Let Our Fame Be Great Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  PART ONE - The Circassians, 1864

  Chapter 1. - Are You Not a Circassian?

  Chapter 2. - We Share Happiness, We Share Sadness

  Chapter 3. - I Give Thee That Little Bird

  Chapter 4. - Three Hundred Prime-Bodied Circassians

  Chapter 5. - The Caucasus Mountains are Sacred to Me

  Chapter 6. - Extermination Alone Would Keep Them Quiet

  Chapter 7. - A Pear Tree in the Mountains

  Chapter 8. - Here Lived the Circassians

  Chapter 9. - The Circassians Do Not Appear in This List

  PART TWO - The Mountain Turks, 1943 – 4

  Chapter 10. - A Red Gramophone

  Chapter 11. - A Dirty Animal

  Chapter 12. - Three Little Boys

  Chapter 13. - The Double-Headed Mountain

  Chapter 14. - I Always Fought against the Class Enemies

  Chapter 15. - Liquidate the Bandit Group

  Chapter 16. - The ‘Unnation’ was a New Phenomenon

  Chapter 17. - Playing Stalin

  PART THREE - Grozny, 1995

  Chapter 18. - War is War, But to Behave in That Way is Not Right

  Chapter 19. - A Muslim Submissive to the Will of God

  Chapter 20. - The Imam and the Princesses

  Chapter 21. - Fire is Better Than Shame

  Chapter 22. - The Old Man Shamil

  Chapter 23. - People Should Not Return Ever

  Chapter 24. - This is All for the Sake of Allah

  Chapter 25. - Everyone was Scared of Them

  Chapter 26. - My Sons were Killed

  PART FOUR - Beslan, 2004

  Chapter 27. - We Offer You Peace, and the Choice is Up to You

  Chapter 28. - I Cannot Even Raise My Eyes towards Them

  Chapter 29. - It was All for Nothing

  Chapter 30. - The Hard Shackles of Evil

  Chapter 31. - I Have Become No One

  Chapter 32. - There is No Need for This Any More

  Postscript The Boy Who Chose an Orange, Not a Gun

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Author’s Note

  The North Caucasus is an area of great ethnic diversity, with dozens of native languages and dialects, none of which had a written form until the twentieth century.

  As such, for centuries it was only described in the languages of foreigners: Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, Persian, Greek and Latin. These have in turn been passed on to us through English, German and French, all of which have their own ways to transliterate the alphabets used by the others.

  Thus, names are spelt in a bewildering variety of ways. The capital of Abkhazia, for example, can be Sukhumi, Sukhum, Sokhumi, Sukumi, Sookom, Soukum, and that’s before we start on how to spell its name in Abkhaz. Many of these spellings have a political dimension. Anti-communist exiles have often refused to use the Soviet-created Cyrillic system for Caucasus languages, and employ complex Latin-based scripts of their own.

  None of the imposed methods look satisfactory. They are full of superscripted letters, apostrophes, dashes and mysterious marks that convey minute but important varieties of pronunciation. To stick with Abkhaz, a student would need to master fifty-eight consonants – by turns bilabial, labio-dental, alveolar, alveolar-palatal, palato-alveolar, retroflex, velar, uvular and pharyngal, as one classification has it – before he could begin to speak like a native. And Abkhaz is relatively restrained. Neighbouring, but now extinct, Ubykh had eighty consonants.

  The Caucasus traveller and historian John F. Baddeley explained in his epic The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, which was published in 1908, how Dagestan – at the opposite end of the mountain chain – was even more complex.

  ‘The Avar language, like many others in the Caucasus, is extremely difficult of pronunciation to Europeans, in proof of which it may be mentioned that the “tl” so frequently occurring on the map is the only rendering the Russians have been able to find for four different sounds or clicks; while their “k” represents no less than six,’ he wrote.

  While researching this book, I puzzled over how I would fit this complexity into the familiar twenty-six letters of our alphabet. A system could presumably be created to harmonize all the different systems into one, but it would be a lifetime’s work, and I am a journalist, not a linguist.

