Name: Perevalova Innokentievna (formerly Yuri Innokentiev, I don't know the capacity in which trans people can formally change their names in TTL Russia)
Nationality: Russian
Ethnicity: Russian father, Kazakh mother
Brief Physical Description: 170cm, slight build, black shag cut hair, brown eyes, prosthetic right leg, has been on HRT for two years as of 2008
Brief Bio: Born 5th August 1980 in Volgograd. As a child, had membership in the Little Octobrists, and later in school took interest in Russian literature and in philosophy. Her father shot himself in 1994 after losing his metalworking job in the Yeltsin years and developing an alcohol addiction. Spent a few years working at a warehouse for All-Russia Black Sea Port company, then joined the army and participated in the 2002 Georgia war, being honourably discharged after having her lower right leg destroyed by a grenade she knelt on to protect her squad. She then went to Russian State University for the Humanities to do a degree on political philosophy, writing her paper on the Russian constitutional reforms since 1991. It was here that she began to more openly explore her gender identity, leading to her coming out as a trans woman in 2005, losing many of her friends from childhood and the army in the process, but her mother gradually came to accept her. She also started entering politics, joining the campaign for the official casualty toll for the Chernobyl disaster to be revised and compensation distributed. This has expanded to work protesting perceived overreaches of domestic security policy and of the government/constitutions anti-democratic elements, raising awareness of peoples political and economic rights, and assisting with a public pressure campaign in the vote to adopt the Declaration of Indigenous People's Rights. As of 2008 she runs a political blog that is rapidly gaining in traffic, with videos she made during the 2008 US election cycle about President Guliani's time as Mayor of New York and the American political response to 9/11, and of the history of LGBT rights in Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union, both going viral in both Russia and the West. People who know her tend to agree that with her war hero status, political record, and her personal charisma and empathy to regular people she meets, she has the potential to reach the Duma if she commits to a political career, if she could overcome or sidestep the nation's overall lukewarm-to-hostile feelings toward trans people. She might join the ranks of an existing party, but the major ones vaguely compatible with her have issues (she's spent her career criticising Yabloko figures, the Communists are too statist and seem a sinking ship, and EUP are just too centrist on domestic policy). She might join the Greens and become within it a relatively strong figure for foreign policy, matters on the constitution and security law to help it grow out of its niche as an environmentalist party, or she might co-found a new, progressive Eurasianist party with likeminded allies to cater to a reaction against overt religiosity and the anti-market sentiment of the post-financial crash world, while accepting moderate monarchism.
Main Goal: For Russia to continue to socially liberalise and have its democracy strengthened.
Secondary Goals:
1. Increase support for a cooperative-based economy and reduce wealth inequality, moving the Russian economic leftwing away from its statist past.
2. Have Russia continue improving links with Europe, to both reduce Russia's defence commitment in the West and import West Europes values of strong human rights.
3. Shift the focus of national policy to maintain demographics away from a reliance on restricting abortion and towards inviting immigration and a France-style programme of natal care that compensates and assists women for having children. Have the government take a role in the Egypt refugee crisis as part of this goal.
4. Support the reforming and liberalising of the Middle East, ideally by diplomatic and economic means rather than attempting to do so by military force, particularly helping reformist and human rights groups in Iran.
5. Promote secular/humanist thought, combat religious fundamentalism and extremism. Stop and ideally reverse Russia's growing religiosity.
6. That Eurasia, Europe, and the new Middle East form a "progressive triangle" alliance to counter the US and the growing China.
7. Have Russia detach itself from the alliance with China as it solidifies these other alliances. Look to Africa for trade and investment opportunities to replace China's economic role with Russia and to counter Chinese influence there (forming a pact in this regard with Britain and maybe France if possible/necessary).
Stances: Pro-democracy, and pro-social liberty. Rights for women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ, and disabled and mental health victims. In private she is sympathetic to market socialism, but watching the fall in popularity of the Communist party she, for now, projects a more moderate position. She hates neoliberalism, considering its outcomes the thing that destroyed her father, and is by extension prejudiced against the US political class for submitting Russia and others to 'shock therapy'. She isn't against wars that would combat reactionism and advance progressivism, but she has admitted to friends in private that in the situation where a political cause she joins in the future adopts an anti-war position, she'll probably accept defending that position even if she disagreed with it, in order to protect that causes reputability as a movement patriotic to Russia (it's harder to argue when the war hero says a war will be bad). She sees China's rise to become a rival to the US as inevitable, and wants to avoid the world being divided between the capitalist, conservative Christian America and the autocratic party-state of China, so that, in addition to her mixed background, makes her sympathetic to Eurasianism. While her political instincts ward her off from taking a confrontational and abrasive stance against people being religious in general, she is dedicated to minimising religions role in politics as much as she can, and wishes to consign it to an increasingly private role. She also has no emotional investment in the monarchy, but accepts it as a harmless status quo and perceives it as useful in reducing, in a small way, the allure of highest-level politics to narcissists.