Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus

502 Pages·2010·6.96 MB·English

by  Oliver Bullough

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