Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Most important from the perspective of the Caucasus highlanders, however, was that he allowed the generals to take the initiative, and the results were dramatic. In 1859, Imam Shamil, ruler of the eastern Caucasus, surrendered. Then the whole military might of Russia was focused on the Circassians. The Circassians had no single leader to be taken in battle, and Russian officers knew they would have to find a different way to defeat them, as noticed by George Leighton Ditson, an American visitor to the Caucasus, as early as 1850.

  Ditson’s memoirs quote a Prince Kotsohobey as saying that ‘These Circassians are just like your American Indians – as untamable and uncivilized – and that, owing to their natural energy of character, extermination alone would keep them quiet, or that if they came under Russian rule, the only safe policy would be to employ their wild and warlike character against others.’

  This viewpoint was encountered a couple of years later by Dr Moritz Wagner. He met a German doctor who said the soldiers were becoming increasingly exasperated with the Circassians’ failure to appreciate the advantages of Russian civilization.

  ‘It is a prevalent opinion,’ said the doctor, ‘among the Russians and Cossacks, that a war of extermination should be waged against the Circassians, because these people are perfectly incapable of appreciating gentleness, friendship and benefits conferred, are unsusceptible of any generous emotion, and because it is impossible to civilize them.’

  Many Circassians sensed that extermination was coming. They were few, poor and starving and had no hope of military support. With the Russians in front of them and the sea behind them, they chose to take to the sea.

  The editor of the Levant Herald, Istanbul’s English-language publication, wrote to the London Times in January 1860 to appeal for help for those unfortunate Circassians already flooding into Turkey.

  ‘During the past stormy season in the Black Sea above a dozen wrecks of these emigrant vessels occurred, hurrying many hundreds of these miserable creatures to death. Of those who made good the passage, thousands landed in every stage of disease and physical suffering, without a dollar to supply even their most immediate wants,’ he wrote, in describing the horrors he had seen among the 20,000 refugees then in Istanbul and Uskudar. ‘Gaunt visions of famishing men, women and children meet you at every turn, appealing to you in their mute passion of bitter hunger and freezing cold with a harrowing energy no British onlooker, at all events, can resist. Inside the khans the spectacle is worse. In the damp ground-floors scores of sufferers, in every stage of want-induced disease – most of them women – lie huddled together, some with no bedding whatever, and the best off with but little.’

  The leaders of those Circassians who remained in their homeland begged Britain for help. Their appeal is still kept in the Foreign Office archives, a mute rebuke to the consuls’ reports either side of it, with their self-satisfied handwriting, and their thick blue paper.

  The paper the Circassians used is too thin for this august company, the lines followed by their exuberant Arabic script are too wobbly, and their piece of paper is too large for the ledger, and has had to be folded to fit in. Unlike all the reports from the British officials, their letter has never been properly attached to the ledger, and is just tucked between the pages. Perhaps this was some anonymous Foreign Office functionary’s way of pointing out the Circassians’ bad manners in being there at all.

  For the message contained in their appeal was a world away from the careful prose of the urbane diplomatic reports that surround it in the file, and it is the only time we hear a Circassian voice describing the nation’s doom. All other sources for the tragedy are written by foreigners, since the Circassians themselves were largely illiterate.

  ‘It is now more than eighty years since the Russian government is unlawfully striving to subdue and annex to its dominions Circassia, which since the creation of the world has been our home and our country. It slaughters like sheep the children, helpless women, and old men that fall into its hands. It rolls about their heads with the bayonet like melons, and there is no act of oppression or cruelty which is beyond the pale of civilisation and humanity, and which defies description, that it has not committed,’ the Circassians wrote, according to the translation appended to the letter.

  The translation is in the same sprawling Foreign Office copper-plate as the reports that fill the ledger, as if the translator could not bear to translate the style as well as the words of the outburst.

