REVIEW: 85 Days in Slavyansk, by Aleksandr Zhuchkovsky

85 Days in Slavyansk, Aleksandr Zhuchkovsky (Translated and self-published by Peter Nimitz, 2022).

As loyal citizens of the American Empire we are legally mandated to have the historical memory of goldfish. So it came as a surprise to many of us when earlier this year the Ukraine exploded into violent conflict. Why, we wondered, had that awful Mr. Vladimir Vladimirovich woken up one morning and decided to invade his neighbor? How terrifying that the leader of a nuclear power could behave in a such a totally random and irrational manner!

The Psmith household would never traffic in disinformation or dangerous conspiracy theories, especially ones that have been debunked by experts. Nevertheless, with a heavy heart I must inform you that Kremlin stooges have been spreading a different story.

In their version, the conflict didn’t begin this year, but instead started almost 9 years ago when the corrupt but democratically-elected leader of Ukraine fled the country in the face of mostly-peaceful protests. The mostly-peaceful protests were definitely not instigated by meddling foreign powers, and besides even if they had been, the poor fools who’d voted for the previous guy had probably only done so because bots and trolls spread misinformation on their Facebook pages. If you think about it, sometimes true democracy means overthrowing somebody in a violent coup, but I digress. The new, super-extra-democratic Ukraine immediately began a campaign of slowly escalating ethnic cleansing against half the country — banning radio broadcasts and school instruction in disfavored languages, banning political parties supported by ethnic minorities, and conducting massacres and pogroms against those same minorities. In response to this, a popular uprising turned into a revolution in some of the targeted regions, which then slowly escalated into a civil war.

The second version of the story is also a lie, or at best a half-truth. The dead giveaway is in the last sentence, because it’s an iron law of history that revolutions never, ever come out of popular uprisings. The wheels of history are turned by political entrepreneurs — individuals or close-knit groups who notice ahead of everybody else that the world has changed in some fundamental way. This unstable situation where material conditions have shifted but society keeps rolling in its groove creates a sort of potential energy, like a charged electric field or a boulder perched at the top of a cliff. In the world of business we call this a market opportunity, and we admire those with the gumption to seize them. In the world of war and politics, market opportunities often look more like a forest full of dry tinder, and the would-be entrepreneur needs an additional quality, fanaticism, that enables him to calmly light a match and flick it over his shoulder.

In Ukraine, the entrepreneurs snuck across the border in a mail truck, packed like sardines, nestled into layers. It wasn’t very dignified, but the military transport that was supposed to meet them hadn’t turned up, and there were 52 men who needed smuggling, plus all their equipment and weapons, so they evicted the trembling driver and lay on top of each other in tidy stacks. Their destination was the city of Slavyansk — carefully chosen for its precise size¹ and for its resemblance to an enormous pile of dry tinder. The Euromaidan had not gone over well in Slavyansk — everybody felt their country slipping away from them, but nobody knew what to do. Then 52 masked men with assault rifles showed up in a mail truck, tore the front gates off the interior ministry, arrested the officials within, and began giving orders to the flabbergasted citizenry. The spark caught, the fire spread, and it has not stopped burning yet.

The author of this book, Aleksandr Zhuchkovsky, may have been one of those masked men (he’s coy on this point), but in any case is a fellow entrepreneur and fanatic. This makes him especially well-placed to tell us what happened but especially difficult to believe most of the time. That’s okay, it just means we have an opportunity to practice reading a text esoterically, against the grain.

For instance: one of the more hotly debated questions in this series of events is whether the 52 men in the mail truck were really the private-sector operation they purported to be, or whether they might have had some… official sanction. To answer this question we need only savor Zhuchkovsky’s incandescent rage at the stupid bureaucratic cattle who not only failed to recognize the brilliance of the scheme, not only refused to lavish it with funding and support, but even tried to stop them. It’s so instantly recognizable as the anguished cry of the frustrated entrepreneur, stifled by policies and beset by careerists and hacks. Fear of those same careerists is what prompted the leader of the masked group to order his men to switch off their phones. Scant hours later, one of their financial backers is accosted in Moscow by some very unhappy representatives of the government, who politely convince him to call off the operation. He tries dialing them, but the calls don’t go through. Their phones are dead, they can’t be recalled.

The leader who turned off their phones is a man named Igor Ivanovich Strelkov², and his presence hovers over every page of this book like an especially gloomy and misanthropic ghost. His superpower is a kind of weaponized pessimism that enables him to anticipate every twist of bad luck and have a ready response prepared for it. His despairing fatalism seems like the polar opposite of the personality you would expect in a man who was part-military commander, part-startup founder, part-cult leader, and highly successful at all three. But that’s because we inhabit a world so devoid of leadership that we only recognize the kind in schlocky movies, all heroic poses and stirring speeches. There are other archetypes: one in particular you might call the anti-leader, a charisma black hole so powerful it wraps around and becomes inspiring, a soft-spoken prophet of doom who certainly isn’t out to manipulate you because his words fill you with boredom and dread, and so you do what he says. Strelkov fits this archetype to a tee, combines it with tactical brilliance and nerves of steel, and thereby becomes absolute dictator of a city of a hundred thousand souls.

