March 15 - Financial Times
Let Our Fame Be Great: Struggle and Survival in the Caucasus
By Oliver Bullough Allen Lane £25, 478 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20
When
Oliver Bullough sets out his store in the opening pages of this
wonderful travel history, preparing the reader for a journey through
the little-known Caucasus, I couldn’t help recalling the words of
Winston Churchill to the Royal Commission on Palestine in 1937: "I do
not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger
even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit
that right. I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red
Indians of America or the black people of Australia.
"I do not
admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a
stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race, has come
in and taken their place.”
For the native Americans, the
Aborigines and subsequently the Palestinians, substitute the peoples of
the Caucasus, giving way before the expansionist power of the Russians.
Bullough,
who reported from Russia and the former Soviet Union for seven years
before making this impressive debut as an author, begins his heartfelt
and compelling history with a brief survey of the momentous events of
July 1783. This was when the Russians first opened their way to the
south, defeating the nomadic horsemen of the Nogai horde along the
marshy eastern shores of the Sea of Azov, in southwest Russia, paving
the way for the subjugation of an entire region. Within a century, what
the author calls "the first modern genocide on European soil” had been
perpetrated by Russian hands. In 1864, the Circassians were finally
defeated, with 300,000 dead.
Today, the nomads have gone. Their
descendants live in Turkey, Jordan, Israel and elsewhere in the Middle
East, leaving land rebranded with villages such as Bright Path of Lenin
and the Revolutionary Wave that eke out an existence beneath the
foothills of the towering Caucasus range.
The Crimean war
provided a tantalising glimpse of a Free Circassia on the eastern lands
of the Black Sea, south of the Sea of Azov, but the chance was lost
through the bickering and indecision of the great powers. Henceforth,
Circassians tended to enter western consciousness – and the Ottoman
sultan’s blue-tiled harem in Constantinople – only in the form of
blue-eyed, light-skinned concubines. Such indolent imprisonment was no
doubt undesirable, but in an age in which supposedly free western women
were no models of 21st-century emancipation, their lives were certainly
less wretched than Bullough suggests. Harem life tended to be more
nuanced than western writers often allow.
While sensitive as a
historian, Bullough is also deft as a reporter. In Moscow he almost
slips on a fatty piece of flesh from a female suicide bomber’s attack.
He writes vividly from Beslan during the aftermath of the hostage
tragedy in 2004.
Though he does not mention it, the judge,
Tamerlan Aguzarov, presiding over the trial of a Chechen called
Nurpashi Kulayev, is named after the great Turkic warlord who spent
decades putting the Caucasus to the sword with his ferocious army of
mounted archers. Kulayev, who can barely speak Russian ("I am not
agree. I without translator, I cannot completely. I badly understand in
Russia”), is denied an interpreter in a show trial that boils over with
the fury of the Beslan mothers. The investigative reporting here
suggests that Kulayev, sentenced to life imprisonment, may have been
innocent.
Bloodshed and cruelty run through these pages with
terrible regularity. Bullough goes back to 1721, the first encounter
between the Russians and the peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan, when one
of Tsar Peter I’s cavalry detachments, seeking to grab the
south-eastern shore of the Caspian Sea from enfeebled Persia, was wiped
out by the mountain folk.
By 1817, the Russian general Alexei
Yermolov, hero of the Napoleonic wars, was starting construction of a
fort that would become the city of Grozny – whose name literally means
"threatening”.
Yermolov’s policy towards the Caucasus was
perhaps not so different from that of Moscow today: "I desire that the
terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more potently than chains
or fortresses,” he said.
The campaigner in Bullough occasionally
gets the better of him. It is not the case, as he argues, that the
world has branded the entire Chechen nation as terrorists. The feeble
west may have stepped swiftly by, as it so often does, but many
commentators, including Bullough’s fellow reporters, have detailed
Moscow’s shameful cleansing in Grozny and beyond.
The ethnic and
linguistic mix of the Caucasus both fascinates and confuses. As an
example, the 2m people of Dagestan speak 40 languages. Across the
entire European Union, by comparison, there are 65 languages. Caucasus
folklore tells of the people’s mythic ancestors, the Narts, being
offered by their god the choice of a short and famous life or a long
life without glory. Without blinking, they choose a life of freedom and
fame. "Their fame is not great, and their stories have not been told,
but truly they deserve to be,” Bullough writes. With this impassioned
volume he has struck a blow for the glory of the Caucasus and helped to
give voice to the voiceless.