Polina Zherebtsova

In 2014, "Ant in a Glass Jar" was published.

In 2013, she has received a political asylum in Finland.

"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.-"

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.

Lydia Chesed, a critic. “Location – the war.”, magazines.russ.ru

Diary of Polina Zherebtsova is valuable by the fact that it upsets the balance of the roles and calls for the voices of other characters: girls, women, old women, waiting for the death from young, strong Russian men in military uniforms. Polina called them "Germans" or "white" because how can she, born at the turn of the Soviet Union and growing up with the Soviet films, name enemies any different? Russians as "Germans", shooting in poor or old women or cackling over the girl who skedaddle from them on all fours – these paintings are not so easy to accept even for the most liberal and unblinkered consciousness, but it makes the effort of every reader to open "Diary" even more valuable.

I read the diaries of Polina Zherebtsova in small portions, they simply cannot be read in bulk. And I am thinking about the following ... It was also very difficult for us to live in the mid-nineties. Well, or so it seemed to us ... Then one side demanded an immediate end to the war and the recognition of independence, while other side – fighting to the bitter end. But what about those who have been there, in Chechnya, between the carpet bombing and sweeps from one side and stoned fanatics on the other – those were rarely remembered by both sides. People were expendable. Let's not call it the flowering of freedoms and human rights. Yes, we were beginning to travel abroad, to discover the world, to read a free press, to earn money. And beside us, in our country, people lived like that. Do you think this all could pass without consequences? For free? It seems that today a little more is talked about those who are now surviving and dying in the Donbass. A little more. But this will repeat itself over and over, I'm afraid, as long as we as a society, as a nation, as a country do not learn a simple truth: the defenceless people come first and foremost.

Since 2012, she has been a member of PEN International.

In 2012, she was awarded The Andrei Sakharov Award “For Journalism as an Act of Conscience”.

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.

In 2011, "Polina Zherebtsova's Journal: Chechnya 1999–2002" was published.

In 2011, Polina published the book The Diary of Polina Zherebtsova, which is about Chechnya.

In 2010, she graduated from the Stavropol North Caucasus University with a degree in General Psychology.

Since 2007, she has been a member of the Russian Union of Journalists.

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."

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.

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 2004, Chechen diary was completed when the author was 19 years old.

Since 2003, she had worked as a staff member for the newspaper.

Since 2002, she has begun 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 The Andrei Sakharov Award “For Journalism as an Act of Conscience”. She was born in a mixed ethnic family in Grozny, Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, USSR. Since 2013 she has received a political asylum in Finland.

Since 2002, she has begun to work as a journalist. In 2003–2004, she studied at the School of Correspondents.

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.

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.

Polina was born in Grozny, USSR, and began keeping her diary when she was 9 years old, at the start of the First Chechen War. She was still living in Grozny when the Second Chechen War began. On October 21, 1999, the market in Grozny where she was helping her mother sell newspapers was shelled, and Polina was moderately wounded.

In 1994, Polina started keeping 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 October 21, 1999 she was wounded by shrapnel during a missile attack on Grozny Central Market.

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 October 21, 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".

The case of the war diaries is exceptional because among confusion in the news, reticence, and many conflicting assessments, just observations of ordinary people, who by the will of fate have become hostages of the war, can give an accurate picture of what is happening. One example of such literature now is the Chechen diary of Polina, the issue of which was a notable event. The book is a real diary that Grozny's resident Polina Zherebtsova kept as a teenager in 1999–2002, at the height of the second Chechen war. Some fragments of the diary were published earlier (in particular, for those Polina won a literary prize in Jerusalem named after Janusz Korczak in 2006), but to publish the entire book she managed not at once since no publishing house take the responsibility to publish "the truth about Chechnya".

Author of the Report on war crimes in Chechnya in 1994–2004. ru. eng.

Ant in a glass jar. Chechen diaries of 1994–2004 has been translated into Ukrainian, Slovenian, French, Lithuanian, Finnish, German, Georgian, and Chechen.

The first military campaign started in 1994. 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 life of her neighbors and friends. Because of the name of her grandfather's stepfather, Zherebtsov, Polina was subjected to repeated insults at school.

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.

LiveLib.ru LiveLib has included the book "Ant in a glass jar. Chechen diaries of 1994–2004" in a list "The 100 best books of all time" based on rating and voting results.

This book can be quoted from any place and in any order. And everything will be an endless terror. Perhaps you can rashly decide that reading is the only way to get people to reject war forever. Polina kept Chechen diaries from 1994 to 2004: 10 years of fire, death, hunger, cold, diseases, humiliations, lies, betrayals, sadism – all, that together is denoted by four letters: "hell."

Polina Zherebtsova (Russian: Полина Викторовна Жеребцова , IPA: [pɐˈlʲinə ʐɨrʲɪpˈt͡sovə] , March 20, 1985) is a Chechen Russian documentarian, poet and author of the diaries Ant in a Glass Jar, covering her childhood, adolescence and youth that witnessed three Chechen wars.

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.

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."