Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose (Excerpts From One Soldier's War by Arkady Babchenko)

Arkady Babchenko was nineteen in 1995 when, as a second-year law student, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in the First Chechen War. After the war ended less than a year later, he returned to Moscow and finished his studies, but after the Second Chechen War started he volunteered to go back. As he explains in the preface of the book he wrote about his experience in Chechnya: “I have no answer to why I went there again. I don’t know. I just couldn’t help it. I was irresistibly drawn back there. Maybe it was 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. Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world.” I thought about this book again recently, after people complained because the New York Times had published a piece on a Russian conscript who died in Ukraine and his mother. As many people have noted, a lot of the dysfunction we have seen in the Russian army since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War is reminiscent of what happened during the Chechen Wars, so Babchenko’s book is useful if you want to understand what is happening in Ukraine at the moment. Indeed, while the events he described happened more than 20 years ago and Russia has changed a lot during that period, not a lot seems to have changed in the Russian army. The book is also worth reading for its literary qualities, it’s really one of the finest war memoirs I have read, so for all those reasons I thought I would share some excerpts here.

In the first excerpt, Babchenko talks about his experience during the First Chechen War at the military base in Mozdok, a town in North Ossetia. He describes the vicious and relentless bullying, known as dedovshchina, that he and his fellow conscripts endured at the hands of older conscripts and officers while they were stationed over there:

The first time I really got beaten up was on 9 May. Victory Day. All hell was let loose in our barracks that time.

The reconnaissance boys kicked us out of our beds and beat us the whole night. Towards morning they got tired of that and ordered us to do squats on the floor. 'You, count,' Boxer told me, and I started to count aloud. Osipov and I did more than the others -384. We sat down, pressed up tightly against each other, and our mingled sweat ran down our legs, dripped onto the bare floorboards and soon formed a pool beneath us. Andy also dripped pus and blood into the mix as his sores opened up again. We carried on for an hour until Boxer got bored of this and knocked us down with two sharp punches.

From that day onward I got beaten by everyone, from privates to the deputy regiment commander, Colonel Pilipchuk, or Chuk, as we called him for short. The only person I didn't get beaten by was a general, maybe because we didn't have any in our regiment.

It's night. I am sitting on the barracks porch, smoking and watching the attack planes accelerating and taking off on the runway. There's no way I can go back to the barracks

- by evening I'm supposed to bring Timokha 600,000 rou-bles that I don't have and have no way of getting. I get 18,000 roubles a month, but the most I can buy for that is ten packs of cheap cigarettes. Inflation is rampant in the country and money is worth less and less all the time, just as our lives are.

Yakunin and Ginger know where there are 600,000 to be had but they won't tell. They'll get out of here soon; anyone who manages to lay his hands on money will get away from this regiment, this lousy runway where smoke-scorched helicopters land all the time. We are inseparable from this field and I have already realized that sooner or later we will all end up on it, waiting to fly to Chechnya.

Fourteen members of our company are AWOL, absent without leave. Young conscripts flee in their droves, heading straight from their beds into the steppe, barefoot and wearing only their long johns, unable to withstand the nightly torment any longer. Even our lieutenant, who was called up for two years after he graduated from college, did a runner. There are only eight of us left, us five and three local boys - Murky, Pinocchio (or Pincha) and Khariton. We live together in the reconnaissance company, and the recon regard us as their personal slaves and do what the hell they like with us.

I spit a tobacco grain onto the asphalt. My spit tastes of salt and blood; my teeth were busted loose ages ago and wobble in my mouth. I can't eat solid food and have trouble even chewing bread. When they give us rusks in the canteen I only eat the soup. We're all the same. We can't chew and we can't breathe in properly because our chests have been so battered by the fists of the dembels - the recruits on their last six months before demobilization - that they became one huge bruise. We inhale carefully, taking only quick short breaths.

'Only the first six months is tough in the army,' Pincha says. 'After that you don't feel the pain.'

They brought us to this unit only three weeks ago, but it already seems an eternity.

Damn, if I had only been able back then to persuade the major to put my dossier in the other pile, everything would be different! But the major put it where he did, and here I am. Maybe it's for the best. Maybe Kisel and Vovka are already dead, while I am still alive. I lived three more weeks - that's a bloody long time, that much we do know by now.

The next pair of attack planes accelerates on the runway.

I wonder why the pilots fight? No-one forces them. They aren't me - they're free. There is no way I can leave here; I have another eighteen months of national service. So I sit on the porch watching the planes accelerate, and I think what I can tell Timokha so he doesn't beat me too badly.

