Piter Petrovich

Posts : 21 Join date : 2012-05-22 Location : UT at Austin

Name: Pyotr Petrovich Romanov
Gender: Male
Age: 17
Represents: Saint Petersburg, Russia
Year: Second

Height: 5'11" (not quite yet fully grown)
Hair/Eye colour: Black/Black

Best subject(s): Literature, Art/Art History, Music
Worst Subject(s): Gym (but has a doctor's note to sit out many activities), Home Ec, Communication and anything related to it
Club(s): Book club, Art club, Band

Other notes:

Reference pic--SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED WITH THIS CHARACTER, JUST DON'T EVEN ASK. /sob (Had to put this as a spoiler, since I cannot post links yet. :I):

_{...But if you do feel like asking: Leningrad has a long history of having its denizens shipped off to the gulags as political prisoners; Stalin was particularly paranoid about leaders in the city getting more popular than him. Also, TB is rife in Russian prisons. Nowadays, Russia is the only European nation that is considered to be a "high burden country" for tuberculosis, ranking just after the Congo. The reason for this is that the conditions of prisons were (and are) unfathomably bad, and unlike in the Imperialist era, the Soviet regime did not bother to remove sickly patients from communal quarters, so diseases spread like wildfire. The biggest epidemic took the form of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. Doctors would start treatment (which takes about a year) on a normal TB patient, but then supplies would run out and the treatment would stop. Consequently, the TB would develop an immunity to the drugs typically used to treat it. After prisoners were released back into society, they spread it to the general public. It's gotten so bad that the prison system actually has special "TB camps" now, which are basically where patients get sent to go and hopefully just die, since they haven't got the resources to treat them. Also, to give you an idea of how high the incarceration rate is/was in Russia: one in every three Russian men is in or has been to prison at least once. Sometimes for stupid things--I have heard of cases where people got years behind bars for stealing jars or cucumbers. And it hasn't improved with time: under Stalin, 9 in every 10 people that were convicted were sentenced. Under Putin, 99 in every 100 people are. And even if they aren't, one has no right to a speedy (or fair) trial in Russia, so even if a person is found to be totally innocent, they may have already spent months waiting in prison for their hearing. (And conditions are so deplorable that one could easily die before ever even getting shipped off to a Siberian labor camp--which still exist, by the way--anyways.) Spending time in the Russian slammer tends to introduce people to crime more than it deters them from it, and subsequently, many end up going back again and again. And get introduced to MDR-TB, again and again.

...My historiography professor seems to think that my niche as an academic is going to be the history of tuberculosis in Russian prisons. Apparently, that is all I talk about, these days-- :'D /shotdown}