. He welcomed me with a firm handshake, and told us to climb into a car, any car that had room, and follow him.What Igor would tell you if you asked him for some context regarding his life in Russia is probably something like what he told me one day in the summer of 2008 during a paintball game on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. We had both been given red headbands to wear; our team would be red and our enemy’s yellow. He tied the headband around his neck, the way the Soviet Young Pioneers, the youth organization of the USSR, wore red bandanas around their necks. The Soviet Union was the country he grew up in, and he was a proud pioneer. “Before perestroika,” he told me, “we were wearing them like this. And after perestroika, we were wearing them like this.” He raised the handkerchief so that it covered his nose and mouth, and turned his hands—index fingers and thumbs—into guns.
That summer, one year before our train trip, he had asked me to facilitate his latest obsession—paintball—by bringing him a paintball gun and accessories from Canada. Every year, he asked me to bring him a list of goods, which he repaid me for. Usually it was just a couple of New York Yankees ball caps, maybe some poker chips. This was by far the priciest haul ever. His requests cost well over a thousand dollars, more than five times the average monthly salary of Russians. So I figured he was doing all right.
Picture me, then, clearing Russian customs with the Igor contents of my luggage: the Tippmann X7 automatic paintball marker (designed to look exactly like a real assault rifle, either the M-16, H&K G36, or AK-47, depending on the configuration) with magnesium receiver, sixty days’ worth of maximum-strength nicotine patches, black Rap4 Strikeforce swat paintball vest, a three-litre bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Straightline barrel kit, the BT Designs APEX adjustable barrel (which has a grooved cylinder allowing one to shoot around corners), paperbacks of The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic in English for his fiancée Anya, TechT Paintball “Ludicrous Speed” Cyclone X7 upgrade kit, a Mario Batali cookbook for his friend Alexei, whom we call Small Al, and a tactical laser sight.
The mob in line at McDonald’s near the Moskovskaya metro stop was ten people deep at seven a.m. I did this at least once during each of my annual trips to Russia: had an Egg McMuffin in the early morning, when I had grown tired of porridge and buckwheat pancakes. More of those unanswerable questions occurred to me: How can this Egg McMuffin taste exactly the same as those I had as a child in north Florida? What would these fresh-faced young Russian people be doing with their lives if they weren’t working for the well-advertised stable wages and regular raises of McDonald’s? Why is McDonald’s the most popular Western fast-food chain here, when the others, most notably Rostiks (KFC) and Subway, serve draft beer?
A girl in the patio booth next to me left half her flapjacks on the table in the Styrofoam pancake container, making a little party for the pigeons and starlings. No one here buses his own tray, but I felt compelled to. What is this strange compulsion? Does it mean that I am hopelessly fucked?
My cellphone rang. Igor.
“It’s a good day,” he said, and then paused.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s nice out.”
“It’s a good day to kill somebody. Listen, bring four litres of water, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
Then I bused my own tray and bought four litres of water.
I met Igor and his friend Alexei, the one we call Big Al, in the subway, at Chyornaya Rechka, near where Pushkin took a shot to the spleen and died in a duel.
Igor and Big Al approached, two hulking skinheads. Igor wore torn jeans and a wrinkled button-down plaid shirt; Big Al, sweatpants and a polo.
We took an endless series of streetcars and buses and marshrutkas, each bus smaller than the last, until we were beyond the outskirts of the outskirts of St. Petersburg, and the marshrutka let us out in front of a gas station on a lonely stretch of highway. We ran across the road, to a gas station parking lot where a group of people had gathered.
The organizer, Misha, another hulking skinhead, wore camo pants, combat boots, and a black T-shirt with a picture of a skull and crossbones and the word . He welcomed me with a firm handshake, and told us to climb into a car, any car that had room, and follow him.
We drove for twenty minutes down narrow dirt roads until we emerged onto the grounds of an abandoned cement factory on the bank of an inlet to the Finnish Gulf, where a pool of brown water oozed toward a bridge and a highway in the distance. Antifreeze bottles bobbed on the surface. Hundreds of spent condoms and smashed bottles of beer littered the ground.
There was a crumbling barn that Misha forbade us to enter; a conveyor with several lookout posts connected to a control tower; and a rusted-out eighteen-wheeler trailer. Behind the barn stood two dilapidated cranes. Bursts of paintball paint spattered every conceivable surface—red, blue, green, and yellow. The trailer facade looked like a giant Jackson Pollock. Surprising bursts of wildflowers matched the paint. Rigid growths of sharp rebar sprouted from the earth and from giant wedges of concrete.
“Seriously, man,” Igor said to me. “This crap. And we will play in this crap. This is the worst, most dangerous playground I have ever seen.”
