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Catching a Tartar

In April 1851 Leo Tolstoy was a university dropout, troubled by gambling debts and plagued by venereal disease. To escape his drifter’s life in Moscow, he set out to join his brother Nikolai’s artillery unit in Chechnya with the vague intention of enlisting in the army. By the time Tolstoy made his journey, many well-educated young men, inspired by Pushkin and Lermontov, had already gone to fight the peoples inhabiting the mountain fastnesses on Russia’s southern frontier (and perhaps win the heart of a demure tribal princess). The Caucasus quickly became a staple of the empire’s popular fiction, populated by Russian Flashmans.

Tolstoy partially succumbed to the fantasy in his early novel The Cossacks, but he found the reality a bit of a sham. He later confided to his diary that his fellow officers were ‘Stupid people. All – especially my brother – drink, and it is very unpleasant for me. War is such an unjust and evil thing that those who wage it try to stifle their consciences. Am I doing right? My God, teach me and forgive me if I’m doing wrong.’

Whatever misgivings he may have had, Tolstoy signed up to the Russian empire’s war against the mountain tribesmen and went raiding. It was a merciless conflict in which the Chechens killed their own women and children rather than let them fall into the hands of Russian soldiers. Russia’s strategy, outlined by General Alexey Yermolov, was simple: ‘I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains of fortresses, that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death.’

In 1894, by which time the irascible old count had supposedly abandoned literature to preach against autocracy in a belted peasant’s shirt, he returned to fiction and to the mountains where his literary career had begun with the novel Hadji Mu

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In April 1851 Leo Tolstoy was a university dropout, troubled by gambling debts and plagued by venereal disease. To escape his drifter’s life in Moscow, he set out to join his brother Nikolai’s artillery unit in Chechnya with the vague intention of enlisting in the army. By the time Tolstoy made his journey, many well-educated young men, inspired by Pushkin and Lermontov, had already gone to fight the peoples inhabiting the mountain fastnesses on Russia’s southern frontier (and perhaps win the heart of a demure tribal princess). The Caucasus quickly became a staple of the empire’s popular fiction, populated by Russian Flashmans.

Tolstoy partially succumbed to the fantasy in his early novel The Cossacks, but he found the reality a bit of a sham. He later confided to his diary that his fellow officers were ‘Stupid people. All – especially my brother – drink, and it is very unpleasant for me. War is such an unjust and evil thing that those who wage it try to stifle their consciences. Am I doing right? My God, teach me and forgive me if I’m doing wrong.’ Whatever misgivings he may have had, Tolstoy signed up to the Russian empire’s war against the mountain tribesmen and went raiding. It was a merciless conflict in which the Chechens killed their own women and children rather than let them fall into the hands of Russian soldiers. Russia’s strategy, outlined by General Alexey Yermolov, was simple: ‘I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains of fortresses, that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death.’ In 1894, by which time the irascible old count had supposedly abandoned literature to preach against autocracy in a belted peasant’s shirt, he returned to fiction and to the mountains where his literary career had begun with the novel Hadji Murat. It is a book that for me has great personal resonance. In 1851 the Avar warrior Hadji Murat had defected to the Russians after falling out with his fellow tribesman, Imam Shamil, then the ruthless leader of the mountain people’s ghazavat, or holy war, against Russia. Now Imam Shamil conspired to have him killed. Hadji Murat offered his services to the Russians ostensibly to defeat Shamil, but his main aim was to free his family, held hostage by Shamil in the mountains. Tolstoy based his short novel on the Avar commander’s dangerous game, playing off the vain, cruel Tsar Nicholas I against the autocratic Shamil. The book builds an unrelenting case against the power that corrupts both the empire and those who would fight against it, with powerful sketches of the lives crushed between them: the pointless death in a skirmish of a Russian peasant parted from his wife by forced conscription but mourned only by his mother, or the silent children who watch in fear as their Chechen parents and elders cry following a brutal Russian attack on their village. Tolstoy researched the novel’s eponymous hero and his opponents thoroughly, consulting many written sources and pestering campaign veterans for the smallest details. ‘Do not blame me . . . for busying myself with such trivialities when I have one foot in the grave,’ he wrote guiltily to a friend. But for all the research that so obsessed him, Hadji Murat is a novel of action that canters along with the poise of a Kabarda thoroughbred. The English reader is lucky that the translators Kyril Zinovieff, who was born two years before Hadji Murat was published in 1912, and Jenny Hughes, have turned their attention to this lesser known work. Zinovieff can remember having Rasputin pointed out to him in a St Petersburg street and textile workers rioting over bread shortages in 1917, and is thus uniquely placed to ensure none of the novel’s telling details are lost. And with Hughes, who began her career on the front page of the Guardian reporting Ruth Ellis’s execution, the deceptively spare and gripping prose of the original crackles with life.

