“Welcome to Hell!” reads a prophetic sign on the road outside Grozny, Chechnya’s capital.
It is New Year’s Day, 1995, and the First Chechen War has entered its third month. After the outbreak of hostilities, Mikail Eldin, the cultural editor for the Chechen literary periodical Vast, noted the immediate shift in priorities and switched from arts commentator to war correspondent.
He reports that Russian soldiers have lost their chance to seize the capital after failing to storm the presidential palace. His fearless countrymen are prepared to fight to the death. But while the Russians are retreating, they have by no means been routed.
As the war intensifies and, indeed, gives rise to the fiercer, bloodier, Second Chechen War, Eldin finds himself swept up in the action and obliged to join the war effort.
“War,” he says at the end of his excellent account of the conflict, The Sky Wept Fire, “this hell incarnate.” Both Grozny and war are hell, interchangeable and ungovernable, but it is worth descending with Eldin for his unflinching portrait of an oppressed people and his tour of a brutal and little-understood battlefront.
Eldin’s book – expertly translated by Anna Gunin – opens with bomb blasts in Grozny’s Freedom Square. Eldin’s journalistic curiosity is piqued. Sheltering behind journalistic neutrality, he sets out to find and interview the aggressors. The armed opposition, bankrolled by Moscow, is dead set on ousting the Chechen president, a man allegedly surrounded and protected by mafia he has financed with the nation’s petrodollars. If there is a lesser of two evils, Eldin doesn’t side with it, at least not yet. “I always remained impartial and apolitical, as a journalist should,” he informs us.
And yet he can’t help but declare that the opposition may have blundered. “Accepting assistance from an army reviled for decimating the Chechen nation every 50 years or so over the past few centuries was not the cleverest move.”
It is after he is caught in crossfire, and after the Russian president Boris Yeltsin sends in wave upon wave of Russian troops who bomb homes and indiscriminately slaughter civilians – only then does Eldin slough off that impartiality and decide he has become a partisan witness to “yet another – history was littered with them – Chechen tragedy”.
It is here, once Eldin has stood up to be counted, that his book really takes off. Gone is the Graham Greene-like bystander reportage from a war zone. Now Eldin is fully engaged – still a civilian and journalist, not yet a soldier, but armed with a hunting knife and an anti-personnel grenade to complement his notebook and pen, and thus able to offer more graphic, visceral, front-line snapshots.
Eldin ushers us from one conflict to another, and in doing so we see another transformation. When the Second Chechen War kicks off at the end of 1999, our naive and jumpy narrator has turned cynical and gutsy. Attached to a resistance unit specialising in tactical intelligence, he describes his exploits in forests, mountains or under siege in the city. The bare facts he presents are alarming: the Russian Empire is spread over one-eighth of the Earth, compared to tiny Chechnya with its population scarcely amounting to that of a Russian city; worse, the first war claimed 10 per cent of the Chechen population.
The frost is as merciless as enemy fire. Thirst and starvation finish off those the “senselessly cruel” Russians haven’t mauled. Towns burn, refugees roam aimlessly. Frustratingly, not to mention disastrously, many Chechens surrender or turn traitor, lured by Russian food, money, or the guarantee to stay alive on what at times looks to be the winning side.
During such instances, we are put in mind of Tolstoy’s great novella, Hadji Murad (1912), in which Chechens feel “repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty” of “those Russian dogs”, and the hero, a separatist guerrilla, abandons the cause, forges an unholy alliance with the Russians and defects.
Were The Sky Wept Fire a novel, it would fail on many levels. Structurally, its three parts stand like solid, intimidating slabs of bullet-ridden granite, each a testament to crimes against humanity. Tonally, it is largely unvaried, a steady, screaming pitch.
Eldin’s middle section, in which he is captured, accused of being a combatant and tortured by the Russians, is powerful and disturbing but also unrelenting, the only alterations being the jump from physical to psychological abuse and the systematic increase in meted-out pain to make Eldin talk, divulge and betray his men. Characters are in thin supply; those that do pop up quickly fall down or blow up. Eldin is the only person the reader can emotionally invest in, but as he lives to tell his tale we are denied any shock surprises. Towards the end a young girl materialises, declaring her love for Eldin, and although he remembers her from an encircled Grozny, the reader doesn’t, and so their reunion matters only to them.
