The Oath

"Baiev’s The Oath is probably the least well-known of my books and yet in some ways it’s the best. It’s an eyewitness account by an ordinary Chechen doctor who went home to stitch up wounds and served in the various makeshift hospitals around Grozny during both modern wars – both Yeltsin’s and the war that began under the next president, Vladimir Putin, in 2000. What’s unusual about it is not just the way it brings the facts of both wars to terrifying life, but that Baiev decided to drop the Chechens’ usual reticence about family and personal life and put a lot of the gallant, quietly courageous people in his life, and their backgrounds and memories, into the book. Most books about Chechnya take sides, one way or another. But Baiev is unflinchingly objective. He describes searing Russian injustices and brutalities. But he also shows how war gives Chechen neighbourhood bullies, like the Barayev family, the chance to turn into monsters (the Barayevs are said to have had a hand in many of the most notorious murders of the war, including the beheadings of four British telecoms engineers in 1998). By insisting on treating both Chechens and Russians, as the Hippocratic Oath demands, Baiev fell foul of both camps and had many hair-raising escapes from death. In the end, he had to escape to America, where he can no longer practise as a doctor. More than anything else, it was the uncomplaining, stoical tone of this book that reminded me of being among Chechens during the first war."