On the morning of November 11, 1996, a group of Soviet-Afghan War veterans—most of them disabled—came together at the Kotliakovskoe cemetery in southern Moscow. They had gathered for a memorial. Two years earlier, Mikhail Likhodei, one of the leaders of the Russian Fund for Invalids of the War in Afghanistan (RFIVA), had been brutally murdered.Footnote ¹ RFIVA regularly organized events in Likhodei’s memory, but the gathering in 1996 was especially large. By 10 or 11 am on November 11, over 100 people were standing beside Likhodei’s grave.Footnote ²

Sergei Trakhirov—the chairman of RFIVA and the person whom most of those gathered would have considered their leader—arrived an hour late, having taken a circuitous route from the RFIVA offices to avoid being tailed. Trakhirov’s secretary recalled that he seemed jumpier than usual that day.Footnote ³ It had been months since Trakhirov had last appeared at a pre-arranged time for an event held in a public location. In March, another leader in the Afghan Movement had warned Trakhirov that there was a hit out on him. Trakhirov’s life was worth $50,000.Footnote ⁴

At the cemetery, Trakhirov relaxed. He was among friends. A video of the event captured just before noon shows him balancing carefully on his crutches, lifting a glass, his platoon of bodyguards arrayed in an arc behind him.Footnote ⁵ In his toast, Trakhirov reaffirmed a promise he had made two years earlier: that he would get revenge for Likhodei’s murder.Footnote ⁶ Another veteran of Afghanistan, Andrei Anokhin, stood about 100 meters away from Trakhirov while the chairman spoke. The other mourners were not certain why Anokhin had come. They knew that he was a loyal follower of Valerii Radchikov, the head of a rival branch of RFIVA and the man whom Trakhirov had in mind when he spoke of revenge. That Anokhin had apparently decided to attend the memorial anyway seemed wildly inappropriate.Footnote ⁷ In fact, Anokhin was at the cemetery for a different purpose. As the mourners lifted their glasses, Anokhin pressed a button on a remote karaoke microphone tucked into the waistband of his pants, detonating the bomb that he had buried beside Likhodei’s grave the night before.Footnote ⁸ The people closest to the grave were thrown a dozen meters into the air by the force of the explosion. Trakhirov died in the blast, along with thirteen others.

The Kotliakovskoe Cemetery bombing was shocking even for 1990s Russia, when contract murder was a quotidian fact of life. Journalists arrived at the scene even before the police, snapping photos around the enormous crater that had once been Likhodei’s grave. Grisly footage of bloody rags hanging in the trees above the site of the explosion played on repeat on the news that evening.Footnote ⁹ Within hours, the cemetery filled with representatives of almost all law enforcement organizations in Moscow.Footnote ¹⁰ The Minister of the Interior himself, Anatoli Kulikov, informed a pack of reporters that the murder had been so shocking and brazen that “a challenge had been thrown down” by the world of organized crime and, in turn, he declared “the challenge has been accepted.”Footnote ¹¹ Not even the Russian police of the 1990s could find a way to let this one slide.

This bombing was shocking for several reasons. For one thing, it had a large number of targets and victims—fourteen dead and fifty injured, twenty-four of them seriously.Footnote ¹² Over 100 people were present at the memorial that day, and they had all been at least incidentally targets of the hit, making it the largest mass contract murder of the 1990s. The bombing took place, by coincidence, on Police Day, which authorities took as a personal affront.Footnote ¹³ It occurred during a memorial service, at a cemetery: a serious violation of the strange ethical codes that had come to govern the world of organized violence.

But what was most shocking about the bombing to contemporary commentators, and what has made the bombing an ongoing source of lurid fascination, was that nearly everyone involved in it was disabled. Both its central perpetrators and the majority of its victims were disabled. The attack was the result of an ongoing, deadly conflict between disabled people over control of a charity that handed out wheelchairs and paid for new prosthetics for disabled veterans. While speculation about uncontrollably violent “PTSD-addled madmen” abounded in the press, most commentators had trouble with the idea that disabled people could perpetrate this kind of violence at all.Footnote ¹⁴ How could someone who used a wheelchair or walked with a cane orchestrate a murder for hire or build a bomb to kill a business rival?Footnote ¹⁵ Some wove elaborate theories that this murder must have really been planned by someone else—someone abled.Footnote ¹⁶

The involvement of some disabled people in organized crime should not be surprising. Many different kinds of people found work within the economy of violence in 1990s Russia. If you needed money, crime was one way to get it, and many disabled people needed money. The chaos of the 90s and the collapse of the Soviet welfare state hit disabled people especially hard. As the state withdrew, those who depended on it were left in the lurch, including disabled people, who often relied on pensions and state support programs that had already been insufficient even before inflation set in. Disabled people, including disabled veterans, had at least as much and generally more reason than anyone else to try their hands at a bit of violent entrepreneurship.Footnote ¹⁷ Desperation, above all, drew people into this world.

