One Soldier's War In Chechnya Read online

  Then the first corpses floated down the Argun towards us. Further upstream, two Niva jeeps carrying retreating rebels had fallen into the ravine. The bodies got washed out of the vehicles and swept downstream. But the first to float into sight was a captured Russian paratrooper, his black and white camouflaged smock contrasting against the murky water. We fished him out, then some officers came to collect him and drove off with him on the back of their truck.

  But the water couldn’t wash them all away, and a few Chechens were stuck in the twisted jeeps. The weather was warm and they would soon start to decompose. We wanted to get them out because they were ruining our water, but the ravine was too deep and steep so we stopped trying.

  When I woke the next morning I went to the water barrel they brought to the kitchen each day. Usually it got emptied quickly, but this time it was full. Ladling out a mug I took the first sip, then realized the water had a tang of dead flesh to it -that’s why no-one was drinking it. I spat it out and put the mug down. Arkasha the sniper looked at me, took the mug, filled it with water, drank and gave it me.

  ‘Come on, what’s wrong with you? Drink!’

  So we kept drinking it, this dead, sulphuric water, but no longer said it was good for our kidneys.

  03/ Chechens

  When we got back to the lookout post, Shishigin nudged me:

  ‘Second floor, first window from the right, see?’

  ‘Yes. You saw it too?’

  ‘Yep.’ He looked at me, biding his time. ‘Chechens.’

  We spotted them by the greenish tinge in the window from their night vision sight.

  Our respective lookout posts were in neighbouring houses, located about fifty metres apart, ours on the third floor, theirs on the second. They were watching us through the night sight and we pinpointed them from the crunch of glass under their feet.

  Neither side fired. By that time we had got to know their tactics pretty well, and sure enough, they kept us under observation until daybreak, after which they fired a couple of rifle grenades and then pulled out. We couldn’t scare them off, because of the comfortable apartment with its huge bed, down pillows and warm blankets that we had picked for our night quarters. Spitting on the war and ignoring security regulations as we hankered after comfort, we had chosen a mousetrap which afforded us no escape route. If it came to a shoot-out, one grenade through the small ventilation window would be enough to take care of us. So we had no choice but to wait and see if they opened fire. And if they did, then which way? Into the room where four of us were sleeping, or at the balcony, where one of us was always on lookout?

  Russian roulette, with the Chechen sniper as the croupier, with odds of four to one on a quick end.

  But they didn’t shoot. Shishigin, who was standing on lookout at dawn, said he heard two short whistles and then the Chechens came down and left.

  The next morning, as day finally broke, curiosity drew Shishigin and me over there. There in the thick layer of dust that covered the apartment were the imprints of army boots and trainers. The booted one, the sniper, sat at the window all the time and surveyed our flat while the other gave cover.

  But they didn’t shoot because their Fly rocket launcher jammed. It happens. The Chechens had brought it in, aimed it and pulled the trigger, but it didn’t work. It still lay there on the kitchen floor where they had discarded it. Another great Russian production flaw - the shoddy work of some metalworker who assembled the launcher had saved our lives.

  Apart from the Fly launcher, there was a small stove in the kitchen. We didn’t have one, so we decided to take this little trophy with us. As we were leaving the apartment block a flare rose from the Chechen side. They caught two inquisitive Russian idiots, and it looked like they were going to take us right there in the block entrance. We skittered back to our house like mountain goats, covering the fifty metres in two sprints, but we didn’t dump the stove. Running into our house we began to laugh like mad, and couldn’t stop roaring for almost half an hour. And at that moment there was no-one closer or dearer to me on earth than Shishigin.

  04/ Chechens II

  I have hardly taken off my boots when a shot rings out. I leap up, grab my rifle and run in my socks to the door, praying that they won’t nail me through it. My heart is pounding like mad and my ears are thumping. I get to the doorway and slam into the wall, back first. I don’t open the door, and wait. Silence. Suddenly I hear Shishigin’s muffled voice:

  ‘Come on you lot, get up one of you!’

  With great difficulty, hopping on one foot, I try to put my boots on, but they resist, crumple up and won’t slide on.

  ‘Hold on, Vanya, I’m coming.’

  What was probably only three seconds seemed to pass like an eternity, and then at last I somehow pull on the boots. Before opening the door I take a few deep breaths, as if preparing to dive into icy water, then I kick the door wide open with my foot and burst into the next room.

  Empty.

  ‘Vanya, where are you?’

  ‘Here, here!’ Pale as a sheet, Shishigin tumbles out of the toilet, buttoning up his trousers as he comes, breathing out hoarsely and gasping: ‘Chechens, below us, the same ones -I was on the bog when I heard them whistle.’

  ‘Shit! You might have thrown a bloody hand grenade at them!’ I am annoyed at him because now we’ll have to go downstairs, where the Chechens are, and a cold fear contorts my stomach.

  ‘I was on the bog!’ Shishigin says again and gives me the hunted look of a beaten dog.

