With the resumption of Russias military action in Chechnya in the 1990s, Hadji Murad gains new relevance, and anyone following global terrorism today will find Tolstoys description of the nineteenth-century war all too familiar. The work provides a wealth of information about the Caucasus and on one of the most colorful figures of the nineteenth-century Russo-Caucasian war, the Avar chieftan, Hadji Maurad. Changing allegiances, inter-ethnic