Members of the organization RFIVA, whose violent operations would ultimately lead to the deaths of Trakhirov and thirteen others in 1996, were better situated than other disabled people to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the sale of violence. Trained for and experienced with warfare, often tied into networks of corruption established in Afghanistan, Afgantsy—including disabled Afgantsy—had many avenues into organized crime.Footnote ¹⁸ Other disabled people also found themselves involved with organized crime in the 90s, if not necessarily by choice. In 1991, RFIVA had organized for itself a set of lucrative customs benefits to allow the organization to make enough money to replace the forms of state support that had evaporated after the collapse of the USSR. The same kind of programs were extended to other major national-level disability organizations in 1993. This potential source of income attracted interest from organized crime and led to a great deal of violence directed toward those organizations—particularly toward VOG, the All-Russian Society of the Deaf, which suffered from a series of murders in the mid-1990s, including of its chairman.Footnote ¹⁹ Unlike VOG, which seemed to have been pulled unwillingly into the orbit of organized crime, RFIVA’s members were enthusiastic participants. They engaged directly in violent entrepreneurship, rather than being exploited by it. While VOG leadership struggled to escape the violence closing in around them, members of RFIVA seemed to revel in it, emphasizing and even exaggerating their own criminality.Footnote ²⁰

Violence was central to RFIVA’s operation as a disability organization and to how its members understood the meaning of being disabled. Their involvement in organized crime was not incongruous with their disability or with disability activism, but instead was the primary form their activism took. By mobilizing an ideal of militarized masculinity that separated them from disabled people who were not soldiers, disabled veterans in RFIVA could reconcile their profoundly negative views of disability and disabled people with the fact of their own disability.Footnote ²¹ These veteran-activists united around redefining disability as evidence of the experience of war, and created a conception of disabled masculinity based on “overcoming” disability by living dangerous, militarized lives.

Having built their postwar identities around tying together war, resentment, and disabled masculinity, members of RFIVA were well-positioned to thrive in the chaotic environment of post-Soviet Russia.Footnote ²² RFIVA’s isolated structure and its members’ self-conception as threatening, brutalized warriors made these unlikely disability activists particularly suited to an era in which isolation and violence were the name of the game. The unregulated market of the 90s, in which anything could be bought and sold, offered disabled Afgantsy a way of swapping their lack of social currency for actual currency instead. Disabled veterans cashed in on a carefully cultivated performance of their own dangerousness. The same qualities and assumptions that they had developed in the 1980s out of resentment over a lack of societal recognition had become, in the 1990s, a good way to turn a profit. In the new capitalist system, that was the only kind of social recognition that mattered.

Yet this unusual approach to disability organizing—using corruption and murder to make a truly obscene amount of cash—could not serve the needs of all disabled Afgantsy. Those needs did not differ from the needs of other disabled people as much RFIVA wished them to. In the end, RFIVA’s atomized form of violent solidarity failed to hold together, and it failed to support the majority of disabled Afgantsy. Instead, this disability community brutally cannibalized itself.

RFIVA developed out of the Afghan movement of the 1980s. By 1989, as the last Soviet troops crossed the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya River, the war in Afghanistan had come to be widely considered a mistake; a bleeding wound, according to Gorbachev. Soldiers returning from Afghanistan came back to a society that had significantly changed and was increasingly critical of the war they had fought in.Footnote ²³ As others, including Michael Galbas and Yaacov Ro’i have shown, these soldiers often returned bitter and angry.Footnote ²⁴ In a sense, Afghan veterans had an early experience of the trauma that awaited many people after the fall of the USSR: suddenly, social structures vanished, state support dried up, and they no longer had a sense of their place and purpose in the world.

Many Afgantsy came back together, in territorially organized units, and some of them stayed organized by unit, often feeling nostalgia for the camaraderie and orderliness of war that was no longer present in their civilian lives. As Mark Galeotti and Ben McVicker describe, that desire for camaraderie served as one of the bases of the Afghan movement; and the other was the need for money.Footnote ²⁵ One of the goals of the Afghan Movement was to create a social safety net for veterans of Afghanistan, replicating the one that had been imperfectly pieced together for veterans of World War II.Footnote ²⁶ Natalia Danilova and Ethel Dunn describe the difficulties Afghan veterans had with this effort.Footnote ²⁷

As Serguei Oushakine and Karen Petrone have argued, veterans of Chechnya and Afghanistan viewed their relationship to the state as an “exchange of sacrifices,” connecting their lack of recognition socially to the lack of financial support they received from the state.Footnote ²⁸ Along these lines, Afgantsy understood social benefits as analogous with praise and respect, as a societal acknowledgement of their sacrifice, imbuing state financial support with a moral weight. As Elena Racheva puts it, “stories of their long-standing struggle for social benefits…clearly evolved into stories about praise and respect.”Footnote ²⁹ Describing their experiences after returning home, Afgantsy often evoked the cliché of the bureaucrat denying them promised financial support with the stock phrase: “We didn’t send you there.”Footnote ³⁰

As the war came to an end, veterans began to form their own organizations, seeking other means of gaining support and recognition. Among the first and largest of these veterans’ groups was SVA, the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan, which was founded in 1989 and incorporated into the structure of the Komsomol. In the late 1980s, SVA was granted approval to establish limited private enterprises to fund itself, rather than relying on inadequate state funding.Footnote ³¹ The group made money through its private enterprises, and much of what it earned—other than what the leadership kept for itself—went to veterans.Footnote ³²

Many of SVA’s program were meant to support disabled veterans specifically, sometimes in the form of direct cash payments. By 1990, it had purchased and received so many wheelchairs donated from western NGOs that SVA gave away some to other disabled people, including veterans of WWII.Footnote ³³ Through these efforts, they only developed more of a sense of isolation; that they could only survive through their own solidarity, and could not rely on anyone else. Afghan war veterans remained resentful about what they saw as a persistent lack of societal recognition, which they understood as reflecting, and reflective of, an absence of state financial support.

