Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘Your people are very good to me in captivity; they are not angry with me, and do not wish me evil. This is very good, and it was not like this in my place. Our lads would throw rubbish at the prisoner and, if they could, they would even have killed him,’ he told his translator.

  The warm sentiment was one he felt for Emperor Alexander II as well. The tsar’s father had cared for Shamil’s son, and now it was the son’s turn to treat Jamal-Edin’s father with grace and generosity.

  ‘Not only gratitude for your Majesty’s magnanimity towards one who was your enemy, but also – I proclaim it again and again – a sincere and deliberate conviction compels me to be your subject. If there be a man upon earth worthy to represent God Almighty, that man, sire, is yourself. If a throne is grounded upon the hearts of men, that throne is yours. Sire, I wish it to be known everywhere, that if old Schamyl of Daghestan, who fought against your arms for thirty years, experiences a regret at the decline of his days, it is only that he cannot be born again to devote his whole life to the service of your empire,’ the imam said, according to an account printed in the London Times in November 1859.

  The compliments may have been expressed in the traditional forms of the Arabic-speaker, but they were clearly heartfelt. Imagine a captured Osama bin Laden expressing such gratitude to the American president, and you have some idea of the surprise that Shamil’s words provoked in those who heard them.

  And the Russians appreciated the dignity of their captive. Shamil’s popularity was such that he appeared at times to possess the draw of an exotic specimen in a zoo, particularly for those officers who had fought against him, and finally had the chance to see their opponent in the flesh. Most of them were stunned by the gentleness of the man they saw in front of them, and the news of the dignity of his appearance made more officers desperate to see him.

  For the crowd of ordinary Petersburgers, however, his popularity seems to have gone far beyond that. Perhaps they admired his resistance to the autocratic state, or perhaps they were simply welcoming him as a genuine hero, but they waited for him and cheered him everywhere he went.

  It was at around this time that Shamil and his sons first met Runovsky. The imam’s new minder had arrived in St Petersburg, and was introduced to Shamil by his first name, Apollon. They had not heard this name before, and tried, unsuccessfully, to pronounce it quietly to themselves: ‘Aflon’, ‘Aflon’, ‘Afilon’.

  Shamil, learning that Runovsky had spent twelve years in the Caucasus, asked what battles he had taken part in. As it happened, Runovsky had missed out on most of the major engagements, but had been involved in one desperate affair in 1843, perhaps the year when Shamil’s influence was at its peak. The highlanders had taken several fortresses that autumn, and the Russian generals were penned up behind their ramparts while the soldiers starved and hoped for relief.

  Runovsky had been a junior officer in a detachment trapped in a small fort in the village of Zyrani, deep in the mountains of central Dagestan. Highlanders held the high ground on all sides. In the context of the war that year, it was a small affair, and the tiny force only had to hold out for six weeks, so it barely makes it into even the most detailed histories. But, for some reason, a song written by the defenders became a popular ditty throughout the army at the time. It described their privations as they suffered in the siege and the cold of the mountain winter, and went something like this:So we came to eat our horses,

  Which we boiled and we baked.

  Lacking salt, we seasoned them

  With powder from our cartridges.

  We smoked hay in our pipes and

  Said farewell to tobacco.

  We were shabby, we were ragged,

  Our clothing fell down off our shoulders.

  We clothed ourselves in sacking

  Instead of cloaks or heavy coats.

  After eating all the horses

  We made shoes from their hide.

  In an interesting sign of how much intercommunication there had been between the highlanders and the Russians, Shamil knew all about the affair, and may even have known the song, for his first question on learning that Runovsky had been in Zyrani was to ask with a smile if he had eaten horse. Runovsky replied that he had, and that it would have been tastier if they had had more salt.

  ‘Well, that is bad,’ said the imam. ‘However, you held on there very strongly; my lads would not have held on.’

