The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova & The North Caucasus by Rob Hornstra

The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova and The North Caucasus

Dedicated to Bella Ksalova 1984 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2010

The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova and The North Caucasus

Rob Hornstra & Arnold van Bruggen The Sochi Project, Amsterdam 2013

The Caucasus, the mountains where humans and animals lived in harmony, and where nature was as wild and fearless as the men.

1. The North Caucasus p. 21

6. A happy childhood p. 111

2. Khava Gaisanova p. 35

7. Return and decay p. 121

3. The mountains p. 45

8. The beginning of the end p. 147

4. Kazakhstan p. 75 5. Hardened in exile p. 91 8

9. The Second Caucasian War p. 157

10. Prayer makes life bearable p. 189

14. Clutching at straws p. 283

11. Islam p. 201

15. Counterterrorism p. 295

12. The disappearance p. 233

16. A secret history p. 325

13. War becomes terrorism p. 243

17. Epilogue p. 335

Gimry, Dagestan

Nazran, Ingushetia Salman Aliev, 35, guarded a police post in Ingushetia. He was shot in the head by a sniper.

Nesterovskaya, Ingushetia Aligan Ganiev, 23, had just completed his training as a police ofﬁcer when he was blown up at a local restaurant. “It felt like a wave of electricity kept going through me. I only regained consciousness in hospital in Moscow.” Aligan lost his sight and an arm and has difﬁculty walking.

Churzuk, Karachay-Cherkessia An abandoned cultural centre in Churzuk, a depopulated mountain village on the border between Karachay-Cherkessia and Georgia.

Levashi, Dagestan Amina Isayeva, 19, in traditional dress.

Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria The state museum for history and culture, which tells the story of Kabardino-Balkariaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s socialist genesis, has remained unchanged for decades.

1. The North Caucasus

When the mountain village appears in the distance, we get out of the car to smoke a cigarette and enjoy the surroundings. The roofs of the village gleam in the sunshine. The road runs along the edge of a steep cliff overlooking a ravine. Two cars speed out of the village towards us, and screech to a halt on the gravel. Two men in long leather coats with fur collars get out, their black hair combed stiffly over their heads. They do not identify themselves, but with a quick motion make it clear that they are armed. In the back of one of the cars we see a highly decorated police uniform. A bigwig. We are under arrest.

1. The North Caucasus

We had left early that morning. The journey from the Dagestani capital Makhachkala to our destination Gimry in the mountains is long and uncertain. Gimry is one of the most famous mountain villages in the country. In the 19th century, Imam Shamil and Imam Ghazi Mullah, two of the four great leaders of the uprising against the Russian occupation, were born in this village. Everyone in Dagestan and in fact everyone in the North Caucasus can recite their heroic deeds. Two centuries later, Gimry is once again at the centre of the uprising against the Russians and their local henchmen. One of the girls who carried out a suicide attack on the Moscow metro in 2010 came from a neighbouring village. A few weeks before our planned visit to Gimry, the police arrested a local boy on suspicion of helping the boyeviks, the terrorists, separatists or bandits in the woods – not an uncommon occurrence throughout the North Caucasus and one rarely with a good outcome, whether the suspect is guilty or not. This time the village fought back and barricaded the main road through the mountains. It was soon blocked with a long line of honking trucks. The police changed tack. The boy was released and the village went back to sleep. The road winds through stunning scenery. The next Star Wars film should be shot in Dagestan. We drive through villages, each with their own speciality: fridges, bread, fruit, you name it. Long valleys crowded with apricot trees form a picturesque contrast to the rocks in myriad shades of grey, black, red and yellow. But the scene soon loses its charm. Men with black balaclavas and large automatic rifles guard checkpoints. Barricades have been erected along the side of the road. Our driver has a cheerful face and an amiable bristly moustache. That may explain why we are waved through at every checkpoint. We twist and turn our way up to a large hydro-electric power station. As soon as we descend into the valley on the other side we are arrested. “Can’t we go to Gimry?” I ask the leather jackets. “Of course not,” one of them replies curtly. Our car is wedged between the senior officer’s jeep and the leather jackets’ civilian car. We are escorted in convoy back along the road to Shamilkala, the region’s main town, named after the 19th-century resistance hero. Shamilkala lies on a reservoir. A few Soviet-style apartment blocks have been erected for the workers at the hydro-electric power station. It looks as if a suburb from any Russian city has been transplanted to the mountains. At the police station we navigate between the caltrops and other obstructions. Two bullet-riddled police cars are rusting slowly in the courtyard. Inside we walk straight into a cage, the kind used to lock up criminals. On the right is a list of policemen who have been killed and their portraits. Twelve officers have died here in recent years. We are taken to a room where two portly policemen laboriously input our details into the computer. One of them explains the situation to us. “A state of emergency has been declared in Gimry. KTO. Counterterrorist operation. We need to know who you are, where you are and what you’re doing. We have to protect you.” Two men from the Russian FSB security service enter the office and begin to interrogate us. They play good cop, bad cop. The good cop has grey hair, the bad cop is dressed in camouflage. The good crop draws us into a conversation about football and Imam Shamil. The bad cop asks us what we think the consequences of our illegal actions will be. We try a response about journalism, information gathering and how interested we are in visiting the monument to Imam Shamil. The good cop points to his phone and says we are lucky. A bomb has just exploded in Gimry.

1. The North Caucasus

Cut to the next scene: the FSB officers have confiscated our documents, including our passports and press cards. The police and FSB leave the room and a small, grey man from the immigration service comes in and closes the door. He noisily fills his lungs with air and looks at us sternly. “Have you ever been imprisoned?” he asks viciously. We sigh. Here comes the intimidation. He licks his pencil, ready to write down our answers. “How do you know about Imam Shamil?” He asks the question as if knowing about Imam Shamil – the lauded, iconic historical figure – is a subversive activity. Our interpreter gives us a wink. This man is not to be taken seriously. “Lev Tolstoy,” I reply, referring to his book about the Caucasus. “Okay,” says the man, but does not give up. “Deportation would be such a shame.” He tries to wheedle a bribe out of us. We refuse. He decides to press charges. We have to go back to the capital. On the floor below are the men with the leather jackets, fur collars and greasy hair. They are from the local counter-terrorism department, responsible for many disappearances and torture we later discover. They summon us to their office. The wall is covered with dozens of mug shots, mostly of men with beards and women enveloped in thick black headscarves. Our pictures are added to them. The gang leader does not talk to us, but hisses and blows us to our seats. I am directed to the sofa, while Rob is photographed with an iPhone. Then it is my turn. Our names are written down again and we are hissed out of the room. With pounding hearts we walk back to the police officers. We are interrogated by the police chief, a fat man who tries to extract wax with a pencil buried deep in his ear, and subjects the result to an equally in-depth inspection. It is the fifth interrogation of the day, in this dank fortress in the mountains. Welcome to the Caucasus. We angrily exit the police station. We are not allowed to go to Gimry and instead have to make the long journey back to the capital to hear our sentence. “Deportation, a lawsuit or a hefty fine,” the little man laughs at us and promises to see us again tomorrow in Makhachkala. It is late. Outside the police station we buy supplies for the journey back. Two men with beards curiously welcome us into their shop. They are father and son. The father is covered with injuries. I ask what happened. “Boom,” says the son dryly. They are stunned when I tell them that we are not allowed to go to Gimry. The son glances around and says, “Come, I’ll take you. I know all the shortcuts through the mountains.” We dare not accept. We never hear anything further about the bomb that allegedly exploded in Gimry. We slither back to the capital over half-frozen roads. Next day we reluctantly head to the immigration office. We can only hope that the fine is not too substantial; that we do not have to appear in court. The man in charge appears to be a friend of our interpreter. He puts us in the care of a sweet girl who practises her English on us, gives us biscuits and makes tea. He winks at us and pulls a bottle of cognac from his desk. “For the wasted time,” he says. He has to settle the case properly, but he will try to get us off lightly. That is the Caucasus too. The two-day delay costs us a fine of €50. This is exactly why we wanted to go to Gimry. Two centuries on and little seems to have changed in the Caucasus. For 200 years Russia has tried to gain control of the region. This book is a short history of that North Caucasus, the six contiguous

1. The North Caucasus

“Have you ever been imprisoned?” Immigration officer

1. The North Caucasus

republics on the northern edge of the mighty Caucasus mountains in South Russia. A patchwork of some 40 peoples and identities, but simultaneously a homogenous region. All North Caucasians share similar traditions, folklore and pride in a common past. Everyone is Russified down to the last glass of vodka, but can pinpoint exactly what sets him or her apart from a Russian. The Caucasus is one of the most dangerous places to live on earth. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the on-going struggle against separatism and terrorism. Many more have been forced to flee their homes and in some cases have still not been able to return. In the fight against separatist and radical groups, hundreds of innocent people have been arrested and disappeared. Scores of police officers have lost their lives in the line of duty. The civilian population suffers under the weight of the campaign against the insurgents as well as the endemic violence and corruption in the government. Critical journalists are few; they fear for their lives. The North Caucasus is tiny. Cross the mountains from Sochi on the Black Sea, where the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held, and you are there. It takes only half a day to drive from one side of the region to the other. A motorway, the Transcaucasian M29, dissects it from west to east, passing through Karachay-Cherkessia, KabardinoBalkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and finally Dagestan on the Caspian Sea – all dots on the map compared to the enormous landmass of Mother Russia that stretches to the north. This book has been a work in progress since 2007, when Russia won the bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. It remains a mystery why the International Olympic Committee would award the Olympics to a city so close to a region plagued by war and terrorism. As we have crisscrossed the republics over the past five years, the same question keeps arising: why is the North Caucasus so incredibly violent? And not just over the last 20 years but eternally? Furthermore, how is it that such a small region can hold such a firm grasp on mighty Russia? This story is about a centuries-long struggle for a dignified existence; about life in times of war, violence and crimes against humanity. This story is about ordinary people’s resilience in exceptional and complicated circumstances. Above all, it is the story of Khava Gaisanova, a proud woman from the heart of the North Caucasus, but who could just as well be from Kabardino-Balkaria, Dagestan or Chechnya. Her history too is filled with collective and individual violence. Her history and the history of the North Caucasus are inextricably intertwined. Both are also unfinished. The security forces in Russia’s violent hinterland do not like prying eyes. Too often our search for information and interviews fell foul of the region’s grim implacability. Arnold van Bruggen and Rob Hornstra

1. The North Caucasus

Chermen, North Ossetia Taxi driver Isa and his wife grow green beans in their backyard.

2. Khava Gaisanova

Chermen, North Ossetia Musa and Ibragim, Khava Gaisanovaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son and youngest grandchild respectively.

Chermen, North Ossetia Lenin Street, the main road through Chermen, in front of Khavaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house.

2. Khava Gaisanova

Khava Gaisanova with her daughter-in-law Madina and granddaughter Dali.

“I looked and asked everywhere, from Dagestan to KarachayCherkessia. I couldn’t find a trace of my husband anywhere.”

“My husband disappeared in 2007. He was probably kidnapped by the police. He went to Vladikavkaz with our neighbour and hasn’t been heard from since.” This short conversation, in a chance encounter, was the beginning of our search for the roots of the violence in the North Caucasus.

2. Khava Gaisanova

In the flat central plains of the North Caucasus, where the mountains still seem far away (they occasionally peek through the clouds) is Lenin Street. It is actually a side-road off the Transcaucasian M29. At the roundabout that forms the border between North Ossetia and Ingushetia, you can turn west towards Beslan, east towards Nazran and south towards Chermen. Lenin Street is the main road through the village. Small streets, more often mud and gravel tracks than sealed roads, occasionally lead off it. On Lenin Street itself is the post office, newsagent and police station (reinforced with large scattered concrete blocks and sandbags to prevent cars from ramming it). From the road there seems to be little life in the village. Only at the crossroads near the newsagent do we see men sitting on a bench. Behind them, in the shade of a tree, two police cars monitor the traffic. A roadblock, a spike strip, lies ready to be thrown across the road in the event of trouble. It is summer. The air shimmers and smells of hay. Swallows swoop through the air. The road is wide. It is flanked on both sides by stately chestnut trees and behind them rows of houses. The properties are surrounded by high fences. Sometimes these are sheets of metal, in dull red or green, and sometimes railings with jagged embellishments. These offer a glimpse of the tidy vegetable plots and ornamental flower beds behind them. The summer kitchens are covered with vines. The pace of life is unhurried. The cars crawl by, slowed by the bumps in the road and the police behind the trees. Anyone entering the village first passes a military barracks and then a psychiatric hospital. As we drive in, we too seem to be overcome by the torpor. We park the car at the newsagent, buy some fruit and mingle with the men on the bench. The police approach curiously, check our documents and strike up a conversation. Further along the road is Khava Gaisanova. She is sitting on a small wobbly bench next to the fridge from which she sells lemonade and water. The high metal gate to her house is wide open. Three small children dart around her, sometimes jumping on the swing hanging from a tree or cooling off with grandma’s spring water. The passing cars leave behind swirls of dust. Khava often waves after them; they are acquaintances. The electricity cable keeping the fridge cold runs inside through the gate. There, Madina, Khava’s daughter-in-law, spends most of her time in the kitchen. The house is surrounded by a high, red-brick wall. The local bricks are so bright that the colour of the houses and walls seems almost unnatural. Behind the wall are the family’s gardens. They grow cucumbers, melons, tomatoes, cabbages, carrots and other crops. A modest orchard supplies apples, pears, apricots and plums. A small flock of chickens and two turkeys peck at the scattered seeds. Khava is just short of her 60th birthday, but her drawn face makes her look older. Yet she is beautiful. Her sharp blue eyes and clear skin make an instant impression on us as we pass. We stop and turn around for a bottle of water and a chat. Impassive, she awaits our arrival, inspects us – as foreigners we are a strange sight here – and finally welcomes us. We ask if we can sit down and talk to her. She beckons a boy and he runs inside to fetch chairs. She slides along the bench so we can sit down immediately. Only then do we notice that the smallest child has a large, knob of butter

2. Khava Gaisanova

melting on his head. “Oh,” says Khava, slightly embarrassed, “that’s a local tradition. He’ll grow up to be clever.” In the warm sun the butter runs in small streams down the child’s face. “My family has lived in Chermen for nine or ten generations.” Chermen is the next village. It is part of North Ossetia but is primarily inhabited by Ingush. If Khava walks to the end of the road that runs past her house to the east and stops in the middle of the fields, she quickly finds herself in Ingushetia. From there, the glistening golden domes of the new Ingush capital Magas can be seen on a clear day. “My family is originally from the mountains,” says Khava. “Like all Ingush. But when the Russians invaded the Caucasus, they were expelled from the mountains. They lived off their fruit trees, gardens and livestock in the mountains and traded wool and leather. It’s better that they left: it was a hard life. The people were poor. There was overcrowding and hunger.” In Ingushetia’s high mountains, families traditionally had their own tower where they also once lived. “My family lived in Egi-Kale,” says Khava, “a large, elevated area on the Georgian border. The towers were used for defence. If we were attacked, the livestock and the entire extended family could fit in those towers. They still exist, but they’re crumbling.” Khava rarely goes there now. Her family roots are buried far away from the modern world, only accessible by dirt roads. She is a teacher at an Ingush school in Chermen. She sighs. “We didn’t used to have any trouble in the village. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. The Ingush and Ossetians started killing each other. Everyone wanted everyone else’s land, the border became fluid. “The children used to sit together at school,” she continues. “Most older people can still get along, but most children don’t even speak each other’s language anymore. They can only fight with each other.” Small furry caterpillars fall continuously out of the chestnut tree. The grandchildren are kept busy picking them off us as we talk. Khava undoes her headscarf, leans back and ties it round her head again, a little tighter. “We Ossetians and Ingush have coexisted peacefully for centuries, but the authorities make money from war,” she says bitterly. The taxi driver leans out of his window. He jibes maliciously that even in a small family, the Ingush still fight. Chermen is in the Prigorodny district. It is controlled from Vladikavkaz, where we are staying. We travelled to the area with Dina, a South Ossetian interpreter and fixer, who makes appointments and relentlessly stalks the people we want to talk to. The taxi driver, who we picked up on the street somewhere, is North Ossetian. The Ossetians hate the Ingush. This stems from the past, from the war during the Soviet era. It also stems from more recent events. “They are horrible people,” says Dina, a woman of around 50 who was once a refugee herself and experienced the atrocities of war in South Ossetia.“They are cruel and always cause trouble. And,” she whispers, “they have a lot of money. Just go to an Ingush village and see the palaces they build.” I ask – slightly mockingly, because the prejudices in the Caucasus quickly become tedious – whether she dares to go to the Prigorodny district and beyond, where those scary Ingush live. “Of course,” she says, “but reluctantly.” We wonder whether or not it is clever to take an Ingush hater with us to visit the people we want to meet on an unbiased and neutral basis. At the moment we have no choice. An Ingush interpreter is no easy find.

