When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.
I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.
I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book.
While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled 'Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour' on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic's first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.
Despite my best efforts, word that an American tourist was in town quickly made its way around Grozny. That I had come to Chechnya not for business or NGO work, but to see the sites and meet the people, was notable enough to be broadcast throughout the republic.
Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.
A foreign ideology cannot be introduced into Chechnya - were it through an Arab or al-Qaeda. Our experience is rich and long enough for us to be Muslims and know what jihad is.
It is not advantageous for Russia in its present state to fight against Chechnya. The army is a mess. It must be made combat ready. That will take time. Russia has a lot of economic, social and political problems much more important than Chechnya.
I assure you, it would be much more pleasant for me to be an ordinary voter in peaceful Chechnya than the president of a republic at war.
