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The dismal performance of the Russian army in Ukraine will come as no surprise to those who have read Arkadiæi Babchenko’s One Soldier’s War in Chechnya (London: Portobello, 2008, translated from the Russian by Nick Allen). Babchenko served as a Russian soldier in Chechnya twice — once as a draftee and once as a volunteer, and the picture he paints is of a feudal-like 20th century army: the soldiers are beaten, harassed and humiliated daily by their Sargents, the Sargents by the officers, the officers by their high commanders….
And if you wish to understand some of the complex roots of Russian-Ukraine relationships, one place to start is Mikhail Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical novel The White Guard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, with an introduction by Evgeny Dobrenko).
Bulgkov, like one of his protagonists, was a Ukrainian medical doctor, and his account of the many-sided conflict in Kiev of 1918 contributed greatly to his literary fame. His novel, first serialized in a literary journal in 1925, was banned from Russian publication till the late 1960s. Stalin watched the play based on the novel, reputedly many times, yet miraculously, didn’t send its author to the Gulag.
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