Character Name: Vasiliy Ardankin Experience: Vasiliy is a professional and very talented as an interrogator. He was a career interrogator for about four years in the Russian NKVD during the Great Purge and the couple of years that followed, with easily over a thousand rapid-fire interrogations under his belt and hundreds of successfully elicited confessions. He was trained by the best - the Soviet secret police - and his natural charisma and very high social intelligence, combined with an uncanny control over his own body language and ease of deception, gave him a natural predilection to excel at the kind of work that involved emotionally manipulating and deceiving others. He was one of the handful of interrogators during that time period who successfully worked by only posing as a sympathetic, down-to-earth maverick different from the other interrogators, someone who felt sorry for the prisoners and wanted to get them the lightest sentence possible—someone there to throw them a rope to get out of the situation, just as he acts here.
Approach: Vasiliy approaches this with the distinctly Soviet style he used for four years - he gets pulled in to mend the Forest Talker's injuries, initially, and acts very different from the others, not trying to get any answers, just gently addressing his injuries. When he steps back, he lets the rough interrogation and handling happen for a little while, then intervenes with the impression of a troubled bystander, taking over for Levi and establishing himself as a sympathetic figure - he checks the Forest Talker for injuries, patches everything sustained during the interrogation up, then offers the man a smoke. In an old interrogator's trick, he pulls the gun from where he has it tucked under his shirt in the front of his pants and sets it down between them, disassembling it and rendering it useless to further establish himself as a nonthreatening presence. He doesn't react to the surliness or even the spitting or any attempts at violence.
He introduces himself—Vasiliy, but everyone calls him Vasya (if the Forest Talker knows anything about Russian culture, he's being quite casual here)—and assures him that he's not going to let anyone hit him again. Keeping his voice low as though for the other interlopers to not hear, Vasiliy leans forward and very candidly explains that look, he agrees with them on the development of the area - that part is obviously genuine - but a lot of these people are getting antsy and coexistence is becoming less and less likely. He explains that he doesn't really see what abducting someone who isn't in charge is really expected to do, but that the people probably did it because they're desperate to live, and that he wants to get the Forest Talker back home before this goes too far and the consequences can't be reversed. He says that he thinks that if the Forest Talker offers them something, something inconsequential to them but something that 'these people' might not know, that they will probably be satisfied enough to let him go and they can all get out of a situation that never should have happened.
Questions:
1) He explains that he has a friend here, who is continuously sick, and that he's adopted an abandoned caribou calf that was left to die in the cold by its mother, and they've named her Lyudmila. They aren't all looking for supplies to push out the Forest Talkers - just to get by. Does he know where any more medical equipment might be? Anything that might help Lyudmila and his friend stay alive? 2) He says he trusts that the Forest Talker knows about Ecology more than he does - does he know why the animals are acting so strange? 3) And he tells him that he knows the old residents didn't listen to whatever the Forest Talkers warned them about—and says that he wants to listen. 'What do you know about this place?'
uh oh sisters... time to shine!!
Experience: Vasiliy is a professional and very talented as an interrogator. He was a career interrogator for about four years in the Russian NKVD during the Great Purge and the couple of years that followed, with easily over a thousand rapid-fire interrogations under his belt and hundreds of successfully elicited confessions. He was trained by the best - the Soviet secret police - and his natural charisma and very high social intelligence, combined with an uncanny control over his own body language and ease of deception, gave him a natural predilection to excel at the kind of work that involved emotionally manipulating and deceiving others. He was one of the handful of interrogators during that time period who successfully worked by only posing as a sympathetic, down-to-earth maverick different from the other interrogators, someone who felt sorry for the prisoners and wanted to get them the lightest sentence possible—someone there to throw them a rope to get out of the situation, just as he acts here.
Approach: Vasiliy approaches this with the distinctly Soviet style he used for four years - he gets pulled in to mend the Forest Talker's injuries, initially, and acts very different from the others, not trying to get any answers, just gently addressing his injuries. When he steps back, he lets the rough interrogation and handling happen for a little while, then intervenes with the impression of a troubled bystander, taking over for Levi and establishing himself as a sympathetic figure - he checks the Forest Talker for injuries, patches everything sustained during the interrogation up, then offers the man a smoke. In an old interrogator's trick, he pulls the gun from where he has it tucked under his shirt in the front of his pants and sets it down between them, disassembling it and rendering it useless to further establish himself as a nonthreatening presence. He doesn't react to the surliness or even the spitting or any attempts at violence.
He introduces himself—Vasiliy, but everyone calls him Vasya (if the Forest Talker knows anything about Russian culture, he's being quite casual here)—and assures him that he's not going to let anyone hit him again. Keeping his voice low as though for the other interlopers to not hear, Vasiliy leans forward and very candidly explains that look, he agrees with them on the development of the area - that part is obviously genuine - but a lot of these people are getting antsy and coexistence is becoming less and less likely. He explains that he doesn't really see what abducting someone who isn't in charge is really expected to do, but that the people probably did it because they're desperate to live, and that he wants to get the Forest Talker back home before this goes too far and the consequences can't be reversed. He says that he thinks that if the Forest Talker offers them something, something inconsequential to them but something that 'these people' might not know, that they will probably be satisfied enough to let him go and they can all get out of a situation that never should have happened.
Questions:
1) He explains that he has a friend here, who is continuously sick, and that he's adopted an abandoned caribou calf that was left to die in the cold by its mother, and they've named her Lyudmila. They aren't all looking for supplies to push out the Forest Talkers - just to get by. Does he know where any more medical equipment might be? Anything that might help Lyudmila and his friend stay alive?
2) He says he trusts that the Forest Talker knows about Ecology more than he does - does he know why the animals are acting so strange?
3) And he tells him that he knows the old residents didn't listen to whatever the Forest Talkers warned them about—and says that he wants to listen. 'What do you know about this place?'