A political fringe on the fringes of society just six months earlier, he was clearly relishing the new attention he was receiving as the public face of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Kherson region. “I’m on a consistent high,” the Moscow-based official told the Guardian in a phone interview in August. “We won. I’m living in a dream. Russia is forever in Kherson.” That “forever” came to an abrupt end on Wednesday when Stremusov, 45, was killed in a car crash as he sped away from Kherson. By this time, he was already fully aware that his dream of a Russian Kherson would soon be shattered as Ukrainian troops moved in to liberate the city. On Friday night, in remarkable scenes, crowds of jubilant residents greeted Ukraine’s armed forces as they arrived in the center of Kherson. The Rise and Fall of Stremousov is a story of how one man’s ruthless opportunism and ideological fantasies can play out in a war-torn country. It also serves to illustrate how thuggish and unsavory characters thrive in Russia today as the country’s leadership embraces anti-Western hysteria. A portrait on display during a memorial service for Kirill Stremousov in Simferopol, Crimea. Photo: Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters Born in eastern Ukraine in 1976, Stremousov worked odd jobs growing up, claiming to sell hounds in the UK and Holland, later working for the state fisheries inspectorate. His life changed, he said, after what he described as an “epic journey of self-discovery” on a motorcycle across Latin America, following in the footsteps of his hero, Ernesto Che Guevara. “I always wanted to be someone like Che. I’m getting there,” he said. Upon his return, he began blogging profusely, propagating some of the many conspiracy theories that had sprung up in the post-Soviet sphere as millions sought ways to cope with the bloc’s collapse and extreme economic instability. He was particularly fond of the neo-Stalinist and neo-pagan movement Concept of Social Security, a conspiracy theory with strong anti-Semitic overtones, just one of the many contradictions of a man who claimed to be fighting “Ukrainian Nazis”. Much of the interview with the Guardian in August consisted of him ranting about the Nazis he said ran Ukraine, while also bashing “Western perverted liberalism.” From time to time, however, Stremusov suddenly changed his tone, speaking with envy and admiration of the European capitals he visited on his travels. “I’d like to see those special cafes in Amsterdam again,” he laughed. As Covid came, Stremousov unexpectedly became a vocal anti-Vaxxer. Meanwhile, he went viral after a video showing him swinging his young daughter around his head like a rag doll, causing her to ‘pop her bones’, was picked up by tabloids around the world. Running for mayor of Kherson in 2020, Stremousov received just over 1% of the vote. He probably would have spent his life as a troublemaker had it not been for Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, which gave the misfit blogger the opportunity to fulfill his darkest daydreams. With most of the Ukrainian administration of Kherson having fled or refusing to serve the Russians, Moscow turned to figures such as Stremusov to try to lend some semblance of legitimacy to their occupation, appointing him as the region’s “deputy governor” in April. On paper, he was second in command, but he quickly outshone his timid boss, Volodymyr Saldo, releasing a daily stream of virulent anti-Ukrainian videos that often bordered on the absurd. Stremousov’s ascent reached its peak in September when he proudly paraded around the Kremlin’s St George Hall during Putin’s bombastic ceremony marking the annexation of Kherson and three other Ukrainian regions. Putin’s willingness to promote fringe figures like Stremusov was a symbol of the final stage of his two-decade rule, said Andrei Perchev, a Russian political journalist. “Putin’s vocabulary and behavior are becoming increasingly thuggish,” Perchev wrote in a recent op-ed for the Carnegie Endowment thinktank. “The president himself embraces the edges of society,” Perchev added. During Putin’s Kremlin annexation speech, along with Russia’s political elite, he observed a minute’s silence to honor the “fallen heroes” of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. One of the people remembered was Motorola, real name Arseny Pavlov, a violent warlord who died in a car bomb in 2016. With the war in Ukraine, Putin also brought up Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruthless Chechen dictator, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ex-convict who runs the private paramilitary group Wagner. Some within the elites now appear to be watching Putin’s behavior closely. An associate of Sergei Kiriyenko, a one-time liberal official in the presidential administration who was tasked with managing policy in the occupied territories, said his decision to suddenly dress in military fatigues was likely inspired by the regime’s growing militarism. “In the season of horrors, you must dress up too,” he said. In the end, Stremusov may have gone too far over the line. As his public profile grew, so did his confidence. Condemning the Russian military defeat in the Kharkiv region, he publicly suggested in one of his daily videos that the country’s Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu – a close friend of Putin’s – should shoot himself. “Indeed, many say, if it had been the Minister of Defense who had allowed such a state of affairs, they could, as officers, have shot themselves,” he said. His murky death, whether an actual accident or the result of a plan by Russian security services to get rid of an inconvenient megaphone no longer useful to the authorities, will likely remain a mystery for the foreseeable future. As crowds of ecstatic Ukrainians gathered in the central square of newly liberated Kherson on Friday, it was clear, however, that Stremusov’s vision of a Russian city would be buried next to him.
