A Russian cavalry detachment rode west from the main line of march to the village of Enderi, which is close to the modern town of Khasavyurt, on the borders of Chechnya. Russian-speakers were known to the locals, since Cossacks had settled along the river Terek fifty years earlier, but regular Russian troops had not been seen there before.
The Russian horsemen were wiped out.
It was a first encounter between the Russians and the mountain peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan, and it was a chilling sign of what was to come. For contacts were to become regular events. Peter’s successors founded a fort at Kizlyar, north-east of Chechnya, to control the trail he had followed along the Caspian shore, and the Russians were clearly here to stay.
The Russians’ presence was to have a profound impact on both sides. For this 1721 expedition was not just the first Russian incursion into Chechnya and the free mountain lands of Dagestan. It was the first incursion by any modern army. The Persians, it is true, occasionally ventured into Dagestan, but their visits were so serially unsuccessful that a Persian saying ran: ‘When a Shah goes mad, he takes his army to Dagestan.’
In the decades after Tsar Peter, one such shah was Nadir, who managed to restore for a while some of his country’s lost might but came badly unstuck when venturing north of the mountains. He took much of lowland Dagestan back from the Russians, but an attempt to advance into the mountains in 1741 met with disaster.
According to a legend still told in the highland villages of Dagestan, he sent an envoy to the free, self-governing community of Andalal, with a demand that it surrender.
‘We are as many as stars in the sky, or fish in the sea,’ said the message to the highlanders, who were supposed to be overawed by this boast of Persian might. Predictably, they were not. Their reply contained a chicken and a bag of millet.
‘As it is easy for this chicken to eat all this grain, so Andalal has the power to crush your numerous forces,’ the attached message said.
The story should not be taken as gospel truth, since the same man who told it to me also told me that a spiritually blessed resident of his village – Megeb, which is high in the central mountains – had kidnapped the shah’s daughter and flown away with her. But Nadir was indeed defeated at Andalal in a battle seen by Dagestanis as a symbol of their unity in the face of foreign aggression.
In the absence of conquest or foreign domination, the mountain communities of Dagestan, and the forest-dwellers of Chechnya, had never created a centralized system of government of their own. They lived in free societies that governed themselves under an ancient system of customs common to all, no matter what language they spoke.
Dagestan itself is almost uniquely suited to creating a fractured society. Bleak and raw, its deep valleys plunge hundreds of metres from a high treeless plateau. The rocks of the mountains break out of the valley sides, sometimes squeezing together to make narrow gulleys, sometimes rearing up to make crags. The freebooting societies that lived in these inaccessible, tawny valleys needed protection from each other, and used the crags as natural castles on which to build villages.
To travellers along the valley bottoms, the villages are visible on the top of the slopes above, natural fortresses for some of the most warlike people in the world.
And the valleys created an ethnic mosaic also. Dagestan is home to dozens of languages, as many as forty, and the ethnic groups often live in isolated villages surrounded entirely by other nations. It is a bewildering place.
Megeb, for example, is a village of Dargins, Dagestan’s second-largest nationality. Seen from the side, it resembles a step pyramid, with flat-roofed houses built on the sides of a rocky hill. Each one’s walls nudge up against the back of its downward neighbour.
It is isolated in the midst of lands dominated by Avars – the region’s largest nationality – and its residents moved to their current homes 600 years ago from around thirty kilometres away. They have intermarried inextricably with the neighbouring Avars over the subsequent centuries, but they are seen as interlopers in these high valleys.
Megeb residents – they are after all foreigners, and cannot be expected to know the local customs – freely admit to having a bit of a reputation for stupidity.
According to one of their legends, they once got swindled out of land by villagers from next-door Sogratl – which has a reputation for low cunning. A delegation from Sogratl came to insist that some land that had long been considered as belonging to Megeb really belonged to them. An elder from Sogratl, who was respected as a particularly honest man, stood before his neighbours and swore he was standing on Sogratl’s soil.
No mountain Dagestani would break his word in a solemn oath, so the Megeb villagers shrugged, scratched their heads, admitted they must be mistaken and gave up their claim. Unbeknownst to them though, the elder had filled his boots with dirt from his village’s own fields, allowing him to rightly swear he was standing on Sogratl’s soil, and thus muscle in on their village’s holding. (For the sake of fairness, I should point out that I did not get balancing comment from Sogratl, where villagers probably say the land was theirs all along.)
Apart from being a funny story, the folk tale shows how seriously the customs of the mountains are still respected in Dagestan. Honesty is such an important part of their culture that a villager would fill his boots with earth so he could technically tell the truth, rather than achieve the same results with just a straight lie.
Islam arrived in Dagestan as early as 733 when the Arabs conquered Derbent, and brought their new religion with them, but it took many centuries to spread. Dagestan was not considered entirely Muslim until the late sixteenth century. Chechnya was also late to Islam, and the last Chechens probably did not convert until the late eighteenth century. Some Ingush were still pagan until the 1860s.
