Yelena Shesternina is not the first Russian journalist to do it, but she has performed a valuable service by bringing the figures up to date. The correspondent for Russky Kurier reported in that newspaper's June 3 issue on a simple exercise in arithmetic: adding up... MORE

With little more than a murmur of token protest from the Western world, the Russian and Ingush authorities on June 7 closed Ingushetia’s Satsita tent camp, the last one housing Chechen refugees. A formal ceremony marking the camp’s closing, to be followed by its total... MORE

A representative of Russia’s State Duma seems to have deliberately deceived visiting PACE delegates in order to try to prevent them from meeting with Russian human-rights activists. According to a June 3 statement by Lev Ponomarev, head of the Moscow-based For Human Rights movement, Duma... MORE

Last week, a mass demonstration against state kidnappings of civilians in Chechnya brought together in Grozny several hundred relatives of kidnap victims. According to a June 4 statement by the Memorial human-rights center, the anti-government demonstration was the largest the Chechen capital has seen for... MORE

Gross manipulation of elections is easy in a completely totalitarian state, but can have self-defeating results in a semi-totalitarian one. The Kremlin’s interference in last autumn’s presidential election for the pro-Moscow Chechen administration was so heavy-handed that most of the credible candidates have so far... MORE

--WHILE FEWER THAN EVER ARE WILLING TO SERVE… As in other recent years, this spring’s Russian military call-up is seeing massive draft evasion. According to a report broadcast on Radio Netherlands last week filed by its Moscow correspondent, Geert Groot Koerkamp, only 5,000 young men... MORE

The Russian and Ingush authorities are making what they apparently hope will be the final push in driving Chechen refugees out of their tent camps in Ingushetia. The sole remaining camp, Satsita, is due to be closed on June 10, according to the Federal Migration... MORE

Both federal and separatist accounts of the day-to-day course of combat operations in Chechnya are so self-serving that it is extremely difficult to discern the truth behind the propaganda. One can be fairly confident that each side’s admissions of its own losses in battle are... MORE

Governments and other organizations with “deep pockets” usually deny paying ransoms or bribes, and the terrorists or corrupt bureaucrats who receive such payments also usually prefer to keep them secret. More than once a kidnap victim has been freed in the Caucasus under suspicions that... MORE

The maneuvers that will really decide Chechnya’s special presidential election in August have all been taking place behind the scenes. The only voters who really matter—Vladimir Putin’s inner circle in the Kremlin—are remaining quiet. But speculation and rumors continue. Andrei Riskin noted in May 26... MORE