Chechnya recounts the story of the violent struggle for independence and the Kremlin politics that precipitated it. Historically, the Chechens' tight clan and religious structures made them especially resistant to assimilation by Russia. In 1944 they were one of the largest ethnic groups to be deported en masse by Stalin. Their history should have warned any Moscow strategist that, if forced to, many would fight a savage war to the end to defend themselves.

And in the end the Chechen fighters achieved the almost impossible when they defeated the Russian army and forced it to withdraw. The product of investigative and on-the-scenes reporting by two established journalists in Chechnya over a three-year period between 1994 and 1997, Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal's account of the Chechens is also a portrait of Russia's failed attempt to make the transition to a democratic society.