Not everyone in the organization was satisfied with the arrangement that SVA had set up with the state. At first, RFIVA’s separation from SVA seems to have derived from frustration about the structure of decision-making power in the organization. In 1992, RFIVA leadership signed onto a letter with other Afghan organizations complaining about SVA dominance of resources, objecting to “internecine wars over benefits that ultimately all participants in combat operations should be able to use.”Footnote ³⁴ In early 1991, members of RSVA decided to split off and make their own organization for disabled veterans only.Footnote ³⁵ In May, eighteen representatives of disabled veterans’ groups from across the RSFSR, mostly former members of RSVA, met to create their own organization, which they called RFIVA: the Russian Fund for Invalids of the War in Afghanistan.Footnote ³⁶

Later, when members of RFIVA described the organization’s founding, SVA was not part of the story. Instead, they focused on themes of solidarity; they had realized they needed to band together to solve problems that could not be solved alone.Footnote ³⁷ But this solidarity was always sharply limited. It included only Afgantsy, and generally only disabled Afgantsy. Their sense of mutual obligation did not extend to disabled people who had not served in the war.

At the beginning of August 1991, once the organization was officially registered, RFIVA held a conference to select its new leader. At the conference, a veteran named Valerii Radchikov sprinted through the crowd, up to the podium at the front of the hall. Once all eyes were on him, he lifted his pant legs and tapped his prosthetic legs with his cane. The gathered group of veterans cheered, impressed by the stunt. Radchikov soaked up the praise.Footnote ³⁸ He was already a cult figure in the Afghan movement, known as the “Afghan Maresev.” A movie was made about him in 1989; Alexander Prokhanov claimed him as a personal friend; throughout the late 80s he went on talk shows representing the model of the Hero-Afganets.Footnote ³⁹ The frame of Radchikov’s life story was modeled on that of an icon of disabled masculinity of the Great Patriotic War, Aleksei Maresev. In 1942, Maresev had crashed his plane, resulting in the amputation of both of his legs, but relearned to fly a plane so that he could return to the front.Footnote ⁴⁰ Forty years later, Radchikov stepped on a land mine, resulting in the amputation of both of his legs, and then snuck back into Afghanistan to rejoin his spetsnaz unit in the Panjshir valley.Footnote ⁴¹

Maresev was the primary model for disabled veterans of Afghanistan for what disabled militarized masculinity could look like.Footnote ⁴² The young men who would eventually become disabled in Afghanistan would have read the fictionalized version of Maresev’s life, The Story of a Real Man, in school, a few years before going to Afghanistan. Many wounded soldiers picked it back up again and read it in a new way while in the hospital, including Radchikov.Footnote ⁴³ Disabled Afgantsy invoked Maresev to reframe missing limbs as a sign of masculinity. They reasserted their masculinity through a process of having “overcome” their disability by returning to war in some form, as Maresev had.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, their disability could speak to their identities as soldiers, and make them more masculine rather than less.Footnote ⁴⁵ Maria Cristina Galmarini shows how blinded veterans of WWII used similar language of overcoming, modeled on Pavel Korchagin and the discourse of labor to fashion themselves as exemplary subjects.Footnote ⁴⁶ Afgantsy invoked Maresev in a similar way, though they regarded the impulse as veteran-specific: a way of ceasing to be “helpless invalids” by instead remaining soldiers and becoming war heroes.Footnote ⁴⁷

Radchikov most of all took the story of Maresev to heart and recreated it. He was the person most associated with “the Afghan Maresev,” the one usually referred to by that phrase. Radchikov was a model of what Afgantsy envisioned disabled masculinity to look like: tougher and more experienced than an abled veteran could be. His disability marked his history of violence and his status as a veteran of Afghanistan, as a war hero, on his body. By engaging in physical stunts, especially skydiving, he proved himself to outclass abled people in athleticism.Footnote ⁴⁸ Like Ginger Rogers dancing backwards and in heels, Radchikov’s athletic and martial feats were made more impressive because he did them on prosthetic limbs. When he jumped out of planes and landed on prosthetic feet, he accomplished something an abled person could not match by definition, just as there would be no way for an abled soldier to “repeat the feat of Maresev.”

