Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  As I wandered around Anapa, I looked out for signs of its Circassian past. The town trumpeted its history, with an archaeological museum showing off how Greeks built a town here two and a half millennia ago, introducing Mediterranean civilization and later Christianity to the nomads and highlanders they traded with. But of more recent history, there was almost nothing. The cultural museum was closed, while a tourist booth could only offer me tickets for the ‘Caucasus Legends’ show, which would take place the following Wednesday and feature the national dances of the Caucasus peoples. I was not tempted to spend five further days in the town so as to see it. Otherwise, there was nothing to remember the town’s former owners by except the remains of the Turkish fort that once dominated its port.

  The fort was demolished in the nineteenth century by sappers who left just one gatehouse standing. The gate now bears the name ‘The Russian gates’ and stands in a delicate little park thronged by families and snack stalls. Cannons stand around the gatehouse and children straddled them for photographs. The gatehouse is roughly square in plan, and its interior is blocked off by portcullises over the two entrances. I did not at first examine the interior, being too distracted by the various shapes and sizes of the people walking by.

  But eventually I walked over for a look, and saw the town had decided to commemorate those Russians who had died ‘at the walls of Anapa’ in capturing its fortress. The memorial was in the form of a cross-shaped military medal, bearing the words ‘For service in the Caucasus’ and the date 1864.

  At first I could not believe what I was seeing. Perhaps the town planners who decided a reproduction of a campaign medal was an appropriate memorial were just plain ignorant. Anapa was captured by Russia more than three decades before 1864, which is when the rest of Circassia was forced to submit. The bureaucrats may not have known that, of course, and the tourists taking pictures of the cross with their phones certainly did not think there was anything out of the ordinary.

  Still, there was no getting away from the fact that the Russian soldiers who died to capture this holiday resort were being commemorated not with something relevant to their battles but with a medal given out for participation in the genocidal campaign that destroyed the Circassian nation. I struggled not to interpret it uncharitably.

  By marking a war memorial with the date of the Circassians’ tragedy, the Russians seemed to be revelling in the completeness of their victory. No one was left here to dispute their ownership of the land. That the memorial was erected in 1996 was particularly telling, and reflected a triumphant Russian nationalism that has emerged since the end of the Soviet Union.

  Once I had noticed such braying joy being taken in the Russian possession of this strip of lush, warm, sunny coastline, I started noticing it everywhere. The resorts down the coast which I visited shared the same indelicate glee that they were built on someone else’s land, and a holiday I had been revelling in lost most of its charm.

  To the south-west of Anapa are seven towns – Novorossiisk, Gelendzhik, Arkhipo-Osipovka, Tuapse, Lazarevskoye, Sochi and Adler – that are built on the sites of the forts built to subdue the Circassians in the 1830s. Some of the towns are export outlets for oil, but most of them are dedicated to tourism alone. Casting about more or less at random, I decided to travel from Anapa to Arkhipo-Osipovka, principally because the name is a tongue-twister and partly because it seemed to be the smallest easily accessible resort.

  Arkhipo-Osipovka was founded in 1837 under the name Mikhailovskoye. The Tenginskoye fort where the aristocrat-rebel-turned-private-soldier Lorer witnessed three ships being wrecked in a storm was just down the coast from here, and this was the heart of the Circassian resistance to the Russian conquest.

  The road to the town from Anapa twists and turns through the hills that line the coast. Even Soviet engineers, no slouches when it came to grandiose building projects, had failed to blast it along the shoreline, where the cliffs are simply too steep. It sometimes ducks kilometres inland before veering back on itself towards the sea once more.

  Resorts and towns have sprung up wherever the road touches the sea. Our bus was forced to slow to a walking pace as we passed through the town centres, and women in bikinis and men in tight blue trunks hitched lifts to beaches or beauty sites out of town.

  It is easy to see how the Russian armies struggled to master this landscape, which is choked with dense trees and scored by rocky stream beds. But, on entering Arkhipo-Osipovka itself, all historical comparison with the rugged, wild land of the Circassians became impossible.

