Let Our Fame Be Great (37 page)
Read Let Our Fame Be Great Online
Authors: Oliver Bullough
10.The road up to Krasnaya Polyana, the mountain village where the last Circassians surrendered to the Russians in 1864, and the Russian army held a parade to celebrate the fact. It will host the winter Olympics in 2014, on the 150th anniversary of the genocide.
11. Khozemat Khabilayeva sits in her living room in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She and her sister were saved by their family dog, Khola, but they could not take him with them into exile.
12. Stalin, who ordered the deportation of the Chechens, the Ingush, the mountain Turks and other nations, is still admired in many parts of Russia, as this rock painting in the mountains of North Ossetia makes clear.
13.The peaks of the central Caucasus as seen from Georgia.This is the view that Freshfield and the other British mountaineers would have seen before they crossed over into the land of the mountain Turks.
14.The gorge of the Cherek valley. Freshfield's mountaineers passed up this narrow valley and were probably the first western Europeans to visit it.
15. Upper Balkaria today. Ruined houses are visible to the right of the picture.
16. A monument to the residents of the hamlet of Sauty slaughtered by Soviet soldiers in 1942.The Misirov family alone takes up almost four columns of names. Ironically, Ali Misirov, who survived the massacre, went on to play Stalin in a post-Soviet film.
17.The memorial to Gazi-Muhammad, the first imam of Chechnya and mountain Dagestan, which stands just outside the village of Gimry. Pilgrims have tied strips of coloured fabric to it, which is slightly ironic since the imam devoted much of his time to stamping out such superstitions.
18.The view Imam Shamil would have seen from the site of his last stand in the natural fort of Gunib.
19. Imam Shamil is still honoured here, and his portrait stares out from a rock painting above the village of Gunib.
20.The author sits on the rock where General Baryatinsky sat to receive Imam Shamil's surrender in 1859.The site has been marked with a pavilion and a small patio.
21. Megeb, an ethnically Dargin village in central Dagestan, resembles a step pyramid.
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