What to read to understand Chechnya

FOR A SMALL territory of 1.5m people, Chechnya has played a big role in shaping modern Russia. The Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s were the only large conflicts, among those that followed the Soviet collapse, to happen inside the Russian Federation. They were also among the bloodiest: around 300,000 people died and the region’s capital, Grozny, was obliterated. Russia pursued the wars to prevent secession. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, lamented the “geopolitical disaster” of the Soviet breakup and warned in 2005 that Chechnya showed how Russia itself could catch the “epidemic of disintegration”. Since major hostilities ended around 2003, the Kremlin has used Chechnya as a model for how to subdue rebels. The Kremlin first installed Akhmad Kadyrov, a former rebel, as leader of the republic. He was succeeded, in 2007, by his son Ramzan. The younger Mr Kadyrov has amassed vast wealth and built a private army known as the kadyrovtsy. A faithful ally to Mr Putin, he has sent thousands of soldiers to aid Russian invaders in Ukraine. (Pro-independence Chechens, meanwhile, have fought on Kyiv’s side). These four books and one film show how Chechnya got here—and what this corner of the Caucasus says about Russia.

In 1990 Boris Yeltsin, then Russia’s leader, implored Russia’s regions to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow”. Elections in Chechnya propelled a pro-independence fighter pilot, Jokhar Dudayev, to power. Tension grew with Moscow and, by 1994, conflict broke out. Sebastian Smith, who reported from Chechnya at the time, tells the story of the first war and the uneasy peace which followed from 1996. As he shows, the Chechens retained their fledgling state largely thanks to the ineptitude and low morale of their opponents. Some Russian soldiers even sold their weapons to Chechen troops rather than fight. But survival came at a cost. Grozny fell, was retaken and, in the process, levelled. An air strike killed Dudayev. The state that survived was cripplingly poor. Organised crime and Islamic extremism flourished, then helped bring about a second war in 1999. Combining reportage with a broader history of the region’s conflicts, this is the essential guide to the first war.