Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘I had, I know not why, formed to myself quite another idea of Schamyl,’ the Prussian officer wrote, ‘and his dignified exterior, his noble features, his graceful and distinguished, though somewhat shy deportment, surprised me in the highest degree, and made a deep impression on me. That such a man should be able to inspire a sentiment of enthusiastic devotion I can well understand.’

  A hundred of the murids escorted the Russians back to their lines, and Jamal-Edin was led before his father’s troops. ‘They rejoiced in God’s blessing and glory. They fired their weapons to show happiness and anger at [their] enemies. As for the imam, he sat under a tree – crying, humbling himself before God, thanking Him, and saying, “Praise God and exalt Him”,’ one of Shamil’s closest allies later wrote.

  The silver was handed out among those who had conducted the raid, with a fifth reserved for the imam. Shamil’s army was rich. The troops could turn and go home, thinking themselves fit to take on the world. They had seized the imam’s lost son from the coils of the Russian state. What could stop them now?

  But, perhaps even then, Shamil may have seen the dangers that awaited him. The very same day he won back his beloved son, the tsar who had fought him all his adult life was being buried. The hide-bound, reactionary, unimaginative Nikolai was dead. His energetic son Alexander, the second tsar to bear that name, would be a far more deadly foe.

  And yet, at that moment, the war was in the past and the future, and Imam Shamil could just revel in having his son back for a while.

  21.

  Fire is Better Than Shame

  Apollon Ivanovich Runovsky was an ordinary officer in the Russian army in the Caucasus. Born in 1823, he had not completed his science training when he was sent off as a cadet – the most junior of officer grades – to Dagestan in 1840. He served in the Caucasus for the next two decades, and was shot in the leg while fighting Shamil’s forces; the bullet stayed there for the rest of his days.

  He became an ensign in 1846, and an aide-de-camp a year later. By 1852, he had spent a year fighting the Circassians and become a lieutenant. After two more years had passed, he perhaps sensed that his talents lay more in administration than in battle and he asked to be named supervisor of the military hospital in Grozny. All in all, it was an undistinguished career, its chief point of interest being a minor blemish in 1857, when he was briefly dismissed for exploiting lower ranks in his own service.

  But then, in 1859, everything changed for the 36-year-old, when his career was yanked spectacularly off course.

  Shamil had been defeated.

  When the end came, it came very quickly. Shamil might have seemed at the peak of his powers when he raided Georgia, carried off the two princesses and regained his son, but, in truth, that had been his last moment of triumph, and the delight of reuniting his family had held within it a tragedy more bitter even than the initial loss.

  Jamal-Edin, the prince who had been welcomed back by the rapturous highlanders, had spent too long among the Russians. He was not ready for the harsh life of the mountains. Deprived of the Russian food he had grown accustomed to, praying five times a day, and subjected to the harsh discipline of his father, the handsome young man sickened and started to fade.

  In February 1858, a messenger galloped into Khasavyurt, desperate to see the military commander. He came from Shamil, and begged that medicine be provided for Jamal-Edin, who was dying. It was clear to the doctor that the symptoms were those of tuberculosis. Medicines were given, and the messenger galloped away again. The Russian officers wondered if the medicines would arrive in time to save the young man, though in truth there was little that a nineteenth-century doctor could have done anyway.

  What hopes they entertained must have all but vanished three months later, when the messenger returned and this time he wanted to take a doctor with him. The doctor agreed, and endured a relentless weeklong journey into the hills, his guides changing daily but never willing to talk to him or tell him how much further he must travel.

  Arriving at last, he looked at his patient and realized there was nothing he could do. He stayed for three days, but Jamal-Edin was dying. His face drawn, his body emaciated, he died alone and uncomplaining, as he had lived those sorry last three years of his life.

  Two months before his death, he had been taken to the village of Karata, where his brother Gazi-Muhammad ruled in the imam’s name. Perhaps Shamil thought the climate there would be more suitable for a consumptive person, or perhaps he thought that the brother’s care would be more amenable than the fierce regulation of his life elsewhere.

