One Soldier’s War in Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko

This book is not an easy read. In it, Arkady Babchenko recounts his periods of service as a Russian soldier engaged in the first and second Chechnyan wars. At eighteen, he was drafted into the army during the first war to fulfill his military service obligations and spent six months in training and about six months fighting. Despite the awful conditions he experienced, he volunteered for the second war and spent another six months fighting in 1999-2000. He explains his return: “It was as if my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul. Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world.”

It is a harrowing account of war in awful conditions. The Russian army is described as abysmally badly organised with minimal training - the young soldiers have only fired weapons once or twice before being sent into action - with incredible levels of bullying and internal violence. Young soldiers are beaten daily with broken noses, ribs, legs usual occurances. Continuous drunkenness is the norm at all levels of the organisation and food supplies are sorely inadequate. In one short chapter a dog called Sharik tagged along with the company until their food supplies ran out and then they killed and ate him.

Babchenko is mobilised to the front. Death is everywhere, torture is commonplace. Babchencko’s prose is clear, unblinking and yet often poetic. He spares his readers nothing, describing the mutilations, diseases, deprivations they all suffered.

On a micro level, the book is a powerful, well-written litany of the horrors of war but on a macro level it remains disjointed without an overriding sense of progression either in the narrator as an individual or in the war situation as a whole. Thinking about this since I finished the book, perhaps this is a true reflection of war. This account shows that there is nothing good about war, nothing enlightening, nothing uplifting, nothing to be learned. The humanity of the soldiers is hidden, suppressed, even the narrator’s. He reveals very little of himself, his family ties, his beliefs, his emotions and again maybe this is a truer reflection of a war situation. Like when Babchenko shoots a missile into a Chechyan home and later discovers he has killed an eight-year-old girl and her grandfather and forces himself to feel nothing.

“And a different soldier had been born in my place, a good one - empty, devoid of thought, with a coldness inside me and a hatred for the whole world. With no past and no future.”

The soldiers trudge on with no higher aim than survival. This confusion, this sense of ‘why are we going through all this?’ which may be the reality of the experience, reflects itself onto the reading experience. Perhaps; in this war, this was amplified even further by the disorganisation, the lack of professionalism of the Russian army which opened the door to barbarism.

The only thing Babchenko can salvage from the wreckage is the close comradeship between soldiers making them “brothers“. And yet one of the most shocking pieces in the book is the detailed account of two days of intensive, horrific torture by the Russion officers of two soldiers caught exchanging a couple of boxes of cartridges with Chechyan children for a bottle of vodka. Although this kind of barter was common among the soldiers, even among the officers, none of them move to defend the soldiers, only sneaking out at night to put a lit cigarette between their lips.

On the jacket, Tibor Fischer compares this book to Catch 22 but, for me, although the prose is certainly faultless and elegant, it lacks the humanity of either Catch 22 or ‘The Things They Carried’ by Tim O’Brien. The narrator comes through the fires of war having lost far more than he ever gained, somehow as a lesser, more bitter person but then, as I wondered above, perhaps this is closer to the truth?

Portobello Books Ltd. New Ed edition (8 Nov 2007) 304pp. ISBN-10: 1846270391