A cloaked and hooded Hadji Murat, escaping from Shamil at the beginning of the tale, rides quietly into a mountain village with his trusted nuker, or bodyguard, to find sanctuary for the night. He is taken in by a Chechen called Sado (the name of Tolstoy’s actual Chechen kunak, or trusted friend, who helped meet some of the young officer’s gambling debts). Under the strict laws of mountain hospitality, Sado must welcome Hadji Murat, though his presence might mean punishment, even death, if discovered by Shamil.

The way Hadji Murat places his right hand on his chest when greeting Sado, the water poured from a ewer over the guests’ hands, the women ever-present but discreet as they hastily prepare food – all are observed with an anthropologist’s eye and remained unchanged when, as a recipient of Chechen hospitality, I reported the return to war 144 years later. Such details show the mountain peoples as living human beings – not as the two-dimensional fanatics of either nineteenth- century Russian thrillers or of the post-9/11 world, where the Kremlin has found it expedient to have the Chechens subsumed in the faceless ranks of al-Qaeda.

At the beginning of the novel, Tolstoy the narrator stops in a field to gather clover, daisies, campanula and cornflowers. A thistle with a raspberry-coloured flower, known as a ‘Tartar’, catches his eye. Out of sorts after he has destroyed the thistle in attempting to pick it, Tolstoy recalls a field of black earth where another ‘Tartar’ is the only living thing to have survived the plough.

One could see that the whole little bush had been run over by a wheel, later to spring up again, so that it stood crookedly but all the same erect, as if part of its body had been wrenched away, its innards gutted, an arm torn off, an eye pierced. But still it stood erect and had not surrendered to man, who had destroyed all its brethren around it.

The mountain tribesmen’s prickly determination to remain independent (later witnessed by Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag following Stalin’s deportation of the Chechens in 1944) came at a price. Tolstoy’s description of a Russian attack on Sado’s village – the houses and crops burned, the wells and mosque fouled, Sado’s son bayoneted – has for me an eerie prescience as it matched all that I saw as a reporter. ‘Nobody mentioned hatred for the Russians,’ Tolstoy wrote.

The feeling that all Chechens, young and old, nurtured towards the Russians was stronger than hatred. It wasn’t hatred, it was a refusal to recognize those Russian dogs as human beings; and such was the revulsion, loathing and bewilderment in the face of the absurd cruelty of these creatures that the desire to exterminate them, like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders and wolves, came to them as naturally as the instinct of self-preservation.

Tolstoy was wrong about the wolves, for they are the Chechens’ totem, but his description of the mountain people’s attitude to the Russian empire as an almost implacable force of nature remains unchanged. In April 1995, Chechen elders in the village of Samashky quietly pleaded with Chechen fighters to leave the settlement to spare the population from a Russian assault (the Russian military attacked the village with devastating results later that month). I interviewed the Chechen commander responsible for defending Samashky at a feast to mark Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, and asked him what he thought of the elders’ request that he and his men quit the village. ‘There will only be peace when the Russians leave our territory. For 300 years, every 50 years, they destroy our mosques and monuments, they kill our women. It is simply the first time for our generation that we have met the Russians under these conditions.’

Later that day, we visited a cemetery where fresh graves were being dug in anticipation of the Russian attack and where I found Magomet, a thin Chechen elder in a snow-white skull-cap. He reminded me of the village elder who, when asked for news by Hadji Murat at the beginning of the novel, replies: ‘The only news is that the hares are all in council to decide how to chase away the eagles and the eagles tear them to pieces one by one.’

Under the stern gaze of the commander, Magomet started bravely: ‘This is a great day for us – it is a difficult time but we will wait to be judged by Allah.’ But with the sound of shelling in the background, the elder’s voice then wavered and tears started in his eyes: ‘I say this with a troubled heart as I cannot understand why this is being done to us.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © Chris Bird 2013


About the contributor

Chris Bird reported the 1994–6 war in Chechnya for the Associated Press. He is now a paediatrician.

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