[2] Polina was an Andrei Sakharov Prize finalist "Journalism as an act of Conscience" in 2012.
[3] She was born in a mixed ethnic family in Grozny, Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, USSR.
When I was nine years old my city was surrounded by a ring of Russian tanks – and houses were turned into ruins and ashes along with their inhabitants.
The upper floors of the apartment building were on fire, and children were screaming in unbearable pain: shrapnel tore their bodies.
My grandfather, a veteran of the Second World War, was in the hospital on Pervomayskaya Street, but was killed in the shelling.
But tell me – can you imagine how the patients scream when the guns are firing at their hospital or when a jet bomber, invisible and invulnerable to their curses, drops a one-and-a-half ton bomb on them?
Before they reached living human flesh, the bombs tore up stone and concrete.
We fell from hunger, lying about in the corners of apartments, half submerged in basements.
The rats slept with me in the hallway on the icy wooden floor, and I didn't chase them away, realizing that even they were suffering from "Russian democracy" Our cats died, unable to withstand the diet of pickled tomatoes we fed them once every few days.
And do you want to hear how I stood near the concrete slabs under which for three days in the centre of Grozny, choking in the wreckage and cement dust, Russian old folk died?
This hell was repeated many times in ten years: as long as the war lasted in the Caucasus, in the Chechen Republic.
In August 1996 rockets from a Russian military post flew into the staircase of our apartment building: our neighbours were blown to pieces.
Blood dripped from the walls and ceiling, and I could hear the surviving neighbours screaming in terrible agony.
This was done by "weaklings" – because a strong man will not assert himself at the expense of the lives of women and children.
In 1999, when the "humanitarian corridors" of refugees were shelled, burning people alive in buses, we could not get out of the city.
"Terrorists" was the name they gave to the children, the old folk and women who traded vegetables, sweets, bread, cigarettes, newspapers, etc.
I got nothing except threats and being told to "shut your mouth", as I was a true witness to these bloody events.
In 2000, On January 19, the surviving neighbours and my mother and I were threatened with execution by firing squad.
Of the forty-eight apartments in our building ten were Chechen and the rest – Russian, Armenian, Gypsy, Azeri, Ingush, Jewish, Polish... We lived together amicably until the war began.
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.
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.