“When he was leaving to go there, his grandpa told him: ‘Lyosha (short for Alexey — translator’s note), don’t be a hero, come back home.’ And he said: ‘Grandpa, everything will be alright, I’ll come back.’ And now he came back!” Tatyana Dekhonova, the aunt of 20-year-old Russian soldier Alexey Tolstokulakov who was killed in Ukraine, recalls. She talks about him in third person and practically never calls him by name, as if she cannot believe that her nephew, such a friendly young man who always had a smile on his face, is gone.
The last time she spoke to Alexey was on 10 April. By that time, no one had heard from him for nearly a month, and his worried relatives called the Russian Defence Ministry hotline. Soon after that, they got a call from Alexey. The junior sergeant told them in a cheerful voice that everything was fine, and that it was very warm “here” — everyone was wearing summer clothes, he said. The phone call lasted for about a minute. On the same day, at about 11 p.m., he sent a text to his aunt Tatyana Dekhonova: “If there is hell on earth, we are here. I’m still alive, but not for long. Help me.” It was late at night in Russia’s Amur region, where his family is from, so Tatyana only saw the message in the morning of 11 April. Nine days later, Alexey will would be killed. A week after that, the army would inform his family about his death, promising to give them 90,000 rubles for the funeral.
Exactly ten months had passed since the day Alexey was drafted in the army until his funeral. This is the story of how a 20-year-old conscript ended up participating in the special operation and got killed there, told by his aunts Tatyana Dekhonova and Maria Perova, as well as Alexey himself, through the messages he sent to his family while he was still alive.