Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘He was good, your eminence. In a word, he had a heart. He doesn’t believe in Christ, but he’s a good man.’

  Exchanges such as this never ceased to delight Runovsky, who recorded them faithfully in his diary. Often Shamil’s replies – like his comment about Kaluga resembling Chechnya – seemed to have a stock quality. They appear in almost identical forms in several different memoirs. He praises the tsar, he praises Russia, he praises his house. But on one occasion Runovsky asked him for his opinion about Russia as a whole, about St Petersburg and Kaluga, and the people he met.

  The question seemed to flummox the imam, who clearly had not expected it. Runovsky said he could wait and prepare an answer if he preferred, and that he should not be shy of saying negative things. But no, he had not understood Shamil’s pause. The imam was once again getting the words he wanted to say just right.

  ‘Now I understand what my son Jamal-Edin died of,’ he said at last.

  Like many of Shamil’s comments, it gains more meanings the more you think about it. Maybe he meant he could understand why his son had fallen in love with Russia, since he had too. Or maybe he meant that a Russian – living in the conditions of their life in Kaluga – could never survive the harsh life of the mountains.

  I think he meant both of those things, but his main meaning – in my opinion – was that the gulf between Russians, in whose number he included his son, and highlanders was so wide that there could be no true mutual understanding.

  His son pined away in the alien conditions of the mountains, just like he was pining away amid the dinner dances, petty intrigues and mansions of Kaluga.

  23.

  People Should Not Return Ever

  In May 1860, Shamil received a guest – Muhammad-Emin, his envoy to the Circassians, former lieutenant and friend. Muhammad-Emin led the Circassians before and during the Crimean War, but faced obstacle after obstacle in the Turkish political scene, which limited his ability to take the fight to the Russians.

  When Shamil surrendered, he appealed to his comrade-in-arms to give in also. Muhammad-Emin did so, and he too was received in St Petersburg.

  In May that year then, the two friends met for the first time in thirteen years.

  It was a funny encounter, similar – from the way Runovsky described it – to any meeting between old and close friends who have not seen each other for a long time. During the three days of Muhammad-Emin’s stay in Kaluga, the two old men reminisced about the war and filled each other in on the years when they had been at opposite ends of the mountains.

  The customs of the Abadzekhs – the Circassian tribe that Muhammad-Emin led – were a particular source of amusement for them. When Shamil and his sons heard that an Abadzekh man could not visit his wife during the daylight hours, they fell about with mirth.

  ‘Imagine having to go secretly to one’s own wife,’ one of the group said to much laughter.

  The laughter reached new heights when Muhammad-Emin told the gathering about how the Abadzekhs count. He said that five, for the Abadzekhs, is ‘t’pfu’, which was too close to the sound of someone spitting for the roomful to take it seriously. In a complex multi-linguistic joke, they started then using the word ‘five’ in one of the other Caucasus languages to express disgust with something. ‘Abadzekh’ rapidly became a synonym for ‘bad’, which delighted the group.

  ‘Abadzekh-woman: five!’ and ‘Abadzekh-horse: five!’ managed to amuse even Shamil, who joined in with a joke of his own, describing a drunkard visible through the window as an ‘Abadzekh man’.

  The picture is irresistibly reminiscent of a group of old empire hands, who served in Nigeria say, or India, getting together to make desperately politically incorrect jokes about the locals and about themselves, with the easy familiarity of old friendship.

  But sadly they would never be able to do so again, for Muhammad-Emin was leaving for Turkey, going into an exile from which he would never return. At least he would not be lonely there, however, for increasing numbers of his fellow countrymen would be leaving soon too.

  This was not the desperate rush into exile of the Circassians, whose national collapse drove them onto overloaded boats and to almost total destruction. It was a slower process whereby religious leaders and former lieutenants of Shamil decided they did not want to be ruled by non-believers, and that the Ottoman Empire – which was headed after all by the sultan, who, as caliph, was nominally head of all Muslims – was their natural home.

