Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Freshfield normally showed little interest in the people he met, but was clearly won over by the villagers in Muchol, which they left ‘carrying away with us pleasanter recollections of its inhabitants than of those of any other village we had halted at. At Uruspieh we had, it is true, received almost equal kindness; but there the princes were imbued with a tinge of Russian manners, in contrast to which the patriarchal simplicity of Balkar was the more striking.’

  Leaving the village, the climbers trekked up the valley towards Georgia, passing guard huts set up to protect the flocks from thieving Georgians who might cross the mountains, then turned east and passed into the land of the Ossetians and out of the scope of this chapter.

  On the publication of his book in 1869, Freshfield started something of a craze for visiting the Caucasus. Climbers from Italy, Hungary and Germany as well as Britain came to follow the trail that he had blazed. The slopes never became thronged, like those in Switzerland, but the books written by the pioneering visitors began to resemble modern guidebooks. One of Freshfield’s later works warned climbers against hiring the son of a particular man who lived in a house with a green roof, for example, and some of the chiefs appeared again and again, becoming stock characters in the accounts.

  Fortunately, however, among the climbers was one who had more curiosity about the inhabitants of the valleys than just their use as porters for exploring the peaks. Florence Grove, who arrived in the Caucasus in 1874, wrote an immensely readable account called The Frosty Caucasus which gives us some of the best information on the tribesmen that we have.

  His group too crossed over from Georgia, but it crossed first into the Cherek valley, which had so impressed Freshfield at the end of his trip. They too encountered two Georgians at the pass, although these had been obliged to kill their – presumably stolen – bullock, since it was unwilling to slog over the pass. The cattle-rustling seems not to have been affected by the passing of six years of Russian rule since Freshfield first climbed these peaks.

  The group’s first encounter on the northern side of the mountains was with the herder assigned to guard the cattle and sheep from such Georgian raids. Since most of the party was Georgian, and they had crossed over from Georgia, it is hardly surprising that Grove should record a frosty reception. This only deepened when the porters killed a sheep. Since it had been killed by a non-Muslim this made the herder worry that it might pollute his hut, so he begged them not to allow the meat to touch the walls or fall into the fire. ‘[T]he guard looked on with an expression such as a Presbyterian might wear when gazing at a Ritualist service,’ Grove noted with characteristic humour.

  His group passed on down the valley the next morning. ‘For naked grandeur of mountain form the Tcherek valley is probably unequalled in Europe,’ he wrote. Further down the valley was a stone bridge with a door on it, another precaution against cattle theft, and here the guard was more friendly, feeding them with bread cooked in the embers, and fresh milk. They passed on towards the villages visited by Freshfield, and Grove’s reaction was even more enthusiastic.

  The unusual houses, tucked into the hillside as they were, astounded him. ‘I doubt whether anything stranger can meet men’s eyes than these houses when seen for the first time. Deserted cow-sheds, vast empty dog-kennels, the home of some animal constructive like the beaver, but on a much larger scale; anything but the habitations of men do these strange hamlets seem to the traveller. They usually appear at first to be completely empty, why I cannot tell, for there are plenty of people in them; but perhaps it is because they are so utterly unlike the dwellings of human beings that the eye does not look for men, and therefore of course does not find them,’ he wrote.

  ‘On nearer approach, however, numbers of men, women, and children are found, and the traveller discovers to his astonishment that these poor sheds are inhabited by a well-to-do and orderly race, remarkably handsome, stately in bearing, self-respecting, partly civilised in their ways and sometimes very richly clad.’

  The welcome from the village chief was rather cold, since their Georgian guide Paul had failed to produce the piece of paper putting them under the protection of the Russian government, but they were still treated with all the stately honour due to a guest, and were lent ponies to explore the gorge below the village, which filled Grove with raptures. On their return to the house assigned them by the chief, however, they were to have the first encounter with the extreme curiosity that was to mark their visit. When they walked back into their room, it was thronged with visitors, who found every single thing they did fascinating.

  Many of their visitors wore the long tunic, shaggy hat and silver-headed cartridge cases that are the national dress of the Caucasus. They were all armed, often with pistol, dagger and sword, but remained good-natured in their scrutiny of the foreigners.

  This curiosity lasted for the whole trip. In the next village of Bezengi, one old man sat next to Grove while he wrote in his notebook. He first of all took off the visitor’s hat to examine it thoroughly, then watched his pen for a long time as it wrote, moved on to test the texture of his tweed jacket and then checked his hobnail boots. The next day, though rainy, was the same. A crowd gathered to watch them all morning. Grove’s clearly good-natured response to everything seems to have been a hit with the highlanders, and he was greeted warmly wherever he went. Although he found the throngs who gathered to watch them irritating, he was philosophical about it, imagining what would happen if a Turkic tribesman in full national dress turned up in an English village. ‘I do not think that in Central Africa the inhabitants could have shown more curiosity; but with all this inquisitiveness, which made them almost take the things out of our hands to examine them, these singular people were not wanting in dignity, or in the feeling of what was due to strangers. They pawed everything we would let them paw, but they asked for nothing; and so we found it in other places. During the whole of our journey on the northern side, I do not recollect a single instance of a Caucasian’s asking for any of the things we carried with us,’ he wrote.

