Let Our Fame Be Great (47 page)

‘This factory was just the same as the paper factory: wheels, ropes and boilers. There was no difference, except that this was significantly dirtier than the paper factory,' wrote Abdurakhman. Runovsky noted that Shamil refused henceforth to take sugar in his tea after seeing the dirt in the factory.

While this scheming and visiting was going on all around, Shamil studied his books and prepared for death. He arranged his room on the top floor so all his texts were accessible from where he sat, and he spent days sitting down and scrutinizing the scriptures. At one point, the doctor even told him he must take more exercise or risk serious problems with his legs.

‘In our books it is written that the human span is limited by the Lord to sixty years. Only a few people live more than sixty years.
Prophet Muhammad lived to sixty. Gazi-Muhammad [the first imam] died before this age. I also do not have long to live. Therefore, now I must think as much as I can about what will happen after my death. All the details of this are written in my books, and apart from that there are so many good things that the more I read the more I want to read,' Shamil told Runovsky in October 1860.

But such a life of indolence was not enough for some of the younger men. Hajio and Muhammad-Sheffi in particular delighted in going into Kaluga society. Shamil's youngest son learned Russian very quickly, and Hajio also learned enough to compliment a lady on her looks.

Shamil only went to such parties rarely, but on one evening he attended a ball at the house of a local notable called Fyodor Shchukin, of whom he became very fond. He sat throughout the party with his host's young son on his knee, smiling and looking happy despite the music, the dancing and the ladies showing a lot of chest – all things that his strict personal code disapproved of. The revellers did not return home until two in the morning, and Shamil said he had had a good time.

‘Thanks be to Allah, the ceiling did not fall on us, and we are still whole and unharmed,' said Hajio, with a degree of sarcasm that appears to have shocked even himself.

Shamil just looked at him steadily, with the light of the moon falling on his face and making him appear very imposing. Hajio shrivelled under the gaze and from then on the imam did not go out in the evenings, and devoted himself to his books.

Among all this chaos, the imam still found time to tell Runovsky about the people he used to rule, the laws he imposed, and the system he created. There are long sections in the diary detailing precise legal measures that Shamil used, and listing the lieutenants that he most relied upon.

He was brutally honest about what he thought were the qualities of his former subjects, and reserved particular bile for the mountain Chechens. His assessment of their baseness, in fact, would have been shocking in the mouth of a Russian leader, let alone their deposed ruler.

He said that until he imposed Islamic law on the people of Tadburty – one of the regions of mountain Chechnya – they had lived by a widespread belief that illegitimate children were of greater value than legitimate ones. They would kidnap each other's wives and daughters and hold them as hostages – something that was more than acceptable to the wives themselves, who would gladly ‘bring forth to the world heroes and valiant warriors' by having illegitimate children by their captors.

The mountain Chechens, according to the imam, lived in five-storey towers, with the livestock at the bottom, then the stores, then the family, then the family's property, and finally the kidnapped women at the top. In smaller towers the women were often kept alongside the legal family (‘the sense of shame not being known to these degenerates of humanity'). Shamil had, he said, managed to impose Islamic rules on them, and to demolish many of their towers, but not without years of effort.

‘There is nothing worse than this trash in the whole world. The Russians should say thank you to me that I corrected them a little. Without this, you would have only one way to deal with them: shoot them to the last man, as is done with harmful animals. In fact, I did not just break the people of Tadburty, but those of Shatoi and Ichkeria too. I did not fight them for their loyalty to the Russians. You know they never had that. I did it for their nasty character, and their inclination to theft and banditry. I am speaking the truth, and I am sure that you will now fight them, not for their loyalty to me, but for the same inclination to banditry, which they do not want to abandon,' the imam said, simply.

‘I tell the truth that in softening the character of the highlanders I employed harsh measures. A lot of people were killed at my orders, but there was no other way to carry on. There is no other means for this people. If you had been in my place, you would have done the same thing, and I am not scared of answering for it before God.'

