THE RUSSIA I DREAM OF FORGETTING; WHAT PEOPLE ARE DYING FOR IN UKRAINE

From Marat Khairullin's Book: "And to wash yourself with a clear teardrop."

Zinderneuf:

While editing the upcoming English translation of Marat’s book, I came upon this short essay that I believe is more timely than ever. Please read this.

Marat Khairullin:

I’m often asked: why exactly did I come to this war? Today, I’ll try to explain myself.

Many years ago now, back in the first half of the 90s, an ethnic gang chased me—at that time a correspondent for a central newspaper—through the streets of a small Ural town. I had come to write about the cemetery of nameless pensioners growing up around that very place.

During that short span of time, just a couple of years since Yeltsin’s sovereignty had been established, as many as 136 lonely pensioners had gone missing without a trace in this classic Stalin-era industrial town, while their apartments were seized by so-called black realtors[1].

They hid me away inside the enormous administrative building of some defunct Soviet industrial giant. We sat huddled in an abandoned director’s office, burning candles—since the whole town lay without electrical power— where we drank filthy vodka. Of the room’s furnishings, the only thing I remember clearly is a lavish oil painting of Lenin still hanging on the wall.

"They’ve got everyone accounted for, every last one. First, without fail, the local precinct officer comes round, then the person disappears, and the apartment’s snatched up that very same day. New owners move in come the next morning. The previous owner’s body isn’t even cold yet, but already they’re taking over. Oh, son… what a terrifying thing it’s become to live in this country of ours…"

These were the words spoken to me by Vladimir Mironych—a veteran of the Great Patriotic War who’d devoted the larger part of his life to that very industrial giant, the cooling corpse of which we were now using for our secret hiding place.

Even the precinct officer had already paid a visit to Vladimir Mironych[2], though the gang’s plans for him were reportedly scrambled by the arrival of this Moscow correspondent—yours truly—possibly saving his life.

Now, I can’t say for certain whether that was true, but right upon arriving I made a critical mistake—I marched straight off to the chief of the town’s police force clutching Vladimir Mironych’s letter. They received me with great demonstrative warmth, rolled their eyes, lamented the sorts of crazy old men who write nonsense to central newspapers, and solemnly promised to look into the matter.

And barely two hours later, there appeared outside my hotel these guys in a Mercedes—a pair of well-fed, calm, and disturbingly noticeable tough men. They were the absolute masters of this place—drinking tea from the receptionist’s cup right at the counter, joking amiably with prostitutes loitering in the hotel lobby, all while pretending not to so much as glance in my direction.

Vladimir Mironych sussed them out in an instant and orchestrated a whole rescue operation—first shook our tail off, then hid me away in the dark, empty carcass of his native factory, where, washing down his account with bitter vodka, he gave me the full rundown on the gang operating in the town:

Which notary was forging and processing the apartments of disappeared old folks?

Turns out it was the wife of that very police chief.

Who handled property registration at the city real estate department?

It emerged the documents were handled by the mayor’s wife.

And who exactly strangled the unfortunate old men (Mironych even knew they were specifically strangled) and buried their corpses in the suburban woods?

You won’t believe it—those same smiling soul-slayers who’d come to watch me at the hotel.

Mironych’s account was steeped in horrifying details, and yet, if you imagine that I, then still practically a kid, was shocked by all this, you’d be deeply mistaken. Into our editorial office came dozens, if not hundreds, of letters with similar soul-wrenching cries—back in those years, thousands upon thousands of people, despairing of finding truth from the authorities, wrote to journalists.

I wasn’t struck by horror at what was happening—I’d long since grown accustomed to it. But when Vladimir Mironych’s letter arrived, in my role as a reporter, I couldn’t just ignore it—what specifically intrigued me was the sheer brazen brutality of the local gang.

All across Russia, lonely old folks, veterans, front-line soldiers who could remember the Great Patriotic War were being forcibly evicted from their own apartments. I’d written so damn many pieces about it that the editorial office where I worked had simply stopped accepting such stories—they’d become something mundane, however ghastly that sounds, just another feature of daily life.

Things like this were happening in Moscow, Balashika, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Kazan Vladivostok. But whereas in big cities they at least spared the old folks—forcing them to sign over their cursed apartments and exiling them to languish out their days in godforsaken abandoned villages—well, in small provincial towns they just straight-up slaughtered pensioners.

Come early morning, Mironych got his acquaintance to drive me out of town stuffed in the trunk of his car.

