Vanora Bennett on Chechnya

You’ve chosen Tolstoy first.

Yes. This is the story of the 19th-century war between colonial Russia and the tough, fiercely independent mountain tribes they needed to control if they were to have easy access to their new territory of Georgia, on the southern side of the Caucasus mountains. In those days the mountaineers were united against Russia under Imam Shamil. Shamil’s war went on for half a lifetime. Many of the Russian writers of the day served in the war – notably Pushkin and Lermontov – and they wrote about it; so it’s remembered to this day, as literature rather than history. Tolstoy’s book is about a Shamil lieutenant, Hadji Murad, who goes over to the Russians, then tries to go back. What I like about it is that it shows war as profoundly ignoble – as an awful combination of personal circumstances that end in disaster for everyone. Hadji Murad, it turns out, was forced by tribal politics to join Shamil and become his star fighter; he turns to the Russians because he’s forced by more murderous tribal politics. He fears for his family and he tries to go back, with disastrous consequences, because rivalries among the Russian generals mean he doesn’t get the honourable deal from them that he’s been promised. Tolstoy is fearless in showing everyone in the theatre of war trapped between two tyrannies, the Russian tyranny a terrifying imposition, but the demands of the mountain armies no less tyrannical. The book also has a powerful and much-quoted description of how Chechen villagers feel when their homes are burned to the ground by Russian troops. “No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings … 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.”

Grim.

It is. This next one is a collection of authoritative essays on how Russians and the mountain peoples of the Caucasus (among other Muslims in the former Soviet world) have interacted, from the end of the 19th-century wars to the outbreak of a modern Russian-Chechen war in 1994. There are accounts of various Russian persecutions right through the 20th century, and how they only stifled but never quite eradicated the spirit of the mountain peoples. Russian policies were aimed at bringing all Soviet peoples together in a Russian-speaking, post-religious, freely-intermarrying community. That didn’t fit with what the mountain people wanted. There are accounts of brutal Russian suppression of unrest in the Caucasus early in the 20th century, and of the mass deportation of the Chechens and other mountain peoples to the steppes of Central Asia during World War Two, after Stalin implausibly accused the Chechens of collaborating with the Nazis. The Chechens who survived (many tens of thousands died) were allowed back after Stalin’s death; but resentment, of course, lingers on. There’s a lot in this book, too, about the way Soviet Muslims learned to hide their faith to counter Russianisation; the preservation of religious belief through anything from secret meetings to, later, cassette recordings of sermons, sold in scruffy street markets, right under the noses of the Soviet authorities. And there are fascinating descriptions of the folksy Sufi form of Islam, with saints and shrines and wishing-wells and a traditional prayer in the form of a round-dance, the zikr, that, at least until the modern war, was how Chechens preferred to worship.

And then the first war?

The first two. A Small Victorious War is a very thorough, practical guide to the first of two post-Soviet wars in Chechnya. The authors interviewed everyone connected with the war, except maybe Boris Yeltsin. Their book tells the story of how and why newly independent Russia, in 1991, first gave its various ethnic minorities what the president called “as much independence as you can swallow” and then, a couple of years later, reined them back in – and how Chechnya, alone, refused to give in, leading to war. Chechnya had been run since independence by Dzhokhar Dudayev, whose enthusiasm for independence was probably genuine but whose claims that it could be easily financed, because Chechnya had enough oil to make it as rich as Kuwait, didn’t measure up against reality when Russia imposed an economic blockade. With President Yeltsin surrounded by an increasingly unpleasant bunch of hardliners, led by his bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, Russia’s generals came to feel they could follow the lead of America in Haiti, and boost their administration’s popularity with a quick war to depose what they regarded as an unpleasant little regime on their southern border. They counted without the two centuries of accumulated resentment of Chechens for their Russian invaders; and then they bungled it, and found themselves mired in a long-running, bloody, chaotic and unpopular repeat of the 19th century.

Your next book?

Baiev’s The Oath is probably the least well-known of my books and yet in some ways it’s the best.