Twenty years have passed since the beginning of the first Chechen war. How has the country changed in this period and what happened to the many men and women who fought for independence?

With this starting point, journalist and filmmaker Manon Loizeau revisited Chechnya, a country where she had previously lived and reported from during the war. The resulting documentary, Chechnya, War Without Trace, was screened ahead of its premiere on Al Jazeera on Friday 12 June to an audience at the Frontline Club.

“Chechnya is a schizophrenic land,” said Loizeau, describing the reality she faced on her return to Grozny. She found people who were once proud and fierce now scared and passively accepting of the regime of Ramzan Kadyrov, who “has tried to be Putin’s best pupil.”

History in Chechnya is re-written everyday: those who fought and died for independence are forgotten, and Putin’s birthday is a national celebration. How has this happened?

Loizeau told the Frontline Club audience that she had originally intended to interview those people that she had met decades before during the war against Russia. However, very few were willing to speak with her.

Loizeau said, “Lots of people I knew that fought during the war are now working for Kadyrov himself for lots of money.”

Before the annexation of Crimea, Chechnya received the highest amount of financial support from Russia. Kadyrov consequently bribed regional clans, buying their support. But money alone could not have achieved such a radical turnaround in national sentiment: terror and fear have also played a significant role in allowing Kadyrov’s grip to tighten around Chechnya.

Human Rights Watch estimates that 5,000 people disappeared during the second Chechen war alone, and – as Loizeau‘s documentary highlights – many families still don’t have an answer as to what happened to their loved ones.

Terror in Chechnya is commonplace, with rampant threats, intimidations, disappearances and murders. Few are those who risk their lives and livelihoods to denounce and actively oppose Kadyrov’s police state, but the lawyers of the Committee Against Torture are among those who take a stand.

“In December, the Committee was burnt down,” Loizeau said. “They managed to reopen three weeks ago. The sad thing was that the Committee was raided again by common people, and now they’re thinking of not reopening the office […] There should be a European campaign on what happened to the Committee against Torture.”

Entire chapters of Chechen history have been erased. When prominent Chechen politician Ruslan Kutayev referenced at a public conference the deportation of 500,000 Chechens by Stalinist Russia, he was subsequently arrested on charges of drug possession and sentenced to four years in jail.

In response to an audience question on how Putin’s policies had reached such heights of popularity in Chechnya, Loizeau responded:
“During the war, Putin said that they had to ‘Chechenise’ the war, and they managed to. Kadyrov has managed to break down the Chechen identity; he has managed to divide the society. Now brother denounces his own brother – they’re killing and fighting each other.”

More information on Chechnya, War Without Trace is available here.

Letters to Myself, which screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 14 April, follows Russian photographer Oleg Klimov as he returns to the places he documented during the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and into the 2000s. The film combines Klimov‘s memories with the stories of the people he photographed at the time.

Director Masha Novikova spent some time filming Klimov in Chechnya in 2000 and later in 2003–05 whilst working on a different film but has known Klimov for over 20 years and has wanted to film him at work for just as long but it took some time to secure funding.

Novikova said through a translator after the screening:

“It was my first war and my first time in a ruined city and of course it was quite tragic for me . . . for Oleg it hasn’t been the first time so . . . he was much more cynical than I was.”

Klimov, speaking through the translator via Skype from his mother’s home near Moscow which appears in the film, spoke about how he felt being the subject of the film instead of being behind the camera:

“It did take us quite a long time, Masha and I, the crew, everybody was looking for the people we were asking about, trying to find out about their stories and it was a very moving, very emotional time for me, as you can imagine 20 years later. It took me back to those times.”

Oleg Klimov speaks via Skype at the Frontline Club

A question from the audience asked what he thought had changed in Grozny, having been back to since the war? Klimov said:

“I’ve actually seen Grozny during three times, pre-war, wartime and post-wartime. . . . These are three completely different realities.

 

“The first reality is basically Chechnya the republic, just like perhaps the majority of post-Soviet republics. People just lived normal lives, it was not very exciting, nothing was really happening. Although you could see that conflicts started breaking out.

 

“ . . . The second reality is the reality of war which is again quite similar to any . . . place which is in the state of war, which is terror and horror.”

 

“ . . . The third reality, which I’ve witnessed the most recent time I’ve been to Chechnya was last year, . . . that feeling was basically surreal, because when you walk down the street knowing about the two previous realities, having seen all that I’ve seen, the question rises that you do not understand what it was all for, why did it all happen? . . . All this money that went first on the wars, and then to restore the city it’s just incomprehensible.”

A further question from the audience asked, how did Grozny change so quickly, who rebuilt it?

Klimov said:

“This can be what we call compromise at best for the Russian government. . . . Because they couldn’t win the war in Chechnya . . . the idea was to buy peace there. . . . They’ve invested a lot of money . . . but the price that the people are paying, that’s where . . . the fear comes from. . . . There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of expression. . . . That’s the price they pay for peace and stability.”

What was it all for? People versus characters: what's left when the motherland gets covered in skyscrapers @frontlineclub with @PhotoAmmon

— Rasa Jusionyte (@rasajusionyte) April 14, 2014

Novikova added:

“Even though it [the war] was a terrible time people did speak out very freely . . . about defending the land and about being free and independent. And I felt a huge respect and love for these people . . . but now I see that even my friends they try to avoid calling things as they are, they use very vague language.”

How does Klimov approach the wars he photographs? How does he feel about the wars as a Russian?

The translator explained:

“It’s very difficult being a Russian, while Russia is fighting Chechnya because of course this dilemma of being a citizen of Russia and being a journalist, . . . [he was] trying to find ways to be neutral, to be right on the front line, not choosing sides. It was really difficult. . . . At one point, Oleg decided that he is going to be guided by a principle, he is not actually going to choose a nation or a people but he is going to be empathetic with the weakest one or the side that is unarmed.”

