Let Our Fame Be Great (22 page)

‘I have always dreamed of appealing about the genocide, it has been my dream. Some people dream about a new car, a new house or a new job. I am just proud that it is my signature under that document accusing Russia. I am pleased that we have officially accused Russia of genocide, we gathered the documents. No one has ever done this before,' he said.

And he was determined to carry on, and to refuse offers or bribes or threats alike.

‘I have been offered jobs, yes, but I would rather kill myself than take them. If someone else acts differently, then I won't condemn them. These authorities kill people if they want to. In the West you don't understand this, but people get killed here every day.'

With the bread and honey beside me, and a fresh cup of tea, it seemed hard to believe anything could threaten this cosy household, but Berzegov was taking the situation very seriously. He had sent his two teenage sons abroad earlier that year. He dug out pictures of them, but begged me not to say where they were.

‘If I too am out of the country or dead by the time you write this, then you can say they are there, but please not till then,' he said.

The two young men looked relaxed in front of the landmarks, bright lights and taxis of the big foreign city where they had requested asylum. They smiled for the camera, with their arms round each other's shoulders. Perhaps they were seeking to reassure their dad back home.

‘They will come home as soon as they have foreign passports. Then they will be safe,' he said, smiling. But I was not sure they would ever return now. They were new additions to the Circassian diaspora, living proof that the modern dreams of reunification are as unlikely to succeed as the dreams of independence a century and a half ago.

Circassians are still struggling for justice, but – then, as now – their appeals are unheard.

Osman Korkmazov was just five years old, but he had already rescued his red gramophone twice: once from two drunk German soldiers, and once from his own family. When the Soviet army came to deport him and tried to stop him taking his favourite possession with him, he knew what to do.

He started to scream.

Given the brutality of the times, he was taking a huge risk. He could have been killed outright, but he was lucky. Rather than shoot him, a kindly lieutenant called Misha befriended him, protected him and allowed him to keep his gramophone. The other inhabitants of his remote village were forced into the back of a truck, squashed together and terrified. But the little boy sat in the cab and sang his new uniformed friends ‘Katyusha' – a folk song beloved of Russians.

‘The truck crossed the wooden bridge across the river Koban,' he was to write more than six decades later. ‘Directly after the bridge, we turned sharply to the right so the long queue of closed trucks taking all the residents of the village of Lower Teberda into exile was clearly visible.'

With the straightforward acceptance of a child, he waited for the next excitement and chatted to Misha and the driver, also called Misha. He did not realize that he was seeing the destruction of his nation, or that he would never live in these mountains ever again. He was just glad to have rescued his gramophone. It was 2 November 1943.

As he sat in the truck with the two Mishas, he told them about his life, and about his red gramophone, but of course he did not realize quite how his fate fitted into the history of the North Caucasus.

When the Circassians were conquered and destroyed by the Russians, their fellow Muslims the Karachais were largely left in peace. They had submitted to Russia in 1829 and had been left to continue their untamed lives as animal herders for the rest of the nineteenth century. Occasional uprisings rocked their valleys, and some Karachais left for Turkey, where they live to this day. But only when the communist government tried to impose collectivized agriculture on them did the modern world intrude.

A series of uprisings followed, and some Karachai men fled into the hills, emerging only to steal livestock and combat the police and soldiers sent after them. Most Karachais lived peacefully, but the ‘bandits' survived and clearly were fed and tolerated by the local population. Such lukewarm loyalty could not be tolerated in Stalin's Soviet Union, where the population was either mobilized or slaughtered into preserving his brutal rule.

Korkmazov's Karachai nation was the first of four North Caucasus nations that were to be stripped of their lands and dumped like rubbish onto the steppes of Soviet Central Asia in 1943 – 4, with the aim of ridding the inaccessible and strategic mountains of the last untrustworthy elements.

According to family legend, Korkmazov was given the gramophone as a present because ‘Patefon' – a ‘little gramophone' in Russian – had been his first word, reflecting a love of music that was to dominate his life. Even as a child he listened intently, enjoying sound above all as war swept around him. Born in 1938, he lived with his mother in the town of Kislovodsk – one of the fashionable spa resorts enjoyed by Russian tourists for a century already. There he learned Russian, and barely spoke Karachai – the Turkic dialect of his people.

His first full memory was also his first encounter with soldiers. He was sitting in the kitchen with his mother when the door opened, and three soldiers entered, led by an officer with a fat stomach on two skinny legs. His stomach was so large that his holster lay on it, and did not hang by his side as it was designed to do. He did not appear to have a neck, and his monstrous puppet-like face scared the young boy, who was waiting for his mother to pour him a cup of tea.

His mother stood and challenged these intruders into her home, answering them in the same aggressive tone that they used to her. This
infuriated the fat officer, who reached forward and pushed off the headscarf she was wearing. She reacted furiously, he slapped her in the face and she collapsed. Korkmazov began to cry. It was an instructive beginning and, he later recalled, the end of his childhood.

‘From that terrifying day I was always scared; scared for my mother and scared in general. I must have sensed the permanent threat that was all around me all the time,' he was to write.

Within days, the Soviet soldiers were gone, his mother had vanished and the town was under attack. Bombs fell all around and, with a child's curiosity, he climbed onto the wall of his yard to see them. Just then an explosion sounded nearby, blasting him off the wall and onto the ground, where he lay, his arm wracked with pain. He came to in a bed with more air-raid sirens sounding, only to be rescued by two soldiers speaking a language he did not know. He did not realize it, but the town had been occupied by the Germans. They plastered his arm, and sent him home.

