Renegade Russian

Red Guardian: General Aleksander Lukin, under the authority of President Yeltsin, you are hereby under arrest [...] for crimes of treason against Mother Russia.
Lukin: Mother Russia? I'm sorry to tell you that I am all that is left of the true Mother Russia, boy.

— Captain America: Winter Soldier

How to have a Red Scare villain without insulting the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation.

The Renegade Russian, formerly Renegade Soviet before end of the Cold War, is or was a member of the Soviet/Russian military, government, or Secret Police. They are involved in an evil scheme as either The Dragon or Big Bad. However, there's one big caveat. Their actions are neither authorized nor condoned by the Kremlin. Indeed, the Kremlin may well be actively trying to stop them, at the time of the Détente in particular. If you're too bad for the Soviet Union, then you are really bad. While they'll likely be a Generic Doomsday Villain in a Cold-War era story, they may well have Communist beliefs in a post-Cold War story, often trying to Make the Bear Angry Again. In any case, expect the renegade to be a former Red Army officer or KGB agent in both eras. Also note that such characters may technically be from smaller republics of the former USSR, instead of Russia itself.

See also The Mafiya, another popular Russian villain group that similarly includes a lot of Former Regime Personnel, and Balkan Bastard, another Slavic villain archetype. More broadly, compare Evil Reactionary, Renegade Splinter Faction and Rogue Agent; nowadays you're also likely to see renegades from Red China and from the North Korean military. Some works have also used renegade Terrorists Without a Cause arising from real paramilitary conflicts like The Troubles or The War on Terror, taking advantage of an convenient source of villains without delving into actual politics. And of course, there's the tried-and-true technique of simply creating a Fictional Country — along the lines of Ruritania, Qurac, Bulungi, or a Banana Republic — to cash in on The Theme Park Version of a regional geopolitical situation while ensuring that No Communities Were Harmed.

Given the nature of this trope, it goes without saying that it doesn't really apply to actual Russian stories, where these would just be just generic villains.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• General Nikolai Alexandrovich Zakharov from The Punisher MAX is a low-key example. Its unlikely he'd ever openly move against the Russian government, but he despises The New Russia and its government, considering them traitors who threw away the sacrifices made for the Soviet Union and whored out the country for profit.
• In an issue of Teen Titans, a Renegade Russian, who blames the USA for the death of his family, infects a young woman with a virulent plague and sends her to the US to spread it. The Russian government sends their superhero Red Star to stop her, leading to the requisite misunderstanding (and superhero fight) with the Teen Titans.
• Batman once fought the "NKVDemon", a Russian Super-Soldier, when he tried killing the new Soviet leadership, starting from the bottom and going right up to Gorbachev. A few years before that, the KGBeast went against his government orders to kill ten political targets, the last one being Ronald Reagan. He was also the NKVDemon's mentor.
• "The Crossing Line", a The Avengers storyline by Fabian Nicieza, features a group of Soviet soldiers who have decided that starting a global nuclear war would be, uh, good for the economy. Not unreasonably, the Soviet government disagrees, and the official Soviet supers team up with the Avengers and Alpha Flight to take them down.
• Blake and Mortimer: Dr. Voronov in The Voronov Plot is a Soviet scientist who attempts to launch a series of bacteriological attacks targeting the Western Bloc and un-stalinist Soviets, by using an alien bacterium which has just been discovered.
• Aleksander Lukin of the Captain America: Winter Soldier arc was a high-ranking Soviet general disgruntled by the fall of the USSR. He uses his megacorp Kronas International to fund his secret mercenaries to commit acts of terrorism, hoping to weaken the US and revive the Soviet Union. In his first scene, Red Guardian attempts to arrest him on Pres. Yeltsin's orders, but Lukin murders him, denying any treason.
• A Chinese variant in Iron Man villain the Mandarin, at least in his earliest appearances. While he lived in and occasionally helped Red China, it was made clear from his debut that he thinks himself above both Beijing and Washington, and he routinely humiliates the PLA officials sent to negotiate with him.
  • Played straight with Titanium Man, who went rogue several times prior to the Cold War's abrupt end; afterwards he briefly joined a group called the "Remont 4" dedicated to bringing back the USSR. That didn't pan out and after being killed (and later coming Back from the Dead and then being alive with no explanation) he's since become a mercenary.
  • Zigzagged with the numerous Crimson Dynamos — at one point the armor was worn by GRU agent Valentin Shatalov, who was the leader of the aforementioned Remont 4. But he later lost the armor in the incident that killed the Titanium Man and the group dissolved after.

