Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus

by Oliver Bullough

Overview

The jagged peaks of the Caucasus Mountains have hosted a rich history of diverse nations, valuable trade, and incessant warfare. But today the region is best known for atrocities in Chechnya and the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.

In Let Our Fame Be Great, journalist and Russian expert Oliver Bullough explores the fascinating cultural crossroads of the Caucasus, where Europe, Asia, and the Middle East intersect. Traveling through its history, Bullough tracks down the nations dispersed by the region's last two hundred years of brutal warfare. Filled with a compelling mix of archival research and oral history, Let Our Fame Be Great recounts the tenacious survival of peoples who have been relentlessly invaded and persecuted and yet woefully overlooked.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465022571
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	08/03/2010
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	528
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Oliver Bullough studied modern history at Oxford University before moving to Russia in 1999. He lived in St. Petersburg, Bishkek and Moscow over the next seven years, working as a journalist for local magazines and newspapers and then for Reuters news agency. He reported from all over Russia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, but liked nothing more than to work among the peoples and mountains of the North Caucasus. He moved back to Britain in 2006, and now lives in Hackney, East London.

Table of Contents

List of Maps vii

Author's Note xiii

Introduction: Let Us Live in Freedom 1

Part 1 The Circassians, 1864

1 Are You Not a Circassian? 15

2 We Share Happiness, We Share Sadness 32

3 I Give Thee That Little Bird 44

4 Three Hundred Prime-Bodied Circassians 64

5 The Caucasus Mountains are Sacred to Me 75

6 Extermination Alone Would Keep Them Quiet 99

7 A Pear Tree in the Mountains 114

8 Here Lived the Circassians 127

9 The Circassians Do Not Appear in This List 134

Part 2 The Mountain Turks, 1943-4

10 A Read Gramphone 145

11 A Dirty Animal 154

12 Three Little Boys 162

13 The Double-Headed Mountain 167

14 I Always Fought against the Class Enemies 185

15 Liquidate the Bandit Group 195

16 The 'Unnation' was a New Phenomenon 210

17 Playing Stalin 220

Part 3 Grozny, 1995

18 War is War, But to Behave in That Way is Not Right 237

19 A Muslim Submissive to the Will of God 250

20 The Imam and the Princesses 264

21 Fire is Better Than Shame 280

22 The Old Man Shamil 293

23 People Should Not Return Ever 307

24 This is all for the Sake of Allah 323

25 Everyone was Scared of Them 340

26 My Sons were Killed 354

Part 4 Beslan, 2004

27 We Offer You Peace, and the Choice is Up to You 363

28 I Cannot Even Raise My Eyes towards Them 384

29 It was all for Nothing 400

30 The Hard Shackles of Evil 413

31 I Have Become No One 428

32 There is No Need for This Any More 445

Postscript: The Boy Who Chose an Orange, Not a Gun 453

Sources 463

Acknowledgements 477

Index 479

Photo insert between pages 244-245

Editorial Reviews

In this grim exploration of some of history's less publicized tragedies, Bullough, who has reported for Reuters from the Caucasus, covers two centuries of conflict between a remorseless Russian military machine and the proud, warlike, anarchic peoples of the Caucasus Mountains. The crimes he chronicles are vast--the 1864 expulsion of a million Circassians; Stalin's deportations of "Mountain Turks" to Central Asia; Putin's "war of complete savagery" in Chechnya. Bullough tries to convey both their epic scale and their impact on individual victims. His firsthand reporting of the Chechnya conflict is especially evocative, and he adds softer interludes that humanize the material: a survey of Russian Romantic writings about the Caucasus, a vivid profile of 19th-century Chechen guerrilla leader Imam Shamil, visits with Caucasian expatriates. Nevertheless, this overstuffed saga of suffering and injustice can grow dreary. The brutality of Russia's army and officialdom is eternal, while the many ethnicities they oppress blur together, and we get no vivid sense of the cultures that inspire their dogged resistance and nonconformity. 16 pages of photos, maps. (Aug. 3)

Publishers Weekly

Financial Times
"[An] impressive debut....Wonderful travel history....With this impassioned volume [Bullough] has struck a blow for the glory of the Caucasus and helped to give voice to the voiceless."

New Statesman
“Bullough should be congratulated on his brave and tireless investigations into an under-reported region of the world.”

