One Soldier’s War in Chechnya

"This is a war memoir which has come out of Chechnya. I think in future we’ll look back at it with All Quiet on the Western Front and all the other books that have managed to convey, to those of us lucky enough not to have lived through wars, something of what war is like. It is a universal book about a young guy, conscripted to the Russian army at 18, who went through what many conscripts go through – beatings, bullying by older conscripts and officers, and the shock of being thrown into this most horrible of wars in the 90s. I had the opportunity to see the author speaking a couple of years ago, and it was incredibly moving. He was still young, but had lived and suffered through the unspeakable craziness that war is and, without any formal training as a writer, was able to bring that out in writing. It rivals The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh about the Vietnam war . It has that same very shocking emotional effect on me as a reader. There are so many stereotypes about Putin, and too many books that show him in dark glasses on the cover with the Kremlin in shadows. It’s presented as an awful, scary place run by the secret police. There is an element of truth in that, but it’s a one-sided story. Putin’s Russia follows on from Yeltsin. The country is being run by a kind of alliance between the secret services and economic reformers. The private capitalists work within it. I think a more balanced view is needed and that’s what I tried to do in my book. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My own view is that people should have more say in their own destinies than they typically do. I’m a believer in social movements and all the rest of it. Those movements have been relatively quiescent in Russia, but I see many signs of hope that communities are throwing up social movements of all kinds. I would like to see the people of Russia playing more part than they do in shaping its future. Of course, there are dictatorial things about the political set-up that get in the way of that, but people like me commenting from the outside won’t have any say in that. The people of Russia will surely sort all that out in their own good time. People working together from their communities is a force that changes the world for the better, as we are seeing in the Middle East."