1 John Keep, Last of Empires: A History of the Soviet Union 1945–91, (Oxford 1996).
2 Steve Crawshaw, "No Man's Land", Independent, 17 September 2000.
3 See Human Rights Watch "Welcome to Hell: Arbitrary Detention, Torture, and Extortion in Chechnya", October 2000 (www.hrw.org).
4 Georgi M. Derluguian, "Che Guevaras in Turbans", New Left Review, September/ October 1999.
5 George A Burrell, An American Engineer Looks at Russia, Boston, 1932, pp.110–11.
6 This allegation was made by Ruslan Khasbulatov, the former speaker of the Russian parliament and a strong opponent of Chechen independence in a devastatingly critical article on Moscow's policies in Nezavisimaya gazeta, 29 December 2000.
7 Sanobar Shermatova, "The Secret War between Russian Intelligence Agencies in Chechnya", Moscow News, 8 August 2000.
8 Eg Manilov's public calculation of Chechen rebel numbers ranged between 8,000 and 26,000. His estimation of rebel losses ranged between 3,000 and 7,000. See Simon Saradzhyan, "General Manilov's 'Dead Souls' Math", Moscow Times, 25 July 2000. He also stated that the total population of Chechnya in August 1999 was only 300,000, although twice that number of Chechens had voted in the presidential election two years before.
9 Capital of Daghestan, one of 21 ethnic republics (including Chechnya) that with Moscow, Petersburg and the 66 predominantly Russian Regions make up the 89 "subjects" of the Russian Federation.
10 In the 1990s Russia's armed forces adopted the Anglo-American ID disk or "dog-tag". Previously Soviet servicemen carried a capsule, resembling a spent rifle shell, in which personal details were sealed. For decades volunteers have searched for these on the battlefields of the 1941–5 war, providing confirmation of death and adding names to monuments.
11 The Old Believers, the "Dissenters" of Russian Orthodoxy, broke from the church in the mid-seventeenth century over its reform of texts and rituals.
12 Retreating from his raid on Kizlyar, Salman Raduyev and the fighters with him were caught by Russian forces near Pervomayskoe village just before reaching Chechnya.
13 In June 1995 Shamil Basayev and 148 Chechen fighters invaded the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk and for a week held up to 1,000 hostages in the hospital. He negotiated their release with the then Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin in exchange for safe passage back to Chechnya.
14 Pavel Grachev, Minister of Defence during the first Chechen war, was famous for his acquisition of several Mercedes for himself and his leading officials.
15 On 4 September 1999, 62 soldiers and members of their families were killed when a residential building in their compound in Buinaksk was demolished by an explosion. Over the next ten days there were two bombings of residential blocks in Moscow (see Chronology).
16 Popkov was among the human rights activists who acted as neutral intermediaries during the first Chechen war, providing news for the civilian population and helping to organise exchanges of bodies and hostages.
17 Spokesman for the Chechen side during the first war, Udugov displayed an effective grasp of PR techniques and constantly wrong-footed the Ministry of Defence in Moscow.
18 The basic Russian (and Soviet) identity document that includes a stamp indicating place of permanent residence and an entry for nationality (ethnic identity).
19 Outside Grozny, the largest urban concentration of Chechens is the community of over 50,000 in Moscow.
20 See Amnesty International's December 1999 report, "For the Motherland" (www.amnesty.org).
21 "To hold back the revolution", asserted the Tsar's Minister for the Interior, von Plehve, in the early twentieth century, "we need a small victorious war." When war with Japan loomed he advocated caution. The first defeat of that conflict was soon followed by the minister's own assassination and the 1905 Revolution.
22 Andrei Piontkowsky is a political consultant in Moscow; Andrei Chernov writes on cultural issues for Novaya gazeta.
23 It means "Peace" in Russian.
24 The signal for Franco's forces to begin their rebellion in 1936 was broadcast as part of the weather forecast on the radio.
