–CHECHNYA IN PERSPECTIVE

“Don’t forget that Chechnya is an extremely tiny place, just 0.1 percent of Russia’s total land area with at present about 0.4 percent of Russia’s population. Thus the criminal violence there is extremely concentrated. In proportion to their numbers, during the last decade Chechens have endured captivity and murder on a scale amounting to the entire Stalinist terror, PLUS half of World War II.” –Aleksandr Cherkasov of the Russian human-rights center “Memorial,” in a November 13 essay for the website polit.ru.