The Angel of Grozny

Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, author of the international best seller The Bookseller of Kabul, chronicles the plight of both Chechens and Russians in her latest work The Angel of Grozny. In December of 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troops to enter Chechnya, which had declared its independence three years earlier, in order to disarm “illegally armed groups.” As an eager journalist living in Moscow at the beginning of the Russian invasion, Seierstad volunteers to ride shotgun with Russian soldiers into the Chechen capital Grozny just a few weeks after the beginning of the invasion. During her visit to Grozny, Seierstad sees first hand the horrors of the war: orphaned children living in the streets, countless families uprooted after the men were killed in combat, evidence of mass graves, and widespread destruction of the country’s infrastructure. While in Chechnya, Seierstad also befriends a Chechen woman named Hadijat, who has taken in scores of abandoned orphans into her own home and gives them the care that the Chechen government cannot provide.

Ten years later, Seierstad returns to Chechnya in 2006 to see how the country has changed. She soon discovers that despite the so called peace in the region, the Chechens are no better off than when she was in the country ten years prior. Chechens still live in fear under the new Russian puppet regime headed by the extravagant dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. The Angel of Grozny is a definite eye opener to a brutal war that has not received as much media coverage as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other titles available from the author at the Dayton Metro Library include: A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal, and With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia.


-- Jared, Main Library