  Jamal-Edin had loved reading, but he feared punishment from his father, and had hidden away his books – written in the proscribed Russian language – for as long as he could. Many of his 300 volumes had been obtained in exchange for freeing a Georgian prisoner of war given to him as a slave by Shamil. That fact alone must have shown Shamil that his son’s heart was not in the fight.

  His death was drawn-out and painful. Jamal-Edin – understanding that he had tuberculosis, and knowing enough about the disease to know it was incurable – predicted each stage of his decline. He was desperate to avoid rumours springing up around his untimely death. But the highlanders did not believe him, and the story told by the villagers was that he had been given a slow-acting poison when in Russian hands.

  He tried repeatedly to persuade those nearest to him that the story was not true, that he was dying of a slow and fatal condition, since he felt a great debt of obligation to his former captors. He struggled to persuade his brothers that the Russians were not bad people and, they said, he died happy, believing he had convinced them. Perhaps indeed he had.

  His death could have been an omen for Shamil that the end was near. The triumph of regaining his son had turned sour for the imam. This time there would be no miraculous escape, there would be no clambering down precipices, and no death-defying leaps over ranks of bayonets. The Russians were coming to finish the job.

  For the Russians, humiliated in the Crimean War and energized by their new Tsar Alexander II, had re-adopted the plans laid out by Velyaminov forty years before. They would treat the Caucasus as a fortress, and its inhabitants as a garrison.

  The Crimean War was taken as a signal for the highlanders as well. The sultan, in whom they had pinned their hopes for so long, had failed to crush the Russians, even though he was allied with the armies of England and France. In the Caucasus, the Russian capitulation and the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Paris, which barred warships from the Black Sea, were seen as a victory for the tsar, since he had survived the onslaught of three sovereigns without capture.

  A delegation of Chechens wrote to Shamil in 1856 asking him to sue for peace. Shamil, perhaps sharing their opinion, made no immediate reply. He must have sensed this was no time for a theatrical response, for fasting and flagellation. He asked only for a couple of months for the smoke to clear.

  The end was near, but Russian overconfidence and instinctive brutality saved him for a while. A council in Stavropol decided that, to pacify the Caucasus, tribesmen who submitted must be moved to Manych – some vacant land on the plains to the north of the Caucasus. The effect on those who had not submitted was predictable enough. They would never willingly surrender their homeland, so all thoughts of suing for peace were forgotten, and the war went on.

  ‘I could never invent such punishment for those Chechens who had betrayed us as their Russian masters did,’ Shamil told the Chechen delegation. ‘Do you want to go to Manych as well?’

  But it was only a temporary reprieve. The Russians might have been politically inept, but they were militarily competent at last. The command had been reorganized along rational lines, and a steady pressure was exerted to squeeze Shamil’s control of his heartland. The forests were felled in great strips either side of the roads, and new forts were built, meaning the highlanders could not even bring the Russians to fight any more. This new tactic proved more effective than any number of battles had been.r />
  ‘The mountaineers could not be frightened by fighting. Constant warfare had given them such confidence, that a few score men would engage without fear a column several battalions strong, and returning one shot to our hundred would occasion us much more loss than we them. Fighting underlines equality between forces, and as long as the mountaineers could fight, they entertained no thought of submission, ’ said Prince Alexander Baryatinsky, the new and gifted commander of the Russian forces.

  ‘But when, time after time, they found that they were not even given a chance to resist, their weapons started to fall from their hands. Defeated, they would have gathered again on the morrow. Circumvented and forced to disperse without fighting, while seeing their valleys occupied without opposition, they came in next day to offer their submission. Shamil’s power was undermined by nothing so much as the gathering of useless hordes which had to disperse to their homes without anywhere offering serious resistance.’

