Few if any of these Russian holidaymakers would know at what cost their country had purchased the clean air and sun of the south. The Circassians still remember; as do the Chechens, the mountain Turks, the Ingush and the others. But the Russians have not preserved the memory of their wars for the Caucasus, and the ghosts of their victims will haunt them till they do.
Sources
As is obvious from the text, much of this book is based on personal reminiscences from people I met during my travels. Almost all of them agreed to be identified, and I am very grateful to them for it.
I also used books in Russian, English and French (many of which were only available in the British Library, which provided an excellent service for which I am very grateful) as sources of ideas and information.
The best overall book for the conquest of the Caucasus and for a general history of the region is John F. Baddeley’s Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, which, although it was published in 1908, is still superb. The more recent Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, by Moshe Gammar (London, 1994), is also excellent.
Sadly, both of these books largely ignore the Circassian war, and the mass deportation that followed it. This has never been properly dealt with by historians.
Charles King attempted the impossible in his The Ghost of Freedom, a History of the Caucasus (Oxford, 2008). His book is interesting, and useful, but the lack of detail is sometimes infuriating.
An excellent atlas of the history, demographics and geography of the Caucasus was written by Artur Tsutsiyev and published in Moscow in 2006 under the name Atlas etnopoliticheskoi istorii kavkaza(Atlas of the Ethnopolitical History of the Caucasus).
More specifically, here are the main sources used for each section of the book.
1783
The main source for this section is the imperial Russian historian Vasily Potto’s Kavkazskaya Voina v otdelnykh ocherkakh, epizodakh, legendakh i biografiyakh(The Caucasus War in Separate Essays, Episodes, Legends and Biographies, published in 1889), which was also used as a source by Baddeley.
Baddeley, like seemingly all writers in English, wrongly located the battle at the town of Yeisk, rather than at Yei Ukreplenie nearby. Some other details on the Nogais are taken from Vorontsov, Osnovatel goroda Yeiska (Vorontsov, the Founder of the City of Yeisk) (Yeisk, 2006) by Yevgeny Kotenko; from Philip Longworth’s Russia’s Empires(London, 2006); and from Russia’s Steppe Frontier by Mikhail Khodarkovsky (Bloomington, Ind., 2004).
The ‘English traveller’ was J. A. Longworth in the second volume of his A Year among the Circassians(London, 1840, and reissued in facsimile by Elibron Classics in 2005), which is an invaluable account of how the Circassians lived before their destruction.
The ‘let our fame be great’ story is from the magnificent selection of Caucasus folk tales compiled and translated by John Colarusso, under the title Nart Sagas from the Caucasus (Princeton, NJ, 2002).
1864
Chapters 1 and 2
There has been very little research into the Circassian diaspora, but useful articles include ‘Some Notes on the Settlement of Northern Caucasians in Eastern Anatolia’ by Georgy Chochiev (Journal of Asian History, 40/1, 2006) and ‘Some Aspects of the Social Integration of the North CaucasianImmigrants’, alsobyGeorgyChochiev,http://www.circassianworld.com/pdf/G_Chochiev_Immigrants_Applications.pdf.
Chen Bram is probably the best researcher into the subject, and specializes in Israel’s Circassians. He has written ‘Muslim Revivalism and the Emergence of Civic Society, a Case Study of an Israeli-Circassian Community’ (Central Asian Survey, March 2003) and ‘Circassian Re-Emigration to the Caucasus’ (in Roots and Routes: Emigration in a Global Perspective, Jerusalem, 1999). He is also a very interesting lecturer.
The www.circassianworld.com website has a good selection of articles on Circassian subjects, including ‘From Immigrants to Diaspora: Influence of the North Caucasian Diaspora in Turkey’ by Mitat Elikpala; ‘Emigrations from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire: An Analysis in the Light of the New Archival Materials’ by Berat Yildiz; and ‘The First “Circassian Exodus” to the Ottoman Empire (1858 – 1867), and the Ottoman Response, Based on the Accounts of Contemporary British Observers’ by Sarah Rosser-Owen.
The Circassians(Richmond, 2001) by Amjad Jaimoukha is also a useful book, although it is expensive and focused on the Circassians to the exclusion of all context.
Chapter 3
This chapter is primarily based on J. A. Longworth’s journal A Year among the Circassians, as well as on James Stanislaus Bell’s two-volume Journal of a Residence in Circassia (London, 1840, and reissued in facsimile by Elibron Classics in 2005). Edmund Spencer’s Travels in Circassia, Krim Tartary, etc (London, 1838, and reissued in facsimile by Elibron Classics in 2005) was also helpful.
