Russia I am Trying to Forget

What for are our children dying in Ukraine...

I regularly receive letters from mothers who have lost their children, each of these contains a bitter reproach: “For what has my child perished?”

They usually write about the chaos in the army, about the callousness of officials who cannot or do not even want to find the bodies of a murdered father, son, or brother. I always do my best explaining at least something in general phrases to these grief-stricken people and I always feel that this is not really enough, but rather very little.

Therefore, today I want to try explaining what were my personal reasons to abandon life in Moscow and why I came to this war to film and write. And then let everyone decide for themselves.

Many years ago, in the first half of the 90s (I was a correspondent for a central newspaper then), I was chased around a small Ural town by an ethnic gang. I came there to write about the unnamed cemetery for pensioners on the outskirts of this town.

In a very short period of time (just a couple of years) that has passed since Yeltsin’s sovereignty was established in this classic Stalinist industrial town, 136 lonely pensioners had gone missing, and their apartments had changed ownership.

I was hidden [by people who assisted] in a huge administrative building of a deceased giant of Soviet industry.

We were sitting in the abandoned director's office; a luxurious oil portrait of Lenin hung on the wall. We were burning candles (there was no electricity in the whole city) and drank filthy vodka.

“They know everyone on the list, local police officer always comes first, and then the person disappears, after that they immediately clean the apartment up, and the next day they move in, the body of the person has not yet cooled down, but they are already in charge... Oh son, how scary it has become to live in the country...” - Vladimir Mironovich, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, who gave most of his life to that same industrial giant, on whose cooling corpse we then were drinking alcohol told me.

A local police officer had already visited him and as Mironych [shorter of Mironovich, more informal, represents name of person’s father] said himself, he is still alive only thanks to the unexpected arrival of a correspondent from Moscow.

I don't know if it was truth or not. But I made a mistake—immediately upon arrival I went to the head of the city police with a letter from Mironych. They greeted me very cordially, surprisingly rolled their eyes, complained about all sorts of crazy people writing nonsense to the central newspapers, but promised to definitely look into it.

And literally a couple of hours later at my hotel, these guys in a Mercedes appeared. They were well-fed, calm and very noticeable. They were absolute masters here—they drank from the administrator's cup at the counter, good-naturedly joked with prostitutes in the hotel lobby and pretended not to look in my direction.

Mironych immediately identified that they were after me, staged a whole operation, shook them off our tail and hid me in the empty and dark building of his native factory where, while washing down his story with bitter vodka, he gave me a complete picture of the gang operating in the city, which notary forged documents and registered the apartments of the missing old people (by the way, she was the wife of that same police chief I visited before), who registered the property rights in the city real estate department (by the way, she was the wife of the city mayor—visiting him was my next obligatory task in my investigation), and who strangled the victims. Mironych even knew that missing old people all got strangled and then buried in a suburban forest—by those same smiling murderers that we’d seen at hotel lobby.

But if you think that all this shocked me, despite being just a kid, then you are mistaken. I received dozens, if not hundreds of letters with similar emotional cries—thousands and thousands of people in those years, desperate to find the truth from the authorities, wrote to journalists. Therefore, I was not horrified by what was happening, I was already used to it.

The cruelty of the local gang described in Mironych’s letter—that was my main interest as a reporter. Lonely old people who remembered the Great Patriotic War (WWII) were evicted from their apartments throughout all the Russia. I wrote so much material about this that the editorial offices where I worked simply stopped accepting these stories from me—they became something commonplace, no matter how creepy it may sound—just a sign of life.

This happened everywhere - Moscow, Balashikha, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Kazan, Vladivostok...but in big cities, old people were spared, forced to assign these damned apartments to new owners and then evicted to live in some abandoned villages. In small towns, old people were simply mowed down.

Early in the morning Mironych asked his friend to take me out of the city in the trunk of his car.

“You know, I never cried during the war, but here…I cried from powerlessness”—he waved his hand and hugged me: “Thank you, son, and goodbye... Write about all that there...”

So many years have passed, but Mironych’s face with tears and despair in his eyes stands clearly in front of me—saying goodbye. This strong man was sure that he was already doomed. And he was ready for this—the old front-line soldier was preparing to die proudly, without complaint. And the only thing he asked God for was for his story to be heard at last... This cannot be confused with anything else.

This story did not end well at all. I even haven’t written the article—my department editor waved his hand tiredly: “Forget it, you can’t prove anything anyway, there are no documents, they’ll sue you…"

Later, American journalist Paul Khlebnikov—a good friend of mine—in his book alleged that Boris Yeltsin personally had to be held accountable for hundreds of thousands of murdered pensioners.

We met several times and had much discussions on this topic; I gave him part of my archive and, being a bit groggy, I told a good joke (as it then seemed to me): “Watch out, they might kill you for that...” Pasha just grinned back.

And after the book had been released, he was murdered...

And for some reason I immediately thought that it was precisely because of the words that he would never forgive Boris Yeltsin for the death of these hundreds of thousands of old people abandoned to the mercy of fate...

So my dear mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers—your relatives did not perish simply to make sure that our lonely old people would no longer be killed in the thousands for the sake of their miserable apartments. No, my dears, if the Ukrainians and the West behind them win and come back to our country, they will kill you and me, not only the old people...

Believe me, that very horror, that we, immersed in the comfort, dared to forget, will return... Was there something more about the horror? Let's remember...

