Chechnya, forgotten land of hell

The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya by Asne Seierstad translated by Nadia Christensen

ANYONE wanting to understand the Russia of today should read this compelling, shocking book about the forgotten suffering of Chechnya. Russian history is always unpredictable, complex, nuanced and defies over-simplification, but the Chechen tragedy is the source of one of the important strands that created the resurgent, swaggering, oil-rich Russia that just elected Dmitri Medvedev as President, with his patron Vladimir Putin as paramount leader.

The Chechens are the violent, ungovernable, Islamic, mountain clansmen of the northern Caucasus who defeated the Russian superpower in the First Chechen War (1994-96), ruining Boris Yeltsin's capricious yet decent, tolerant yet corrupt, inept yet usually well-intentioned presidency. Then it was the brutally competent defeat of the Chechens by Yeltsin's tough, vigorous, disciplined heir, Putin, in the Second Chechen War, that established his political kudos. Putin promised to "whack [the Chechen terrorists] even if they're in the shithouse", and was able to deliver what Russians want from their masters: security, prosperity and imperial prestige. Like him or not, he is the most genuinely popular leader since Stalin.

The slaughter and criminality of the two Chechen wars beggars belief and it still continues. The Chechens themselves - deeply flawed, unmanageable even by their own leaders, addicted to baroque violence and vendettas, and perpetrators of sickening acts of terrorism against Russian civilians - must share some of the blame. But Russian conduct has killed at least 100,000, reducing the place to a dystopian wasteland.

Reporting in Chechnya is dangerous, difficult, unfashionable and frightening. It requires courage.

Now Asne Seierstad, Norwegian author of The Bookseller of Kabul, has covered her Nordic looks in scarf and heavy make-up and bravely penetrated today's Chechnya to report the damage rendered by war on children, to chronicle its poisoned society and expose its reign of murder, torture and corruption. She concentrates on a few characters, letting them recount harrowing stories.

The Angel of the title is Hadijat, a woman who runs an orphanage in Grozny for damaged children such as the abused, broken, brutalised, bereft brother and sister Timur and Liana, whom Hadijat works so hard to heal.

Another boy has just proudly murdered his own sister, an honour-killing. The children are routinely arrested, tortured, vanished. Another hero is the brave Shamil who, despite threats, runs Grozny's Memorial human rights organisation, which is deluged with accounts of murder and torture. She secretly visits Tamara, a mother of four sons, all of whom have been killed or kidnapped or vanished.

Seierstad's journalism is acute, taking me back to my own few days in Grozny on the eve of the 1994 invasion; the history, too, is vivid. The Chechens resisted Russian conquest in the 19th-century Murid Wars but in 1944, Stalin deported a million souls of the Chechen nation - half of them died, a catastrophe that Seierstad tells using interviews with old survivors and unpublished diaries. In 1991, the Chechens declared independence.

Yeltsin, fearing that the Russian Federation itself would fall apart, ordered his army to conquer Chechnya.

Their guerrilla fighters retook Grozny - and Russia sued for peace. Putin's invasion restored imperial pride and now Moscow has shrewdly "Chechenised" the conflict, handing over the republic to Ahmed Kadryov and then, after his assassination, to his terrifying 29-year-old son Ramzan, now President of Chechnya. Ramzan rules Chechnya (aka Ramzania) with a mix of brutality, energy and showmanship. Seierstad's meetings with Ramzan rank in the vivid dread of their portrayal with the most fearsome yet blackly comedic character-sketches in the history of reportage. She reveals, at the centre of a preposterous court, a strongman who jogs everywhere, can't sit still, keeps pet lions, talks gibberish and who rules through publicity stunts (inviting Miss World and Mike Tyson to Grozny), an insane cult of personality and a murderous secret police.

Ramzan has achieved a return to peace, normality and reconstruction, but Seierstad graphically reveals that this has come at a terrible price, cataloguing eyewitness accounts of murder, torture and vanishings: "There are certain families no one visits. They don't visit each other. No one says goodbye to the dying. Having contact with these families can lead you into darkness yourself. They are burdened with catastrophe.

The strife in Chechnya has entered a phase where streets have eyes, everyone watches everyone else and anyone who doesn't denounce others is hiding something. The iron fist of the republic hammers in the idea that traitors are threatening us. Those who associate with these people are enemies themselves. That is what's called 'Chechenising'. The executioners and victims are Chechens. The Kremlin decides who will have the power. Its henchmen operate in darkness and shadow. And in broad daylight."

The authoress, too, is risking much. Anna Politkovskaya, chronicler of Russian political corruption, had mockingly interviewed Ramzan just before she was assassinated. Seierstad asked Ramzan if he ordered her murder. He replied laughing, "We don't kill women; we love them!" but concludes: "She should've stuck to housewifery!" This book has grotesque villains, shining heroes and thousands of damaged people and innocent but hopelessly unhealable children who are neither. I devoured this in a few hours - a powerful book of heartbreaking yet flamboyant reportage from a forgotten hell.

Simon Sebag-Montefiore's novel Sashenka will be published in June.