ingenv Posted May 25, 2021 Share Posted May 25, 2021 The police, often their competitors in the protection business, have guns and badges, but the Chechens have something far more terrifying at their disposal: guns and folklore. Russians are, in a way, victims of their own literature. Nineteenth-century works such as Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Aleksandr Pushkin’s Prisoner of the Caucasus imparted a sometimes admiring, sometimes horrified picture of the Chechen as a fierce primitive who would never shirk from a fight, an impression only solidified by their performance during the Chechen wars. As a result, there is a general assumption that, to quote one gang hanger-on, “you don’t mess with the Chechens. If you challenge them, even if they know they will lose, they will fight, and they’ll summon their brothers and their cousins and their uncles and keep fighting. Even if they are going to lose, they’ll fight just to bring you down, too. They are maniacs.” Link to comment
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