From the song of the Russian army veterans who were involved in the Chechen conflict
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* Charismatic nineteenth-century Russian nationalist and representative of imperial tsarism in the Caucasus. He applied a policy of terror and repression towards the Caucasian peoples, especially those of the Muslim faith, forcing them with violence to adopt Christianity.
One morning – really early, it must have been four a.m. – Moscow woke me up. My comrades and I had slept in the courtyard of a half-wrecked building in a public housing district on the outskirts of the city. We’d been embroiled in a series of bloody skirmishes with the enemy for days. My group and I had been fighting on the front lines but luckily we were all still in one piece. We hadn’t taken any losses, but we were dead tired.
It seemed like the battle was never going to end. Every second was crucial, every action was important and required great concentration, and at the end of the day we felt like juiced oranges. During battle, we had a clear objective: to push the enemy to the other end of the city, where the armoured infantry units were waiting to eliminate all of them . . . It was an exhausting task, and Captain Nosov had given us permission to take a break, to go behind the line to rest amidst the rubble, in the area guarded by our infantry.
Before falling asleep, some of us said that maybe the mission was over; we were all hoping we wouldn’t have to set foot in that godforsaken city again. Then, sleep came.
A little while later – at four, as I said – Moscow woke me up by tapping my chest with the butt of his Kalashnikov.
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