Bilbo Baggins Must Die!

The Soviet Union, 1988: perestroika goes down and the floodgates open. The evil capitalist goodies of the West are finally available to all. There’s a nationwide run on blue jeans, B.U.M. Equipment sweatshirts, Bruce Springsteen CDs, and JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the latter being several million times more popular than any of the others.

The books: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, along with their prequel, The Hobbit, have, in little over a decade, become preposterously popular in the former Soviet Union. You think you’re a fan because you downloaded the movie trailer, know who’s playing Gandalf, and have read each book maybe twice? That’s lightweight. Groups of devotees all over Russia have formed full-fledged religious lifestyles around the fictional Middle-Earth and its denizens. They call themselves Tolkienists, and there are thousands of them in the motherland.

The first Russian Tolkienists were a dozen or so Moscow State University students; eager for an escape from the funfest that was the Soviet Union in the late ‘80s. They started dressing up as wizards, warriors, and dwarfs, and ended up hanging out in the forest for real. This isn’t the kind of role-playing that involves sitting around your mom’s dining room table rolling a 342-sided dice. Tolkienists live inside their characters, dancing around in the hills, dueling with safety-padded swords, and drinking elfin berry wine (which is actually vodka with red food coloring).

There’s even inner turmoil in the group. Just like the real world. The old school Tolkienists aren’t happy with the new wave of teenagers getting into “the life.” While it used to be about writing sequels to Tolkien’s books or composing little songs based on the Rings Trilogy, today’s young Tolkienists want to hang out, smoke cigarettes, and fight with their fake battle-axes. A popular Tolkienist sect, the Eglador society, is illustrative of the turn towards nihilism amongst the dwarfs and orcs. The clubs are traditionally split, like The Force in Star Wars, between light and dark. When you join the society, you devise a character and pick an allegiance: good or evil. Evil seems to be a lot more appealing lately. In some groups dark outweighs light ten-to-one. Fortunately, there are some Tolkienists who are crying out for unity. Chanting the unintentionally cool slogan, “I am above the clash!”

The Tolkienist phenomena could have easily remained nothing more than another reason to think Russians are funny. The same way others see the fight between English Montrealers (blockheads) and French Montrealers (Pepsis) or the way our white, middle-class nazi skinheads used to fight white, middle-class anti-nazi skinheads. A curious way to burn off excess testosterone and deal with mental illness that doesn’t hurt anyone but those who choose to join. Unfortunately the Kazakhstan police don’t see it that way. They have decided to eradicate the Tolkienists from the planet by ripping them out of the forest and throwing them in jail. Today there are almost a hundred Tolkienists in police captivity and they are being tortured daily. This is because, as their official position states, “revolution and Satanism are fomenting amongst the makeshift hobbit-holes.”

The Central Asian police aren’t stopping at the elfin wine alcoholics – oh no. They are now out to destroy anyone with an “alternative lifestyle.” Buskers, gays, lesbians, hippies, and punks are also arrested and systematically subjected to the notoriously brutal Kazakhstani cops’ favorite torture method, the “water tank.”

The unlucky hobbit, anarchist, or protest singer is put in a cell with a four-foot ceiling. Water is pumped in until the cell is half full. The prisoner can’t stand fully erect because the tank is too small, and he can’t sit down because he will drown. The only option is an excruciating crouch in icy water. The police leave prisoners in the water tank for basically as long as they feel like it. This can be anywhere from an hour to two days.

THEY WILL BE THE END OF THIS
COUNTRY IF WE DON’T STOP THEM.

The water tank, a common method for extracting confessions, is a seriously questionable technique in any scenario, but especially against the peaceful Tolkienists. What do the police want them to confess to? Being nerds? If they are trying to deprogram them they are drastically underestimating how passionate these people are. Of course, it’s impossible to discover the authorities’ intentions because they deny the whole affair. When asked by tourists like myself, the police deny any wrongdoing. They insist they only arrest those that are a threat to society. After a few glasses of vodka, however, the official position changes. “These kids are not like when I was a boy or when my father was a boy,” says a man who admitted to being a sergeant when I pretended to agree with his cause. “They are a new breed of Kazakhstan. One without courage or work ethic. They will be the end of this country if we don’t stop them.” Most Tolkienists are showing Aragorn-like bravery in the face of this persecution. Like many places east of Moscow, all this corruption is leading to a new hatred for the police. NWA and “Fuck the Police” are now common graffiti on the ancient brick walls, and the persecuted would rather die than lose the fight. As Oakbringer, one of the Middle-Earth leaders, so logically put it, “We are doing nothing wrong. We are hurting no one. We spend all our time in the mountains dealing with each other in our own way. The police don’t like it, but we are not going to stop. This is our entire life.”