One Soldier's War [Hardcover]

Arkady Babchenko (Author), Nick Allen (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 21, 2008

One Soldier’s War is a visceral and unflinching memoir of a young Russian soldier’s experience in the Chechen wars that brilliantly captures the fear, drudgery, chaos, and brutality of modern combat. An excerpt of the book was hailed by Tibor Fisher in the Guardian as “right up there with Catch-22 and Michael Herr’s Dispatches,” and the book won Russia’s inaugural Debut Prize, which recognizes authors who write “despite, not because of, their life circumstances.” In 1995, Arkady Babchenko was an eighteen-year-old law student in Moscow when he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya. It was the beginning of a torturous journey from naïve conscript to hardened soldier that took Babchenko from the front lines of the first Chechen War in 1995 to the second in 1999. He fought in major cities and tiny hamlets, from the bombed-out streets of Grozny to anonymous mountain villages. Babchenko takes the raw and mundane realities of war—the constant cold, hunger, exhaustion, filth, and terror—and twists it into compelling, haunting, and eerily elegant prose. Acclaimed by reviewers around the world, this is a devastating first-person account of war by an extraordinary storyteller.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If you haven't yet learned that war is hell, this memoir by a young Russian recruit in his country's battle with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, should easily convince you. And yet Babchenko, who was drafted in 1995 as a second-year law student for the first Chechnya campaign, actually volunteered for the second one in 1999 for reasons even he is hard put to explain. Written shortly after his discharge from the army, the book burns with the need to tell of his personal ordeal and that of his fellows as young, innocent and woefully inexperienced grunts condemned to a miserable life ruled by shell-shocked superiors and perpetual threats. Here there are no good guys or moral high purpose—No one, from the regimental commander to the rank and file soldier, Babchenko assures us, understands why he is here; one fights only for the fellow soldier next to him. Babchenko, now a journalist, demonstrates genuine literary ability, especially in the earlier vignette-like chapters, but readers will glean little about the conflict's political and historical context. Redundancy weakens a narrative that otherwise would have benefited from brevity. (Feb.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Thomas de Waal

All wars pervert language and our sense of reality, but Russia's war in Chechnya was especially grotesque.

In 1994, in the most opportunistic fashion, President Boris Yeltsin sent the Russian army to crush a secessionist government in the southern province of Chechnya. Ostensibly, the army's task was to "restore constitutional order" and "disarm bandits." But to correspondents covering the conflict, it was obvious that Yeltsin's decision would be a catastrophe, for one reason above all others: The Russian armed forces were a frightening rabble of unruly men.

Far from restoring constitutional order, the soldiers abused every article of Russia's young constitution, looting, raping and killing in what was supposed to be part of their own country. One day in 1995, I met a young Chechen businessman who explained how the armed forces were fulfilling the second part of Yeltsin's orders, the "disarming" of the populace. He rummaged through a wardrobe in his house and pulled out a wad of $100 bills -- $5,000 in all -- that he said he had agreed to pay two soldiers for a consignment of Russian army snipers' rifles, grenade-launchers and ammunition (which would, of course, pass quickly into the hands of Chechen insurgents).

In One Soldier's War, his memoir of Russian army life, Arkady Babchenko confirms that this kind of sale was rife. He describes how two new recruits were beaten, tortured and expelled from his unit for selling ammunition through the fence of their base to buy vodka. But their real mistake was not that they traded with the enemy. It was that they were new:

"We don't watch the beating. We have been beaten ourselves and it has long ceased to be of any interest. Nor do we feel particularly sorry for the gunners. They shouldn't have gotten caught. . . . They have seen too little of the war to sell bullets -- only we are entitled to do that. We know death, we've heard it whistling over our heads and seen how it mangles bodies, and we have the right to bring it upon others. And these two haven't. What's more, the new recruits are strangers in our battalion, not yet soldiers, not one of us. But most of all we are upset that we can no longer use the gap in the fence."

At moments like this, One Soldier's War evokes Catch-22 or, closer to the source, the savage ironies of Isaac Babel's tales of the 1919-21 Russian-Polish war, Red Cavalry.

Babchenko went to war having learned Morse code but not how to use a gun. He and his fellow conscripts were systematically hazed and humiliated by senior soldiers; they sold their boots for cabbage pies and treated a stray dog as a lucky feast; they were filled with hatred and nihilism:

"We stopped caring for ourselves, no longer washed, shaved or brushed our teeth. After a week without soap and water our hands cracked and bled continually, blighted by eczema in the cold. We hadn't warmed ourselves by a fire for a whole week because the damp reeds wouldn't burn and there was nowhere to gather firewood in the steppe. We began to turn wild as the cold and wet and filth drove from us all feelings apart from hatred, and we hated everything on earth, including ourselves."

The memoir, by turns horrific, sad and funny, fills a big gap by providing us with the first-person experiences of an articulate Russian soldier. As one tale of savagery follows another, however, the story becomes increasingly frustrating to the reader who knows the Russian political context. The end of one war, a two-year interlude and the start of a second war are barely registered as the narrative becomes war-without-end, totally enclosed within a soldier's helmet and a company of men.

