Michael Gloss’s real and imaginary wars

A year ago, in April 2024, a mercenary contracted to the Russian army died somewhere on the frontline in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Among the hundreds of soldiers dying every day in this war, as well as among the thousands of foreign nationals fighting for money on the side of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, one thing stood out: he was the son of the acting deputy head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Michael Alexander Gloss was only 21 years old, driven by antiwar and anti-imperialist beliefs to participate in the imperial war of conquest now in its fourth year against Ukraine. How was this possible? And what can this tragic story tell us about the current disorientation of much of the U.S. Left?

Michael Gloss was born in 2002 into a family of professionals in the U.S. military: his father, Larry Gloss, fought in Iraq in the early 1990’s, and in recent years has worked for a company producing security software for the military and intelligence, and his mother, Juliane Gallina Gloss, had a brilliant career specializing in cybersecurity, and in early 2024 was appointed deputy chief of the CIA.

In 2021, Michael enrolled at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he studied Human Ecology. The very next year he became involved in protests for climate justice and abortion rights, and in the beginning of 2023 he traveled to Europe . Gloss attended Rainbow family gatherings, the oldest countercultural U.S. organization “practicing non-violence and peace activism,” and also volunteered to help earthquake victims in the Turkish province of Hatay.

His public posts on social media at this time paint a portrait of a typical left-leaning college student: he is outraged by the Israeli bombing of Gaza, the irresponsibility of governments and corporations in the face of climate change, and the U.S. military-industrial complex—the cause of all wars on earth. Michael dreamed of benefiting humanity by developing sustainable agriculture.

In August 2023, with this set of ideas, Gloss traveled to Russia, the country that has waged the largest war on the European continent in decades. Already in September, his name appears in the database of the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street in Moscow, which most foreigners who enlist in the Russian army pass through. On his account on the Russian social network VKontakte created around this time, Michael described himself as a “supporter of a multipolar world” who “hates fascism.”

From the analysis of Gloss’s social media posts by journalists from the independent Russophone magazine Important Stories, it is possible to reconstruct his perceptions of Russia, which he saw as a direct antipode of the United States. While the United States is dominated by militarism, racism, and corporate greed, Russia is the bearer of anti-fascism and the vanguard of the Third World’s struggle for global justice.

At the training base where Gloss spent two months before being sent to the front lines, he indeed met many “volunteers” from Nepal, China, and African countries. Unlike Gloss, however, they have been driven to serve in the invading army by extreme poverty, rather than “anti-imperialist” views (though not without exception).

Not counting migrant laborers from Central Asian countries, who are forced to enlist in the Russian army in large numbers under threat of being jailed, Nepalis rank first among the foreigners involved in the war in Ukraine. So far, about 15,000 citizens of Nepal have signed an army contract, mainly because of the huge salary of $2,000 per month. All mercenaries are also promised Russian citizenship within two weeks of signing the army contract, which may look attractive to migrant workers from post-Soviet Central Asian republics.

In a voicemail message that he recorded for friends, Michael Gloss also talked about getting a Russian passport, with which he planned to travel to Africa.

Actually, the reasons for Russians by birthright to participate in the war are not much different from those of foreigners— huge paychecks, as well as the opportunity to avoid prison for criminal charges. The war (which in Russia is still officially called a “special military operation”) is being waged by the Kremlin significantly with the help of mercenaries—local and foreign—who are becoming increasingly difficult to recruit, despite ever-increasing payments.

There are indeed some ideologically motivated individuals among the tens of thousands of foreigners fighting in the Russian army, but their ideas are very different from Gloss’s. For instance, Russian media recently proudly reported on a squad of French citizens who had joined the war against Ukraine, with one of them talking about the necessity of a common struggle against “Wokeism, LGBT and degenerate Western ideas.”

Far-right Americans and Western Europeans can easily become Russian citizens even without participating in the war, though. In April 2024, Putin signed a decree that allows all residents of “unfriendly states” who reject “destructive liberal ideological attitudes that contradict Russia’s traditional spiritual and moral values” to relocate to Russia. Needless to say, Michael Gloss—a pacifist, anti-fascist, and environmentalist—hardly met these criteria.

Gloss had no time to realize this. On April 4, 2024 he was killed in the Russian army’s offensive along the Razdolovka-Veseloye line.

The names of these villages in the Donetsk region probably did not say much to the Nepalese who were part of the 137th Airborne Regiment thrown into the attack on Ukrainian positions. Usually, Russia does not inform relatives of Nepalis who have gone to war of their fate. Families try to get help from the Nepalese authorities, but not everyone can come to terms with their loss. For example, a few months after one of them went missing, his father committed suicide.

The life of an American, especially the son of high-ranking parents, is worth more, however. It can be assumed that Russian authorities learned about Gloss’s background only after his death, and his body was committed to earth in the United States in December 2024.

The story of Michael Gloss’s death became widely known through media leaks only a year after his demise. The War of Gloss—against imperialism and injustice—and the War against Ukraine—for territorial gains, “traditional values,” and imperial ideas of the “Russian world”—were fought in two parallel spaces, one imaginary and the other real.

The imagination that turned the destroyed Ukrainian cities into the forefront of the battle between American fascism and Russian anti-fascism was created over the past few years by numerous pseudo-leftist bloggers, like the authors of Grayzone or Jackson Hinkle, who spread Kremlin narratives. Gloss went to Russia under the influence of such “alternative” information from social media.

The reality of Putin’s Russia—militarism and blatant social inequality, harsh state policy of sexism and homophobia, the government’s information monopoly that has transformed all media into a tool of chauvinist propaganda, thousands of political prisoners (including leftists)—embodies everything that Gloss passionately wanted to fight against.

Like most of his generation, Gloss’s beliefs were shaped as a set of spontaneous emotions on flickering images and fragmentary isolated facts, unconnected to collective action and debates within a political organization. The acute sense of injustice of the world around him and the total lack of trust in the media mainstream, reflected in the crooked mirror of the internet tankies, creates a phantasmagoric picture of the world for thousands of sincere self-seeking young people.

Michael Gloss had the courage to follow this false path to the end. His death will be in vain if significant political conclusions are not drawn from it.

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Featured Image credit: Old Photo Profile; modified by Tempest.