Daily Blague

After all, what can you learn about such a place that will still be true in five years? In the ten since Mr Goltz witnessed the Massacre of Samashki, a virtually independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria rose and then collapsed, the nature of the conflict with Russia went through a complete transformation - perhaps "metastasization" would be a better word. What began as a nationalist/separatist struggle fought on the ruins of the Soviet Empire has become an Islamist/terrorist action in which the needs and desires of ordinary Chechens are not consulted. But Mr Goltz has not written a history of warfare in the Caucasus: although I learned everything in the foregoing sentences from Chechnya Diary, it appears in the background of a harrowing personal account of which the author, not Chechnya, is the protagonist. That's what makes Chechnya Diary a great read. The great big fat insoluble problem in the back of beyond is the setting, not the story. And Mr Goltz has a shrewd idea of how much outdoor plumbing, fried garlic greens and urban devastation you can take. It's there, but it's not overdone.

Ordinarily, I don't retail stories and plots. It's not that I worry about spoiling the fun for readers; it's just that I have always hated book reports. But nothing I can say about this book will intrigue you unless I give you some idea of what happens in Chechnya Diary, because it's not what you think. At first, perhaps it is: Mr Goltz, on the strength of a tenuous and ultimately regrettable contract, smuggles himself into Chechnya in order to film a short documentary showing the "Chechen spirit." It's understood that this assignment will require some "bang-bang" - visuals of firings, shellings, and, if possible, killings. How to do this without exciting the attention of Russian or Chechen commanders presents predictable problems, and Mr Goltz is less than thrilled when his accidental minder shuttles him off to Samashki, a small town where nothing is going on. That changes when the Russians start bombing the area, and a local commander, Hussein, decides to blow up the railway tracks. Mr Goltz misses this but films the explosion of a Russian truck. Arrangements are made to spirit him out of Samashki so that he can get his documentary on the air, but the blockade and the shelling make this impossible. It is thanks to a seemingly improbable surprise that Mr Goltz leaves Samashki at all, and there, you would think, the story would end. But you're only halfway through.

Mr Goltz goes to Moscow, quarrels with the outfit that sent him on the assignment, and generally tears his hair out. He is rescued by a colleague, Lawrence Sheets, who has been covering the devastation of Grozny, the Chechen capital. Mr Sheets is in a position to hire Mr Goltz as a camera man and stage a return to the Causcasus, to cover whatever's going on there. They duly fly back to neighboring Ingushetia and drive miserable roads, trying to get through checkpoints. But Samashki has been sealed off again. After several days of impasse, Mr Sheets' employer, Reuters, pulls the plug on the expedition, but Mr Goltz cajoles "Uncle Larry" into letting him have one last try, and this time the approach to Samashki is unimpeded. The Russians have finished with, and finished off, the town of Samashki. Mr Goltz finds bodies everywhere. There are survivors, too, but their stories only add to the horror. We will learn later that a Russian officer who had seen Apocalypse Now had the bright idea of "setting" the massacre to the  music of a Shostakovich symphony. The streets are full of used the discarded syringes from which soldiers injected themselves with uppers. The Massacre at Samashki appears quite literally to have been an orgy of  violence, an arcade game made real.

With his now even-better footage, Mr Goltz cobbles together a report that wins him a nomination for the Rory Peck Award, a prize for high-risk camera work named for a cameraman who was killed by a sniper while covering Boris Yeltsin's 1993 coup. Mr Goltz doesn't win the prize, but the producers like his work so much that they commission a follow-up: Mr Goltz is to return to Samashki to hook up with Hussein. And this is where the story really heats up. I will say no more than this: Hussein has been forced to leave Samashki by disgruntled townspeople. An ugly rumor has calcified, and big part of it goes like this: the foreign cameraman whom Hussein took round with him on his missions, and who knew the details of the town's defenses - Mr Goltz, that is - was a Russian spy. Proof? The Massacre occurred mere days after Mr Goltz's departure.

