As I finished reading the letter, Berzegov emerged into the living room, rubbing his eyes a little but otherwise looking bright and awake and happy to talk.
Berzegov is an artist and a karate coach, and of an athletic build despite his grey hair. He did not seem angry as such, but spoke with a consistent sense of outrage that never boiled over into a temper.
Since he had received this letter from the Russian parliament, he had stepped up his campaign. He set up an appeal in the name of Circassian organizations from nine different countries and sent it to the European Parliament on 11 October 2006. The parliament had promised to look at the appeal when its turn came, and he was now awaiting a response.
‘After we sent our letter to the State Duma, we already started to get messages coming from acquaintances that there was no need to raise the question again,’ he said. ‘But we appealed to the European Parliament anyway, which meant we went outside the Russian system, and that they could not forgive. That was when they decided to do something about me.’
The appeal to the European Parliament, which was addressed to its then president, Josep Borrell, is a summary of the history of the Circassians, and how they were exiled from their homeland. It quotes the nineteenth-century Russian historian Adolf Berzhe and his estimate that of a million Circassians, 400,000 were killed in war, 497,000 deported and only 80,000 allowed to remain in their homeland.
‘Russia has changed its political form several times in the 142 years since the Russo-Caucasian War, but in its relation to the Adygs (Circassians) it remains unchanged – this is the forced cultural assimilation of those of the native population who remained on their historic territory and a ban on the return of those Adygs (Circassians) exiled from the north-west Caucasus,’ it concludes, in words that could not have been more different to the tale of peace and harmony laid out in the schoolbooks I read in Arkhipo-Osipovka.
When Berzegov sent this letter, the campaign against him started for real. He received phone calls late at night in pure, accentless Russian, saying that if his two sons died he himself would be to blame. Then, he said, he was abducted from right outside his house by three men who pressed a pistol into the back of his head, and told him to stop shaming Russia. ‘That time they said they were veterans of the security services,’ said Berzegov, with a resigned sigh. He leaned back in his armchair and awaited my next question.
There is no proof that the threats of violence against Berzegov have any connection to the Russian state, but what happened next unmistakably did.
Health inspectors, fire inspectors, food inspectors, sanitary inspectors and more started to arrive to check up on Berzegov’s shop, which had sold food, drink and the everyday items that little shops sell all over the world. As soon as it opened in the morning they would arrive and start sampling.
‘There are twenty-one structures, probably more in fact, that can come and check up on things. By law they can only come every three months. But if they get a complaint from a customer they can come more often. And they came so often we had to shut the shop last September. One lad has agreed to rent it off me, although I warned him what would happen. He won’t last long.’
I asked him what kind of checks the authorities had conducted.
‘Well, they fined us for some sausage we were selling. They say that the seller of the sausage is responsible for the taste of the sausage. But they took the sausage right from the delivery truck, they did not even wait for me to put it in the fridge before they took it away for analysis. Twenty tonnes of this sausage arrives in Maikop from Moscow every day but they only fined us,’ he said.
Berzegov is clearly a stubborn man, and as these checks based on tip-offs continued, he tried to look into the allegations against him. He got hold of one letter of complaint that had been sent by a ‘regular customer’ of his shop. The letter was completed with all the details required by law, and Berzegov tried to find out why the writer had decided to complain about him.
The writer, it transpired, could not have been a regular customer, because he did not exist. The address on the letter could not be found on any map, there was no person with that name registered with the police, and the mobile phone number belonged to a baffled Armenian in the town of Apsheronsk who had not complained about Berzegov, had no idea who Berzegov was, and naturally did not know that he owned a shop. At this point, Berzegov realized the bureaucrats were just inventing evidence against him. Resistance was therefore hopeless, and he closed the shop down.
‘This is how Russia works now. It’s not about threats, they make you shut the shop yourself by suffocating you. They come and impose a fine every day, and you have no choice. If they can’t find something wrong, they’ll sample the air and tell you your air doesn’t meet the required standards. There is nothing you can do. In a normal situation you could bribe them, but if the authorities don’t like you, you can’t. I can take them to court, and the court will say I was right but that will be six months later and they will already have fined me for the electrics, or for something else.’
Some Circassians, worried for Berzegov, had encouraged him to drop the political campaign and join a cultural organization that stays on the safe ground of dance, music or folklore. He said he had even been offered jobs, security and money if he would just keep his head down and join one of the mainstream Circassian groups.
‘People say I am too tough, they say we should just get on with developing music and developing language, but that would be to neutralize our organization. I have stuck to my line, I want recognition of the genocide and if people want to help me they are welcome to. If they just want to play the fiddle, then they should go and play the fiddle, if they want to dance, they should go and dance. But my organization is only involved in the genocide,’ he said.
‘What is the point of developing the language anyway if we don’t have a future of some kind? If there is no future then why bother?’
