The bodies of Russian servicemen1 killed in the fighting are returned to their families, Russian lives given in the name of Boris Yeltsin’s ham-fisted Chechen policies. For the president, these images are a potential political disaster …
Boris Yeltsin says himself that his style of governing is one of crisis management and in the case of Chechnya he’s the one who let the crisis brew, ignoring the republic’s growing discontent until conflict was inevitable …
Boris Yeltsin’s war to stop his country disintegrating has left Chechnya in ruins, facing Moscow with a horrendous bill for reconstruction and the prospect of other wars in other republics that may still have to be fought to hold Russia together …
Now political terrorism has come to Moscow – an explosion on a crowded underground train leaving four people dead and many injured …
As part of my research for this book I dug out the videotapes of my BBC news reports from Russia between 1987 and 1997. I was startled to be reminded how many of them were devoted to ethnic and nationalist disturbances in the outlying republics of the USSR. I reported on the escalating conflicts in the south of the USSR that drove Armenians, Azeris, Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans and others to rebel against Soviet rule. And I reported on the Kremlin’s sometimes brutal attempts to hold the Soviet Union together. In the 1990s, another ethnic group rose in anger and revolt. The previous rebellions had been in the non-Russian Soviet republics, but Chechnya was part of Russia itself, and its drive for independence from the hated Russian yoke would become the greatest domestic challenge for Boris Yeltsin and his successors.
The south has always been a problem for Russia, and in many ways a problem of her own making. The ethnic flashpoints of the 1980s and 1990s, and the terrorist bombs that still explode in Moscow today, all sprang from seeds that were sown many centuries earlier. Russia’s south is a dangerous frontier – unruly, angry and brutal, but rich in physical resources, geographically beautiful and strategically vital. From the earliest times, Russians eyed its fierce nomadic tribes with suspicion and fear, and the experience of conquest by the Mongols instilled a lasting desire to secure the country’s borders (see here). Through several centuries, a succession of tsars tried to drive Russia’s potential enemies ever further from her heartlands by expanding the Russian Empire in all directions. In the east, the policy was largely successful, with Siberia becoming a loyal part of Russia itself (see here). In the north and west, buffer states were acquired but failed to prevent invasions by the Swedes, Prussians, Lithuanians, French, Poles and Germans. But it was in the south that Russia’s expansionist ambitions met the fiercest resistance and unleashed the longest-lasting problems.
When Ivan the Terrible launched a drive to annex the southern lands in the sixteenth century, he initiated a struggle that would dog Russia for four centuries. He captured the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, but lost territory to the Crimean Tartars, who sacked and briefly held Moscow in 1571, taking many of its inhabitants as slaves. The Muslim warlords were the bogeymen of the Russian psyche; the south was a source of menace, terror and death.
In 1654, Alexei I signed a treaty with the Cossack leader Bogdan Khmelnitsky enabling Russia to incorporate Ukraine into its empire. In Moscow’s eyes it represented a joyful reunification of the old lands of Kievan Rus, the ancient fountainhead of Russian civilisation. But for many Ukrainians the forced union became a source of stored-up anger and resentment that would fester for hundreds of years. Both Ukraine and Russia claimed to be the true inheritor of the golden age of Kiev, and each regarded the other with suspicion and sporadic hostility.
In the 1680s, Peter the Great sent his armies against the Crimean khan, but his enemies’ scorched earth tactics sent them scurrying back home. Russia’s southern frontier would advance and recede with the following generations.
The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were consumed in wars with the Ottoman Turks for control of the fertile lands north of the Black Sea. Catherine the Great brought the rest of Ukraine, the Crimea and the warm-water ports on the Azov and Black Seas under Russian control. Possession of these southern territories accelerated Russia’s rise to Great Power status, and contributed to a sense of national pride that helped glue together a fractious empire.
But the Caucasus region, where Chechen, Georgian, Dagestani and Ingush peoples populated the breathtaking mountains and lush valleys, became a vicious battleground. Resistance to Russian rule brought 50 years of guerrilla warfare in the early nineteenth century that claimed thousands of lives and inspired Russia’s writers and poets with tales of cruelty, passion and pride. Pushkin’s narrative poem ‘A Captive of the Caucasus’ (1822) set the tone for generations of writers:
So shall I sing that glorious hour2,
When the Russian eagle
Rose above the Caucasus
And Russian drums did beat in combat bloody …
I sing of you o mighty heroes
Whose feet did trample down the tribes …
All to the Russian sword do now bow down.
