Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Yermolov saw Chechnya as the breadbasket of mountainous Dagestan, and its conquest as the key to the whole eastern flank of the mountains. Apparently lacking in even the smallest remnants of humanity, he set about his task with such a degree of cruelty and such a lack of honour that his name has passed into Chechen folklore as a byword for savagery.

  The Chechens were furious about the construction of Grozny in 1818, and kept up a steady sniping fire on its builders. The Chechens could not come too close, however, because of the power of Russia’s artillery. Yermolov, suspecting that the tribesmen would love an artillery piece of their own, pretended to abandon one on the battlefield. When the Chechens came forward to collect it, he minced them with grapeshot.

  It is a fairly typical example of the tactics by which Russian civilization was brought to these savages.

  ‘I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains of fortresses, that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death,’ Yermolov said.

  His plan was simple, and spelt out by his chief of staff, Ivan Velyaminov, in words that would guide the actions of successful commanders throughout the whole Caucasus war:

  ‘The Caucasus may be likened to a mighty fortress, marvellously strong by nature, artificially protected by military works, and defended by a numerous garrison. Only thoughtless men would attempt to escalade such a stronghold. A wise commander would see the necessity of having recourse to military art; would lay his parallels; advance by sap and mine, and so master the place. The Caucasus, in my opinion, must be treated in the same way, and even if the method of procedure is not drawn up beforehand, so that it may be continually referred to, the very nature of things will compel such action,’ Velyaminov wrote.

  The building of forts was part of the plan, and the subjugation of the population was another. Yermolov gave the tribesmen a choice. Either they submitted to Russia, and moved to where Russia wanted them, or they did not submit, which meant they would have to move deep into the mountains and starve. As a first step, the lands up to the river Sunzha – where the fort of Grozny glowered out over the land – would be cleared of inhabitants.

  If the inhabitants refused to obey the tsar’s officers, they were rebels, and thus could be massacred. In the village of Dadi-Yurt, the Chechens did refuse, and their fate has been remembered by their countrymen to this day. The Russians had already destroyed six villages when they approached Dadi-Yurt in September 1819. They surrounded the village and, when its inhabitants stood firm, it was assaulted. The Chechen resistance was stubborn but doomed.

  Encouraged by singing and chanting from their womenfolk, the men fought on until they were all but wiped out. The women fought on too, often preferring to kill themselves than fall into the hands of the Russians. Only fourteen men were captured at the end of the battle and 140 women and children – many of whom were injured. It was a terrible massacre. In the short term it may have been effective in cowing the nearby people; in the longer term it succeeded only in changing the hatred felt for the Russians into near hysteria.

  Subsequent years saw new ‘pacifying’ missions, which destroyed Chechen villages, and deepened both the highlanders’ hatred and Russians’ incomprehension. Unable to believe that any people could continue to resist after such punishment, some Russian officers effectively ceased to view the Chechens as human beings at all. One commander, General Grekov, referred to the Chechens in his letters as ‘rogues’ or ‘rascals’, and happily fulfilled his tasks to ‘destroy villages, to hang hostages, and slaughter women and children’.

  Faced with this onslaught, the Chechens were compelled to unite. In national gatherings in 1821, and again in 1824, they appointed Naqshbandis as spiritual leaders and a Chechen called Beybulat, who had served the Russians then defected back again, as military leader. Beybulat had led the assaults on Grozny which had faced the Russians’ grapeshot, and his strategies of quick marches and lightning attacks on weak targets were effective. The Chechen resistance was far more successful than that of the Circassians, precisely because they fought under a single commander and submitted to the discipline of the Sufis.

  The Russians, predictably, were furious, not least at their own impotence. In July 1825, shortly after the Chechens took a Russian fort, massacred its garrison and stole its guns, the Russians summoned more than 300 Chechen elders to a meeting. Ostensibly, it was to discuss the situation, but the local Russian commander took the opportunity to harangue and insult the assembled notables in their own language.

