North Caucasus Service’s Online Library Preserves Chechnya’s Literary Heritage
In early 2015, as a step toward preserving Chechnya’s literary heritage, the North Caucasus service launched an online library available for free to users with both text and audio versions of classics selected from Chechen poetry and prose, as well as works from contemporary authors.
RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service is one of the few independent media outlets reporting in this predominantly Muslim region, one of the most repressive and arbitrary in the Russian Federation. The Service, operating out of Prague, is the only international, Chechen-language broadcaster providing an independent alternative to the tightly controlled official press in this notoriously arbitrary region of Russia. The audience spans Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Krasnodar Krai, Adygeya, North Ossetia, and Stavropol Krai.
In 2017 the Service launched the Kavkaz.Realii website to provide the region’s Russian speakers with accurate and uncensored news. The Service’s correspondents are regularly subjected to threats and intimidation. Assassinations and bombings are common, and anyone viewed as a potential threat to the local leadership or crossing “red lines” can be imprisoned.