Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  No organized power had ever tried to conquer the northern slopes of the Caucasus, since no organized power had ever had a secure route there before. To the west, where the Black Sea washes the mountains’ roots, the cliffs plunge straight into the water. A single traveller would struggle to pass from south to north here, let alone an army. Very few genuine passes traversed the high mountains, and those that did were threatened by savage tribesmen, vicious weather, wild beasts and avalanches. Only to the east, along the Caspian shore, could foreigners hope to pass into the North Caucasus: and there the Dagestani and Chechen warriors were more than a match for almost any invader.

  But suddenly, with the destruction of the Nogais, a whole new route was created: across the steppes, from the north. The mountains that had served as a wall to defend the highlanders from the aggressive south became a trap that blocked their retreat.

  The Russians swept across the newly conquered steppes quickly. The Cossack colonizers built their fortified villages in the river valleys, and – together with the regular army – they were fighting the tribes all along the range within less than a decade. If the Russians expected it to be an easy fight though, they were mistaken. Over the next two centuries, their armies would defeat Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, as well as almost every single one of their neighbours, however mighty. No one resisted them for as long as these supposed savages in the valleys of the Caucasus.

  The outside world did not notice the clashes on the marshes of the Yeya in 1783, since it had other things to think about. The Americans were building their democracy, while the French were preparing to build theirs. The British were spinning textiles and digging coal. Communications within Russia were notoriously bad, so it is possible that few Russians even realized the significance of what had happened. But had anyone noticed the little campaign, they would have gained a sneak preview of how the Russian army would fight all the tribes to its south.

  Like the Nogais, enemies would be slaughtered if they did not submit. Like with the Nogais, the slaughterer would be honoured. Suvorov received the Order of Vladimir First Class, and has streets still named after him in Moscow and St Petersburg. He went on to fight in Poland, Turkey and Italy, and died having never lost a battle. Few of those battles would be as easy or as brutal as these ones had been, however.

  And as with the Nogais, the slaughter would be forgotten by its perpetrators. No one I spoke to in Yeya Fortress knew their little village had once witnessed a battle that decided the future of Russia. In the larger town of Yeisk, a bargain-basement holiday resort an hour’s journey along the coast in the rickety bus, the museum staff reacted with disbelief to the suggestion. The only hint that Suvorov might have done something morally questionable was a quote attributed to him on the museum wall: ‘Never has vanity, especially that fuelled by momentary passion, directed my actions, and I always put aside personal ambition when it came to serving the nation.’ Perhaps here he was apologizing for the destruction of the Nogai nation: ‘I was just doing my job.’

  For the Nogais are gone. A few villages in the foothills of the mountains remain. But here, in their heartland, no trace survives. I left Yeisk the next day, heading south on a bus towards the distant Black Sea coast, and looked for a Turkic name or a felt tent, anything that might suggest a nomad influence.

  There was nothing.

  In fact, there was less than nothing. It took me a while to spot the absence, but by the time we had reached the foothills of the Caucasus range, I had realized what was wrong. Where the Nogais had herded horses, cattle and sheep, these Russians farmed only wheat, sunflowers and maize. In the 300 or so kilometres between Yeisk and the hills, whence Suvorov took the hundreds of thousands of stolen livestock, I saw only two cows, a gaggle of geese and one pig. Where the nomads moved their tents with the herds, now the Russians are huddled into compact villages of two or three thousand people, their right-angle streets identical to every other settlement along the highway. The Russian-language village names showed the curse of the colonialist by being either crushingly dull – Sandy, Jolly – or totally over the top – Progress, the Bright Path of Lenin, the Revolutionary Wave. The very culture of freewheeling movement and lordless life was extinguished with the nomads, to be replaced by the blind obedience of the Russian state.

  But not every nation would vanish as readily as the Nogai, although Russia was equally merciless to all those who did not accept its troops with the bread and salt of friendship.

