Obituary for Roman

I promised myself never to write auto-fiction again, but so far the stories that catch me in their funnel traps are much more lively and voluminous than anything I can come up with from scratch.

The other day I received a notification about the death of a person who appeared in my life 3 years ago only once, but it came out so vividly that I remembered his name for a long time. He died in the war in Ukraine. He fought as part of the Wagner PMC, and after the end of Wagner - as part of a combat unit of radical football fans. Everything that I learned about this man, I learned, as they say, against my will.

In 2021, I received a short but expressive message from a man named Roman Litasov:

“They are complete animals, fems are not people. Greetings from Pozdnyakov."

Enthusiasts of the “Male State” then, without exaggeration, sent me thousands of threats on all social networks, but I remembered Roman because he wrote from his non-anonymous account and with his photo on his avatar - and also duplicated the message on both Instagram and VKontakte. He wrote this to me on February 14th. Some men know how to send a heart-breaking valentine.

On February 14, 2021, I lived in Russia, in Moscow. At that time I organized many street women’s protests. At the beginning of February, Navalny returned to Russia - and he was immediately imprisoned, there were rallies. I thought a lot in those days about Yulia Navalnaya. On February 14, the entire city will be decorated with flowers, hearts and pink ribbons. Lovers will sit in a cafe by candlelight and glow with happiness. And her husband is already in prison. Then I thought about how many such women there are - wives, mothers, girls, sisters of political prisoners. And how many women political prisoners there are - under house arrest, after torture, in prisons. I initiated the action for February 14 and gave it the name “Chain of Solidarity and Love: action in support of Yulia Navalnaya and all women political prisoners.” It was a peaceful protest in several cities. “Male State” - a huge telegram channel with hundreds of thousands of aggressive and often ultra-right men - published a post calling for persecution of me as the organizer of the action. They not only posted links to all my accounts, but also posted a surveillance photo: on the day of the action, I entered the gates of a country house. The address was visible on the gate. The house was a secret shelter for activists in situations of persecution and burnout—my friends and I supervised it. Thus, the shelter address was leaked. I was shaking because it put the safety of everyone in that house at risk. Well, because someone secretly accompanied me all the way from Moscow to the Moscow region - and I didn’t even notice.

Roman Litasov was one of the thousands of men who wrote to me. I decided to take revenge on them all by getting back at him. He was an easy target: it was not difficult to find out where he worked, what city he was from and the range of his interests. He turned out to be a fitness trainer from my city - from Omsk. I am an Omsk resident - and I called on all Omsk residents reading me to contact the fitness club where Roman worked, demanding that he be fired for threatening behavior towards women. My request spread: tens of thousands of reposts, dozens of news in major media. The fitness club first disowned Roman (“that kind of guy doesn’t work here”), and then closed its social networks. Roman also closed his social networks. Later, my subscribers wrote to me that the coach first lay low, and then went back to work for the same club. Nobody fired him. But I was still jubilant: I was able to give at least some resistance.

From the photographs, Roman Litasov gave the impression of a huge, pumped-up man. Mountains of muscle, reddish beard. He was subscribed to some public pages of neo-fascists who worship solar signs, Russian heroes and pagan gods. Also, judging by the subscriptions, I realized that he really likes Slavs, and he likes those who are not Slavs much less. He wore heavy silver medallions with pagan symbols (runes? letters?), and on the Internet he left comments of a eugenic nature: Slavic women should not mix their blood with just anyone, and disabled people should be gotten rid of so that they could not pass on their genes to anyone (he wrote this under a post by the mother of a child with a disability). In general, the portrait was drawn up, and the novel was shown to the general public in all its glory. Men continued to harass me on social networks, but this time for deanon of the coach and for the fact that I thereby ruined his career.

This would have been the end of Roman Litasov’s invasion of my life if not for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Six days ago I received notification of his death. “A fitness trainer from Omsk, who bullied activist and writer Daria Serenko, died in the war in Ukraine.” In the first minutes, I was happy - and I let this joy bubble up into my head. “He lived sinfully and died funny,” witty commentators wrote under this news. “This will happen to anyone who poisons Dasha.” “From misogynist to war criminal.” “The path of a person in two screenshots,” I signed my post. One photo was a screenshot of his insults towards me, the other was a screenshot of the news about his death. Didn't live 2 weeks before my 36th birthday. The world remembers him for insulting a feminist. “You must live so that your name is in the obituary of your enemy.” My name was mentioned in all the news about his death.

