He is an unlikely hero, as heroes often are. Arkady Babchenko, born in Moscow,
the only son of a middle-class family, wanted to be a lawyer. But in
November 1995, in his second year of law studies, he was conscripted into
the Russian army and sent to Chechnya.
There, as a soldier, he encountered killings, beatings, starvation and sheer
terror, all the brutalities and humiliations of war. Yet a few years later,
after graduating, he was irresistibly drawn back to fight a second time in
the bitter conflict in the tiny republic in the north Caucasus that was
trying to break away from the Russian Federation; this time he went as a
volunteer soldier.
“Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world,” he says. He cannot
otherwise explain why he volunteered. “Maybe because my past was there, a
large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that
first war, but not my soul.”
In Chechnya something happened to him as he stood on the edge of humanity: the
war was dehumanising but it moulded his manhood. It taught him to be a
survivor and, he says, it made him a completely different person.
“When I returned from the war, my mother did not get back her son,” he says.
“The Arkady Babchenko who went to war does not exist any more. I am a new
man with different interests, different friends, a different outlook on
life. I am not happy that the war happened in my life, but I have no
regrets.”
Chechnya cost thousands of lives on both sides. Horror was everywhere. Round
the main square of one village were large crosses upon which Russian
soldiers had been crucified and castrated.
In retaliation Russian troops herded all the men they could find into the
square, threw them down in piles and hacked at them. In half a day the whole
village was castrated, then the battalion moved out.
But many of Babchenko's comrades were killed, not by their Chechen enemies but
by the brutal conduct of their own Russian officer corps who starved and
beat the young conscripts, suppressing everything that was human in them,
destroying their personality and individuality, treating them, he says, no
better than slaves.
That Babchenko, now 30, is alive at all to tell this grim tale is a constant
puzzle to him. Tall and slender, with stubble on his chin, he has melancholy
brown eyes that still have the stare of a man who has seen death at close
hand. He suffers survivor’s guilt.
He was having coffee in Soho last week after readings at London’s South Bank
Centre from his acclaimed book on the conflict, One Soldier’s War in
Chechnya, and admits that while he does not miss war, without its extremes
of highs and lows it has left everything else flat.
“You would imagine that this trip to Britain would impress me and have an
impact on me,” he says. “Yet it is not happening. Of course war was the
lowest point as well as the highest in my life. Because I had buried all my
sensations there I am totally immune to anything now. I have slowly regained
some of the feelings but not all of them, so my senses are not all there.”
He thinks he is suffering from the same emptiness described by some survivors
from Stalin’s gulags – “this totally destructive, negative experience which
wipes out everything in you”.
More and more these days, Babchenko is recognising that just being alive is a
gift. He was a colleague of the late Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned
Russian journalist and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin’s policies
in Chechnya, who was murdered just over a year ago. He remains deeply
affected by her killing.
Politkovskaya, 48, had been working on an article about torture in Chechnya.
Her still unsolved murder – she was found shot dead in the lift of her
Moscow apartment block – had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
Like Babchenko she worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper).
Although he says that he has not received death threats Babchenko, also an
ardent Putin critic, admits that he now wonders how safe he is in a Russia
where more than a dozen journalists have been murdered in recent years.
This and more makes him fear for Putin’s Russia. “I think it is hanging on a
brink of an incredible precipice,” he says. “It has not yet fallen to the
bottom. But it has not quite got out.
“Russia’s problem is that it is too big. It is also its saving grace. There is
so much inertia because of its size that the upheavals and perturbations are
absorbed by this enormous body of the country.
“I do think it will slowly emerge. You can see the signs of an emerging civil
society but Putin is pushing Russia down, trampling it into the mud even
further. That is the logic of his actions.”
But, he says, the West should not be frightened of Russia, for all the
aggressive rhetoric from the Kremlin. “Rather we, not the West, should be
the ones to be frightened of Russia. No Russian tanks will ever enter
London, Paris or Berlin.”
Moreover, he says that the Russian army is no longer a good fighting army. It
was at its most professional, well trained and combat experienced in 1989
when it withdrew from Afghanistan. But the best army officers resigned over
Chechnya after 1995. They felt betrayed that the high command had sold them
and gone into the conflict just to make money. There were no high ideals
worth fighting for.
In Chechnya, he writes, thieving was both the foundation of the war and its
reason for continuing: “Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to
desperation by constant underfunding, half crazed with hunger and a lack of
accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences,
regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army
but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from
the dictates of jackals that run it.”
He tells how the soldiers sold cartridges, the drivers sold diesel oil, the
cooks sold tinned meat and the battalion commanders sold the soldiers’ food,
while the regimental commanders trucked away vehicle-loads of equipment and
the generals stole the actual vehicles themselves. Many Russian soldiers, he
believes, were killed by bullets and guns that their desperate comrades had
sold to the Chechens for food.
One day, he writes, two recruits were caught selling ammunition through the
wire to Chechen children for vodka and came in for specially sadistic
treatment. After a savage beating they were put in a pit for hours, then
taken out, suspended by a rope from a makeshift gallows for a day and a
half, then they had their toes wired to a hand-driven electric generator.
“Afterwards the armaments officer unties the ropes and they fall to the ground
like sacks of flour. They can’t stand or lift their swollen arms. Their
hands have gone black and their fingers are twisted,” Babchencko writes.
These days Babchenko does not maintain links or contacts with the comrades he
fought alongside: “I don’t want to see the people whom I saw being beasts
and they don’t want to see me because we both experienced this animal state
back then in Chechnya. We have gone our different ways and the things that
unite us are not the best things in our lives by far.”
But, in another way, he cannot completely let go of his military past. He runs
a hugely successful website and a magazine written by Russian war veterans –
a copy of which he has brought with him to London – that tries to reflect,
analyse and do something about the war that so changed their lives.
The cover of its latest issue is the cemetery at Bogorodskoye, 30 miles from
Moscow, where all the unidentified Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya are
buried after years stored in a refrigerator. The magazine and website are
filled with their stories, diaries and songs.
Paradoxically it is for these things and not his remarkable book, which has
been so acclaimed in the West, that Babchenko is best known in Russia. Here
his book is being compared with All Quiet on the Western Front and the best
writings on war. In Russia, he says, no one cares. Nor perhaps should they.
“In war,” he writes, “there is a breed of people who, like bears that have
tasted human flesh for the first time, will keep killing to the end. They
look normal enough, but when it comes down to it all they can think about is
plunging themselves into another slaughter.”
If another war happens, he says that he will go back: “But I will not be
armed. I will go as a journalist. This is my work now.”
