Okay, I really really want to write a character analysis on Makarov but there's surprisingly a lot you can talk about because he's actually very rich and full of hidden depth. I'll be doing this in parts and for now I'm going to cover his upbringing.

Okay let's get this show on the road.

At first glance, Makarov feels like a surface level villain. To a lot of people, he has no other motivations other than being “power-hungry” and being an Ultranationalist but I think he has a lot of depth that canon only gives us crumbs of. So what do we know about him? He was born in 1970, Ivanovo Russia (USSR at the time) during Cold War times. He was born during the times of ‘detente’ from 1970-1979 however by the end of the 1970s, detente essentially ends on an incredibly bad note as it opens up with Reagan calling the USSR an ‘evil empire’, openly backed anti-communist freedom fighters and Soviets launching on attack in Afghanistan. People were terrified of nuclear war, especially because of the War Fear in 1983. As a young teenager, he would have been highly indoctrinated by propaganda and anti-Western sentiment. Now, this is fairly obvious and we get into the big question– why is Makarov like that? And it is a fair question. Many young boys were influenced by propaganda, hell, Yuri too but why did Makarov turn out *that* way specifically? It’s a concoction of things really. Makarov most likely has an extremely low empathy baseline, you couple that with very high intelligence, ambition, add propaganda, war scares, Western presidents calling your homeland an ‘evil empire’ and dehumanisation of your opponents at a formative age- its all essentially a cocktail for that. We don’t exactly know when he graduated from Frunze Military Academy, the wiki implies it had to be around when he was 18-19 because the sequence is that he graduated as a captain in the Russian army and then he was stationed in Berlin in 1989 but the actual way that the Frunze Military Academy works is that you are eligible at 24-30. He was either part of an accelerated program if we want to be generous to Activision or we can accept that the devs were ignoring real-life logistics but hey, either way, it’s a 3 year course so if he really did graduate while he was 18-19, he joined up when he was around 16-17 years old. An indoctrinated and gifted teenager was hyper-militarised, immersed in discipline, combat theory, tactics. This all begins to paint a very clear picture about Makarov’s childhood and teenage years and it is likely that by this point, warfare and by extension, violence was becoming normalised for him, seeing it as routine. By the team he reached adulthood, violence wasn’t just a tool, it was probably how he experienced and understood the world. And then of course, it’s implied that fresh out of graduation he is a captain and stationed in Berlin during the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Imagine you are freshly 19, you are a captain and you are already in command, expected to make decisions that affect your men’s lives and not only that but you’re part of the 98th Guards Airborne Division of the VDV, y’know an elite airborne infantry unit. Of course, you’re going to come out of it war-hardened, and fundamentally changed. Makarov would have formed his identity through this event because it’s implied to be the first time he was deployed in an active duty zone. Power, fear and strategy would have become his baseline reality. Makarov was trained for war but seeing it in reality it would reinforce his desensitisation and it would fully solidify the idea that violence and control are constants. From what it looks like, Makarov didn’t get a simple civilian life during his teenage years, and experiences that would normally shape adolescence were largely replaced by militarisation, propaganda and exposure to violence and by the time he’s an adult, he sees the world entirely through the lens of warfare, strategy and control, like we see in canon. Makarov isn’t like that just because. He is the way that he is because it’s the only way he knows how to be.

Role as a terrorist So. Terrorism. We’ve got to start from the start again. Let’s think about it. Indoctrination, the Cold War getting messy while he’s in his early teens, long conditioning in violence, strategy and control. Desensitisation, ruthless efficiency that causes him to commit ‘cleansing raids’ in Chechnya. That’s a long list there and his perception of the world -> violence, warfare, bloodshed is also a thing. Now, when the Russian government boots him out of the Armed Forces in 1996 after the UN investigation, the structure of military life disappears but the need to exist through conflict doesn’t. His whole life is violence. He ultimately can’t exist outside of warfare and bloodshed because he doesn’t know how to. He has never had a civilian life (if we consider Activision’s storytelling), he hasn’t had the luxury of existing in a ‘normal’ framework. Terrorism is inevitable for him when we think about it in this lens and it becomes almost his way of preserving his sense of self. If Makarov stops waging war then he stops being Makarov. Ultranationalism, vendettas, are, yes, what he genuinely believes in. He was indoctrinated from a young age, he definitely has genuine patriotism and has extremist ideology but that’s just scratching the surface because the emotional core, what really drives him and keeps him fully engaged in life is the violence in warfare. Makarov can’t conceptualise peace, so he didn’t settle after being booted out of the military. So yeah, in the end, terrorism isn’t just a choice that Makarov makes, it’s a form of self-expression and exercising his identity. It’s almost sad in a way, when you think about it.  Religiosity Another part I do want to touch on is his religiosity. He is likely Orthodox Christian (probably raised as such) and despite feeling like this is probably cultural scaffolding, there is personal conviction in his faith. Makarov’s religious-stance is very fascinating. He seems to operate under the belief of violence being ‘permissible’ and even righteous. Before No Russian he says that God is on their side, it feels like a justification because it ultimately is. He’s using the concept of God as a tool, not a constraint because he doesn’t have limits. “God is on our side” is very much him confirming the rightness of his jingoism and intentions. Now here’s the interesting part, he’s fairly paradoxical, yes, according to his statements he probably sees God as a cosmic witness however, he also seems to view Hell as if it’s an inevitable outcome (“I’ll see you in Hell” - to Captain Price). It’s fairly interesting, it reads as if Hell isn’t a deterrent because he already lives in ‘Hell.’ War, death, terror is how he views the world. He embodies violence and control. Hell isn’t a punishment to him, it doesn’t scare him in the way it would scare a regular God-fearing believer because it’s essentially where the war continues when you die.  He’s not morally restrained by religion because in his own perception it validates him, gives him something symbolic and in the same vein, eternal punishment doesn’t faze him because he’s ‘used to it.’