Polina Zherebtsova (Russian: Полина Викторовна Жеребцова, IPA: [pɐˈlʲinə ʐɨrʲɪpˈt͡sovə]; 20 March 1985) is a Chechen Russian diarist and poet. She is the author of Ant in a Glass Jar, covering her childhood, adolescence and youth that witnessed two Chechen wars.
She was born in a mixed ethnic family in Grozny, Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, USSR. In 2002, she began to work as a journalist. She is a member of PEN International and the Union of Journalists of Russia. She has been awarded the Janusz Korczak international prize in Jerusalem in two categories (narrative and documentary prose). In 2012, she was awarded Andrei Sakharov Award "For Journalism as an Act of Conscience". In 2013, she received political asylum in Finland.
Author of a Report on war crimes in Chechnya in 1994–2004.
ru. eng.
Polina was born in Grozny, USSR, and started her first diary on 25 March 1994, days after turning nine, at the start of the First Chechen War. She was still living in Grozny when the Second Chechen War began. On 21 October 1999, the market in Grozny was shelled where she was helping her mother sell newspapers, and Polina was moderately injured.
Politkovskaya described war as a journalist from the outside. Polina Zherebtsova writes about war from inside the heart of darkness. Der Spiegel №10 /2015.
Ant in a glass jar. Chechen diaries of 1994–2004 has been translated into Ukrainian, Slovenian, French, Lithuanian, Finnish, German, Georgian, and Chechen.
Polina Zherebtsova has given interviews to the BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, has participated in literary festivals around the world.
She has always offered publishing rights for translations of all of her books by herself, without the use of services of literary agents.
Contents
Biography
She came from a family of Chechens and Ukrainians. She calls herself a cosmopolitan.
Polina's father was a lawyer, who died when Polina was a child. Her mother, Elena, worked as a senior goods manager at a large company. She devoted her spare time to her daughter's education.
Polina grew in a family that equally revered books like the Torah, the Bible and the Koran. Since childhood, she had studied religion, history, and philosophy.
Polina Zherebtsova was born in 1985 in Grozny and lived there for almost twenty years. She considers herself a cosmopolitan as she has multi-national ancestry. Polina's father died when she was very young. Polina's maternal grandfather Zherebtsov Anatoly Pavlovich, with whom she had formed a friendship, worked in Grozny for more than 25 years as a TV journalist-cameraman. Polina's maternal grandmother was a professional artist. Paternal grandfather was an actor and musician. Polina's paternal grandmother was a professional actress.
On 25 March 1994, Polina started writing in a diary in which she recorded what was happening around her. Her diaries cover her childhood, adolescence and youth that witnessed three Chechen wars. School, first love, quarrels with parents, what is familiar to any teenager, side by side in the life of Polina with the bombing, starvation, devastation and poverty.
On 21 October 1999 she was wounded by shrapnel during a missile attack on Grozny Central Market.
Since 2002, she has begun to work as a journalist. In 2003–2004, she studied at the School of Correspondents.
In 2004, Chechen diary was completed when the author was 19 years old.
In 2006, she has been awarded the Janusz Korczak international prize in Jerusalem in two categories (narrative and documentary prose). Competition theme was "terror and children."
First Chechen War
The first military campaign started in 1994. Polina began her first diary on 25 March 1994 at the age of nine. At the beginning of the war, Zherebtsova's grandfather, Anatoly, was killed by shells from airplanes. Zherebtsova made the first serious entries in her diary at this time. She kept the diary to herself, and wrote about humorous and sad moments in the lives of her neighbors and friends. Because of her Russian surname and national strife, Polina was subjected to repeated insults at school.
Second Chechen War
In 1999 a new round of war in Grozny began in the North Caucasus, when Polina was 14 years old, which she describes in her diary.
While helping her mother trade in the central market in Grozny after high school, Polina was wounded in her leg on 21 October 1999, when the marketplace was shelled, as described in a preliminary report "The indiscriminate use of force by federal troops during the armed conflict in Chechnya in September–October 1999".
