A follower’s account tells how Shamil, on recovering from his wounds, walked back to Gimry and was disgusted to see women sitting unaccompanied and spinning wool by the roadside: a flagrant contradiction of the Koran. The earth had barely settled on Gazi-Muhammad’s grave and already the people were disobeying his laws. Shamil shook his head and walked on. As he passed the women later in the day, the situation was still worse. An old man with a stick had joined them, and this was too much for Shamil, who took the stick and beat the man with it. He then struck one of the women when she refused to leave.
Shamil was beaten twenty times by order of the court as a result, causing his chest wound to open again, but he was unrepentant. He was doing God’s work. He preached that it was the duty of every believer to enforce the law. The local populace did not listen to him.
‘Tomorrow we will drink wine, party and dance,’ said one man. ‘Then we will see how humiliated those [Sufis] will be.’ Shamil attacked the group, beating them heavily, and this was too much for his neighbours. He was forced to leave his home village and retreat elsewhere.
His uncompromising faith may not have appealed to all the residents of Gimry, but it attracted young men from all over the Caucasus who wanted an imam to teach them the laws of God and the discipline of the Sufi order, and to lead them against the Russians. These men had to abide by the militant traditions of the Naqshbandi, and became known as murids – or ‘the committed ones’ in Arabic.
As murids, they could not drink, or smoke, or indulge in luxuries of any kind. According to the legends of the mountains, however, these laws were as often as not flouted by the highlanders.
Stories today abound about individual murids who succeeded in circumventing the ban on smoking that Shamil imposed. One murid supposedly killed twelve Russian soldiers, and won the right to have a cigarette as a result. Another is said to have forded a rushing stream and carried off a particularly beautiful Christian woman on the far bank. She was to be Shuanat, Shamil’s favourite wife, and her captor was allowed to smoke as much as he wanted.
Some of these stories may in fact be true, since Shamil unquestionably had a talent for dramatic and extreme gestures. He suffered from a fainting disease, which he turned to his advantage by explaining the fits he would fall into as divinely inspired. He also had an excellent network of spies and would casually drop in secret information as being something he had seen in a dream.
The most extraordinary such performance came when a delegation of Chechens sought permission to surrender. In their lowland forests, they were far more vulnerable than the Dagestanis to punitive action from the Russians.
A delegation came to the imam’s village, and sought a way of persuading him to give up the fight. He had issued an order that any traitors would be killed, and anyone talking of surrender would be severely punished, so they were keen to seek out the perfect envoy to present their proposals to their ruler.
Eventually, they persuaded the imam’s mother to intercede on their behalf, and she went to her son and begged him to end the torment of his subjects.
Shamil must have realized the seriousness of the situation. If even the Chechens were begging him to end the war then indeed morale must be low. If even his mother was carrying the message, then surely no one believed in the cause?
He told the crowd he would have to pray for three days for inspiration, and he vanished into the mosque. The villagers gathered and waited outside. Perhaps this time Shamil would show himself to be able to compromise? Or perhaps the Chechen delegation would be punished as the law promised?
When Shamil emerged, gaunt and pale, he had made his decision. He had communed with the Almighty, he said, and there was only one action he could take. He must enforce the law. The law stated that anyone speaking of surrender must be punished severely, and that person had been his mother. He therefore decreed a hundred strokes of the cane on his mother’s back.
She screamed and begged for mercy, but he was implacable. One stroke fell, two, three, and on the fourth she fainted. At this, Shamil – the master of the dramatic – himself stepped forward, and said that the Koran allowed a son to take his parent’s punishment. He stripped off his tunic and demanded that his executioner inflict the remaining ninety-six strokes on his own back.
He took the beating without a sound, stood up, and ordered the Chechen delegation to go home and talk no more of surrender. They followed his instructions, for who would argue with this madman?
And he brought them success in war too. Every year, the Russians would wait for his forces to pour out of the mountains, never sure which fort would be the target. In 1846, he even led a raid into Kabarda, the easternmost part of the land of the Circassians. The raid was not a success in military terms, but it was a striking demonstration of ambition and reach.
