Arkady Babchenko: "Chechnya is not the past, Chechnya is our future"

Arkady Babchenko,
in 1995-1997 sergeant of the 429th motorized rifle regiment named after the Kuban Cossacks, orders of Bogdan Khmelnitsky and Suvorov (Mozdok-7) of the United Group of Troops in Chechnya

Fifteen years have passed since the beginning of the Chechen war. Today, guys could be fifteen years older. They would now be thirty -three. The age of Christ. But no longer

The war does the same with society as the public execution: removes prohibitions. If you can use the city without analysis-and at least de jure your city, then there is no law. If you can send your children to a meat grinder, then everything is possible.
The situation that we today have in the country - the cop chamber, the collapse of justice, the vertical of power, the leveling of the value of human life, the absolute decline in morality and morality, nationalism and xenophobia - roots lies there.
Remarque wrote that Germany in the First World War lost a whole generation. We have lost not a generation - a country.

Chechen syndrome

In the best years, the number of united groups of troops in Chechnya reached 100 thousand people. During these fifteen years, no less than half a million passed through the war. Those who returned brought their philosophy to the world. The philosophy of war.
My good comrade Dima Krasnopeev, the ensign of the FSB, who served in Chechnya a sniper, but never shot a person, believes that in Russia everyone is sick with the Chechen syndrome. Disagreement. And those who fought (which, of course), and not fought, which is much worse. Each of us survived our war in his head. The first association with the word “Chechen” is a killer, a terrorist, a bastard, an enemy. And the society is not yet able to get rid of this syndrome.
Sociologists say that four generations should be replaced to the origin of new moral guidelines. This is at least thirty -six years. That is, according to the most optimistic forecasts, in the nearest twenty years of improvement of the situation, one does not have to expect.
But to be honest, I do not know how many years should pass for this banal, and therefore, the only true truth becomes universally recognized: you can’t kill. I don’t know how many years should pass so that we stop seeing the enemy in Chechens.
And I don’t know how many years should go through the children of those Chechens who are now seventeen to twenty and who have not seen anything in their lives - at all, except for the war, have ceased to perceive the Russians as a fraction of hell.

Separated country

The Great Patriotic War raised. Chechnya shared the country. Modern Russia built the army that the Communists dreamed of-workers and peasants. And exclusively workers-peasants serve in it. And if in the first war I still met people after the institute, then in the second, it seems, I was the only soldier in the battalion with higher education. Castle is worse than in the XIX century. I have not yet heard that the peasant's son became a manager in Gazprom. I have not yet heard that the son of a top manager fought in Chechnya.
The guy from the hopelessness is taken to the army, send it to the war, where he tides his hands and legs, the state gives him a pension of two hundred bucks and returns back to the hopelessness. Hello family, survive as you want!
There is only one rehabilitation program for veterans in our country - vodka.
I have enough fingers on my arms so that from all my friends - and during the service I changed seven, it seems, parts - to count those who managed to catch on life after demobilization. Find a normal job, create a family, provide a future for yourself and your children. The rest from the war did not get out. Either they will be smuggled for the tenth time, or they sit or thump in black. The vast majority is quietly drunk in the guard.
The defeat in the war sets up to defeat in peaceful life. Society is not aimed at development, not aimed at victory. This is also the result of the war.

Postcombans

Fifteen years. Time flies quickly. It seems that everything was only yesterday. I do not remember the faces of most of my fellow students at the institute, but the field near Achha-Martan, on which my war began in the 96th, I remember to the smallest details. To the shades of blue on the tops of the mountains, to a degree of degree of the oppressive heat that pressed to the ground, like cast iron, to sounds, to smells - completely.

I have long been not the nasty Dushar with an automatic machine as it was. But not the one that was supposed to become. The war changed my life, and she went along another rut that was not intended for her. All that I have is only due to the fact that there was a war in my life. My wife was waiting for me from there. She wrote letters. My mother drove me to Mozdok twice. I spent the night on checkpoints. I saw everything with my own eyes. And if there is a postcombatant syndrome, then it is legitimate to talk about the Syndrome of the mother of the postcombatant.
My circle of communication is only veterans. I have no other friends. All we are talking about is war. My work is connected with the army.
I have been living in the war for fifteen years, and I have nothing else. All I can have a war. All I know is war. I can’t say that I am grateful to the war - it would be too blasphemous.
But I do not regret anything. And if there was an opportunity to choose life again, I would choose the same. One friend of mine was right, who said - the best years of our life. But I would not want them to my children.
The figures of the losses that Russia suffered in Chechnya were on both sides, because in that civil war both were citizens of the same state were not named. According to official figures, she took about 5 thousand lives of our soldiers for the first and 4.5 for the second. About 30 thousand were injured. No one counted the losses among civilians, we can only operate on human rights organizations. They call the figure 25-30 thousand people.

Alien pain

Our past is our future. There was no comprehension of Chechnya. A mourning was declared for the dead in Lame Horse. For the dead in Chechnya, for fifteen years, mourning was not announced even once.
But if someone believes that Chechnya is in the past, then he is mistaken: Chechnya is in the future. Because nothing has changed. No conclusions have been made. There was no reform of the army, there were no innovations in weapons, which lagged behind the modern requirements for thirty years, strategies were not revised for the changed circumstances of warfare in local wars. Our army still knows how to send cannon meat forward by divisions.
We still have the same untrained unprepared slave army, which will be sent to fight, it is not clear for what ambitions. Without cards, air support and elementary water. Which was very well demonstrated in South Ossetia.
And we are still ready to put our own abdomen for the great -powerful interests of the Great Empire.
That war was far from the last. This is already clear. But if nothing is done, then the circle will surely become closed. Get ready.