Let Our Fame Be Great (48 page)

Obviously, as in the case of Jamal-Edin, it did not always work in quelling their parents' rebellions. But, from the Russians' perspective, the case of Musa Kundukhov was more successful. He became a
resourceful and respected officer, rising to be a general and military governor of Chechnya.

His service was never straightforward, however, since he lacked the accepting spirit of a young Russian aristocrat. Aged just nineteen, he was an interpreter for the tsar on his tour of the Caucasus, and – he later said – this insight into the governing style of the Russians left him disillusioned with their supposed civilizing mission. The tsar, according to Kundukhov, treated a Chechen delegation arrogantly, calling them ungrateful, and ruining any hopes of winning their trust and support.

Tsar Nikolai relied on the blunt instrument of General Pullo – who is famous above all for the inflammatory remark that ‘now we have taken away their arms, we have only to take away their women's trousers' – to keep the Chechens intimidated, with disastrous results.

‘I consider that it would be quite correct to name as the chief cause of the past twenty-five years' cruel struggle, i.e. the rising of the entire Eastern Caucasus, and the unlimited power there and in Chechnya of Shamil – the deaf ear Nikolai turned to the just petitions of the peaceable mountaineers into whom, instead of fear, he instilled the hatefulness of their position and strong enmity to himself,' Kundukhov wrote in his memoirs, which were published after his death.

He had personal experience of that hatred since two of his brothers rejected Russia, and fought alongside Shamil. Kundukhov, although he stayed in the Russian service, did not accept Russian values. He still engaged in blood feuds and, in one encounter, he shot dead a treacherous Chechen who dared to walk through society with his head held high.

He served in Poland – then a Russian province – and helped suppress the 1848 Hungarian revolution, which had shaken Vienna's power over central Europe. Although he declined to serve against Shamil, he bemoaned the advance of puritanical Islam in his homeland, and felt that both Shamil and the tsar brought nothing good.

‘Every day, every hour of the day, in all the villages, the hapless inhabitants were waiting, gun in hand, for the onslaught of the foe who came after them with fire and the sword. And in the mosques, they prayed, to make removed and far from them the fear of death
and so to steel themselves for unyielding resistance,' he wrote of a visit to the Caucasus in 1848, when he had attempted peace negotiations with Shamil.

‘The usual folk songs have been replaced by this: “There is no God but God. O, God, we have no one to whom we can turn for help, no one whom we can trust, in thee only we put our trust. To thee only we pray. Save us from tyranny”,' he added.

He was clearly no fanatic, and he had equal condemnation for Shamil's methods as well as for the cruelty and corruption with which Russia ruled the Caucasus after its victory. In 1860, after Shamil's surrender, he was made head of the Chechen district, which he attempted to govern fairly. He went round the villages, promising them that their lands would not be taken away from them, that they could be governed under their own laws, and that they would not be conscripted into the Russian army. But, shortly after he made these promises, the government decided to break them, by giving some of the Chechens' land to Cossacks. Kundukhov resented being made into a liar, and was furious.

This is not to say that he was a gentle man. He was merciless in his pursuit of those of Shamil's lieutenants who had not surrendered with their chief. A Chechen called Baisungur, for example, held out in the remotest parts of Chechnya and was the target of Kundukhov's ruthless military skills until his capture in 1860.

‘On the land of Benoi, neither a single [person] who has not submitted, nor a single house, has remained. All the food stores have been destroyed,' he wrote in a report in January that year.

But he strongly objected to non-rebellious highlanders being punished along with the rebels. The government's plans to move peoples en masse into the interior of the country to make sure they would never rebel again particularly enraged him. Eventually, after a series of tyrannical actions of this kind, which convinced him that the Russians intended no good for the Caucasus, he decided to leave. He began to circulate among elders, persuading them of his plan, telling them that without a homeland the Muslims of the Caucasus risked becoming just another wandering people like the Jews of the Russian empire.

