Let Our Fame Be Great (19 page)

Sochi is a town that worships money. I rented an enclosed balcony in a grimy tower block from an old couple with pictures of Stalin on their walls. It was twenty-five minutes' walk from the centre of town, and with a view only of another tower block, but still cost triple the price of the clean little room I was to rent in central Anapa a few weeks later. The town was a mass of banks and hotels and boutiques and adverts. The adverts heaved with the transliterated English-language words that have spread across modern Russian like a fungal infection: Dizayner, VIP-shoping, Bouling, Kottedzh, Dzhiping, Rafting, Siti, Konditsioner. Every foreign word betrayed the worship of money that makes Moscow tick, and which had spread down here with the holidaymakers.

The town's wealth was reflected in its museum: far more professional an affair than those in the other towns I would visit along the coast. It was based in a graceful building in the centre of town, with two cannons out the front and a team of nosy old women manning
the front desk. The Caucasus war occupied a small, delicately lit room at the start of the display, but my hopes of finding out something new about the Circassians were stillborn. Of its five individual exhibits, each of the forts that were founded in the 1830s on the territory of modern-day Sochi got one. The end of the war took up the fifth, but even that only mentioned the defeated enemy in passing, with the laconic inscription: ‘after the end of the Caucasus war a mass resettlement of the Circassians to Turkey and the countries of the Middle East began.' A picture depicted a column of refugees with sheep, carts, cattle and household goods. Although they did not look happy, there was no suggestion that anyone actually died.

Next to the picture was a congratulatory telegram from Tsar Alexander II to his victorious troops. ‘I thank from my soul all the leaders, the officers and the lower ranks for their excellent service, crowned by total success. I am more proud of you than ever,' it said.

The museum went on to show how Sochi developed from a rural patch of mountain into the country's premier resort town. Sochi – like everything in the former Soviet Union – has declined from its 1980s peak, of course. Its current tally of one and a half million holidaymakers a year was a long way below the five million people coming yearly two decades ago. But it has ambitions, and central to its ambitions is the greatest mountain event of all: the Winter Olympics, which is due to be held above the resort in 2014.

Circassian groups abroad objected bitterly to the first suggestions that the Olympics be held here, and they had a point. This was beyond insensitive. For the International Olympic Committee was being asked to celebrate peace and sportsmanship exactly 150 years after the Circassians' total destruction, and on the exact spot where the last Circassians surrendered.

‘The Olympic flame cannot shine on a vast graveyard of nations. The Olympic spirit cannot be compatible with the spirit of a genocide. And we are sure that no Olympic sportsman would be happy to see the perspective of Olympic Games transformed into a hell for the local people,' said a coalition of twelve Circassian diaspora organizations in a letter to the International Olympic Committee before it approved Sochi's bid to host for the games.

The IOC ignored them.

‘What if one of the candidates to host the Olympic Games had been Auschwitz Birkenau? Would it be of conscience and acceptable to select Auschwitz Birkenau, where 1.5 million people were systematically starved, tortured and murdered, as the Olympic host?' they asked in a new appeal.

‘In a similar vein, we ask how we are supposed to accept the Olympic Games to be played in Sochi and its surroundings which became a cemetery for Caucasians as a result of Russian cruelty . . . The Circassian – Ubykh nation inhabited in Sochi was almost totally massacred and more than 90 per cent of the Caucasian population in the region was either exterminated or exiled.'

Again, their words made no impact.

In Russian, the village where the games will be held is called Krasnaya Polyana – Red Glade – but in the language of the people who once lived here, variously claimed to have been Abkhaz or Ubykh, it was Kbaada. Here, in 1864, four columns of the Russian army converged on the last surviving force of highlanders, and received their surrender. The four columns paraded together and celebrated their final victory. The locals went into exile, where the Ubykh language died out on 7 October 1992 with the death of its last native speaker.