Tornau’s own volume of memoirs, Vospominaniya Kavkazskogo Ofitsera (Memoirs of a Caucasus Officer), was first published in Moscow in 1864, and since 1991 has been printed several more times. John Shelton Curtiss’s The Russian Army under Nicholas I (Durham, NC, 1965) is magnificent.
The Alexandre Dumas anecdote is from Adventures in the Caucasus (published in English in London, 1962). Xavier Hommaire de Hell’s Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, the Caucasus, etc. (London, 1847) was also useful. Nikolai Ivanovich Lorer’s memoirs were published in the Soviet Union as Zapiski Dekabrista (Notes of a Decembrist) in 1931 and are moving and wonderful.
George Leighton Ditson’s Circassia, or a Tour to the Caucasus(New York, 1850) was not very helpful, and neither was G. Poulett Cameron’s Personal Adventures and Excursions in Georgia, Circassia and Russia (London, 1845); nor was Notes of a Half-Pay in Search of Health; or Russia, Circassia and the Crimea in 1839 (London, 1841). I will not be reading any of them again.
David Urquhart has attracted the interest of several historians, but sadly his only biographer has been Gertrude Robinson, whose David Urquhart: Some Chapters in the Life of a Victorian Knight Errant of Justice and Liberty (my version was published in New York in 1970, but it was originally published in 1920) is not a triumph. He is a man who would be a wonderful subject for a proper biography.
Other details can be found in David Urquhart’s England, France, Russia and Turkey (published in 1835); in British Diplomacy as Illustrated in the Affair of the ‘Vixen’ by ‘An old Diplomatic Servant’ (viz. Urquhart), a pamphlet published in 1838; and in a speech by Urquhart published as a pamphlet in 1863 under the title The Flag of Circassia.
‘David Urquhart and the Eastern Question 1833 – 37’ by G. H. Bolsover (The Journal of Modern History, VIII, 1936) was useful, while ‘Urquhart, Ponsonby, and Palmerston’ by Charles Webster (English Historical Review, LXII, 1947) gives the crucial insight that Urquhart was mad. Also interesting is Imagining Circassia: David Urquhart and the Making of North Caucasus Nationalism by Charles King (The Russian Review, vol. 66, issue 2). The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain by John Howes Gleason (Cambridge, Mass., 1950) has an excellent chapter on Urquhart.
Chapter 4
Much of the information on Muhammad-Emin and the Crimean War comes from Longworth’s report in the UK Foreign Office archives in Kew, London. On the slave trade, Dumas’s travel notes and Moritz Wagner’s Travels in Persia, Georgia and Koordistan(London, 1856) were useful, but the best source was Ehud R. Toledano’s The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression (Princeton, NJ, 1982).
Chapter 5
The major sources for this chapter are of course the books themselves: Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time(English translation by Vladimir Nabokov, New York, 2002); Pushkin’s Prisoner in the Caucasus is found in Eugene Onegin and Four Tales from Russia’s Southern Frontier , translated by Roger Clarke (Ware, 2005) and Journey to Arzrum (translated by Birgitta Ingemanson, Ann Arbor, 1974); Bestuzhev’s Ammalat Bek (there is a section in English in Blackwood’s Magazine, published in Edinburgh in May 1843 and available online); Grace Walton’s Schamyl, or the Wild Woman of Circassia (London, 1856); and Alexandre Dumas’s Adven
tures in the Caucasus and The Snow on Shah-Dagh and Ammalet Bey (London, 1899, in a translated form that credits Bestuzhev-Marlinsky).
The best summary of the criticism is Susan Layton’s Russian Literature and Empire (Cambridge, 1994).
Other useful books were Lauren G. Leighton’s Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (Boston, 1975), Lewis Bagby’s Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Russian Byronism (University Park, Pa., 1995), Elaine Feinstein’s Pushkin (London, 1998), Laurence Kelly’s spectacularly good Lermontov: Tragedy in the Caucasus(London, 2003), Harsha Ram’s ‘Pushkin and the Caucasus’ in The Pushkin Handbook (Madison, Wis., 2005) and T. J. Binyon’s Pushkin (London, 2002).
Chapter 6
The ‘extermination alone’ quote is from George Leighton Ditson’s memoirs. This was rather an own goal, since he was attempting to repair the damage done to Russia’s image by other foreign visitors.
