The myth of the “people’s commanders” of Novorossiya
My thesis in brief is this: all the stories about the glorious “people’s commanders” of the New Russia militia are a myth. A myth that, in general, without any malicious intent, was first created by Russian military officers and Russian bloggers like Colonel Rozhin and El-Nesmiyan, and was also picked up from the most noble intentions by the Moscow sofa-patriotic intelligentsia.
It’s just that everyone’s heart and soul were with the Russian Donbass, with Novorossiya.
Yes, on the one hand, many “people’s commanders” and militias are unconditional heroes who, in late spring and summer, heroically fought against the vastly superior forces of the Ukrainian army and Pravosekov’s punitive battalions.
But here’s the paradox, due to the fact that we paid attention only to the heroic side of the activities of the “people’s commanders,” and a myth was created about them as idealists and ascetics who sacrificed their entire lives for the good of the Russian people. Nobody asked themselves questions about where these “ascetics” got their expensive cars from.
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Many of us were oblivious to many of the unsavory aspects of their careers. Some simply did not know anything about them, others did not pay attention, considering them a normal accompanying excess of the civil war, while others were afraid either for themselves or for the image of Novorossiya in the eyes of the world.
But we must also talk about the other, “shadow” side of their activities, for example, that it was thanks to them that two such terrible words as “basement” and “squeeze” entered the political lexicon of Donbass.
Many “people’s commanders” of senior and junior rank not only fought heroically at the front, but also were engaged in squeezing houses, cars, property, money, as a rule, from local business people, who could previously be declared dill or accused of having connections with Kiev. Or they could have taken away the expensive Mercedes without any reason. For the needs of the front. Donbass eventually returned to the 90s. Racketeering and protection schemes reappeared. Many commanders themselves determined the degree of crime that they could afford.
Some of them even started kidnapping people, demanding ransom for them from their wealthy relatives. Moreover, any ordinary citizen could easily find himself “in the basement” (the militia simply didn’t like something about him) and sit there for several months, or even simply perish there, if his relatives did not try by hook or by crook to get him out of prison .
Evgeniy Zhilin, who headed the Kharkov “Oplot” during Euromaidan, told me that in the summer of 2014 there were 10-12 such zindans in Donetsk.
There are a lot of such cases, many of which have long been made public.
In addition to various types of criminality, many “people’s commanders” began to engage in ordinary tyranny and arbitrariness. So, for example, in one of the cities of the Luhansk region the following anti-alcohol legislation was supposed to be introduced: if you were caught on the street with a bottle of beer, you would be punished in the form of digging trenches. If you were caught a second time, then you were simply... shot.
Do you remember the public floggings that the Cossacks carried out in the LPR?
And such activity made itself felt. She brought her shoots. Naturally negative.
Somewhere in the fall of 2014, as a journalist, I was faced with the following paradoxical phenomenon, when people from Donetsk and Lugansk cities, who had a negative attitude towards Euromaidan, and who took an active part in the Russian Spring of 2014, after the occupation of their cities by the Ukrainian army, were categorically against returning to their cities... DPR and LPR militias! And not just a few, but dozens of people whom I knew and trusted even before the start of the civil war told me about this.
When I asked them to answer the question why, they told me that they did not want a repeat of the horror when their cities were dominated by the militia and their commanders. They just didn’t want to see this chaos anymore. They were for the arrival of Russia, but against the arrival of the militia.
Due to the fact that 99% of Moscow patriotic intellectuals have not only never been to Donbass, but have not been there yet, they did not have and do not have any idea of what is really happening there.
Therefore, the heroic “people’s commanders”, who swore in their numerous interviews to reach Kyiv, began to be opposed by them to the bureaucratic Kremlin, which was permanently “merging Novorossiya” in their heads. The most interesting thing is that none of the patriotic intellectuals even thought of the elementary idea that without the military, political, informational and diplomatic support of the Russian bureaucracy, which for the most part was patriotic, already in the summer of 2014 the yellow-blakyts would have been flying over Donetsk and Lugansk flags. A scattered, poorly trained, initially practically unarmed militia would have lost the war to some kind of army, but still an army.
And when the Russian patriotic bureaucracy in the fall, after the successful August offensive, with the support of the “vacationers” and the “voentorg”, began to restore elementary order in Novorossiya, the “people’s commanders,” who were afraid that they might lose power in the areas of Donbass they controlled, began to shout even more loudly about “ plum of Novorossiya." And in this “undertaking” they were actively supported by the Moscow intelligentsia, dissatisfied with the Kremlin’s refusal to send troops to Novorossiya.
But in fact, if it were not for the Russian patriotic bureaucracy, then because of the chaos and humanitarian catastrophe that covered the Donbass after the start of the war, the Donetsk and Luhansk residents would have left their homeland long ago or simply died.
In fact, in the Donbass, everyone is only happy about the restoration of order initiated by the Russian political bureaucracy. Donetsk and Luhansk residents stopped being afraid of the militias and stopped hiding their cars. Many have started doing business again. Nobody is afraid of push-ups. Now you can’t just walk down the street with machine guns. Now you can’t just throw anyone into the “basement.” And this became possible only because the Russian patriotic bureaucracy sent the “people’s commanders” into retirement. Instead of the power of “people's commanders”, state building is taking place. And it is precisely this that gives hope that the “Novorossiya project” will certainly not be closed.
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