Krasnaya Polyana was deserted for a decade after their departure. Then, in 1878, a group of Greek traders crossed over the high pass into its hidden valley and saw the glorious red of autumnal bracken covering its fields, and gave it its name. A road was blasted up the narrow gorge from the sea and the village, which was the personal property of the imperial family, became one of the most prestigious resorts in Russia. Tsar Nikolai II had a cottage here (although he appears to have never used it), as did many generals and ministers.

The prestigious image has lasted to this day. Vladimir Putin, both as president and prime minister, has polished his action man image with regular skiing holidays and has used the resort for high-level meetings. The helipad Putin has used is on the very spot where the four columns paraded in 1864.

Krasnaya Polyana is a couple of hours' drive from Sochi's centre, the length of the trip depending on the heaviness of the traffic on
Resort Avenue, the main coastal highway. I visited on a beautiful autumn day, in a minibus with twelve other tourists, an Armenian driver called Rafik and an irrepressible Cossack tour guide called Valery, who started his running commentary before we had even got out of the bus station.

‘You see these skyscrapers going up, cash, cash, cash, that's what they call money, it's all being done by Muscovites, and not the normal Muscovites either, these are the elite ones who've forgotten about us, who've forgotten about the people, if you look to your right you can see the famous clock on the train station.' And so he went on.

Valery wanted everyone on the bus to spend as much money as possible: lunch, honey, jeep rides, cable car rides, alcohol, souvenirs, photographs with an eagle, a bear cub or a camel. I expected him, therefore, to be rather put out when I declined any additional excursions and said I just wanted to see the sights. I had misjudged him. He was, it turned out, a keen amateur historian and declared an immediate desire to join me and to correct the errors in my historical thinking. This he did in an almost unbroken monologue, some of which I wrote down.

‘These local tribes often attacked our peasants. I often argue with these Circassians. They had the chance of settling down and accepting the tsar but they refused. And you know, fifty years after the end of the Caucasus war, in 1914, they sent a delegation to the tsar to tell him how happy they were to be living under Russian laws. But sadly they did not all stay here, when the war ended, the tsar gave a condition to the local people, either move north of the mountains or leave for Turkey. They were cross with us, you see, because we wanted to abolish slavery. They did not understand this and rose up. When everyone had left these places, the animals walked around and wondered where everyone was. For fourteen years there was no one, because the inhabitants had preferred to leave their homes for a foreign land. They asked if they could come home but we said they had to give their oldest sons as hostages. They often stabbed us in the back before, they fought against us, which is why they had to leave. Circassians are like children, big children of nature, you know. I have
a lot of friends who are Circassian and I say this to them. They say they invented the sabre, you know. They like to plant trees. They have this tradition that you plant a minimum of ten trees if you want to marry. And if you want to go to heaven you have to plant a minimum of fifty trees. They are just big children.'

Valery, who was sitting right next to me, gave this exhausting lecture through the public address system, as if he was still talking to a whole bus rather than just to me. Occasionally he referred to me in the plural as ‘my friends' through force of habit. Meanwhile, Rafik swung the minibus through the curves up to a viewing platform giving us a panorama of the whole resort.

It was a magnificent sight, and the village will make a fine Olympic venue. The deciduous forests were dense on the slopes, and a cliff had to be fully vertical before trees failed to find a niche for their roots. As the slopes rose, the broadleaves faded into conifers and then bare rock at maybe 2,200 metres. The valley floor below was a patchwork of roofs: grey, green, orange, russet, blue, with trees in amongst them. Over to the left, the sharp higher peaks rose up towards the main Caucasus range, with glaciers and rocks and open ground.

It is astonishing that the Russian soldiers made it here at all, the passes being so high and the forests so dense. I could have stopped and looked at the view all day.

But Valery was in a hurry, and wanted me to see the zoo, which has a specimen of the rare Caucasus buffalo. We descended the hill once more, passing the new resorts being built to house big-money tourists (‘. . . you see this cable car, that's Putin's cable car, it's beautiful, beautiful, the Turks built that, there is a new hotel, with the green roof . . .') and Valery gabbled on as we drove along the valley floor to the zoo.

