Book of the week

Published:

The Angel of Grozny – Inside Chechnya

IN CHECHNYA, the “extreme has become everyday”. The bestselling author of The Bookseller of Kabul has returned to the war-torn land of her first assignment as a rookie reporter in 1994 for this story of a broken and devastated society.

This is no ordinary account from a foreign correspondent. For two years, Asne Seierstad travelled around Chechnya talking to street children, orphans, the dispossessed, resistance fighters, mothers who had lost their sons and men and women who had been tortured. She spoke to anyone who would talk to her, putting herself in situations which could have got her killed at any time.

Seierstad’s narrative is underpinned by the tales of Hadijat, the Angel of Grozny, who runs an unofficial orphanage.

Hadijat is mama to dozens who have nowhere else to go. It is their tales and the stories of people they know, friends they have lost and families who have become outcast under President Ramzan Kadyrov’s brutal regime that fill the reader with despair and horror.

She delivers an engrossing account of a region forgotten by many in the world, of a place turning in on itself, and of the complicated history of Russia and Chechnya, but she does not become bogged down in fact.

The Angel of Grozny is about brutalised children, honour killings, disappearances and fruitless searches. It is about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Mr Kadyrov’s farcical regime characterised by rebuilding projects that feature only facades and countless departments all set up to organise celebratory events.

The essence of this mesmerising, sensitive and harrowing book can be summed up in the Norwegian journalist’s own words shortly after she returned to Grozny in 2006 when she glimpsed something in a fragment of mirror glass: “I saw eyes there. The eyes were filled with fear and horror. Then I realised they were mine and I was so shocked.”

Morag Lindsay