When I read Neal Ascherson's Black Sea, I had to admit that I knew nothing at all about a huge and contested part of the world. I followed up on Ascherson's bibliography and read a series of ethnographic studies of ancient Black Sea peoples -- Scythians, Sarmatians, etc. -- and from there moved eastward to the Caucasus and leaned about the Abkhazians, the Ossetians, the Chechens, etc. Yesterday I finished Nicholas Griffin's Caucasus (2001), which is half travel book and half a biography of Imam Shamil. Shamil, of whom I also knew zero until a few days ago, is the legendary Avar guerrilla leader who led the opposition to the Russian conquest of the mountains in the mid-nineteenth century. He's the national hero of the Chechens, and is a compound of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo-- with a little Islamic fervor added in. The Russians conquered the Caucasus with a combination of overwhelming force, superior technology, and ruthlessness: they systematically obliterated villages, murdered as many civilians as possible, and when all else failed, cut to the ground the primeval beech forests -- defoliation not then an option -- in which Shamil and his Murids found refuge.
Reading about Shamil led me to Hadji Murad -- Tolstoy's extraordinary last novel and one in which Shamil is a minor character. In 150 pages or so, Hadji Murad says as much about the brutality, the stupidity, and the vanity of war as War and Peace says in ten times as many pages. Tolstoy, who had soldiered in the Caucasus, wrote in his diary (according to Griffin) that the war was "so ugly and unjust that anybody who wages it has to stifle the voice of his conscience." Hadji Murad is a charismatic leader who's involved in a foolish feud with Shamil; he surrenders to the Russians, tries to escape, and is killed and beheaded. That's the plot, but the genius is in the telling. After recounting an atrocity in which the Russians, in sport, destroy a small settlement, ruin the crops, and bayonet a small child, Tolstoy describes the feelings of the remaining villagers as they set about the hopeless task of rebuilding: "It was not hatred, because they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them -- like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves -- was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation." Tolstoy is disgusted by the Russian actions, but he's equally repelled by the brutal mountaineers, and he goes out of his way to draw parallels between the utterly cruel Imam Shamil and the fat, ignorant, vainglorious Nicholas, the Czar of All the Russians.
In the nineteenth century, the Russians cut down the forests; in 1999, they conquered Grozhny (the capitol of Chechnya) by dynamiting every significant building in the entire city.
Comments