  In one last desperate roll of the dice, Shamil struck out of Chechnya towards Vladikavkaz, where the Ingush were revolting. Apparently he believed that Musa Kundukhov, a Muslim general in the Russian service whom we will hear of again, had promised him his cooperation. Nothing came of it, and by the end of 1858 Shamil had not only lost his son, but the best part of his territory.

  The final assault came in July 1859. Russia’s troops manoeuvred around the defences Shamil had set up, forcing the waiting army to disperse, and the last shreds of morale left with it. In a final indignity, Shamil’s wagons and treasury were robbed by his former subjects, and he was abused and insulted as he headed for his last stronghold: the mountaintop village of Gunib.

  Shamil despaired, and recited a poem as he rode to his last battle.

  ‘I swore by my brothers, whom I considered my coats of armour, but they were armour only for my enemies. I considered them well-aimed arrows, but they were aimed only at my heart. They said “we have pure hearts” and they spoke the truth, but only of my love.’

  As his miserable party laboured along the last stretch of road, he turned to his son-in-law and later chronicler Abdurakhman and asked him: ‘If meat spoils, we treat it with salt. But what can we do if the salt spoils?’

  Gunib, however, was a wonderful place to make a last stand. It is a natural fortress that, if only the defenders had enough men, could surely never be captured. It is ringed by cliffs, which rise sheer all around a bowl-shaped plateau. The plateau has fields, a stream, houses and trees, and its only exit is guarded by high walls, pierced by a single gate.

  Now there is a prosperous village at the foot of the cliffs, but in Shamil’s time the defenders were ensconced on the plateau, too far from the Russians to be harmed by artillery, and secure in the knowledge that they were impregnable.

  Or, they would have been, if only there had been more of them. Shamil had commanded thousands just weeks before; now there were only 400 defenders, and even they were wavering in their loyalty.

  The Russians wanted to take their enemy alive. They posted rewards for him in case he tried to flee, and held peace negotiations for two weeks, but that came to nothing.

  According to one account, Shamil’s envoys were sent with the message that the imam was prepared to surrender, if he was allowed to make the pilgrimage to the holy places with his family. ‘If you release me, my family and my followers on the Haj, then between us will be peace and agreement. If not, then the sword is unsheathed and the hand is strong,’ the imam’s message said. The Russians’ reply did not satisfy him, however, so the battle was on.

  Before dawn on 6 September, the highlanders began to hear the Russian soldiers cheer as they made their advance. Some of Shamil’s followers threw stones down the cliffs, hoping to knock out their assailants, but the resistance was hopeless in the dark. The Russians were swarming up the cliffs all around the village. The thin screen of defenders might be able to hold them for a while, but even the smallest toehold on the plateau would allow the Russians to push soldiers up the cliffs, and would leave the last few hundred people loyal to the imam outnumbered and outgunned.

  Abdurakhman feared for his family and rushed back to the houses where they had been staying. ‘When I got to where our families were, I found them in the house by the mosque. They looked like baby swallows held in the hand. They were crying from the horrors of the day.’

  The defenders, having lost their hold on the clifftops, retreated down the slight slope towards the last pocket of resistance. Russians now held the heights, which dominate the bowl of the plateau from all sides, and poured fire down into the throng.

  A Russian emissary called out to the last men left fighting: ‘Save your ammunition, do not bring death upon yourselves. Do not spill your blood. Save your honour.’

  The highlanders stopped firing and listened: was this the end? Some looked to the imam for a decision, but found no comfort. ‘They did not speak to him about it, being afraid of the shame. As it is said, fire is better than shame. And the imam was quiet, saying nothing; he was fully determined to die and to fight until his sword was broken to pieces,’ Abdurakhman recalled.

  Shamil begged his followers to kill him: ‘Is there no one among you who would kill me? I allow you to spill my blood, so the enemy does not see me.’

  But they refused. Shamil then gave them permission to leave, and said he would die alone. Again, they refused. His son Gazi-Muhammad knelt before him and begged him to surrender: once, twice. On the third time the imam gave in. He could resist his son’s entreaties no longer: the father’s love had overcome the fanatic’s zeal.