2. Khava Gaisanova

The next day, the day we meet Khava for the ﬁrst time, we drive eastwards from Vladikavkaz and pass the endless barracks of the Russian 58th Army before reaching the ﬁrst villages and suburbs. Prigorodny actually means ‘the suburbs’. After the army barracks comes Oktyabrskoye, a town that indeed feels like a suburb. Then it starts. “Put an Ossetian family in an Ingush village and next morning they’ll be dead,” the driver sneers. He points to the houses with high walls and massive gates. “All Ingush.” He points to the smaller, lower houses. “Those are the Ossetians.” He indicates men wearing white prayer caps. ‘”Ingush.” He distrusts all Ingush. “They come with weapons, blow up our markets and kill our children. And what do we do in return? We live in peace. They are dangerous people.” Dina nods along. “What does your husband do?” I ask Khava, who stares coldly ahead of her at the driver’s comments. There is a short silence. She looks at us intently, but then lowers her gaze. “My husband disappeared. In August 2007 I went to Kazakhstan. My brother, who lived in the capital Astana, had died. I stayed there to support the family during the mourning period. Then my son Musa rang to say that my husband was seriously ill. I went home as quickly as I could. That’s when they told me that my husband had disappeared. Probably kidnapped by the police. He had been on his way to Vladikavkaz with our neighbour. Neither of them has been heard from since.” The driver does not say anything now. Dina looks at Khava inquiringly. Sighing, Khava begins her life story. It is hard for her; she prefers not to talk about it. Her daughter-in-law Madina brings tea and sweets. We interject occasionally, while Khava silently begs us to answer the only question that matters: where is my husband? It is late, night is falling and our driver and interpreter do not dare to drive back in the dark. Bidding farewell, we ask whether it would be possible to return to write the entire story. She agrees. Anything that could help to bring back her husband. Trust has been established. Dina slowly stands up from her chair. With tears in her eyes she embraces Khava. One of the children runs outside and gives Rob, myself and the driver a handkerchief and a pair of socks and Dina a pot of home-made jam, as parting gifts.

2. Khava Gaisanova

Chermen, North Ossetia Magomed Lianov, Khavaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s uncle.

3. The mountains

Gudauri, Georgia Old postcard of the Transcaucasian Military Way (Tbilisi-Vladikavkaz).

Gunib, Dagestan Shamil Gate (in the tradition of a photo by the tsarist photographer Prokudin-Gorskii).

Tsokh, Dagestan

The mountains are the soul of the Caucasus: it is where Russian armies have worn themselves down and where the inhabitants of the plains flee when they feel threatened. We went into the mountains five times and were arrested or refused access three times. Wars are still being fought here. Indeed, over the past three centuries, few decades have been peaceful and few generations have not lived through a war.

3. The mountains

The road from Vladikavkaz to Tbilisi is a feat of strength. Officially known as the Transcaucasian Military Way, it was built in 1783, when 800 Russian soldiers carved the road out of the rocks and gorges that form the border between the North and South Caucasus. Thanks to this road, the Russians no longer had to cross the plains on the Caspian Sea or the rugged paths on the Black Sea to advance upon Azerbaijan and Georgia, and were finally able to gain a foothold in the Caucasus. We park the car by the side of the road, in the middle of the mountains. Herds of cows nonchalantly cross the road and effortlessly climb the slopes; there are no herdsmen in sight. The air is stunningly fresh and light. We breathe it in whenever there is a break in the heavily laden trucks tearing past on their way to Armenia. This small tortuous two-lane road is Armenia’s lifeline. Surrounded by its sworn enemies Azerbaijan and Turkey, the country has little choice but to transport its import and export goods over this road to Russia. The Armenian economy thus suffered a severe blow in 2008, when the border road was closed during the August War between Georgia and Russia. There is an insurance office across the road from where we are parked. Pimped-up Ladas with pumping music, belonging to young Armenians on their way to Vladikavkaz, are parked haphazardly in front of it. We are waiting for Khava’s uncle, Magomed Lianov, who wants to show us the towers where Khava’s family once lived. He has been warming us up for days. “I’m going to make you the best shashlik,” he promised us. “You’ll stay with me and I’ll first show you the Lianovs’ towers before we take a UAZ to the Gazdievs and Gaisanovs.” A UAZ is a Soviet all-terrain jeep, and if anything breaks, it can easily be fixed with a well-aimed blow from a hammer or a socket wrench. Khava’s uncle had already told us wonderful stories about his family. “My ancestors were progressive,” he said. “They lived in very primitive conditions, but they understood that the world was lager than their own backyard. Around 1900, my grandfather went to Tbilisi, where he bought oil lamps for the whole family. It may sound strange, but it was a revolution for the village. Until then they had lit their homes with fires and beeswax candles. They lived in a dilapidated house, not made of stone or wood but of a type of local clay. It stank, because they used cow dung as heating fuel. My grandfather continued his moder nisation drive and whitewashed the walls. They had the right idea about life.” We had been sitting at Khava’s table when the uncle burst in with his stories. “You’ll see the photos of my ancestors,” he said. “They were as strong as wrestlers, tall as giants and they could easily eat a goat for dinner. At banquets, they had no problem consuming 400 kilos of meat.” In the mountains, every family clan has at least one tower. It is the pride of the clan. In traditional families, the ancestral mountain community still determines who can and cannot marry. “Our family tower is unique,” said Magomed. “It is the only one which is still permanently inhabited.” The towers were built from a mixture of goat’s milk, eggs and sand, the uncle claimed, “and so they are strong as steel; until cannons were introduced, no army could take those towers.” Magomed finally joins us on the Transcaucasian Military Way. He gets out of the car, apologising profusely for the hour that he has kept us waiting. “Follow me,” he says, “my wife and daughter have been cooking all afternoon. It’s high time!” We drive on through the mountains and near a bunker covered in camouflage nets cross a military bridge over the River Terek. On the far side a barrier blocks the road. Three Russian soldiers with Asian features indifferently wave through the cars that want to cross the border into Ingushetia. Magomed takes our passports and marches up to the Russians with a self-assured air. They greet him cordially – he is a

3. The mountains

regular visitor here. But from the car we immediately see a frown appear on their faces when he pulls out our passports. Magomed had promised us that everything would be alright: he said he knew all the soldiers and would personally vouch for us. That is the most important and most significant guarantee in the Caucasus. Even at the height of the Chechen wars, when kidnapped foreigners and Russians were worth thousands of dollars, they were never harmed if they were hosted by a Chechen family. To harm a guest is to harm the family and thus the honour of the clan. A blood feud would be the inevitable consequence if a guest were hurt. Magomed saunters back over. “They’re just making a call,” he laughs, “but I’m sure it will be fine.” We have already given up hope. We had seen a sign on the bridge in English – which is unique here – saying that this is a special border crossing for which a permit is needed. We had told the uncle this, but he could not believe that his small, inconsequential village would require a permit. “Border area? If you head down that road you get to the border,” he indicates the road where he had picked us up earlier. We are denied access nonetheless. He announces the news like a dog with his tail between his legs, his honour as a host crushed by the rigid Russian laws. He rarely looks frustrated. “I can’t even invite my own guests home,” he says. We say goodbye and he crosses the border to his house, which we will never see. In Arabic, the Caucasus is known as Jabal Al-Alsun, ‘the mountain of languages’. There are few places on earth where so many different peoples, many of them speaking totally different languages, coexist. Chechen, for example, belongs to a tiny language family, together with Ingush. The Kabardin, Cherkessians and Adygeans speak a language that is only spoken in the north-western Caucasus. The Balkars and Karachays, on the other hand, speak a type of Turkish, while Ossetian is an Indo-Germanic language related to Persian. More than 30 languages are spoken in the mountains of Dagestan – the most multi-ethnic area in the Caucasus. Pliny reported that the Romans needed 130 interpreters to communicate in the 300 languages that are spoken here – probably an exaggeration, but it conveys the complexity of the region. The Caucasus is a natural conflict zone, if you can call it that. It is comparable to the Balkans: a mountainous area that is difficult to access and control. Perhaps this is also why it forms a natural boundary between different superpowers. Empires come and go, but all the empires that have pitched their tents around the Caucasus have been worn down by these rugged mountains and – by all accounts – their equally rugged inhabitants. The Caucasus offers rich pickings for those interested in geopolitics and the extent to which the environment shapes its inhabitants. The higher the mountains, the more horizontal the social structures. Feudalism does not work here: the territories are too small and difficult to control and distances are hard to bridge. Councils made up of the old, wise and warriors governed the tribes. The princes and chiefs only ruled the plains, but with every attack from a larger power, the hierarchy was cruelly disrupted. Even today, the mountains continue to offer a safe haven for fighters and insurrections. The mountain villages are widely considered to be the primeval home of the various clans in every population group. The three passages through and around the mountains clearly reveal the centuries-old struggle for this region. On the west coast, the route is guarded by the forts of Tuapse and Novi Afon. But in the blue waters of the Black Sea, the ruins of ancient Greek fortresses and trading centres are occasionally still visible. From

3. The mountains

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Until cannons were introduced, no army could take the towers.â&#x20AC;? Magomed Lianov

3. The mountains

Dioskurias, a restaurant (which was practically destroyed in the war of 1992) in the Abkhazian capital Sukhum, ancient Greek stones and columns can be seen just beneath the water’s surface. In the middle lies the modern passage where the city of Vladikavkaz (literally: ‘ruler of the Caucasus’) watches over anyone who travels into the mountains from this point. And in the far east on the Caspian Sea lies Derbent, the oldest city in Russia existing even before Russia itself. The city is steeped in thousands of years of history. On a low plateau in the easternmost foothills of the Caucasus, a large castle looks out onto the mountains, but also provides a stunning view of the narrow coastline to the north and south. It is hard to imagine a more strategic location. On a warm summer’s day, we climb up the steep slope to the massive fort. The city is chaotic. During the last decades of the Soviet Union, millions of tourists came here every year. But in the turbulent decades since, Dagestan has become a no-go zone. Located next to the central market, the old Intourist hotel is a large complex that appears as if it has been through a war. Elderly ladies have set up stalls at the entrance selling berries, fruit, sausages and honey from their own gardens. In the market itself, everything is on sale. This city, which lay on the Silk Road, has commanded a central position on trade routes for millennia. It is no less bustling today, as all the road freight from Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia passes through here. However, it feels more like the chaotic bustle of a Middle Eastern market town than a Russian city. Indeed, modern Russian history is just the tail end of the earlier influences that can be found here. The churches date back to the 4th century, the synagogues are at least as ancient and the oldest mosque is from the 8th century. The castle provides a perfect impression of the city’s original layout. A guide who has clearly had to tell the story a few too many times, explains that a high wall ran westward through the mountains for 60 kilometres. It was known as the Great Caucasian Wall, he says. Four horses could run abreast over the wall; that’s how wide it was. We look back at the mountains and see nothing. “Everything was pulled down in the following centuries,” he says. “It was all reused to build houses and villages elsewhere. Small parts of the wall survive only in the least accessible places.” If you look out over the city, you see two city walls to the left and right of the castle. They drop steeply down from the castle plateau and then cut through town to the coast. These two walls used to mark the city boundary. There was no way travellers headed northwards could avoid the city with its tolls and markets. This also probably explains the town’s name: Derbent means ‘the gate’. The city walls did not end at the seashore, but stretched 500 metres into the sea. The area between them formed a natural harbour, a shelter from the turbulent Caspian waves. It is a brilliant concept: a monstrously large castle with two arms that envelop the city and penetrate deep into the sea. It is hard to think of Derbent as a Caucasian city. Precisely because it controlled the plains, it was the playground of the Persians and the Turks, the Mongols and the Khans; in other words, the people of the plains. The thick walls, high towers and strategic location of the city’s fortifications express exactly what each old village and monument here expresses: war and control. It is exactly like the mountain villages further up, where the family towers of rough-hewn stone, beaten eggs and goat’s milk guard the valleys as well as provide shelter to the inhabitants. Caucasians are proud of their history, which is defined by war and violence. Masculinity, too, plays an important role. The British historian John F. Baddeley describes it splendidly in his historiography from 1901, The Russian

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Conquest of the Caucasus Caucasus. The villages were located as remotely as possible, he writes, preferably on a south-facing rock, so that all the warmth of the sun was captured, even during cold winter days. The distance to water sources and farmland did not matter – that was the domain of women. The men lay in the sun, sharpening their sticks when they were not sleeping, eating or fighting. All the chores were left to the women. When a woman was worn out at a young age, the man would take a new wife. Polygamy was not unusual. When there was an attack, the enemy had to risk lives to reach the village. It was impossible to fire at it from a distance. In the village itself, all the houses were built like small forts: surrounded by stone walls and connected to each other via small, stifling alleyways. The enemy was faced with the almost impossible task of knocking down a new garrison of men and women in every house. “In our culture, you aren’t a child for long,” says the old Dagestani historian Mogamedkhan Mogamedkhanov, who works at the university in the Dagestani capital Makhachkala. “In the West and in Russia, you can play around until the age of 16, or sometimes even 30. Here, a girl of eight is already grown-up and bears full responsibility in the household. Boys need to learn to fight at the age of eight and be ready for real life at the age of 14. Life in the Caucasus is serious and that’s reflected in children’s upbringing. Adolescent behaviour is considered irresponsible here. It doesn’t happen.” In the good old days, when men were not lazing about, sleeping or eating, there was wrestling. As a form of fighting in times of peace, this sport is just as typical of the Caucasus as the high mountains. Even today, wrestlers from the Caucasus are a force to be reckoned with at the Olympic Games and invariably take home the majority of the medals. In a legendary wrestling school in Makhachkala, the colossal former world champion Mogamed Ibragimovich Magomedov proudly lectures us. “Our ancestors told us that we need strong and courageous men,” he says. “Only the very strongest survive. All the Roman conquerors tried to place their crown on our mountains. Everyone tried: the Reds and the Whites during the revolution, the Mongols before them – but no one succeeded.” He voice reverberates around the hall like a bell. It is a story that he has told before and he seems genuinely proud of it. “One example,” he continues. “There is a monument in Iran for Nader Shah, the former king. He is a celebrity there: they call him the second Alexander the Great or the second Napoleon. But our mountain peoples defeated him laughingly. The coward fled and left all his troops behind, dishonoured. The same goes for Genghis Khan. He slithered along the coast and didn’t dare to penetrate into the mountains, out of fear for our swords. The rulers of Samarkand… well, you see what I’m trying to say: we fought and fought.” The guide in the castle told us that Derbent was not only the gateway to the Caucasus, but also a dividing line between cultures. To the south of the gateway were the peoples of the great empires: the Persians, Turks, Armenians and Georgians. To the north were the barbarians. Nomads and tiny mountain nations lived to the north, and from the north came the wild Mongol Hordes. Sometimes they were a nuisance to the rulers south of the gateway when they came down from the mountains and robbed caravans or raided a village or town. But more often the tribes fought among themselves and the mountains were merely the source of the finest ironwork, felt, wool and leather products.

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The stars on this German map from 1856 depict Russian forts. The orange line along the Rivers Terek and Kuban is the Cossack defence line. In Chechnya, still shown here as a separate country, the yellow dots of Russian outposts extend to the foot of the mountains.

Gunib, Dagestan Gunib has acquired almost legendary status in Russia as the place where Imam Shamil ďŹ nally surrendered to the Russians.

Everything changed with the arrival of the Russians. In 1770, Russia’s expansion drive turned southwards. For centuries Russia had been flooded by the hordes from the endless plains to the east of Moscow and Kiev, the Slav homelands. Until 1699, Russia paid large annual bribes to the Crimean Khans – who were also the nominal rulers of some of the Caucasian peoples – to prevent invasion and war. But now the quest for land, raw materials but certainly also stability on the borders, spurred the great journey eastward to the Pacific and southward to the Caucasus. The rivalry with the powerful Ottoman Empire on the Black Sea also played an important role in this. It was an ambitious journey. Russia wanted to take its place on the world stage and had serious plans to compete with Britain to conquer the fastest route to India and its wealth. In contrast to the Western drive for expansionism overseas, Russia established a colonial empire within its own borders: an uninterrupted landmass of subordinate peoples under Russian supervision, where Russian gradually became the lingua franca and the Russian administrative system was imposed. The Cossacks were instrumental in this gradual shift. These multi-ethnic gangs once formed autonomous sectarian groups on the Russian borders. While they also had their own countries and governments, they were gradually incorporated as Russian border guards in the 17th century. From the end of the 18th century, a period known as the Caucasian War started. The war officially started in 1816, but it cannot be dissociated from the events that preceded it. After the mountain road to Georgia – a mostly loyal state – was largely secured in 1783, the Russians started building fortresses to the east and west of Vladikavkaz. A line of fortresses manned by Cossacks and Russian army troops was built to the west along the River Kuban and to the east along the River Terek. While they were initially regarded as a line of defence, these fortresses gradually also became a base from which to confront the restless mountain peoples. It is a classic concept reminiscent of Asterix and Obelix: the Cossack soldiers stand guard and the mountain soldiers occasionally attack the strongholds to steal men, women, food and goods. The conquest of the Northern Caucasus largely advanced over these three fronts, which have, strangely, hardly changed since. From the start, the Russians found that the central front, where the Ingush, Ossetians, Kabardin and a number of smaller tribes lived, was easily pacified and not many great battles took place there. In the east where the Chechens and all the Dagestani peoples lived, the Russians continue to struggle, even today. In the west were the Cherkessians and many other smaller ethnic groups. Their casual nation state is shown as Circassia on old maps. These western peoples felt most connected to – and protected by – Turkey. Their wars were a permanent game to win over the Turks, British and French and thus drive out the Russians. Until 1864 all the princes, villages and peoples fought against the Russians in a war that lasted decades. In the end the Turks, weakened by the Crimean War, only offered refuge to the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Caucasus. The tsar paid for the boats, his armies drove the peoples to the ports. Even today, large Caucasian communities can be found in the former Ottoman Empire from Istanbul to Cairo. These communities try to maintain their culture and language and in many countries such as Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Israel, Cherkessians have held special hereditary positions in the army since the wars of the 19th century. Nowhere did the Caucasian War generate a larger stream of refugees than

