative and sceptical of Soviet authorities. Medea retained some old Khevsur garments and traditions, but generally she found nature, music, clothes, and her siblings the only good parts of her childhood.

War broke out 2 years after her admission, and Medea joined her division as a field medic. Her medical skills, while mostly cobbled during wartime, were very much sufficient for treating battle injuries, and as such she was the division's sweetheart.

Soon the young medic pined for the division's intelligence officer Mykola. But before any of them could confess, their tender feelings were disrupted when Medea sacrificed herself to divert the German’s attention during an ambush in Sandomierz, subsequently getting imprisoned in Ravensbrück camp. This was where she suffered from horrific, unethical medical experiments and cruel assaults by camp tyrants, resulting in a crippled leg she had to amputate (she later used a wooden prosthetic leg). Fortunately, thanks to the courage she showed to the camp's chief when she refused to drink with him to victory of Nazi arms, Medea avoided her execution and, finally, ran from Nazis. She later anonymously submitted a testimony of her time in the camp to the Nuremberg Trial.

After having fled Ravensbrück, she joined as an unofficial member of a division belonging to the underground KPD resistance movement in Berlin, fighting alongside Soviet troops. This was when she met Lev Adler, the unofficial scout of the Soviet division she was trying to contact. They took a shine to each other at first sight due to shared trauma - Lev had also lost his family and innocence to the Nazi Reich. During the Battle of Berlin, Medea was chosen as her underground unit's representative in a meeting meant to establish contact with the nearest Red Army division. Much to her joy, her long-lost lover Mykola was also present. By a stroke of luck, all three survived to Victory Day and went back to the Soviet Union a happy family (Lev Adler now Lev Sokolenko). Afterwards Medea also got 4 more kids with Mykola - Viktor, Rusudan, Lasha and Mykyta - and gradually settled into domestic bliss.

Too bad the bliss only lasted 12 years.

Remember Medea's wooden prosthetic leg? This is where it comes to play. During a business trip to her native Chaukhi mountains, the doctor got caught in a flood. Because her wooden leg broke in two, she was unable to run away in time from the oncoming landslide.

Suffice to say her family never recovered from the shock.

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Hi there, its Athena. Welcome to my new Thursday Ask-A-Thon where its basically a Thursday version of my Sunday Ask-A-Thon where I ask ya'll about your wips: Has there been any major changes in a character in terms of how you created them, to how they turned out as the wip went on?

hi again Athena.

Well, definitely! My two most fleshed out WIPs has gone through at least 4 pivotal changes, each. I'll go with Anthologia Sovietica.

Medea Kurauli was originally a guy called Malkhaz Artsividze. However, because I changed her backstory from a regular Tbilisi urbanite guy to a Khevsur highlander, I had to change her name as well as her surname ending to fit the background (-uri/uli suffixes in Georgian surnames are a great bet that the bearers come from the Northeast highlands). Also, her missing-in-action period was originally much more vague - at the beginning I just thought she'd get ping-ponged between various captors before somehow finally meeting her crush postwar. Oh well, the Vrba-Wetzler Report and the Red Orchestra gave me some nasty, but necessary ideas to sketch out an alternative. One more thing, I originally intended her to have only one birth kid with Mykola aside from Lev, but the more I thought about it the sooner I realised that those two pining idiots would definitely not keep their hands off each other. So, four birth kids it is.

Mykola Sokolenko was originally a girl called Maria Kogut. However, the name didn't hit me the right way - I had always envisioned the character's personality as fierce and elegant at the same time and Maria just wasn't what I had in mind. Also, I changed his backstory from just a nondescript Ukrainian peasant girl into a half-Jewish Cossack boy (I somewhat blame the influence on Tommy Shelby). The assault on his mother by a Cossack was there since the beginning, but I never connected it to a pogrom till I read about Fastiv. And after some obsessive repetitions of the Seventeen Moments of Spring soundtrack on piano I decided that giving Mykola a job in KGB would be very very fitting, actually.

Lev was originally just some random Jewish kid wandering in a nondescript Polish forest in a constant state of fatigue and hunger during the War, but then I got some fridge brilliance and thought 'oy, he can be the catalyst to Mykola and Medea's union!' So I gave him a much more active role; he evaded the Germans and the concentration camps, followed the nearest Soviet division he could find around till they gave up and let him be their scout, and eventually got trusted with establishing connections with local sympathisers because he could speak Polish and German fluently (this boy is fluent in 4 languages by the time he reached the age of 15 he is a chad alright). Note the last part: that's how Mykola found Medea.

Rusudan was originally supposed to be a nurse, following her mother's medical career. However, after some thinking I realised that her flippant, adventurous spirit would definitely feel stifled by the rather rigid hierarchy and heavy workload of the major Soviet hospitals, so instead I let her become a wildlife biologist. That way Rusudan got to be the cool science lady she deserved to be. Shame that her death turned out to be very early and tragic...

Lasha and Mykyta were actually last-minute additions. I was kinda on a whim and wanted to see how far the Sokolenko kids could travel and settle. The answer is very; Lasha ended up a cool lone ranger sort of ethnologist in the Caucasus, while Mykyta ended up following his dad's spying career but worked in a different department (Mykola was in the 3rd Department, his son in the 7th). I also gave them a sweet tooth and unnatural hunger for roasted meat of any kind, like their mother, as well as a love for horseriding, like their father.