Author: Charles River Editors
Narrator: Colin Fluxman
Unabridged: 2 hr 16 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 11/20/2019
Today, Chechnya is a republic with some degree of autonomy in the contemporary Russian Federation. Its population is just over a million people, and it stretches over an area of 17,000 square kilometers. The majority of Chechnya’s population is comprised of Sunni Muslims, meaning religion has played a key role in the territory’s development. In southwestern Russia, landlocked within 100 kilometers of the Caspian Sea, Chechnya is north of the Caucasian mountains, bordering other North Caucasus provinces such as North Ossetia, and Dagestan, and Georgia.
Russia itself is a well-established Slavic, Orthodox Christian country, though its majority Muslim provinces were not obvious to outsiders until the post-Soviet conflicts of the 1990s. The history of the Chechen people in the region is, nevertheless, long-established, and Chechnya has become synonymous with conflict, civil war, and discontent. While many people are aware of that, few understand how things reached that point. The area is complex and fascinating, representing one of the world’s true fault lines in terms of religion, empire, and geography.
Wedged in the North Caucasus mountain range and bordering the Caspian Sea, Dagestan is a true meeting point of cultures, religions and geopolitical rivalries. A crossroad between east and west, Dagestan has been vitally important at different times for various powers in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and even between different religious and ethnic groups. In spite of all that, and in large measure because of it, Dagestan’s society is a composite of these rivalries over the centuries.
At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event sp...
In the wake of taking Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire would spend the next few centuries expanding its size, power, and influence, bumping up against Eastern Europe and becoming one of the world’s most important geopolitical players. It wa...
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“Had I just 10,000 Cossacks, I would have conquered the whole world.” – Napoleon BonaparteThe history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and ex...
Famine – one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation – continues to be one of the most crippling and destructive scourges of humanity. This inexorable affliction, traumatically fatal in the worst-case scenarios,...
Russia has been depicted by the media as a cyberspace boogeyman, a nation of hackers that can and will exploit any and all vulnerabilities of private organizations, government entities, and social media platforms. Over the last 10 years, as hackers ...
The Cold War moved into one of its most dangerous phases after Brezhnev’s death as both sides deployed nuclear weapons within alarming proximity in Europe. A NATO exercise, “Operation Able Archer,” almost led to a Soviet miscalcul...
The three modern Baltic states - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - may occupy small tracts of lands bordering the Baltic Sea, but their respective histories are unique. Latvia, like its neighbours, was settled thousands of years ago, with a number of...
Wedged in the North Caucasus mountain range and bordering the Caspian Sea, Dagestan is a true meeting point of cultures, religions and geopolitical rivalries. A crossroad between east and west, Dagestan has been vitally important at different times...