One Soldier's War

About this book

One Soldiers War is a visceral and unflinching memoir of a young Russian soldiers experience in the Chechen wars that brilliantly captures the fear drudgery chaos and brutality of modern combat. An excerpt of the book was hailed by Tibor Fisher in the Guardian as right up there with Catch-22 and Michael Herrs Dispatches and the book won Russias inaugural Debut Prize which recognizes authors who write despite not because of their life circumstances. 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 nave 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 warthe constant cold hunger exhaustion filth and terrorand twists it into compelling haunting and eerily elegant prose. Acclaimed by reviewers around the world this is a devastating first-person account of war by an extraordinary storyteller.