  Slowly, as quietly as possible so the glass doesn’t scrunch underfoot, we go out into the corridor. Each step lasts forever, and in the time it takes to move down the three-metre long eternity of the hall it seems a thousand generations have been born and died on earth and the sun burned out and was born anew. At last we reach the staircase and I crouch down and poke my head round the corner, then whip it back. There doesn’t seem to be anyone on the stairs. I take a longer look round the corner. No-one. The tripwire I set yesterday between the third and fourth steps is undisturbed, which means they didn’t come up. We have to go.

  I motion to Shishigin to go to the opposite side of the stairwell and watch over the lower flight of stairs. He runs across, unslings his rifle and hisses:

  ‘Arkasha, stay there!’

  Moving carefully, my rifle trained on the staircase, I go over to the stairs, a single thought going through my head: ‘Arkasha, don’t go, don’t go... ’ I’m trying to convince myself, but then I take the first step down. ‘Don’t go!’ I go down a few more steps and reach the corner. I am panting and my temples are pounding - this is scary stuff. ‘Don’t go, don’t go, don’t...’ I burst into the apartment, boot open the door to the bedroom -empty. Then the kitchen, no-one, and I go back, realizing that I have wasted time and now have none to spare. I lob a hand grenade into the gaping entrance of the apartment opposite, throw myself to the ground and wait for cries, moans, point-blank firing...

  The blast thunders and then it’s silent. There’s no-one there, they are gone.

  I squat down and pull a pack of Prima cigarettes from my pocket, roll one in my fingers, light it and toss the empty pack. I'm incredibly tired.

  A bead of sweat rolls from under my hat down the bridge of my nose, hangs for a moment from the tip and falls on the cigarette, extinguishing it. I stare dumbly, my hands trembling. It was stupid to go in there on my own, I know. I throw the cigarette away and stand up.

  ‘Shishigin, give me a smoke. They've gone.’

  05/ Yakovlev

  Yakovlev vanished towards evening. He wasn’t the first to go missing. A couple of weeks earlier two soldiers from the 8th company had taken a machine-gun and tried to go home. No-one would have looked for them but the disappearance of a machine-gun in the battalion is a serious matter and the battalion commander, or Kombat, spent days scouring the fields for these two. The OMON paramilitary police found them when they showed up at a block post to ask for food.

  No-one looked for
Yakovlev. The storming of Grozny was underway, the 2nd battalion tried in vain for the third day to take the cross-shaped hospital, suffering high casualties, and we were bogged down for the third day at the first row of houses in the private district. The storming operation was faltering, and we didn’t have time for Yakovlev. They listed him as a deserter, wrote off his rifle as lost in combat and closed the case.

  Again it was the OMON who turned up our missing man during the night, while they were mopping up in the first line. In one cottage cellar they found a mutilated body. Yakovlev. 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.

  06/ The Cow

  We inherited the cow from the Buinaksk brigade when we relieved them in the mountains. Painfully emaciated, it looked like an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp and was about to kick the bucket. She lay for a day, staring blankly at a point on the horizon, unable to even lick the wound on her shoulder left by a PTUR shell fragment.

  On the first evening we put out a big pile of hay for the animal. Her nostrils twitched and her long tongue started to lick at the offering, looking up at us with one eye, unable to believe her luck. Then she began to crunch at the hay and she gorged on it for two days without stopping, not even sleeping. Before us, the paratroopers hadn’t fed her at all. At first she ate lying down, then she stood up.

  Three days later, when she was already walking, Murky managed to squeeze a mug of milk from her udders. It was thin and didn’t taste too good, and it didn’t have a drop of fat, but we drank it like God’s nectar. We drank in turns, a mouthful for each, and were happy to have our cow.

  The next day her nose started to bleed. She was dying, and without looking the cow in the eye we led her to the ravine to finish her off. She was barely able to walk on her weak, buckling legs, and we cursed her for dragging out her own execution like this.

  Odegov led the cow on a rope to the edge of the ravine and turned round and fired at her somewhat hastily, sending the bullet passing through her nose. I heard bone break with a dull thump and crunch, like a side of raw meat being hit with the flat of a spade. The cow staggered, looked at us, realized that we were killing her, and lowered her head submissively.

  Dark, clotted blood gushed from her nose. Odegov took aim a second time and suddenly lowered his rifle, turned round and started striding back up the hill. I caught up with him, took his rifle and came back, and shot the cow point-blank between the ears. Her eyes jerked upwards, as if following the bullet that killed her, then rolled in their sockets, and she slid down the gully.

  We stood at the edge for a long time looking at the dead cow. The blood congealed on her nose and flies crawled up her nostrils and came out of the hole in the back of her head. Then I pulled Odegov’s sleeve.

  ‘It’s only a cow.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘OK.’

  07/ To Mozdok

  It had been raining for a week. The low grey sky was constantly covered with black clouds and the rain didn’t let up for even a minute, only altered its intensity.

  Our kit hadn’t been dry for ages, everything from our sleeping bags to our puttees was soaked. And we were shivering from cold. The advent of the rain had replaced the forty-degree heat with a vile, muddy gunge, and the temperature fell to fifteen degrees Celsius.

