The Oath

by Khassan Baiev

It’s an eyewitness account, by an ordinary Chechen doctor who went home to stitch up wounds and served in the various makeshift hospitals around Grozny during both modern wars – both Yeltsin’s and the war that began under the next president, Vladimir Putin, in 2000. What’s unusual about it is not just the way it brings the facts of both wars to terrifying life, but that Baiev decided to drop the Chechens’ usual reticence about family and personal life and put a lot of the gallant, quietly courageous people in his life, and their backgrounds and memories, into the book.