Let Our Fame Be Great

In the afternoon of April 15, 2013, I was listening to the radio. An announcer interrupted the broadcast to report that there had been a blast at the Boston Marathon. He was careful not to attribute the bombing to any one group - because we are all afraid of appearing to stereotype one group as terrorists. Indeed, he insisted, the Boston blast might have been caused by a ruptured gas pipe. After Chechen refugees Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were identified as the Boston Marathon bombers, one of my students said to me, "See? Everyone thought it was Muslim terrorists. But now it turns out it was Russians!"My student should read Oliver Bullough's "Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus." So should many people."Let Our Fame Be Great" is a heartbreaking, informative, recommended book. I was often in tears while reading it. I'm very glad I learned what Bullough had to teach. LOFBG is a travelogue through the history, literature, and current events of the Caucasus. This little-known corner of the world should be better known.I have Circassian and Armenian friends. I've been to Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, three countries bordering the Black Sea. I remember reading about the Russian destruction of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in the New York Times. Even so, I knew virtually nothing about the material Bullough introduces in his book.The Caucasus is a spit of land between the Black and the Caspian Seas, between Russia to the north and Turkey and Iran to the south. When Turkey was Europe's "sick man" and its power was declining, Russia moved south to fill the vacuum. Russia wanted access to the Black Sea, because its own ports freeze over in winter. Through brute force, Russia attempted to control or even eliminate the scattered Muslim ethnic groups living in the Caucasus. Russia did this as a czarist empire, as the Soviet Union, and as post-Soviet Russia.Bullough depicts the Russians in the Caucasus behaving, more or less, as American settlers behaved toward the Native Americans. We want your land, and we will do what we have to do to you to get your land.Another comparison: historian Anne Applebaum compared what the Russians did to the Caucasus to what the Nazis did to Poland.Bullough divides his book up into chapters devoted to various Caucasus ethnic groups: Circassians, Mountain Turks, and Chechens. For each group, he works through literature going back hundreds of years, historical accounts, travelogues, state documents, and contemporary accounts. This is a massive amount of material, reduced to brief excerpts.With the Circassians, for example, Bullough quotes literature written by Russian authors like Ivan Turgenev, travel accounts by British representatives toying with the idea of aiding the Circassians against the Russians, quotes from Russian military leaders attacking the Circassians, and encounters with modern-day Circassians living in diaspora in Israel.Bullough has a gift for selecting particularly heart-rending quotes, and he uses many of these quotes as chapter titles: "The Caucasus Mountains are sacred to me," "Extermination along would keep them quiet," "The Circassians do not appear on this list," "Liquidate the bandit group," "It was all for nothing," and "I have become no one."One anecdote Bullough recounts tells of one Caucasus woman, Khozemat Khabilayeva, who, as a child, was part of a Soviet-ordered mass deportation of her homeland. Her dog, Khola, tried to save her family, and he met with a sad fate that Khabilayeva, an old woman now, wept over, decades after his death. There are many such stories in this book, the individual droplets that add up to an ocean wave of history.Because I was so unfamiliar with this history, I did question if Bullough was too sympathetic to the Caucasus peoples, and too hard on the Russians. Bullough, though, includes actual quotes by Russian leaders voicing genocidal intent toward Caucasus people. He cites one Russian leader who decorated his home with the decapitated heads of Circassians.Too, Bullough does report on unappealing aspects of Caucasus culture. Circassians, for example, had the custom of selling their own children into slavery. So many Circassian daughters were sold into sex slavery that the reputation of the beautiful Circassian spread all the way to PT Barnum's sideshow. Bullough describes the 2004 Belsan hostage crisis as a complete horror.I compared what I know of Russian behavior to my own ethnic group, Poles. In Poland, czarist Russia and Soviet Russia deported massive numbers of people, redrew maps, criminalized the identity of oppressed people, executed large numbers of people in order to terrorize populations. Russia, it seems, did to the Caucasus what it did to the Poles. Bullough's account is all too believable.Russia plans to hold the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, one site of its genocide against the Circassians. A Caucasus terrorist leader, Doku Umarov, issued a threat against these games. Terrorism is wrong. The Sochi games should be protested, in peaceful, educational, and solidarity-building ways.Bullough includes photos of the bones of Circassian refugees found lying in the dirt in Akchakale, Turkey. Circassian activists should take these bones from Turkey, by boat across the Black Sea, retracing the route their ancestors took, and bury them in Sochi, with the stated goal of building a genocide monument in Sochi. They should film the entire trip. No doubt the Russians would attempt to stop them. Their peaceful protest would educate the world about their history.I wonder, after reading LOFBG, why no one seems to care about Russia's human rights abuses against Caucasus Muslims. Bullough writes of Khasan Bibulatov, a Chechen man who was horribly tortured by Russians. Zarema Muzhakhoyeva is one of the most pathetic human beings I've ever read about - her life story is right out of an over-the-top Dickens orphanage. She gave up her suicide bomb mission, cooperated with the Russian police, and was still jailed for twenty years. I wonder if so little attention is paid to victims of Russian oppression in the Caucasus because Russia committed many of these crimes as a communist government, and leftists don't want to remind the world that communists were the last century's most prolific murderers.