The planes take off with a roar that shakes the barracks windows and disappear into the night, the twin dots of their exhausts twinkling. I take a final drag on the cigarette, stub it out and go up to the second floor.

Well, did you bring it?' asks Timokha, a tall, swarthy guy with big cowlike eyes. He is sitting in the storeroom, his feet up on the table as he watches TV. I stand in front of him, staring silently at the floor.

I try not to annoy him. When you're asked why you haven't done something, the best thing you can do is to stand there and maintain meek silence. We call this

'switching on the fool.

'Has the cat got your tongue? Did you bring it?'

'No,' I reply, barely audibly.

Why not?'

'I haven't got any money.'

I didn't ask you if you've got any money, dickhead!' he roars. 'I don't give a damn what you do or don't have. I'm asking you why you haven't brought 600,000 roubles.'

He gets up and punches me in the nose, from below, hard. The bridge of my nose crunches and my lips become warm and sticky. I lick the blood from them and spit it out on the floor. The second blow hits me under the eye, then I take one in the teeth. I fall with a moan. I can't say it hurt that much, but it's best to moan loudly so the beating stops sooner.

This time it's no joke the way Timokha gets worked up.

He kicks me and screams: Why didn't you bring the money, fucker? Why didn't you bring the money?' He makes me do press-ups and when I'm on my way up he kicks me in the teeth with a dirty boot. He catches me hard and my head snaps right back. I lose my bearings for a moment, my left arm collapses under me and I fall on my elbow. My split lip gushes onto the floor, and I spit out blood and the polish that I had scraped off Timokha's boot with my teeth.

'Count!' he yells.

I push myself up again and count out loud. Spurts of blood fly onto the floor. There's a news report on the television, something about Chechnya. The army commander has arrived for an inspection in Vladikavkaz. He is satisfied with the state of battle readiness and discipline in the forces. Tomorrow the commander is due to visit our regiment and check the discipline here. He'll probably be satisfied with the disciplinary readiness of our regiment too.

Timokha eventually tires. He orders me to get a cloth and clean up the blood. I wipe the boards but the blood has already soaked into the wood and left a noticeable stain.

What are you trying to do, asshole, drop me in trouble?' Timokha hisses and hits me in the forehead with his palm.

What the hell do you think you're doing splashing your filthy blood here for, eh, moron? Now wipe that off! I'll give you one more week to get the money, understand? I'm going on leave in a week. If you don't get the money by then I'll come back and kill you. The clock's ticking.' I go back to my billet and sit on the bed. I have to last one more week. Timokha will get back from leave in two or three months, no sooner. No-one comes back earlier, and three months is a long time, almost half a lifetime, anything could happen.

I crawl under my dusty, dirty blanket. Of the sixty beds in the empty barracks only four are made-up, for Zyuzik, Loop, Osipov and Yakunin. Ginger is gone.

'Did he beat you?' Loop mumbles from under the blanket.

His lips are now like two purple dumplings from his share of knocks.

'Yes,' I reply, smearing toothpaste under my eye.

We learned this trick back in training, a tried and tested treatment for black eyes. If my eye swells up the next day, Timokha will beat me even harder; he'll tell me I'm a snitch and that this is how I'm trying to turn him in. Even though there isn't a single new guy in the regiment who still has an unmarked face.

My split lips ache even in my sleep.

I am on orderly duty and wash the floor. The officers have been drinking in the storeroom all evening. The commander of the recon company, Lieutenant Yelin, is now seriously drunk; his corpulent face is sunk into his shoulders and his eyes are dazed and empty apart from the glow of hatred in his pupils.

Alternately resting his rifle on his knees, Yelin is methodically firing at the ceiling. That's a habit of his. When he gets drunk he sits in this armchair and fires at the ceiling.

It's probably because of his shell shock - they say he used to be a cheerful, smiley man. Then half of his company got killed near Samashki, and later he got blown up in a carrier.

Then I heard the same thing happened again. These days Yelin is the craziest officer in the regiment; he hardly talks to anyone, he uses his fists to give orders and he couldn't give much of a damn about anything, not the lives of the soldiers, or the Chechens, or even his own. He doesn't take prisoners, instead he slaughters them himself, the same way they slaughter our soldiers, by pinning their heads to the ground with his foot and slitting their throats with a knife. The only thing he wants is for the war never to end so that there is always someone to kill. The whole ceiling of the storeroom is riddled like a sieve with bullet holes and the plaster showers down on Yelin like rain, but he pays no heed and just keeps firing upward.

