Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  The harem is glorious. Its bathroom is all gold taps and cool tiles, but it was a vicious world. For young women it was cold and unhygienic, with waterborne and vermin-borne diseases taking their toll on them. Nonetheless, the population of the harem increased steadily. By the reign of Abdulaziz from 1861 to 1876, when Circassians flooded into Turkey, it contained more than 800 women.

  The Circassians among these women were shipped from their homeland when they were in their early teens and bought by the ladies of the large harems, to be reared and trained in upper-class ways to increase their market value. In a few years, they would be sold on, perhaps even to the imperial harem itself.

  In 1843, while the Russian blockade was in earnest, a young and beautiful girl would sell for as much as 70,000 kurus. It is a sign of how terrible the fate awaiting the Circassian nation, and the sheer number of Circassians who were already flooding into Turkey, that by 1860, when the emigration had begun and the Russians had stopped blockading the coast so fiercely, this price had collapsed to just 1,500 kurus.

  For the Russians, torn by their competing strategic demands, seem to have given up on their campaign against the slave trade in the 1840s. ‘What do you want us to do with people who have already fled,’ the Russian minister Count Nesselrode asked drily of the British ambassador.

  The British and French, otherwise Turkey’s best friends, were firmly opposed to the trade. But, ironically, when London and Paris took control of the Black Sea during the Crimean War, the trade boomed. Unlike the Russians, they were not tasked with coastal patrols, nor did they have a presence on the coast, and the slavers loved it. Stratford Canning, the British ambassador, was forced to rebuke the Turks for the trade’s revival. ‘So long as the trade is permitted or connived at, so long as preventive measures, capable of enforcement, are loosely, or not at all employed, the Turkish authorities will be justly open to censure, and incur, to their peril, the charge of acting upon principles inconsistent in spirit and effect with the existing alliance. Let them beware of producing throughout Christian

  Europe, a total relaxation of that enthusiasm for the Sultan’s cause which has hitherto saved his empire from the grasp of Russia,’ he said.

  It was a clumsy threat and a meaningless one. The Turks recognized humbug when they saw it, and knew that this Liberal government – like most British governments before or since – would never wreck an alliance on a point of principle. Nevertheless, they took steps to push the trade out of sight and blocked slaving raids on Georgia, since the unprotected families of volunteers in their armies would frequently get kidnapped – with a resulting decrease in their soldiers’ zeal for the cause.

  By 1855, however, the Turks felt secure enough to resume their slaving in style, and prices collapsed to unprecedented levels as the Circassian exodus began. The British were insisting that the trade be banned, but were roundly ignored and some of them were even rather embarrassed. One ambassador wrote to the Foreign Office noting that since the wife of the grand vizier was a Circassian slave, as were ‘still more exalted’ ladies, he would be ‘guilty of gross impropriety’ if he continued to insist on an embargo.

  The trade in Circassian girls would only be stopped when Circassia ceased to exist. In 1891 – 2, long after 90 or more per cent of the Circassians had fled to the Ottoman Empire or died on the way, the imperial harem secretly sent out envoys to find blonde, blue-eyed non-Turkified girls for the sultan. But the girls had most of them been born in Turkey, and already knew a little at least about Turkish life. The harshness of their existence and the horrors of the exodus had left lasting marks on their faces, spoiling the perfect features the sultans had prized.

  On top of that, the families that had been of the slave class in Circassia had now been freed. They did not want to sell their daughters back into slavery, and many would only sell to the envoys of the sultan when they learned it was for a large institution in the capital and received a promise that they could see their daughters twice a year.

  In Ehud Toledano’s excellent book The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, he concludes that the great demographic and economic changes in the Circassians’ lives, rather than the impact of Western ideas, had been behind the gradual disappearance of the slave trade in Turkey and he is no doubt right.

  Nevertheless, the romantic image of the slave trade remains to this day. As the tour guide in the harem droned on in her harsh monotone, two of the American tourists whispered to each other.

