Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the Defiant People of the Caucasus (review)

In 1991, as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, sparks of nationalism erupted over the territory of the Eurasian superpower. The Baltic states struck out for freedom from forced annexation into the Soviet Union. Georgia declared its independence, and Ukraine followed soon after. The Cold War order was dissolving, and the longing for self-determination, or outright independence, was striking new chords.

These stirrings hit that area of southern Russian known as the North Caucasus with particular violence. For centuries, the Russians had regarded this area of stunningly beautiful mountains as entrancing, even if the locals seemed rebellious. The hoped-for "Caucasus without the Caucasians" (Kavkaz bez Kavkaztsev) has been a slogan all too often on the tongues of nationalist-minded Russians.

In November 1991, Chechnya declared its independence—not from the Soviet Union like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—but from its most important constituent part, the Russian Federation. President Boris Yeltsin's chief of military staff, Marshal Pavel Grachev, declared that a battalion of assault troops could put down the rebellion within a few weeks. How wrong he was!

The troops Yeltsin dispatched in the fall of 1994 encountered stiff resistance from the Chechens, who fought the ill-trained Russian recruits to a standstill. The outcome was a negotiated agreement at Khasavyurt in 1996 under which the fighting stopped, Russian federal forces pulled out, prisoners were exchanged, and both sides agreed to desist from the use of force in the future and to negotiate a stable political status for Chechnya by the year 2001. Chechnya had won de facto independence. Russian military leaders had been humiliated and began contemplating revenge.

The situation deteriorated, and Russian leaders feared for the disintegration of Russia itself. Under Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudaev the area became lawless and dangerous. Trains were raided by rebels, foreign aid workers were kidnapped, some were beheaded, bombs started going off unpredictably. In January 1997, Aslan Maskhadov was chosen as Chechnya's first president in elections that the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe termed "free and fair," but he was unable to stabilize the situation.

The Chechen independence movement now began to cede to radical homegrown Islamists, encouraged by emissaries from abroad, who escalated the struggle for freedom from Moscow by detonating bombs on Russian territory. In the fall of 1999, a raiding party headed by the Chechen extremist Shamil Basayev launched an incursion into neighboring Dagestan.

Russian Premier Vladimir Putin, who had just been appointed prime minister (and would become acting president by the end of the year), declared he would hunt down and kill terrorists wherever they were, including "in the shit house." He launched a new invasion to "restore constitutional order." Only this time he unleashed overwhelming force. Again the Chechens resisted, but they were powerless against carpet bombing, needle bombs, vacuum bombs, bunker-busting bombs, and antipersonnel mines, some disguised as toys intended to blow the arms off unwary children. Chechens denounced the cruel Russian attacks as state-sponsored terrorism. Hundreds of thousands fled.

Oliver Bullough, a recent history graduate of Oxford University, arrived in Moscow as a new correspondent for the British news agency Reuters in 2002, three years after the second Russian-Chechen war began. In October 2002, while on a feature assignment in the Russian capital, he learned that Chechen rebels had seized the Dubrovka theater across town. He dropped everything and rushed to the scene where some 40 Chechen fighters had seized the house and threatened to kill the audience unless the Russian government brought the bombing of Chechnya to an end. Eventually, the Russians pumped a debilitating gas into the theater, permitting the rescue of most of the 850 hostages and the killing of the hostage-takers. This was Bullough's first introduction to the violence of the Chechen struggle and the fierce reaction from the Russians.

Barely two years later, on 1 September 2004, he was dispatched to Northern Ossetia to cover the takeover of...