On the night of August 7, 2008, war broke out between Russia and Georgia in Tskhinvali, a city in South Ossetia. South Ossetia and North Ossetia are largely homogeneous ethnically, but they ended up across the border from each other in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union—North Ossetia in Russia and South Ossetia in Georgia. The South had long sought reunification.
The conflict lasted all of five days, several thousand died, many more were displaced, and the world went into an uproar. It immediately became a campaign issue in the American elections, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy stepped in to broker a peace deal while Russian tanks rolled toward the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
I had planned to spend my last few weeks in Russia that summer watching the Beijing Olympics on TV. Igor had to work every day and spend his day offs with Anya. I hoped to see the American-born J.R. Holden run the point for the Russian national team (he had been naturalized Russian by decree of Putin for the express purpose of running the point for the national team) against the United States. That match-up was not to be (Russia sucked in group play), and the whole Olympics paled against the war coverage.
I had the same armchair post as the rest of Russia, but for me it would be the first time I’d watch a major world event through the lens of a censored media.
August 8, the day of the Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, I turned on Channel One, the Russian state-controlled television station, to find out that Georgia had launched an attack against South Ossetia.
The footage of Georgian missiles falling on Tskhinvali played on repeat. The emphasis was on the fact that the missiles were launched in civilian areas. Georgia blocks Internet, the ticker read. One of the first interviews I saw was with a North Ossetian Cossack, a guy straight out of an Isaac Babel short story in silken red shirt and fur hat, who, speaking on behalf of patriotic Cossacks everywhere, proclaimed, “If Russia is involved in a conflict, we will all go there to protect her!”
In short, according to the Russian media: Georgia provoked aggression; Georgia’s actions constituted genocide, the murder of around two thousand South Ossetians creating a humanitarian catastrophe; Georgians had been trained, provided with arms, and given the go-ahead to move in by the West, specifically the United States.
Later, at an Internet café, I looked up CNN. The talking heads were already questioning the Russian assertion that Georgia launched missiles first. Presidential candidate John McCain condemned “Russian aggression.”
Soon, the Russian media announced that Russia had liberated the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali while Georgia declared a state of war. The Western media reported that Russian forces were sixty-five kilometres outside Tbilisi, sowing rack and ruin in their path. Grigory Karasin, Russian deputy minister of foreign affairs, described the Georgian offensive as “uncivilized,” “criminal,” “wicked.” Medvedev declared that Russia was going to protect Russian citizens in South Ossetia and that many people had already died because of the “barbarous” actions of Georgia.
The Russian line about Georgian aggression seemed strange. Would Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili really be so bold as to think the West would engage Russia in direct military conflict over Georgia?
The Western line, that Russia had prepared for and planned the attack on its end, made more sense.
There had been an ongoing Russian initiative to give South Ossetian citizens Russian passports, in effect instantly populating the conflict zones with its citizens. Russian troops who had been amassing in South Ossetia during recent months were characterized as “peacekeepers.” It might have been a master chess move by Putin to set everything in place then wait for Saakashvili to get nervous.
In Medvedev’s first appearance on the world stage, presenting Russia’s position on the conflict, he sputtered out of the gate, reading from a prepared speech, looking worried and unsure. Meanwhile, French president Sarkozy, who had swooped in to broker a peace deal, played it like a master, practically dancing, all charisma and gesticulation alongside the wooden and bleary-eyed Russian president.
On Russian TV, the war was only ever referred to as “the humanitarian catastrophe in South Ossetia.” Flipping through the channels, I saw that a little peace sign with a blip of text reading “No war” had been added in the corner of all Russian MTV broadcasts. Russian stations showed images of South Ossetian pensioners with bandages around their heads describing missiles arriving without warning. Western stations showed images of Russian troops hooting wildly and shooting up already dead Georgians on the side of the road.
Russian troops nearly made it to Tbilisi—it was unclear what would happen if Russia took the Georgian capital—but then they stopped short. And a nervous pause settled over the whole affair.
