Part 1: The Ideology of Mozgovism
Translated by Dr. Livci, edited by Rurik; transmitted by Rolo Slavski
Previously, we covered Storm Z.
What I hope to achieve with this essay is to show that the “Russian Spring” of 2014-2016 was a genuine grassroots uprising that was first and foremost anti-oligarchic in its worldview. This is exactly why Moscow and Kiev were so terrified of it and what led to the successful efforts to quash it on both sides. Of course being “anti-oligarchic” isn’t really an ideology, but that is how Alexander Zhuchkova (the author of today’s book) refers to Mozvogoi’s vision for New Russia. The book in question is titled Mozgovoi because it is the story of the famous LDNR militia commander of the Donbass rebellion and his role in the Russian Spring.
The author, Zhuchkovski, met both Mozgovoi and Strelkov in person during the hot phase of round one of the Not-War in Donbass (the first 8 years). His first book (which I still haven’t read) is about Strelkov and his defense of Slavyansk, which was the key initial battle that set the field for the war to come. Zhuchkovski himself was doing volunteer work for the militias as soon as the war started and organised volunteer networks to help civilian initiatives from within Russia to reach Donbass. This was actually much more difficult than it sounds because the FSB actually worked actively to prevent volunteers from reaching Donbass (and suppress the rebellion) unless they were specifically ordered not to and such orders were rare.
Mozgovoi was a larger-than-life figure amongst many larger-than-life figures on the Russian side during the Donbass uprising in 2014. Strelkov, Givi, Motorola, Zarchenko, Dremov and others were all talented and charismatic field commanders. What made Mozgovoi especially relevant and particularly dangerous to the powers that be was that as well as being very charismatic he could actually articulate a vision of what the Russians of Donbass were striving for and point out who was really opposing them during the uprising. When the man spoke, he struck a cord with many normal Russians living in Russia and Ukraine who would nod along and say, “yes, that is exactly what we want and what we are shedding all this blood for”. As a matter of fact, people who were closely following the Russian Spring in those days from all over the world were attracted by Mozgovoi’s personal magnetism. People from as far alway as South America showed up to fight on the side of the rebels in Donbass because they thought Mozgovoi was a kind of Che Guevara reborn.
Now, a reader who still holds on tightly to Cold War-tier anti-communist ideology will probably check out and stop reading right here. Do try and bear with me though if you actually want to learn something about what the Russia Spring was actually about. Yes, volunteers from places like Chile and Argentina showed up in Donbass to help the rebels because they thought Mozgovoi was Che reincarnated. But Mozgovoi was actually anti-Soviet in his worldview. Martyrs almost always become a legend after their deaths (and sometimes during their lives); that resonates with the emotional needs of people in the present and few take the time to figure out what that person actually stood for in reality. In South America, Che is a legend and a symbol of resistance to South Americans who are sick of being dominated by American puppet regimes and spook-sponsored cartels. He is a symbol invoked by those who want more “peasant power” in that part of the world. Whether this whitewashes Che’s actual actions and his own worldview is another matter entirely and is beyond the the scope of this essay. Or take Hitler, who in death became a symbol of racial solidarity to later White Nationalist groups, even though Hitler was simply a German nationalist during his life.
Point being: Mozgovoi channeled that same sentiment and energy in Donbass while dressing up as a White Guard, not a Communist.
To this day, there is a still a White v Red split in FSU politics and society and this split is worth discussing because Westerners are unaware of it and instead try to impose their Dems v Republicans or Labor v Tory paradigms onto Eastern Europe. This approach simply doesn’t work because the divide is very different there. Your attitude towards the USSR and its legacy is what decides where you fit on the socio-political divide. The older generations are overwhelmingly more pro-Soviet in all FSU countries (including Ukraine). The younger generations are overwhelmingly more anti-Soviet. The political punditry shows its loyalties by either signaling support for or counter-signaling the USSR. As an example, Putin and his cronies started out as anti-Soviets, but as they began to rely more and more on the older voter base for support, they began embracing Sovietism even as they pursued neo-liberal economic policies and de-militarization and de-industrialization and de-nationalization of the country.
What makes political debate so frustrating in the FSU is that it always devolves into a debate over the USSR and its legacy.
It is very difficult to just talk about the situation as it is now without getting into a debate about the USSR.
This is important to understand as we talk about the militia populist leaders and the importance of figures like Mozgovoi.
In general, the White camp in FSU politics is very diverse and can include ethnic nationalists as well as SJW Soros types working together at times because of a shared disdain for Soviet legacy politicians and attitudes among the population. Because “Whites” and “Reds” hate each other because of their ideological differences this typically is enough to keep them from uniting against their real enemies in power.
Mozgovoi, despite being personally unsympathetic to the USSR, was able to attract both Communist sympathizers and White Guard/Nationalist types together under his banner because his words and deeds transcended ideology.
In Donbass in 2014-2015 Mozgovoi was able to draw people of all political persuasions (other than big city Liberals of course) to the banner of the “New Russia” cause (Novorussia) because he was taking shots at common enemies and because he was promoting a populist message; he refused to get bogged down in never-ending debates on Soviet history. People found this to be very refreshing. In contrast, no one talks like this in English-language media, not even the most radical bloggers that I’ve heard of or read at some point. By Western standards, Mozgovoi was extremely radical because he was not talking about participating in elections or “Culture Warring” or any of that divisive and pointless nonsense. Mozogovi openly spoke of the need for the peasants to start self-organizing so that one day, given a window to do so, they might seize power by any means necessarily.
This position cost him his life.
Mozgovoi came from a middle class background. He genuinely adored his parents and one of his two sisters. After finishing school, he served in the Ukrainian Army for 7 years and during that time he got married and had a daughter. As happens so very, very often, his traditional and wholesome Orthodox Slavic wife was actually an insufferable shrew who drove him away from the family. To escape his wife, Mozgovoi left Kharkov and went off to find work in St. Petersburg, where he became a successful manager of construction crews. In that line of work he made good money and was praised by his workers and bosses alike which anyone who has worked in the trades can confirm is quite the accomplishment. Despite his difficult relationship with his wife, Mozgovoi visited his family in Ukraine often and was able to maintain a close relationship with his daughter for awhile, something that most men are stripped of by the oppressive feminist social legislation in the Slavlands. Predictably, after she divorced him, his now ex-wife turned his daughter against her father and being a typical women she did this despite Mozgovoi doing his best to be a good father.
Our biographer Zhuchkovski describes the situation like this:
One day, Mozgovoi’s ex wife asked him to take on her brother Maxim to work with him. Mozgovoi agreed and Maxim left for St Petersburg. On his birthday, on the 3rd of April 2012 Alexi (Mozgovoi) and Maxim arrived back in Kharkov by train where they were met by Elena and Dasha (ex wife and daughter) who rushed to hug and kiss Maxim. Alexei stood their awkwardly feeling like a total outsider, unneeded and unwanted. They didn’t even greet him at all. Most painful for him was the cold reception from his daughter that he so loved. At that moment, something permanently broke in Alexi. He immediately left for Svatovo and his sister to celebrate his birthday. While his sister was preparing the table, Alexi went out on the balcony to smoke. He stood there for a long time, remembering how he used to dote on his daughter and how she loved spending time with him. Worried about his long absence from the table, his sister’s husband came out to check on him and for the first and only time saw Alexei softly crying.