  He then threatened to punish them and ordered them to surrender the daggers that all Caucasus men carried as a mark of their manhood. The first two elders called up surrendered their knives. But the third refused to do so. Grekov – he who had boasted of slaughtering women and children – struck him in the face. The elder responded by stabbing Grekov and his commanding officer to death, as well as wounding several other officers. He himself was killed, as were almost all the elders at the meeting. Any way you looked at it, it was a disaster for everyone present.

  The Chechens’ revolt fizzled out over the next year, perhaps because of the extreme repression Yermolov dealt out or perhaps because the spiritual and military leadership was entrusted to two different people, but their temporary successes were signs of things to come.

  Next time, the tribes would be led in battle and in prayer by the same man, and he would be a fully fledged Naqshbandi from the heartland of Dagestani Islam. The Chechens would be among his best warriors, but neither he, nor his two successors, would be a Chechen. All three would be Avars, and they would shake Russia’s hold on the Caucasus with the black banner of Islam and the chants of holy war.

  There is no doubt that Russia’s own merciless brutality in battle provoked the response that was to come, and the way the highlanders defied that brutality in these early battles has inspired every generation, up to the present day.

  Chechen rebel fighters in Grozny in 1999 sang of Sheikh Mansur, who had been remembered in folk memory as a national hero despite official Russian and Soviet historians saying he sold out his own countrymen. Here are the closing lines of the song they sang, composed by rebel bard Timur Mutsurayev, whose simple recordings feature only a voice and an acoustic guitar. His words inspired his countrymen in their doomed battles.

  He knew no fear in the fight for faith

  And the terrible enemy trembled before him.

  He was a simple, gentle slave of Allah,

  A Muslim submissive to the will of God.

  The enemy’s rumours and base slanders

  Claim Mansur was a traitor and a spy.

  However, he followed the ancient laws

  And was a firm Muslim.

  Let modernity and antiquity quarrel,

  What other hero can be compared with him?

  For it is clear to all, that this person

  Was an example in battle to all peoples.

  Mansur’s successors as leaders of the highlanders learned early to answer brutality with brutality, as a Georgian family discovered to their cost in 1854.

  20.

  The Imam and the Princesses

  In summer 1854, Prince David Chavchavadze had just taken up a post as head of the local militia protecting the lowlands of Georgia from highland attack. Since the days of Sheikh Mansur, the highlanders had become a fearful foe for Russian soldiers sent against them. The two sides rarely met in open battle, but in guerrilla war. In sniping raids, the highly mobile and skilled light cavalry of the highlanders was a threat to any settlement within reach of the mountains.

  But Chavchavadze, a 37-year-old lieutenant-colonel, really had nothing to worry about. His force was more than adequate for repelling raiding parties. It might struggle to cope with anything more ambitious, but there had been no major highlander raid onto Georgia’s rich plains since 1800. Worrying rumours were coming down from the hills though, so Chavchavadze had to be ready.

  He pushed his militia north of the Ala
zani river, to the side closest to the mountains, and set his defences against any push south. He had a personal interest in stopping any mountain force from crossing the river as well, since his estate, Tsinondali, with its rich vineyards and fine mansion, was close to its southern bank.

  But his duties were not a discomfort. His own family was enjoying the summer at Tsinondali, where his wife Anna and his sister-in-law, Princess Orbeliani, were holding court, and he joined them as often as he could. With the princesses were the prince’s four daughters and one son, plus Princess Orbeliani’s son and her niece. A French governess called Anne Drancey completed the party.

  In mid-July, news came that Imam Shamil – the leader of the Chechens and the mountain Dagestanis – had massed his forces at Karata, a village whose location allowed him to attack both north into Russia and south into Georgia. The prince and his troops took up defensive positions, and were ready when the attack came.

  As ever the highlanders came with devastating speed. They attacked and retreated equally rapidly, and the clashes were over within hours. The prince thought he had beaten them off and even scribbled out a note to his wife, saying that there was ‘no occasion for uneasiness’. He underlined those last few words.

