Let Our Fame Be Great (16 page)

Under the treaty, the Black Sea was officially declared neutral and Russia was not allowed to keep a navy there. This should have benefited the Circassians, but Alexander II's subsequent achievements cancelled that out.

The Crimean War had been a humiliation, and Russia could clearly no longer continue on its old path. In the twenty-six years of his reign, therefore, Alexander abolished serfdom – the form of slavery that tied Russian peasants to the land – reformed the army and navy, started Russia's network of railways, reformed the legal structure, introduced local assemblies with limited powers, and more.

Most important from the perspective of the Caucasus highlanders, however, was that he allowed the generals to take the initiative, and the results were dramatic. In 1859, Imam Shamil, ruler of the eastern Caucasus, surrendered. Then the whole military might of Russia was focused on the Circassians. The Circassians had no single leader to be taken in battle, and Russian officers knew they would have to find a different way to defeat them, as noticed by George Leighton Ditson, an American visitor to the Caucasus, as early as 1850.

Ditson's memoirs quote a Prince Kotsohobey as saying that ‘These Circassians are just like your American Indians – as untamable and uncivilized – and that, owing to their natural energy of character, extermination alone would keep them quiet, or that if they came under Russian rule, the only safe policy would be to employ their wild and warlike character against others.'

This viewpoint was encountered a couple of years later by Dr Moritz Wagner. He met a German doctor who said the soldiers were becoming increasingly exasperated with the Circassians' failure to appreciate the advantages of Russian civilization.

‘It is a prevalent opinion,' said the doctor, ‘among the Russians and Cossacks, that a war of extermination should be waged against the Circassians, because these people are perfectly incapable of appreciating gentleness, friendship and benefits conferred, are unsusceptible of any generous emotion, and because it is impossible to civilize them.'

Many Circassians sensed that extermination was coming. They were few, poor and starving and had no hope of military support. With the Russians in front of them and the sea behind them, they chose to take to the sea.

The editor of the
Levant Herald
, Istanbul's English-language publication, wrote to the London
Times
in January 1860 to appeal for help for those unfortunate Circassians already flooding into Turkey.

‘During the past stormy season in the Black Sea above a dozen wrecks of these emigrant vessels occurred, hurrying many hundreds of these miserable creatures to death. Of those who made good the passage, thousands landed in every stage of disease and physical suffering, without a dollar to supply even their most immediate wants,' he wrote, in describing the horrors he had seen among the 20,000 refugees then in Istanbul and Uskudar. ‘Gaunt visions of famishing men, women and children meet you at every turn, appealing to you in their mute passion of bitter hunger and freezing cold with a harrowing energy no British onlooker, at all events, can resist. Inside the khans the spectacle is worse. In the damp ground-floors scores of sufferers, in every stage of want-induced disease – most of them women – lie huddled together, some with no bedding whatever, and the best off with but little.'

The leaders of those Circassians who remained in their homeland begged Britain for help. Their appeal is still kept in the Foreign Office archives, a mute rebuke to the consuls' reports either side of it, with their self-satisfied handwriting, and their thick blue paper.

The paper the Circassians used is too thin for this august company, the lines followed by their exuberant Arabic script are too wobbly, and their piece of paper is too large for the ledger, and has had to be folded to fit in. Unlike all the reports from the British officials, their letter has never been properly attached to the ledger, and is just tucked between the pages. Perhaps this was some anonymous Foreign Office functionary's way of pointing out the Circassians' bad manners in being there at all.

For the message contained in their appeal was a world away from the careful prose of the urbane diplomatic reports that surround it in the file, and it is the only time we hear a Circassian voice describing the nation's doom. All other sources for the tragedy are written by foreigners, since the Circassians themselves were largely illiterate.

‘It is now more than eighty years since the Russian government is unlawfully striving to subdue and annex to its dominions Circassia, which since the creation of the world has been our home and our country. It slaughters like sheep the children, helpless women, and old men that fall into its hands. It rolls about their heads with the bayonet like melons, and there is no act of oppression or cruelty which is beyond the pale of civilisation and humanity, and which defies description, that it has not committed,' the Circassians wrote, according to the translation appended to the letter.

The translation is in the same sprawling Foreign Office copper-plate as the reports that fill the ledger, as if the translator could not bear to translate the style as well as the words of the outburst.

This was far from the first time the Circassians had begged Queen Victoria for help during their decades of resistance to Russia. They had previously written and declared their defiance, and their bravery, asking only for arms to help them resist the invaders from the north. But this time, their appeal was more pathetic and, at this remove, appears to be more touching. The men had given up hope and were seeking simply to save the lives of the non-combatants that lived
among them. ‘Many are the lives which have been lost in battle, from hunger in the mountains, from destitution on the sea-coast, and from want of skill at sea. We therefore invoke the mediation and precious assistance of the British Government and people – the guardian of humanity and centre of justice – in order to repel the brutal attacks of the Russian Government on our country, and save our country and our nation together.

‘But if it is not possible to afford this help for the preservation of our country, and race, then we pray to be afforded facilities for removing to a place of safety our helpless and miserable children and women that are perishing by the brutal attacks of the enemy as well as by the effects of famine,' the letter said.

Previous letters had been signed by individual chiefs, each of whom had a personal seal – or at the very least a thumbprint – to go with his name. This time, the appeal was more direct: it is signed simply ‘The people of Circassia'.