I promise to get to the really interesting stuff in a second but these sorts of details are important for understanding who Mozgovoi became during the Russian Spring. Betrayed by his ex-wife after helping her out, daughter turned against him, and soon after these events, his parents’ health began to quickly deteriorate as well. The old normie-Alexei was soon dead and the commander of Prizrack (ghost) brigade took his place. As a matter of fact Mozgovoi himself described his life previous to the uprising thus:
A journalist asked the brigade commander what he did before the war and he answered “before these events I did absolutely nothing. I’ve only just now started to actually live”. He answered the same question on a different occasion with “just fooling around”.
Roughly a year before the uprising, Alexei was in a sort of emotional purgatory and it was only when the Russian Spring came that he found his true calling. I bring this all up to highlight just how typical Alexei’s life was for the average Slavic man prior to the rebellion and to give hope to other men in similar positions all over the world
Rurik sometimes jokes that if it weren’t for all the divorced middle-aged men in Ukraine and Russia and Belarus, that there would be no war because there would have been no one volunteering to go to Donbass and die in the rubble and mud simply for a chance to escape their overbearing wives. There is a kernel of truth to this kind of dark humor.
I don’t want to rehash the whole beginnings of the Russian Spring but Mozgovoi was there at the very start. In Lugansk, he was put in contact with some local Anti-Maidan/pro Russia activists who were preparing to try and separate Lugansk from Ukraine. These guys were a completely grassroots organization and they got no help from Moscow whatsoever. As well as being an excellent biography of Mozgovoi the man, the book is also a very damning condemnation of the Kremlin’s conduct during those decisive years. The leaders of the pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk were a couple of local Soviet army vets that ended up stuck living in Ukraine when the USSR was dismantled (just like General Syrsky). They had almost no resources of their own and received none from Moscow and their plan amounted to seizing power in Lugansk via an armed coup, and then forcing Moscow’s hand to send in peacekeepers once the deed was done. Any casual reader of Slavland Chronicles knows by now that the absolute last thing the Kremlin would have wanted is for a bunch of Donbass proles and peasants to start demanding that Russia send in peacekeeping troops while allowing Donbassians to become Russian citizens.
Mozgovoi’s role was to act as the public face of the rebels up until the time came for the actual leadership to take over which was presumed to be after the success of their pro-Russian coup. Valery Bolotov and Valery Lopin who were the real organizers of the coup in Lugansk saw that Mozgovoi was an extremely charismatic man with persuasive oratory skills. They commissioned Mozgovoi to go around rallying the locals in support of Lugansk seceding from Kiev and joining Russia.
Initially, the rebels demanded that Kiev put Yanokovich back in power, but quickly realized that this wouldn’t happen and that this was an unpopular position because most Russians in Donbass hated Yanokovich at that point. When Kiev inevitably declined to comply with their demands though, the rebels stormed the SBU building in Lugansk and held a referendum on independence which overwhelmingly passed. After that the rebels sat around expecting Russia to send help which never came. Moscows recognition of Lugansk’s independence would not come for the next 8 years.
IMPORTANT: Notice how Mozgovoi and his people didn’t “Culture War” and post essays about how “the Banderaites have really gone bananas!” as part of their resistance strategy. No, they quickly identified the true power structure in Lugansk and took them out with a self-organized and self-armed force of patriots. That is, they targeted the local HQ of the spook state and from there, local resistance to their agenda evaporated. The pro-Kiev politicians and media fled on their own soon after. For dissidents in the West, the entire episode should be very educational, but it will simply be ignored, sadly.
But this is how rebellion, secession and victory are actually achieved.
Sadly, no “dissident” figure in the West speaks like this or seems to understand these concepts. People are told that “the media” run things or “the woke college professors” or some other inanity to keep them confused and directionless in their opposition to the agenda of the powers that be. The truth is that the modern world is built on relatively small numbers of spooks using terror and technology and wide networks of coercion to maintain control over a huge and disparate mass of people. As the Donbass rebellion demonstrated, these central nodes of power can be taken out by nativist rebel leaders.
Of course, we should all morally condemn Mozgovoi and the other military-minded men who effected this coup for their anti-Christian morality and I will be the first and loudest to disavow and denounce such anti-Liberal and anti-Democratic behavior. But we have to admit that what they did was successful. Morally abhorrent and pure Evil, but … well … And perhaps if men of such views and values were to emerge in other parts of the world, well …
* * *
Mozgovoi found the rebels’ inaction after the initial successful coup appalling and dangerous so he broke off to make his own brigade — the Ghost (Prizrak) Battalion. Unlike them, he wasn’t content to wait around begging Moscow to step in and take over the reins and protect them from Kiev’s retaliation. Eventually, Mozgovoi joined up with Strelkov and Mozovoi’s Prizrak Brigade took part in heavy fighting around Lichansk and Debaltsev. Famously, Prizrak was the first major formation to break into Debaltsev in strength and set the stage for a UAF defeat in motion during that bloody battle. Naturally, Moscow squandered the opportunity to end the war and the weak and poorly armed and unmotivated UAF then and there. Instead, the war was allowed to fester and the UAF was given almost a decade to prepare and rearm by Putin, who many insist is a geopolitical chess master.
Anyway.
With that brief background out of the way, let’s analyze what “Mozgovoism” actually is because that way we will be able to better understand what was behind the Russian Spring. Hint: it wasn’t Putinism, that’s for sure.
“Today when the Russian people finally see a ray of light in the darkness they try and smother it with political fog. When symbols and ideas arise to unite us they, with great zeal, pour filth on them to denigrate the awakening Russian people”.
Mozgovoi didn’t leave any political will or testament whose authenticity can be confirmed. There was an electronic diary of Mozgovoi’s published but Zhuchkovski doubts its full authenticity. He asked the publisher of the diary where he got it from and the publisher said that he had received it anonymously via email along with one scanned photograph containing the above passage I quoted. Zhuchkovski says the photographed passage is really Mozgovoi as it perfectly matches his handwriting and even contains his signature which matches as well. I wanted to lead off with that passage because it summarises Mozgovois attitude to Moscow in the final year of his life. He wasn’t talking about Kiev and CIA psyops or Navalny. As a matter of fact, despite fighting them, Mozgovoi on more than one occasion did live video calls with Ukrainian soldiers and found common ground with them, which scandalized many media personalities and politicians on both sides. The point is that Mozgovoi didn’t consider “Taras” and “Mykola” (slang for Ukrainian average Joes) as his primary enemy. Mozgovoi’s believed that he was in a war against a global oligarchy. And his hatred for the Kremlin and Kiev as regional operation bases for the globalist empire was a process that took some time to develop.
But for now, let us get into Mozgovoi’s basic political view of the world.
Zhuchkovski:
Every ideological group tries to claim Mozgovoi for their own camp. For example, Communists draw a portrait of Mozgovoi as a leftist leader. At the same time there is not one saying or letter of Mozgovoi’s that expresses sympathy to Communism or the USSR. When I pointed this out to a Communist I was speaking with, he advanced the extravagant thesis that Mozgovoi was a Communist by deed, not by words. Of course with that approach you can claim any person you want for your ideological camp.