Much later, Human Rights Watch and European Union reports on the Russia–Georgia conflict appeared. Their conclusions: Georgia ignited the conflict and Russia was guilty of violating numerous aspects of international law in its provocations, including the amassing of “peacekeepers” in South Ossetia. The funny thing is that, in these reports, the majority of the blame is laid at the feet of the Western darling Saakashvili, who comes off as trigger-happy and wilfully reckless.
In the black-and-white story of the conflict, the real truth turned out, as it often does, to lie in the grey area. But from where I was sitting, the censored Russian media had the better claim to the more correct version.
I had a few days in Moscow before my flight back to Toronto. I looked up the Chechen vets Denis Butov and Ilya Plekhanov, and we arranged to meet at a beer hall near Mayakovsky Square.
In the courtyard of the apartment I was staying at, a group of young boys armed with butter knives viciously stabbed the ground. They seemed to be playing a game. The game seemed to be: viciously stab the ground. And they were quite good at this game.
I met Butov and Plekhanov and their friend Arkady Babchenko at the beer hall. Butov and Plekhanov were editing the Art of War site and print magazine. Babchenko had covered the war for both Novaya Gazeta and Artofwar.ru.
The waiter brought us massive one-litre mugs of Pilsner Urquell.
Hanging out with these guys made me feel as though I was among a different species of human being than myself, and while I wanted to steer the conversation to the Georgian conflict, they made it clear they were there because I had offered to buy them beer and that they, especially Babchenko, would talk about what they wanted to talk about.
Denis criticized the stories of another contemporary writer. “His soldiers are running around fearing for their lives everywhere,” he said. “Yes, I feared for my life when they tried to kill me. But this feeling of fear goes away after a little while.”
“For me,” Arkady said, “the most important thing is, if we are talking about war, when you read the text, do you smell the smell or you don’t smell the smell? Do you feel that heat or you don’t feel that heat?
“The matter is in people, and people in all wars behave the same,” he said. “In all wars, personal features and the behaviour on display during the war are absolutely similar. Consider any war movie with Chuck Norris. He has all the right equipment, all the right moves, but the behaviour at war and his personal characteristics are not specified. Then it’s not real war.”
“Leave Chuck Norris alone,” Denis said.
Babchenko served his initial tour of duty in Chechnya in 1997 at eighteen years of age. He returned, got a university degree, and then re-enlisted for another six-month tour in 2000. In a photo of his family seeing him off for his first tour, he’s skinny as a rail. He looks like a bird, like a joke. He looks like someone who wouldn’t make it back from the Russian army once, let alone twice.
I asked him what made him enlist the second time, and what drove him back effectively a third time in August as a correspondent, as one of only a handful of journalists travelling directly into the line of fire.
“Nothing drives me to war, you understand,” he said.
“For money, bastard,” Denis said. “He’s just bored at home.” “When the Russian soul is struggling and cannot find how to live anymore,” Ilya said, “the Russian soul always goes to war.” Arkady ignored them both. “For me, the fact that I went to both wars is absolutely normal. Why no one else went? Why no one else went? That’s the question. When in your country there is a war, why nobody goes to that war? Let’s talk about South Ossetia. All Russian troops there were screaming, ‘We are great Russia! We are going to conquer everyone!’ How come nobody went anywhere, and how come nobody conquered anyone?”
“I don’t know exactly what you mean,” I said.
“That’s the question,” he said. “What do I mean? We’re trying to answer it.”
The night the Russia–Georgia conflict started, Arkady boarded a plane to the Caucasus. He attached himself to a Russian unit and sent a chronological photo record of their journey and his first war as a non-combatant. The images began in Vladikavkaz, where he met and interviewed those modern-day Cossacks lining up to go into war against Georgia to protect the Motherland. Then to the destruction of Tskhinvali. He travelled through South Ossetia and into Georgia. Charred bodies in puddles on the sides of the road as tanks go past. Fleeing Georgian troops.
The cover of the print issue of Art of War magazine featuring Arkady’s South Ossetia reporting showed a young, tough Russian solider. His fatigues were open, revealing a gaping wound the size of a pear above his heart. The headline read, Indestructible Union.
