Ukraine Crisis - Page 426

With troops on Ukrainian border the tone is sharpened also on the Russian home front. Author and journalist Arkady Babtjenko fought in Chechnya - now he is called a national traitor.

Hi, my name Arkady Arkadevitj Babtjenko. Thirty-seven years, college educated, married, father of one daughter.

When I was nineteen my homeland put boots on my feet, stuck a rifle in my hands, put me on a tank and said: "Go." So I went along. "The restoration of the constitutional order" - thats what the they called the war that time. When I was twenty, I went myself to the enlistment office and enlisted, voluntarily, in the army and went to war for the second time. " Anti-terrorist Operation" - as it was called from 1999. Participated 102 days in direct warfare, as it is called in my soldierbook.

During the two wars for my country, I received free transportation and two thousand rubles in coupons. Thanks for that.

My cousin, Sergei Babtjenko, was killed in Tajikistan. At the border. Some kids had been sent there as relief. And would immediately be sent out on a raid. He offered to take their place. They were about to arrest a gang that smuggled heroin. My cousin was the machine gunner . They killed him with a shot to the head. The only one who was killed in battle. By a sniper. Now his name is engraved in the memorial to the fallen soldiers from Bashkir, where he was born.

My father, Arkady Lavrentevitj Babtjenko, fired a rocket at the Cosmos. He was an engineer, worked at the Federal Technical Space Agency. Engineered cable masts for rockets. His last job was a cable mast to the space shuttle "Buran". Dad was away on business trips six consecutive months. In Baikonur, he lived in a dorm. And in Moscow in a two room apartment with wife, son, mother, brother and his family. That apartment was all we had. Nothing else. No car , no garage, no datja.

In the 90s, when the "Buran" project was discontinued after only one space flight, my father didnt begin to either barter nor steal. For stuff like that, he was absolutely incapable. He was born to launching rockets into space. And continued until his death to draw those cable masts, which they no longer needed. In almost total poverty.

He died of a stroke. 1996. When I was out in the war. We did not even say goodbye.

My grandfather, Lavrentij Petrovich Babtjenko, one hundred percent zaporogkosack, was a tank driver. Fought at Chalchin - Gol River. In 1939. Wounded thirty times. Once seriously. And the injuries broke him in the end - he died in 1980, when I was three.

His wife, Yelena Mikhailovna Kuptsova (by first husband, her maiden name I do not know because she hid it well - Jew, of course), served during the war on the rooftops putting out the fire bombs. When the opportunity presented itself, she never took the chance to travel outside of Russia. She worked all her life until she died. Handled the boiler. In our house, in the basement. Three days a week .

She died a few months after her son. Then I was still out in the war. I do not even know how they buried her.

My great- grandmother surnamed Bachtijarova (partly Tatar, oh yes) came to Moscow in the 30's. With her ​​two children, she received shelter in a boxroom at a school. There, she then came to work the rest of her life.

Her daughter, my grandmother, began working at age 14 and produced throughout the war iodoform - an antiseptic used in amputations. Then she joined the labor front and unloaded rail cars of coal. Or cut forest.

Her brother escaped at age 15 from the front during the first months of war and returned prior to 1956 - from Siberia.

Her grandson, my mother, traveled to Chechnya to fetch me home. She saw everything with their own eyes. She then adopted six children.

Mom is currently running an orphanage in her home. All children come from Lipetsk in central Russia. From broken families. Alcoholic parents, of course.

My wife's grandfather, Pyotr Gorkanov, pureblood Mordvin, fought during the Great Patriotic War with chemical weapons and lost his vision. Until his death he lived in the village. In a small house with a fireplace. Gas was not installed in his - the veterans, the invalids - lifetime.

My father in law, also pureblood Mordvin, served as second lieutenant in East Germany. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he, his wife and their two children sought shelter in various barracks and night shelters.

During all these nineteen years of adulthood - actually longer than that, from 1993 - I have taken all the shit together with my country. I was always where my country was in trouble. If it was at the White House, then I was there. In Chechnya , then I was there. In South Ossetia, then I was there. In Krymsk, then I was there. In Blagoveshchensk, yes, I was there too.

All this time I was, my family, my grandparents and relatives nothing but Russians for my country. When it was necessary to go to war at Chalchin - Gol, build rockets for very little pay, starved in cellars, produce iodoform to the front, stay overnight in the barracks with the kids, fall in Tajikistan, feed the lice in Chechnya, adopt abandoned children - then we were Russians.

In Chechnya, there was no one who ordered me to take my guns, go to Ukraine and get a identity crisis When you should die for the Russian homeland, the Russian homeland doesnt care if you are Jewish or not.

Then the homeland only knows a single nationality: cannon food.

That I should get to Ukraine I was told only recently.

By they who had never been out in a war, of course.

In the past couple of months I've heard more shit being said about me and my family than I've heard in my entire life.

On "Jewish fascist" Maidan, no one ever even came up with the idea to ask me about my nationality. Right sector, who fought shoulder to shoulder with the Russians, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Armenians, did not care. Simply did not care. It was not relevant.

But in my Homeland ...

The man for whose sake they started the second Chechen war, so that he would ascend to the throne, the man who himself never fought for his Motherland (he stayed far away from the Afghan war) and that since he came to power sends equally young conscripts instead of his own children to the wars which he now starts himself in Georgia and the Crimea, now this man tells me from the tribune, that I who voluntarily went out in his war, am a traitor, an enemy agent and a second rate person .

In my Homeland, I am now a Jew, a ukrainian son of a bitch, a fifth columnists and traitor to the nation.

Now tanks are moving against Slavjansk, armored vehicles against Kramatorsk, the "self- defense" has conquered three trucks with ammunition and a tank.

Okay, time to get moving again. Im going.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.