Then the joy quickly gave way to a feeling of devastation. Yes, the banality of evil, yes, a war criminal, but how can a person be reduced to this? I would like to receive news that a person’s ways are inscrutable: that a person was a supporter of the Male State, and then became a volunteer at a crisis center for women. I would like to make sure that there are no predetermined trajectories of patriarchy. I wish Roman wasn't such a complete character. I would like reality to speak to me in a more complex language of hope, rather than in the simplistic language of hatred and war.

Be careful what you wish for. As soon as I wanted this, women started writing to me. Women who knew Roman Litasov. Classmates, women whom he trained in the gym, some other women. I wanted to say: women, leave me alone. But the women kept writing and writing, recording voice messages, memories, and remarks for me. Some of them really wanted to prove to the feminist whom he bullied and with whom he ended up so strangely intertwined in the media after his death that he was worth something. As if I was his close person during life.

After the first wave of irritation, I still became interested. Part of me wants his name and himself to fade into oblivion, that he deserves it, but the other part asks: what kind of child was he? what did he become when he grew up? what did he love? What contradictions did he have?

- what should a man be like?

- equal to me

- a man is equal to a woman, right?

- everyone is equal to each other

- Why then can one be insulted, but not others? In the comments, everyone attacked the deceased Roman. How many nasty words have been written about him. Why does someone think they are better than him? What's better? I really feel sorry for the man. And why can someone consider his way of life wrong, but theirs beautiful? Did they really know him personally and can condemn him?

This dialogue took place on my Instagram. Roman was Lisa's coach. I listen to her voices:

— I could come to him with my problems, and he supported me. My husband beat me, and Roman said that this man would not change and that a man should not show force towards a woman. I left my husband, now everything is fine with me, I have two children.

I'm trying to tell Lisa that being a war criminal is more complicated than a "lifestyle." Then I decide to stop trying to prove anything: the living Lisa is more interesting to me than the dead Roman. However, if it weren't for Roman being dead, she wouldn't have written to me and shared her story, thinking she was sharing his story. I don't want to put pressure on her.

Lisa sends me screenshots of some strange text. I peer at it and understand that, most likely, this is Litasov’s personal channel. I find a channel and read it for several hours. This is an ordinary military channel of the Wagner PMC mercenary with an analysis of military strategies and tactics, with photos of weapons and a count of how many and where they killed Ukrainians. What distinguishes him is only the style of the texts themselves - Roman writes in a very literary manner, in places even excessively poetic. He realizes that he has PTSD and keeps either a war diary or a diary of his PTSD. That is, Roman also wrote autofiction. So do I. In one of his posts, he mentioned that he dreams of writing a book.

“In war, the colors are different... You cannot enjoy their beauty. You just won't be able to do it. Your brain has already switched from “Life” mode to “Survival” mode. You can’t tell what beautiful grass grows in the field. You are only interested in one thing - whether your camouflage hides you in this field, and whether there are “petals” there. A beautiful old tree, which you would look at at home with respect for its age, now interests you only in terms of building a dugout or firewood.

When you arrive there as a newcomer, your brain is still looking for the beauty that it is used to noticing around you. And you are amazed by the callousness of veteran fighters who do not see the obvious. But after a short period of time you become the same. And now you understand why this is so. Your brain simply doesn’t have time for beauty. Behind every beauty now lies danger . "

<…>

“When I arrived in civilian life, I noticed an interesting feature in myself, namely a constant readiness for combat. For example, walking down the street, I don’t look at the architecture of beautiful old houses, but look where I could quickly jump into a hole or ditch in the event of a sudden artillery shelling, or I begin to look out for the possible position of an enemy machine gunner or sniper. And that’s not all the post-traumatic tricks of my brain. More to come. Looking at the houses, I briefly assess how difficult it would be to storm them.

