With Boris Yeltsin trying hard to deal with the problem of Russia’s imperialist domination of Chechnya, The Reading List is reminded of two Leo Tolstoy works that shed real light on the subject even though they are 100- plus years old:
Anna Karenina, In which Levin rages against the Russian incursion into Turkey as an act of inappropriate nationalist fervor.
Hadji Murad, One of his few great late works, a novella about–yes!–a Chechen uprising against Russia.
