01

“You remember when they, like, occupied the city council building and put up the DPR flag?” says Kabaka, who I haven’t seen for the past ten years. “Well, we’re sitting at home having a drink. My wife’s brother turns up, and he says, ‘I’ve just come from the city council.’ ‘What’s going on there?’ And he says to me, ‘They’re deciding who’s going to be mayor, who’s going to be in charge… Don’t you want to go?’ he says to me. Well, I’m drunk, so I say, ‘Fuck it, let’s go!’ ‘What, you’re going to drive?’ he asks. I say, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ But fuck, all my wife did was try to talk me out of it: ‘It’s better to stay here.’”

“Fuck the mayor!” Skhar laughs. “Kabaka’s the mayor of Mariupol, the bitch!’

lol

“Anyway, some guy came in and decided to take over the meeting,” Kabaka continues his story. “They shut him up fast. And about three or four weeks later, he was in jail.”

“You could be too, Kabaka, you know,” says Shkar.

lol

“Well, if I was in charge everything might have been different…” says Kabaka. He’s joking.

“You’d be in a prison cell by now,” Shkar insists.

“Or I might have actually got the situation under control.”

“Yeah, Mariupol would be the new Donbass fortress.”

“The Mariupol People’s Republic.”

“We’d have had the MPR.”

lol

“And then what?” I ask. “The Azov battalion came, right?”

“Yeah. And we’d gotten drunk the day before, too.”

All we could do was laugh at that.

“No, well, there was one time before that I wanted to evacuate. It was terrible. When there were no cops and people just started looting… Robbing shops…”

“Who was looting?” I ask.

“Well, these guys.”

“The Mariupol People’s Republic.”

Why was that so funny?

“This guy told me: ‘It’s night. I see four guys in masks running over to the Nike shop. One of them shoves the plastic doors with his shoulder. They open. The guys run in, they close.” He goes on, “I went up to them. One guy’s leaving. With a full bag. Stuffed full. I took him down, took the bag. There was a shitload of clothes in there…”

“My sister’s husband works as a security guard. He says, ‘Shit, we weren’t even going out any more by then. Alarm here, alarm there. What’s the fucking point? Let those MPR guys sort it out themselves.”

“Right.”

“The biggest deal was 9 May,” Kabaka continues his story. “When we were liberated. When Azov came in and fucked up the city council building. It went up in flames and the entire People’s Republic moved to Georgievskaya Street. Building seven, or something like that, at the university. They set up their HQ there. They lined the intersection with tyres. They didn’t let anyone through. And that lasted for about a month after May ninth.”

“Uh-huh. So they held out for about a month after the ninth?”

“Yeah. And in the summer those guys from Azov drove down Lenin Avenue to the intersection with Georgievskaya Street. And from there they started racing the fuck around in Kamaz trucks. They had heavy machine guns there. Up drove a Kamaz, burst the fucking barrier tape, and drove on. Along comes another, and does the same.”

“What the fuck did those MPR guys do?”

“Nothing. They’d been evacuated the day before. They said, ‘You’re fucking screwed.’ Almost everyone in there was fucked. Five or six cripples were left to guard the whole thing… They fucked those guys up, took them prisoner. And that’s how Mariupol was liberated.”

We laugh.

02

“Well, when all this started,” Arseniy says, “Me and Andryukha… We went out to get something… I can’t remember what. Or why, either. Anyway, our lads from the firm had to be at some  military depot*. And we had to deliver something to them. We stood by the entrance – by now the military had already totally cleared out – and they started robbing the depot. I’m telling you, the gate’s wide open and they’re carrying everything off!’

* Many DPR thugs came from private security companies and there has always been an obvious connection between being a gangster in the 90s and 2000s and being in private security later on. These lads are private security guards, and they were near the military depot to sort out issues with Ukrainian soldiers.

We laugh.

“Cars are coming straight in. So I’m, like, ‘What’s going on? Well, come on, let’s go…’ And we go. We go in. And it’s chaos in there. They’re smashing up the radiators for scrap metal. They’re smashing out the plastic windows. There’s this noise, “BOOF! BOOF!” ­– at the barracks. They’re smashing up everything, and this noise keeps coming, like this: “BOOF! BOOF!” Yeah, like that. And we’re like, you know… Well, something’s making me uncomfortable. So I’m like, ‘How can you do that?’ I go in, I say, ‘Are you kidding, people? What are you doing?!”

“There’s no point doing that,” Leshch says.

lol.

“Yeah, so I actually say, ‘Haven’t you any shame? Hey! Where are you taking that crate?’ Basically he’s carrying a crate of military spades to the exit. And I’m already, you know, freaked out, like, you know… I launch myself at him, grab a spade, ‘I’m going to bash your head in! Give it up!’ He chucks down the spades. ‘Get the fuck out of here, dammit!’ I basically kick him out, and he runs off. I say, ‘Andryukha, shut the gate!’ Andryukha shuts the gate. Locks it with a deadbolt. I start yelling, ‘Get the fuck out of here, dammit!’ and start waving the spade. I say, ‘I’m going to chop you up!’ Basically, I’m kicking them out. Anyway, a car drives up to the gates. It’s full. ‘I say, ‘All right, open up! Everyone out!’ Basically, you know they see everything. They dump a load of stuff from the car boot. I let them out. Anyway, it took me about 40 minutes…’

“And then you gathered it all up and sold it,” Leshch jokes.

