The Chechen Wars are presented less through battlefield scenes than through their effects on Russian public life: the reporting they demanded, the families left with unanswered questions, and the authorities’ readiness to treat protest as subversion. In Emmanuel Carrère’s account, they reveal how state violence and official impunity could persist alongside a shrinking, beleaguered democratic opposition.

The wars and the work of reporting

The wars provide the subject that made Anna Politkovskaya known to readers who closely followed the conflict. Until she was shot dead in her elevator on October 7, 2006, she was a courageous journalist and declared opponent of Vladimir Putin’s politics, but her name was familiar chiefly to those watching Chechnya. Her death transformed her sad, determined face into a Western emblem of freedom of expression. Carrère, then traveling frequently to Russia, was sent to Moscow not to investigate the murder but to speak with people who had known and loved her. He spent a week at Novaya Gazeta, where she had been a star reporter, and among human-rights associations and committees of mothers whose sons had been killed or wounded in Chechnya.

Those organizations were tiny, poorly lit, and equipped with old computers. Their members were often elderly, and there were very few of them. Carrère describes this small circle as practically the whole democratic opposition in Russia. Its isolation sharpened the contrast between the costs of the wars and the indifference that some of his Moscow expatriate acquaintances attributed to the wider population. They regarded formal liberties as a losing cause so long as people could get rich, and rejected the widespread French suspicion that Politkovskaya’s murder had been ordered by the political police or, more or less, by Putin. The account presents that suspicion as a disputed claim, not an established finding.

Grievance, impunity, and the families of victims

Carrère sets the expatriates’ defense of the status quo against the testimony of exhausted women. They spoke of nighttime kidnappings, victims taken away in unmarked cars, soldiers tortured by their own superiors, and justice denied. Corruption in the police and army could be dismissed as simply the way things were; the deeper grievance was the authorities’ arrogance and brutality when ordinary people demanded explanations, backed by the officials’ apparent confidence that they would face no consequences.

That anger was shared by mothers of dead soldiers, families of children massacred at Beslan, and relatives of the victims of the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis. The connection made in the narrative is not that these tragedies were interchangeable, but that the families encountered the same refusal to answer for the treatment of human life. Their insistence on explanation and respect brought them into conflict with a state accustomed to treating accountability as a challenge to its authority.

Dubrovka and the transformation of mourning into protest

In October 2002, Chechen terrorists seized the audience at the Dubrovka Theater during a performance of the musical comedy Nord-Ost. Russian special forces ended the crisis by gassing both the hostages and their captors. The number of civilian deaths remained disputed; official estimates put the total at about 150. Families who asked whether the operation could have been handled differently, and whether their mourning deserved greater respect, were treated as accomplices rather than as bereaved relatives. Putin later celebrated the inflexibility with which the crisis had been resolved.

Each year, relatives gathered to commemorate the dead. The police did not ban the ceremony outright, but watched it as though it were a seditious gathering—which, in Carrère’s interpretation, it had become. At one such commemoration, two or three hundred people stood in the square before the theater, surrounded by a comparable number of OMON riot police in helmets, carrying shields and heavy clubs. Rain fell; umbrellas opened over candles protected by paper rings. Signs bearing photographs and names of the dead took the place of icons. The mourners included orphans, widows and widowers, and parents who had lost children. No state representative attended. The families’ representative spoke briefly and with cold anger; there were no speeches, slogans, or chants. The gathering’s silent restraint made its political significance unmistakable.

From war reporting to a broader opposition

Politkovskaya’s defense of dissent also unsettled Carrère’s initial assumptions about Eduard Limonov. He discovered that she had supported forty National Bolshevik Party militants given lengthy prison sentences after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration offices while shouting for Putin to leave. She described them as courageous people of integrity who offered hope for their country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner likewise supported the party’s members, despite reservations about its name. These examples placed opposition to Putin across political boundaries that Carrère had assumed were absolute.

Limonov later told Carrère that he no longer sought an armed uprising; he favored a peaceful, democratic revolution like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which he said the Kremlin feared and would try to crush. He also described himself as living under threat: he had been beaten with baseball bats, had recently escaped an attempted assassination, and said his name appeared on a list of Russia’s enemies. Politkovskaya and the former FSB officer Litvinenko were also cited in this context, as was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had spent time in Siberia after entering politics. The book does not collapse these different cases into the Chechen Wars. Instead, it shows how the wars and their consequences formed part of a wider setting in which reporting on state violence, demanding accountability, and organizing opposition could all become dangerous.