He was the Russian police officer in charge of Crimes of Special Importance who in 1990 artfully coaxed a confession from the serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, a Ukrainian engineer with fifty-three victims to his name. Today, Kostoev is a tireless and outspoken member of the Russian parliament, urging greater respect and citizens’ rights for the people of the North Caucasus, and particularly for his own people, the Ingush, whose fate he feels is unknown to the wider world. He was barely born when Stalin declared all Chechen and Ingush to be criminals for collaborating with the German invader – a thing they had emphatically not done. The entire Ingush nation – his mother included – was forcibly deported to slave-labour camps in Kazakhstan. One of his earliest childhood memories is watching Russian guards on horseback whipping his mother for gleaning corn. The Ingush, he says darkly, hate all invaders equally. Even when Stalin died and they were grudgingly allowed home, they found their houses given over to the Ossetians, a tribe of Christianized usurpers from south of the mountains, and Stalin’s former henchmen.