  The Russian troops of Alexander II – hailed today as the great reformer of the tsarist empire, but for the Caucasus tribesmen the biggest murderer of them all – could only defeat the Circassians by driving them en masse from their lands on the Black Sea coast.

  In what was the first modern genocide on European soil – fifty years before Turkey’s Armenians were butchered, ninety years before the Holocaust – perhaps as many as 300,000 Circassians died from hunger, violence, drowning and disease when Russia expelled them from their lands on their final defeat in 1864. Scattered pockets of their descendants still cling to the slopes of the North Caucasus, but the vast majority of the nation now lives in Turkey, Israel, Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East. What was once their country is now home to Russians, Armenians, Cossacks, Ukrainians and all the other loyal nations of the empire.

  Eight decades later, Joseph Stalin – a communist who learned the lessons of his tsarist oppressors well – crushed the mountain Turks and the Chechens by ripping them from their homes and dumping them on the steppes of Central Asia. Tens of thousands of them died too.

  In the 1990s, those same Chechens – far from being cowed by their treatment – fought a war more terrible than anything even the Caucasus had seen before. Grozny, their capital, was destroyed block by block. The fighting became so savage that children were targets for both sides. Tens of thousands of Chechens, tired of war, disgusted by the brutality, fled Russia with just a suitcase to seek peace elsewhere. They now live in France, Norway, Poland, Austria and throughout the world.

  Through the horrors and joys of their shared history, and in the dozens of countries where war has driven them, the Caucasus nations have mingled and traded and fought, creating a rich shared culture of folklore, music, dance and costume.

  That folklore includes a corpus of poems passed from generation to generation. They describe the Narts, the mythic ancestors of all the Caucasus nations. The stories are told in many different languages, but remain essentially the same. In one such tale, their god sends a swallow down as a messenger, and gives the Narts a choice.

  ‘Do you want to be few and live a short life but have great fame and have your courage be an example for others for evermore?’ asked the swallow. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer that there will be many of you, that your numbers will be great, that you will have whatever you wish to eat and drink, and that you will all live long lives but without ever knowing battle or glory?’

  Throughout the chronicles, the Narts delight in holding meetings and discussions to decide the correct course of action. But in this tale they do not do so. Without hesitation, they tell the swallow to take their answer back to his master.

  ‘If our lives are to be short, then let our fame be great! Let us not depart from the truth! Let fairness be our path! Let us not know grief! Let us live in freedom!’ The swallow took that answer away with him and, so the story goes, ‘their fame has remained undying among people’.

  But, in truth, their god did not keep his side of the bargain. Despite what he promised them, their lives have been cut short, fairness has passed them by, they have known endless grief, and their fame has not been great.

  Like the Nogais, many of the peoples that listened to the tales of the Narts around their winter fires were to face slaughter, and have their fate forgotten. Who now remembers the Circassians? Or the Balkars? Or the Karachais? Or indeed the Nogais?

  With a few honourable exceptions, the world has responded to the slaughter in the mountains with blank indifference. The Circassian exo
dus attracted headlines at the time, but the nation’s fate has drifted out of history. While the deliberate destructions of Turkey’s Armenians and Europe’s Jews are remembered and taught in schools as bleak warnings of humanity’s inhumanity, the Circassian genocide is not even known about in the land where it happened.

  In Neal Ascherson’s otherwise wonderful book Black Sea, for example, which traces the interaction of nations around the great inland sea, the Circassians do not appear even once in the index. He finds room for such diverse subjects as Pol Pot, Boudicca and Queen Elizabeth I of England, but a nation that once controlled the entire north-eastern coast of the sea that is the book’s subject does not warrant a single mention.

  Likewise, taking another book at random from my bookcase, Philip Longworth’s Russia’s Empires details at some length (in a chapter called ‘The Romantic Age of Empire’) how Russia subdued the Caucasus, but without mentioning that a major military tactic had been depopulation on a national scale.