  My revelation came when visiting the tomb of a Sufi holy man, born in Dagestan, but buried in Turkey. He and his family members were clustered together in an attractive building that doubled as a prayer-hall for pilgrims wishing to visit his grave. His own headstone was written in Arabic script, but three of his descendants had been commemorated in modern Turkey’s Latin alphabet. The name he had passed down to them was spelt, on three adjacent graves, in three different ways: Serafuddin; Serafeddin; Serafetdin.

  I puzzled for a while over how I could manage when even his family could not agree, then decided simply not to bother. If they did not care, it seems perverse to spend too long worrying about it. As a result, I have not even pretended to use a unified system of spelling, but have tried to create a book that is easy to read, in which names do not baffle the reader with clusters of consonants, strange apostrophes and clumps of ugly vowels.

  I come to the Caucasus via the Russian language, so I have used the Russian version for most names, transliterated in the same simple system most British journalists employ. For people in the book who would have written in Arabic (primarily the nineteenth-century leaders of Chechnya and Dagestan), I have used a version of their name closer to Arabic, with the letter ‘j’ instead of the Russian ‘dzh’, for example.

  I have also tried to use the form of spelling most likely to be familiar to readers. For example, I have called the capital of Chechnya Grozny, the Russian version, rather than Dzhokhar, as some separatists insist. In such cases, the decision on which name to use is as much political as linguistic, and I mean no recognition or rejection of the locals’ positions by the choices I have made. I had to call the places something, and came down on the side of familiarity.

  I know some readers will be offended by some of the choices I have made, and will feel I have sided with their opponents. I just hope they will take comfort from the fact that their opponents are almost certain to have been offended by something else in the book.

  On a separate note, I apologize that throughout I have used the word ‘Caucasus’ as a rather clunky adjective as well as a noun: as in ‘Caucasus peoples’; ‘Caucasus wars’; ‘Caucasus cultures’; ‘Caucasus languages’. This at least is not my fault. I blame the German eighteenth-century racist Christoph Meiners, who gave his anthropologist colleague Johann Friedrich Blumenbach the idea to randomly assign the origin of the ‘white’ race to the south Caucasus.

  To this day, the word ‘Caucasian’ remains a racial category and is thus not available to describe things and people actually from the Caucasus, which is extremely annoying.

  Introduction Let Us Live in Freedom

  Russet and gold marshes choke the river Yeya. Its muddy waters merge into the stagnant pools that bubble and ooze through the reeds of its estuary.

  Driving along the causeway from Yeisk towards Azov in a Hungarian-made Icarus bus, I failed to notice that I’d crossed the river at all. Only when the marshes ended, and the bus had climbed the tiny elevation to the steppes proper, did I realize I had passed the site of a battle that doomed the peoples of the Caucasus mountains to two centuries of carnage.

  This muddy land, where Russia stares at Ukraine across the waters of the Azov Sea, is a strange place to l
ook for the gateway to a mountain range, since all around the horizon is a flat line ruled dead-straight against the sky. To the west are the sea’s turgid, grey-brown waters. To the east are the broad steppes that stretch to the Sea of Japan. And here is an in-between land of mud and reeds that struggle to lift themselves out of the water.

  Yet in these marshes, in 1783, Russia opened its path to the south, to the land of the mountains. Here it finally extinguished the power of the steppe nomads that had held it in subjection for so much of its history. The muddy waters swallowed up the last descendants of the terror from the east that – according to Russian folklore – had held it back, kept it backwards and poor. The nomads had ruled the steppes by raiding and skill for as long as Moscow had ruled Russia, but the Muscovites had finally outgrown them. With the horse lords killed, Russia was free to fulfil its destiny: to march to the warm waters of the Black Sea and beyond.