Due to injury and illness Polina and her mother didn't have time to escape from the war. She faced hunger and eviction along with other neighbors in the "cleansing", as described in pages of the diary. Her main goal was to make people understand the need to avoid war, especially in the same country. The diary also says that before the conflict began in 1994 in the Republic, the relationship between Russian and Chechen peoples was relatively friendly.
In February 2000, five months after her injury, 14-year-old Polina was operated on by surgeons of the 9th Moscow hospital, removing the biggest piece of shrapnel of the 16 pieces.
She had to change schools five times in the city, as all were destroyed in turn during the war in Chechnya. In 2002, 17-year-old Polina entered ChPGI (Chechen State Pedagogical Institute). In 2004 she graduated from the school of reporters with honors.
Since 2003, she had worked as a staff member for the newspaper.
In 2005, Polina moved to Stavropol. In Stavropol she transferred to the North Caucasus State Technical University, where she obtained her diploma for General Psychology in 2010.
In 2006, Polina was the winner of the international literary contest named after Janusz Korczak in two categories. In the same year, she wrote a letter to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, asking for help with the publication of her diaries. Staff members of Solzhenitsyn's foundation helped Polina move to Moscow, but failed to publish the diaries.
Emigration
Because of threats which Polina reported she had begun to receive, by mail and phone from people representing themselves as "patriots of Russia", she left Russia in January 2012, taking political asylum in Finland.
Threats were constantly set in the fact that I must stop writing on this subject if I want to live and if I don't want to have my family killed. It's unbearable to live in constant fear. I'm very worried about my family. We were able to go, and we asked for political asylum...
In 2013 she was granted political asylum.
Action
Polina signs petition "Putin must go".
She wrote a Letter to Khodorkovsky.
.......
I was very sympathetic to you when you were in prison. I considered the sentences you were given unjust, political. Even now I think that you may have been subjected to pressure. But you in your interview you said: “Putin is no weakling. I am ready to fight in order to keep the North Caucasus as part of our country. This is our land, we conquered and won it!” Consider: now you will have to share responsibility for those war crimes, which in the Caucasus are not the costs of “conquest”, but its essence.
Read my diary.
Read how we were conquered.
How we buried our murdered neighbours under fire, having first covered the graves with branches so that the hungry dogs would not tear the bodies apart. How thousands of women and children were murdered in the Chechen Republic.
Do you still want integration with such a Russia?
I do not.
And I do not need her citizenship. I am embarrassed by it, like the shameful brand-mark on a slave.
Polina Zherebtsova
23.12.2013
Books
2011 — Polina Zherebtsova's Journal: Chechnya 1999-2002 Moscow, Detektiv-Press, ISBN 978-5-89935-101-3
2014 – Ant in a glass jar. Chechen diaries of 1994–2004 Moscow, Corpus, ISBN 978-5-17-083653-6
2015 – Thin Silver Thread (novels) Moscow, AST, ISBN 978-5-17-092586-5
2017 – Donkey Nature, (novel), Moscow, Time, ISBN 978-5-9691-1536-1
2017 – 45 parallel (novel), Ukraine ISBN 978-966-03-7925-1
Publication in foreign languages
Polina Jerebtsova, Le journal de Polina Jerebtsova. Dédié aux dirigeants de la Russie d'aujourd'hui (translated into French by Véronique Patte). France, Paris: Books Editions., 2013. ISBN 2-36608-032-8.
Polina Zherebtsova, Sodan sirpaleet. Finland, Helsinki: INTO, 2014. ISBN 978-952-264-312-4.
Polina Zherebtsova, Le journal de Polina. France, Paris: 10/18, 2015. — 528 с. ISBN 978-226-406-455-4.
Polina Zherebtsova, Чеченські щоденники 1994–2004. Ukraine:«Клуб сімейного дозвілля, 2015.ISBN 978-966-14-8343-8.