Sincere Commies just saw somebody doing the things they wanted done and assumed that he must have been acting out of Communist conviction even if he himself didn’t know it. This is similar to what Christians do when they claim that a certain author or political figure was Christian because he did good things and so much have been motivated by the power of Christianity even if they didn’t know it themselves or even spurned the religion. According to Zhuchkovski, the people closest to Mozgovoi say he never had any clear ideology at all and held an eclectic worldview that drew inspiration from both Monarchism and Socialism. This is very similar to Strelkov’s worldview, who Mozgovoi got along with very well.
In Mozgovoi’s office there were 3 flags, the black 17th Don Cossack regiment banner with the death’s head symbol that is popular with the White Guards, and the Red Army victory banner. But the closest and most meaningful for Mozgovoi was the banner of New Russia which occupied the center. Mozgovoi never supported any kind of autonomous Lugansk or Donestk Republic, he always wanted a united “New Russia” just like Strelkov did. As for the Red Victory banner, Mozgovoi described his relationship to it thusly:
It was an awful war with devastating deprivation. Our predecessors who experienced it are holy. We honor the banner they struggled under. I’m blamed for having a Cossack uniform with silver shoulder boards. Apparently I’m a White Guard representative [traitor] right here next to the red victory banner. The past of our uncles and fathers is our history that we have no right to repeat and we have a duty to remember.
The Cold War style anti-communist/anti Russian who knows absolutely nothing about Russia will see a victory banner and assume that modern Russia is therefore a Trotskyite/Stalinist State or even that the liquidation of the USSR was part of a Russian ploy to trick the West. See the defector Golytsin …
But it is not just Westerners who think like this, Baltic peoples and Poles often claim the same thing. What’s always amused me the most, personally though, are the Americans who think this way. Americans rage about those “damn woke SJW liberals” renaming everything and demolishing monuments. They argue that you don’t have to idealize the Confederacy to simply agree to just leave the flags and monuments alone like was originally agreed to by the North and the South. The truth is that the war was a complicated and grotesque bloodbath and that neither government was on the side of the angels. Putting aside the fate of the outdated farm equipment, the South was run by an international oligarchy as a giant plantation that impoverished the average free man and the subsequent war democided the White population in these territories. This is not to excuse Lincoln, but it is worth pointing out that the monuments were left alone by his government and subsequent Yankee occupation governments for centuries. Normal people instinctively recoil at iconoclast behavior whether it is modern SJW fanatics rampaging on campuses or ISIS fanatics in Syria and Iraq destroying old relics or Mau’s temple-burning cultural pogroms or the early Christian revolutionaries destroying native European learning and culture in the name of their twisted and barbaric superstition.
Normal people are repulsed and revolted by this kind of behavior.
These days, even American right-wingers who hate the federal government get mad when the symbols of the federal government are desecrated by leftist goons. This is exactly how many Russians that otherwise don’t like the USSR feel about many of the symbols of the Red Army or the Soviet state. Many patriotic Russians understand that the Bolsheviks were a hostile ethnic group who seized power and butchered them, but they aren’t going to meekly allow symbols of the USSR to be made illegal and be ashamed of themselves to please a bunch of vicious, Russia-hating Poles, Baltoids, and Western Cold Warrior dinosaurs who will always hate Russia no matter what flags are flying over the Kremlin. It would be pure cuckoldry to burn the flags under which so many millions of peasant died fighting under to please people that will always hate Russia no matter what. That is just how the vast majority of people feel about the issue.
Simple.
Mozgovoi’s ancestors were Don Cossacks and according to relatives that knew him, when he was young he was infatuated with pre-Revolutionary Russia. Like Strelkov, Mozgovoi was a literal LARPer and there are pictures of him dressed up like a White Guard officer.
That might even be part of why they got along so well.
Zhuchkovski notes the irony of the two most iconic field commanders and legends of the Russian Spring being White Guard enthusiasts considering that Donbass is solid Soviet/Commie territory on account of it being the once-beating industrial heartland of the USSR. And the rebel guys who initially recruited Mozgovoi as an agitator to begin with were Communist in their sympathies as well.
As an aside: this is something that even Americans like Russell “Texas” Bentley (RIP) seemed to struggle to understand. Texas was a committed Communist and seemed to take personal offense at the existence of non-Communists in the rebel ranks. Russians are often able to look past ideological difference because they focus more on their shared Russian identity. In contrast, Americans are a very ideological people and they have a hard time understanding the concept of identity as something innate that is immutable and worth identifying around and preserving. They believe that it is immoral to identify along innate identity lines and that only elective ideologies are morally acceptable as a way of self-identification. This is because of their fundamentalist Christianity cultural background, undoubtedly. Thus, even within families, typically a daughter or a wife will routinely denounce her menfolk despite their blood-ties because of some ideological infraction. This attitude has spilled over to men, mostly of the Leftist variety. Initially, Russell was hostile to Rurik because Rurik was not a Communist as well and he called Rurik a Nazi.
Rurik writes:
but as we continued to talk and focused on common enemies, we realized that we had a lot more in common than Russell originally had assumed. Both of us understood that Moscow and Kiev (and Donbass) were run by the same shtetl [small Jewish town of pre-Bolshevik Russia] and that there was a lot of treachery going on in the war. We both believed in a future free of oligarchy and for an end to the systemic predation on the people by the parasite class at the top of the globalist occupation government.
Zhuchkovski recalls an interview where a British journalist asked Mozgovoi who he considers to the great heroes of history:
Practically every White Guard Officer, he said. And I don’t want to offend the Communist Comrade Zhukov.
As a matter of fact according to Mozgovoi, the Soviet period did lots of damage to the Russian psyche:
For 70 years our people learned to be scared of bureaucracy. This servile upbringing has been so thorough that now at the very word bureaucrat, people cower. Then in the last 20 years they taught us to cower before the rich and to stupidly work for them without asking any questions. This combination has created an unthinking organism that can be paid the absolute minimum to work for oligarchs and to also support an army of chinovniks (bureaucrats).That is the outcome of 70 years of Soviet and then 23+years of Oligarchic government.
I don’t loath the USSR as much as Mozgovoi did but I absolutely have to agree with his statement 150%.
You see even people sympathetic to the USSR based on the fact that life was generally more stable and safe compared to modern Russia or Ukraine who would still have to admit that the soul-crushing bureaucratic nature of the Soviet system was no virtue and that it left scars on society.
Furthermore, modern Russia and Ukraine retained almost all the bad aspects of the USSR while liquidating all that was admittedly useful and good. It follows from that that the soulless and de-humanising nature of the Soviet bureaucracy was retained but that it is now in the hands of an international oligarchy that lords over the peasants and are arguably even more malevolent than the old Politburo. The Soviet system trained people to just submit and get by so you can go home to your commie block apartment and watch the long sunset with your cat on the balcony (as Rurik once put it). Well, now that same system is in place but with none of the social benefits or social stability because the people running it are even less accountable to the average citizen and you probably will have DIEversity hanging out in the stairwell of your newer, smaller, larger apartment megabloc.
