The Republic of Serbian Krajina is portrayed as a self-proclaimed Serbian enclave whose fate is shaped by a war that repeatedly rearranges its front lines and alliances. For Eduard Limonov, it becomes not merely a destination but a place to seek combat: he arrives intending to serve as a soldier, spends two months amid guerrilla actions and uncertain loyalties, and leaves with a pistol as a souvenir. The account’s eventual outcome is stark: within a year, the enclave will have disappeared, and its inhabitants will be dead, imprisoned, or refugees.

A contested enclave

The Republic of Serbian Krajina lies not far from the Adriatic and becomes a battleground as the conflict between Serbs and Croats reignites alongside the continuing war between Serbs and Bosnians. Three parties are now fighting over overlapping claims, while others try to separate them. Alliances shift according to immediate advantage: a former enemy may become useful when a different enemy is more pressing. Diplomats and journalists struggle to make sense of the resulting political and military changes.

The enclave is also politically isolated. The account describes it as a self-proclaimed entity recognized only by the Serbs. Belgrade is the only route Limonov can reach by bus from Budapest: the embargo has halted air traffic into and out of the Serbian capital, leaving the country ostracized and increasingly isolated. For people in the region, the political boundary between Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian territory does not reliably describe the conditions on the ground. Front lines divide villages, while alphabets, official languages, currencies, religions, and nationalist loyalties can change from one stretch of road to the next.

Limonov’s journey into the war

Limonov travels to Belgrade because he wants to enter the war, which he sees at this point as his only salvation. He plans to leave his bag at the Hotel Majestic and approach the ad hoc embassy established by the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Unlike his earlier role as a journalist, he now asks to serve as a simple soldier. The representatives are surprised: foreign volunteers have not arrived in large numbers. They tell him that reaching the enclave is difficult and that he must wait to hear from them, so he returns to the hotel.

After three days, the hotel barman tells him that Arkan has learned he is there and wants to see him. Limonov goes to a suite on the hotel’s top floor, where Arkan, in uniform and a green beret, is dining with his men. Arkan asks whether Limonov has yet made a revolution in Russia. Limonov answers that he has tried: he had been among those who defended the White House against Boris Yeltsin’s tanks and had been wounded in the attempt to take Ostankino. He now wants to fight in Krajina. Arkan explains that the corridor between Belgrade and the enclave is repeatedly cut by Croat or Muslim forces and by the United Nations peacekeeping force, but says a group will leave the following day. Limonov agrees to go.

At five in the morning, he is the first aboard a minibus waiting outside the hotel. The vehicle collects men from Belgrade’s outskirts and sets off as the sun rises. They travel across Herzegovina on roads bordered by burned-out villages and truck wreckage. Although the passengers appear to be peasants travelling to a livestock market, they are Arkan’s militiamen returning to the front after leave, and the minibus carries weapons. It passes through the roadblocks without incident, despite the difficulty of identifying which militia controls them and the rapid changes in territory and allegiance.

A front with shifting loyalties

During the journey, the radio reports what sounds like a coup in the Republic of Serbian Krajina. The defense minister to whom Arkan had recommended Limonov has been imprisoned, and new posters show Arkan with a price on his head. The account links this upheaval to Slobodan Milošević’s preparations for negotiations: in collusion with Franjo Tuđman, he is preparing to abandon the enclave to Croatia in exchange for Serbian territory in Bosnia and an end to the embargo. Arkan, a hard-line figure who might obstruct this political rearrangement, has become a liability. Yet the confusion and delays that characterize the region prevent the convoy from simply becoming a trap. Left to present himself to the authorities, Limonov is passed from office to office and eventually sent to a remote garrison.

There he receives a uniform assembled from mismatched pieces, the rank of captain, and a room whose previous occupant was a captain killed by a land mine. The rank and room are assigned together for convenience, and the next tenant is expected to be a captain as well. The following morning, Limonov is issued a Kalashnikov and placed under the supervision of a brutal, irascible Serbian officer. When the officer threatens a subordinate’s Croat wife, Limonov is shocked. The explanation offered is that the officer’s own family had been killed the previous year. A few days later, the subordinate kills the officer. In this episode, the war’s violence appears not as a settled chain of command but as an intimate cycle of injury and retaliation.

The garrison is described as one of the war’s dead ends: people neither come nor go, and no one can clearly say who is fighting whom. Both sides suffer losses. Serbian peasants are especially wary because they feel betrayed not only by the West but by their own homeland, which is preparing to abandon them. The apparent military outpost is thus also a place where political decisions made elsewhere are felt as abandonment on the ground.

Two months and the enclave’s fate

Limonov remains in the mountainous region for two months. He says he takes part in guerrilla actions, including village raids, ambushes, and skirmishes, and the narrator believes that he risks his life. Whether he killed anyone remains uncertain. Asked about it later, Limonov says that he has fired often and seen men fall, but cannot say whether he hit them; the narrator suspects some evasion, while acknowledging that the evidence cannot establish what happened. The account preserves that uncertainty rather than turning his presence at the front into proof of a particular death.

Eventually, a Japanese journalist gives him a ride back to Belgrade. At each roadblock Limonov says he has no weapon, although he has kept a 7.65 pistol as a souvenir of his time in the Balkans. He has continued to brood over Arkan’s challenge about making a revolution in Russia. By the time he leaves, he understands his stay in the enclave as a peripheral struggle and resolves to return to Moscow, where he intends to fight on what he considers the true front.

The Republic of Serbian Krajina’s disappearance gives these two months their retrospective force. A year after Limonov’s stay, the enclave no longer exists; its inhabitants have been killed, imprisoned, or driven into refuge in Serbia. The narrative presents the location as a place where military danger, ethnic retaliation, and diplomatic bargaining converge, but where those living among the shifting front lines have little control over the larger settlement. Its final significance lies in that contrast: Limonov leaves with a weapon and a renewed political purpose, while the community whose war he entered is abandoned and scattered.