It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the
past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than
England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous
groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the
Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians
(Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of
many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have
settled there over the past 2,000 years.
Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of which a handful are
established literary languages and several others have only a precarious
recent literary status, are spoken. Worse for anyone trying to present a
coherent narrative, these disparate peoples have very different histories,
and only two, the Georgians and Armenians (some would add the Azeris), have
a history of statehood consistent enough to be retold as one would retell
the history of a West European country. Worst of all, the frequent ravages
of invaders, from Arabs in the seventh century, Mongols in the thirteenth,
Iranians in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and Russians over the past
300 years, have not only destroyed and driven out whole states and peoples,
but burnt the records of their very existence. Even the year of death and
the place of burial of the greatest of Caucasian monarchs, the Georgian
Queen Tamar, is uncertain. Historians of the Caucasus have on the one hand
to have at their command an immeasurable range of expertise, from
archaeology to the folklore of dozens of different languages, and on the
other the imagination and verve to bridge the gaps in chronology and in any
other verifiable sources. It is a task that would daunt even the teams that
produce the Cambridge Histories of, say, Russia or India.
Charles King, a specialist in Romanian, with a good reading knowledge of
Russian, but not of any Caucasian language, has crossed the Black Sea and
fearlessly attempted the impossible. The focus of his book is similar to
that of Susan Layton’s Conquest of the Caucasus (1995, republished 2005), in
that King sees the Caucasus through the eyes of Russian conquistadors and
imperial dreamers, as they romanticize and demonize the lands they occupied
(or, in the case of Georgia, “liberated”) when the grip of Ottoman and
Iranian empires weakened. Thus the different reactions of Caucasian nations
to the conquests of the early nineteenth century – complicity and acceptance
by the Georgians, relief by the Armenians and Ossetians, desperate surrender
or flight by the Circassians, resistance to the death by Chechens and
Dagestanis – are the best insight that King can offer into the diverse
cultures that were incorporated into the Russian Empire or wiped out by it.
Equally interesting is the anthropological and linguistic research, mostly by
German scholars working for the St Petersburg Academy, that preceded,
accompanied, or followed Russian military conquest and which aroused a
respect for, and bewilderment at, the complexity and scientific importance
of the now vulnerable belief systems and languages encountered. A Collection
of Materials for A Description of the Locations and Peoples of the Caucasus,
some eighty volumes published between 1884 and 1915 in Tiflis, show the
extraordinary wealth of information that was gathered. (Unfortunately, there
is no complete set of this Collection in any library in the United Kingdom,
and it does not appear in King’s bibliography.) Like the British in India,
Russians began to feel a perverse admiration for the tribes (whether Pathans
or Chechens) that hated them as conquerors, and contempt for the nations
(whether Tamils or Armenians) that decided to integrate with them. Today, of
course, as the southern Caucasus has achieved some sort of statehood and the
north Caucasus has been crushed and demoralized, Russians feel a paranoiac
hatred for all “blacks” (or “persons of Caucasian nationality”).
If King’s narrative has a fault, it is over-simplification. His account of the
role of Islam in Chechnya and Dagestan ignores the fact that pagan beliefs
underlie all Caucasian codes of conduct, and that in the highlands Islam in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was like Christianity in the tenth
century (as the ruins of Byzantine churches in Chechnya and Circassia show),
used as a rallying flag and a means of gaining support from outsiders. Once
the Caucasus highlanders were left in peace, they reverted to animism: this
is demonstrated by the Georgian words for “icon” and “deacon” acquiring the
meaning of “pagan shrine” and “shaman” among the Khevsur clans.
Nevertheless, King offers new perspectives: for instance, Western
romanticizing of the Caucasus as a region for new mountaineering exploits
and as a source for a real supply of the Circassian maidens of Byron’s
poems. This romanticizing underlies attitudes to the new states of the
southern Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, where a hard-headed
desire to have a route for oil and gas that cannot be cut off by Putin and
Medvedev is glossed as an aspiration to encourage European Union-standard
human rights and democracy. The discussion of Georgia’s emergence from
“failed state” status under a tired Edvard Shevardnadze, mired in
corruption, like the account of Azerbaijan under its dynasty of ex-KGB
Alievs, and of an Armenia run by violent nationalists and thinly disguised
Soviet-style Communists, is more than competent. One would wish only for a
little more cynicism: Mikeil Saakashvili may have the suave exterior of a
Columbia University lawyer, but there are a lot of questions not posed, let
alone answered here. The initial connivance of the Russians at the Rose
Revolution, which got rid of the Ajarian warlord Aslan Abashidze as well as
of Shevardnadze, two figures particularly hated by Putin, is unmentioned,
and the mysterious sequence of murders and unexplained deaths of
Saakashvili’s rivals and opponents needs to be discussed as proof of the
continuity of a specifically Caucasian way of politics.
In a book dealing with “the ghost of freedom” one would expect a more thorough
exploration of the Caucasus’s little Kosovos, where ethnic groups such as
the Abkhaz and South Ossetians try to break away from a newly independent
Georgia only to find themselves international pariahs, whose only refuge is
a return to the Russian embrace. Here Putin’s salami tactics for
reincorporating lost Soviet territory meet with no adequate or even
intelligent response by the principal victims, for instance the Georgians,
or from the European Union and United States who have already tied
themselves into knots over the former Yugoslavia, and can only wring their
hands as they see Russia, with the help of its heavily armed “peacekeepers”,
turning Abkhazia back into its own private recreation zone. King ends with a
vague hope that Europe’s “inexorable march” towards liberal values can
proceed in the Caucasus, but not much of the evidence supports him. For over
a thousand years the Georgians and Armenians have appealed to Europe for
support as fellow Christians, as Europeans by culture, if not by geography,
and after being strung along by Crusaders, by Louis XIV, by various Popes,
by Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and both Bushes, can still not believe that
the answer they get will always be a perfunctory apology that deeper
interests of state force the West to take sides with its major trading
partners, not its cultural and spiritual brothers. Ghost of freedom, indeed.
Given the present crisis, as Russia backs Ossetia’s separatists with bombs
and shells, our politicians’ vacillations and our diplomats’ complacency may
not be remedied in time, even if a group of experts were hurriedly assembled
to follow up Charles King’s reconnaissance and produce and analyse in full
the history of the Caucasus.
Charles King
THE GHOST OF FREEDOM
A history of the Caucasus
291pp. Oxford University Press. £17.99 (US $29.95).
978 0 19 517775 6
Donald Rayfield is Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary
College, University of London. His books include Anton Chekhov: A Life,
1997, and Stalin and His Hangmen: The tyrant and those who killed for him,
2005. He is the editor of A Comprehensive Georgian–English Dictionary, 2006.
