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Sergey Vladimirovich Taboritsky is a potentially playable character in the Hearts of Iron IV mod The New Order: Last Days of Europe.
His Qualities[]
What Makes Him Entertaining?[]
- His storyline is among the most developed and well-made in the mod. That the developers were able to integrate psychological horror into a grand strategy game is impressive in its own right.
- Though incredibly heinous, he is a surprisingly sympathetic figure:
- He suffers from severe psychosis that gives him an utterly warped perception of reality. The more his story goes on, the more evidently it troubles him.
- Since he was raised in an antisemitic society, he is filled with subconscious self-loathing over his partial Jewish ancestry.
- If he loses to the Passionarity, he honorably admits defeat instead of breaking down like Gumilyov.
- If he exiles the Passionarity from Russia, he will show that he misses them.
- He is implied to have some subconscious remorse, since he ends his penultimate diary entry with "Nabokov, if I knew it would lead to this, I" before being cut short. There is also an earlier diary entry where he laments that he killed hundreds of people for no gain, even if it's too ambiguous to say he's remorseful.
- His "Midnight" ending is played for sympathy. He experiences a mental breakdown where he hallucinates Tsarevich Alexei, first robed in golden splendor, then as a pile of bloody bones; implicitly, Taboritsky realizes that Alexei is dead and never coming back. This experience is enough for Taboritsky to literally die of shock as he is mortified by the realization that his work was all for nothing.
- If he loses the Komi power struggle and is arrested by whoever he lost to, then he hallucinates Alexei and the Virgin Mary in his prison cell, giving him some level of solace.
- He and his Holy Russian Empire have an interesting aesthetic, with a bizzare hybrid of Russian tsarism, Biblical motifs, and Nazism. There is also his creepily cool "Verify Your Clock" unification theme.
- Despite his crippling psychosis, he shows enough intelligence to pose a competent threat. He is able to successfully fake a sane, collected exterior in order to gain the trust of the Passionarity and to eventually become leader of Komi. He was also apparently charismatic enough to gain a genuine following in Komi.
What Makes Him Detestable?[]
- To call Taboritsky a "bigot" would be an understatement. Should he establish his regency, he will lead a genocide against all Jewish people, Turkic peoples, Mongolic peoples, anyone who isn't Russian Orthodox, poor people, mentally ill people (ironically), disabled people, LGBT+ people, intellectuals, and dissidents. He believes that these people's existance displeases God, so Russia must be "cleansed" of them so that the nation will be blessed with Alexei's return.
- Due to his insanity, he can make several poor decisions. It's not for nothing that Taboritsky's Komi is one of the hardest states to play as; his horrifically dystopian policies leave the Holy Russian Empire's population (and by extension, manpower) constantly declining, it's army deeply demoralized, it's economy in shambles, and it's production output low. There is also his "insane troll logic" that turning Russia into a living nightmare will somehow bring Alexei back.
- Overall, his path was written to be the worst possible outcome for Russian reunification in the mod. He murders so many innocent people that his empire collapses into chaos the moment he isn't there to hold it together, and everything he does is ultimately for nothing since Alexei has been dead for decades.