The Foreign Office documents are available in the UK government’s record office in Kew, which is a great place full of very helpful people. Arthur de Fonvielle’s account was originally published in the imperial Russian magazine Russky Invalid(Russian Invalid, 1865), but has been reprinted in pamphlet form as Posledny god voiny Cherkesii za nezavisimost 1863 – 1864(The Last Year of Circassia’s War for Independence 1863 – 4). The complete version was published in Kiev in 1991, and the bowdlerized version was published in Nalchik in the same year.
The historical newspaper quotes here, and throughout the book, come from copies held either digitally or on microfilm in the British Library, which is a magnificent institution.
Chapters 7 and 8
There is not much on the modern history of what was once Circassia, but books covering the development of elite and mass tourism include Sochi, stranitsy proshlogo i nastoyashechego (Sochi, Pages of the Past and the Present) (published in 2007 by the Sochi history museum); Bolshoi Sochi(Greater Sochi) by Sergei Shumov and Alexander Andreyev (Moscow, 2008); Kurorty Chernomorya i severnogo kavkaza(Resorts of the Black Sea Coast and the North Caucasus) (published in 1924); as well as modern guidebooks such as 100 Chudes u Chernogo Morya(100 Wonders of the Black Sea) (Krasnodar, 2007).
Chapter 9
Berzegov’s plight has been ignored by mainstream media organizations, but has occasionally been covered by the Regnum news agency and the Caucasian Knot (www.kavkaz.memo.ru) human rights website.
1943 – 4
The best book on the deportations is Robert Conquest’s The Nation Killers (London, 1970). Aleksandr Nekrich’s The Punished Peoples(New York, 1978) also has some good information, as does Anne Applebaum’s magnificent Gulag (London, 2003). Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR by Pavel Polian (Budapest, 2003) has also been useful.
Chapter 10
This chapter is based on the unpublished manuscript U menya byl dom Rodnoi(I Had a Home) by Osman Korkmazov and on my conversations with the author.
Chapter 11
Details in this chapter are taken from some of the many books written about Chechnya. The massacre in the Chechen village of Khaybakh is well described in Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal’s excellent Chechnya: A Small Victorious War(London, 1997). Michaela Pohl’s superb research was published as two papers called ‘It Cannot be That Our Graves Will be Here’ (www.chechnyaadvocacy.org/history/Graves%20-%20MPohl.pdf ) and ‘From the Chechen People’ (http://www.chechnyaadvocacy.org/history/From%20the%20Chechen%20people%20-%20MPohl.pdf ).
Chapter 12
Figures and documents in this chapter are taken from Balkartsy: Vyselenie i Vozvrashchenie(The Balkars: Deportation and Return) by Kh.-A. M. Sabanchiyev (Nalchik, 2008); from Byli soslani navechno(They were Sent Away for Ever) (Nalchik, 2004) by the same author; and from Pravda o Vyselenii balkartsev(The Truth about the Deportation of the Balkars) by D. V. Shabayev (Nalchik, 1992).
Chapter 13
This chapter is based on Douglas Freshfield’s The Exploration of the Caucasus (London, 1896); on his Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan (London, 1869); and on F. C. Grove’s The Frosty Caucasus(London, 1875). The account of the 1829 expedition to Elbrus is from Prince Golitsyn’s Zhizneopisannie Generela ot Kavalerii Emanuelya (Life-Sketches of the Cavalry General Emanuel) (published 1851 and Moscow, 2004).
Credit for the conquest of Elbrus is too often assigned for nationalist reasons. British writers tend to assign it to Freshfield (see From a Tramp’s Wallet: A Life of Douglas William Freshfield by Hervey Fisher (Norfolk, 2001)), whereas Circassians or Russians assign it to a local (such as in Amjad Jaimoukha’s The Circassians). I tried to be fair, and assigned it to neither of them.
The details on turn-of-the-century conditions in the high Caucasus come from J. F. Baddeley’s magnificent two-volume labour of love The Rugged Flanks of the Caucasus (Oxford, 1940), which is full of treasure for anyone interested in the region, and also from Zhilyabi Kalmykov’s very competent Ustanovlenie Russkoi Administratsii v Kabarde i Balkarii(The Establishment of Russian Administration in Kabarda and Balkaria) (Nalchik, 1995).
