Of course, living together wasn’t easy at first – each of us had led very different lives, until we found ourselves in hell alongside a bunch of complete strangers.
My comrades came from all over Russia, and obviously each had his own story behind him, but we had all been marked by the same things: run-ins with the law, unstable families, difficult personalities…
The oldest comrade was Moscow, who, as you can tell by the nickname, came from the nation’s capital. He’d been called to arms two years late, because as soon as he had come of age he had run away from home to avoid military duty, but ultimately even he, like me, had been caught and sent to war.
One of our other brothers was Shoe. He had two juvenile convictions for burglary under his belt. His name was really Viktor, but he had earned his nickname because he never wanted to take off his shoes. Nosov was always yelling at him, telling him that if he didn’t wash his feet, sooner or later the smell would poison the entire unit. Shoe was always cheerful and had an athlete’s physique: he was nimble like a mouse, and he could fit through even the narrowest of spaces.
Another was Zhenya, aka Deer, so called for his hunting skills. He came from the region of Altai, in southern Siberia. His parents were scholars; his mother was an archaeologist or anthropologist, something like that. Deer was a normal guy, but when he got mad or didn’t believe what you were telling him his eyes became two slits so narrow that they disappeared.
Then there was Spoon, whose real name was Roman. He was physically strong, a little wild in his way of doing things. He would eat whatever he came across; he was always hungry. He was originally from a remote village in the woods at the foot of the Ural mountains. He got his nickname because of his surname, which in Russian sounded very similar to the word ‘spoon’.
Finally, there was big, bulky Aleksandr, who was from St Petersburg. Even though he was incapable of stringing together two words that made complete sense he always talked a lot, mostly about wanting to become a footballer (his nickname, in fact, was Zenith, from his favourite football team). He was our machine gunner, and he always carried his RPK 7.62-calibre gun. Nosov would joke that Zenith was ‘Mother Russia’s last shot’.
As for me, in Chechnya just as in Transnistria, everyone just called me Kolima. I was the sniper; I had to protect my comrades during transfers, participate in operations as a storm trooper, and find and eliminate the enemy snipers collaborating with other units.
In short, we of the 76th division were a group of men each cut to his own cloth, and despite the differences in age, background or social class, none of us ever felt alone. In fact, if I look back on it now, the only thing that truly helped us endure the war was finding in the others friends to lean on. Friends who strived every day with all their might to do the same thing you were doing: trying to stay alive.
We brought back trophies from every mission: the weapons and ammunition taken from the enemy. For this reason every saboteur had a couple of American and European guns, the most prized of which were the Colt .45 ACPs and their American clones. Having a weapon like that meant a lot; it meant that the person carrying it was a cutthroat, and commanded respect from the others. If a young soldier found a pistol like that, a senior soldier would swipe it from him, and thus the weapon would pass from hand to hand, until it wound up in the hands of the commanding officers.
The Austrian Glock and its variations, however, were the weapons of choice for conscripts and contract soldiers. People also liked CZs and other German guns. Among the terrorists, besides an unbelievable number of Russian-made firearms, like Makarov 9s, Stechkins and Tokarev 7.62s, European or American guns were always going around, generally ACP 45s, PARA 9s or 9x21s. I myself took a 9x21-calibre 98 Beretta FS from a dead man’s body, a beautiful, very handy weapon, more precise and secure than Russian pistols.
The assault rifles, as I said, were modified. We also used drum magazines with a higher number of charges than usual, and we would tie normal magazines together so that when we ran out of shots we could replace them in a second.
The enemy’s bayonets and knives were almost always American, and when we could we took them for ourselves. We liked those weapons a lot because they were useful and easy to handle, whereas the Russian bayonet seemed like a sort of universal tool you could use for anything – even plumbing, if you wanted – except close combat.
From the body of the first enemy sniper I killed, I took a Canadian-made knife designed for the American army. It was an all-black bayonet, nice, light, easy to carry and to hook to your belt. A year later, when I walked into a fight with a young Arab – our group was on a mission in a small city that we were liberating – that bayonet saved my life.
That one was a close call.
I was on reconnaissance in the basement of a city hall building. It was too dark to see anything, but all of a sudden I heard a noise. It was clear that the other guy had noticed my presence too. Shooting blindly, we used up our entire magazines without landing a single shot.
After that, the poor bastard threw a hand grenade, but it only made a terrible noise. With a heavy head and a constant whistling in my ears, I pulled out my bayonet and leapt into the dark where I thought my adversary was. We hit each other again and again; I hit him with the knife, while he tried to strike me with the butt of his empty gun.
When I finally made it out from underground, and my comrades brought out the man’s body, I saw that I’d practically ripped him apart. He was missing a few fingers; his whole face was full of open bleeding wounds. I had even gouged out one of his eyes. I don’t remember how I delivered the final blows, but on one side he didn’t have a single centimetre of living tissue left.
My muscles were frozen with emotional exhaustion, and for a good half hour I wasn’t able to open my right hand, the one that had been gripping the knife. It had been clenched so tightly it almost seemed as though an invisible hand were holding it shut.
Even if keeping the enemy’s weapons was prohibited by Russian military law, we didn’t care. As our captain would always say:
‘If they want us to play their game, then they can at least let us use the toys we want!’
After I’d been with the saboteurs for a while, I realised that Captain Nosov had his own personal theory on war. It was based on his experience in Afghanistan; he often said that it was very similar to the war we were going through in Chechnya, because in the end the enemy was the same. His interpretation of the facts, when he commented on what happened during our operations, was decidedly anti-government. In short, as any Russian soldier worthy of the name would say – always ready to defend the nation’s honour at all costs – Nosov ‘whistled like a traitor’.
Our captain was convinced that the war in Chechnya was nothing but a farce, a performance that Russia had put on all by itself, making use of its friends in the Arabic world and even paying the mercenaries to fight against us. Since I had always kept my distance from political discussions, the captain’s claims weren’t always clear to me. His theories completely overturned my beliefs about the governing structures; Nosov often talked about the power of ex-KGB agents, asserting that somehow a group of veterans within our secret services had the Russian government under their thumb.
I was very curious and asked many questions, because I truly wanted to know what was going on, in this place I’d been thrown into. So the captain tried to explain everything to me in the simplest way possible: