Chechnya, a 6,000-square-mile corner of the northern Caucasus, has struggled under Russian domination for centuries. The region declared its independence in 1991, leading to a brutal war, Russian withdrawal, and subsequent "governance" by bandits and warlords. A series of apartment building attacks in Moscow in 1999, allegedly orchestrated by a rebel faction, reignited the war, which continues to rage today. Russia has gone to great lengths to keep journalists from reporting on the conflict; consequently, few people outside the region understand its scale and the atrocities—described by eyewitnesses as comparable to those discovered in Bosnia—committed there.
Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the liberal Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta, was the only journalist to have constant access to the region. Her international stature and reputation for honesty among the Chechens allowed her to continue to report to the world the brutal tactics of Russia’s leaders used to quell the uprisings. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya is her second book on this bloody and prolonged war. More than a collection of articles and columns, A Small Corner of Hell offers a rare insider’s view of life in Chechnya over the past years. Centered on stories of those caught-literally-in the crossfire of the conflict, her book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it, from the guards who accept bribes from Chechens out after curfew to the United Nations. Politkovskaya’s unflinching honesty and her courage in speaking truth to power combine here to produce a powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet.
Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in Moscow on October 7, 2006.
The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea
Remote, forbidding, and volatile, the Caspian Sea long tantalized the world with its vast oil reserves. But outsiders, blocked by the closed Soviet system, couldn’t get to it. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and a wholesale rush into the region erupted. Along with oilmen, representatives of the world’s leading nations flocked to the Caspian for a share of the thirty billion barrels of proven oil reserves at stake, and a tense geopolitical struggle began. The main players were Moscow and Washington–the former seeking to retain control of its satellite states, and the latter intent on dislodging Russia to the benefit of the West.
The Oil and the Glory is the gripping account of this latest phase in the epochal struggle for control of the earth’s “black gold.” Steve LeVine, who was based in the region for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Newsweek, weaves an astonishing tale of high-stakes political gamesmanship, greed, and scandal, set in one of the most opaque corners of the world. In LeVine’s telling, the world’s energy giants jockey for position in the rich Kazakh and Azeri oilfields, while superpowers seek to gain a strategic foothold in the region and to keep each other in check. At the heart of the story is the contest to build and operate energy pipelines out of the landlocked region, the key to controlling the Caspian and its oil. The oil pipeline that resulted, the longest in the world, is among Washington’s greatest foreign policy triumphs in at least a decade and a half.
Along the way, LeVine introduces such players as James Giffen, an American moneyman who was also the political “fixer” for oil companies eager to do business on the Caspian and the broker for Kazakhstan’s president and ministers; John Deuss, the flamboyant Dutch oil trader who won big but lost even bigger; Heydar Aliyev, the oft-misunderstood Azeri president who transcended his past as a Soviet Politburo member and masterminded a scheme to loosen Russian control over its former colonies in the Caspian region; and all manner of rogues, adventurers, and others drawn by the irresistible pull of untold riches and the possible “final frontier” of the fossil-fuel era. The broader story is of the geopolitical questions of the Caspian oil bonanza, such as whether Russia can be a trusted ally and trading partner with the West, and what Washington’s entry into this important but chaotic region will mean for its long-term stability.
A book by academic and former head of the Office of the President of Azerbaijan. English version of the text: Azərbaycan – 2003-2008: Zaman Haqqında Düşünərkən.
Caspiana: A Digital Toolbox for Students and Scholars of Central Asia and the South Caucasus
Caspiana: A Digital Toolbox for Students and Scholars of Central Asia and the South Caucasus is a website created to facilitate research on the fascinating regions spreading east and west of the Caspian Sea. It is developed and hosted by The Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. Here you can find links to selected media sources, government portals, legislation databases, statistics, and academic resources to study eight countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
The SRB Podcast’s mission is simple: to provide a space for the many, many interesting thinkers who do amazing work to express their views, discuss their work, and contribute to the larger public discussion on the region. The show also seeks to give the public access to the wonderful and growing body of research that rarely reaches a broad audience but is crucially important, especially as tensions with and in the region flare. It is my hope the SRB Podcast will make a modest contribution to paint a picture of Eurasia in all its complexity and the spread knowledge about it to an interested public.
Browse and adapt hundreds of standards-aligned lesson plans for K–12 classrooms. Lessons encourage students to make local connections to global news stories, while strengthening skills such as critical thinking, media literacy, and communication.
The Edward and Helen Mardigian Reference and Research Library at NAASR is composed of more than 20,000 books, pamphlets, periodicals, and documents, primarily in Armenian and English, dating as far back as the late eighteenth century. The collection encompasses a broad range of topics including history, literature, art and architecture, linguistics, as well as law, anthropology, and natural sciences.
Two circumstances led to the establishment of a library at NAASR. The first was the donation of books on Armenian subjects by NAASR members and their families; the second was the increasing number of requests to NAASR by students, the media, and individuals for information on Armenian topics. The library has become a center for scholars, undergraduates, high school students, and the general public, who have benefited from NAASR’s unique holdings.
Through the years, numerous important and valuable collections have been donated or willed to NAASR and form the heart of the Armenian language collection, and NAASR continues to accept donations. The largest of these collections is the Ani and George Bournoutian Collection of more than 3,000 titles. Other major collections donated to NAASR include those of Hagop Atamian, Dickran Boyajian, Dr. John A. C. Greppin, George Kolligian, Harry Kolligian, Alice Odian Kasparian, Samuel Toumayan, and Manoog S. Young.
The library also contains several important collections of personal papers, including those of the late Avedis Derounian (aka John Roy Carlson), the Rev. Charles Vertanes, Emmanuel P. Varandyan, Haigazn Kazarian, Marderos Deranian, Dicran Simsarian, and others, which represent a substantial source of information for future researchers.
Highlights of the library include a large number of histories of now-destroyed Armenian villages and towns, Armenian dictionaries of many different types, a copy of virtually every title published in English over the past half century, and an enormous trove of newspapers and periodicals, including scholarly journals.
The Mardigian Library's fully searchable catalogue can be accessed by clicking here: NAASR Library Catalogue.
Please note that the NAASR follows Library of Congress transliteration rules for Armenian, Russian, Persian and other languages. We suggest omitting diacritical marks when searching.