Next to him sits a small Armenian, Major Arzumanyan, commander of a tank battalion. He's also suffering from mild shell shock. Vodka doesn't affect him, and he loudly tells Yelin about a battle in Bamut.

Why didn't they let us totally flatten that shitty little vil-lage, eh? Who set us up, who was it? We had already driven them out into the mountains, all we needed was just one more push, a last dash, and suddenly we get told to pull out! Why? Why? We had two hundred metres to go to the school. If we'd taken it the village would have been ours!

Who bought up this war and who's paying for it, eh? Three of my vehicles are burnt out, and I've got thirty dead men!

Now I'm going to pick up some more, choose a new lot of greenhorns and send them off to the slaughterhouse, all over again. All they're good for is snuffing it in big bunches.

And who's supposed to answer for that, eh?'

Yelin grunts and shoots at the ceiling. They pour another round and the cold vodka glugs into the glasses. I can smell it, the tang of raw vodka. They make this stuff here in Mozdok, at the brick factory, and it's dirt cheap. Every soldier knows a few houses in the village where you can buy this cheap stuff stolen from the factory. It was me who went and got them this bottle.

I am washing the floor by the open door of the storeroom and try not to make a noise and catch their attention. The main thing in the army is not to be noticed; then you get beaten less and you're pestered less. Or is it best to get out of here altogether like Ginger, who hasn't been seen in the barracks for several days. He's living out in the steppe somewhere like a dog, and only visits the regiment to get some grub. I've seen him a couple of times at night, near the canteen.

They notice me all the same.

'Hey, soldier,' Arzumanyan says. 'Come here.'

I do as I'm told.

Why do you pricks go and get killed like flies, eh? What do they bother training you for if all you can do is die?

What did they teach you there? Do they teach you to shoot at all?' he asks.

I say nothing.

Well, you dumb sheep?'

'Yes,' I say.

'Yes... So how many times did you fire a weapon?'

'Twice.'

'Twice? Pricks. Want to join my tanks? Come on, tomorrow you'll fly with me to Shali where they'll have you for breakfast. And me. Well, are you coming? Yelin, let me have him.'

I stand in front of them, drenched in sweat, with wet, rolled-up sleeves and a rag in my hand. I hang my head and say nothing. I have no wish to fly with the shell-shocked major to Shali and get eaten for breakfast. I want to stay here, get my bruises but remain alive. I'm afraid that Yelin really will hand me over. I'm not one of his men, but they won't look into it if he does. One wave of his hand and it's done.

Yelin blearily looks up at me from under his lowered brow, struggling to take everything in. Now they're going to give me a beating.

The tank officer suddenly deflates. The spring in him unwinds and he slumps back in his armchair.

'Get the hell out of here,' he says with a wave of the hand.

'You wouldn't fit in a tank anyway - too tall?

I leave and creep out of the barracks before Yelin can stop me.

I sit down in the porch, light up and look at the take-off strip. I wouldn't mind sneaking into the cockpit with them and flying the hell out of here. Or even better, I could get transferred to the pilots corps. Now they have it good! In their barracks there are just officers and two dozen soldiers. The pilots don't beat the soldiers; they feed them well and the only work there is making the beds and washing the floor.

But I have no right to complain, I had a lucky night tonight; I didn't get beaten or whisked off to Shali.

…

Said returns from hospital. He got shot through the shin during the storming of Bamut and spent two months in the sickbay, and then had a long period of leave that he had awarded himself. Now he has arrived to quit.

His eyes are misty, his hair uncut and dirty, and he is wearing some sort of ragged Afghan cap and army boots with greasy trailing laces. But he has authority here. Said is a thief; he has several burglaries to his name and people do what he says.

He hated me from the moment he met me. I don't know about love but hate at first sight definitely exists. He doesn't extort money from me. I have money after selling those stolen car stereos, about half a million roubles stashed away in the closet under the stairs. I'm a resourceful soldier after all, and if Said wants money I can hand it right over and he won't beat me. But that's not what he's after. He wants me to bring him bananas. He knows I won't be able to get any right now, during the night, so he gives me two hours to come up with some.

I have no intention of even leaving the barracks. I return to our quarters and go to bed. I've got two hours at least. In two hours on the dot I am woken - out of some kind of thief's honour he has stuck to his word.

'Get up, you're wanted,' says Smiler.