An endless line of cars filed in behind us, and more and more men and several women got out. Igor fired the X7 for the first time across the canal. He held down the trigger and the automatic rat-a-tat-tat attracted a crowd, all of whom wanted a turn firing it.
One group of men with whom we’d soon be at war were shirtless, their bodies canvases of scars and tattoos and fresh and not so fresh paintball welts. Some also had precision, high-dollar, semi-automatic markers—though not quite as swank as Igor’s. Some groups seemed to be organized into teams. They communicated through wireless walkie-talkie headsets and lined up along the banks of the inlet shooting at the antifreeze bottles bobbing in the brown water. To kill time before the games began, they took cellphone pictures of each other blindfolded on their knees with guns held to their heads.
I had never played paintball before. I rented a marker from the organizer, Misha, that fired one paintball at a time, and whereas the others’ guns torpedoed a barrage of paintballs across the expanse of the canal, mine lobbed a single paintball about twenty feet before it splooshed into the water.
Igor told me that, with this rental marker, I fell into the category of what the experienced players call “hamsters.”
We gathered in a circle as Misha explained the rules and scenarios. If you’re hit, you immediately hold the marker in the air, which means you’re dead. You return to base. I speak passable everyday Russian, but much of what he said was war- and weapon-specific, and afterward Igor asked him to elaborate on a few things for me.
“The main thing,” Misha said, “is not to impale yourself on the rebar.” He pointed to a sharp spike of metal sticking out of a hunk of cement.
“Got it,” I said.
Misha and his wife handed out the red and yellow bandanas to differentiate the two teams.
Igor and I drank water and some raspberry tea he’d brought in a Thermos. I asked him where the vodka was, and he shook his head disapprovingly. “You can’t drink while playing paintball,” he said. “Alcohol makes your mask fog.” It didn’t seem to bother our opponents, the gang of Chechen vets.
The first game was the usual scenario. Our team dispersed into the landscape. We had about two minutes, after which one of the referees in neon vests blew a whistle. The other team charged after us.
Igor and I hid in the thick of the brush around the cement factory barn. The ground crunched under my feet. I crouched along behind Igor, using him as a shield. He climbed onto the roof of the Dumpster and hunkered, mowing down some yellow-team guys trying to stealth by on the other side. He leapt from the Dumpster and rolled through a dusty pile of spent condoms. He came up firing and turned a three-sixty into the cover of a tree before hitting the deck flat.
Because my hamster marker lobbed, I had to aim up if I wanted to get any distance and let the arc take it. Despite his moves, someone pegged Igor on the side of his helmet with a splash of red paint. “Whore,” he shouted. I climbed down the back of the Dumpster and utilized Misha as my replacement human shield. We picked our way through thick bushes to the top of a small hill. I fired into the sky in hopes that my bullets might rain down on someone from the yellow team.
Two members of the yellow team wearing slick blue helmets, the walkie-talkie guys, popped up in front of us. They pelted Misha, but I managed to duck back.
Misha slapped at his chest, and his hand came away covered in orange paint. “Avenge my death, Jeff!” he shouted. I avenged his death.
And as I revelled in the pride of my first kill, a green paintball tagged me in the meat of the thigh.
I asked our fellow combatants about their attraction to paintball. A few of them, like Igor, seemed to have somehow or other conned their way out of the military.
Most of the guys we were fighting beside and against were former Special Forces guys and veterans of Chechnya.
Vadim, a veteran and neighbour of Igor’s in Piskaryovka, told me, paraphrasing (if I’ve got the origin of this correct) Jesse Ventura: “Once you’ve hunted men, it’s not interesting to hunt animals anymore.” Vadim was on the yellow team.
I didn’t know exactly what the attraction was for Igor. If I had narrowly avoided conscription in a cruel military and a brutal war, I’d feel for some reason honour bound to not engage in elaborate, pretend dramatizations of combat. I tried to get a bead on Igor’s feeling about it, but he kept dodging.
“Did you see my dismount from the Dumpster?” he said, changing the subject. He smiled at the aesthetics of it. And I have to admit, at least as far as simulated combat goes, he looked pretty good doing it.
Later, in the middle of the Capture the Flag scenario, Igor answered his cellphone, and it was his fiancée, Anya. She was nonplussed that he was spending the day playing paintball with us rather than hanging out with her. The conversation was a short one. He recounted it to me after:
“I just wanted to tell you that I’m not pissed at you,” she said.
“Baby,” he said, “I’m busy right now. You know this.”
“Fuck you,” she said, and hung up.
Word began to circulate that I was not only a hamster but a foreign hamster. A foreign hamster on the paintball field. Suddenly everyone on the yellow team was gunning for me.