  Shamil’s son Gazi-Muhammad, on returning from a trip to the Caucasus in late 1861, told Runovsky that blood feuds – repressed under Shamil, who believed only the criminal should pay for a crime, not his family – had made a spectacular resurgence. He said of the 16,000 households in Chechnya, as many as 600 were in a state of blood feud of some kind. That is, almost 4 per cent of the whole population.

  Shamil had recommended to the Russians that they crack down hard on his former subjects to prevent their reverting to their old lawless ways. ‘Now, they are like sheep,’ he had said. ‘Wherever you drive them, they will go without objection. When they have looked about them, they will be harder to cope with.’

  The Russians were paying the price for letting the tribesmen ‘look about them’.

  An intrepid British traveller ventured into Dagestan in 1861, perhaps attempting to blaze a trail for mass tourism, or perhaps driven only by a desire for adventure. He wandered right across Shamil’s old domains. He recorded that even in Georgia it was considered unsafe to venture out of the house after dark, and the Dagestan he described was a land of constant upheaval.

  One story he told was about the destruction of a group of Russian soldiers who had gone fishing.

  ‘The Russians were all fine strong men, and though they were soon overpowered by numbers, made a determined resistance. But it was a hopeless fight, six of them were almost cut in pieces by the terrible khangiars [swords], the seventh rushed into the water and gained the opposite bank, and escaped by concealing himself in the underwood.’

  The survivor managed to creep back towards the army camp. He ‘staggered, naked, though the freezing night, up a difficult path to a spot whence he might perhaps even see the tents of his comrades – a few yards further and he might have lived – but though his brave heart had not failed him, cold and loss of blood dragged him down.’

  It is clear from this account, and from others, that the land was far from calm and, as Gazi-Muhammad noted, the targets for the attacks were not only Russians but often those who, in Shamil’s service, had been brutal in crushing the liberties of their countrymen. Such men, scared of revenge, had begun gathering up their belongings and leaving for the Ottoman Empire. Daniel-Sultan, Shamil’s friend-turned-sworn-enemy, was one of them and many others went with him.

  Such men genuinely could not reconcile themselves to what even an optimist knew must be the final conquest of their homeland by Russia. Among them, perversely, was Musa Kundukhov, the most prominent Caucasus tribesman in the Russian service.

  Born in 1818 to a Muslim Ossetian family, Kundukhov was given while just a boy as a hostage to the Russians. It was standard practice for young highlanders – like Jamal-Edin – to be taken to St Petersburg or Moscow and there enrolled in a military academy, where they would learn the virtues of a Russian officer. The idea was an ingenious one. Their families would be too scared to rebel, since their son could pay the price, while the son and with him the new generation of potential rebels would be russified and thus less likely to reject the tsar.

  Obviously, as in the case of Jamal-Edin, it did not always work in quelling their parents’ rebellions. But, from the Russians’ perspective, the case of Musa Kundukhov was more successful. He became a resourceful and respected officer, rising to be a general and military governor of Chechnya.

  His service was never straightforward, however, since he lacked the accepting spirit of a young Russian aristocrat. Aged just nineteen, he was an interpreter for the tsar on his tour of the Caucasus, and – h
e later said – this insight into the governing style of the Russians left him disillusioned with their supposed civilizing mission. The tsar, according to Kundukhov, treated a Chechen delegation arrogantly, calling them ungrateful, and ruining any hopes of winning their trust and support.

  Tsar Nikolai relied on the blunt instrument of General Pullo – who is famous above all for the inflammatory remark that ‘now we have taken away their arms, we have only to take away their women’s trousers’ – to keep the Chechens intimidated, with disastrous results.

  ‘I consider that it would be quite correct to name as the chief cause of the past twenty-five years’ cruel struggle, i.e. the rising of the entire Eastern Caucasus, and the unlimited power there and in Chechnya of Shamil – the deaf ear Nikolai turned to the just petitions of the peaceable mountaineers into whom, instead of fear, he instilled the hatefulness of their position and strong enmity to himself,’ Kundukhov wrote in his memoirs, which were published after his death.