  Likewise, Stalin’s destruction of the mountain Turks – divided by the Soviets into the Balkar and Karachai nations – has passed largely unnoticed. The deportations were perhaps overshadowed by the horrors that were happening elsewhere in 1943 – 4, but they are indicative of the approach of the Soviet Union to its subjects, and deserve far greater publicity than they have received.

  The Chechens, meanwhile, have been victims of geopolitics. Some of their own leaders have been stupid enough to employ terrible brutality in the cause of their attempt to gain independence. The world has been able to effectively brand the whole Chechen nation as terrorists, and has been happy to avoid grappling with the dreadful strategy Moscow has followed in suppressing their self-rule. Ignorance has bred indifference, which in turn has bred deeper ignorance.

  A friend who worked for a Western television station in Moscow once told me how an interviewer had been flown in specially to speak to the then president, Vladimir Putin. The interviewer – who was apparently quite well known in his own country – glanced down the list of questions prepared for him by the local staff, saw one about the plight of the Chechens, and crossed it out.

  ‘I asked about them last time,’ he said, simply, when asked why. In the years between the two interviews, possibly as many as 10,000 Chechens had died in a war waged by Putin’s army.

  I was musing on all this, on the mountains and on the fate of the Nogais, as I wandered out into the marshes along the Yeya river down tracks the cattle had made in their quest for food and water. Flies buzzed around me, and birds rose up complaining from almost at my feet. I sat at last on a patch of cropped grass and listened for a while. I thought that if I cast my mind back I might be able to imagine the cheers of the Russian soldiers, the cries of the tribesmen, and the screams of the dying women and children.

  I heard nothing except the flies and the birds.

  The day was hot, and after a while I eased onto my back. The sun glowed red through my eyelids, and I thought about the giant mountain range away to the south. It would not take me long to get there – just a day or two by bus, if I did not stop on the way – and I wondered what awaited me.

  I had seen horrors beyond my imagining because of the Caucasus. I can still, without closing my eyes, see before me the butter-pale, serene, long-eyelashed face of a dead teenage boy, one of the 334 victims of the Beslan school siege. I can still feel the revulsion of picking through the snow, trying not to step on scraps of fat-edged flesh that were all that remained of a Chechen woman who had blown herself up, along with five passers-by, in central Moscow. I can still remember the shock of seeing bombed-out Grozny, with its crumpled factories, and shattered tower blocks, for the first time.

  The memories of those outrages were close around me as I lay in the marshes. They always are. But that was not what I was thinking of. As I lay there, I replayed something that had happened earlier, the first time I ever saw the mountains, one early morning in 2003.

  I had visited a Chechen refugee camp where civilians who had lost their homes existed in ragged, khaki tents in a field of mud and stones. I called on a Chechen woman who lived in one of these tents – in size, no bigger than my living room in Moscow – and she had told me about her life, how she cooked, tended, cleaned and mended for twelve children who had nothing to do all day but play in the mud. The children were not all hers; some were the orphaned children of her sister, others of her cousin. She lived without a husband, and I got the impression that he was dead too.

  She had had no stove, just an open gas flame which she used to boil water for washing clothes and cooking pasta.

  The load she was bearing would have broken a lesser woman, but she shrugged it off. She could even laugh at the idiocy of a humanitarian organization which had called at the tent a fortnight before. She had not been home at the time, so they had asked the children what the family needed. As a result of the charity’s generosity, the tent now boasted a large television for everyone to watch while she washed their clothes by hand, juggled sauce pans on the gas flame, and tried to keep mud off the bunk beds.

  I had left her tent shaking my head at the wonder of her, and walked back towards my car. Glancing upwards as I walked, I was stunned to see the full majesty of the main Caucasus range suddenly emerge from the clouds. Where just a moment before had been a dirty grey blur, there was now the brilliant white clarity of the highest mountain range between Canada and Central Asia.

  The slopes shone as they soared up to sharp point after sharp point, and the range receded into the west where Mount Elbrus – the highest peak in Europe – was perhaps just visible.