  The encounter formed the basis of a firm friendship that grew up between them over the next two and half years. One night, Runovsky took Shamil to the theatre to watch a ballet about a sultan and his harem. This was the imam’s second time at the theatre, so he did not examine the magic of the dimming lights as closely as he had before, but the performance was enough to amaze him none the less.

  ‘On seeing the harem on stage, with all its attributes, Shamil became noticeably animated, but he immediately reconsidered and adopted a calm pose as befits the lord of a harem. In fact, for the whole show, he held himself like a true gentleman,’ Runovsky wrote.

  Nonetheless, his nonchalance notwithstanding, Shamil was clearly impressed, not least by the finale, when the harem inmates formed themselves into a human pyramid.

  ‘The prophet promised us this only in heaven and I am very glad to be able to see it on earth,’ the imam said.

  It is clear, however, that the life he was living was wearing him down. He was missing his family and tired by the attention and the ceaseless round of receptions and visits. As they walked back from the theatre through the cold evening, Runovsky had to lend the shivering Shamil his jacket, and Gazi-Muhammad asked the officer – in the pidgin Turkic that the Russians and highlanders used to communicate – whether their wives and children could come to join them soon.

  Other observers too noticed that Shamil seemed listless under the constant scrutiny.

  On the morning of 24 September, for example, according to an account in a Scottish newspaper, twenty or thirty officers were waiting to see the imam before he had even got up. The officers, who included generals, were talking quietly among themselves to avoid disturbing their defeated enemy.

  ‘What a quantity of tea he can take in,’ said one subaltern, ‘he would ruin his father and be the death of this mother, if they had a frugal turn of mind.’

  ‘How is it with the imam?’ asked a general at last when a servant appeared. ‘I hope he will not keep us waiting the whole day long.’

  When they were finally admitted to the imam’s room, they found him seated under a portrait of the tsar. Shamil had been looking at a watch, carefully comparing its face with that of a clock, but he put it away in his pocket when they came in, and nodded in their direction. The officers approached, stood around two yards in front of him, and waited in silence, scrutinizing his appearance.

  ‘Certainly, this was but a bad sample of an oriental hero, as far as exterior went,’ the journalist wrote with heavy sarcasm. ‘If the features could be trusted, this man was neither cruel nor ferocious, but mild, intelligent, and prudent.’

  They waited and examined him for five minutes without a word, until Shamil turned aside and began to pray. The officers took this as a cue for them to speak, and discussed his appearance loudly.

  ‘The majority were struck with admiration, and called him a lion with the gentleness of a lamb, a great warrior, a sagacious leader, with many other eulogistic expressions. However, there were some of the party who, having served in the Caucasus, recalled the many executions he had ordered, and insisted on terming him savage and fiend.’

  When Shamil finished praying, he spoke for the first time, asking through an interpreter when he would be allowed to continue his journey to his final destination. A general said he would leave within a week if he so wished, which seemed to satisfy the imam, who then rose and left the room.

  The audience was over for the generals, but it is a scene that was probably repeated for the imam time after time. It is little wonder that he was exhausted.

  Whe
n the time finally did come for Shamil and his sons to leave St Petersburg, Runovsky was with them. The crowd outside the hotel was even denser for this last glimpse of the popular hero. They cried out to him, saying: ‘Farewell, farewell’, ‘Stay here with us, Shamil’ and ‘Be our guest for a while longer.’ But he would not stay. He was – no doubt with a feeling of relief – on his way to the train station.

  As he sat on the train, the crowd thronged the platform. Shamil reached up and opened the curtain and the mob exploded with joy. Hats were thrown into the air, and Shamil – clearly moved – put his hand on his heart and nodded to them repeatedly for the half an hour that the carriage sat there. When the time came for the train to move out, the imam wished to make a small speech.

  ‘Tell them, please, that I cannot express my feelings in words, they are too deep and sincere. Tell them only that their attention makes me full of happiness, and gives me the same satisfaction that I felt on receiving the news of the relief of Dargo in 1845, and that I received from the successes in Dagestan in 1843 . . .’

