Free Fall: A Sniper's Story from Chechnya

"At the end of my second year of military service the saboteur unit transferred to the mountains. Along with some of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ special units (called the OMON), we went through the villages to conduct what in our operation order was called ‘clean-up of residential areas’. Obviously this had nothing to do with maintaining sanitation in the mountain territories; it was a very specific and sensitive phase of the counter-terrorist operation intended to ‘reestablish respect for the laws of the Russian Federation’."

"To us, the Chechen mentality was incomprehensible – it seemed absurd for them to help foreigners from Africa or the former Yugoslavia but to want nothing to do with us, their neighbours, with whom, for better or worse, they had a shared history. They saw the terrorists as heroes, as people who had sacrificed themselves for the good of the Nation – Muslim Robin Hoods. Obviously we soldiers knew that both Chechen campaigns had been tainted by political and economic interests. As Captain Nosov had often told us, practically branding it into our minds: ‘Always remember that the feared Shamil Basayev, like many other Chechen Islamic terrorist leaders, was trained by our own secret services – we Russians were the ones who taught him to defend himself.’ We had learned from experience how the terrorists were linked to the corrupt officials working in our Command, but no one ever dared to bring up those stories; no one ever released the findings from the investigations conducted by the FSB. If we found out that there was a mole it was because of his comrades, who had reported him or in some cases simply eliminated him, since accidents happen in war every day anyway. These affairs, even if they didn’t reach the ears of the media, circulated widely among soldiers and officers. They were shared in whispers, during pauses between one battle and the next. Often the whispers were about an officer from Command dying in an accident: ‘He fell from a moving tank,’ they would say, which meant that he had been beaten to death by his own men. These stories were always concluded with a statement full of scorn and malice, spat out with cigarette smoke: ‘He liked shawarma too much...’"

"Nosov looked the mullah straight in the eye and, in that tone we all knew well, the one he used when he didn’t feel like playing anymore, he asked: ‘Where are your wounded?’ The man suddenly went pale, and his hands began to tremble. Trying to keep calm, he raised his hands to the sky, as if he were asking for divine forgiveness, and addressed the captain in a humble voice: ‘What wounded, commander? Perhaps I do not understand the meaning of your words. We are only servants of God. We help the people of the village...’ Nosov smiled with the politeness of an English nobleman, went up to him, and without removing his gloves – he was wearing the tactical Kevlar ones, which are stiff and heavy – gave him a hard slap in the face. The man let out a cry and then crumpled to the floor, sliding down the wall as if his muscles could no longer support the weight of his body. His nose immediately swelled up and started to bleed; his eyes filled with tears. Nosov pulled out his gun from under his vest and pointed it at the man’s head. ‘I need your wounded, now. If you prefer, I can find them myself, but by that point everyone will be dead: old, young, women, cats, dogs...’ The man started to whimper, hugging his knees to his chest. Breathing hard, big reddish bubbles came out of his mouth, saliva mixed with blood. Nosov took a lamp from the table, broke it apart and poured the kerosene over the man, who started to squeal like a pig at the sight of an executioner’s knife, while trying desperately to unwind his kerosene-soaked turban. His dirty hair poked out from the strips of cloth. Our captain took a box of matches and lit one, holding it over the man. ‘If you don’t tell me where you keep the wounded I’ll burn you alive,’ he said cruelly, holding the match in one hand and the gun in the other. ‘I don’t give a shit about your fucking religion; I think you should all be killed...’ Sobbing, the man sputtered out a storm of incomprehensible words, among which we could just make out: ‘In the garden... around the back... under the tent...’ Nosov pushed the point of the pistol into the cloth of the turban hanging off the man’s head and fired; the bullet was muffled, as though he had used a silencer; a cloud of gunpowder spread all around. The man’s head had been pierced by the bullet from one side to the other; the wall he had been leaning against a moment earlier was covered in blood and bits of brain. For a few seconds the dead man’s left foot kept moving over the kitchen’s rough floor, scraping the cement with his fake leather shoe. Nosov spat on the ground and pointed us to the exit. ‘I’ll be right there,’ he said. As I stood by the door, I saw the captain dropping the lit match on the corpse, which immediately caught fire. At that point Nosov looked right at me: ‘I’m really fucking sick of these Muslims...’"

