Balalaika

Balalaika, real name Sofia Pavlovna Irinovskaya, is the boss of Hotel Moscow's Thai branch in Roanapur. Various people throughout the series derogatorily refer to Balalaika as Fry-Face due to the scar on the right side of her face. Balalaika is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Russian woman with a skinny build, pale skin, a mole under her left eye, and scars on her neck, bosom, upper legs, and the right side of her face, hence she has been called the derogatory nickname "Fry-Face" by several people. She is 180 centimeters tall (or 5'11"),] and her hair is very long and done up in a huge ponytail, going down to the base of her spine. She is usually seen wearing a wine-colored skirt suit with black pantyhose and black 1-inch heels. Her nails are long and painted pink, and she also wears rose-colored lipstick. Whenever traveling, she wears a Russian military coat draped off her shoulders with a rank insignia of a Soviet Airborne Forces captain. However, she removes it when it is considered polite. She is usually shown smoking a thin Russian cigar, in contrast with the other characters who smoke cigarettes. Due to Balalaika's leadership during the hellish fighting in Afghanistan, her men look up to her as their superior and will do just about anything upon her orders, with Boris being her right-hand man. She always refers to Boris by the title of "Sergeant" and often refers to her other men by their military rank. They refer to her as "Капитан" (Capitan, Russian for "Captain"). As a combat officer, she is a skilled strategist and well-rounded fighter, capable of taking care of herself despite the fact that all of her troopers, including Boris, often worry for her. Although she has shown herself to be rather cynical on occasion, she is also a pragmatic, opportunistic, and professional businesswoman. She frequently employs Dutch and the Lagoon Company because they share a mutual respect and Balalaika trusts Dutch as a discreet man of integrity. There is strong mutual loyalty between herself and her soldiers. They share an almost familial bond, and will do anything to protect or avenge one another. She is also downright ruthless, willing to utilize whatever means to achieve what she wants. As a mafia leader, she has claimed that trust and profit are her concerns, also remarking once that her motivation is to maximize her group's profits and eliminate anyone in the way by any means necessary. On one occasion, Balalaika even admitted that she only lives to bring destruction and dance as long as she can "on the bottom of hell's cauldron." She has no qualms about killing children, although she used to be hesitant to do so during the Soviet–Afghan War because of Afghan children whom she and her men fought in Panjshir. Balalaika regards herself and her men as soldiers who missed their chance to die in Afghanistan. While some of her actions can be interpreted as attempts to pursue an honorable death in combat for her men, Balalaika's status as a military figure is tempered by her role in the criminal underground. She backed away from engaging with Shane Caxton's American soldiers in combat after Mister Chang reminded her of their unfinished fight. Balalaika opted for a future battle with Chang over a present opportunity to engage the American unit, which she regarded as a foil to her own disgraced Soviet unit, because she wanted to preserve their joint interest to keep the city of Roanapur standing. Due to the fact that her personal military force, the Vysotniki, is entirely composed of ex-VDV forces, they and Balalaika are at a serious advantage over the other criminal organizations. Specifically, Balalaika, like her men, has military grade training, combat experience and discipline that is unprecedented among the rest of the criminal underworld of Roanapur. She is also one of the few people to earn the respect of Revy, who calls her "Sis." In turn, Balalaika also seems to hold Rock in high regard, sometimes relying on his knowledge and business skills as well as hiring him as a translator and even teasing him once that he was a "good villain." She is capable of speaking Russian and English as seen when she had Rock translate her English into Japanese during the "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise" arc. In her childhood, she took life advice from her uncle, a marshal in the Red Army of the USSR. Balalaika's father had presumably either been condemned by the USSR or fled the country. Due to her father's condemned status, she felt that she had to restore her family's honor. Instead of participating in the shooting competition at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Balalaika joined the Soviet Airborne Forces (Vozdushno-Desantnye Vojska; Russian for "air assault troops"), also known as the VDV. During her service, she first received training at the special training area on Wrangel Island, Russian SFSR, and she accordingly became a paratrooper and a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. A fine marksman and sniper, she received the nickname "Balalaika" (one of the Soviet army's slang terms for the Dragunov sniper rifle). Balalaika can be easily identified by the various burn scars across her body, which she sustained from being tortured by the Afghan Mujahideen over a month after being captured in Afghanistan, as stated by a former soldier of hers in the first light novel. During the Soviet invasion, Balalaika was withdrawn from the war by her superiors when she was a lieutenant. Later in 1987, Balalaika was re-drafted to return fighting in Afghanistan with her fellow paratroopers and had been promoted to a captain in the Soviet Airborne Forces. Besides participating in battles, Balalaika had also interrogated prisoners-of-war during her service. Eventually, Balalaika and her men were discharged immediately after the war's end in 1989, with Balalaika being discharged for breaking an international cross-border agreement in order to save a child. After she and her unit were cast aside by the Soviet Union, they had no group to fight for, especially while living in impoverished conditions after the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1992. At a cemetery for the funeral of a soldier who died due to "dirty money," Balalaika in her VDV uniform met her men there and proudly proclaimed that they could fight again under her leadership, with the men saluting and enthusiastically agreeing. Balalaika and her men then joined the global crime syndicate Hotel Moscow, and in Moscow, she crushed many people in her way to rise in the ranks, becoming powerful enough to be a branch leader. After her brief rise, she eventually settled in Roanapur, where she led her gang's Thai branch. In her first year in Roanapur in 1993, a large-scale conflict with the already-established Hong Kong Triad under Mister Chang's leadership ensued, and a shootout between Balalaika and Chang in November 1993 resulted in both of them being wounded. Before the two could destroy the city further, a peace was brokered between the rival criminal organizations by Dutch, who had also saved Balalaika. Balalaika accordingly uses the Bougainvillea Trade Company as a front for Hotel Moscow in Roanapur. When conducting foreign operations from Thai soil, she uses the Russian cargo ship Marya Zaleska as a legal cover from the police and various law enforcement agencies in addition to using Hotel Moscow's connections to the Russian Federation's embassies. Moreover, she uses the pseudonym V.V. Vladilena, also shortened to Miss Vladilena, as a legitimate business name and embassy cover. She had once used her embassy connections to evade arrest in the "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise" story arc. Although Balalaika is the leader of her own branch in Hotel Moscow, she still takes orders from Pyotr Slevinin, a high-ranking boss in Moscow where the Russian mafia is based. Additionally, Balalaika despises the former KGB agents who joined the various Hotel Moscow branches, particularly Vasili Laptev, the former head of Hotel Moscow's Japanese branch. Regarding Balalaika, Black Lagoon series creator Rei Hiroe stated the reason that he made a woman the head of Hotel Moscow: "Simply because I thought it'd be better to see a woman's butt. Her scars are totally my fetish too. I've loved female characters with scars since I drew Grimalkin von Stieber in Hisuikyōkitan.