A SMALL CORNER OF HELL

Author: Anna Politkovskaya
Year: 2003 (2002)
Publisher: Ordfront
Language: Swedish (translator Stefan Lindgren)

Chechnya. 26th of March. The year is 2000. The Russian 160^th armoured regiment is stationed near the town of Urus-Martan, or Martanthi in the Chechen language, in the southwest vicinity of Grozny. The commander’s name is Colonel Yuri Budanov. Today is his daughter’s second birthday and Colonel Budanov has invited the senior officers of the regiment to a modest celebration. Before long they are all in a drunken stupor. As the clock advances toward midnight, Colonel Budanov decides that he wants to go to the nearby village of Tangi-Chu. He says he knows where to find pretty girls and takes four of his officers with him. They pull up outside the humble farmhouse of the destitute Kungayev-family and break inside. Colonel Budanov knows what he is talking about. The family’s eldest daughter, eighteen years old Elza Kungayeva, is an extraordinary beauty. To the sound of her parents’ and younger siblings’ tearful laments, anguished pleas, and futile resistance to protect her, the five soldiers roll Elza, kicking and screaming, up in a carpet and carry her off to their awaiting vehicle. Back at the regiment, Elza is repeatedly raped, beaten, and tortured. When Elza endeavours to break free in a bid to escape, Budanov grabs her by her throat and extinguishes her young life by strangulation. Her expired body is disposed of in a makeshift grave in a grove right outside the regiment’s encampment.

The singularity of this narrative does not emanate from the events themselves, for such atrocities were regrettably commonplace during the course of the second Chechen war, and conceivably during the preceding conflict as well. What makes Colonel Yuri Budanov stand out is that he was actually prosecuted for his deeds. The catalyst for this was that his superior officer, General Vladmir Shamanov, was on vacation at the time. Shamanov had garnered notoriety for shielding his subordinate from law enforcement, a prerogative facilitated by Russian law. Consequently, the next morning, instead of reporting to General Shamanov, the events form the night before were reported to General Valery Gerasimov*. General Gerasimov possessed a divergent disposition from Shamanov. Not only did he allow the police to enter the compound and apprehend Colonel Budanov, he attended in person to open the gates for them.

But Russia would not be Russia if the story ended there. Owing to the emergence of fabricated evidence and spurious testimonies, Budanov was acquitted by the judiciary. This triggered an unusual and widespread surge of public protests in Moscow and elsewhere, culminating in a re-evaluation of the case by a higher court. This time, the court adopted a somewhat different approach. It ordered Budanov to submit to a psychological evaluation. Conveniently, the results purported that Budanov had suffered a transitory psychosis in the exact moment the crime was committed but never before and never thereafter. This would mean that he could not be sentenced for his actions on the night of the 26^th of March, but there was also no reason to separate him from his command. Budanov was a free man. Elza Kungayeva’s remains were returned to her grieving family - for an ‘administrative fee’.

These chronicles and many others, about corruption, abuse, lies and deceit, politics and money, children whose eyes turn black when they hear the Russian language, and a whole people being all but wiped out by its own government without a word being spoken in their defence by the international community, can be found on the pages of Anna Politkovskaya’s book “Tjetjenien” (“A Small Corner of Hell”). It is a scathing assault on Russian politics and a detailed account of the bestiality and savagery that the Russian army unleashed on the Chechen population. Politkovskaya tells the story of people who otherwise would never have been heard. I knew it would be a harrowing read and still it was worse than I had imagined. If you are surprised by the reports from Mariupol, Bucha, and Bakhmut you just have not been paying attention.

Four years after this book was published, on the 7^th of October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her own home. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the assassination took place on Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Maybe it was not. But the fact remains that one of the most dangerous voices challenging the Kremlin had to been silenced. And that no matter how badly we want it in the West, Russia is not about to change.

*This is the same General Valery Gerasimov who in 2023 would become the supreme commander of the Russian war effort in Ukraine.