winter soldier – shinelikethunder

wintercyan:

coffeestainanalyst:

lauralot89:

Does anyone have any idea as to Bucky’s general location when he fell from the train? I’m assuming Russia, given the attire of the man who found him, but were we ever given any indication as to where the mission occurred?

I’ve been wondering about this for a while. In my head, the whole thing does not make any sense.

Talking strictly MCU here – the last time we’ve seen Zola before the train scene, he’d been experimenting on Bucky at a facility near the Italian/Austrian border.

Steve catches a glimpse of the map:

(Sorry for the terrible quality)

The HYDRA base should have been somewhere around that stylish red dot.

There’s almost a year (?) between Bucky being rescued by Steve and falling from the train, so Zola could have gone anywhere. Russia though, that seems a rather dangerous journey, even if HYDRA had already infiltrated parts of the military there.

I assumed, given Zola continues working for the Red Skull, they retreated to one of the other bases… again, see map.

Now, I’m dead sure I read “train through the alps” a lot in fanfic, and either we’re all wrong, or that’s Canon. (I think I even remember Eastern Alps?)

So there, hello Alps:

Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, parts of Germany, Italy, Hungary and what’s now Slovenia.

So Zola’s Swiss, right? For some reason, I always assumed that’s where the train was headed, but even if it wasn’t – they must have been in that general area somewhere, and I can’t really see how they’d be likely to meet Russian soldiers there.

And even IF. Why wouldn’t they return Bucky to their – at that point – allies?

I have both read and written fic where Bucky was found by some other party first and only when the war was over came to be with the Russians, but that doesn’t seem to be backed up by Canon, either.

Therefore: confusion all around.

It’s not actually all that confusing!

We know the first HYDRA base, the one where Dr Zola experiments on Bucky, is located in Austria, between Kitzbühel and Klagenfurt (the red dot on your first map above):

When the Kitzbühel-Klagenfurt base is set to self-destruct, Red Skull escapes in a one-person prop-plane while Dr Zola drives off in Red Skull’s car. They later meet up in the vicinity of another HYDRA base, as evidenced by Red Skull driving the car to inspect the destroyed base during the Howling Commandos montage, and again in the “you are failing!” scene. This suggests Dr Zola is travelling between the different HYDRA bases in Europe to speed up the production of weapons and parts for the Valkyrie and to ward off the Howling Commandos, a mission he is obviously failing on both counts as Red Skull tells him, “we are continually delayed because you cannot outwit a simpleton with a shield!”

The movie cuts straight from Red Skull ordering Dr Zola to “finish your mission […] before the American finishes his” to Dr Zola’s train driving through a snowy mountain range. According to the CA:TFA Director’s Commentary, the Howling Commandos are waiting to ambush the train “on a mountainside in Austria,” and the visual effects team reports that the scene “takes place in the Alps”—put together, this gives us the Eastern Alps. I’ve been trying to find an in-movie reference to the Eastern Alps specifically, but I’ve only got extratextual evidence. However, I think it’s fair to assume Dr Zola is heading towards the main HYDRA base, according to Colonel Philips located “in the Alps, 500 feet below the surface,” to finish his work on the Valkyrie, which is scheduled to take off a couple of days later. This all points towards Bucky falling from the train somewhere in the Eastern Alps.

So what’s up with the Soviet soldiers finding him? Answer: the Eastern Front. In the spring of 1945, the Eastern Front was pushing through Czechoslovakia into Hungary and Austria:

It’s not unlikely a vanguard of Soviet soldiers would’ve made its way into the Alps and found Bucky there. They’d have taken him back to their camp for medical treatment, discovered that he had superhuman strength/stamina/healing abilities due to Dr Zola’s experiments, and then just… kept him. The Soviet Union and the US weren’t exactly the best of friends even as allies, and the end of the war became a free-for-all grab-bag of German technology and resources. An American soldier left for dead would be considered spoils of war, especially if he showed evidence of superhuman abilities that Soviet scientists wanted to study. Which evidently they did, since the KGB’s Special Division started a file on James Barnes on March 23, 1945 (see eatingcroutons’s fantastic MCU timeline):

The US branch of HYDRA later reacquires Bucky, probably at Dr Zola’s behest and after the fall of the Soviet Union when Russia was selling out of its military surplus.

Ooh, excellent tracking-down of details, both from props and extracanonical sources. I do wonder a lot about the early days of the Winter Soldier program and who was responsible for it, and whether there’s a whole story there that we aren’t going to get until Cap 3. Because the information we have is super ambiguous.

On the one hand, he’s recovered right off the bat by Russian soldiers and the KGB file starts in early 1945, and it would appear that the Russian connection extends right up into the present day, since his ammo and the team he takes with him to the freeway shootout are Russian. Which kind of suggests that he’s “on loan” from Dept X or the FSB or whatever Hydra-ridden shadowy organization has control of him: murderdoll complete with manufacturer-provided accessories. If they’d recovered him back in the early 90s you’d think he’d be heading up an American team in the field by now.

On the other hand, Pierce’s little speech to him suggests they have an established rapport (which is deteriorating, to Pierce’s annoyance). If he’s on loan from Russia, it’s probably an ongoing arrangement rather than an isolated incident.

And then there’s Zola. Not only is he there while the stump of Bucky’s arm is being amputated and the metal arm attached, Bucky’s very first flashback is to Zola in a forest in the snow. Implying… what, that he was there when Bucky was recovered? That he may have been the one to lead the Russian soldiers there? In which case everything between the train and the Valkyrie must happen in a very short timespan: Zola’s captured, flown to London before the day is out, sings like a canary, and is immediately repatriated to his home (neutral) country. Unless someone with a better knowledge of the relevant international law and conventions can tell me Phillips meant something different by “remanded to Switzerland,” I’m going to assume Zola was at liberty between March 1945 and whenever he was recruited under Operation Paperclip, which could be anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years. So presumably the first thing he does once he’s set free is hightail it back to that mountain pass to recover his most valuable experiment.

And he… just so happened to have a handful of Russian soldiers handy to transport Bucky to someplace where Zola could build “the new fist of Hydra” in that interim period. So either there’s already a Hydra cell growing within the KGB, or Zola is pretending to cooperate with the Russians and let them believe they have full control over the Winter Soldier project, probably while planting the seeds for a Hydra cell within the KGB. And then the Americans come calling and he smells opportunity.

(Or maybe he was found independently by the Russians and they didn’t know what to do with him until Zola, pre-Operation-Paperclip, managed to wrangle his way onto the project. WHO KNOWS. I HOPE WE GET THE FULL STORY IN CAP 3.)