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in this western area. Peoples like the Ubykhs, who previously lived around Sochi, were practically wiped out. The last Ubykh died in 1992 in Turkey and the language only survives on audiotapes and in language archives. In recent years the Circassian diaspora has launched a global campaign to have the genocide against them recognised. The final decisive battle on the western front of the Caucasian War was fought in 1864, in exactly the same place where the 2014 Olympic Games are due to take place, in the ski resort of Krasnaya Polyana. Today, a large memorial plaque proudly commemorates the final conquest of the mountains. History is one of the most politicised subjects in the Caucasus. Visiting a historian at a local university can be a baffling experience, especially in such a small area where so many groups have different views about the same events – as if one has suddenly landed in the middle of a nationalist sect rife with conspiracy theories. Then we meet Arthur in the North Ossetian town of Vladikavkaz. Arthur is not a historian but an engineer, whose interest in regional maps started merely as a hobby. But maps bring sources and stories with them, which is how Arthur gradually became a historian. He based his analyses purely on what he saw on maps, not on folktales, propaganda or centuries-old genesis stories, going back to biblical times if necessary. It is a great relief to speak to him. I treat him to cake in one of the quasi-fancy cafes on Gorki Street. “The Russians were extremely influential here,” he says. It sounds like he is stating the obvious, but he means something else. “It was the Russians who traced the region’s borders,” he explains. “They started making maps, which needed names on them. That’s also how the Russians came to give names to the different population groups. They decided that the Ossetians – who called themselves Allans – were to be called Ossetians and at first they also classified the Balkars under that name. When they discovered that the Balkars were in fact different, they called them Mountain Tatars. And when the name Balkars finally stuck, it was used for five different peoples. Just like the Cherkessians today, who are also made up of four ethnicities. The Chechens are also a Russian invention; they were named after the inhabitants of the town of Chechen-Aul. The Ingush are named after a town that used to be near Vladikavkaz: Angush. The Russians didn’t aim to cause such confusion,” Arthur emphasises, “it was the result of their inherent need to divide the area into administrative units. The Russians had no choice but to incorporate the Caucasus into their own bureaucratic system. Until then, such a concept was unheard of. Borders were not important here, not in the absolute sense in any case. Ossetians could join the Georgian army and many Kumyks became Chechen because those peoples’ freedom appealed to them. Of course it is strange that the borders created by the Soviet Union, but also the ethnic divisions, sometimes led to people killing each other 200 years later.” Russian expansion also had a lasting effect on another level. Sheikh Mansour was the first great resistance fighter who went to war against the Russians. He was the first to realise that Islam could be a unifying force in the struggle against the Russians. There was no other way he could unite the different peoples than under this green flag – an idea that still holds sway today. In the period that the Russians had yet to gain a permanent foothold in the Caucasus, Mansour scored great victories. The Russians were distracted by their wars against Turkey and Persia and periodically left their positions and fortresses in order to deploy their armies elsewhere. Mansour plays an important role in the

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history of the North Caucasus because he was the first to seek to unite the whole region in a holy war against the Russians. He was also the first to successfully use guerrilla tactics against the Russians. When they realised that he was gaining influence among the different peoples, they organised a punitive expedition to his village. They set the village on fire, but found neither inhabitants nor combatants. It was only when the Russians were retreating to the Terek line through the dense forests of Chechnya that Mansour attacked and killed more than 600 Russian soldiers. He must have been a charismatic leader. Wherever he fled, he was able to convince the local population to join the fight against the Russians and the Cossacks. But the attack on the large, former Turkish fortress of Anapa on the Black Sea in 1791 was to prove fatal. Mansour was captured and died in captivity near St Petersburg. After the Napoleonic wars, Russia was definitively a world power and wanted to embed the Caucasus within its borders once and for all. Until then, the mountain peoples had been a shifting mosaic of loyalties, wavering in their allegiance to Moscow. Tsar Alexander I appointed Aleksey Yermolov to the task. For years after, the mention of his name would make fighters in the Caucasus shudder. With Yermolov, Russia embarked on an uncompromising campaign against the mountain peoples and pushed back their borders. He moved the frontline from the rivers closer to the mountains. This is how he founded the current Chechen capital Grozny, which, freely translated, means ‘the terrifying’ – a name without double meaning. Yermolov’s memoirs read like a divide-and-rule manual. With a relatively small army, he made his presence felt across the Caucasus, paying one tribe a considerable amount of money in exchange for its loyalty, while taxing other, loyal tribes. He employed a scorched-earth policy, cutting down forests to deprive the mountain peoples of their natural defensive positions. He burned down villages and killed women and children if they helped to defend the village. The Russians held the families of clan chiefs and regional leaders hostage and threatened to kill their sons if they did not remain loyal to the Russians. Russian supremacy was not self-evident during this period. The mountain peoples formed a majority, but they were poorly armed and badly organised. In his book The Caucasus from 1854, the Russian historian Ivan Golovin gives an apt description: ‘Corruption is without doubt a discipline which Russia handles with uncommon skill. Thanks to corruption, Russia has been able to force its way through the Caucasus.’ The tribes and armies were organised horizontally and often per village or valley. For a long time, they were the Caucasus’ strength. But as enemy armies modernised, the lack of a more vertical power structure proved to be the Caucasians’ Achilles heel. The great leaders of the Caucasian War on the Chechen-Dagestani side leapt into this vacuum. As they looked for a way to transcend local village and family ties, they found it in Islam. Imam Ghazi Muhammad was the first leader of jihad, the holy war against the Russians. In the Caucasus, Islam was not strict or orthodox. It was a mixture of local customs and was not dominated by Sharia, Islamic law. This was to change under Ghazi Muhammad. The struggle against the Russians could not be won without adherence to Sharia law, according to Ghazi Mullah and his successors, Khamzat-Bek and Shamil. The struggle against the Russians automatically acquired a

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religious goal, for as long as the Russians were the occupying or conquering power in the region, Sharia could never become dominant. The imams turned against local practices, against wine, drunkenness, blood feuds and the distorted form of Islam being practised. They organised themselves into a local version of monastic orders. The revolt started in Gimry, the remote mountain village where we had miserably failed to stay out of the hands of the security forces. Within a relatively short time, the insurrection spread well beyond Gimry. At its height, Imam Shamil, by far the most successful leader, controlled a huge part of Dagestan, Chechnya and western Cherkessia. No leader in the Caucasus had threatened Russian authority as Shamil did. There are fabulous stories about him. In 1832 the Russians attacked Gimry in order to capture or kill the rebel leaders. After they had forced their way metre by metre into the impregnable village, they found Ghazi Mullah’s body in his hut. In an obscure German book by Ulf Seidl, the events that followed are described in this anecdote: ‘The only survivor? On the platform of the tower another figure appeared, slender and tall. The soldiers were already aiming their guns at him, but the man jumped over their heads and struck down three Muscovites. (…) Then he made his way over a bullet-riddled wall and escaped through the breach, leaving a trail of blood behind him.’ Shamil’s escape from the hell of Gimry formed the basis for this heroic image. Time and again Shamil was able to evade Russian capture. The siege of the mountain fortress Akhoulgo near Gimry in 1839 lasted 80 days because the slopes up to the fortress were unassailable. Nearly 3,000 Russians lost their lives, an incredible number on the scale of the field battles that took place during the Caucasian War. Shamil also lost thousands of soldiers, women and children, but managed to escape unnoticed through the Russian lines. For 25 years he held absolute sway over his faithful followers and a varying number of villages and regions, depending on the progress of the struggle. But his luck eventually ran out. By the late 1850s, his power was waning. People were tired of the violence, Shamil’s Islamic puritanism and Russia’s retaliations. He wandered through the mountains seeking allies, but Russian power had become too strong. Gunib is a small town in the heart of the Dagestani mountains. In Russia it has acquired almost legendary status as the place where Shamil’s Imamate finally came to an end after a 25-year struggle against the much larger Russian empire. Drive up there now and the first thing you see in the mountains above the city is a great fortification, which is still used as a Russian army cadet base. Below, on a mountain wall between the fortress and the city, is a portrait of a man with a wild beard on a green flag. In Shamil’s birthplace Gimry the insurrection against the Russians continues to spread, but in Gunib, Shamil has become a veritable tourist attraction. Gunib is strategically situated between steep cliffs that rise up to a high and inaccessible plateau on one side, and a hairpin-bend road that descends into a deep ravine on the other. The small town offers unencumbered views on three sides into the valleys and ravines. No one can approach it unnoticed. Deputy Mayor Mogamed shows us around. He is proud of his town’s history. “Gunib has produced so many intellectuals,” he says. “We’re one of the centres of civilisation in Dagestan.” On the central square, the legacy of the tsarist conquest is still visible. A small church, which takes pride of place in old photos, has lost its steeple and become a kind of a youth hangout. The former residence of the military chief rises on a rocky outcrop. We drive up to the fortress and an old white

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Resistance groups in the mountains fought the communists until the 1970s.

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gate is known as ‘Shamil’s Gate’. Mogamed climbs on to a low wall to tell us the story. “At the time, the Russians had learned to take their time. They closed off all the valleys and sought out the highest positions in the surroundings. From there they could shell Gunib.” Further along, the plateau is wooded. We pass an old sanatorium for Komsomol pioneers with respiratory diseases and then a small, whitewashed teahouse looms up against a rock face in the forest. “This is where it happened,” says Mogamed with an air of respect. Imam Shamil was surrounded by the Russians. His own army was tiny. Many had abandoned him; only the last faithful followers had remained. Shamil decided to capitulate in order to save his wife and children and perhaps himself. On the spot where the blindingly white teahouse now stands, endlessly reproduced on biscuit tins, postcards and tea sets, Shamil shook hands with the Russian leader Bariatinsky. After his capture and to his utter amazement, Shamil was given a hero’s welcome in Russia. For days he travelled the country by carriage and train. He was apparently amazed at its unimaginable size. He had spent his whole life fighting for an area of a few hundred kilometres. Now he travelled for weeks through a seemingly endless country. In St Petersburg he was paraded before the tsar and aristocracy. People in theatres and at the opera gaped at him. Photos from that time show a tall, slightly unkempt man in a long habit, who looks fiercely into the camera. Shamil was unhappy in St Petersburg. He was eventually given permission to settle in Kaluga and later went on to Kiev, where he lead a luxurious life at the tsar’s expense. In 1869 he was allowed to leave the country. He travelled to Istanbul via Odessa, where the sultan received him with great pomp. He then went on to Mecca and Medina, where he died in 1871. The end of Shamil’s reign in 1859 in the east and the battle for Krasnaya Polyana in 1864 in the west marked the official end of the Caucasian War. But the Caucasus would never be calm. Immediately after Shamil’s arrest a new imam, who also attracted a reasonable following, took his place in the Dagestani town of Sogratl. The 600 men living in the district were exiled to Siberia. Of all the figures in Caucasian history, Shamil was the ideal adversary for the Russians: a tall, bearded man, who time and again escaped from the Russians in seemingly impossible ways; an enigmatic, charismatic leader; the mouse who taunted the cat for so long. At the end of his life, Shamil had become larger than life. His persona fitted seamlessly with the romantic image of the Caucasus, which, paradoxically, developed in parallel with the punishment campaigns of Yermolov and his successors. Piatigorsk is the historical capital of South Russia. This was the main base from where the Caucasian War was fought. Vladikavkaz was of course closer to the action, not to mention later fortresses like Grozny in Chechnya and Kizlyar in Dagestan. But Piatigorsk attracted officers’ wives, rich Russians, writers, poets and charlatans who moved to the Caucasus in the wake of the war. Piatigorsk is located safely above the Cossack river lines. Abundant medicinal waters flow from the surrounding mountains, which soon attracted aristocratic tourists from the north. Today, the city is still full of old sanatoriums and retains its 19th-century feel. There is also a museum to Lermontov, the author of A Hero of Our Time and many poems that are treasured as part of Russia’s national heritage. Memorial stones scattered through the town recall the trials of literary heroes like Pushkin and Tolstoy, respectively in exile and a soldier in the tsar’s army.

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It was the heyday of the Romantic Movement and Pushkin and Lermontov were fully absorbed by it. In their words, the Caucasus became more than just a border area where endless wars raged, more than a geopolitically interesting area. The Caucasus represented the mountains where humans and animals still lived in equilibrium, where nature was just as fearless as the men. The struggle in the Caucasus was the struggle against the noble savage, a civilising mission, a task for Russia. At the same time, it held up a mirror to Russia. While civilisation had brought calm to Russia, the Caucasian was still a real man, a fighter, someone whose honour mattered. Both in Pushkin’s story The Prisoner of the Caucasus and in Lermontov’s poem Demon, the women of the Caucasus are represented as mysterious, fairy-tale beauties; the women from The Thousand and One Nights, but in Russia’s very own Near East. Much later, around 1900, Tolstoy tells splendid stories in his fictionalised portrait Hadji Murad about an envious ally of Shamil who sided with the Russians to defeat Shamil. Tolstoy describes how the Russians received Murad but did not trust him at all. Because of his symbolic value, however, they gave him a grand welcome and allowed him to stay at the court in Tbilisi in a form of exile. Tolstoy tells the story, he writes, because he found a beautiful raspberry-coloured thistle on his estate. When he went to pick it to add it to his wildflower bouquet, it was so tough and strong that he had to tear it off filament by filament. Such a life force, the writer reflects: man has subdued all of nature, but this one thistle refuses to give up. The writer pursues his meditation and uses the thistle as a metaphor in his history of the Caucasus. The Romanticism of the 19th century persisted in 20th-century folklore. The fierce guerrilla fighters of the Caucasian War were translated into tableaux of supernaturally healthy, powerful men, noble warriors, rising above the common hustle and bustle, sitting proudly on horseback; or women – firm, proud types with large bosoms – engrossed in a noble craft such as jewellery making, pottery or fruit preservation. During the Chechen wars in the 1990s, a song did the rounds among the anti-Russian fighters about Baysangur, Shamil’s ally who fought the Russians to the bitter end in the besieged town of Gunib. According to the song, when Shamil signed the peace treaty and surrendered, Baysangur called after him: “Turn around, I will shoot you down!” Shamil did not turn around, knowing that a fighter like Baysangur would never shoot someone in the back. The song was the Chechen answer to the romanticised history that the Russians had written. The Caucasian War in many ways determined the future of the Caucasus. This is where the inspiration for a holy war comes from; for a binding, supra-ethnic war like the one being attempted today. Russia’s paradoxical relationship with the Caucasus finds its origins in the Caucasian War. Pushkin and Tolstoy made the Caucasus an integral part of Russia’s cultural heritage, with all its romantic clichés and dissolution. At the same time, the Caucasus is a symbol of rebellion and brutality. The Caucasus’ darkly romantic unpredictability prompts Russians to say that it is impossible to have a conversation with Caucasians, as they only understand the language of violence. This mistrust has had catastrophic consequences for the Ingush in Chermen.

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Sogratl, Dagestan â&#x20AC;&#x153;After the Caucasian War, we dissolved like Dagestani honey in Russian tea,â&#x20AC;? says Sogratl native Ali Kemalov.

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Sogratl, Dagestan Weapon-handling instructions on the wall in the local school.

4. Kazakhstan

Nazran, Ingushetia Fatima Gazdieva was deported to Kazakhstan as a child. “We’d left everything behind, and had no idea where we were going.”

“It was Red Army Day, a holiday...” This phrase is uttered frequently in the North Caucasus. As a result of what happened to the Ingush on Red Army Day 1944, Khava was not born in Chermen but in distant Kazakhstan.

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“It was Red Army Day, 23 February 1944...,” Khava also begins her story. We are sitting with her and Uncle Magomed in her summer kitchen, a spacious, covered room between the house and the pantry. Large carpets cover a wooden platform. On one side are lush green plants and a few prayer mats ready to be unrolled. The grandchildren play next to the platform and son Musa and daughter-in-law Madina occasionally drop by to listen. They cook, bring tea and clear the table. They are not allowed to sit at the table or join the conversation, unless asked to by Khava or Magomed. Those are the rules in the Caucasus, where age matters. “My parents didn’t talk about it much,” says Khava. “I think they found it humiliating, embarrassing for the children.” She reconstructs their story with difficulty. The soldiers came on a holiday, when most of the people in the village were at home. It was freezing and families were huddled together around their stoves. “The soldiers banged on the doors. They said, ‘You have two hours, pack your things, it’s a long journey.’ People took everything they could in the two suitcases they were allowed. Some buried valuables, others took them with them. Then the soldiers came back.” Khava points outside. “They lined the roads and drove my parents and the other Ingush from the village, here to the right, towards the train station. “My parents were still children.” She is the oldest in the family. In 1944, 11 years before she was born, her parents were just 13 and 14. “They said that they all walked happily along the street, oblivious to the disaster awaiting them,” Khava recalls. For an actual eyewitness account, Khava sends us to her great aunt, Fatima Gazdieva. She lives just across the border near Chermen, in the Ingush Nazran. She was deported herself. “Go and visit her,” Khava says. “She lives next to the entrance to the mill.” When we knock, a bent old woman with a face lined by age and sun exposure opens the door. Delighted, she invites us in; she always has time to talk about the past. Fatima is 73 and remembers the deportation as if it were yesterday. She searches for biscuits and sweets while asking her daughter-in-law to make tea before starting her story. “Two soldiers came to our house. We didn’t know them so we didn’t want to open the door. My mother worked at the mill, my father was fighting on the front. But the soldiers found us. When my mother came home, we had already packed our things. Then hell broke loose.” Fatima sits on the edge of her seat when she talks. From the sofa opposite, her son and grandson listen breathlessly to the tales of their mother and grandmother. “The journey lasted 21 days. The train was packed. We could hardly move. My legs swelled up because they began to retain fluid. It was horrible.” Fatima shakes her head as she talks. “It was freezing cold and we had little food. Some people had brought preserved fruit; they were the lucky ones. My younger brothers both got frostbite in their legs. They still suffer from it.” Fatima gets emotional as she tells her story. A grandson is sent to get a glass of water. “So many people died,” she sobs. “All people we knew well from our own village. We had left everything behind. Our goats, sheep, furniture. And we had no idea where we were going.” The trains rumbled out across Kazakhstan. Khava’s parents were dropped off at a kolkhoz in North Kazakhstan. Many others were set down elsewhere, up into the mountains of Alma-Ata. “It was an inconceivable time,” confirms Uncle Magomed, back at the kitchen table next to Khava. “I come from a family of six sisters and four

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brothers. All but my younger sister were already born when my family was deported to Kazakhstan. The ﬁrst four sisters died of hunger and exhaustion within a year of being deported. The ﬁfth sister died prematurely from cancer. We think it was because of the hardships she had to endure as a child. She was never strong.” Khava decided she could never trust the Russians, the people who had colonised her country, deported her parents and waged war in the Caucasus. “That will always stay the same, even though times have changed.”