I go to the storeroom. Said is sitting with his injured leg on the table, and one of the recon is massaging his injured shin.

'You called for me, Said?' I ask.

"To some people I'm Said, to others I'm Oleg Alexan-drovich,' he answers.

'You called for me, Oleg?' I say again.

'Say Oleg Alexandrovich.'

I say nothing and look at the floor. He can kill me right here, but there's no way I'm going to do him the honour of calling him Oleg Alexandrovich.

Well, what have you got to say?'

'You called for me, Oleg?' I said.

He smirks.

'Did you get any?'

'No,' I reply.

The usual foreplay begins.

We could skip this bit really, but Said is enjoying his power and I don't get hit in the face.

Why?' Said says with surprising calm.

'I don't know where to get bananas, Oleg.'

'What?'

'I don't know...'

What?' he says, finally letting rip. What, you don't want to look for what I told you to find? Useless prick! You'll go and look, got it?'

He starts to hit me viciously. If the others beat me because that's the way it is, Said beats me out of sheer hatred. He enjoys it, gets a real pleasure from it. A stinking nobody on civy street, he is top dog and master of souls here.

Said is weak, and his punches are not as hard as Boxer's or Timokha's, but he's stubborn and vicious and 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. He doesn't do this so often, evidently the hole in his shin hasn't fully healed over and is bothering him, but he lays into the back of my head with vigour in an effort to bust up my face on the floorboards. Eventually he manages, and I fall and lie there on the filthy boards, blood running from my split lips.

Said lifts me up and starts to hit me again, using his palm on my broken lips, aiming all the time for the same place, because he knows that will be more painful. I jolt heavily from every blow and moan. I am tiring now as I press myself up and shield myself with my arms, tensing my muscles so that the kicks don't go deep into my body I have lost count of the blows and it seems Said has been beating me from the moment I was born, and this was all I have ever known. For heaven's sake, I'll get you your lousy bananas! But Said no longer cares about bananas. He is joined by a few more of the recon and they surround me and smash me in the back with their elbows. I stand doubled up, shielding my stomach with my arms, but they don't let me fall over so they can also kick me from below with their knees.

They shove me into the latrines, where a thickset Tartar called Ilyas hops and kicks me in the chest. I fly backwards and smash the window with my shoulders, sending shards of glass cascading over me, over my head and stomach. I manage to grab the frame and stop myself from falling right through. I didn't even cut myself. Once again they knock me from my feet and I crash to the floor. This time I don't get up, I just lie there amongst the broken glass and all I can do is try to cover my kidneys and groin. Finally the recon take a breather and have a smoke.

Said flicks his ash straight onto me, trying to get me in the face with the burning tobacco grains.

'Listen lads, let's take him down a few more pegs - let's screw him,' he suggests. Beside my face there is a large, jagged piece of glass. I grab it through my sleeve and it sits snugly in my palm like a knife, a long fat blade, tapering at the end.

I get up from the floor, clutching the shard. Shame I don't have the keys to the armoury...

Blood drips onto the shard from my split lip. I stare right at Said, Ilyas and the rest of them, I stand in front of them holding a blood-smeared piece of glass, watching them smoke. Said doesn't flick any ash on me now.

'OK,' says one of the recon, 'leave him, let's go. We haven't got any antiseptic anyway...'

They leave. The cicadas trill in the expanses of the steppe outside the broken window. Fighter bombers take off from the runway and head for Chechnya. A single lamp shines on the empty parade ground. There isn't a soul around, not a single officer or soldier.

The swarthy major was right. I am alone in this regiment.

That night they rough me up even worse, wreaking vengeance for that flash of resistance in the latrine, and the whole recon company piles on top of me to administer the beating, not even letting me get out of bed. This isn't even a beating - they are grinding me down to nothingness, like scum, and I am supposed to act accordingly, not try to wriggle out of it. They throw a blanket over me and force me from the bed, drag me into the corridor and beat me there. It carries on in the storeroom, where they lift me up by the arms and pin me to the wall so I don't fall. I start to lose consciousness. Someone delivers a fearsome punch to my right side and something bursts, piercing my very core with a burning pain. I gasp hoarsely and fall to my knees, and they carrying on kicking me. I pass out.

The recon have gone. I am lying in the corner of the storeroom on a pile of jackets and the walls and the ceiling are spattered with my blood. There's a tooth on the floor. I pick it up and try to push it back into the gum. In the end I throw it out of the window. I lie motionless for a while.

The pain is so bad I can't breathe; every muscle feels mangled and my chest and sides have become one huge bruise.

