Maria Zhuganova

Maria Zhuganova is a former Russian soldier whose testimony reveals how the Zombie War turned institutional secrecy, moral confusion, and fear into obedience, then into ideological conviction. Her story begins with a young woman cut off from the world and ends with a pregnant veteran welcoming an authoritarian empire as the guarantor of safety. The distance between those two positions is the decisive arc of her character: Maria survives the war physically, but her understanding of survival becomes inseparable from state violence and renewed Russian power.

Identity and Circumstances

Maria is interviewed in Khuzhir, on Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal, within the Holy Russian Empire. The interview room is deliberately bare, containing only a table, two chairs, and a large wall mirror that appears likely to be one-way glass. Although the interviewer is technically alone with her, Maria senses observers behind it, placing her testimony inside a structure of surveillance rather than private confession. Her worn face, graying hair, and fraying uniform communicate the accumulated effects of military service and hardship; she insists on wearing the uniform despite its condition, making the garment both evidence of her past and a continuing declaration of identity.

Her later physical circumstances complicate the image of the hardened veteran. A nurse interrupts the interview to ensure that Maria takes her prenatal vitamins. She is four months pregnant, and the child will be her eighth. Pregnancy places an unmistakably domestic and generational future alongside the militarized language of her testimony. Maria is not merely recounting a vanished soldier’s life: she is speaking as a mother whose body carries the continuation of the society she now defends.

Isolation and the First Signs of Collapse

Maria’s unit was stationed in North Ossetia, Alania, officially to keep peace between Ossetian and Ingush minorities. Its rotation was due to end around the time the authorities severed the camp from the outside world, invoking “state security.” The isolation was comprehensive. Televisions were removed from the barracks, as were personal radios and cell phones. Maria possessed only a cheap disposable phone with five prepaid minutes, bought with what her parents could afford, and had intended to use it to call them on her birthday—the first birthday she would spend away from home.

The soldiers did not know that the Great Panic had begun. They were excluded from the news, confused about their assignment, and increasingly angry at orders whose purpose was never explained. Officers, Military Police, and a mysterious civilian known as Rat Face all participated in the blackout. Rat Face was described as a small, mean man with a thin, ratlike face who appeared without explanation and remained near the officers, listening, watching, and whispering. His presence made the state’s hidden power personal: secrecy was no longer an abstract policy but a figure standing in the shadows of the unit.

The atmosphere worsened after the soldiers were disarmed. Maria recalls Baburin, an older veteran who had fought in Afghanistan and twice in Chechnya and was rumored to have fired first on the Duma during Yeltsin’s crackdown. Once sociable and frequently drunk, Baburin stopped smiling, stopped telling stories, and apparently stopped drinking altogether. His repeated warning that something was going to happen became the unit’s only intelligible interpretation of events. His silence and Maria’s uncertainty show an army deprived not only of information but of a usable moral framework.

The Child in the Field and the Decimation

The clearest rupture comes during a sweep of an unnamed hamlet. After the unit has completed its searches and interrogations, a terrified child runs into the road, pointing toward another little girl staggering through the mud across a field. Lieutenant Tikhonov sees the approaching figure through binoculars and loses color in his face. Rat Face looks as well, whispers to the lieutenant, and the platoon sharpshooter Petrenko is ordered to aim at the girl.

Petrenko confirms that he has the target, but when ordered to shoot, he asks for the command to be repeated. Although his rifle is shaking, he refuses. The refusal freezes the chain of command: the soldiers look at one another and then back toward the field, unable to act within the rules they have been given. Rat Face resolves the crisis himself. He walks toward the child, meets her halfway, draws a pistol from beneath his coat, and shoots her between the eyes. Maria remembers the girl’s wide eyes, raised arms, and high, rasping moan, as well as the probable mother collapsing into sobs and curses after the shot. Rat Face returns to the vehicle as if nothing exceptional has happened.

For Maria, this is not the beginning of the rebellion but its confirmation. She explains that other army units had already begun to resist by the time the Military Police closed the base, and that the government had decided how to restore order. The chosen punishment was “decimation,” in its literal sense: one person in every ten was to be killed. The Spetsnaz assembled the soldiers on the parade ground in full dress uniform while a new commanding officer accused them of betraying their oath through selfish treachery and cowardice. Maria recognizes the historical falseness of this rhetoric. The army she knew was not a sanctuary of patriotism but a place to learn a trade, obtain food and shelter, and perhaps send money home when the government paid its soldiers. Yet the speech still terrifies her because the armed men and guard towers make the executions seem imminent.

The sequence exposes the state of exception governing Maria’s world. Soldiers are treated as subjects to be surveilled, disarmed, judged, and killed, while ordinary moral and legal restraints are suspended in the name of national survival. The child in the field is similarly reduced to a target before any shared understanding of her condition can be established. Maria’s testimony therefore records two linked forms of dehumanization: the undead are classified for destruction, and the living are disciplined through the same logic of impersonal elimination.

From Survivor to Imperial Believer

Maria later says that her only regret is not remaining in the army for the “liberation” of the former republics. In her account, the motherland has been purged of undead filth, and the war must now be carried beyond its borders. She wishes she had been present when Belarus was formally reabsorbed into the empire and expects Ukraine to follow. Her exclusion from these campaigns is described as the result of “other duties,” not a rejection of the project. The former conscript who once did not understand what her unit was doing has become someone who longs to participate in expansion.

Her final political statement makes the transformation explicit. Maria says that the authorities allowed the interviewer into the country so that foreign audiences would hear these stories and understand what would happen if anyone challenged Russia. In her interpretation, the war drove Russians back to their roots and reminded them what it meant to be Russian. Strength and fear have become, for her, signs of safety. She welcomes the chance to warm herself beneath the protective fist of a Caesar, treating concentrated authority not as the source of her earlier terror but as the remedy for the chaos that preceded it.

This is not a simple recovery of patriotic belief. Maria has already described a Russia of corruption, disorder, unpaid soldiers, and hollow official language. The new imperial confidence gains its force precisely because the war has made insecurity unforgettable. Her politics are therefore built from trauma: the memory of helplessness is converted into a demand for power strong enough to prevent its return, even when that power reproduces surveillance, coercion, and violence.

Narrative Function and Significance

Maria’s interview demonstrates why the book’s history cannot be reduced to official facts and figures. The interviewer’s project arose after nearly half of the personal material gathered for the United Nations Postwar Commission was removed as too intimate and too full of opinions and feelings. The official report sought data unclouded by the human factor, whereas the book preserves testimony such as Maria’s because the emotional and bodily dimensions of history determine how survivors interpret the peace that follows.

Her account also illustrates the book’s polyphonic method. Maria’s voice does not resolve into the interviewer’s judgment. Her memories contain uncertainty, especially around the exact wording and sequence of the order to kill the girl, but they are precise about the moral shock of Petrenko’s refusal, Rat Face’s casual execution, and the soldiers’ fear on the parade ground. The interview setting, the absent transcription device forbidden for security reasons, and the watchers behind the glass all remind the reader that even recollection is produced under political pressure.

Maria’s present life gives the testimony its final irony. She is carrying her eighth child while praising a state that has learned to turn wartime terror into a founding myth of national strength. Her story preserves the violence that official power would use as a warning, but it also shows how thoroughly that violence can be absorbed into a survivor’s idea of protection. In Maria, survival does not lead back to innocence. It leads to memory, memory leads to fear of disorder, and fear of disorder leads to the embrace of the fist that once held the gun.