Since the end of the Soviet Union, the rise in a common sense of Circassian identity has pleased him. He said the Circassians were connecting with each other, and young Circassians realized what had happened to their nation and why they were spread all over the world. When Berzegov first came to Maikop from his home village in 1978, he said, Circassians could be stopped on the street for speaking their language as if they were foreigners. Now at least the nation had woken up.
‘In my generation, we thought we had somehow just appeared as a nation in 1917. That was our understanding. As for what came before the revolution, there were only a few historians and they told us we had nothing: no history, no culture. Maybe some old people knew that there used to be a lot of Circassians here, but they couldn’t talk about it or they would be accused of nationalism,’ he said. ‘We would sit in our village and put up the antenna and listen to Voice of America. Sometimes they would even speak in our own language, but that was the only knowledge we had that there was a diaspora somewhere.’
Although some Circassians have moved to Adygea from abroad, including a whole village from Kosovo, the numbers are few and they do not have the same rights to move back to their homeland as ethnic Russians who grew up outside Russia. Under a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin in June 2006, only people who speak Russian and know Russian culture come under the law on ‘fellow citizens’ which permits people whose family once came from what is now Russia to return home.
According to Berzegov, this decree is illegal, since Russian is only one of the official languages of Adygea so it cannot be insisted on. However, illegal or not, it makes any Circassian’s return extremely complex, tying it up in bureaucratic obstructions that he knows only too well.
‘I have always dreamed of appealing about the genocide, it has been my dream. Some people dream about a new car, a new house or a new job. I am just proud that it is my signature under that document accusing Russia. I am pleased that we have officially accused Russia of genocide, we gathered the documents. No one has ever done this before,’ he said.
A
nd he was determined to carry on, and to refuse offers or bribes or threats alike.
‘I have been offered jobs, yes, but I would rather kill myself than take them. If someone else acts differently, then I won’t condemn them. These authorities kill people if they want to. In the West you don’t understand this, but people get killed here every day.’
With the bread and honey beside me, and a fresh cup of tea, it seemed hard to believe anything could threaten this cosy household, but Berzegov was taking the situation very seriously. He had sent his two teenage sons abroad earlier that year. He dug out pictures of them, but begged me not to say where they were.
‘If I too am out of the country or dead by the time you write this, then you can say they are there, but please not till then,’ he said.
The two young men looked relaxed in front of the landmarks, bright lights and taxis of the big foreign city where they had requested asylum. They smiled for the camera, with their arms round each other’s shoulders. Perhaps they were seeking to reassure their dad back home.
‘They will come home as soon as they have foreign passports. Then they will be safe,’ he said, smiling. But I was not sure they would ever return now. They were new additions to the Circassian diaspora, living proof that the modern dreams of reunification are as unlikely to succeed as the dreams of independence a century and a half ago.
Circassians are still struggling for justice, but – then, as now – their appeals are unheard.
PART TWO
The Mountain Turks, 1943 – 4
10.
A Red Gramophone
Osman Korkmazov was just five years old, but he had already rescued his red gramophone twice: once from two drunk German soldiers, and once from his own family. When the Soviet army came to deport him and tried to stop him taking his favourite possession with him, he knew what to do.
He started to scream.
Given the brutality of the times, he was taking a huge risk. He could have been killed outright, but he was lucky. Rather than shoot him, a kindly lieutenant called Misha befriended him, protected him and allowed him to keep his gramophone. The other inhabitants of his remote village were forced into the back of a truck, squashed together and terrified. But the little boy sat in the cab and sang his new uniformed friends ‘Katyusha’ – a folk song beloved of Russians.
‘The truck crossed the wooden bridge across the river Koban,’ he was to write more than six decades later. ‘Directly after the bridge, we turned sharply to the right so the long queue of closed trucks taking all the residents of the village of Lower Teberda into exile was clearly visible.’
With the straightforward acceptance of a child, he waited for the next excitement and chatted to Misha and the driver, also called Misha. He did not realize that he was seeing the destruction of his nation, or that he would never live in these mountains ever again. He was just glad to have rescued his gramophone. It was 2 November 1943.
As he sat in the truck with the two Mishas, he told them about his life, and about his red gramophone, but of course he did not realize quite how his fate fitted into the history of the North Caucasus.
When the Circassians were conquered and destroyed by the Russians, their fellow Muslims the Karachais were largely left in peace. They had submitted to Russia in 1829 and had been left to continue their untamed lives as animal herders for the rest of the nineteenth century. Occasional uprisings rocked their valleys, and some Karachais left for Turkey, where they live to this day. But only when the communist government tried to impose collectivized agriculture on them did the modern world intrude.
A series of uprisings followed, and some Karachai men fled into the hills, emerging only to steal livestock and combat the police and soldiers sent after them. Most Karachais lived peacefully, but the ‘bandits’ survived and clearly were fed and tolerated by the local population. Such lukewarm loyalty could not be tolerated in Stalin’s Soviet Union, where the population was either mobilized or slaughtered into preserving his brutal rule.