‘These unhappy Jews do not have their own fatherland, they do not have anywhere to live, where they can be proud of themselves. This is why these unhappy people have been deprived of human dignity, why they have to live and work under the oppression of the people on whose territory they live,' he said.

He told the elders he spoke to that he did not believe his descendants would forgive him for having stayed in a land that had been conquered.

‘Having looked at the desolation that is our fatherland, I find it unbearable, the air seems unbreathable, and this is why we have a duty, in the presence of two evils, to choose the lesser.'

His speeches found a receptive audience, and he knew he had a destination, having already visited Turkey, and found the government there willing to accept 5,000 families from the Caucasus every year.

He was not as successful in gathering emigrants as he had hoped, but he still collected a caravan of several thousand families – mainly Chechens and Ossetians – and received money from the government to pay for their transport expenses. The first caravan to depart in early summer included his family and his parents. They crossed over the chain of the mountains, and passed down to Tbilisi. Other caravans came later, until in July he too – having sold his lands, his orchard and his house – left his home for the last time and headed for the border.

Perhaps he believed he would return home one day, but he never did. He was just one more Caucasus emigrant to Turkey, albeit a distinguished one, and his convoy of families was dispersed around the country, where they could swell the Turkish labouring and military classes.

‘I addressed to the Almighty an ardent prayer, asking him to give me the strength to return at the head of Turkish regular soldiers to deliver the Caucasus from this abhorrent government,' he wrote later, describing how he crossed the border.

As it happened, the first half of his prayer was granted. Turkey and Russia went to war again in 1877 – 8 – a war that lost the Turks their hold over the Balkans, and their last lands in the south Caucasus. Kundukhov led a cavalry division against his former comrades-in-arms. But, once again, the Turkish army was trounced on the battlefield, and
the last conceivable chance of winning independence back for the Caucasus went with it.

The war was accompanied by an uprising in Chechnya and Dagestan. The rebels were widely popular, and for a time they held the mountainous districts. Russian repressions, which typically involved burning the villages of mutineers and executing prisoners, succeeded only in inspiring further uprisings. But the Russians were merciless, forcing out civilians and destroying houses. Once more, the rebels were isolated in Dagestan, where they were surrounded, betrayed and captured. By November 1877, the leaders were in jail and in March the next year most of them were executed.

The Russians knew what to do now. The highlanders had rebelled too many times.

‘Our aim should be to pluck out all the untrustworthy people from the villages and to exile them and their families to Russia for ever. The taking of hostages should be merely a temporary measure. In general [we should] pluck out as many as possible and in the most oppressive manner. The entire population of Benoy and Zandak should be exiled to Siberia and if these rascals refuse, they should all be exterminated in the winter like cockroaches and starved to death,' wrote Adjutant-General Svistunov to his deputy.

‘Under no pretext should they be untied on their way and in case of the smallest resistance by anyone, beat them all up. I must add: my strong wish is for the latter possibility to happen.'

Thousands of Chechens and Dagestanis were sent to Russia, where many of them simply pined to death. On their being pardoned three years later – when Tsar Alexander III took the throne in 1881 after his father's assassination – many of them left their homeland for ever, to become the second wave of emigration to the Ottoman Empire.

The Turkish village of Guneykoy, in the Yalova region south of Istanbul, was founded by such emigrants. At their head was the Naqshbandi sheikh Muhammad Madani, who was in his early sixties when he left his homeland in 1896. In truth, the Naqshbandi order had struggled to retain its pre-eminent position in society after Shamil's surrender and he was just one of many leaders who chose to start a new life abroad.

According to stories told in the village to this day, Muhammad Madani, who was born in one of the villages near Gunib where Shamil made his last stand, was offered a place to live in Istanbul. He refused it, telling the government he would seek his own residence.