Film

• The James Bond movie series loves this. The Soviet government itself, while always pursuing its own self-interests, is vehemently opposed to open conflict with the West, and its agents may even cooperate with Bond in stopping their rogue elements.
  • Colonel Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love. She is actually working for SPECTRE and its mysterious leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld. This is a change from the original Ian Fleming novel, where Klebb has the backing of her government.
  • Averted in For Your Eyes Only, which is the only James Bond movie in which his enemy is a communist agent acting with the blessing of his government. Even then, the Russians are depicted as respectful competitors rather than bloodthirsty villains.
  • General Orlov in Octopussy. A crooked and power-hungry General Ripper, he wants to do his country an unasked favour by blowing up a nuke in Western Germany so Russia can seize control of Europe, but ends up getting shot by GDR border guards before Gogol can arrest him for theft and embezzlement of Soviet state funds (to pay the terrorists).
  • Christopher Walken's character in A View to a Kill is a French millionaire installed by the Soviets. When he goes rogue, the KGB itself attempts to get rid of him. After Bond finally manages to kill him, he is offered the Order of Lenin from Gogol.
  • General Koskov from The Living Daylights, who tries to implicate his boss, General Pushkin, as one. Pushkin then has him arrested and is implied to have been executed off-screen for his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
  • General Ourumov and Xenia Onatopp from GoldenEye, who are working for Janus in The New Russia. Averted by Valentin Zukovsky (former KGB, now underground criminal syndicate) and Defense Minister Mishkin (who is an antagonist for Bond but that is due to him not knowing what is up with the GoldenEye attack on Servenaya).
  • General Chang in Tomorrow Never Dies was to be conveniently delayed by traffic when Beijing was to be struck by a nuke previously stolen from a British warship, whereupon he would launch a coup and take command of the Chinese government. In the novelization, the Chinese government sends their agent to find Chang, since he stole a high-tech radar system. He is later arrested for the theft and treason.
  • Valentin Zukovsky's nephew, the captain of a nuclear submarine, in The World Is Not Enough. They had no clue about the real plan, though — the crew thought they were just making money on the side.
  • Colonel Moon, a renegade from North Korea, in Die Another Day. Though he does gain the loyalty of the North Korean generals after the coup. (Except, oddly enough, Moon's father, an officer with a great deal of common sense.)
• Captain Marko Ramius and his officers in The Hunt for Red October — according to their government. Ramius planned to defect with his brand new hi-tech submarine, so the Soviet Ambassador fed the US government the Renegade Russian line to get them to sink him. In the novel, the Americans know that Ramius is defecting and the Soviets say they are conducting a rescue mission; they argue that the Kremlin will not use the renegade story because it would indicate that the Soviet government has lost control of its own military.
• Telefon (1977). A KGB clerk, motivated either by Stalinist sympathies or an insane need to write his name in history, steals a list of Manchurian Agent saboteurs in the United States and tries to start World War III. An interesting twist in that the protagonist (played by Charles Bronson) is a KGB agent trying to stop him. A further twist is that his KGB bosses neglected to inform the new Premier of these agents, so they can't just get him to inform the Americans as they'll be for the chop.
• In Crimson Tide, the nuclear threat is from a Siberian separatist who hijacked a missile emplacement on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
• In the third The Librarian film, the main villains are these, hoping to revive Dracula and use him to create a vampire army to reconquer and restore the Soviet Union.
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor: General Yang and his lieutenant Choi are working for the titular undead warlord in hopes of restoring China to its former glory. Rather uniquely for this trope, they are not Communists but rather Kuomintang members (the main antagonists to the Communists in the Chinese Civil War), though you'd only know that if you recognize their outfits. Either way, they qualify since the Kuomintang wanted No More Emperors, which makes Yang and his followers renegades all the same.
• The Soldier (1982). Renegade KGB steal nuclear material and, posing as terrorists, threaten to detonate an atomic bomb in the Saudi oilfields unless the US forces the Israelis off the West Bank. The Heroes "R" Us group led by the title character have to stop them, ironically going renegade themselves in the process.
• General Chan Lu from the remarkably silly Battle Beneath The Earth is an example of the Renegade Chinese version.
• The villains in Salt are a group of KGB Communist hardliners that somehow outlived the Cold War.
• Terrorists led by Ivan Korshunov in Air Force One.
• Star Trek:
  • Commander Kruge from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, who unilaterally decides to take his ship to the Genesis planet, attack Federation starships and murder Federation scientists in an attempt to learn its secrets.
  • Given that the Klingons are Cold War analogs, the renegade Klingon commander on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier counts as a sci-fi version of this trope.
  • General Chang from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who is plotting with other renegades from the Federation to prevent peace between the two powers.
  • The entire House of Duras in Star Trek: The Next Generation, whose non-stop scheming eventually escalates into a full blown civil war where they try to take over the Empire. Obedience to the ruling authority doesn't seem to be the Klingons' strong suit.
• Inverted in Dr. Strangelove, whose villain is an American renegade who launches a nuclear attack on the Soviets without authorization.
• In Wild Wild West, Loveless seems to find quite a few influential British, French, and Mexican allies to go along with his plan of dividing the United States and granting its land to its previous owners. At first he seems to be trying to resurrect the Confederacy, but he's really only interested in his own aggrandizement.
• The bad guys in the first xXx are former members of the Russian Army who deserted during the Chechen War of 1999 and started an organized crime ring, which is actually a front for their real objective: anarchist terrorism. Yelena is actually a Double Agent who is spying on them for the FSB.
• Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident has Dr. Nikolaeff, the nuclear scientist working for the Baron.
• Vladimir Radchenko in Crimson Tide leads a mutiny and seizes control of a Russian base that has nuclear missiles, threatening to launch them at the United States.
• Death Train (1993) features a renegade Russian general (Christopher Lee) hoping to revive the USSR by building a nuclear bomb with stolen weapons-grade plutonium, then handing it over to the Baath regime in Iraq so that the Russians will invade it to recover their weapon, with the inevitable American response forcing them to go back to their Soviet ways.
• While August Best from the Made-for-TV Movie Panic in the City may be employed by the Soviets, he is not above carrying out his own vicious agenda to nuke LA.
• The 1989 Made-for-TV Movie Red King, White Knight has the KGB hiring a foreign terrorist to kill Premier Gorbachev to stop his policy of perestroika.

