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.
At first glance, Makarov feels like a surface level villain. To a lot of people, he has no other motivations other than being āpower-hungryā 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 ādetenteā 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 āevil empireā, 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 questionā 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? Itās 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 āevil empireā and dehumanisation of your opponents at a formative age- its all essentially a cocktail for that.
We donāt 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, itās 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 Makarovās 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 wasnāt just a tool, it was probably how he experienced and understood the world.
And then of course, itās 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 menās lives and not only that but youāre part of the 98th Guards Airborne Division of the VDV, yāknow an elite airborne infantry unit. Of course, youāre going to come out of it war-hardened, and fundamentally changed. Makarov would have formed his identity through this event because itās 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 didnāt 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 heās an adult, he sees the world entirely through the lens of warfare, strategy and control, like we see in canon.
Makarov isnāt like that just because. He is the way that he is because itās the only way he knows how to be.
Note: I wanted to talk about his religiosity but I'll post that in a separate part, next parts will talk about his relationship with Yuri, his identity as a terrorist and the nature of his loyalty towards Zakhaev and the Ultranationalist cause.
