The American Dream, Russian-style

A few days ago, the legendary separatist commander Motorola – leader of the glorious Sparta Battalion, hero of the Siege of Sloviansk, the Battle of Ilovaisk and the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport – met his untimely end.

Everyone knows what the American Dream is. It’s a simple, clear and readily transferable concept. Invent! create! produce! Work hard! Be honest and decent! Sooner or later, success will be yours – every honest grafter is destined to taste success eventually – and you’ll earn your million even if you started out as a waiter or a janitor. You’ll have a family with two kids, you’ll own a beautiful home in the suburbs, and there’ll be two cars in your garage and a barbecue pit in your backyard.

But is there an analogous “Russian Dream?” Beyond Russia’s borders, Russians are thought of as gloomy and never-smiling people – not, in truth, an altogether unfair stereotype. In Russia itself, this question will perhaps put more educated people in mind of a certain epic poem by Nikolai Nekrasov entitled Who Lives Well in Russia? (spoiler alert: no one). Less erudite folk, meanwhile, might be reminded of the fairy tale about Emelya and the magic pike, which essentially boils down to the following sentiment: one fine day, everything will just happen for you – and you won’t have to toil away to get what you want. The polar opposite, in fact, of the American Dream. In Russia, the waiter and the janitor both know that no amount of honest graft – not even sixteen hours’ worth per day, every day – will ever earn them a million dollars. But they also know that at some point they might, just might, get lucky.

Consider the case of a certain “lucky” carwash worker from a provincial Russian town, one Arseny Pavlov. In 2014, this diminutive, goateed guy saw on TV that a bit of a ruckus was taking place in Eastern Ukraine, and having got himself in trouble with the police at home, he took the train straight to Donetsk. Once there, he got himself a machine gun, assembled a battalion and acquired the nickname “Motorola,” becoming a legendary (well, for some people anyway) separatist field commander, leading the Sparta Battalion in the Siege of Sloviansk, the Battle of Ilovaisk and the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport – battles that have become a part of glorious Russian military history. Legend says that he had worked on Motorola phones in the army, hence the nom de guerre, but as with so many legends, who can tell fact from fiction?

A few days ago, he was killed when a bomb went off in the lift of his apartment building in Donetsk. According to the official version of events, it was Ukrainian saboteurs who perpetrated the bombing. Many believe, however, that yet another “hero of the Russian Spring” has been eliminated by the FSB.

What prompted the unassuming Pavlov to make the trip to Donetsk – an alien city in an alien country? He had no links to Ukraine. None at all. What was he fighting for? Whom was he fighting against? For the sake of what – or whom – did he die?

The answers to these questions aren’t as obvious as might initially appear. Some wars are, so to speak, dramaturgically clear-cut, the Second World War being a case in point: a great Fascist foe is threatening our survival, and we must quash that foe lest we be quashed ourselves. “Clear-cut,” though, isn’t an adjective you’d readily use to describe the war being waged across a comparatively small part of Eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian embassy in Moscow has continued to operate this entire time, as has the Russian embassy in Kiev; and you can still fly between the two capitals, albeit with a few difficulties at border control. For all the TV propagandists’ exhortations, Motorola and his militants couldn’t have failed to entertain at least some doubts about the legitimacy of this war. He must have realised that he was fighting just because.

The dramaturgical structure of this conflict – its narrative – was just a little contrived. It was akin to a cruel reality show or a protracted social experiment serving as a remedy for despair. The reasons behind it aren’t so much political or economic as existential. Pavlov boarded that train to Donetsk in an attempt to escape. To escape the provincial swamp; to escape the nausea of everyday life; to escape meaninglessness and a set of perpetual dead ends.

The war endowed his life with a degree of meaning. War renders existence intelligible. You’ve got your men here, the enemy’s men are over there, and it’s over there that you need to point your gun. The war made Arseny Pavlov a somebody.

But since the war wasn’t genuine, the meaning he’d acquired wasn’t entirely genuine, either. Arseny Pavlov aka Motorola had joined a Russian-style fight club whose purpose lay in cultivating medievalism and destruction to compensate for the fact that this generation hadn’t experienced a major war. But then the people behind this fight club resolved to scale the project down, and Motorola was suddenly surplus to requirements.

This is the American Dream, Russian-style. A carwash worker becomes a field commander, the “Che Guevara of Donetsk.” But it is a dream that ends not on the battlefield, not in suburbia – both of those ends one might describe as fitting. No, Motorola met his end in a way that one might say entirely suited the legend.