Once known for its honour-loving bandits and rugged scenery, the Caucasus is the narrow wedge of land between Russia and the Middle East. Rippling with wooded gorges, its ethnic and linguistic complexity – forty languages in Dagestan alone – has long intrigued outsiders. These days the Caucasus is better known for separatism and scenes of bloody violence, which the author, Oliver Bullough, puts into vivid historical focus. More crucially, he sheds a telling light on contemporary Russian political thinking.
Bullough, a companionable ex-Reuters journalist, bypasses independent Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – which for some collectively define the region – and instead goes in search of three peoples in the North Caucasus: the Circassians, Karachai-Balkars and Chechens. This is really a book about Russia’s relationship with its unruly southern flank, its dogged attempts to subdue it, and bitter incomprehension when the locals bite back. And he tells a brilliant story, interweaving personal reportage with impressive reading, both in the Caucasus and its far-flung diaspora.
The book begins with the tsarist army which, flush with the imperialist dream, first breached the region in the late 18th century, slaughtering the Nogay people to a man. Once Russians had tasted Caucasian resistance, however, success would be patchy, and the romantic Kavkaz would soon be redubbed a land of jihadist savages. One wonders how much these warlike peoples knew of their northern adversary. Imam Shamil, the aged warrior-king of the Eastern Caucasus, who surrendered to the Russians in 1859, stared through his train window as he travelled north and said, “If I’d known Russia was so big, I’d have never fought against it.”
Circassians were one of the first peoples to suffer Russian ethnic cleansing. Prized throughout history as bodyguards for the Ottoman sultans – and their pale, blue-eyed daughters sought for the harem – Circassians cling in exile to a code of honour called habze, so pervasive that one Circassian gangster in Istanbul was reportedly shot dead after an argument when someone else paid his bill, a mark of deep disrespect. Their historic sin was to resist Russian encroachments. Circassians were hounded and finally massacred into exile in 1862-4, their homeland sliced into three districts, and their coastline turned into a spa retreat. With appalling irony (deliberate or not) Krasnaya Polyana, the site of the Circassians’ last stand, is to hold the Winter Olympics in 2014, the 150th anniversary of the genocide.
One of the most moving sections is the plight of the Karachai-Balkars, a Turkic people crushed by the Soviet machine, who are still lobbying for recognition of their own genocide. Moscow, incensed by disparate Balkar resistance to its central rule, ordered a Soviet detachment in 1942 to “wipe the villages of Balkaria from the face of the earth.” In the Cherek valley alone, 700 people, mostly women and children, were murdered at point-blank range. One Balkar soldier returned from the front to find all eight of his children dead. The remaining Balkars were exiled to Central Asia and erased from the pages of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia of 1944.
But nowhere is the story more tragic than in the case of the Chechens, to whom half the book is dedicated. Here Bullough is most impassioned. Chechens, long resistant to Russian encroachments, are today are viewed by Russians with almost hysterical xenophobia. Also deported en masse from their mountainous homeland to the Central Asian steppe, Chechens refused to assimilate and trickled illegally back to their villages. After two further wars with Russia in the 1990s, their society has been completely shattered, leading to one of the highest birth defect rates in the world. Russians have little sympathy. After all, says Bullough, they “failed to understand how the deportation of 1,478,499 Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia in February 1944 could have influenced their worldview.”
Let Our Fame Be Great is a treat. It is finely bound, with excellent maps, and Bullough draws you irresistibly into his narrative, fusing reportage, history, and travelogue in colourful, absorbing prose. At times, however, he is long-winded and rather sloppy, and occasionally you wonder where his editor was: (“the horizontal horizon”). Some sections are simply too long, such as 58 pages devoted to Imam Shamil.
Still, the book is a pleasure, and most importantly, it is critical to understanding modern Russia with its worrying collective amnesia. Few attempts are made to examine the country’s past, and those that do are met with non-cooperation or a lot worse. Given the extraordinarily tenacious spirit of the Caucasus, Bullough warns, “it may be that the ghosts of their victims will haunt them until they do.”
Thorns in Russia's side