Let Our Fame Be Great (42 page)

The death song of the Sufis rose up as the bullets died away. The defenders prepared their knives for the end. Just then, a tall bearded figure emerged into the doorway of the house. He stared at the ranks of soldiers, took a run-up and jumped clean over them. Landing behind them, he turned, and stabbed three with his sword, received a bayonet thrust to the chest, then turned and fled into the dusk. He was safe, but the others in the house were not so lucky. Apart from
one other, they died to a man. According to stories still told in Gimry, the imam was found in a posture of prayer: a hand on his beard and eyes raised to heaven.

The Russians could congratulate themselves on their victory, or so they thought.

If that bayonet thrust had only been slightly more accurate, the history of the Caucasus would be very different. For the fleeing man would be the greatest imam of all. It was Shamil, whose forces would terrorize lowland Georgia in two decades' time.

The respect in which this resistance hero is still held in Dagestan, although it has been part of Russia for a century and a half, is clearly visible at the site of the battle. A mosque has been built for visitors to pray where the first imam died.

A sign declares in Avar and Russian: ‘Here, in an unequal battle with the forces of the tsarist army, was heroically killed the leader of the highlanders' struggle for freedom and independence'. Visitors have tied little strips of coloured cloth to the branches that overhang the sign to signify their prayers: a little piece of irony since the imam himself loathed such superstitions.

About ten metres up the hill are the remains of the house where the doomed defenders fired their last bullets, and between the first sign and the house, is another sign. ‘Here landed Imam Shamil after his leap'. Here too are strips of cloth. Where the site of the first imam's death is holy, this is holy too. It is where the new imam lived.

If the sign is correct, it was a mighty leap: five metres if not more. Perhaps the sign is exaggerated, perhaps it is not, who can say? For Shamil is a man to whom stories attach themselves.

According to legend, he was given the name Shamil – which is a corrupt version of Samuel, and hence a Jewish name and very unusual in the mountains – after his father pledged to give his new son the name of the first person he saw. The first person he saw was a Jew, and the fierce Muslim leader would have a non-believer's name for his whole life.

Another story tells how Shamil was first called Ali or Muhammad-Ali, and grew up a sickly child. By mountain superstition, changing a child's name confused the evil spirits afflicting him, and with his
new name Shamil was able to become the bravest and most nimble warrior in the mountains.

He did not take over as imam immediately on Gazi-Muhammad's death. A second imam ruled for a while, until he was killed in a blood feud, and Shamil assumed his title. The Russians apparently did not realize the threat they had left behind them, since the new imam concentrated on forcing his subjects to obey Islamic law and respect his rule rather than on fighting Russia.

A follower's account tells how Shamil, on recovering from his wounds, walked back to Gimry and was disgusted to see women sitting unaccompanied and spinning wool by the roadside: a flagrant contradiction of the Koran. The earth had barely settled on Gazi-Muhammad's grave and already the people were disobeying his laws. Shamil shook his head and walked on. As he passed the women later in the day, the situation was still worse. An old man with a stick had joined them, and this was too much for Shamil, who took the stick and beat the man with it. He then struck one of the women when she refused to leave.

Shamil was beaten twenty times by order of the court as a result, causing his chest wound to open again, but he was unrepentant. He was doing God's work. He preached that it was the duty of every believer to enforce the law. The local populace did not listen to him.

‘Tomorrow we will drink wine, party and dance,' said one man. ‘Then we will see how humiliated those [Sufis] will be.' Shamil attacked the group, beating them heavily, and this was too much for his neighbours. He was forced to leave his home village and retreat elsewhere.

His uncompromising faith may not have appealed to all the residents of Gimry, but it attracted young men from all over the Caucasus who wanted an imam to teach them the laws of God and the discipline of the Sufi order, and to lead them against the Russians. These men had to abide by the militant traditions of the Naqshbandi, and became known as
murid
s – or ‘the committed ones' in Arabic.

