“We were all separatists. Nobody said: “We are from Ukraine”
Last Saturday in Sudak, at the “Genoese Helmet” festival in old Soldaya, a medieval Genoese fortress, I met the vice-speaker of the Crimean parliament Andrey Kozenko.
He is only 35 years old, but Kozenko has been in politics for about fifteen years. It was he, as a representative of the Russian community of Crimea, who drove the Fuhrer of Ukrainian nationalists Oleg Tyagnibok around the peninsula, disrupted the presentation of a book about the Ukrainian SS division, and was also one of the participants in the sensational action to deliver the Victory Banner to Lviv on May 9, which aroused the ire of official Kyiv.
Andrei Kozenko has a good chance of becoming a representative of Crimea in the State Duma very soon. I advise you to pay attention to this politician. Perhaps he will have to play an important role in the fate of not only his native peninsula, which has returned to Russia, but also the entire greater Novorossiya, which dreams of repeating the fate of the Crimeans...
At the festival in Sudak, in a medieval landscape among knights-reenactors in steel helmets and armor, with swords and battle axes, he looked harmonious.
Kozenko looks like a medieval knight - young, handsome, lean, agile, slight stubble on his cheeks gives his appearance a certain romantic brutality. These were the young people in 1099 who set out from their castles in England, Bavaria, Burgundy, and Normandy to conquer Jerusalem.
By the way, I saw that at the tourist market in the Kozenko fortress I bought myself a dagger and a metal rose. A dagger and a rose, you see, are a beautiful combination. Pragmatism and the “art of the possible”, apparently, have not yet eradicated the romanticism from Kozenko.
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-When I studied your biography, I learned that your career began in 2001 as a security guard. An unusual start. How did it happen?
-(laughs) It was a civil service. There was nothing unusual or supernatural about this. I was already a 5th year student at the Crimean Institute of Economics and Law. I was 20 years old and needed to start earning money. Therefore, I officially got a job at the Zheleznodorozhny District Department of Internal Affairs of Simferopol and took a free visit to the institute. By the way, my work as a security guard did not affect my studies in any way - I graduated from the university with honors, receiving a red diploma.
By the way, after graduating, I later taught there, giving lectures to students on economic disciplines.
-Was the security guard's salary high?
-Well, then there were hryvnias. I received 100-120 hryvnia.
-And what were they enough for? Could you take the girl to the cafe?
-(laughs) A little bit was enough. Therefore, I could tell the story.
-What were they guarding? Were there any interesting cases? Maybe some robbers attacked?
-The service was XNUMX/XNUMX. Guarded stores. There were no attacks, but there were people who were already well drunk. You know, someone like that comes into a store, starts arguing with the seller - either they refuse to sell him booze, or they didn’t give him enough change, he speaks in a raised voice, and a protracted argument begins. Therefore, we had to calm them down.
Schools were also guarded. For example, Simferopol first gymnasium.
-Did anyone try to go to the school library at night?
-Basically, the “readers” were tramps who wandered around the territory. I had the opportunity to guard the directorate for the construction of the Feodosia-Kerch gas pipeline. There's Gagarinsky Park nearby. Drunken tramps wander around the area. So sometimes you had to deal with them. Even though I was the only one working the shift, if something happened, I had special equipment to calm him down: a baton, a gas canister, and handcuffs. But there was no need to use them. We achieved mutual understanding through mutual dialogue.
-How did this first work of yours influence you?
-You know, this kind of work disciplines you - after all, you are responsible both for the object and for yourself. I remember my leader - captain Mirzoev Farik Mamedovich. I don’t like to praise myself, but I will say that he praised me. He said: “Andrey, I am very glad that people like you work for us.”
-Why did you go to security? You could go sweep the streets, wash windows, or become a laboratory assistant at your university.
-It was related to studies. Although attendance was free, you still had to go to the lectures that took place during the day. And working as a security guard allowed this. The schedule was as follows: at 8 pm I took over to guard the facility, at 8 am I was released. I went to pairs. I went to bed after three. True, every second day I did not get enough sleep. By the end of the year, fatigue was already making itself felt, but I was young, my heart was strong.
-Are you fighting well?
-Fine. But I only had to fight at school. I am a non-aggressive person, and I will never be the first to get into a fight and I will never insult anyone. At school I trained in boxing for a year, hand-to-hand combat and taekwondo. Both then and now I am in excellent physical shape.
-I know that you have a degree in political science. In this case, the question is: are you, according to your convictions, red or white? Left or right?
-Well, in this case, in theory, you should ask me: what International am I for - the second or third.
You know, I’ll try to explain to you why I’m not one or the other. This is due to the circumstances that formed me as a politician. I have been in the Russian community of Crimea since 2001. We then asked ourselves the question: who are we? Communists, liberals, right, left, who? Answering these questions, we said, we are Russians. This is precisely what was important for us, so we are neither left nor right, although at the very beginning we had communists, members of the Party of Regions, and members of other parties. We understood that Crimea is a region specific to Ukraine - it is socioculturally Russian. Therefore, they set themselves the task: to protect the Russian language, to demand state status for it. We fought for Ukraine to join the Common Economic Space and the CSTO. We wanted to become a powerful pro-Russian movement.
Unfortunately, at that time not only Crimean, but also many Russian politicians seemed embarrassed to say that Crimea was illegally transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Khrushchev. Remember, there was a scandal when Luzhkov, answering a question about the ownership of Crimea, said that this was a special region of Russia?