  This was far from the first time the Circassians had begged Queen Victoria for help during their decades of resistance to Russia. They had previously written and declared their defiance, and their bravery, asking only for arms to help them resist the invaders from the north. But this time, their appeal was more pathetic and, at this remove, appears to be more touching. The men had given up hope and were seeking simply to save the lives of the non-combatants that lived among them. ‘Many are the lives which have been lost in battle, from hunger in the mountains, from destitution on the sea-coast, and from want of skill at sea. We therefore invoke the mediation and precious assistance of the British Government and people – the guardian of humanity and centre of justice – in order to repel the brutal attacks of the Russian Government on our country, and save our country and our nation together.

  ‘But if it is not possible to afford this help for the preservation of our country, and race, then we pray to be afforded facilities for removing to a place of safety our helpless and miserable children and women that are perishing by the brutal attacks of the enemy as well as by the effects of famine,’ the letter said.

  Previous letters had been signed by individual chiefs, each of whom had a personal seal – or at the very least a thumbprint – to go with his name. This time, the appeal was more direct: it is signed simply ‘The people of Circassia’.

  The letter is dated 9 April 1864. It is not clear how long it would have taken to get to London but it seems certain that by the time some undersecretary forgot about it in the files that have been its home ever since, it was already meaningless. Just a month and thirteen days after that appeal was handed to a sea captain and taken away, the ‘people of Circassia’ had lost their homeland. They were the people of Circassia no more, just Circassians.

  The Russian government had sought to defeat them in their mountain home for most of the nineteenth century, and it did not plan to let them ever again pose a threat to its rule. A Russian general had once compared the Caucasus Mountains to a ‘mighty fortress, marvellously strong by nature, artificially protected by military works, and defended by a numerous garrison’. The Russian army had conquered the fortress, and now it would destroy those military works, and drive that garrison out.

  The Circassians received a blank choice: move to the plains and live like Russian peasants, or leave the country. Suddenly, the Circassians, so long the fighters called in to fight other people’s wars, needed a mercenary army of their own. They did not get one. But they did get a Frenchman called Arthur de Fonvielle, one of a group of idealistic foreigners who came to help the Circassians at this last battle.

  He did not succeed in winning the war for them, but he did write a memoir. His account of their struggle and their exile is the only one I know of that describes at first hand what happened to them.

  Along with three Poles and another Frenchman, he landed in Circassia with a group of thirty Circassians and a roguish trader called Ibrahim, who affected poverty in order to gain a better price for his salt, knives, tobacco, bread and other trade goods. The Circassians in return sold him young and beautiful Circassian girls destined for the harems of Turkey.

  ‘They didn’t even ask much money for them,’ noted de Fonvielle, as he waited for his little group to be led to war. The highlanders surrounded them while they waited, looking at them with wonder.

  But despite the warmth of this welcome, de Fonvielle did not enjoy the lavish hospitality experienced by earlier visitors to the Circassian coast, for there was nothing to eat. The Circassians were
boiling up tree leaves to make soup, and typhus was rampant, while three separate Russian columns marched towards them.

  De Fonvielle, who had come to help save the Circassian nation, found himself witness to its end. Free Circassia was only thirty to forty leagues long, he wrote, and in places only three leagues between the sea and the closest Russian post. There are about four and half kilometres in a French league, meaning that Circassia was reduced to a bare rump of what it had once been.

  He himself appears to have been a roguish character. His memoir, which was published in the magazine Russian Invalid in 1865, loves to pick out humorous events and phrases. But, as time passed, even this adventurer started to be appalled by what he saw.

  In his first engagement, the memoir describes two Russian warships bombarding the shore with complete impunity. Some Circassians rush to the beach, only to be shot at themselves. The Circassians lost twenty people killed and about the same number injured, while the boat de Fonvielle arrived in was destroyed. The warship was unharmed. It was not a good omen for the months ahead.

