Brief Overview
Yuri is a mixed Sakha and Russian man who grew up in Yakutia. He was recruited to serve in the Tsar's army for the duration of the Great War, and when the Russian Revolution broke out in February 1917 he found himself fighting for the Bolsheviks. He met a penniless Russian noblewoman in hiding, Oksana Komolova, and protected her until they entered a marriage of convenience in 1920.
Once their relationship took a turn for the genuinely romantic, Yuri and Oksana teamed up with a powerful occultist and magician named Vladimir Makarov to take down a rogue vampire who was going on a killing spree in Moscow. Shortly after Yuri and Oksana entered a polyamorous relationship with Vladimir, they were all forced to flee the newly-formed USSR for Berlin, Germany.
History & Family
Yuri's mother was a Sakha woman who attempted to be as Russian as possible for societal gain. She refuses to answer to the name her Sakha mother had given her, and only responded to her confirmation name: Svetlana. She married a Russian fur trader named Yegor.
Yuri was the oldest of three boys. While his parents worked, Yuri remained at home to help his grandmother look after his younger brothers, whose Russian names were Artyom and Pavel. He learned Sakha in secret from his grandmother, and the language that Svetlana both claimed to have forgotten and would beat him if she heard him speaking it became a haven of sorts for Yuri. Russian was the language of social inequality, of his alcoholic father and domineering mother, of (later on) the military instructors who saw him as a stupid Siberian barbarian. Sakha, by contrast, was the language of warm kitchens that were full of good smells, of teasing his brothers in childhood, of his secret name (his great-grandfather's name) that his grandmother gave him so he wouldn't lose his connection to half his heritage.
