Undead Soldiers The medical commission said A little prayer to their maker, Which done, they dug with a holy spade The soldier from god’s little acre, When the doctor examined the soldier gay 01/15 Or what of him was left, He softly said: This man’s 1-A, He’s simply evading the draft. – Bertolt Brecht, “Legend of the Dead Soldier,” 1918 I found out that there was a war on between Oxana Timofeeva Russia and Ukraine at a small gas station, where I met some Ukrainians who, like me, were traveling across Europe by car. Neither Russian Now Is Night nor European nor American media had made any mention of a real military encounter between our countries, and so it was hard to believe these agitated women when they told of atrocities committed by Russian occupants on Ukrainian soil. They seemed like yet another element of brainwashing, just like the reports of Ukrainian Nazi atrocities that flooded the Russian media against the backdrop of the annexation of Crimea, only now with a Ukrainian accent – a mirror image of aggressive propaganda from the other side of the conflict. Ours was a meeting on neutral territory, so to speak, somewhere in the middle of a generic Europe. The women’s tone toward me was unfriendly, even accusatory – as if being Russian automatically made me guilty of the atrocities they were describing. At some point it even seemed that they were screaming at a me. Yet their stories of welded-shut zinc coffins v e e returning “from the East” etched themselves into f o my mind. m i T ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIt was late May 2014, three months before a n a Ukrainian security forces captured Russian x O Ê paratroopers in the village of Zerkalny in the 8 1 Donetsk Region. Putin’s response to the question 0 2 of how Russian soldiers found themselves in the y a territory of a neighboring country was that they m — “got lost” because there is no clearly marked 1 9 border there, but the appearance of military # l t personnel was living proof that forced even the a h n r g i official Russian media to utter the word “war” – u o N j s though the Russian and Ukrainian presidents x I u l w f immediately rushed to sign a ceasefire o - e N agreement, as if to end the war before it had really even begun. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThen again, the war had actually begun long before Russia’s secret incursion into Eastern Ukraine. The war came to the Maidan with the first nationalist slogans, and it came to snuff out the revolution. Rabid nationalists were the ones who brought war as they wrecked statues of Lenin. The nationalist turn of the Maidan 05.11.18 / 16:37:24 EDT 02/15 Crosses marked only with numbers stand on the graves of unknown Russian-backed separatists at a cemetery in the Eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, FebruaryÊ16, 2015. Photo:ÊAFP 05.11.18 / 16:37:24 EDT 03/15 Alevtina Kakhidze, In Zhdanovka, the only place with cell coverage is the cemetary... , 2014. 05.11.18 / 16:37:24 EDT repressed the movement’s social content, while ideologically lost, succumbing to patriotic the ensuing war has frozen any potential flare- hysteria and throwing themselves into battle ups of class struggle. Fascism, nationalism, the with any enemy indicated by mass propaganda, regime of war arise to put an end to the nascent itself especially intolerant in times of war. worker’s movement, as Georges Bataille wrote in ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊEntire divisions get lost with “one-way 1933.1 Today’s wars remain true to the same goal, tickets” to enemy territory, only coming home as which is why in countries that the first world “two-hundreds.” “Cargo 200” is the general name customarily calls “nondemocratic” – meaning 04/15 given to both fallen Russian soldiers and the zinc “poor” – social and political protests become coffins in which they come home from the war, as ethnic conflicts so quickly. if death had welded body and coffin together in ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ“They’re showing us cartoons,” said my zinc, turning both into one singular dead weight. friend on the day Putin flew to Minsk to discuss This dead weight is the main material remains, the conditions for settling the situation in the indisputable evidence, and the only reliable Ukraine. The next morning, I was sitting on an physical proof of war. War is nothing but an airplane, greedily reading Russian newspapers, assembly line for the production of corpses. trying to understand (in vain) what it was the Cargo 200 is the principal immediate material presidents had agreed upon. It was a secret that product of the war, impossible to consume, while this newly printed matter could not reveal, even fresh graves are the trace it leaves on the earth. if it still smelled of ink, and neither could Eugene ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊSuch dead weight is a serious problem in an Thacker’s great book on the horror of philosophy, undeclared war. The dead, like the living, have a which I read on the plane. Real horror was here, formal status, upon which the claim of the living nearby – an invisible, cold horror between the over their dead bodies depends. If there is no lines of the morning papers, which told of the war, there are no soldiers. Two-hundreds return meeting between presidents and of ten living from Ukraine and, according to official sources, soldiers in uniform who lost their way into are either somewhere else entirely (e.g., at Ukraine, with weapons and documents, yet not a exercises in Russia’s outer regions), or they word about hundreds or even thousands of dead. resigned or went on leave – in a word, they are ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThis is when I remembered the Ukrainian lost, but not fighting in a neighboring country. women at the gas station and their stories of Identified or unidentified, what to do with this welded-shut zinc coffins, which I had had trouble cumbersome burden? As a rule, in wartime the believing because they voiced what the unidentified are buried in mass graves, and their newspaper won’t tell you. A chance encounter on families receive funerary notices or letters the road with these ladies is just part of the stating that their loved ones are missing in rumor mill, hardly an authoritative source of action, while identified two-hundreds are given information. To be believed, facts must be to their families for burial. But what do you tell revealed and confirmed by official sources the families if there is no war, and where do you presenting incontrovertible proof. a put the unidentified bodies? v e ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWe usually only believe whatever has been e ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAs the state wages its undeclared war, it f publicly recognized as fact, forgetting how many o faces the same question as the murderer: What m i T stringent filters reality passes through to reach to do with the body? There are rumors that some a n that stage – the stage of cartoons made in a of the white trucks in a Russian humanitarian aid x O Russia, Ukraine, the US, or Germany depicting Ê convoy that drove into Ukraine were empty but 8 puppet presidents and the politics of the 1 returned full of cargo 200. Some bodies come 0 2 countries they represent. Such cartoons never home, others stay on Ukrainian soil, buried on y show welded-shut zinc coffins with dead a the spot. Some say that the Russian army has m soldiers. They only show living soldiers, who, in — bought mobile crematoria: special trucks on a 1 the very last instance of the official Russian 9 Volvo frame for the quick and safe disposal of # l media spectrum, were after all only lost (maybe t biological waste such as the corpses of a h n r g it’s comedy, not truth, that we’re unconsciously i homeless animals or infected cattle. u o N j looking for in cartoons, and maybe that’s what s ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe undeclared war announces itself when x I u l w gives them their strength). f conscripts and even more contract soldiers stop o - ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn a way, they really were lost: according to e N sending news to their loved ones. Some relatives the few witnesses, many of the Russian soldiers mobilize, joining forces to search for and collate were convinced that they were being sent to information, organizing communities and some region of Russia for exercises, only committees, and soon the Soldiers’ Mothers grasping that they were in Eastern Ukraine when organization is put on the blacklist of foreign the hail of bullets began. Conscripts get lost agents. Some of their sons are found, others are while following some murky order, as do not. Some mothers continue to wait, others mercenaries, who also don’t understand entirely receive their two-hundreds. Families meet and where and why their division is moving; they are bury this cargo. Its point of origin is unknown, the 05.11.18 / 16:37:24 EDT only explanation a short note: “died while ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn Alexei Balabanov’s film Cargo 200 (2007), executing his military duty.” The official a girl falls into the hands of a militiaman who explanation says they died in their own country – turns out to be a maniac and ties her to the bed on maneuvers, or in an accident such as a gas in his apartment. She is waiting for her main explosion – but there is no proof of war paratrooper-fiancée to come home from more solid than these identified two-hundreds, Afghanistan, but the fiancée comes home as their coffins, and their graves, whose number is cargo 200.