  Tanned visitors thronged the seafront, where the narrow valley, squeezed between two wooded hills, was crammed with bars, restaurants, amusements and promenades. A small artificial pond offered children rides on motorized swans, a local radio station announced popular attractions, a strip bar was getting ready for the evening, and a big wheel circled lazily.

  It was a lovely place, hot and lazy, but it was cursed for me by a triumphalism untempered by empathy or concern for the people who once called this valley their own.

  From the top of the Ferris wheel, you could see what a lonely place this must once have been for the inhabitants of the Russian fort here. With no port for supply ships to dock, even a small storm would have cut the defenders off from all help, while a gently sloping valley led into the heart of the dense mountains to the north. An enterprising local man has built a reconstruction of part of the fort, on a small rise in the middle of the valley, and it seems pitifully small and vulnerable when viewed from above.

  This must have been something like the view seen by the Circassian force that assaulted the fortress on 22 March 1840, buoyed up by successes in capturing the forts of Lazarevskoye, Nikolayevskoye and Velyaminovskoye earlier in the year. The garrison of 440 men was in no doubt about what awaited them, and did not believe the reports of turncoat spies sent here by the Circassians to mislead them with claims they were safe. The Circassians, whose number has been estimated at 11,000 but is more likely to have been 1,500 or so, clearly were experienced by now at attacking forts and carried ladders and ropes to scale the walls with. Russian sources have very detailed accounts of what followed.

  The defenders were outnumbered, and the attackers scaled the walls quickly. Hand-to-hand fighting started inside the fort itself, and immediately went badly for the Russians. They were being pushed back and defeat was going to be rapid.

  Here Arkhip Osipov, one of the defenders, knew his hour had come. He had the keys to the magazine and ran towards it (stopping, the history says, only to receive a blessing from a monk). By this stage most of the officers were dead, and he was acting on his own initiative. Passing a group of surviving defenders he called out: ‘Brothers, it is time! Remember me kindly! Those of you who remain alive, remember my deeds!’ With these words, he threw himself into the magazine, blew it up, and wiped out the remains of the fort, most of the defenders and many of the attackers. Or so the story goes.

  The Circassians took eighty prisoners, including two officers, around fifty of whom returned from captivity and told the story of Arkhip Osipov and his heroic suicide bombing.

  The episode would be a small footnote in a series of skirmishes that had no long-term significance, had it not been seized on for propaganda value by the government. That this Ukrainian serf, who had served twenty years in the army and five of those in the appalling boredom and deprivation of garrison duty, should blow himself up rather than be captured was too good an advertisement for the Russian army to miss.

  Arkhip Osipov was, by official decree, eternally to be named first whenever the roll-call of his regiment was read out, and his name was replied to with the words ‘died for the glory of Russian arms in the Mikhailovskoye fortress’. A cross was erected to mark his feat in 1876, then the name of the village that had grown up on the site was changed to Arkhipo-Osipovka twenty-three years later in his honour. A grand, pompous memorial was erected in the garrison town of Vladikavkaz to commemorate Osipov’s valour. It was topped by a Ru
ssian eagle with its wings spread and a laurel wreath in its claws.

  Whether the story of Arkhip Osipov is true, or a load of imperialist nonsense, is a moot point. The fact is that the village is still revelling in its role as fore-post in occupying this land 150 years later.

  I asked the family who had rented me a room if this emphasis on their military past rather than their holiday-making present troubled them, but they seemed genuinely baffled by the question. They had always been taught, it transpired, that the attackers on the fort had been Turks, themselves keen to occupy the country. That Circassians were involved had never occurred to them, and they insisted that I was wrong.

  They lent me a pile of history books to help me ‘understand’ what had happened here and elsewhere on the Black Sea coast. The first – An Introduction to the History of the Kuban – was intended for quite young schoolchildren, judging by its illustrations, and is approved by the local government. It painted a troubling picture for anyone who would have liked the Circassians’ fate to have been commemorated by their conquerors.

