One Soldier’s War

Arkady Babchenko was drafted out of a Moscow law school at age 18 and sent to fight in the First Chechen War. After discharge, he returned to school, but then volunteered to serve in the Second Chechen War. He wrote One Soldier’s War telling of his experiences against two enemies, Chechen rebels and criminal traditions of the Russian army. 

Of the latter, he wrote:

“Thieving is both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing. The soldiers sell cartridges; the drivers sell diesel; the cooks sell canned meat. Battalion commanders steal the soldiers’ food by the crate – that’s our canned 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 themselves.

“There was one well-known case when someone sold the Chechens brand-new armored 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 around Chechnya.

“Quartermasters dispatch whole columns of vehicles to Mozdok packed with stolen goods: 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 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.”

(Russia is a criminal activity. Russia has always been a criminal activity, from the days of the Kiev rulers, to the czars in St. Petersburg, the Bolsheviks and Communists ruling from Moscow, to Vladimir Putin and whatever kind of political philosophy he adheres to. Under the czars, Russia stole more land and enslaved more people than any other since the Mongol hordes. Bolsheviks and Communists recaptured those lands in the civil war of the early 1920s. The captives who wanted freedom from Russia got it when the Soviet Union fell apart. But years and centuries of criminalism did not go away simply because the rulers changed. Russia will never change.)