Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day wrote ... (Thank you for this source)

War and Peace, Russian style

War is brutal, but Russian war is something else entirely. Glas magazine, which promotes Russian writing in the English-speaking world, delves into the conflicts in Chechnya and the Caucasus in its latest issue — Glas 40: War and Peace — and it's grim but brilliant stuff.
One of the contributors is Julia Latynina, a talented and brave journalist, who specializes in exposing corruption in the Caucasus. Lawlessness, local mafia lords, totalitarianism and rebel chieftains populate the landscape here and Latynina pulls the patchwork threads together to make it all readable, and terrifying. She notes: "Russia's weak, hopelessly corrupt and incredibly venal state authority is gradually slipping down from the Caucasus Mountains — as grease slips off a dirty plate under a jet of hot water — exposing what has been there for thousands of years: a culture of mutual assistance based on clanship and family ties, barbarous cruelty, a cult of individual honour and blood vengeance — with the simple difference that now the blood vengeance is exacted using grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs."
Here's a memorable excerpt from Julia Latynina's novel Niyazbek, translated by Andrew Bromfield: http://www.eamonn.com/2006/12/war_and_peace_russian_style_1.htm

WAR & PEACE
Contemporary Russian Prose
anthology, 400 pp. , ISBN 5-7172-0074-9
a compelling portrait of post-post-perestroika Russia
Link: http://www.russianpress.com/glas/glas%2040.html