Among the few surprises to come from Chechnya's election day on October 5, so far the most interesting is the revelation that the Russian troops who took part voted overwhelmingly against Akhmad Kadyrov. A respected Moscow journalist, recently returned from Grozny, told Chechnya Weekly on... MORE

Evidence continues to mount that the October 5 election was massively rigged. BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg participated in an election day tour of Chechnya that was organized and closely controlled by the Russian authorities. He reported on October 11 that at a polling station in... MORE

Clearly attempting to exploit his post-election-day momentum, Kadyrov told a Moscow press conference that all Interior Ministry troops in Chechnya should be organized under a single command--with those of the federal ministry placed "if not in direct subordination, then under the direction of the Interior... MORE

If the Kremlin should finally decide to engage in bona fide peace negotiations in Chechnya, it will now have to negotiate not only with Aslan Maskhadov but with a wide range of rebel field commanders. That is the view of Anna Politkovskaya, who told Radio... MORE

A visit to Georgia's Pankisi Gorge by officials of the Putin and Kadyrov administrations, which occurred just before the October 5 election, produced strikingly modest results. The visitors failed to persuade a single Chechen refugee to join them on their return flight. Some eleven families... MORE

By Andrei Piontkovsky Russia has yet again lost a war in Chechnya--just as it did in the nineteenth century, and in 1944 and 1996. If this really is a war for the territorial integrity of the multi-ethnic Russian Federation, then the Chechens must feel themselves... MORE

The Chechen Interior Ministry told the news agency Novosti on October 14 that unknown gunmen shot dead one of its police colonels as he was driving in Grozny. The NTV television network identified the slain colonel as Zhelaudi Mezhiev, deputy chief of the ministry's investigative... MORE

The purging from Chechnya's government structures of supporters of the main opposition candidates in the recent election has apparently intensified since October 5. Marina Perevozkina of Moskovsky komsomolets reported in an October 21 article on her conversation with Salavat Gebertaev. He is the mayor of... MORE

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies has found that there were more Russian casualties in the past year in Chechnya than there had been in the previous year. Nevertheless, a spokesman for the institute told Chechnya Weekly in an October 21 telephone interview that... MORE

Akhmad Kadyrov's October 19 inauguration as Chechnya's newly "elected" president was remarkable for several symbolic gestures. These gestures, Zoya Svetova suggested in the October 20 issue of Russky kurier, might be interpreted as a deliberate effort on Kadyrov's part to make the ceremony as different... MORE