Literature

• A couple of examples from the Alex Rider series of books, since they draw a lot of inspiration from James Bond. Most notable are General Alexei Sarov from the third book, Skeleton Key, Yassen Gregorovich, who appears in Stormbreaker and Eagle Strike, and Nikolai Drevin from the sixth book, Ark Angel.
• While Dale Brown novels often use a remilitarized Russia, Act of War and Edge of Battle has explicitly ex-military Colonel Yegor Zakharov and his men.
• Rainbow Six has Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov, a former KGB intelligence officer who instigates terrorist incidents on behalf of the Big Bad. At least until he learns the truth of the plan, decides that Even Evil Has Standards, and turns informer.
• In the prologue to the Deathlands series about an After the End United States, a hardline communist faction called vseesozhzenie (terrible fire) tries to take out the US military and political command system by exploding three nuclear bombs in Washington D.C. during the Presidential inauguration, as a prelude to a nuclear attack. It doesn't go well.
• The Big Bad in James Bond novel Death Is Forever (which is set ten months after the dissolution of Soviet Union) seeks to restore international communism, and the book repeatedly posits the threat of people who won't give up on its ideology, and will continue to fight the west until the bitter end.
• Vladimir, an Estonian patriot and former Russian general, in Smiley's People; he defected to the British after discovery.

Live-Action TV

• A few MacGyver (1985) bad guys.
• Jake 2.0 uses this.
• 24 uses this from time to time, particularly when Charles Logan shows up, before subverting it in the final season.
• NCIS has these everywhere, as does its parent series JAG. The most notable example is submarine captain Mikhail Yerastov, hired by Al-Qaeda in season 7 of JAG, who wants to avenge his dead KGB wife who was killed by the CIA.
• Spooks has a very interesting variant in its tenth and final season. In this case, the renegades' endgame is to trick Britain into attacking a Russian jetliner bound for London, thus stopping a proposed partnership and driving the two nations into war while simultaneously opening the way for the Ultranationalist Party to seize power in the Kremlin.
• The Last Ship: The Big Bad of the first season is Admiral Konstantin Ruskov, who took his ship rogue and refused to return it to dock when the Red Flu pandemic reached Russia, and is now seeking the cure as a means of creating a new world order. Though, since the Russian government and military have been wiped out, how "renegade" they are is debatable.
• The New Avengers: In the "K is for Kill" two-parter, Colonel Stanislav is a hardliner who is not happy with the thawing Cold War, and puts in a motion a scheme set up after World War II in an attempt to trigger World War III.
• The Enemy Within focuses on FBI's efforts to stop a Russian terrorist named Vassily Tal, who is very good at subverting their efforts by turning people or using blackmail. It's eventually revealed that Tal was a case of Create Your Own Villain. After he left Russian intelligence to strike out on his own, he was contacted by Americans and offered to work for them in exchange for a safe passage for him and his two brothers to the US. Instead, he was betrayed and his brothers were killed in an airstrike.