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Nazran, Ingushetia The mill where Fatima Gazdieva worked after returning from Kazakhstan.

Kantishevo, Ingushetia Mogamed Agilkov, 74, was forced from his hometown Vladikavkaz twice: during the deportations and again during the Prigorodny conﬂict.

“When I returned from Kazakhstan I lived for months with a Turk who had occupied my father’s house. I was eventually able to buy him out.”

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Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia Vezir Kozayev, 73, has lived in an abandoned sanatorium near Vladikavkaz since 1992. As a refugee from South Ossetia, he has been unable to build a new life.

Nazran, Ingushetia â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Long live Russia and the Soviet Union, which brought us into the modern ageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is written on this monument, at the entrance to the tower commemorating the deportation to Central Asia.

5. Hardened in exile

Grozny, Chechnya Akhmed Ustarkanov, 88, returned from the Second World War a highly decorated veteran to ﬁnd a Chechnya without Chechens.

“What we saw as deportation, the Kazakhs saw as an invasion.”

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The deportations of 1944 were by no means the first in the history of Russia and the Caucasus. In Tsarist Russia, the mass relocation of people or even entire nations had already been identified as a proven way of reducing unrest in one place while at the same time meeting other needs elsewhere.

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Traveller and historian John F. Baddeley’s wonderful historiography, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, documents the deportation of the Nogay nomads in 1777 from the steppes north of the Caucasus to the Crimea of the Crimean Tatars (which, as Baddeley describes in 1908, was such a horrendous event in the history of the Nogay that they in turn fled to Turkey, an exodus from which the Crimea never recovered). With the Nogay gone, the road to the Caucasus lay open for the Russians. Less than a century later, Caucasians were deported or fled to avoid the Caucasian War and Russian oppression. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Dagestanis, Cherkessians, Abkhazians and peoples like the Ubykh who can no longer even be found in modern Russia moved to Turkey, were put on boats by the Russian army or driven across the mountains. Following these forced mass migrations, Russians and Cossacks – often also under duress – were brought in to colonise the coastal area and southern steppes. In 1937, the adventurous British diplomat Fitzroy Maclean travelled clandestinely through the Caucasus, as he describes in his fantastic book Escape to Adventure.. He arrived in Lenkoran, to the south of Baku, and was just thinking how peaceful and untouched the village was by the long arm of Moscow, when a convoy of trucks passed by. The trucks were carrying NKVD officers with fixed bayonets and ‘depressed-looking Turko-Tatar peasants’. In a newly laid ‘park for peace and culture’ (which marked the official start of the Sovietisation of the village), he learned that the peasants were part of the ‘deliberate policy of the Soviet government, who believed in transplanting portions of the population from place to place as and when it suited them’. He was told that these Tatars would probably be replaced by other peasants from Central Asia. A man then approached him with a copy of the satirical Soviet newspaper Krokodil.. He pointed to a cartoon about British oppression in India. “This is exactly what happens here,” he said and walked away. A comment like that at the height of Stalin’s reign of terror took courage. Prior to the deportation of the North Caucasian peoples, Stalin had – these Turko-Tatars included – already moved 4.5 million people around the Soviet Union. Amongst them were hundreds of thousands of Germans, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Romanians, Kurds, Kalmyks, Tatars and a large number of kulaks, the so-called wealthy farmers who owned their own property and refused to participate in the collectivisation of agriculture. The deportation of Khava and her contemporaries had yet to begin. Less than 20 years earlier, many in the North Caucasus had regarded the Soviet Union as a good idea, following the poverty, war and terrorism under the tsar. A Soviet-style republic appealed to many, for had they not been governed for centuries by the old and wise in their villages and regions instead of tsars and princes? Of course there were also other movements. The desire for independence was greater than the loyalty to the new regime in Moscow. In the chaotic days of the revolution, dozens of republics established themselves in and around the Caucasus, all with overlapping borders and conflicting loyalties towards the Whites, Reds, tsars, Turks and English. One such republic that held out for several years was the Mountain Republic of North Caucasus, where Imam Shamil’s grandson had a seat in the government. Others include the Caucasus Emirate, the Mountain Government and the Republic of Adygea. The Cossacks and Ossetians remained loyal to the tsar and later the Mensheviks, ‘the Whites’. They paid a high price for this loyalty. A portion of the

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Cossacks had already been deported to the Ukraine and northern Russia in 1921. Less than 20 years after the revolution, the Cossacks and Ossetians were once again considered to be potential loyal supporters of Moscow, while the Chechens and Ingush were sent to Kazakhstan and further afield. In the new Red Russia, some peoples restored historic ties with Moscow, but amongst others the desire for independence remained undiminished. The horrors of the ˈ20s and ˈ30s undoubtedly contributed to this. Stalin implemented the catastrophic collectivisation policy and removed all traces of opposition during The Great Terror. The Caucasus’ traditional councils were particularly affected. The old, the wise, the noble families and the mullahs were gradually eradicated during show trials, were summarily executed or deported to deepest Siberia, accused of being kulaks, or representatives from the old days. While the remnants of the tsarist wars were still smouldering, the Caucasus cautiously began to rebel against the new regime again. Most of the uprisings did not have national support, but were instigated by smaller gangs, called ‘bandits’ by the Soviets. In the mountains, familiar territory for the Ingush, Chechens, Karachays and Balkars, it was easy to hide and set up guerrilla campaigns. The repercussions became increasingly deadly. According to the Soviet troops, the only way to punish the gangs was to cut off their supplies of food and assistance. Entire valleys of villages and hamlets were wiped out in the late ˈ30s and early ˈ40s with the aim of depriving the guerrilla fighters of their lifelines. Despite this, resistance groups in the mountains continued to fight against the communists until the ˈ70s. The uprisings only became a threat to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Just as the tsars had always sought an overland route to India, so the Germans regarded the route to the raw materials in the Caucasus and Iran as essential for their survival in the war. The first oil reserves were in Grozny, while in Baku, Azerbaijan it was said that you only had to dig a hole in the ground to hit black gold. The Nazi regime had another weakness for the Caucasus. Within German craniology, the Caucasus was a popular region in which to measure skulls due to its unusually high number of ethnic groups and languages. Beautiful books were published of superbly drawn Caucasian heads, accompanied by dry, quasiscientific summaries of the peoples’ character and their evolutionary state. The distinction between uebermenschen and untermenschen was made early here. According to German race ideology, the Arians, the Indo-Germanic race, were ranked top of the list. Caucasian groups of Indo-Germanic origin, like the Ossetians, thus had an advantage in the Germans’ eyes. In preparation for their advance, the Germans sent scouts and pamphleteers to the Caucasus. They threw leaflets reading ‘For a free Caucasus’ out of aeroplanes. Under the Germans, the mountain peoples were led to believe, the Caucasus would finally be free again. “It was a frightening period,” says 83-year-old Sofia Tshomayeva, a Karachay in the small mountain town of Karachayevsk in Karachay-Cherkessia. “The Germans were everywhere and spent the nights in our homes. Girls were so afraid of them that they didn’t dare to show themselves.” Even so, she named her two grandchildren Albert and Biebert. “Wasn’t that what Hitler’s children were called?” we ask. We are unable to confirm it, but the promises made by the Germans no doubt sounded tempting. With the memories of the Caucasian War still fresh in the minds of the older generation, along with the civil war from around 1920, collectivisation and The Great Terror, it is

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perhaps surprising that rebellion against the Bolshevik occupation did not break out across the Caucasus. Nevertheless, support for the German troops remained muted and fragmented. With the beginning of the war, thousands of Caucasians left for the frontline. Furthermore, the region boasts many war veterans, with the Caucasian peoples contributing disproportionately to the war both in terms of soldiers and victims. The Germans only just reached the Caucasus. At the end of 1942 they ascended Mount Elbrus and proudly planted the Nazi flag at the summit. Footage of the event was shown around the world, but it was only the vanguard who would taste this short-lived victory. In the meantime, the war had reached a turning point and the Germans began their unprecedentedly rapid retreat. Less than two and a half years after the Germans had climbed Mount Elbrus, the Russian army had reached the gates of Berlin. Akhmed Ustarkanov was just 17 when the war broke out. When he opens the door of his spacious apartment in Grozny, Chechnya, he is wearing blue satin pyjamas and a small scull cap. He is tiny. His wife is sent to the kitchen to prepare food and uncork the vodka. He is an old-school Chechen – as Russified as can be – and so we have to drink toasts to life and death, women, guests, friendship and future generations. “It was 3 July 1941,” Ustarkanov remembers. “Stalin called on us to take up arms. We signed up with seven friends from our village, Urus Martan. We were so desperate to fight that we even lied about our age. We were assigned to the cavalry and were given lessons at the barracks in Grozny. But things quickly started to go wrong.” The small, 88-year-old man sits on the edge of his seat. “In 1942, the Soviet Union was caught off guard. Stalingrad was under siege and we had to cut our training short to leave for the front. I was deployed as a mounted scout.” He shows us the evidence of his war: a jacket covered with medals, an endless array commemorating battles, sieges, jubilees and various other tributes. His pride and joy is a photo of him in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. Ustarkanov left Stalingrad and travelled the country until he was stationed in present-day Kaliningrad to supply the frontline. His war was a long one. After the German troops capitulated, he was immediately sent to the eastern front where the war with Japan was still being fought. From there he was sent to Mongolia and then Manchuria. “I was 23 when I was dismissed,” he says. “I came home to an empty Chechnya. I realised later that I’d been lucky. More than 16,000 soldiers from Ingushetia and Chechnya had been captured at the front and sent to camps. It was only on my return home that I was declared a public enemy.” In 1947, Ustarkanov went to Kazakhstan and found his parents in a small kolkhoz close to the Kazakh mountains. He became a gym teacher at a local school. “It was difficult in Kazakhstan,” he says. “There were a lot of riots between us and the Kazakhs and Russians who already lived there. What we saw as deportation, they saw as an invasion.” “They were the 15 darkest years ever for our nation,” agrees 74-year-old Mamatay Bostanov in Karachayevsk. It is a clear day and Mount Elbrus towers above the other peaks. The town is a tranquil paradise on the River Kuban, where apple trees hang with fruit and cows and chickens roam the backstreets. Dozens of crates filled with freshly picked apples and pears are stacked in front of Mamatay’s improvised garden bench. “For 14 long days our world was dark and bleak,” he

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recalls the journey. “Each day we stopped somewhere and were given something to eat. The only thing I can remember is a sort of fish soup. If someone in the carriage had died that day, we gave the body to passers-by. That’s why many of us are buried in places that nobody can remember anymore. But even more people died in Central Asia than in the train – of typhoid, malaria, starvation.” His own, small family of five survived the deportation, but his wife lost six of her nine siblings. She brings out a pile of old photos. “Some of them died there,” she says pointing, “others still live in Central Asia; some are now our neighbours.” It is disconcerting to realise that every family in this village was affected by Stalin’s insane policies. One inhabitant was born in Kazakhstan, another in Kyrgyzstan, while someone else we speak to at a bus stop was a year old when he was deported and 15 when he returned. Few, however, believe that collaboration with the Germans was the real reason for the deportations. “Stalin was Georgian. He wanted to clear this area for Georgians,” says 73-year-old Amir Uzdhanov, also in Karachayevsk. Georgians were living in his home when he returned from Kazakhstan, and in the intervening years his family had been decimated. When his father returned from the war, he found the area deserted. He soon learned that his family and kinsmen were living in Central Asia and followed them there. “He died less than a week after finding us,” says Uzdhanov. “The exhaustion was simply too much for him.” While small resistance groups fought on, the disappearance of almost 500,000 inhabitants from the Caucasus was less like removing the sting from the wasp and more like wiping out the wasp itself. The remaining republics were renamed: Karachay-Cherkessia became the Cherkessian Autonomous Oblast, KabardinoBalkaria became simply Kabardino. Ingushetia was divided between North Ossetia and the new Russian region of Grozny. Within a few years the Balkars, Ingush and Chechens had been erased from maps, atlases and reference books. Similarly, Khava’s parents, her old aunt Fatima and all the other Ingush were deported from Bazorkina, named after an Ingush general in Russian service, and would return 20 years later to Chermen, named after an earlier Ossetian hero. Under the inspiring leadership of Moscow, Ossetians and Georgians from the South Caucasus and Russians from the north were relocated to the abandoned villages on the plains to colonise the new North Caucasus. In the mountains, home to the Russian resistance for centuries, there was nothing but silence. The villages blew away, crumbled or were overrun by grass and plants. If you leave Chermen on Lenin Street and cross the roundabout on the M29 – past the fortified checkpoints – you reach Mayskoye. It is a village like any other, made up of comfortable houses with summer kitchens, grapevines and orchards. At the far side of the village is a canning factory. Next to it is the small Konservny train station surrounded by trees and fields of flowers. The canning factory no longer exists. A car dealer has set up next to the old entrance gate. Men with leather jackets and large moustaches tell us that the factory closed in 1991, like so many others with the fall of the Soviet Union. The local police do not take kindly to foreigners asking directions and we are locked up in a factory building that has been converted into a police station. We are given tea and biscuits and treated politely. Our documents are checked and registered and we are served a second cup of tea or instant coffee before being

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released. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. Standard procedure,” says the duty officer as he shakes our hand. A flock of sheep ambles across the train track. They are startled by a slowly approaching train. It is the local Grozny to Mineralny Vody service. Station manager Fatima Gondorova walks slowly towards us. She takes care of the large wood burner that heats the antiquated station in the winter. In the control room a gigantic green device displays the railway line between Grozny and beyond to Beslan and the trains arriving and departing. Most of them do no come here. The big event is the MoscowGrozny train, which stops here twice a week. This is where it happened – one of the many places in the Caucasus where a single day changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. An insane operation as well as a logistical triumph: in the middle of the Second World War, freeing up an army to transport half a million people from all corners of the North Caucasus. They were not the only ones. Belarusians, Volga Germans and various other ethnic groups were deported at the same time. But nowhere else did this occur on such a thorough, ethnically defined scale as in the North Caucasus. Beria, the notorious head of the NKVD secret police, personally oversaw the operation. In a telegram dated 20 March 1944, he summarised the areas to which the deportees had been transported. It is a neat list of oblasts, regions, in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan followed by numbers that total 491,571. Other documents explain precisely which ethnic groups ended up in which sovkhoz or kolkhoz, how many died during and following transportation, and how many were arrested and sent to Siberia. This level of detail makes the deportations even more incredible: that the Soviet Union succeeded not only in relocating half a million people, but that it was able to document it all so accurately. Each deportee had their own file. One such file for Alaugin Agiyevich Temurziyev, number 5020, can be found in Ingushetia’s deportation museum. Under ‘category’ is written ‘North Caucasian Ingush’. There must once have been a basement somewhere filled with 491,571 of these files, which only account for those deported from the North Caucasus. The deportation monument is located on the M29, the motorway that transects the Caucasus and Ingushetia from west to east. It is at the very least a curious piece of architecture. Right next to the road is a row of arches built in pompous neo-classical style. Behind them are two large arms with the same arches, extending back to a field. There, on a small hill, one of the towers from the mountains has been reconstructed, complete with Disneyesque turrets. Inside, the genocide is commemorated, because according to the UN Convention on Genocide of 1948, ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part’ is also considered genocide. The monument is a fine example of historical interpretation. At the end of the left arm is a large copper tableau showing the Ingush swearing the oath of allegiance in 1770 to the Russian envoy to the tsar in Angush, where Vladikavkaz is today. In later history, the Ingush, who incidentally look extremely angry in the tableau, gave this moment more weight than it actually deserves. It was a small delegation who took the oath, as the Ingush had no leaders or representatives, except for the council in each village, and they did not travel to Angush en masse for the occasion. At the end of the right arm a similar tableau celebrates this Ingush-Russian bond. The tableau bears all the hallmarks of Soviet propaganda, even though it was

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Map from a Russian atlas, 1955 (left). Kabardino-Balkaria is called Kabardin ASSR, the Prigorodny district has been swallowed up by North Ossetia and the Chechen-Ingush ASSR no longer exists. In the next edition from 1966 (right), Kabardino-Balkaria has its old name back and the Chechen-Ingush ASSR has reappeared. Only the Prigorodny district has remained Ossetian.