  As they set off down the coast, they discovered why the Russian army had for so long struggled to manoeuvre in these densely wooded hills. In Circassia, the hills plunge straight into the sea: often at a 45-degree angle, with the beach exposed to the storms which gave the Black Sea its ominous name. After the conquest, the Russians were to build a highway along the shoreline, but even in the twenty-first century the traveller has to twist and rise and turn sharply again to find a way through the terrain.

  The Russian tactics more or less consisted of forming a line on the northern slope of the mountains, and pushing everyone ahead of them towards the summit. The crowds of refugees became thicker as the Russians progressed. And then the crowd spilled over the passes, and started to stream down to the sea. As they fled, they infected untouched communities with panic, and ate up their food supplies. Even if winter had not been coming, and the harvest had not failed, there would not have been enough to eat.

  ‘We met several parties . . . fleeing from the Russians. These unfortunate people were in the most sad state; barely clothed, driving in front of them small flocks of sheep, their only source of food, men, women, children followed silently one after another, leading a few horses, on which was placed the whole household’s goods and all that they managed to take with them,’ de Fonvielle wrote.

  There were no bridges over the numerous rivers that cut through the hills down to the sea, adding a fresh hazard to the refugees’ plight. De Fonvielle saw a party being washed away. His group saved just three of them, before itself being trapped in a storm on the beach.

  Wet, cold and miserable, they finally linked up with a Circassian army of 3,000 – 4,000 near Tuapse, a river valley that is now a major oil export port, and battle was joined. The Russians brought up cannon, but even so were broken and fell back to their camp. Celebrations were muted, however, for this was a pyrrhic victory. The Circassian casualties were not far off one in ten, and more victories of that kind would destroy them, especially since anyone with a serious wound was almost certain to die in the cold and hungry conditions. The Circassian troops spent the night mourning every death with their traditional songs.

  ‘There were fifteen or twenty of these choirs, and they all sang independently from the others; this terrible concert, which continued until the morning itself, did not allow us to even shut our eyes, which was appropriate in fact since we constantly expected a Russian attack.’

  By noon the next day, only 500 or 600 Circassian troops were left, the others having died, been wounded or melted away. The foreigners realized further resistance was futile, especially since their feared local renegades might curry favour with their conquerors by betraying them to the Russians. ‘Our retreats became every day more shameful; the fleeing by the people rose; the number emigrating permanently rose. From every place taken by the Russians, the settlements’ inhabitants fled, and their hungry groups crossed the country in different directions, leaving along the way their ill and dying; sometimes whole groups of emigrants froze or were carried away by blizzards, and we often noticed, going past, the traces of their blood. Wolves and bears dug through the snow and pulled human bodies from underneath it.’

  Even those few Circassians still fighting were giving up hope. De Fonvielle desperately dreamed of a hundred or so European troops to hold the Russians off, and to allow the Circassians to rally and return to the offensive. But they did not come. ‘The highlanders were dying of cold, abandoning their posts and leaving just a few people to watch the enemy, and if it had not been winter, which interfered with our communications but also with those of the Russians, the country could not have been held. Every day the territory that we held shrunk more and more, the Russians, albeit slowly, moved ever forward, and it was obvious that with the first good days we would be finally defeated.’

  In the circumstances, further resistance was pointless. They decided to leave to avoid falling into the hands of the Russians. And it is at this point that de Fonvielle’s description became invaluable. His is the only extant description of the conditions in Circassia at this time, and he is the only man who described the panic that overcame the nation as it prepared to leave en masse for Turkey.

  Ships were sailing from Turkey to the Circassian shore in relays, and would fill up with Circassians and leave again immediately, their owners desperate to make as much money – or slaves, for some refugees were reduced to paying for the voyage with their children – as they could from this never-to-be-repeated opportunity. A boat that usually held fifty or sixty people, de Fonvielle said, now held as many as 400. These refugees had just a few handfuls of grain and some water to sustain them for the week’s journey on the open sea. Returning sailors described the horrors of seeing passengers thrown overboard, of half of the passengers of some ships dying, and of fights between the crews and the Circassians, but the refugees would not be put off. They did not even build shacks on the shore to wait in. They just sat and huddled in the snow and wind, fixated on building a better life over the sea.

