#Echo of war chechen how to

'I was lucky to get a hold back on life,' he says, 'And now I have something to live for.'īut even if he can be optimistic for himself, he is pessimistic about Russia. people can only live on the brink.'īabchenko had two crucial routes back: his family and his work as a journalist. And you somehow need to drag yourself back up again. life loses its flavour, it becomes boring. Survival - that's the only thing in front of you. In an hour you go through so many events, so many life-important events.

'There's nothing like the density of life in wartime. For like any addict, Babchenko said, he had to find a way to recover from 'adrenaline dependency'. But it seems his greatest piece of luck the second time was to find a way to return home fully - body and soul. 'There was no question whether to go or not to go.'Īgain he survived. And seeing as the world didn't accept my body, it returned to where my mind was,' he explains. My body walked around and looked at this world without understanding it. Only my body had come back from the first war. Babchenko believes his real aim was to cement himself in power. Three years later, however, the newly appointed prime minister, Vladimir Putin, ordered the troops back in, saying he needed to stop Islamic terrorism spilling beyond Chechnya's borders. In 1996 Moscow signed a truce with the rebels, which postponed a final decision on Chechnya's status and left it to continue its metamorphosis into a quasi-independent bandit state. The stickiest question is why, after eluding fate during the first war, Babchenko went back - voluntarily - for the second. You need to be as imperceptible as possible. Fate is a very subtle, a very sensitive system. 'If you think 'a year after the war I'll become a writer', then fate will get you - kill you. A soldier, he believes, has the best chance of survival when he no longer cares whether he lives or dies. Babchenko describes soldiers grazing on berries 'like moose' or drinking water tainted with rotting human flesh. Drunk, seemingly deranged bullies drag them out of bed, half-kill them, threaten to rape them and then beat them all over again for daring to have black eyes.īut almost as shocking is the inability of Russia to provide even the basics for its soldiers. One Soldier's War is probably at its most disturbing - and most powerful - when Babchenko describes the younger soldiers cowering in fear of the older men. The Russian army is a dangerous place, even in peace, even miles from the enemy. But at the end of the day it's humiliating to get out of it.' Of course I'd just as happily not have served. He did not need to go: he was at university, which buys time and if time isn't enough a bribe can usually buy exemption. Babchenko hit conscript age when Mother Russia, in the guise of Boris Yeltsin, was sending her sons south to try to prevent Chechen secession. In the 1990s every young man in Russia potentially faced two years' military service (since cut to one). But he also loved books: his favourite subject was war and his favourite book was Erich Paul Remark's All Quiet on the Western Front. He was a normal teenager (if there is such a thing) who liked normal teenage things. They were poor, but so was nearly everyone, especially people who relied on the disintegrating state for their pay packets. As a book, it not only tallies with growing western dismay about life in Russia, but has also earned Babchenko critical comparisons with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Tolstoy's early stories about Russia's 19th century Caucasus wars.īabchenko's background is Muscovite 'working intelligentsia': only child, mother a teacher, father an engineer. These notes became One Soldier's War in Chechnya, his memoir of the Chechen conflict which was published in the UK earlier this month by Portobello Books (translated by Nick Allen).

#Echo of war chechen how to

I didn't think how to make it beautiful to read. 'I never thought it would be published,' he admits. Instead Babchenko presents us with a relentless account of fear, boredom, confusion, filth, cold, disease, hunger, thirst and lingering dread - a world that feels far removed from the gold-embossed bestselling accounts of square-jawed British or American ex-soldiers. No comforting heroes or villains no familiar arc of near-defeat and triumph-against-the-odds. What poured out of him - at night, at work, on the metro - is an unflinchingly un-macho record. The whole horrific experience - he needs to vent it. When a person comes back from war, from prison, from any extreme situation, he has to get it out from inside himself. 'If I hadn't started writing, I might have lost myself to drink. 'Writing was the only thing that helped,' he says of the months following his demob.