#vorona

“…и рабочий класс, и все более и более разнообразные слои общества выделяют с каждым годом все больше и больше недовольных, желающих протестовать, готовых оказать посильное содействие в борьбе с абсолютизмом, невыносимость которого еще не всеми осознается, но все более широкой массой и все острее ощущается” “...and the working class, and increasingly diverse strata of society, each year throw out more and more people filled with discontent, eager to protest, ready to render whatever assistance they can in the struggle against absolutism. The intolerable nature of which is not yet realized by everyone, but is felt ever more acutely by the wider masses” — 'What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement' (Что делать? Наболевшие вопросы нашего движения) by Vladimir Lenin, 1902.

This isn't just a smart book to show she's a prodigy. It adds crucial layers to her character. This isn't just a dry political text. It's a revolutionary playbook. It's about strategy: how to turn widespread discontent into an organized force to dismantle a powerful system. Vorona isn't reading it as a believer in communism. She's reading it as a strategist studying the mechanics of power, control, and upheaval.

First, about her father, 'Dragon' (Дракон). He probably read this book too. He's not 'just a criminal'. In the Russian 1990s, that word is a political category. He started as a hitman for a mercenary band. In the post-Soviet chaos, these weren't just 'gangs.' They were often made of ex-KGB, ex-soldiers, ex-police — state security apparatus that privatized itself. Their 'business' was the direct result of a collapsed empire. Dragon is a product of the Soviet system that collapsed and mutated into violent capitalism. His library is a relic of that ideology of control. Vorona studies the source code of the system that created the monster she had to escape from. It is never explained what happened to her mother (the original 'Vorona'). Probably the cost of building a kingdom on the rotten foundation of post-Soviet politics-crime. Vorona doesn't want to rule her father's kingdom. Her escape to Japan is a rejection of that specific hybrid, toxic system. She doesn't just want power; she wants a purer form of it, untethered from that history.

It's hard not to wonder what would her stance be in modern Russia. Vorona is profoundly apolitical in a traditional sense. She doesn't believe in 'isms.' Her worldview is Nietzschean-meets-cyberpunk. For her, any state — be it Putin's Russia, a liberal democracy, or the Soviet Union — is primarily a system of control that limits her personal power and freedom. In theory, she could be a radical libertarian, an anarchist, a cynical manipulator of the system's weaknesses. But in practice, her most defining political act was to leave. She is not a reformer, nor a revolutionary fighting within the system. She is an escapee. Russia, to her, is the physical and psychological territory of her father — a place where power is tied to oligarchy, corruption, and post-Soviet fatalism. It's a played-out field.

Ikebukuro is her chosen laboratory. It's a controlled environment, foreign and neutral, where she can run her experiments on power without the suffocating baggage of her past. Here, she observes raw power (like Shizuo's strength) as a detached scientist. Her goal isn't to change Russia or Japan. Her goal is to understand and attain a state of pure, autonomous strength for herself, far from the source of her trauma.