Though Radchikov was especially successful in presenting himself as the new Maresev, he was not the only person to describe himself in those terms. Many disabled veterans put their own life narratives into a frame defined by the story of Maresev, or in some way tried to mimic Maresev. Members of RFIVA re-learned to fly a plane with a prosthetic foot; went sky diving while blind; refused their discharge from the army; learned to stand at attention when it required balancing precariously on crutches; and other such feats of “overcoming” and returning to military life.Footnote ⁴⁹ The imagery and language of “repeating the feat of Maresev” underlay ideas of heroism and masculinity in the disabled Afghan movement of the 1980s and 90s. They all seemed to want to return to war. This sense of their uniquely disabled, militarized masculinity—a masculinity that marked them, through disability, as soldiers familiar with violence—also contributed to their sense of isolation and victimization. Disabled veterans had made particularly extreme sacrifices, and had been particularly altered by violence during the war in ways that were often physically marked on their bodies. Only disabled Afgantsy could relate to this experience. Abled veterans—who had only metaphorically left a part of themselves in Afghanistan—couldn’t understand what they had gone through. Neither could disabled people who had not remade themselves as soldiers, and who they therefore regarded as “helpless invalids.”Footnote ⁵⁰

At RFIVA’s founding conference in 1991, Radchikov made a proposal. If the gathered Afgantsy elected him as their leader, he could solve all of their problems: he would make them all wildly, unimaginably rich.Footnote ⁵¹ As he laid out his plan, the crowd began to cheer his name, and Radchikov was elected RFIVA’s first official chairman.Footnote ⁵² Radchikov’s plan, voted on and approved at the conference, was to appeal to the Ministry of Finance for a set of enterprise rights and tax benefits that would expand on SVA’s existing economic program in an entirely new way. The same set of tax exemptions they received would later also be extended to several other organizations, such as the National Sports Federation. While Radchikov’s plan did end up making some people at that conference rich, many of the people that had cheered his name would die in the ensuing violence instead.

People who knew Radchikov said that he liked to make it clear that RFIVA’s benefits program was organized for him specifically, and not for RFIVA overall.Footnote ⁵³ The benefits were the results of his efforts and of the deal that he alone had made with mysterious high-ranking figures in government. He chose to extend the riches to RFIVA out of personal benevolence, or perhaps out of loyalty to the Afghan movement, but he wanted it known that he had been the one knocking on doors and making promises. He was particularly good at that: charming, with an inspiring personal story, a few impressive medals pinned to his chest, and an offer of a cut of the profits once they began to roll in.Footnote ⁵⁴

According to rumors, Radchikov set up his program by brokering a deal. When RFIVA made money through its tax schemes, its benefactors and patrons would get a generous cut. In private conversations, former members of RFIVA said Radchikov often bragged that he had convinced officials to sign off on the necessary paperwork by offering astronomical bribes to various suspicious characters, supposedly in the range of at least $800,000 each.Footnote ⁵⁵ Whether this was an exaggeration is hard to say, though it presumably was: Radchikov enjoyed bragging about his corruption, as did other members of RFIVA. But there probably is also some degree of truth to these rumors. A lot of people made money off of RFIVA.

The idea behind the scheme logically followed from the set of beliefs that the Afghan movement already held by the end of the 1980s: having been betrayed by the state and society, Afgantsy had learned that they could not rely on anyone for help, and so had to find ways to support themselves instead. Radchikov’s program was supposed to allow disabled veterans to solve their problems by getting into private business, rather than having to rely on help from the state or charity from abled people, similar to SVA’s enterprise rights in the ‘80s. RFIVA’s additional program of proposed tax loopholes would give the organization a leg up, allowing it to participate in the market on an equal playing field with the businesses of abled people. Disabled Afgantsy would earn a profit that they could use to replace the kinds of support that they had been granted officially, but had not actually received.

But RFIVA’s program was based on a different set of ideas about state obligation than SVA’s enterprise rights program from the 1980s, in two major ways. First, RFIVA’s proposal represented the enterprise rights and tax benefits as ends in and of themselves, rather than as a replacement for other social welfare programs that the state could no longer afford. Disabled people could use the market to make themselves fully independent; no longer reliant on the state or society for support and care.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the new neoliberal Russia, this was an inherent good. Making a profit was the understood aim. Money could serve as a new currency of the social recognition Afgantsy had long been denied. According to the program, allowing disabled veterans to re-make themselves into economic beings would “radically change the attitude of society to the problem of disability.” This, Radchikov’s proposal stated, was the “most important goal” of the program.Footnote ⁵⁷

Second, RFIVA’s program was not for Afgantsy. It was for disabled people, a category that happened to include some Afgantsy. The policy proposal was by and for RFIVA, without any suggestion that the program should be extended to any other group. But disabled Afgantsy themselves were mentioned in just one paragraph in the proposal, towards the end, where they were used as an example of one particularly vulnerable group of disabled people. Framing their proposal for state support as a program for disabled people fit poorly with disabled Afgantsy’s self-understanding. It may have been necessary for the sake of the proposal, but it was not a reflection of a change in attitude. Disabled veterans of Afghanistan continued to regard themselves as fundamentally distinct from other disabled people. They continued to describe the nature of state obligation towards them in terms of war and sacrifice, as a repayment owed for their heroism, rather than in terms of their needs as disabled people.Footnote ⁵⁸