  Accompanied by twelve of his followers, he rode towards the Russians – ‘he looked not to the right, not to the left, only at the horse’s mane’ – and gave himself up. Ahead of him, seated on a small rock, was Baryatinsky. He welcomed the imam into captivity, and Shamil unbuckled his sword and handed it to his conqueror. Shamil’s war was over.

  Apollon Runovsky, meanwhile, was busy running his hospital in Khasavyurt, the job he received when he was allowed back into the army after his temporary disgrace. It must have been a relief for him to have any kind of job at all, and perhaps he felt he would be in the posting until the end of his career. If he did, however, he could not have been more wrong.

  A new posting was on its way, and one that surely he did not expect. He was to live with Shamil.

  ‘Live with Shamil! Take care of him! How could I ever have imagined such a thing? On the contrary, I well remember how during my long period of service in the Caucasus, I more than once thought that Shamil would be taking care of me, if the fortunes of war had left me as his prisoner,’ Runovsky wrote.

  As Shamil’s pristav – the word means policeman or bailiff, but in this case he was more like an aide-de-camp – he was ordered to help the imam, while simultaneously keeping him under control. He had to watch him permanently, but without being intrusive. He could not interfere in Shamil’s religious or family life, but must keep a diary of sayings, comments, conversations and events.

  Shamil was to be honoured and feted as a worthy adversary, with Runovsky supplying his wants. It could have been a tough job for the hospital administrator, since no one knew if Shamil would turn out to be a savage, twisted by anger. But it did not turn out that way. The imam appreciated this rare display of magnanimity from the Russians – one that would never be repeated – and he came to love his captors as his son had done.

  ‘When I decided to obey the wishes of my wives and children and surrender,’ Shamil told Runovsky many months later, ‘and when I walked to the meeting with your commander, I was convinced I would hear from him the words: “Well, pig, where’s your sword that you suggested I should come and take from you?” The expectation of this meeting was so upsetting that I fully believed myself worthy of this insult, and decided that I would stab myself as soon as I heard it. But when the words of the commander were translated for me, and had only a friendly meaning, I at first did not believe my ears, and, not expecting anything like that, I could n
ot give an answer, and when I spoke, I made so many mistakes that it seems I did not speak very well at all.’

  Runovsky’s diaries give a sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly but always fascinating account of the imam’s existence. They are the completest study of his character that we have, and illuminate this guerrilla warrior in unexpected and wonderful ways.

  In one series of consecutive entries, for example, in February 1861, Shamil told Runovsky about highlanders who were in Russian service, then about the mountain beliefs concerning snakes, then about why boys and girls are born at different times (girls are conceived if the mother is well-fed, apparently), then about who in the mountains is best able to treat a scorpion sting. Elsewhere, Shamil discussed the laws he imposed, which of his lieutenants were most loyal, the appalling sexual habits of the Turks, and more.

  Shamil, on his surrender, had been taken with his wives and children down to the plains. After a short rest, Shamil, his sons Gazi-Muhammad and Muhammad-Sheffi, and the follower called Hajio were separated from the others, and sent north into Russia.

  According to a family anecdote related to me by one of his descendants, after a few days of rattling through the uninterrupted steppe, Shamil commented: ‘If I had known Russia was so big, I would never have fought against it.’ True or not, the remark is entirely in keeping with the imam’s outlook on life, which turned out to be startlingly naive.

  At times, I had to keep reminding myself that the man described in the hundreds of pages of diaries and recollections had resisted the mighty Russian army for two and a half decades. He seemed like someone who had never encountered the modern world before.

  If Shamil feared the reaction of the Russians to his presence, he was again mistaken. He was greeted by cheering crowds at every stop he made on his journey and, on arrival in St Petersburg, he became a sensation. Giant throngs gathered outside his hotel, hoping for just a glimpse of his face, or outside buildings where he stopped as he was conducted around the city. He was amazed by all he saw, and particularly by the warmth of his welcome.