Remember the first quote of Mozgovois that we read? About how “they” throw filth on Russians and denigrate them when they start showing signs of organizing or of political life? Well that’s who “they” are: the bureaucrats and the oligarchs and the spook state (larger now than ever before). Those who keep Russians in a state where they are content to work and die for breadcrumbs. Those who are trying to prevent this unthinking mass of slaves from regaining some collective ethnic consciousness. That’s what the Russian Spring really was to Mozgovoi — a reawakening of this defeated, enslaved super-organism. And Mozgovoi had absolute contempt for those who stubbornly clung to their chains.
In one his very first video recordings as an agitator for the separatists, Mozgovoi said:
I am Mozgovoi Alexi Borisovich. I won’t hide my face and name. I want to appeal to my countrymen in the Eastern Regions. Enough sitting on the couch! Enough thinking that someone will do something for you! Don’t worry about your head, worry about your honor. Our ill-wishers have given us one chance and if we miss it there won’t be another. To miss this opportunity will be easy and making up for it later almost impossible. I choose Russia, I am for Russia!
This was well before Mozgovoi became utterly disillusioned and hostile to Moscow, but the theme of demanding that the peasants get off their asses because nobody else will help them is a key recurring point of his worldview and message. Even before Mozgovoi gave up on Moscow, he berated the locals for thinking Moscow should help them when they weren’t doing much to help themselves.
What has happened with our people? What kind of creature have they been turned into that isn’t willing or able to fight for its own freedom? What kind of society, without principles or honor, without ideals? For what price do you sell your freedom? A pathetic handout from the chinovnik [bureaucrat]? Haven’t we exchanged everything too cheaply just for a full stomach? I often hear accusations against Russia in regards to not sending troops. I also have a question. Who should Russia help in this situation? Most of the population pretends not to notice what is happening right now. People with a slave mentality don’t need anyone besides an owner. As long we fail to understand that, nothing in our lives is going to change.
This is a key point for all dissidents to understand.
The masses can only be awoken through direct action. Nice words and poignant essays have their limits. People respond to power and authority. Seize that first and the masses will follow. Put the cart before the horse and you will always be disappointed by the results.
Mozgovoi’s very harsh berating of the common peasants and their docility never changed. Mozgovoi wasn’t one to engage in the usual political charade of making the peasants promises and pretending that he sympathized with them and was one of them. He was demanding that they stop acting like their typical selves essentially and actually start self-organizing to seize power for themselves. He didn’t make any political promises at all, he simply acted where it was possible for him to act and set an example of seizing the situation.
In the slice of Lugansk oblast that Mozgovoi essentially conquered, he liquidated crime overnight, much as Strelkov did in Slavyansk. This is no small matter, as readers of the Chronicles know, Donbass was and still is, the most corrupt and criminal place in Eastern Europe. But when a power vacuum appeared and Mozgovoi seized control, crime all but disappeared. Furthermore, Mozgovoi accomplished this with no help from Moscow. He refused to subordinate himself to the official LNR [Luhansk People’s Republic] authorities in Luhansk and for this, his Prizrak brigade was cut off from government aid.
Nonetheless, Mozgovoi accomplished more than the official LNR authorities with far less resources. This just made him all the more popular in Lugansk and all the more hated in Moscow and amongst the official LNR government structure.
Why couldn’t Moscow and the LNR satrapy bring Mozgovoi under control? Well, because he quickly became a genuine popular legend in Luhansk, they couldn’t just openly take him down. Despite Mozgovoi’s fairly vicious attacks on the average Donbassian whom he called out for their slave mentality, he was loved by them all the same. Men of action are almost always universally beloved, even if they mete out harsh words to their fans. Actions speak louder than words and are said in a language that is more well-understood by the masses. Many people are unable to understand the language used by political idealists of all stripes about “rights” and “self-determinism” and “justice” or whatever. It finds no purchase in their minds or hearts. But these same people do understand the pageantry of the uniform or the symbol or the flag. Or the simple and informative bark of the gun and the man who wields it.
To Mozgovoi, submitting to the LNR authorities entailed not just the breakup of his brigade, but also the return of the old soul crushing system. It would mean the return of the spook overseers, the corrupt chinovniks, the ethnic mafias and so on. The fact that it would be overseen from Moscow instead of Kiev would be the only difference — a difference that the locals wouldn’t even notice. In short, it would mean that the whole Russian Spring was in vain. And this wasn’t just an ego trip for Mozgovoi, it was about seeing the uprising through to its goals instead of selling out and getting pulled into the system.
Recall that in one of his earliest appeals to the people, he was saying they had a very unique chance to change their lives which was presented to them by the Russian Spring. In the West, it is a cliché by now in dissident circles that everyone has to wait until either Jesus comes back — or Hitler before that — before they can do anything. In the summer of 2014 though, Mozgovoi understood that there was a brief moment of chaos in which Kiev and Moscow both had their grips on power slacken in Donbass and that there wouldn’t be another moment like this to self-organize and seize power. His tirades against the peasants weren’t condescending or a form of elitism like we are accustomed to from our culture curators. They were heartfelt demands that his people not let the chance slip and make a bid for freedom.
Mozgovoi did more than just crush crime in his territory. He set up four cafeterias that fed hundreds of people every day for free. He kept local businesses running to the maximum extent possible and got rid of the predatory spook apparatus that had preyed on them previously. Small businesses needed to pay the FSB or the SBU or the local ethnic mafias protection money to be allowed to operate in many parts of the Slavlands — this is referred to as a krisha. He also kept the maternity words working and the electricity running by attracting volunteer specialists from Russia with his magnetism and charisma. Basically, life was more stable in his slice of Luhansk Oblast than anywhere else in Donbass and at a very hard time in their history.
Most remarkably: he did it all with no help from Moscow or the LNR authorities.
By rights, he should be a symbol for all Libertarians and Anarchists and his little mini-country a kind of modern Catalonia. Somehow, I don’t think they will recognize him as one of their own though. In contrast, the evil “statist” Monarchists and Nationalists and even Communists claim him as their own. This says a lot about actual revealed political preferences, I think. There wasn’t any weed and gay sex allowed under Mozgovoi, so the project has no appeal to the former groups, clearly.
One of Mozgovoi’s most interesting projects that, sadly, he didn’t get to see through due to his assassination was basically the organization of a kind of modern yeoman warrior caste in Luhansk.
Zhuchkovski:
In the spring of 2015 the commander of the Prizrack Brigade focused a lot of attention on the development of agriculture around Alchevske (Mozgovois city). He always repeated that sometime the war would end, and foundations for peacetime agriculture needed to be laid now. Mozgovoi regularly met with rural residents and praised them for their work. Не regularly looked after truck fleets and equipment, and he looked for technical specialists to help increase the tempo of agricultural restoration as well as patrons in Russia to provide modern construction materials and equipment.Mozgovoi wanted his brigade to feed themselves with their own hands and not live off Russian aid. To this end he planned on a system of military agriculture, for Prizrack to produce their own agricultural products. It was one of Mozgovoi’s main plans, for his brigade to feed itself and not live on the government needle. The last time the brigade commander appeared on the internet it was to report on the progress of his military agriculture plan.
