On November 23, the Russian State Duma began parliamentary hearings devoted to "the beginning of the constitutional process in Chechnya." Organized by the Duma Commission on Chechnya, they attempted to bring together representatives of the Russian authorities and the authors of numerous drafts of a... MORE

The newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on November 27 the words of Anatoly Khryachkov, the pro-Moscow military commissioner of the Chechen Republic, who stated that the Russian Armed Forces will have drafted 1,000 Chechen young men by the end of this autumn. "It is planned that... MORE

On November 18, as was reported in the most recent issue of Chechnya Weekly, Akhmed Zakaev, a special representative of Chechen separatist president Aslan Maskhadov, and retired General Viktor Kazantsev, President Putin's plenipotentiary representative in the Southern Federal District, held a two-hour lunch in the... MORE

On November 15, Minister of the Interior Boris Gryzlov announced to the Russian press that Said Peskhoev, an ethnic Chechen, was being proposed to President Putin for the post of head of the pro-Moscow Chechen MVD. Gryzlov added that all the necessary papers were being... MORE

The head of the Russian Auditing Chamber, former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, announced on November 20 that his agency had conducted an audit in Chechnya and concluded that "there are sufficient problems in the republic." "We have established," Stepashin noted, "that Chechnya received only about... MORE

In mid-November, a five-month-long, closed, secret trial of five residents of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, charged with having participated in the terror bombings of Moscow and Volgodonsk during September of 1999, came to an end on the grounds of a penal colony located outside of the city of... MORE

If the Stavropol trial represented, in Yakov's words, "an information bomb no one noticed," the trial taking place in Makhachkala, Dagestan of Salman Raduev and three others for participation in a January 1996 raid on the town of Kizlyar during the 1994-1996 war has been... MORE

The award-winning Russian war correspondent for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya, who has been temporarily sent out of Russia by her editorial board due to credible death threats made against her, has been on a book promotion tour in the United States. On November... MORE

On November 13, a commission of the Russian State Duma devoted to the state of human rights in Chechnya met in Moscow. Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) who, together with several Duma deputies, comprise a joint working group on... MORE