Thread by @mdmitri91

I want to tell you a story about one Bashkir man whose name was Rif (pron. R-e-e-f).

Bashkirs are native people of Bashkortostan region in Russia, which lies on the border between Europe and Asia. Get a glimpse of what the norm is for a large proportion of the Russian citizens.

When I last saw him in 2010, Rif was around 55. All his life he lived in a village Uzungulovo, about 30km from Beloretsk town in Ural mountains of Russia. This region is known for vast forests, fertile plains, wide rivers, tall mountains, and lakes full of fish.

I knew Rif as a next door neighbour of my mother’s childhood friend Elena who bought a plot in Uzungulovo village a few years prior. She lived in a large city of Magnitogorsk and stayed in the village during weekends.

Her son Gleb was my childhood friend and we spent a lot of time together whenever I was in Russia. He is 3 years older than me and I always saw him as my older brother. At times, we would spend weeks in that village, just the two of us.

Uzungulovo is a Bashkir village. Neighbouring it was a Russian village of Ozernyi. My parents would always tell me that Russian villages are usually more run down than Bashkir ones. To me, they both looked the same.

These villages are remote. You have to drive for hours to reach them. People who are born in those villages rarely go outside. At best, they’ll go to provincial towns like Beloretsk, which offer some civilisation, but generally look like bigger versions of the same villages.

Anyway, to Rif. Rif had a limp. When he was 18, Rif got drunk and fell from a shed, breaking his leg. Left untreated, it healed without medical intervention, and Rif was left with a limp till the rest of his days.

Rif didn’t have an easy life, though he wasn’t starving. He and his wife Sonya had cattle and chicken. But they had to work hard to keep things afloat. They did not have much income apart from occasional jobs, and the help of their children, who lived in bigger cities.

Hard life makes you look for ways to make it more bearable. For many in Russia, the most obvious choice is alcohol. Like many in his village, Rif loved a drink. It’s something he was doing from early years.

Rif once chopped a whole KAMAZ full of wood for 500 rubles, which was around $15 at the time. It was a big KAMAZ truck. Once the job was done, Rif bought two bottles of 7% beer in the village shop and got hammered.

If you wanted something from Rif you gave him a bottle. The best souvenir to bring Rif from the big city was beer. Alcohol transformed Rif from a quiet limping weathered Bashkir man into an energetic fella who could chop a whole truck of wood in a few hours.

One day, Rif died. He did not even live to see his 60th birthday. I don’t know the exact reason for his death, I just know that he died, like many other men who die young in thousands of villages across the vast lands of Russia.

Today, a 20-year old version of Rif is in Ukraine. He travelled 5,000 kilometers on a train, and then 300 km on a tank to get there. He signed a contract for a chance to risk his life earning life-changing money. His government made him take this gamble.

Rif enters cities and towns of Bucha, Irpen, Mariupol. For the first time in his life he sees orderly rows of houses built with highest grade materials, European style. He sees cafes, parks, expensive cars. At first, he is shocked. Then he gets the jealous. Then - angry.

He enters a house for a sleep over with his comrades. Here, Rif notices the sheer amount of items, from dishwashers and TVs, to clean white bedsheets and branded clothes. He opens the fridge and finds there foods he never heard of.

Rif has never seen anything like that. This furniture costs more than his rickety wooden house in Uzungulovo which no one would want to buy anyway. Rif remembers the gravel, manure-covered roads of his home village, his old 90s TV that only shows Russian state media.

Rif remembers his tiny income and his hopelessness he had to drink away. But more importantly, Rif knows that if he survives, he has to come back to Uzungulovo to chop wood and look after his cattle just go keep himself fed.

So, Rif takes this opportunity, and grabs as much as he can, knowing all well no one is going to punish him for doing so. He takes everything he can see that fits in his backpack in the hopes of taking it all home. He will never be back here. He has to go Uzungulovo.

I’ll leave it to you what to think of this. Rapes and massacres cannot be explained by sheer poverty. The things we already know put these people on the same bench as the 20th century nazis. And soon we will be finding out much more.

But I also tend to see some of these people as victims. Victims of the country that lead its people to a state of total desperation. Rif, whom I knew was not a bad person. Today's Rif is like him in many ways. Just with a TV who tells him his atrocities are an act of heroism.