In a video released by Prizrack on the 20th of May 2015 titled “first step towards military agriculture” Alexi thanks those who materially support the brigade and in a quiet voice says “Dear friends of Prizrack Brigade, you see here a home where 150 baby chicks are resting. Now you understand why I’m talking so quietly and calmly, but with enormous confidence in our future.”
In three days, the Brigade Commander would be murdered.
This is actually what could be considered a legit “revolt against the modern world”.
This was also Mozgovoi channeling his Cossack roots. What else can we call military agriculture other than a return to Cossackism or something like the Eastern Roman Imperial Theme system? In other words, creating an economic base of self-sufficiency that would be independent of globalist government or international oligarchy. With that base secured, people could self-organize into warbands, essentially. And Mozgovoi was dead serious about going back to this kind of Cossack model.
He tried to establish a war counsel that encompassed all the major field commanders in both the LNR and DNR [Donetsk People’s Republic]. This project, like the military agriculture project, also didn’t come to fruition due to the fact that only mid-level field commanders who hadn’t been bought off yet by either side were interested. The reason that the main field commanders didn’t have the courage to sign on with Mozgovoi’s idea is down to the fact that they all depended on money and support from Russia, unlike Mozgovoi’s brigade. Moscow as well as the official authorities in the LNR/DNR were adamant that Donestk and Luhansk not form any sort of united central government or that they take their independence efforts too far. Moscow was committed to returning these rebellious territories to Ukraine (for some concessions, of course). Mozgovoi, on the other hand only supported a single New Russia. An official military counsel of both LNR/DNR commanders could in theory be a first step in undermining the separate LNR/DNR system. This meant that any commanders signing on to Mozgovoi’s plan would be putting their support from Moscow at risk and incurring the anger of their spook supervisors. Mozgovoi didn’t need to worry about this since he wasn’t receiving any aid, but essentially nobody else had the balls do go it alone like he did.
In any case, here is how Mozgovoi described his reasoning behind the military counsel:
I’m a Don Cossack myself. The Cossacks had a circle of Atamans who collectively decided all major life-impacting decisions. Why not design the military counsel along the same lines as the Cossack circle? Every member should have the right to vote, listen, speak and directly take part in deciding urgent matters. In this way, we share full collective responsibility for what is going on. Perhaps this will speed up the building our republic.
A reporter asked Mozgovoi if such a counsel might be included in the formal government structure of the LNR to which he responded:
I don’t see a contradiction between integrating it into the government as well as it being outside the government and functioning as a control mechanism over the actions of the authorities.
Obviously, Mozgovoi wanted the Military Assembly to simply control everything of major importance. When he said that perhaps the counsel would speed along the creation of the Republic, he was obviously refering to a united New Russia since the LNR and DNR already existed. Mozgovoi wanted a Cossack-modeled military government to be tasked with making the most important decisions. It is a shame that he was the only big commander totally willing to go it alone and not take any pieces of silver from the Kremlin. Many other powerful commanders who did comply with Moscow grudgingly unlike Mozgovoi’s total non-compliance policy still ended up just as dead as Mozgovoi and likely at the hands of the same killers. That’s not to say I think any less of guys like Givi, Dremov, Belzer, or hell even Zarchenko. It is just that the time has proven Mozgovoi’s non-compromising position correct. All those men were no less personally courageous than Mozgovoi, but apparently, they trusted Moscow more than each other. What Mozgovoi wanted was for all these men to come together and manage their war on their own. Sure, they would have had far less resources in this case, but managing what they had collectively without the insane graft and corruption that came as a condition of Moscow’s patronage leaves me with a hunch that the difference wouldn’t have been all that large. After all, it is not like the LNR/DNR militias were especially well-armed in February of 2022 even. Despite eight years of Moscow’s supposed patronage, they were still shockingly under-equipped and under-trained as the subsequent war showed.
A decent example of what Mozgovoi was getting at when he spoke of a People’s Authority was demonstrated on the 25th of October 2014 when he held a sort of People’s Trial over a cop accused of raping a teenage girl and a drug addict neo-Nazi accused of aiding the Ukrainians. The Prizrack Brigade invited the city locals to come and decide what to do with the accused.
Zhuchkovski:
Hello residents of Alchevsk said Shevchencko (Prizrak Brigade’s 2nd in command). We have invited you here today so that on this soil, finally, we can conduct a court of people’s law. We, the peoples militia, ask you to decide the fate of these 2 individuals with covered faces (the accused were at this time blindfolded) who have in our view committed contemptable and filthy crimes. We want for the first time in many years for the law to be served as the people see fit. In accordance with this, all your voices will be considered. In our opinion (the brigade’s) the crimes committed by these individuals call for the highest form of punishment.“I would speak of justice” said Mozgovoi who was sitting nearby. “Yes and most of all justice be served,” added Shevchencko.
After the Prizrak investigators (at this point the Brigade was often fulfilling functions usually associated with the police) ran through the details of the case involving the cop accused of raping the girl, what they had uncovered and what conclusions they had drawn, they recommended that the man be shot. At that point Mozgovoi took the microphone and said:
You have listened to the information and understand the essence of the crime. Now I want you to understand why we have called you here and why we are conducting this court. Even if this court doesn’t accord with official norms of jurisprudence according to lawyers, it does accord with the people’s authority. Today you have the first chance to manifest yourselves as an active civil society whose words and opinions matter. Today you have the first chance to share full collective responsibility for what takes place. Every one of you needs to understand that building a new state doesn’t depend on one or two people. Every one of you needs to make concrete contributions. Before making any decisions here at this court, think hard first of all. All of you have the right to speak here, that is what the microphone is for. We have been forced to stay silent all our lives but now all have the right to speak.
At the higher level, the military counsels would decide major matters of course, but that is not to say that Mozgovoi wanted some caricature military dictatorship that Westerners have been taught to shudder in horror at the prospect of. As matter of fact, Mozgovoi often spoke about having armed soldiers on the streets in civilian affairs distasteful. But getting back to the court, there was indeed a lively back and fourth between the citizens in regards to the cop with most demanding he be shot but a minority blaming the girl for being a whore. Also, the cop was a recent member of the brigade though he had never fought. At one point a women asked the brigade leadership how they could have let such a man join. Shevchencko, Mozgovoi’s number two man replied:
Well, we are asking you, the people to decide his fate and we are the people’s militia. We consider ourselves part of the people. We caught a criminal, gathered evidence, and brought it all before you and hid nothing, unlike the previous authority who covered up everything. We did not hide that he was one of us.
The woman’s question triggered Mozgovoi somewhat who took the microphone after Shevchencko:
You reproach us because he was amongst us but I have a question of my own, where were you when he was living amongst you? When he ended up with us, he was quickly put on trial as you can see. Where were you, dear citizenry, when he was amongst you?
After Mozgovoi one of the Prizrak investigators took the microphone and sarcastically asked:
Could Ananev (the accused cop) have solved his problem and avoided any trial under the previous authorities?
The collective vote of the citizens present ended up against shooting the cop and for shooting the neo-Nazi drug addict. The book doesn’t clarify how long the cop was in jail for and how long before the neo-Nazi was shot, Mozgovoi was murdered and the whole system he was trying to build was dismantled. The whole trial ended up being in vain.