In fact, when in 1993 the same program of benefits granted to RFIVA was expanded to cover three other national disability groups, disabled Afgantsy in RFIVA were deeply insulted. It became one of their most important examples of a fundamental lack of societal recognition for their heroism. Members of RFIVA frequently complained that by granting other disability organizations the same kinds of support they had, the state had made it so that “heroes” like them, who had been wounded in Afghanistan, were being unfairly “equated with people who got drunk and fell under a tram.”Footnote ⁵⁹ RFIVA members like Trakhirov, and others who took up this phrasing, were referring to VOI, VOS, and VOG—the largest national level disability organizations—which were not specifically for people injured by trams. They were organizations for everybody: for all disabled people, for all blind and all deaf people in Russia. But this inclusivity made them fundamentally different from RFIVA, which was organized not around a form of disability or a set of shared needs, but around the context in which its members became disabled. The fact that they had become disabled in Afghanistan, and not anywhere else, mattered more than what form that disability took. The suggestion that they shared the same kind of disabilities and possibly even the same vulnerabilities and needs with people who might have become disabled in any old way—from birth, by coincidence, under a tram—was, to them, a grave insult.

In their own conversations, regardless of how they framed their proposal, RFIVA’s members still saw the program as a reward for their heroism—a reflection of their military service and masculinity—and not because of particular needs for medical care or financial support that other disabled people might also have. In fact, they hardly acknowledged that they had any needs at all that could not be fulfilled naturally by the market or through their own grit and determination, through a form of overcoming they now conceptualized through their ability to turn a profit. These tax cuts were supposed to be privileges for exceptional men, not assistance for vulnerable ones.Footnote ⁶⁰

But Radchikov’s RFIVA program, phrased around disability rather than heroism, had appeal, although the political context had changed between when the proposal was made in 1991 and when it was approved in 1992. By 1992, since, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, there was no longer any such thing as society, there was no longer a reason to think of government support in terms of societal obligations.Footnote ⁶¹ But Boris Elʹtsin and his reformers believed in the market’s ability to solve all social ills. RFIVA’s program suggested the possibility of eliminating the needs of disabled people, entirely through market forces; grounded, as the proposal claimed, in “the principles of independence and self-sufficiency.”Footnote ⁶² This program suggested that through a special tax cut, the state could effectively transform disabled people into abled people. It could eliminate interdependence, mutual obligation between disabled people and others, through the market. People whose disability prevented them from working under any circumstances, people for whom this vision could not possibly function, are referenced in the program, but only as a problem RFIVA could figure out how to solve on its own later, without state or society getting involved. RFIVA would be able to solve its own problems. It would need no one and nothing else.

These ideas about disability matched up almost exactly with disabled Afgantsy’s sense of the meaning of their own disability, even if conflating their experiences with those of other disabled people did not sit well with them. They understood disability as something that made them into an isolated, victimized, atomized group that had to look out for itself, whose members could rely only on each other, rather than other people, for survival. For disabled Afgantsy, who already felt cut off from state and society, the idea of fully atomized post-Soviet existence made perfect sense.Footnote ⁶³ Disabled Afgantsy could have this form of solidarity, their own interdependence, but only within the sharply limited context of the private corporation.

Disabled Afgantsy in RFIVA were thus uniquely suited to the changes in Russian society that took place during the 1990s. The USSR had already collapsed when they returned from the war. Their sense of collective existence had fallen apart. They already understood themselves as betrayed by a state and society that had broken its most fundamental promises to them. By the time the USSR fell, disabled Afgantsy had prepared in advance. They already assumed that they could not rely on anyone else, and the 90s proved them right. RFIVA was an already atomized community that had prepared in advance to resist the atomizing forces of post-Soviet neoliberalism. RFIVA had been founded on a principle that was at the same time deeply cynical and profoundly idealistic: Afgantsy had learned the hard way that nobody could be trusted; yet they had to trust one another to survive. They would share what they could and would take as much as possible from everyone else.

By the standards of the 1990s, RFIVA was an enormous success. It raked in money. Evidence of its new wealth became quickly apparent. In 1992, Radchikov suddenly drove a new foreign car, a Jeep.Footnote ⁶⁴ He wore new clothes, imported and expensive. He travelled abroad frequently, ostensibly for medical treatment but often for fun. While some Russians were making less than $500 a year, Radchikov easily spent that much on dinner.Footnote ⁶⁵ Members of RFIVA joked that Radchikov was “so generous” with his ill-gotten money that he would regularly go to the strip club Up&Down and drop $2,000 on a single dance.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was obvious to everyone that he was pillaging RFIVA’s coffers in all kinds of baroque ways to make himself rich. He did not try particularly hard to hide it. Members of RFIVA were by and large not immediately bothered by that. RFIVA was already making money, and it was about to make more; soon, they thought, the money would reach them too. They would all get rich.

Success in 1990s Russia was not just measured in profit. Without any oversight, organized crime, corruption, and violence thrived within the newly free market. Criminal groups secured wealth for themselves at the expense of other people, through violent means. It was in and because of this environment that RFIVA succeeded: it was well positioned to take advantage of this chaotic situation. The fact of violence was not a downside, but a part of how RFIVA’s members—hardened by war and comfortable with brutality—understood their role in this new world.