After a while I manage to pull myself up and along the wall to the door. I lock it and collapse again on the pile of jackets where I remain until almost morning.

When dawn breaks I take a razor and start to scrape the blood off the walls. I can hardly breathe and I can't bend over. Something in my right side has swollen up and is pul-sating. But I have to clean the blood off and I scratch away with the razor on the wallpaper. It takes me a long time to scrape away the brown drops, and I'm not too careful as I work, tearing away the wallpaper. 'Radiomen!' yell the drunken recon, their feet pounding on the floor. If they remember that I'm in the storeroom they will smash down the door, drag me out and finish me off.

I start to sort out the jackets and hang them in the cup-board. The sergeant-major is coming soon and everything has to be in order.

I find a letter in the pocket of one of them. It's to a guy called Komar, written by a girl. I unfold it and read.

My darling Vanya, sunshine, my beloved sweetheart, just be sure to come back, come back alive, I beg you, survive this war. I will have you however you come back, even if you lose your arms or legs. I can look after you, you know that, I'm strong, just please survive! I love you so much Vanya, it's so hard without you. Vanya, Vanya, my darling, my sunshine, just don't die. Stay alive, Vanya, please survive.

I fold up the letter and start to bawl. The dawn light is shining through the window, and I sit on the pile of jackets and howl from my battered lungs. Blood seeps from my ravaged lips. I'm in pain and I rock backwards and for-wards, the letter clenched in my hand, bawling my head off.

That morning Sergeant-Major Savchenko takes one look at my swollen face and without saying a word goes into the store room to the recon. Said is sitting in the armchair, his leg up on the table like before. The sergeant-major pins him to the armchair with his knee and beats him with his fist from top to bottom, smashing his head back into the seat with all his fury, and now it's Said's blood spattering onto the walls.

Savchenko beats him long and hard, and Said whines with pain. Then he throws him onto the floor and starts kicking him. Said crawls out of the storeroom on all fours with the sergeant-major kicking him from behind as he goes, before he finally throws him down the stairs.

I listen to the sounds of the beating in the storeroom without even raising my head. I'm glad that Savchenko is beating Said, or rather I'm overjoyed. My liver, jaw, teeth, every part of me rejoices as I hear how this piece of shit squirms and begs Savchenko, 'Please, Sergeant-Major, don't, please, I am already injured.' And the sergeant-major hits him and hisses through his teeth: 'I'm not just 'Sergeant-Major" but a senior warrant officer, you fucker, understand? A senior warrant officer.'

I am elated but at the same time I know that I am now in total shit. When the sergeant-major leaves, Said will come back and put a bullet in me.

Savchenko also realizes this and he spends the night here. He takes the armoury keys from the duty officer and sleeps in the barracks. We carry two beds out of the storeroom and put them side by side at the entrance, behind the wall, so no-one can come and fire a burst through the door, and then we fall asleep. For the first time I sleep soundly the whole night without waking. I don't dream anything and only open my eyes when the sergeant-major touches my shoulder.

'Get up, Babchenko,' he says. 'Muster.'

Good for him. If I had a tail I would definitely be wagging it now.

After that, Babchenko was finally sent to Chechnya, where a different kind of hell awaited him.

In this excerpt, he talks about an incident that took place during the Second Chechen War while he was stationed in Argun, a town in Chechnya where his unit was sent after they took a lot of casualties against the rebels in the mountains:

The Kombat has caught two recruits from the anti-tank platoon up to no good. It turns out they had passed some boxes of cartridges through the fence to the Chechen kids, then drunk a bottle of vodka and fallen asleep by the gap.

Half an hour later the Kombat chanced upon them and gave them a beating, and then kept them overnight in a large pit in the ground. Today their punishment is to be continued and they fall us in again on the parade ground.

We know too well what will happen now.

At the edge of the square they've dug an improvised torture rack into the ground, a thick water pipe that has been bent into the shape of a gibbet. At the Kombat's orders, the platoon made it during the night by placing the pipe against two concrete piles and using an armoured car to bend it in the middle. Two ropes now dangle from it.

The anti-tank gunners are led out, hands bound behind their backs with telephone cable and dressed in ragged greatcoats and long johns. Their faces are already swollen and purple from the beating and there are huge black bruises where their eyes should be, oozing pus and tears from the corners. Their split lips can no longer close and pink foam bubbles from their mouths, dripping onto their dirty, bare feet. It's a depressing sight. After all, these are not tramps but soldiers, ordinary soldiers; half of the army is like these two.