Before the vote was taken on what to do with cop though, Mozgovoi again took the microphone and said:
I want to repeat that you constitute the highest authority that we (the brigade) are fighting for. For a People’s Authority. If you think that in the future some old bureaucratic grandpa will come along and fix everything you are wrong. It is time to take things into your own hands. Everything. Started with the courts and finishing with everything, with all economic and political questions. Your time has come people, wake up!
At this point a woman took the microphone and said she supported shooting the cop like the brigade investigators recommended. Shevchencko responded that a collective vote was required because the Brigade was not the final authority, the people are. After the collective totally non-anonymous public vote, there weren’t enough votes for execution after all, a verdict which I personally agree with. This article is already long so I can’t drop all the details here that the brigade investigators uncovered but it obviously looks like yes, the cop was a scumbag (like all cops are) and the teenage girl (15 years old) was a indeed an unrepentant whore (like …) . My reading of the details of the case indicate to me that she was having sex with the cop in exchange for access to drugs. Many such cases. Now, if the trial had been about a cop dealing drugs to minors, then okay he should be shot. But the brigade investigators framed it as being about the cop raping the girl. That threw the whole process off.
Presumably, they would have drawn conclusions and fine-tuned their approach for future trials. Probably, the brigade investigators were generally supportive of shooting corrupt cops and this guy clearly was one and they just assumed the normal people present would “get” that. But since women were present and had a right to speak, they made it all about the girl which made the men instinctively be like “wait she was obviously a whore”. The thing is women have no business being involved in this kind of stuff and Mozgovoi being a Cossack would known women ran nothing but the house in Cossack days.
But this whole project was barely off the ground, so solving the modern woman issue hadn’t come up yet.
It remains an amusing anecdote of “people power” and if anything, it justifies Mozgovoi’s harsh words about the quality of the public to some extent.
Nonetheless, a military agrarian caste, a military leadership counsel working on the major issues, and the people being very involved and running day-to-day affairs of justice and local economic and political questions is getting to the essence of what Mozgovoi was all about. No spooks, no bureaucrats, no ethnic criminals. It all seems terribly naïve and utopian I guess, but then again Mozgovoi’s very short-lived experiment was in fact successful right up until his murder. He was a much beloved man.
He was also scary enough that Moscow simply had to kill him.
According to Zhuchkovski, if one analyses Mozgovoi’s appeals to the people, there are three general themes that he hit on very often. The first is the People’s Authority. The second is anti-Fascism (yes I know the irony but please stay with me a little longer) and the third is anti-oligarchy. For the sake of keeping this article at a readable length I’ll not spend to much time on the first because the examples I’ve already given demonstrate what he was getting at. Basically, it is an appeal to stop having a slavish mentality vis-à-vis the government and the oligarchs. In discussions with his close associates in the brigade, Mozgovoi indicated that in practice long term this would involve specialists in their respective fields solving things at the absolute lowest level possible in partnership with the communities. I have heard this concept explained before as “Distributionism”. Given that the Prizrack Brigade wanted corrupt officials shot on principle, this would facilitate the transfer of power downward to specialists in technical fields who are working in tandem with communities they are usually a part of. By “specialists” we are talking about actual engineers, farmers, people who run mines and reactors etc. We obviously aren’t talking about spooks and bureaucrats running things like you had under Communism or the current system.
Let us move on to the much more controversial point of “anti-Fascism” because I know it will trigger some readers and anti-Russians might jump onto this kind of unfortunate and loaded rhetoric. I’ll let our biographer Zhuchkovski lead off here:
Antifascism almost constituted an official ideology at the beginning of the revolt in Luhansk. During the early months of the war the Brigade Commander often spoke of fascism in Ukraine and referred to the militia as antifascist. However, over time his relationship to this theme underwent a definite evolution.
As Mozgovoi became more and more disenchanted with Moscow and their LNR satrapy he stopped talking about Fascism.
Zhuchkovski:
At the beginning of 2015, when Mozgovoi was asked about his contacts with Fascists who had participated on the Ukrainian side of the war he answered “yeah I didn’t see any fascist over there, no Hitlers or Goebbels. In general they are just yesterday’s workers. It is incorrect to accuse the population of Ukraine of being fascist. When we finally understand who is managing our brains maybe we can stop killing each other?
Mozgovoi talking to a journalist about Fascism:
Journalist: I want to tell you about how in Italy there is a real independent anti-fascist movement
Mozgovoi interrupts: My dear there is no real fascism. The anti-fascist movement … you know its like with a computer … there is a virus and anti-virus and one person creates them both.
Journalist: So you don’t think there is any fascism in Ukraine?
Mozgovoi-There is just business, nothing more. Create one movement and another to oppose it. Profit from and control both ends.
Mozgovoi wrote in regards to Fascism:
Everyone is fighting Fascism in all its manifestations. Every side is duty bound to declare that battle exactly, to show the presence of Fascism amongst the opposing side. It is for good reason as well, because for us who survived the war with real fascists during the great patriotic war what can better serve as a fuse to ignite this current suicidal brothers’ slaughter? Yes, a slaughter not a war. Of course! The so-called appearance of Fascism. Fellow citizens, do you want an enemy? You will receive one. Oh and right here, all over the internet and social media we have all those slogans and symbols and propagandistic bells and whistles. There’s the AstroTurfed meetings with crowds of young people dressed up like Nazis growing like yeast. And right there it is necessary to take lots of pictures and post them everywhere. After all, it is necessary not just to form the image of the enemy but also to distribute and promote it. But suddenly it is not so credible. For some reason, all these fascist youngsters are nowhere to be found. Instead, it is mobilized workers, peasants and contract soldiers being taken prisoner who don’t have much to do with fascism. Go off to fight the fascist and run right into people just like yourself. Why are they just like us? Because they pour the same crap into their ears as well. Who are we to them? We are fascist to them too of course.
Respected Stalkers I hope that’s enough to demonstrate that Mozgovoi was by no means some Saker/Zanon-tier anti-fascist or a Kremlin-tier Antifa Multikulti warrior. As far as Mozgovoi was concerned, the whole slaughter was totally AstroTurfed on both ends. Both sides sides were shown images of the other that were meant to cause the most resentment. Yes, there are AstroTurfed neo-Nazis in Ukraine, but that is because someone needed them to be there. And as Rurik has explained, many of the top leaders were Israeli or FSB or SBU assets. In Ukrainian media, the Donetsk rebels were portrayed as a literal invading army from Russia. Mozgovoi said that they were portrayed as fascists but the whole point of the word “fascist” is that it just means something bad that you are duty-bound to oppose. In order to morally justify taking up arms at all nowadays, you have to show the presence of Fascism on the opposing side first and foremost, like Mozgovoi said. This is the same in America, where MAGA believes that they are fighting the Fascist Left and the SJWs believe they are fighting the Fascist Right. So, a literal invading Fascist army was what the Ukrainians were shown because a Ukrainian would be duty bound to oppose that and let himself get conscripted off to die in Donbass. And yes, even to this day, the Russian side is referred to as the fascist menace by Western and Ukrainian propaganda. Mozgovoi saw through this deception.