  Above the marshes on the north bank of the river is a tiny village, which still bears the name Yeya Fortress – Yei Ukreplenie – given to it by the advancing Russian army. To this fortress, in early July 1783, came thousands of the families that made up the Nogai horde, the last free descendants of the armies of Genghis Khan in Europe. The Russian General Alexander Suvorov had summoned them to swear allegiance to their new ruler, Catherine the Great, and the steppes were covered by their tents. Over three days of feasting, he cajoled, he persuaded, he charmed and he threatened, until eventually he had the agreement of the Turkic-speaking nomads. They would transfer their loyalty from the defeated Khan of Crimea to the great empress from the north.

  According to the little museum in Yeya Fortress, in the course of the feasting Suvorov treated them to 500 barrels of vodka, 100 bulls and 800 sheep. A picture on the wall shows the scene. Oriental princes in pointed hats, beards and fur-trimmed caftans are interspersed with clean-shaven Russian officers in their full dress uniforms and epaulettes. In the distance, giant cauldrons steam over an open fire, while musicians play for a Russian and a Nogai dancing energetically together.

  The picture is one of friendship and conviviality. On the far right, a Nogai man is upending a jug into his mouth. The white-haired Suvorov himself is raising his glass in toast, while another Russian is embracing a nomad lord, as they all sit on sumptuous carpets spread on the fresh turf.

  Lyudmila, the museum’s director, insisted on showing me the rest of her exhibits. She proudly pointed out jars of sunflower seeds, lentils, maize and wheat from the long-defunct collective farm. Photographs showed happy workers parading down the streets that still bear their communist names: Street of the Second Five-Year Plan, Street of the Soviets. As we looked out of the window, a long-legged girl cycled through the dust of Lenin Street, chased by her squealing little sister.

  On that lazy August afternoon, as flies buzzed in the sunlight and swallows darted in the blue, it seemed nothing bad could ever happen here, as if time had stood still since that merry afternoon in the eighteenth century when Suvorov persuaded the Nogais that their future lay to the north.

  But the picture was deceptive, like a photograph of a rock concert before it is suicide-bombed.

  Suvorov had a surprise for his new friends. After they swore their allegiance, he told them that the first order of their sovereign empress was that they should gather up their belongings, cross the Volga and resettle on the plains south of the Urals. They must retrace the westward journey their forefathers took centuries before and leave Europe behind them. There was no place for headstrong and troublesome nomads on Catherine’s steppes, and Russia’s hard-working and obedient peasants had another use for the black earth, perhaps the richest land in the world, on which they grazed their horses.

  To the nomads, the rule of Crimea – which itself had been annexed by Russia earlier that year – had always been light if felt at all. Government for them was a question of tribute, not of obedience. This order shocked, dismayed and then angered them. The rank and file rose up and killed the leaders who had signed this treacherous pact. Suvorov was suddenly faced not with 6,000 dinner guests, but with 6,000 armed, angry and warlike opponents. They marched on the Yeya Fortress, determined to avenge the insult and secure their lands.

  But Suvorov was ready for them. Perhaps this was the outcome he had wanted all along. As would so often prove the case in the battles with its southern neighbours – the Chechens, the Dagestanis, the Circassians and the other mountain peoples – over the next 200 years, Russia’s disciplined troops could easily destroy any angry mob that charged against them. Reinforcements arrived and pinned the Nogais back against the marshes of the river.

  Where now the rushes whisper to each other, the cows blink against the flies, and the falcons hover, the Nogais were pushed back. Their ranks breaking under the strain, they began to sink into the mud, to feel the helplessness of their position. Their sudden attack had failed, and now they were trapped.

  Even the great nineteenth-century Russian historian of the Caucasus, Vasily Potto, whose five volumes trumpet the achievements of his country’s armies, allowed the Nogais some sympathy here.

  ‘The Tatars were pushed into the marshy river and, seeing no salvation, in a fit of helpless anger, destroyed their own treasures, slaughtered their wives and drowned their infants.’

