Allah's Mountains : The Battle for Chechnya

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but one-sided...
Review: I agree with both Mr. Yin and Leonides. The premise of the book was good, but the book is heavily biased and ultimately unsatisfying if you are a serious student of this and related conflicts. The author admits that the Chenchens are proud, but somewhat thuggish, then goes on to praise how they cherish their knives while at the same time castigating the Russians for acting war-like. War is murderous and both sides in this book play at savagery. The author cannot praise one side and castigate the other - and contradicting himself on many pages - for the same characteristics; he loses all credibility.

And, let us not forget that Chechens are supporting Al-Qaida and related extremist,Islamic groups.

Rating:
Summary: Moving account of an unusual war
Review: I highly recommend this book as a moving account of the wars in Chechnya and the only book to explore all the remote North Caucasus nations. Smith travels deeply among these little known, ancient peoples and in Chechnya he seems to have witnessed just about every major turning point in the first war.

Having enjoyed this book so much and also having read several others on Chechnya(Anatol Lieven, Carlotta Gall, Anna Politkovskaya) I was amazed by the uninformed review already on this site by a previous reader.

This reviewer says Smith is way too pro-Chechen and never shows the Chechens in a bad light, only the Russians. I found Smith was certainly showing sympathy for this people. But then as a people they are the ones hurting. Their capital Grozny, large parts of other towns, and many of the villages have been flattened by aerial bombardment and artillery. Maybe 100,000 people, probably far more (no one bothers counting anymore) have been killed out of the tiny population. Smith points out early on that the entire Chechen ethnic group is smaller than the Russian armed forces alone. Just think about that.

By concentrating on travels with the Chechen guerrillas, not Russian troops, Smith was able to see the frontlines and feel the same effects of war as the people living in the republic. Any journalist knows that trying to get information from a regular army, especially one committing war crimes, is unlikely to result in anything but lies. If Smith is wrong in believing the Chechen side to be suffering by far the greatest, then so is MSF, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the other western journalists who spent time there and wrote books about it (Lieven, Gall etc), not to mention the incredibly brave Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who is one of the very few to dare contradict her government's propaganda.

What has happened in Chechnya makes Kosovo pale in comparison and Milosovic is on trial for war crimes. Even in Bosnia the Serbs did not inflict such massive destruction - they didn't have half the Russian weaponry, after all. If Smith shows admiration for the Chechen guerrillas, then you do have to think about what he says he saw: a few thousand fighters with light infantry weapons tying down up to 100,000 Russian troops armed with helicopters, planes, tanks, artillery etc for several years.

I wonder if that reviewer even read the book. He/she says that the Chechens are not criticised, but on the first page I read Basayev was a terrorist and criminal AS WELL as being a hero to his own entourage. I read of a Chechen father trying to bury his son during a Russian air raid but cursing the Chechen guerrillas who had dragged him into the war. Etc, etc;

And as for there being no irony in writing about Aslan Maskhadov trying to prove he had a "regular" army by obstinately putting his men in unfavourable terrain against the Russian weapons, then that reviewer just doesn't get irony! What I read was just as he had announced this "apocalyptic" policy to Smith, an attack by Russian artillery started and Maskhadov (and Smith we suppose)had to run for their lives. Seems ironic to me.

Then there was some idea that history is given too much play in Allah's Mountains, the reviewer saying that to compare past Chechen-Russian relations so often to the present is like "comparing modern US-Mexican relations to US attempts to kill Pancho Villa".

Now this really IS ludicrous! Surely the whole point Smith was making, and it is one of the main points of the book, was that in a place like Chechnya the past really does sit very heavily on the present.

First you had brutal and long colonial conquest in the 19th century (Chechnya was about the hardest place to conquer in the whole Russian empire); then you moved straight into Soviet repression and Stalin's genocide in the 20th; then you went straight into the chaos and war of the post Soviet period. In other words there was never a moment when people might put the past behind or have any incentive to change their way of thinking. Conflict, conflict, that's all they know in Chechnya.