And what are Klimov’s thoughts on the recent outbreak in Crimea?

“It’s a very absurd and strange situation when we have these polite armed men with Kalashnikovs who nobody knows who they are but everybody knows that they are either special forces or private army that is linked of course to Russia. But it’s not the official troops, it’s not the official Russian army so it’s a strange situation where everybody understands but nobody actually names it or discusses it as official Russian army.”

Issa, a friend in Chechnya, his usually steady voice betraying just a tremor of fear, said unknown gunmen had opened fire on the car he had sent to collect me. 

Of the two men inside, one was badly wounded. He said that my trip to the mountains south of Grozny would have to be postponed. 

Later that day Issa (not his real name) called again to say there were rumours of government involvement in the shooting. “Go back to Moscow,” he said. “Go back now. There’s something badly wrong here. You’re not safe.” 

Sitting in my hotel in Vladikavkaz, a half hour drive from the scene of the Beslan school siege which had ended so tragically six months before, I was a little rattled but hardly suspicious. 

Even in 2005, four years after the Kremlin had declared the pacification of the small mountainous republic complete, drive-by gunfire and random shootings were everyday occurences in Chechnya.

It was only when I returned to Moscow and, with an American colleague, Doug Birch, who had been with me in the Caucasus, was invited to an interview at the Lubyanka, that alarm bells began to ring. 

Deep in the corridors of the slab-like building, the nerve centre of Lavrentia Beria’s infamous purges of the 1950s and so much other Soviet repression, a senior official sauntered in in a worn grey suit. 

“So you are the journalist who was shot up in Chechnya,” the FSB man started with a knowing look. “How many times do we have to tell you people not to travel there without our escorts?” 

My mind raced. How did the FSB know about the shooting in Chechnya? Were they behind it? Were they capable of shooting western journalists? If they were not involved, then how did they know about the incident? 

Casting aside some of the wilder theories that sprang to mind, there was an inescapable conclusion. Either Moscow’s secret policemen had been party to the attack or they had found out about it in some other way. 

In the event, President Putin’s men were wrong. As so often happens, important details were misconstrued. I had not been in Chechnya at the time. 

But the Russian regime’s message was loud and clear: Don’t try and hide from us, because you can’t. Mess with us, and you’ll be sorry. Defy us, and you may not live to tell the tale. 

For many western journalists based in Moscow, such oblique threats – and the ever-present possibility of expulsion – were cause enough to stay away from Chechnya. Editors in London and New York had, in any case, long wearied of the story. 

Some reporters opted for the Kremlin-organised Potemkin visits that showed off rebuilt hospitals and schools. But only the most stubborn persisted in travelling illicitly to the region. 

For Anna Politkovskaya, probably Russia’s bravest and most critical journalist, such trips were the bread-and-butter of her professional career. 

While the majority of Russian reporters slavishly toed the Kremlin line, she travelled repeatedly and extensively in the war-torn republic documenting Moscow’s crimes and abuses. 

When Putin nominated Akhmed Kadyrov as his proxy, Poltikovskaya cast a light on the killings and kidnappings he carried out in the Kremlin’s name. 

Later Kadyrov was blown apart by a bomb and his thuggish son Ramzan took over the levers of power – and terror – in Chechnya. 

Politkovskaya continued to be unflinching in her criticism. Long after international attention had moved on, she frequently travelled to Chechnya to document the banal brutality that stalks the republic. 

Such commitment to a story is often thankless in a world where media attention flits giddily from one crisis to the next. For those who stay behind, the journalistic rewards inevitably diminish but the risks only increase. 

The result of Politkovskaya’s work were two seminal books on Chechnya under Putin: The Dirty War and A Small Corner of Hell. 

Later she wrote Putin’s Russia, a book that was an unremitting attack on the former KGB spy’s rule. It won her international plaudits. 

But as her voice won an audience abroad, so the danger for Politkovskaya at home grew. Regime officials began to denounce her as a traitor and a nuisance.

Officials hinted that the country would be better off without her. 

In the dying years of the Soviet Union, the reasoning was that the more a dissident’s voice was heard abroad, the safer they were at home. But this calculus fails to hold under the quixotism of today’s Kremlin. 

The Putin regime, characterised by an arrogance that comes with its increasing economic clout and an almost total lack of censure from the west for its more egregious actions, has become immune to foreign criticism. 

This is the milieu that led to Politkovskaya’s death. 

In 2004 as she made her way to Beslan to try and help negotiate an end to the hostage crisis, she was almost certainly poisoned by the servants of the regime. 

Then, this autumn, as she made her way home to her Moscow apartment, she was shot dead, apparently by a professional killer. 

The debate over who killed Politkovskaya will continue for some time. Was it the FSB? Was it a faction of the military embarrassed by her investigations into corruption? Was it Ramzan Kadyrov? 

We will probably never find out. After a howling silence, Putin made it clear that he did not see Politkovskaya’s demise as a setback for Russia. On the contrary. 

During the last trip I made to the Caucasus before leaving Russia I worked on another story with a local journalist called Fatima, a mother-of-two. 

The story was about the killing and torture of innocent civilians by the local FSB and police. We found plenty of evidence. 

To punish Fatima for working with foreign reporters, local FSB agents abducted her and burnt cigarettes into her fingers. A key interviewee we talked to later went missing, presumed dead. 

Unfortunately, with Putin in the Kremlin, such abuses have become the norm. 

Julius Strauss was The Daily Telegraph’s Moscow Correspondent from 2002 – 2005.