They stand the soldiers on the square. The two raise their heads and look through the gaps in the swelling at the ropes swinging in the wind.

The Kombat grabs one by the throat with his left hand and hits him hard in the nose. The soldier's head snaps back to his shoulder blades with a cracking noise. Blood spurts. The commander kicks the second one in the groin and he falls to the ground without a sound. The beating begins.

Who did you sell the bullets to?" screams the Kombat, grabbing the soldiers by the hair and holding up their swollen faces, which quiver like jelly beneath the blows. He traps their heads between his knees in turn and lashes them with blows from top to bottom.

'Well, who? The Chechens? Have you killed a single fighter yet, you piece of shit, have you earned the right to sell them bullets? Well? Have you even seen one? Have you ever had to write a letter of condolence to a dead soldier's mother? Look over there, those are soldiers, eighteen-year-old lads who have already seen death, looked it in the face, while you scum sell the Chechens bullets. Why should you live and guzzle vodka while these puppies died instead of you in the mountains, eh? I'll shoot the fucking pair of you!' 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 got caught.

The Kombat is right, 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.

'Cretins,' spits Arkasha. 'They put the gap out of bounds; they got themselves caught and ruined it for all of us. So much for selling the generator.'

He is more bothered than any of us. Now he'll have to go to the local market to satisfy his passion for trading. We don't like it at the market - it's too dangerous. You never know if you'll come back alive. You can only buy stuff from the Chechens at the side of the road, when one of you jumps down from the armoured car and approaches them while the platoon trains their rifles on them and the gunner readies his heavy-calibre machine gun.

The market is enemy territory. Too many people, too little room to move. They shoot our guys in the back of the head there, take their weapons and dump their bodies in the road. You can only walk around freely if you take the pin out of a grenade and hold it up in your fist. It was a whole lot more pleasant to trade through the fence on our own ground. We were the ones who could shoot people in the back of the head if need be.

'Yeah,' says Lyokha. 'Shame about the gap. And the generator.'

The Kombat works himself into an even greater rage.

There's something not right with his head after the mountains and he is on the verge of beating these two to death.

He lays into the wheezing bodies with his feet and the soldiers squirm like maggots, trying to protect their bellies and kidneys, a vain hope with their hands tied behind their backs. The blows rain down one after another.

The Kombat kicks one of them in the throat and the soldier gags, unable to breathe. His feet kick convulsively and he fights to gulp in some air, eyes now bulging through the swelling.

The rest of the officers sit in the shade of a canvas awning near the gatehouse, watching the punishment as they take a hair of the dog from a bottle of vodka on a table in front of them. Their faces are also swollen, but from three days of continual drinking.

Our political education officer, Lisitsyn, gets up from the table and joins the Kombat. For a while they flail at the gunners with their boots in silence - the only sound is their puffing from the exertion.

We understood long ago that any beating is better than a hole in the head. There have been too many deaths for us to care much about trivia like ruptured kidneys or a broken jaw. But all the same, they are thrashing these two way too hard. We all thieved! And every one of us could have wound up in their place.

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. Battalion commanders steal the soldiers' food by the crate - that's our tinned meat on the table that they snack on now between shots of vodka. Regimental commanders truck away vehicle-loads of gear, while the generals steal the actual vehicles them-selves.

There was one well-known case when someone sold the Chechens brand-new armoured cars, fresh from the production line and still in the factory grease. Military vehicles that were sold back in the first war and written off as lost in battle are still being driven round Chechnya.

Quartermasters dispatch whole columns of vehicles to Mozdok packed with stolen goods: carpets, televisions, building materials, furniture. Wooden houses are dismantled and shipped out piece by piece; cargo planes are filled to bursting with stolen clutter that leaves no room for the wounded. Who cares about two or three boxes of cartridges in this war where everything is stolen, sold and bought from beginning to end?

And we've all been sold too, guts and all, me, Arkasha, Pincha, the Kombat and these two guys he is beating now, sold and written off as battle losses. Our lives were traded long ago to pay for luxurious houses for generals that are springing up in the elite suburbs of Moscow.

The blows eventually cease. Those two jackals step back from the gunners, who lie gasping face down on the asphalt, spitting out blood and struggling to roll over. Then the armaments officer steps forward and helps Lisitsyn lift one up, raise his arms and tie his wrists in the noose. They tighten the rope until his feet dangle a few centimetres above the ground, suspending him like a sack, and string up the second guy the same way. They do it themselves as they know that none of us will obey an order to do it.

