Let Our Fame Be Great (25 page)

Sitting at the table with Makhiyev and me was Khussein Kuliyev, who was twelve years old in 1944, and thus already doing a man's work in the mountains. As soon as his friend finished his account, Kuliyev launched into his story, about being with his grandfather in a mountain hamlet called Zhuongu.

‘One morning my grandfather woke me up and told me soldiers had come. Maybe, he said, one of them was my father, who was at the front, so I ran to meet them. But my father was not there so I ran back. I was scared. They checked everything, they were on horses. The next day, my grandfather wanted to feed a calf, which had just been born, to make sure it had milk. But when we went out there were three more soldiers, and they would not let him feed it. They said gather up everything you have and they drove us off on foot. We walked for nine or ten kilometres, we did not know where we were going. I said to my grandfather that I wanted to eat, and one soldier heard me. He must have been a Tatar or from Azerbaijan, or one of the other Turkic peoples, because he understood our language and he gave me cheese,' Kuliyev remembered.

Finally they reached the lower village, and there found Kuliyev's mother and his four sisters all gathered in a field. They were loaded onto trucks then driven out of the village. But the road was bad and they had to dismount and walk over every bridge. Their aunt Fatimat had come to stay with them and as they passed through Lower Chegem, she saw her children standing with the crowd.

‘She cried out that those were her children, to let her out, but the soldiers hit her with their rifles and we just drove further. She had a three-year-old daughter who she wanted to take but they would not let her,' he said.

After the long train journey, the Balkars were unloaded in the steppes of Central Asia where factory directors or collective farm
chairmen would choose those they wanted. Obviously, young adults were the most popular, since they could work and would not have children who put a burden on the schools and ate food without being productive. As such, the Kuliyev family with five children and just one adult was left unpicked when everyone else had gone.

‘These collective farm chairmen, they came on camels or whatever. In the end, a Kazakh man came in a wagon and he saw us children there and he took us. He said he would take everyone. He put us in the village club to sleep. It just had an earth floor for us but it was only for one night, after that he freed up rooms for us. He was a kind man, he helped us, he gave us a metal oven, he helped us with corn. He was called Mukhash. I remember that, but I cannot remember his surname. He was a kind man.'

After the Balkars, Beria's attention moved on. Other nations would be deported – the Crimean Tatars, the Meskhetian Turks, the Soviet Greeks, and others – but they were not from the North Caucasus. Moscow's perpetual problem of governing the Caucasus had been solved. From the Black Sea – once Circassia – to the borders of Dagestan – where the ethnic map is so knotted that not even Beria could unravel it – the highlanders were either cowed or wiped out.

Moscow was, it was intended, never to be troubled by the Caucasus again. The troublesome highlanders had been kicked out of the highlands.

The high valleys of the Karachais and the Balkars were discovered by the outside world in 1868, when a party of Englishmen, their Swiss guide and Georgian servants slipped and stumbled down a glacier into the Upper Baksan valley. These valleys had never seen anyone like them before, although the foreigners themselves had had an indication they were about to enter a world where normal rules did not apply before they even crossed the watershed. As they toiled up the slope to the pass out of Georgia, they passed four men hurrying eleven cows down from the clouds. These, it transpired, were men from the Georgian village of Lashrash who, ‘according to custom, had been on a cattle-lifting expedition over the pass, and were now returning with their unlawfully-gotten booty, stolen from one of the herds belonging to the Tartars of the Upper Baksan'.

Douglas Freshfield, the writer of those words, had reason to be apprehensive about what he would find beyond, especially since his porters were mainly Georgian – the traditional foe in cattle deals of the people they were about to meet.

But he need not have worried. He was shortly to arrive in one of the most traditional pockets of Caucasus culture, where hospitality was strong and even in the 1860s the hand of the Russian government was rarely felt. His group was made welcome in the village of Urusbiye, and treated with great kindness.

His party was not here just for fun, however. He too wanted to conquer the Caucasus, but to do so not with weapons but on foot. He had already achieved the first ascent of Mount Kazbek – the great bishop's mitre that dominates the road from Russia to Georgia – and now he would attempt Mount Elbrus, the tallest mountain in the Caucasus, and thus the tallest in Europe.

Freshfield, perhaps the foremost mountaineer of his day, was bored of climbing in Switzerland. The peaks had been conquered and the mountains were getting crowded. On coming to the Caucasus, he found a new landscape of soaring peaks, tight valleys blocked by glaciers, villages of strange, burrow-like homes crowned with defensive towers, and lush green grazing for the cattle of the highlands. Here there were no other tourists, and here were villages that had never seen a western European before. Freshfield was stunned by the lost world he had found.

He engaged in an ambitious and risky trek from Kazbek, along the southern slopes of the Caucasus into the Georgian region of Svaneti, which is legendarily lawless even today. Crossing the pass into the land of the Turkic cattle-herders now called the Karachais and the Balkars, he approached his new foe – Elbrus.

In fact, his group scaled the great double-peaked mountain with little difficulty, except for the extreme cold, for it is not technically demanding. Their only major annoyance was a flock of sheep that resented their tent and spent the night assaulting it. On arriving at the peak, they saw a view they felt no one had seen before.

‘Light clouds were driving against the western face of the peak, and a sea of mist hid the northern steppe – otherwise the view was clear. Beginning in the east, the feature of the panorama was the central chain between ourselves and Kazbek. I never saw any group of mountains which bore so well being looked down upon as the great peaks that stand over the sources of the Tcherek and Tchegem,' noted Freshfield, before the cold drove his party down to the plains again.

