The Chechen Wars in Historical Perspective: New Work on Contemporary Russian-Chechen Relations

The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the College of William and Mary recently featured a three-day symposium, "War and Terror in Chechnya: New Russia Between East and West," a series of talks, discussions, and films.' Two of the three films, Kavkazskii plennik (Prisoner of the mountains, 1996) directed by Sergei Bodrov and Voina (War, 2002) by Aleksei Balabanov, draw on historical imagery and the history of imperial representation of the mountain peoples of the North Caucasus. Prisoner of the Mountains evokes the heritage of Russian romantic writing on captivity, the transformative impact of colonialism, noble savagery, and exotic eastern female sexuality, while War returns Russian viewers to the world of savagery without any trace of nobility. Far from the images of Mikhail Lermontov and Aleksandr Pushkin, Balabanov's Chechens are closer to those described by military officials in the Caucasus Army responsible for the exile of numerous mountain peoples in 186364-violent, fanatical, ignorant of Islamic tradition, motivated by primitive blood feuds, and bound to clans rather than any notion of society. Prisoner of the