  ‘It would not be bad being a concubine. At least you’d work for the royal family,’ one of them said.

  ‘It’s perfectly quaint,’ the other, perhaps her husband, said in agreement.

  5.

  The Caucasus Mountains are Sacred to Me

  In this atmosphere of war, savagery, slavery and exile, it might appear that there was little room for leisure. The Russian soldiers that survived disease and ambush appeared to exist only to inflict unspeakable sufferings on their foe. Surely no civilian would come to this land of death and horror.

  But, in fact, Russian tourists flocked to the Caucasus. They took the waters at the newly fashionable spa resorts like Pyatigorsk – its name means ‘the five mountains’ – at the foot of the high peaks of the central range. They gossiped and flirted and drank in this wild border region. They were attracted of course by the beauty of their surroundings, and by the thrill of the warfare. But above all they came because of the vision of one man: Alexander Pushkin.

  Pushkin was a natural user of words and he loved teasing. In the stifling world of St Petersburg and its royal court in the late teens of the nineteenth century, these were both prized assets and a very real danger. For Russia’s elite loved intrigues, and had little else to do but indulge in them. So the presence of a petulant, handsome, witty poet like Pushkin must have been a rare treat.

  The age was one of relative liberty for the affluent few. Although hopes that Tsar Alexander would grant a constitution after Russia defeated Napoleon had been dashed, the ideas that the Russian officers had learned in Paris had endured. The tsar, who inherited the throne from his murdered father in 1801, had relaxed censorship and, though he was more inclined to mysticism than democracy, he did not do anything drastic to stop the spread of Western ideas. This new generation of Russians were no longer just European by geography; they were influenced by the same thoughts as their contemporaries in more developed countries to their west.

  Pictures of Pushkin are endlessly reproduced in Russia. His flamboyant whiskers and his shock of hair were a legacy of an African great-grandfather who had served Peter the Great. His exotic looks just added to his appeal for the salons of the capital, and Russians began to whisper his verses to each other, giggling over the more dangerous passages, including his ‘Liberty: An Ode’ and one questioning the tsar’s bravery.

  Inevitably, Pushkin came to the attention of the secret police, and was exiled to the south to teach him the rules of service. It was to be a fateful choice. He spent just a few weeks at his place of exile – Yekaterinoslav, which is now Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine – before catching a chill when swimming in the river, and being rescued by the family of a childhood friend. He had already thrilled what society there was in the minute town where he had been posted. At one point, he turned up at a party in transparent trousers and no underwear. Now, he was on his way to amaze the whole country.

  As Pushkin and his rescuers – the Rayevsky family – trotted sedately across the steppes of southern Russia, and began to see the mighty peaks of the central Caucasus – including Elbrus, the tallest mountain in Europe – notch the skyline, the poet was inspired.

  The family stayed in the Caucasus for a few months, taking the waters in the still untamed springs, where they scooped up drinks with a broken bottle or a bark ladle. They saw the local tribesmen, and marvelled at the wilderness around them.

  ‘I am sorry, my friend,’ Pushkin wrote to his brother, ‘that you could not see this magnificent range of mountains, with their icy summi
ts which from afar in the clear twilight look like strange, many-coloured and motionless cards.’

  Pushkin had been reading, and had discovered the poet Byron: the English creator of the romantic ideal, and celebrator of oriental womanhood. Byron too was handsome, women flocked around him like they did around Pushkin. Perhaps Byron’s poems have not stood the test of time as well as Pushkin’s have, but, at the time, he was the model of masculine virtue. Pushkin was swept away.

  His group travelled on from Pyatigorsk, across to Crimea, and to the ruined palaces where the defeated Muslim khan had once lived. Pushkin could flirt with his friend’s sisters, he could play on the beach, and he could create Prisoner in the Caucasus – perhaps his first mature poem.

  It is hard for a foreigner to appreciate Pushkin since his appeal lies in his ability to effortlessly exploit the beauty of the Russian language. If you can understand a Pushkin poem, which is hard even for someone who speaks Russian well, its beauty is breath-taking. But if you cannot, you wonder what the fuss is all about.