Chapter 14
The ‘sardonic journalist’ observing the collapse of white rule in southern Russia in 1920 was C. E. Bechhofer, whose In Denikin’s Russia and the Caucasus (London, 1921) is unjustifiably forgotten. Richard Douglas King’s Sergei Kirov and the Struggle for Soviet Power in the Terek Region 1917 – 18 (New York, 1987) was also useful.
Most of the details on Khutai’s life come from conversations with elderly Balkars, but articles from the magazine Balkaria and the website www.balkaria.info were useful pointers towards what questions to ask.
Chapter 15
Most of the detail in this chapter comes from the extraordinary book Cherekskaya Tragediya(The Cherek Tragedy) by K. G. Azamatov, M. O. Temirzhanov, B. B. Temukuev, A. I. Tetuev and I. M. Chechenov (Nalchik, 1994), which cuts through the official versions to detail the facts about the massacre in 1942. I cannot praise this book enough.
To create the narrative of the massacre, I have mixed the conversations I had with survivors with the book’s tales of the Cherek valley massacre, which were gathered from survivors in the early 1990s. The book is now unfindable except with extreme good luck, although parts of it are available in Russian on the internet.
In the absence of the book, O. O. Aishaev’s Genotsida mirnykh zhitelei balkarskikh sel v noyabre-dekabre 1942 goda (The Genocide of the Civilian Residents of Balkar Villages in November to December 1942) (Nalchik, 2007) has a good account of the massacre, and is based on the same materials.
Chapter 16
The information on the deported Balkars comes from Pravda o Vyselenii balkartsev(The Truth about the Deportation of the Balkars), Byli soslani navechno(They were Sent Away for Ever) and from Balkartsy: Vyselenie i vozvrashchenie(The Balkars: Deportation and Return).
Chapter 17
Much of this chapter is based on court documents given to me by Iskhak Kuchukov. Ali Misirov’s tale is detailed in Cherekskaya Tragediya (The Cherek Tragedy), and his acting career is testified to in, among other places, the closing credits of Khrustalyov, Mashinu, the film described in the chapter.
1995
The best general book on relations between the Chechens and the Russian government is Moshe Gammer’s The Lone Wolf and the Bear (Pittsburgh, 2006).
The North Caucasus Barrier, edited by Marie Bennigsen-Broxup (London, 1992), has several articles on different aspects of the mountains, but is perhaps best on the Chechens.
Chapter 18
Several journalists who covered the 1994 – 6 Chechen war wrote books about their experiences. Some of the best of these are Sebastian Smith’s Allah’s Mountains(London, 1998), Gall and de Waal’s Chechnya: A Small Victorious War and Vanora Bennett’s Crying Wolf (London, 1998).
Details on the discrimination suffered by Chechens in pre-1991 Chechnya are from an interesting article in the Central Asian Survey (vol. 10, no. 1/2, 1991).
The collection of Chechen state documents Ternisty Put K Svobode (The Thorny Path to Freedom) wa
s published in Vilnius in 1993.
Some of the details on relations with Russia come from Tony Wood’s Chechnya: A Case for Independence (London, 2007).
The collapse of the Russian state, and the rise of criminal gangs after 1991, is fascinatingly documented in Comrade Criminal(New Haven, Conn., 1995) by Stephen Handelman.
Chapter 19
The details on Peter the Great’s expedition come from Gammer and Baddeley.
The stories from Dagestan were told to me on my travels in the Caucasus. Other anecdotes are taken from Baddeley’s Rugged Flanks of the Caucasus, and from Skazaniya Narodov Dagestana o Kavkazskoi Voine(Sayings of the Peoples of Dagestan about the Caucasus War), which was published in 1997 in Makhachkala under the editorship of M. M. Kurbanov.
Accounts of Sheikh Mansur’s life are very vague. Gammar’s ‘A Preliminary to Decolonising the Historiography of Sheikh Mansur’ (Middle Eastern Studies, 32, 1, January 1996) is a bit incomprehensible, while other accounts are unreliable. The main biography is by ‘Nart’ – supposedly a descendant of Mansur. This was written in 1924, and published in the Central Asian Survey (vol. 10, no. 1/2, 1991). Other details come from the account of the last days of Imam Shamil in Dnevnik Runovskogo(Runovsky’s Diary) in the twelfth tome of the Akty Kavkazskoi Arkheograficheskoi komissii(Acts of the Caucasus Archeographical Commission) (Tbilisi, 1866 onwards).
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