Ivan Boldyrev was a Republican politician from Galileo that later went on to become the first independent governor of Galileo and the first president of the Unified Republic of Stars.
Early Life
Ivan Boldyrev was born in Galileo City on December 4, 2124. Colonization was in full swing and he was one among the wave of first native born children in the colonies. He was the youngest of six and his parents were Russian immigrant shoe makers. Because of the need for new industries and the goods they would produce, his parents did unusually well in their trade and were able to send Boldyrev and his five siblings to the New Literature & Sciences Day School where he received all of his formal education.
At fifteen, he left school to work for a classmate's mother at the famous Liz's Dinner & Cabaret. He began as a busboy but soon rose to head bartender and was said to have drawn a regular clientele based upon his force of personality. At twenty-two, he was promoted to assistant manager, answerable only to the Carter family. As part of his duties in this new job, he was to oversee the health and welfare of the prostitutes the establishment employees in the upstairs brothel. Often, this included "disciplining" customers who abused them.[1]
In 2150, after a series of disagreements with owner Jessica Carter, Boldyrev left Liz's to open his own establishment, Little Moscow. Set up to attract exactly the same clientele as Liz's but with his charm, it soon stole away much of Liz's business.
Still, Boldyrev was not the sort to rest on his laurels. In 2153, at the age of 29, he ran for a seat on the Galileo City Council.
At the time, there was very little to the job. Galileo City was little more than a communal garbage, water, and sewer services organization. The fees paid to it were optional if one didn't want its services. This was, in a large part, due to the fact that the UN had forbidden the colonies from forming their own governments. At the time, the UN was supposed to oversee colonization of the star cluster. However, the job it did was poor and it rarely had much of an actual presence on a colonial world.
Boldyrev, however, was not dissuaded. In his election speech, he promised a new era of a stronger city council, capable of organizing more than the laying of water pipes or prompt trash service. He foresaw something more along the lines of what cities provided citizens on Earth, namely laws and a proper police force to enforce them.
Galileo City was known for being particularly lawless and Boldyrev had grown up in that environment. But many others saw the problems it created around them and Boldyrev, upon winning his seat, soon began passing Common Laws and ginning up support for funding a police force.
When, in 2160 as a two-term councilman, Boldyrev ran for Mayor, he won in a landslide and took it as a mandate to enact his ideas.
Mayor of Galileo City
As his first act, Ivan Boldyrev pressed for the city council to enact his police force and by the following year, he made his first appointment to the post of police chief. It was met with applause throughout the city but angered the Earth authorities.
In 2161, Earth appointed a series of planetary governors to oversee the collection of taxes from the colonies. Xiao Peng is appointed to Galileo. Boldyrev, always the first to try to charm someone, soon made friends with the elderly Xiao and for the next several years had a regular breakfast meeting with him every week, discussing the rights of the colonies.
For a short time, it seemed as if Galileo City might have been the first colonial government to attain Earth sanction. Xiao began proffering the idea of recognition if the city would collect a tax on behalf of his government. But in 2165 the political winds had begun to change. The governors personal police forces on the planets, the PPF, had been seen to commit multiple abuses against the populations and Earth and anything associated with it was at an all time popularity low.
Sensing this, Boldyrev issued an ultimatum to Xiao. He would cease having any negotiations about proxy taxation unless he made himself subject to an as-yet to be created planetary legislature and give full recognition to the existing governments on the planet. Xiao, of course refused.
Soon after, Governor Xiao issued his own ultimatum: pay his taxes, enforce his laws, or else. The "or else" was a direct threat of bringing in the UN's Navy as a show of force to coerce the taxes from the city governments. It's unknown whether Boldyrev had hoped this would happen but he certainly capitalized on it.
Taking the Governorship
When the UN forces landed on Galileo, they found the city almost empty. Perhaps as a show of force or perhaps as a tactic, the UN troops marched down the four compass point avenues of Galileo City, meeting in the middle on the Galileo Commons. Given the resistance and lack of people encountered along the way, they must have thought the city emptied in advance of their landing. As it turned out, it was anything but.
