ONE SOLDIER’S WAR IN CHECHNYA
ARKADY BABCHENKO was born in 1977. In 1995, at the age of 18, he was drafted to fight in the first Chechen War and then in late 1999 volunteered to return for six months during the second Chechen War. A law graduate, he currently works as a journalist on the non-conformist newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
This is his first book.
NICK ALLEN is a British journalist working for the German Press Agency DPA in Pakistan. He worked in Russia for 11 years, also covering the conflict in Chechnya, and has translated for the literary journal Glas New Russian Writing.
From the international reviews of One Soldier’s War in Chechnya:
‘Like Tolstoy, Babchenko was a Russian soldier in the Caucasus before he was a writer, and his remarkable stories cast a frequently shocking light on the barbaric conduct of the occupying forces... In the tradition of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms [...] One Soldier’s War is an artfully contrived narrative deploying fictional techniques as well as autobiography... A devastating testimony from an extremely talented young writer.’ New Statesman
‘Illuminating and darkly humorous... Babchenko is also capable of arresting lyricism.’ Daily Telegraph
‘Arkady Babchenko’s prose is raw and uncut and his subject matter is one of the most terrible wars in the world - without a doubt the most under-reported... Babchenko’s book is an account from an ordinary Russian grunt, and its fundamental honesty makes unbearable reading... A fine book.’ Literary Review
‘A riveting, semi-autobiographical soldier’s tale of brutality and boredom in the Chechen war’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent
'One Soldier’s War is a gripping narrative and a sobering one. For all the horrors he describes, Babchenko doesn’t seem to intend a simple antiwar message; nor does he judge the moral rightness of the Chechen war. The book itself comes garlanded with comments comparing it to All Quiet on the Western Front and other masterpieces of combat literature... it certainly deserves a place in that notable literary tradition [...] for showing us that war, up close, could be as appalling toward the end of the 20th century as it was at the beginning.’ Watt Street Journal
‘Remarkable - my book of the year.’ Matthew Sweet, ‘Night Waves’, BBC Radio 3
‘Arkady Babchenko fought in both Chechen Wars. One Soldier’s War in Chechnya is the extraordinary result, as damning as it is harrowing. It tells all those stories that were never allowed to appear in the press at the time... His account is vivid, stark and horrifying. The cruelty is all the more wrenching because of the moments of fleeting, lyrical beauty. Babchenko, like the best war reporters, is able to report war how it is, but also reflect on it... Babchenko’s honesty is unblinking, his prose at times, unbearable. It is a tour de force. A grim testament to the worst of wars.’ New Humanist
‘Right up there with Catch-22 or Michael Herr’s Dispatches.’ Tibor Fischer
‘I have not read a book about war and soldiering like it since All Quiet on the Western Front. Babchenko’s prose, like Remarque’s, is stark but evocative, eloquent in its simplicity, and absolutely unflinching in its honesty. He presents the face of war with all cosmetics off, an utterly brutal and brutalizing experience that does nothing but kill and maim people spiritually as well as physically. His book should be required reading for anyone who still harbours the illusion that war has some redemptive qualities.’ Phil Caputo, author of A Rumor of War
‘Arkady Babchenko has written a hypnotic and terrifying account of his enforced participation in the Chechen wars, one that is entirely free of the self-absorbed razzle-dazzle that too often passes for “literary” writing these days. The book’s power is in its clarity and detail. Babchenko’s honesty has the force of a blunt object. He is surrounded by killing and by death, eager for a wound that will not kill him but take him out of hell. The killing he does shatters him to his core. It is simply a great book.’ Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down
‘Babchenko’s clear, vivid, factual language, and his mercilessly detailed descriptions of sensual experiences, absorb the reader and torpedo any reflex to suppress emotion. Pictures stay with the reader, which are impossible to forget.’ Berliner Zeitung
‘This literary account from the front is a modern equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front: harrowingly good.’ SonntagsZeitung
ONE SOLDIER’S WAR IN CHECHNYA
ARKADY BABCHENKO
Translated from the Russian by Nick Allen
Preface
It would be wrong to think that the war in Chechnya began the day the federal army was brought in. And there was certainly more than one motivation behind it. Chechnya is a complex tangle of factors and accidents, a whirlwind of events that the future historian will have difficulty sorting out.
The Chechnya conflict started in the early 1990s, soon after General Dzhokhar Dudayev came to power. He had been a pilot in the Soviet air force and fought in the Soviet-Afghan war. From the outset he followed the policy of political independence for Chechnya, and ultimately declared its cession from the Russian Federation.
In 1991 Dudayev expelled Russian army forces from the territory of Chechnya. When the army withdrew, a huge amount of ammunition was left behind. More than two hundred airplanes were abandoned in the airport of Grozny alone, together with tanks, armoured carriers, artillery and even several ‘Grad’ rocket launchers. The amount of weaponry was simply astounding - whole ammunition depots, tens of thousands of units, were simply left behind.
