Eduard Limonov and Arkan's wartime friendship

Eduard Limonov’s friendship with Arkan, the leader of the Serbian Tigers, made the Balkan war at once a political alliance, a path toward combat, and a cherished personal myth. The book places Limonov’s warmth toward Arkan beside evidence of the militia’s brutality and then follows their reunion through a landscape where political bargains could overturn a soldier’s destination overnight. For Limonov, the bond endured less as a stable military partnership than as a memory of the war he longed to rejoin.

An alliance formed in war

The account first establishes the world in which Arkan operated. Jean Hatzfeld describes the Tigers’ treatment of Croatian prisoners after the surrender at Vukovar: the People’s Army steps aside while Arkan’s men take charge, and captives who had lived and worked alongside their captors are forced onto military trucks. Hatzfeld also recounts a militiaman describing the slow killing of a kneeling prisoner as an initiation into the patrol. This is the violence that surrounds the friendship in the narrative, not an incidental backdrop that can be set aside when Limonov describes Arkan with affection.

Limonov’s own account begins at Arkan’s headquarters in Erdut, near Vukovar. He found Arkan astute and circumspect, and felt flattered that the commander had singled him out from ordinary journalists. They drank slivovitz and discovered that they shared political opinions: they condemned Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Franjo Tuđman, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and agreed that Russia needed a revolution. Limonov also criticized French intellectuals who supported the Croats. Their agreement was broad enough that he asked Arkan to accept him as a Russian volunteer. Arkan welcomed him, and the book describes a fast friendship born from that meeting.

The narrator’s presentation deliberately holds this personal bond against the militia’s recorded conduct. Limonov’s admiration does not erase the prisoners’ terror or turn the Tigers into an uncomplicated band of comrades. Instead, the gap between his intimate language and the violence reported by others reveals how readily he could experience political affinity and wartime belonging as a moral vindication of the people who offered them.

The return to Arkan

Several months later, news that Arkan’s militiamen had defeated Bosnian Muslims moved Limonov to tears. He took out a photograph of himself and Arkan posing with the group’s little tiger mascot. Looking at it, he felt radiant nostalgia and addressed Arkan as his brother, wishing he could return to the war in the Balkan mountains. The photograph condenses the relationship: it is a record of their meeting, but in Limonov’s later recollection it also becomes a portable image of a comradeship and a battlefield life he wants back.

When Limonov later arrived in Belgrade, three days passed before the barman serving him vodka said that Arkan knew he was there and wanted to see him. Arkan received him in a suite on the hotel’s upper floor, accessible only to the warlord’s guests. Limonov was searched by Arkan’s bodyguards before entering; Arkan wore a khaki uniform and green beret and was feasting with a dozen of his men. His first question was whether Limonov had yet made a revolution in Russia. It turned their old political conversation into a test of what Limonov had done since their first meeting.

Limonov answered that he had tried. He said he had been among the defenders of the White House against Yeltsin’s tanks and had been wounded in the attempt to take Ostankino. Now he wanted to fight in Krajina. Arkan explained that reaching it was difficult because the corridor to Belgrade was repeatedly cut by Croats, Muslims, and the United Nations peacekeeping force. A group was leaving the next day. Limonov accepted immediately. The exchange shows the friendship operating practically: Limonov’s desire to return to the war met Arkan’s access to a route and a fighting group, even though that access could not guarantee where the journey would lead.

A route broken by politics

At five in the morning, Limonov was the first aboard a minibus waiting outside the hotel. The vehicle gathered men from Belgrade’s outskirts and set off at sunrise. His companions looked like peasants travelling to a livestock market, but were in fact Arkan’s militiamen returning to the front after leave; weapons filled the cargo space. The disguised journey crossed roads lined with burned villages, where front lines and authorities shifted between Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian control. The militia’s passage without incident seemed strange precisely because the men and their cargo were not what they appeared to be.

Three-quarters of the way to their destination, the radio reported a coup in the Republic of Serbian Krajina and the imprisonment of the defense minister to whom Arkan had recommended Limonov. Posters appeared on tree trunks showing Arkan with a price on his head. The narrator interprets the upheaval as part of Slobodan Milošević’s preparations to abandon Krajina to the Croats in exchange for Serbian territory in Bosnia and an end to the embargo. In this changing political calculation, a hard-line commander such as Arkan had become a nuisance. The group seemed to be heading toward a trap, but the region’s confused loyalties and delays produced a less direct outcome: Limonov was left on his own to present himself to the authorities, passed from office to office, and finally sent to a former Austro-Hungarian garrison.

The separation matters to the shape of their friendship. Arkan had made Limonov’s return to the front seem possible, but the political crisis that threatened Arkan’s position also unsettled the journey and removed Limonov from the group. The account does not turn this into a clean rescue or a definitive rupture between the men. Instead, their connection appears within the same unstable system of personal recommendations, armed factions, and political realignments that determines where Limonov can go.

Memory and the meaning of the bond

The photograph with the tiger mascot gives the relationship an afterlife beyond their meetings. In it, Limonov remembers Arkan as a brother and the war as a place to which he longs to return. That longing stands in sharp contrast to the described initiation killings and the prisoners driven from Vukovar: the same war is, for its captives, coercion and terror, while in Limonov’s retrospective image it is also comradeship, purpose, and lost intensity. The contrast does not make the friendship unreal; it shows what Limonov’s attachment allows him to cherish and what it leaves outside the frame.

The book therefore presents Arkan not merely as a famous acquaintance or a route into the fighting, but as a figure through whom Limonov’s political convictions and appetite for danger could become personal. Their shared hostility toward political opponents helped form the bond; the invitation to volunteer and the later offer of a place in a group gave it concrete consequences. Yet the Balkan political game repeatedly frustrated any simple passage from friendship to a settled military role. What remains most vivid is Limonov’s own image of return: the remembered commander, the little tiger in the photograph, and the wish to stand beside Arkan again.