Aleksei Sakhnin
Translated by Dan Erdman
In 2014, Igor Ivanovich Strelkov was the hero of the Donbass insurrection. He and his forces occupied the city of Slavyansk - located on the road between Donetsk and Kharkov - and for a long time defended it from Ukrainian national forces. Then, retreating to Donetsk, he prevented the surrender of the city and was appointed Minister of Defense of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. However, Strelkov was soon summoned to Moscow and forced to resign in exchange for Russia’s promise to send weapons and volunteers to Donetsk. The promise was kept; the volunteers, who had simply “gone on vacation” from the regular army, repelled the Ukrainian offensive and were ready to take Mariupol, but then were suddenly stopped by a shout from the Kremlin: Putin and his entourage declined to attack Ukraine at that time. The quarrelsome and independent Strelkov has since remained out of work, always prophesying a new inevitable war; this did, of course, actually happen 8 years later, but under completely different circumstances.
After the outbreak of the recent hostilities, Strelkov sharply criticized the army authorities, while at the same time desperately trying to get to the front. In the end, he was indeed taken into the army, offering to form a volunteer battalion in Rostov-on-Don, but nothing came of it; the former hero of Donbass returned to Moscow with the firm conviction that the cause for which he fought was hopelessly lost: “In most of the units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, soldiers and officers do not understand for what and for what purposes they are fighting.”
It’s remarkable how much Mr. Strelkov has missed his epoch. His romantic nationalism and passionate faith in the utopia of the Russian irredenta called him to become the next Garibaldi. But life has mercilessly exposed the inadequacy of this vocation. Instead of a cruel but proud and, ultimately, progressive reconquista, a dirty, bloody, hypocritical pantomime is performed. And, except for Strelkov himself, no one - from general to private - believes that this farce has any meaning at all.
Strelkov brings his jihad to the front, but finds that no one there is much interested. His name will disappear from the battalion lists. The command hopes that he will somehow disappear by himself, blow up on a mine or die from a random fragment. Everyone is afraid to take responsibility for a restless fanatic. Nobody needs his sacrifice or his heroism. But even the very backbone of the army, the soldiers and officers, are, he finds, seized with apathy. “Apathy saps morale, and results in the fulfillment of the tasks only ‘for show,’ without any real interest in their successful result,” Strelkov has ruefully observed.
Strelkov blames the rotten regime for what is happening. He thinks, for example, that a passionate desire to negotiate with former Western partners prevents fighting, disorients and demoralizes the army. Maybe this is true. But things get even worse for Strelkov and his fellow national romantics. It turns out that the cult of the restoration of the empire, to which they have given their lives, is nothing more than an empty operetta. There is no substance to it: the empire is simply not needed by anyone. The nationalists of the 19th century sometimes entered into alliances with reactionary forces, like the same Garibaldi who made a deal with the Sardinian monarchy. But they were solving an objective historical problem: they were creating a nation-state with a single market, a standard language, and a system of national education. In the conditions of industrialization, it was impossible to do without these. But today’s Russian “imperial reconquista” does not solve any problems that are really facing society. While it might make the ideal ideological justification for a massacre, it could inspire nothing more than apathy.
The Ukrainian adventure and its imperial ideology is doomed to failure not only because Putin’s Russia is weak and corrupt. But also because there is no room for anyone in this project. Neither for Ukrainians, nor for Russians. Not for heroes, not for opportunists. It does not entail a new school of thought, no language, no industrial breakthrough, no future. The Russian elites do not have a project for the future, nor do they have an adequate understanding of the past to which they urge us to return. In this bloody mess there is no place even for sincere national fanatics like Strelkov. It’s just emptiness, nobody needs it.
Excellent article!
But didn't Strelkov start the war in the Donbas? I recall seeing headlines in 2014 where he bragged that the people in the Donbas did not want to fight until he, Strelkov, made war unavoidable.
Excellent article!
Perhaps Strelkov should be recognized for starting the war in the Donbas. In mid-2014 he bragged the people there did not want to fight until he, Strelkov, made war unavoidable. What specifically he did to achieve this I do not know.