Lawlessness and chaos set in after Dudayev had announced a 100 per cent amnesty for all criminals, without exception, which led to a huge influx into Chechnya of all kinds of people who were in trouble with the law. The immediate result was an outbreak of banditry, and before long murder and robbery had become commonplace; more often than not, non-Chechens were the victims. A wave of Russian refugees flooded into Russia from Chechnya. It would be wrong to say that the genocide of the non-Chechen population was a state policy, but Chechens, whose society is based on a system of clans known as teips, were certainly better protected. (Chechnya’s current president, Ramzan Kadyrov, belongs to the Benoi Teip, for example.) Since Russians have no teip system they found themselves completely defenceless: no-one was going to avenge their deaths, and this made them easy prey.
Growing gangsterism and unemployment undermined Dudayev’s authority and caused a split among the population. This conflict was exacerbated by the fierce struggle for domination going on among the teips. In November 1994, pro-Moscow opposition forces led by Umar Avturkhanov stormed Grozny and were defeated. Twenty Russian tanks were destroyed together with their crews, and the few surviving tankmen were captured. Moscow renounced them - President Boris Yeltsin, a despotic ruler, couldn’t have cared less about individuals, and he was infuriated that General Dudayev had acted beyond his authority. In my opinion this was the real reason federal forces were sent into Chechnya.
The military operation to overthrow the Dudayev regime was launched on 11 December 1994. It was poorly planned - recall the then Minister of Defence General Grachyov’s announcement that he would ‘capture Grozny with two regiments in two hours’. From the outset, the army was betrayed by the high command. Its soldiers were insufficiently trained, depressed and demoralized; they did not understand the aims of this war, and they were treated as cannon fodder.
That December in Grozny the Russian army bore huge losses. On New Year’s Eve, the 131st Maikop brigade was almost completely wiped out. Various other units approaching the city from different directions were blocked and partially destroyed. People were killed in their thousands. To this day there are no official statistics for casualties in the first Chechnya campaign.
Under the current Russian government we’ll never know them anyway because they are catastrophic. But according to unofficial information, in January alone almost five thousand Russian officers and soldiers were killed in the Battle of Grozny.
The Chechen losses, not to mention the deaths among the civilian population, are not known and probably never will be -no-one counted them at all.
I was drafted into the army as a second-year law student in November 1995, a year after the war began. I spent six months in a training unit in the Urals, and in May 1996 I was transported to the Northern Caucasus together with fifteen hundred other conscripts. First I served at the frontline town of Mozdok, on the border with Chechnya, and then in Chechnya itself. Officially a truce had been signed by then, but shooting was going on all the time. This period is described in the stories ‘The Runway’, ‘Mozdok-7’ and ‘The Summer of 1996’.
On 6 August 1996, Chechen fighters captured Grozny and held the city for two weeks. This was the second-heaviest battle, and it ended in yet another truce and the signing of the Khasavyurt Accords, by which Chechnya practically received independence within the Russian Federation.
In late August my father died and I was given leave. I barely made it to the funeral. That same day I fell ill with dysentery and was taken to hospital in an ambulance. My leave expired before I was released from hospital, and when I reported to the army authorities I was arrested as a deserter. I spent three months in the penal battalion (see the story ‘Special Cargo’). Because of an absence of incriminating material - as if it were not clear from the start - the case was closed.
After Dudayev’s death in April 1996, Aslan Maskhadov was elected president of Chechnya. Maskhadov was a reasonable and even-tempered man, and had been Chief of GHQ. under Dudayev, but his position was not secure; his army consisted of only two thousand men, and he was therefore powerless as president. In reality Chechnya was controlled by field commanders of fighters’ units such as Ruslan Gelayev, Shamil Basayev, Arbi Barayev, and the Jordanian Khattab, to name but a few. Lawlessness reigned supreme, and people were kidnapped all the time. In the People’s Friendship Square in the centre of Grozny, there was a flourishing and perfectly open slave trade. According to official data, during the three years of Chechnya’s ‘independence’ almost thirty thousand people were kidnapped, sold into slavery or executed in Chechnya.
After the demobilization, I completed the remaining two years at the Law Institute and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. It was the autumn of 1999, and the second Chechen campaign was just beginning.
This time I volunteered to take part in the war. There were many thousands of us, ex-soldiers, who returned to that second war after the first. I have no answer to why I went there again. I don’t know. I just couldn’t help it. I was irresistibly drawn back there. Maybe it was because my past was there, a large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul. Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world.
At any rate I couldn’t just sit there - I had to do what I could. And yet there is no blood on my conscience, I know this for sure. My experiences of the second war are described in ‘New Year’s Eve’, ‘Alkhan-Yurt’, ‘The Storming Operation’, ‘Argun’, and ‘Chechen Penal Battalion’.
The second war was quite different from the first. For Chechnya the first had been a war of liberation, a war for independence when the people were united and inspired; in the second it was not the Chechens we fought, but the rebel bands. By then the Chechens were tired of lawlessness and dislocation. The second war was even more incomprehensible and dirty than the first.
