Vaido Kuik

Dr. Vaido Toomas Kuik, PhD (born 12 July 1971 in Pärnu, Estonia, USSR), is a Uralican politician, activist, and professor. He is one of twenty Uralican Tribal Council members who has been elected every term since Uralica's foundation, and is considered one of the founding fathers of Uralica.

Biography
The youngest of four children of Neeme and Kadri Kuik, Vaido was a generally happy child, all things considered, however the stringency of Socialist Estonia became stifling to him when he wanted to fuel his curiosity and explore the world, even at a young age.

He got something of a rude introduction to the outside world thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, which came into effect when he wasn't quite 14 years old, in February of 1986. He began to realise that all was not as rosy in the world, particularly the Soviet Union, as he once thought. Always a curious and intelligent child, he began to seek outside sources to study history and other topics, and would eventually wind up going to Finland as an exchange student for the 1987-88 school year. Having enjoyed the true freedom that that country offered, he found it hard to return to Estonia, but he did so out of ethnic pride, and would graduate in the summer of 1989, just shy of his 18th birthday.

He immediately returned to Finland, and spent a year studying history at the University of Helsinki, during which he impressed his professors so much that they got in touch with professors at Oxford University. Despite his protests that he could not afford Oxford nor did he speak a word of English, Vaido was offered a massive scholarship to go study in England, and to learn English beforehand.

At first he found the English language hard to pick up on, but after meeting fellow Estonians at Oxford during his summer language sessions, he started to settle in somewhat. He waited for a year to learn the language before picking back up on his history studies, and he blew his professors away with intelligent arguments on the histories of many nations, especially the Soviet Union.

The collapse of Communism at the end of 1991 was a godsend for Vaido, who would return to Estonia every summer until his graduation in the winter of 1994, to talk to his parents, siblings, and friends about all he had learned. After spending a bit longer in England to hone his language skills, he returned to Estonia for what he though would be for good.

Literally every university in the nation wanted him "in their system" and began trying to entice him with large scholarships and grants. The Estonian government had their eyes on him as well, and offered him a KR100 000 grant if he would spend the rest of his academic career at the vaunted University of Tartu. He accepted this quickly, and on top of his scholarship money, he earned a small amount in being a teaching assistant. He was quite popular with undergraduate students because he would always encourage them when they needed encouragement and push them to reach their full potential.

His marks in studying for his MA and PhD in history floored his professors. Immediately after his PhD graduation in the summer of 2002, he was hired by the university as a full professor, splitting his time between teaching and doing research.

He became increasingly interested in the history of his own people, the Estonians, and their ethnic cousins in Finland, northern Scandinavia, and Russia, so he would make frequent trips around the area doing ethnographic research.

After three academic years, though, Vaido's teaching ground to a halt as the beginnings of Cataclysm encouraged Vaido to take his entire family and flee to the Canadian Rockies. They lived in Valemount, British Columbia for half a year, long enough to see the world completely change from one of ethnic nation-states to a "splintered mess" of city states. The Kuik family returned to Estonia in late 2006, becoming citizens of the New Polar Order, then later the Finnish Cooperation Organization.

It was his time in the FCO that he learned about the suffering of ethnic Uralics in various regions in what was once Russia. Of particular note to him were the subversion of the Mari people of Mari El, the Moksha and Erzya in Mordovia, and the Livvi Karelians and Livonians in the area around St. Petersburg. Furious, he and a few of his friends, as well as brothers Raimond and Edgar and sister Anna, began protesting this openly. Because of their persistence, word reached the FCO about this persecution, as well as the then usually-neutral CCC, who felt compassion for the persecuted peoples.

In March of 2007, things really heated up with the leadup to the onset of Great War III. After having been asked to talk at a local college in Syktyvkar in the heart of the Komi Republic, Vaido decided to take his protests a step further and actually form an organisation to, so to speak, "do something about it." He gained instant support from Christian organisations, although he himself wasn't a professing Christian yet. It was meeting Dr. Matti Koppinen, a well-educated pastor from Turku, Finland, that began Vaido's road to conversion. Meri Vanhanen, a Karelian, Yevgeny Kolpakov, one of his friends from his academic visits to Yoshkar-Ola, and Lasse Mäkelä, a linguistics professor at the University of Helsinki, would soon join him in Syktyvkar, and the Uralicist Movement was born. By the end of April, he was baptised, meaning that not one Uralicist could claim they were not Christian in some way, until the arrival of Udmurt Jew Ovdey Shlomov.

