Been reading Oliver Bullough’s Let Our Fame Be Great. The half covering the Chechen nation is an encompassing image, with primary sources about e.g Imam Shamil; the innocent Chechen arrested at Nord Ost; the author’s own meetings with communities. Great for gaining a sense of their 1944 deportation.

Just finished The Chechen Struggle: Independence Won and Lost by Ilyas Akhmadov, Foreign Minister when the second war started. Starting at Chechnya’s independence under Dudayev in 1991, going through the election where Shamil Basayev ran, then to serving Aslan Maskhadov’s presidency… Many insights.

Just finished reading Hadji Murad by Tolstoy, which fictionalises a real-life Avar leader that fought with Imam Shamil before switching to the imperial Russian side, when Tolstoy was a young soldier in the Caucasus. It was the last story Tolstoy wrote—Hadji Murad’s story stuck with him all his life!

Just finished reading Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, about a white reporter in 1959 who darkens his skin to pass as a black man and travels around the American South. He later worked with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr.