Let Our Fame Be Great (50 page)

‘You had to gain their respect and once you had it then you had it for life.'

In March 1921, a Soviet official responsible for the hundreds of small nations scattered across the Bolsheviks' new state addressed the 10th Congress of the Communist Party.

In the four years since the revolution that brought down the tsars, he and his comrades had battled the old ruling classes, rival left-wingers, foreign armies, separatists, religious leaders, maniacs, democrats and monarchists for control of Russia.

Now, on 10 March, that battle was all but won. The foreign armies had either withdrawn or were about to. Internal opposition was continuing, but would soon be crushed. The Bolsheviks were looking about them and deciding how to build the perfect society.

The Soviet official, himself a Georgian from the southern flanks of the Caucasus mountains, said he sympathized with the ethnic minorities, whom he governed as Nationalities Commissar. They had been forced into the Russian state, he said, their land had been stolen and given to favoured groups like the rich peasants – ‘kulaks' in Soviet speak. They had been driven to the verge of complete destruction.

‘The old government, the landlords and the capitalists have left us as a heritage such browbeaten peoples as the Kirghiz, the Chechens and the Ossets, whose lands served as an object of colonisation by Cossacks and the kulak elements of Russia. These peoples were doomed to incredible suffering and extinction,' he said.

‘The position of the Great-Russian nation, which was the dominant nation, has left its traces even on the Russian Communists, who are unable, or unwilling, to establish closer relations with the toiling native masses, to comprehend their needs, and to help them emerge from their backward and uncivilised state.'

He promised a new era for the minorities. He held out a hand of friendship to them. From now on, the Chechens and their neighbours would be trusted as full citizens. They would be helped to gain all the wonders of modern civilization.

‘We must save the Kirghiz and the Bashkirs and certain of the Gortsi [highlander] tribes from extinction and provide them with necessary land at the expense of the kulak colonisers.'

It was a clear promise. From now on, the highlanders would live in peace and freedom. The official who made the promise would have plentiful opportunities to see that it was fulfilled, for his name was Joseph Stalin.

But he had made a giant miscalculation. Hidden within his promise and his pleasant words was a mistaken assumption, which would come back to haunt him when he gained supreme power. No matter what help the Russian communists gave the Chechens, it would not change much. The Chechens did not wish to emerge from their ‘backward and uncivilised state'. In fact, they rather liked it.

Mazhmudin Samursky, a disillusioned communist from the North Caucasus, put it rather neatly in 1925. The legacy of hatred created in the wars of the nineteenth century was all but unconquerable, he said. Put simply, the Chechens and their neighbours in upland Dagestan did not want to be ruled by Russians, and that was all there was to it.

‘Dislike of European civilisation, sanctified by religion, is more difficult to fight than religion itself. It is essential to avoid intimidation which would only confirm the clergy's preaching that European civilisation was always a weapon of oppression and enslavement of the Eastern peoples,' he said.

It is not clear where he had been living for the eight years since the revolution, for the ‘intimidation' he was so desperate to avoid had been the major method of interaction between Chechens and Russians for most of them.

In 1919, a Chechen Naqshbandi sheikh, Uzun Haji, declared himself Imam, raised the banner of Shamil once more, and declared holy war on the Russian incomers. Thousands of Muslims trekked to his capital in the mountains of Chechnya, where they danced and prayed and honoured the new leader. He was to die – of natural causes – just after the Red Army entered Chechnya, but his followers resisted the Russians whichever flag they marched under.

For the Red Army, intoxicated by its own power, came not as a liberator but as a plunderer. It attacked ‘patriarchal traditions and Islam', it relied on ‘punitive raids, police denunciations, blackmail, settling of private feuds, plunder, confiscation of food supplies and fodder, forced conscription into Red regiments, requisitions and destruction of small trade'. It is hard to think of anything better guaranteed to enrage the Chechens.

The rebels and the Reds battled in the mountains of Dagestan. Some 10,000 people died on each side, before the last stronghold was seized.

By the time of Stalin's speech, the rebels were close to defeat as an organized force, and their last stronghold in Dagestan fell in May 1921.

For the next two decades, ‘bandits' continued to haunt the mountains, hidden among the civilian population. They were hunted and sometimes they were caught. More often their civilian sympathizers were persecuted and killed. Stalin's brave new policy towards the Chechens had never been implemented. Almost every year brought a new sweep against anti-Soviet elements, sometimes whole Red Army regiments were wiped out before order was restored.

In 1931, by which time Stalin had secured near total control, more than 35,000 Chechens were arrested and most of them shot in a crack-down on religious leaders, nationalists and – ironically, considering what Stalin had said – ‘kulaks'. In 1937, at the start of the truly giant purges, another 14,000 men were arrested, including the entire local Communist Party.

And what was the crime of these arrested communists? They were guilty of quoting the Bolshevik policy on nationalities and saying that their Russian comrades had to ‘struggle even more resolutely against Great Russian chauvinism, against any oppressive attitude to the Chechens, to strongly and openly defend the necessity of a specially sensitive, specially cautious Russian attitude to a nation that had for decades been exposed to humiliating mockery and has therefore the right to be suspicious of the smallest manifestation of a similar oppressive attitude'.

The comments were a rephrasing of Stalin's own speech of 1921. But, sadly, the Chechens were sixteen years too late in making them,
and they had signed their own death warrants by doing so. Inevitably – since the purges meant that now even the communists were not safe – more Chechens headed into the mountains, whence they struck out at Soviet targets. The pattern of intimidation and resistance was maintained all the way up to 1944, when Stalin decided to have done with these people. It had taken him twenty-three years to come round and realize – as the tsarist officers, and even Imam Shamil, had done – that inflicting ‘incredible suffering and extinction', far from being a misguided policy, was the only way a foreign conqueror could impose his will on the Chechens.

That is not to say that Stalin approved of Imam Shamil. The imam, who had been treated so honourably by his tsarist conquerors, was re-examined by Stalin's pet historians, who made the belated discovery that he had not been a brave freedom fighter or a religious fanatic, but a foreign agent bent on sabotaging the friendship between the highlanders and the Russians.

Under Stalin, even the dead were not safe. In 1950, the standard school textbook of the
History of the USSR
condemned Shamil's resistance as ‘a reactionary and nationalistic movement in the service of English capital and the Turkish sultan. It was directed against the true interests of the highland peoples.'

A couple of years later, another historian – N. A. Smirnov – took the counterintuitive position that the mountain peoples had actually been asking Russia for help during the Caucasus wars. ‘They unhesitatingly reposed their trust in the Russians, hoping for protection from Shamil and from encroachment by external foes . . . The policy of severing the Caucasus from Russia was deeply alien and repulsive to the Caucasus peoples.'

For ordinary Chechens, it was a confusing time.

Abubakar Utsiev grew up in this world of instability, conflicting policies, irrationality, violence and horror. Born in 1924, he lived in the very heart of the unruly mountains, near Itum-Kale – one of the most inaccessible of all the Chechen villages. For the Soviet government to impose its will on the highlanders in these hills, they had to come in force.

In 1942, when Utsiev was seventeen, he and his family were driven
out of the hills and forced to settle on the plains. When the real deportation came two years later, he was all alone, separated from his relatives and without support or help.

When the train carrying him arrived in the Akmola region of Kazakhstan, he was just the kind of man chosen first by the collective farm bosses. He was young, he had no dependants, and he would not be a drain on the resources of the village. Consequently, it is something of a surprise that he was bagged by a farm as remote as Krasnaya Polyana – one of three closely connected collective farms – twenty kilometres or so from the tiny steppe town of Balkashino.

‘They brought me here on an ox-cart,' he remembered when I visited him in 2008.

‘There was snow and slush. There were children, old people, women crying, dying. You cannot understand. The people had no idea what was happening.'

He was right. When I arrived in Balkashino, it was literally impossible for me to understand the suffering those emigrants faced. The bus I took to get there from the city of Astana had come second-hand from somewhere in northern Europe – its labels were in English and German – and its windows sensibly were not made to open. In the climate of the Baltic countries, where any draught could freeze a passenger, closed windows would probably be a blessing.

In the flaying sunlight of a Kazakh summer, however, the bus became an oven. The tiniest breeze from the open skylight was as refreshing as a cool drink of water, as I sat and poured with sweat in my squalid seat. I kept falling asleep, then waking as if to a nightmare when the same view kept reappearing outside the window.

The land could not have been more different to the Caucasus, where the mountains are craggy, or snowy, or wooded, but never boring. This country was featureless. A dead-straight horizon dominated everything, imposing its absolute tyranny on buildings and factories alike. When people flicked by our windows, they looked puny and insubstantial in relation to this single, powerful line dividing the green of the wheat fields from the blue of the sky.

A telegraph pole, or a tractor, or a barn became the complete focus of the landscape. Strange tricks of perspective and scale could make
buildings seem huge or tiny – sometimes both at the same time. At one moment of wakefulness that I remember, a small cluster of huts in the middle of a blank patch of grassland was signposted from the road as a ‘Relaxation Zone'. I could not imagine how it would be possible to relax there. A few minutes further on, we stopped in a village. Its shop bore the label ‘Everything for Everyone'. I wanted to buy some water, but it had run out.

The Akmola region was the most dreadful of all the terrible destinations for the deported North Caucasus nations. In the five years after 1944, 35 per cent of the Chechen and Ingush deportees, and 49 per cent of the Balkars, sent here died.

The deportees had no idea what was happening to them. Collective farm bosses treated them with contempt and hatred. KGB files of the period show that the Chechens often responded by refusing to work, or attempting to gain positions of responsibility where they could steal from the state for their own ends. KGB agents went among the population in the run-up to the elections of 1946. Bafflingly – in a manner reminiscent of Russia today – the government of the Soviet Union seemed to genuinely want the electorate to vote for it, even though the election was meaningless and the result rigged.

The authorities were apparently worried that the deportees would simply refuse en masse to vote, as if that might somehow endanger their legitimacy. Their spying revealed a degree of confusion among the Chechens about the true situation that must have disturbed Soviet officials, who were presumably already paranoid enough now the Cold War was starting.

‘I won't participate in the polling, because the Soviet government did not send us here to live, but to die. I would vote for an Anglo-American government with pleasure, because it would be better than the Soviet,' said one Chechen man quoted in the KGB documents.

‘After the elections we will return to the Caucasus, because England and America will help us restore our state. That is why we will not vote for Soviet candidates, we are going to vote in the Caucasus, for our candidates,' said another.

Utsiev was luckier than most. Being alone, he was billeted on local people, who turned out to be kind and looked after him.