Transnistria is both a contested political territory and a landscape of armed disorder in Eduard Limonov’s account. He travels there on a reporting mission for Dyen, joins a punitive raid, and crosses bomb-damaged streets and mine-strewn fields. The place also gives him his first encounter with battalion leader Konstantin Kostenko, whose rise from garage owner to feared local ruler makes the collapse of ordinary authority concrete. News that Kostenko has been murdered later returns the territory to the narrative as a place where violence threatens to erase the lives it has made notorious.

Political Geography and Conflict

The account describes Transnistria as an autonomous republic formed amid the breakup of the Soviet Union. It sets the conflict against Moldova’s earlier history: the territory had belonged to eastern Romania before the Soviet Union annexed it. The account characterizes Moldovans as deeply impoverished and says that many dreamed of rejoining Romania. After Moldova declared independence, Russians living in the new state opposed the change. They are described as settlers who had exercised power over a largely Romanian local population; facing harassment and reprisals under the new state, they created an autonomous republic of their own and took up arms to defend it.

This compressed history presents the fighting as more than a simple contest between armies. The new political boundary changes who holds authority, while the account emphasizes the unsettled relations between Russians and the local Romanian population. Its comparison with the Serb republics of the former Yugoslavia places Transnistria among the conflicts erupting in the ruins of the empire. The territory is consequently shown not as a settled political unit but as a place where competing claims to rule become armed struggles.

Limonov’s Passage Through the Territory

Limonov arrives as a reporter for Dyen, but he is not a detached observer of the fighting. He sympathizes without reservation with the Russians’ cause and is drawn to the succession of wars breaking out after the Soviet Union’s collapse. He takes part in a punitive raid against Romanians. During the fighting, he crosses a block of bombed-out buildings under sniper fire and runs across fields scattered with mines. Those specific movements give the conflict its physical scale: political allegiance carries him into streets and open ground where a misstep or an exposed crossing can be fatal.

The account says that Limonov loved being there. That response sits uneasily beside the danger he encounters and the raid in which he participates. His commitment to witnessing the wars is therefore also a willingness to enter them, rather than merely report from a safe distance. It is in this setting that he meets Kostenko, a figure whose authority and violence seem to belong to the same breakdown of civic order that brought armed conflict to the territory.

Kostenko’s Rule

Before becoming a warlord, Kostenko had commanded a paramilitary unit in Afghanistan and opened a garage in Moldova. As the surrounding town descended into chaos, he became its absolute master. Ukrainian like Limonov but born in the Far East, where his father had been garrisoned, he had Asian features and a reputation for old-school cruelty. Fear gathered around him. He dispensed justice in his garage, surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards and a blonde woman in a miniskirt and dark glasses: a makeshift court whose setting and armed attendants made the collapse of ordinary institutions visible.

Limonov witnesses Kostenko condemn a fat, sweaty man suspected of being a traitor paid by the Romanians. The accusation is not presented as independently established, but the sentence is immediate: Kostenko orders him to die. Limonov approves of this firmness, as does Dugin, who hears the story later. The episode shows how thoroughly Limonov is drawn to decisive authority, even when that authority takes the form of a death sentence delivered in a garage. Kostenko is not simply a source for a report; he is also a model of power Limonov can admire.

Death and the Work of Memory

Limonov and Kostenko spend several nights talking. Kostenko recounts his adventurous life and predicts that his enemies will eventually kill him. He has nowhere to run, he says, and returning to life as a mechanic would be unthinkable after ruling a city. The prediction gives his later death a grim continuity with the life he has chosen: the man who has made himself master of a town recognizes that he cannot simply leave that role behind.

Limonov learns that Kostenko’s sawed-off torso has been found in a car trunk, beside his half-charred head. No explanation of the killing or identification of the perpetrators accompanies the discovery in this passage. The stark physical details replace the warlord’s aura with the evidence of a brutal death. When Limonov recounts Kostenko’s story to Dugin, Dugin interprets the earlier conversations as an attempt to leave some trace of an obscure and violent fate. The two men drink to Kostenko’s memory. In the narrative, Transnistria thus remains present beyond the reporting mission: its violence has produced a story that Limonov carries elsewhere, and the act of telling becomes the surviving trace of a man whose rule ended in mutilation.