"As soon as I stepped off the train I took a walk around my home town, and I realised that I had an inexplicable impulse to shoot everyone I saw on the street. I felt a lethal charge of hatred: it was eating me up inside, making me scorn everything that represented peaceful life."

"[...] on another channel the President spoke like a genuine criminal, openly threatening anyone who got in his way but at the same time so charismatic and reasonable that even I wanted to applaud his speeches..."

"I sat there in front of the broken television all night, thinking of how, like sheep to the slaughter, we had obediently gone to sacrifice our lives in the name of an ideal that the rest of the country cared nothing about. By the time I got up from the chair it was already morning, and something that an Arab prisoner once told me kept going through my head: ‘Our society doesn’t deserve all the effort we’re putting into this war.’ Only at that moment did I comprehend how right he was, this person, this man whom I had continued to call an enemy."

"Once in a while I’d sing a song or talk out loud, in an effort not to feel so alone. At night I would gaze out of the window. Turning off the light and aiming my rifle at the nearby houses, I would observe people; frame them in my sight and then shoot, pulling the trigger of my unloaded weapon. This gesture – shooting at real people with a real weapon, even if just in pretence – brought me some serenity and peace, and led me onto the right track. I was able to put my thoughts in order, just as some people relax by doing crossword puzzles."

"The closer I got to Siberia, the more I felt like I was a part of the land. It was as if it were calling out to welcome me, to help me get past all my troubles, to give me strength. I knew that I was going home, to the place where I belonged and where I would be able to find peace. It was a reawakening, a moment of connection with the real that makes you want to get out of bed, to do something with your day, to live. Like jumping out of an airplane in flight, and savouring the free fall before you open the parachute."

"I found out from some friends in the army that Captain Nosov and Moscow fell in battle – a few months after my discharge – in a mountain area between Chechnya and Dagestan. They had gone on reconnaissance and found themselves surrounded by a large group of terrorists. The infantry night explorers who went to recover the dead that day said that Nosov’s and Moscow’s bodies had been mined. Evidently one of the two, before he died, hadn’t wanted to give the enemy the chance to commit dishonourable acts on their remains. I visited their grave, in the military cemetery of the city of M—. According to army tradition, friends who have fallen together are buried together."

"Publishing has been plagued by fabricated memoirs in recent years. [...] But Nicolai Lilin's Free Fall: a Sniper's Story from Chechnya may be unique. Lilin, who wrote a brutal first-person account of fighting in the Russian army in the Chechen war, praised by its publisher as "a unique and remarkable memoir", has admitted that he did not experience much of what he described and deliberately embellished it to help sales."

"[...] it contains tales so unlikely that most editors would surely have spotted them as false, such as when Lilin finds a Chechen with a rifle loaded with hyper-accurate bullets filled with liquid mercury. Such an idea is nonsense since the liquid would shift in flight and render them useless."

"The foreword states that names, dates and places have been changed "to protect those involved" but gives no clue that the book is not a truthful account of someone's experiences. Almost a quarter of the book, pages 99-188, is an ultra-violent account of fighting in a built-up area – presumably Grozny – in which Lilin and his group rescued a cut off Russian unit, but not before it had lost 13 lieutenant-colonels."

"If Free Fall were a novel, it would be just a plot-free Russian version of Andy McNab. But, marketed as a memoir, Canongate can say that it "offers a unique perspective on one of the most controversial wars in living memory"."

"The author insists that the book is based on his own combat experience in Chechnya. In an interview with Ogonyok, he said that he took part in the second Chechen campaign, but refused to give details. I learned from the Italian media that he allegedly served in the 56th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment. However, sources in the Ministry of Defense claim that there was no soldier named Lilin or Verzhbitsky in Chechnya."

"His works ("Free Fall: A Sniper’s Story" and "Siberian Education") are truly impressive for their triteness and the sheer quantity of outright lies, nevertheless, this man is a favorite among some Western readers in Europe and the United Kingdom."

"Needless to say, Lilin has never set foot in Chechnya [...], but, following in the footsteps of Baron Munchhausen, this does not stop him spouting a load of exorbitant cock-and-bull stories – and everyone, at least nearly everyone, laps them up!"