Russia полностью

Yermolov was lionized by society, and admired by radical youth — not least by the poets Lermontov and Pushkin. It has been fashionable lately to castigate the likes of Yermolov for excessive cruelty, bred of prejudice. It is also argued that his methods were counter-productive — that they provoked opposition unnecessarily. ²² However, as Baddeley points out, the Russians hardly differed from the British and other imperial powers in their behaviour when their will was contested by peoples they regarded as uncivilized, and it is difficult to imagine that some of the peoples they encountered would have been any more tractable whatever Russia’s actions. It is here that we encounter the origins of the Chechen problem, which stretch back long before 1800.

As the multiplicity of languages recorded in its valleys testifies, the Caucasus had attracted refugees since ancient times. As with the Basques in the Pyrenees or the Romansh-speakers of Switzerland, isolation aided survival. So did belligerence, and the peoples of the Caucasus included some, the Chechens among them, who were more belligerent than most. This tendency was accentuated by the difficulty of winning a living from the stony mountain soil, and by the need to carry arms to defend one’s sheep and goats from wild beasts.

Violence, moreover, could be productive for the mountain people. Trade routes crossed the Caucasus, and so the local population not only sold their services as guides, like the Swiss, but turned to robbery — for money, goods and slaves. (Unsold slaves were set to work in the household or with the animals.) From the sixteenth century at least, reports by travellers make frequent reference to robbers infesting the western shores of the Caspian Sea and its hinterland. Chechen Island, situated at a hazardous but strategic point in the Caspian opposite the estuary of the river Terek, takes its name from the Chechen pirates who used it as a base. Stepan Razin, Cossack leader of a great insurrection in the 1660s which incorporated a robber expedition, is also said to have used it. ²³ Nearly two centuries later a French traveller in the Caucasus remarked that mountain settlements (auls) in the eastern Caucasus were prosperous because of the booty their inhabitants had accumulated.

Since no state could impose its law on them, these mountain societies tended to be regulated by the blood feud, which they had come to apply collectively to intruders like the Russians. The German scholar Pallas noticed the same tendency among the spirited, but disorderly, Circassians to the west, a decade and more before Tsitsianov first arrived in the Caucasus. ‘Among the Circassians’, he wrote, ‘the spirit of resentment is so great that all the relations of the murderer are considered as guilty. The customary infatuation to avenge the blood of relatives generates most of the feuds, and occasions great bloodshed among the nations of the Caucasus; for unless pardon be purchased or obtained by intermarriage between the two families, the principle of revenge is propagated.’The customary law of family vengeance was already being applied to communal retribution, however, and ‘the hatred which the mountainous nations evince against the Russians, in a great measure arises from the same source.’ Moreover, when a member of the Circassian elite was killed, blood money was not acceptable in compensation: ‘They demand blood for blood.’ ²⁴

In time, some Circassians, like the Tatars and Bashkirs before them, were recruited into the Russian army and were even shown off in the capital like a particularly exotic, colourful imperial trophy. Martha Wilmont, later Lady Londonderry, who lived in St Petersburg with the Princess Dashkova, who had been an intimate of Catherine the Great, for five years from 1803, described ‘a small group of Circassians, wild looking people with mail caps, scarlet shirts, armour and long spears, looking like warriors of old’ leading a St Petersburg parade, displacing even contingents of the elite Chevalier Guards. ²⁵ However, their feuding passions did not diminish. ‘Revenge wrote a visitor to the western Caucasus in the 1830s, ‘is with them paramount to every other consideration; no wealth can purchase forbearance, no entreaty for mercy can avert the blow; blood must be requited alone by blood; for when a Caucasian falls, hundreds of his comrades vow to avenge his death, and until that vow is accomplished, their hearts are steeled to every pleading of pity or humanity.’