Do you, for example, know about the Circassian diaspora? Stalin's ethnic cleansing of the mountain Turks (the Karachais, Chechens, Inguish, and Balkars)? Shamil, the charismatic 19th-Century Sufi leader of the Dagestanis? The historical roots of the mayhem and terrorism that have convulsed Chechnya, spilling over into Beslan and Moscow?Before reading this book, I knew distressingly little. For much of modern Western history, the peoples of the Caucasus (the mountains that stretch between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) have been isolated and ignored. But for more than two centuries, Russia has waged war against them, alternately trying to subordinate them, uproot them, or exterminate them. In 1864, in "the first modern genocide on European soil," Russia drove about 1.2 million Circassians from their native lands, killing about 300,000 in the process. In 1943 and 1944, Stalin massacred or exported to the Russian steppes the native Turkish peoples of the North Caucasus, and then expunged them from the official encyclopedia of the peoples of the Soviet Union. After letting the Chechans return during the 1980s, the Soviets reversed course and in 1994 invaded Chechnya, igniting the violence and disorder that have continued since. And those episodes are the more notorious ones - the tip of the iceberg of the hell that has been the Caucasus.Oliver Bullough is a British journalist, who was introduced to the relatively unknown history of the peoples of the Caucasus in covering Chechnyan terrorism in Moscow. His telling of their story in LET OUR FAME BE GREAT is more journalistic than conventional history. As a result, it is more engaging than all but the very best-written history books. Bullough incorporates into his book accounts of his own travels to the Caucasus, anecdotes from extensive research among little-known historical sources (many written in Russian), and his numerous interviews with the victims of violence or their descendants, some located in the Caucasus but many now scattered throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe, from Israel and Turkey to Austria and Poland. By so doing, Bullough imbues the book with a personal dimension that accentuates the senselessness and tragedy that comprises so much of the history of this backwater region. Stalin, ignominiously but with a sad kernel of truth, said, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." This book helps convert the cold statistics back into individual tragedies.The one consistent thread throughout the book is the abominable conduct of the Russians/Soviets. At bottom, LET OUR FAME BE GREAT is a tale of Russian cruelty and duplicity, brutality and mendacity. This nation's treatment of Native Americans has been abhorrent, but it pales in scale and savagery to Russia's treatment of the mountain peoples of the Caucasus. And, by and large, the Russia of today refuses to acknowledge that history. It engages instead in massive historical denial and revisionism, which in turn influences how the rest of the world perceives the region. Ironically, the 2014 Winter Olympics will be based in Soshi, with the Olympic flame situated close to the precise spot that the last free Circassians surrendered to the Russian Army 150 years earlier, in 1864. (In opposing the selection of Soshi, a Circassian activist asked whether the IOC would even consider Auschwitz Birkenau as a possible site for hosting the Olympics.) It will be interesting to see whether the not-so-distant genocidal history of the region is even mentioned in any of the coverage of the Olympics.LET OUR FAME BE GREAT has its flaws. It is the result of prodigious research, both secondary and first-hand, but the sheer volume of material tends to swamp the organization and presentation. There are a few too many instances of overly melodramatic or clichéd writing. But, notwithstanding those flaws, the book reads easily enough and it gets a strong recommendation for shedding so much light on this neglected corner of history and the world.

It is must for anyone wanting to learn of the hardships of indigenous peoples against the tyranny of super powers. None of us are innocent - but we don't know that until the truth is revealed after being squashed for so long. Oliver B is a very talented writer and sympathetic to struggling peoples. He is an obvious risk taker - i really look forward to more of his work.

The people who live in the Caucasus be it the Circassians or the Chechens amongst others have a remarkable story to be told, the author Oliver Bullough with his contacts in the region and his many years of journalism reporting from there tells us about the struggle, the wars that these defiant people have had to go through. Although written from his own viewpoint and for that Russia in the past or Putin in the present isn't looked favourably upon he has made the Caucasus and it's peoples history a great read. Recommended.

A mixture of modern history, travel and polemic, this is a very rich and enriching book, slightly inconsistent in tone and style, but always engrossing. Is this part of Europe or Asia?

Absolutely fascinating book about a fascinating and often ignored region

Superbly conducted, flows effortlessly between history & travel, a must for all who have or plan to fall into the rabbit hole that is the Caucuses.