Published by Portobello in the UK and Grove Atlantic in the US, 2008

One Soldier's War is a visceral and unflinching memoir of a young Russian soldier's experience in the Chechen wars that brilliantly captures the fear, drudgery, chaos, and brutality of modern combat. Reviewers around the world have hailed it as "remarkable ... a work of both autobiography and the imagination in the tradition of... Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (Hugh Barnes, The New Statesman), a modern equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front (Zurich's Sonntagszeitung), and "right up there with Catch-22 and Michael Herr's Distpatches (Tibor Fischer, The Guardian).

In 1995, Arkady Babchenko was an eighteen-year-old law student in Moscow when he was drafted into the Russian Army and sent to Chechnya. It was the beginning of a torturous journey from naive conscript to hardened soldier that took Babchenko from the front lines of the first Chechen War in 1995 to the second in 1999. He fought in major cities and tiny hamlets, from the bombed-out streets of Grozny to anonymous mountain villages.

Babchenko is introduced to the terror of war at the very start of his service. During his six months of training, instead of being taught how to fight, he and other new recruits are savagely beaten by their own superiors as part of a longstanding hazing practice known as dedovshchina. Later, in battles at the front, he witnesses acts of unspeakable brutality — one comrade is sliced open and strangled with his own intestines—as well as moments of heartbreak and humanity — in a small village, the mothers of missing soldiers pick through piles of dead bodies to look for their sons. Throughout the book, Babchenko takes the raw and mundane realities of-war—the constant cold, hunger, exhaustion, filth, and fear—and twists it into compelling, haunting, and eerily elegant prose.

Like Anthony Swofford's Jarhead and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried this is a spellbinding book in which one soldier's story is rendered with such power, precision, and insight that it transcends his own experience and captures the universal experience of warfare. One Soldier's War is a devastating book by an extraordinary storyteller that "should be required reading for anyone who still harbors the illusion that war has some redemptive qualities" (Philip Caputo).
"A harrowing, masterfully written tale that bears promise of becoming a classic of modern war reportage.” — Kirkus Reviews