One Soldier's War In Chechnya

by Arkady Babchenko

  I don’t think they’ll go to jail. Going to the crime scene to carry out a test investigation was impossible and the evidence had all remained there. Moreover, Limonchenko found a good lawyer and paid him a lot of money. They summoned me as a witness in this case, but that was a long

  time ago, maybe two years. Since then, I haven’t heard a word.

  The criminal case opened by the Bolshevo military prosecutor’s office of the Moscow military district under article 338, clause 2 (desertion) and article 226, clause 3 (theft of munitions) was halted through a strange coincidence of circumstances. Because of the amnesty for Chechen rebels announced by the Parliament, Privates Limonchenko and Kryuchkov were released on a written undertaking not to leave town. Even though it was written in black and white that the amnesty did not extend to people who had stolen munitions. It was not possible to find the investigator in charge of this case; he had either been discharged or transferred to Moscow, but then his trail vanished. After a two-year interval the case was sent for completion to the regional prosecutor’s office of the North Caucasus military district.

  ‘No comment. The case is in the final stages,’ say the military prosecutors. ‘All we can say is that we have ample grounds on which to press charges and it falls to a court to pronounce them guilty or not.’

  25/ Chechen Penal Battalion

  No-one liked them, not in the first war or the second.

  The Chechens hated them for the robbery, rape and murder they perpetrated; they never took them prisoner but killed them on the spot after first cutting off their ears and ripping out their tongues.

  Our soldiers hated them for wriggling out of combat, for saving their own skins and for their lies. ‘We do the same work as them but do it better,’ the conscripts complained, ‘so why do they get paid more?’

  And the officers hated them for being uncontrollable, for their drunkenness and stealing, and for shooting them in the back at night.

  They always got sent right into the thick of it. The storming companies who had to attack in the first wave and who got killed first were formed from their ranks. Not because they fought better than anyone else, but because no-one minded much about using them as cannon fodder. If someone has to die, then let it be the worst people you can find.

  They called these combined units penal battalions. At least half of the contract soldiers in them had been ex-criminals who had served time in prison camps.

  Ex-criminals serving in the army are nothing new, all the more so in Chechnya. From the very start of the Caucasus wars the scum of the earth would flock here from all over Russia. The stench of robbery and impunity around them was so strong that it blotted out even the fear of death. How many criminals went to Chechnya back then no-one could count even now. It was quite normal for contract soldiers to have a criminal record. Many of them had sentences hanging over them, and you would meet individuals who had signed a written undertaking not to leave wherever they came from.

  ‘Back in 1995 the situation in the contract-based army service was about the same as it is now with alternative army service. There was no mechanism in place and there was no question of any kind of professional selection,’ says Major Petrenko, a commander of Moscow’s draft commissions. ‘They took anyone they got and only demanded reference documents from the police as a matter of procedure - it didn’t mean anything. Do you want to go and join the slaughter? Be our guest, off you go to die. It was better than sending conscripted boys.’ Making the most of this opportunity, a wave of assorted dregs washed into the army, causing the military to howl with dismay. They immediately hated the contract soldiers, every last one of them. I remember how one battalion commander frowned when the helicopter brought him long-awaited replacements from Khankala:

  ‘What the hell do I need this lot for? They’ll drink vodka for two weeks and scavenge in the ruins, and there’s enough looting going on as it is. And they’ll start dumping their rifles and applying for discharge. They’ll take all their looted junk back home, drink away the money they’ve earned and then come back to Chechnya again.’

  This lot stole everything they could lay their hands on, even in battle. Here’s a typical scene during an attack: the platoon occupies an apartment block and disperses among the floors Five minutes later the unit is already layered like a cocktail in a glass. The conscripts are on the second floor, which is the optimum height: grenades won’t reach you, and if you have to get out of there you’re not too high up. From the third floor up the looters are busy. With their weapons slung over their backs, they rummage through abandoned trunks in strangers’ apartments. Greed burns in their eyes, and they have no time for any fighting. Nothing deters them. The most sought-after items were of course jewellery, but tape recorders, crystal, sets of china and quality clothing disappeared just as readily into their swag bags. One came up to me once with a folded handkerchief in his hand.