It is just as well, then, that Eldin’s book is an account. It is, as Eldin admits, “chronologically messy and stylistically imperfect”, but then war is a dirty business. The bloodshed is overwhelming, but it is arguably the only way to accurately convey what Eldin and his people experienced. As if aware of the limitations of trekking, hiding, killing and suffering, here and there Eldin attempts to temper the gloom, flecking the carnage with sporadic light. In his darkest hours his faith keeps him sane. He recites verses from the Quran and declares the torture he will undergo will purify him, enabling him to “stand before God with a shining face”. He quotes Sufi parables and sprinkles in titbits of Chechen culture. There are also illuminating musings on the art of war in which general tactics and rules of engagement alternate with hard-won, self-acquired wisdom. At one point, Eldin confesses to being a fatalist. “Life is easier for fatalists – because fatalists find it easier to die.” As a result, “if you are a fatalist, war too will be easier”.
The more battle-hardened and battle-scarred Eldin becomes, the more he immerses the reader. During the prolonged torture and interrogation section he makes us share his plight by changing from first-person to second-person narration. We are pulled right in. “You” are beaten and malnourished in a cell; “you” are hauled out of the frying pan and into the fire when shunted from prison to be “filtered” in a concentration camp.
Equally effective is Eldin’s detail. He resists all-out grotesquery, preferring to home in on tiny incidents and aspects. He captures the “intolerable salty smell of blood fused with the smell of molten metal”. He records and is appalled by bomb-blasted bodies but is puzzled by their nakedness, until he discovers explosions strip their victims of clothing. Injured soldiers lie in fear of being eaten by packs of feral dogs. An old man ignores the overhead drone and thunder of attack planes and feeds his hens.
All of this is “an eyewitness account and not an analysis”, Eldin explains. This is only partly true. As war grinds on, Eldin starts to analyse and, more crucially, judge.
The Russians are savages with their prisoners of war; the Chechens, in contrast, “employed a policy of returning captured soldiers to their mothers”. The Russians “dishonoured the corpses of their own soldiers” by refusing the Chechens’ appeal for a temporary truce to bury fallen fighters. The Chechen media is superior to the disinformation- and propaganda-spouting Russian media, which has presented the Chechens as barbarians since the time of the tsars (Grozny, in Russian, means “terrible”).
Such a tilt in balance is inevitable, particularly after Eldin’s torture, but for the reader it becomes difficult to distinguish between tendentiousness and objectivity. It is worth noting that the journalist Anna Politkovskaya also reported on the war and highlighted the abuses committed by both Russian military forces and Chechen rebels.
However, there is a moment when Eldin discusses the run-up to the second war. For him, the apartments that were blown up and the terrorist incidents were “merely stages on the journey”. The real reason for the Russian invasion was revenge for having lost the first war. Eldin doesn’t linger here; this is “a job for the historians”. The first of the stages he mentions refers to the explosions in shopping malls and apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian cities in 1999; the terrorist incidents were two hostage crises – the Moscow theatre siege of 2002 and the Beslan school crisis of 2004. Before his murder, the spy-turned-journalist Aleksander Litvinenko claimed the last two were orchestrated by the Russian Security Service. Masha Gessen, in her superlative 2012 exposé of the current Russian president Vladimir Putin, The Man Without a Face, wrote “that the apartment-block explosions were the work of the secret police seems almost beyond doubt”.
If both assertions are true, and if Eldin shares the same views, then he should be commended for his restraint, for adhering to that eyewitness account with intermittent analysis and condemnation of his enemy, and not lapsing into full-scale subjectivity. “Let’s not get too lost in the wilderness of politics,” he says, and sticks to his word by returning to the conflict.
The Sky Wept Fire ends soberly, and with the news that Eldin now lives in exile in Norway. As a survivor, he sees it as his duty to remember those that sacrificed themselves – “and not just to remember, but to tell their story as best I can”. This is a story that should be heard from a writer who, like Gessen, Litvinenko and Politskaya before them, is exceedingly brave for daring to speak out.