The village is a cluster of red roofs around a white mosque, all overshadowed by wooded hills. This was a wasteland of forests and rocks until the Dagestanis came – attracted by a fresh water spring, which, according to local legend, sprang out of the rock at Muhammad Madani's call. Ties to Dagestan are still strong. The older generation speak Avar among themselves, and the women still wear the baggy pantaloons of the Caucasus. At least ten pictures of Imam Shamil adorn the walls of the ‘Barkala' (‘thanks' in Avar) café, along with the green Chechen flag, with its horizontal red and white stripes.

Muhammad Madani is the subject of dozens of local legends, which tell of his miracles and wisdom. According to one account, he was taken to Siberia after the failed uprising, but no amount of chains could contain him and he would always appear in the prison yard unencumbered and unmarked, where he would publicly pray, sit or read. Eventually, his Russian jailers were forced to let him go, since his imprisonment was making them a laughing stock.

I wondered if that was a garbled version of the real story, in which the Russian government was forced to allow the exiled Dagestanis to go home or to Turkey just to keep them alive. Many of the highlanders moved to the plains simply died of homesickness and disease. Some 429 of the 1,625 Dagestanis settled in the Novgorod region died in the first few months after their arrival. Russian officials may have endorsed cruelty to the highlanders at a distance, but they could not watch these poor people dropping at such a rate.

So, the tsar let them leave his realm. Muhammad Madani brought the first group of emigrants to the Turkish village he founded, and was then joined by another group under a second Naqshbandi sheikh, called Serafuddin, who was to become his son-in-law and principal follower.

‘My father left Dagestan in the early 1900s, with Serafuddin,' said Hatice Sener, the 75-year-old great-aunt of a friend who took me to
see the village. She told me some of the stories of the village, where fact and fiction mix together in confusing ways.

‘This was before Nikolai [II] became tsar. They decided to emigrate because the tsar was very cruel. After the collapse of Imam Shamil there was pressure on Dagestanis. There was fear that the roads to Turkey would be closed. Muhammad Madani predicted that communism would bring big problems for religion. He said the roads would open for three months and then they would be closed by snow. He said those that left would go to Turkey, and those that did not leave would stay for ever and that it was a pity to live in Russia.'

The stories told about Muhammad Madani show him to have been an unusually gentle man.

In one legend, he was leading the
zikr
– the ecstatic prayer ritual of the Sufis – for the whole village, when he felt a small undercurrent of unhappiness which nagged at him. ‘Everyone is doing zikr. All the animals are doing zikr with us. The worms are doing zikr with us. The birds are doing zikr. Every being in the village is doing zikr with us except one animal who is disconnected from his father and feeling depressed. Allah is not happy. The prophet is not happy, the saints are not happy,' the sheikh intoned.

It turned out that a small child was keeping a worm in a box, and the misery of the worm had upset God. ‘From that, the people of the village understood and raised their children with an understanding that harming any creature, no matter how small, causes unhappiness and earns the displeasure of God, of the prophet, and of saints,' the story relates.

And the influence of the sheikh's teachings was still strong. As Hatice Sener sat there in a flowered top, a white headscarf and brown cardigan, she recounted tale after tale from her family's past. The husband of her great-aunt was in the leather trade and he stayed in Dagestan, and she had long dreamed of trying to find her family and seeing a land where everyone spoke Avar, but she said she would never do so.

‘I never plan to go to Dagestan, because the sheikh said that Dagestan was a bad place and that people should not return ever,' she said.

Muhammad Madani passed leadership of the community on to Serafuddin, and the village became a refuge for many Dagestanis.
Although Serafuddin himself died in 1936, his house is still open to all supplicants, and his daughter-in-law – a tiny, wizened old lady who was watching television when I called – keeps it ready for prayer meetings and callers.

Those Dagestanis who made it to Guneykoy were the lucky ones. Most emigrants faced conditions far more extreme than those enjoyed in the Yalova region, which is nestled in the hills overlooking the Sea of Marmara.

Groups of Chechens were settled elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, and many were forced to make their own way to the unforgiving lands of the Middle East. They arrived in what is now Jordan in 1901, and found a land of ruins and nomads.