– Proud sons of the Caucasus!
You fought and died most fierce;
But nothing saved you –
Not your enchanted armour, nor your mighty steeds,
Not your mountains, nor your love of freedom wild …
Pushkin was a liberal and a defender of freedom, yet the oddly jingoistic end to his poem shows how even he became carried away by the exploits of Russian imperialism unfolding as he wrote.
The campaign to subdue the south under Alexander I in the nineteenth century was led by General Alexei Yermolov, a distinguished veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns and commander of Russia’s artillery forces. Arriving in the Caucasus in 1816, he quickly established a reputation for ruthlessness and extreme cruelty. His deliberate campaign of terror included the execution without trial of enemy insurgents, the massacre of their families, and the kidnapping and rape of native women. He justified the destruction of millions of acres of forest – just as the Americans would justify the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in the next century – because it removed potential hiding places for enemy guerrillas. Yermolov said his aim3 was ‘to make the terror of my name a more potent defence of our frontiers than any chains or fortresses’:
I desire that for the natives my word should be a law more inevitable than death … Mercy in the eyes of the Asiatics is merely a sign of weakness. And the reason for my severity is one of the greatest humanity: I consider that one execution saves hundreds of Russian lives from destruction and deters thousands of Muslims from engaging in treason against the state …
Yermolov founded the fortress city of Grozny, now the capital of Chechnya. From there he launched punitive expeditions against Chechen villages, ordering his officers to ‘destroy their towns, hang hostages and slaughter their women and children4’. Many thousands of Chechens were deported and exiled from their homeland. Villages were razed and razed again. One such raid, on the village of Dadi in September 1819, has lodged in the collective memory. The local population, inspired by the legendary Chechen leader Shamil, put up such heroic resistance to the Russians that their deeds are celebrated in Chechen folk ballads. When all the male villagers had been killed by enemy bullets, the defences were manned by women wielding ceremonial daggers; rather than be taken prisoner, they used them to cut their own throats:
Awake, you braves5!
Wake your families, wake your wives!
Hurry through the morning prayer!
Your village now is under siege.
Three rings of glinting steel,
Bayonets, daybreak stained with blood.
The day will shatter in a thousand deaths.
No child, no woman shall be spared!
Open up the great Koran,
Say the prayer of death.
Today, brave men, your souls
Will fly. But the infidels
Will never see your backs in flight.
Allah will take your Holy War
In His embrace …
Each blade of grass, each rock recalls
The pain and rage of our fathers’ land.
They shared their death with foes
Who came unbidden, sword in hand.
And happy were our fighters not to see,
Not to weep at the pitiful sight,
Of a Chechen child in tears
By the side of his murdered mother’s corpse.
For the Chechen people, General Yermolov remains even today a figure of hatred and revulsion, a symbol of Russian genocide and a spur to some of the most appalling atrocities Chechen fighters have inflicted on captured Russian conscripts in the wars of the past 20 years.fn1
Even at the time of Moscow’s drive into the south, though, the patriotic support of Yermolov’s campaigns expressed by Alexander Pushkin was not shared by all. In 1837, Mikhail Lermontov, a young Guards officer with liberal leanings, wrote a coruscating poem full of radical anger against tsarist hypocrisy and the ‘hangmen who murder liberty, genius and glory … huddling around the throne in a greedy throng’. Soon after, he was transferred to a dragoon regiment in the Caucasus, a sort of prison exile in the guise of military service. But in his seminal novel A Hero of Our Time (1839), Lermontov implies that for him Russia is the prison, while the wild rebellious Caucasus offers liberty:
Yesterday I arrived in Pyatigorsk6 … When there is a storm, it comes right down to the roof of the house … To the west is Mount Beshtu, blue as the last cloud in a dispersing storm. Mashuk, like a shaggy Persian cap, covers the entire northern horizon … Farther away, the mountains are darker, mistier … and at the very limit of sight, a silver chain of snowy peaks runs from Kazbek to mighty Elbrus with its towering peaks. What joy it is to live in such a land!
A Hero of Our Time is bursting with such marvellous, evocative descriptions of the magnificent Caucasus and its fierce, proud inhabitants who fought to protect their homeland. Lermontov’s vain, complicated, self-obsessed Russians seem petty by contrast. The book’s title is clearly ironic: if anything, it is the noble savages, the Chechens and the Dagestanis, who are the heroes, while the Russians are sterile, cynical wastrels. Lermontov’s theme is an oblique indictment of the ‘civilisation’ that brings slavery and repression.