So he met the second army of his short life, and, once again, the experience was unpleasant. Two drunk German soldiers stumbled into the courtyard, sending his grandmother scurrying inside. But they followed, and started hunting for food. Not finding anything, they scanned the house for valuables, and their eyes fell on the red gramophone, which sat in the corner. One of the soldiers picked it up, and started for the door. But this was more than Korkmazov could bear. With his good hand, he grabbed the gramophone's handle and began to scream. The soldier failed to separate him from it, so he picked up both of them and carried on. Luckily, a German officer who had seen the boy at the hospital was passing at the time. He angrily told the soldiers to put the gramophone down, and to let the family be. The gramophone had been saved for the first time.

‘Only then did I notice my grandmother. Scared to death, she sat tucked into a niche between the wall and the stove, unable to say a word. I ran to her. My poor grandmother took me in her shaking arms,' Korkmazov remembered.

After this they were left in peace, the kind officer brought them food and otherwise they saw no one, since their neighbours had all fled. But the peace did not last long; just a few weeks after their
arrival, the Germans pulled back from Kislovodsk. They were starting their long retreat all the way to Berlin.

They were replaced by the Soviet army, and then they in turn moved on, leaving the town peaceful but far from calm. Korkmazov's mother reappeared. She had been hiding in the forests outside town, scared that she would be taken away by the Germans as the wife of a member of the Communist Party, albeit a dead one. She cried over her son, worried about his broken arm – which was by now out of plaster – and fussed over him. But she was not with him for long. Once more she vanished, this time arrested by the Soviets. They would not meet again for more than a year.

For the Soviets had sent police squads in behind the advancing army, to investigate collaborators and traitors among their own citizens. Once again Korkmazov, with the wide-eyed naivety of a child, saw them but did not realize until later the purpose of their nasty work. His dog Boynak, however, was not so blind. Boynak, a large and shaggy Caucasus shepherd, was friendly to everyone, and only ever barked at the flies that tormented him. He had befriended the Soviet soldiers, then the German soldiers, and then the Soviet soldiers again. But these policemen he did not like. He began to bark when they walked into the yard. Rushing at them, he only escaped being shot when a neighbour's son grabbed his collar and pulled him away.

‘Boy, help us,' one of the two men said. ‘Do you remember, did these cursed Germans hide anything in your courtyard: bags, rucksacks, suitcases? Maybe they buried them somewhere in the garden.'

Korkmazov had not seen anything and told them so, no matter how many times they asked the question. This infuriated one of the men, and he pulled out a pistol and screwed it into the side of the boy's head, not so hard as to draw blood but enough to hurt.

‘Speak, or I'll blow out your brains,' he shouted.

His colleague pulled him back, telling him that fear would make the boy forget. They found nothing, but their interrogation of the child terrified Korkmazov's aunts sufficiently to make them take their nephew and flee. With the instinct of the true Karachais, they headed for the mountains, their ancestral home, where they thought they would be safe.

They packed the family's belongings as quickly as they could, brushing off the child's increasingly frantic questions about their plans. Finally, bags and cases were piled on the floor, but there was no room on the donkey for the red gramophone. Korkmazov pleaded and pleaded but the strangers who had come to guide them refused to take it. Finally, however, his aunt Dubrai relented. The gramophone was loaded onto the donkey. It had been saved for a second time.

They walked for hours, exhausting the little boy, who sat for a time on the donkey. After a short sleep, they headed off into the dawn and walked all that second day. Their journey continued more days than Korkmazov now remembers. But early one morning they reached their destination: Lower Teberda.

It was the start of a perfect summer for the boy. He was related to everyone in the village, and although their attentions were at first baffling – especially since his command of the Karachai language was poor – he soon made friends among his cousins in the high mountain valleys of his people. There were no tanks, no anti-aircraft guns, no bombs, no explosions, just the sound of the river and the talk of his family.

But the war was still felt. There were no young men in the village, since they had all been conscripted. The herding – for the Karachais were a herding nation – was done by the children. Korkmazov was among them, and they lived for the summer in a wooden hut, sleeping on cut grass, watching out for the cattle, and obeying the orders of Aimat – the daughter of his favourite aunt, Dubrai. But the summer would not last for ever, and soon they would have to descend to the village where his peaceful life was about to end.

While he had played in the mountains and watched the cattle, the secret police had been busy. Forces from the NKVD – which would later be renamed the KGB – scoured the mountains, rooting out armed men and anti-Soviet guerrillas who were fighting the Red Army. In April 1943, a decree authorized the banishment of 110 families of people judged to be bandits. Momentum was building for a solution to the unruliness of the Karachais.

The Karachais had, it was decided in a secret decree, ‘behaved traitorously, joined units organized by Germans for fighting the Soviet authorities, handed over honest Soviet citizens to Germans,
accompanied and provided terrain guidance to the German troops advancing over the mountain passes in the Caucasus; and after the withdrawal of the enemy they resist measures carried out by the Soviet authorities, hide bandits and secret German agents from the authorities thus providing them with active support'. On 12 and 14 October, the necessary papers were signed. The Karachais were going to pay as a whole for their lukewarm support for the government in Moscow.