The Sky Wept Fire: My Life as a Chechen Freedom Fighter

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It is only possible to write beautifully about war if you have never witnessed it from within. It was my fate, though, to spend long years seeing war from the inside. And so much happened that perhaps would have been better forgotten, but it was my duty to remember. Yet this book is not a chronicle. After all, memories can be messy… For a chronicle, you need the utterly cold and impartial mind of a historian. Whereas I have followed my memories haphazardly… Listening more to my heart. Trying to understand just what it was that happened to me – a man far removed from the blood and romance of war. I have tried to be as neutral as possible in my account of these events, yet at the same time I remain deeply partisan. Partisan about everything I saw.

This is not a seductive story of war for the adventurous or the romantic. I’ve merely recounted to the best of my ability what I was fated to witness and what my memory deemed important. I’ve omitted the names of persons with whom I crossed paths – some are still alive, and those who are dead have relatives who are still alive. Though on second thoughts, I don’t know if I could have resisted the temptation, for the sake of historical record, to name ‘names, addresses and safe houses’ (as President Putin once urged his citizens to do) had it not been for my strange memory, which has blotted the names from my mind, leaving only the faces and their actions. Indeed, history is made up not of names, but of the personalities behind them.

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