Writing later in the century, Lev Tolstoy is even more critical. In his youth he served in the Caucasus as a junior officer in the Russian army and wrote in his diary that the campaign was ‘ugly and unjust’. His last completed work, the novella Hadji Murat, is fired with moral revulsion for the Russians who cheat and butcher their way through Chechnya:
No one spoke of hatred7 of the Russians. The emotion experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was much stronger than hatred. It could not be hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings; it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these animals that it made the desire to exterminate them – like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders or wolves – as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.
The heavy-handed repression of nationalism in the outlying regions of its empire left Russia with problems that would fester for centuries. In recent years Chechnya has been the most visible of these, but other ethnic groups continue to nurse similar grievances that also date back to tsarist times. Periods of crisis and weakness in the governing regime have historically incited nationalist agitation among the empire’s minorities, raising the spectre of catastrophic disintegration. In the revolutionary turmoil of the early twentieth century, the liberal prime minister Sergei Witte warned in his Memoirs (1921) of the ethnic fault lines that threaten Russia’s unity:
This flood [of revolutionary pressure]8 is made more dangerous in Russia by the fact that 35 per cent of the population consists of non-Russian, conquered nationalities. Anyone who has intelligently read recent history knows how difficult the development of nationalism in the past century has rendered the task of welding together heterogeneous national elements into a uniform body politic. [In 1905] the border provinces were clearly taking advantage of the weakening of Central Russia to show their teeth. They began to retaliate for the age-long injustices that had been inflicted upon them … They were ardently waiting for what appeared to them as their deliverance from the Russian yoke. For this situation we alone were to blame. We failed to perceive that since the days of Peter the Great and, especially, since the reign of Catherine II, we had been living not in Russia, but in the Russian Empire … Our border provinces will never put up with the policy of ruthless Russification. The Georgians, Armenians, Tartars … wanted autonomy; all longed for the annihilation of the system of deliberate oppression that embittered their existence.
The protracted struggle to subdue her southern territories would be damaging for Russia herself. Ever since Kievan Rus, the self-image of a nation in danger, in a quasi-continuous state of battle or preparedness for battle, had permeated the Russian psyche. The Mongol occupation had inculcated the model of a militarised state that devotes national resources, material and human, predominantly to the waging of war. And the centuries of attritional conflict in the Caucasus and elsewhere confirmed the belief that Russia must remain ever vigilant, ever mobilised for self-defence. The strain of unremitting military readiness would deform Russia’s economy and state structures and stand in the way of social reform. The perceived need for a ready supply of military recruits would fatally delay efforts to abolish the curse of serfdom. Ultimately, it would undermine the efforts of reformist tsars in the nineteenth century and lend impetus to the forces of revolution.
Part of the reason why Russia was willing to pay such a heavy price for domination of the Caucasus was to shield her vulnerable southern frontiers, where the Persians, Turks and increasingly the British were jostling for territory. The decline of the Ottoman Empire left Russia and Britain facing off in a struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the departing Ottomans. The so-called Great Game – the Bolshaya Igra – would play itself out over a period of 90 years, not coming to an end until the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Before then, the struggle for supremacy in Central Asia would spread to fighting on Russia’s own territory. Fear of Russian penetration into the Mediterranean spurred the British and French to land troops in the Crimea in 1854 to destroy the tsar’s Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol. Nicholas I, whose belligerence had done much to provoke the Crimean War, died of pneumonia at the height of the fighting, leaving Russia to suffer a devastating defeat. A punitive peace treaty in 1856 forced her to dismantle all her naval bases on the Black Sea, undoing the work of centuries to establish a warm-water port in the south and dashing hopes of access to the Mediterranean.
The scale of the disaster, the tactical blunders and the humiliation of tsarist authority marked the beginning of the end for Russia as the dominant European power. And, crucially, it sparked such public dissatisfaction at home that it gave a new impetus to the emerging forces of the revolutionary opposition. Discontent would grow throughout the century and culminate in the explosive events of 1917.
fn1 In the twenty-first century, Russia continues to take its lead from Yermolov. Villages, towns and – most spectacularly – the Chechen capital, Grozny, have been shelled to rubble. Yermolov’s tactics of divide and rule, and the bribing and blackmailing of puppet rulers to wield power on Moscow’s behalf have brought a semblance of stability, but only at the expense of repression, murder and state-backed terror. History suggests strongly that it will be many generations before the volcano of Chechen resentment is snuffed out.