The living shall envy the dead

Current AffairsTens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have died in Chechnya over the last decade, in a dirty conflict that the Kremlin refuses to call by its true name - civil war.

As well as devouring an untold number of lives, Moscow's unacknowledged war has brutalised a new generation of Chechens, and returned thousands of damaged Russian men to cities and towns where only their fellow veterans offer support, and provide an easy entrée into a criminal world that values their familiarity with extreme violence.

Successive Russian presidents have used the ambitions of Chechnya's armed separatists to bolster their own standing - Boris Yeltsin was convinced that a "small, victorious war" would boost his ratings, and Vladimir Putin succeeded him in 2000 on a macho promise to "rub out [the rebels] in the outhouse". Yeltsin's popularity did climb and Putin is stronger than ever, despite his signal failure to end the war and helped by the destruction of independent national television that his administration has overseen.

With the media mostly passive and parliament servile, Russians have no easy access to reliable information on Chechnya, and most of the nation seems to support the prosecution of a conflict that Putin insists pits Moscow's men against Islamic terrorists funded by the al-Qaeda network.

In Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society, Valery Tishkov casts the eye of an eminent historian, ethnographer and anthropologist over the crass attempts of Russian and Chechen hardliners to radicalise their societies, and steel them for war by demonising a historical enemy.

Several journalists and academics have already chronicled the Chechen conflict, - in which the only lull since 1994 came when the defeated Russian forces pulled out from 1996 to 1999 - but Tishkov is not interested in body counts or a tally of battles won and lost.

Rather he examines the nature of Chechen society after a decade characterised by brutality and what he calls the "demodernisation" of the republic, meaning "a time when the mass of people feel unable to influence the ruling powers and religion becomes a weapon and an incitement to violence". With the collapse of democracy and accountability, society can dissolve into groups motivated only by self-interest, which take on increasingly extreme forms and operate in a lawless environment where only radical means and ends appear to offer a true possibility for change - hence the rise of extremist philosophies and violence.

Tishkov argues that Islam, which was a relatively weak factor in post-Soviet Chechen society, was co-opted by separatists as a means of galvanising their people and emphasising the "otherness" of the mostly Orthodox Russians.

While providing a convenient rallying point for Chechnya's late independence leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, Islam was also the conduit for foreign forces - namely Arab fighters and Saudi financiers linked to al-Qaeda - to enter the conflict, Tishkov writes.

He occasionally echoes the Kremlin's indignation at what he calls the reluctance of the world's press to condemn rebel atrocities, while being quick to highlight the countless well-documented cases of kidnap, torture and murder by Russian troops.

But Tishkov is at his best when letting the victims of such crimes speak for themselves. The accounts of a wide range of people involved in the war - politicians, rebel fighters, hostages and ordinary survivors of indiscriminate Russian bombing - are the book's strength, and what marks it out from other studies of the conflict.

After Russian planes bombed the town of Shali in January 1995, apparently in a misguided effort to obliterate civilian moral and material support for the rebels, one survivor recalled: "A phrase I'd heard somewhere kept running through my head: 'and the living shall envy the dead'. I envied the dead, but I didn't want to die.

"Every morning I repeated a verse I'd learned at school: 'All the kids get up at dawn, the sky's lit up and there's no war.' What sweet words, I wished it were just like that."

Tishkov does not believe, as some scholars and journalist argue, that history will always make enemies of the Chechens and Russians. Chechens fought Tsarist troops in the 19th century, and were deported en masse to Central Asia by Josef Stalin in 1944, reinforcing widespread hatred and mistrust of Moscow's rule. But many Chechens regretted the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tishkov insists, and had little time for Dudayev's efforts to drag the little republic from the Russian Federation.

It was largely the brutality of the Russian military that hardened attitudes towards them, he says, a brutality that blights an entire post-Soviet society scarred by the cruelties of successive authoritarian regimes, Tsarist and Communist.

"The atrocities of the Chechen war and the difficulty in settling the conflict were rooted in the coarseness and drunkenness of officers of the Russian army, the brutal treatment of recruits by old- timers, and the poor education and immaturity of village boys recently conscripted from the countryside and the fighters of the Chechen mountains.

"The war will not end if it is so easy to kill other humans and squander soldiers' lives with impunity."

Daniel McLaughlin reports from Moscow for The Irish Times

Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society By Valery Tishkov University of California Press, 284pp. £12.95