Yuri?

[FieldMarshall]

Call me a dunce if you all worked this one out already, but I'm sure it is Yuri Gagarin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin

He was Russian, so the accent is right.

In 1961 he went into space, so the time period is right.

He was an astronaut, so you'd probably find him at the rocket launch site.

Chances are that if there weren't zombies everywhere, that rocket would be the rocket the took him into space in 1961, and Treyarch knew this, so they incorporated the real life event into their storyline.

Maybe Sam tried like...car jacking his rocket and thats why he's all crying for help and whatnot.

Questions? Comebacks?

[Matuzz]

Mostly know as the first man in space.

[terminaltheory]

I thought the same thing as you, fieldmarshall. But as I started looking around, I found some more things.

Yuri is actually an extremely common russian name. One of the most well known, is the same one you mentioned, whom is an astronaut.

I started searching around for some famous Yuris, and wikipedia yielded these results:

* Yuri Brezhnev (born 1933), son of Leonid Brezhnev

* Yuri Churbanov (born 1936), son-in-law of Leonid Brezhnev

* Yuri Andropov (1914–1984), Soviet Politician and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

* Yuri Artsutanov (born 1929), Russian pioneer of the idea of Space Elevator

* Yuri Feodorovich Orlov (born 1924), Soviet physicist and human rights activist

* Yuri Izrael (born 1930), Russian scientist and vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

* Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968), Soviet cosmonaut, the first human in space

* Yuri Maslyukov (1937–2010), Russian politician

* Yuri Matochkin (1931-2006), Russian politician

* Yury Luzhkov (born 1936), Mayor of Moscow from 1992 to 2010

* Yury Sevidov (1942–2010), Russian footballer

* Yury Zakharevitch (born 1963), Olympic weightlifter for the Soviet Union

Out of all of these, Yuri Artsutanov caught my eye. He had the original idea of a space elevator, and fits perfectly into the time period. He is a short bio of him from wiki:

Yuri N. Artsutanov (born 1929) is a Russian engineer born in Leningrad. A graduate of Leningrad Technological Institute, he is best known for being one of the pioneers of the idea of space elevator.

In 1960 he wrote an article "V Kosmos na Electrovoze (en. Into space with the help of an electric locomotive)", where he discussed the concept of the space elevator as an economic, safe and convenient way to access orbit and facilitate space exploration.

Artsutanov developed the idea from works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in 1895 proposed an idea of building an orbital tower. Artsutanov's concept was based on the linking of geosynchronous satellites to the ground with a cable. He suggested using the satellite as the base from which to construct the tower since a geosynchronous satellite will remain over a fixed point on the equator.[1] By using a counterweight, a cable would be lowered from the geosynchronous orbit to the surface of Earth while the counterweight was extended from the satellite away from Earth, keeping the center of mass of the cable at the same height above the Earth. The ideas of Tsiolkovsky's compression-structure concept and Artsutanov's tension-structure concept differ in that a compression structure is well outside conceivable future capabilities, while the tension-structure is much easier to build and maintain, and is considered possible with near-future technologies.

Hmm. Teleporters, elevators, and space? Maybe. Just another thought.

Sorry for the wall o' text.

[GideonGraves211]

it is neither. If you listen to the radio his last name is Zivorski (thats how it sounds to me)