A Chechen Girl's War Diary: A Glimpse of the Past, and Maybe the Future

With violence rising in the North Caucasus, and Ingushetia poised, tragically and preventably, to become the next Caucasian hot zone, I've been thinking about Chechnya's two recent wars more. Between 1994 and 2009, at least 100 thousand Chechens died as Chechen separatists and militant Islamists fought the Russian army in the tiny republic. The violence leveled Chechnya's towns and cities, and triggered refugee outflows to other parts of southern Russia and into Caucasian former Soviet republics.

In April 2009, Russia declared the war in Chechnya won, but violence had already spilled over into neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia, and Chechnya's insurgency is growing once again, largely in response to the repressive tactics used by the government of Moscow-backed former warlord Ramzan Kadyrov. Chechnya never grabbed headlines the way the wars of the former Yugoslavia did. A million Chechens suffered out of the spotlight because Chechnya's conflict was seen as far away and inconsequential, unlike the very European Balkan wars, and the Russian government severely curtailed media access to areas affected by fighting.

Today, as the Caucasus region braces for the possibility of renewed large-scale conflict, more and more narratives of the Chechen wars are appearing in the media. One such narrative comes from Polina Zherebtsova, a teenager who kept a diary of her life in Grozny, Chechnya's capital, through the second Chechen war. Polina's diary entries, published by a Russian literary journal and translated in pieces by the blog Tangentialia, lend a child's words to the shattering of civilian life under a rain of bombs. In one entry, dated 27 Sept. 1999, Zherebtsova writes:

In our Staropromyslovsky district, the station ‘Beryozka’ was bombed – it’s right by us. They’ve been bombing it since morning. I am going to read Shakespeare. Our library has twelve of his books. These are old books, printed early in the 20th century. My grandfather, the journalist and cameraman, bought them. He was killed in a crossfire in 1994 at the beginning of the first war.

I have terrible dreams at night.

Born to a Russian mother and Chechen father, Zherebtsova feels fully Chechen, but finds her identity and heritage difficult to reconcile as the war drags on, and animosity toward ethnic Russians grows. "The woman who sells medicines introduced me to her sisters," she writes. "She says that everyone has taken a liking to me. But I must wear a scarf so that nobody knows that my mother is Russian and will treat me better."

During the Bosnian war, the diary of Sarajevo schoolgirl Zlata Filipovic became an international bestseller. Polina Zherebtsova's war diary is just as compelling, and important to understanding the nightmare that may soon engulf Ingushetia. This blogger hopes a publisher picks it up soon.

[Photo: Polina Zherebtsova's Chechen war diaries. Tangentialia.]