As murids, they could not drink, or smoke, or indulge in luxuries of any kind. According to the legends of the mountains, however, these laws were as often as not flouted by the highlanders.

Stories today abound about individual murids who succeeded in circumventing the ban on smoking that Shamil imposed. One murid supposedly killed twelve Russian soldiers, and won the right to have a cigarette as a result. Another is said to have forded a rushing stream and carried off a particularly beautiful Christian woman on the far bank. She was to be Shuanat, Shamil's favourite wife, and her captor was allowed to smoke as much as he wanted.

Some of these stories may in fact be true, since Shamil unquestionably had a talent for dramatic and extreme gestures. He suffered from a fainting disease, which he turned to his advantage by explaining the fits he would fall into as divinely inspired. He also had an excellent network of spies and would casually drop in secret information as being something he had seen in a dream.

The most extraordinary such performance came when a delegation of Chechens sought permission to surrender. In their lowland forests, they were far more vulnerable than the Dagestanis to punitive action from the Russians.

A delegation came to the imam's village, and sought a way of persuading him to give up the fight. He had issued an order that any traitors would be killed, and anyone talking of surrender would be severely punished, so they were keen to seek out the perfect envoy to present their proposals to their ruler.

Eventually, they persuaded the imam's mother to intercede on their behalf, and she went to her son and begged him to end the torment of his subjects.

Shamil must have realized the seriousness of the situation. If even the Chechens were begging him to end the war then indeed morale must be low. If even his mother was carrying the message, then surely no one believed in the cause?

He told the crowd he would have to pray for three days for inspiration, and he vanished into the mosque. The villagers gathered and waited outside. Perhaps this time Shamil would show himself to be able to compromise? Or perhaps the Chechen delegation would be punished as the law promised?

When Shamil emerged, gaunt and pale, he had made his decision. He had communed with the Almighty, he said, and there was only
one action he could take. He must enforce the law. The law stated that anyone speaking of surrender must be punished severely, and that person had been his mother. He therefore decreed a hundred strokes of the cane on his mother's back.

She screamed and begged for mercy, but he was implacable. One stroke fell, two, three, and on the fourth she fainted. At this, Shamil – the master of the dramatic – himself stepped forward, and said that the Koran allowed a son to take his parent's punishment. He stripped off his tunic and demanded that his executioner inflict the remaining ninety-six strokes on his own back.

He took the beating without a sound, stood up, and ordered the Chechen delegation to go home and talk no more of surrender. They followed his instructions, for who would argue with this madman?

And he brought them success in war too. Every year, the Russians would wait for his forces to pour out of the mountains, never sure which fort would be the target. In 1846, he even led a raid into Kabarda, the easternmost part of the land of the Circassians. The raid was not a success in military terms, but it was a striking demonstration of ambition and reach.

Russian attempts to capture him were regularly disastrous too. The year before the raid on Kabarda, a new Russian viceroy in the Caucasus received firm orders from Tsar Nikolai to destroy Shamil's capital. A force of 21,000 men – much of it led by some of the most titled officers in the army, all of them with the camp luxuries they required – set out to crush Shamil once and for all. Shamil retreated and retreated, staying tantalizingly out of reach for weeks. The Russians took Shamil's capital – Dargo – but there was no one in it, so they were no closer to reaching their objective than at the start.

It was now that Shamil's guerrilla genius appeared. Every Russian attack was unopposed, but every retreat was turned into a bloody rout. He knew the lumbering Russian column was low on supplies, and would have to send men for more food soon. When it did so, they were attacked from every side. This ‘biscuit expedition' brought no supplies, and lost 556 men killed, including two generals. Over the next five days of humiliating retreat, the Russians were hounded by snipers in the forests on all sides, and lost another 295 men killed.
It was a spectacular disaster, which raised Shamil's prestige to new heights.

So, this was the leader of the mountains whose forces swooped onto Georgia that summer day in 1854. He was a fanatic, a guerrilla genius, a performer and an administrator. He had crafted a system of government out of the Naqshbandi creed, and he imposed it mercilessly. His murids were his elite soldiers. Above them were his
naib
s – lieutenants who governed in his name. They ruled Dagestan – the bleak uplands with their deep valleys and rocky crags – and Chechnya, a lusher, softer land dominated by great beech forests. Chechnya has its high mountains, but much of the region is made of rolling hills, densely wooded, in which the Chechens could hide from the invaders.

Shamil looked out over these woods in upland Chechnya when the princesses were being brought in as captives.

On their miserable journey through the mountains, they had learned a lot about the hatred felt for the Russian government and its subjects. In one village, they were pelted with stones and sticks, and not one inhabitant would let them spend the night indoors. Their captors treated them brutally. Lydia, Prince David's infant daughter, had died early on when her mother was unable to hold onto her as she jolted along on the back of a horse.

Children were apparently deemed to be more or less disposable.

‘Princess Baratoff observed one of the Georgian children, who had been separated from its mother, crying violently, to the great annoyance of the Lesghian who had taken charge of it. The mountaineer at last took the child by the legs, dashed its brains out against a rock, and threw it towards the abyss which received the stream somewhat lower down,' says a contemporary account of the affair written from the princesses' own testimony.

With twenty-two days of this misery on their journey, it is not surprising that they were apprehensive about appearing before the imam. He was a man with a cruel reputation, but he fascinated people throughout Russia and beyond. Who was this man who defied the might of the Russian empire? Many writers had imagined a character for him, sometimes with unwittingly comic results.

A German, for example, remarked – apparently without any source beyond his own imagination – on Shamil's ‘aquiline nose, small mouth, blue eyes, blonde hair and beard, and delicate white skin'. All these qualities could only point to more of ‘a Germanic than an eastern extraction', we learned, as if a guerrilla leader could not possibly have emerged from the Caucasus without an infusion of good north European blood.

Now, with the princesses' arrival, for the first time outsiders would have a chance of closely observing the imam and his household. On arriving at Shamil's home – a complex of buildings around a courtyard – they saw a figure in white looking down at them from a balcony. This was Shamil, and though they did not know it at the time his mind was likely to have been in turmoil as well.

Some fifteen years previously, the imam had suffered a grievous loss. Trapped by Russian troops in the mountain village of Akhulgo, he had been forced to give up his youngest son, the six-year-old Jamal-Edin, as a hostage for good behaviour. Ever since, he had been trying to get him back. The youngster had since become a Russian officer, and russified, but Shamil still dreamed of uniting his family. With these high-ranking new captives, perhaps he finally had hostages of his own that the Russians would be prepared to exchange for his son.

And while the negotiations dragged on – sometimes happily, sometimes painfully – the princesses would gain plentiful insights into the household of the Lion of Dagestan, as some of the more excitable newspapers had taken to calling him.

What they found resembled a soap opera, although the cast would have seemed far-fetched if it were fictional. Shamil had three wives: bitter, sharp-tongued Zeidat; sweet-natured, kind Shuanat; mischievous young Aminat, who delighted only in irritating Zeidat. He had two resident sons: noble Gazi-Muhammad, whose visits everyone looked forward to; delinquent Muhammad-Sheffi, who once almost set the whole complex on fire.

Zeidat's father Jamal-Edin, who was also Shamil's spiritual superior in the Sufi hierarchy, and his wife provided emotional support for the captives, while a steward, Hajio, was the target for merciless teasing.

Shamil's third wife Aminat, a seventeen-year-old girl from the Kist nation, which is closely related to the Chechens, was delighted to have the princesses to talk to. She constantly cooked up new schemes to keep everyone amused, including breaking into the imam's quarters, where he lived with a favourite cat.

‘The captives accompanied her with fear and trembling; but curiosity overcame every other feeling. In Shamil's private room they saw some very rich carpets and a great number of books. Aminette also showed them some beautiful Georgian pistols mounted in silver, and pistol cases of cloth embroidered in silver and gold,' the account of their captivity says.