Let Our Fame Be Great (71 page)

The ‘sardonic journalist' observing the collapse of white rule in southern Russia in 1920 was C. E. Bechhofer, whose
In Denikin's Russia and the Caucasus
(London, 1921) is unjustifiably forgotten. Richard Douglas King's
Sergei Kirov and the Struggle for Soviet Power in the Terek Region 1917 – 18
(New York, 1987) was also useful.

Most of the details on Khutai's life come from conversations with elderly Balkars, but articles from the magazine
Balkaria
and the website
www.balkaria.info
were useful pointers towards what questions to ask.

Most of the detail in this chapter comes from the extraordinary book
Cherekskaya Tragediya
(
The Cherek Tragedy
) by K. G. Azamatov, M. O. Temirzhanov, B. B. Temukuev, A. I. Tetuev and I. M. Chechenov (Nalchik, 1994), which cuts through the official versions to detail the facts about the massacre in 1942. I cannot praise this book enough.

To create the narrative of the massacre, I have mixed the conversations I had with survivors with the book's tales of the Cherek valley massacre, which were gathered from survivors in the early 1990s. The book is now unfindable except with extreme good luck, although parts of it are available in Russian on the internet.

In the absence of the book, O. O. Aishaev's
Genotsida mirnykh zhitelei balkarskikh sel v noyabre-dekabre 1942 goda
(
The Genocide of the Civilian Residents of Balkar Villages in November to December 1942
) (Nalchik, 2007) has a good account of the massacre, and is based on the same materials.

The information on the deported Balkars comes from
Pravda o Vyselenii balkartsev
(
The Truth about the Deportation of the Balkars
),
Byli soslani navechno
(
They were Sent Away for Ever
) and from
Balkartsy: Vyselenie i vozvrashchenie
(
The Balkars: Deportation and Return
).

Much of this chapter is based on court documents given to me by Iskhak Kuchukov. Ali Misirov's tale is detailed in
Cherekskaya Tragediya
(
The Cherek Tragedy
), and his acting career is testified to in, among other places, the closing credits of
Khrustalyov, Mashinu
, the film described in the chapter.

The best general book on relations between the Chechens and the Russian government is Moshe Gammer's
The Lone Wolf and the Bear
(Pittsburgh, 2006).

The North Caucasus Barrier
, edited by Marie Bennigsen-Broxup (London, 1992), has several articles on different aspects of the mountains, but is perhaps best on the Chechens.

Several journalists who covered the 1994 – 6 Chechen war wrote books about their experiences. Some of the best of these are Sebastian Smith's
Allah's Mountains
(London, 1998), Gall and de Waal's
Chechnya: A Small Victorious War
and Vanora Bennett's
Crying Wolf
(London, 1998).

Details on the discrimination suffered by Chechens in pre-1991 Chechnya are from an interesting article in the
Central Asian Survey
(vol. 10, no. 1/2, 1991).

The collection of Chechen state documents
Ternisty Put K Svobode
(
The Thorny Path to Freedom
) was published in Vilnius in 1993.

Some of the details on relations with Russia come from Tony Wood's
Chechnya: A Case for Independence
(London, 2007).

The collapse of the Russian state, and the rise of criminal gangs after 1991, is fascinatingly documented in
Comrade Criminal
(New Haven, Conn., 1995) by Stephen Handelman.

The details on Peter the Great's expedition come from Gammer and Baddeley.

The stories from Dagestan were told to me on my travels in the Caucasus. Other anecdotes are taken from Baddeley's
Rugged Flanks of the Caucasus
, and from
Skazaniya Narodov Dagestana o Kavkazskoi Voine
(
Sayings of the Peoples of Dagestan about the Caucasus War
), which was published in 1997 in Makhachkala under the editorship of M. M. Kurbanov.

