Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘The old government, the landlords and the capitalists have left us as a heritage such browbeaten peoples as the Kirghiz, the Chechens and the Ossets, whose lands served as an object of colonisation by Cossacks and the kulak elements of Russia. These peoples were doomed to incredible suffering and extinction,’ he said.

  ‘The position of the Great-Russian nation, which was the dominant nation, has left its traces even on the Russian Communists, who are unable, or unwilling, to establish closer relations with the toiling native masses, to comprehend their needs, and to help them emerge from their backward and uncivilised state.’

  He promised a new era for the minorities. He held out a hand of friendship to them. From now on, the Chechens and their neighbours would be trusted as full citizens. They would be helped to gain all the wonders of modern civilization.

  ‘We must save the Kirghiz and the Bashkirs and certain of the Gortsi [highlander] tribes from extinction and provide them with necessary land at the expense of the kulak colonisers.’

  It was a clear promise. From now on, the highlanders would live in peace and freedom. The official who made the promise would have plentiful opportunities to see that it was fulfilled, for his name was Joseph Stalin.

  But he had made a giant miscalculation. Hidden within his promise and his pleasant words was a mistaken assumption, which would come back to haunt him when he gained supreme power. No matter what help the Russian communists gave the Chechens, it would not change much. The Chechens did not wish to emerge from their ‘backward and uncivilised state’. In fact, they rather liked it.

  Mazhmudin Samursky, a disillusioned communist from the North Caucasus, put it rather neatly in 1925. The legacy of hatred created in the wars of the nineteenth century was all but unconquerable, he said. Put simply, the Chechens and their neighbours in upland Dagestan did not want to be ruled by Russians, and that was all there was to it.

  ‘Dislike of European civilisation, sanctified by religion, is more difficult to fight than religion itself. It is essential to avoid intimidation which would only confirm the clergy’s preaching that European civilisation was always a weapon of oppression and enslavement of the Eastern peoples,’ he said.

  It is not clear where he had been living for the eight years since the revolution, for the ‘intimidation’ he was so desperate to avoid had been the major method of interaction between Chechens and Russians for most of them.

  In 1919, a Chechen Naqshbandi sheikh, Uzun Haji, declared himself Imam, raised the banner of Shamil once more, and declared holy war on the Russian incomers. Thousands of Muslims trekked to his capital in the mountains of Chechnya, where they danced and prayed and honoured the new leader. He was to die – of natural causes – just after the Red Army entered Chechnya, but his followers resisted the Russians whichever flag they marched under.

  For the Red Army, intoxicated by its own power, came not as a liberator but as a plunderer. It attacked ‘patriarchal traditions and Islam’, it relied on ‘punitive raids, police denunciations, blackmail, settling of private feuds, plunder, confiscation of food supplies and fodder, forced conscription into Red regiments, requisitions and destruction of small trade’. It is hard to think of anything better guaranteed to enrage the Chechens.

  The rebels and the Reds battled in the mountains of Dagestan. Some 10,000 people died on each side, before the last stronghold was seized.

  By the time of Stalin’s speech, the rebels were close to defeat as an organized force, and their last stronghold in Dagestan fell in May 1921.

  For the next two decades, ‘bandits’ continued to haunt the mountains, hidden among the civilian population. They were hunted and sometimes they were caught. More often their civilian sympathizers were persecuted and killed. Stalin’s brave new policy towards the Chechens had never been implemented. Almost every year brought a new sweep against anti-Soviet elements, sometimes whole Red Army regiments were wiped out before order was restored.

  In 1931, by which time Stalin had secured near total control, more than 35,000 Chechens were arrested and most of them shot in a crack-down on religious leaders, nationalists and – ironically, considering what Stalin had said – ‘kulaks’. In 1937, at the start of the truly giant purges, another 14,000 men were arrested, including the entire local Communist Party.

