With the resumption of Russias military action in Chechnya in the 1990s, Hadji Murad gains new relevance, and anyone following global terrorism today will find Tolstoys description of the nineteenth-century war all too familiar. The work provides a wealth of information about the Caucasus and on one of the most colorful figures of the nineteenth-century Russo-Caucasian war, the Avar chieftan, Hadji Maurad. Changing allegiances, inter-ethnic tensions, raids on villages, inaccurately reported war casualties, grieving mothers, and even the gruesome beheadings described so vividly in Hadji Murad still occur. Rarely are they described in prose as powerful as Tolstoys

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