The ghost of Anna Politkovskaya hangs over everything written about Chechnya and the surrounding regions. She wrote about brutality, official lies and intimate cruelties. She eviscerated Russian actions and policy in the North Caucasus, that belt of statelets and tribes, mountains and plains to the south of Russia where for almost two centuries, successive tsars and commissars have decreed repression and war. She homed in on Chechnya, most resolute, most cruelly abused and most cruel of the enemies of tsarism and communism. Through her fame in the west and infamy in Russia, her writings have become classics in the practice of journalism.
This is not because the Russian journalist, murdered last October in the lift of her apartment building in Moscow, was a great analyst of the politics and likely future of the region. A grim chronicler of conflict, she was little interested in clashing narratives and priorities; she attributes all of the region’s woes to a Russian policy of destroying Chechen separatism. She did not wish to engage with the dilemmas of leaders, or even, for the most part, with the violence of the separatists. She wished to bear witness to the horrors of a Russian occupation of a land seeking independence.
She cannot be read - as some would like her to be - as the definitive writer on Russian neo-imperialism. She never claimed this. In her work she was always closely focused - counting the bodies in a morgue and examining the marks of torture, or conducting a surreal interview with the warlord-playboy (and pro-Russian Chechen president) Ramzan Kadyrov. Where she comments at length on the evils of the regime of President Vladimir Putin, as she does in A Russian Diary, she is less convincing. This is not because Putin’s administration is anything other than autocratic, often thuggishly so, but because criticising it is the kind of thing any liberal Russian intelligent can do. To be sure, she does it better than most: her description of how the Kremlin smothers its critics by patient, even affectionate, explanations of their difficulties is an excellent vignette of a power not so much soft as slimy. Where she rises to world-class is in her observation, her pity for the victims and her engagement with her craft.
Through Politkovskaya’s journalism, her readers come to grasp something of the dangers of Russian power - its brutalities to its enemies within, its savage discrimination towards the many Caucasians and Muslims within its vast territory and its inability to create, indeed its aversion to, the institutions of civil society. The most wretched reading in A Russian Diary is her precise and horrified observation of Russia’s atomised, squabbling and weak liberal parties. When I was in Moscow as a correspondent in the early 1990s, I wrongly thought these groups would play a major part in the reconstruction of Russia from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Now, they snarl at each other, run forlorn campaigns and, in some cases, seek the spoils of office and dwindling fame. Once Russia’s best hopes for the future, they are now consigned to a largely hated recent past.
Journalists of Politkovskaya’s kind - that most precious part of the craft, the reporter - do not and should not pretend to give an overview for which they have not done the work. For that they should rely on analysts who can claim perspective - such as Tony Wood, who seeks to make the case for Chechnya’s independence. It is not a hard case to make, and nothing more than just for the compact people who live in homelands sandwiched between Russia and Georgia. They have a history of repression in the imperial era and of near-genocide in the Soviet one, when Stalin ordered much of the nation to be annihilated or deported to Kazakhstan.
A vast majority of the population wanted independence, and had probably always wanted it. It might, under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, have been granted with certain policeable guarantees. These would have included the repatriation of the tens of thousands of ethnic Russians and other non-Chechens who wished to leave, and some safeguards over border security - though Yeltsin would have had to take on much of his military and security apparatus to do it, and his political capital was low. Had that happened, it’s hard to see how even a messy assumption of independence could have been worse than the many tens of thousands of dead in two Chechen wars, the flattening of the capital Grozny, and well over a million refugees and homeless. Tony Wood, in Chechnya: The Case for Independence, says that a deal was available in 1993, when Dzhokar Dudayev (a former Soviet air force general) was president. He considers Dudayev’s assurance to the Russian government that ”we do not see strategically a place for the Chechen Republic outside the current economic, political and legal space which covers the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)” as an opening for a compromise.
But there is a large problem here, which Wood does not address. Was such a declaration worth anything? Dudayev was a notoriously volatile man and Russian-Chechen relations are marked with betrayals on both sides. And if he did mean it, was he capable of delivering something which his militants would have rejected? In any case, Dudayev was claiming independence: the members of the CIS were the former Soviet republics, already all independent states.
The larger problem is Wood’s reluctance to see the Chechens as anything other than noble freedom fighters. He is good on Russian horrors and he repeats the charge that Putin’s administration probably had apartment houses in Moscow and Ryazan blown up and blamed on Chechen terrorists as a casus belli. I now find this convincing. But Wood is weak on Chechen wrongs. He does not deny the vast criminality, drug dealing, kidnappings, killings and mass murders, but he tends to explain them away as responses to Russia’s actions. He sees western leaders, in particular Tony Blair, as criminally complicit in Russia’s actions in the province, and scorns Blair’s ”hypocritical selectivity” in his choice of humanitarian interventions. I agree that the west, including the UN, has done too little to highlight Chechnya’s massacres, but the attempt to draw Russia closer to democratic states and away from just that kind of behaviour was and is not misconceived.
