THE OATH

Graphic, often horrifying memoir by a Chechen doctor who treated Russian soldiers, Chechen rebels, and civilians caught in the middle.

Now living in the US and struggling with English, Baiev is assisted here by former U.S. News & World Report Moscow bureau chief Nicholas Daniloff (Two Lives—One Russia, 1988, etc.) and freelance journalist Ruth Daniloff. Drawing on his wartime journal to depict the bitter conflict, the doctor also recalls his Muslim childhood amid an extended family, his medical studies in Moscow, and his early years as a prosperous cosmetic surgeon in Russia. With war imminent, he returned to Chechnya in 1994 and was soon practicing emergency medicine under rapidly deteriorating and extremely dangerous conditions, first in Grozny, the capital, and then in his hometown, Alkhan Kala. Operating without electricity, gas, or running water, under attack from Russian missiles, eventually forced to use sour milk and honey on wounds, to suture with ordinary thread, and to amputate limbs using only local anesthetics and carpentry saws, Baiev was at times the only doctor for some hundred thousand people. Both Russian forces and Chechen rebels threatened to kill him for treating those on the other side, and his escapes were harrowingly narrow. During an uneasy peace in the late 1990s, suffering clinical depression and contemplating suicide, Baiev made a life-changing, soul-saving pilgrimage to Mecca. By the summer of 1999 he was again in Chechnya, stockpiling food and medical supplies in preparation for the resumption of war. This time he videotaped conditions for Western news organizations. After the nephew who helped him was executed, Baiev decided in early 2000 to take the offer of a Russian security services officer to help him leave Chechnya. Members of Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Watch helped him find sanctuary in the US.

A compelling portrait of the Chechen people and the effects of war on innocent victims, demonstrating the depths to which human beings can sink and the heights to which they can rise.