One Soldier’s War by Arkady Babchenko (PDF)

Description

A visceral and unflinching memoir of a young Russian soldier’s experience in the Chechen wars. In 1995, Arkady Babchenko was an eighteen-year-old law student in Moscow when he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya. It was the beginning of a torturous journey from naïve conscript to hardened soldier that took Babchenko from the front lines of the first Chechen War in 1995 to the second in 1999. He fought in major cities and tiny hamlets, from the bombed-out streets of Grozny to anonymous mountain villages. Babchenko takes the raw and mundane realities of war the constant cold, hunger, exhaustion, filth, and terror and twists it into compelling, haunting, and eerily elegant prose. Acclaimed by reviewers around the world, this is a devastating first-person account of war that brilliantly captures the fear, drudgery, chaos, and brutality of modern combat. An excerpt of One Soldier’s War was hailed by Tibor Fisher in The Guardian as “right up there with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.” Mark Bowden, bestselling author of Black Hawk Down, hailed it as “hypnotic and terrifying” and the book won Russia’s inaugural Debut Prize, which recognizes authors who write despite, not because of, their life circumstances. “If you haven’t yet learned that war is hell, this memoir by a young Russian recruit in his country’s battle with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, should easily convince you.” —Publishers Weekly

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Arrived ahead of schedule and in outstanding condition. I am just sitting down to start this book now. Definitely recommend this seller.

⭐You’ve read Im Westen nichts Neues, if not in the original German then in English as All Quiet on the Western Front? As Erich Maria Remarque brought WWI trench warfare to life, Babchenko’s remarkable One Soldier’s War gives us insight into the Russian war machine in Chechnya and more recently, the Ukraine. Read this book, and you will understand why Putin’s Russia will ultimately fail, not just in its ambitions in Ukraine and elsewhere, but as a state.But that’s not all: Brimming with insights harvested from and further distilled by hard experience, this straight shot of Russian vodka will give you the leans. The country that Garry Kasparov aptly labeled a bankrupt gas station is so inept, so completely corrupt and now so isolated that it must collapse under its own weight.Ukraine is only its latest military misadventure. A review of contemporary Russian military interventions reveals a string of poorly executed “special military operations.” Afghanistan, Poland, Chechnyas I and II, Syria, Ukraine… the list goes on.Read Babchenko. See for yourself. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who wishes to understand Russia in the Ukraine and its surprisingly subpar logistics and execution. I just wish Vlad Putin would read this book. But if he did, he would surely climb aboard one of his big, fat Russian rockets, the design of which is unchanged since Sergei Korolev’s original 1950-era canted-boosters design, at Baikonur cosmodrome and launch himself one way into space: part pariah, part piranha, he is no longer welcome anywhere on Earth. Nowhere. Soon, not even in Moscow. General George C. Marshall, where are you? Russia needs you. It desperately needs ctrl-alt-delete on its hard drive and a reboot with a new OS.Thank you, Arkady. We know this book was painful to write, but we cannot imagine how much.

⭐To begin I will say that it took me really a very long time to finish it. And that is because every situation is meticulously described to the last detail. From the things they did, places the went to, the horrible, dehumanizing brutal conditions Mr Babchenko and his fellow comrades had to endure while out in the field during combat operations, as well as the horrible beatings they suffered in the barracks.For me, a civilian that has never been exposed to war, sometimes it was too much to take. I’d put the book away for a few days, o read something else before picking it up again. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for him to let it all out on paper. I have read lots of military literature over the years, and I am sure this is by far, the most moving, graphic combat memories I’ve ever read.If you’re easily moved by cruelty and violence stories, this might not be the right book for you. I would recommend it to anyone somehow familiarized with this type of stores, military experience, or those who for any reason wish to understand what war is like. I think Mr Babchenko does a great job at that in this book.

