Ivan 'Russia' Braginski

IVAN (RUSSIA) BRAGINSKI

{I’d end my days with you in a hail of bullets}

I Feel Like We're Summoning The Devil

[/color]:[/b]Ivan Braginski
Nickname/Alias: Vanya, Mother Russia, Commie(he doesn’t like this one he’s not communist)
Gender:male
Character Type: (Country)
Country or Country of Origin:Russia
Canon or Original:Canon
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When I look into all of your stupid faces

I think how fun it will be to pound them into dust

[/color]:[/b]Violet
Hair:White
Height and Weight:6’0 180
Other Distinguishing Features:A scarf he always wears

Overall Appearance: Ivan is a tall nation standing at six foot tall, and usually has to look down at the rest of them being that quite a few are rather tiny. His hair is the color of the snow, and his eyes are a violet purple. Usually he’s found wearing his military coat, boots, thick pants, and a scarf. He nearly never takes the scarf off, only when he’s sleeping and sometimes he even forgets to remove it. Most of the time he’s fake smiling, even if it does appear to be a bit creepy in nature.

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Man up or I'll beat you with my peace prize!

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[li]Vodka
[/li][li]Sunflowers
[/li][li]His Sisters
[/li][li]Hockey
[/li][li]Pickaxes
[/li][li]The arts

Dislikes:
[/li][li]Being Controlled
[/li][li]Being Lonely
[/li][li]Taking off Scarf
[/li][li]Being called Commie(He’s Socialist Dammit!)
[/li][li]Belarus when she’s cray cray
[/li][li]General Winter
[/li][li]Cheap Vodka
Strengths:
[/li][li]Largest Country
[/li][li]Very strong – He carries around a pickaxe all day and is a world superpower…pretty easy to figure out.
[/li][li]Can cause ‘curses’
Weaknesses:
[/li][li]Fairly Emotionless – Being under an oppressive rule for a very long period of time forced his emotions away and he doesn’t quite remember what they are like anymore. He tries, but it’s usually fake and mostly just creepy.
[/li][li]Insane – Does this even need an explanation, the man is insane and that makes him both unpredictable and dangerous as all hell.
[/li][li]Doesn’t realize how cruel he actually is/can be.
Fears:
[/li][li]General Winter
[/li][li]Everyone leaving him forever and ever
Secrets:
Any Quirks/Habits:
[/li][li]”Become one with mother Russia, Da?” <- habit of saying that
[/li][li]Carries around a pickaxe
[/li][li]Drinks, an atrocious amount of vodka
[/li][li]Smiles creepily
Overall Personality: Russia is a very cruel nation without realizing he is. It’s because of how oppressed he was in the past that he acts this way, and while it was a long time ago the number of wars and amount of pain he’s had to go through made it hard to bounce back from. Thus now he’s a bit cruel in a childish way without even noticing that he is. He just tries to smile because that is supposed to be a friendly gesture isn’t it, and he just kind of wants a friend. He’s sick of being alone, and while he was used to it at one point, he had grown very used to company, and now they’re all gone. That doesn’t stop him from making quite mean remarks, but that’s mostly because he doesn’t actually realize they’re mean in the slightest. After all, how could a person misinterpret becoming one with him, unless they are his sister Belarus because he wants no part of ‘becoming one’ with her.

Really, he’s just fairly emotionless and quite a bit insane from all the war and pain he’s had to face. It’s cracked his sanity pretty much beyond repair, and so he spends quite a bit of time bitter and drinking by himself. He does try to be better, but it always ends up as creepy. He also is fairly good at manipulating people to do what he wants because of the influence he had over other nations for years. He doubts they will have forgotten about that being that he’s a hard person to forget. Whether that’s a good thing or not is really not one of his concerns, it’s just a matter of him being able to influence still. Really, he’s just vaguely childish in nature and does a lot of things that don’t actually make much sense, like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute because snow is soft and won’t hurt when he lands in it. So yeah, definitely a bucket full of insane certainly.
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I'm the hero!