In the early stages of Great War III, only a few people would actually join the movement, even as the Uralic Purges began. However, moral outrage began to build when the Purges received media attention from TV news networks around the world.

Most of these Uralicists would end up in Syktyvkar at first, and as its first head, Vaido organised protests and sanctuary schemes for Uralics and Uralic-supporting Russians alike.

He made a trip to Ukhta in June to help organise the first "subsidiary branch" of the Movement, whose founder turned out to be well-known composer Nikolay Shevchuk, who while Russian, was disgusted with the actions of some of his fellow Russians in forcing his best friend and his family out of their homes in Ulyanovsk.

In July, he handed the reins of the Movement over to Shlomov, whom he felt was a very responsible and organised conveyor of ideas, but he continued to serve in an active role in the politics of the area, as they slowly gained more and more support.

The following month, he took a determined and passionate Jarkko Salomäki under his wing, teaching him all about the Movement and how it worked. He was quickly impressed by the Sointula Finn's knack for languages and his ideas concerning the formation of a single pan-Uralic homeland, so come October, he threw his support behind Salomäki, a move mirrored by the then-chair of the movement, Ovdey Shlomov, who had befriended the towering Finn.

Kuik watched as Salomäki took the movement he created to the next level, and aside from the Syktyvkar Riots of 2 March 2008, was impressed at how peacefully it was done. Salomäki's passion and oratory skills brought millions to the cause, as well as the backing of several alliances, both overt (CCC, NpO, FCO, SOLID, GR) and covert.

Kuik was not in Syktyvkar at the time of the riots on 2 March 2008, although he was saddened by what had taken place when he heard it from an audibly distressed Salomäki over the phone. The Finn was not proud of having to kill in self-defence, as he had wounded 26 Russian supremacist extremists - 6 fatally - during the riots.

He returned to Syktyvkar to partake in the Three-Day Revolution, which was the turning point in the foundation of the Uralic state. The amount of open solidarity shown by the world's Uralics inspired many, and disheartened those extremists that sought to subvert them.

Approaching noon on 18 March 2008, exactly one year after he founded the Uralicist Movement, Vaido Kuik was the first person to sign the Constitution of the Tribal State of Uralica (Jarkko Salomäki would be last to do so), and he declared the occasion to be "a day that will be remembered forever."

It wasn't long after Uralica was founded that Vaido was asked to run for office in the nation. On 1 April 2008, he was voted in by every single voting Estonian Tribe member, and has not failed to be voted in once in monthly elections since the fact. He is now known as being one of Jarkko Salomäki's right-hand men in the government, especially where infrastructural improvement and cultural policies are concerned.

He met his future wife, then Tiina Tamm, at an early meeting of the Estonian Tribal Board in Vaahruše. They married only four months later, and their first two children, twins Taisi and Tarmo Kuik, were born ten months later, in May of 2009. More recently, Tiina gave birth to their third child, Konstantin Kuik, in Syktyvkar, where the family now lives.

Vaido has been heavily involved with Uralica's education system, having served as chair to two different departments of study - History and Uralic Studies - since taking on tenure at Uralikan Yliopisto. He teaches classes in those two subjects as well as classes in Estonian history and literature.

Trivia

 * His oldest brother Raimond is the manager of the Uralican men's national football team. He himself "likes football, but prefers ice hockey," having lived in Finland for so long.
 * His favourite movies include "Schindler's List," "The Fear Factory: The Untold Story," and "The Passion of the Christ."
 * He is a fan of Sirkka Numminen and Nikolay Shevchuk, and also lists Bane of the Machine as a "guilty pleasure" of his.
 * It was his idea to celebrate the release of the New Polar Order from its crushing War of the Coalition terms as a national holiday, called "Polar Day."