Accounts of Sheikh Mansur's life are very vague. Gammar's ‘A Preliminary to Decolonising the Historiography of Sheikh Mansur' (
Middle Eastern Studies
, 32, 1, January 1996) is a bit incomprehensible, while other accounts are unreliable. The main biography is by ‘Nart' – supposedly a descendant of Mansur. This was written in 1924, and published in the
Central Asian Survey
(vol. 10, no. 1/2, 1991). Other details come from the account of the last days of Imam Shamil in
Dnevnik Runovskogo
(
Runovsky's Diary
) in the twelfth tome of the
Akty Kavkazskoi Arkheograficheskoi komissii
(
Acts of the Caucasus Archeographical Commission
) (Tbilisi, 1866 onwards).

The best book on the arrival of Naqshbandi Islam in the Caucasus is Anna Zelkina's
In Quest for God and Freedom
(London, 2000). Slightly older, but almost equally interesting, is
Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union
by Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush (Berkeley, Calif. Press, 1985).

Also useful was
Islam in Post-Soviet Russia
, edited by Hilary Pilkington (London, 2003).

Timur Mutsurayev albums are hard to find these days, although his return to Chechnya may change that. The song ‘Sheikh Mansur' is on his album
12 tysyach Modzhakhedov
(
12,000 Mujahedin
).

The events surrounding Imam Shamil's raid on Georgia and the princesses' captivity are most notably told in Lesley Blanch's
Sabres of Paradise
(my edition was published in New York in 1995), in which she gives the impression she would like nothing more than to be swept off by a wild horseman herself.

Other useful sources were Anne Drancey's
Captive des Tchetchenes
(Paris, 2006); E. A. Verderevsky's
Captivity of Two Russian Princesses in the Caucasus
(London, 1857, although I have a reprint by Kessinger Publishing); and the anonymous Prussian officer's
A Visit to Schamyl
(London, 1857). Shamil's former scribe Muhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi wrote his own account, called ‘The Shining of Dagestani Swords in Certain Campaigns of Shamil', which is included in
Russian – Muslim Confrontation in the Caucasus
(edited by Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and Gary Hamburg, London, 2004).

Other useful snippets on Shamil came from
A Campaign with the Turks in Asia
by Charles Duncan (London, 1855); and from J. Milton Mackie's
Life of Schamyl
(Boston, 1856, although I have a University of Michigan reprint).

Runovsky's biography comes from his
Dnevnik Runovskogo
(
Runovsky's Diary
) in the twelfth tome of the
Akty Kavkazskoi Arkheograficheskoi komissii
(
Acts of the Caucasus Archeographical Commission
); and from his
Zapiski o Shamilya
(
Notes about Shamil
) (St Petersburg, 1860), as do many of the details about the sad end of Jamal-Edin. The story about the end of Shamil's resistance at Gunib comes from Abdurakhman's
Kratkoe Islozhenie podrobnogo opisaniya del imam Shamilya
(
A Brief Exposition of a Minute Account of the Affairs of Imam Shamil
), which was reprinted in Arabic and Russian in Moscow in 2002.

The details about eating horses come from the Dagestani magazine
Akhulgo
, and the song is well-known to folklorists, featuring for example in I. F. Varayev's
Pesni Kazakov Kubani
(
Songs of the Kuban Cossacks
) (Krasnodar, 1966), as well as in Shapi Ganiyev's history
Imam Shamil
(2001).

Baron August von Haxthausen's
The Tribes of the Caucasus
(London, 1855) amusingly shows how Shamil was all things to all men.

Details on Shamil come from Runovsky's two books; from Maria Chichagova's
Shamil na Kavkaze i v Rossii
(
Shamil in the Caucasus and in Russia
) (St Petersburg, 1889) and from Abdurakhman.

Continuing instability in the Caucasus after Shamil's surrender can be seen in the second chapter of
Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1861
, edited by Francis Galton (London, 1862), as well as in Arthur Thurlowe Cunynghame's
Travels in the Eastern Caucasus, on the Caspian and Black Seas, Especially in Daghestan and on the Frontiers of Persia and Turkey during the Summer of 1871
(London, 1872).