Now we understand why Chechnya Diary begins with an epigram that states the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the observer affects the observed. To be sure, Mr Goltz is no mere observer. He has often crossed a line drawn in thick ink by the journalistic profession. He has, I believe, been criticized by "mainstream" journalists for taking sides and supporting soldiers with, if nothing else, his enthusiasm. He doesn't shoot guns, but his shooting cameras are hardly more neutral than rifles. Mr Goltz is not built for neutrality. A fluent speaker of Turkish, he seems ordained to take sides against the Russians no matter what the conflict. (In Azerbaijan Diary, this partisanship presents the two sets of bad guys - the Armenians and the anti-democratic supporters of Haydar Aliyev, the Soviet pasha in Azerbaijan - as vileness-prone Russian proxies. But partisanship does not corrode Mr Goltz's objectivity; he is as ready as anyone to expose a rat fink on his own side.

At the end of Chechnya Diary, Mr Goltz threatens to hang up his spurs. His last attempt to enter Chechnya (illegally, of course) finds him in the mountains of Georgia, taking a cold look at his latest bright idea: to celebrate his forty-fifth birthday in Samashki, and then to cover the new war, in which Russia faced not nationalist-separatists but Wahhabi Islamists for whom Chechnya was the new Afghanistan. Obstacles at the border, however, seem insurmountable.

Was I planning to just sort of hang around as a war voyeur?

Well, maybe. I could still try and sneak by the Georgian guards and make it across the river, and take the "toboggan ride" down the Argun, and maybe make it to Grozny that night; the alternaive would be to stay in Shatoi or Itumkale, likely under interdictory attack, and then push on to Samashki the next day.

But I did none of those things and was in none of those places. I was back in Tbilisi in a restaurant, getting drunk with old and new friends, feeling rotten and cowardly.

I rationalized that the time had come for other madmen (and women, too), to make their mark in the exciting world of war reporting. Maybe I was now older and war-weary - and maybe wiser. But the argument felt hollow. Maybe I was just afraid.

The candor about fear is both admirable and touching, but it elides a question that Mr Goltz never poses explicitly: considering the unavoidable dangers and huge risks of injury or death, what makes a man go halfway round the world to see other people's wars at first hand? And what sort of man engages in war as a noncombatant? I don't mean to psychologize Mr Goltz's motivation, much less to hormonalize it: you won't get any piffle out of me about machismo or performance anxiety or any of the other endocrinologies. Chechnya Diary implicitly suggests several aspects of an ultimate answer. One is that Mr Goltz likes to play - serious games. He savors the special quality of excitement that occurs in the least likely of places, the wilderness. He likes to thumb his nose at bullies and, with luck, to see that they're bruised, if not necessarily by his hand. He cultivates his collection of can-you-top-this tales. But he is also sane enough to wonder, when the chaos of war erupts and the shrapnel starts flying, to wonder how he could be so effing crazy as to put himself on the spot. This makes him a companionable human being; without it, he would be a gratuitous barnstormer. And a terrible bore.

And let's not forget the educational aspect of these books. Whether Mr Goltz ought to teach history to tender minds is arguable, but he manages to inject a lot of cold information into his lively text, and even if you forget the details you will hold on to the important parts of the story of Chechnya's struggles. He makes "Chechnya" too rich and interesting, too populated by memorable characters, to dismiss as an insoluble problem. It's for this reason that I wish that both of his books had more in the way of apparatus: maps, timelines, perhaps even indexes of major players. There is a map of the town of Samashki in Chechnya Diary, but it's not nearly as useful as a map of the Grozny region would have been, or even a map of Chechnya itself. Such maps are not easy to come by: in my expensive-if-not-exorbitant Macmillan World Atlas, I could obliterate most of Chechnya with my thumbprint. I fault Mr Goltz's editors for this: he has written a fine text, and they have not produced  book the book that it deserves. Although the events related in Chechnya Diary are contingent, and many of them will require reinterpretation in light of further history, Mr Goltz's story itself is timeless.