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.