New Avenues in Chechen War Memorialization
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READING POLINA'S DIARY: NEW AVENUES IN CHECHEN WAR MEMORIALIZATION By Nina Soulier Submitted to Central European University Nationalism Studies Program In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts CEU eTD Collection Supervisor: Professor András Kovács External Supervisor: Professor Charles Shaw Budapest, Hungary 2020 Abstract This project is centered around Polina Zherebtsova's youth diary of the Second Chechen War. It investigates its value as a historical source in through an analysis of the text and of the publication process, in order to understand the civilian experience of war and its memorialization. Her account gives new perspectives on youth under wartime in the Chechen case. It revolved around morality collapsing because of hunger, generating lawlessness, civilian-led looting, ethnic persecution of Russian, sexual impurity in women. She observed a new "Chechenization" of the non-Chechen civilian population and increasingly "traditional" gender roles around. Girls in Chechnya followed more traditional paths in Polina's generation than in the previous, Sovietized ones, but Polina articulated a Soviet-style approach to her own life, which was centered around the war. The analysis of media reaction to the publication sheds light on the memorialization of the war in Russia, where it is widely considered as taboo, in Chechnya, and in the West. CEU eTD Collection ii Acknowledgements The remoteness caused by the current world situation makes it unthinkable for me not to thank the people who have contributed to the following piece. First and foremost, I would like to sincerely thank my supervisors for their intellectual guidance and their unwavering patience. I am heavily indebted to Professor András Kovács for his theoretical rigor and his presence through the entire time of writing. I would also like to thank Professor Charles Shaw of the History Department for his engaging insights throughout the process, and kindly providing me with crucial input from the Soviet period, both through thesis- writing time and during CEU's hectic Vienna semester in the Fall of 2019. I would also like to thank the entire Nationalism Studies Department faculty and staff, and in particular Luca Váradi and Szabolcs Pogonyi for providing me with a memorable experience of academic and social dimensions over two years. I am grateful to Georgy Tatevosov for his incisive and necessary insights into the subject matter. I am indebted to Jackie Lichtenstein and Elena Di Benedetto for improving the quality of this work. The last "Thank you" goes out to my mother. CEU eTD Collection iii Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... iv Part 1: Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Literature review: Making use of diaries ............................................................ 1 1.1.1.Diary as Genre 2 1.1.2.Ego-Documents in history 3 1.1.3.Diary as a historical source 4 1.1.4.War diaries as crisis diaries 7 1.1.5.Women's and girl diaries 8 1.1.6.Women's wartime diaries 10 1.1.7.Soviet diaries 11 1.2. Chechen wars scholarship ................................................................................. 13 1.2.1.General scholarship 13 1.2.2. Women in Chechnya 15 1.3. Research questions ............................................................................................ 17 1.4. Theoretical framework ...................................................................................... 17 Part 2. Analysis of Polina's diary ............................................................................................. 21 2.1. Crisis diary, Reflexivity, Material takes ........................................................... 21 2.1.1.General context of the diary 21 2.1.2.From bodily to moral decay 24 2.1.3.Historical agent 28 2.1.4.Professional aspirations 30 2.2. Ethnic shifts ...................................................................................................... 33 2.2.1.Interethnic tensions 33 2.2.2.Chechenization of society in Polina's perspective 36 2.3. Gendered considerations ................................................................................... 42 2.3.1.Gendered culture in 1990s Chechnya 42 2.3.2.Family life and education 44 2.3.3.Sexual collaboration and anti-Soviet, anti-Chechen morality 46 CEU eTD Collection 2.4. Chapter Conclusion .......................................................................................... 49 Part 3: The role of the published diary in the memorialization of the war.............................. 50 3.1. The "Grey Elephant in the Dark Room:" a heterogenous silence over the Chechen wars................................................................................................................ 50 3.2. Publishing the books ......................................................................................... 53 3.2.1. Addressing the source problem 53 3.2.2. Original reception 55 iv 3.3. Shifts in the author's intent- from witnessing to making political claims......... 57 3.4. Russian reception .............................................................................................. 59 3.4.1.Inauthenticity, Russophobia 59 3.4.2 Inauthenticity as a way to appear Western – The Shtamov controversy 61 3.4.3.Co-opting Zherebtsova from the official Russian angle 62 3.4.5.Polina as a champion of opposition newspapers 64 3.5. Chechen context ................................................................................................ 66 3.5.1.Chechen war memorialization 66 3.5.2.Reading the Diary in Chechnya 68 3.6. Western Context ............................................................................................... 71 3.6.1.Western Memorialization 71 3.6.2 Western reception 72 3.7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 73 Part 4: Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 75 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 79 Primary Sources............................................................................................................ 79 Secondary Sources........................................................................................................ 82 CEU eTD Collection v Part 1: Introduction On November 2, 1999, a girl wrote in her diary: "In the spring, I will be fifteen years old… If I am still alive, obviously."1 Her interrogations over death were well-placed. Two weeks before, she had been hit in the leg by shrapnel from the Russian bombing of the Grozny market, where she worked. The commitment to recording her life did not falter with her wound, nor by the dire material conditions of the siege. Polina Zherebtsova was born in Grozny in 1985 to a Russian mother and a Chechen father, who died when she was young. She began writing her diary at the age of nine and covered the two Chechen wars in her diary. Her accounts of the wars have been published with controversy in Russia and translated in other European languages, albeit not in English. In the academic literature, the Chechen Wars (1994-1996, 1999-contested) have mostly been studied through the analytical lenses of national secessionism, Islamic radicalization, widespread use of violence. There is a striking lack of scholarship on civilian narratives in Chechnya in wartime, which is why this project analyzes this diary and its publication. 1.1. Literature review: Making use of diaries In the following section, I will be investigating the uses of diaries as historical sources. In order to understand the value of Polina's diary, this section will provide a framework to understand the relationship between the genre and its uses in history. It will review the theorizations and stakes of different subgenres: ego documents, diaries, crisis diaries, CEU eTD Collection women's diaries, women's crisis diaries, and Soviet women's crisis. A discussion of the Second Chechen war literature will ensue, highlighting the frameworks of violence, ethnic and gender affiliations in the conflicts. 1 Polina Zherebtsova, Le journal de Polina Jerebtsova: Une Adolescence Tchétchène, [Polina Zherebtsova's Diary, Chechen Adolescence] trans. Veronique Patte, Books, 2013, 42. 1 1.1.1. Diary as Genre Post-World War II literary scholarship grappled with defining the boundaries of various genres of ego-document, and what these entailed in the construction of the self on a page. The first theorists, Lejeune and Okley, set forth the autobiography as a corpus that contains great variations in style and form, and yet had the common trait of investigating the self through writing.2 Whether the autobiographer wrote a diary, a memoir, or loose letters, he or she was looking for answers about themselves, inscribing themselves into a tradition of writing on the self.3 Scholars struggled to create a distinct definition for the diary genre, seeing it as