On 15 May 2004 Russian economics minister German Gref visited the city of Grozny and was shocked by the sight. ‘What we saw today at Minutka (a square in the south of the city) looks almost like a set from a Hollywood movie’, Gref told reporters. Russian president Vladimir Putin had expressed something similar when he flew over the city four days before. ‘Despite what's being done, from the helicopter it looks horrible’, he told a meeting of the local Chechen government. It is worth considering the words of these two men, both of whom carry enormous responsibility for the state of the city they were visiting. The majority of the destruction they saw had been carried out by the Russian government more than nine years before, with more inflicted by Putin himself almost five years ago. Yet somehow both men had either forgotten or discounted the importance of the fact of this mass devastation of a Russian city until being physically reminded of it. In a way, like most of their compatriots, they had accepted the ruination of Grozny as normal.

The appalling condition of Grozny is of course no secret. The dozens of journalists and aid workers who visited the city over the preceding decade had repeatedly seen its ruins and tried to reflect on its meaning – not to speak of the tens of thousands of Chechens who have to live in these conditions and experience the meaning of it every day.