Whenever someone passed through – and all Russian officers passing through Kaluga had a standing order to call on Shamil to pay their respects – and asked if he had any messages for the Caucasus, Shamil always asked him to tell his former followers that he was
happy and comfortable in captivity. He also never missed an opportunity to tell Russian listeners of his gratitude to the tsar.

And the surprise that visitors might feel hearing these comments was counteracted on one occasion when soldiers from the nearby garrison who had been prisoners of war with Shamil, and forced to work as slaves, asked if they could visit him. The conditions endured by captive soldiers were proverbially uncomfortable and were one of the greatest charges levelled against Shamil during the war.

To Runovsky's surprise, though, the visiting soldiers chatted warmly with the imam about conditions in the mountains, and then, on leaving, one of them bent down and kissed his hand.

‘Why did you kiss his hand?' asked Runovsky afterwards. ‘In the mountains maybe you had to do this, but here, why did you do it?'

‘Your eminence, we did not have to kiss Shamil's hand. We do it from the heart,' the soldier replied.

‘He is a good man. The only prisoners who lived well were those where Shamil lived or those in places where he passed through. It was forbidden to complain about our bosses, but it happened, and if an appeal got through to him then he would take the prisoner away and keep him at his own place, and even punish the guilty party.'

Runovsky was surprised by the warmth of the former captive's praise for the imam.

‘He was good, your eminence. In a word, he had a heart. He doesn't believe in Christ, but he's a good man.'

Exchanges such as this never ceased to delight Runovsky, who recorded them faithfully in his diary. Often Shamil's replies – like his comment about Kaluga resembling Chechnya – seemed to have a stock quality. They appear in almost identical forms in several different memoirs. He praises the tsar, he praises Russia, he praises his house. But on one occasion Runovsky asked him for his opinion about Russia as a whole, about St Petersburg and Kaluga, and the people he met.

The question seemed to flummox the imam, who clearly had not expected it. Runovsky said he could wait and prepare an answer if he preferred, and that he should not be shy of saying negative things. But no, he had not understood Shamil's pause. The imam was once again getting the words he wanted to say just right.

‘Now I understand what my son Jamal-Edin died of,' he said at last.

Like many of Shamil's comments, it gains more meanings the more you think about it. Maybe he meant he could understand why his son had fallen in love with Russia, since he had too. Or maybe he meant that a Russian – living in the conditions of their life in Kaluga – could never survive the harsh life of the mountains.

I think he meant both of those things, but his main meaning – in my opinion – was that the gulf between Russians, in whose number he included his son, and highlanders was so wide that there could be no true mutual understanding.

His son pined away in the alien conditions of the mountains, just like he was pining away amid the dinner dances, petty intrigues and mansions of Kaluga.

In May 1860, Shamil received a guest – Muhammad-Emin, his envoy to the Circassians, former lieutenant and friend. Muhammad-Emin led the Circassians before and during the Crimean War, but faced obstacle after obstacle in the Turkish political scene, which limited his ability to take the fight to the Russians.

When Shamil surrendered, he appealed to his comrade-in-arms to give in also. Muhammad-Emin did so, and he too was received in St Petersburg.

In May that year then, the two friends met for the first time in thirteen years.

It was a funny encounter, similar – from the way Runovsky described it – to any meeting between old and close friends who have not seen each other for a long time. During the three days of Muhammad-Emin's stay in Kaluga, the two old men reminisced about the war and filled each other in on the years when they had been at opposite ends of the mountains.

The customs of the Abadzekhs – the Circassian tribe that Muhammad-Emin led – were a particular source of amusement for them. When Shamil and his sons heard that an Abadzekh man could not visit his wife during the daylight hours, they fell about with mirth.

‘Imagine having to go secretly to one's own wife,' one of the group said to much laughter.

