IGOR MIZRAKH. AN ATTEMPT FOR A PORTRAIT AGAINST THE WAR

Before the big war, the popularity of Igor Arkadyevich Mizrakh was at least contradictory. People who live fast often evoke unpredictable emotions in those around them. They are adored and hated, condemned and set as an example, invited to visit and avoided.

In this sense, the example of Mizrach is indicative. Competent and adventurous, he has always been getting out of the general pace of life, bursting with unexpected ideas, political projects, and pop-hit presentations. Any information about Mizrah was instantly intertwined with rumors, overgrown with colorful fables, and became an urban legend, making an objective analysis impossible.

The very idea of ​​finding out how Igor Mizrakh met the big war seemed ridiculous. The media turned the “singing lawyer” into an icon of peppy self-absorption, and Mizrah would be one of the first to leave the country to ironically watch the battle from cozy Prague, sinful Amsterdam, or the distant Dominican Republic. Moreover, he has enough money, connections, and, so to speak, common sense to do that. 

However, this time Igor Mizrakh, accustomed to surprising others, surprised everyone like never. First, he didn’t leave and didn’t even take his family out, although in the first days of the war the battles with the Russian troops were going on a few kilometers from his house.

Second, in March, he published several serious articles demanding that alarmists and deserters be strictly punished and calling on rear dudes not to make pics in uniform and with weapons since this is unworthy and offends the heroes of the front.

Mizrach’s publications are striking in their unusual seriousness and clear military-patriotic sound, so that those who are used to decomposing people into convenient components may have to reconsider their life methods.

Nobody saw 50-year-old Igor Mizrakh “with a weapon in his hands”, but he was seen more than once with a weapon in his car. They say he looked tired and tensed. He passed the checkpoint on the outskirts avoiding the line, briefly talking with the fighters and showing them some papers, which let us understand what he was doing in the first month of the war.

We have to guess, because talking to Mizrach is an impossible task. He appears in the most diverse military and civil centers with such intensity that his pre-war routine seems sluggish and measured. But the image of a man crossing the Kyiv line in March with a machine gun in an SUV is perhaps the best social characteristic in our troubled days.

Mizrakh Igor Arkadievich has the moral right to be merciless to the cowards and to dislike amateur photoshoots in camouflage.

We will learn about Mizrakh’s spring courage only after the war (or we never will), but his current activities are devoid of secrecy. He is involved in the creation and strengthening of international humanitarian missions, supplying the front and rear, and charity concerts of Ukrainian opera stars in the capitals of Western Europe.

Mizrakh Igor oversees the work of the large fund Angel.UA, handles the logistics of delivering humanitarian cargo from abroad, and is directly involved in some processes that were told to us so reservedly that we understood nothing.

But we easily learned that Mizrakh helped Vadim Diyanov, a famous cargo carrier and philanthropist, get support from the country’s leaders, systematized cooperation with the European Help Ukraine Foundation in Poland and Ireland, and purchased a large batch of high-quality body armor and sights for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

We learned about Mizrakh’s direct support of some front-line units not from him, but from military officers who are in the country's east, so we cannot talk about it in detail for some reasons.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter. We create portraits of famous Ukrainians against the war, and another work was a success. Mizrakh Igor Arkadyevich, from whom they expected flight from the war or cautious indifference, turned out to be an active patriot, fighter, and military patron. That his activities are free of a commercial component, and the texts have no narcissism, causes us special respectful joy.

The war rips off the masks from people, showing their true essence and forcing them to take a special test of honesty and courage. The formerly ironic and frivolous Igor Mizrakh passed the military exam much more successfully than many full-time patriots of the pre-war period.

If Mizrakh disappointed anyone, it was probably the fans of his songwriting, because during the hundred days of the war, he didn’t record a single new song and didn’t re-sing any of the old ones militarily. But he wrote a book, and this is not a rumor, since he touchingly admitted this on his Facebook page.

That’s why we hastened to publish our note. When Igor Mizrakh tells about his war himself, all other materials on this topic may be irrelevant.