(extract; for full article, click here)

. . . Journalists of Politkovskaya’s kind - that most precious part of the craft, the reporter - do not and should not pretend to give an overview for which they have not done the work. For that they should rely on analysts who can claim perspective - such as Tony Wood, who seeks to make the case for Chechnya’s independence. It is not a hard case to make, and nothing more than just for the compact people who live in homelands sandwiched between Russia and Georgia. They have a history of repression in the imperial era and of near-genocide in the Soviet one, when Stalin ordered much of the nation to be annihilated or deported to Kazakhstan.

A vast majority of the population wanted independence, and had probably always wanted it. It might, under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, have been granted with certain policeable guarantees. These would have included the repatriation of the tens of thousands of ethnic Russians and other non-Chechens who wished to leave, and some safeguards over border security - though Yeltsin would have had to take on much of his military and security apparatus to do it, and his political capital was low. Had that happened, it’s hard to see how even a messy assumption of independence could have been worse than the many tens of thousands of dead in two Chechen wars, the flattening of the capital Grozny, and well over a million refugees and homeless. Tony Wood, in Chechnya: The Case for Independence, says that a deal was available in 1993, when Dzhokar Dudayev (a former Soviet air force general) was president. He considers Dudayev’s assurance to the Russian government that ”we do not see strategically a place for the Chechen Republic outside the current economic, political and legal space which covers the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)” as an opening for a compromise.

But there is a large problem here, which Wood does not address. Was such a declaration worth anything? Dudayev was a notoriously volatile man and Russian-Chechen relations are marked with betrayals on both sides. And if he did mean it, was he capable of delivering something which his militants would have rejected? In any case, Dudayev was claiming independence: the members of the CIS were the former Soviet republics, already all independent states.

The larger problem is Wood’s reluctance to see the Chechens as anything other than noble freedom fighters. He is good on Russian horrors and he repeats the charge that Putin’s administration probably had apartment houses in Moscow and Ryazan blown up and blamed on Chechen terrorists as a casus belli. I now find this convincing. But Wood is weak on Chechen wrongs. He does not deny the vast criminality, drug dealing, kidnappings, killings and mass murders, but he tends to explain them away as responses to Russia’s actions. He sees western leaders, in particular Tony Blair, as criminally complicit in Russia’s actions in the province, and scorns Blair’s ”hypocritical selectivity” in his choice of humanitarian interventions. I agree that the west, including the UN, has done too little to highlight Chechnya’s massacres, but the attempt to draw Russia closer to democratic states and away from just that kind of behaviour was and is not misconceived.