  But it was too late. The train had pulled out and there was no time for St Petersburg to hear Shamil’s gratitude. That would be stored up for the residents of another town, for Shamil was on his way to a new life in Kaluga.

  22.

  The Old Man Shamil

  In every memoir written by someone who met Shamil in Kaluga, of which there were several, the captured imam always made a comment of some kind of about how the hills and countryside around the town reminded him of Chechnya.

  These could only have been the remarks of a profoundly unhappy man. The vertical lines of the Russian pine forests, and the jagged but horizontal horizon of the central Russian plains have nothing in common with the rolling beech forests and soaring peaks of the Caucasus. Maybe, though, the little self-deception was a comfort of some kind for the old man, who had nothing left but his family, his books and his memories.

  On one occasion, Shamil used a variation on the line, which was clearly something of a party piece that he dragged out to amuse his Russian guests, perhaps to assure them that he was not feeling homesick.

  Runovsky, who seems to have genuinely won the imam’s trust, asked him if anyone else in the Caucasus could rise up and take his place as a unifying leader of the Chechens and the Dagestanis. Shamil was silent for some time and just gazed at his questioner, with a look that Runovsky described as containing ‘the past, which definitely was, and the future, which for him will never be’.

  ‘No,’ Shamil said at last. ‘Now the Caucasus is in Kaluga.’

  It took me several readings of that short passage to realize the depth of bitterness encased within it. His last months of warfare, when his armies had melted away faster than the snow on the hillsides and his allies had turned into robbers and spies, had permanently scarred his heart. The Caucasus had betrayed him, and no one there was worthy of bearing the name ‘imam’ and leading the tribes to war. If the Caucasus was now a land of turncoats and traitors then the true spirit of the mountains had deserted them.

  Or perhaps I am being unfair to Shamil. Maybe he was reflecting the deep love he felt for his family members – they were to join him in the town three months after his own arrival – and was saying that the only people that made the Caucasus precious were in Kaluga with him. Hence for him the Caucasus was truly in this little town.

  Or yet again, maybe he saw the spirit of the Caucasus as being something that was captured when the mountains were conquered. With the imam captured, so was the mountains’ soul, and that was now trapped in the gilded cage of the little provincial town.

  He was certainly troubled by his capture, and it is hard to see how he could not have been. He had exhorted thousands – possibly tens of thousands – of his followers to choose death over the dishonour of capture by infidels. Yet, here he was, living in comfortable exile while his soldiers’ widows still mourned their loss, and their children grew up without fathers.

  These questions that Shamil’s personality still poses – the combination of simplicity and intelligence, of cunning and naivety – make him a fascinating man. Runovsky’s papers give us the opportunity of examining that personality in some depth, and the results are extraordinary.

  Runovsky was given money to pass on to Shamil, and he tried to encourage his charge to manage his own household expenses. But the imam refused to do so. He had no understanding of money, and it clearly upset him. Nevertheless, Runovsky finally wrote out a receipt for the imam to sign. The receipt ended with the signature: ‘The Slave of God Shamil, Imam’.

  Shamil objected to that, and refused to sign it, using words that are heartrending even today, coming as they did from such a strong man.

  ‘What kind of imam am I? I could be in no way satisfactory to those who chose me as imam. What kind of imam am I?’ he asked.

  For no amount of comfort could take away from the imam the knowledge that he had failed, and failed catastrophically. He may have seen similarities between Kaluga and Chechnya, but he was still an impossible distance from his homeland, and had no chance of ever seeing it again.