The long absence, therefore, of a foreign ruler or a foreign religion allowed the mountain customs to continue largely unchanged into the modern age. Communities were governed by councils of elders, and land was held in common by each village. The rigid ownership of land – as in the tale of the cunning elder with his boots full of earth – could cause centuries-long disputes between rival villages or communities.
The folk traditions are full of stories of unsuccessful attempts by foreign invaders or misguided locals to make the tribes into normal peoples with normal systems of government. In one tale, as recounted by the traveller and historian John F. Baddeley, once upon a time the Ingush ‘moved by some madness’ gathered together to select a prince from among their number.
Every significant Ingush man came to the meeting, with the single exception of the most respected elder of the nation. Inevitably, they chose him as their ruler and summoned him to hear their decision. Three times, however, he refused to appear before them.
At last, on their fourth time of asking, he consented to come to the gathering, much to the relief of the Ingush. But their relief was not to last long, and it turned to bafflement when he arrived dressed in a beautiful silk robe, belted together with a crude, dirty girth from a donkey’s saddle. One of the assembled notables finally got up the courage to ask why he was wearing such an extraordinary outfit.
‘Well, why not? What is the objection?’
The spokesman for the assembly said that a donkey’s girth did not befit such a beautiful garment.
‘And so would a prince with the Ingush people,’ replied the potential ruler, and so the attempt to establish a government failed.
The lack of rulers in the mountains, though it befitted the highlanders’ ideas of honour and freedom, made it almost impossible to impose justice between communities when the tribes’ customs were violated. Communities held collective responsibility for crimes committed by their members, and such inter-community crimes were frequent, since livestock was the only major source of wealth and was easily rustle-able.
Joint councils of elders would meet to deliberate on crimes committed between two communities, but their decisions could be impossible to enforce
against the will of the criminal’s village, leading to festering disputes that could last for centuries.
Inevitably, when serious crimes were involved, the disputes led to blood feuds, which could threaten to wipe out the entire male population of particularly unfortunate communities, despite Islam’s prohibition on revenge being taken on anyone but the direct culprit. The only way out of a blood feud was the symbolic adoption of a criminal into the victim’s family – murder within a family being impossible – by his touching the mother’s breast with his mouth. That was, naturally, an impossible act to achieve without the acquiescence of the victim’s family, so feuds dragged on and on.
The prospect of blood feuds did not stop the men of the mountain communities engaging in cattle raids on their neighbours and on the unfortunate plain-dwellers, however. Almost every man in Chechnya and mountain Dagestan was armed, mounted and ready to attack at any time.
While they prepared for war, they tended to leave the women to do most of the actual work in the villages, such as cooking, fetching water, food and fodder, milking the cows, light mowing, cleaning the house, making clothes and so on.
The men traditionally did the heavier jobs, or sat around and watched the livestock, leading to serial accusations from visitors of laziness. Baddeley wrote about how he failed to get fodder for his horse in one Dagestani village when passing through around 1900 because, as the large group of men lying in the sun told him, ‘there is no woman available’ to carry it.
‘Muhammad said that women were camels to carry men over the desert of existence; the mountaineers of the Caucasus apparently took this dictum more or less literally and put all heavy burdens on the backs of their womankind,’ he said.
Things have changed little since then. Or, as one unusually outspoken Chechen woman I know well put it: ‘I have never really understood what men are for.’
It was this world of disunited, but potentially formidable, highlanders that Russia set out to conquer in the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. Russia organized their Cossacks – originally runaways and freebooters – and formalized their links to its own armies, which marched to the mountains along the trail blazed by Peter the Great. The Cossack villages of the river Terek were linked into great fortified lines – where, incidentally, the women did the work and the men manned the watchtowers in a mirror image of the highlanders’ society – and forts were added in Mozdok, Kizlyar, Vladikavkaz and elsewhere.
Russia had no foreign power to argue ownership here, as it did with the Circassian lands on the Black Sea coast, since Chechnya was unclaimed. It had a free hand to seize as much of the mountains as it could.
The highlanders’ response was furious. The Russians were, as the highlanders not unreasonably saw it, stealing their land. They might squabble among themselves for land on a local level, but they could unite against true interlopers. They just needed a leader to galvanize their response, and they at last found one in a Chechen villager called Ushurma.
According to the most convincing account of his life, Ushurma was born in 1732 to influential Chechen parents in the lowland village of Aldy on the river Sunzha. His parents had migrated to the village from the mountainous region of Ichkeria, and his father had fought the Russians and taught his son to hate them.
Ushurma is said to have spent days of his youth on horseback, perfecting his martial skills, and often practised his swordplay on sheep – an expensive habit for his father, who had to compensate the owners of the outclassed livestock. His father also taught him the Koran and, aged twenty, he left to study in Dagestan, which had become the regional centre for religious learning.
According to stories passed down about Ushurma, he saw visions of the Prophet Muhammad, who told him he had to return believers to the true path. His family tried to stop him preaching, but eventually had to give way before his insistence. Speaking from the roof of the mosque, he exhorted his neighbours to live according to the rules of the Koran, and then distributed meat among them.