  He had personal experience of that hatred since two of his brothers rejected Russia, and fought alongside Shamil. Kundukhov, although he stayed in the Russian service, did not accept Russian values. He still engaged in blood feuds and, in one encounter, he shot dead a treacherous Chechen who dared to walk through society with his head held high.

  He served in Poland – then a Russian province – and helped suppress the 1848 Hungarian revolution, which had shaken Vienna’s power over central Europe. Although he declined to serve against Shamil, he bemoaned the advance of puritanical Islam in his homeland, and felt that both Shamil and the tsar brought nothing good.

  ‘Every day, every hour of the day, in all the villages, the hapless inhabitants were waiting, gun in hand, for the onslaught of the foe who came after them with fire and the sword. And in the mosques, they prayed, to make removed and far from them the fear of death and so to steel themselves for unyielding resistance,’ he wrote of a visit to the Caucasus in 1848, when he had attempted peace negotiations with Shamil.

  ‘The usual folk songs have been replaced by this: “There is no God but God. O, God, we have no one to whom we can turn for help, no one whom we can trust, in thee only we put our trust. To thee only we pray. Save us from tyranny”,’ he added.

  He was clearly no fanatic, and he had equal condemnation for Shamil’s methods as well as for the cruelty and corruption with which Russia ruled the Caucasus after its victory. In 1860, after Shamil’s surrender, he was made head of the Chechen district, which he attempted to govern fairly. He went round the villages, promising them that their lands would not be taken away from them, that they could be governed under their own laws, and that they would not be conscripted into the Russian army. But, shortly after he made these promises, the government decided to break them, by giving some of the Chechens’ land to Cossacks. Kundukhov resented being made into a liar, and was furious.

  This is not to say that he was a gentle man. He was merciless in his pursuit of those of Shamil’s lieutenants who had not surrendered with their chief. A Chechen called Baisungur, for example, held out in the remotest parts of Chechnya and was the target of Kundukhov’s ruthless military skills until his capture in 1860.

  ‘On the land of Benoi, neither a single [person] who has not submitted, nor a single house, has remained. All the food stores have been destroyed,’ he wrote in a report in January that year.

  But he strongly objected to non-rebellious highlanders being punished along with the rebels. The government’s plans to move peoples en masse into the interior of the country to make sure they would never rebel again particularly enraged him. Eventually, after a series of tyrannical actions of this kind, which convinced him that the Russians intended no good for the Caucasus, he decided to leave. He began to circulate among elders, persuading them of his plan, telling them that without a homeland the Muslims of the Caucasus risked becoming just another wandering people like the Jews of the Russian empire.

  ‘These unhappy Jews do not have their own fatherland, they do not have anywhere to live, where they can be proud of themselves. This is why these unhappy people have been deprived of human dignity, why they have to live and work under the oppression of the people on whose territory they live,’ he said.

  He told the elders he spoke to that he did not believe his descendants would forgive him for having stayed in a land that had been conquered.

  ‘Having looked at the desolation that is our fatherland, I find it unbearable, the air seems unbreathable, and this is why we have a duty, in the presence of two evils, to choose the lesser.’

  His speeches found a receptive audience, and he knew he had a destination, having already visited Turkey, and found the government there willing to accept 5,000 families from the Caucasus every year.

  He was not as successful in gathering emigrants as he had hoped, but he still collected a caravan of several thousand families – mainly Chechens and Ossetians – and received money from the government to pay for their transport expenses. The first caravan to depart in early summer included his family and his parents. They crossed over the chain of the mountains, and passed down to Tbilisi. Other caravans came later, until in July he too – having sold his lands, his orchard and his house – left his home for the last time and headed for the border.

  Perhaps he believed he would return home one day, but he never did. He was just one more Caucasus emigrant to Turkey, albeit a distinguished one, and his convoy of families was dispersed around the country, where they could swell the Turkish labouring and military classes.

  ‘I addressed to the Almighty an ardent prayer, asking him to give me the strength to return at the head of Turkish regular soldiers to deliver the Caucasus from this abhorrent government,’ he wrote later, describing how he crossed the border.

