Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
J F Baddeley knew the Caucasus as well as any foreigner and wrote a great deal about his experiences there. The book is based almost entirely on Russian sources and accounts of events, since indigenous Caucasian languages were not written down until the 20th century. It’s a monumental piece of military history.
Your first book is The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus by John Frederick Baddeley, a military history of the Chechen and Dagestani resistance to Russian invasion in the early 19th century.
J F Baddeley was an English journalist and businessman who travelled extensively in Russia and the Caucasus in the 19th century. He knew the Caucasus as well as any foreigner and wrote a great deal about his experiences there. This is the more well known of his two books on the Caucasus which focuses on the resistance of the Chechens and Dagestanis to the Russian conquest. Led by Sufi Muslim leader Imam Shamil, they fought very effectively and bravely for 40 years until they were finally conquered in 1859. The book is based almost entirely on Russian sources and accounts of events, since indigenous Caucasian languages were not written down until the 20th century. It’s a monumental piece of military history.
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Oliver Bullough is Caucasus editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and former Reuters correspondent in Moscow. His book Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus is published by Allen Lane. He talks about the brutal oppression of the Circassians under the Tsars and says they pretty much vanished after the Russian invasion of the 1860s. The Russians gave them a choice to move north of the mountains and settle as peasants under Russian law or leave. I think they were quite surprised when a million or so Circassians chose to leave, but about a third of this group died in the course of the exodus. These events have since been recognised to be the first genocide of the modern age and I think the parallels with the Armenian genocide of 50 years later are clear.
