Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya [Hardcover]

In Angel of Grozny, Åsne Seierstad provides a deeply personal insight into the life and times of the Russian Republic of Chechnya. Her book is full of personal anecdotes and descriptions of her visits to a vast range of people in Chechnya, and her bravery and persistence in seeking out these stories is a wonder in itself however, and several times I found myself wondering how she would get out of the situations she found herself in.

Seierstad first visited Checyna during the war in 1994, when the break-up of the Russian empire was in full swing. Boris Yeltsin, while encouraging other Soviet nations to "take as much sovereignty as you can", drew the line at allowing Chechnya to gain its independence because he felt that this would threaten the borders of Russia itself. The result was a violent war, with Chechen fighters confronting young Russian soldiers with the traditional daggers and assassins' bullets, only provoking severe retaliation from the Russians against the civilian population.

Seierstad begins her book by describing her first visit to the country as a young reporter for a Swedish newspaper, managing to infiltrate herself deep into Chechen-held territory, where she met Chechen fighters and village elders, even staying in the home of a senior Chechen leader.

Eventually peace negotiations with Russia took place and Chechya gained a semi-independence from Russia. However, when Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister of Russia in 1999 another war started, even more brutal than the first, killing tens of thousands of Chechens and leading to ultimate Russian victory, greatly enhancing Putin's reputation among his own people, leading to his appointment as president in 2000. The Chechen leaders were killed over the next few years during a "normalisation process", resulting in a Chechen republic fully integrated with Russia, with every official photograph of the Chechen President Ramzan being accompanied by another one of Putin.

Seierstad's book is largely about her recent return to Chechnya, during which she travelled extensively and interviewed many people both citizens and officials. Much of her book describes the plight of the many orphaned children of Chechnya. She stayed for several weeks with Hadijat, the "Angel of Grozny" of the books title, who began to take in and look after street children, and runs a non-official orphanage based in her home and the homes of some of her supporters. The children's tales are harrowing, and there is no certain future for them, for the instability of life in the republic results in a daily struggle for survival. Such is the damage done to the children through war and poverty, abuse and neglect that it seems impossible at times to see any future for them. Hadijat somehow managed to create a family experience for them however, and her influence on the children is considerable.

Seierstad manages to gain an extensive interview with President Ramzan himself. Ramzan is adulated by most of his people but this seems to be the adulation due to a tribal chief rather than the leader of a democracy. He seems to be a man both humble and autocratic at the same time, and evidently immensely dangerous to his enemies. He is a committed Muslim and this leads to statements about the need to "protect" women by keeping them modestly dressed and focusing on their domestic duties, while he himself has no compunction about being seen with glamorous models.

The tension between Whabbist Islam (as preached by followers of Osama Bin Laden) and the mainstream Islam approved by the state is visible throughout the book. The mainstream Islam is seen as a means of social control and order, whereas Whabbist Islam is outlawed and its followers seen as enemies of the state.

This book is probably about as good as it gets if you want a picture of Chechyna today. There is much of interest, not least the way in which a Muslim republic can form part of modern Russia. The countless personal stories give it a much human interest, but there is also plenty of background to the history and politics of Chechnya, such that having read this you feel you know as much as you need to know about this sorry nation, whose troubles are probably far from over.

In 1990, Boris Yeltsin, trying to undermine Michel Gorbachev, told the leaders and potential leaders of the many republics of the USSR to "take as much sovereignty as you can swallow" from the Kremlin. The army general Johkar Dudayev did just that, as he was hell bent on making Chechnya independent of Russia. Four years later, Yeltsin sent tanks over the border. In the early hours of new years eve 1994, the Russian Army rolled into Grozny. In the resulting attack by the Chechens, a thousand Russian soldiers had died in 24 hours, and the first Chechen war had begun.

A Norwegian journalist, Asne Seierstad wanted to find the truth about the war, and why Yeltsin wanted to crush the rebel nation of Chechnya, so in 1995 she travelled into the war zone, and reported on the first war. Her first report was form a hospital in the capital and then "one week later I'm in a ditch" being shot at by the Russian army . It was a harrowing and sobering experience, with the Russian army laying waste to villages in the lowland plains, the fierce resistance in the mountains, and the brutality of the war in the breakaway republic. In 2005, Asne decided to report on the situation ten years on, and she returned to the still war torn republic.

The angel of Grozny presents stories and tales about the war in the republic, and the cost of the war from both sides, to the children orphaned, the Russian soldier injured in the war, the refugees facing huge discrimination in Russia, and the Putin backed president of the republic. And those tales are so well told that they are easily believed, coming from someone who went deeper into the conflict than possibly any other journalist. As well as the past of the conflict, and the horrors of Beslan, the book also paints the picture of the new post communist Russia - a land of rampant corruption, racism and injustice. And few places in Russia can match supposedly peacetime Chechnya for injustice.

Even after the war has finished, the capital is still in ruins - not just form the Russian army bombing, but from shoddy construction of new buildings. Seemingly the only new buildings built that are not botched are prisons and mosques. But the most disturbing part of the book is the situation that the Chechens now face. In the republic, its now Chechen versus Chechen, and the Putin backed president of the republic Razman comes across in the plain, neutral account here, as a sociopath (a previous president, Razman's father was assassinated in 2004, and Seierstad suggests it was the Russians). In the interview in the book he is unrepentant about his own gulag in the grounds of his mansion, the myriad disappearances and the rampant corruption of his government. The Chechens are now worse off in 2007 than they were in 1988, as the despotic ruler of the republic lives it up in his mansion inviting miss world participants for parties and events,while he imposes his watered down version of Sharia law on the mainly Sufi nation, and orphans eat out of garbage dumps and kill pigeons for dinner as detailed so vividly in the first chapter.

And that is not the only picture painted vividly by Seierstad. She tells the story of the resistance fighters, the women and the children in Chechnya, and the Chechens in Russia facing racism everyday in Russia. But in all the bleakness, the ray of light is the story of the angel of Chechnya, a women who runs an orphanage in Grozny, and refused to abandon the victims in the war. The meeting between the author and the woman running the ophanage is one of the books most memorable passages.

In the book, only the civilians, are free from criticism, and as a result, this is one of the most moving accounts of war you can ever read, and the book will shock you, and it will grab you, but it will not leave you unchanged. As an account of the result of war on all sides, this book has few equals, and certainly none as far as an account of Chechnya is concerned.