"Y’know, in the war I never once cried, not a single time, but here… I cried from sheer helplessness," Vladimir Mironych told me as we parted ways. "Thank you, son… Write about everything you’ve seen here…,"

We embraced tightly, and then we never met again afterward.

So many years have passed since then, yet Mironych’s face—streaked with tears, eyes full of utter despair—remains vividly clear before me: at that precise moment, this fundamentally strong man was certain he was already doomed, and he was psychologically prepared for it—the old front-liner was getting ready to die proudly, without complaints. And the only thing he still asked of God was that his story might finally be heard by someone.

Only with the passing years, really just quite recently, came the slow dawning understanding that Vladimir Mironych’s generation—then not old at all, still full of vigor and vividly remembering the Great War—was beyond priceless, yet we failed to preserve it, didn’t let them live out their remaining days with dignity, bartering away our own national greatness for cheap beer and imported jeans.

As for me personally, this whole story ended anything but well. I never even bothered writing the article; my section editor just wearily waved his hand in dismissal:

"Forget it, you’ll prove nothing anyway, there are no documents, they’ll sue us to hell and back…"

Then some time later, my good friend, the American journalist Paul Khlebnikov, in his book alleged that Boris Yeltsin had to be personally held accountable for hundreds of thousands of murdered pensioners. He met with me several times specifically, we talked long and hard about this very topic, I handed over part of my archive to him. I recall joking grimly back then:

"Watch out—they’ll kill you for this eventually."

Pasha merely gave a wry smile in response.

And after his book came out, they did indeed kill him. And for some reason my very first thought was: precisely for those words—that he would never forgive Boris Yeltsin for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of old people abandoned to their fate.

That’s why, my dear ones, all who’ve perished in today’s war, they didn’t die for nothing. And not just so that our lonely old folks wouldn’t be killed by the thousands anymore for their miserable apartments. Because if Ukraine and the West standing behind it win and come here to our land, it’s us—you and me—they’ll be killing next. Believe me, it will all come flooding back, all that horror which we, having sunk into our comfortable oblivion, dared to forget.

Oh yes, we forgot how in the Russia of the 90s a million human beings died from samogon[3] and causes directly linked to alcohol—overwhelmingly men, somebody’s precious sons, fathers, husbands, brothers. We forgot that every single year 30 to 50 thousand perished in car crashes, and the majority of drivers—the ones actually causing the accidents—faced no legal consequences whatsoever.

Starting, it seems, from 1997 onward, a special report dedicated to torture within police stations (“militia at the time) regularly emerged under UN auspices—naturally, an unfriendly act by the USA, yet still, it spoke volumes about the true state of Russia’s law enforcement system, in whose capital during certain years over a thousand citizens were gunned down by hired killers right out on the streets of the capital city of my struggling country.

In the very year Putin became prime minister (1999), yet another monstrous study was published, coldly stating that every third girl in our vast country before reaching 18 years of age had experience with so-called "commercial sex." Thus did polite Western researchers term prostitution in our country.

By the twilight of the century, the black-market transplantology trade in Russia was valued at a figure monstrous for those times—a full billion US dollars. Approximately 20 thousand Russians were “dismantled for spare parts” annually; everything was harvested for use, even lymphatic fluid—snapped up eagerly by Western perfume giants. And again that chillingly polite formulation—"without donor consent."

And then too in Russia there existed an actual slave market—about 15 thousand Russians sold annually—and a parallel market for sexual slavery: in foreign brothels across the globe, by various expert estimates, held strictly "against their will" were up to half a million of our young girls. There was also the Chechen war, which I could endlessly write about. And so on and so forth.

For you, my dear readers, all this may well be merely abstract numbers, but I spent all those years traversing cities and remote villages writing article after article about crippled lives and broken fates… I looked these cold statistics directly in the eye, smiled back at them, drank vodka with them. Back then I was a very callous man, hardened, almost never shed tears. I remember only one solitary such instance.

It was also in some God-forgotten backwater town, an eternal polustanok[4] on one of Russia’s desolate outskirts.