'Fall out,' shouts the Kombat, and the battalion disperses to its tents.

'Bastards,' says Arkasha. It's not clear who he means: the gunners, or the Kombat and Lisitsyn.

'Pricks,' whispers Fixa.

The soldiers hang there all day and half the night. They are opposite our tents and through the doorway we can see them swaying on the rack. Their shoulders are pressed up to their ears, their heads slumped forward onto their chests. At first they tried to raise their bodies up on the rope, change their position and get a little more comfort-able. But now they are either asleep or unconscious and they don't move. A pool of urine glistens beneath one of them.

There is a hubbub inside the command post as our commanders down more vodka. At two in the morning they consume another load and all tumble out onto the square to administer a further round of beatings to the dangling gunners, who are lit up in the moonlight.

The officers place two Tapik (TA-57) field telephones under the men and wire them up by the toes. The units contain a small generator, and to make a call you wind a handle which produces a charge and sends a signal down the line.

'So, do you still feel like selling bullets?' Lisitsyn asks and winds the handle of the first phone.

The soldier on the rope starts to jerk and cry in pain as cramps seize him.

What are you yelling for, you piece of shit?' Lisitsyn screams and kicks him in the shins. He then rewinds the Tapik and the soldier howls. Again Lisitsyn lashes at his shins. And so on for maybe half an hour or more.

The officers of our battalion have turned into an organized gang that exists separately from the soldiers. They truly are like jackals, and so that's what we contract soldiers call them. We in turn are called 'contras', or sometimes 'vouchers', as we are there to be spent. And the two camps hate each other for good reason.

They hate us because we drink, sell cartridges and shoot them in the back in battle, because every last one of us yearns to get discharged from this lousy army. And since we want nothing more from it than the money it pays us for each tour of duty, we don't give a damn about the officers and will screw them over at every opportunity. They also hate us for their own poverty, their underfed children and their eternal sense of hopelessness. And they hate the conscripts because they die like flies and the officers have to write letters informing the mothers.

What else can you expect of the officers if they themselves grew up in barracks? They too used to get beaten as cadets, and they still get beaten at their units. Every other colonel of ours is capable of little more than screaming and punching, reducing a lieutenant, captain or major to a moaning, dishevelled wretch in front of junior ranks. Nor do the generals bother to mete out penalties to the colonels any more; they simply hit them.

Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desperation by constant under-funding, 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 the jackals that run it.

Why should you care about soldiers when you can't even provide for your own children? Competent, conscientious officers don't stay long and the only ones left are those with nowhere else to live, who cling onto empty assurances that they will be allocated an apartment someday. Or those who cannot string two words together and know only how to smash in the teeth of some young kid. They make their way up the career ladder not because they are the best, but because there is no-one else. Accustomed from the very bottom rung to beating and being beaten, they beat and are beaten right to the top, teaching others to follow suit. We learned the ropes long ago; the ways of the gutter are the universal language in this army.

Lisitsyn gets bored of winding the Tapik. He puts a flak jacket on one of the gunners and shoots him in the chest with his pistol. The round doesn't pierce the jacket but the impact rocks the body on the rope. The soldier contorts and gasps, his lungs so close to collapse that he is unable to draw breath. Lisitsyn is about to fire again but the Kombat averts his arm, worried that in his state of drunkenness he will miss and hit the wretch in the belly or the head.

We don't sleep during all of this. It's impossible to doze off to these screams. Not that they bother us; they simply keep us awake.

I sit up in my sleeping bag and have a smoke. It was much the same in Mozdok. 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.

The yelling on the parade ground stops and the officers go back to the command post. The only sound now is the moaning of the gunners. The one who was shot at wheezes heavily and coughs as he tries to force some air into his chest.

I'm sick of their whining,' says the platoon commander from his sleeping bag. 'Hey, shitheads, if you don't settle down I'll come and stuff socks in your gobs,' he shouts.

It goes quiet on the square and the platoon commander falls asleep. I pour some water in a flask and go outside.

Arkasha tosses a pack of cigarettes after me.

'Give them a smoke.'

I light two and poke them between their tattered lips.

They smoke in silence, no-one speaks. What is there to say?

As Babchenko explains, after this beating, the two men were later thrown out of the base and probably killed by Chechens while trying to get home. The book also contains plenty of details about the brutal way in which the Chechens fought their war against Russia.

