In an interview on Putin and Russian History

Your final book, Let Our Fame Be Great, is by former Reuters Moscow bureau chief Oliver Bullough and looks at the history of the Caucasus.

I think the Caucasus is Russia’s Achilles heel, really. It was the great triumph of the Tsarist empire getting the Caucasus. It was a great military feat trouncing these supposedly barbarian, wild mountain people. So it was celebrated in Russian literature and history as a great conquest. Then in the 1930s and 1940s it was the site of the extraordinary great deportation of the Chechen and Ingush people – tens of thousands of people driven from homes in the middle of the night, put on cattle trucks and dumped on the Steppe in central Asia with appalling casualty rates. And then when the Soviet Union broke up, Chechnya tried to regain independence and conflict ensued.

Actually, what we are seeing is the point at which the Russian empire busts. It’s tried to digest the Caucasus but it hasn’t. What Oliver Bullough does absolutely brilliantly is look at the forgotten history of the Caucasus. What I particularly like about it – although he writes very well about all the bits of the Caucasus – is his focus on the Circassians and one of the great untold stories of the 19th century. This was a large country which had the misfortune to be on the southern fringe of an expanding Russia. There was what nowadays we would call a genocide, and one that rivals the treatment of the North American Indians or the Australian Aborigines or any of the other victims of European imperialism. But it has just vanished from our collective memory. I don’t think one person in a thousand knows about tens of thousands of Circassians who were massacred on the beaches of the Black Sea, in fact very close to Sochi where Russia will host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

What Bullough does brilliantly is to bring to our attention the fragments of documents we have from these pathetic remnants of cemeteries in Turkey – where the ships laden with dead bodies arrived. He also goes to places like Syria and Jordan where the Circassian diaspora has now become very influential and well-established and interviews them, and you get this feeling for this whole world you just don’t know about. These people with their language, their history, their culture and their colossal tragedy behind them, trying with satellite television, Twitter and the Internet and all these modern means, to get themselves back together again and get their story told.

The book also looks at the history of Russia’s interventions in Chechnya, in which both sides have committed atrocities. Is this a conflict that is likely to raise its head again in the near future?

The Chechens are a very tough people who have been brutalised by their historic experience. I don’t think anyone should take a naive, romantic view that this is a captive nation struggling to be free and they’ll become the Switzerland of the Caucasus if they’re allowed to be, because the damage done by history leaves very deep scars on all sides. I wouldn’t want to particularly judge the question of what should be the constitutional arrangements in the North Caucasus – I just think that Russia is struggling and failing to hold on to the North Caucasus. Russians are leaving, and you have bunch of corrupt and very oppressive satrapies that pay lip-service to Russia, but where the Russian constitution doesn’t actually apply any more. They consume very large amounts of Russian money and I just don’t think that’s very sustainable. The combination of some mistakes by the Chechens and many more mistakes by the Russians has created a really horrible situation that is going to be around for a long time.