The men who followed Strelkov were a motley crew — young men, old men, even a few teenagers. Most were idealists of one sort or another — his crew included unreconstructed communists and Orthodox crusaders, Donbass particularists and pan-Slavic dreamers, skinheads and rappers. Strelkov himself, quixotic as always, is a monarchist who sought the restoration of the Romanov dynasty, while one of his chief lietuenants was a rabble-rousing man of the people. What they had in common was that they were all "made for war". There is a kind of man who is miserable unless he is fighting for a cause, or just plain fighting, and in 2014 those men descended upon Slavyansk. The other thing that united them is that they were artists and romantics. Zhuchkovsky remarks that among the rebels the single most popular military call-sign was "Poet", and that eventually it got so ridiculously overused that that moniker was banned.

There was, of course, another city that was taken over by a rag-tag band of irredentist LARPers³ and warlike poets, almost exactly a century earlier. The Yugoslav port of Rijeka was seized in 1920 by the Italian proto-fascist artist Gabriele D'Annunzio and his band of degenerates, who proclaimed the Free State of Fiume and produced one of the most remarkable political documents ever. So when reading about Slavyansk I naturally couldn’t stop making mental comparisons to D’Annunzio’s demented reign over Fiume. But the two couldn’t have been more different — D’Annunzio was a maniacal, clownish dwarf who turned parts of the city into a never-ending orgy, whereas Strelkov’s Slavyansk seems… uhh… more boring:

The drug problem was easily defeated. I ordered the arrest and execution of all known drug dealers. As soon as they found out they all fled. The entire gypsy population fled too. I didn’t even have to shoot anyone.

The other difference is that the rebellion in Slavyansk was fighting for its life almost from the moment of its birth. The plan had always been that by raising the patriotic standard over Slavyansk, they would put the Kremlin in an untenably awkward position and shame them into intervening on the side of the Donbass. Strelkov, with his signature pessimism, assumed that the plan would fail from the very start, but thought it was worth a shot anyway. When the plan indeed failed and Russia refused to intervene militarily, the Ukrainian government fell on them with a vengeance and placed the city under a brutal siege.

Most of this book is the story of that siege, told in a tone that wavers between fawning adulation at its heroes and black humor at the ridiculous, doomed situation that they put themselves in. The battles start out as glorified shootouts between rival gangs (complete with shouted insults and trash-talking), and escalate in savagery as both sides bring in heavier weaponry, but every scrap over every street corner is lovingly recounted with the air of a heroic epic⁴. This epic's conclusion is foreordained, though, and the only dramatic tension is in the debate over whether to surrender, make an Alamo-style last stand, or try to stage a cinematic breakout from encirclement.

Most startups fail, and most entrepreneurs either wind up penniless or go back to their anonymous toil in the bowels of the large organizations that they despise. Strelkov’s organization was built with an acqui-hire in mind from the very beginning, but when at last the time came and the fire had spread so widely that the Russian government finally was forced to step in and take over a war they never wanted, his misanthropy and inability to be a company man saw him instantly replaced, banished to private life, and forbidden from returning to the war he had started.

At first, Strelkov seemed to take it philosophically. “It doesn’t matter,” he said in one interview, “after all, I was the one who pulled the trigger that started the war.” But something is preventing his unquiet soul from drifting into retirement, perhaps it’s survivor’s guilt, perhaps wounded pride, perhaps just the fact that he’s “made for war”. Over the next few years, Strelkov tried again and again and again to volunteer for the Russian military, and was rebuffed every time. Finally, in the wake of a shocking Ukrainian victory this Summer caused in part by critically low Russian manpower, Strelkov got his wish and joined up under Russia’s edict of partial mobilization. But in less than a month he was drummed out again, and now he sits on the sidelines, venting his spleen at the Russian government on a Telegram channel with millions of followers, in posts that are as dyspeptic as they are hilarious.

Still, as the civil war in Ukraine ratchets up into a war between Russia and the United States, the awful logic of escalation turning in an ever tighter spiral, it isn’t Strelkov’s latest Telegram posts that I think of. I’m reminded instead of one of his first press conferences as commandant of the city of Slavyansk, shortly after he took off the mask and revealed himself to the world. In response to a question from a panicked reporter, the Gavrilo Princip of our age shrugs his shoulders, rolls his eyes, and drawls: “nobody is going to start a nuclear war over Slavyansk”. For once, Strelkov the uber-pessimist said something optimistic. I hope he was right.

1. The population of Slavyansk was about 100,000 people, which the rebels judged large enough to be self-sufficient and to hold out for a while in a siege, but small enough that they could take it over easily. That a group of 52 thought a city of 100,000 was ripe for an easy takeover shows you the kind of men we are dealing with here.

2. This is a nom-de-guerre, his real name is Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin, but he goes by Strelkov throughout the book, and this is also the name listed on his official awards from the Donetsk Peoples’ Republic.

3. Strelkov’s hobbies include a passion for historical reenactment. He is literally a LARPer.

4. In fact given that Beowulf, the Iliad, and the sagas of the Icelanders are stories about similarly small groups of men with similarly large personalities in similarly stupid situations; it would not surprise me if the Siege of Slavyansk is turned into a real epic in a few generations.