Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Shamil was ready for this reply, however, and perhaps this was an argument he had been through in his own head. What followed was as complete a discourse on his own philosophy as anything Runovsky ever recorded. It is complete in itself, logically coherent, yet somehow alien and peculiar.

  ‘A man must never express his dissatisfaction with anything at all. If someone gives me food that is not tasty or is over-salted, then I must not judge him. I must keep my silence, in the same way that I must if it is very good food. Above all I must not criticize a servant if he is to blame for something. If I start to scold him, then it is a great sin, that is what it says in the books. Therefore I am always content, content with everything, and I have no needs, and I must observe my customs when it is necessary for other people. If I do not do this it will be a great sin, it says so in the books.’

  As Runovsky’s acquaintance with Shamil and his family went on, he discovered that this philosophy informed much of their attitude to the outside world. The shoes they had bought in St Petersburg, for example, did not fit and were very uncomfortable. The imam did not mention it, however, since that would have been a sin, until it was too late to replace them. It was a pattern regularly repeated.

  Runovsky became very frustrated by Shamil’s insistence that what was ‘written in books’ was the only truth, but he failed to shift the imam from his beliefs, which admitted no hypocrisy or double standards. For example, Shamil would give out charity to all poor people as he walked through Kaluga, and would often force it upon people who had not even asked for it. Once, indeed, he apologized to a young child for not being able to give him anything. The child’s reaction was not recorded.

  Shamil did not himself carry the money, leaving it to his follower Hajio – the same man who was tormented by the captive princesses during their enforced stay in the mountains – to do so for him. Hajio was regularly instructed to distribute large sums, which were far greater than the household could afford. On one occasion he gave out 10 roubles – a huge amount by the standards of the time. Runovsky eventually took Shamil aside and warned him off the practice. He said most of the beggars did not deserve the money, and would spend it undesirably.

  Shamil was having none of it. ‘But it is no business of mine where the poor person takes his money,’ he said.

  ‘But you can’t give out so much,’ the ever-sensible Runovsky insisted.

  ‘Well, how much can I give out?’

  ‘One kopeck, two, three, maybe five,’ was Runovsky’s reply. But if the officer thought he had controlled this drain on Shamil’s resources, he was wrong. The imam asked for an explanation, asked how many kopecks there were in a rouble, and asked how many someone would need to survive. Runovsky explained the cost of food, drink and accommodation, but failed to satisfy the old man.

  ‘Well, what help is it to give one kopeck?’ asked the baffled imam, having learned that a beggar could not live on such a small sum.

  ‘You give, I give, a third person gives, thus the poor person gathers enough for his daily existence,’ said Runovsky, giving a little summary of the principles of Western charity. But that, inevitably, did not satisfy Shamil.

  ‘What need have I for others? If a poor person asks help of me then I must help him. If I give him too little, that means I am mocking him. And in books it says poor people must be helped and not mocked for their situation. Does it not say the same in your books?’

  Even Runovsky had to recognize the logic in Shamil’s position, and was forced to give in. Eventually, however, he had his way, by persuading Hajio that most of the supplicants went and spent the money on vodka, which was not good for them.

  It is not surprising that this gentle and thoughtful old man was a giant success in Kaluga society. Shamil was perhaps the second most famous celebrity – behind only the tsar – in the empire, and having him in their midst was a huge coup. The imam was regularly invited to parties and balls, or to drink tea.

  One woman, Maria Chichagova, saw the imam regularly, since her husband was in charge of his well-being for a while. She had the disarming habit of referring to the imam as the ‘former terror of Dagestan and Chechnya’ and said he liked nothing more than to play with children.

  ‘Shamil very much loved children, and such a person cannot be evil,’ she wrote, in her own – disappointingly uninformative – memoirs. ‘On Shamil’s departure, I realized that I had not once remembered his Caucasus cruelties. Nothing made him appear a soul-less, cruel, severe person. On the contrary, from first acquaintance, Shamil inspired sympathy in me. As a consequence I discovered that in this highlander’s wild nature was hidden a divine spark of love for his neighbour.’