  Translators of Prisoner in the Caucasus into English often render it in prose, since its daft plot looks even sillier in bad verse. In the poem, Pushkin created a handsome Russian officer, unlucky in love and disgusted by life, who is captured by the wild mountain tribes the Russian army is fighting. He is dragged into their village, half dead, filthy and unconscious, but his sex appeal remains undimmed. That very evening, as he sits alone in his cell, a local woman comes to him. She feeds him and, though they lack a common language, loves him wordlessly.

  The days go by, her love grows stronger and she brings him honey, millet, wine and other foods of the mountains. ‘It was the first time that the innocent young girl had known the joy of being in love. But the Russian had long ago lost the ecstasy of his younger days; he was unable to respond,’ the poem says, as rendered by Roger Clarke’s prose translation. As he sits and watches during the day, he learns a little of the Circassians’ habits and the poem records some spurious ethnographic details: their hospitality, their delight in competitions. They admire the Russian for his indifference and nonchalance, and are delighted that they will get such a good price for him when they come to sell him in the slave market.

  But they reckoned without their traitorous compatriot, whose love has taken a turn for the physical. ‘Make love to me. No one yet has kissed my eyelids. No young, dark-eyed Circassian has crept at dead of night to the bed where I sleep alone.’ The Russian tells her to forget him, that he can never love again, and she leaves in tears. Although she ceases to visit him, her love remains true. And, when her fellow villagers go off to war, she rescues him, guides him back to his people and, although he offers to take her with him, kills herself in the river.

  It is hard to take it seriously now, with its assumption that all Muslim tribeswomen were just waiting for a world-weary adolescent to come and sweep them off their feet, but the poem caused a sensation. In an age without newspapers or other ways of finding out what was happening on Russia’s southern frontier, this was the closest Russians came to news. The ethnographic details – made up by Pushkin, since he never spent time among the tribesmen – sounded authentic, and what tribeswoman would not want to share the bed of a brave Russian soldier?

  The tone of the poem was one of glory in the army and its feats: a point rubbed home by the epilogue, which celebrated such generals as Yermolov, the butcher whose troops slaughtered their way across the North Caucasus, and Tsitsianov, as they marched under the double-headed eagle of the tsar.

  ‘I shall celebrate the glorious time when our two-headed eagle, scenting bloody combat, rose up high against the disaffected Caucasus, when the roar of battle and the thunder of Russian drums first broke out along the foam-flecked River Terek, and our daring general Tsitsianov, head held high, himself took part in the carnage . . . [A] deafening uproar in the East! . . . at last it was time for the Caucasus to bend its snowy head in self-abasement: Yermolov was on the march!’ the poem thunders.

  Pushkin, a 21-year-old of a passionate and headstrong mindset, may not have intended serious political analysis. However, the implication is that, though the Russians killed and slaughtered their way through the hills, they brought progress. The Russians might have felt backward in comparison to western Europe. But they were European compared to the savages in the hills.

  The poem was a giant success, and opened a vent for Caucasus literature that would spew out huge amounts of dross, along with one great towering masterpiece.

  But this celebration of the conquest by young progressives like Pushkin was not to last, for Russia was on the brink of change. The poet’s whole generation was to be shaken by the death of the tsar, the treason of the army and the retribution that followed.

  Tsar Alexander died in early winter 1825 (on 1 December, according to the Western calendar, but in November, according to that still then used in Russia). He had no sons, leaving a two-week period of confusion in which his two brothers – Nikolai in St Petersburg and Konstantin in Warsaw – both refused the throne and swore loyalty to each other, without realizing it. A group of army officers, who had been plotting to create a more democratic system for the best part of a decade, decided to take control. They marched their troops onto Palace Square, the handsome space that fronts the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, and demanded a constitution. All day they stood in the freezing cold, focus of a more or less sympathetic crowd, until troops loyal to the new Tsar Nikolai I mowed them down with grapeshot.