only recently made. It celebrates the year 1992, when Ingushetia chose to become independent from Chechnya and remain an autonomous republic under the Russian federation. As a result, Ingushetia was largely spared the destruction of the Chechen wars. The tableau also depicts aeroplanes flying through the sky, a train racing into view, oil being drilled and architecture celebrated. In the foreground are athletes, scientists, farmers, welders and a mother and father complete with happy children bearing flowers. It appears to be saying: long live Russia and the Soviet Union, which brought us into the modern age! The message is admittedly true, but the point at which the two pompous arms glorifying Russia meet – somewhere between 1770 and 1992 – was when that glorified Russia deported the entire Ingush nation. In the tower, several young women give guided tours. They were all born in Kazakhstan. Piles of documents from Beria and the NKVD are displayed in open, wooden cabinets. Beautiful, simple paintings by Ingush painters on the walls depict the deportation. Two soldiers in long yellow-green winter coats enter a room where a family of six children, a grandmother and a mother are preparing to leave. The oldest boy helps his grandmother put on her shoes. The window is open and the white curtains flutter dismally in the breeze. Outside, in the early morning light, the first of the families walk to the waiting trucks. Other paintings show the inside of the train and the bodies that are laid in the snow along the route. They are harrowing images, devoid of any macho Soviet realism. At the last painting, the guide points to the mountains. “That’s Tsori,” she says. Like all horrific histories, the anecdotes are even more terrible that the history itself. “Tsori, Guli and two other villages were so isolated that the NKVD missed them. When the NKVD finally arrived, the trains had already left. Moreover, Beria thought: all of the papers have already been signed to say the mission is complete. Let’s just kill these people to avoid any confusion in Moscow.” The fear of Stalin and the system was deadly for the inhabitants of these villages. They were herded into a number of family towers and, the guide emphasises, “with the greatest difficulty, because it was cold and wet, were burned alive.” Around 20 per cent of the deportees died during the journey or shortly after their arrival in Central Asia. Once again, following the Caucasian War, the civil war around 1920 and The Great Terror of the 1930s, the mountain peoples were decimated. The deportees were subjected to severe restrictions. They were not allowed to leave the villages to which they had been relocated without permission from the police. In the chaos of the journey, some families were separated for years. Anyone caught breaking the rules was brutally arrested and sent to prison camps in Siberia. An NKVD document in the deportation monument shows that of the around 24,000 people who arrived in South Kazakhstan in the spring, 357 were arrested and 1,267 had died by 15 June 1944. Survival in these fragmented communities thus became a matter of creativity. One of the solutions was to take multiple wives – a measure sanctioned by the Koran to compensate for the shortage of men in times of war and repression. The women married young and the Chechens, Ingush and Balkars sought each other out where possible. The deportees were housed on kolkhozes and sovkhozes, large collective state farms. They herded sheep, picked cotton and cultivated sugar beet. “The Russians said that we were traitors and even cannibals,” Mamatay Bostanov, the Karachay, told us. “Luckily, the manager of the kolkhoz sympathised with our

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desperate situation. He gave us accommodation in the mountains and not on the plains where everybody else lived. As a result, it was easier for us to adjust than most of the Karachays who had been sent to the deserts or steppes.” Fatima Gazdieva, Khava’s aunt, told us how immediately after their arrival in Kazakhstan, two nephews were dispatched to find her a suitable husband. Within a year she was married and at 16 she had her first son. “We were soon offered a job,” she tells us. “But where we lived was terrible. At home in Bazorkina or Chermen, we worked in the canning factory. Here we had to work in the fields. There were no factories. It was gruelling work and we had to improvise everything. There were no building materials available. My husband and I scoured the whole area. We built a simple house but we were able to whitewash it.” Little by little, the Caucasians rebuilt their pride. Fatima planted a small field of corn behind her house and ground corn flour between two stones she had found. “For a long time we weren’t able to afford new clothes, but life gradually improved. It was easy to make friends because everyone was in the same situation.” In his book The Gulag Archipelago Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn writes about his experiences in the prison camps: ‘There was one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission – and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens.’ Solzhenitsyn follows this description with a fairly classic ‘noble savages’ story about blood feuds and other Chechen virtues. But what he saw in the Gulag matches the stories told by the Chechens and all the deported mountain peoples. With man and might, they tried to uphold their clan structure and traditions – in exile more than ever.

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Konservny, North Ossetia The train station from where Khavaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parents were deported.

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Konservny, North Ossetia Fatima Gondorova, the station manager.

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Konservny, North Ossetia The main event is the Moscow-Grozny train, which stops here twice a week.

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We lean over a large pile of photo albums. Khava, Magomed and even Musa join us. We witness a happy time. We see Khava and her siblings growing up, playing and going to school. “I love Kazakhstan,” says Khava. She points to the children in a class photo. “Look, Germans, Kazakhs, Russians, us Caucasians. Everyone lived there.”

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We spread out the photos on a sheet of paper we have brought. A family tree of Khava’s family, the Gazdievs, and the Gaisanovs, her husband’s family, emerges. We see the generations going back to the 19th century, old-timers who lived through the tail end of the Caucasian War. They are beautiful, informal portraits from the Soviet era. Every time we start talking about her father-in-law or great father-in-law, Khava bobs up. I ask what she is doing. “Respect,” she says. “When you hear the name of your deceased father-in-law, you’re supposed to get up from your chair.” Traditions in the Caucasus are humorous and almost all are based on respect for men, age and the prevention of violence. We gently mock the tradition. “Now I won’t do it on purpose,” she warns us when she notices that we find her bobs amusing. Yet I occasionally see her bob inadvertently when her father-in-law is mentioned. Khava was initially dubious about our interest in her family history. In this country, it is best to stay under the radar as much as possible. Anything that attracts attention can only lead to trouble. Now she is enjoying it. She shows us a small, discoloured photograph of her grandmother, Tamara. “Ah Granny,” she says. “My grandfather was killed on the Western Front in the Second World War. When my grandmother was deported, ‘guilty’ of being a member of the resistance against the communists, she wasn’t even aware she was a widow. She only found out later in Kazakhstan. She wanted to go back to the Caucasus as soon as she could.” Khava lovingly strokes the picture. “My grandmother always hoped we would return. She loved Chermen and the Caucasus. My mother did too. She was always telling stories about how beautiful it was here. All she could talk about was Ingushetia, the paradise of her youth. She told us about the vast fields, the trees, the gardens, the river. In Kazakhstan we lived on the steppes. We children had a good time in Astana. It was a city, we could go to the cinema and theatre. Although not without our parents’ permission, because the Caucasian children in exile were brought up even more strictly than here.” Khava’s finest memory is of Love in Kashmir, a beautiful love story she saw when she played truant from school. “That was an exception. We weren’t allowed to do anything. We wore long skirts and covered our arms.” She loses herself in thoughts from her childhood. “I still remember that my classmate Ramazan fell in love with me in secondary school,” she says. “He wanted to see me after school and dropped by with some excuse. I opened the door and there he was, red-faced. He asked for something, a textbook I think. We didn’t even touch each other, but my parents were furious when they found out. What else would the boy surely want? They were very protective. At the same time, our classes were mixed and after school we wore the uniforms of the Komsomol pioneers.” From 1956, people were gradually allowed to return to the Caucasus. Tamara went back straight away. “My grandmother was born in 1900,” says Khava. “For her, going back was of paramount importance. In her long life, the deportation was just a short interruption.” Khava’s parents found it harder to say goodbye to the adoptive country in which they had grown up. In 1957 they sold their house, but were unable to get a residence permit for the Caucasus. Moscow had been overwhelmed by the flood of people who wanted to return immediately. In their supreme ignorance, that had not been the Russians’ intention. “When the backlog of people didn’t ease, my parents built their own house in Astana.” She looks back at it with pleasure. “My parents worked at the bread factory. My father transported sugar, flour and fruit to the factory and my mother baked biscuits and sweets. She occasionally brought some home. They settled down there, had children and made new friends.”

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Chermen, North Ossetia Old photos from Khavaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s album. On the left are family photos taken when Khava lived in Kazakhstan. Top right: immediately after her return to Chermen with Mukhazhir. Bottom right: Khava on a school trip to Sochi with her class.

Still, the household that Khava grew up in would always remain frugal, the frugality of people living on the edge. In 1957, her parents had already sold their large pieces of furniture in readiness for moving. “Later, my mother wanted to buy new curtains or another chair,” Khava laughs at the memory. “Then my father would say, ‘Is that a good idea? When we’re going back to our own country.’ Once she bought a lovely lamp. My father said, ‘It’s beautiful, but who’s going to visit us here? And we’ll buy everything new when we move back; our house will be wonderful.’ “They were unhappy, even though they had a good life in Kazakhstan. With two jobs and a large family, moving isn’t easy. And they had been young when they were deported.” Khava only knew the Caucasus from her parents’ and grandmother’s stories. However, when she visited as a 20-year-old in 1975, she almost never left again. “I didn’t like it,” she says. “Astana was a real city. I had friends and family there. There was a nightlife. Chermen was so rural. I didn’t see the paradise my mother was always talking about.” While Khava was staying with her grandmother, she caught the eye of Mukhazhir, a fine young man with a neat moustache and wavy hair that covered his ears. “He was very attractive, it must be said,” says Khava, looking at an old photo of him. “I was still studying in Astana and not even thinking about marriage and the future. But he saw me and managed to find out who I was. We didn’t talk to each other. You don’t do that.” As she talks she flips through a thick folder of photographs of him. A real poser, in tight 1970s fashion. “He sent his envoys to my parents in Astana. My grandmother lived in Mayskoye, three kilometres outside Chermen. He sent his father and aunts to her. The families appeared to know each other; they were both descendants of the four men who had once founded Egi-Kale in the mountains. My grandmother was happy with this large, wealthy family, but one more sign was needed to seal it.” Later that week, Khava’s uncle took the bus to Nazran. Mukhazhir took the same bus, greeted him jovially and bought all the bus tickets. That was the final proof he was suitable. “That’s how my family decided that this would be my husband,” Khava says laughing. “I was 20, he was 29.” In the pile of photographs are pictures of Khava. She was indeed a beautiful woman, with thick curly black hair, a small firm mouth and limpid eyes full of melancholy. “I was very attractive back then,” she says almost coquettishly. “Everyone wanted to marry me, but my whole family wanted him. “My first instinct was to run away,” says Khava, “but I had nowhere to go. My grandmother had my passport and money. Luckily I wasn’t kidnapped. A boy will often pluck a girl from the street and hold her captive for a few weeks, while his envoys arrange the wedding with the family.” It happened to Khava’s younger sister Aza. “She was lured outside and whisked away. It still happens sometimes in the Caucasus, but you don’t have to accept. When this boy’s representatives came to talk, my mother refused outright. She said that Aza wasn’t ready and she could find a better man herself. She eventually did find him, in the Nazran hospital where she worked.” Khava believes that her grandmother really chose her husband. “She knew that he and his family were good. Even so, I would rather have stayed in Astana with my parents and my own life.” She married Mukhazhir in Chermen. Her own parents did not attend. It is the tradition in the Caucasus that the groom never sees the

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parents-in-law. The bride’s parents buy new furniture, gold jewellery, watches, carpets, clothes and curtains for the house. But parents-in-law only bring arguments and divorce. In 1976, Khava gave birth to her ﬁrst and only son Musa. She even graduated from the university in Astana. She picks up a photograph showing her proudly holding up her diploma, a new agricultural engineer specialised in grain culture. “I should have stayed in Kazakhstan,” she says, shaking her head. “I could have got a good job. Not in Chermen. It was a waste of three years studying. They don’t do anything with grain here.” Khava and Mukhazhir built their own house. He worked on a kolkhoz, she became a teacher at School No. 2 in Chermen. “We had a good life,” she says. She shows us holiday snapshots of herself in Piatigorsk, the whole family in Sochi, her in a bathing suit in the Black Sea. She sighs as she thinks about what was to come. “The 1980s were poor. So much changed. The Soviet Union was teetering and we could feel it. At the same time there were also more opportunities. I started making coats out of sheep’s wool, felt and leather and tried to sell them at the market in Rostov. But business wasn’t good. I didn’t make enough and soon gave up. “You could feel the world was changing,” she says. “We sensed doom in the air. It felt like a storm brewing. You see the clouds gathering and darkening. Then you hear the rumble of thunder, when the clouds collide. It becomes eerily quiet and then the downpour begins.” All that time Khava’s parents were thinking about moving back to Chermen, the paradise where they had been born, before Stalin and Beria’s troops moved them to Kazakhstan. The impending deluge held them back. “For the last 20 years, the situation here has been quite complicated,” says Khava. It is an understatement. “That certainly played a role in their decision not to move back. Very occasionally they went there on holiday.” By then Astana had become the Kazakh capital and a real metropolis. “Unrecognisable,” says Khava. “They died two years ago in their self-built house in Astana. Shortly after one another. Far away from their home village and daughters.”

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Karachayevsk, Karachay-Cherkessia The earliest photos in Modalif and SoďŹ a Chomayevâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s album were taken in Kazakhstan.

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Map in the deportation monument in Ingushetia. The checked and striped areas, according to the map, were taken from the Ingush between 1944 and 1956. When this map was made, however, Ingushetia did not exist â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it was still part of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR. As a result, the name of the new republic has been stuck on the map with yellow tape.

“Once we were in Central Asia, nobody seemed to care about our fate,” says Mamatay Bostanov, from Karachayevsk. “We wrote endless letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, but nothing happened.”

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The deported people felt betrayed, but then Stalin died. The shock reverberated through the Soviet Union. It is impossible for outsiders to understand the Orwellian worship of a person who caused so much suffering. For Mamatay and his family, it seemed like the end of the world. “We cried our eyes out,” he says. “We always sang songs for him, in which he was the father-figure. He meant everything to us and suddenly he was gone. We had no idea how we or the Soviet Union could go on. Then we received the news that we were allowed to return home...” “No Marxist-Leninist, no man of common sense can grasp how it is possible to make whole nations responsible for inimical activity, including women, children, old people, communists and Komsomols, to use mass repression against them,” an impassioned Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed to a room of party delegates at the infamous 20th Congress of the Communist Party on 25 February 1956. Hundreds of delegates looked at him in amazement. Some people fainted, there was the occasional shocked outburst and when Khrushchev praised the Communist Party and the Soviet people, the hall erupted in familiar ovations. It was two o’clock in the morning and Khrushchev was only halfway through his lengthy speech. Then he said: “All the more monstrous are those acts whose initiator was Stalin and which were rude violations of the basic Leninist principles [behind our] Soviet state’s nationalities policies. We refer to the mass deportations of entire nations from their places of origin, together with all communists and Komsomols without any exception. This deportation was not dictated by any military considerations. Thus, at the end of 1943, when there already had been a permanent change of fortune at the front in favour of the Soviet Union, a decision concerning the deportation of all the Karachays from the lands on which they lived was taken and executed.” Khrushchev recited the names of all the other nations and ended the list with the cynical observation that if Stalin could have found enough space somewhere to deport Ukrainians, he would certainly have done so. This elicited a laugh from the delegates, but the speech had far-reaching consequences. Suddenly, the Karachays, Balkars, Chechens and Ingush existed again. They reappeared in articles, newspapers and official memoranda. Although it would take months for the Politburo to officially declare the deportations unconstitutional, the genie was out of the bottle. The exiled communities in Central Asia became hives of activity. Many people tried to return home immediately. Police were posted at all the main stations along the railway line in Kazakhstan, Kirgizia and Turkmenistan, in an attempt to convince people to wait for a centrally organised repatriation. The return also had conditions attached. The most important of these was also the most familiar: to move anywhere within the Soviet Union, a residence permit for the place of destination was always needed. Without it, it was impossible to go anywhere. The Soviet Union decided to exercise caution, and as a result any available residence permits were traded at exorbitant prices. Moscow was terrified that the hundreds of thousands of deportees would clash with the Georgians, Russians and Ossetians now living in their houses. To prevent this, Moscow offered the Ingush the steppes of South Russia. The Chechens could also be located further north, beyond the River Terek and in North Dagestan. No such solution was proposed for the Karachays and Balkars, who were to be reintegrated into their home countries. As soon as Khrushchev gave the go-ahead in 1956, however, the floodgates opened. The majority of people moved back as soon as they could, to the homelands they had been forced to leave ten years earlier. Like

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Khava’s grandmother, who moved back in 1957. She did not make it as far as Chermen however, but settled near the canning factory in Mayskoye to the north. Eset Umarov lives in northern Chechnya, in the small town of Isheskaya on the Russian border. “This is actually Cossack country,” she says, “but we get on well.” Eset and her family originally came from a Chechen village high in the mountains, but life in Kazakhstan had changed them. They were only too happy to accept the offer to move to the countryside beyond the Terek and were given a large piece of land. Eset shrugs her shoulders. “This is Chechnya as well,” she says diplomatically when we ask about it. “We’ve lived alongside the Cossacks for centuries. Life here is better than in the mountains.” Her neighbours in the next village are Cossacks. Her family is blond haired and blue eyed with ruddy complexions; a stark contrast to the dark, stocky Chechens in the area. “Only Cossacks and Russians lived here,” says Galina Mokrousova, a proud old Cossack woman, “but from 1956 we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by Chechens.” It fitted the Soviet ideal of progress to settle the Chechens in these fields, where it was easier to establish large state farms and schools than in the mountains, she says. It must have been strange suddenly living amongst the people who had been your archenemy for 150 years, the reason your ancestors were moved to the forts on the Terek by the tsars. “We went to great lengths to become friends with them,” says Galina, “and our efforts paid off. By becoming good neighbours, we survived the wars in the ʼ90s.” From 1944, the Russians, Georgians, Cossacks, Ossetians and others cultivated the fields and inhabited the abandoned houses where the deportees had once lived. To a large extent they were also part of the complicated political manoeuvres aimed at keeping the Caucasus peaceful and loyal. To this end, tens of thousands of South Ossetians from Georgia were brought to the North Caucasus, primarily to repopulate the Prigorodny district. And now the mountain peoples, whom the Russians had so feared for one and a half centuries that they had erased them from the history books, had come back – and had received reparation and compensation to boot. Stories circulated throughout the North Caucasus about the dreaded returnees who entered homes at night to claim their former property. It led to a spontaneous exodus of new settlers from the North Caucasus. It must have been an incredibly confusing time for everyone. Gamat-Khan Katzoyev, born in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, lives in the Ingush Kantishevo, a scattered farming village on the North Ossetian border. He can still remember that time. “When we came back from Kazakhstan, Ossetians were living in my house. They saw us coming and fell silent. They left the house without saying a word. The strange thing was that they hadn’t bought anything and nothing in the house had really changed. We returned to exactly the same house that my parents had left in 1944. The Ossetians sensed that we would come back.” Rioting broke out in cities like Grozny in 1958. Thousands of Russians protested against the arrival of the Chechens and Ingush and the privileges they had received, such as housing, land and financial compensation. They also stormed police stations, Communist Party offices, the train station and other public buildings. One of their primary demands was to change the name of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to the Multinational Soviet Socialist Republic. In addition, they wanted no more than 10 per cent of Grozny’s population to be made up of

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;They were the 15 hardest years in the life of our nation.â&#x20AC;? Mamatay Bostanov

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Uchkeken, Karachay-Cherkessia Tribute to those who rebuilt the village on their return from Central Asia.