After about 1992, members of RFIVA began to make euphemistic allusions to the people with “buzzcuts and raspberry-colored jackets,” who now frequently knocked on the doors of Radchikov’s office. Allegedly, as soon as his benefits program was approved, Radchikov immediately went about setting up meetings with the emerging world of organized crime. He took bids for contracts and offered RFIVA’s services to those that came knocking, and encouraged the regional branches to do the same.Footnote ⁶⁷ The kinds of business partners RFIVA members now found themselves working with was not a surprise. The benefits program seems to have been structured around the assumption that RFIVA’s members could productively engage with violent people in the world of organized crime. The form and character of its tariff exemptions do not make much sense otherwise. Organized crime must have been baked into the plan from the beginning.Footnote ⁶⁸

Concrete details on RFIVA’s involvement with organized crime are difficult to come by, because of the nature of the conduct in question. No one took notes or memorialized their conversations.Footnote ⁶⁹ But people in and around RFIVA seem to have widely assumed that this would be how the benefits worked: via and alongside violence and violent people. During later criminal proceedings, witnesses testifying both for and against Radchikov referenced RFIVA’s involvement with organized crime casually. It was something many of them seem to have been proud of, to the point of exaggerating the degree of their own violence. Disabled Afgantsy on Radchikov’s side of RFIVA talked about involvement in organized crime in the same way they discussed going sky diving or flying planes. They had overcome, and gone back to war.

In interviews before and after the bombing, Radchikov suggested that his involvement with organized crime was facilitated by being a disabled Afganets. In public, he tended to frame violence as a naturally occurring phenomenon that went along with doing business in Russia, something like the weather. But he would also winkingly allude to the mechanics of the benefits program, his own deal making and navigation of the market of violence, as he did in one interview in 1995: “We have learned how to earn good money, it becomes clear that the Fund is attractive to many and different people,” he said, referring equally to “political, commercial, and criminal mafia” interests. Radchikov described running what he called “a business” as the most dangerous thing he had ever done—and he jumped out of planes as a hobby. “And you ask me if it’s painful and scary to [go skydiving] on prosthetic legs…”Footnote ⁷⁰

Matter-of-factly referencing the violence he himself had experienced as RFIVA’s chairman, he went on: “There have been a few attempts on my life… . But that’s not the point. I’m not trying to hide or shield myself with bodyguards, although of course it’s stupid to pass through Afghanistan and die at home from a bullet from around the corner …” Radchikov explained that his lack of concern stemmed from being part of a community of disabled Afgantsy. “It’s harder to remove me because I have a strong organization of ‘Afgantsy’ behind me,” he told the interviewer. “There are about eight thousand disabled veterans of that war alone in Russia. And now the ‘Chechentsy’ have been added, too.”Footnote ⁷¹

In other words, the threat of violence from organized crime was not a concern, because his Afgantsy (and, eventually, Chechentsy) could deal that violence right back. Many Afgantsy, including disabled Afgantsy in RFIVA, hired themselves out as bodyguards during this period, essentially selling their ability to use force. They were not afraid; they had seen worse in Afghanistan. Disabled Afgantsy understood themselves as particularly suited to violence and conflict—which made for a perfect fit with the world of organized crime. And in Radchikov’s case, they could also act as his protectors, not that he needed any. These disabled Afgantsy, who had plunged into the world of organized crime were once again acting as Maresev. Their return to the front was not to war, exactly, but to the violence of doing business in the 1990s. This concept of the Afghan Maresev, the desirability of going back to war, was core to how disabled Afgantsy understood their own masculinity, and involvement in organized crime allowed them to express that self-understanding. Afgantsy would exaggerate their comfort with force, making winking allusions to acts of violence they could not have been involved in: improbable murders, deals that never occurred. They wanted people to know, and to assume. They were dangerous men.

A great deal of RFIVA’s business was illegal even in the permissive legal environment of 1990s Russia. Other entities would use RFIVA’s package of benefits for money laundering and tax evasion, taking advantage of its particular structure of tax and tariff loopholes. RFIVA would then take a cut of the profits. This seems to have been the main way that the national organization and its various branches made money, rather than selling products at a discount as described on paper. But RFIVA’s benefits were working just as expected. Disabled Afgantsy were participating in the economy and making a lot of money doing so, although the economy in question was one untroubled by legal or moral constraints.

RFIVA’s accounting was creative and opaque, and so it is impossible to say exactly how much money they actually made. According to court filings from 1994, halfway through that year, RFIVA theoretically could have had nearly a billion dollars in its various accounts.Footnote ⁷² Much of that money probably did not belong to RFIVA; most of what passed through RFIVA’s accounts went back into its commercial structures or was repaid to the various companies RFIVA worked with. Some untraceable amount of that money belonged to RFIVA branches, and would have gone back out to them from the central account, ostensibly to support local programs for disabled Afgantsy. A great deal of the money “flowed upward,” disappearing into offshore accounts to pay off Radchikov’s original bribes and promises to officials. Still, a great deal of money went through the accounts of RFIVA, and it profited. But much of this prosperity did not actually transfer to the people whom RFIVA was supposed to be helping. For one thing, a lot of the money seemed to end up in the pockets of a single disabled Afganets named Valerii Radchikov.