  The first section of the schoolbook is a timeline. Starting with 500,000 years ago (‘ancient people lived here’), it went on to mention the Scythians and the Greeks, before the one-line comment ‘before the arrival of the Cossacks, here lived the Circassians’. Nothing is said of the war that the Cossacks and their Russian masters fought to take control of the land, and instead the schoolchildren are told ‘the Cossacks were given the Kuban by Catherine II in gratitude for their military service’, with no mention of the fact that the lands beyond the Kuban river were not hers to give.

  One of the authors of the book, Tatyana Naumenko, also contributed to the Atlas of the History of the Kuban, which my hosts lent me as well. In it, the period 1801 – 60 features broad blue and green swathes on the map to mark where the Circassians lived. On the next map, which spans 1860 – 1917, they are gone, with no explanation.

  I had become fascinated by this little bundle of historical distortion, and eagerly turned to the next item: a school-leaver’s essay discussing ‘literary pages in the heroic history of Arkhipo-Osipovka’. The essay, an intensely nationalistic discussion of the importance of commemorating the likes of Osipov written by my hosts’ son, started with the phrase: ‘Our homeland lives and will always live because millions of heroes went to death so it could live in honour and respect.’ It ended with a story of a local lad who died in 2001 while fighting in Chechnya, and the quotation ‘To preserve memory, and to cherish memory, is our moral duty before ourselves and our ancestors. Memory is our wealth.’

  The irony of this insistence on memory in the midst of such total amnesia was too much for me. And I gave up on reading history and went to sleep.

  9.

  The Circassians Do Not Appear in This List

  Not all the Circassians left their homeland in 1864. Around a tenth of them agreed with Russia’s conditions that they settle on the plain, and abandon their resistance. Among their descendants is Murat Berzegov, one of the angriest of Russia’s Circassian critics. A few days after leaving the coast, I was looking for his home on the outskirts of the Russian town of Maikop, and was not having much luck.

  Maikop is the capital of a Russian region partly inhabited by those Circassian families that took up the tsar’s offer to move north of the mountains and not leave for Turkey. It is a nondescript town, built on a grid pattern, with its streets clearly labelled and numbered. Or so I thought, until I came to Berzegov’s street, which started at house number 29, whereas Berzegov lived at number 13a. My taxi driver drove up and down the street, insisting, with ever-increasing frustration, that it had to be there somewhere.

  In Russia, you pay taxi drivers by the journey, not by the distance travelled, and he was rapidly losing patience. Eventually, I paid him off and struck out on foot into a wilderness of garages and warehouses that might perhaps hide my quarry.

  After a while, I came across some five-storey apartment blocks, the signature buildings of Russia. I found house number 15, then house number 13, but of house number 13a there was no sign. I asked every passer-by, of which there were very few, how to find it. I asked for Berzegov by name. No one had heard of him.

  Eventually, I sat down next to a little shop in the courtyard, which had a note saying ‘back in 10 minutes’ tacked to the door, and waited.

  Half an hour passed.

  A door opened round the back of the shop, and I pushed myself up off the step I had been perched upon and went round to meet the proprietor. In a little yard, which I now saw extended to a one-storey house, a careworn but handsome woman was feeding a vast, black dog with scraps from the kitchen.

  She glanced up, smoothing away a few wisps of hair when she saw me, and asked what I wanted. I asked how I could find Murat Berzegov.

  ‘Oh, come in,’ she said. ‘I’m his wife. But you must excuse us, he’s asleep. He has such trouble sleeping at night with everything that’s going on.’

  I had been looking forward to meeting Berzegov since I had first seen his name mentioned in a report from an obscure Russian news agency two years before. He headed an organization called the ‘Circassian Congress’ and agitated ceaselessly for Russia to recognize the destruction of his nation as genocide.

  As I waited, his wife wondered that I had struggled to find him.

  ‘You could have asked anyone you saw where Murat lives, they all know him, he’s famous round here,’ she said.

  I had not the heart to tell her I had done just that and that no one had heard of him.