  But, for these early months in Kaluga, Shamil was not happy. He hid it well, but he desperately missed his family. He worried that Shuanat, now she was back among her own people, might return to Christianity and be torn away from him. He should have trusted his beloved wife, who would have stayed with him through more than a few months’ forced separation, but it worried away at him. Other perceived slights from his past now rose up and concerned him too.

  He had a particular dislike for the Turks, since the sultan never wrote him a letter to ask how he was, and he expressed hatred for Daniel-Sultan, one of his former allies who had deserted him.

  But in mid-January 1860 his depression vanished.

  A rumbling from outside the window showed that a wagon was arriving. A messenger entered the receiving room, asking the imam what he would like done with his books. Most of his library, which he had lost in the last humiliating retreat to Gunib, had been recovered and here it was, ready for him to read again. The imam was delighted, and then overjoyed when he heard that his family was close behind. He clearly struggled to follow his own rule of hiding his feelings, and trembled with impatience before mastering himself. He also failed to stop himself criticizing a servant and swore at Hajio for only giving a 30-kopeck tip to the messenger. The bringer of such news deserved gold, Shamil said.

  First up the stairs came Muhammad-Sheffi, Shamil’s youngest son. The imam walked to the head of the stairs to meet him, then reconsidered and went back to sit at the table, adopting an expression of indifference. His son, on entering the room, also looked like he wished to embrace his father, but instead calmly walked up and kissed his hand.

  They prayed together while the remaining carriages arrived.

  In quick succession entered Gazi-Muhammad, Shamil’s oldest son, followed by the imam’s oldest son-in-law (also, as it happened, the brother of his senior wife, the brother of Shamil’s other son-in-law, and the son of the imam’s spiritual leader). Then the women arrived, and stepped out of their carriages into the snow. The family went upstairs, kissed the imam’s hand and prayed, before retreating upstairs for a week.

  Shamil was no doubt relieved that his favourite wife, Shuanat, had come back to him, but the rest of the family were less pleased that the senior wife, Zeidat, had done so. Hajio had already, rather disloyally, suggested that it would not be a bad idea if someone thought of converting Zeidat to Christianity and leaving her in the Caucasus.

  For now that Shamil’s bossy senior wife was in Kaluga, life would be anything but relaxing. Politics, personal dislike and petty viciousness would transform the three-storey brick-and-stucco mansion into a little nest of problems.

  Zeidat carried a host of political issues with her. No one had much of a good word to say for her, but that may well be because Runovsky’s informants – Gazi-Muhammad, Hajio, Muhammad-Sheffi – were all in the opposing faction. They felt that Zeidat exploited her position as senior wife to make Shuanat’s position hell, and to squeeze the rest of them out of any position of responsibility.

  The third wife, Aminat, who had so loved the Georgian princesses, had been divorced and was nowhere to be seen. Most accounts hold that she was divorced for being infertile, but Hajio said she had been sent away because she was too mischievous. Her habit of making jokes against her older rival had backfired, and Zeidat had forc
ed Shamil to dispense with her.

  Shamil’s sons’ main ground of complaint against Zeidat was that, though their sisters – the children of Fatimat, a now dead wife – had been due to marry two of the imam’s chief lieutenants in solid and sensible dynastic marriages, Zeidat, keen to increase her own influence, had forced the imam to marry the two girls to her own brothers. These brothers were hated by Shamil’s sons, who were jealous of the weight they carried as the sons of Shamil’s spiritual adviser.

  By this stage, the three-storey building contained, besides Shamil, his two wives, his two sons, his five daughters, one granddaughter, his two sons-in-law, one daughter-in-law, a nanny, the nanny’s son, a translator, a servant, two companions for his sons, a seventeen-year-old captured Ingush girl whose position was uncertain and a random Afghan dervish who seems to have adopted Shamil but to have served no discernible purpose.