  Kaluga is 200 kilometres south of Moscow, and was then a pleasant little town, with a centre of Russian brick-and-stucco houses and outskirts of peasants’ cabins, sited on the banks of the river Oka. The house that was assigned to the imam is still called ‘Shamil’s house’ and is a handsome three-storey mansion of yellow stucco with white flourishes. It has a private garden surrounded by a fence in the local style, and bears a sombre plaque in the Russian language – ‘In this house lived Shamil, Imam of Dagestan and Chechnya 1859 to 1868’ – with a stylized portrait of Shamil wearing his turban and national dress.

  It was around this time indeed that the first photographs of Shamil were taken. Writers had previously speculated about his appearance, but now they could see from the portraits from St Petersburg that he was a good-looking man, with a pale face and a dense black beard. His eyebrows are often drawn into a frown, giving him a look of stern concentration, and his shaggy hat is wrapped in the white turban of a Sufi sheikh.

  In one photograph, he sits flanked by his two sons. All of them are dressed in the tunics of their homeland, and have daggers at their belts. Shamil clutches his sword in his left hand as he glowers at the photographer. Together they give out an air of wary readiness. They may have surrendered, but they were still on their guard.

  After they arrived in Kaluga, Shamil retreated into himself. Runovsky left his charge alone, not wanting to impose on him. But the imam sought out his Russian officer and, via an interpreter, began to tell him a story of a nanny looking after an orphan child. Runovsky was not sure where the tale was going but listened to it attentively.

  ‘I am an old man, but I am here in a strange land. I do not know your language or your customs, so I do not think of myself as the old man Shamil, but as this little child, who, by the will of God, has been left an orphan and needs a nanny to look after him,’ Shamil said, with irresistible candour.

  ‘The king has made you my minder. The colonel has told me about what you have orders to do, and now I think you are that very nanny that I need. I am sure that the king, in showing me so many kindnesses, wishes me well, therefore I will not ask you to be a “good” nanny, and just ask you to love me in the way that a normal nanny loves her child. And I promise that I will love you for this, not just how a child loves his nanny, but also in the way that the old man Shamil loves someone who does him a kindness.’

  Runovsky then promised not only to love him, but to respect him too, but Shamil had not finished. The imam said he had watched Runovsky closely ever since they had first met, and was sure that they would have a close relationship.

  ‘The old man Shamil has never made a mistake about a person he has observed for a long time, and I know I have not made a mistake this time.’

  Shamil regularly retreated into his own quarters – the top floor of the house, which the younger men later nicknamed Akhulgo, after the fortress where
Jamal-Edin was taken by the Russians – but he still appeared for tea and chats with Runovsky, sometimes one suggesting the topic of conversation, and sometimes the other.

  The regular diary entries written by the Russian officer progressively build up a picture of Shamil that is surprising and rather lovely. In place of the fierce chieftain the Russians might have expected, they had a gentle and thoughtful old man who contemplated before speaking or acting, and lived by a moral code as unshakeable as it was peculiar.

  One day, Shamil and Runovsky sat and ate lunch together. The officer did not record what the food was, merely that it was very bad. He pushed his plate away, saying he would complain to the cook. Shamil was shocked, and told him he must not do so.

  ‘It is a great sin,’ the imam told him.

  ‘But is it not a sin for the cook to feed us with dreadful food?’ replied Runovsky, perhaps in jest.

  ‘Yes, it is a sin, but God will punish the cook for it himself,’ said Shamil, with great simplicity. His answer did not satisfy Runovsky, who clearly preferred his rewards from God to be more immediate, and ideally to arrive before the next meal was scheduled.

  ‘But if I do not tell the cook that he has cooked dreadful food then he, not knowing this, will always cook it the same way, thinking that maybe he is supposed to do it that way. It must be right to tell him that there is too much salt or that he has somehow spoiled the food,’ the officer said.

  Runovsky clearly felt he had won the day with this speech, but Shamil did not budge, so Runovsky went on the offensive once more.

  ‘So is it also a sin to tell a person that he is ruining a valuable thing, that he interferes with your affairs, that he wants to change your customs, or that he harms your condition of life and forces you from happiness into unhappiness and need?’