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Russia came along when the nomadic pastoralists did. They had a number of civilizations, and a young him tended to bounce around between them for visits. Even back then there was warfare, and he often ended up in the middle of battles between them not sure who’s side to choose. It was very stressful for someone so young having to choose sides, and eventually he decided that whoever won was who’s side he would go to. It still meant he bounced around a lot, and now he was more of a prize that was won with battles rather than just someone that moved around like the nomads that resided there did. It was a very chaotic existence at first for the young not-quite country. Time passed without him even really noticing, and he’s not entirely sure when this was going on, he hardly even remembers it anymore because it was so long ago. It did go on for a period of time though until around eighth century BC, when Ancient Greek traders brought their civilization to the trade emporiums where he resided. Time didn’t pass for him the same way it did for everyone else. Most of the time was spent on his own, so he didn’t even notice it because he stayed the same, and not too much around him really changed all that much. Occasionally something new would happen, like Ancient Greece coming for trade, but usually it just stayed the same. He was a small little civilization as of right now, and thus didn’t really know what to expect from the world, or that there even was a rest of the world. He didn’t travel outside of his own territories, and so he didn’t really realize that there were others like him at first, that is, until he met Ancient Greece of course. The centuries passed, and things really didn’t change much.

Things changed once it became AD, and in the third to fourth centuries a new kingdom of Oium existed for a while, and he stayed with them until they were overrun by Huns, and he was taken as a prisoner for quite some time. They began taking over more of his kingdoms were taken over by Huns, and a few different invaders now fought over him. It was definitely quite the predicament and he bounced between them. None of them were very nice, and the Turkish ruled between his Caspian and Black Seas until the tenth century. Finally, those who would be the ancestors of modern Russians were taking over his area. They gradually settled Western Russia, and he escaped the crazy invaders to go to them. They were far more peaceful, and less mean to him, so he liked them much better than the invaders that took over part of him previously. They came in during the seventh century, and continued to grow, and actually he started to grow at this point in time. Rather than nomads who often fought and got overrun, these people were peaceful, and were settling all over what would later become Western Russia. They were rather nice, and seemed to be building a civilization that he might actually be able to call home. Certainly it was better than having to move around all the time, while he did like it, he wasn’t used to people after being alone for so long, and may found him quite odd. Especially since he didn’t grow like the other kids that looked his age did. So he continued to spend quite a bit of his time alone and basically lived right outside the civilization rather than in it. They didn’t understand what he was, and really he didn’t fully understand it himself, so he preferred to stay away and only go into the civilizations when he actually needed to. It was very lonely at times, but usually he honestly didn’t mind it, it was just what he was used to after so long of bouncing between groups of people but never staying very long, and instead sticking to being on his own. Though, he did imagine that it was probably very odd to see a toddler wandering around and fending for itself with the skill that he did. He’d learned quite a bit of things from spending a little time with the tribes in his area, and so knew how to cook and fend for himself in the wilderness where he so often spent his time.

Soon, or well soon for him being that he still didn’t really grasp the concept of how time passed, Kievan Rus was founded. It was established when the Vikings came in and they even had a leader which was whom he ended up staying with because he was their country. It was weird to explain certainly, he was the land and people of which Rurik ruled. At first the man didn’t believe him, but he had to when the boy wasn’t actually aging at all and appeared to be unable to be permanently injured in any way. Thus started the long line of rulers he would be passed to. It wasn’t always that whoever would be told about him either initially, which would make things rather awkward initially, but he was getting fairly used to awkward being that he was still very much a loner. The rule passed down a few times, and soon all the local east Slavic tribes that he had become used to were getting subdued and forced into Kievan rule against their will. He didn’t really like the feeling of his people being oppressed, but he was still only just a child and there wasn’t really much he could do about it. He was thrown into military expeditions that he had to fight during, despite being a child, and they were rather long expeditions to Byzantium and Persia that were relatively unpleasant. He wasn’t very good at fighting, and he was only a child, so it rather sucked that he was being forced to fight against other countries that were a bit older than him. He got hurt a lot, and was usually thought to just be some random child that wandered onto a battlefield. The soldiers rarely even took him seriously, and most of the time he just wanted to return back to what he was now calling home. Soon he became one of the largest and most prosperous states in Europe, but that didn’t mean he was getting much older. At least he had passed the toddler stage now, but not by much. They adopted Orthodox Christianity, and the creation of the first East Slavic written legal code, the Russkaya Pravda occurred. It was the Golden Age of Kiev, and he was seeing some good progress that he was mostly alright with. Adjusting to a religion was a little odd, but he would grow used to it over time. Then, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there were constant incursions by nomadic Turkic tribes, and it caused a rather large migration to more wooded areas. He wanted to go with them, and was tired of having to defend his area from jerks. It was hard work, and he was still just a child so usually he ended up beat up quite a bit, and sometimes even kidnapped for small periods of time before he would manage to escape back to his lands. Soon after, the age of feudalism and decentralization happened. It ended up with the first basically civil war in his country or state, or whatever it was considered at the time. There were four different areas that were doing a mass of infighting, and he was stuck in the middle going slightly crazy. He actually doesn’t remember a majority of this fighting because he was thrown so much and it just got confusing as to where he was at each point. That, and since they were all fighting and he was their country, his mind was being torn into four at the time and three parts were ganging up on the other and he ended up all sorts of uncomfortable from it. He literally couldn’t pick a side, because he was all the sides, and none of them liked one another, really he probably worried the respective leaders with how out of it he usually acted because of it. It did end though when the Mongols invaded and destroyed Kiev. It was nice that he could concentrate again, but the Mongols weren’t exactly nice rulers.

