When Vladimir Putin became President of Russia in 2000, his first priority was to reestablish the intelligence agencies’ grip on the country by portraying himself as a strongman protecting Russian citizens from security threats. Despite condemnation by the United Nations, the European Parliament, and European Union, the policy of brutal “ethnic cleansing” in Chechnya continued. For Putin, Islamist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, were a welcome opportunity to rebrand the war against Chechen independence, not as the crushing of a democracy, but as a contribution to President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.”
In the years that followed, Putin’s regime covertly supported and manipulated extremist factions in Chechnya and stage-managed terrorist attacks on its own citizens to justify continuing aggression. US and European condemnation of Russian atrocities in Chechnya dwindled as Russia continued to portray Chechen independence as an international terrorist threat. Chechnya’s Prime Minister-in-Exile Akhmed Zakaev, who had to escape Chechnya, faced Russian calls for his extradition from the United Kingdom, which instead granted him political asylum as Russia’s increased its oppressive operations.
Price: $59.95
Pages: 624
Publisher: Academica Press
Imprint: Academica Press
Publication Date:
27 May 2022
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781680532715
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Russian & Former Soviet Union, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Geopolitics
Akhmed Zakaev’s memoir is an essential document for anyone who wishes to understand the fate of Chechnya in modern times and the rise of Vladimir Putin. Zakaev played a key role in Chechnya’s doomed wars with Russia between 1994–1996 and 1999–2003. He gives us vivid pen portraits of leading Russian opposition figures, all of whom are now dead. They include the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, the liberal journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and the FSB officer turned whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko, and the Cambridge-based Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.
An acute analyst of international affairs, Zakaev observed earlier than most that Putin had a dark vision for Russia’s future, in which law and human rights counted for little. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the U.S. administration of George W. Bush were indifferent to the suffering of Chechnya. After 9/11 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Putin cast his own murderous actions as part of the global war on terrorism — a casuistic and self-serving argument Western leaders were happy to embrace. Zakaev is a unique witness to these events — the last survivor, practically. His account is compelling and scrupulous, in a marvelous translation from the Russian by Arch Tait.
Chechen nationhood remains as elusive as ever. This volume keeps the possibility alive — for Chechnya’s diaspora and for future generations.
– Luke Harding, author of Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West
Akhmed Zakaev is the Prime Minister in Exile of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (CRI). He was born in 1959 into a family deported by Stalin’s regime, along with the rest of the Chechen population, in 1944. Zakaev graduated from acting and choreography schools in Grozny and the Institute of Theatre and Cinema in Voronezh and became an actor. He worked at the Chechen National Theatre. In 1994 he became Minister of Culture in the independent Chechen government of Djohar Dudaev, and during the First Russo-Chechen War was commander of the Western Group for the Defense of Ichkeria. Zakaev played a leading role in the negotiations that led to the signing of a Russo-Chechen peace treaty at the Kremlin in 1997, which Russia later violated. He opposed the rise of radical Islam in Chechnya, alleging a link between Islamist extremism and Russia’s covert global pro-terrorism policy. In 2002 Russia accused him, by then in exile, of involvement in a series of crimes, including the hostage-taking at a Moscow theatre in 2002, which ended in catastrophic loss of life. In 2003 a British court declared the accusations groundless and politically motivated.
