Serbia

Serbia is presented as both a political center and a threshold to the wars unfolding around it: Belgrade is where Eduard Limonov is invited, questioned, and reunited with Arkan, while the routes out of the capital lead toward contested territory. The country’s position in the narrative is inseparable from the struggle over who counts as victim, aggressor, patriot, or foreign volunteer. Limonov arrives eager to experience war; the surrounding details reveal a conflict more complicated than the heroic version he prefers.

Belgrade and the road to Vukovar

In November 1991, Limonov is invited to Belgrade for the launch of one of his books. During a signing, uniformed men ask what he knows about the Serbian Republic of Slavonia, an enclave of Serbs in eastern Croatia who have rejected Croatian secession and declared their own. Vukovar has just fallen, and they invite him to see the place for himself. The invitation turns a literary visit into a possible passage toward the fighting.

Limonov initially has other priorities: events in his own country interest him more than disputes between Balkan peasants. But he is nearing fifty and has never been to war; he decides that it is an experience a man must have sooner or later. Excitement keeps him awake all night. At dawn, two officers collect him from his hotel and drive him along the highway between Belgrade and Zagreb. The route, ordinarily a connection between capitals, has become a succession of roadblocks and checkpoints. Soldiers inspect travelers’ identity papers while others keep rifles trained on them.

His Russian identity leads the soldiers to assume he is Orthodox and pro-Serbian, but his French passport makes them suspect that he is Catholic and therefore pro-Croatian. The encounter eases after Limonov makes vehement attacks on Franjo Tuđman and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, whom the Belgrade soldiers regard as an advocate of a new German imperial order. The episode shows how quickly national and religious labels become tests of allegiance on the road out of Serbia—and how Limonov meets that test by performing the expected hostility.

War as spectacle and political story

The account complicates the comparison offered to Limonov by his Serbian escort, who develops an analogy between the Serbs’ fate and the persecution of Jews during the Second World War. The soldiers supporting the Serbian cause are wearing Yugoslav People’s Army uniforms. Although the army is theoretically not a participant in the conflict, it has in practice, as a majority-Serb force, shelled Vukovar and Croatian positions around it. Its involvement makes the analogy untenable: the Jews did not have the Wehrmacht’s steadfast support in defending themselves against the Nazis.

That contradiction does not trouble Limonov. His attention fixes instead on the armed men, tanks, sandbags, gray-green uniforms against the snow, distant mortar fire, and villages whose ruins are still smoking. He imagines himself in 1941 rather than 1991: the historical image of war matters more to him than the political distinctions that might challenge his chosen role. Serbia is thus not simply the setting for his encounter with a conflict; Belgrade is the point from which he enters a scene already saturated with competing accounts of victimhood and responsibility.

Later, at Arkan’s headquarters in Erdut near Vukovar, the political and personal dimensions of that attraction meet. Limonov finds Arkan astute and circumspect, and is flattered to have been singled out by a military leader rather than treated as an ordinary journalist. They drink slivovitz and agree in their hostility toward Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Tuđman, and Genscher, as well as in their belief that Russia needs a revolution. Limonov asks whether he can join as a Russian volunteer; Arkan answers that everyone is welcome. A friendship begins, and when Limonov later reads that Arkan’s militiamen have defeated Bosnian Muslims, he is moved to tears and looks at a photograph of himself with Arkan and the group’s tiger mascot. Belgrade’s political welcome has become, for him, a personal bond with the war.

Belgrade under embargo

When Limonov returns to the region later, Serbia has become difficult to reach. He travels by bus from Budapest; the nearly empty journey takes all night, and the account describes it as the only way to get to Belgrade. The embargo has stopped air traffic, and the airport is closed. Europe’s ostracism has left the Serbian capital isolated, while the country sinks into paranoia. The narrative notes that reasonable Serbs despair at the course Slobodan Milošević is leading them down and try to resist the accompanying brainwashing. Limonov neither seeks them out nor wants to: he wants war, and regards throwing himself into it, even at the risk of losing himself, as his only salvation.

His plan is to leave his bag at the Hotel Majestic and visit the improvised embassy of the Republic of Serbian Krajina. The conflict now includes Serbs and Croats fighting over the enclave as well as the continuing conflict between Serbs and Bosnians. Alliances shift according to who shares an enemy, leaving diplomats and journalists at a loss. Limonov, no longer content to act as a journalist, offers himself as a simple soldier. The representatives are surprised: foreign volunteers have not arrived in large numbers. They tell him that access to Krajina is difficult and that he must wait to be contacted, so he returns to the hotel.

The hotel as a wartime crossroads

The Hotel Majestic gathers a different kind of passage through Serbia: a piano bar, people trading foreign currency, sex workers, gangsters, journalists, and politicians competing in nationalist intransigence. Limonov likes this atmosphere. A seventeen-year-old admirer approaches him, having read his books and articles in the Serbian press; her mother has read them too. After he signs books for the mother, she turns a blind eye when he sleeps with her daughter. The scene places celebrity, sexual opportunism, and proximity to violence within the same hotel, while Limonov’s thought of possibly being killed intensifies his experience of the encounter.

After three days, the barman tells him that Arkan knows he is in Belgrade and wants to see him. Limonov takes the elevator to a top floor reserved for the warlord’s guests, is searched by guards, and enters a suite where Arkan, in a khaki uniform and green beret, is feasting with about a dozen men. Arkan asks whether Limonov has yet made a revolution in Russia. Limonov answers by recounting his role among the defenders of the White House and his injury during the attempt to take Ostankino, then explains that he wants to fight in Krajina. Arkan describes the difficulty of reaching it: the corridor from Belgrade is repeatedly cut by Croats, Muslims, and the United Nations peacekeeping force. A group is leaving the next day, and Arkan asks whether Limonov will join it. Belgrade’s role in the episode is finally plain: it is the waiting room, meeting place, and launch point from which Limonov hopes to convert his appetite for war into participation.