page_title: Polina Zherebtsova
section_title: Second Chechen War
hierarchical_section_title: Polina Zherebtsova / Second Chechen War
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Скан из книги дневник Жеребцовой Полины.
context_page_description: Polina Zherebtsova 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.
  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. 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.
  Author of the Report on war crimes in Chechnya in 1994–2004.
  ru. eng.
  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.
  Politkovskaya described war as a journalist from the outside in. Polina Zherebtsova writes about war from inside the heart of darkness.
context_section_description: 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".
  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.
  Polina continues to publish in the Moscow magazine Banner, the magazine Big City, and the newspaper Free Word.
  In 2011, Polina published the book The Diary of Polina Zherebtsova, which is about Chechnya.
  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.
  Library "Bestseller" has awarded the book with the first place in the project "With a book to peace and harmony", dedicated to the presentation of books about wartime.
caption: Diary of Polina Zherebtsova
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