The letter is dated 9 April 1864. It is not clear how long it would have taken to get to London but it seems certain that by the time some undersecretary forgot about it in the files that have been its home ever since, it was already meaningless. Just a month and thirteen days after that appeal was handed to a sea captain and taken away, the ‘people of Circassia' had lost their homeland. They were the people of Circassia no more, just Circassians.

The Russian government had sought to defeat them in their mountain home for most of the nineteenth century, and it did not plan to let them ever again pose a threat to its rule. A Russian general had once compared the Caucasus Mountains to a ‘mighty fortress, marvellously strong by nature, artificially protected by military works, and defended by a numerous garrison'. The Russian army had conquered the fortress, and now it would destroy those military works, and drive that garrison out.

The Circassians received a blank choice: move to the plains and live like Russian peasants, or leave the country. Suddenly, the Circassians, so long the fighters called in to fight other people's wars, needed a mercenary army of their own. They did not get one. But they did get a Frenchman called Arthur de Fonvielle, one of a group
of idealistic foreigners who came to help the Circassians at this last battle.

He did not succeed in winning the war for them, but he did write a memoir. His account of their struggle and their exile is the only one I know of that describes at first hand what happened to them.

Along with three Poles and another Frenchman, he landed in Circassia with a group of thirty Circassians and a roguish trader called Ibrahim, who affected poverty in order to gain a better price for his salt, knives, tobacco, bread and other trade goods. The Circassians in return sold him young and beautiful Circassian girls destined for the harems of Turkey.

‘They didn't even ask much money for them,' noted de Fonvielle, as he waited for his little group to be led to war. The highlanders surrounded them while they waited, looking at them with wonder.

But despite the warmth of this welcome, de Fonvielle did not enjoy the lavish hospitality experienced by earlier visitors to the Circassian coast, for there was nothing to eat. The Circassians were boiling up tree leaves to make soup, and typhus was rampant, while three separate Russian columns marched towards them.

De Fonvielle, who had come to help save the Circassian nation, found himself witness to its end. Free Circassia was only thirty to forty leagues long, he wrote, and in places only three leagues between the sea and the closest Russian post. There are about four and half kilometres in a French league, meaning that Circassia was reduced to a bare rump of what it had once been.

He himself appears to have been a roguish character. His memoir, which was published in the magazine
Russian Invalid
in 1865, loves to pick out humorous events and phrases. But, as time passed, even this adventurer started to be appalled by what he saw.

In his first engagement, the memoir describes two Russian warships bombarding the shore with complete impunity. Some Circassians rush to the beach, only to be shot at themselves. The Circassians lost twenty people killed and about the same number injured, while the boat de Fonvielle arrived in was destroyed. The warship was unharmed. It was not a good omen for the months ahead.

As they set off down the coast, they discovered why the Russian army had for so long struggled to manoeuvre in these densely wooded hills. In Circassia, the hills plunge straight into the sea: often at a 45-degree angle, with the beach exposed to the storms which gave the Black Sea its ominous name. After the conquest, the Russians were to build a highway along the shoreline, but even in the twenty-first century the traveller has to twist and rise and turn sharply again to find a way through the terrain.

The Russian tactics more or less consisted of forming a line on the northern slope of the mountains, and pushing everyone ahead of them towards the summit. The crowds of refugees became thicker as the Russians progressed. And then the crowd spilled over the passes, and started to stream down to the sea. As they fled, they infected untouched communities with panic, and ate up their food supplies. Even if winter had not been coming, and the harvest had not failed, there would not have been enough to eat.

‘We met several parties . . . fleeing from the Russians. These unfortunate people were in the most sad state; barely clothed, driving in front of them small flocks of sheep, their only source of food, men, women, children followed silently one after another, leading a few horses, on which was placed the whole household's goods and all that they managed to take with them,' de Fonvielle wrote.

There were no bridges over the numerous rivers that cut through the hills down to the sea, adding a fresh hazard to the refugees' plight. De Fonvielle saw a party being washed away. His group saved just three of them, before itself being trapped in a storm on the beach.

Wet, cold and miserable, they finally linked up with a Circassian army of 3,000 – 4,000 near Tuapse, a river valley that is now a major oil export port, and battle was joined. The Russians brought up cannon, but even so were broken and fell back to their camp. Celebrations were muted, however, for this was a pyrrhic victory. The Circassian casualties were not far off one in ten, and more victories of that kind would destroy them, especially since anyone with a serious wound was almost certain to die in the cold and hungry conditions. The Circassian troops spent the night mourning every death with their traditional songs.

‘There were fifteen or twenty of these choirs, and they all sang independently from the others; this terrible concert, which continued until the morning itself, did not allow us to even shut our eyes, which was appropriate in fact since we constantly expected a Russian attack.'

By noon the next day, only 500 or 600 Circassian troops were left, the others having died, been wounded or melted away. The foreigners realized further resistance was futile, especially since their feared local renegades might curry favour with their conquerors by betraying them to the Russians. ‘Our retreats became every day more shameful; the fleeing by the people rose; the number emigrating permanently rose. From every place taken by the Russians, the settlements' inhabitants fled, and their hungry groups crossed the country in different directions, leaving along the way their ill and dying; sometimes whole groups of emigrants froze or were carried away by blizzards, and we often noticed, going past, the traces of their blood. Wolves and bears dug through the snow and pulled human bodies from underneath it.'