The UN forces stood in parade stance as Governor Xiao Peng issued his proclamation about taxes owed to Earth. When he was finished, a single gunshot rung out across the commons, dropping the troops to their bellies in search of the shot's origin. It's destination, on the other hand, was the podium from which Xiao was speaking from. Splinters rained down over the governor and the UN colonel leading the force.
It is said the commons went quiet at the shot.
Then Boldyrev appeared. He demanded that the soldiers surrender their weapons and leave the planet and that if they did so, they would be allowed to leave without incident. It was then that Xiao noticed that the soldiers had been penned into the commons by a ragtag militia some 60,000 strong and blocking all the avenues of retreat. Xiao attempted to negotiate with his friend but Boldyrev was not having any of it.
Whether the soldiers might have broken free of their position remains a matter of debate but the colonel, seeing the difficulty in doing so and wishing to avoid the same public relations disasters constantly stumbled into by the PPF decided not to test the mayor's resolution. He ordered his soldiers to surrender their weapons and, just as Boldyrev promised, they were allowed to leave the planet without any difficulty. For a violent city like Galileo City, it was a marked example of mass restraint.
Of course, the act was not without its consequences. Upon receiving Xiao's report, the General Assembly declared all colonial governments illegal and ordered the planetary governors to take over all government duties. But because of the distance from Earth, this order was mostly ignored.
In 2167, Ivan Boldyrev was elected as the first popularly elected planetary governor, in large part because of his repulsion of the UN forces. Deciding that the UN built governor's mansion on the commons was the right of the governor, Boldyrev with a large contingent of city police, evicted Xiao Peng against his protests of a "coup." But Boldyrev was unapologetic, in large part because of Xiao's calling in of UN soldiers.
But even with his rising to be the first elected executive of a planet, Boldyrev's vision and lack of being able to stand still for very long led him to pursue a path that would lead the Colonial Star Cluster to break away from Earth altogether.
Role in Independence
Just a year after being elected and in direct reaction to the tyranny that he believed the UUHA blockade around Athena, Galileo, and Troy to be, he invited the other colonial planets to send delegates to an "Independent Congress." The body was charged with making a unified decision for the star cluster on how best to respond the the UUHA.
Though not a delegate to the congress himself, Boldyrev played an important role, acting as an informal "president" and keeping the delegates on topics he preferred they discuss. The delegates themselves frequently found themselves discussing the real or perceived differences between the different planets and what their proper roles should be amongst themselves. Boldyrev, however, wished to keep them thinking about whether they would prefer to remain subjects of the Earth government or have the power to decide their issues themselves.
While only twelve of the colonized fourteen worlds attended but in less than six months, Boldyrev had them convinced that independence was the only way to achieve their goals. He also succeeded in convincing them that some sort of lose federation based upon mutual self-defense was necessary to preserve their independence. In this sense, Boldyrev became the father of the Independent Fleet, the precursor to the larger and permanent Republican Fleet.
Boldyrev also formed his own militia company to preserve and defend Galileo City, formally known as the Galileo City Militia F-Company but known to the locals as the "Freedom Riders" for their use of horses.[2] Boldyrev's F-Company militia was active in the First Republican Defensive but mostly as a protective detail for the new governor.
However little Boldyrev might have participated in the actual military defense of Galileo and its titular city, he was active with both revolutionary speeches and served as a potent symbol of independence, often visiting other militia units to help provide motivation.
But his biggest and most lasting achievement remained the Unified Republic of Stars.
First President of the Republic
In 2172, Boldyrev called for a second Independent Congress. After the close call of the First Defensive, most of the Independent Worlds were on edge about the survival of their independence movement. While few worlds saw actual enemy troops make planetfall, pictures and stories from those worlds where they had scared the people of the other planets.
Boldyrev capitalized on this by calling for a more permanent union, its primary goal of which was to ensure the defense of all the independent worlds but which would also guarantee free trade among the many planets and serve as a bulwark against the kind of tyranny that had overtaken Earth. Surprisingly, this met with more resistance than did the idea of independence.
Most of the worlds had come to think of themselves as separate and independent of the other planets within the Colonial Star Cluster but, in truth, this was not the case at all. Each of the worlds depended on the others for both manufactured and raw products alike as well as general trade. Galileo, for instance, had less than 30 million people, less than the top three US cities combined and too few to continue their economy if cut off from the other planets. Athena likewise boasted a population of just over 26 million but its economy was almost entirely based on imports and exports, being able to produce very little tangible product themselves. But worlds like Columbus and Al Gharbiyah worried about the imposition of the other worlds' moralities on themselves and were concerned that a larger, federated government might impose such on them.