  ‘Hey, you’re from Moscow, you’re educated. Tell me, is this gold?’ he asked, producing several lumps of heavy metal from the cloth.

  It was gold. Dental crowns, several of them, one for three teeth in the lower jaw.

  There persists a romantic notion that the most reckless acts of heroism are pulled off by ex-criminals, as if life in the camps had taught them the toughest laws of survival.

  But that’s a long way from the truth. Malice and bravery are different things. In order to be a good soldier you can have no fear of death. You have to be ready to lay down your life for a comrade, or crawl for a wounded man in an open space under sniper fire. But the morality of the criminal world teaches you something else: to save your own skin.

  You can’t force that kind of guy into battle with a rifle butt. He will always find a thousand reasons to stay behind and stoke the stove for the porridge, and if you really go for him he’ll start wailing about a violation of his constitutional rights and apply for a discharge. Fortunately for him, there’s a clause in his contract that says it can be annulled at any time, even in the midst of battle.

  Over the years, the army forces in Chechnya have become a magnet for former camp inmates, only now they don’t go there to loot. There’s nothing left to steal, apart from maybe a few barrels of crude oil. Now it’s the threat of a new prison sentence that drives them there. If you want to lie low there is no better place than Chechnya. And the best thing is that it’s totally legal to avoid prison this way. The criminal code says that the statute of limitations for a crime only applies if the suspect has not evaded the investigation. So what happens if he is also serving the state? And what if he even earns himself a medal? It's the medals that attract the criminals to Chechnya. Once, when we stopped near Shatoi, I had a smoke with an infantryman. He introduced himself as Anton, a sniper from St Petersburg.

  ‘Like hell do I need Chechnya - all you can earn is pennies here now. I’m actually an investigator. I’ve collected so much money in bribes that I could buy myself a house abroad. I have a nice apartment and a foreign car. But there’s a sentence hanging over me. I need to get a medal, and then I’ll qualify for the amnesty.’

  Not only rank and file escape court by going to Chechnya, there are regimental commanders who have done the same thing. Once I was talking to a staff officer from the Moscow district’s military prosecutor’s office. The conversation turned to Chechnya and we tried to list mutual acquaintances:

  ‘What did you say his name was, Dvornikov?’ he asked. ‘Yeah, of course I know him, a colonel, commands a regiment. He’s one of our clients. We’ve been working on him for some time. But we’re very unlikely to finish his case because he got promoted in Chechnya and has some medals now.’

  *

  The ex-criminals bring cruelty with them to the army, and their main characteristics are bitterness and greed. I remember how they made a captured Chechen run across the minefield in Chernorechye. It was the same field that was littered with the bodies of hundreds of Basayev’s men after their ill-fated exit from Grozny. The Chechen brought the infantry weapons,
drugs and money, and they sent him out into the field again and again to go through the pockets of the dead. The prisoner made three trips, enriching his captors by thirty thousand dollars, and then an anti-personnel mine tore off half his foot. They shot him after that.

  The worst thing is that the ex-criminals infect the others. We had a conscript who killed a Chechen for effect, took him to the dam and shot him. Later he boasted, ‘I just shot down a Chechen’, failing to understand that killing a one-legged prisoner doesn’t make you a soldier.

  Another soldier in my regiment, Sanya Darykin, was just a normal guy when we got called up. We served together, defended ourselves together from the dembels, and mopped the floors side by side. Then after three months he went absent without leave and stole a car. Seventy days in a disciplinary battalion turned him into a completely different person. He no longer acknowledged us, his fellow soldiers, and nor did he acknowledge the dembels. He gathered a little gang of others who had done time like him and only associated with them. His favourite entertainment was to make young soldiers crawl through the heating pipe under the barrack ceiling after lights out. Those who didn’t make it through in fifteen seconds took a sound thrashing.