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Chermen, North Ossetia Taimuraz Tsirigov does not expect peace between the Ossetians and Ingush to last.

“We’ll always live separately, like the Jews among the Muslims in Israel.”

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Chechens and Ingush. After several days of destruction and occupation, the demonstrators were dispersed by the army. The KGB archives from the time include wild claims in letters from Russians writing: the Chechens have come and have appointed a mullah as their leader and they pray to God / They want to appropriate the republic and restore mountain laws / They want to reinstate private ownership / They say that the Russians do not belong here / The Russians are terrified. Women and children are afraid to make eye contact, because new incidents occur every day. One letter contains an offensive but accurate generalisation about the returning Chechens: Kazakhstan has taught them nothing, only embittered them towards the Russians and the Soviet state. The Ingush staged their first protests in the ʼ70s, principally demanding that the Prigorodny district become part of the Chechen-Ingush Republic again, restoring the borders of the republic before the deportations. However, a new reality was emerging in the villages. The centres were now occupied by Ossetians and the new inhabitants, while the Ingush were building their homes in the foothills of the mountains. Halfway down Lenin Street in Chermen, three men sit on a bench in front of the newsagent. Aslanbek, Nukhzar and Taimuraz introduce themselves. Taimuraz, a short, stocky man with grey hair and a strong, weathered face, speaks for the group. “The Chermen we were born in was the Chermen of the Russians, of Ossetians like us, Germans, Poles and Cherkessians. Chermen is named after the Ossetian national folk hero. He was born from lava and fought the rich to help the poor.” The other men nod vigorously. “We know each other from the army,” Taimuraz points to his companions. He invites us to his house. “You are my guests,” he proclaims and rings home on his mobile to announce the visit. His house, a small dwelling behind an iron fence, is a few minutes’ walk away. He claims to have lived here “for generations”, as people can sometimes so wonderfully claim. “Our village was founded by the tsars,” he says. “This isn’t an Ingush village.” I ask him about the time when the Ingush left and the village was empty. “There was no empty village,” he declares. “I already told you that the Ossetians, Russians and Cherkessians lived here.” His daughter Oxana brings us chunks of roast pork and half a carafe of home-made vodka. This is accompanied by gherkins and pickles. His granddaughter Dasha clambers over him. He looks at us proudly. “When the Ingush returned from Kazakhstan, land was cleared for them in South Russia. They had been away for years. The people who were living here at the time had bought their houses, cultivated the gardens, reared livestock. And don’t think that they had come here voluntarily.” He nods meaningfully. In a few sentences and looks, he has exposed the whole rotten history of this region. Everyone here is a victim of the caprice of Stalin’s regime; but you can exaggerate. “I must tell you that the Ingush had it good, compared to the other nations. They lived peacefully in Kazakhstan, while 60 per cent of our boys died on the front. And the Ingush who moved to Kazakhstan were given thousands of roubles and two cows.” “And a house,” our interpreter Dina adds, before she can stop herself. She has been caught up in the accepted narrative of her nation. “The Ingush say that they are oppressed, but I lost six members of my family in the war,” emphasises Taimuraz, who likes to emphasise what every Ossetian asserts, that of all the peoples in the Soviet Union, the Ossetians made the greatest sacrifice in the service of the Red Army.

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An air of poverty hangs over the summer kitchen where we are sitting. The cliché of the ‘big houses’ where the Ingush live and the ‘small houses’ of the Ossetians, which Dina and the taxi driver had so scornfully pointed out, seems to be increasingly accurate. “They earned a lot of money in Kazakhstan,” says Taimuraz. “When they came back, their houses were occupied. Some families gave them a room. They were often allowed to use the kitchen. No one was homeless. They tried to buy us out, but where were we supposed to go?” Taimuraz sounds bitter. “The Ingush started to say that this was their land in the ʼ70s; that they wanted it back. The situation grew worse each year. So did the corruption. The Soviet Union was perhaps even more corrupt than Russia today,” he complains. “Everything was state property, but it was also for sale. You could buy whatever you wanted. The Ingush started buying houses, land and good jobs. And they bought weapons.” The Prigorodny district – an area of less than 20 by 60 kilometres – stretches eastwards around Vladikavkaz. Today, the area to the west of the city is also part of the Prigorodny district, although that was a political decision, made to anchor it more firmly in North Ossetia. South of the capital, the River Terek winds into the mountains, up to Georgia, Kazbek and the border crossing with Dzherakh, where we were once denied access to Ingushetia. A few hamlets still lie in the woods at the foot of the hills. This was once the Ingush home base, but they left a long time ago. In Yuzhny in the produkty, the small supermarket found in every village, we ask who the local elders are, who knows the history the best. A fierce debate ensues. The shop has not changed in decades. The ancient floor is still polished daily and an endless array of green plants in the window – Russia excels in the use of anonymous green house plants – lends atmosphere to the faded Soviet glory. After much deliberation, we are told to visit Sima Kasayeva. She is over 80 but knows everything, the customer and shop assistant say in unison. We find Sima on the next street, basking in the sun outside her house. A few chickens scratch around under a parked, vintage truck. The dog lying next to her scampers away in fright when we approach the house. We are inevitably invited inside and she spends the first hour offering us samples of all her home-made jams, making tea and coffee and tearing pieces of bread. “They started coming back in 1963,” she says, “but I can’t remember any real problems. They moved in with my neighbours and my son walked to school with an Ingush boy every day. There wasn’t any shooting, any fighting.” Sima gazes upwards, almost looking for problems. “In fact, we were a happy village. We took the bus to work in Vladikavkaz every day. Some people worked in the forest. My neighbour, who was Ingush, was always doing laundry. She helped me enormously.” She broods for a moment. “Look, Stalin was Ossetian, Beria was Georgian. Beria wanted the Ingush dead. Stalin knew them, he made sure that they were taken somewhere safe. No, things only went wrong when the South Ossetians and the other Ingush came,” she says, jumping to the 1990s. Conduct interviews in the Prigorodny district and most reconstructions of the time between the Second World War and 1990 result in a dogmatic narration ending inevitably with the conflict. This can take two forms. Men like Taimuraz trace everything before and after the Prigorodny conflict back to the war. It was clear that the war was imminent, and after it ended nothing would ever be the same again.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;When we returned from Kazakhstan, the Ossetians left the house without saying a word.â&#x20AC;? Gamat-Khan Katzoyev

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Others say that the conflict broke out completely unexpectedly. Sima tells us about the generally happy time she remembers, just as Khava claims only to have good memories of these years. All the evil from that period seems to pale in comparison with what followed over the next two decades. The bloody conflict of the early ʼ90s and the anarchy and violence of the years that followed make many people long for the relative peace and prosperity of the Soviet Union. The ʼ60s and ʼ70s were the heyday of the Soviet Union. After World War II, the Soviet Union became the only superpower to rival the United States. The farming industry produced fairly well while consumables and schooling were available to everyone. The photos that eyewitnesses show us depict the classic image of sun-drenched Soviet propaganda: large combine harvesters in cornfields, cheerful Komsomol camps, multicultural classes at school. Faster than they had perhaps ever thought possible, the Caucasians in Central Asia were embedded in the Soviet system that had previously brought them little more than war, terror and misery. The bitter agony of the impoverished and oppressed years prior to their deportation to the unforgiving climate of Kazakhstan and Kirgizia would not be quickly forgotten. However they embraced the new, relative prosperity. Central Asia became their home away from home. The prosperity even absorbed families like Khava’s; her parents lived out the rest of their lives in Kazakhstan, where they built careers, raised their family and enjoyed their retirement. The North Caucasus was also developed. Remote villages were connected to water, gas and electricity, and every year millions of Russian tourists visited the spas in South Russia and the Caucasus mountains. Factories were built in villages and everyone had work, however specious this was in the Soviet system where unemployment ostensibly did not exist. A veteran in Chechnya, who worked for the police in Urus Martan, told us that in the past – during the good years – when a murder was committed in the republic, a team of ten men from Moscow was flown in to investigate. “How about that,” he laughed scornfully and looked at us knowingly. In Karachay-Cherkessia, near the border with South Russia and Kabardino-Balkaria, is the provincial town of Uchkeken. We drive through it on one of our many trips through the region. In the central square is a curious monument honouring a long line of men. Most similar monuments in the former Soviet Union honour the local veterans of the Second World War, but this one dates from 1959. These are the men, reads the accompanying text, who returned from Central Asia, rebuilt Uchkeken from nothing and made it strong and proud. The men do indeed look proud. It is a touching sight. The world-weary figures wear the trappings of the Communist Party: medals, the occasional sash – symbols of the system that nearly destroyed their people; the system that erased them from the map and denied their existence for almost 15 years. The longer one thinks about it, the crazier it becomes. Yet it is also remarkable that the distrust and perhaps even hatred towards Moscow did not increase significantly. Following their return to their home countries, the deportees were quickly forced back into the straitjacket of the socialist state. They got jobs on the kolkhozes and in factories and worked their way up the communist nomenclature. There were no alternatives. The Soviet Union used not only jobs, factories and education as means to pacify the Caucasus, but also imposed peace in the socialist tradition of friendship of the peoples. Shamil, the great resistance fighter from the Caucasian War, played a notable role in this. After the revolution he was declared a Soviet hero – he had

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fought against the tsars, just like the Reds, after all. Following World War II and the deportations, however, Moscow began to view Shamil as a dangerous symbol. Moreover, as a religious leader he was an advocate of a reactionary religion. The Caucasian traditions had to be rendered harmless. The dances became folklore, and the swords were blunted and served a purely decorative purpose in sword dance fights. Through the folklorification of local traditions, the Soviet Union tried to take the sting out of the past and to paint the Caucasians as noble savages, as Pushkin and Tolstoy had been so successful in doing. The Caucasus could be proud of its many peoples, its ironwork and embroidery, but only if these benefitted the gaiety and exotic character of the friendship between the diverse peoples in the Soviet Union. But that was as far as it should go. Schools that taught in their own language were closed throughout the North Caucasus and local history was removed from the curriculum. Writers and poets were banned or also folklorified. In the regions where the population was deported, only the odd monument commemorates this upheaval. The similarities with the other regions are greater: war veterans are honoured and every school has its own World War II museum. Soviet propaganda is observed in its entirety, Lenin quotes included. The factories are just as deserted, the villages just as neglected. The differences can be seen in the small things. In North and South Ossetia, Stalin is still revered, for instance. His portrait is carved into or painted on rock faces and his bust still occasionally adorns village squares. Here, Stalin is the Ossetian hero, the man who gave North Ossetia additional land at the expense of the deported Ingush, and South Ossetia autonomy within the Georgian Soviet Republic. This reverence is unthinkable among the Balkars, Karachays, Ingush and Chechens. “When Stalin died, life began again,” one Karachay put it succinctly. The Soviet Union’s heyday was short lived. All in all, this period of relative peace in the Caucasus is unique in a troubled history of more than 200 years. In the Ingush monument to the deportation, a Disneyesque colonnaded tower, these years are portrayed as merely an intermezzo between two wars. Our tour jumps abruptly from the horrific deportations and exile in Central Asia to several decades later. We suddenly find ourselves in a room covered from top to bottom with photos, newspaper clippings and maps. We see horribly disfigured corpses, abused women, pictures of tanks and soldiers, interspersed with portraits of a still slim Boris Yeltsin – looking bewildered in front of a crowd of Ingush. For a moment we are transfixed, stunned. What a transition. But here – simply yet powerfully – Stalin’s crime, acknowledged by Khrushchev and Yeltsin, is linked to the historical rights of the Ingush: Chermen should be called Bazorkina and the Prigorodny district is Ingush.

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Kantishevo, Ingushetia Gamat-Khan Katzoyev, 65, lost both legs during the Prigorodny conﬂict. He was born in Kazakhstan. “When we returned, we moved into exactly the same house my parents had left in 1944. Nothing had changed.”

Through the folklorification of local traditions, the Soviet Union tried to take the sting out of the past and to paint the Caucasians as noble savages, as Pushkin and Tolstoy had done so successfully before them.

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Uchkeken, Karachay-Cherkessia Almost every city in the North Caucasus has its own museum of national history, where local customs and traditional costumes are exhibited.

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Naurskaya, Chechnya The Cossack twins Stanislav and Vladislav, 13, recited a Chechen poem for the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. The audience gave the boys a standing ovation and Kadyrov rewarded them with a luxury apartment in Grozny.

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Nazran, Ingushetia Monument commemorating the cooperation between the Ingush and Russian army.

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Chermen, North Ossetia Magomed, 14, Khavaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grandson.

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

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It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers. Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts. Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers. Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers. “My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.” For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.” Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava. “The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

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Mukhazhirâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photo album / Moechazjirs fotoalbum

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Madina and Musa bring tea and crystal dishes piled with biscuits, sweets and chocolates. Even after dinner, Khava has pulled out all the stops. Apricot and plum jams are served in small bowls alongside the tea. The abundance of sweets is accompanied by baskets of bread and plates of Ossetian butter and Ingush honey, as Khava points out. “A good combination,” she says laughing. “There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.” She pours her tea into her saucer and slurps it loudly. Khava does not remember any major problems following her return. Actually, she says, they had a good life in Chermen. Everyone was friendly to each other. Ossetians and Ingush attended each other’s funerals. “But,” she says, “dark forces were released and the conflict began. Even then, ordinary people continued to be friendly towards each other. The conflict was provoked by the Ingush and Ossetians authorities, that much is clear to me.” The day the conflict erupted, Khava was in bed with flu. “I heard shots. I thought it was a training exercise, but then my neighbour ran in. He had been going to pick vegetables in the field but had to turn back. He shouted, ‘Why are you lying in bed? The war has started!’ Then I saw the first armoured vehicles in the street. “Everyone panicked,” Khava continues. She lives on the Ingush side of the village. This is the side that was built after the Ossetians took over the centre, following their return from Central Asia. It is only a few hundred metres to Ingushetia, down the road to the crossroads, and from there only a short distance to Nazran, the Ingush capital at the time. “People began to load up their children, gather as many animals and valuables as they could and race back and forth as militias appeared everywhere. It was very frightening.” The war broke out in the autumn. There was a lot to do in the garden. Khava decided to stay in Chermen. She wanted to harvest her vegetables and prepare food for the Ingush men who had stayed behind. Her garden filled with the livestock that her fleeing neighbours could not take to Nazran. “The same day the militias began to plunder the houses of the refugees. My husband came home two days later and said that I really had to leave. He had seen Russian tanks and behind them bandits. Ossetian bandits. They were Ossetian but chiefly bandits,” she says. She glances casually at Dina, our Ossetian interpreter, “and bandits have no nationality. “We left our house on 3 November 1992. All the other Ingush had already gone. We went to Nazran, but that was almost more dangerous. The city was full of refugees. Anarchy reigned. Complete lawlessness. It sounds strange, but you get used to anything. In the beginning I heard shooting, explosions and I kept waking up. After a while it became background noise and eventually I slept right through it. Those were strange days in the Caucasus. In 1997 I was in Grozny, Chechnya, where my sister lives. It was complete chaos. The whole city had been shot to pieces in the war. The crime was appalling. Men with guns and long beards were everywhere.” Khava left the anarchy of Nazran and returned to Chermen as quickly as possible to save what she could. “I didn’t have any enemies here,” she says. “When I came back, four houses were still burning. When they saw that Ingush were coming back, that stopped. They hadn’t reached my house. My conscience was clear, that’s why I could go back straightaway. I hadn’t killed anyone. My husband came back too, and my son got married here in 1995. He now has four children.” The Prigorodny conflict is one of the many conflicts of that period, and perhaps the least known. “The problem was that Ingushetia didn’t exist back then,” says Khava. “We were still part of Chechnya, where there were other things to worry about. We

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didn’t even have our own television channel. All the news about us was from the Russian or Ossetian perspective. They reported on the unimaginable cruelty of the Ingush. They said that we were killing children and our men were raping Ossetian women. Our backs were against the wall.” Khava describes how life after the war slowly improved. She went back to teaching at the school where Ingush and Ossetians have since been taught separately. “It’s such a shame,” she says, “but the authorities in Vladikavkaz aren’t ready to bring them together.” She points to the sky when she says the word ‘authorities’, forces on which it is impossible to exert any influence from here. “There’s almost no contact now between the Ossetians and Ingush, but things are slowly getting better. The older generation is often friendly to each other, we talk to each other, kiss each other when we meet. But the young people are growing up in a strange village without getting to know each other. They don’t treat each other well. At my school, small fights break out between Ingush boys every day. But if a fight breaks out between an Ingush and an Ossetian boy, it becomes a big deal. We have to be careful, because it doesn’t take much to start a fire here.” She points outside. “Around the corner, do you hear that? My grandson Magomed is playing football with the neighbour’s son. He has an Ossetian father and an Ingush mother, so it is possible. “Do you remember my uncle Magomed?” she asks. “He gave up in those years. He saw no future in the Caucasus and went back to Kazakhstan, the place where he had been born in exile. Trade was the only way to earn money here. In North Ossetia that was vodka, in Ingushetia and Chechnya it was illegal oil and sometimes cars. But everyone was already doing it. Around 10 per cent of our people stayed in Kazakhstan. You’re embraced by the community as soon as you arrive. He did well, trading in millstones I believe. He just couldn’t adapt to the climate and had to come back. He still has a scar on his neck, which swelled up like a potato. He had to have surgery but it kept bothering him. He’s now decided not to worry about the conflict anymore. If you are beyond reproach, you need only fear Allah, he says.” She pours more tea into her saucer and slurps it loudly. “Madina,” she calls, “give the boys tea!”

