Leo Tolstoy and Chechnya War

On January, 29 Financial Times published an article by Michael Church ‘A Thistle in Russia’s Side’. The author reviews a book called ‘The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus’, by English journalist John F. Baddeley that was written a 100 years ago and finds a lot of similarities between Chechen-Russian wars of the 19th century and modern day Chechnya conflict. I don’t want to analyze this article as it strikes me as very shallow and biased but there is one passage there that is worth special attention.
Mr. Church writes about a famous story by Leo Tolstoy ‘Hadji Murat’: “Tolstoy's heart was with the ordinary Chechens… He lets us get to know the inhabitants and breathe the peaceful air of a Chechen village, then shows what the Russians do in a morning of carefree violence with fire, bayonet, and gun: they also make a point of fouling the mosque. The survivors, writes Tolstoy, "experienced feelings stronger than hatred. It was the refusal to recognise these Russian dogs as people. And the desire for their destruction, like the desire for the destruction of rats, poisonous spiders and wolves, was just as natural a feeling as the feeling of self-preservation."
This is the sixth time when I find this passage about ‘Russian as dogs and rats’ in articles and books about Chechnya and every time the author, who cites these words, uses them as an example that Tolstoy liked and felt sympathy towards Chechens. This is rightly so but exactly here in ‘Hadji Murat’ Tolstoy uses these words to illustrate the idea – the moment Chechens started feeling that killing Russians is the same as killing rats or poisonous spiders, they committed moral suicide. They become rats and spiders themselves. They loose the right to be named humans.
I would like to stress it again – Tolstoy was a true Christian and he is known not only for his great novels but also for his belief in non-violence when facing oppression. Tolstoy’s ‘Hadji Murat’ is actually a story of how a person starts believing that all Russians are dogs and then how he gradually becomes a dog himself.
This idea in ‘Hadji Murat’ is so simple that I wonder why journalists like Michael Church do not recognize it. Just make a simple acid test: replace words ‘Russians’ with ‘Jews’ and ‘Chechens’ with ‘Palestinians’. How about this passage: “After what the Israeli Army did in the Palestinian refugee camp X. the survivors experienced feelings stronger than hatred. It was the refusal to recognise these Jewish dogs as people.” Sounds disgusting, doesn’t it?
“Did Vladimir Putin not read Hadji Murat at school? It's not too late”, - writes Mr. Church but I would recommend Mr. Church to read Hadji Murat himself. If he reads it with open eyes and mind not biased by russophobic ideas he would realize that Beslan was not a tragic exception but quite a predictable episode. The moment you start treating people of any nationality – no matter if they are Chechens, Russians, Jews or Navajos – as dogs and spiders, you become a moral corpse, a zombie that can only kill, kill and kill.