Medvedev said, “These are animals. Irrespective of their motives, what they do is a crime by any law and any moral standard…I have no doubt that we will find and destroy them all.” I agree with him only partly. Terrorism against innocent civilians is indeed a terrible crime for which there can never be an excuse. But the perpetrators are not animals. They are human beings who, no doubt, have themselves suffered greatly in their lives directly because of the actions of the Russian State against them, against their loved ones and against their people. Acknowledging and understanding this would be more useful than simply calling them animals. Nor can Russian authorities “destroy them all”, because new traumatised Chechens will step up in place of the old. Two happy women did not wake up one morning and decide to kill as many Muscovites as they could. The cause goes much deeper. In 1944 Stalin, in the name of the Russian Soviet state, deported the entirety of the Chechen and Ingush people from their homeland, as if they indeed were animals – as if they were so much cattle. Stalin’s successors, including his post-Soviet successors, saw no reason to treat them as if they were human after all by apologising and reconciling with them. Forced Russification followed, as did the Chechens’ totally predictable resistance to it, culminating almost as soon as Russia’s ability to exert force weakened in the ghastly Chechen wars. Russia has a long history of treating Chechens, and not only Chechens, with a lack of human dignity, Chechens react, and the Russian President re-enforces their anger by again calling them “animals”. If at any time over the last 60 years Stalin’s successors had had the wisdom, courage or even just the simple humanity of seeking genuine human reconciliation with Chechens, perhaps there would not be so many grieving and frightened people in Moscow today. Suppressing terror is certainly necessary, but so is avoiding its causes in the first place.