  And what was the crime of these arrested communists? They were guilty of quoting the Bolshevik policy on nationalities and saying that their Russian comrades had to ‘struggle even more resolutely against Great Russian chauvinism, against any oppressive attitude to the Chechens, to strongly and openly defend the necessity of a specially sensitive, specially cautious Russian attitude to a nation that had for decades been exposed to humiliating mockery and has therefore the right to be suspicious of the smallest manifestation of a similar oppressive attitude’.

  The comments were a rephrasing of Stalin’s own speech of 1921. But, sadly, the Chechens were sixteen years too late in making them, and they had signed their own death warrants by doing so. Inevitably – since the purges meant that now even the communists were not safe – more Chechens headed into the mountains, whence they struck out at Soviet targets. The pattern of intimidation and resistance was maintained all the way up to 1944, when Stalin decided to have done with these people. It had taken him twenty-three years to come round and realize – as the tsarist officers, and even Imam Shamil, had done – that inflicting ‘incredible suffering and extinction’, far from being a misguided policy, was the only way a foreign conqueror could impose his will on the Chechens.

  That is not to say that Stalin approved of Imam Shamil. The imam, who had been treated so honourably by his tsarist conquerors, was re-examined by Stalin’s pet historians, who made the belated discovery that he had not been a brave freedom fighter or a religious fanatic, but a foreign agent bent on sabotaging the friendship between the highlanders and the Russians.

  Under Stalin, even the dead were not safe. In 1950, the standard school textbook of the History of the USSR condemned Shamil’s resistance as ‘a reactionary and nationalistic movement in the service of English capital and the Turkish sultan. It was directed against the true interests of the highland peoples.’

  A couple of years later, another historian – N. A. Smirnov – took the counterintuitive position that the mountain peoples had actually been asking Russia for help during the Caucasus wars. ‘They unhesitatingly reposed their trust in the Russians, hoping for protection from Shamil and from encroachment by external foes . . . The policy of severing the Caucasus from Russia was deeply alien and repulsive to the Caucasus peoples.’

  For ordinary Chechens, it was a confusing time.

  Abubakar Utsiev grew up in this world of instability, conflicting policies, irrationality, violence and horror. Born in 1924, he lived in the very heart of the unruly mountains, near Itum-Kale – one of the most inaccessible of all the Chechen villages. For the Soviet government to impose its will on the highlanders in these hills, they had to come in force.

  In 1942, when Utsiev was seventeen, he and his family were driven out of the hills and forced to settle on the plains. When the real deportation came two years later, he was all alone, separated from his relatives and without support or help.

  When the train carrying him arrived in the Akmola region of Kazakhstan, he was just the kind of man chosen first by the collective farm bosses. He was young, he had no dependants, and he would not be a drain on the resources of the village. Consequently, it is something of a surprise that he was bagged by a farm as remote as Krasnaya Polyana – one of three closely connected collective farms – twenty kilometres or so from the tiny steppe town of Balkashino.

  ‘They brought me here on an ox-cart,’ he remembered when I visited him in 2008.

  ‘There was snow and slush. There were children, old people, women crying, dying. You cannot understand. The people had no idea what was happening.’

  He was right. When I arrived in Balkashino, it was literally impossible for me to understand the suf
fering those emigrants faced. The bus I took to get there from the city of Astana had come second-hand from somewhere in northern Europe – its labels were in English and German – and its windows sensibly were not made to open. In the climate of the Baltic countries, where any draught could freeze a passenger, closed windows would probably be a blessing.

  In the flaying sunlight of a Kazakh summer, however, the bus became an oven. The tiniest breeze from the open skylight was as refreshing as a cool drink of water, as I sat and poured with sweat in my squalid seat. I kept falling asleep, then waking as if to a nightmare when the same view kept reappearing outside the window.

  The land could not have been more different to the Caucasus, where the mountains are craggy, or snowy, or wooded, but never boring. This country was featureless. A dead-straight horizon dominated everything, imposing its absolute tyranny on buildings and factories alike. When people flicked by our windows, they looked puny and insubstantial in relation to this single, powerful line dividing the green of the wheat fields from the blue of the sky.