The issue included a long piece about Babchenko’s trip with the Russian unit. His journalistic style focuses on the gruesome details, the visual and situational details that are the reality of war, and the effect of bearing witness to it all. At one point he wrote: “I always dreamed of writing stories for children, but for nine years already I’ve written about bloated corpses in the heat on the streets of ruined cities. You want a great Russia? Here she is. Take a whiff.”
When the bill came, Arkady wrote, Why do you water down the beer? and From Russia With Love at the bottom.
We walked down Tverskaya street and Ilya joked that the three of them were like the three heroes from Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Butov bought cans of beer from a kiosk for all of us and we stood by the Mayakovsky statue in the cold.
Arkady bummed two cigarettes from an Italian tourist. After he smoked those, he approached another guy in a business suit, who gave him an entire pack of menthol Vogues. Denis refused to smoke them. Arkady sucked one down.
“Every time I’m around you guys, you talk to me about stories,” I said. I had wanted to discuss the particularities of the conflict with them, and they had wanted to discuss the authenticity of war stories.
Arkady told me that if not for the stories of Remarque, he probably would not have gone to war to begin with. This reminded me of Butov’s statement that the stories of Mironov led to his request for assignment to Chechnya.
Arkady despises writing that dramatizes and romanticizes war. He’s afraid it will influence young readers in the way he and Butov were influenced. “You should write only about how war is awful,” he said.
Though he has now become the famous writer of their group, Babchenko was initially attracted to the Art of War (kind of like an Internet community, a Veterans of Foreign Wars post, and a psychiatric support group for veterans all rolled into one) by Butov’s stories of Chechnya. Veterans and combatants from every war in recent history have posted their stories there. It’s how the three of these guys met.
Arkady said that he was perusing the site and read Denis’s work. It moved him to write to Denis and to return to his own memoirs, which he had abandoned out of depression, memoirs that would eventually become the book One Soldier’s War, a harrowing and graphic account of his time in Chechnya.
“Arkady wrote me a big email letter,” Denis said. “I thought he was the typical dickhead.”
“He just learned this word today,” Ilya told me. “Now he will say it all the time.”
Ilya had a similar experience, drawn into the site in large part by Butov’s Chechnya stories.
Denis seemed embarrassed by his friends’ praise. He recalled meeting Ilya for the first time on the train to Odessa for an Art of War conference there.
“He was drunk and very aggressive,” Denis said. “Then we drank some, and I came up to his level.”
“We are beating around the bush, Jeff,” Arkady suddenly said to me. “Do we have a generation of Chechen war writers in Russia right now or not?”
He posed the question that I did not ask. Then he answered it.
“Dostoevsky was right: there are those who dare and those who are afraid. Will we talk about the war or will we be still silent? If we were to meet three years ago, I would say we don’t have writers about these wars. Now I can say that there are.”
I asked him about the common viewpoint that the Russian army damages young men.
“I want to tell you that if five years ago I felt like a leper, nowadays I don’t feel like a leper,” he said. “I feel like one of the normal people in society. I think that we are normal. We are normal. And it’s not that this world is normal. It’s us who are normal in an abnormal world. And that’s what I am happy about. I am really happy that I found people who think the same way. And I am happy that we have our own brotherhood.”
When we finished our beers, Arkady and Ilya ran to catch the metro home to their wives and children before it closed at one a.m. Denis, who lived with his brother and worked in IT, walked a little way with me. He told me that Ilya’s and Arkady’s wives hated him because every time they got together with him, they ended up drunk.
“I am the enemy of the state,” he said.
I emailed Igor when I got back to Canada and told him about meeting again with the Chechen vets and Babchenko’s perspective on the war. He responded by sending me a video clip from a Russian site that showed a series of nuclear explosions wiping out the major cities of the world. He wrote, all world in dust man, everybody are prepared.
Doom was already on his mind. I had arrived in Russia at the beginning of the summer of 2008. I had arrived in a resurgent country. When I left at the end of that summer, new blood had been shed and the world was tipping toward crisis.