After a long work of translation, verification of sources and restyling of the text, we are pleased to announce the release of the English version of Volume II of “Freedom or Death! History of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria”.

You can find the book on Amazon (CLICK HERE) Or in our dedicated website, http://www.freedomordeath.net (CLICK HERE).

With this volume, Orts Akhamdov officially joins the team. Read his presentation on www.freedomordeath.net !

With the introduction to the book, we wish you a good read.

The war in Ukraine began in Chechnya.

It may seem like a provocation. Yet, it is the reality that the pages of this second volume, entirely dedicated to the First Russo-Chechen War, reveal. The genesis, development and unfolding of this bloody conflict seem like the draft of the script that the world is witnessing in these months between Donbass and Crimea. Even then, as today, Russia invaded a free state, masking the war it was unleashing behind the definition of a ‘special operation’. Even then, as today, the enemy of the Russian state had been labelled and demonised: if Zelensky and his government are called ‘Nazis’ today, Dudaev and his ministers were called ‘bandits’ back then. Even then, as today, convinced of their superiority, the military commands marched on the capital, claiming to bend a people to their will, as they had done several times in the Soviet era. But even then, as today, they were forced to retreat, only to unleash a bloody total war, the most devastating European war since 1945.

The First Russo-Chechen War was the first tragic product of Russian revanchism: the ‘zero point’ of a parabola that leads from Grozny to Kiev, passing through Georgia, Crimea, Belarus and Donbass. With one substantial difference: that the Russians lost that first war against Chechnya. Their ambitions, based on the worn foundations of a crumbling empire, ended up frustrated by the stubbornness of a nation immensely inferior, in numbers and means, to the Ukrainian one, which today defends its land from the war unleashed by Putin.

This story can teach those who have the patience to read it two important lessons: what happens when you indulge the ambitions of an empire, and how to defeat it. If it is already too late to put the first into practice, for the second we are still in time