  A telegraph pole, or a tractor, or a barn became the complete focus of the landscape. Strange tricks of perspective and scale could make buildings seem huge or tiny – sometimes both at the same time. At one moment of wakefulness that I remember, a small cluster of huts in the middle of a blank patch of grassland was signposted from the road as a ‘Relaxation Zone’. I could not imagine how it would be possible to relax there. A few minutes further on, we stopped in a village. Its shop bore the label ‘Everything for Everyone’. I wanted to buy some water, but it had run out.

  The Akmola region was the most dreadful of all the terrible destinations for the deported North Caucasus nations. In the five years after 1944, 35 per cent of the Chechen and Ingush deportees, and 49 per cent of the Balkars, sent here died.

  The deportees had no idea what was happening to them. Collective farm bosses treated them with contempt and hatred. KGB files of the period show that the Chechens often responded by refusing to work, or attempting to gain positions of responsibility where they could steal from the state for their own ends. KGB agents went among the population in the run-up to the elections of 1946. Bafflingly – in a manner reminiscent of Russia today – the government of the Soviet Union seemed to genuinely want the electorate to vote for it, even though the election was meaningless and the result rigged.

  The authorities were apparently worried that the deportees would simply refuse en masse to vote, as if that might somehow endanger their legitimacy. Their spying revealed a degree of confusion among the Chechens about the true situation that must have disturbed Soviet officials, who were presumably already paranoid enough now the Cold War was starting.

  ‘I won’t participate in the polling, because the Soviet government did not send us here to live, but to die. I would vote for an Anglo-American government with pleasure, because it would be better than the Soviet,’ said one Chechen man quoted in the KGB documents.

  ‘After the elections we will return to the Caucasus, because England and America will help us restore our state. That is why we will not vote for Soviet candidates, we are going to vote in the Caucasus, for our candidates,’ said another.

  Utsiev was luckier than most. Being alone, he was billeted on local people, who turned out to be kind and looked after him.

  ‘When we arrived, they distributed us among the buildings. I lived with a family, but most people lived in the barracks with the field brigades,’ Utsiev remembered.

  His brother had been in prison when he was deported, while his father was dead, and his mother and sister were sent to a different town. He had no relatives to help him find his way, and could have been forgiven for dropping his head and accepting defeat.

  But he did not do so. He found the support that the Chechens have always found when times are tough: from the Sufis. Akmola became the centre of a Sufi revival. More than twenty groups were active there by the mid-1950s, but the most dramatic focus of all was in Krasnaya Polyana, where a holy man worked alongside Utsiev in the fields.

  ‘In 1946, I managed to find my mother and sister, in Kostanay; I told them to come back with me, because there was a holy Chechen man and I had made friends with him,’ he said.

  ‘I studied under him, and my mother and sister finally moved here in autumn 1948.’

  It was the beginning of an influx of Chechens that has transformed Krasnaya Polyana and the other two collective farms that neighbour it into a little Chechnya in Kazakhstan. Gradually, as the fame of the Sufis spread, so more Chechens moved here, squeezed out the other communities and created their own sanctuary in the midst of oppression.

  Now, as I walked down the dusty main street, between the sky-blue single-storey houses, children with huge dark eyes called out to me in Chechen, then turned giggling to hide their shyness from my gaze. It was just like being in a Chechen village, except for the brutal, flat horizon that overshadowed everything.

  Utsiev would not say the name of the holy man; none of the villagers would, in what seemed to be a mark of respect for his sanctity. But he was called Vis Haji. He was born in 1908, and studied the way of the Sufis in a brotherhood that arrived in the Caucasus around the time of Shamil’s defeat, and which took the Naqshbandis’ place as the movement of choice among tens of thousands of Chechens and Dagestanis.

