Mikhail Oktan

Mikhail Oktan (born February 4, 1912) is a Russian military officer and politician who collaborates with the Greater Germanic Reich and leads the All-Muscovite Congress including the Union for the Struggle Against Bolshevism within occupied Reichskommissariat Moskowien.

In-Game Biography

Few collaborators are as total a butt of mockery as Mikhail Oktan is. "Talented scoundrel and adventurer", "utter rascal", "servile, clever fanatic": these are all things that men who knew him have called him. One former associate described him as consciously imitating the appearance and gestures of Adolf Hitler.

And why should they not call him such things? More than virtually any other leading collaborationist, Oktan trips over his own feet to toe the Nazi line on the "Jewish question". He waxes poetic about fighting the "Jewish microbe" with the same devotion as any petty Party prefect.

Oktan almost exactly matches the NSDAP line on Bolshevism—that is, that it is a tool in the service of the Jews, striving for world rule. Having failed in Russia, he affirms, they then tried to spread communism to the West until German arms put an end to it. No collaborationist identifies more totally with National Socialism than Mikhail Oktan.

Oktan insists that Germany, unlike Moscow, was not forcing its system on Russia; it permits the restoration of land, customs, and religion. Regardless of the reality on the ground, he "skillfully combines the qualities of a German officer, an Odessan tradesman, and a clever lickspittle." When these qualities are combined with Oktan's deliberate imitation of Hitler's appearance, it is obvious that this man envisions himself a Führer over the Russian people.

Background

Early life

Mikhail Oktan was born on February 4, 1912 as a son of a mining engineer Aleksandr Ilinich in Gosudarev Bairak (currently Horlivka in Ukraine). However, there are no substantial certificate documents regarding what exactly he did in his youth, so up to the period of World War II, there can only be a wide scale speculation. Most likely of them being that he at one point joined the Red Army during the 1930s after he finished his studies. His true nature would appear when the Great Patriotic War would break out with Germany and the Soviet Union.

World War II and desertion

At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Oktan was a Red Army captain. When he saw how the USSR started to rapidly lose against the advancing forces of the Third Reich, he voluntarily deserted from the Red Army. In 1942, he formed the Union for the Struggle Against Bolshevism under the directive of the German command in Oryol and became a leading figure in the Ostpropaganda department of the Reich's Propaganda Ministry.

Involvement

If both the Globocnik government and the Wehrmacht fail to deal with the Moskowien Disruption following Adolf Hitler's death, Oktan will establish the collaborators as the sole pillar of stability in the colony, forcing Germany to grant nominal independence to Muscovy as a protectorate.

History

Oktan, just as in this world, is one of the most mysterious historical figures, as there is almost no information about him in English, and Russian sources are wildly contradictory. His real name was possibly Mikhail Iliynich or Natko, which explains his weird pseudonym.

It is thought that he was not a native Russian, as a 1943 New York Times article attests that he was not fully fluent in Russian. At various points, he claimed Serbian and Croatian ancestry, pretending to be a Balkan baron who had residences in Paris. He claimed that before the war, he had been a chemical engineer, but partisans and a colleague suggested that he was a Communist Party functionary. He allegedly served in the Red Army for a short time before he voluntarily joined the Germans. In occupied Oryol, he set up an anti-Semitic journal. He organized children's settlements where he sent 7-14 years old kids nominally to raise them in a Nazi spirit, but they really acted as forced blood donors for the Wehrmacht.

After the liberation of Oryol, Oktan moved to Babruysk, but the only definite detail of his life after Babruysk itself was also liberated was that he took part in putting down the Warsaw Uprising. How he died remains a mystery to this day, with reports of him either fleeing from the battlefield and moving somewhere else to getting captured and presumably killed by the Red Army.