Let Our Fame Be Great (18 page)

‘ “These poor Circassians, how unfortunate they are!” I said to him, trying to find out how hard-hearted he was.

‘ “This is how the Almighty wills it,” he replied in a quiet voice.

‘ “But they are dying of hunger and cold.”

‘“Yes, the Circassian girls are going to be cheap this year in the markets in Istanbul,” the old pirate answered me eventually, in a completely calm voice.'

And they could not be anything but cheap, being so plentiful.

According to official figures, slightly over a quarter of a million Circassians left Russia in that winter and spring of 1864. If we include those who left earlier and later, the best estimate I can find is that between a million and 1.2 million Circassians fled to set up a new life in Turkey, of whom 300,000 – 400,000 died.

The Circassians that survived were dispersed, some being sold, most being settled on marginal land where their warlike qualities could be of use to the Ottoman Empire, and all being forgotten by a world that had once praised their battles against the tsar's armies but had ignored them in their desperate hour of need. Their destruction was almost complete.

I stood at the base of the fort in Akchakale and wondered how many Circassians had looked out from this point towards the blue horizon of the Black Sea, and strained their eyes as if they could somehow reach beyond it – to the hills of their homeland away to the north. For those unhappy immigrants of 1864, the road back was closed. Their future lay to their south, in the villages that would be assigned to them by the sclerotic Turkish government.

But the world has changed since then. Turkey and Russia have both lost empires, but have developed trading links. Ferries run three times a week between Trabzon and Sochi: an ugly, wonderful Russian city on the Black Sea coast. I decided to catch a ride with one, to see what was left of the homeland of the miserable refugees.

The ferry ride was a twelve-hour exhausting journey in a baking cabin and we arrived twelve hours late. Still, as we approached Russia I was wriggling with excitement. I had left Russia two years previously and was delighted to be going back. I sat on the deck and watched dolphins bounding over the sea to examine us. They would approach exuberantly, then vanish beneath the waves again, disappointed to find just a dirty old steamer.

The first glimpses of the mountains came with evening. A line in the clouds was too sharp to be made of air and water vapour, and over time resolved itself into a dip between two mountain peaks. Patches of snow became visible, slightly yellower than the clouds behind, and soon touches of the mountain range stood out first in one place, then another, as the visibility shifted with the evening air. A high valley was quite clear for ten minutes then merged back into the haze. A mountain's shoulder emerged in its place. Gradually, the coastline itself rose out of the sea, revealing the densely furred hills of the lush west Caucasus, dotted with houses, some of them small and discreet, some of them the brutal towers loved by Soviet architects.

Although Sochi is a town that welcomes more than a million tourists a year, its impact on the coastline is less than that of resorts in some other countries. The hills remain wooded, and the tourist infrastructure is tucked away among the trees.

This is the star of the Russian tourist industry, where Stalin and other Soviet leaders chose to relax, and where they concentrated their efforts on building a holiday zone for the workers.

Sochi's use as a holiday resort was pioneered in 1872, just a few years after the Circassians left for ever. A certain F. I. Grabe, taking advantage of the combination of a temperate climate and a complete absence of people, built a villa here, and within two years fifteen other families were living nearby. The development was given a sharp impulse by the completion of the coastal road in 1891 – 2, which finally gave the Russians the ability to move quickly through these hills that had always frustrated their efforts to defeat the Circassians.

One Russian writer recorded: ‘Sochi is our Toulouse, our Biarritz, our Bordeaux, but it stands a long way above them, because it is warmer and more picturesque.' Another, a doctor who investigated Sochi's potential as a place for treating the sick, went further. ‘Sochi is not only the best corner of Russia, but of the whole world,' he wrote.

By 1902, Sochi was home to thirteen hotels, and more were being built all the time. Simultaneously, doctors built sanatoria where invalids could take the waters, and be treated with the most modern techniques.

These sanatoria were to be the drivers behind the sudden development of Sochi that followed the Soviet government's nationalization of the resorts in 1919. As it invested in industry, it also invested in holidays for the proletariat it was creating. Perhaps it did this for ideological reasons, or out of the kindness of its communist heart, but I like to think the sanatoria it built were pit-stops: where the tired, damaged workers could be repaired by skilled medical staff, before being sent back to work once more.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union's factories were full of danger and pollution. The workers lived cramped up, several families to a room, in damp and dirty conditions in the filthy cities or the new
growing industrial towns. No human could live for long like that and stay healthy, so giving them breaks made economic and political sense.

‘Centres of relaxation are organized with the aim of giving the workers and the state employees the chance of regaining their strength and their energy during a yearly regular break in the most pleasant and healthy conditions,' wrote the government in a decree in May 1921. In short, the workers would receive holidays so they could work better. They would get sunshine and balmy breezes for a week or two, then they could return to Siberia or the Arctic and eat bad food, drink too much and work too hard until next summer.

A pamphlet published in 1924 and called
Resorts of the Black Sea and the North Caucasus
praised the region for its hot springs and mineral lakes, its mud baths and its hill-walking. The only reference to the people who lived in this southern land of mountains and beaches are a handful of pen-and-ink drawings of men in the typical dress of the mountains. The implication is clear: you did not come to the south to talk to the people who lived there or to think about its history. You came to get well again in virgin territory which the Soviet Union could exploit as it saw fit. The people were picturesque details, like animals in a zoo.

