Yuri Petrovich. Talk about a name from the past. Yuri was the fourth man to wear the Crimson Dynamo armor. And his early life was just as twisted as what the Soviets did to me… Lies, indoctrination, mind-altering drugs, the whole deal. Yuri should have been the perfect armored agent, but instead he turned against his handlers, and even lost his mind for a while from what I was told.
Probably the most frustrating thing (for me) about Brubaker’s Captain America run is the way he incorporates a lot of Natasha’s continuity without incorporating Natasha in it, despite her being a constant presence in the book. A lot of the Winter Soldier mythos is cobbled together from disparate Black Widow arcs; the “memory altered KGB sleeper agent” has been done a lot in Black Widow stories back when Bucky still stayed dead. Nowhere is this more apparant than in Gulag.
This character, Ivan Petrovich, was introduced in the Champions as part of an extended plotline dealing with Natasha’s and Ivan’s past. (It also introduced Darkstar!!) Yuri is the son of Ivan Petrovich Bezukhov, Natasha’s creepy Bronze Age sidekick. Properly, his name should be Yuri Ivanovich Bezukhov, but this was before Marvel researched Russian naming conventions and learned how patronymics worked!! In any case, he felt intense jealousy towards Natasha because Ivan seemed to like her more. When he found out that he’d been kidnapped by the KGB instead of abandoned by his father, like he’d been led to believe, he sort of went berserk.
Tony Isabella, who created Yuri Petrovich, had plans to reveal that Ivan was Natasha’s biological father, as well!! But he never got around to it.
All of this was published in the mid-70s, which means they took place in the late 90s sliding timescale style at the earliest. Bit of a connundrum for Winter Soldier, who was inactive the entire decade. Ed Brubaker has told me I overthink continuity, true story.
From Captain America #616, by Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato.
