From time to time, certain political forces try to privatize well-known events and endow the belligerents on our side with their own and no one else's ideology.
I don’t have any sociology regarding the political convictions of the Russian army - and I don’t think they exist at all.
In the end, the army fights because it is an army, and what is in its soul is the twenty-fifth question.
The institute of political instructors has just begun to be recreated, and the political instructors, to be honest, do not really know how to explain our tasks to soldiers and officers from an ideological point of view.
Ideology is banned in the country, but in the war it was suddenly needed.
Get out how you want.
I have no idea how they get out.
But there are a couple of notes about the LDNR army.
I must say right away: there are almost everyone among the militias.
Moreover, there are a lot of those whom you would not expect to see there.
While serving in the Donbass, we assembled a full-fledged (284 people on staff) battalion - someone left, someone arrived, I saw many hundreds of people, and I had time to get an idea of the ideological portrait of the average militia.
In a nutshell: there is no portrait.
We made a chapel in the battalion, but only a few people constantly went there.
From time to time a dozen fighters came in.
Our fighter and fellow soldier Andrei Kuban Ivanchuk, God rest his soul, then baptized several fellow soldiers.
Kuban was a Cossack with all the consequences: anti-Bolshevism and the cult of Emperor Nicholas II.
I don’t remember that the Kuban had serious ideological comrades-in-arms in this sense, but a number of fighters were sympathetic to the fact that he very persistently preached.
At one of our positions, someone got hold of a portrait of Lenin and hung it up in the kitchenette.
Kuban was angry, but Lenin had a support group - maybe ten people, and all of them, by the way, were young.
The rest didn't care.
If Kuban hung a portrait of Nicholas II next to Lenin, the majority would react complacently or not at all.
The subject of my main surprise was that among the militia there were really many - up to a quarter of the personnel - convinced pagans.
In general, people who came out of the extreme right movement met quite often.
It was, of course, the youth.
They bypassed the chapel and, if the Kuban tried to drag them in, they naturally cursed.
The greatest sympathy among the militia was traditionally caused by any paraphernalia associated with the Great Patriotic War: Zhukov and Rokossovsky, the red banner over the Reichstag - no one had any questions at all: neither the pagans nor the Orthodox.
In our unit, we did not impose any ideology on anyone and did not even offer it.
But in general, it must be said right away, it always depends on the commanders, on the officers.
Strelkov was right.
Brain was left.
Motorola positioned himself as a Russian nationalist, despite the fact that the condominium right-wing movement in Russia could not stand him.
Motorola was surprised.
He believed that, on the one hand, the government had strangled popular Russian nationalism, and on the other hand, some strange personalities had privatized it.
The location of the Kalmius unit was hung with red flags and portraits of Soviet leaders in an unusual consistency.
Zakharchenko was both right and left at once.
He treated Lenin rather coolly, but the “Russian spring” consciously began under his monument in Donetsk.
Nicholas II was not at all considered a political figure and was defined as bankrupt.
He generally accepted the Soviet project, appreciated its artifacts, but immediately associated himself with both the Soviet soldier and the imperial warrior.
He once told me that he would not rush about in the Civil Civil War, like Melekhov in The Quiet Don, but he did not say whose side he would take.
In his family were both white and red, and he was proud of all.
He went to church, he knew all the rituals perfectly, he was directed to the Russian, multinational, cathedral, militarized future.
When today, while liberating territories, they simultaneously draw two-headed imperial eagles and immediately restore monuments to Lenin, this is completely normal.
If you conduct a survey among the militias, finding out the most significant figures for them, Putin will inevitably take the first place there.
Moreover, Putin will have his own.
There is a Cossack Putin, there is an imperial Putin, there is a Chechen Putin.
And the Soviet Putin, a product of the KGB, the direct heir to Stalin and Andropov, of course, is also there.
Then, of course, there will be Stalin.
Many have theirs too.
Stalin is not only Soviet, but also anti-Soviet, which is historically paradoxical, but can you forbid people to think as they like.
Next, approximately equally dividing the proportions, will be mixed up Svyatoslav, Lenin, Makhno, Nicholas II and anyone - such names can fly out that you say: “Holy-holy-holy” - and stop the survey.
Intelligent leftists, inveterate communists, intelligent rightists, even Nazis, anarchists, sectarians, anyone went to the Donbass war.
I saw busts of Dzerzhinsky and portraits of Potemkin-Tavrichesky in the officers' offices.
There is a battalion of Bob Marley (Bob was leftist and professed one of the offshoots of Christianity, but in general he loved grass) and there is a battalion of Evpaty Kolovrat (definitely right, which can converge with Bob Marley's battalion if only in matters of grass).
There were those who considered the Ukrainian nation a fiction.
There have always been many.
There were those who considered themselves correct Ukrainians.
There were fewer of them, but over time it became more.
I will tell you who has never been there in the Donbass.
In all these eight years, I never met a single liberal there who came to help the Russian world defend its legal rights.
All these tales of them “about our and your freedom” turned out to be a bluff in a liberal environment.
They care about anyone's freedom, but not ours.
With them, we were not on the way.
The rest will have to accept each other.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.