Boldyrev answered their concerns with a proposal for a federal government extremely limited in scope with a representative house in the legislature with larger populations having a larger percentage of the representation and a senate made up of equal number of senators appointed by the planetary governments to act as a check.
As it turned out, this worked equally as well for the more libertarian planets as it did the conservative ones as they were concerned that with the large voting blocks Columbus and Al Gharbiyah had might force their morals on the rest of the federation. It proved to be the perfect balance of independence and free trade that all fourteen worlds could agree on.
In 2173, the Second Independent Congress released the Constitution Of The Republic and by the end of the year it was ratified, bringing the Unified Republic of Stars into existence. And at its head, it required a president. Boldyrev, naturally, wanted the job.
He soon found himself in a three-way race with two of the other most popular figures of the revolution, Bill Keller of Troy and Iskender Abaz mayor of Athena City. Winning with a narrow victory because of his role in the First Defensive, Boldyrev found himself the first President of the Republic. In little more than five years, Boldyrev had risen from mayor to governor to president of the entire Republican Star Cluster.
Serving three terms, from 2174 to 2189, Boldyrev oversaw the establishment of the Republican Fleet, the beginning of the NOVA Program, the establishment and initial building of the new Federal Government and set the precedent for vetoing overreaching and perhaps unconstitutional bills from congress as well as how and when to use the presidential veto. He also led the new republic through the Second Republican Defensive and delivered much oratory from which the republic continues to derive its sense of self.
Lastly, when he declined to run for a fourth term in 2189, he also set the precedent that no president should serve more than three terms, a feat only again achieved by presidents Junichiro Niwa in 2214 and Mingxing You in 2274.
After Politics
After retiring from the presidency, Boldyrev recognized that the new republic was beginning to suffer from a wave of depression, knowing that they were now alone in the universe and cut off from the home world of humanity. In 2189, after completing his third term, Boldyrev embarked on a tour of the republic, delivering more of his barn burning speeches, encouraging the people of the republic to look to themselves for strength. They had, after all defeated Earth. Millions attended and the speeches were widely republished.
In 2193, he published a best selling book entitled People of the Republic recounting his three year tour of the republic and sharing hopeful anecdotes about those he encountered along the way and about what he saw.
The following year, Boldyrev attempted to repeat his success. Unfortunately, while in the city of Taos-on-Darwin, Boldyrev suffered a massive heart attack. Thousands attempted to visit him and he saw those he could before exhaustion over took him. On November 19, 2195, Ivan Boldyrev died, requesting that he be buried on Darwin instead of being returned home to Galileo. His wife Sonia was said to have agreed reluctantly.
A vault was built for him within the mountain city and a statue of the first president was place atop. It was unveiled two years after his death on October 20, 2197 and was attended by thousands of people from across the planet and even current president Karen Wei was in attendance. Later that year, October 20th was enacted as the first national holiday within the republic and continues to be remembered.
Honors
Following Ivan Boldyrev's death in 2195, Rayo Motors Park, the baseball field in New Chicago in which the Pinstripes play was renamed Boldyrev Park in his honor.
In 2341 when the republic decided to relocate the federal government to a new capitol, the continent on New Normandy donated for its purpose was designated the Boldyrev Republican Federal District (or Boldyrev RFD), ensuring that the citizens of the Republic, never in danger of forgetting him, never would.
Footnotes
- ↑ It is said that this is how he earned the venom later spewed at him by Galileo Herald editor Mickey Sweeney. Boldyrev reportedly turned him in to the new city sheriff instead of relying on the usual punishment methods of the time and Sweeney served three months at a work camp for his offense.
- ↑ The "Freedom Riders" were also derided as the "Farce Riders" for Boldyrev's tendency to dress himself and his men in elaborate military-like uniforms, rife with ribbons and gold lace. This criticisim is valid given the lack of effectiveness they showed during the First Republican Defensive and when the planetary militias were folded into the Fourth Fleet with the founding of the Republic, the former F-Company was disbanded.