  After four months Sanya went down the tube completely. The next time he went absent without leave, he and another guy robbed a man after they’d first smashed him unconscious with a metal pipe.

  People think that dedovshchina is a symptom of a broadly conscript-based army and that you can avoid it by switching to a contract-based system. But units that consist entirely of contract soldiers have existed for a long time now, and there it’s exactly the same. Only it’s the criminal elements rather than the older recruits who assume the role of bully.

  I saw with my own eyes how an orderly, a former engineer with a graduate degree, mopped the barracks with a rag, getting ready for the next detail, while some tattooed ‘Granddad’ soldier spurred him on with kicks.

  The army has been living according to prison-camp rules for a long time. A male collective in a confined space inevitably assumes a prison’s model of existence. It’s a universal truth -the strong always push around the weak, and anyway, someone has to mop the latrines.

  To create an army with a human rather than a criminal face, you have to apply a few axioms that are as obvious as they are impossible to apply. A soldier should serve, and cleaning the latrines should be the job of voluntarily employed cleaners. A soldier should be well paid and afraid to lose his job. There should be professional selection, just as they have in cosmonauts’ schools, and a speeding fine should be a black mark on a soldier’s career. A soldier is inviolable, and any violence against him should be punishable by law. Just as any act of violence by a soldier outside of his duty should be punished with a jail sentence too.

  But this is clearly a utopia.

  26/ Operation 'Life' Continues

  No-one returns from the war. Ever. Mothers get back a sad semblance of their sons - embittered, aggressive beasts, hardened against the whole world and believing in nothing except death. Yesterday’s soldiers no longer belong to their parents. They belong to war, and only their body returns from war. Their soul stays there.

  But the body still comes home. And the war within it dies gradually, shedding itself in layers, scale by scale. Slowly, very slowly, yesterday’s soldier, sergeant or captain transforms from a soulless dummy with empty eyes and a burnt-out soul into something like a human being. The unbearable nervous tension ebbs away, the aggression simmers down, the hatred passes, and the loneliness abates. It’s the fear that lingers longest of all, an animal fear of death, but that too passes with time.

  And you start to learn to live in this life again. You learn to walk without checking the ground beneath your feet for mines and tripwires, and step on manholes on the road without fear, and stand at your full height in open ground. And you go shopping, talk on the phone and sleep on a bed. You learn to take for granted the hot water in the taps, the electricity and the central heating. You no longer jump at loud noises.

  You start to live. At first because that’s how it’s worked out and you have stayed alive, you do it without gaining much joy from life; you look at everything as a windfall that came your way through some whim of fate. You lived your life from cover to cover in those hundred and eighty days you were there, and the remaining fifty odd years can’t add anything to that time, or detract from it.

  But then you start to get drawn into life. You get interested in this game, which isn’t for real. You pass yourself off as a fully fledged member of society, and the mask of a normal person grows onto you, no longer rejected by your body. And those around you think you are just the same as everyone else.

  But no-one knows your real face, and no-one knows that you are no longer a person. Happy, laughing people walk around you, accepting you as one of their own, and no-one knows where you have been.

  But that doesn’t bother you any more. You now remember the war as some cartoon horror movie you once saw, but you no longer recognize yourself as one of its characters.

  You don’t tell anyone the truth any more. You can’t explain what war really is to someone who has never been there, just as you can’t explain green to a blind person or a man can’t know what it’s like to give birth. They simply don’t have the necessary sensory organs. You can’t explain or understand war - all you can do is experience it.

  But you’re still waiting for something all these years. God knows what, though, you simply can’t believe that it ends just like that, without any consequences. You’re probably waiting for someone to shed some light on it all, for someone to come up to you and say, ‘Brother, I know where you’ve been. I know what war is. I know what you’ve been fighting for.’