On their return to Urusbiye, they were heroes. Much of Freshfield's book
Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan
is a complex account of precise routes he took and gripes against the inaccuracy of the Russian map, but occasionally he allows himself to talk about the people he met. This was one of those times.

‘Several minutes passed before the story was fully understood: our burnt faces, and the partially-blinded eyes of the two men who had accompanied us, were visible signs that we had in truth spent many hours on the snowfields, and the circumstantial account and description of the summit given by the porters seemed to create a general belief in the reality of the ascent,' he wrote with pride.

‘The scene was most entertaining. The whole male population of the place crowded round us to shake hands, each of our companions found himself a centre of attraction, and the air rang with “Allah”seasoned phrases of exclamation and astonishment, mingled, as each newcomer entered, and required to hear the tale afresh, with constant reiterations of “Minghi-Tau!” – a familiar name, which sounds far more grateful to the ear than the heavy-syllabled Elbruz.'

The villagers, he assured his readers, said no one had ever scaled Elbrus before so British people everywhere could take pride that here was yet another natural obstacle ground under an English-made hobnail boot. It was a triumph for the empire that was delving into the unknown hearts of all the continents on earth.

The only trouble with his glorious achievement is that it was not true. He was not the first man to stand on that peak and exult over the view. A local man had beaten him to it almost four decades earlier as part of a Russian expedition to the lands of the Turkic herders in 1829.

The mission was led by the Russian General Georgy Emanuel, commander of the Caucasus Line, who was desperately trying to prevent an uprising by the tribesmen of the central part of the mountain range. Russia was locked in the war with Turkey that would eventually win it the Black Sea fortress of Anapa, but at the time the result was not certain.

Emanuel feared that if the Turkic mountaineers in the central Caucasus rose up, they would connect the warring Circassians to the warring Chechens and threaten Russian control over the whole of its southern frontier.

Short of troops, but determined to prevent such a disaster for the tsar's army, the general had a great idea. He would take a scientific expedition to Elbrus – collect animals, gather a few rocks, measure some heights and distances, march about – and thereby show the local tribesmen the Russian flag.

He set off, according to a contemporary biographer, from Pyatigorsk in late June. Arriving at a bridge over the river Malka, which is about halfway to the mountain, his small force of soldiers and scientists was met by a deputation of tribesmen. Ostensibly here to show
respect, the elders – the biographer said – were in reality concerned that the Russians would destroy their homes in retaliation for destruction caused in the war against Turkey.

The tribesmen had fortified their villages, and retreated into the heights with their weapons, while the delegates worriedly sought to find out the general's intentions. The general was apparently quite a politician and assured them they had nothing to worry about.

‘Since they had already sworn allegiance to Russia, then he counted them Russian subjects, and he would have to answer before the Emperor if he even thought of doing them any harm; on the contrary, they, with their kind bearing and humility for all this time, had earned the right of friendship and protection from the Russians; his arrival with a few scientists only showed a desire to know their country, collect plants, stones, animals, and that he, taking advantage of the kind disposition of the Karachais, wanted only to come to Elbrus, which no one had yet reached, and would not even step into their houses,' Emanuel's biographer wrote.

A few presents cemented the good impression, and instead of being greeted with war, the Russian expedition gained many new members who decided to come and have a look at the mountain as well. A week of bad weather delayed their plans, but eventually, on 9 July, the expedition was encamped at the very foot of Elbrus and the assembled Cossacks and ‘Circassians' (this word is likely to have meant ‘highlanders', rather than people who were necessarily ethnic Circassians) were told that he who arrived on the summit first would receive the princely reward of 400 roubles.

The group of academicians and their guides reached the edges of the snows in the afternoon of that day and settled down to sleep on the mountainside. They started out the next day at three in the morning, and toiled further upwards. But they started to suffer great discomfort, as is hardly surprising since they can hardly have been in condition for scaling a 5,642-metre mountain and lacked climbing equipment of any kind.

‘The thawing snow, the stones and cliffs which were impossible to avoid, and the sun rays reflected off the snow, made continuation for the academicians difficult at a height of 14,000 feet and even
impossible; they had, they thought, still 1400 feet till the very top,' the biographer's account relates. They were very much mistaken. 14,000 feet is equivalent to almost 4,300 metres. If their height measurement was correct, they were still more than a kilometre below the summit, rather than the 400-odd metres they calculated.

One academician called Lents, together with two ‘Circassians' and a Cossack resolved to go still higher, but they too halted before the summit, resolving to turn back. This left one man, identified as just Killar, to push on alone.

It is he, and not Freshfield, who can claim to have first set foot on the mountain's summit.

‘At 11 a.m. he found himself on the very peak of Elbrus. General Emanuel, watching from the camp with his telescope, first saw Killar, standing on the summit of Elbrus, and all those around confirmed it with their own eyes. Cannon fire alerted the whole camp. While Mr Lents, who did not have the strength to go further, collapsed from tiredness, Killar managed to return from the summit, and arrived in the camp a whole hour before the academicians,' the book claims.

Brave Killar received his 400 roubles from the general, plus some fine cloth for a new tunic and the honour of the first champagne toast at luncheon. The mountain was, it would seem, already conquered before Freshfield came near.