Russian attempts to capture him were regularly disastrous too. The year before the raid on Kabarda, a new Russian viceroy in the Caucasus received firm orders from Tsar Nikolai to destroy Shamil’s capital. A force of 21,000 men – much of it led by some of the most titled officers in the army, all of them with the camp luxuries they required – set out to crush Shamil once and for all. Shamil retreated and retreated, staying tantalizingly out of reach for weeks. The Russians took Shamil’s capital – Dargo – but there was no one in it, so they were no closer to reaching their objective than at the start.
It was now that Shamil’s guerrilla genius appeared. Every Russian attack was unopposed, but every retreat was turned into a bloody rout. He knew the lumbering Russian column was low on supplies, and would have to send men for more food soon. When it did so, they were attacked from every side. This ‘biscuit expedition’ brought no supplies, and lost 556 men killed, including two generals. Over the next five days of humiliating retreat, the Russians were hounded by snipers in the forests on all sides, and lost another 295 men killed. It was a spectacular disaster, which raised Shamil’s prestige to new heights.
So, this was the leader of the mountains whose forces swooped onto Georgia that summer day in 1854. He was a fanatic, a guerrilla genius, a performer and an administrator. He had crafted a system of government out of the Naqshbandi creed, and he imposed it mercilessly. His murids were his elite soldiers. Above them were his naibs – lieutenants who governed in his name. They ruled Dagestan – the bleak uplands with their deep valleys and rocky crags – and Chechnya, a lusher, softer land dominated by great beech forests. Chechnya has its high mountains, but much of the region is made of rolling hills, densely wooded, in which the Chechens could hide from the invaders.
Shamil looked out over these woods in upland Chechnya when the princesses were being brought in as captives.
On their miserable journey through the mountains, they had learned a lot about the hatred felt for the Russian government and its subjects. In one village, they were pelted with stones and sticks, and not one inhabitant would let them spend the night indoors. Their captors treated them brutally. Lydia, Prince David’s infant daughter, had died early on when her mother was unable to hold onto her as she jolted along on the back of a horse.
Children were apparently deemed to be more or less disposable.
‘Princess Baratoff observed one of the Georgian children, who had been separated from its mother, crying violently, to the great annoyance of the Lesghian who had taken charge of it. The mountaineer at last took the child by the legs, dashed its brains out against a rock, and threw it towards the abyss which received the stream somewhat lower down,’ says a contemporary account of the affair written from the princesses’ own testimony.
With twenty-two days of this misery on their journey, it is not surprising that they were apprehensive about appearing before the imam. He was a man with a cruel reputation, but he fascinated people throughout Russia and beyond. Who was this man who defied the might of the Russian empire? Many writers had imagined a character for him, sometimes with unwittingly comic results.
A German, for example, remarked – apparently without any sourc
e beyond his own imagination – on Shamil’s ‘aquiline nose, small mouth, blue eyes, blonde hair and beard, and delicate white skin’. All these qualities could only point to more of ‘a Germanic than an eastern extraction’, we learned, as if a guerrilla leader could not possibly have emerged from the Caucasus without an infusion of good north European blood.
Now, with the princesses’ arrival, for the first time outsiders would have a chance of closely observing the imam and his household. On arriving at Shamil’s home – a complex of buildings around a courtyard – they saw a figure in white looking down at them from a balcony. This was Shamil, and though they did not know it at the time his mind was likely to have been in turmoil as well.
Some fifteen years previously, the imam had suffered a grievous loss. Trapped by Russian troops in the mountain village of Akhulgo, he had been forced to give up his youngest son, the six-year-old Jamal-Edin, as a hostage for good behaviour. Ever since, he had been trying to get him back. The youngster had since become a Russian officer, and russified, but Shamil still dreamed of uniting his family. With these high-ranking new captives, perhaps he finally had hostages of his own that the Russians would be prepared to exchange for his son.