I spent six months in the second war and was demobilized in April 2000. I wrote an article about my first-hand experiences in Chechnya and took it to one of the Moscow dailies. They offered me a job, and that’s how I became a journalist. It was at this time that I wrote the stories ‘Field Deception’, ‘The Obelisk’, ‘Lais’, ‘A Soldier’s Dream’ and ‘Traitors’, to name a few.
I did not mean to write a book; I did not even think about what it was I was writing - stories, memoirs, or some other kind of text. It was not consciously a project; I just couldn’t carry war within myself any longer. I needed to speak my mind, to squeeze the war out of my system. I wrote compulsively - on my way to work in the metro; during my journalistic assignments; at home at night - and some of the stories almost wrote themselves. Many of them were hard-going, and I had to force myself to write them. But I was not writing a book: I was simply continuing those unfinished discussions with the boys. They stayed with me long after the war was over and I could not let them go. It was a form of madness.
This book is largely an autobiography - everything in it is true. A few stories have been compiled from several real episodes that have been compressed into a single period and shifted in time. Some events I did not witness personally, but I can vouch for their veracity.
All the characters are real people - the names are real too. But in a few cases I have combined two or three persons into one character. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was easier for me to write that way.
In the end it all added up to become a book. Let that remain in people’s memories. It must not be forgotten.
Arkady Babchenko
April 2007
ONE
01/ Mountain Brigade
Only those who have spent time in the mountains can imagine what they’re like. The mountains are as bad as it gets. Everything you need to live, you carry with you. You need food, so you discard all the things you can do without and stuff dry rations for five days into your backpack. You need ammunition, so you load an ammo box of bullets and half a box of grenades into your pockets, backpack and cartridge pouches, and hang them on your belt. They get in the way when you walk, rasping on your groin and hips, their weight pulls on your neck. You chuck your AGS automatic grenade launcher over your right shoulder and the launcher of your wounded mate Andrei Volozhanin over your left shoulder. You string two belts of grenades in a cross over your chest, like the sailors in the old Revolution movies, and if you have a spare hand, you also grab a ‘snail’ box of ammo belts.
Then there’s your tent, pegs, hatchet, saw, spade and whatever else the platoon needs to survive. And the things you need for yourself - your rifle, jacket, blanket, sleeping bag, mess tins, thirty packs of smokes, a change of underwear, spare puttees, and so on - about seventy kilos in total. Then when you take your first step uphill you realize there’s no way you’ll make it to the top, even if they put a gun to your head. But then you take the second and third steps and start to clamber and scramble up, slide, fall, and start back up again, clinging tooth and nail to the bushes and branches. Stupefied, you sweat and sweat, thinking about nothing except the next step, just one more step...
The anti-tank platoon is scrambling alongside. They are even worse off: my grenade launcher weighs eighteen kilos, while their PTURs - guided anti-tank missiles - weigh forty-two kilos. And Fat Andy whines: ‘Commander, how about we dump one rocket, eh, how about it?’ And the commander, an enlisted lieutenant who also has tears of exertion in his eyes, asks: ‘Come on, Andy, fat ass, what’s the sense in us being up there without rockets, eh? Our infantry are dying up there... ’
Yes, our infantry are dying up there - we crawl and croak our way up, but we keep going.
Later we relieve the lads from the Buinaksk mountain assault brigade who have been living there in a daubed clay shepherd’s hut.
After the luxurious flats of Grozny, with their leather sofas and mirrored ceilings, this crummy barn seemed pitiful. Clay walls, an earth floor and a small window that barely lets in any light. But this was their first real accommodation after months spent sleeping in rat holes and ditches. For seven months they trekked around the mountains, day in, day out, clearing the Chechens from the heights, sleeping where they dropped at night, too tired to get up, and when they awoke, they’d go back up again. They became like Chechens themselves, bearded, unwashed, in soiled tan
k corps jackets, half crazed, full of hatred for everyone and everything. They looked at us with malice in their eyes - our arrival meant the end of their brief respite, that they had to leave their ‘palace’ and head back into the mountains yet again. Ahead of them lay a nine-hour march and then the storming of some strategically important hill. They talked about it lightly - nine hours isn’t so long, usually the march lasts a whole day or even two. We realized that our torment had been a cakewalk compared with what they had to go through. We watched as they left and each one of us felt scared, because soon we would have to follow them. Our heights were already waiting for us.
02/ The River Argun
On 1 March they threw our platoon over to Shatoi. Our task was to hold the bridge across the River Argun. We had no water with us and so we took it from the river. It stank of rotten eggs and had the colour of cement but we drank it anyway, telling ourselves that hydrogen sulphide was good for the kidneys. The river was to us what a desert spring is to the Bedouin. We washed and drank there and took its water to cook with. There were no rebels in this region and our lives assumed a calm, quiet rhythm.
In the mornings we would head down to the river like holiday-makers, stripped to the waist, flowery, plundered towels thrown over our shoulders. We washed and splashed about like kids and then sat around on the rocks and sunbathed, our white bellies turned to the bright winter sunshine.
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