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“Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.”
― Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil

“The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered - viscerally, emotionally remembered - what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way - which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Моя личная мечта в день рождения Кадырова только об одном. Я говорю об этом совершенно серьезно. Я мечтаю о том, чтобы он сидел на скамье подсудимых.”
― Анна Политковская

“No fundamentalist undercurrent ran through the national culture before the first war. Sufism had always been the predominant Muslim sect, and Wahhabism was a foreign, wartime import. A few times a year, Arab Wahhabis came through the village in search of recruits. They promised rations, shelter, an eternity in Paradise, and, until that day of glorious martyrdom, a monthly salary of two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars. Few young men followed the monochromatic Wahhabi faith, but many were quite willing to be radicalized for a monthly salary that eclipsed what they would otherwise earn in a year. The war of independence so quickly conflated with jihad because no one cared about the self-determination of a small landlocked republic. Arab states would gladly fund a war of religion, but not one of nationalism. And in this way it didn’t matter who won the war between the Feds and fundamentalists: the notion of a democratic and fully sovereign Chechnya would be crushed regardless.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“On December 9, 1994, Yeltsin issued a statement ordering the Federal army to execute the disarmament of all illegal armed units in Chechnya, or as they were known locally, the government.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region: it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces �� those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB �� who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now, [...] the true goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire Russian population: “The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order in this country and we’ll do it whatever the cost.”
― Сергей Ковалев

“Наверное, самое страшное для меня были эксгумации. В селе говорят: "Вот, нашли несколько трупов". В каждом селе, как правило, есть матери, которые ищут своих детей. И, как правило, когда находят трупы �� из-под земли какая-то часть появилась, или трактор проехал, взбудоражил почву�� Матери видят журналиста �� говорят, пойдем с нами, ты хотя бы зафиксируешь это. Потому что потом прокуратура стремится скрыть, что вообще нашли захоронение. До сих пор нет ни одного судмедэксперта в Чечне, который работает и фиксирует�� Так и не удалось эту службу создать, несмотря на острую необходимость. И ты с ними идешь, и уже не можешь показать, что тебе страшно, больно �� потому что вот эти матери с тобой ожидают, что там найдут тела их детей. Поэтому моя роль была в том, чтобы успокаивать этих матерей.”
― Анна Политковская

“[Р]аньше я была театрофилкой, как всякий московский человек. Но после того, как я насмотрелась всего этого на чеченской войне, я перестала ходить в театр. Мне все кажется очень скучным. Вот все это неправда. Это искусственная жизнь. Настоящие страсти �� они другие.”
― Анна Политковская

“War had made its grip on the civilians, who were overwhelming, purely innocent and exposed to ritualised slaughters.”
― Naveed Qazi

“Humanity found commonalities of trust, religious beliefs and culture but the world around me was far away from it. It had slipped back to its most primitive times.”
― Naveed Qazi

“Prisons were like villages, where each cell was like a house and had its own set of rules.”
― Naveed Qazi