Anatoly Rakovsky

> *"Tolya Rakovsky was a rabid dog, and he's damn lucky* you *put 'im down. Had he lived long enough to piss off a somebody, his fate would probably've been worse."*
> ~ Theodore Rourke, to Yelena Trotskaya.
>
>

## Introduction

**Anatoly Rakovsky** was the son of prominent vozhd Szymon Rakowski, and was himself a low-level crime boss in Mechanocratic Russia. He would become known in the future as the man who murdered Vasiliy Kuznetsov and raped Yelena Trotskaya, instigating the latter's rise to power and prominence.

## Background

Of the many things he had to say about his son, Szymon Rakowski would always comment that bringing Anatoly up into a life of luxury at his Simferopol mansion was his greatest mistake. The end result of this was that, until adulthood, he never had to work for anything. His education was all but guaranteed, and lucrative employment as the eventual master of the mighty Balaklava syndicate that his father controlled awaited him once he matured. With everything set into place for him, Anatoly came to believe himself as invincible, and he slipped into a lifestyle of incredible extravagance. As he matured, he began hosting huge, lavish parties (often at his father's expense) on a nearly weekly basis, with regular, untethered access to luxury goods – nobody dared deny him what he wanted, for fear of incurring Szymon's wrath.

Aged twenty-one, Rakovsky was established as the boss of the Balaklava syndicate's central Asia subsidiary, based in Ufa, Bashkortostan. There, he built up a massive chain of brothels, loan sharks, protection rackets, slave markets and joywire factories. His involvement in the sex market earned the profuse displeasure of his father, who loathed rapists and sex-slavers. He had always made it a point of pride to keep his syndicate out of the slave markets, a reputation that had just been tarnished by his own son. Anatoly's obstinate behaviour only soured their relationship further; one especially angering incident involved Szymon attempting to use a host of fellow Nightfall Society elites to confront Anatoly and persuade him to restore the syndicate's reputation. Instead, Szymon found himself embarrassed in front of his allies after being berated by his own son for interfering in his businesses. Anatoly rightly pointed out that he had been promised the chance to run things his way, and directly accused his father of going back on his word. Despite all of this, Szymon allowed him to continue, believing that his son's depravity would eventually be tamed by the pursuit of further wealth in more lucrative, less disreputable underworld industries.

Unfortunately for both father and son, Szymon's faith would be dispelled by the events of 2131. He learned that the girl that Anatoly had raped and enslaved two years prior had been taken under the wing of none other than Mir, the all-powerful Supreme Leader. Realising that his son was about to be killed, Szymon personally petitioned the Archaelect to spare Anatoly, and the latter to turn himself in to the Mecharussian authorities. He found himself being rebuffed by both: Anatoly hung up after an angry assurance that Trotskaya was no match for him, and Mir (having overheard the previous phone call) expressed sympathy for being cursed with such a stupid and arrogant son.

Just as his father predicted, Anatoly's insatiable greed had become his undoing. Aware that Trotskaya was coming for him, he planned to ambush her, recapture her and then sell her on the global sex-slave market instead of making any effort towards an escape. His ambush was a miserable failure, the baseball bat he used as a weapon shattering against Trotskaya's armoured skull. Initially believing that he had struck a Drakon supercommando by mistake, he finally realised the gravity of his error, and the terrible consequences that his actions had led him to. Unfortunately, this realisation came far too late, and Anatoly Rakovsky's life of decadence earned him only a hideous, agonising death.

## Personality

Arrogant, depraved, sadistic and unscrupulous in the extreme, Anatoly Rakovsky epitomised the spoiled rich kid archetype like no-one else. Up until his untimely death, he remained steadfast in his belief that if he wanted something, he could take it with complete impunity – including women unfortunate enough to take his fancy. His attitude to his peers was even worse: everyone who worked for him was property, and everyone else was lower than dirt. Even a perceived slight was likely to earn anyone a bullet to the back of the head.

His father was noted to have had an exceptionally low opinion of him, irritated by his narcissistic behaviour and regretting that he never instilled the values of a proper vozhd into him. Szymon reserved a particular loathing for his predatory attitudes toward women, believing it unbecoming of a young man like him. Everybody else tended to hate him outright, tolerating his constant posturing and temper-tantrums (albeit barely) only out of goodwill to his powerful father.

To find any redeeming trait of Rakovsky's character at all would necessitate scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel. If people had anything to appreciate of him, however, it was always his appreciation for fine art and high culture. It was this that allowed him to win the respect of prominent art collector Anzhela Sokolova. Indeed, Sokolova could be considered one of the mob scion's only friends in a world growing increasingly bored of his behaviour. If, of course, the term 'friend' can be in any way applied to a woman who always intended to relieve him of his considerable art collection when his luck finally ran out.

For many who knew him, this moment was always a matter not of *if*, but *when*. In a conversation with Yelena Trotskaya, Hermod IL security chief Theodore Rourke commented that by killing Rakovsky when she did, she actually did him a favour. The only thing keeping him alive was the insistence of his powerful father, yet even that would never have saved him if he had angered someone truly prominent within the criminal underworld.

## Notable appearances

Rakovsky's only physical appearance so far is in *The Absolution*, the final chapter of Crimson Seraph's first volume.

## Trivia

Anatoly Rakovsky is uncannily similar to Iosef Tarasov, who serves as the secondary antagonist of the first *John Wick* film. In similar fashion to Rakovsky, Tarasov is the son of powerful mobster Viggo Tarasov, and instigates the titular hitman's return to the life of contract killing by murdering a loved one – in Wick's case, his puppy. The similarity is entirely unintentional, however, as the author had not watched *John Wick* before creating the character. This is a trait that he shares with Mildred Boughton, another gangster antagonist whose unexpected similarity to Ma-Ma from the 2012 *Dredd* film only occurred to the author when a colleague informed him of it.

A more intentional influence on the character is Joffrey Baratheon from *Game of Thrones*. Like Joffrey, Rakovsky is extremely sadistic, depraved and highly resistant to his parents' attempts to control him when in a high position of influence. Not to mention, this brutality is directly responsible for his downfall.