Korkmazov’s Karachai nation was the first of four North Caucasus nations that were to be stripped of their lands and dumped like rubbish onto the steppes of Soviet Central Asia in 1943 – 4, with the aim of ridding the inaccessible and strategic mountains of the last untrustworthy elements.
According to family legend, Korkmazov was given the gramophone as a present because ‘Patefon’ – a ‘little gramophone’ in Russian – had been his first word, reflecting a love of music that was to dominate his life. Even as a child he listened intently, enjoying sound above all as war swept around him. Born in 1938, he lived with his mother in the town of Kislovodsk – one of the fashionable spa resorts enjoyed by Russian tourists for a century already. There he learned Russian, and barely spoke Karachai – the Turkic dialect of his people.
His first full memory was also his first encounter with soldiers. He was sitting in the kitchen with his mother when the door opened, and three soldiers entered, led by an officer with a fat stomach on two skinny legs. His stomach was so large that his holster lay on it, and did not hang by his side as it was designed to do. He did not appear to have a neck, and his monstrous puppet-like face scared the young boy, who was waiting for his mother to pour him a cup of tea.
His mother stood and challenged these intruders into her home, answering them in the same aggressive tone that they used to her. This infuriated the fat officer, who reached forward and pushed off the headscarf she was wearing. She reacted furiously, he slapped her in the face and she collapsed. Korkmazov began to cry. It was an instructive beginning and, he later recalled, the end of his childhood.
‘From that terrifying day I was always scared; scared for my mother and scared in general. I must have sensed the permanent threat that was all around me all the time,’ he was to write.
Within days, the Soviet soldiers were gone, his mother had vanished and the town was under attack. Bombs fell all around and, with a child’s curiosity, he climbed onto the wall of his yard to see them. Just then an explosion sounded nearby, blasting him off the wall and onto the ground, where he lay, his arm wracked with pain. He came to in a bed with more air-raid sirens sounding, only to be rescued by two soldiers speaking a language he did not know. He did not realize it, but the town had been occupied by the Germans. They plastered his arm, and sent him home.
So he met the second army of his short life, and, once again, the experience was unpleasant. Two drunk German soldiers stumbled into the courtyard, sending his grandmother scurrying inside. But they followed, and started hunting for food. Not finding anything, they scanned the house for valuables, and their eyes fell on the red gramophone, which sat in the corner. One of the soldiers picked it up, and started for the door. But this was more than Korkmazov could bear. With his good hand, he grabbed the gramophone’s handle and began to scream. The soldier failed to separate him from it, so he picked up both of them and carried on. Luckily, a German officer who had seen the boy at the hospital was passing at the time. He angrily told the soldiers to put the gramophone down, and to let the family be. The gramophone had been saved for the first time.
‘Only then did I notice my grandmother. Scared to death, she sat tucked into a niche between the wall and the stove, unable to say a word. I ran to her. My poor grandmother took me in her shaking arms,’ Korkmazov remembered.
After this they were left in peace, the kind officer brought them food and otherwise they saw no one, since their neighbours had all fled. But the peace did not last long; just a few weeks after their arrival, the Germans pulled back from Kislovodsk. They were starting their long retreat all the way to Berlin.
They were replaced by the Soviet army, and then they in turn moved on, leaving the town peaceful but far from calm. Korkmazov’s mother reappeared. She had been hiding in the forests outside town, scared that she would be taken away by the Germans as the wife of a member of the Communist Party, albeit a dead one. She cried over her son, worried about his broken arm – which was by now out of plaster – a
nd fussed over him. But she was not with him for long. Once more she vanished, this time arrested by the Soviets. They would not meet again for more than a year.
For the Soviets had sent police squads in behind the advancing army, to investigate collaborators and traitors among their own citizens. Once again Korkmazov, with the wide-eyed naivety of a child, saw them but did not realize until later the purpose of their nasty work. His dog Boynak, however, was not so blind. Boynak, a large and shaggy Caucasus shepherd, was friendly to everyone, and only ever barked at the flies that tormented him. He had befriended the Soviet soldiers, then the German soldiers, and then the Soviet soldiers again. But these policemen he did not like. He began to bark when they walked into the yard. Rushing at them, he only escaped being shot when a neighbour’s son grabbed his collar and pulled him away.
‘Boy, help us,’ one of the two men said. ‘Do you remember, did these cursed Germans hide anything in your courtyard: bags, rucksacks, suitcases? Maybe they buried them somewhere in the garden.’
Korkmazov had not seen anything and told them so, no matter how many times they asked the question. This infuriated one of the men, and he pulled out a pistol and screwed it into the side of the boy’s head, not so hard as to draw blood but enough to hurt.
‘Speak, or I’ll blow out your brains,’ he shouted.
His colleague pulled him back, telling him that fear would make the boy forget. They found nothing, but their interrogation of the child terrified Korkmazov’s aunts sufficiently to make them take their nephew and flee. With the instinct of the true Karachais, they headed for the mountains, their ancestral home, where they thought they would be safe.
Let Our Fame Be Great Page 16