  The Afghan, who was an ally of Zeidat’s, was engaged in lengthy and unsuccessful attempts to persuade Runovsky to give him a pension for unspecified services to Russia, related to the time of Shamil’s surrender.

  With so many people in such close proximity, it is unsurprising that conditions were insanitary. By June 1860, Abdurakhman – Shamil’s son-in-law, one of Zeidat’s brothers – had contracted a painful and irritating rash and Runovsky called in a doctor to treat him. The doctor advised him to wash more, and to change his underclothes more frequently, but Abdurakhman refused to, saying such things were unnecessary.

  Runovsky, scared of contagion and angry that the young man risked infecting the whole household with his refusal to treat his rash, then declined to shake his hand. Abdurakhman exploited his connections, via his sister, and Shamil stopped speaking to Runovsky for a while.

  It was a difficult game for Runovsky to play, since he was ever mindful of his order not to interfere with Shamil’s family life.

  Gazi-Muhammad returned to fetch his wife in the summer of 1860, leaving Abdurakhman in charge of the household. As a result, Shuanat and Muhammad-Sheffi did not receive money for food or medicine, and Runovsky was forced to subsidize them from his own pocket. Shamil, under the influence of his wife’s family, demanded an oven be installed on the top floor and even rejected food cooked by Christians.

  The situation looked like it could not get much worse, but in fact more trouble was around the corner.

  Gazi-Muhammad’s wife Keremet was the daughter of Daniel-Sultan, a lieutenant of Shamil’s who the family believed had betrayed the cause. Shamil also – despite Runovsky’s insistence that it was not the case – believed that Keremet had sent spies to help the Russians.

  Shamil refused to live in one place with his daughter-in-law, while Keremet herself refused to live in the same house as Zeidat. A new house had to be found.

  The tensions were surely heightened by the extreme boredom of their existence. They had nothing to do but scheme and walk, and – in winter – they could not even sit on the banks of the Oka and watch the river flow. The men of the family, used to ruling a country and waging war, suddenly had nothing to do, while the women were unable to go outside, fearful of being seen by infidels.

  From Runovsky’s account, it is clear that time passed almost imperceptibly, with feuds simmering for months and years. Abdurakhman also wrote an account of their life and completely blocked out their time in Kaluga, except for mentioning two visits that Runovsky organized to local factories. In his account, you get the impression the visits came on consecutive days, whereas from the diary it is clear they were seven months apart. It is terrible to think of these energetic and resourceful people reduced to squabbling and visiting sugar plants.

  ‘This factory was just the same as the paper factory: wheels, ropes and boilers. There was no difference, except that this was significantly dirtier than the paper factory,’ wrote Abdurakhman. Runovsky noted that Shamil refused henceforth to take sugar in his tea after seeing the dirt in the factory.

  While this scheming and visiting was going on all around, Shamil studied his books and prepared for death. He arranged his room on the top floor so all his texts were accessible from where he sat, and he spent days sitting down and scrutinizing the scriptures. At one point, the doctor even told him he must take more exercise or risk serious problems with his legs.

  ‘In our books it is written that the human span is limited by the Lord to sixty years. Only a few people live more than sixty years. Prophet Muhammad lived to sixty. Gazi-Muhammad [the first imam] died before this age. I also do not have long to live. Therefore, now I must think as much as I can about what will happen after my death. All the details of this are written in my books, and apart from that there are so many good things that the more I read the more I want to read,’ Shamil told Runovsky in October 1860.

  But such a life of indolence was not enough for some of the younger men. Hajio and Muhammad-Sheffi in particular delighted in going into Kaluga society. Shamil’s youngest son learned Russian very quickly, and Hajio also learned enough to compliment a lady on her looks.

  Shamil only went to such parties rarely, but on one evening he attended a ball at the house of a local notable called Fyodor Shchukin, of whom he became very fond. He sat throughout the party with his host’s young son on his knee, smiling and looking happy despite the music, the dancing and the ladies showing a lot of chest – all things that his strict personal code disapproved of. The revellers did not return home until two in the morning, and Shamil said he had had a good time.