  But it turned out he had missed the main force. A separate army under the command of Imam Shamil’s son and heir, Gazi-Muhammad, had avoided the prince’s force, forded the river and set to work plundering the villages on its southern bank. And among those villages was the prince’s mansion, and the prince’s family: a rich prize for highlanders bent on loot and ransom. The princesses hid in an upstairs room and initially thought they had escaped unharmed as the raiders concentrated on stealing fabrics and china from the bottom floors. But then one highlander tried their door, which was locked, and sounded the alarm. Men poured up the stairs.

  ‘The door resists for a few instants . . . The fury of the Tatars reaches its peak . . . The door shakes under their redoubled blows . . . The door yields . . . Then, there is a terrible struggle,’ wrote Drancey, the governess, in her dramatic account of the affair.

  ‘A cloud of men rains onto us ... a dreadful mixture of cries of rage and desperate sobs are heard . . . each one of us is picked up in the arms of one of these savages . . . all resistance is useless.’

  The attacking force gathered up the princesses, their children, Drancey (who cried out: ‘I am French, I am French’ in French, in the vain and somehow rather Gallic hope that this would stop them from kidnapping her) and the servants and rode for the hills. In their excitement, they looted the house and stole the women’s clothing. Drancey was left in just her boots, her corset and her blouse. Some of the children were almost naked.

  When soldiers sent by Prince David Chavchavadze reached his home, it was a smouldering ruin. His whole family was gone, and just an elderly Georgian woman remained. Marina Gaideli had nursed four generations of the family, and seen the mansion built. She sat beside its remains, half naked and inconsolable.

  ‘David, David,’ she sobbed, ‘why are you not here to help your family?’

  As the news of the raid spread, her shock was replicated across Georgia, and then Russia, then the world. Shamil seemed unstoppable. Even the highest families in the land were at risk of his wrath.

  It was an extraordinary development. Just three decades earlier, the highlanders had been desperately resisting Russian punitive raids. Their attempts to unite had been ill-coordinated, hasty and badly led. The Cossacks and regular units had been able to ride more or less at will through the mountains burning villages, rounding up civilians and wiping out resistance.

  Nikolai, the tsar whose rule started in 1825 and who was to stifle the likes of Lermontov and Pushkin with his mindless philistinism, wanted the highlanders crushed. He ordered his commander-in-chief in the Caucasus to ‘tame for ever the mountain peoples, or exterminate the insubordinate’. Under this edict, Russian troops became ever more brutal, the resistance against them ever more hopeless.

  It was more than the Naqshbandis could take. The official doctrine taught by the elders said that Sufis should accept the rulers of this world, and concentrate on living a perfect life by the laws of Islam. But, the younger men said, how could you live a perfect life when non-believers were burning your home, killing your neighbours, and raping your wife?

  In 1829, Naqshbandis gathered in the mountains of Dagestan and proclaimed an Imam. He would lead them against the Russians both spiritually and militarily, and finally the resistance would have a focus. His name was Gazi-Muhammad, and his impact was sudden and dramatic. Over the next three years, he was to cause panic among the Russians, sacking or besieging every fort within reach. The tribes of the eastern Caucasus responded to his success, rising up against the invaders.

  The jihad had begun.

  Gazi-Muhammad would not be fated to lead it for long, however. The Russians – like an elephant stung by a bee – staggered around, flailing out at their maddening tormentor. Eventually in 1832, they trapped him. In the summer of that year, they destroyed eighty villages in Chechnya, then they moved into mountain Dagestan, where they intended to find the imam in his home village of Gimry: the centre of mystical Islam in the mountains.

  The terrain was imposing, but the Russian generals did not care. ‘Can a dog go there? Where a dog can go, a Russian soldier can go too,’ said one general when questioned over paths.

