Arts & Entertainment

Review: ‘The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya’, Asne Seierstad

By team ⋅ March 29, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The Scotsman, 15 March

Who is Asne Seierstad? A journalist, chasing the truth? A danger-junkie, thriving on the thrills? An agent of revelation, exposing political crimes and atrocities across Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Chechnya? The man at the heart of her previous book The Bookseller of Kabul accuses her of simply being a meddler in other people’s affairs, and one who gets it wrong at that. What is her purpose?

Sierstad’s book is the result of a series of visits to Chechnya, to Moscow, to post-war Grozny. She steps nimbly from place to place, from world to world. Much of her work as already been filed in reports to her newspaper back in Oslo, dating back to 1995 when, as a freelance writer, she entered the Chechen battle zone after Yeltsin sent the tanks in.

The Chechen republic had been proclaimed some three years earlier. Seierstad watched on television as the Russian army suffered a humiliating catastrophe. She was 24 years old, a rookie journalist. She hitched a ride on a Russian military aircraft, arriving amid mayhem. The book charts her journey, her enlightenment. She reported Chechnya’s horrors for over two years. Ten years later she returned, and was shocked to find what war had done to a brutalised people. You want to trust what she says because of the steely stare of her prose, and because she seems trusted by everyone else.

She can transport you into suffering and squalor; into palaces of demagogues, cold-hearted liars. She can paint you into the presence of those who lie and steal and kill because they are brutalised. Among them Timur and Liana, a brother and sister, haunt this tale. Then there is Nikolai, the infantryman destroyed by a rebel landmine, and Tamara whose son disappeared. She spends time with them all, rigorously conjuring the minutiae of what happened.  It is chilling reading.
There are heroes here, but their feet are mostly of clay. The exception is Hadijat, the house-mother running her refude among the remains of what was once a civilisation, giving shelter, lover and structure to Grozny’s lost children. The ‘Angel’ herself.

It becomes a harrowing portrayal, a gleam of defiance amid the detritus of hope. The whole account esudes a sense of unfinished business, both political and human, a sense of the scale of tremendous oppression.