The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus

507 Pages·2015·3.14 MB·English

by  Lesley Blanch

Reviews
THE GUARDIAN Crammed with truly fabulous stories of fighting and love and
violent death … this profound and exhilarating book turns the struggle of the
people of the Caucasus to remain independent of Russia into a universal saga …
it is no wonder Shamyl had such a powerful influence on Tolstoy and Pushkin.
LAURENCE KELLY It is on The Sabres of Paradise, with its unforgettable
picture of the Imam Shamyl and the religious wars in which he was a central
figure, that Lesley Blanch’s reputation rests most firmly. The events she
chronicles, as Philip Marsden reminds us, have suddenly become hugely topical:
two genocidal wars in Chechnya, the rebirth of Russian nationalism, the attempt
to impose its values on a Muslim clan and tribe, heir of Shamyl’s traditions, the
struggle between what Marsden describes as ‘two worlds, two battles, two
societies.’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Twentieth-century Russia is only
nineteenth-century Russia writ large. Miss Blanch’s book is therefore especially
welcome for she has provided a gallery of Russian portraits and in the course of
her story outlined Russian foreign policy through most of the nineteenth century.
I can imagine no better introduction to modern Russia.
PHILIP MARSDEN Like Tolstoy’s, Lesley Blanch’s sense of history is
ultimately convincing not because of any sweeping theses, but because of its
particularities, the quirks of individuals and their personal narratives, their
deluded ambitions, their vanities and passions.
HAMISH BOWLES writes in Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years
(2001) Jacqueline Kennedy and Khrushchev maintained a spirited badinage
through dinner. Mrs Kennedy had recently read The Sabres of Paradise, Lesley
Blanch’s dashing history of the Muslim tribes’ resistance to Russian
expansionism in the Caucasus, and attempted to engage the Soviet premier in
conversation on the subject. He responded with the comparative numbers of
teachers per capita in the Soviet and Tzarist Ukraine. She cut him off with the
playful riposte, ‘Oh, Mr Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics’.

First published in Great Britain in 1960 by John Murray Limited.
This electronic edition published in 2015 by BookBlast ePublishing,
a division of BookBlast Limited, P.O. Box 20184, London W10 5AU.
Copyright © Lesley Blanch, 1960.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Copyright this electronic edition © Georgia de Chamberet, 2015.
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this
publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means, (including without limitation electronic, digital,
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Mobi ISBN 978-0-9930927-1-8
Print ISBN 978-0-9930927-2-5
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Cover portrait: Shamyl, Imam of Daghestan in 1859, portrait by Thomas Horscheldt.
From the first edition of The Sabres of Paradise.
For
Edna and Marston Fleming
with love
The Sabres of Paradise
Contents
Cover page
Reviews
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Introduction
Part One
The Time
The Setting
Shamyl
The Holy War
The Time of the Shariat
The Tzar
The Warriors
The Cossacks
The Struggle
The Imam
Tiflis
Part Two
Excess
Hostage
Crowns and Cupolas
Shadows on the Mountains
Loyalties
Voronzov Glories
Dargo
Treachery
Hadji Mourad
The North
Bariatinsky
Madame Drancy
Tsinandali
The Great Aoul
Part Three
A Captivity
A Sacrifice
A Farewell
An Exchange
A Defeat
Another World
An Acceptance
An End
Epilogue
Genealogical Notes on Shamyl and his wives and children
Authors Note
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
About the Author
Other books by Lesley Blanch
Position of the Caucasus.
Introduction
The Caucasians wrote love poems to their daggers, as to a mistress and went to
battle, as to a rendez-vous. Fighting was life itself to these darkly beautiful
people − the most beautiful people in the world, it was said. They lived and died
by the dagger. Battle-thrusts were the pulse of the race. Vengeance was their
creed, violence their climate. ‘I am at my eleventh head,’ boasted a Caucasian
princeling, a twelve year old, who spoke French with a Parisian accent which
won the admiration of Alexander Dumas and who coveted his father’s bag of
twenty-four rebel heads, severed as contribution to the pacification of the
province. The baby prince Georghi Melikov, at an age when he might have been
sucking his thumb, was running it over the blade of his kindjal, or two-edged
dagger, lisping that it had been made for him by Mourtazali the celebrated
armourer. When Agha Mahommed, ‘the Persian Eunuch’, took Tiflis in 1795,
his troops raped all the women they fancied and as a memento of their victory
they hamstrung the right leg of every virgin taken. But the women, too, knew
how to fight, for they were believed to descend from the Amazons. Beneath their
veils they wore a dagger. When the inhabitants of Akhulgo were besieged by the
invading Russian army in 1837, women fought beside men; when their
ammunition had gone, they flung down rocks on the oncoming troops; when
there were no more rocks, the men hurled themselves to death, on the bayonets
below. And when the men were gone, the women flung down their children as
living missiles, and leapt after them. Such was their desperate resistance. Such
was this climate of violence.
Severed enemy heads or hands were always good coinage in the Caucasus. A
Tousheen girl’s dowry was reckoned in these trophies. The more dashing a
young Caucasian delikan, or brave, the more severed hands dangled from his
saddle bow. Right hands, of course; left hands hardly counted and the loss of one
never stopped a Caucasian from fighting. Sliced-off ears, a less cumbersome
method of indicating the number of heads taken, were usually strung along the
whip thong. When one Chechen chieftain found his son dead of wounds, he cut
his body into sixty pieces and sent out horsemen across the mountains and
valleys, each with a fragment, to be given to his kinsmen and vassals. For each
piece, an enemy head was returned. Thus was his son’s death avenged.
Vengeance, vendetta or kanly, was often pursued through three or four
generations, decimating whole families, till there was no-one left. A household
was only reckoned poor, only pitied, when there was no-one fit to fight.