Sunday Times(UK)
"The Caucasus is a frontier land of high, jagged snow peaks, ruined flint fortresses and pine forests that have hidden centuries of bare-rock rebellion by warrior nations. Waves of uprising, conquest, deportation, exile and resettlement have pitted the peoples of the north Caucasus against Russia for hundreds of years and continue to do so still. Oliver Bullough’s book is a painstaking, sensitively reported effort to knit together their lost history."

Spectator(UK)
“Let Our Fame Be Great is a treat. It is finely bound, with excellent maps, and Bullough draws you irresistibly into his narrative, fusing reportage, history and travelogue in colourful, absorbing prose..... He tells a brilliant story, interweaving personal reportage with impressive reading, both in the Caucasus and its far-flung diaspora.”

Kirkus (Starred Review)
“A gripping, often sanguinary account of the history, culture and current status of the people for whom the Caucasus has been home, battleground and slaughterhouse… this is a fearless examination of a brutal place… A remarkably illuminating window into a world of neglected people and deleted history.”

Independent (UK)
“Remarkable....Powerfully-written.”

The Economist (UK)
“Oliver Bullough’s first book marks him out as a distinguished researcher, observer and narrator....His research is formidable.”
 

Financial Times (London)

“A courageous young journalist illuminates one of the world’s most ethnically and culturally diverse regions. His travels and historical back-stories show that contemporary brutality in Chechnya is nothing new, and reminds us of the fate of whole nations such as the Circassians, scattered to the winds by Russian imperialism.”
 
The New Republic
“[I]mpressively researched and devastating… Bullough’s book combines intimate personal accounts, formidable historical research, and first-hand observations collected during years of reporting in the region into a heart-scraping testimony of Russia’s systematic and deliberate brutality in the North Caucasus—and the cruel acts of terror that it continues to provoke.”
 
Christian Science Monitor
“[C]ompelling. . . . As Bullough dashes and darts us through the amazing and forgotten episodes of the region, we see that this is a book of discoveries… cultural history filtered through the eyes and heart of a bright and earnest young writer… fresh and vital, admiring and frustrated.”
 

The Sunday Times (London) Books of the Year
“Oliver Bullough…clearly put his heart and soul into his grand, furious Let Our Fame Be Great.”
 

Times(UK)
"How much do you want or need to understand about a far-off place of which we know little? More than you would think, to judge by the enthusiasm of Oliver Bullough, who brings us exciting news, presented as short, gripping stories that tell of the terrible things that happen to people caught up in constant warfare, who have long struggled for survival and suffered not only diaspora but enforced deportation. The history of their resistance and resilience has been largely unknown for two centuries. Now their stories are sung by a champion and will resound beyond their boundaries."

Norman Stone, Director of the Center for Russian Studies at Bilkent University, and author of The Atlantic and Its Enemies and World War One
“This wonderful, moving book flashes backwards and forwards over a terrain almost impossible to survey, and manages the feat.”

Orlando Figes, author of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia and A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924
“Lively and impassioned… a tragically neglected corner of our world.

From the Publisher

An Institute for War and Peace Reporting journalist debuts with a gripping, often sanguinary account of the history, culture and current status of the people for whom the Caucasus has been home, battleground and slaughterhouse. Several times, Bullough confesses fear or anxiety in this harrowing history of a region he has come to know well and traverse many times, often in the company of people whose language he only partially knows, if at all. Nonetheless, this is a fearless examination of a brutal place, in which the Russians come off particularly poorly. Beginning more than two centuries ago, the Russians-then the Soviets, now the Russians once again-employed every weapon in the arsenal of human cruelty, including murder, massacre, relocation and ethnic cleansing, to subdue people who, according to the author, mostly desired to be left alone. Bullough begins with people less-known in the West-the Circassians-and, deftly maneuvering through history, legend and geopolitics, tells the story of their defeats and diaspora (many are now in Jordan). The author takes us to little-known sites of long-forgotten atrocities, places unknown now even to the local residents, and reminds us continually how victors write history books, erect memorials and control cultural memory. The author then turns to groups of mountain Turks-the Balkars and the Karachais-whose very existence the Soviets denied well into the 1940s. Finally, Bullough explores the complicated and tragic stories of the Chechens, a more familiar name. They, too, suffered unspeakably at the hands of those who wanted their land. The author notes that, in desperation, the Chechens have committed some unspeakably stupid and destructive acts of their own. In this final section, Bullough tells individual stories of people separated from land and loved ones. A remarkably illuminating window into a world of neglected people and deleted history.

Kirkus Reviews