⭐One Soldiers War by Arkady Babchenko is a depressing, brutal, and moving account of the Russian’s soldiers experience in both the First and Second Wars in Chechnya. I have read many accounts of soldier’s experience in a diverse range of wars and conflicts from World War II, Vietnam, Algeria, and Rhodesia, this one is by far the most depressing. The conditions faced by the author and his fellow soldiers in both wars can truly be described as a living hell. The soldiers or conscripts were thrown into combat with extremely minimal training, the author himself says that he had only fired his weapon twice before being sent to Chechnya. The soldiers were given minimal food, and clothing with which to protect themselves from the cold Chechen Winter, and the soldiers often froze and almost died from lack of hunger. Perhaps the most brutal part was that the Russian army has a system of hazing, called Dedovshchina, where officers and higher ranks systematically beat the man under them for the most minor infractions or even just for for sport, for days or weeks periodically, resulting in broken jaws and ruptured kidneys.Although some other reviews have doubted the accuracy of the author’s account of the beatings, all I can say is that the system is still a problem according to articles published by Time magazine and the New York times, and has resulted in hundreds of deaths every year. I can imagine the system being much worse in the author’s time in the military in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s, when the army was much less professional and gutted by the end of the cold war.On top of the beatings and horrible conditions, the soldiers lost horrendous casualties to the Chechens, which gives the impression that the Russian generals and commanders were extremely incompetent and cared next to nothing for the lives of their soldiers, a situation where Chechnya came to be known as a meat grinder. The book despite its merits, tends to jump around chronologically, and ultimately leads up to the climax of the author’s horrible experience fighting in the mountains which is described only as a vague and reoccurring dream that is almost to0 terrible and depressing for the author to give a full account. I personally would have like to know more about what happened in the mountains, since the author alludes to it a lot in the book, but maybe the author is trying to convey that only those who were there can truly understand it. The book also gives little context to how the war in Chechnya started and how events progressed and led to the second war in Chechnya. This may be a reflection of the author’s own experiences where he states that the soldiers, and generals had no idea why they were fighting and dying in Chechnya or the reasons for the war. The book is also full of great quotes and imagery which give the book a more serious literary feel that is in contrast to many other personal accounts of war that are more day by day details oriented. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Russia’s involvement in Chechnya, or in learning about the horrors of war in the modern era. This book will dispel any romantic myths you may have about war, and instead replace it with the sobering reality that war is truly horrible, and that ordinary humans are capable of truly horrible and horrific things.The book was extremely emotional at the end and nearly moved me to tears.

⭐Brilliantly written personal account of a soldiers experiences in the Chechen wars.

⭐More like a novel than a discription of the war

⭐This book shows the war as it really is: brings you in the middle of heavy firefights under mortar shelling, when you barely notice what’s happening, and in other moments while you’re doing nothing but looking at your toes, laying down on the grass under the sun. Waitind for the time to drag..This book gets you running on a rattling carrier, grabbing as tight as you can… makes you feel the dull and cold inside your boots, makes you feel the smell of your sweat under your flack jacket, makes you jump to tighten your webbing to reduce noise when you move, makes you duck down under fire, hoping not to be hit…A rare and unique wink on the Chechen war.The awful stink of war: this is what it gives you. Directly told from one of the guys you saw a thousand times in real war footages.War is hell and this is it.

⭐This book is clearly one of the saddest and most shocking books I have ever read. Definitely not for the faint-hearted.There is so much truth about life and death. And the political current affairs/wars in Iraq and Syria show some striking resemblances. Definitely a book that makes you think about how precious and peaceful our lives are. I have to admit this book made me feel helpless and sad at the same time. Readers who know Nicolai Lilin’s Sniper will “enjoy” this great read, too. Hopefully, we will never have to experience a war. What this book teaches us is that life is precious and is often not lived to the fullest by us.

⭐Babchenkos Aufarbeitung seiner Erlebnisse in Chechenien ist für alle die dieses Thema interessiert ein äußerst lesenswertes Buch. Teilweise weißt das Buch Sektionen auf die sowohl inhaltlich als auch sprachlich eher enttäuschend wirken. Nichtsdestotrotz ist die Darstellung der beschriebenen Geschehnisse idR. fesselnd und schockierend, es gelingt dem Autor sehr gut ein beeindruckendes – wenn auch dunkles – Bild dieses Krieges zu zeichnen.

⭐

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