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Character Deep Dive: Vladimir Chekhov

Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Dec. 28, 2024
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It’s time for another Character Deep Dive, this within the amazing political war thriller The Second Crimean War by the awesome and proliferate The Doodler!

The Second Crimean War is an alternate history webcomic, of a different 1995 where, after the collapse of the USSR, the emerging, independent Ukraine is disparaged by warring factions and the threat of insurrection in the face of a weak and corrupt government dependent on the Great Powers to help it remain a cohesive state. At the same time, the country is struggling to avoid becoming yet another battleground for the remote puppeteering and influence war of Russia vs. the USA- and perhaps also manage to avoid becoming a truly failed state. (This plot is NOT inspired by current events as it was created a good decade before any of this happened.)

Within this harrowing situation, there are two main characters- Yana, a young Ukrainian woman who is left stranded in the warring zone of the country as her family is fleeing to Canada and has to fend for herself. She faces the freezing Ukrainian winter and the specter of starvation when she comes upon the second main character of the story: a Ukrainian colonel, ex-USSR special forces, Yaroslav Kossak. He too is stranded and waiting out the winter. Through a tentative truce, Yana and Kossak team up in the most unorthodox way possible and end up being key players in the settling of peace in a country that has been torn apart by warring factions for far too long.

…and yet, this Character Deep Dive is about neither of them, though it would be fascinating to look into them and their incredibly fleshed out personalities.

This is a Character Deep Dive about Kossak’s childhood and current close friend. Colonel Vladimir Chekhov.

Chekhov is a Russian, from the current Russia, who served in the war USSR waged (and lost) in Afghanistan together with Kossak. Their friendship is as vital to the plot of the story as it is subtle since the Ukrainian government has invited him to give consultation in resolving the trouble the most powerful insurrectionist (going by the moniker Bohdan) is causing them.



Chekhov is an enigmatic yet key player in the entire situation. A quiet yet explosive force to be reckoned with, that we will be looking at today! So let’s get to it:


Basic Character Design

Chekhov is a tall, thin, wiry guy with gray hair in a crew cut. When he’s not in official business, wearing his army uniform, he’s very casually dressed, favoring jeans and comfortable shirts and sneakers. He must somewhere in his mid or late 30s, around the same age as Kossak and he is married to Kossak’s cousin, Talia.

You could be fooled that Chekhov is an easy adversary because he is very quiet and unassuming as a rule and because he looks like he can’t even qualify for the featherweight class. However, you’d be wrong. In both strategy and combat, Chekhov is extremely competent, as is illustrated in just this little scene where he can’t even get a snack in peace:





It’s therefore no surprise that Kossak relies on him to have his back even though they are hundreds of miles apart:



On top of that, Kossak saved Chekhov’s life during that war in Afghanistan, bringing him back to safety after an ambush where the rest of their unit perished- a very traumatic experience that has marked them both, even though they react to it in very different ways (more about that later).



Their being close friends means that we learn a lot about Chekhov’s past from things that Kossak tells Yana about him in key moments of emotional vulnerability of his own. In fact, here’s a great summary of what else we should know about Chekhov before diving deeper in his personality and motivations:



After the USSR dissolved and Kossak became a Ukrainian, Chekhov remained his close friend and family and by extension he also remained very fond and concerned about Ukraine itself.




Chekhov’s Psych Scan

On the surface, Chekhov is a quiet man, always calm, never angry, never displaying emotions. Not only when he has to deal with a rowdy room full of politicians and government big wigs, but even when he’s handling very worrying situations or emergencies that get personal.






According to Kossak, he has always been this way:



But has he, really?

Kossak gives us a summary of how they became friends and how Chekhov basically converted Kossak from being a bully into being his (eventual) friend.



In that scene alone, Chekhov displays an impressive set of behaviors:

a) he talks back to the bully instead of being intimidated
b) he swiftly retaliates when physically attacked with a precise move that causes injury
c) he then corrects (or at least somewhat relieves) said injury.

And that’s after earning the title of “egghead” which I’m assuming he had before Kossak tried to beat him up as he mentions.

And what about this seeming lack of emotionality that he generally displays?

It’s clear that Chekhov has emotions exactly like everyone else does, and quite intense ones at that when the situation calls for it. They range from mischievously happy…



…to intensely worried and frightened (yet able to snap back to calmness)…



…to hugely relieved, happy, and then crushed by his own influx of emotions he’d been holding back once he gets good news.



This sheer range alone is proof enough that Chekhov has a pretty solid grasp of his emotions while being in full control of them when the situation calls for it. Even when he is overwhelmed, he makes sure he emotes in private if he’s not in the company of people he intimately trusts.

Even when he feels he’s in over his head, with immense emotional charge (such as his friend’s life hanging in the balance along with the country’s) he still manages to work with environmental cues and a highly cerebral, precision scan of other people’s words and actions in order to draw correct conclusions- all the while keeping his emotions in check.