Polina Scherebzowa, Polinas Tagebuch (translated into German by Olaf Kühl). — Berlin, Rowohlt Verlag, 2015, 576pp. ISBN 978-3-87134-799-3.
Polina Žerebcova, Polinos dienoraštis (translated into Lithuanian by Indrė Butkutė). — Lithuania, Tytoalba, 2015, 415pp. ISBN 978-6-09466-107-5
Polina Zherebtsova, Тонка сріблиста нить, Ukraine: BСЛ, 2016. ISBN 978-617-679-207-9
Polina Žerebcovová, Deníky Poliny Žerebcovové - Děvčátko uprostřed čečenské války (translated into Czech by Libor Dvořák), Czech Republic, BizBooks, 2016, 479pp ISBN 978-80-265-0500-6
Polina Zherebtsova, Осляче поріддя, Ukraine: BСЛ, 2017. ISBN 978-617-679-357-1
Polina Zherebtsova, TŠETŠEENIA PÄEVIKUD 1994–2004, Estonia, Tänapäev, 2017. ISBN 978-994-985-161-4
Polina Zherebtsova. 2017. Мравка в стъклен буркан: чеченски дневници 1994 - 2004 Mravka v stǎklen burkan: čečenski dnevnici 1994 - 2004 (translated into Bulgarian by Нели Пигулева Neli Piguleva). Ruse, Bulgaria: Avangard Print, 5988pp. ISBN 9789543373307
Novels and Stories
Marriage of captivity – 2003
The Dream about Passport – 2003
Larissa – 2004
Not fate – 2004
Baptism – 2006
Little Angel – 2006
The Tale of Rabbit – 2007
Grandfather Idris – 2008
and so on
Literary Prizes
Janusz Korczak International literary prize for fragment from the diary published as "Baptism" – 2006
Janusz Korczak International literary prize military tale "Little Angel" – 2006
Polina was an Andrei Sakharov Prize finalist "Journalism as an act of Conscience" in 2012
Ernest Miller Hemingway International literary prize for book "Donkey breed" - 2017
Finalist of the Angelus Award (Poland) "Chechen Diary" – 2019
Reviews
"Agonizing Zherebtsova's storytelling already caused a comparison to her predecessors – Anne Frank, who kept a diary during the Second World War, and Zlata Filipovic, whose diary tells about the war in Bosnia. Publishers highly valued the diary, however, for a long time, one after another, they refused to print it, being "loyal to the government of modern Russia.-"
Alissa de Carbonne, "Reuters", United Kingdom.
Polina Zherebtsova was 14 when the bombs started raining down. They hit the market where she worked with her mother, the streets she walked down daily, until Grozny was reduced to rubble, a hometown no longer recognisable. From the start, Zherebtsova wrote about it, an act of catharsis as much as a document on the second Chechnya war. She filled dozens of diaries in a messy, scribbled cursive, sometimes embellished with doodles – bomb blasts that look like flowers, blocks of flats seen from a distance.
Miriam Elder, journalist, correspondent of The Guardian
The girl born in 1985 in the Soviet Union, sees herself not Russian or Chechen, but a citizen of the world. Her homeland is on the pages of books, written in Russian. But in war-torn Grozny, the word "Russian" is a stigma. Russians are "guilty" of everything around, although they themselves are a suffering party.
Because of the Russian name girl is beaten by peers at school in each of the five schools that she had a chance to study in. Over the years, Polina learned to fight to defend her dignity. In the book, a lot of the episodes show that courage and perseverance inspire respect, but cowards do not survive. Enemies are always challenging and eyeing for how the victim will behave: break or hold out.
In Russia, where the mother and daughter Zherebtsova get at the end of the book, they are considered "Chechen women", and they are again disenfranchised outcasts. Polina has repeatedly reiterated that she is a person of the world as her lineage intertwined many bloodlines. The concept of "personality" for her means more than "a representative of some nation", and “cultural identity” more than “national."