  The destruction was terrible. Suvorov sent back to the Russian lines a living prize of 300,000 horses, 40,000 head of cattle, 200,000 sheep, as well as uncounted numbers of women and children – who were perhaps shared out as the animals were among the victorious soldiers.

  But the group at the feast had not been the whole Nogai nation; others had been grazing their herds or camping elsewhere, and they rose up to avenge the massacre. Towards the end of August, a new mass of tribesmen attacked the Yeya Fortress, besieging it for three days before once more being beaten off. And now the Russians pursued them. Chased across the steppe southwards, the Nogais crossed the river Kuban and tried to flee up the river Laba into the mountainous land of their neighbours, the Circassians. The Russians left the valley choked with their dead.

  In 1838, an old man called Mansour told an English traveller he met on the southern bank of the Kuban of how the raid had changed the complexion of the land. ‘My beard is not yet white, still do I remember the day when, instead of yonder castles, there was nothing on the opposite bank but the huts of the Nogais – a people whose customs and religion were in unison with our own – with whom we could trade, associate, and war, it might be, all on a neighbourly footing, as we would do among ourselves; but these the Muscof [Muscovites] chased them from their rightful homes, driving some of them across the Kuban, where they found refuge among ourselves, and the rest to the devil or Krim Tartary [Crimea]. In their place they established these Cossacks – giaours [unbelievers] like themselves – and whose way of life is to us an abomination,’ the old man said.

  After this second suppression, the Nogai nation was truly no more. Although they had long since lost the dread reputation their forefathers had earned when Genghis Khan’s armies were unrivalled between Korea and Ukraine, their military strength had still been formidable. They had traded with Russia for years, and were largely dependent on it for their commerce. As early as the sixteenth century, Russia was buying 50,000 horses from them a year. But the fact remained, while they roamed and raided lawlessly across the steppe, no Russian peasants could hope to settle, plant crops and live peacefully.

  Suddenly, with them gone, to the south of the Yeya was an empty space, ready for settlement. And to the south of that space loomed something quite new for the Russians: a mountain range. Without the Nogais to plague them, the Russians, children of the forests and swamps of the cold north, could march onwards to warm lands of wine and feasting. By destroying the Nogais and winning the steppes, they had opened the door to the Caucasus mountains, and, after the Caucasus mountains, to the lands of Georgia and Armenia, and to Turkey and Persia too. And perhaps after that, they might march to India itself, the greatest prize of all. Russia had dis
covered its destiny, and the Caucasus peoples were standing in its way. For them life would never be the same again.

  These peoples who lived to the south of the Nogais had, over the millennia, developed an astoundingly complex patchwork of free communities, of princes, of lords, of slaves and of freemen. The nomads had effectively secured their frontier so, on the northern slopes of the Caucasus mountains, where few armies had ever been, they had been free to develop in their own way untroubled by outside interference.

  They had traded with the Turks, the Genoese and the Greeks. Turkish slave-traders had purchased their sons and daughters to serve as mercenaries and concubines in the Ottoman Empire. Some embassies had gone back and forth to Moscow, and occasionally an army had appeared from Persia to be defeated and sent scurrying home again. The religions of the Russians and the Turks had taken root here and there, but in the main the highlanders had been left alone to live their lives untroubled by the outside world.

  In its isolated bubble, the Caucasus had become perhaps the most ethnically complex place on earth. Whole language groups exist here with no relations outside the region. The Circassian language is related to no other, save for neighbouring Abkhaz and now extinct Ubykh. The origins of Chechen and Ingush fascinate linguists. The two million people in Dagestan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, speak forty different languages. By comparison, there are just sixty-five languages native to the entire European Union.

  An ethnic map of the region looks like an oil stain on a puddle. The yellow of the Circassians juts up against the light blue of the mountain Turks. The dark blue of the Ossetians touches the browns of the Chechens and Ingush. Then the purple of the Avars heralds the whole rainbow of the peoples of Dagestan. This Babel was a world apart, with its own traditions, many of them dating to long before the arrivals of Islam and Christianity. It governed itself without much interference from anyone.