In denying to the Chechens any agency except a reactive one, Wood fails to examine the growing dependence of the Chechen fighters on Islamic radicals. As Gordon M. Hahn writes in his careful and minutely researched study, Russia’s Islamic Threat, it was to these radicals that they ”naturally turned”. In his summary Hahn gives something of the necessary balance which Wood lacks: that ”the Chechens’ Sufi jihadist warrior culture, their custom of blood revenge, the war’s decimation of Chechnya and brutalisation of the population and the general absence of a negotiating process combined to turn the Chechens towards Islamist jihadism and its strategy of mass terrorism.”
It is certainly the case that Russia, as the regional superpower, bears the largest responsibility for solving the crisis which the demand for independence created. But it was a demand which was framed violently and designed to ethnically cleanse the republic of Russians (who had been a majority in Grozny) and which caused many Chechens great concern. On one trip to Grozny as the first war was beginning in 1994, I talked to several of Dudayev’s ministers, none of whom thought that the tactic of confronting Russia was other than disastrous. Russia was therefore in the position of a man in a pub confronted with a drunk who wants a fight. As a sober man, it is his responsibility to walk away; instead, Russia put itself in the position of one who summons the rest of the pub to beat the drunk senseless.
As Hahn shows, it isn’t just Shamil Basayev and other terrorist leaders who have gone over to a radical jihadist position; the strategists of jihad outside Russia see Chechnya as a valuable base in the future. He quotes Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, as saying that ”the liberation of the Caucasus would constitute a hotbed of jihad... and the region would [then] become the shelter for thousands of Muslim mujahidin from various parts of the Arab world.” Hahn believes that the radicalisation of Russia’s Muslims is going on apace, and will spread. He gives a chilling and I hope (but fear not) overdone list of future problems: Russia’s emerging Islamic network becomes a recruiting ground for jihadists; the radicals promote civil war within Russia; the secession of one or more Muslim republics; the possibility that jihadists might acquire WMD from Russia’s badly controlled stockpiles; and the demand for dictatorial powers from Russians to crush the rising threat.
He also enumerates the actions the US and the west should take to counter these: put the security of Russian WMD at the top of the Russia-west relationship; increase co-operation between Russian and western secret services; pressure Russia to reduce military operations in Chechnya, rebuild its economy, restructure the federal nature of the country and tackle anti-Muslim/Caucasian discrimination. Merely to read the list - which is entirely sensible - is to realise how difficult it will be. This is especially so at a time when, buoyed by the oil price, Russia’s president and most of its people (to judge from the polls) regard the west as a busted flush.
It was Beslan which did most to put Chechnya’s ”freedom fighters” beyond the pale. More than 1,200 men, women and children were taken hostage by terrorists in the 2004 school siege in the southern Russian province of Ossetia, the major non-Muslim area of the North Caucasus. The siege ended with some 330 of them dead, including more than 188 children. Beslan: The Tragedy of School No 1, Timothy Phillips’ account of this carnage, despite a few glitches, turns out to be a fine and subtle one. It intercuts the scenes of deepening horror at the school with descriptions of and reflections on the Russian educational system, Chechen terrorism, the nature of life in Russia and relationships between men and women in the North Caucasus. The book, based on extensive interviews, rouses pity and horror - as does his work on revealing the despair of the town in the years since the raid.
In one of his reconstructed vignettes, Phillips describes how the two women suicide bombers who were part of the gang were ordered by the leader, known as the ”Colonel” (real name Ruslan Khuchbarov), to go into a room where the more able-bodied men among the hostages had been put and to detonate the charges in their belts. After some argument they did. Few survived. He reports that the women might have been reluctant; that a witness heard one protest that they didn’t know they would attack a school. But in the end, they did it.
Terrorism of that intensity is on the streets of London, Madrid, New York and Moscow. I agree with the objection that the ”war on terror” is an inappropriate phrase for what we must do. But we must certainly understand the depths of a challenge, which is a modern, religiously-based perversion of Islam into a proto-fascist cause. And we must combat it before there really is a war.
John Lloyd was the FT’s east Europe editor from 1988 to 1991 and Moscow correspondent from 1991 to 1995.
A RUSSIAN DIARY
by Anna Politkovskaya
Harvill Secker ₤17.99, 336 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤14.39
CHECHNYA: The Case for Independence
by Tony Wood
Verso ₤12.99, 160 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤10.39
RUSSIA’S ISLAMIC THREAT
by Gordon M. Hahn
Yale ₤25, 368 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20
BESLAN: The Tragedy of School No 1
by Timothy Phillips
Granta Books ₤10.99, 224 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤8.79
