Croatian War of Independence

The Croatian War of Independence emerges as a conflict in which the case for national self-determination could not be separated from the fate of minorities, the weight of wartime history, and the violence of military action. Its early phases resist a simple division between innocent and guilty sides. The narrative’s turning point is the destruction of Vukovar, where the distance between political arguments about the war and the ruin experienced on the ground becomes impossible to maintain.

Independence and the Minority Question

In the first months after Yugoslavia began to break apart, many of the narrator’s friends supported Croatian independence on the principle that a people should be free to leave a state. Opponents of that position questioned whether the same principle could be extended to every separatist movement, and invoked France’s historical friendship with the Serbs, who had resisted Nazi Germany, in contrast with the Croats’ wartime collaboration. The discussion also carried the legacy of atrocities associated with the Ustaše and the Chetniks. Such arguments did not settle the dispute; they showed how readily contemporary claims became bound to memories of earlier violence.

The narrator finds the question of Croatia’s Serbs especially difficult to dismiss. After long holding a dominant position in Yugoslavia, they risked becoming a vulnerable minority in an independent Croatia. Their fears appeared understandable in light of the new Croatian government’s first measures under President Franjo Tuđman: Cyrillic signs were banned, Serbs were removed from civil-service jobs, and the Yugoslav federation’s red-starred flag was replaced by a red-and-white checkerboard flag. The account notes that the flag had been created in 1941 by the Germans and carried associations with the Second World War for those who had lived through it. These circumstances complicate any neat moral division, without making the competing national projects or their conduct equivalent.

The account’s initial uncertainty ends, or at least changes, with Vukovar. The city’s spectacular destruction makes it harder to sustain a detached comparison of national claims. It is there that Limonov’s encounter with the war begins, and where the narrative tests his appetite for combat against the devastation surrounding him.

Vukovar and Limonov’s First Encounter with War

In November 1991, while in Belgrade for the launch of one of his books, Limonov was approached at a signing by uniformed men who asked what he knew about Serbian communities in eastern Croatia. They described a Serb-inhabited enclave that had rejected Croatia’s secession and itself seceded, provoking a conflict in which Vukovar had just fallen. They invited him to see the situation for himself. Limonov had other interests, but he was approaching fifty and had never been to war. He accepted, excited enough not to sleep that night.

Two officers collected him at dawn and drove him along the highway between Belgrade and Zagreb. The route, no longer used by private vehicles since hostilities began, was marked by roadblocks and checkpoints. Soldiers inspected travelers’ identification while others kept rifles trained on them. Limonov’s identity complicated the officers’ assumptions: he was Russian and presumed Orthodox and pro-Serbian, but carried a French passport, which led them to presume he might be Catholic and pro-Croatian. Their suspicion eased after he joined in denouncing Tuđman and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister who had encouraged European recognition of Croatian independence. The exchange, sealed with a drink, carried him onward into the conflict.

The account makes clear that the journey’s Serbian framing concealed an important contradiction. The soldiers supporting the Serbian cause wore uniforms of the Yugoslav People’s Army, which officially could not take part in the conflict but, as the narrative describes it, had in practice shelled Vukovar and Croatian positions around it. This undermined the accompanying officer’s comparison between the Serbs’ predicament and that of Jews during the Second World War: the Jews had not had the Wehrmacht’s support in defending themselves against the Nazis. Limonov, however, was not troubled by the inconsistency. He was captivated by the armed men, tanks, sandbags, uniforms, and distant mortar fire. Passing villages still smoking, he felt that he had entered the real war he had long imagined, and the war his father had missed.

The Fall of Vukovar

Vukovar had been taken by Serbian troops two days before Limonov arrived. Those around him called the city’s capture a liberation, but the narrative presents the result as devastation. Once a handsome Habsburg city, Vukovar resembled a smaller Berlin after the Red Army’s advance: a wasteland of rubble, twisted metal, and broken glass, with bulldozers beginning to clear the debris. There were no habitable hotels, very few houses still standing, and mines made it dangerous even to urinate beside the path. Many corpses had already been removed, but Limonov was taken to a body-identification center.

There he saw tortured, burned, and mutilated bodies, as well as bags of human remains unloaded from trucks. When he asked who the dead were, the officer guiding him answered that they were Serbs, apparently treating Serbian casualties as the self-evident victims and Croats as their torturers. The account challenges that certainty by placing it beside the destruction of a Croatian city by Serbian—or, more precisely in the narrator’s formulation, federal—artillery and the disappearance of a quarter of Vukovar’s population. Limonov did not conclude that one side was wholly right and the other wholly wrong. He believed there had been innocent victims, brave fighters, and unjustly displaced peasants on both sides. Yet he rejected neutrality as cowardice and felt that fate had placed him with the Serbs.

That allegiance is portrayed as emotional and experiential as much as political. Limonov felt at home around the evening fires and in the camp at night, among armed men warming their hands. He interpreted combat as a release from the sameness and reasonableness of civilian life, even describing the pleasure of war as something that could become addictive. This is his outlook as represented in the book, not a neutral judgment on the conflict: the scenes of ruined streets, mines, and dead bodies stand in sharp tension with his exhilaration.

Militias and the Conflict’s Aftermath

The narrative widens the frame beyond the regular forces, emphasizing that the wars in the former Yugoslavia were fought largely by militias. Accounts by Jean Rolin and Jean Hatzfeld describe a paramilitary culture in which young men acquired weapons and the power to terrorize civilians, abuse women, and take what they could. Peasants and soccer hooligans mixed with criminals, psychopaths, foreign mercenaries, Russian Slavophiles who came to support the Serbs, and neo-Nazis drawn to the Croats. The conflict’s violence therefore appears not only as a struggle over territory or sovereignty, but also as an environment in which armed groups could exercise unaccountable power.

The fighting later extended to another Serbian enclave, the Republic of Serbian Krajina, as conflict continued among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. Limonov returned to the region seeking not to report on the war but to serve as a soldier. After reaching Belgrade by an overnight bus from Budapest—air travel had stopped under the embargo—he offered himself to the enclave’s representatives as a foreign volunteer. He was eventually given a mismatched uniform, the rank of captain, a room, a Kalashnikov, and a Serb officer as a guardian. The officer’s hostility toward a subordinate’s Croat wife reflected the cycle of personal violence and inherited grievance within the unit: his own family, he said, had been murdered the previous year, and within days the subordinate would slit the officer’s throat.

Limonov remained in the mountainous region for two months and said he took part in raids, ambushes, and skirmishes. When asked whether he had killed anyone, he said he had often fired and seen men fall but could not say whether he had hit them. The narrator expresses some doubt about that answer while acknowledging that the truth cannot be established. The political entity for which Limonov had fought did not endure: one year later, its inhabitants were dead, imprisoned, or refugees in Serbia. The war’s trajectory thus turns his imagined military brotherhood into a setting of uncertainty, reciprocal violence, and displacement, while leaving unresolved the personal question of what he did there.