Tabletop Games

• The GURPS Technomancer setting has Russia in a civil war between the Federal forces and rebels led by Joseph Stalin, who was never quite dead, just sleeping and waiting. Dangerous antagonists can emerge from that mess.
• In The Madness Dossier, the old Soviet psy-war program acquired a working grasp of mental manipulation techniques and a very partial understanding of true nature of reality. Elements of that program appear to have gone rogue, and may make dangerous human opponents for the heroic Project SANDMAN.
• The default setting for the third edition of Champions, as developed in the 1980s, featured a relatively straightforward pair of Soviet/Warsaw Pact super-teams ("The Supreme Soviets" and the "Cominterm"), who were largely loyal to the Soviet Union, if only because that suited their ambitious leader, Colonel Vasalov, putting the members in the range from Worthy Opponents to Dirty Communists, with some potential to act as Chummy Commies. However, the switch to 4th edition came around the time of Soviet collapse, and by the time the characters were updated in Classic Enemies (1991), they needed major changes, and one group, "Red Doom", had gone distinctly Renegade, with Colonel Vasalov aiming to depose President Gorbachev and take over Russia. (The other group, the largely independent and heroic "New Guard", considered Red Doom their greatest enemies.)

Video Games

• Zakharov in the video game Act of War.
• Call of Duty has used this type of villain repeatedly.
  • The similarly-named Imran Zakhaev in Call of Duty 4 : Modern Warfare is the leader of an ultranationalist Russian faction currently involved in a civil war with the ruling government. He commits a huge amount of war crimes, supports Middle Eastern Terrorists in Qurac to spite the West, and attempts to nuke the United States near the end of the game. Despite all their setbacks in Modern Warfare, including Zakahev himself and his bodyguard unit all getting killed by the SAS, the faction he founded ends up victorious and ruling Russia by the sequel. Oddly enough, despite being termed an ultranationalist, Zakhaev is not an ethnic Russian, going by his name.
    • As Imran Zakhaev sounds very much like a Chechen name, this might actually be a case of having done the research on Infinity Ward's part, coupled with No Celebrities Were Harmed, as a fictional counterpart to Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen dictator and former rebel having turned Russian loyalist. It may also be a reference to Vladislav Surkov, allegedly born Aslambek Dudaev, a half-Chechen, half-Russian close confidant of Putin and long-serving key member of the administration who is, in the West, often seen as a sort of grey eminence in the Kremlin, responsible for much of the (not "ultra", but fairly nationalist) ideology of the Real Life United Russia party. (It should be noted here that while there certainly are ethnic nationalists and white supremacists in Russia, due to it's nature as a multiethnic state, there is also a peculiar brand of "civic" patriotism/nationalism focused on being a Russian citizen, whatever the ethnicity, so it's not all that surprising.) Then again, it may just be a coincidence.
  • In the second and the third games, we have Vladimir Makarov, one of Zakhaev's proteges. Interestingly, he is a renegade to the very government that Zakhaev fought to instate because they couldn't handle his radical ideals (which, ironically, is what their martyr fought for). He starts out as a small time terrorist with a few hundred goons who provokes a U.S.-Russian war by massacring hundreds of Russians at an air port and framing the CIA for it. By the third game he's somehow in de facto control of much of the Russian military after pulling off a coup against the president and massacring his cabinet.
  • Callof Duty Black Ops has Nikita Dragovich planning to disperse lethal biological agents in major U.S. cities in a plot that is hinted to be running without anyone in the Kremlin either approving or knowing the full details. Much like Volgin's case below, this is an example that takes place when the Soviet Union is still around.
  • In Call of Duty: Black Ops II, one of Raúl Menendez's key allies is Tian Zhao, head of the Strategic Defense Coalition's armed forces (who, coincidentally, turns out to have fought in Afghanistan alongside Alex Mason against Dragovich's erstwhile lackey, Lev Kravchenko). He's also in charge of China's military, but the Chinese government has zero control over him, to the point that they send an assassination request to the U.S. Carry it out, and the Chinese premier will thank the American president personally.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) has General Barkov, who the developers describe as "a rogue general that has the correct intentions but has gone off the rails in his effort to get what he wants."
• And again, the also-similarly-named Zaitsev in Vanquish, who initiated a coup in Russia with his robot army.
• General Alexei Vasilievich Guba from the Operation Flashpoint series, particularly the first installment, Cold War Crisis. The year is 1985, and Guba and his loyalist troops have launched an unauthorized invasion on a certain backwoods island chain sandwiched between NATO and Warsav Pact territory. They have 2 stolen nuclear SCUD launchers and intend to provoke World War III between the East and West Bloc (because Guba is deeply disgusted by Gorbachov's perestroika and the decline of the economic and military might of the USSR).