And while the negotiations dragged on – sometimes happily, sometimes painfully – the princesses would gain plentiful insights into the household of the Lion of Dagestan, as some of the more excitable newspapers had taken to calling him.
What they found resembled a soap opera, although the cast would have seemed far-fetched if it were fictional. Shamil had three wives: bitter, sharp-tongued Zeidat; sweet-natured, kind Shuanat; mischievous young Aminat, who delighted only in irritating Zeidat. He had two resident sons: noble Gazi-Muhammad, whose visits everyone looked forward to; delinquent Muhammad-Sheffi, who once almost set the whole complex on fire.
Zeidat’s father Jamal-Edin, who was also Shamil’s spiritual superior in the Sufi hierarchy, and his wife provided emotional support for the captives, while a steward, Hajio, was the target for merciless teasing.
Shamil’s third wife Aminat, a seventeen-year-old girl from the Kist nation, which is closely related to the Chechens, was delighted to have the princesses to talk to. She constantly cooked up new schemes to keep everyone amused, including breaking into the imam’s quarters, where he lived with a favourite cat.
‘The captives accompanied her with fear and trembling; but curiosity overcame every other feeling. In Shamil’s private room they saw some very rich carpets and a great number of books. Aminette also showed them some beautiful Georgian pistols mounted in silver, and pistol cases of cloth embroidered in silver and gold,’ the account of their captivity says.
Aminat seems shortly after this to have incited one of the princesses to ‘accidentally’ bump into Hajio, a man who was rather enamoured of the princess. If an unbeliever touched him, he would have to wash himself ritually seven times, a fact that the princess then found out about and exploited mercilessly with regular accidental contacts. ‘At last Hadjio avoided the young princess as if she had been fire, and went in a cautious and circuitous manner round every point where she was likely to make her appearance. He was moreover in a constant state of trepidation as long as he was in the same room with her, and was particularly amusing whenever she gave the least sign of approaching him.’
With diversions like this, time passed, although the princesses, their children and their servants remained desperately uncomfortable in a small room measuring just twenty-six shoe-lengths by twelve shoe-lengths. The major enemy was boredom, particularly when Shamil went away campaigning and they became targets for Zeidat’s spitefulness. The senior wife appeared to derive pleasure from tormenting the women, and took the opportunity of her husband not being present to serve them scarcely edible food, and to dangle the prospect of death over them.
Shuanat, mindful of her Christian background as an Armenian’s daughter and the possibility of rumours about her loyalty starting behind her back, was kind to them but had to be careful to visit them only rarely.
Only Aminat remained friendly and during the winter was their only visitor. One evening, the princesses sat on their balcony enjoying the moonlight and the fresh air, and the young wife came to see them. They all sat and looked out on the view, when Shamil appeared wearing a white coat and walked to Aminat’s chamber. It was clear that he wanted to see his wife, but his wife – it transpired – did not want to see him, since she dived under the princesses’ bench and hid there.
Shamil knocked, but there was no answer. So he waited, and waited, and waited, and still his wife did not come. ‘Thus, for a considerable time, the illustrious saint, the powerful Iman of Chechni and Daghestan, waited freezing in the cold, like an ardent and not particularly saintlike young man, for the sake of a love-meeting with a girl of seventeen. At last the severity of the night, and the evident inutility of waiting any longer, made him return to his own apartments. ’
While this peculiar family story unfolded, letters had been to taken to St Petersburg, requesting that the imam’s son be released. The tsar agreed, as did the unfortunate Jamal-Edin, who now faced the prospect of setting up home in mountains he had not seen since he was a child. Shamil demanded 40,000 silver roubles in ransom as well, and the prince was forced to mortgage his land and seek loans from elsewhere to redeem his family.
The outcome of the talks was probably never in doubt, although Zeidat kept the princesses in a state of panic by occasionally saying they would be sent as wives to Shamil’s lieutenants if the ransom was not larger than previously agreed. The distractions aside, however, the handover was finally set for mid-March 1855, on the Michik river not far from the town of Khasavyurt.