In the final excerpt, Babchenko reflects on what it was like for the people who made it out alive:

No-one returns from the war. Ever. Mothers get back a sad semblance of their sons - embittered, aggressive beasts, hardened against the whole world and believing in nothing except death. Yesterday's soldiers no longer belong to their parents. They belong to war, and only their body returns from war. Their soul stays there.

But the body still comes home. And the war within it dies gradually, shedding itself in layers, scale by scale. Slowly, very slowly, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or captain transforms from a soulless dummy with empty eyes and a burnt-out soul into something like a human being. The unbearable nervous tension ebbs away, the aggression simmers down, the hatred passes, and the loneliness abates. It's the fear that lingers longest of all, an animal fear of death, but that too passes with time.

And you start to learn to live in this life again. You learn to walk without checking the ground beneath your feet for mines and tripwires, and step on manholes on the road without fear, and stand at your full height in open ground.

And you go shopping, talk on the phone and sleep on a bed. You learn to take for granted the hot water in the taps, the electricity and the central heating. You no longer jump at loud noises.

You start to live. At first because that's how it's worked out and you have stayed alive, you do it without gaining much joy from life; you look at everything as a windfall that came your way through some whim of fate. You lived your life from cover to cover in those hundred and eighty days you were there, and the remaining fifty odd years can't add anything to that time, or detract from it.

But then you start to get drawn into life. You get interested in this game, which isn't for real. You pass yourself off as a fully fledged member of society, and the mask of a normal person grows onto you, no longer rejected by your body. And those around you think you are just the same as

everyone else.

But no-one knows your real face, and no-one knows that you are no longer a person. Happy, laughing people walk around you, accepting you as one of their own, and no-one knows where you have been.

But that doesn't bother you any more. You now remember the war as some cartoon horror movie you once saw, but you no longer recognize yourself as one of its characters.

You don't tell anyone the truth any more. You can't explain what war really is to someone who has never been there, just as you can't explain green to a blind person or a man can't know what it's like to give birth. They simply don't have the necessary sensory organs. You can't explain or understand war - all you can do is experience it.

But you're still waiting for something all these years. God knows what, though, you simply can't believe that it ends just like that, without any consequences. You're probably waiting for someone to shed some light on it all, for someone to come up to you and say, 'Brother, I know where you've been. I know what war is. I know what you've been fighting for.'

That's very important, to know why and what for. Why the brothers the war gave you had to die? Why people were killed, why they fired on goodwill, justice, faith and love, crushed children and bombed women? Why the world needed to lose that girl I saw back on the runway in Mozdok, with her smashed head and a bit of her brain lying in an ammo box next to her? Why?

But no-one tells you. And then you, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or captain, start to explain it to yourself. You take a pen and paper and produce the first phrase as you start to write. You still don't know what it will be, a short story, a poem or a song. The lines come with difficulty, each letter tearing your body like a shard being pulled from a wound.

You feel this pain physically as the war comes out of you and onto paper, shaking you so that you can't see the letters. You are back there again and death once more rules everything, the room fills with moaning and fear, and once again you hear the big guns, the screams of the wounded and people being burnt alive, and the whistle of mortar shells falling towards your prone back.

A drum beats and a band on a sultry parade ground plays

Farewell, Slavs', and the dead rise from their graves and form up, a great number of them, everyone who was dear to you and was killed, and you can already spot familiar faces: Igor, Vaseline, Four-Eyes the platoon commander...

They lean towards you and their whispering fills the room:

'Go on, brother, tell them how we burnt in the carriers! Tell them how we cried in surrounded block posts in August 1996, how we whimpered and begged them not to kill us as they pinned us to the ground with their feet and slit our throats! Tell them how boys' bodies twitch when bullets hit them. You survived only because we died there. Go on, they should know all this! No-one should die before they know what war is!'

And tinged with blood, the written lines appear one after the other. Vodka is downed by the litre while death and madness sit beside you, nudging you and correcting your pen.

And there you are, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or cap-tain, concussed a hundred times, shot to pieces, patched-up and reassembled, half crazed and stupefied, and you write and write and whine with helplessness and sorrow, and tears pour down your face and stick in your stubble.

And you realize that you should not have returned from the war.

At first, I thought I would explain what lessons I think we should draw from Babchenko’s memoirs, but then I realized that it was probably better to just share some excerpts and let people draw their own conclusions. They will probably reach conclusions I think are dumb or even downright insane, because this war turns even people who have nothing to do with it into maniacs apparently, but it’s not as if anything I say would change their mind anyway.