  The city was stunned, and the government’s response was swift. The cobbles were scrubbed, the palace façade repaired, the bodies slipped under the ice on the river. By morning, it was as if nothing had happened. Then the conspirators were arrested. One of them, Alexander Bestuzhev, did not wait for a knock on his door. Wearing his full, gorgeous dragoons dress uniform, he walked into the Winter Palace and gave himself up as a traitor. That was the last that St Petersburg society would ever see of him. He would never dance or gamble in the halls of the great houses again. But in his verse, he would scandalize them, and do more to popularize the Caucasus than even the great Pushkin himself.

  Bestuzhev was taken to the Peter and Paul fortress, the squat camp on the river Neva with its one soaring golden spire, where he and his fellow ‘Decembrist’ conspirators were locked up for six months of interrogation and trial. They tangled each other in a dense mesh of confessions, revealing all the secrets of their one-time secret society, and ruining the chances of change in Russia for almost a century.

  The new tsar believed he had been preserved on his throne by a miracle. His own father was killed by plotters disgusted by his brief rule, and here were young, aristocratic officers confessing that they too had wanted to kill their sovereign, his brother. They had, however, been beaten to it by the tsar’s death from natural causes and thus launched their premature and ill-fated rising.

  ‘The beginning of the reign of Emperor Alexander was marked with bright hopes for Russia’s prosperity. The gentry had recuperated, the merchant class did not object to giving credit, the army served without making trouble, scholars studied what they wished, all spoke what they thought, and everyone expected better days. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented the realization of these hopes, which aged without their fulfilment,’ said Bestuzhev in a lengthy letter to the new tsar. He only joined the movement in 1823 and was just sixteen when Napoleon was defeated, but he did not hesitate to invoke the glory of his fellow plotters who had marched across Europe.

  ‘[T]he military men began to talk: “Did we free Europe in order to be ourselves placed in chains? Did we grant a constitution to France in order that we dare not even talk about it, and did we buy at the price of our blood priority among nations in order that we might be humiliated at home?”’

  Behind the closed cell doors, however, Bestuzhev was less defiant. He opened up all the secrets of the conspiracy. His biographer, Lauren Leighton, does not blame him for having done so although she concedes his evidence sent his best fri
end, Kondraty Ryleyev, to the gallows. He managed to shield his brothers but otherwise it is hard to agree with her positive assessment of him. He gained beneficial treatment for himself as a result of his betrayal. While five of his fellows were hanged – including the similarly named Bestuzhev-Ryumin – he was sent to Siberia to live in exile, before being posted to the Caucasus to serve as a common soldier.

  Many of the former Decembrists had been writers, while Bestuzhev and his betrayed friend Ryleyev had published a literary magazine. Only Bestuzhev, presumably because of his cooperation, was allowed to keep writing after his disgrace. But he was forced to use a pen-name. As a writer, Alexander Bestuzhev, the dandy and the wit, was dead. Alexander Marlinsky, the daredevil and hero, was born in his place.

  He had signed himself Marlinsky, a nom de plume that derived from the name of a pavilion outside St Petersburg, before but only now was the name to become famous throughout Russia. Decades later, Russians would remember thrilling over his stories, and the novelist Ivan Turgenev even confessed to having kissed the name Marlinsky on a journal cover.

  None of his vast readership knew his real identity, or of his revolutionary past, but he swayed them with his lurid, romantic prose, his lust for action. For ten years he ruled Russia’s literary scene, before disappearing as rapidly as he had appeared. A modern reader will share the opinion of some contemporary Russian critics, who as early as 1834 were complaining that his writing was awful. Nevertheless, you have to admire his sheer hard work and exuberance.

  During his seven years of service in the Caucasus, he was persecuted, sent into battle again and again, spied on, beaten, envied and slandered. His own brother was mistreated so viciously that he went insane. Yet he constantly wrote letters to his sisters and his brothers – three of whom had also been Decembrists – and had time to effectively invent the Russian novel. He set it in the Caucasus.