  That’s very important, to know why and what for. Why the brothers the war gave you had to die? Why people were killed, why they fired on goodwill, justice, faith and love, crushed children and bombed women? Why the world needed to lose that girl I saw back on the runway in Mozdok, with her smashed head and a bit of her brain lying in an ammo box next to her? Why?

  But no-one tells you. And then you, yesterday’s soldier, sergeant or captain, start to explain it to yourself. You take a pen and paper and produce the first phrase as you start to write. You still don’t know what it will be, a short story, a poem or a song. The lines come with difficulty, each letter tearing your body like a shard being pulled from a wound. You feel this pain physically as the war comes out of you and onto paper, shaking you so that you can’t see the letters. You are back there again and death once more rules everything, the room fills with moaning and fear, and once again you hear the big guns, the screams of the wounded and people being burnt alive, and the whistle of mortar shells falling towards your prone back.

  A drum beats and a band on a sultry parade ground plays ‘Farewell, Slavs’, and the dead rise from their graves and form up, a great number of them, everyone who was dear to you and was killed, and you can already spot familiar faces: Igor, Vaseline, Four-Eyes the platoon commander... They lean towards you and their whispering fills the room: ‘Go on, brother, tell them how we burnt in the carriers! Tell them how we cried in surrounded block posts in August 1996, how we whimpered and begged them not to kill us as they pinned us to the ground with their feet and slit our throats! Tell them how boys’ bodies twitch when bullets hit them. You survived only because we died there. Go on, they should know all this! No-one should die before they know what war is!’

  And tinged with blood, the written lines appear one after the other. Vodka is downed by the litre while death and madness sit beside you, nudging you and correcting your pen.

  And there you are, yesterday’s soldier, sergeant or captain, concussed a hundred times, shot to pieces, patched-up and reassembled, half crazed and stupefied, and you write and write and whine with helplessness and sorrow, and tears pour down your face and stick in your stubble. And you realize that you should not have returned from the war.

  27/ I am a Remind
er

  About a million military personnel passed through Chechnya in the ten years after the start of the first war in 1994. That’s the population of a large city. Fifty divisions of seasoned soldiers who bring their philosophy, the philosophy of war, back to civilian life with them when they return.

  Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant! - Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you!

  At the age of eighteen they had already killed men who were sometimes older than their fathers, and they saw how these grown men died from the bullets unleashed by their hands. There were no voices of authority, and there was no God either. They were ready for anything. There were no women in their world, no children, no old men, no sick people, no cripples. There were just goals: dangerous ones, safe ones, and ones with potential.

  Three of them meet and sit in the subway near my metro station every morning. They have five medals between them, six crutches, two artificial limbs and one leg. And a common hatred for the whole world. They’ve been coming here for a few years now to sing songs, and they are always the same songs in the same order. They sing terribly, but that doesn’t bother them. They hate the people they are singing for.

  They see the world from below, and not just because they only have half of their bodies left, but because half of their souls are gone too. They’re closer to the spit-drenched asphalt than to people’s faces. They no longer have the strength to get up and start a new life on plastic legs, and no longer wish to. These young men don’t want to try to keep up with life any more. All they want is for the war to last forever, and for them to be part of it.

  I sit on the ground with them in the subway. On the scratched marble stand a bottle of vodka and a soldier’s mug, and beside them a packet of cigarettes and some matches. For ‘furnishings’, one of them brought a travelling rug, a small cushion to sit on and a tape player. When his two comrades leave, he stays there on his own and plays one cassette of Afghan and Chechen songs until evening. He doesn’t look homeless; he’s clean, shaven, his hair is neatly cut, and his camouflage fatigues are washed and pressed. Nor is he begging. There’s a small bowl in front of him but it just kind of lies there on its own. If people want to they can drop a coin in; if not, they just carry on. He couldn’t care less. He doesn’t say thanks to the first type and he doesn’t abuse the second. He just sits there, listens to music and smokes. He’s not here. His column left five years ago and he stayed with it.