A whole commando unit, led every time, it seemed, by Vadim, hunted me down early in each scenario.
Misha announced a modification of the scenario rules, which Igor translated as “unlimited respawn.” In unlimited respawn, returning to camp after you’re shot brings you back to life. But upon my resurrection, I was instantly killed again and again. Sometimes it was funny for a yellow-team sniper to shoot me—in the back or in the ass—at the very moment of my respawn.
Big Al stomped back to camp for a drink of water. “I like paintball,” he said. “But I don’t like how fast I die.” He cut back onto the field again, and Igor whispered, “Al is huge. Good target.”
We paused for lunch, potato and barley soup. Igor and I shared the rest of his Thermos of hot raspberry tea. One wouldn’t imagine Igor to be the type to bring a Thermos of hot raspberry tea to paintball, but there it is.
After lunch, we played everyone’s favourite scenario: Narco-Traffic. One team member with a blue beach ball is the narco-dealer, and he has several points across the field to which he must deliver drugs. Our job was to cover him. There was no respawn on this one. I got shot in the side of the head, and I returned to base camp to inspect my welts and swab the paint out of my ear.
The final scenario was called Massacre. Every man against every man. Teams be damned. Igor and I decided to sit out the Massacre. We peeled off our fatigues by the trash receptacles made from real RGD-2 grenade crates. I had perfectly circular red welts all over me. I noticed that Igor had two of the nicotine patches I’d brought him from Canada duct-taped to his shoulder.
A black German shepherd puppy, Misha’s paintball mascot, decided to sniff us out. It was named Russia—not Rossiya (a light, noble word, almost a whistle), which means Russia in Russian, but the English word Russia (which trundles out of a Russian mouth with a long rumbling R culminating in sh, like the dramatic sh of shazam, before exhaling into the final ah). At that moment, Vadim passed by and fired his paintball marker into the dirt. Russia scrambled under the van into the soft sand and whimpered. Vadim smiled, showing his grey teeth. (The next time we saw this dog, at another paintball game a year later, it was full-grown and fearless when it came to guns. To that dog, a paintball gun was just a ball delivery system, and he enjoyed nothing more than to be fired upon at point-blank range. He would be both the most fearless and the shortest-lived warrior on any real-life battlefield.)
A retro tourist boat—a replica of a Romanov-era ship—appeared, floating into the inlet from the Gulf. The tourists on the boat peered at us. You could sense from their body language that they were concerned by what must have appeared a sizable army of men with machine guns. “Cannon meat!” someone shouted. Everyone who had already been massacred snatched up their markers and rushed to the shoreline. The tourists on the boat hit the deck. A downpour of paintball pellets rained into the water just short of the boat’s hull.
After playing fake war, I went to Moscow to talk real war with Denis Butov, who grew up in Krasnoyarsk in the centre of Siberia and was drafted into the army at the age of twenty. His assignment was rather benign: an internal troops brigade assigned mostly to field exercises near Krasnoyarsk.
The year before his draft, Butov had read an essay entitled “I Was in This War” by Vyacheslav Mironov, who is now a well-known war writer, also from Siberia. The essay had been reprinted in a Krasnoyarsk newspaper. It was about an assault on Grozny in January 1995 in which Chechens tortured and killed Russian soldiers. The story had a strong effect on Butov.
“I wanted revenge,” he recalled of his thoughts at the time.
He went to the recruitment office and requested reassignment to Chechnya. They surely thought he was crazy. And they surely thought he was just the kind of soldier they needed in Chechnya.
I had discovered Butov’s writings in an edition of the literary journal Glas, which publishes contemporary Russian work in translation. I thought his stories were powerful and wrote to him. He wrote me back, and I was surprised that a grizzled veteran of such a cruel war used smiley-face emoticons so frequently in his email correspondence.
We met at a café in downtown Moscow near the Tverskaya metro, where, on August 8, 2000, a Chechen terrorist bomb killed eight people. Nearly a decade later, the memorial at the underground crossing there was still flush with fresh flowers. Butov brought along his friend and fellow veteran Ilya Plekhanov.
Plekhanov was about six feet tall and in his early forties. He basically looked like somebody’s dad, and because he’d spent much of his childhood in Australia, he spoke perfect English with an Australian twang. There was something darker in Butov. He was short and stocky, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. His eyes were slightly crossed, and when we shook hands, I noticed that he was missing his ring finger above the first knuckle. He had a friendly and mischievous smile.
Plekhanov ordered a milkshake and Butov a glass of iced tea stuffed with herbs.
I asked Butov what he thought about his decision to go to war now, ten years after the fact, given everything that had happened to him.
