Kirill Zholtok

General Kirill Zholtok (Latvian name Kirils Žoltoks, born 13 June 1949 in Daugavpils, Latvian SSR, Soviet Union) is a Uralican military leader, politician, and general authority figure. He is one of roughly one thousand Latvian-speakers in Uralica, and although he has some Livonian ancestry "going way back" (his words), he is better recognised as one of the foremost political figures in the Russian Tribe. He is also joint vice-chief of the Uralican Army, the first-ever Kunnianmitali winner, and the first and only commanding officer of the Mindphaser Division.

Biography
Born to a Latvian-Russian father and a Russian mother, Kirill could best be described as a Soviet army brat, as his father was a low-ranking officer in the Red Army. His mother tongue was Latvian, but he also had a command of the Russian language by the time he was in grade school, speaking to his father in the former and his mother in the latter.

He didn't have a very easy childhood, and some of this was of his own doing. Early on in life, he showed violent tendencies and a certain defiance towards authority, perhaps due to his father's alcoholism and his mother's seeming apathy. He developed a fierce temper and fell in with a bad crowd, eventually ending up in jail for assault no less than three times. He was finally put in boot camp when he turned twenty and remained there until he had been sorted out, having been threatened several times with being sent to the gulags in northeastern European Russia. After boot camp, he became interested in being a soldier after having seen the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. His instructors at boot camp had noticed this and sent him to a secret military camp in central Siberia (the exact location of which he still hasn't figured out, since the camp was apparently destroyed during the Cataclysm). He was trained to fight the "American oppressor" there, and he picked the tricks of the military trade up so quickly that his instructors had him put in officer training.

He would finally return to regular Daugavpils, a changed man, in 1976. Now a lieutenant, he would only be around long enough to say goodbye to his struggling family - his father's alcoholism had taken its toll on his liver, and he would die within three months of Kirill leaving.