We never learn why Babchenko, a conscript in the first Chechen war, from 1994 to 1996, volunteered to fight again in 1999. And there are even more troubling omissions. One is President Vladimir Putin, who -- in contrast to his predecessor, the bumbling Boris Yeltsin -- never is mentioned by name. The other is the civilian population of Chechnya. The soldiers routinely used the word "Chechens" to mean rebel fighters, the enemy. Babchenko suffered mental torment when it became clear he ordered artillery fire that killed an 8-year-old girl and her grandfather, but usually he sounds strangely uninterested in the suffering of the Chechen civilians, the main victims of Yeltsin's and Putin's wars.

War is not just an existential experience for young men. It is the ultimate test for a society, forcing its citizens to ask if they can trust their government to dispense death in their name. That is a question Babchenko never addresses in this harrowing but rather self-absorbed memoir.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802118607
• ISBN-13: 978-0802118608
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #738,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting. A modern classic., January 29, 2008

By 

Alexander F. Remington (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Soldier's War (Hardcover)

Arkady Babchenko is a journalist, but he came to that career after having served 7 years in both Chechen campaigns. In his introduction, he explains that he has changed some names, reported some events he only heard about but didn't see, created composite characters out of several, and changed the timeline of certain events in the telling of the stories, as he tried to bring all the stories together to form a book. As it is, the stories are disjointed and disconnected, some incredibly short and some extremely long, each an interlude in an interminable conflict. Yet they come together to sketch a frightening, hauntingly fractured portrait of a war that is otherwise not well known in the West.

Babchenko's episodic style seems to recall, perhaps quite consciously, the greatest Russian novel by a war journalist, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry. Both are unflinchingly brutal in their descriptions of human decay, moral and physical, of the blood and filth that attaches to bodies in conflict, and the corrupt souls that flock to it. He says multiple times that no one can be made to understand war if they haven't seen it, and that every soldier who served in Chechnya left their life there; the book is a personal catharsis for a man who cannot leave behind what he took from the battlefield.

For anyone who reads it, it's a profoundly moving attempt to explain why.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The war in Chechnya through a Russian soldier's eyes, December 10, 2008

By 

T. Kunikov (United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: One Soldier's War (Hardcover)

Arkady Babchenko's book about his participation in the wars in Chechnya was a rare find for me. I've been greatly interested in these modern and current wars but the literature on them is quit limited and usually comes with a bias/agenda. Accounts from the soldiers themselves are rare, as rare as those from the Soviet-Afghan war. Such an account will more than likely come with a bias of its own, but there is a distinct difference between a primary source (an eyewitness account in this case) and a secondary source with an agenda. Since, in this case, the author is regularly critical of both the government and military high command, the majority of this book simply deals with what it takes for a soldier to survive such a war.

For those interested in this account, you should be warned it is not an easy read. War is never glamorous, and the type of war Russian soldiers found themselves in during the Chechen conflict regularly involved atrocities, torture, wanton destruction and murder. That being said, the book is separated into three parts. The first part consists of mini-chapters, 1-3 pages each, with no real linear narrative to connect them to each other. Just quick "sound bytes" of what war was like. These quick glimpses into the war are probably what stayed with the author long after he had returned home. Arkady was drafted and participated in the first Chechen war, then volunteers for the second. He claims that while his body may have left the war his soul had stayed. The overall translation is good, but not great, as there are a few mistakes and omissions which tend to take away from the storyline(s). But this can be overlooked as some of the events recalled here are simply too powerful to forget, more than once I had to reread entire paragraphs just to make sure I understood what the author was saying.

The period of time spent in Mozdok is eye opening. Hard as it might be to believe, soldiers do go through a hazing process when they first arrive in the army. It was the same during the Soviet Union and it seems to have lasted after the fall of the USSR. Most of the men in my family served in the Soviet Army and quite a few had something to say about the hazing process. Granted, I have never heard of the extremely barbaric experiences described here, but that might be because when my family members served the Soviet Union was not at war. But it isn't hard to believe that such beatings, torture, and humiliation took place on a regular basis if you have been keeping up with news coming out of Russia. Suicides by soldiers have been quite high and many take place because boys of 18, 19, or 20 simply cannot take being beaten on a regular basis for months on end. The author explains how he learned to deal with it or try to avoid it, some of his friends went AWOL, while another spent time in a hospital after suffering a broken finger during his latest beating. The chaotic situation the regiment he belonged to is also telling of the time. The mid 1990s were hard on Russia and her citizens. Corruption was widespread and few cared about anyone but themselves. Soldiers sold weapons and ammunition to the same Chechens that used said weapons and ammunition to then kill Russian soldiers in Chechnya, everyone was looking out for themselves.

I won't go into details about the many other stories you'll find within the pages of this book but suffice it to say, it's worth your time if you have an interest in what someone serving in the current Russian Army might go through. While each story is relative to the author and should not be generalized, the fact that such events can occur only speak to the severity of the situation young Russian boys might have found themselves in during the first and second Chechen Wars.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Horror, March 23, 2008

By 

H. Feifs "Friend of Earls" (Durham, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Soldier's War (Hardcover)

Soldiers War details hell on earth in a clear laconic voice of someone who was there and now can never leave. The descriptions of the war are so graphic and the detailing of the confusion of military and political leadership are simply chilling. The CIA was wrong about the evil empire's military prowess, I think all the Russians hoped to do was absorb enough bullets from the West and walk in with the remainder.
Worth a close read.