It might even be that Chekhov has a bit of imposter syndrome since he consistently believes that he’s not good at communicating with other people or even perhaps ‘reading the room’ properly. He certainly feels Kossak is a lot better at doing that. And while he might be right in that Kossak may have more of an intuitive approach to understanding other people and coaxing them to cooperate with him in different ways, Chekhov has also developed this skill and applies it in different yet equally efficient ways through out the story.

So having laid all that out, all the signs in Chekhov’s behavior and inner thoughts and other inferences, coupled with Kossak’s accounts of his childhood lead me to consider that Chekhov is a gifted individual who displays high emotion regulation.

His skilled emotion regulation may have been honed from his time being raised in an environment (a soviet military school, closely monitored by superiors) where internalizing rather than externalizing your thoughts and feelings is a survival skill. Not speaking your mind, guarding your thoughts and keeping them free within you may be the way to exist in a place where challenging ideas is potentially career or even life threatening.

And while internalizing emotions and thoughts can be a potential risk for mental health issues, Chekhov doesn’t display any of the behaviors that would point me to suspecting he has any. He certainly doesn’t quite qualify for any diagnosis. I can theorize that his giftedness and general curiosity about things (he’s reading a book on beekeeping in Kossak’s memory, though he doesn’t have beekeeping as a hobby, so I’m assuming he is reading it either because he’s curious about it or because it’s more interesting and a socially acceptable way to be unavailable to people he doesn’t like) led him to watch, learn, and adapt his behavior to be true to his own self while also never inviting trouble for himself:




And having said that, it bears question- how about that terrible experience that haunts Kossak and which nearly claimed Chekhov’s life?

Let’s talk about it!

The Afghanistan incident

In one of the comic’s most powerful sequences (and there are many so that’s saying a lot), Kossak is getting tipsy on vodka and gives a harrowing yet spartan account of how he lost all his fellow men and comrades in an ambush in Afghanistan. All except Chekhov, barely.



We notice throughout the story that Kossak has flashbacks from that time as well as other traumatic experiences from Afghanistan, such as witnessing the brutal death of many children. And while we never really see enough of Chekhov to have much of a chance to notice whether he does too, we at least know that Afghanistan does haunt his thoughts just as frequently, even if not necessarily in vivid flashbacks or dreams like it is with Kossak.



And we know both friends grieve for their lost buddies:



I think, however, that of the two Kossak is more likely to qualify for some version of PTSD while Chekhov is grieving (and remembering) more adaptively.

Does this mean that he doesn’t have trauma?

Of course not. Such events are traumatic by definition. How the person processes trauma, however, can vary greatly. And Chekhov strikes me as a person that converts negative emotions into constructive action of some sort, and mitigates the pain of grief and loss that way. It doesn’t mean he hurts any less. But he has potentially more (or different) grieving resilience that protects him from developing a full-blown mental health issue.

It also helps that out of this ordeal his closest friend survived, the one with whom he has learned to accept and receive support. Something that I think also helped Kossak push forward with minimal issues.



There’s a ton more I could say about Chekhov, from the fact his hair has grayed when he's still quite young (maybe genetic, but also a sign of chronic stress) and his sense of humor to the way he has inspiring trust in other people (including his American counterpart Matapang), how his grasp of politics is informed by Afghanistan among other things, how he has an elegant way of throwing his weight around when he must, and how he calmly protects even overenthusiastic mooks from getting a swift end to their careers thinking they have intel when they really only have a (false) confession.



However, we’d be here all day and I’ve already said that Chekhov is a gifted person that checks nearly all the boxes for that giftedness. So we have to move on. Just read the webcomic and enjoy him for yourself!

2D vs 3D

Chekhov is Kossak’s backup in the shadows as well as in the big wig room. He serves perfectly as that support in the plot and as Kossak’s friend. But his character goes so far beyond that, serving as a calm force of steadiness that offers insights into a ton of different elements in the story, from who Kossak is in relation to Chekhov and vice versa to how politics have evolved, devolved and stagnated since the fall of the USSR in ways that, unfortunately, are hauntingly valid today.

Environmental cues

Who Chekhov is can be ascribed to his environment. His friendship with Kossak has served to bring him out of his shell, and in return he has helped Kossak be more grounded and adaptive. Both have on occasion thought “what would (the other one) think?” and make better informed decisions that way.

On the other hand I think some of Chekhov’s remarkable resilience and adaptiveness stems from his giftedness, which is something that may be innate – just not inhibited from his environment somehow. But that’s more of a nurture vs. nature debate, which in the end does boil down to this giftedness being honed by his environment into the powerhouse it is right now, allowing him to evolve into a calm, controlled individual that at the same time is healthily connected to his own self and emotions.

Mad kudos to The Doodler for creating such a fascinating character within a cast of equally engaging ones pushing forward a very compelling plot!

Definitely read The Second Crimean War!


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comment

anonymous?

Banes at 12:25PM, Dec. 29, 2024

Wonderful stuff, Tantz! And wonderful artwork by the doodler!

Jason Moon at 12:15PM, Dec. 28, 2024

I love reading these character deep dives! You do such an amazing job on these posts Tantz! <3

The doodler at 11:35AM, Dec. 28, 2024

I won't say anything (to avoid biasing readers) but Eeeeeee!


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