Sergei Podovsky

**Sergei Podovsky** is a Soviet Helicopter pilot.

Sergei T. Podovsky was born on January 6, 1935 in Leningrad, USSR. He graduated from the Soviet Military Academy in 1957. He became a helicopter pilot with the 11th Soviet Regiment Vladivostok from 1957 to 1960. He then was a military advisor to the Vietnamese People's Air Force from 1960 to 1964 before serving as a military advisor for North Korea from 1964 to 1968, when he was promoted to Major. He then returned to the Kremlin in Moscow to work for the Soviet Military Intelligence Beauru from 1968 to 1970. He then returned to Hanoi, North Vietnam to work as an interrogation officer for the Hoa Lo Prison. He was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in 1972. Podovsky was with the Army of the Soviet Union, in the special forces, which took him to Cambodia, China and North Vietnam. Podovsky was fluent in five languages: Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, English and Russian.

Lieutenant Colonel Podovsky, along with his men, are working with the North Vietnamese communists and holding several American soldiers prisoner in a prison camp. Podovsky is first seen when Rambo and an escaped prisoner are captured and sent to a Viet Cong prison camp. Podovsky arrives in a helicopter and pulls John Rambo out of a sewage pit after Lieutenant Tay strikes him. Podovsky takes Rambo's own knife and scrapes a leech off of Rambo's chest and has Rambo cleaned up. With his best Russian soldier, Sgt. Yushin, Podovsky interrogates Rambo, first attempting to sweet-talk Rambo into radioing Marshall Murdock and instruct him to never conduct further searches for prisoners of war. Rambo refuses to comply with this and reads the radio transcript of when Murdock gave the orders to betray Rambo when he needed him most. When Rambo still refuses to do this, Podovsky orders Yushin to torture Rambo. Yushin does this by electrifying Rambo on an improvised electrocution device made up of a metal bedspring mattress. When this fails, Podovsky pulls Rambo's own knife from a fire and has Yushin drag the heated blade along his cheek, cutting the skin and instantly cauterizing the wound. Rambo only agrees to comply to Podovsky's demands when Podovsky orders Yushin to put the heated blade into another POW's eyeball. Instead of giving the demands, Rambo sends a threat to Murdock telling him he will come after him and fights his way out of the room with the help of his partner, Co Bao. Podovsky sends Lieutenant Tay and some of his men into the jungle to kill Rambo. This fails, but Co is killed instead and Rambo flies into a rage and kills Tay and all of his men. In response, Podovsky sends a number of Russians to find and kill Rambo. After Sgt. Yushin is killed by Rambo, Podovsky decides to take it upon himself to kill Rambo and flies off in his helicopter. After an intense helicopter chase through the jungles, Rambo's chopper is badly damaged from enemy fire and appears to crash land in a river. Podovsky flies down by the downed helicopter and sees that Rambo is seemingly dead. As Podovsky is about to finish the job with a missile, Rambo pulls a hidden M72 LAW rocket launcher and fires it through a hole in the windshield at Podovsky's helicopter, blowing him to bits. In the novelization, Rambo instead grabs him and throws him into the sewage pit where he presumably drowns.