He was trying to get to the bottom of one case of a local farmer, whose only cow had been pilfered by rebel soldiers. He had jailed several rebels for theft. The two public executions for looting were justified, he said, because only the lowest form of humanity would steal the few provisions remaining in the town. 'In order to live by the laws of
the New Testament, first we must live by the laws of the Old Testament; an eye for eye. If the people behave like animals, we will treat them like animals.'
This was the Romanians sixth war. The first had been the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, soon after he signed up. He became an officer in the Soviet and Russian armies, and later in an interior ministry special forces unit. There was no way of verifying his claims; he never even told me his real name. But I doubted he was lying.
Having been through the blood, mud, and brutality of both Chechen wars during the 1990s, he left the army. Afterwards, he tried his hand at civilian life, setting up a small construction company in Moscow. It was not a success, and he ended up working on the building sites himself to make a living.
The Romanian did not like corruption; his eyes sparkled with fury whenever he brought the subject up, which was often. If he had his way, he would have all the corrupt officials shot. Joseph Stalin had been right, he said; there may have been repression back then, but the country developed, and progressed, and that was the main thing.
'Giving a bribe makes you feel like a gay. It's like being raped. This repulsive man standing in front of you with a leering smile and his hand open. It's disgusting. I never gave a single bribe when I was working in construction.' He continued, pensively, after a pause: 'That's probably why nothing ever worked out for me.'
The Romanian had come to eastern Ukraine of his own accord, he insisted. Nobody had sent him. He made regular, informal reports to old friends in the Russian security services back in Moscow, but was spending his own small savings pot to subsist here. He had seen footage on the news a few months previously, of pro-Russian protesters burning to death in Odessa's trade union building, a horrific event in any terms, but one that Russian television had upgraded to a Nazi-inspired pogrom. He decided there was nothing for it but to travel to Donetsk himself. Just as patriotic Russians had come together to defeat the Nazis in the Second World War, he said animatedly, it was again time to join in unity against the modern-day 'Ukrainian fascists' and their backers in Western capitals. On his lapel, he wore the orange-and-black St George's ribbon. It marked the Soviet victory in the Second World War, and had become the symbol of the Donetsk rebels in this new war.
Although he despised the corruption of Vladimir Putins Russia, he was pleased that over the past year the president had done at least something to restore Russian prestige, annexing Crimea and providing support to the rebels. The army was being revamped again; money was being spent on defence. Maybe soon, Russia would once again become a country of which he could be proud.
The Romanians trajectory over the past two decades was an extreme variation on a recurrent theme of post-Soviet malaise that I encountered during my years reporting from Russia and other former Soviet countries, first as correspondent for The Independent and then for The Guardian. He had lost his way in the aftermath of the Soviet Union; now, as he meted out summary justice on the battlefields of a messy war, he felt that he was finding his bearings again.
By any measure, his presence in Ukraine, commanding a ragtag bunch of armed separatists and ordering public executions, was illegal. But the Romanian did not consider himself to be outside his homeland. His home was the Soviet Union. That was the country in which he was born, the country to which he first swore a military oath, and the country that still lived on in his heart. He admired the coal miners and steelworkers of eastern Ukraine, 'simple, hardworking and morally outstanding people' who made him feel he was back in the Soviet Union.
The Romanian mourned the Soviet Union's passing, but it was not quite right to say that he longed for its resurrection. His nostalgia was not about a devotion to Leninist philosophy. It was not necessarily even a striving for the same kind of lives people had lived before Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and the subsequent Soviet collapse. What the Romanian really missed was something more fundamental.
'We need to rebuild the country. The Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, it doesn't matter what you call it. I want a Russian idea for the Russian people; I don't want the Americans to teach us how to live. I want a strong country, one you can be proud of. I want life to have some meaning again.'
PART ONE
Curating the Past
A first-tier nation
i
To assert that the collapse of the Soviet Union cast a long shadow over subsequent events in Russia and the other former Soviet republics is to state the obvious. It is hardly surprising that the death of a whole system would irrevocably shape the future for years, if not generations, to come. But I feel that the particular way in which the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the vacuum of ideas and purpose it left in its wake, is undervalued when it comes to our understanding of Russia and the whole post-Soviet world.
In 1991, Russians experienced a triple loss. The political system imploded, the imperial periphery broke away to form new states, and the home country itself ceased to exist. There were few committed Communists left by 1991, but that did not make the collapse any less traumatic. Russians felt they had lost not an empire or an ideology, but the very essence of their identity. If they were no longer Soviet citizens, then who were they?
Images of toppling Communist monuments and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall were the easy metaphoric expressions of the Soviet collapse; the multitude of Lenins that remained, standing proudly amid the capitalist cityscapes of modern Russia, were a sign that attitudes to the Soviet past in Russia were not so clear-cut after all. But the visual, surface issue of how to deal with Communist symbols was just one small part of the picture. Almost every story I have written during many years of reporting from Russia and the broader post-Soviet region has been, at least in some way, about the effects of the Soviet downfall, and with it the requirements of reformatting national ideologies, the international geopolitical balance, and the emotional and psychological makeup of 250 million people.
For a great many Soviet citizens, the collapse came as a long-awaited blessing: the end of a stifling political system and the arrival of a multitude of exciting opportunities. But even for those who despised Communism, the collapse of the country along with the system was a jarring moment. They had spent their lives walking along a particular path: it had been hard going, the progress was minimal, and it was unclear if they would ever make it to their destination. But they at least understood the terrain. Suddenly, the ground beneath their feet gave way. All that had constituted the fabric of everyday life—accolades and punishments, status and rank, linguistic and behavioural codes—was suddenly rendered meaningless. The established order had dissolved, and in its place was a new world that was difficult to navigate and full of pitfalls.
It was a sensation I would hear about again and again from people who had failed to find their way in the post-Soviet years. The vague sense of unease and nostalgic longing created fertile ground for manipulation. It often seemed to be most acute in those aged between forty and fifty: people who had come of age just as the system collapsed. Men often seemed to struggle more than women to find the emotional resources to deal with the transition: there are many confused and angry men to be found in these pages.