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Sofie Ivanov was the wife of Andrei Ivanov and the mother of Susan Ivanova and Ganya Ivanov.

History

Sofie was born in 2201, in the Russian Consortium. At some point in her life, she manifested telepathy, but she managed to keep it hidden most of her life.[1] Having never been tested by The Corps, her exact Psi rating in uncertain, but thought to have been around P3, or above.[2]

She married Andrei Ivanov, a scholar and pacifist, and they lived in St. Petersburg. They had two children, Ganya and Susan, whom they raised in the Jewish Orthodox faith. Sofie would use her telepathy with her children, enjoying a very close, intense love with them. As a young child, Susan began to exhibit latent telepathic abilities. She stressed for Susan to not tell anyone. She also employed a number of means to ensure no one discovered Susan's latent ability: she taught Susan how to fool the tests given, moved her to different schools, etc.[3][4]

In, 2236, on her thirty-fifth birthday, she was discovered by the Psi Corps. Rather than join the Corps or go to prison, she elected to use "Sleepers" to disable her ability. Once a week a person would come and give the drugs to her, and each week she sank deeper and deeper into a depression, a side effect of the drugs. In 2246, after ten years of the treatments, she committed suicide. Her loss devastated her family and would have repercussions for many years to come.[1][5]

Notes

  • Sofie is mentioned on occasion, but her only appearance was in a nightmare Susan Ivanova had in ("Eyes.")
  • Even though the Show has generally referred to her as Sofie Ivanov, Russian naming Syntax requires her name to be Sofie Ivanova, because Russian last names are possessive adjectives and have a Male and Female form, (-ov ending for males, and -ova ending for females, for example.)[6]
  • There is some inconsistency as to when exactly Sofie took her own life. In ("TKO"), Rabbi Koslov explicitly states that Sofie's death was a year prior to Ganya's (circa 2246). However Susan's own account of the incident in ("The Long Night"), leaves one with the impression that she was just a small child at the time, which appears to clash with the previous statement as a year prior to Ganya's death, Susan would have been in her mid teens - her birth year of 2230 having been established in ("Eyes") and her age during the Minbari War is established in ("In the Beginning") and by implication, in ("And Now For a Word"), in which she specifies 2247 as the year she enlisted.
    If Susan was indeed a child at the time, then Rabbi Koslov was simply mistaken and Sofie died much earlier than Ganya (circa 2233 - 2237.) If on the other hand Yossel was correct, then Ivanova just let slip to Sheridan that she still played with dolls as a teenager...
    Of course the real world reason is probably that J. Michael Straczynski, when writing ("The Long Night"), simply forget the line from ("TKO") (written several years earlier by Lawrence G. DiTillio.)

Refererences

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