  Initially, the Qadiri movement – as it was known – had preached non-resistance to the tsars, just like the Naqshbandis had fifty years earlier. But it was a difficult position to maintain in the face of constant oppression, and within a couple of years it too allowed its followers to resist the Russians. Less intellectual than the Naqshbandi, it employed a loud, ecstatic prayer ritual – or zikr – and spread among less educated Chechens who did not have access to the Arabic texts or scriptures. The tsarist authorities, recognizing the power of the loud zikr in welding communities together, banned it. But the Chechens did not care. By the First World War, almost every Chechen or Ingush man was a member of one of the brotherhoods.

  This was an exceptional development. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, official Islam of either a liberal or a strict stripe dominated. But in the Caucasus the mystical Sufi orders absorbed and swept over all other forms.

  Vis Haji was, according to the stories told today, an exceptionally kind man. He would not sanction violence of any kind, or resistance to the state authorities. Believers should do what they are told, he preached, but not initiate cooperation.

  ‘This man did not look for anything, he ate just a little,’ said Utsiev. ‘I studied with him, and learned from him. I looked for no honours, I worked honestly. I have a garden, livestock, and this has been my life’s work.’

  Vis Haji died at dusk on 17 May 1973, and Utsiev assumed his role as the leader of the community. He himself was too modest to say so, but it was clear from how the other men deferred to him that he was now the first man in the village.

  I have a picture of Utsiev on my desk in front of me as I type. He is old now – eighty-four years old if his birth date in his passport is correct – and has the watery eyes and white beard that age brings. His eyes are hooded, but they have an intensity and a focus that seem to bore straight through you as you look at the photograph. Strangely, I do not remember his eyes being like that in the flesh. They were kind and careful, and always checked to see that I had everything I needed.

  For the photographs, he wore a white fur hat, wrapped with the white cloth of a Sufi sheikh – the same cloth that marked out Imam Shamil as a spiritual authority. The rest of the time he wore a little velvet skullcap of the kind typical of Chechnya.

  He is one of just five men left alive who were Vis Haji’s disciples. They are the keepers of the teachings of the holy man, whose life story has become the basis of village legend.

  Abudadar Zagayev, a pale, round 42-year-old and the holy man’s oldest son, told me of a miracle his father had performed when still a child.

  ‘When my father was running along as a child he got a thorn in his foot.
They did not have shoes in those days. This was still when they were in Alkhan Yurt [in Chechnya]. And a friend took the thorn out with his teeth. My father said to him if you live to a hundred you will not lose your teeth. This man died maybe seven or eight years ago and he still had all his teeth. That is a fact,’ he said.

  Lechi Birsanukayev, a local Chechen who had introduced me to the village, chipped in with a tale of his own. He said that Vis Haji had known the Koran intuitively, despite not having studied it.

  ‘A few mullahs got together who knew the Koran and wanted to know what his father had, how he could get all these people together. His father said he could not read the Koran, he did not know Arabic, but everything he told them was in the Koran, when translated it was the same as the Koran,’ he said.

  Vis Haji was not disliked by the authorities, who probably liked the non-resistance doctrine that he preached, and individual state officials even respected him, according to the Chechens in Krasnaya Polyana today.

  ‘There was a chairman of the collective farm, he was a Russian called Anatoly Popov who would not even smoke in front of the holy man, even though he was older than him. He earned their respect through his pure Muslim ideology. You cannot steal, you cannot cheat, you must be clean,’ said Birsanukayev.

  But that is not to say that Vis Haji preached collaboration with the Soviets. On the contrary, he believed everything should be approached in the same spirit of non-participation. He would not support the government, and he would not oppose it. He was indifferent to it. Perhaps his doctrine was an early expression of the Russian dissident mantra: ‘Live as if you lived in a free country’.

  ‘Even if a relative has been killed you have no right to interfere,’ said Zagayev. ‘One time three men escaped from prison and a person here wanted to turn them in but my father said he should not do this, they are saving their own souls and it is up to them.’