Although we were here to see the animals, Valery could not halt his history lecture and continued as we looked through the mesh into their enclosures. This time Rafik, the Armenian driver, joined us. Perhaps it was Valery's mention of the Turks building the cable car that had provoked it, but Rafik had started thinking about the Armenian genocide in 1915, when the Turks massacred a million of his compatriots in the Ottoman Empire. He had things to say.

‘I would welcome anyone into my house,' he said, apropos of nothing, ‘except a Turk. Let them recognize the genocide, then they are welcome, but not yet.' Valery, who initially looked surprised at this unexpected twist in the conversation, was vehement in his approval. He had many Armenian friends too, it transpired, and any country that did not recognize the genocide could never be a friend of his.

I had been hoping to find an excuse to ask them their opinion on the Circassian allegations of genocide, and whether it was improper to hold the Olympics on land where so many people had died. And here it was. The Turks do not recognize the Armenian genocide, I said, but then the Russians do not recognize the Circassian genocide either.

We had reached a bench under a tree, having already seen the buffalo, which stood massively in the mud. Valery turned round sharply. He stumbled at first, but soon got into his stride.

‘There was no genocide, they were to blame for that themselves. They fought on the side of the Turks, this was no genocide, they left of their own accord. I have heard this talk about a genocide, but when people use their daggers to kill wounded soldiers . . . well, when they were resettled, that was, well ... well, there was no genocide. And anyway, the people who lived here they left themselves, they wanted to. They had a choice, they didn't have to move to Turkey, they could have moved to the north of the Caucasus. When we pacified the people, we did not destroy them, we just told them not to attack us and then when war started between Russia and Turkey, they stabbed us in the back. So we had to give them conditions. They lived like beasts anyway, like bandits, they stole things.'

The lecture went on, but I had stopped listening. Valery was a kind, friendly man who had given up his day to show me around the village. I did not want to offend him, so I stopped asking questions and just accepted that he could not see the parallel between his own nation's crimes and those of others.

I sat on the bench, leaned back onto the tree trunk and looked up through the leaves. Valery's voice rumbled on. Hundreds of tiny pears approaching ripeness dangled between the leaves over my head.
The tree was tall, and must have been more than 200 years old considering how slowly trees grow at this altitude.

I sat and wondered about the Circassian who had planted the pip that became this tree all those years ago, and whether this tree had been one of many in an orchard, or a solitary sapling grown by accident. Perhaps he had lived nearby and tended this tree for its harvest, or perhaps he just threw a pear away when returning from the fields.

Maybe he planted nine other trees as well so he could get married. I hope that he planted forty-nine more trees though; then he will have gone to heaven.

It is not just Sochi that is insensitive to the Circassian claims of genocide, but the whole coast, which – if it remembers the nineteenth-century war at all – celebrates it as a victory, not as the squalid campaign of attrition and slaughter that it really was.

A week or two later, far to the north-west of Sochi, on the cliffs above Anapa's beach, Russian tourists walked arm-in-arm along the elegant promenade. The evening sun warmed the left side of my face as I looked back into town, and gave a pleasant ruddy glow to the ugly concrete hotels thrown up for the Soviet Union's holidaymakers. Directly behind me was a white vertical slab. Its concrete sail featured a blazing sun, a woman's face and a group of four androgynous infants who appeared to be battling against a strong wind.

In a country not renowned for its public memorials, this one was particularly unpleasant, and a casual passer-by reading its bland inscription could not possibly imagine why it occupied such a prominent position. I had nothing much to do though, so I studied it, and realized as I did so that it commemorated the act that finally buried any last trace of a Circassian Circassia.

In the middle of the concrete sun, from which rays streamed down onto the back of the woman's head, were the words: ‘Resorts to the Workers' with a signature and, in smaller type, ‘from a decree of the Council of People's Commissars 21 April 1921'.