“I chased fifty people out of there in forty minutes. With a military spade.”

“Were you scared?” I ask.

“Actually, no. I wasn’t scared. Somehow I managed to suppress the will of the crowd.’

lol

“Well, what would you have done if some guy there had said, ‘Hey, you!’?” asks Leshch.

“Well, there was one. I suppressed him.”

lol

“Then three guys turn up in balaclavas. Revolutionaries, basically. They’d come looking for guns. I feel like I can’t kick these guys out on my own. They went through there somewhere… They didn’t find any guns. When they came back, I gave them spades and then they took up with me.”

lol

“Well, yeah, that’s what happened. A life experience. Interesting. Then afterwards I felt completely knackered, true. As if I’d unloaded a lorryful of sacks. But then Andryukha says, ‘“You’re a passionary*! Yes, a passionary, that’s right! I looked at you and remembered the Passionary Theory!”

* Passionarity is a theory of personality devised by the twentieth-century Soviet ethnologist Lev Gumilyev. A passionary is an energetic person who devotes those energies to aiding the survival of their ethnic group.

03

That poet, Voshchev, drinks every day. So he can’t afford to buy a new laptop.

“Sounds like I’m hearing you through cotton wool,” I tell him on Skype.

“Well, I’m a vatnik*, what do you expect from me?” Voshchev replies with grim amusement.

* Vatnik is a slang term for someone who blindly buys into xenophobic Russian propaganda. It derives from the word ватник/vatnik, meaning a wool-padded cotton jacket.

lol

There’s some kind of wild, primal urge towards truth in Voshchev. Maybe that’s why he was kicked out of the Mariupol poets’ circle. That winds me up. Anyway, Voshchev is the only person who likes me.

“Everyone hates Stalin, anyway,” I continue a conversation we started ten minutes ago.

“I wish I’d spoken up for him. But if you think about it, under Stalin I’d have been in jail for sure. So let old mustachios go. Somebody’s gotta do the routine intellectual work.”

“I’m really not idealising the Stalin period, Vitalik,” replies Voshchev from somewhere in the depths of his digital well. “It was basically shite, of course. But I reckon the evil he did was kind of… well, more natural, maybe. Not the inhuman, almost Satanic stuff Hitler did. Think about it – human-skin lampshades, gas chambers… Really, yeah. Total Satanism.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I reply to Voshchev. “But if you take Stalin on his own merits…

He was a thug and a tyrant. But he came to power in time to defeat Hitler. Evil could only be defeated by another evil.”

“You’re talking about World War II?”

“Yeah.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Two wi… aora… fought each other.”

“What?”

“Wi… ao… You know what that is? From Daniel Andreev’s Rose of Peace.”

“Say the name again.”

“Rose of Peace.”

“No, say the first thing again.”

“Wi…ao…”

“For fuck’s sake, I can’t fucking hear you!”

“Two wi… ora were fighting – the German one and the Russian one. Those two have been fighting for over a hundred years…”

“What the fuck is that about?”

“It’s a mystical interpretation of history. But still, I think there’s something in it…”

“Voshchev,” I say to Voshchev.

“What?”

“I really, really need to understand this word properly. Can you speak it syllable by syllable for me? Pretty please.”

“Witz. Raor.”

“Witz. Ragor?”

“Raor.”

lol

There’s fuck all about it on Google.

“A subterranean being that with every nation, every people, sort of, puts…” Voshchev tries to explain after a long while.

“A Witzraor?!” I finally shout, almost in despair.

“Well, something like that,” said Voshchev, already sounding a bit unsure.

Fuck it.

“So you like the mystical interpretation of history?” I check.

“It’s not that I like it… I feel like it’s valid.”

“So it turns out that these two Witzraor are there, yeah?”

“Yeah. Subterranean battle worms. There’s an American Witzraor. A German Witzraor. Every nation has a Witzraor in proportion to its size. The Soviet Witzraor defeated the German one.”

“And then the American one defeated the Soviet one?”

‘It didn’t defeat it. Knocked it down. Well, knocked it onto its knees. But now the Soviet one is rising again, it’s Russian now. And to be honest, I think that’s great. The American one is a destroyer. It doesn’t care about anything except its own welfare. The Russian one is still inclined to build things.”

“Listen, what about our home-grown Ukrainian nationalists… Have they got one too? They also have something mystical-occult, right?”

“To a very small extent, I reckon.”

“Why?”

Voshchev replies simply, “I don’t feel it, I know that they’re a knock-off of some kind. To make money for someone.”

Of course, I wish our nationalists also had their own strong, dangerous Witzraor. That would make things more interesting. But Voshchev’s mystical thought develops only reluctantly in that direction.

That night, I downloaded Rose of Peace from the internet and started reading slipping into a delirium: “Gagtungr and his kind laid a paw on the laws of this life. They’d failed to change the laws of the middle levels of Shadanakar, but many species and classes of the animal kingdom and some types of elementals came under their dominion – in whole or in part. Hence the duality of what we call nature: beauty, spirituality, harmony, friendliness – on the one hand, creatures devouring each other, and on the other…”