“First of all, I was young and silly,” Butov said. “I was kind of romantic, and I thought I must do it actually. Because I thought it was the right thing to do. I think it was the right thing at this moment. I wanted to go to war. I just didn’t know what war was at that time. I’m not sure I’d ask to be sent to Chechnya if I knew what I know today. But what happened happened.”
Butov’s experience in Chechnya eerily echoed the Mironov story that had inspired him to go there in the first place. Butov’s unit of thirty-two soldiers was involved in a notorious assault in Grozny in August 1996. “They liquidated all but four of us,” he said. “It was kind of hell.” Butov documented his experience in the autobiographical short story “Five Days of War,” which he wrote one evening after he returned to Krasnoyarsk from Chechnya shell-shocked, poor, lonely, and totally misplaced outside a war zone. He found the website Artofwar.ru, where other veterans posted stories and reminiscences, mostly very bad writings with lots of gore and nationalism and melodrama. Butov’s stories were different.
“Five Days of War” recounts how his unit was pinned in a bunker by an unknown number of Chechen rebel machine gunners trying to reclaim Grozny from Russian forces. After an hour of attack, there were ten of them left and only eight who could still fight. They held out for three days with more vodka than water and without the proper training to use their sniper rifles after their snipers were killed off. On day two, the seriously injured among them began killing themselves.
Butov and the remaining soldiers kept the machine gunners at bay and drank their vodka (“Some cause for cheer in this shitty life,” Butov wrote) and had conversations about whose side God might be on in this conflict. “I don’t think God is on anyone’s side now,” a soldier named Kuzya said. “It’s just a couple of minor devils on dope playing for money … They cheat like crazy, and no one wins.”
On day three, another unit rescued the four of them that were left.
Afterward, Butov returned to his parents’ apartment in Siberia, where he became a shut-in and often contemplated suicide.
“Just leaving the army, leaving the war, I thought there was no place for me,” he said. “I had physically returned, but my soul was still there.”
Once, he took a girl on a date and tried to describe his alienation to her. She told him that only fools went to Chechnya. Anyone with any sense, she said, could have gotten out of it. She said that if he hadn’t gone into the service, he’d have made some money instead of fighting and he’d be successful, but because he was drafted and especially because he asked to be sent to the Caucasus, he was a fool and a loser and no one would love him, and so on. Another time, walking through the park with a different girl, he mistook an electrical box with wires sticking out of it for a booby trap. Later, in the presence of a group of old friends, he explained why it was better to strangle a guard than to cut his throat. His old friends stopped returning his calls after that.
“I knew that I’m not a hero,” Butov told me, “but I thought that I had fought for my country. I thought my country will meet me at least neutrally and not hostile. But it was very hostile. I needed rehabilitation. I needed some kind of therapy. I needed work, money.
“There was a problem, and there is a problem,” Butov said, “in that service is not a noble thing here in Russia, unfortunately. If we’re talking about during the Soviet Union, there would come a point when every man would have to serve some time. Now the common point of view is a real man has to buy his way out of the service.
“When I returned, I divided people into two parts: who served and who didn’t. Friends who didn’t were neutral at best. Or maybe enemies … It was not a single case. It is the common point of view of society on this problem. They hated us. We hated them. Now, I think different. I used to think that only people who had been to war could understand me. Then I came to realize that there were people who didn’t serve who can understand me and even more people who served and they are morons actually.”
I was hesitant to bring any of this up with Igor. Personally, I always felt guilty around guys my age who had gone to Iraq while I prowled bars and wrote my stories. And unlike Igor, I hadn’t swindled my way out of the fate. Could what Igor had done even be considered a swindle in light of the immorality of it all? Wouldn’t any reasonable ethicist say that he and the tens of thousands of others who’d done the same thing were in the right? Put in the same situation, I’d have done everything in my power—I’d have paid much more than Igor paid for an X-ray showing a non-existent crack in my spine. In any case, when I described my meeting with Butov and Plekhanov to Igor, he listened thoughtfully.
I told him that I understood his decision perfectly and that I’d have done the same thing. “But,” I said, “I also think, hearing stories like those people told me, I would feel guilty for having done it.”
“Well, man,” he said. “Better to be alive with guilt than dead without guilt. I was thinking at the time, ‘Who the fuck needs it?’ I didn’t want to be pushechnoye myaso.” He didn’t want to be cannon meat. “This is the question of survival. It means I wasn’t guilty. You can’t be guilty for your life. How you can be guilty for your survival?”
“And if a soldier who fought came up right now and called you a coward?” I asked.
Igor paused. “It’s a good question. I will say, ‘It’s your fate.’ Basically, it is, I think. It was your choice. My choice was not to go on this war.”