At the end of the Virtuous Mission, the prologue of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Konami, 2004), a huge man in an officer’s greatcoat opens the cases The Boss has brought as a gift on defecting to the Soviet Union. Inside are a Davy Crockett launcher and two American nuclear shells. The man lifts the launcher by hand, a piece of hardware that normally sits on a tripod, while Major Ocelot tries to talk him out of it. He ignores him. He fires at OKB-754, the design bureau of the scientist Sokolov, which is of no further use to him, and a mushroom cloud rises on the horizon. This is Colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin of the GRU, the game’s main villain: he is plotting to overthrow the Soviet government, he funds his fortress of Groznyj Grad with a secret fortune, the Philosophers’ Legacy, and he wants the Shagohod, a tank built to launch nuclear weapons. His body, on top of that, carries a permanent electric charge. That shot is what forces the United States to send Naked Snake back into the jungle, with orders to eliminate Volgin and The Boss.
// The theoryThe body as a sentence
Volgin looks as if he had been drawn with one of William Sheldon’s charts at hand. In The Varieties of Human Physique (1940), the American physician and psychologist proposed that every body combines three components, each scored from 1 to 7: endomorphy (softness, roundness), ectomorphy (thinness, fragility) and mesomorphy (bone, muscle, strength). He matched each one with a temperament, and the mesomorph got the somatotonic one: energetic, fond of risk, hungry for power and dominance, not very sensitive to the pain of others. In Varieties of Delinquent Youth (1949) he applied the scheme to 200 young men from a rehabilitation home in Boston and concluded that delinquents were mostly mesomorphs. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck seemed to prove him right in Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (1950) and Physique and Delinquency (1956), when they found far more mesomorphs among 500 delinquent boys than among 500 who were not. It is worth saying early: as an explanation of crime, the theory is discredited. The correlation exists, but what Sheldon inferred from it does not hold up.
The textbook mesomorph
Fill in Sheldon’s form with Volgin and you get an almost pure somatotype. He is a giant who stands a head taller than everyone around him, fights with his fists like a boxer and takes blows that would floor anyone else. And his character ticks the somatotonic list item by item: dominance (he wants power over the Soviet Union), a taste for physical violence (he interrogates with his knuckles) and callousness toward the pain he causes. The game even gives him a superpower that is a pure extension of the body: electricity that comes out of his fists. Volgin is what Sheldon thought he saw in his photographs: a physique with the behavior already written in.
// The subjectThe colonel who interrogates with his fists
The game builds Volgin in three moments. The first comes in the Virtuous Mission, just after The Boss has recaptured Sokolov. Volgin turns up on the rope bridge and, because Snake has seen his face, orders The Boss to kill him; she breaks Snake’s arm and throws him into the river. The second, now in Operation Snake Eater, takes place near Groznyj Grad: Volgin suspects the scientist Granin of being the infiltrated spy, shuts him inside a metal drum and beats it with his electrified fists until Granin is dead, before he can talk; Snake witnesses it from a distance, from the ruins at the top of Krasnogorje. When Ocelot reproaches him for the pointless killing, and for the bomb while he is at it, Volgin answers that he is in command, and that in a cold war of spies you kill before you are killed. The third is the torture of Snake. After unmasking him in his disguise as Major Raikov, Volgin strings him up in a cell and beats and electrocutes him to find out whether he has come for the Legacy. Snake does not talk. By the end of the interrogation he has lost his right eye, stepping in to save Tatyana, the spy EVA, from a shot fired by Ocelot.
Colonel Volgin
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// The crackIt is not the muscle that kills
The theory breaks exactly where Volgin does the most harm. His fists kill Granin and leave Snake half dead, but the shot at OKB-754 wipes out an entire facility and pushes two superpowers to the brink of war, and that took no body like his: all it took was having the bomb in his hands and no one above him to stop it. What makes Volgin dangerous is his position: his rank in the GRU, the Legacy’s fortune, a fortress of his own, a nuclear tank and the protection he extends to his own people, such as Raikov. (Spoiler warning.) Not even the ending vindicates the body: after losing to Snake in the hangar, Volgin chases the pair at the controls of the Shagohod, and when the tank lies wrecked on a bridge, he is standing on the remains when a bolt of lightning strikes him. His own electricity turns him into a lightning rod.
Sheldon’s method did not survive scrutiny either. He rated photographs of naked bodies by eye, a judgment that depended heavily on who was doing the scoring, and his sample came from a single institution. And the Gluecks’ finding allows for far more down-to-earth explanations than biology: some crimes, such as fights, attract the strong, and police and judges see the big boy as more threatening. The historian Nicole Rafter (2007) read somatotyping as part of an antimodernist reaction in the science of its day, not as a solid discovery. Explaining Volgin is not excusing him. His sadism is his own, and the game does not hide it. What it does not explain is his build.
The big-villain bias
Fiction designs its brutes with Sheldon’s physique because audiences read the body as a warning, and Volgin is the most complete example: the game tells us who he is before he opens his mouth. That habit is harmless in a video game and less so outside it. The theory died as science, but it survives as a perceptual prejudice: the one that makes a big body look guilty ahead of time. Volgin teaches the opposite of what he appears to. His gravest violence is explained not by muscle, but by power that no one ever called him to account for.
Three key ideas
- Somatotype theory (Sheldon, 1940-1949; the Gluecks, 1950 and 1956) linked the muscular body, the mesomorph, to an aggressive temperament and to crime; criminology today regards it as discredited.
- Colonel Volgin of the GRU, the villain of Metal Gear Solid 3, is a textbook mesomorph: an electric giant who beats Granin to death, tortures Snake and fires a Davy Crockett nuclear warhead at Sokolov’s design bureau.
- The crack: his gravest crime required not muscle but rank, money and a weapon; the Gluecks’ correlation is better explained by selection and by the bias with which the system looks at big bodies.
Sources · further reading
- Sheldon, W. H. (1940). The Varieties of Human Physique. Harper & Brothers.
- Sheldon, W. H. (1949). Varieties of Delinquent Youth. Harper & Brothers.
- Glueck, S. and Glueck, E. (1956). Physique and Delinquency. Harper & Brothers.
- Rafter, N. (2007). “Somatotyping, Antimodernism, and the Production of Criminological Knowledge”. Criminology, 45(4), 805-833.
- Rafter, N. (2008). The Criminal Brain: Understanding Biological Theories of Crime. New York University Press.
- Konami Computer Entertainment Japan (2004). Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Konami.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Coronel Volgin?
Coronel Volgin (“Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin”) is a villain from Metal Gear Solid, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He is a giant, he punches like a boxer and he carries electricity under his skin.
Why does Colonel Volgin (Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin) become a villain?
Colonel Volgin, of Metal Gear Solid 3, and somatotype theory: an electric giant who tortures with his fists looks like Sheldon’s mesomorph, but his worst crime was pulling a nuclear trigger.
Which criminological theory explains Coronel Volgin?
Coronel Volgin's case is analysed through Somatotypes. Somatotype theory (William Sheldon, 1940-1949) held that the muscular body, the mesomorph, comes with an aggressive, dominant temperament that predisposes a person to crime; the Gluecks believed they had confirmed it in 1950 and 1956, and criminology now regards it as discredited. Colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin of the GRU, the villain of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004), is its perfect caricature: a giant charged with electricity who interrogates with his fists. But his great crime, launching a Davy Crockett nuclear warhead at a Soviet design bureau, did not depend on his physique but on his rank, his money and the opportunity.
