HISTORY: MARY RUSSELLreviews Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the CaucasusBy Oliver Bullough Allen Lane, 496pp, £25
‘THE RISING SUN had burned off the fog and, as we topped the long ridge, the mountains suddenly loomed up to the left of us, impossibly grand in the pink light of the morning. There was Kazbek, with its sloped shoulders like a monk in white . . . And that solid loom on the horizon was Elbrus, the double-headed giant of the central Caucasus, emblem of the land of the mountain Turks.”
In his book Let Our Fame Be Great, Oliver Bullough offers this picture of the majestic Caucasus mountains though it appears not at the beginning of the book but on the penultimate page, as his tribute to the many highland peoples who, for hundreds of years, lived in the shadow of the mountains and who are now little more than shadows themselves, victims of forced marches, political and economic displacement and genocide – all crimes perpetrated against them by both Czarist and Soviet Russia.
His story starts with the Circassians, confirming our stereotype image of blond and blue-eyed women for sale in the markets of Istanbul, the men fierce, daredevil fighters, armed, literally, to the teeth.
In his search for what is left of their communities, Bullough travelled through Kosovo, Turkey, Israel and finally to the Caucasus themselves from where the diaspora began. It was here that the last remnants of Genghis Khan’s followers, the nomadic Nogai, stood in the way of Catherine the Great’s plans to expand into the Crimea and beyond.
In 1783, the Russians laid on a feast for the Nogai who, after consuming 500 barrels of vodka, were happy to swear allegiance to the Empress. No sooner had they done so, however, than her generals started driving them off their land, confiscating their animals and thereby their livelihood so that the Nogai were forced westwards towards the Circassians who occupied the coastal lands along the Black Sea.
Some 80 years later, the Circassians – the Nogai having ceased to exist – were themselves driven off their land by Czar Alexander II and into the sea. It was, says Bullough, “ . . . the first modern genocide on European soil – 50 years before Turkey’s Armenians were butchered, 90 years before the Holocaust”. At the time, something like 300,000 Circassians died of hunger and violence while many drowned seeking safety in over-crowded boats along Turkey’s northern coast.
But though the Nogai and the Circassians were dealt with, there was still a number of awkward highlanders remaining in the Caucasus including – and here we move into the present day – the Chechen.
It is against this background of persecution and extermination that the political and violent struggles in Beslan and Grozni have been enacted, for these places represent what is left of the Chechen homeland so bitterly fought over.
Oliver Bullough is committed to laying before us the sad story of the people of the Caucasus – his extensive and painstaking research is but one sign of this – though his desire to win our sympathy for the Chechen people is so passionate that at times it is counter-productive. His dislike of Russia – Czarist, Soviet and post-Soviet – leads him to make certain incompatible statements. Noting that Russians appear not to know about the sufferings of the Chechen, he wonders if it is “because Russians themselves have suffered so terribly that they prefer not to remember the horrors they have imposed on others”. This is not a yardstick he applies to Israel – which he visited to interview some Circassians living there – and which, nevertheless, he describes as a democracy.
I found this account of mountain people especially interesting because of my own experiences of the Svan – the highlanders who live on the other side of the Caucasus, in Georgia. There, the Svan represented the outsider, not least because they never fully took on Christianity in a country that is ardently Christian.
Back on the Russian side of the Caucasus, the religious stumbling block, to Russia, is Islam and within Islam a particular branch of Sufism – the Naqshbandis – which requires strict adherence to Islam. In his book, Bullough includes a couple of photos showing a group chanting and moving towards the trancelike state that characterises Sufism and it’s not hard to see how threatening that might appear to both Czarist and Soviet Russia.
But instructive as all the background history is in this book, it is the author’s involvement in present day events that injects a much-needed burst of vitality. Working as a journalist for Reuters’ Moscow desk, he is there when the gassed victims are carried out into the street following the occupation of the Dubrovka Street theatre. He visits the morgue in which were laid some of the 334 hostages who died in the Beslan school siege. “The smell was stronger here. It almost had a solid presence, and it felt like cheese or sickness in my throat,” he wrote. He interviews a young Chechen woman persuaded by Chechen separatists to act as a suicide bomber and grieves at the grave of his photographer colleague, a cheery Chechen who abhorred violence and who was killed by a bomb in Grozni.
“War is my profession,” a Chechen asylum seeker explains.
Mary Russell's book Please Don't Call it Soviet Georgiais published by Serpent's Tail
