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DR Book Club: Behind Russia's Forgotten War

The war in Chechyna is Russia’s hidden nightmare, one of the most poorly understood – and least covered – conflicts of our time. The lawlessness of the north Caucasus, coupled with the Kremlin’s hostility to the press, has made independent reporting on Chechnya nearly impossible. Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad is one of the few who […]

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The war in Chechyna is Russia’s hidden nightmare, one of the most poorly understood – and least covered – conflicts of our time. The lawlessness of the north Caucasus, coupled with the Kremlin’s hostility to the press, has made independent reporting on Chechnya nearly impossible.

Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad is one of the few who has managed to penetrate the information blockade. In her new book, The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War, she travels incognito to the desolate republic, where she finds a population brutalized by a decade and a half of war.

Grozny means “terrible” or “forbidding” – an appropriate name for Chechnya’s capital, which was leveled in a siege that made Sarajevo look like a picnic. Today, the rubble has been cleared, but Seierstad returns to find that the “rebuilt” Grozny has had little more than a cheap, shoddy facelift. More troubling, she documents the rise of an ominous cult of personality around Ramzan Kadyrov, the thuggish, track-suit clad former rebel who is now the Kremlin’s man in Chechnya.

Seierstad describes a meeting with meeting with Baslan, the head of the Chechen branch of Nashi, the pro-Putin youth movement. She notes a picture on the wall of Baslan with Kadyrov.

Baslan has the same picture on his cell phone. As time passes, I notice that Ramzan’s ministers, his relations and even casual acquaintances have pictures of him on their cell phones. Everyone who has ever been photographed with Ramzan seems to use it as a screen saver.

‘EVERYTHING is thanks to Ramzan,’ Baslan assures me. “But we do some things ourselves. We distribute calendars, we hang posters. On 8 March we gave roses to all the women in Grozny, a gift from Ramzan.

She also travels on a surreal Kremlin-organized press junket for the inauguration of Kadyrov. As official minders look on, residents of
Grozny heap praise on Fearless Leader.

‘You can talk freely with anyone you wish here,’ says the man from the Moscow office. ‘You have ten minutes!’

Every second person in the park seems to be a guard; to conduct interviews appears pointless. Instead, I follow a Russian television crew to see what people say to them.

‘Ramzan is our hero!’

‘Look how he has rebuilt our city!’

‘We thank Ramzan!’

‘We praise Ramzan!’

‘He has given Grozny back to us.’

‘Everything around us is thanks to him!’

The replies roll off their tongues, and revive memories of street interviews in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein. The same expressions of nervous happiness on people’s faces. Even the government TV journalists get bored.

Students of counterinsurgency seem to spend a lot of time debating the lessons of Algeria, Malaya or Vietnam. The decade-and-a-half-long conflict in Chechnya rarely gets a mention. That strikes me as a mistake, in part because Russia’s tenuous success in pacifying Chechnya rested, in large part, through a strategy of “Chechenization” –
bringing former rebels like Kadyrov over to the Kremlin’s side to serve as Russia’s proxies.

In the case of Kadyrov, this strategy has led to a grotesque cult of personality; magnified a culture of impunity and lawlessness; and led to a wave of disappearances. It has also created a kind of amnesia.
C.J. Chivers of the New York Times recently described the new memorials springing up in Grozny.

But here in Grozny, public discussion about the forces that flattened this city is complicated by the fact that those forces were not foreign. They were Russian. And so in the urge to memorialize the war, Grozny has become an outdoor shrine to the president’s father,
Akhmad H. Kadyrov, who was killed by a bomb in 2004 at a ceremony, as fate would write it, commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany.

In the government’s version, Akhmad Kadyrov, a Sufi religious leader and former rebel, had grown so disgusted with separatists and the Arab jihadis who joined them that he led an armed countermovement, steering Chechnya back to the fold of a beneficent
Moscow...

But the problem with the Kadyrov cult of personality that the younger Mr.
Kadyrov has sponsored is that it requires both selective forgetting and an awkward balancing act for former rebels now courting Kremlin favor.

A
visitor will not find official acknowledgment that by the time the elder Mr. Kadyrov rose to prominence, Chechnya and Russia had been at war, off and on, for nearly 10 years. Or that an accumulated mass of evidence has documented Russian human rights violations against
Chechens on a grand scale.

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