  Here de Fonvielle was in luck, for a boat arrived captained by a man he had met before. And this Yakub gave him a place that night. Only when morning came was he able to see that 347 people were packed aboard, with so little space on deck that the crew had to walk on the passengers’ heads to get to their places.

  The voyage was desperately uncomfortable, made more uncomfortable for the Frenchman by the Circassians’ resolve to throw him overboard if a Russian warship came close. And then people started to die. On the second day, the bodies of two women and a child were thrown overboard. On the third day, two men and a woman followed them. On the fourth day, fifteen people died. It is hard to imagine the delight with which this cargo of the living dead saw the shore on the fifth day, their water having finished two days before.

  ‘If we had remained for another forty-eight hours on board, then probably more than half of the passengers would have died, before we got into Trabzon,’ de Fonvielle said.

  The Circassians praised Allah when they saw the shore, and de Fonvielle recognized with pleasure the ruined fort of Akchakale, which he had seen a few months before. The fort juts out of the coast to the west of Trabzon (the Trebizond of the ancients), and was one of two designated settlement sites for refugees near the town. When de Fonvielle had last seen it, the fort was deserted save for a few fishing huts. Now, it was thronged. Smoke rose into the sky and, as they sailed closer, they heard the sounds of the mourning songs. The camp was full, and twelve other ships were offshore, already unloading their cargoes of Circassians onto the beach.

  What de Fonvielle was witnessing, terrible though it appears from his description, was just a fraction of a human catastrophe on a biblical scale. Foreign newspapers began to refer to it as an ‘exodus’, as if no other word could do justice to its horrors.

  The first accounts of the disaster that appear in the Foreign Office file that also contained the Circassians’ petition are dated F
ebruary 1864. This must have been before de Fonvielle’s arrival at Akchakale, since a mere 3,000 refugees were based there, but already the situation was desperate.

  ‘The quarters in the vicinity of the cemeteries are rendered uninhabitable owing to the careless manner in which the dead are buried, and the offensive consequences thereof; and whole families have abandoned their dwellings. The chief aqueduct which feeds the fountains of the town is tainted, a Circassian corpse having been found floating therein,’ wrote a consul called Stevens in Trabzon.

  By May, Stevens was writing that 25,000 people were encamped at Akchakale and at a second camp at Saradere, with 120 – 150 people dying every day. So far, the writers managed to retain their distant gentlemen’s club style. But on 20 May came another letter, this one misshaped like that of the Circassians, which like their petition shatters the atmosphere of polite boredom. In Samsun, a town further along the coast to the west, the situation was even worse.

  ‘Everywhere you meet with the sick, the dying, and the dead; on the threshold of gates in front of shops, in the middle of streets, in the squares, in the gardens, at the foot of trees. Every dwelling, every corner of the streets, every spot occupied by the immigrants, has become a hotbed of infection. A warehouse on the sea-side, a few steps distant from the quarantine-office, hardly affording space enough for 30 persons, enclosed till the day before yesterday 207 individuals, all sick or dying. I undertook to empty this hotbed of pestilence. Even the porters refused to venture in the interior of this horrible hole, out of which, assisted by my worthy colleague Ali Effendy, I drew several corpses in a state of putrefaction,’ says the little letter written by the Medical Inspector of the Ottoman Empire, one Barozzi.

  ‘The encampment presents a picture hardly less revolting. From 40 to 50 thousand individuals in the most absolute destitution, preyed upon by diseases, decimated by death, are cast there without shelter, without bread and without sepulture. Here, I will stop, for great as is the confidence you honour me with, a complete description of this unqualified misery might seem to you overcharged.’