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Nazran, Ingushetia The museum dedicated to the victims of the repression in Nazran keeps photos of the hundreds of people who disappeared during the Prigorodny conﬂict in 1992.

“During the Prigorodny conflict, the genocide of the Ingush started in 1944 was completed.”

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Kantishevo, Ingushetia Beslanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s airport is visible in the background.

The Soviet Unionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dramatic collapse in 1991 took almost everyone by surprise. In the Caucasus, the collapse heralded a period of violence and conflict which can rightly be called the Second Caucasian War, and which continues to this day.

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It is not a war of conquest, as was the case in the 19th century, but a struggle for influence. In an interview, a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow referred to the former Soviet states as Moscow’s children. He extended the metaphor, saying that children reach puberty and start acting up, but they will always be your children. The imbalance of power inherent in his words is perhaps still most evident in the Caucasus, a region deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. The Caucasus is comparable to the Wild West in the United States: romantic, full of pioneering spirit and laden with the heroism of the advancing frontier. A southern dream. The best restaurants in Moscow were the Georgian restaurants and films often depicted the emotional, half-savage, hairy men from the Caucasus. The soldiers who fought in the Caucasus are still immortalised in statues across the country, however gruesome the results of their military adventures were in practice. Perhaps this is why Russia seeks to maintain more power and influence in the Caucasus than in Central Asia and the western countries of the Soviet Union. Russia has fought for the Caucasus for 200 years – a fight it is unwilling to relinquish easily. Russia used divide and rule politics as well as military violence to subdue the Caucasus. These same tactics are being employed in the Second Caucasian War. The various uprisings and demonstrations in the ʼ80s all served a local goal. None of the conflicts from that period has been resolved and smoulder on as small, regional wars. From 1987, the inhabitants of the Azerbaijani autonomous district of Nagorno-Karabakh, in the South Caucasus, sensed that an important change was imminent. The Armenian majority sought both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary links with the Armenian homeland, while Azerbaijan did everything in its power to keep the region within its borders. It led to a bloody war that could flare up again at any moment. In 1989 unrest broke out in Georgia. In the capital Tbilisi pro-independence, anti-Soviet Union protests were crushed by the army. At the same time, newly formed independence movements in the Georgian autonomous regions of Adjara, Abkhazia and South Ossetia used armed conflict to gain de facto independence. Russia’s ambivalence was clearly visible in these conflicts. Thoroughly informed about local government through its security forces, and military and historical links, Russia provided weapons and military support to one side (Abkhazia, for example) and political support to the other (Georgia led by the former Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Shevardnadze). The conflicts may have indeed been local, but they were played out at the highest levels. The conflicts in the ʼ90s can be seen as local attempts to reinstate the national borders that Moscow had redrawn in the ʼ20s and ʼ40s. South Ossetia and Adjara attempted to use their autonomous Soviet status to gain independence. Protesters in Abkhazia demanded a return to the independence they had enjoyed between 1921 and 1931. The Armenians and Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh were only too aware that these years would determine the country in which their children would be born: no longer in the multi-ethnic Soviet Union, but in a country dominated by either Azeris or Armenians. Alexander Chibirov experienced the events first-hand. The historian from South Ossetia spends part of his time in the North Ossetian Vladikavkaz. As the son of the second president he does not always feel at ease in the small, cramped republic of

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South Ossetia, home to fewer than 60,000 people. “I keep myself to myself,” he says. “There are too many different groups jostling for power.” He prefers to talk about the history of the Caucasus, laced with a good dash of Ossetian patriotism. “In 1989, I was stationed with the Red Army in Vilnius, the capital of Latvia. Huge protests broke out. Together with the police we were ordered to disperse the crowds. I knew that something big was about to happen. I decided to go back to Tskhinval, the capital of South Ossetia, as quickly as possible. The Georgians started their nationalist protests at exactly the same time. Georgia for the Georgians, they sang. War was inevitable.” Chibirov tells fantastic stories about the almost clumsy start of the conflict. “If you whistle in Tskhinval, everyone will come to your aid. It’s a village. The violence started small, as a series of fights. But from 1991 things became serious and many people died.” In 1990 Chibirov was working for OMON, the military police. He was shot and spent a year in hospital recovering from his injuries. “Only when the Russians came to help us did we become more or less independent. But that independence degenerated into total anarchy.” Despite this de facto independence, the country remained a complex patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian villages. It was only during the next war in August 2008 that the country gained the sort of independence it wanted, Georgian villages were destroyed and the Georgians expelled. We are in a cafe in Vladikavkaz. Along with Makhachkala, this is the only city in the North Caucasus with an established nightlife, beautiful tree-lined streets and an old city centre. The wall of the cafe displays a photographic history of the town, from tsarist, military Vladikavkaz to communist Ordzhonikidze, Dzaoudzhykhau cleansed of the Ingush between 1944 and 1956, post-Stalinist Ordzhonikidze and Vladikavkaz again from 1990. “Nationalism plays tricks on the Caucasians,” says Chibirov. “Whenever someone wants an ethnically pure country, another group is always in the way. That’s how small the Caucasus is. But you mustn’t get big ideas here. For that, you would have to be God. Communism didn’t work for a reason.” In the North Caucasus, the first conflict was a direct result of Stalin’s divide and rule politics. Until the deportations, more than 90 per cent of the Prigorodny district was Ingush – and it was still part of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic for a reason. In the years following the deportations in 1944, some 60,000 South Ossetians from Georgia were settled in the Prigorodny district to populate the empty farms and villages. This migration continued after the first Ingush returned from Central Asia, until 1959. Despite this, the Ossetians continued to fear the returning Ingush. The murder of an Ossetian driver in 1981 sparked days of rioting in Vladikavkaz. Army units were deployed to quell the demonstrations. The Ossetians demanded a halt to the large number of Ingush returning to the city and the Prigorodny district. The government partially gave in to the demand and stopped issuing residence permits for Ingush, who continued to return anyway while building their houses illegally. By 1990, 40 per cent of the population was officially Ingush. Unofficially, that figure was likely higher. The North Caucasus seized the potential of the power vacuum created in 1991 by the collapse of the Soviet Union with both hands. Chechnya quickly declared independence. The Ingush opposed this decision, and following skirmishes and a referendum

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declared itself once again independent of Chechnya and loyal to Moscow. The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic was divided into the Republic of Ingushetia and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, as the Chechens referred to their country. Ingushetia expected a reward for its loyalty and asked Moscow to reinstate the pre-1944 borders, including the Prigorodny district. It was election time, when promises were easily made. Yeltsin signed a law rehabilitating the victims of political violence and stating that they could expect territorial integrity to be restored. Simultaneously, the new Republic of Ingushetia was declared legal but without its borders being defined. Ingushetia’s deportation museum displays a photo of Yeltsin stiffly addressing a large Ingush crowd in a square in Nazran. “Salam alaikum Ingushetia,” he said. His words were greeted with cheers. Below him a banner reads: Genocide of the people – a disgrace to the country. Tensions in the North Caucasus were growing. In a mixed city like Vladikavkaz protests and riots were an almost daily occurrence. At the same time, tens of thousands of refugees streamed into the country from South Ossetia. North Ossetia was under pressure from two sides. Moscow’s ambiguous position made the situation untenable.. An increasing number of people were killed or wounded in small, local fights and shootings between the Ingush and Ossetians. North Ossetia rejected any claims by the Ingush. Yeltsin’s election promises and the well-intentioned rehabilitation laws of the Russian Duma had no practical results after the elections. What should happen to the Ossetian population of Prigorodny? What would be the status of Vladikavkaz, which the Ingush also claimed? An armed conflict seemed unavoidable. The guides at the deportation museum in Ingushetia have organised a meeting to learn the details of the Prigorodny conflict. We are escorted in a taxi to a large, new country house in the village of Kantishevo, on the Ingush-Ossetian border. A row of elderly Ingush men are seated according to age in the grand foyer. We greet the eldest man first, then proceed down the line. A similar row of women nod in our direction from the other side of the room. We move to the dining hall, because a good conversation is impossible without food and drink. Magomed Agilkov takes the floor. He is 74, was born in Ordzhonikidze, raised in Kazakhstan and in 1962 returned to Ordzhonikidze, remaining there until it was renamed Vladikavkaz. “After I came back, I lived for months with a Turk, who had occupied my father’s house. I was eventually able to buy him out. But in 1992 I had to leave the house again. I didn’t want to, but I was forced to,” he says. The regret is visible on his face. “It happened so quickly. In late October the body of an Ingush girl was found on the street in Yuzhny. Both Ossetians and Ingush stood around discussing who might have done it. Yuzhny was a colourful place. Armenians, Jews and Russians lived there too. We communicated well, but the conflict was coming ever closer. When I got home the same evening I heard the first gunfire. It came from both sides.” More and more men join us at the table, trying their best to disrupt the speaker by telling their own stories. Anecdotes and accusations fly about who started the war and how it broke out. There is no unified version, only agreement that the country was suddenly ablaze. Agilkov opted for safety, he continues. He loaded friends and family into the back of his truck and drove as fast as he could to Dzherakh, the Ingush town in the mountains near the Georgian border. “On the way, shots were fired at my cab. There was a long line of cars and Ossetian militias ahead of us. They were

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drinking and roaring Ossetian songs. My hand was broken and the only thing I could do was jump out of the cab. I was knocked unconscious. Only later did I hear that other people had saved the column. I only woke up in hospital. “In retrospect,” he continues, “it was clear the war was coming. There had been so many murders and incidents. The police in North Ossetia subjected us to an increasing number of checks and put roadblocks everywhere. I think that the Ossetians planned everything. They already had experience fighting in Georgia and wanted to remove us from their country definitively.” This is something all the men can finally agree on. Sima Kasayeva, 81, was also in Yuzhny in 1992. She had previously told us that the return of the deported Ingush had proceeded so smoothly. “The whole war was invented by outsiders,” she says. “The Ossetians from South Ossetia are rude and anti-social.” She sincerely regrets that there are no Ingush left in her village. “What can I do about it? The Ingush were bad, they fought us, they killed us and took innocent hostages. My neighbours down the street lost a son, others lost a daughter. All of them died in the months of the conflict.” Sima describes how the Ingush organised themselves. Mass demonstrations and meetings were held in the nearby sports field. She describes them as tribal, almost animalistic events. “The meetings lasted two or three days. They slaughtered cows and sheep and ate them immediately. We didn’t know what was happening, they spoke in their own language.” She recalls those days in 1992 with evident fear. When the conflict broke out, the Ossetians gathered in the house of a Turk who lived nearby. “We were terrified. The Ingush were shooting on one side. They started the war. After a while the Ossetians’ armoured cars and Russian tanks entered the village from the other side. The armoured cars took us all to Vladikavkaz, while the soldiers and tanks started fighting.” The Ingush can never live here again, Sima believes. She stresses, “The innocent Ingush who didn’t want to fight were targeted and killed by Ingush soldiers.” It is a tradition in the Caucasus to subject one’s opponent to extraneous cruelty. “The Ingush who remained incited the soldiers against us, they are just as guilty. Thanks to the Russians we won. We celebrated there,” she points to the square in front of the small shop. In early November 1992 – six months after his visit to Nazran – Yeltsin determined that Prigorodny would definitively remain part of North Ossetia. Meanwhile, the conflict in the small province had already claimed the lives of 600 Ingush. More than 1,000 were injured and 60,000 fled the area. Nine thousand Ossetians also fled and 52 were killed. It was not until 1995 that an agreement was signed between North Ossetia and Ingushetia concerning the return of refugees. To this day, however, more than half of Eastern Prigorodny remains off limits to returning refugees. Thousands of Ingush still live as refugees in Ingushetia and elsewhere. Travelling between Ingush and Ossetians villages, history quickly becomes a blame game. “Make sure you talk to enough Ossetians,” an Ossetian historian says in alarm when he hears that we have spent several days talking to people in Ingushetia. Our interpreter Dina suppresses every conversation in which the South Ossetians are blamed for the conflict. Meanwhile, the conversation with the group of men around

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;In retrospect, it was clear that the war was coming. There had been so many murders and incidents.â&#x20AC;?

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Kantishevo, Ingushetia We are escorted in a taxi to a large, new country house in the village of Kantishevo, on the Ingush-Ossetian border.

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Nazran, Ingushetia Anecdotes and accusations ďŹ&#x201A;y about who started the war and how it broke out in 1992. There is no uniďŹ ed version, only agreement that the country was suddenly ablaze.

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Kantishevo, Ingushetia Magomed Khozoev (51) was seriously injured in 1992, during the ďŹ rst days of the Prigorodny conďŹ&#x201A;ict between the Ingush and Ossetians. He heard an explosion not far from his house and went to investigate. At that moment a second bomb exploded.

Agilkov has degenerated, ending up in a slanging match. “Not a single shot was fired in Ossetian villages,” says one. “Our people were killed in their own houses, sometimes in their own beds,” another shouts over the top of him. A filmmaker in the group, who swamps us with negatives and photos of disfigured corpses, tells us that the Ossetians liked to tie two Ingush together and set them alight. “They called it Ingush candles,” he says. The men are bitter. Eleven of the 19 villages in Prigorodny are still off limits to them. Their houses were burned down or occupied by others. “Often South Ossetians,” someone almost spits out. “What actually happened,” says the filmmaker, who enjoys some authority among the men and thus often leads the conversation, “is that the genocide of the Ingush started in 1994 was completed.” His comment ignites arguments about whether Stalin was Ossetian or Georgian. In Kantishevo, Gamat-Khan Katzoyev tells us more about the war. He lives on the border between North Ossetia and Ingushetia. “The Ossetians were smarter than us. They had higher positions in Moscow. In the conflict we were killed like dogs. The Russian and international press were on the side of the Ossetians. They had a wellorganised lobby. Nobody cared about us.” Gamat-Khan receives us on the doorstep of his exuberantly decorated house. On the quiet country road, two young girls race to and fro on roller-skates. In the distance the air traffic control tower of the airport in Beslan is just visible. Gamat-Khan is in a wheelchair. “I heard an explosion at the crossroads here in Chermen.” It is the same crossroads near Khava’s house. “In my naivety, I went towards it. Just as I arrived, a second bomb exploded. The Ossetians were bombing the crossroads. I only regained consciousness in hospital. When the conflict started, I thought it would stay small. But the Soviet Union deployed its entire arsenal: planes, tanks, grenades, machine guns. I worked in Vladikavkaz so I had a lot of Ossetian friends. Now I rarely see any of them. They’re afraid of us and we’re afraid of them.” After our conversation, Dina and Gamat-Khan start talking. “What nationality are you exactly?” he asks Dina. “Guess,” she says blushing. “Georgian?” he guesses, “Balkar?” After all the hatred expressed towards Ossetians and in particular South Ossetians, Dina finally dares to reveal herself. At other times she calls herself Diana and puts on an exaggerated Muscovite accent. “I come from Tskhinval, South Ossetia,” she says. They look at each other and fall into each other’s arms. Dina gets into the car sobbing. Back to the three old Ossetian men on the bench in the centre of Chermen, a stone’s throw from Khava’s house. They all fought in the conflict, they say. Yes, it was a nasty time, but they are reluctant to say much more about it. “The Ingush prepared everything meticulously,” Taimuraz tells us. “My Ingush neighbour denied it, but I know better. The war was made possible by the Soviet Union’s infinite corruption. Yeltsin was bribed to support the Ingush.” Taimuraz does not see relations between him and the Ingush ever improving. He also opposed the return of the Ingush to Chermen after the war. “It was forced on us by Russia. Look,” he explains. “The Ingush are Muslim. Their aim is that every Muslim kills an orthodox Christian in his lifetime. We’ll always live separately, like the Jews among the Muslims in Israel. Until the next conflict, that is,” he threatens. “Our ancestors were real fighters. I’m an old man, but I’ll be the first to defend myself. I’ll never renounce part of my motherland to anyone.”