  Our dug-out flooded continually. We didn’t have bunk beds and when we came back from sentry duty we would just lie in the cold, squelching mush and sleep all night in the same position: on our backs, trying to keep our noses and mouths above the water.

  In the morning we crawled from the dug-out as if from the bowels of a sunken ship. Making no attempt to shelter from the rain, we stomped through the puddles in our sodden boots, which were instantly caked with great clods of clay.

  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. And 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. Squabbles flared over nothing and instantly escalated beyond control.

  And when I had almost transformed into an animal I was summoned by the company commander.

  ‘Get your kit ready. Your mother has come to see you. Tomorrow you’ll travel with the column to Mozdok.’

  These words instantly separated me from the others. They would stay here in the rain while my torment was over. I was on my way to see my mum in a warm, dry and clean place. And nothing else bothered me about the life of the platoon, about the lives of its men, apart from one thing I’d heard: that after a brief ceasefire the Chechens had started to shoot up our convoys again. As I spent my last night on guard duty and swallowed my tasteless thin porridge in the morning, and as I promised Andy that I would come back, all I could think about was that they had started to shoot up the convoys again.

  08/ The Ninth Neighbourhood

  Before dawn, at around six, the Chechens hit the area with grenade launchers as usual. We are deployed in the private sector, and the nine-storey apartment blocks of the ninth neighbourhood in front of us are occupied by allied Chechen troops commanded by the former Grozny mayor, Bislan Gantamirov, who is fighting on our side.

  They have it worst of all, and already four of them have been wounded, one seriously. They ran back to us and hammered on the gates. ‘Hey, Russians, get up, give us a vehicle, we've got wounded!’

  They lie in the snow on stretchers, covered to the chin with blankets and obviously in great pain, their faces bloodless, jaws clenched and heads tipped back. But they don’t make a sound. Their silence is unnerving as we gently lift them onto our shoulders and we ask one of them, ‘Are you alive?’ He half opens his eyes, looks at us from tormented pupils. Alive.

  We load them onto the armoured carrier, the seriously wounded guy inside and the others on the top. I stand below and help them lift the stretchers. The deputy battalion commander injects them with his own promedol painkiller and two of the Gantamirov troops jump onto the vehicle with them.

  ‘Come on, get a move on,’ shouts one. ‘Do you know where the hospital is in Khankala, I’ll show you the way?’

  Weaving between shell holes on the battered, deserted road, the lone carrier disappears into the dark, urgently racing along with no escort, jolting the wounded as it goes. I think to myself that the one who’s badly injured won’t make it and will die on the way.

  When it starts to get light we occupy the apartment blocks. They are empty and we take them without any fighting. The blocks stand in a square formation, forming an enclosed, protected yard inside. Only in one place is it vulnerable to snipers, and a bullet zips past my nose, taking a few chips out of a concrete wall. But elsewhere you can walk without hiding, and stand up freely without needing to duck down as you move.

  We savour this feeling and the posh apartments with their red furniture, soft sofa beds and mirrored ceilings, savour having taken the houses so easily. The infantry disperses among the flats, searching out the best ones to spend the night in.

  Half an hour later we get shelled by self-propelled guns. I’m standing in the street with the company commander when the first house on the right suddenly shudders and starts to collapse in the centre. A huge split spreads down from the ninth floor, balconies, girders and floor supports spew out and seem to hover in the air, turn over, and then drive themselves into the ground with a thud. Small debris scatters down into the yard after the heavy blocks.

  We don’t know what’s happening and squat down instinctively, crawl behind a rusty, shrapnel-riddled garage and look all around us. Then we realize that it’s fr
iendly fire. The company commander fumbles for the headphones of the radio on my back and starts to call up the battalion commander, or Kombat. I crawl over to the spare radio that’s standing on the open ground, with the commander scrambling after me, still wearing headphones. One after the other, him standing over my head and me crouched between his legs, we shout into the mouthpiece for them to cease firing. Tangled up in the wires and the headphones we forget about the shrapnel - all we can think about is reporting that we are here and that they should halt the shelling, that we must stop them from hitting our guys.

  Infantrymen pour out of the house and stand dumbstruck in the porches, not knowing where to run. The company commander ignores their swearing and shouts at them: ‘Take it easy, just don’t panic, lads.’

  The last to come out of the door is Gilman, lumbering calmly like an elephant.

  ‘No-one’s panicking, sir. We have to get the guys out of here,’ he says.

  The commander tells them all to get back under cover. I take a dozen paces and turn round: he is still standing there, so I go back. I'm a radioman and I have to stay with him.

  Huge 150-millimetre shells weighing more than 30 kilos roar through the air above us and blow up the upper floors. One blast erupts and a whole vertical section of the building vanishes, leaving just rusty steel entrails jutting from the shattered walls. Another shell flies down the middle of the yard and hits the house on the left before it explodes. We drop to the ground and crawl back behind the garage. Several apartments catch fire, the blaze crackles and it starts to get hot. Soon it becomes hard to breathe in the heavy, acrid smoke that rakes our throats.