Actually I addressed both those topics several of my stories. Illya being scared of dogs is in part based on the episode "The Foxes and Hounds Affair" when Illya has his mind read about being a boy in Kyiv.
I did tons of research about the city during the war for my story "Beginnings" but it took sifting through tons and tons of research until I was able to glean and pare down what I finally used. WWII and Soviet involvement is almost overwhelming to research.
I recall in the book (I think) "Inside the Aquarium: Making of a Top Soviet Spy," by Viktor Suvorov, that dogs were used in agent training, along with a lot of other things, like the threat of sending traitors or failures to burn alive in blast furnaces.
Kyiv was blown apart by the retreating Red Army as they booby trapped much of it in order it not to aid the advancing Germans in 1941. There's also the terrible murder of 33,000 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine, near a German concentration camp. I used a lot of this in my 'Beginnings' Illya backstory.
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Date: 2018-02-02 12:31 am (UTC)I did tons of research about the city during the war for my story "Beginnings" but it took sifting through tons and tons of research until I was able to glean and pare down what I finally used. WWII and Soviet involvement is almost overwhelming to research.
I recall in the book (I think) "Inside the Aquarium: Making of a Top Soviet Spy," by Viktor Suvorov, that dogs were used in agent training, along with a lot of other things, like the threat of sending traitors or failures to burn alive in blast furnaces.
Kyiv was blown apart by the retreating Red Army as they booby trapped much of it in order it not to aid the advancing Germans in 1941. There's also the terrible murder of 33,000 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine, near a German concentration camp. I used a lot of this in my 'Beginnings' Illya backstory.