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Guram and Vakha, aged 36 and 20 respectively, pick us up. Vakha drives while Guram sits next to him in a drunken daze. We rattle through the Prigorodny district in an ancient Volga, once the limousine of Soviet cars. “This is the deal,” Guram shouts above the roar of the engine. “I help Vakha with the maintenance of the Volga and he drives me around when I need it. I don’t have a car.” Vakha smiles behind the wheel. He tries to tune his old car radio but little more than a low crackle comes out of it. Guram slaps his hand away; he wants to talk. “Vakha and I have been friends for a long time,” he shouts, giving Vakha a thump. “Vakha is Ingush and I’m Ossetian so I’m allowed to hit him.” We stop along the route so that Guram can ask for directions in unadulterated Ossetian, but he cannot get the door open. He pushes and pulls, until the inside of the door falls off in his hands, then smoothly snaps open the exterior. In frustration, he flings the inside of the door into the boot where a small lake has formed – another reason to thump his friend. Our trusty driver Isa was unavailable that day, so he sent us Vakha. However, Vakha does not dare to drive out of Chermen into North Ossetia. He does not speak Ingush and his Russian is heavily accented. Moreover, he is driving a Volga with an Ingush licence plate, like most Ingush in Chermen. That is a problem, especially in North Ossetia. No police will let this car through. Neither will the Islamic flag on his rear-view mirror do him any favours. He almost faints when we drive into Ossetia. He would rather not be here, which is why he has brought along his repairman Guram. There are few better forms of persuasion for a young Ingush man than a cheerful, inebriated Ossetian next to him. We are not stopped (at the two checkpoints, Guram and Vakha hang out of the car laughing and waving) and judder on to our destination. Vakha keeps the engine running, revving noisily, so that he does not have to spend another ten minutes trying to get the car going again. “In my time we were still taught together at school,” says Guram. “I don’t have any trouble getting on with the Ingush. But since the war we’ve lived in a divided village.” In terms of numbers, the Prigorodny conflict was a mere trifle compared to what was to follow. The two wars in Chechnya, which were fought between 1994-1996 and 1999-2006, cost an estimated 150,000 lives. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the country, first the Russians and other nationalities living in Chechnya, then the Chechens themselves. During the first war, the population of Ingushetia doubled as a result of the influx of Chechen refugees. The wars in Chechnya were characterised by indescribable cruelty. Anyone who reads the stories by journalists such as the Russian Politkovskaya, the Polish Jagielski or the Russian soldier Babchenko, but in particular the endless testimonies in the reports by Amnesty, Memorial and Human Rights Watch can reconstruct the never-ending tableau of human rights violations, attacks on both sides and utter destruction. Most of the Chechens we meet dislike discussing the wars in Chechnya. We do not talk to prominent figures, but ordinary people who tried to guard their homes or protect their families. Almost all of them were affected. Some fled, only to return as soon as possible, or stayed permanently in one of the neighbouring republics, Moscow or Western Europe. They all refer to the terrible anarchy; to the front that was nowhere, or rather the front that was everywhere. Bombings and armed incursions were incessant. Friend and foe were indistinguishable. The Russians could be your

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protectors or your murderers. The countless Chechen militias could save your country, but their presence in your village also invited disaster. Chechnya is a depressing country to travel through. Not only because every resident has a gruesome story to tell, but also because the current, post-war leadership of the young Ramzan Kadyrov bears all the traits of a dictatorship. In every interview it is clear that the people we talk to are afraid either to talk about the current state of affairs, or scared that they might touch on undefined taboos. The Chechen history of the last 20 years is a confusing political power struggle that in many respects resembles a modern version of the 19th-century Caucasian War. It began so euphorically. In 1991, a monument to the deportations was erected in the middle of Grozny. It showed a Koran with two hands on either side reaching to the heavens. For the first time in centuries, Chechnya was in control of its own fate. I find reports of the accompanying celebrations: mourning marches interspersed with expressions of great joy that the country’s grief could finally be commemorated. Two wars later, little remains of the monument except a pile of stones. The monument was erected by the first president of independent Chechnya, Dudayev. The elections were a harbinger of things to come. Chechnya is a traditional country. Decisions are traditionally made by family clans, which are spread over several teips. These are groups of families originally from one village or region. Ingushetia has the same system. The Gazdievs, Khava’s family, are one of the founders of Egi-Kale. That is the family clan. With three other families, including the Gaisanovs, who originated there, they form a teip. All important decisions are ideally made by the elders of the teip, and marriages can only be arranged among members of the same teip. The teips survived 70 years of the Soviet Union. However, unable to choose a joint leader from their own ranks, they chose the ultimate representative of the old system: namely the highest soldier that Chechnya had ever had in the Russian and Red Armies, the eccentric Soviet Air Force general Dzhokhar Dudayev. Infighting soon broke out, providing Russia the opportunity to intervene in the country. “When the Chechens decided to become an independent state, the Ingush said: we want to remain part of Russia. Russia is a strong country, you shouldn’t fight that. You should have strong people as your friends, not as your enemies,” Khava had already told us. In the North Chechen village of Isheskaya, Eset Umarov saw the Russian armies approaching. “We were chased out of Kazakhstan,” she remembers. “When Kazakhstan became independent, there were uprisings against the Chechens in some areas. I came back to Chechnya, proud that we had gained independence. Then war broke out here too.” Eset runs a shop on the main road from Mozdok, a garrison town in North Ossetia, to Grozny. “Thousands of soldiers and tanks passed by,” she says. “They were utterly unpredictable. Most of them were drunk and aggressive.” She was able to keep her family together through the war, although her house was destroyed. Six years later, they are still repairing it. “It was a frightening, chaotic time,” she says. But now it is over and she does not want to talk about it anymore. With her daughter she picks some strawberries from the garden and puts them on the table for her guests, accompanied by a foaming glass of fresh milk from her cow. Arkady Babchenko fought in both Chechen wars. He witnessed how Chechen soldiers slit the throats of Russian soldiers and how Russian women wandered through

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Chechnya like apparitions in search of their missing sons. Some of these women were raped, murdered and burned. There was little heroism in the Chechen wars. Babchenko’s One Soldier’s War is a beautiful but brutal book in the tradition of Pushkin and others who were seduced by the Caucasus. Like so many writers before him, Babchenko muses on the green grass, the fragrant apricots and how this existence as a soldier in the Caucasus must be real life.. At the same time, he cannot comprehend how war could break out here. War, he writes, should happen in the Arctic Circle, where it is dark and cold. Not here, where the days are so beautiful but where dead Russian soldiers return to the motherland in silver body bags. He describes Grozny as the Stalingrad he knows from Soviet propaganda: a lifeless, destroyed city; a city terrorised by frightened convoys, ripping to pieces corpses which no one dares to remove for fear of being hit by a lurking sniper. Babchenko’s literary account paints a shocking picture of the Russian army. The prevailing view at the time was that Russia was in complete chaos. More than the chaos, however, Babchenko describes an institution that was morally bankrupt. An army in which rank and seniority were used for the most heinous hazing, during which young soldiers frequently died, committed suicide or deserted. The arms trade with the Chechen rebels was lively and profitable. As described in books about the First Caucasian War in the 19th century, captured soldiers were employed by the Chechen militias. That was a fate reserved for conscripts, however; mercenaries were killed immediately. Shamil Basayev thrived in this chaos. Named after the legendary Imam Shamil, Basayev fought in Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia before the war came to his own country. He was a daredevil, the man who took extreme action while his political leaders negotiated with Moscow over ceasefires and political solutions to the war. He bribed Russian army units and in 1995 travelled with a group of fighters to the South Russian Budyonnovsk, taking a hospital and hundreds of people hostage. The hostage crisis came as a shock to Russia. For three days, Russian troops stormed the hospital, killing more than 100 civilians in the process. Basayev eventually negotiated a Russian escort and went back to Chechnya with several hostages as a human shield. His return was treated as a victory parade. He had achieved definitive hero status. Ailing Russia was no match for the ebullient Chechens. While the Russians occupied the large, ruined cities, the Chechens maintained control of the mountains and the countryside. The Russians appointed loyal Chechens to government positions in the hope of currying favour with the local population. In 1996, however, after more than two years of war, a combined Chechen attack in Grozny proved to be a defining moment. Support troops were destroyed and several days of fighting later, it was over. The Russian army signed a ceasefire. In 2001, as stated in the Khazavyurt agreement, Russia and Chechnya would again discuss mutual relations. President Mashkadov (Dudayev’s successor, allegedly killed by a satellite-guided missile in 1996) was officially invited to Moscow. The war appeared to have been a political success, but Chechnya degenerated into an anarchic state where local militias held sway. The population simply tried to survive. So much had been destroyed; houses, the state farms from the past. Many people tried to make ends meet by trading metal, weapons or oil. The motor trade flourished. The country was a black hole where illegal money could be laundered. Jagielski, for example, describes how Chechens with bags

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Chermen, North Ossetia Guram (left) and Vakha (right) are friends, even though one of them is Ingush and the other Ossetian.

“In my time we were still taught together at school,” says Guram. “I don’t have any trouble getting on with the Ingush. But since the war we’ve lived in a divided village.”

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full of self-printed roubles went on shopping sprees in Moscow. As Chechnya did not yet have its own legal status, it was still part of the rouble monetary system. The various militias were restless. The short period of peace between the first and second war was never entirely peaceful. There was too much violence and too many problems, such as the refugee problem, that had not been resolved. Radical Islam became an additional factor. Shamil Basayev, the mighty rebel leader who had brought Russia to its knees, was a precursor of this. He aligned himself with the international jihad movement, in which the Arab militia leader Al-Khattab was an important pawn in Chechnya. Originally secular leaders Dudayev and Mashkadov regarded the movement with suspicion, especially when foreign jihadists, trained in Afghanistan and elsewhere, arrived to reinforce the Chechen armies. As in the Caucasian War, Chechnya was not enough. Basayev had grander plans for jihad and independence. In mid-1999, Yeltsin appointed FSB leader Vladimir Putin as prime minister. Putin was due to succeed Yeltsin as president at the end of the year. Basayev would provide him with the opportunity to establish his power definitively. Less than a week after Putin’s appointment, Basayev and a modest military force invaded neighbouring Dagestan. Simultaneously, apartment buildings in Moscow collapsed. The truth about the collapse would remain a mystery for a long time. According to the government, Chechen terrorists were to blame; according to eyewitnesses and a number of journalists, the security forces were behind the disaster. The attacks killed nearly 300 people and wounded more than 600. It was more than enough reason for Putin to attack Chechnya. The Second Chechen War proved to be even more devastating and destructive than the first. Once again, however, Russia failed to conquer and occupy Chechnya. The only tactic that appeared to work, apart from the massive deployment of troops and weapons, was divide and rule. As Tolstoy describes in his wonderful book Hadji Murad, in which the Russians make grateful use of the titular character to try to convince the mountain peoples to side with them against Imam Shamil, so the Russians also tried in this war to win over Chechens with status. They were successful. Akhmad Kadyrov, Grozny’s chief mufti and the highest religious authority in Chechnya, was prepared to take on the leadership. Like Hadji Murad – who allegedly made shashlik from dead Russian soldiers – before him, Kadyrov also had a long track record in the struggle against the Russians. He called repeatedly for a jihad and fought in the First Chechen War. However, the rise of religious figures such as Basayev and groups like the Wahhabis and Salafists from abroad caused him concern. In his assessment of this new religious reality, shifting allegiances and the prospect of another devastating war, cooperation with Russia seemed the best solution. That says a great deal about the past two centuries of Chechen history: independence from Russia is an illusion. Only a form of cohabitation has brought Chechnya any kind of peace. The Second Chechen War and the destruction it brought created an even larger stream of refugees than the first war. One of these refugees is Ruslan, who now lives in the Dutch province of Limburg. His father was an ambulance doctor, a dangerous occupation in a country at war. In 2000, he was shot as he rushed across the street with a wounded person on a stretcher. Ruslan knows from eyewitnesses that the Russian army attacked the ambulance. Together with his mother and brother, he filed a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. If he wins the case, he will not be the first. Every year, Russia pays out thousands of

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euros in compensation to the families of the victims of Russian violence. The filing cabinets in Strasbourg are overflowing with cases from the North Caucasus. Ruslan now travels to Grozny as often as he can. We meet him one evening in a billiard cafe in Grozny. He is delighted when he hears Dutch. After the war, Chechnya was rapidly rebuilt with money from Moscow and Ruslan saw a business opportunity. He now sources lamps in Germany and the Netherlands and sells them to the new Chechen elite, those who benefit from the reconstruction money from Moscow. “In Chechnya, stability never lasts long,” he says. “I have to strike while the iron is hot.” In 2004, Akhmad Kadyrov was assassinated in a bomb attack while attending a World War II ceremony in a football stadium in Grozny. His son Ramzan Kadyrov soon became his de facto successor, seizing absolute control of the country. Akhmad is now regarded as the first president. Dudayev and Mashkadov no longer appear in local history books. The latter was shot in 2006 in Tolstoy-Yurt, near Grozny. His body was personally inspected by his rival Ramzan. The war rages on. Basayev and Mashkadov’s successors are still hiding out in the villages and mountains of the North Caucasus, awaiting their chance to establish what they call the Caucasian Emirate. In a Chechen bar, one of the few where alcohol is freely available, is Vacha, a bigwig in Chechnya’s judicial system, but tonight just a short man with a round stomach, a ruddy, equally round face and a taste for vodka. When the vodka has overpowered him, he takes to the dance floor with his vassals. To avoid any mishaps, he gives his gun to his driver. A boy stands behind a synthesiser and in a monotone voice sings rousing lezginkas, traditional songs that everyone in a dark Chechen bar should hear. Vacha drags a waitress – the prettiest – from behind the bar and dances in wild circles, accompanied by loud, rhythmic clapping from his friends. His drunken attention then falls on us. He sends jugs of beer to our table and giving us an occasional thumbs up, monitors how we are doing. When it comes to a conversation, he claims savagely that “if Putin deposed Kadyrov, we would have 50,000 men ready to go to war against Russia within an hour.” Sometime later he kidnaps us and takes us to his house in Gudermes, a town 40 kilometres away. This is aggressive hospitality: you can protest, but ultimately you do not have a choice. We tear through the night and watch with regret as our hotel flashes past the window. Vacha’s gun clatters uncontrollably on the dashboard. At his house, he opens a 30-year-old bottle of cognac. Just before he falls into a drunken stupor and we lie down on his bed, we manage to hold a serious conversation with him. Clumsy from inebriation, he cuts slices of bread and sausage – drink without food does not exist. “If war breaks out again, I’ll immediately side with the Russians,” he says in a lucid moment. “They’re simply too strong for us; you can’t fight that.” And the rebels in the mountains? “Ah,” he says. “Kadyrov keeps them there. When Chechnya no longer has a problem with terrorists and separatists, we’ll instantly lose a few billion roubles in support from the Kremlin.” Dagestan, Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria escaped the war dance of the ʼ90s, although not without a significant amount of unrest. One ethnicity dominated. In the Soviet Union, local governments were controlled by if not largely made up of Russians. When the Soviet Union collapsed, new power struggles emerged, some of them violent. Relations between the small group of Balkars (who were also

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;In Chechnya, stability never lasts long. I have to strike while the iron is hot.â&#x20AC;? Ruslan, Grozny

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deported) and the large, powerful group of Kabardin are still strained. In KarachayCherkessia, fights often break out over which group wields too much power, with the Cherkessians as the leading protagonist. The crisis was perhaps most successfully resolved in Dagestan, home to more than 30 nationalities. These range from tiny tribes of a few hundred people to the Avar, of whom there are more than one million. To prevent Dagestan from sliding into violence, a complicated system has been devised to create a balance of power. The various government posts and important functions are divided according to a precise allocation model. For example, the Avars get the prime ministership if the Lezgin get the presidency. The Parliamentary Speaker is then a Lak and so it goes on until all the 30+ nationalities have been accounted for and everyone is satisfied that no single group wields too much power. In the ʼ90s, the Dagestanis watched with trepidation as the wars in Chechnya destroyed their neighbour. We are told proudly that poorly armed Dagestani villagers kept Basayev and his militias at bay. Ali Kemalov is a journalist and head of the Dagestani journalists union. He comes from the once indomitable mountain village of Sogratl. The village supports Russia in order to survive, using the same arguments Ingushetia used to remain part of Russia and not pursue independence like Chechnya. “After the Caucasian War in the 19th century, we dissolved like Dagestani honey in Russian tea. We were always focused on the south,” he says, “with an Arabic script and our Islamic faith. But Russia gave us access to the west, to Europe.” He tells us how Dagestan has always been coveted, and that it is perhaps better to seek safety under the wing of a large nation. “Freedom and individualism run in the blood of every Dagestani, but we also know that we’ll never be left alone if we’re independent.” The Chechen wars weakened the Caucasus. The violence, anarchism, terrorism and corruption have destroyed all the early ʼ90s dreams of restoring local traditions and achieving greater independence and freedom. Out of this period of chaos and strife, a new phenomenon has emerged, something that Russian and local leaders are only too happy to label as alien to the Caucasus, but which simultaneously underlines the parallels with the First Caucasian War: Islamic radicalism. Local, traditional Islam barely had a chance to recover in the years after the atheistic Soviet Union before missionaries from the Middle East and Afghanistan introduced new, more radical and orthodox strands. These thrive here, just as the Muridism of Imam Shamil and his followers struck a chord during the First Caucasian War. Linked to this radical Islam is a new movement, arising from the international jihadists and pro-independence militias of the Chechen wars. The wars in the Caucasus may officially be over, but the Second Caucasian War continues, in an unremitting struggle for control of the rugged mountains.

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Isheskaya, Chechnya Six years after the last war, Eset Umarov is still repairing her house.

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Goity, Chechnya “Imran Dzhambekov was a good boy,” says his mother Zainap. She is still ﬁghting for the truth about his death.

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Ekazhevo, Ingushetia Lis Ismailova (64) lives with relatives in Ingushetia. For decades she lived in the Chechen capital Grozny, until she was forced to ďŹ&#x201A;ee during the Second Chechen War between 1999 and 2006. She cannot return. Her apartment was destroyed and as an ethnic Ingush she is not eligible for compensation from the Chechen government.

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