The expansion in the number of holidaymakers, despite the Soviet Union's need to rebuild after the civil war that followed the proclamation of the workers' state, was staggering. In 1921, just 4,565 people came to Sochi on holiday. Six years later, the number was 21,443. By 1935, the state had given up providing exact figures, and claimed 118,000. The growth was checked by the Second World War, but took off in earnest in the 1950s, when the government stopped bothering with even vaguely specific statistics. By 1960, it said 500,000 people were coming here every year, and by the late 1980s five million were.

It was an astonishing transformation for a patch of coastline that had been home to just the Circassian tribesmen until their expulsion in the 1860s. Hotels and sanatoria dotted the shorelines, and these were the tall towers I could see from the ferry as we neared the shore. The port building is handsome, with a spire and a clock. By the time
our ferry had come close enough for us to read the time, the passengers had collected their passports from the purser, gathered their belongings and headed for the stern, where we would disembark.

Apart from me, a British student called Geoffrey and a Circassian lady professor, the passengers were either Russian women or Turkish men. The split reflected the divides in the economy in the two countries.

The Turkish men were heading to Russia to work in the booming construction trade. Many of them had done it before, and the ferry was the cheapest and most convenient way to get to Sochi, where new hotels were going up all the time.

The women were a different case entirely. As we lined up on the gangplank, I spoke to two of the women ahead of me. They said they had been tourists in Turkey, and were returning to Russia to renew their visas before going back. The stories sounded flimsy. A Turkish tourist visa lasts for two months, and it seemed unlikely they could take such lengthy holidays and still want to go back for more. Besides, the towns they had visited were well off the tourist trail, too small to even be mentioned in my thick guidebook. These women were clearly not just tourists.

Then I remembered where I had seen one of them before. As Geoffrey and I had sat and drank beer in the ferry's restaurant the evening before, she had got up and done a ponderous strip-tease. She was clearly what the Turks call a ‘natasha' – one of the small-town prostitutes who flooded into Turkey with the demise of the Soviet Union, and who provide to this day the raw material for the country's sex business. The two women I spoke to had been based in small towns along the Black Sea highways, presumably doing business with the truck-drivers, and never visited Istanbul or the Mediterranean coast where Russian tourists throng in summer.

The strip-teaser had been clearly seeking to drum up a little more business before she went home. I cast my mind back to the cheap hotel where I had stayed in Trabzon before we sailed, and the exaggerated cries of ecstasy that came through the thin wall from the next-door room. I wondered if any of my fellow passengers had been working there too.

We had a long wait for passport control, as is always the way in Russia, but the customs officials were friendly and the women, once they realized we were not trying to hire them, proved good company. Sochi was just the other side of a glass door, and then we were outside.

As I looked up towards the towering hotels and the neon, however, I failed to notice the threat closer to hand. Before I knew what was happening, a fat policeman had demanded to see my passport, grabbed it from my hand and marched off. Geoffrey and I had been towards the end of the queue, and the policeman had already corralled a miserable-looking group of Turkish men before we emerged. We tagged along with them and straggled after the policeman. He had a large bottom, and walked as though his trousers were chafing him, but he set a good pace and we had to struggle to keep up.

He told us to wait outside the port building, went inside with a friend dressed in civilian clothing, and began to invite us in one at a time. Geoffrey and I, as Westerners, were clearly the prized catches and had to wait until the end as one Turk after another was called in ahead of us. It was dark by this time, and the policeman's office was brightly lit. Through the window, we could see the Turks arguing over the amount of bribe they were going to pay to get their passports back. Our hearts grew heavy. After a wait of an hour, and after a Turkmen man was thrown out of the office without his passport for not being able to afford the bribe, it was our turn.

I was informed that my visa was not in order. The objections of the fat policeman, who on closer inspection strongly resembled a pig, were threefold: I had a business visa, but was in a holiday resort; I did not have a work permit, and yet I had a business visa, which meant I intended to work; the visa was issued by a Moscow company so I should be in Moscow, therefore I was an illegal immigrant. All three objections were legally groundless, but he emphasized them with an impressive command of Russian obscenities, the familiar and extremely rude ‘thou' form of the verb, and a copy of the Russian criminal code, which he slapped onto the table to emphasize his points.

I attempted to argue, but he cut me off to answer a call from the window. Two women had come to ask if he would be long. We waited while he chatted to his visitors. Most of their conversation
was too quiet to overhear, although from the tone it was clearly filled with female giggles and male bravado. Then he cut them off.

‘Just a few minutes,' he said. ‘I'm doing some business with these foreigners.'

I had no idea what right, if any, he had to enforce immigration law. I had, after all, just passed passport control so presumably my papers were in order. I did not even know what branch of the police he belonged to, since I did not recognize the three initials on his smart metal badge. But eventually, I paid the $200 he wanted, mainly because I was too tired to argue and too shocked at coming across such a revolting man. I wouldn't be surprised if he cleared $1,000 every time a ship comes in, and that would be a very useful addition to his salary indeed.

At the time, I was furious and dispirited, but after a few days in Sochi I came to realize his crass corruption was the perfect introduction to the ultimate new Russian town. His welcome could not have been more different from the generosity and hospitality with which the Circassians had greeted their British visitors in the nineteenth century, but it was certainly appropriate, for the Circassian heritage has been erased more thoroughly here than anywhere.