Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars

Overview

When the Russians bombed the capital of Muslim Chechnya in 2000, a city with almost a half million people was left with barely a single building intact. Rarely since Dresden and Stalingrad has the world witnessed such destruction.

The Caucasus is a jagged land. With Turkey to the west, Iran to the south, and Russia to the north, the Caucasus is trapped between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. If it didn't already possess the highest mountain range in Europe, the political ...

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Overview

When the Russians bombed the capital of Muslim Chechnya in 2000, a city with almost a half million people was left with barely a single building intact. Rarely since Dresden and Stalingrad has the world witnessed such destruction.

The Caucasus is a jagged land. With Turkey to the west, Iran to the south, and Russia to the north, the Caucasus is trapped between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. If it didn't already possess the highest mountain range in Europe, the political pressure exerted from all sides would have forced the land to crack and rise. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Peter the Great, Hitler, and Stalin all claimed to have conquered the region, leaving it a rich, but bloody history. A borderland between Christian and Muslim worlds, the Caucasus is the front line of a fascinating and formidable clash of cultures: Russia versus the predominantly Muslim mountains.

Award-winning writer Nicholas Griffin travels to the mountains of the Caucasus to find the root of today’s conflict. Mapping the rise of Islam through myth, history, and politics, this travelogue centers on the story of Imam Shamil, the greatest Muslim warrior of the nineteenth century, who led a forty-year campaign against the invading Russians. Griffin follows Imam’s legacy into the war-torn present and finds his namesake, the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, continuing his struggle.

Enthralling and fiercely beautiful, Caucasus lifts the lid on a little known but crucially important area of world. With approximately 100 billion barrels of crude oil in the Caspian Sea combined with an Islamic religious interest, it is an unfortunate guarantee that the tragedies that have haunted these jagged mountains in the past will show no sign of abating in the near future.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Novelist Griffin (The Requiem Shark) wonderfully weaves historical facts and compelling characters in this adventure through the Caucasus region, the rugged land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. As the current home to the republics of Georgia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan and Dagestan, the Caucasus region is politically tense and historically convoluted, but Griffin deftly explains the past and present state of the region through two parallel narratives. First, Griffin describes his travels though modern Caucasus with a small film crew as they investigate the legend of Imam Shamil, a Chechen leader who successfully fought Russian invaders during the 19th century and whose exploits continue to inspire Chechen fighters today. Griffin then recounts the many stories and myths regarding Shamil, "a figure revered throughout the region, yet virtually unknown to the West," but who was "a front-page regular of the London Times" as he fought against the Russians for almost 20 years. Through powerful descriptions of the fierce combat between Shamil and the Russians, which pitted a guerrilla forces of an indigenous people against the massed troops of an empire, Griffin shows the many ways in which "the echoes of Chechnya between the mid-19th and turn of the 21st century are remarkable." This short work is an excellent and richly detailed look at an important but relatively little-known geopolitical region. (Mar.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Located in the mountainous territory bordering Turkey, Russia, and Iran, the multi-ethnic region of the Caucasus, though rich in anthropological, cultural, and linguistic history, has been examined in only a very limited body of scholarly research. This fetching collection of 28 vignettes explores the legacy of a revered native, Imam Shamil, a 19th-century freedom warrior and inspiration for today's Chechen resistance. The collected essays combine historical and contemporary accounts to illustrate the complex efforts to control this isolated land and peoples: constructed as a continuing narrative, the chapters form a dramatic story of the longest ongoing conflicts in the world. The specialized focus may limit the audience to serious students of the Caucasus, but general readers could find that it inspires greater interest in the area. [Interested readers may wish to consult another recent work, Nart Sagas from the Caucasus, p. 125.-Ed.]-Richard K. Burns, M.S.L.S., Hatboro, PA Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A satisfying blend of history and travel memoir, set in the tortured, contested landscapes of the Caucasus Mountains. English novelist Griffin (The House of Sight and Shadow, 2001, etc.) is a devotee of such wild places as Chechnya, Armenia, and Georgia. Why he is attracted to these venues we never quite learn, but his quest has an interesting basis: Griffin travels into the Caucasus to try to "measure the effect one man can have on his region’s history 150 years after his death," the man in question being the anti-Russian cleric and political leader Imam Shamil, who made life difficult for the Tsar’s empire-builders and provides inspiration for nationalists today. That quest provides a useful thread to hold together this sometimes madcap narrative as Griffin travels from one dreary Stalinist-era city, one snow-shrouded mountain pass to another, gauging the memory of Shamil and, more important, the spirit of resistance that holds Chechens, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and other denizens of the mountains so firm in their hatred of all things Russian save rubles and vodka. There are plenty of reasons for these people to dislike their Russian neighbors. The Muslim Chechens, for instance, were deported en masse into Siberia and Kazakhstan by Stalin, who claimed they were conspiring with the Nazis. They were permitted to return only in 1957, a quarter of their number lost in exile. By the time rebellion flamed into war in 1994, writes Griffin, "Many Russians could not place Chechnya on a map, yet the Chechens had forgotten nothing about Russia." Today the Russian army is busily destroying every building in the land capable of sheltering a sniper (that is to say, every building in the land). And soit goes, the only thing dividing the Chechens in their unified hatred of Russians being the new class system emerging from the thriving black market—enough, one might think, to scare away the equally tenacious Russians. Lively, thoughtful, and a big help in elucidating bewildering struggles in faraway mountains.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780312308537
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Press
  • Publication date: 3/1/2003
  • Edition description: 1ST US
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 256
  • Product dimensions: 5.64 (w) x 8.68 (h) x 0.98 (d)

Meet the Author

Nicholas Griffin was awarded a Betty Trask prize in 2000 for his first novel, The Requiem Shark. His second novel, The House of Sight and Shadow, was published in the same year. Born and bred in London, Griffin now lives in New York.

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