Ukrainian politicians and presidential candidates, when coming to us, made pro-Russian statements, only to then go to Western Ukraine and say the exact opposite. None of them later wanted to fulfill their promises, so objectively, both Crimea and Ukraine needed such a movement.
At some point we realized that we had to become a party. And at first the Russian bloc became such a party for us. In 2006, we ran for the Supreme Council of Crimea and became deputies. By the way, immediately after the Orange Revolution, the Russian Community of Crimea was the only organization that took to the squares against Yushchenko. Others were scared.
In 2009, together with Sergei Aksenov, we created the Russian Unity party. In addition to humanitarian issues, we also indicated our economic tasks in the party program: protecting the economic rights of the region.
In 2010, they were able to appoint three people to the Supreme Council of Crimea: Sergei Aksenov, Sergei Tsekov and Sergei Shuvainikov. I didn't make it because I followed the list. There were 2-3 of our representatives in the district councils. We didn’t perform very well then, of course, but only because we had just registered.
Please note: now many politicians in Crimea are embarrassed to talk about their political past. But we don’t. Because they never betrayed the Russian idea, the Russian world, even when they collaborated with other political forces during the times of Ukraine.
Now, after Crimea became part of Russia, we re-registered and we have new tasks: we must help our compatriots in the territory of Ukraine and in the territory of Donbass.
I talked about all this for so long so that you understand my evolution as a politician, that in those conditions and given those tasks, I simply could not become either left or right.
-I remember that Sergei Aksenov’s “Russian Unity” and Igor Markov’s Odessa “Rodina” went to Lviv on May 9, 2010 to unfurl the Victory Banner on the Hill of Glory. I even remember that Yanukovych ordered to ban this trip, threatened, so only a few people went, but there would have been more.
-Not exactly Yanukovych. At that time, more than 500 people wanted to sign up for this trip, but we began to receive threats from law enforcement agencies that if we went, they would simply stop us on the road and arrest us. Therefore, in order not to expose our supporters, we refused such a large number of people. Then 10 people left Simferopol in a minibus. Another 20 of our supporters were already in Lviv.
A little background on this trip. Since 2009, we have carried out such an event - “Roads of Victory”. We came to that other city of Crimea on the day of its liberation. They unfurled Victory flags, lit a cartridge into which gasoline was poured, in memory of our soldiers who died for the liberation of our land. We helped veterans. I remember that Sergei Aksenov, at his own expense, in September 2010, invited 5 veterans from each region of Ukraine to vacation in Alushta. These veterans were to be personally identified by regional veteran organizations.
Then we transferred this action to other regions of Ukraine. It was within this framework that we had to go to Lviv. We also wanted to do this because we could not allow our veterans, who were threatened by Ukrainian nationalists, to be violated.
-Led by Mikhalchishin.
-Yes, he and I then met face to face in Lvov. He threatened us: they say, it will be the end of you all now, get out of here, we will not allow you to unfurl the Victory Banner here. But we still deployed it on Victory Hill. It was large, about 100 square meters. Then they threw various objects at us to destroy the banner. But they didn't succeed. I’ll tell you a secret: if something happened, we had another such banner with us.
By the way, Dmitry Polonsky, the current minister of the Crimean government, and Mikhail Sheremet, now the first deputy prime minister of the Crimean government, were with us on the trip then.
-Was it scary?
-Then no. It was scary later. The main thing is that we saw in Lvov what then appeared in 2014, first at the Euromaidan, and then throughout Ukraine and Donbass. And then we issued a warning.
-Have you often encountered Ukrainian nationalists?
- I had to. Here in Crimea, “Svoboda” began to operate at the end of the 2009s. In XNUMX, I even came to their office to disrupt their event. Imagine, in pro-Russian Crimea they were going to present the brochure “Nachtigal Division in Questions and Answers.” Moreover, this was supposed to happen next to the Russian consulate in the apartment of Svoboda member Eduard Leonov, where Svoboda opened its office.
Only journalists were allowed there, but I managed to get in and prevented them from making this presentation. Then someone even called the police and said that the office was mined. In general, the event was disrupted.
They tried to repeat something similar on Pushkin Street. It was about a book about the UPA.
-To be honest, when you and Aksenov went out to protests with Russian banners, did you feel like marginalized people?
-No, they were marginalized, but many were afraid to come out with Russian tricolors, although they sympathized with us. Crimea is Russian, and in those days the Ukrainian flag could only be seen at official events. And the self-awareness of the Crimeans was non-Ukrainian. Abroad, they preferred to answer the question “Where are you from?” - “We are from Crimea.” Nobody said: “We are from Ukraine.”
We have introduced a good tradition of going to various events with Russian flags. Since 2004, we have celebrated Russia Day this way. They celebrated both April 19, the anniversary of Catherine the Second’s Manifesto on the annexation of Crimea, and September 9, when they commemorated those who fell in the Crimean War.
-Why hasn’t anything been done so far to have the convictions of those people who fought for Crimea to become Russian and who were convicted of separatism expunged? Many people can’t even teach because they have a criminal record.
-The question is posed correctly. This is a political issue that needs to be resolved and regulated legislatively. We, too, were all separatists. So we need to develop a mechanism for expunging these criminal records. After all, these people were already fighting for Crimea to become Russia.
Continuation of the interview with Andrey Kozenko - read on “PolitNavigator” in the coming days
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