He proclaimed himself to be Imam – or ‘leader’ – and gave himself the name Mansur, which means ‘victorious’ in Arabic. It is under the name Sheikh Mansur that he is remembered in the Caucasus today. It is said he took it upon himself to mobilize his neighbours to oppose the Russians, provoking concern in the forts on the far side of the river.
In the centuries since, stories have accumulated around Mansur. Some claim that he could see the future, that he could fly and that he could be in more than one place at once. Russian officials became very concerned about this threat to their presence.
‘On the opposite bank of the river Sunzha in the village of Aldy a prophet has appeared and started to preach. He has submitted superstitious and ignorant people to his will by claiming to have had a revelation,’ wrote a Russian major-general in 1785.
The Russians despatched an expedition to Aldy that year to teach Mansur a lesson. When the 3,000 troops reached the village, they were disappointed to find it empty, so they set fire to it and destroyed Mansur’s own house to make their point. Turning for home, however, they found that the villagers had not run away at all but were waiting to ambush them in the forests lining the road. In the subsequent battle, half the Russian force was destroyed and the rest fled in panic across the river, in which many drowned.
The victory made Mansur famous across the Caucasus, and has secured his popularity to this day. A later resistance leader of the Chechens and mountain tribes described him in heroic form as being ‘so tall that in a crowd of standing people it appeared that he was sitting on a horse’.
The Russians were appalled by the reverse at Aldy. The Russian major-general quoted above commented that ‘it is impossible to subdue the Chechens unless to exterminate them completely’ – possibly the first expression of an opinion that was to become common over the next two centuries.
Even without extermination, however, Mansur’s resistance did not last. He was overambitious and his attempts to fight the Russians in the open fields failed, losing him his support in a few short months. He escaped to the land of the Circassians, where he organized their resistance for a while before being captured by the Russians in 1791. He died three years later, probably of tuberculosis, in a fortress in Russia’s north.
As an uprising, his movement was a failure, but it did show the tribes what they could do if they united, and united behind the standard of Islam. Mansur’s movement had laid as much weight on enforcing the rules of the Koran as it had on fighting the Russians.
Apparently, he threatened to kill himself if his father did not stop smoking, and he forced the villagers to stop drinking and to pray five times a day. All of these commands would become familiar to the mountain peoples over the next century, since the resistance leaders would all follow Mansur’s lead in combining Islamic reform and battle.
The Russians realized very quickly the threat that reformed Islam posed to their rule. In a treaty with Russia in 1810, Ingush elders pledged they would not allow Muslim missionaries among them. But such agreements were no match for the forces of Islam, which had found a new driving force – Sufi mysticism.
Without rulers to convert them from above, the free communities of Chechnya and mountain Dagestan had largely been introduced to Islam by roving holy men – many of them belonging to the Naqshbandi brotherhood of Sufis, which preached strict observance of Islam’s laws and a personal and intense relationship with Allah. Its adepts studied the Koran and obeyed their own teacher in all things.
It is unclear whether Mansur himself was a Naqshbandi. If he was not, then his movement certainly closely resembled that of the Sufis. Be that as it may, in the decades that followed his defeat, the brotherhood spread into Chechnya and Dagestan, its centre of gravity becoming the village of Gimry, a free community in the ethnically Avar lands in Dagestan’s mountains. Now, if the Russians were to launch a concerted effort to conquer the free highlanders, they would find their foes organized for the first time. They might not have a unified govern
ment, but they did have a single faith.
The Naqshbandi leader in Gimry – Sheikh Jamal-Edin – opposed holy war, saying it was more important to purify individuals. But it would be ever harder to maintain the battle for a pure, peaceful internal faith, if the Russians were going to impose their own legal codes and customs. Calls to wage holy war would be hard to resist, if the Russians provoked them.
All that was required was for the Russians to give a spark, and the whole of Chechnya and Dagestan could catch fire.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the Russians were largely too distracted to do so. But, with the French defeated, they were able to turn their full attention to these troublesome mountains where the highlanders refused to bow down before the empire of the tsar.
And now, one of the greatest Russian heroes of the campaigns against the French was ready to lead those invincible Russian armies. Alexei Yermolov, beloved of his soldiers, had been decorated on the field by Suvorov, whose massacre of the Nogai nation in 1783 had set the tone for Russia’s whole conquest of the Caucasus. Yermolov had commanded both the Russian and Prussian guards at the fall of Paris in 1814, and was the most respected soldier in the empire.
He was a man of action, and one who believed in writing his philosophy across the map. As he extended the Russian network of forts, the highlanders could have been forgiven for seeing the names given to these new Russian bases and giving up in despair.
Starting in 1817, he erected Vnezapnaya (‘Sudden’), Neotstupny Stan (‘No Retreat’), Zlobny Okop (‘Malicious’) and Burnaya (‘Stormy’). And at the heart of them all was a fort that would become a city, and which the Chechens and the Russians would fight over time after time. Its name was Grozny (‘Threatening’; the word is the same as that used to describe Tsar Ivan ‘the Terrible’).
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