
Title: The secret history of Khava Gaisanova and the North Caucasus
Photographer(s): Rob Hornstra
Writer(s): Arnold Van Bruggen
Designer(s): Kummer & Herrman
Publisher(s): The Sochi Project, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Year: 2013
Print run: 1100
Language(s): English
Pages: 52
Size: 20 x 27 cm
Binding: Softcover
Edition:
Print: Robstolk & Dijkman Offset, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: Russia, 2009-2012
ISBN:















The North Caucasus is so incredibly complex that we initially got lost in the details. No other book took us so long to define. A history of violence was to be the overarching theme, but then we met Khava Gaisanova and decided to focus on a single character. So many elements of the region seemed to come together in Khava’s story that we decided to use it as the basis for our book. All even chapters are about events in the life history of Khava and her ancestors, while the uneven chapters place these family events in the larger perspective of the North Caucasus. The book is printed on newsprint to emphasize the urgent character of the story. A reproduced photo album of the missing person Mukhazhir is concealed in the back of the book.
Khava Gaisanova lives in Chermen, a village in the heart of the North Caucasus. In 2007 her husband disappeared, like so many men in the North Caucasus disappear without a trace – kidnapped, arrested or simply executed and buried in anonymous graves. The unstable North Caucasus described in this book lies on the other side of the mountains from Sochi. In The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova and the North Caucasus, a grim picture unfolds of the region hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics.
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