<…>

I have fewer and fewer such “fun things”. I started to control myself. As it turned out, you can get a person out of the war, but you won’t be able to get the war out of a person for a very long time . ”

I came across a video on the channel. He rents, in his words, “a real man’s dream room.” This room is his military headquarters in a strange Ukrainian apartment, hastily abandoned by civilians. He spends the night there. Simple interior - sofa, wallpaper, toys, household items. The room is small and looks like a child's room. There Litasov and his ammunition settled down, which he shows and comments on the video with pleasure and tenderness. A sapper kit, grenades, a machine gun, something else. Camouflage green boxes and pieces of iron laid out on other people's tables and chests of drawers. He films himself in the dressing table: his face is covered with squares, but his figure and shape are visible. His voice is low and insinuating, like a Soviet announcer. There are unpleasant artistic notes in the voice. Litasov uses the call sign “Svyatogor”.

I ask Svyatogor’s classmate what kind of child he was.

“I understand that I didn’t know the person who died and went “for the idea” and harassed women. And if it were anyone else, I wouldn’t even think about him for a second, because I already have an image in my head. Maybe this is a lesson in its own way for all of us? The Romka I remember was really cool. The most vivid impression so far is how he cried in music class because there was some sad song about a bird, and ran home when the boys pulled him into fights, because he was always head and shoulders above everyone else. In high school, his little sister was born, and a few years later his mother died. I remember that when he moved to Omsk for university from Kazakhstan, strange photos with shaved guys in the style of neo-Nazis began to appear on his VK. I don't know how long this lasted. Then he became a coach, got married, and took pictures in chain mail. When did a person change so much? I don't know. I am not a psychologist and cannot say whether this pseudo-masculinity was compensation for my youthful years. It's very sad that everything could have been completely different. People who support the war, they somehow believe in it. I don’t know how to explain this, but even my 80-year-old grandmother supports this. I don't even know what else to say. Our school chat still exists and no one can believe that it’s all the same person.”

“Reading books is an activity that I have always loved and which I did not forget about during the war. Books always took me away from battles, away from all sorts of troubles, into their own interesting worlds. Worlds where everything is somehow naive and unusual and at the same time sophisticated.

It must be said that there were a lot of books; in any home you could choose them to suit every taste and color. During my business trip I read 6 full books. Of these, the most memorable works are “Pan” by Knut Hamsun and “The Sea Wolf” by Jack London. Naturally, I also read military literature, I couldn’t do without it. I took many of these books for further training of attack aircraft. Personally, I always advise everyone to read during combat, since there is still a lot of free time. Reading greatly relaxes your nervous system and helps it adapt. In my opinion, this is some kind of therapy for your mental health. But also, as I noticed, reading books develops your imagination, and imagination is needed in war. With its help, unusual solutions can be born . ”

I read and try to cope with the wave of anger and nausea. He would go to other people's abandoned houses and pick out books from them to read. The people who lived in these houses were either killed or became refugees. Is fantasy really needed in order to use it in war? Why couldn't you use your imagination to imagine a world without war? How do you like this unusual solution? Well, I'm talking to a dead man. In fact, there are two dead people here - a man who did not live two weeks before his 36th birthday, and a boy crying in class over a song about a bird. One killed the other and died himself.

There is something inexplicable to me in the fact that perhaps the most meaningful and detailed text about Roman is written by a man whom he probably hated in absentia with all his soul. What is this - an act of justice, curiosity, revenge, narcissism, humanism? I still feel like it's an act of hope. Isn't there a lot of attention and honor for a war criminal? Why am I dedicating an obituary to this man - are there really no beautiful forgotten women left to spend this time and effort on? Am I falling into the trap of the “protagonist riddle,” where the answer is simply that the hero was disliked, and this explains and justifies his actions for the reader? Am I romanticizing Roman the way he romanticized the war for himself? He writes about the war as about the woman he loves - and this makes a strong and depressing impression on me. I don't know how it's possible to love war so much. I don’t know how you can be ready to give your life to war and sincerely believe that this is your service and destiny. That war is your homeland.

For some reason, I’m trying to discern behind a man, hung with ammunition and weapons, a child who is afraid to show too much strength, because he is taller than everyone else. I can't do almost anything.

One day Roman conveyed greetings to me from Pozdnyakov. This mysteriously led to the fact that today I say goodbye to Roman on my behalf.

Goodbye Roman. I’m sorry that in your entire life you have never found a book that would prevent you from becoming a murderer and dying.

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if you want to avoid war, conscription and military service, if you want to become a deserter, write to “Go through the forest” https://t.me/iditelesom_help