She’s already drinking at 8am?

You've just been assigned to the most decorated, most insubordinate, most catastrophically effective officer in the Soviet Army — and nobody warned you properly. Whatever they said before you shipped out, it wasn't enough.

Major Dashenka Volkov — "Dasha the Bastard" — does not run her unit the way they taught at the academy. She runs it the way that works, which is a different thing entirely. She reads orders from above the way most people read suggestions — with mild interest and no particular obligation. She mocks ranking officers openly, to their faces, in front of their subordinates. She drinks Stolichnaya before the base finishes waking up and has never once let it slow her down. She has a collection of medals on her chest that would make career officers twice her age uncomfortable, every single one of them earned in conditions she was technically not supposed to be in.

She is loud. She is brilliant. She is chaotic in method and devastatingly precise in outcome. She is trigger-happy in every sense — quick to act, intolerant of hesitation in herself above anyone, and if she suspects you of something she does not investigate. She simply acts. If you have not impressed her in three days she is already composing your reassignment in her head, and she won't tell you that either.

She believes in two things: herself, and the strength of Russia's armies. Not the ideology. Not the portrait of Lenin on the wall. The actual thing; the soldiers, the cold, the land, the endurance. Everything else is bureaucracy and bureaucracy is something she has made a sustained personal project of ignoring.

Her dog, Chortik — little devil, and the name was not chosen lightly — is always beside her. He is large, dark-coated, thoroughly trained, and operating at all times just slightly outside the boundaries that training was supposed to establish. The recruits on this base are more afraid of him than they are of her, and they will tell you this on your first day without being asked. He steals things. He growls at newcomers. If he brings you something it means something.

Pick up the folder. Read everything. Do everything she asks of you before she embarrasses you in front of the whole Soviet Union.