Grozny Blues is a haunting, often dreamlike documentary about Chechen people caught between the contradictory pressures of manufactured realities and coerced silences.
After several North Caucasus commanders transferred their allegiance to Islamic State, an ISIS spokesman announced the creation of a 'Caucasus Province'. Is this the end of the Caucasus Emirate?
While Vladimir Putin has given Ramzan Kadyrov a free hand in Chechnya, the relationship between Moscow and Grozny is far more complicated than it first appears.
I was in Budyonnovsk on 14 June 1995, when Chechen separatists raided the town and took hostages, killing 129. Twenty years later, this town in southern Russia is still known as the 'town of black shawls'.
The relationship between religion and ethnicity on the one hand, and civic assimilation on the other, is far less harmonious than Putin’s magniloquence asserts.
Just like in business, the centre of Russia has transferred a range of its functions to a regional political ‘contractor’. But now the tail is starting to wag the dog.
Russian reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre has been muted, although a massive march in Chechnya defended Islam from the ‘mockers’.
Chechen women have to be very careful about what they wear because of Ramzan Kadyrov’s ‘virtue campaign.’
Luiza encounters regular violence and intimidation in her work helping women survivors of state-sponsored violence. Living under the Chechen regime, activist women need a combination of self and community care.
Umar is 25 and from Gudermes in Chechnya. He is gay. What can the future hold for him in the macho, dzhigit, society he inhabits? He talked to Kseniya Leonova, the first time he has told anyone his story.
If they are responsible for last Monday’s bombings, the Tsarnaev brothers are mass murderers. Whether they are terrorists is less clear.
The background of the Tsarnaev family must provide some clues to the Boston bombing.