  Maikop is capital of Adygea, one of the three autonomous Circassian areas within Russia. Ironically enough, it was founded in 1857 as a military base for the final push to subjugate the Circassians and was later assigned to be the capital despite being almost entirely Russian. Adygea, where only 25 per cent of the population are Circassians, has Circassian-language television, and its government building flies the golden arrows and stars of the green Circassian flag, but otherwise it is just a typical Russian provincial town, all rotting concrete and too-wide streets, and a more than usually miserable one.

  The Circassians who live here are descended primarily from the Abadzekh tribe, which agreed to be resettled to the north of the mountains in 1861 and thus partly escaped the exile and death three years later that greeted their ethnic kin who remained behind. Their homeland is one of three nominally Circassian regions in the North Caucasus. To the east is Karachayevo-Cherkessia, then further east still is Kabardino-Balkaria, but the Circassians only make up a majority in the last.

  The Soviets, who specialized in the politics of divide and rule, split up the Circassians into three nations. First of all are the Adygeans, who live around Maikop; then come the Cherkess; and, on the eastern edge, are the Kabardins. The divisions are a nonsense, and their titles all derive from different names used for the Circassians. Adygea comes from the Circassians’ own name for themselves, which is Adyg or Adiga. Cherkessia comes from the Turkish name for Circassians, which is Cherkess. Kabardino is derived from the geographic region of eastern Circassia, which is Kabarda.

  A parallel would be if a conqueror of England divided it into three states, named them England, Angleterre and Wessex, and randomly decided they were inhabited by three different nations, although they speak the same language, have the same religion and share the same customs. The splits have, however, become an obstacle to Circassians, like Berzegov, who want increased rights or recognition of their tragic past.

  I walked into the little house, turned left along a panelled hall and sat in the living room, a small but comfortable place with a sofa, an armchair, piles of paper in the corner and dumbbells scattered around the floor. Berzegov’s wife bustled off to wake him up, then vanished into the kitchen, from which she shortly brought the first of several trays of tea, sweets, bread and honey that punctuated the morning.

  The news report in which I first heard of Berzegov described a letter sent by him to the Russian parliament’s Nationalities Committ
ee. He had, in the name of his Circassian Congress, requested that Russia’s parliament – the State Duma – recognize the genocide of his nation.

  While I waited for him to appear, I fished out my copy of the reply he had received and sat down to read it. It is truly a fascinating insight into the bureaucratic mind.

  ‘The Committee of the State Duma for Nationalities Issues has examined your appeal addressed to the State Duma Chairman Boris Gryzlov on the question of the recognition of an act of genocide committed, in your opinion, by the Russian Empire against the Adygean (Circassian) ethnic group, and announces the following.

  ‘According to the data of the Russian Academy of Science’s History Institute, in the Soviet period sixteen ethnic groups were repressed on the grounds of nationality, and another forty-five ethnic groups underwent partial repression. The Adygeans (Circassians) do not appear in this list,’ the reply stated.

  The letter, which was signed by a junior member of parliament from the Volga region of Bashkortostan and dated 17 January 2006, goes on to express a few banalities about the importance of inter-ethnic harmony for the good of the fatherland but has already made its point. It does not recognize that the massive deliberate expulsion of the Circassians, and the death from disease, starvation and violence that accompanied it, was a genocide.

  The logic of the letter would not satisfy even a moderately intelligent child, since it transparently failed to answer the question. Berzegov asked about acts committed by the Russian Empire, which existed until 1917. The State Duma answered about acts committed by the Soviet Union, which existed after 1917.

  On a more technical level, the reply refers to the ‘Adygeans’, which is one of the three Soviet-constructed nations created to undermine the unity of the Circassians. Berzegov’s letter asked for recognition of the genocide committed against the Adygs, which is the Circassians’ own name for themselves. It is a small but telling mistake, like referring to someone as Englandish instead of English. The fact that the member of parliament made this mistake is a clear indication of quite how little thought or research went into the committee’s response.