• Metal Gear:
  • Sergei and his daughter in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty seek to make Russia a superpower once again, while Ocelot just pretends to be affiliated with them. Though he does seem pretty disgusted with the state of post-Soviet Russia.
    Ocelot: 20th century Russia had its share of problems, but at least they had an ideology. Russia today has nothing!
    Snake: They're struggling between freedom and order, and a new spirit of nationalism has been born.
  • Colonel Volgin in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, an interesting example as the Soviet Union is still around during MGS3.
  • Subverted with the Soviet personnel in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops: They were doing exactly what the Soviet government told them to do on the San Hieronymo Peninsula (build a missile base), and carried on with the top-secret mission while suffering all the while specifically because they thought doing the mission under the Soviet government would greatly benefit Russia. However, when Detente came, and the Soviet Union experienced a policy shift, the Soviet government screwed them over, cancelling all shipments and cutting all communications with them, not even allowing them to come home specifically because they wanted to make it seem as though the Soviet soldiers were of this trope in case the missile base was ever discovered. Suffice to say, the soldiers weren't pleased at this development.
• In Splinter Cell, General Kong Feirong and his faction of the PLA provide another Chinese example. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gives us a Japanese example in the form of Admiral Otomo and his ISDF faction.
• GoldenEye (Wii) upgraded its Renegade Russians to accommodate advancing the story to 2010. General Ourumov became an under-the-table arms dealer out of jealousy toward rich, post-Soviet era oligarchs, while Xenia Onatopp is a veteran of the 2008 South Ossetia War who left the Russian army and went mercenary.
• Older Than They Think trope as far as video game plots go, actually, particularly for Mil Sims. "Red" Russian forces bent on restoring the old Soviet system by taking control of nuclear arms and facilities in Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula have served as the plots for the original Ghost Recon game and the study combat flight sim Jane's F/A-18. Both games predate Modern Warfare by seven years.
• Colonel Markov, General Stanisgeslov, and Major Illich from Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, whose coup forces against the Russian government of 2016 are called the New Russian Federation (NRF).
• Red Ivan from Evil Genius is an ex-Soviet commando who was exiled to a gulag for having a sadistic streak that even his old Soviet taskmasters found distasteful. Being betrayed left him disillusioned with Communism, but he also retains his hatred of western politics, making him the perfect tool for an Evil Genius out to cause global chaos. In the sequel, Ivan has now moved on to be a supervillain in his own right of The Generalissimo variety and now seeks to conquer the world for himself.
• Modern military shooter spoof and Doom mod Call of Dooty parodies this. The player is clearly just fighting the same zombies, imps and demons from the core game, but the map designer just slapped a few hammer-and-sickles on the maps, while every character swears up and down that they're actually fighting Russians (on Phobos.)
• Metro 2033: being set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow Metro, this was kind of inevitable. In the first game, you fight both the communist Red Line and the Russian Neo-Nazis of the Fourth Reich in order to reach your destination, and unaligned bandits on other occasions. In the second game, the Red Line are the main antagonists. To be fair, though, it's not like the Red Line have a monopoly on the ex-Soviet angle—it's heavily implied that Miller, the commanding officer of the much more heroic Rangers of the Order, formerly served in the real Red Army before the atomic hellfires forced the citizens of Moscow underground and wishes to recolonize the irradiated surface and restore Russia's glory, but knows that the dictatorships sought by the Red Line and the Fourth Reich aren't the way to achieve that.
• Iron Man 3: The Official Game: The Crimson Dynamo is a former Russian soldier who resented how his country eventually became corrupted by the capitalist ideals of the West. After stealing a prototype armoured suit from the government, the Crimson Dynamo joined forces with A.I.M. in the hopes of using their resources to help take over Russia and restore its former glory.

Web Original

• Sapphire: Boris Rubanenko. Officially, he pledges allegiance to the Soviet Union. However, in Episode I, he plans to nuke the West AND East indiscriminately, so that both sides will be weak enough for a Psychic takeover.
  • Not to mention trying to start another war between North Korea and Japan in Episode II, plus whatever he has up his sleeve for Episode III...

Western Animation

• Crimson Dynamo in season 2 of Iron Man: The Animated Series is this, wanting to crush Iron Man and Tony Stark while also bringing back the USSR. He gets hired at one point by a group of these guys to help them and ends up causing a nuke to go off, killing himself and poisoning the entire area with radiation, which Iron Man gets blamed for. Then Tony discovers his technology inside the Dynamo's fried armor...

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