Percentage-wise, as it became richer, RFIVA seems to have gotten better at distributing its profits, although it is also possible the organization simply improved its imaginative bookkeeping. An audit in 1994 showed that only 2% of RFIVA’s money actually went to pay for programs for disabled Afgantsy in 1993, while probably 10–20% of its profits went to those programs by 1995.Footnote ⁷³ Even so, the disconnect between the amount of money the organization made and the amount it spent on veterans only became more drastic as more and more zeroes appeared in the kinds of contracts that RFIVA settled. What could you do for disabled Afgantsy with a billion dollars? It was sometimes claimed that there were about sixteen thousand members of RFIVA across all branches of the fund, though those numbers were impossibly exaggerated, with double- and triple-counting at almost every opportunity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Even accepting those inflated numbers as accurate, with the amount that RFIVA might have made in just the first half of 1994, Radchikov should have been able to pay every RFIVA member around $50,000; a life-changing amount of money, especially in Russia in 1994. Or, RFIVA could have split up its profits even further and paid each and every veteran of Afghanistan, abled and disabled alike, several times the average wage in Russia at the time. But RFIVA did not do that. Instead, a few people became millionaires. The conflict over how to divide the wealth tore the organization apart.

Violence helped RFIVA thrive in the 1990s. But the same characteristics that fueled RFIVA’s success also led to its explosive dissolution. Disabled Afgantsy were isolated from the rest of society, with a sense of themselves as endlessly comfortable with violence. They built their identities and communities around that violence. When RFIVA broke apart over an internal dispute, the split ended in bloodshed. Almost as quickly as RFIVA received its benefits, disagreement arose over how they should be used. Increasing tensions divided RFIVA over how best to distribute the money, primarily between the national structure and the regional branches that had generated the most money. In 1993, some of the regional branch leaders met in Yekaterinburg and accused Radchikov of having neglected them. They wrote in a report intended to remove Radchikov as chairman, “Having isolated itself from regional organizations, the board of the fund does not focus on solving problems common to disabled Afgantsy, but is occupied by commercial activities, in violation of the RFIVA charter.”Footnote ⁷⁵ They accused Radchikov of various violations; some actual crimes, but mostly moral and interpersonal betrayals of the principle of solidarity in the pursuit of profit above all.

Under pressure, RFIVA’s accountants provided these dissidents with the fund’s financial documents. These materials were not entirely complete, but they showed that in 1993, very early in its operations, $200 million had already gone through the central fund’s businesses in some form, though again, most of that probably did not belong to RFIVA itself.Footnote ⁷⁶ While less money sat in the RFIVA accounts than legally should have been there, the more serious issue to RFIVA members was the money that still remained in those accounts—over $2 million. Distributing these resources would have required investing institutional energy in ways that Radchikov’s RFIVA had never bothered to. As a result, the organization had left a fortune sitting in the bank, unused.

The board of RFIVA had always been more interested in earning money as a signal of success, and less in actually spending it. Even Radchikov’s lavish lifestyle had hardly drained the organization’s bank account. Radchikov had promised when he became chairman that he would solve the problems of disabled Afgantsy by making them all rich, turning money into the currency of social recognition. Seen in this light, Radchikov’s embezzlement was not a betrayal but a fulfillment of that promise, a flashy demonstration that disabled Afgantsy should be seen as successful businessmen, the original proposal’s “most important goal.”

But the promise had not, in fact, been fulfilled. Though RFIVA had become rich, wealth had not solved the problems of most of the group’s members. Profit alone had not been enough. Making money and spending it turned out to be different skills. Many Afgantsy could have used the $2 million in the RFIVA account for something other than a symbolic representation of recognition owed. Disabled veterans had needs that went beyond symbolism. Yet RFIVA was not organized to identify and meet those needs. After August 1993, RFIVA split over this argument into two independently operating organizations that both used the name RFIVA; one led by Radchikov, who refused to step down, and the other by the leader of the dissident group, Mikhail Likhodei. The two sides tried to reach an agreement without violence. Likhodei and his supporters tried to bring Radchikov in willingly, through conferences and democratic votes. Then, they sued, trying to sort out the dispute through the legal system.Footnote ⁷⁷

But this was the 1990s, and those forms of conflict resolution did not have much weight. The fight continued to escalate, and weakened governing institutions did not provide any route for solving it. In the context of the 90s, the next logical step was violence. Previously, Afgantsy had used their capacity for violence externally, against outside threats. But as soon as there was a conflict between them, they began to turn their violence capacity against each other. By 1996, RFIVA’s conflict had ceased to be about money. Instead, it was about the self-conception of the groups’ members. Even after most of the benefits were cancelled—in part in response to the escalating violence—the battle continued. RFIVA’s hyperviolent disabled masculinity made it far more difficult for them to back down from conflict, even as the violence spiraled out of control. Likhodei was murdered in 1994 as he walked into his apartment; most believed the hit to have been organized by Radchikov’s side of the fund. Other members of RFIVA, on both sides of the dispute, were shot at, blown up, and attacked with flare guns and broken bottles. The violence reached Radchikov personally: in 1995, gunmen opened fire on his Jeep and shot him in the head multiple times, though he survived.Footnote ⁷⁸ The final expression of this spiral was the Kotliakovskoe cemetery bombing, a manifestation of violence that exceeded even the norms of the world of organized crime.

