TIMOTHY PHILLIPS 

Arkady Babehenko 

ONE SOLDIER'S WAR IN CHECHNYA
Translated by Nick Allen 407pp. Portobeilo. £16.99.
978 1 84627 039 0

One Soldier's War in Chechnya is an alarming and deeply affecting book. For its author, Arkady Babchenko, who will relive these stories for the rest of his days, this is a considerable literary and psychological feat. Its translator, Nick Allen, has skillfully preserved in English a voice that is fiercely intelligent without being intellectual, masculine but not macho.

At the start of a law degree in 1995, eighteen-year-old Babchenko was conscripted into the Russian Army. Scarcely trained, he was sent to an airbase on the Chechen border to await deployment. The treatment that he and his comrades received there, before reaching the front line, is startling. Instead of refresher training or essential briefing, all Babchenko got was abuse, a mixture of organized bullying (the enslavement of new conscripts by older ones that is endemic in the Russian Army) and aggression, untrammeled  by law or civilization. He was kicked and beaten by superiors, who carried out this self-assigned duty with seeming pleasure. With basic assault as the foundation for their attacks, the perpetrators engaged in an aimless search for more ingenious forms of torture as well. Junior conscripts who put their hands in their pockets were punished by having their pockets filled with sand and sewn shut: after a couple of days their groins would erupt in weeping sores.

One night, an older soldier, Said, commanded Babchenko to bring him bananas within two hours. When the author failed, Said beat and tortured him:
… he hits me a long time, for several hours. He does it in bouts; he batters me, then sits down and rests while forcing me to do press-ups. As I do, he kicks me in the back of the head with his heel, and sometimes smacks my teeth from below with his boot.

No wonder Babchenko and his comrades dreamt of being posted to Chechnya. And, bizarrely, the reader also feels some relief when the author is finally sent to the real fighting. The bullying continues but becomes secondary to the struggle to survive against a formidable external enemy. Failure to escape the Chechens had dire consequences: enslavement or a slit throat. In one scene, a young Russian soldier is stabbed in the throat and bleeds slowly to death while his comrades watch, pinned back by Chechen snipers.
As Babchenko's work makes clear, the ordinary soldiers had hardly any understanding of the aims they were fighting for. Politics was always at arm's length, because both politicians and soldiers wanted it that way: readers will be surprised that President Putin does not feature in this book. Corruption and opportunism ensured that the meaning of the war was constantly shifting. Chechens were frequently rearmed gratis by emaciated soldiers, in exchange for food and water. After eating, the Russians would then be attacked with their own weapons:

Thieving is both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing. The soldiers sell cartridges; the drivers sell diesel oil; the cooks sell tinned meat . . . . Regimental commanders truck away vehicle-loads of gear, while the generals steal the actual vehicles themselves.

All of this was as true during the second Chechen war, from 1999, as it was in the first. The structure of Babchenko's book attests to the similarities, with one conflict seamlessly turning into the next in the text.
Babchenko today is a contradictory figure. His book is as powerful a polemic as there can be against the senselessness of war and the moribund values of post-Soviet Russia. Nonetheless, he is aware that the war's impact on his own personality has not been entirely negative. Speaking at the Royal Festival Hall on his book's publication, he said, "I wasn't meant to become the Babchenko I am today, but I like him all the same". Now he uses his considerable talents to campaign for veterans' rights. His years in Chechnya are always the reality, the rest of life he describes as a game.
Not a traditional autobiography, One Soldier's War in Chechnya is instead a series of memories which poured out of the author and onto the page. Often the resulting disjointedness is an apt metaphor for the jarring, dissonant experience of war itself. Only occasionally - particularly in the short opening chapters - is the structure bitty and distracting.
A forced peace has broken out in Chechnya in recent years, but Babchenko knows that the murderous bullying still goes on. His hope for change is slight: this is the system; no one will stop it; most Russians don't want to know. Like Chekhov's gloomy doctors, he - is forced to look decades into the future and even then sees little to be positive about:
Someone would get a beating on the runway and I would sleep with a blanket over my head to keep out the light and muffle the cries and I'd think, great, it wasn't me today. Four years have passed since then and nothing has changed in this army. You could wait another four years and forty more after that and it would still be the same.

 In one scene, a young Russian soldier is stabbed in the throat and bleeds slowly to death while his comrades watch, pinned back by Chechen snipers:
Trong một xen, một người lính "Hồng Quân" bị đâm vào cổ, và máu cứ thế ộc ra, trong khi đồng đội ngắm nhìn, dưới sự canh chừng của du kích bắn sẻ Chechnya