It so happened that I have spent the whole of my youth on endless business trips around the once great country where Democracy and Yeltsin had won. And I have endless memories of the nightmare which I have witnessed, lived through and felt with all the fulness of my senses. For example, about the fact that back in the ‘90s in Russia, more than a million of people died from alcoholism and causes directly related to alcohol. Mostly men were the victims, and they were also someone’s sons, fathers and brothers. Like the fact that every year somewhere between 30 to 50 thousand people got killed in road accidents, and the biggest part of it was that the killer drivers had not even been subjected to criminal liability or hadn’t gone to trial.

And, as far as I remember, starting from year 1997, the UN annually issued a special report on torture in the police (“militia” at the time)—this, of course, was an unfriendly move by the United States, nevertheless, it spoke about the state of the law enforcement system in the country. At the same time more than a thousand people annually died from the bullets of murderers on the streets of the capital city of my tortured country.

And in the very year when Putin became prime minister [1999], another terrible study was released which stated that every third girl in Russia under the age of 18 had the experience of “commercial sex.” This is how Western researchers found a tolerant term to label prostitution in our country. In addition, at the end of the century, the black market in organ transplants in our country was estimated at a monstrous figure for those times—a billion dollars per year. About 20 thousand Russians annually were “dismantled for spare parts”...Everything was used, even lymphatic fluid; Western perfume giants used to buy it with enthusiasm… And again same monstrously polite formulation: “without the consent of donors.”

And there also used to be a slave market in Russia (about 15 thousand Russians were sold annually without their consent) and a special market for sexual slavery—according to various estimates, up to half a million of our girls were held “against their will” in foreign brothels...

And there was also the Chechen war, which also I can endlessly write about... And so on and so forth...

And, my dear readers, for you these are just numbers, but all these years I have been traveling around the Great Country and writing articles about these crippled destinies. I looked in the eyes of these numbers, smiled at them, drank with them, sometimes even had affairs, and wrote and wrote...

And you know—for some reason I was a very callous person then, I almost never cried…I remember only one such case...

It was some kind of God forgotten town, an eternal “polustanok” [waypoint] on one of the endless outskirts of Russia.

Misha the geologist was, you know, one of those bright and quiet Russian idealists who somehow turn up spontaneously in all the corners of our holy country—people like these are the most conscientious people who wrote to me then, they did not ask for anything for themselves, but only had their souls aching for their neighbors.

This is the kind of person who wrote me a letter, and I arrived, and we went to the local “Aniskin” [Fyodor Ivanovich Aniskin district police officer “village detective” – fictional character by Vil Lipatov]— an older district police officer named Kuzmich.

He had been listening to me, he listened for a long time and looked into my face. Finally, he smiled wryly: “So you want to have a look, correspondent, well, let’s go and have a look...”

We walked on a clear and very cold night between two railway tracks on where freight trains stood. And suddenly Kuzmich rushed somewhere to the side, between the carriages, we caught up with him only when he was already dragging a kicking lump out of some hole.

“Don’t you scratch, little devil, you know I won’t do anything...” - Kuzmich groaned, bringing out a grimy kid at most 8-10 years old into the light of the moon.

“Let’s go”—Kuzmich pushed him a bit roughly in the back, he obediently trotted off...

In a basement “kaptyorka” [storage room] Kuzmich spoke just as sternly: “This is Aska. Take off your jacket,“ he warned us, ”Beware of lice...” He took out the sausage and bread, cut it and muttered to the boy again: “Eat.” He sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette, and told me: “Wait, that's not all...”

The boy obediently took the sandwich and began eating it quietly, the three of us smoked in silence and looked at him... Then the door suddenly opened slightly and a girl of about six slipped through the crack and sat down next to Aska and took his hand.

“Here, meet Sima,” Kuzmich grinned: “I have about thirty of them running around the station here, but these ones are in love... Real love, they hold on to each other—she works in the carriages with shift workers, and this one guards her… Yes Seraphim? How much did you do today? Come on eat...”

Sima just bowed her head and began to smile at the floor quietly...Even then I noted what a nice, childlike smile she had...

“That’s how it is here, correspondent, the nearest orphanage is half a thousand miles away... Yes, they escape from there... Where to place them... No one cares about them...”

And we had a serious conversation with Kuzmich, the children ate, drank tea and immediately went to sleep right on the chairs...

And we all smoked, talked and sat until the frosty morning, which the surrounding huts look like these are hanging by the smoke attached to the red sky. And then I left.

And a few months later I received a letter from Misha.

Sima, while working in the carriage, was dragged by passing shift workers, Aska rushed with a knife to defend her… Kids got thrown out of the carriage at full speed…

The broken bodies of the children were found thirty kilometers from the halt station, a criminal case wasn’t initiated, and Kuzmich was eventually expelled from the police for drunkenness…

That's when I started crying. The only letter that made me cry, I think…

But that's not what I'm talking about…

My dears, everyone who writes and does not write letters to me with bitter reproach that their children, brothers, fathers died in a war that was foreign to them. No, my dear ones, they died so that there would be as few numbers like described before as possible in our country… Because if the Ukrainians take over, then this damned Democracy return.

And then Mironych, Aska and Sima will definitely not forgive us all... And so, while we are still fighting, there is a chance that God and the millions of innocents killed by Yeltsin’s inhuman regime behind him will forgive us all.

Although, to be honest, I don’t know this for sure, I just believe in it. And so, I left my life in Moscow and now I live here, in the war, and I dream of forgetting the Russia of my youth, through which I wandered, as if knee-deep in endless human grief...

Personally, I am fighting here as best I can exactly for this reason, and let the rest decide for themselves…