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“Åsne Seierstad is a journalist with a moth-to-flame-like attraction to the world’s hot spots. Famed for her bestselling “The Bookseller of Kabul” (based on three months she spent there in 2002), she has also written about Baghdad and Serbia.

So in a sense it’s not surprising that Seierstad’s latest book,
The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War , deals with Chechnya.

And yet, reporting on Chechnya posed a different kind of risk for Seierstad: It threatened the love of Russian culture that had propelled her into journalism. Enamored of Russian poetry, the Norwegian Seierstad learned to speak the language fluently and then became a Moscow-based reporter, eagerly canvassing Russia by train as she “searched for the Russian soul with fascination and uncontrollable curiosity.”

But what she saw in Chechyna nearly extinguished her passion. “Little by little,” she writes, after experiencing Chechnya, “I had become almost anti-Russian.”

Seierstad first travelled to Chechnya in 1994 as Russian tanks rolled in to squelch an uprising. Ten years later, she returns in disguise, this time to explore a territory and a people brutally brought to heel by Russia’s military.

What she discovers is a land in which 12th-century buildings have been leveled and human lives blasted. For centuries, Russians and Chechens have fought, but this last round has been particularly devastating.

Today, Chechnya is again part of Russia. The territory has a Russian-approved Chechen president and yet, “People are more afraid now than during the war [with Russia],” one Chechen tells Seierstad.

“It’s called ‘chechenising’ the conflict,” says Seierstad. “Whereas before, Russian forces committed the worst abuses, now the Chechen militia maintains control in a society maimed by fear.” …

But in the end it is a Russian who speaks most eloquently. “War?” wrote Tolstoy in 1853 after fighting with the Russian army in Chechnya. “What an incomprehensible phenomenon. When common sense asks: Is it right, is it necessary? the inner voice replies: No.”