  ‘Thanks be to Allah, the ceiling did not fall on us, and we are still whole and unharmed,’ said Hajio, with a degree of sarcasm that appears to have shocked even himself.

  Shamil just looked at him steadily, with the light of the moon falling on his face and making him appear very imposing. Hajio shrivelled under the gaze and from then on the imam did not go out in the evenings, and devoted himself to his books.

  Among all this chaos, the imam still found time to tell Runovsky about the people he used to rule, the laws he imposed, and the system he created. There are long sections in the diary detailing precise legal measures that Shamil used, and listing the lieutenants that he most relied upon.

  He was brutally honest about what he thought were the qualities of his former subjects, and reserved particular bile for the mountain Chechens. His assessment of their baseness, in fact, would have been shocking in the mouth of a Russian leader, let alone their deposed ruler.

  He said that until he imposed Islamic law on the people of Tadburty – one of the regions of mountain Chechnya – they had lived by a widespread belief that illegitimate children were of greater value than legitimate ones. They would kidnap each other’s wives and daughters and hold them as hostages – something that was more than acceptable to the wives themselves, who would gladly ‘bring forth to the world heroes and valiant warriors’ by having illegitimate children by their captors.

  The mountain Chechens, according to the imam, lived in five-storey towers, with the livestock at the bottom, then the stores, then the family, then the family’s property, and finally the kidnapped women at the top. In smaller towers the women were often kept alongside the legal family (‘the sense of shame not being known to these degenerates of humanity’). Shamil had, he said, managed to impose Islamic rules on them, and to demolish many of their towers, but not without years of effort.

  ‘There is nothing worse than this trash in the whole world. The Russians should say thank you to me that I corrected them a little. Without this, you would have only one way to deal with them: shoot them to the last man, as is done with harmful animals. In fact, I did not just break the people of Tadburty, but those of Shatoi and Ichkeria too. I did not fight them for their loyalty to the Russians. You know they never had that. I did it for their nasty character, and their inclination to theft and banditry. I am speaking the truth, and I am sure that you will now fight them, not for their loyalty to me, but for the same inclination to banditry, which they do not want to abandon,’ the imam said, simply.

&
nbsp; ‘I tell the truth that in softening the character of the highlanders I employed harsh measures. A lot of people were killed at my orders, but there was no other way to carry on. There is no other means for this people. If you had been in my place, you would have done the same thing, and I am not scared of answering for it before God.’

  Whenever someone passed through – and all Russian officers passing through Kaluga had a standing order to call on Shamil to pay their respects – and asked if he had any messages for the Caucasus, Shamil always asked him to tell his former followers that he was happy and comfortable in captivity. He also never missed an opportunity to tell Russian listeners of his gratitude to the tsar.

  And the surprise that visitors might feel hearing these comments was counteracted on one occasion when soldiers from the nearby garrison who had been prisoners of war with Shamil, and forced to work as slaves, asked if they could visit him. The conditions endured by captive soldiers were proverbially uncomfortable and were one of the greatest charges levelled against Shamil during the war.

  To Runovsky’s surprise, though, the visiting soldiers chatted warmly with the imam about conditions in the mountains, and then, on leaving, one of them bent down and kissed his hand.

  ‘Why did you kiss his hand?’ asked Runovsky afterwards. ‘In the mountains maybe you had to do this, but here, why did you do it?’

  ‘Your eminence, we did not have to kiss Shamil’s hand. We do it from the heart,’ the soldier replied.

  ‘He is a good man. The only prisoners who lived well were those where Shamil lived or those in places where he passed through. It was forbidden to complain about our bosses, but it happened, and if an appeal got through to him then he would take the prisoner away and keep him at his own place, and even punish the guilty party.’

  Runovsky was surprised by the warmth of the former captive’s praise for the imam.