The laughter reached new heights when Muhammad-Emin told the gathering about how the Abadzekhs count. He said that five, for the Abadzekhs, is ‘t'pfu', which was too close to the sound of someone spitting for the roomful to take it seriously. In a complex multi-linguistic joke, they started then using the word ‘five' in one of the other Caucasus languages to express disgust with something. ‘Abadzekh' rapidly became a synonym for ‘bad', which delighted the group.

‘Abadzekh-woman: five!' and ‘Abadzekh-horse: five!' managed to amuse even Shamil, who joined in with a joke of his own, describing a drunkard visible through the window as an ‘Abadzekh man'.

The picture is irresistibly reminiscent of a group of old empire hands, who served in Nigeria say, or India, getting together to make desperately politically incorrect jokes about the locals and about themselves, with the easy familiarity of old friendship.

But sadly they would never be able to do so again, for Muhammad-Emin was leaving for Turkey, going into an exile from which he would never return. At least he would not be lonely there, however, for increasing numbers of his fellow countrymen would be leaving soon too.

This was not the desperate rush into exile of the Circassians, whose national collapse drove them onto overloaded boats and to almost total destruction. It was a slower process whereby religious leaders and former lieutenants of Shamil decided they did not want to be ruled by non-believers, and that the Ottoman Empire – which was headed after all by the sultan, who, as caliph, was nominally head of all Muslims – was their natural home.

Shamil's son Gazi-Muhammad, on returning from a trip to the Caucasus in late 1861, told Runovsky that blood feuds – repressed under Shamil, who believed only the criminal should pay for a crime, not his family – had made a spectacular resurgence. He said of the 16,000 households in Chechnya, as many as 600 were in a state of blood feud of some kind. That is, almost 4 per cent of the whole population.

Shamil had recommended to the Russians that they crack down hard on his former subjects to prevent their reverting to their old lawless ways. ‘Now, they are like sheep,' he had said. ‘Wherever you drive them, they will go without objection. When they have looked about them, they will be harder to cope with.'

The Russians were paying the price for letting the tribesmen ‘look about them'.

An intrepid British traveller ventured into Dagestan in 1861, perhaps attempting to blaze a trail for mass tourism, or perhaps driven only by a desire for adventure. He wandered right across Shamil's old domains. He recorded that even in Georgia it was considered unsafe
to venture out of the house after dark, and the Dagestan he described was a land of constant upheaval.

One story he told was about the destruction of a group of Russian soldiers who had gone fishing.

‘The Russians were all fine strong men, and though they were soon overpowered by numbers, made a determined resistance. But it was a hopeless fight, six of them were almost cut in pieces by the terrible khangiars [swords], the seventh rushed into the water and gained the opposite bank, and escaped by concealing himself in the underwood.'

The survivor managed to creep back towards the army camp. He ‘staggered, naked, though the freezing night, up a difficult path to a spot whence he might perhaps even see the tents of his comrades – a few yards further and he might have lived – but though his brave heart had not failed him, cold and loss of blood dragged him down.'

It is clear from this account, and from others, that the land was far from calm and, as Gazi-Muhammad noted, the targets for the attacks were not only Russians but often those who, in Shamil's service, had been brutal in crushing the liberties of their countrymen. Such men, scared of revenge, had begun gathering up their belongings and leaving for the Ottoman Empire. Daniel-Sultan, Shamil's friend-turned-sworn-enemy, was one of them and many others went with him.

Such men genuinely could not reconcile themselves to what even an optimist knew must be the final conquest of their homeland by Russia. Among them, perversely, was Musa Kundukhov, the most prominent Caucasus tribesman in the Russian service.

Born in 1818 to a Muslim Ossetian family, Kundukhov was given while just a boy as a hostage to the Russians. It was standard practice for young highlanders – like Jamal-Edin – to be taken to St Petersburg or Moscow and there enrolled in a military academy, where they would learn the virtues of a Russian officer. The idea was an ingenious one. Their families would be too scared to rebel, since their son could pay the price, while the son and with him the new generation of potential rebels would be russified and thus less likely to reject the tsar.