Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A Dirty War is about the way the Russians conquered Chechnya in 1999-2000. It’s a really powerful account written in the immediate aftermath of the events, bringing to life the brutal mistreatment of Chechens and the destruction of Grozny by Russian forces. Politkovskaya was a very brave woman to write the book at the time and deserves a great deal of respect for what she did.
Sadly, there has been a lot of death and oppression in the region in recent years too, as reflected in your last book by Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist assassinated in Moscow in 2006.
Yes. Politkovskaya’s book A Dirty War is about the way the Russians conquered Chechnya in 1999-2000. It’s a really powerful account written in the immediate aftermath of the events, bringing to life the brutal mistreatment of Chechens and the destruction of Grozny by Russian forces. Politkovskaya was a very brave woman to write the book at the time and deserves a great deal of respect for what she did. It is pretty unambiguous that the Russian treatment of the Chechens was extremely violent. No matter how bad the Chechen terror attacks in Beslan and Moscow were, what happened in Chechnya was a hundred times worse and people sometimes lose sight of that. There has been a bit of a tendency in the international media to demonise the Chechens but the day-to-day trickle of horrors in Chechnya terrified and horrified far more people than the bigger scale Chechen attacks on Russia. The cumulative picture of attacks on Chechens means that they’re a traumatised nation. People rather forget that.
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Oliver Bullough is Caucasus editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and former Reuters correspondent in Moscow. His book Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus is published by Allen Lane. He talks about the brutal oppression of the Circassians under the Tsars and says they pretty much vanished after the Russian invasion of the 1860s. The Russians gave them a choice to move north of the mountains and settle as peasants under Russian law or leave. I think they were quite surprised when a million or so Circassians chose to leave, but about a third of this group died in the course of the exodus. These events have since been recognised to be the first genocide of the modern age and I think the parallels with the Armenian genocide of 50 years later are clear.