The two wives the captives had befriended were heartbroken to see them go. ‘Now you are going away you will forget us,’ said Shuanat in a melancholy tone. ‘When you get home, you will live as you did before; but I – We had become fond of you; your presence here occupied and interested us; and we were quite accustomed to you.’
Aminat could not speak for sadness, but Zeidat – true to form – saw the opportunity and stole their samovar.
The handover is probably a unique occasion in the entire Caucasus war, when we have four separate accounts of one event, as well as the official Russian documents. It was a fascinating display, the highlanders and the Russians lined up opposite each other in force, with hostilities postponed for the day.
Madame Drancey, the governess, wrote of her joy in seeing the Russian troops lined up to receive the freed hostages, their ranks shining in the sun of a glorious spring day. When the Russians arrived, there were already some highlander units waiting for them, and these too made an impression on their foes. Jamal-Edin, the son whom Shamil had not seen for a decade and a half, was ready for the exchange.
A group of Russian soldiers escorted Jamal-Edin and the carts full of money to the place of exchange. His half-brother Gazi-Muhammad and an equivalent number of highlanders were already waiting to receive them, and to escort the princesses back to the Russian lines.
‘All the poetical ideas which had been formed in Europe about Schamyl and his followers, the fallacy of which three years sojourn here has sufficiently proved to me, seemed at this moment to be more than justified. At the head of the troops rode Khasi-Mahoma, a young man of good though slender figure, but a pale expressionless face. His entirely white appearance – he was mounted on a beautiful white horse, wore a white tunic, and a white fur cap – gave me a very disagreeable impression of him, which was much strengthened by his pompous and affected manner,’ wrote a Prussian serving as an officer in the Russian army and part of Jamal-Edin’s escort.
‘Behind him in two ranks appeared his 32 followers, all Murids, splendidly mounted, equipped and armed. There was a grace in their proud and military bearing which was enhanced by a dash of half-savage wildness. They carried their long guns cocked, and rested on their right thigh. Their stern dark faces and wiry forms, the richness of their arms, glittering with gold and si
lver, the beauty of their fiery little horses, combined with the background of the surrounding landscape, offered a coup d’oeil, the like of which I never remember to have witnessed.’
As Prince Chavchavadze rode forward, he heard one of his daughters call out: ‘Look, mama! There is papa on a white horse!’ It was then that he knew his family had finally been freed. Gazi-Muhammad sought to reassure him that the women had been well treated.
‘The Imam gave me orders, prince, to inform you that he took as much care of your family as if it had been his own; and that if the captives suffered any discomfort with us it did not arise from any intention on our part to annoy them, but from our ignorance how to behave towards such women and from our want of means,’ the young man said.
Jamal-Edin, still dressed in Russian uniform, embraced his brother, and the two sides separated once more. As the highlander party returned to the river, the excitement bubbled ever higher. Individuals dashed forward from the ranks to kiss the hands of Shamil’s eldest son, freed from the clasp of the non-believers, then joyously joined the escort which swelled to hundreds of people.
‘I have seldom seen, collected in one place, a body of more fine and more powerful men and horses,’ wrote the Prussian officer, who accompanied Jamal-Edin on this last journey too.
But before the young man could be presented to the father who had waited for him now for sixteen years, he had to change into the clothing of his people, and to discard the uniform of his captors which he had worn for so long. Hajio walked forward and handed a bundle of clothing to him, upon which he was surrounded by his companions to screen him from sight. He changed, and emerged as a magnificent prince of the mountains, in tunic, fur hat and silver-gilt weapons.
He rode to his father, and dismounted, and Shamil took him in his arms, tears pouring down his face. The imam had won a great victory, and his son was restored to him. But, even now, he did not exult or show any crude emotion. He turned to his son’s escort of Russian officers and thanked them for their kindness.
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