Books

Part of a landmark crossmedia project, winner of the 2017 Rencontres d'Arles Dummy Book Award.

Co-authored with Maria Morina and Oksana Yushko, under the artistic direction of Anna Shpakova, this book of photographs and text traces the transformations of Grozny, the Chechen capital, between 2009 and 2017.

Taking Thornton Wilder's novel Theophilus North as our model, we dissect a city marked by the trauma of two successive wars into nine hidden layers of existence, each revealing a facet of post-war social change: the evolving role of women, the weight of tradition, rising economic inequality, political tension, and the war… that never ended, according to Chechens.

This bilingual book's French title draws on a line from the Quran: “You inspire in their hearts more fear than Allah”. It's a reference to Putin's approach to the Muslim citizens of his country, and the choice of languages, French and Russian, reflects my dual life: far from the country that sees me as a traitor, in the country that adopted me.

Between 2014 and 2021, I followed about a dozen Russian converts to Islam, men and women pushed to the margins for their faith by a state that came to see them as traitors. Surveilled, harassed, in some cases tortured, most were forced into exile, only to find a cold welcome abroad.

Most of them are, like me, post-Soviet kids of the 1990s; we share a past and its cultural codes. From a former nationalist to a former pro-government activist, they all invited me into their daily lives and gave me hours and hours. But the collective portrait that emerges is not of them. It is of the repressive machine that tests itself on minorities before turning on society at large, and then on the neighbours: this book went to print two weeks before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.