Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya's remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.
Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.
Chechnya is part and parcel of the Russian Federation.
When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
Criminals were coming to Chechnya from all over the world - they did not have a place in their own countries. But they could live perfectly well in Chechnya.
We loved being in Russia and would love to go back again, especially to visit my namesake.
The history of Chechnya is one of imperialism gone terribly wrong. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Chechens were among the few peoples to fend off Mongol conquerors, but at a terrible cost. Turks, Persians, and Russians sought to seize Chechnya, and it was finally absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1859.
There was something about the idea of Russia that I found very intriguing, and I think I had romanticized it a lot.
I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.
I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.