Stanley Greene: Open Wound - Chechnya 1994 - 2003

Renowned photojournalist Stanley Greene's unflinchingly honest images from four years covering the war in Chechnya.

The collapse of Russian communism in 1991 resounded to the shudder of an empire. It also sounded the death knell of the small, impoverished, forgotten land-locked state of Chechnya in the Caucasus, which had the misfortune to be of geopolitical importance.

Chechnya, whose population is mainly Muslim, reiterated its desire to become an independent state as it had already done 150 years earlier. In 1991, most Chechens were not aware of the economic stakes of oil and they were considered peasants who were just good at throwing clods of earth at the Russian cavalry. Today, they know what to expect.

A “lightning war” was launched against the Chechens in 1994, reducing the capital to a rat-infested pile of rubble. Grozny has become the Dresden of the Caucasus. Subsequently the Spetznatz, a Russian special forces unit, chained murders and kidnappings. No one was spared, neither men, nor women, nor children.

But the Chechens are not resigned. What is left in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is a vision of hell in the eyes of the survivors – pictured by Stanley Greene – that seems impossible to contemplate. What do the mothers of the Russian soldiers who have done this to Chechnya feel now about their sons?

Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. Twenty years later he was given a camera. Open Wound records nine years of the history of the Chechen rebellion through his eyes.

“… when you sit on the fence and watch genocide without doing anything about it, you are as guilty as those who are committing it.” Stanley Greene