Konstantin Kostenko

Konstantin Kostenko was a former paramilitary commander turned warlord whose brief rule over a Moldovan town embodied the violent authority that emerged amid the collapse of Soviet power. Eduard Limonov met him in Transnistria while reporting for Dyen, admired the ruthless decisiveness with which he governed, and later learned that Kostenko had been murdered. In the book, his story passes from a battlefield encounter into an account told at a Moscow banquet: a life of power and violence whose ending had seemed, even to Kostenko himself, inevitable.

From commander to warlord

Kostenko had once commanded a paramilitary unit in Afghanistan. He later opened a garage in Moldova, but as the surrounding town descended into chaos he became a warlord and its absolute master. The change from mechanic to ruler is central to the way his story is told: his former occupation becomes a measure of how completely violence had remade his position. Kostenko himself was said to see no return to ordinary life after wielding power over a city.

He was Ukrainian, like Limonov, but had been born in the Far East, where his father was stationed. The account describes his Asian features and associates him with an old-fashioned cruelty that made him feared. These details mark him as a particular individual rather than an abstract commander, while the authority he exercised over the town placed him at the center of its collapse.

Justice in the garage

Kostenko dispensed justice in his garage, surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards and a blonde woman in a miniskirt and dark glasses. The setting joins the remnants of a civilian business to the armed spectacle of his rule: the garage remained, but its function had become a place where decisions of life and death were made.

Limonov witnessed Kostenko condemn a fat, sweaty man suspected of being a traitor paid by the Romanians. The account presents the accusation as a suspicion, not as established proof. Limonov approved of Kostenko’s firmness, and Alexander Dugin, who later heard the story from him, approved as well. The episode shows the attraction Kostenko’s forceful justice held for the two men, even as it makes the brutality of his authority unmistakable.

Limonov in Transnistria

Limonov met Kostenko while on a reporting mission for Dyen in Transnistria, amid fighting over the region’s status after the Soviet Union collapsed. The book describes Russian settlers, who had dominated the largely Romanian local population, as facing harassment and reprisals after Moldova declared independence; they responded by forming an autonomous republic and taking up arms. Limonov was unreservedly sympathetic to their cause and wanted to witness the wars breaking out across the former empire.

He participated in a punitive raid against the Romanians, crossed bombed-out buildings under sniper fire, and ran through fields strewn with mines. It was in this conflict that he encountered Kostenko. The narrative distinguishes Limonov’s own actions from Kostenko’s rise to power: it establishes their meeting in the war zone, but does not say that Kostenko took part in the raid. Limonov’s account instead centers on the conversations the two men shared afterward.

A death foreseen

Kostenko and Limonov spent several nights talking. Kostenko described his adventurous life and predicted that his enemies would eventually get him. He believed he had nowhere to run, and that a man who had ruled a city could not simply return to being a mechanic. His prediction gives his story a grim direction: the end appears not as a sudden reversal of his expectations but as the consequence he had already anticipated.

By the night Limonov told the story in Moscow, he had learned that the sawed-off torso of his friend had been found in a car trunk beside his half-charred head. The brutal discovery establishes Kostenko’s death while leaving the circumstances and perpetrators unspecified. Limonov was grieving as he recounted their conversations to Dugin, whom he had just met at a banquet organized by the editor of Dyen.

The story that survives

Dugin interpreted Kostenko’s disclosures as an effort to leave some trace of a dark, violent fate that was about to end. He listened with growing interest as Limonov’s recollection moved from the garage and the suspected traitor to Kostenko’s foreboding about his own death. The conversation gives Kostenko a second, posthumous presence: first as the warlord remembered by Limonov, then as the subject of a story shaped and received at the banquet.

That act of telling also changes the story’s emphasis. Kostenko’s rule depended on armed power and fear, but after his death what remains in the scene is the account of the man: the former commander, the garage owner who became a ruler, the friend who predicted he would not escape his enemies. Dugin’s attention makes the telling itself consequential, while Limonov’s grief gives it personal weight. Kostenko cannot return to an ordinary life or control his fate; the trace he wanted must instead depend on others remembering and recounting it.