The Mongols were cruel to him, and they conquered and oppressed his people, and made their own state that pillaged all of his principalities. They ruled for over two centuries, and it was during those two centuries that Ivan lost most of his emotions. He just couldn’t show them or else he was going to be tormented by the Mongols. They committed a number of atrocities and it explains quite a bit about his personality being that he was forced to experience that while still only looking like a child. Part of him at least fought against hem and the invading Swedes. Why couldn’t the other nations just leave him alone and mind their own damn business? Just because he was small didn’t mean they should take all sorts of advantage of him. He did his best to escape to other parts of him, but one part always felt the torment they were inflicting, and it did some serious damage to his mentality. He wasn’t strong enough to just stay with them and endure it, so he usually ended up hiding until he was forcibly dragged back and tormented again. It was a very rough two centuries with them to say the least.

It was around then that he met who would be his capital, Moscow. She was definitely a powerful successor state at the time, and even with the Mongols ruling over, influence was asserted and gradually became the main leading force in the process of the Rus’ lands’ reunification and his expansion. It wasn’t exactly pleasant times though with frequently being kidnapped by the Mongols and tormented, and agriculture being murdered by a little ice age. Then, of course, he was also getting the plague every five or six years, but it wasn’t as bad as Western Europe at least. Soon though, they were able to fight back against the Mongols, enough to start reclaiming the territory they had taken from them years ago. They were absorbed into Moscow, and he was no longer being tormented by the very rude Mongols anymore, which was a relief. The damage, unfortunately, had already been done though and so he was a little on the cruel side rather than the innocent nation he had once been. Still, he looked like a child though, so he just came off as a slightly rude kid rather than the cruel nation he was being turned into. It’s a shame really, he could have ended up not so bad if it hadn’t happened to him when he was still so young, but it was too late for that now. Besides, he did get a bit better over the years about it. He was just not much better. He was soon a unified nation under Ivan III(the Great) and the Mongols were gone. He even had a coat of arms now, which was the double-headed eagle. Though, he wasn’t sure how he felt about being considered an offspring of the Roman Empire, but if that was what his ruler wanted to do, there wasn’t much a nation that looked like a child could do to stop him from it.

The first Tsar was officially crowned in 1547, and from there started a long reign of not so nice to him rulers. They pretty much could do whatever they wanted, so it really wasn’t a surprise. At least he was starting to get older finally though. More territory was annexed from the disintegrated Golden Horde, and there was a long and unsuccessful Livonian War against the coalition of Poland, Lithuania, and Sweden for access to the Baltic sea trade. This wore him out, and made his rulers mad that he wasn’t stronger. They just wanted him to be the strongest nation to defeat all the enemies, and really it wasn’t working. Punishing him for not always succeeding only made things worse too, but seeing as he had already suppressed his emotions he just took it. The Tatars of Crimean Khanate even kept raiding his lands along with other allies and burned down parts of Moscow. It was getting slightly ridiculous, and parts of him were being taken over again. He was really getting sick of that to be honest. So thus he trained until he was able to finally defeat the invading army in the Battle of Molodi and eliminated the threat of the Ottoman-Crimean expansion into Russia. The raids from Crimeans didn’t cease for a long time, but there was construction that helped narrow down where they could try and attack him from at least. The Rurik Dynasty ended in 1598 and between that and a famine, things were not going very well for Russia. He was closer to a teenager now at least, but a civil war was breaking out. There was a lot of crazy going on and others occupied him once more, but they were forced to retreat eventually. The civil war though was, like any civil war, rather brutal on him. It tore him apart just like the four fighting parts of him did long ago. Only, it felt worse because he knew better what was going on this time and remembered most of it. Fortunately, the Romanov’s finally took over and he started to recover a bit. He continued to grow and took more territory. He even acquired his sister Ukraine, but not after having to fight the Polish for her. He felt bad that she was stuck, like him, under such an oppressive rule and so his leader took her in and he treated her like his sister, though the Polish did get to keep half of her unfortunately. He expanded into Siberia though, and thus looked more like a teenager than a child so people took him slightly more seriously. That didn’t mean they were really nice to him, and he wasn’t nice back. It caused quite a few arguments between him and his ruler which he usually lost because they ruled and he was just a country.