Zhuchkovski:
When we speak of Fascism in Ukraine very often people marching with torches and Nazi symbols around cities or the use of such symbols by soldiers at the front is presented as proof. However, Fascism is not the ideology of the Ukrainian Government and the leaders of the Ukrainian Government are generally not Ukrainian by Nationality. In Ukraine, an Oligarchic clan system has been built and its members only act in pursuit of power and enrichment. If it is profitable for them to employ radicals or Nazis than they will do so. Even the Jewish members of Ukraine’s government have no compuction against working with those who employ the symbols of Nazi Germany or the ULA. For these reasons, Mozgovoi didn’t consider the primary enemy of New Russia to be abstract Fascism or even the Ukrainian Government but rather the Oligarchic conglomerates that were profiting off the war in Donbass.
Respected Stalkers, I think we are seeing the outlines of why Mozgovoi fell out with Moscow eventually, the details of which I’ll cover in my next article if you find this one interesting.
Mozgovoi declaring the Jewish oligarchs profiting off the war to be the primary villains is a very significant point, but it cuts both ways. Mozgovoi would know damn well that the Russian Spring was being smothered by Moscow while he was still alive on behalf of these same oligarchic clans. The Donbass Jewish mafia, to be precise. He would know Mariupol wasn’t liberated in 2014 or 2015 because doing so would threaten Akhmetov’s personal business interests, for example. Something that outraged Mozgovoi was the failure of the LNR/DNR authorities to purge Donbass of the old bureaucracy. That is, the same chinovniks who were working even under Yanokovich’s reign were still in power. Who did these Chinovniks really work for? As a matter of fact, Kiev purged the bureaucracy more thoroughly than the LNR/DNR. This was done for the benefit of the Dnipropetrovsk oligarchs (Kholomoisky) and at the expense of the Donbass clan. In other words, it was an inter-oligarchic spat. The LNR/DNR governments left the Donbass oligarchic bureaucracy of whom Yanokovich was a member in place but this Donbass oligarchy had absolutely no interest in actually liberating Donbass from Kiev. What they wanted, just like the Kremlin today, is to get their seat at the table in Kiev back. Furthermore, as has already been stated, the people of Donbass hated Yanokovich and all oligarchs in general, the Donbass clan being no exception. Mozgovoi purging the corrupt officials in his corner of Luhansk made his territory the most stable and livable while he was in charge there, and it is one amongst many reasons why he was so loved by the peasants and hated by Moscow and its Lugansk satrapy.
In October of 2014, a Ukrainian journalist set up a video call where a couple of officers who fought on Ukraine’s side during Ukraine’s ATO [Joint Forces Operation] against Donbass spoke to Mozgovoi. The fact that the journalist wanted the dialogue to be specifically with Mozgovoi speaks of the regard that he was held in. Some fragments of that conversation shed light on the anti-oligarchic core of Mozgovois general philosophy. Also his willingness to speak with Ukrainian military officers publicly and like equals indicates that he didn’t identify them as his true enemy.
Mozgovoi speaking to Ukrainian Officers:
For the most part, troops on both sides here consist of normal people which our oligarchic overlords use as personal home gladiators. That’s how I see it. For the most part, the average people on Maidan wanted to force positive changes. The idea of Maidan doesn’t especially differ from our ideals. Personally, I’ve always stated that we don’t fight against the people of Ukraine. First and foremost, we fight for justice and truth. We fight the removal of the presence of oligarchy within our society and their representatives in positions of power because business and oligarchy is a rattlesnake like (poison) mixture.
Of course, depending on Mozgovoi’s primary audience his rhetoric could shift. For example when his words were meant primarily for Ukrainians, he stressed sympathy with Maidan and that he wasn’t fighting primarily with Ukrainians. When his words were meant for Russian listeners he could talk about storming and bombing Kiev. There is no real contradiction here though in my opinion. Mozgovoi wanted to see the Russian Spring all the way through and taking Kiev would be the physical/geographic expression of that victory. However the one constant theme in his rhetoric that remained no matter who the primary intended audience happened to be was his total opposition to oligarchy. Mozgovoi in another interview:
To this day we still haven’t destroyed our enemies working in our rear. Until we have dealt with them we can’t advance forward.
(I think it’s now obvious who Mozgovoi is referring to by enemies in the rear and it isn’t just SBU spies)
The journalist than asks Mozgovoi what happens when they have dealt with the enemies in the rear.
–We go straight to Kiev.–So your goal is Kiev?
–Our goal is the liberation of all Ukraine from oligarchs and sell out chinovniks. Maybe enough slaving away for those whose personal assets already exceed the government budget by several times over? Time for them to share a little.
–That’s the same goal as those who were at Maidan, I don’t see the difference.
–That’s what I don’t get. Those who are fighting us now fight for the interest of the oligarchs. I would gladly reach an agreement with the regular troops and officers, with the regular people who stood on Maidan. We have the same interest as them. They want to be free people. Is it really worth it for us to fight? Ever since the days of the Teutonic Knights it has been becoming clear that it is better not to become tangled up with the Slavs. Those that come with a sword will be killed. Therefore it’s better to place the sword in the hand of a another Slav and force them to kill each other. Our task is to make our brothers understand that we are the same, with the same goals as them.
–But you intend on storming Kiev?
–Why not? They are allowed to storm to Lugansk and Donetsk. Kiev is better than those cities?
–And after Kiev what? Further West?
–Lets see what happens. If the soldiers on the other side understand finally that they are fighting themselves then this can all end tomorrow.
–What are your most urgent plans?
–To receive a Toychka U system from Europe and strike Kiev. Let them answer for the blood of Donbass.
–The Ukrainian Army employed Toychka U’s against you?
–Literally a few days ago they struck the town of Rovenki in Luhansk Oblast. If the enemy wants to fight with those methods why should we not answer in kind?
Zhuchkovski thinks Mozgovoi was displaying more blood thirst than usual there due to the audience he was speaking to, a liberal European journalist and he knew his words would be heard by local Russians. Local Russians needed to hear that Mozgovoi knew of the recent missile attack on a town in Luhansk and he wasn’t indifferent to this crime. Unlike Moscow, Mozgovoi would not pretend nothing happened and that everything was fine; hence his saying that he would be fine with hitting the Ukrainians back in kind. Nonetheless, in that exchange, Mozgovoi hammered what he always hammered away at, the real enemy being the oligarchy. He is showing a natural intuitive understanding of how to present himself as a leader and how to get people to respond.
In a different interview, Mozgovoi gives more detail about what constitutes victory:
–Victory isn’t only the end of military action. It also a includes a changing of the world views and reasoning of mankind. It is a moment of cardinal change. Will man continue to live within the framework in which he has been herded or will he liberate himself from this framework? We have a chance now to start thinking on our own. If we don’t begin thinking independently and deciding our own affairs then we can’t declare victory. All the sacrifices will have been in vain.
The journalist asks him if he plans on achieving these changes through the barrel of a gun (gotta hate these smarmy culture-warrior journalists).
–No. Both sides have already gone at each other with rifles. It doesn’t take much to understand that you are fighting with your image in the mirror. On one side, there is a taxi driver and there is another one on the other side. Who is he fighting and what for? Against oligarchy and for a better life? Well they tell one “you are fighting for your land the Russians have occupied” and they tell the other “you are fighting Fascism”.
