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The Chechens were an even harder case than the Circassians. Their upright bearing, handsome looks and eagle-beak noses fitted a Romantic image of the noble savage and was to help them win friends in mid-nineteenth-century England, but back in the 1790s the naturalist Peter Pallas had thought them to be ‘the most turbulent, hostile, and predatory inhabitants of the mountains … [and] without exception the worst of neighbours on the lines of the Caucasus’. ²⁶ Even more savage than their neighbours, they were little inclined to work, and fanatical. ²⁷ Their elite (there was also an underclass of captive slaves) was carefully schooled in the martial arts from infancy. Entrusted to a tutor-cum-guardian (usden) from outside the family, a boy would be taught how to ride, use arms, steal and to conceal his thefts. ‘He is afterwards led to more considerable and dangerous robberies, and does not return to his father’s home until his cunning, his address, and his strength are supposed to be perfect.’ Until then his tutor received nine-tenths of his loot.

Lacking other occupation or income apart from what meagre crops their slaves could grow for them, it is hardly surprising that the Chechens should have become professional robbers. As they lived close to the main artery connecting Russia with Georgia and the rest of Transcaucasia, the Russian government, whose trade and communications they threatened, had no choice but to deal with them. War with the Chechens could therefore be regarded as inevitable. Nevertheless, the threat the Russians posed to their traditional way of life — the introduction of laws which reduced the power of the mountain princes; the ban of the slave trade, from which the mountain peoples had profited since times beyond memory — deepened the Chechens’ hostility. They could not remember a time when they had not exported girls to Istanbul, took pride whenever one was taken into the harem of some potentate, and always hoped that one might be taken for the Sultan himself. The mountain men were of the stuff that myths are made. In their white, shaggy sheepskin hats they seemed to be ‘of gigantic height’; their expression was wild, and each was armed to the teeth with gun, axe, dagger and steel-barbed ‘club that might have served Hercules’. ²⁸For Circassians and Chechens alike the laws of feud were extreme, and hard as iron. And they applied them ruthlessly to their struggle with the Russians.

On the mountaineers’ side the war was total, fought to the death. Baddeley described an encounter relatively early in the war, when the Chechen village of Dadi-Yurt was attacked. Since every house was guarded by a high stone wall, it had to be to be pounded by artillery and kept under relentless small-arms fire. Once a breach was made, soldiers rushed in, but were met in the dark by Chechens wielding daggers. ‘Some of the natives, seeing defeat to be inevitable, slaughtered their wives and children … Many of the women threw themselves onto … [the soldiers] knife in hand, or in despair leaped into the burning buildings and perished in the flames.’ The Russian commander proposed a parley, but the answer, given by a half-naked Chechen, black with smoke, was ‘We want no quarter.’ ‘Orders were now given to fire the houses from all sides. The sun had set, and the picture of destruction and ruin was lighted only by the red glow of the flames. The Chechens, firmly resolved to die, set up their death-song, loud at first, but sinking lower and lower as their numbers diminished.’ Eventually some broke out, preferring to die from bullets or the bayonet rather than burn to death. Some Dagestanis who were with them were captured, but ‘not one Chechen was taken alive.’ Seventy-two men ‘ended their lives in the flames.’ ²⁹

Casualty rates in such a war are inevitably high, and on the Chechen side they included women. The demographic effect on the Chechens — who numbered about 150,000, of whom 60,000 were adult males ³⁰ - was manifest, and the wars eventually reduced the mountain population sufficiently to allow the survivors to subsist without robbery. So resistance abated. Yermolov’s methods had apparently worked, and his successor, General Rosen, managed to quell the Chechens and quieten Dagestan. But the lull proved only temporary.

The great Chechen leader Shamyl had recognized the demographic problem, and set out to counter it by encouraging younger marriages. As the population recovered, the fundamentalist Murid creed, which had arisen in Dagestan but had spread to Chechnya in the 1820s, gained adherents. Governed by their imam, they saw it as their overriding purpose to die in battle against the infidel, and the war flared up again. The Russian state had long experience of accommodating Islam, but Muridism — puritanical and fiercely anti-Western — was a new force to contend with.