Russia was proclaimed an Empire in 1721 and became recognized as a world power under Peter the Great. He defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War, and forced him to finally leave his two lost regions. He also made him leave the only thing keeping him from the sea and sea trade. Then he participated in the Seven Year’s War and annexed East Prussia and Berlin for the fun of it. He really had nothing better to do, and he was so used to fighting that he kind of enjoyed it at this point. Unfortunately the next ruler made him give the places back, but it was fun while it lasted. The Age of Russian Enlightenment came, and political control over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth occurred. It felt kind of nice after all the time he had spent fighting them to finally actually get to be mean back. It was also slight payback for the way they had treated his poor sister Ukraine, but he’d probably never admit that. He even went so far as to take over some of the Ottoman Empire during the Russo-Turkish Wars. His leaders treated him like a war machine, and that was what he became. That was how he spent the advancing years until adulthood too, just fighting and bullying other nations as they had done to him in the past. He even took Finland from Sweden, and Bessarabia from the Ottomans. He even colonized Alaska and founded settlements in California. Antarctica was discovered too in 1820 by an expedition that he actually didn’t go on. He was too busy with other things to do actual discovering, though he did bring Alaska and California home with him once they were founded. Russia then fought against Napoleon and France. Why they were trying to take over he wasn’t entirely sure, but he would make sure it was a failure. Well, with the help of General Winter of course, but he doesn’t particularly like the man even if he does help during invasions. He resisted the invasion and General Winter smacked them in the face in order to cause a very decisive defeat and a way of saying “get out now”. They threw Napoleon out of the country and then went through Europe with the war of the Sixth Coalition, finally entering Paris. The officers from the Napoleonic Wars brought ideas of liberalism to Russia, and they tried to shrink the Tsar’s powers during a Decembrist Revolt. His power and influence in Europe was disrupted by defeat in the Crimean war after Nicolas I’s rule ended. He was not thrilled about a defeat certainly, and definitely not thrilled about his influence being disrupted. He liked his influence, and being a powerful nation. He really didn’t like the massive wave of Asiatic cholera either that killed close to a million of his people. That was, drastically unpleasant and it made him just as sick, only he couldn’t die from it. Just felt like he was dying and he got absolutely no sympathy from his ruler for it. Really he just had to assure them that they couldn’t catch it from him and get back to work. The successor of Nicholas I enacted significant changes and spurred industrialization which modernized the Russian army, which had liberated Bulgaria from Ottoman rule.

The late nineteenth century game with a number of socialist movements. His ruler was killed by revolutionary terrorists, but his son’s rule was a bit more peaceful. The next ruler, and last Russian Emperor, was unable to prevent the Revolution of 1905, which was caused by an unsuccessful Russo-Japanese War. Ivan had tried, but it appeared he wasn’t doing very well, and his leader was not exactly a huge fan of that certainly. It ended in a demonstration incident that became known as Bloody Sunday, but the government was then forced to be slightly less oppressive to his people by giving them the freedoms of speech and assembly, legalizing political parties, and creating an elected legislative body. Watching Bloody Sunday was kind of hard on him. He knew his rulers were cruel, but straight out shooting his people was hard to watch. As long as they were mean to him, he didn’t really care, or well couldn’t care actually, but to be so cruel to his people was horrible, so he had a slight hand in making the changes. He really was always torn between how the people felt and how his leader felt, and it was hard to deal with much of the time. Usually though it meant that he just kept his mouth shut and faced it by himself silently.

Ivan then entered World War I in response to Austria-Hungary declaring war on his ally Serbia, and fought quite a bit while isolated from its allies. They almost completely destroyed the military of Austria-Hungary, but there was some serious public distrust going on back home, and so he had to return back. There were a lot of casualties and he was fairly injured anyway, so going back didn’t cause too much of a stir with the leaders this time. Then the Russian Revolution of 1917 happened, and it was a mess of a revolution. The February Revolution forced his leader to abdicate, and they were imprisoned, and executed. That overthrow was a messy one, and they even cut out his heart during it because the originally thought he was part of the family. Figured that it would certainly kill him, and they murdered the rest of the family. He really wasn’t even sure what to make of that. Ivan was just simply torn between rooting for his people to stop being oppressed, and being horrified at what they had done. It was definitely an inner turmoil like that of past civil wars. The Provisional Government took over, and he had to explain again to them who he was and why he had actually lived having his heart cut out of his chest. Definitely wasn’t something your average person experienced every day, and really his heart kind of falls out of his chest sometimes now because of it. They only made things worse though, and the October Revolution occurred and Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government and created a socialist state. He, again, had to explain to Lenin who he was because he wasn’t a child of someone who was in power, but instead just threw the old people out and acquired him that way. He was starting to get used to the explanation by now, and besides he had worse things to deal with like a civil war. Honestly, Lenin probably thought he was some sort of lunatic with the way he acted because he was both sides of the argument and ended up beating the hell out of himself again. The number of civil wars was starting to get a little on the ridiculous side in his opinion, and his sanity is so broken now that he’s really just not even sure how to interact properly without being quite cruel. He does try to come off as nice and smile, but usually it just ends up appearing creepy. Anyway, he had lost a number of his territories in a Treaty, but that wasn’t really one of his main concerns at the moment. Really, he was far more concerned with the Red and White terrors that were royally screwing his economy and infrastructure. Then there was a famine, that didn’t help anything in the slightest, so needless to say he was vaguely out of commission for much 1917 to 1921.

