HOWZAT

Most Russians knew nothing about the deportation and it was a taboo subject in history books. But in Chechnya, resentment lives on and the 1994-96 war, followed by a second conflict that began in 1999, served as proof that Russian governments know only the language of force.

As Seierstad writes, Russian suspicion of Chechens runs equally deep. Mothers still lull babies to sleep with a nursery rhyme that ends: “a wicked Chechen crawls onto the bank and sharpens his kinzhal [dagger]”.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, calls the conflict an “anti- terrorist operation”. Officials in Moscow argue that after their troops left in 1996, Chechnya became a haven for organised crime, kidnapping and Wahhabi militants. They say they sent in troops only in 1999 after a string of random bomb explosions in Moscow and two southern Russian cities killed more than 200 civilians.

When Seierstad returns to Grozny in 2006, she finds construction under way at frenetic pace, all funded by Moscow. Everywhere there are pictures of Putin’s puppet Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen warlord whose clan swapped allegiance at the beginning of the second war in 1999.

She is excellent at describing the personality cult she refers to as “Ramzania”. The warlord turned president keeps four lions, a panther and a tiger, and claims that he spits in their faces before petting them to show who’s boss. He is whizzed about town in a motorcade of 30 speeding vehicles she describes as “silver bullets”, and his ministers and advisers all have his picture on their mobile phones.

Beneath the veneer of stability, Kadyrov runs a reign of terror and Grozny has become a place where “streets have eyes, everyone watches”. Seierstad herself is shadowed everywhere, but manages to sneak back in and meet mothers whose sons have been whisked off the streets, and victims of torture.

It all makes for a fascinating, if often horrifying read. If I have a criticism, it is that while she talks to Chechens who are victims of racist violence in Russia, the only Russian victim she interviews is a young soldier who stepped on a Chechen mine and was blinded. It would have been interesting to hear from some of the Russians forced to leave Chechnya after its declaration of independence in 1991.

The book tends to romanticise the Chechen rebels, yet they have been responsible for some of the world’s most shocking massacres of recent years. I would like to have heard from relatives of the 130 people killed in the Moscow theatre siege in 2002, when Chechen rebels strapped with explosives stormed the building, or the siege of the Beslan school that left 331 people dead, more than half of them children.

For, as is clear from the book’s gruesome opening — in which a young boy smashes a dog’s skull with a brick — this is a conflict where those who are most defenceless have suffered most.

The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya by Asne Seierstad
Virago £14.99 p340

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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