Vukovar is a city in Croatia whose destruction in 1991 becomes the decisive test of competing accounts of the Yugoslav conflict in Emmanuel Carrère’s narrative. Its fall does not make every claim about Serbian vulnerability false, but the ruins, the artillery that produced them, and the violence inflicted on Croatian prisoners make it impossible to treat the war as a simple story of one innocent side and one guilty one. For Eduard Limonov, Vukovar is both the war he has long wanted to encounter and a place whose devastation he sees without allowing it to settle his allegiance.

Setting and the Road to the Battle

In the first months after Yugoslavia’s collapse, the political situation could not be divided neatly into good and bad. Serbs who had lived for generations in Croatia faced the prospect of becoming a minority under a Croatian government whose early measures included banning Cyrillic signs, dismissing Serbs from the civil service, and replacing the Yugoslav federation’s red-starred flag with Croatia’s red-and-white checkerboard flag. For those who remembered the Second World War, that flag carried associations with the state established under German occupation. The fears of Croatian Serbs were therefore not presented as wholly invented, even amid propaganda and escalating conflict.

One focus of the conflict was the Serbian Republic of Slavonia, an enclave of Serbs in easternmost Croatia. Unwilling to go along with Croatian secession, its inhabitants seceded in turn, provoking Croatian opposition. Vukovar, a key city in the fighting, fell to Serbian forces in November 1991. The account treats this destruction as the moment when the earlier comparison between threatened Serbs in Croatia and Jews under Nazi persecution begins to break down: the fate of Vukovar’s Croatian population and the role of the forces attacking the city complicate that analogy.

Limonov’s Arrival

In November 1991, uniformed men approach Limonov at a book signing in Belgrade and ask what he knows about the Serbian enclave and the recent fall of Vukovar. He knows little. They invite him to see the city for himself. Although events in Russia matter more to him than what he regards as disputes between Balkan peasants, he accepts: he is nearing fifty, has never been to war, and believes a man ought to experience it. His excitement keeps him awake through the night.

Two officers collect him at dawn. Their route follows the highway between Belgrade and Zagreb, now marked by roadblocks and checkpoints. Soldiers inspect travelers’ identification while others keep rifles trained on them. Limonov’s Russian identity leads the soldiers to presume that he is Orthodox and pro-Serbian, but his French passport suggests to them a Catholic and therefore pro-Croatian allegiance. The tension eases after he makes forceful attacks on Croatian President Franjo Tuđman and German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, whom Belgrade regards as an advocate of Croatian independence. The party drinks together and continues toward the front.

The officers’ account leaves out a consequential contradiction. The soldiers supporting the Serbian cause wear the uniform of the Yugoslav People’s Army, which formally cannot participate in the conflict but, because it is majority Serb, has in practice shelled Vukovar and Croatian positions around it. One officer develops the comparison between threatened Serbs and Jews during the Second World War, but the army’s role in the city’s destruction undermines that comparison. Limonov, however, is absorbed by the military spectacle: armed men, tanks, sandbags, gray-green uniforms against snow, and the sound of mortars. Smoking village ruins and the frozen landscape make the present feel to him like 1941 rather than 1991. This is the war his father missed and the war he himself has entered.

A City Called Liberated

Vukovar had been taken by Serbian troops two days before Limonov arrived. People around him call its capture a liberation, but the city he sees has been devastated. The once-pretty Habsburg town resembles a smaller Berlin after the Red Army’s capture of that city. There are no hotels left for him to stay in, few houses remain standing, and none of those that remain is habitable. Rubble, twisted metal, and heaps of glass cover the landscape as bulldozers begin clearing it.

Even the path through the ruins is dangerous: urinating beside it is forbidden because of land mines. The sky is empty of birds. Most corpses have already been removed, but Limonov is taken to a body-identification center, where he sees tortured, purple and charred bodies, slit throats, and bags of human remains unloaded from trucks. The officer guiding him identifies the dead as Serbs and treats Croats as their torturers. That explanation might fit events elsewhere, the narrative observes, but it is difficult to sustain on the outskirts of a Croatian city annihilated by Serbian—or, more precisely, federal—artillery, where a quarter of the population is missing.

Prisoners, Violence, and the Meaning of Allegiance

The violence associated with Vukovar extends beyond the bombardment. Jean Hatzfeld describes Croatian prisoners gathered in a warehouse after being driven from their cellars during the final attacks. In principle, the Yugoslav People’s Army is responsible for protecting them. In practice, it steps aside and lets Arkan’s Serbian militia, the Tigers, decide their fate. Victors and captives often know one another from the same villages, neighborhoods, workplaces, and bars; people who had recently lived alongside one another are now forced onto military trucks by rifle blows.

Hatzfeld also recounts what one of Arkan’s young men tells him about the militia’s treatment of Croatian prisoners: initiation involves slowly cutting the throat of a kneeling captive. The recruit says that those too nervous must begin again, that few refuse, and that those who do leave the patrol. The account makes the violence at Vukovar not an abstraction or an incidental consequence of battle, but a practice described by one of its participants.

Limonov does not conclude that every victim on one side is innocent or every person on the other guilty. He recognizes that both sides have innocent victims, courageous fighters, and peasants driven from their homes. Yet he rejects neutrality as cowardice and feels that fate has placed him with the Serbs. Vukovar’s significance lies in that unresolved conjunction: the city makes the costs and contradictions of his chosen allegiance visible, while his refusal to withdraw from it becomes part of the narrative’s portrait of his attraction to war.