Bloody War: Obituary for 29-year-old anti-fascist Vsevolod ‘Seva’ Petrovsky

February 18: He was a journalist, poet and anti-fascist activist. The bloody war in the Donbass also made Vsevolod “Seva” Petrovsky a soldier. I first met Seva in April 2014 in Donetsk, shortly after the founding of the People’s Republics and the outbreak of heavy fighting in Slavyansk. We talked about the threatening advance of the militant nationalists and their violent excesses. Seva helped me with his contacts; we worked together.

He struck me as a very sensitive and tender person. Anyone who knew him can well imagine that verses like these came from him: “You should be planted in a field of poppies / in a turbulent field of fire. / They are exceptionally quick to germinate / down. / Kiss / red on red. With iron cutting edge / drive a sharp blade on the lips / and they shall flow with hot juices / red on red.”

Seva was a communist, a descendant of the October revolutionary Grigori Petrovsky, well known in the region; and for a time a coordinator of the Marxist organization Borotba. He fought as “one of the best left journalists of Ukraine,” says the Internet magazine LIVA , for which Seva wrote — first against corruption under Yanukovych, and since the coup in Kiev against the new chauvinist rulers.

For the defense of proletarian internationalism and the working class in the Donbass, Seva finally joined the Communist division of the Ghost Brigade, one of the battalions of the Lugansk People’s Republic. On the night of February 8, he was near the village Komissarowka, searching for the wounded. He came under heavy fire from Ukrainian artillery. It was “over very quickly”; a piece of shrapnel hit Seva in the heart, report his comrades. He was only 29 years old. 

“I cannot express my pain,” says Eugene Wallenberg, his friend and commander of the political department of his company, expressing what many who knew Seva feel. “Rest in peace, my brother and comrade. Forgive me that I could not protect you.”