By Arkadiy Babchenko, independent journalist, creator of “Journalism without intermediaries”
08.30.2014
Translated and edited by Voices of Ukraine

I think we are now observing the emergence of the most terrible war for Russia in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Not in terms of the number of the dead, but in the sense of what is now happening with [Russian] society. No other nation during a war thought of the fact that [one] could renounce the names of their dead husbands for money. That [one] could remove her husband’s name from his grave for a compensation or an apartment. That [one] could give up the name of the fallen father of her children. That one could present a deceased for a living [man]. That [one] could agree with the fact that their seemingly non-existent bodies will be buried in unmarked graves in a non-existent kind of war in the non-existent kind of country.

How can [one] be a paratrooper, and walk by the “honor, courage, valor” posters on the parade grounds every day, and then submit to the petty out-of-his-mind Gebist [KGB officer] and go to die by his order, to VOLUNTARILY renounce his name, erasing the memories of himself from the life around him–I don’t understand this.

In Chechnya, we have made dog tags from steel spoons, because if you are going to burn in an APC, the standard dog tags from aluminum alloy melt–and this was the main message of that war: to be identified. To have the opportunity to be buried. To be entitled to at least your name, if the right to life didn’t work out. And our commanders only helped us in this.

And the message of this war is not to be identified. To die without one’s own name.

I don’t understand how [one] could buy his dead citizens, who were sent to war by you as well.

I don’t understand how [one] could sell her deceased husband, son, brother for a compensation.

I don’t understand this.

It’s really frightening.

I am saying that this will be the last war for Russia, not because she won’t have the strength or the economy.

This will be the last war for Russia, because the process of disintegration of the ethos is almost complete. The moral degradation of the nation has practically taken place. And this war will just finish it.

Yes, and there is no longer a nation. There are no communities that could say about each of its members – “we.”

This territory is inhabited by separate groups and communities of aggressive and embittered people, randomly connected to each other by external circumstances, hating all others who are not part of their pack–and there is no longer a nation here.

I think when [our] descendants will study this time, in which you and I are now living, they won’t be able to describe it.

Because in order to understand what “Putinism” is, [one] needs to live in it.

Even our closest neighbors don’t understand this. The Ukrainians write to me–”Russia, wake up.” But we are not sleeping, dammit…

When [they are] trying to kill a person [with their own hands] for the fact that he didn’t prevent them from kicking the bucket as an anonymous numbered corpse during an undeclared war, with painted-over board numbers and removed epaulettes under a sign with numbers… I don’t know what else needs to be said [about this].

Every time I come across the names of my acquaintances in reports, I am surprised every time–well, nothing could have happened to him for sure.

Shlossberg [Russian Parliamentarian of the city of Pskov, who was allegedly assaulted for investigating the death of Pskov paratroopers] now, it turns out. His number is up, it seems.

Come on…

Source: Arkadiy Babchenko FB