HardIngush

Russian blogosphere is not so small, but it's concentrated only at LiveJournal. Not many bloggers who post outside LJ are popular, so we can assume that Russian-speaking part of LJ is almost 80—90% of Russian bloggers. (Of course, we are not speaking about microblogs here.)

Around September 2012, there was new account in LiveJournal created. Unlike many others so-called "political prostitutes" — both pro-putin (or anti-orange) and pro-orange (or anti-putin) — whose popularity is generated by their political posts, "copypasters" who mostly repost funny pictures and jokes, photographers who travel around the world and post pictures, HardIngush's popularity was based on his professional skills and his current job.
He is member of Russian Spetsnaz in Ingushetia (North Caucasus). What else do we know about him?



Almost nothing. He doesn't let anybody know his real name. His rank is unknown. He hides or blurs his face and faces of his co-workers on any photo he publishes — member of antiterrorist group will be dismissed, if he shows his relation to special forces in media. We don't know what does he look like. In fact, photos in this post may depict some other person, HardIngush uploaded them into his VK account, but nothing more.

Because of name of his blog you may think he is Ingush, but he is Russian, his username stands for "Hard Ingushetia". Could it be that authorship changed since September? I don't think so, style of posts remains same.

He is married. In his childhood, he dreamed of becoming a cook, not special forces member — cooks seemed to be so happy and chubby in his child books. He doesn't drink and dislikes drinkers. His favourite quote is, “Killing in the name of religion is same as sending wife to work as prostitute in the name of family values.” HardIngush isn't Christian or Mislim, he doesn't believe in God. He isn't nationalist either: "Nationalism, just like onanism is good for teens and people who have problems with opposite sex."

He isn't first actively blogging member of antiterrorist group, but while Karden posts only about his equipment (lookie, what a nice backpack/flashlight/armoured car/scope for my rifle), Hard expresses his opinion in different questions and sometimes gets political. Separatists in their propaganda materials often accuse Federal Security Service in killing innocent people, stealing, kidnapping, and other weird stuff, and it seems Hard can't stand these lies.

Is he only a PR project, weapon of informational war? I don't think so. Many people suspect him in this, but yet there wasn't any proofs. He says, he was trying to get some friends, some communication online, so he created a blog. Why does he have so much time to post? HardIngush says, they have plenty of free time while they aren't in action.

Right now he is slowly losing interest in blogging, and he is planning to close his blog on February 1. I'm going to start translating some of his posts and post it here during New Year break. You can follow this blog using RSS/Atom feed (what is RSS?) or Twitter.

Russian POV is dedicated not only to military forces of Russian Federation, there will be all sort of stuff — from cats to space ships, but first I'm going to stick to HardIngush materials since is intending to delete his entire blog.

List of translated posts:

2012.09.17 IED