  He was limited in what he could say to the villagers, since many of them did not speak Russian and he did not speak Turkish, which meant his chances of finding out the condition of the valleys were very limited. However, he did have the translator Paul, who helped him understand one man who was vociferous in his complaints about the government.

  ‘The Russian Government does not deal justly with us. It is now confiscating much of the property of the proprietors,’ said the stranger, before spoiling the impression of a noble fighter for liberty by revealing that the substance of his complaints was that the government abolished slavery in the mountains in 1867. ‘I say that the rights which men in a country have always possessed should be respected by the Government, and the Russian Government does not respect ours. Formerly we had slaves of our own who did our work for nothing; now this is not allowed, and we have to pay men to work for us.’

  It is easy to mock such a complaint, but it is the first recorded sign of growing disquiet in the mountain valleys, which was to swell over the next decades as misgovernment and brutality became the staples of Russian rule under both the tsars and the communists. The highlanders were used to being left alone, and were now gaining all the benefits of the corruption and violence inherent in the Russian system.

  That was all in the future though. As Grove passed on through the valleys, he told anecdotes of curiosity, filth, rain, mutton and hospitality, before recounting how they climbed the higher, western peak of Elbrus.

  His expedition was almost certainly, therefore, the first to climb Europe’s highest mountain, although he was very modest himself, estimating that the two peaks were actually almost the same height.

  His trip was nearing an end, but he remained full of respect and liking for the Karachai-Balkars, despite their tireless ability to keep talking all day. ‘Strong, healthy men as most of them are, well capable of doing a long day’s work without the slightest distress, it is wonderful how they loiter o
n a journey, and what frequent and protracted halts they make. Most irritating, too, is their procrastination,’ he noted. ‘It will be seen then that, though the Caucasians are not always to be relied on, and at times try the traveller’s patience largely, the good much predominates in their character, and I think that those who have sojourned among them cannot fail to carry away a most pleasant remembrance of this simple pastoral race, untouched as yet for good or evil by the great forces of Western civilisation.’

  But those forces were in fact touching them, little by little. When the English historian and traveller Baddeley visited the valley of the Cherek in 1902, the guards against cattle raiding had been added to by a government sanitary inspector, and cattle needed certificates and documents before they could pass the checkpoint. In such a remote point and without oversight, it seems unlikely that the guard would have been of great honesty and the bribes paid to him are likely to have been a de facto tax on sending cattle by the traditional route to Georgia. Russian government had arrived in the high Caucasus.

  Freshfield made a similar point about the deficiency of Russian administration in the central Caucasus. ‘There is no competent local authority to which to appeal in case of difficulties,’ he said, in The Exploration of the Caucasus, in which he bemoaned the failure of the Caucasus to find its true place as a mountaineer’s paradise. ‘While the old chieftains have lost much of their feudal or patriarchal authority, the new starshinas or village mayors, appointed by the Government, are in the more remote districts treated with very scant respect by their communities.’

  The last couple of decades in these valleys before the 1917 revolution have been little studied, although one local historian called Zhilyabi Kalmykov has done some research. His narrative tells of how the reforming possibilities of the Russian rule over the North Caucasus ran out of steam rapidly, as bureaucratic inertia replaced military necessity after the Circassian nation was destroyed in 1864.

  The government imposed headmen on every village, and ran courts centrally with their judges being part of the local administration. The system was intended to be temporary but lasted for almost twenty years. The judges were ‘officials and officers, not knowing the languages of the people and not having even the smallest understanding of the cultures and shariat of the people itself ’.

  The court used Russian law to resolve criminal cases, which was baffling for the tribesmen, who were used to controlling punishment themselves. Baddeley knew a respected merchant called Toterbek Mourzaganoff, who had three shops and would mediate in murder cases to fix a degree of compensation that had no connection to any investigation by the official court.

  ‘Russian legal decisions and punishments had no effect whatever on the demand for blood or the amount of blood-wite exacted under customary law . . . the Russian Courts, no matter what their merits, in matters relating to blood-vengeance failed to satisfy the native idea of justice. The slayer was sentenced to imprisonment or penal servitude, perhaps even for 20 years, but he lived, while his victim lay rotting in the grave, his spirit in anguish because unavenged,’ wrote Baddeley.

  The Russian courts were not even efficient. Between 1908 and 1910, the number of unresolved cases in the Nalchik region – which covered the Turkic highlanders’ eastern valleys – increased by 726. Some cases had not moved for two, three or even more years. And the legal system was ever more restrictive.

  These highlanders, used to being able to wander wherever they wished, now could not visit another village without a permit from their headman. They could not take produce to market without a piece of paper certifying the amount, type and destination of their goods. Whole villages were also held responsible for crimes committed on their territory and even, in the case of the mountain villages, on the roads leading to them.

