Since August, 1999, Anna Politkovskaya, reporter for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, has been to Chechnya more than forty times, to cover the war – the second one to befall this tiny republic belonging to the Russian Federation. Having published her first reporter’s notebooks in 2000, today she is going further, to keep the horror that Chechens are still suffering in the public eye, and to warn us, too, that the very future of Russia and its chances to accede to true democracy are at stake.
Describing the suffering of the Chechen population, martyred by federal troops, she shows how the continuation of the conflict causes it to spin ever more out of control. The total violence encourages the extremist minority fringe – to the detriment of the majority of Chechens, won over to Western ideals – and dehumanizes those involved on both sides of the battle. Russian soldiers loot, rape and kill with impunity, Chechen fighters stoop to denouncing each other and internal feuding, consumed by a desire for revenge on one side, and the cynical demands of survival on the other, sometimes tipping over into plain and simple criminality. In the end, these practices rot society to its moral core.

For Anna Politkovskaya, who pulls no punches against Vladimir Putin, the roots of the vicious spiral of civil war contaminating all of Russia can be found in the tradition of power needing an enemy – a scapegoat to bear the brunt of Russians’ (real) suffering in the difficult era of post-Communism.