  That was what I remembered as I lay in the sun on the marshes and felt the grass stems tickle the backs of my ears. I remembered that woman and those mountains, and the unbreakable spirit that made them both rise gleaming and pure.

  Their fame is not great, and their stories have not been told, but truly they deserve to be.

  To learn their stories, I would have to travel far from the mountains. I would labour across the steppes of Central Asia. I would squat outside the internment camps of Eastern Europe. I would wander through the cities of Turkey. First of all, though, I would sit and drink tea on a warm, fragrant morning amidst the olive trees and gentle hills of northern Israel.

  PART ONE

  The Circassians, 1864

  1.

  Are You Not a Circassian?

  That same sun eased down on me a few weeks later, as I drove along one of Israel’s immaculate roads and gazed up at a church crowning the brush-covered lump of Mount Tabor to my left. Idar Khon, a 44-year-old retired lieutenant-colonel in the Israeli army, was at the wheel, but there was nothing military about the atmosphere.

  I had phoned him, without warning, that morning. The man I was supposed to meet had been called away, and had given me Khon’s number. I had been apprehensive about calling this unknown officer, but need not have worried.

  ‘Well, I don’t actually have a driving licence at the moment,’ he had said, pausing for effect, and then laughing, ‘but I’ll come down and get you in half an hour.’

  He was better than his word, and was outside my hotel in his Japanese SUV within fifteen minutes. We drove together up the hill towards his village, surrounded on all sides by the dense cultivation that makes Israel look so lush. And after ten minutes or so a sign told me we had arrived. It was written, like all signs in Israel, in Hebrew.

  But there was another, more familiar, alphabet alongside the boxy Hebrew letters: the Cyrillic. In a script that could be welcoming visitors to any place in the Russian Caucasus, it told me we were entering the Circassian village of Kfar-Kama.

  This village is one of the southernmost outposts of a great Circassian diaspora that spreads from a couple of villages in Kosovo, through the great cities of Turkey, and on into the arid and difficult lands of Syria and Jordan. Here, in Israel, was the end of the chain, a chain created after Russia expelled almost the entire Circassian nation from its home in the hills that fringe the n
orth-eastern shore of the Black Sea in 1864.

  Witnesses at the time testified to the desolate conditions of the refugees, who were crammed into leaky boats, ferried across the Black Sea from their mountain home, and dumped to shiver and die on the open beaches of the Ottoman state. Perhaps 300,000 of them were dead before that doddery old empire organized itself enough to find them places to live. It gave them land that no one else wanted, land that was threatened by disloyal nations or anarchic nomads on the edges of the vast Ottoman state that stretched from modern-day Bulgaria to North Africa and the borders of Iran. Hence, the Circassians found themselves spread in a long line ending in Kfar-Kama in Galilee.

  I had come to the village to see how much of the Circassians’ culture had survived their destruction and dispersal. Nineteenth-century travellers, who had wandered through their Caucasus valleys before their defeat and marvelled at the resistance of this outnumbered nation, had admired their openness, their moral fibre, their impulsiveness and above all their generosity.

  Khon, a handsome man with short grey hair and an open face, was a credit to his ancestors. He clearly cared far more about hospitality to a guest than about the Israeli traffic laws. He barely flinched as we passed a police car on the way into the village, and he welcomed me warmly to his clean, airy home. He would, he said, teach me about the Circassians’ culture and, over a long morning of tea and conversation, while the breeze lazily stirred the curtains and the sun beat down, he did so.

  Eventually, it was time for lunch. His wife Dina, a radiantly beautiful woman with a headscarf and a broad smile, put out food for us and their children and we sat and chatted. With lunch over, Khon and I took our time over cups of tea, while the children hared around the house, enjoying their after-school freedom.

  Khon was deep into a description of habze, the Circassians’ code of conduct, when their nine-year-old sprinted round the corner into the living room, slipped on the carpet, and slammed the side of his head into one of the chairs. It sounded painful and he screamed with the shock of it. He sobbed into his mother’s arms as she comforted him.