The Soviet Union consisted of him, his sisters Ukraine and Belarus, and the Baltic states along with a few others. His house had become quite crowded to be honest, and the union became the largest in terms of size compared to any other country. Then Lenin died, and Stalin took over and put down all his opposition to take all the power for himself. The Great Purge occurred, and he felt bad for his people once more. They were being needlessly executed for being in the Bolshevik party, or being military leaders and it was getting ridiculous. Stalin launched a planned economy, and people were sent to penal labor camps including a number of political convicts who didn’t like Stalin. Millions of his people were deported and exiled, and a number of things let to a soviet famine. He was returned from an agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse though in a short period of time at least.

Then there was World War II. He ended up in Soviet-Japanese Border Wars, and there were a few failed attempts at an anti-Nazi alliance with Britain and France, so they decided to improve influence. The USSR built up its military and claimed some former territories and ended up with the Baltic states. Most of them seemed rather terrified of him, and he was perfectly fine with that. Then Nazi Germany decided to be stupid and invade. Because, that has worked so well for people in the past after all, not really. They originally did have quite a bit of success, but they were halted at Moscow, and then they were given a number of major defeats, and even drove through Eastern Europe to capture Berlin. They even threw Japan out of China and North Korea thus contributing to the allied victory. By 1945 he was acknowledged as a superpower despite the economy and infrastructure suffering massive devastation because of World War II.

After the war, he occupied much of Eastern Europe, and even East Germany for a while. He then became the world’s second nuclear weapons power right behind Alfred. Then the Cold War started. Stalin died and Nikita denounced Stalin and launched a policy to get rid of all of his movements. The labor system was reformed, and many prisoners were released and rehabilitated. The repression eased a bit, but tensions with the US heightened when they clashed over the deployment of the US Jupiter Missiles in Turkey and Soviet missiles in Cuba. Then, as a sort of distraction he supposed, they launched a satellite into space, and started the Space Age, he even had the first human to orbit the Earth. Another period of collective rule followed it until Leonid Brezhnev became the leader. There was an Era of Stagnation, which economic growth slowed and social policies became static. There was then a Kosygin reform, and decentralized the Soviet economy. He then ended up fighting in Afghanistan, but it drained economic resources and dragged on without actually achieving anything until they withdrew in 1989 because of international opposition, anti-Soviet guerilla warfare by the US, and a lack of support from the Soviet citizens. Prior to 1991, Russia’s economy was the second largest in the world, but during the last few years he was being afflicted by shortages of goods, budget deficits, and explosive growth in money supply which caused inflation. The Baltics then decided to secede, and while a referendum was held to which most citizens voted in favor of preserving the Union a coup occurred and the Soviet Union was disbanded and Communism came to an end. His sisters left him for their independence, and he found himself missing the large number of nations in his house. Sure it was loud, but he had grown used to it, and now was finding himself bitter and alone. Sure his sister Belarus scared the ever living daylights out of him, but that didn’t mean he didn’t miss having her around. Then there was Ukraine, who was kind of a cry baby, and probably a bit scared of him, but she was forbidden from seeing him. The Baltics were obviously terrified of him and pretty much wanted nothing to do with him, so that was out too. He found that really he didn’t have any friends at all, and he definitely missed having some sort of companion. Anyway, Presidents began being elected, and changes towards socialism were made, but it was still a little on the messed up side and vaguely corrupt in nature. He is now known as the Russian Federation.


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You've got it backwards! Backwards!

Hurry up and throw it! If you don't hurry up and throw it, you'll go "boom"!

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Abbey. Go look

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I Summon thee from far away lands, come forth!

You called?

[/color]:[/b]Cal
Timezone:Eastern

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