Kundukhov's autobiography can be found in
The Caucasian Quarterly
, between April and September 1938. Annoyingly, however, this publication then apparently disappeared, and from Chapter 6 onwards the autobiography is only available in French in the sister journal
Le Caucase
.

Biographies of the Sufi leaders who left the Caucasus can be found in
The Naqshbandi Sufi Way: History and Guidebook of the Saints of the Golden Chain
by Muhammad Hisham Kabbani (Chicago, 1995). These are also available on
www.naqshbandi.org
.

Stalin's comments from his speech at the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party can be found in his
Marxism and the National and Colonial Question
(London, 1936). The kind of craven work Soviet historians produced under his rule can be seen in
Borba gortsev za nezavisimost pod rukovodstvom Shamilya
(
The Highlanders' Fight for Independence under the Leadership of Shamil
) by S. K. Bushuev (Moscow, 1939), which opens and closes with quotes from Stalin. M. I. Quandour's
Muridizm
(Nalchik, 1996) has a chapter called ‘The Treatment of Shamil and Muridism' by Soviet historians which nicely details the steps communist writers took to show Shamil in a bad light.

I first heard about the Chechens of Krasnaya Polyana from Michaela Pohl's research.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago
has been published in abridged and full versions. The information here is from the full Russian-language edition. Sultan Yashurkayev's diaries have been
published in several European languages, but sadly not in English or Russian. He helpfully gave me a copy of the Russian manuscript, large chunks of which can also be found on the internet.

The best books on the war are the general ones mentioned under Chapter 18, although a lot more work needs to be done.

Timothy Phillips's
Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1
(London, 2007) tells the story of the siege.

I have concentrated on the home-grown origin of Basayev's tactics and Chechen extremism in general, because I think that is overwhelmingly the most important element. Others, however, prefer to stress the Arab and international links. For a completely different viewpoint to my own, you could try reading
Chechen Jihad
by Yossef Bodansky (New York, 2007), which appears to be exclusively based on the viewpoints of the security services. Even if you do not like the book, it is interesting to see how so much information can be married to so little insight.

Transcripts of Kulayev's trials are available on
www.pravdabeslana.ru
, which also includes huge volumes of material on the siege, compiled by locals angry about the government's failure to investigate it fully. A lot of it looks like conspiracy theories, but some is disquieting. Marina Litvinovich deserves commendation for putting the site together.

Some of the best work on Russian brutality was conducted by the legendary Anna Politkovskaya, whose book
A Dirty War
(London,
2001) is a terrifying picture of what happened. Elsewhere, Andrew Meier's
Chechnya: To the Heart of a Conflict
(New York, 2005) is superb. Anne Nivat's
Chienne de guerre
(New York, 2001) is a good account of the destruction of Chechen resistance.

The documentary
Babitsky's War
, directed by Paul Yule, chronicles Andrei Babitsky's attempts to show what was happening in Grozny in 1999 – 2000 and is available on the internet. I strongly recommend watching it.

Kudayev has won assistance from Reprieve, the British legal charity, which worked hard to win justice for the men being held at Guantanamo Bay. Reprieve provided me with copies of his papers, and I am very grateful to them, particularly to Saadiya Chaudary, who gave up a lot of her time to talk to me. The excellent book
Bad Men
(London, 2007) by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, does not deal with Kudayev, but shows the kind of problems he faced in legal limbo.

Human Rights Watch made him one of the three primary subjects of its
Stamp of Guantanamo
report, which uncovered the abuse he received on his return to Russia.

Kudayev's mother allowed me to use his poems, and thanks to Maria Golovnina for her help in translating them.

The figures on asylum applications are taken from the UNHCR's
Asylum Levels and Trends in Industrialised Countries
reports, which can be found in the publications section of its website
www.unhcr.org
.

Putin's comments are available on
www.kremlin.org
, which is a surprisingly good website.

Thanks first of all to my family. To Jenny and Willy, for making me who I am. To Tom, for making me laugh and making me think. And to Rosie, for making everything perfect.