The reason it's important to understand this is that then you might have an inkling as to why against such ridiculous odds and at such a high price there are still today Chechens going out and blowing up Russian tanks.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: I will have to agree with leonidas_of_sparta, I bought the book even after reading his comments and I was severly disappointed. I think leonidas_of_sparta covered the book's flaws pretty well and i will give only one example of the inherent unbalance in this book. Sebastian Smith faults the western countries for the failure of chechnya because they did not invest during the post war peroid but he then goes on stating that the four foreign engineers (who were beheaded by chechen kidnappers)should never went to chechnya, even though they were during what smith was lamenting - post war reconstruction funded by western powers. This book is so un-balanced that it contradict itself on the same page.

Rating:
Summary: a masterpiece
Review: If you can read only one book this year, read this one.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointing and unbalanced look at the conflict
Review: On first inspection, this book seems to be highly promising. Sebastian Smith presents a lucid, well-written account of a conflict which he has witnessed first-hand. He attempts to place the action with its wider context, both in terms of the dynamics of Kremlin politics as well as the much older history of Russian intervention in the Caucases.

However, as he progresses, Smith begins to show his clearly partisan feelings, which romanticize the Chechen fighters while demonizing the Russians. It gradually becomes clear as his narrative proceeds that he has spent the vast majority of his experience living and travelling with the guerrillas, and the story is soaked in the color of an opinion of an author who has clearly "gone native".

Smith lambasts the Russian leadership for carelessly throwing away human life for political gain, yet when he describes Aslan Maskadov making a similar decision to order his troops to be slaughtered needlessly on open plains to make the point that the Chechen leadership has litigimacy beyond being a "group of bandits", Smith lionizes him without any sense of irony.

Such characterizations permeate the text. Nowhere are the Chechens selfish, evil or incompetent. Likewise, the Russians are never right. While there is no doubt in my mind that the Russians perpetrate the greater of the atrocities and make the greater share of mistakes and miscalculations, I find it hard to believe that this is a war unlike all other wars: that it served to bring out the worst in both sides, neither of whom we in the West would find particularly savory. Instead, Smith petulantly refuses to acknowledge that the war could have ben anything other than a struggle between a noble people struggling for freedom against an oppressive empire of evil and tyranny.

By doing so, Smith tars his own credibility, and does his book the most grevious harm: he destroys its sense of balance.

A final comment centers upon Smith's use of historical anecdote from ancient conflicts. They offer poignant views of how old the conflict is, but the manner which he employs them are clearly meant to imply to the reader that what happened in 1995 was exactly the same as what happened in the 1800s, and before. It is meant to say "nothing has changed save the weapons, not even the people themselves". It's a distracting method that doesn't hold up well to rigorous analysis any better than comparing modern Mexican-American relations to the campaigns to kill Pancho Villa.

Overall, I had high hopes for this book. There hasn't been enough good analysis of the Chechen conflict, and this book had more potential than any that I've seen recently. Unfortunately, it lost any semblance of objectivity quickly and as a result it has done a disservice to the very people that Smith so clearly sympathizes with. My personal sympathy lies with the Chechens (a legacy of my Cold War tendency to revel in Soviet misfortune, undoubtedly), but by taking such a clearly biased stand, Smith alienated me to such an extent that I couldn't in good conscience attribute any truth to his slavish adoration of even the most questionable acts by the Chechen fighters.

As a result, I rate Sebastian Smith's book only two stars out of five: a very very disappointing and unbalanced view of the war in Chechnya.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Smith's book is excellent, extremely well written, Allah's mountains is an extraodinary moving report on an oppressed nation by a ruthless state

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: This book makes a great companion to Anatol Lieven's recent book on Chechnya. Though not as analytical as Lieven's book, "Allah's Mountain's" is well-written and enjoyable to read. This is one of the only books I have found with any significant information whatsoever on Chechnya's neighbor, Ingushetia.