  If normal police methods did not find the thief, and if the villagers were not prepared to surrender him, then soldiers, dragoons or a sotnya of Cossacks would be billeted on them for two months or more. The troops would behave as if they were at home, costing the already far from wealthy villagers substantial sums that they could not afford. The visiting troops were also unlikely to hurry to catch the criminal since they were receiving everything they needed for free.

  The inevitable result was dissatisfaction with the Russian authorities, which bubbled over into opposition to the starshina or headman appointed by the government. The headman, assisted by an assembly of all the richer members of the villages, controlled the distribution of land and the permits allowing people to trade and travel, and did not have to pay any tax. It is hard to imagine a system better designed to breed corruption, and it was massively unpopular, even after 1906 when the government made the headman position elected.

  In 1909, villagers in the Chegem valley – where both Freshfield and Grove remarked on the peculiarities of the houses – refused to elect a headman, in protest against the government. The authorities sent in the police ‘flying squad’, which had been set up to deal with bandits, and forced the villagers to hold their elective meeting. They also fined them for 17,000 roubles’ worth of back taxes.

  With traditional authority fading away, and the Russian government unpopular, the conditions were ripe for a revival in robbery in the high valleys. The valleys were so full of hiding places, and so hard to police, that bandits could rest secure against anything but a full-scale military invasion.

  True authority would not be stamped on them until the 1940s, when the Soviets finally lost patience with a people who refused to bow down before foreign rule, and sent them into exile.

  14.

  I Always Fought against the Class Enemies

  Ismail Zankishiev was born into this world, where the old ways of the mountain Turkic life were falling apart. The Russian rules and institutions allowed the rich to consolidate control over the pastures and herds that had been the common wealth of his people. His family lived in the village of Kunyum in the Upper Cherek valley, and his father Musa may well have been among the crowds that welcomed the British mountaineers to the village in the 1860s and 1870s.

  But by 1895, the year of Zankishiev’s birth, the Caucasus had failed to become a global climbing destination to rival the Alps, and social tensions in the valleys were becoming more obvious. The number of people in the North Caucasus increased steadily over the next few years, mainly through natural population growth. Tensions rose in the villages, where demand for land was intensifying, and young men were not able to set themselves up as independent households. The injustice of a political system whereby a local trustee dominated land distribution, allowed or disallowed private trade, controlled tax payments and summoned the police must have been obvious even to a child.

  The young Zankishiev took the first opportunity he had to rebel against it.

  That chance came in 1917, when the tsar’s government collapsed in St Petersburg under the strain of three disastrous years of the First World War. The Russia the tsars had created began to collapse too, and authority collapsed nowhere so totally as it did in the Caucasus. Bits or all of the mountain range were variously claimed or controlled in the next few years by the Caucasus Mountain Republic, the Caucasus Imamate, the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, the Russian Republic, Turkey, Germany, Britain, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, as well as a bewildering number of even-more-micro states that sometimes did not even exist on paper.

  ‘South Russia, since the fall of Rostov, had become remarkable for the number of “governments” in its territory and the consequent lack of any real government,’ wrote one sardonic journalist who despairingly watched the blood and disease of the collapsing resistance to the Bolsheviks in southern Russia in 1920.

  In the North Caucasus, the injustices of the colonial administration gave plenty of causes for conflict. Disputes raged between the Cossacks and the highlanders over attempts to undo the Cossacks’ hold on the best land, between the Cossacks and working-class newcomers, who felt the Cossacks were reactionaries, and between the highlanders and the newcomers
, who represented a modern world many of the highlanders distrusted. The highlanders meanwhile fought among themselves, along ethnic lines, or along religious lines, or along ideological lines, or all three. It was a bewildering period, in which various factions supported or opposed the Bolsheviks purely for local reasons, and the Bolsheviks found themselves committed to supporting religious law in one place, and to governing via the Workers’ Councils in others. Some factions tried to interest world powers in the Caucasus, and the interventions of the Turks, the Germans and the British during or after the First World War raised hopes that local independent states might be secure. They were not.

  An engaging, self-proclaimed ruler called Haidar Bammate even popped up at peace talks in Switzerland in 1919. His business card – still kept in the archives of the British Foreign Office – identified him as ‘Ministre des affaires étrangères de l’union des peuples circassiens et du daghistan’. His attempts to lobby for the support of his union received no support at the congress, with an unnamed British bureaucrat noting sourly that it was ‘quite impracticable’. A second envoy, called Abdul Merjid Tchermoff, this time ‘President of the Delegation of the North Caucasian Republic’, appeared later, but had the same lack of success.

  The more or less fictitious states proclaimed in the Caucasus had their adherents, but eventually the Red Army crushed all opposition to its rule, leaving those who had supported it early enough in commanding positions in the 1920s. This meant a profound change for the five eastern-most valleys of the mountain Turks – the Balkars, as they would be known – which from 1921 were united with the lowland Circassians into the newly created autonomous region of Kabardino-Balkaria.