Chechnya: The Case For Independence, by Tony Wood

The installation of Ramzan Kadyrov as president of Chechnya on 2 March makes this book super-timely. As a gangster heading a puppet regime on behalf of Vladimir Putin, Ramzan is following faithfully in the footsteps of his father Akhmad, blown to bits at a "Victory Day" parade in Grozny three years ago. His "Chechenisation" policies were a crude cover for Putin's mendacious colonialism.

Tony Wood's thesis is that, although the Chechens' war of independence is "unwinnable", the Chechens have already won. They defeated the Russian army in 1996, crippled Yeltsin's presidency, and represent the principal threat to Russia's stability.

Adducing historical precedents in many countries, Wood presents a closely argued legal case for independence. He indicates the benefits this would bring not only to the Chechen people, but to Russia itself. In the process, he gives us a brilliant short history showing how this tiny country, with one million inhabitants, has degenerated from an egalitarian network of agrarian clans to a hellish anarchy where hunger, sickness and terror are the daily lot of all those not allied to its criminal militias.

Chechnya's million people would have been far more, had it not been for Russia's repeated attempts at genocide. Stalin's deportation of half the Chechen nation in airless freight trains to Kazakhstan was the climax of a policy begun under the tsars. The memory of that event, with its 30 per cent mortality rate, is now the defining experience of Chechen identity. Islam is also part of that identity but here, as Wood shows, historians must tread warily. It has formed a political focus, but its leaders brought down Aslan Maskhadov, the last hope for a negotiated peace.

Wood's prose becomes incandescent as he apportions blame for this international scandal. Putin's justification - gladly endorsed by New Labour and the US - is simple: al-Qa'ida are attacking his flank, so this is the war on terror. Wood demolishes myths about the "foreign fighters" dominating the resistance movement, and shows why it has to be predominantly home-grown. While the West turns a blind eye, so does most of the Muslim world; and Chechnya has now even been largely abandoned by the liberal-left.

Solzhenitsyn described Chechens in the gulags as the one nation who would not give in; this scrupulously argued book explains why that's still true today.