Local social workers such as Don Everard, who lives and works in the St Thomas, say the media’s image is overstated. Now St Thomas houses 900 black families, but many of the old houses are abandoned, and those that still operate are overwhelmed by gangs of youths who trade drugs by day and bullets by night.A sign in the neighbourhood laundry says, “No smoking weed, No selling dope”, but the drug-taking and the illegal commerce is, for many youths, the only active part of their day.The St Thomas project has been used repeatedly by the media as the most potent symbol of the nation’s troubled young. Only the St Thomas Project was worse.Sixty years ago, when the St Thomas Project was built, it was a series of three-storey buildings with wrought-iron Southern balconies overlooking courtyards shaded by huge oaks. It was built in 1954, three years after the making of the film, A Streetcar Named Desire. Battered and neglected by its owners, the New Orleans Housing Authority, theDesire soon became one of the least desirable places to live. Muggings for tourists’ purses – the typical violent crime in the French Quarter – were actually 11 per cent fewer.One of the Projects is called Desire, on the street made famous by Tennessee Williams. About one-third of all the killings in New Orleans took place inside the Projects, and about one in five of those killers was a juvenile; the younge s t was 11 Elsewhere in the city, however, violent crime fell.

New York, Los Angeles and Miami were not even in the top 10.
Homicides rose 37 per cent in the city in the first half of this year, and rapes went up by 30 per cent. In the first six months of this year, it had the highest homicide rate of any city in the United States. There were 48 deaths per 100,000 population – compared with 34 in Washington DC. Then there is the Garden District of elegant old mansions in the Greek revival style, some occupied for generat ions by moneyed Southern families And finally there are the Projects. The Projects are where the other inhabitants of New Orleans live. They are mostly black and entirely poor and they survive, or try to, in public housing that is a kind of no man’s land in endless ghetto warfare Shootings have catapulted New Orleans intothe record books. Then there is greater metropolitan New Orleans, which gives the city’s fine old name to the spread ing modern suburbs along the Mississippi and the coast that are like other housing developments in Ohio or the next big city down the highway.

There is the French Quarter, with its tiny streets, fine French-style buildings and buggies and mules. New Orleans is several cities under one name. Now, as then, the party of war is proving itself worse than brutal and authoritarian: it is shown up as incompetent and risible. If it were to fail in Chechnya, Russian neo-imperialism would perhaps be discredited once and for all. The attempt to turn Russia into an empire again will have failed. The tide of ultra-nationalism in Russia might then begin to retreat. That would not be a bad outcome, either for the world, or for Russia..

That is why the Russian press and public are protesting so vehemently. If there is a silver lining to this dismal episode, it is that Russian civil society is proving more sophisticated and more determined than many suspected.With luck, this operation may prove to have less in common with the invasion of Afghanistan – which in its early days went like clockwork – and more with the bungled August 1991 coup which attempted to salvage the Soviet Union and instead precipitatedits collapse. They seem to understand that there is a direct connection between the amount of libertyRussia allows its weaker neighbours, and the amount of freedom they themselves will enjoy.The party of war in the “power ministries” which have pushed Boris Yeltsin into this invasion are the very same people who pilfer Russia’s mineral wealth, blow up nosey journalists with suitcase bombs and are threatening a clampdown on press freedom. But there is still a world of difference between Russia as a federal structure bound by treaties signed with some consent of its smaller ethnic groups – something like British India – and an empire ruled by autocratic fiat, even if in diminished borders.Parts of Russia’s ruling elite have recently been sliding back towards accepting the imperial definition of Russia, but ordinary Russians do not seem to support them. no Chechen ever tried to be of service or to please the authorities.”What those Russians who oppose the invasion have grasped is that what is at stake in this crisis is not a tiny piece of troublesome territory, but the fate of Russia itself, its self-definition as a country. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a general Russian aspiration was for Russia to become a “normal” country, meaning a normal nation-state looking after its own people, living in peace with its neighbours and shedding its imperial legacy.This is hard to achieve in the Russian Federation, where 100 ethnic groups rub uncomfortably against one another. Their independent spirit has been recognised by no lesser a Russian patriot than the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote of the Chechens in the Gulag: “Only one nation refused to accept the psychology of submission…