Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is a city scarred by the bloody resistance to the Russians’ rape and murder of its people, after the collapse of communism there in 1991. The Chechen rebellion that followed this onslaught was recorded by Stanley Greene for a period of nine years. It is a vision of hell in the eyes of the survivors.
The collapse of Russian communism in 1991 resounded to the shudder of an empire. Soviet imperialism and empiricism was dead and lands, nations, and peoples would henceforth be free from the tyranny of the communist diktat. But it also sounded the death knell of a small, impoverished, and forgotten land-locked state in the Caucasus which had the misfortune to be of geopolitical importance. Stanley Greene's photographs in Open Wound are so powerful as to make Chechnya our responsibility. He is unashamed to use guilt, with his painter's eye, to relate the deeds of men in Chechnya to our own conduct.