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Russia has been at war with Chechnya twice since 1991, and Chechnya has been involved with the gravest of national crises that Russia has faced since the end of the Cold War. Yet, Chechnya has never received any sustained international attention. One reason for this is that many of the activists and journalists who sought to shine light on the region have been killed.
In this context, the book 'Subjugate or Exterminate!: A Memoir of Russia's Wars in Chechnya' (Academica Press, 2019) by Akhmed Zakayev, the London-based Chechen leader whom Russia has long sought to extradite from the UK, provides a fresh account of the past quarter of a century. It also provides a unique firsthand account; Zakayev fought in both of the Chechen wars, and was variously a minister, a military commander, a negotiator, and a presidential candidate.
The Henry Jackson Society is delighted to invite you to a fascinating panel discussion with dissident and Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic's government in exile, award-winning translator Dr Arch Tait, the book's publisher Dr Paul du Quenoy, and foreign correspondent Luke Harding on the subject of Akhmed Zakayev’s recent book ‘Subjugate or Exterminate!’: A Memoir of Russia's Wars in Chechnya (Academica Press, 2019), which relates a major participant's role in Russia's conflict with Chechnya.
Akhmed Zakayev is Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic's government in exile. Zakayev was first trained as an actor and became the chairman of the Chechen Union of Theatrical Actors in 1991. A veteran of the First Chechen War, Zakayev was one of the signatories of the Chechen-Russian peace treaty when it was signed in 1997 and served as Chechen deputy prime minister after the war. When Russia attempted to implicate him in the planning of the Moscow theater siege in 2002, a British court refused to extradite Zakayev. He was granted political asylum in 2003. Zakayev leads a political movement which both opposed the turn in Chechen militancy towards Islamism an the current Russian-backed Chechen government of Ramzan Kadyrov. Between the Chechen Wars he co-authored a book, Wahhabism, The Kremlin's Remedy Against National Liberation Movements, positing a link between Soviet Union support for terror groups and dictatorial states and political Islam's growth. It was discovered in 2008 that Zakayev was targeted for assassination along with friend and acquaintance, Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered by polonium-210 poisoning in 2006. He continues to campaign for Chechen independence from exile in London, and Russia continues to attempt his extradition. His recent book, Subjugate or Exterminate!: A Memoir of Russia's Wars in Chechnya' seeks to provide a personal telling of the Chechen conflict.
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Dr Arch Tait learned Russian at Latymer Upper School, London; Trinity Hall, Cambridge; and Moscow State University. He has a PhD in Russian literature from Cambridge and began translating in earnest in 1986 after a meeting with Valentina Jacques, then editor of the magazine Soviet Literature. From 1993 he was the UK editor of the Glas New Russian Writing translation series, whose editor-in-chief was Valentina's successor, Natasha Perova. To date he has translated 35 books by leading Russian authors of fiction and non-fiction. Dr Tait's most recent translations are Yelena Rzhevskaya's Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter (Greenhill), and Maxim Trudolyubov's The Tragedy of Property (Polity); and Ivan Chistyakov’s The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard (Granta).
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Dr Paul du Quenoy is President and Publisher of Academica Press, a leading independent publisher based in Washington, DC and London, and Professor of History at the American University of Beirut. He received his Ph.D. in Russian History from Georgetown University and has also taught at Georgetown, the American University in Cairo, and St. Petersburg State University. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, Professor du Quenoy is the author of three books and numerous scholarly articles, including work on Russia and the Middle East. He is also an internationally recognized cultural critic, regularly publishing on art, theatre, and music, and chairman of the Russian Ball of Washington, DC.
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Luke Harding is an award-winning Guardian foreign correspondent. Resident in Moscow between 2007-11, he was expelled from the country by the Kremlin, the first case of such an expulsion happening to a journalist in Russia since the end of the Cold War. Afterwards, he penned Mafia State to describe the Putin regime. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. His book, The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken, was nominated for the Orwell Prize, while The Snowden Files and (as co-author) WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy have both been turned into films. In November 2017, Harding published Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win on the subject of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election, examining the dossier of former British Agent Christopher Steele.
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| Отдел мониторинга "Чеченпресс" |
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