The reporter replies that by Mozgovoi’s logic victory will be when everyone throws down their weapons to which he replies:
–If they throw down their weapons just like that they can always pick them up again. Victory will be when everyone understands for what and why.
Mozgovoi obviously thought big as befits an absolutely larger-than-life figure. How often do we ourselves rage at NPCs preferring pretty lies and BS? Mozgovoi is speaking about nothing less than revoking the right to be an NPC from the population forcefully. A kind of forced mass red-pilling. With the people’s court, he was outright demanding people start taking their fate into their own hands. For people to literally understand “for what and why” requires overthrowing the entire ideological complex of post-World War II civilization (at least). Mozgovoi is speaking of outright existential issues in regards to the nature of our entire political and economic systems. And people took him very seriously. Probably because he had an army, not just a Substack blog.
In my humble opinion, a leader of Mozgovoi’s caliber, who can speak not just of the local problems and civil war but also of outright existential issues in regards to mankind itself can only arise in Russia. I say this as a Westerner that Westerners are so jaded, so cynical, so materialistic and so … bourgeois, that this kind of talk either goes straight over their heads because they don’t understand it or they just brush it off as unimportant because they don’t see how it relates to flipping houses and crying to their shrink about how they don’t have any friends. After all, to a clever calculating Westerner, everything revolves around competition and getting people to like you by acquiring fame, connections and money in a never-ending dog-eat-dog rat race to the top of the dung heap. I don’t mean to include all Westerners in this critique but to point out that this is indeed the dominant culture there. The cult of the extrovert and the soothsayer and the fast-talking self-empowerment guru or PowerPoint salesman is what dominates the American psyche. Mozgovoi isn’t talking about networking hacks or retirement fund investment opportunities, therefore he would be considered to be spouting silly and childish nonsense by most.
Of course, there were also those from all around the world who were moved by Mozgovoi’s ruminating. None from North America, but still. Furthermore, as all Stalkers should know, Strelkov has a deserved reputation for being perhaps the most difficult and sometimes impossible commander to get along with despite his incorruptibility and competence. Nonetheless, Mozgovoi is literally the only major Russian Spring figure whom he has never said a bad word about. I’m including that observation to drive home that the existential nature of Mozgovoi’s philosophy was not mocked or belittled by any of his contemporaries. The cultural code of Eastern Europe is still different enough that this sort of thing isn’t mocked or stigmatized as “incel-talk” or something similarly flippant and pejorative.
Another example of Mozgovoi demonstrating his skill as a leader who understands the anger of his countrymen and channels it to identify the real enemy was on display in another video call with Ukrainian journalists and soldiers. He starts out by demanding to know why the Ukrainians are dropping Toychka U missiles on Donestk.
–Can you please explain why a few Toychka Us hit Donestk today?
The Ukrainians respond that they wonder the same thing and if there is a “3rd party’s” hand at work. Mozgovoi jumps right on that and says:
-I’ll tell you. Here we are talking about a 3rd party. That 3rd party is working to sow division, to divide and conquer. This 3rd party is none other than the special services. That same SBU and FSB [security services of Ukraine and Russia respectively], the descendants of the KGB. They have one teacher and now we are seeing the results of their work. As long as we don’t sort out that out, as long we keep sitting around drinking vodka, this is all going to be of no use.
Mozgovoi speaking of the FSB right along with the SBU speaks for itself.
As far as Zanon would be concerned, he just declared himself a traitor to multipolarity. The idea that the SBU and FSB (and the other spook agencies) work together and run a transnational spook state (set up by Andropov) is an idea that should be familiar to readers of the Chronicles though.
Here is what one of the Ukrainians said during the conversation:
–Well as it ends up, we are sitting here helpless and can’t do a damn thing, like a dog who understands what is happening but can’t speak.
Zhuchkovski commented the following on that exchange:
Those taking part in the discussion really couldn’t do anything. The helplessness of the Ukrainians is amply shown when one of them compares them all to dogs. Not only because the power of the 3rd party was far greater than theirs but because there were few in Ukraine willing to voice the same kind of thoughts.
I think we can all relate to that.
This is precisely why Mozogovoi was so adamant about the need to seize the chance that the Russian Spring was offering. During the next call Mozgovoi participated in with the Ukrainian, there was a then-unknown but now fairly famous journalist in Russia and Ukraine named Tatiana Montian present. Tatiana went on to become a close associate of Murz (now dead, suicide) and Vladimir Grubnick (Donbass vet harassed by the FSB). During their discussion Montian commented:
–These oligarchs have set us all against each other and use us as meat and bargaining chips to gain concessions from each other. What is the point in killing each other for the sake of those assholes?
Mozgovoi enthusiastically replied that it was pleasant to speak with an intelligent women (how rare they are!) and that he had no desire to fight pointlessly, but that he also couldn’t live in the same country as with the oligarchy. From there Mozgovoi and the Ukrainians commiserated that it was so difficult to unite and overthrow the real common enemy.
Within a few months, Mozogovoi was forbidden from further discussions with the Ukrainians. Whether he would have complied with the LNR authorities’ decrees is unknown seeing as how he was murdered not long after being told he couldn’t do any more video calls. However to demonstrate the hypocrisy involved on the LNR’s end, Yuri Shevchencko, the man who became Prizrak Brigades commander after Mozgovois murder and whom we met during the peoples trial was told by the head of the Lugansk satrapy government that “there will never be New Russia”. So the same government which told Mozgovoi he couldn’t do video calls with the Ukrainians also was adamant that there would also never be a New Russia, which was ostensibly the cause that thousands of Donbassians were fighting for. This means Luhansk’s and Moscow’s opposition to Mozgovois calls wasn’t about Mozgovoi warming up to the so-called Anal-Satano-Nazis.
It was actually about something else entirely.
* * *
Well guys, this translation is already way too long so I’ll have to wrap up for today.
I feel like I still haven’t done Mozgovoi justice and actually demonstrated how central he was to the Russian Spring. Mozgovoi never created any manifesto or political program, but nonetheless his deeds and ideas were the most concrete manifestations of what the Russian Spring was or could have been. Strelkov, of course, is no less iconic than Mozgovoi, but Mozgovoi was simply there longer than Strelkov and ran his own slice of Donbass longer than Strelkov. Furthermore, Mozgovoi had a willingness to speak with Ukrainians which is something Strelkov would have never even considered mostly on account of personality differences. And when Mozgovoi spoke with the Ukrainians, everyone watched and listened. It was unheard of and unthinkable and yet he did it. Mozgovoi wasn’t simply about liberating Donbass from Kiev, Mozgovoi was about forcing men in general to re-evaluate their relations with themselves and their government and even to change their very understanding of what it means to be a human. Yes, I know. As I said, such a figure could only arise in Russia where people still allow themselves to wonder aloud about these things from time to time, and that is precisely what makes this “Spring” a Russian one in addition to where it took place.
But more on that next time.
If you, the Readers of the People, actually found this interesting I will do a part II covering Mozgovois falling out with Moscow and the conspiracy theories surrounding his murder. If you would appreciate such an article let us know. Conversely, if it generates cries of outrage from the typical NAFO or PutinAnon types that will only bolster my resolve to finish part II faster.
Until next time. Stay frosty out there, fellow Multipolar Antifa BRICS Warriors;).