After Likhodei’s murder, Sergei Trakhirov, Likhodei’s deputy and chairman of RFIVA’s Samara branch, became the leader of the alternate RFIVA. Radchikov understood Trakhirov’s elevation as a personal affront. Whereas Radchikov had been a colonel, Trakhirov was only a corporal, without a particularly impressive war record. His disability stemmed not from combat, but from having accidentally fallen off a tank, probably within days of arriving in Afghanistan.Footnote ⁷⁹ Not only was Radchikov being challenged for leadership of RFIVA, he was being challenged by someone who did not fit the mold of masculinity that he understood himself to represent: the challenger was not a war hero, whose disability did not mark his experience with violence in the same way. One detective who investigated the case later reflected, “Radchikov unambiguously evoked masculine affection. And then, who is this guy Trakhirov? … An ordinary corporal, of which there are many.” Perhaps, he suggested, this was why other Afgantsy in RFIVA had gone along with Radchikov’s plan. “It would have seemed quite ‘natural’ to blow up Trakhirov, who had discredited the very image of the hero-Afganets, the Maresev of our time …”Footnote ⁸⁰

Radchikov responded with an expression of violence that fit the mold—the “very image” of the Maresev of the 1990s. Prosecutors later argued that over the course of the summer of 1996, having decided to kill Trakhirov, Radchikov purchased an extensive arsenal of weapons. Supposedly, he acquired two AK-74s, a Makarov pistol, at least 269 cartridges of bullets of various calibers, at least 16 kg of TNT, at least 114 grams of C-4 or other plastic explosives, two grenades, two electronic detonators and a remote control unit: all for the purpose of murdering a single man.Footnote ⁸¹

Radchikov may not have intended the bombing to be as dramatic as it turned out. He learned of the memorial shortly beforehand, without necessarily knowing how big the event would be. Prosecutors argued that he may have thought murdering Trakhirov at the cemetery, rather than at Trakhirov’s house or at the central RFIVA offices, would limit collateral damage to anyone that Radchikov would have considered an innocent bystander. Anybody who would attend Likhodei’s memorial would have been one of Radchikov’s most intractable enemies.Footnote ⁸² But there were over 100 people at the cemetery that day.

The story of RFIVA is the story of the 1990s in miniature. Disabled Afgantsy embodied the extremes of what the 90s could be: unimaginable wealth for a few, achieved through violence, and at the expense of everybody else. These veterans had an early taste of the social atomization and sense of abandonment that would come to characterize the decade. The vision of disabled masculinity that developed through the experience of violence and war in the 80s drew them into organized crime in the 90s. Being suited to the 90s, though, also meant corruption and a violent end. The same forces that helped RFIVA thrive also destroyed it.

In part, the struggle within RFIVA turned bloody because of the absence of alternative methods of conflict resolution under a nonfunctional state, a circumstance the organization previously exploited for profit. The courts, legal institutions, and the state had little ability to constrain the corruption or the violence of RFIVA, and so nothing could stop violent conflict from spreading once it began. The form of violent solidarity and group identity they had built to resist their own isolation made RFIVA well equipped to function in a violent, atomized world, but also meant they would find it natural to turn violence against each other when that solidarity was broken. They conceptualized their own disability and relationships to one other in the language of profit and danger, and so disputes over profit quickly became dangerous.

The bombing, and the story of RFIVA, continue to shape the contemporary perception of disabled veterans as naturally violent. With endless press coverage and a sensational murder trial, disabled veterans came to be associated with the bombing, and with the chaos of the 90s itself. The bombing has become a part of the mythology of the “wild 90s.” The attack is referenced in the television program Brigada and a similar bombing occurs in the movie Tycoon. Footnote ⁸³ It spawned true crime blogs and all kinds of conspiracy theories of varying degrees of plausibility.

While the bombing’s origin in a gang war between disabled veterans was initially met with surprise, that shock has dissipated. The attack changed the reputation of disabled veterans and helped cement the stock character of the criminal disabled Afganets into Russian mass culture.Footnote ⁸⁴ In a sense, despite its ignominious end, RFIVA achieved the most important goal of its initial proposal: attitudes of society to disabled veterans were fundamentally changed. At the same time, though, this reputation destroyed RFIVA. Shortly after the attack, the government canceled benefits for the second and final time. RFIVA dissolved itself and reformed several times over the next decade, failing to escape its negative associations. Radchikov himself was brought to court, but acquitted on a technicality. Once again, he bragged about his own corruption, claiming that he had paid off the judge with a million-dollar bribe.

But that was the end. Shortly after his trial, in 2001, Radchikov died in a car crash. Radchikov’s success and struggle encapsulated the chaos and violence of the decade and his obituaries referred to his death as a symbolic end of the turbulent prior decade.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ahead of Radchikov’s funeral, attendees checked the cemetery for bombs, inch by inch.Footnote ⁸⁶ But there were no bombs. Radchikov’s eulogists vowed to get revenge on his enemies, but in the end, no one ever sought revenge. That era was over.