25 On the afternoon of 21 October 1999 the Central Market in Grozny was struck by a rocket attack, leaving many dead and wounded. Despite denials it seems clear that this was authorised by the Russian government.
26 In February 1944 the Chechens and Ingush, accused of intending to aid the invading German forces, were deported en masse to Kazakhstan. Many died on the journey. The survivors could not return home until 1957. (The Germans captured Mozdok in August 1942, but could never get close enough to take Grozny and Baku, then the Soviet Union's greatest centres of the oil industry.)
27 The Russian widow of Chechnya's first president, Jokhar Dudayev (see Biographies).
28 Until 1991 the ethnically dose Chechens and Ingush were united in the autonomous republic of Checheno-Ingushetia. When Chechnya declared independence, the less numerous Ingush (135,000 in 1989) decided to remain within the Russian Federation.
29 An association of European States, founded in 1949, committed to defending parliamentary democracy and to encouraging the economic and social progress of its members. Russia was admitted in 1996.
30 A term applied to the Ministries of Defence and of Internal Affairs, and to the Federal Security Service (FSB).
31 Those assimilated to the dominant Russophone culture but not themselves ethnically Russian. The last Soviet population census in 1989 found 15 million people across the USSR who defined themselves as such "Russian speakers".
32 The main military base for federal forces in the North Caucasus.
33 Kalashnikov is a leading member of Zhirinovsky's nationalistic Liberal Democrat Party.
34 A euphemism, widely used by the police and other Russian officials, to legitimate a common racial stereotype applied to anyone from the post-Soviet states of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan or the seven North Caucasian republics within Russia.
35 "Dukh" (lit. "spirit"), Soviet army slang for their opponents in Afghanistan (1979–89).
36 Russian Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov (1729–1800) insisted that his soldiers have cool heads and warm feet.
37 See the April 2000 Human Rights Watch report "No Happiness Remains" (www.hrw.org).
38 Since 1993, 12 December is marked as the day on which independent, post-Communist Russia adopted its new Constitution.
39 See Chapter 8, "Camp Guards".
40 In 1945 at the end of the war the male Chechens who had fought the Germans did not take part in victory parades (even the 132 among them who as Heroes of the Soviet Union had won the ultimate accolade for their bravery) but were sent off to join the old men, women and children deported to Kazakhstan in their absence the year before (see fn. 18).
41 A slang term (in Russian "federaly") first used for the federal forces during the 1994–6 Chechen war.
42 The daydreaming landowner in Dead Souls, who is charming but ineffective.
43 Minister of Information in the Chechen government during the last war (see fn. 9).
44 A Dudayev ally until 1993, Beslan Gantamirov then aligned himself with the federal authorities and returned with them in October 1999 (see Biographies).
45 The nineteenth-century Pale of Settlement restricted Jewish residence to the Western provinces of Tsarist Russia (modern-day Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania).
46 For several weeks after the explosions residents of apartment blocks organised themselves into shifts round the clock to monitor any suspicious activities in or around their buildings.
47 The author and her readers wrote their patriotic school compositions about the Soviet Motherland, a multi-national state with a cosmopolitan ideal ("My home is not a house or street, my home is the USSR").
48 Common painkillers in Russia that are widely abused as narcotic substances.
49 As in Soviet times, the holidays begin on 1 May (May Day) and continue, with little pause for work, up to Victory Day on 9 May. Inauguration is one more Western neologism introduced into Russian public life over the last decade.
50 See Chapter 20, "The Decisive Battle".
51 In early December 1999, at least 18 civilians were killed by federal soldiers in Alkhan-Yurt, not far from Grozny (see Chapter 14). On 5 February 2000 no less than 62 civilians were killed by soldiers in Novye Aldy, a village-suburb of Grozny (see Chapter 38).
52 Deputy premier Nikolai Koshman visited the village and on 23 December promised a rapid inquiry but no results were made public. An investigation by the military prosecutor's office was soon closed.
