Lyosha Lagunov
Lyosha Sergeyevich Lagunov (born 31 August 1957; Voronezh, RSFSR, USSR) is a former Soviet army officer, and current self-proclaimed "Chief-General of the United Resistance" since the early 1990s. Since the planet's consumption by the Horde began in 1985, Lagunov has led a small series of insurgencies, initially with a small battalion of Soviet soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. After the Great American March in 1992, Lagunov would find an old American missile silo now simply called "The Titan." There, Lagunov would merge his forces with scattered remnants of the United States Army and Washington National Guard, integrating them into his command and officially forming the United Resistance. To this day, the Titan continues to be Lagunov's command headquarters and residence. He once personally governed the militarized settlement that is the Titan, bringing in migrants from across the nearby wastelands to train up their children for the purposes of growing the insurgency's numbers. In recent years, however, much of these governing responsibilities have been officially passed down to Lieutenant Mikhail Pavlovsky, who considers himself to be Lagunov's best right-hand man. He is reportedly not in great health, and has effectively hijacked the Titan's alcohol production for his own personal ends. He is strongly protective of his only child Kaya Lagunova and has banned her from volunteering in the militia, and reportedly relies on her assistance now in his old age. She is quite openly resistant to him now, which has brought a lot of strife to his personal life since the death of his wife Katerina Belova.
Early life
Lyosha Lagunov was born in Voronezh on August 31, 1957, the second son of a family of urban workers. His father Sergey fought in the Great Patriotic War, once participating in one of the battles that would close the Courland Pocket. Lagunov already had some interest in the military even prior to mandatory conscription, and remained in the armed forces as a career after his required two years were over. By the time he had been promoted to the rank of Sergeant, his division was redeployed to Afghanistan. Conducting two tours in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, his time there was interrupted after he was ordered to return to Moscow under a court martial for disobeying a ranking officer. The nature of what that that might have been about remains unknown, and Lagunov has never spoken of it. The Horde's invasion began on September 17th, 1985, while Lagunov was preparing to rally the soldiers serving under him to resist the court martial. With the soldiers already on his side, Lagunov rallied them into a fight against the creatures of the Horde.
The Horde's invasion of Earth
After the outbreak of the invasion, Lagunov received unofficial pardon from the Soviet state a few days later, granted out of a desperate need to shift all resources towards defeating the spreading infection of the Horde in the countryside. Lagunov's forces practically became his own personal militia, as very few commands could be issued to him and his makeshift battalion successfully. Lagunov's militia would relocate to the Altai Republic, where it would successfully defend the town of Aktash for a little over a month before the collapse of the USSR. A week after the Soviet Union's collapse, Lagunov began ordering the deconstruction of the town, and for the militia to begin moving the people northwards.
The Great American March
By May of 1986, Siberia remained frozen. With no sunlight for months from sustained light nuclear winter, the Horde's creatures had not followed Lagunov's militia north into the barren lands. With next to no resources left, the soldiers and the people reportedly had to consume frozen bark to survive. Lagunov and Katerina Belova would assemble a daring plan to march nearly a thousand people across the northern wastelands toward North America, where they could regroup in a place that the Horde least expected them to be. While it was far from a sane plan, the desperate circumstances at the time pressured the group into going through with the venture. It was a miserable six years of marching across the dead wastes, with more than half of the initial population dying by the time they had arrived at the Titan in the summer of 1992.
Finding the Titan base was a miracle of luck. Lagunov's forces had accidentally run into an operation being conducted by remnants of the Washington National Guard in the area, with the sudden influx of trained manpower winning the day for the National Guard, who were planning this to be a suicidal mission. Being brought back from the brink of annihilation, Captain Mason Parker joined his forces with Lagunov's, and offered the Titan base as a command center to Lagunov. He would then form the United Resistance, and declared himself the military and political head of this new organization.
Chief-Generalship
Since 1992, Lagunov has been recognized by a few thousand people as the Chief-General of the United Resistance.