Chechnya

“First of all, stop the bleeding.”
--perhaps the most often repeated line in Khassan Baiev’s memoirs, Grief of my Heart

Grief of my Heart is the memoir of Khassan Baiev, a Chechen surgeon who was a witness to both Russo-Chechen wars since the fall of the Soviet Union. Baiev stayed in Chechnya through most of these two wars treating the wounded on all sides: wounded Chechen civilians, wounded Russian civilians who lived in Chechnya, wounded Chechen fighters, wounded Russian soldiers. He helped Chechens escape the Russians and Russians escape the Chechens. And through it all he helped keep his family alive and together.

A remarkable man with a remarkable story, but not a story for the faint of heart or for those who want simple good-vs.-evil. It is a story of how personal lives and entire cultures get subsumed in the supposedly cerebral chess game of international politics…and how the consequences are very bloody, very tragic, and full of immoral and criminal acts. It is also about how personal lives and entire cultures survive the bloody, tragic, immoral consequences and rise to heroism and kindness.

Dagestan…Chechnya…Ingushetia…North Ossetia….Georgia…Armenia….Azerbaijan

The Caucus Mountains dominate these nations, would-be nations, and territories. This has been a crossroads for millennia, the meeting point of large ethnic groups, religions and civilizations from the earliest moments of history.