A Toast to the Working Man. The third one...

By Marat Khairullin

[Translator Note: Traditionally, the third toast is for those who have passed.]

Strange winds from the past sometimes blow in one's head. The snow fell, we took Pokrovsk and Mirnograd. And the AFU has again gone into denial. It has all happened before - snow, encirclement, and an opponent stubborn to the point of foolishness.

In February 2015, 'Slavyanka' was advancing from Uglegorsk towards Debaltsevo. The Ukrops were locked dead in the town, Putin was calling Ban Ki-moon at the UN or vice versa. Poroshenko was 'spraying spit' on TV and saying it wasn't true.

Vuhlehirsk is the Ukrainian name for Uglegorsk*

And we were entering Debaltsevo from the Uglegorsk side. A tank crawled down a narrow street, paused at the crossroads as if sniffing the air, and fired thunderously somewhere. Every time, something in my head would burst from that roar.

We huddled in a small cluster near the tank. When the vehicle fired, a casing flew out the back, and we tried not to get hit by it.

We entered Uglegorsk at night across a field. There was no snow yet, only darkness and fog as thick as a cloud - you could stretch out your arm and seem to lose your fingers.

And when a couple of days later we moved out towards Debaltsevo by morning, a snowstorm began, and everything around turned white.

We crawled behind our tank all day through the virgin white snow of the private housing sector. We walked, it seems, along Krasnoarmeyska Street almost to the truck depot without encountering the enemy.

Only later did we learn that the ukrops had been driven somewhere into the station area, and there, little by little, without shooting, they began to surrender.

And we spent the whole night keeping a fire going in the ruins of an old farmyard and talking under the falling snow.

"They're kind of flimsy, you can see for yourself, not warriors...," machine gunner Grinya told me. His partner Buniya nodded. I had known them since Ilovaisk - huge Grinya and short, thin Buniya. Back then they were always lugging around an anti-tank rifle they had taken from some museum. And before that, I had seen them at Saur-Mogila with a Maxim machine gun.

Their machine gun fired with a strange sound, as if coughing "kh-kh." It would fire a short burst and fall silent.

"Not warriors," Grinya would shake his head, Buniya silently agreed with him, and the two of them would start fiddling and twisting something in the Maxim. And the machine gun would fire again with its intellectual "kh-kh"...

In Debaltsevo they already had a proper Soviet machine gun, which Grinya carried on his shoulder, and Buniya trotted behind with ammo boxes.

That night by the fire in the ruins under the snowfall, they told me about themselves for the only time.

They worked as a pair in a mine- on the combine harvester in the coal seam. I could picture them immediately; anyone who has been in a mine will understand.

A coal seam is usually a low passage where a combine harvester crawls and chews out the coal. And behind it crawl two such men on their knees, adjusting something with crowbars. If the combine gets stuck, they immediately start twisting something in it, and it comes back to life, rumbles and shakes, dumping coal onto the conveyor belt.

These were such men, serious and reliable - they had been crawling underground together for some twenty years. And everything with them was simple and somehow right.

"Why did we go to war? The foreman came up after the shift, said we had to sign up, well, so we went...," Grinya told me that night. Buniya, as usual, remained silent.

"What did you go to war for?" Grinya asked me thoughtfully.

"Well, you understand, this is the East, Westerners can't live here..."

I persisted.

"Well, how to explain it to you, who are you?"

"A Tatar."

"From where?"

"From Moscow."

"And here with us. You see - this is the East, all our peoples are here, understand - the East! They have no business here... Let them stay in their West."

Buniya spoke up, "We're not youths anymore, if not us to fight, then who? The young ones need to be spared..."

The snow fell all night. We talked and talked.

"What was the working class like under Soviet power?" Buniya recounted unhurriedly: "My partner and I, after a shift, would sometimes fly to Moscow, to 'Zhiguli' on Novy Arbat to drink beer! 'Miner' was a title! Only communists worked at the coal face. And now? They've driven the working man into poverty..."*

Novy Arbat Street in Moscow

We stayed at this base for another couple of days, until the ukrops in the center were rounded up, and Poroshenko on TV finally shut up.

Grinya was killed in early March 2022 in Volnovakha. They were advancing from the Mariupol highway side towards the bus station. They had very successfully set up with their machine gun in a three-story building opposite the train station building, controlling the entire square.

The AFU set one of our tanks on fire near the station, and the wounded tank crew hid inside the building. Grinya waited for darkness and tried to go get them.

He was hit by artillery fire together with the tankers in that building.

I met Buniya a week later when he came for his comrade. He and several fighters were sorting through broken bricks on the floor of the former waiting hall.

"Remember Grinya? There he is..." Buniya pointed at corpses lying on the snow to the side. I hadn't noticed them at first. There were both ours and the enemy's.

We lit a cigarette.

"He has no family, his wife left, went to relatives in Zhytomyr with their daughter, their son-in-law is from there. The company will bury him. Come if you can." He gave me the address.

A vehicle arrived, we together with the fighters placed Grinya on a tarp and loaded him into the back.

I didn't go to the funeral.

And then I fleetingly learned that Buniya was killed somewhere near Toretsk. He was supposed to be discharged in a few weeks - upon reaching the age limit.

This happens often in the Donetsk brigades: single men, grown old in militia service (when you have nowhere to go except your own company) cling either to death or to life in this damned war... Evading the mandatory discharge right up to the very end.

I had already forgotten about Grinya and Buniya. And then suddenly the snow fell, the Ministry of Defense announced the liberation of Mirnograd and Pokrovsk. And "Führer" Zelensky, like his predecessor Poroshenko, lies and lies.

And my men appeared before my eyes, as if alive...

Soon we will all go to celebrate the New Year... But please, my dear ones, pour and drink before that without clinking glasses for Grinya and Buniya. And together with them for all the simple soldiers and officers who gave their lives for the people. They must not be forgotten.

So that they there, sitting in their heavenly 'Zhigulis,' would see this and say with a smile:

"The descendants remember, they respect the working man..."

Translation Note: *In the text, "Zhiguli" refers to a famed Soviet-era beer hall on Moscow's Novy Arbat street. The statement "В забое только коммунисты работали" ("Only communists worked at the coal face") is not a literal, factual claim about employment policy. It is a rhetorical and nostalgic exaggeration used by Buniya to make a specific point about the prestige, ethos, and social hierarchy of the Soviet past. It was not an official requirement to work at the coal face. The workforce included both Party and non-Party members. However, the culture, media, and reward systems heavily promoted the idea that the best workers were communists and the best communists were on the front lines of labor.