Chechnya's Walking Wounded

Tatyana, a young nurse in Nizhni Novgorod, a regional capital in Central Russia, had been married just 10 days last March when her husband Alexander, 21, knifed her to death for failing to find his misplaced cigarettes. Alexander then tried to kill himself with the same knife, but failed. In Saratov, some 750 km down the Volga River from Nizhni Novgorod, 20-year-old Alexei killed a drunken passerby with an ax because the man rudely turned down his offer to see him home. In Verkh-Isetsk, an industrial town in the Urals, Andrei — a former army sniper — landed his father in...