  To get to Gimry, they would need every bit of their surefootedness. Today, there is a tunnel connecting the village with the lowlands, but in the 1830s the Russians had to climb over a precipitous ridge, which was considered all but impassable. Made of a curious rock formation, it is marked by hundreds of cone-shaped outcrops, like gigantic monks at prayer carved out of stone. The ridge is so high that it affects the weather.

  When I was there, the clouds were spilling over the ridge from the lowlands but vanishing when they hit the drier air of the mountains. In our mountain valley, we had a clear blue sky and perfect sunlight. On the other side of the ridge, the side of the lowlands, there was thick cloud and gloom. Once the Russians had scaled the ridge, they found a wooded gorge that descended to the head of the valley. Once in the valley though, their problems were only just beginning. They had to march across a jagged surface of moraine overshadowed by steep walls that gradually become cliffs – towards the waiting imam.

  The residents of Gimry had built a wall across the gorge to stop the Russians, and at first they were successful. But they were outnumbered, the Russian musket fire was too heavy. Eventually, the brave Russian soldiers breached the rampart and the defenders fled in rout. All resistance was ended, the path to Gimry was open, except for one little house hard against the cliff on the left flank of the Russian advance. It was cut off once the defenders fled, but shots still emerged from it, killing the Russians as they readied to attack. The whole fury of the assault was now concentrated on the house, and the defenders’ ammunition was not endless.

  The death song of the Sufis rose up as the bullets died away. The defenders prepared their knives for the end. Just then, a tall bearded figure emerged into the doorway of the house. He stared at the ranks of soldiers, took a run-up and jumped clean over them. Landing behind them, he turned, and stabbed three with his sword, received a bayonet thrust to the chest, then turned and fled into the dusk. He was safe, but the others in the house were not so lucky. Apart from one other, they died to a man. According to stories still told in Gimry, the imam was found in a posture of prayer: a hand on his beard and eyes raised to heaven.

  The Russians could congratulate themselves on their victory, or so they thought.

  If that bayonet thrust had only been slightly more accurate, the history of the Caucasus would be very different. For the fleeing man would be the greatest imam of all. It was Shamil, whose forces would terrorize lowland Georgia in two decades’ time.

  The respect in which this resistance hero is still held in Dagestan, although it has been part of Russia for a century and a half, is clearly
visible at the site of the battle. A mosque has been built for visitors to pray where the first imam died.

  A sign declares in Avar and Russian: ‘Here, in an unequal battle with the forces of the tsarist army, was heroically killed the leader of the highlanders’ struggle for freedom and independence’. Visitors have tied little strips of coloured cloth to the branches that overhang the sign to signify their prayers: a little piece of irony since the imam himself loathed such superstitions.

  About ten metres up the hill are the remains of the house where the doomed defenders fired their last bullets, and between the first sign and the house, is another sign. ‘Here landed Imam Shamil after his leap’. Here too are strips of cloth. Where the site of the first imam’s death is holy, this is holy too. It is where the new imam lived.

  If the sign is correct, it was a mighty leap: five metres if not more. Perhaps the sign is exaggerated, perhaps it is not, who can say? For Shamil is a man to whom stories attach themselves.

  According to legend, he was given the name Shamil – which is a corrupt version of Samuel, and hence a Jewish name and very unusual in the mountains – after his father pledged to give his new son the name of the first person he saw. The first person he saw was a Jew, and the fierce Muslim leader would have a non-believer’s name for his whole life.

  Another story tells how Shamil was first called Ali or Muhammad-Ali, and grew up a sickly child. By mountain superstition, changing a child’s name confused the evil spirits afflicting him, and with his new name Shamil was able to become the bravest and most nimble warrior in the mountains.

  He did not take over as imam immediately on Gazi-Muhammad’s death. A second imam ruled for a while, until he was killed in a blood feud, and Shamil assumed his title. The Russians apparently did not realize the threat they had left behind them, since the new imam concentrated on forcing his subjects to obey Islamic law and respect his rule rather than on fighting Russia.