As a disclaimer, Flora wants me to point out that I did most of the brainstorming in this even though I'm say we (girl, take my praise will you.. even if it ain't entirely true ha) "They gonna find out who the brains of the operation was and who was just sitting in her car seat sipping on a juice box while she wrote angst. They need to know this now. It shows us as people xD" So there you go friends. You can blame me for the crazy intricacies of the plot here LOL

So we're back to that first question, yeah? The most vital part of the female OC creation.

How and why are they in America?

Having Sveta be of a high ranking family made that much easier. Sveta's father doesn't see what he's doing as wrong, and has no real idea that Sveta holds him contemptible. With the war suddenly on the Eastern Front, the Soviets must turn to the Allies for assistance. And what father wouldn't want to get their only daughter out of a war zone? 

So Sveta becomes a courier and liaison for the Red Army. Only, Sveta isn't about to leave Russia alone. Here's what Flora has to say about our other little Russian sniper.

From Flora:

I knew that the dynamic and relationship of Zhanna and Sveta was going to have to be different than anything I had ever written before. I would be tackling the poverty of the Soviet Union, the antisemitism and the nationalism of the 30s. Zhanna is a Polish Jew whose parents escaped the "Great Purge" of the USSR in 1938. They left her behind with family friends, under the guise of being fully Russian. Zhanna had been born there and that made it easier for her to pretend.

Zhanna is indebted to chance and luck. She was lucky that she could pass as a Russian native. It was by chance that she met Sveta when her guardian, a tutor in the Samsonov household, confessed to Sveta's mother. It was luck that Sveta and her mother were willing to help her and shelter her. She is indebted to these two. Veronika sees her as restitution for her husband's evil work and welcomes her into their home as an act of defiance. Sveta and Zhanna both relate to each other on a deeper level. They are both being used. Sveta for her political ties, and Zhanna for her background, her family, and her trauma by the Samsonovs.

Zhanna was old enough to know that if someone found out she was Polish, she would be killed. She also lives long enough to see a time when if someone finds out she is Jewish, she dies. She has to pretend to be Russian to stay alive and that is why she is so connected and proud of being a sniper in the army. It's the one thing that is HERS and will keep her safe.

So, armed with her political ties and standing beside the younger woman she sees as her only true friend, they get to America. But they can't just.... walk there. Nazi occupied Europe stands between them and safety. 

That's where I began to realize we needed to pick a city for the girls. Given Sveta's family, it would need to be one of the larger cities. In the end, I picked Stalingrad (now, Volgograd) because it's in the south. That helped us with our decision on how to get the girls to the rest of the Allies. They go through North Africa, specifically Tangier. In Tangier they're eventually smuggled out by the OSS to England. After a stint in England, they finally, finally arrive in America.

This is where I finally got to really dive into how those two questions from last chapter end up effecting her storyline.

1. What is her personality?

2. What drives her decisions?

And this, this is where Zhanna and Sveta diverge the most (at least, down the line). I won't go into Zhanna because I don't want to spoil Flora's character, but I will talk a little bit about what being in America looks like for Sveta.

It's not fun.

This is, again, where I found it most important to really draw from history. I ended up getting into some documents from the Library of Congress' online archives which included information on the NKVD and early Stalinist Russia. The more I dug, the more I realized that my initial ideas were going to work.

The NKVD actively worked alongside the Gestapo before the war broke out on the Eastern Front (aka the Great Patriotic War by the Russians). The NKVD, being a Soviet organization, were the result of the Reds victory over the Whites in the Russian Revolution. America and the Allied nations spoke out and in some cases actively supported the Whites.

Who, of course, lost to Stalin's (then Lenin's) Soviet regime, the regime of Sveta's family.

So not only is Sveta a woman from a country that until about six months previous had been on friendly terms with America's enemy... but her own family had deep ties to the regime that America actively worked against and active ties to the organization of the Nazis that was known for being the most ruthless. 

Yeah, that's gonna go well for her.

I don't want to go into what we have in store for Sveta (that WOULD be telling), but I will say this for anyone who read Alice Klein's story (A Soldier of No Importance & Humanity of the Broken), Sveta is about as opposite as you can get.

When Alice arrived in America, she was called Nazi for being half German. But it didn't take all too long for her to put those to rest (in the most part). Her being French helped, as did the knowledge that she had actually been fighting against the Nazis.

Sveta doesn't have that. In fact, when Sveta was in sniper training, the only war around for Russia was the Winter War against Finland (end in March 1940). Not Nazis. Not only had she not fought the Nazis, but for all intents and purposes, Russia had been like an enemy during WWII until June 1941. I feel like I summed up her experience pretty well with this quote I pulled out randomly for Flora:

She exists in a state of "I hate everyone" 

because she cannot admit what she really feels is "I hate myself."  

Let's talk about why they'd be with Easy though, why the paratroopers at all? 

Well, let's look at history again. 1942 saw the beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad. They couldn't exactly walk back home the way they came (or, take a boat...). The only way to get back to Russia would be with an Allied victory.

So the western Allies over them a chance to train as paratroopers. After all, they're already soldiers. And that, there.

That's our how and our why.

Not only did figuring out a good explanation for how and why secure any sort of plot holes we may have developed without this hammered down. But by finding out the how and why, Sveta's character became exponentially more complex, and her entire character now cannot be separated from the how, the why, or the who she is.

I read a lot of Band of Brothers fanfics that, due to the nature of fanfiction being serial updates, I will end up forgetting who a character is between updates. If I can't remember the how and why and who of a character I'm reading, I'm going to stop. If someone is going to write an effective story, those three elements need to be blended in a way that you can't know one of those answers without the other two. 

Then came the fun stuff. 

Soundtracks. Aesthetics. RESEARCH. 

I'll share some of that soon too.