The Wall Street Journal-20080122-Hell on the Edge of Paradise
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Hell on the Edge of Paradise
One Soldier's War
By Arkady Babchenko
(Grove Press, 395 pages, $25)
For 400 years, Russian troops have done their best to subdue Chechnya, a small nation in the wild and beautiful Caucasus mountains, closer to Baghdad than to Moscow. During World War II, Stalin had its Muslim population rounded up and sent in cattle cars to the east, for fear they would collaborate with the invading Germans. They weren't allowed to return during his lifetime. Unsurprisingly, when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Chechens seized the opportunity and declared themselves an independent republic. Thus began a monstrous war that in somewhat milder form continues to this day.
A million young Russians have passed through the Chechen meat grinder. Among them was Arkady Babchenko, a Muscovite who seems to have a yen for the military life. For one thing, he allowed himself -- in 1995, during the First Chechen War -- to be conscripted, a fate avoided by 80% of those called up and one that costs the lives of 1,000 young Russian men a year from accident, murder and suicide. For another, he actually volunteered, in 1999, for a second tour of duty. Clearly he got stuck on the life, though from the evidence of his memoir it's hard to understand why.
Here is his wake-up call in the barracks at Mozdok, a garrison town near Chechnya's northern border, involving Mr. Babchenko and two of his comrades: "The next moment someone kicks me off the bed and I land on the floor. Osipov lands on top of me right after. 'Get up, bastard!' someone shouts above me. We leap to our feet like madmen and draw ourselves to attention. Osipov immediately gets punched in the jaw and I get a kick in the ear. As I fall I manage to glimpse Zelikman having his head smashed against the bed frame, then I get punched in the solar plexus and I hit the floor, completely dazed and gasping for air."
So it goes in the Russian army, where colonels beat majors, captains beat lieutenants and sergeants beat privates. Most savage of all, second-year conscripts torment the newcomers, of which Mr. Babchenko, early in his memoir, is one. The "granddads," he explains, "regard us as their personal slaves and do what the hell they like with us. . . . You either hang yourself or take it in the face -- that's your entire choice." At that, he was lucky. The men in the engineering barracks nearby were routinely beaten with shovels.
In their eye-popping detail and near-perfect dramatic arcs, some of Mr. Babchenko's stories read more like fiction than journalism. But the essence of the book can probably be taken at face value. A 1994 report from the Russian Academy of Science estimated that a Russian conscript had an 80% chance of being beaten by his superiors, and the ill- preparedness of the average Russian soldier is well documented. "Shorn-headed boys," Mr. Babchenko says of himself and his comrades, " . . . we were herded into this war and killed by the hundred. We didn't even know how to shoot; we couldn't kill anyone, we didn't know how." He had fired a rifle just twice before going to Chechnya.
In the mayhem that is the Russian army, it would be too much to hope that the troops treat the Chechens any better than they treat each other, and they don't. The Muslims, of course, return the favor. Here is how Yakelov, Mr. Babchenko's fellow recruit, died: "The rebels had slit him open like a tin of meat, pulled out his intestines and used them to strangle him while he was still alive. On the neatly whitewashed wall above him, written in his blood, were the words Allahu akbar -- God is great."
Astonishingly, Mr. Babchenko volunteered to return to Chechnya as a contract soldier -- Russia's unfortunate substitute for the volunteers who serve in most Western armies. The kontraktniki, as they are called, have turned out more like self-interested mercenaries than professional soldiers -- "the scum of the earth," he says of them. "They stole everything they could lay their hands on, even in battle." Volunteering to join their ranks seems madness, but war and the military do exert a fascination, on some men anyhow. "Maybe war is the greatest narcotic of all," Mr. Babchenko suggests at one point.
Or perhaps he was seduced by the beauty of this southern land, so different from his native, wintry Moscow: "The sun is shining brightly," he says of a day waiting at Mozdok airport, watching helicopters ferrying troops into combat and bringing back bodies in silver bags, "the birds are singing and the steppe overwhelms with the scent of lush grass and apricots. . . . We can't believe that they brought us to the edge of paradise, with its tang of apricots, only to wrap us in silver sacks."
"One Soldier's War," translated from the Russian into idiomatic English by Nick Allen, is a gripping narrative and a sobering one. For all the horrors he describes, Mr. Babchenko doesn't seem to intend a simple antiwar message; nor does he judge the moral rightness of the Chechen war. The book itself comes garlanded with comments comparing it to "All Quiet on the Western Front" and other masterpieces of combat literature. Though not a masterpiece itself, it certainly deserves a place in that notable literary tradition, if only for showing us that war, up close, could be as appalling toward the end of the 20th century as it was at the beginning.
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Mr. Ford is the author, most recently, of "Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942" (2007).