53 On 28 December 1999 President Boris Yeltsin presented Shamanov with the "Hero of Russia" medal (see page 118).
54 In Russian Shamanov uses the idiom "buried" (pokhoronili), cf. Anatol Lieven's assessment, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, 1998.
55 An allusion, in particular, to the Imam Shamil, a religious and military leader from Daghestan, who led a protracted guerrilla war (1817–59) against Tsarist forces in the Eastern Caucasus. The Chechens rebelled in 1825–6 and joined forces with Shamil in 1839.
56 See Chronology.
57 In May 2000 Putin appointed seven presidential plenipotentiaries to each supervise a group of regions within the federation. General Kazantsev was put in charge of the group embracing the ethnic republics of the North Caucasus and the predominantly Russian regions to their north.
58 Turpal-Ali Atgiriev and his men took part in Salman Raduyev's January 1996 raid on Kizlyar (see Chapter 3). He also headed Maskhadov's election campaign in 1997.
59 See Chapters 9 and 11.
60 In the 1975 Soviet film, lanky "Grasshopper", a teenage conscript, is waiting for his chance to fight the Germans but only the "old men", those with a year's service, are allowed to go off to battle.
61 The full list can be found at the Novaya gazeta website: www.novayagazeta.ru/actions/memory/memory.shtml
62 Name of a popular Russian TV game show, taken from Collodi's tale Pinocchio, and often applied to the entire country in the Yeltsin era of pyramid schemes and other scams and rackets.
63 Briefly Soviet minister for the oil industry, Khadjiev has opposed Dudayev since 1991 and for a year in 1994–5 was in charge of the Moscow-supported administration in Chechnya. In his early 40s, Bazhaev for several years headed Sidanko, the new Siberian-Far Eastern oil company.
64 The Kursk submarine sank on 12 August 2000, nine days after this report.
65 Chelyabinsk is a city in the Urals; that is, a thousand miles northwest of Chechnya.
66 "Chechen" and "Ingush" are Russian names. The two nations refer to themselves, respectively, as Nokhchi and Galgai and jointly as Vainakh.
67 The Chechen security services (formerly DGB) were so named in 1997 as Chechnya began to redefine itself as an Islamic State.
68 The "lesson about peace" at the beginning of the school year was a Soviet innovation of the mid-1970s.
69 Founded in 1988 by Andrei Sakharov and others, Memorial's primary purpose was to document the crimes of the Soviet regime since 1917 and to commemorate its victims. From the outset it took a very active interest in contemporary issues, and set up its own Human Rights Centre to monitor areas of conflict and ethnic tension in the "trouble spots" of the Soviet Union.
70 Those incidents recorded by staff at Memorial's office in Nazran, opened in March 2000, are indicated by the annotation (MN). All other reports cited during these two weeks came from Interfax, Russia's major independent news agency (see www.memo.ru/hr/hotspots/Ncaucus/hronics). In December 2000 the Memorial Human Rights Centre was able to open an office in Grozny itself.
71 Jokhar Dudayev's nephew, Salman Raduyev, who led the January 1996 raid on Kizlyar (see Chapter 3), is today in the FSB prison in Moscow, awaiting trial on charges of terrorism.
72 In the 1960s Professor Ilizarov devised innovative appliances for enabling damaged limbs to recover.
73 All the inhabitants of the Belorussian village of Khatyn, several hundred people, were massacred or burned alive by German soldiers in 1942.
74 Since Putin's election as President the two most prominent media magnates in Russia Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky have been pursued by the prosecutor's office on a variety of charges and have both taken refuge abroad.
75 The letter had already been sent to all the relevant military and civil authorities in Moscow and Chechnya with little result. Politkovskaya travelled to Khatuni with the knowledge and permission of the new Chechnya government.
76 A symptomatic change in attitude was expressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great proponent of Russian isolationism and "self-limitation". In 1992, he said, he had advised Yeltsin not to use force on Chechnya, but cordon off the country south of the Terek; now he saw military intervention as the only answer.