Misha the geologist, you understand, was one of those genuinely bright and quiet Russian idealists—deeply conscientious folk who ache in their souls for their fellow human beings and turn up spontaneously in all corners of our holy country. He penned a letter to my editorial office; I came out to meet him, and together we went to see the local Aniskin[5]—an aging precinct officer named Kuzmich. He listened long and hard to my initial pitch, then somehow crookedly smiled and proposed:

“So you want to have a look, correspondent, well, let’s go and have a look…”

We walked on a clear, bitingly cold night between two frozen railway lines, upon which stood immobile freight trains. Suddenly Kuzmich darted sideways, squeezed himself through the narrow gap between wagons, and hauled out from some dark hole a violently kicking bundle of rags.

"Hey now, quit scratching me, little devil, you know perfectly well I won’t do anything bad to you," Kuzmich grunted heavily, firmly restraining a grimy boy of about 8-10 years.

"Move along now," he gave the boy a rough but not unkind shove in the back, and the kid obediently shuffled forward.

Down in a basement kaptyorka[6], Kuzmich growled out angrily:

"This here’s Aska. Go on, take your jacket off. And you, mister correspondent, best be careful—he’s crawling with lice."

Then he pulled out coarse bread, cheap sausage, and meticulously cut thick sandwiches.

"Eat up, boy."

He sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette, and told me:

“Wait, that’s not all…”

The boy began eating quietly and obediently, while we three grown men sat in heavy silence watching him.

Quite unexpectedly, the door creaked slightly ajar and through the narrow gap slipped silently a girl of about six years; she sat herself down right beside Aska and took his small hand firmly in hers.

"Well now, allow me to introduce—this here’s Sima," Kuzmich remarked with a grim half-smile.

"I’ve got maybe thirty of these street rats running around this station, but these two… what they’ve got is real love, see? They cling to each other for dear life—she works in the passing freight cars with the itinerant oil workers, and this little fool here tries to stand guard over her… Ain’t that the truth, little Serafima?"

Sima merely tilted her head downward and smiled a tender, private smile at the dirty floor. I noted immediately what a good, genuinely childish smile she possessed.

"That’s how things stand here, mister correspondent. Nearest state orphanage’s five hundred versts[7] off, and they’d just run away from there anyhow… Where to even put ’em… Not a soul in this world gives a damn about them."

The children finished eating, gulped down some lukewarm tea, and immediately curled up to sleep right there on the wooden chairs, while we adults talked on until the frost-laden dawn, which hung the chimney smoke from surrounding peasant huts like frozen veils against the scarlet-streaked sky. I departed on the very first morning train.

Several months later arrived a second letter from Misha. During one of her grim "work shifts" inside a railcar, Sima was forcibly dragged away by passing shift workers; Aska instantly rushed at them with his little knife trying to defend her. They were both thrown brutally from the moving train at full speed… The children’s cruelly broken little bodies were eventually discovered in a ditch thirty kilometers distant from that godforsaken whistle-stop, and predictably, no criminal case was ever opened. And Kuzmich? He was summarily thrown out of the police force for alleged chronic drunkenness. That precise moment—that’s when I finally broke down and wept. That singular letter remains, it seems, the only one over which I ever cried in my entire career.

If anyone dares tell me that a beloved son, a father, a husband, a brother died in vain in this foreign-seeming war—know this with absolute certainty: they did not perish for nothing. They died so that such monstrous numbers in our wounded country might become as vanishingly few as humanly possible. Because if the enemy ultimately takes the upper hand, that same cursed democracy will come crashing back upon us. And then, I swear to you, Mironych, Aska, Sima and all the other countless betrayed souls will most assuredly not forgive us.

Personally I, to the extent of my abilities, am fighting here precisely for this grim purpose, because I dream desperately of finally forgetting that accursed Russia of my youth, through which I wandered as if wading perpetually knee-deep in endless, suffocating human sorrow.

And you… you must each decide for yourselves where you stand…

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[1] The term "black realtors" (чёрные риелторы in Russian) refers to criminal groups or unscrupulous real estate operators who illegally seize properties—often from vulnerable owners like elderly or isolated individuals—through coercion, fraud, or violence.

[2] “Mironych” is a shorter version of “Mironovich,” representing the name of a person’s father.

[3] "Samogon" (самогон) is a traditional Russian homemade distilled alcohol, similar to moonshine.

[4] “Polustanok” translates to “railway whistle-stop.”

[5] A reference to Fyodor Ivanovich Aniskin, a district police officer or “village detective” – and a fictional character by Vil Lipatov.

[6] “Kaptyorka” is a boiler room or a storage room.

[7] A verst (верста in Russian) is an old Russian unit of distance that was widely used before the metric system was adopted. One verst is about 3500 feet, or a little over a kilometer.