  As it happened, the first half of his prayer was granted. Turkey and Russia went to war again in 1877 – 8 – a war that lost the Turks their hold over the Balkans, and their last lands in the south Caucasus. Kundukhov led a cavalry division against his former comrades-in-arms. But, once again, the Turkish army was trounced on the battlefield, and the last conceivable chance of winning independence back for the Caucasus went with it.

  The war was accompanied by an uprising in Chechnya and Dagestan. The rebels were widely popular, and for a time they held the mountainous districts. Russian repressions, which typically involved burning the villages of mutineers and executing prisoners, succeeded only in inspiring further uprisings. But the Russians were merciless, forcing out civilians and destroying houses. Once more, the rebels were isolated in Dagestan, where they were surrounded, betrayed and captured. By November 1877, the leaders were in jail and in March the next year most of them were executed.

  The Russians knew what to do now. The highlanders had rebelled too many times.

  ‘Our aim should be to pluck out all the untrustworthy people from the villages and to exile them and their families to Russia for ever. The taking of hostages should be merely a temporary measure. In general [we should] pluck out as many as possible and in the most oppressive manner. The entire population of Benoy and Zandak should be exiled to Siberia and if these rascals refuse, they should all be exterminated in the winter like cockroaches and starved to death,’ wrote Adjutant-General Svistunov to his deputy.

  ‘Under no pretext should they be untied on their way and in case of the smallest resistance by anyone, beat them all up. I must add: my strong wish is for the latter possibility to happen.’

  Thousands of Chechens and Dagestanis were sent to Russia, where many of them simply pined to death. On their being pardoned three years later – when Tsar Alexander III took the throne in 1881 after his father’s assassination – many of them left their homeland for ever, to become the second wave of emigration to the Ottoman Empire.

  The Turkish village of Guneykoy, in the Yalova region south of Istanbul, was founded by such emigrants. At their head was the Naqshbandi sheikh Muhammad Madani, who was in his early sixties when he left his homeland in 1896. In trut
h, the Naqshbandi order had struggled to retain its pre-eminent position in society after Shamil’s surrender and he was just one of many leaders who chose to start a new life abroad.

  According to stories told in the village to this day, Muhammad Madani, who was born in one of the villages near Gunib where Shamil made his last stand, was offered a place to live in Istanbul. He refused it, telling the government he would seek his own residence.

  The village is a cluster of red roofs around a white mosque, all overshadowed by wooded hills. This was a wasteland of forests and rocks until the Dagestanis came – attracted by a fresh water spring, which, according to local legend, sprang out of the rock at Muhammad Madani’s call. Ties to Dagestan are still strong. The older generation speak Avar among themselves, and the women still wear the baggy pantaloons of the Caucasus. At least ten pictures of Imam Shamil adorn the walls of the ‘Barkala’ (‘thanks’ in Avar) café, along with the green Chechen flag, with its horizontal red and white stripes.

  Muhammad Madani is the subject of dozens of local legends, which tell of his miracles and wisdom. According to one account, he was taken to Siberia after the failed uprising, but no amount of chains could contain him and he would always appear in the prison yard unencumbered and unmarked, where he would publicly pray, sit or read. Eventually, his Russian jailers were forced to let him go, since his imprisonment was making them a laughing stock.

  I wondered if that was a garbled version of the real story, in which the Russian government was forced to allow the exiled Dagestanis to go home or to Turkey just to keep them alive. Many of the highlanders moved to the plains simply died of homesickness and disease. Some 429 of the 1,625 Dagestanis settled in the Novgorod region died in the first few months after their arrival. Russian officials may have endorsed cruelty to the highlanders at a distance, but they could not watch these poor people dropping at such a rate.

  So, the tsar let them leave his realm. Muhammad Madani brought the first group of emigrants to the Turkish village he founded, and was then joined by another group under a second Naqshbandi sheikh, called Serafuddin, who was to become his son-in-law and principal follower.