Zhenya belonged to the small contingent of old Russian men and women who were incapable of leaving Chechnya because they either didn’t have the money or the strength.

I met her on Moscow Street. She was walking along nimbly, or as nimbly as her shabby rubber galoshes permitted. Two even shabbier children trailed behind her dragging a cart with three and a half wheels, full of old iron. Elza would collect scrap in the ruins and gouge the aluminium components out of it.

While distributing humanitarian aid in Grozny in 2000, Czech journalist Petra Procházková conducted a wide range of interviews with women who wanted to describe to the outside world what life in Chechnya had become.

History of relationship between Chechnya and Russia.

At the start of armed resistance to the Russians, many Chechens looked for inspiration to their history or to the war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

On February 23, 1944, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the Chechens and their Ingush neighbors -- some 400,000 people -- to be deported to Central Asia and Siberia for "mass collaboration" with invading Nazis.