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TRACKING THE
COMPLEXITIES OF THE CAUCASUS
Alex van Oss
Eurasianet,
05.04.2009 |
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CC-Literature
and History Department |
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Most Caucasus
writing these days is either journalistic or academic,
obsessed for the most part with conflicts or oil. The Ghost of
Freedom manages to break the mold: Charles King, a professor
of government and international affairs at Georgetown
University, has produced a work that is at once informative,
eclectic, and immensely satisfying. |
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n fewer
than 300 pages King provides a comprehensive and
gracefully written account of the South and North
Caucasus, plus Black Sea regions of Russia, such as
Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Excellent maps by Chris
Robinson depict political boundaries of 1780, 1890, and
2008, showing dramatically how Persian or Ottoman
territory one century became Russian the next, and now,
independent. The title, "The Ghost of Freedom," comes
from Pushkin’s 1821 poem "Captive of the Caucasus" whose
Byronic protagonist, tiring of Mother Russia,
"...quit the confines of his native land, and flew away
to a far off strand with freedom’s cheerful
apparition..."
… Or its illusion. The hero gets captured by locals,
finds romance, and then escapes. The poem inspired
sundry other stories, operas, a ballet, a book, plus a
film or two--all with the same title; and it prompted
thousands of restless Russians to "go West" (go south,
that is) and seek love, profit, epiphany, and adventure
in the mountains.
So much for Pushkin. When pondering this seductive part
of the world, it is useful to keep a couple of points in
mind; first, the Caucasus is not Russia, and second,
Russia is not the Caucasus. The Ghost of Freedom
explains why the region is no longer the "jewel in the
crown," or a proving ground for a Big Brother; nor can
it in any way be considered a single political entity.
Rather, its extremely variegated terrain also harbors
distinct cultural ecosystems that at various times have
been called a "museum of mankind," a "mountain of
tongues," and even a "sculpture" (see below), with a
bewildering array of languages, ethnicities, and views
of history.
Indeed, the Caucasus can be likened to the classic
children’s finger-puzzle in which 15 little sliding
squares, enclosed in a frame, must be reconfigured in
correct sequence. This is devilishly hard to do. In the
living puzzle of the Caucasus there are of course many
more pieces, which King rearranges in various
illuminating ways, while neatly summarizing vast amounts
of history.
King begins at the beginning, 25 million years ago, with
the collision of continents that forced up most of the
mountain ranges of Eurasia, including the Caucasus and
its deposits of oil and gas. (By the way, this
geological train-wreck is still in progress, albeit in
extremely slow motion.) There has been much cultural as
well as tectonic grinding in the Caucasus over the
centuries. Scores of indigenous peoples and invaders
have collided, traded, and genetically intermingled,
leaving remnants and pockets of themselves in valleys,
among alpine meadows, and in isolated auls (aerie-like
highland villages) between the Black and Caspian Seas.
The Caucasus has paid the price of being a cultural
crossroads, and has weathered incursions from every
quadrant: Persians from the southeast; Greeks and Romans
(plus Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans, and Turks) from the
southwest; Huns, Avars, Mongols (and Russians, British,
Germans, and so forth) from the north. The result--as
cartographers soon discover to their dismay -- is what
King describes as "borders on the move" (a concept
reminiscent of certain ancient Caucasus legends that
describe a time when the mountains could actually walk
around...on ’legs’ of clouds!)
Maps are never the territory, of course, but King’s
"surfeit of borders" precisely describes a neck of land
historically chock-a-block with feudal clans and feuding
vassalages, suzereinties, satrapies, and client
states--and their shifting alliances. Add to this the
poking and prodding by great powers and no wonder
Caucasus politics displays a certain operatic quality
(Bolshevik Revolution here, Rose Revolution there,
charming folk dances and drinking songs over yonder,
while oil wheeler-dealers and ’frozen conflict
peacekeepers’ wait in the wings). Readers of The Ghost
of Freedom will perhaps not be surprised to learn that
the maneuvering continues, the United States being but
the latest partner (or padrone) active in the South
Caucasus. Tomorrow--who knows?--that role may revert to
Russia, Turkey, or even China, and once again we would
need to redraw the maps.
Today’s nations can be old or spanking new. Azerbaijan,
King writes, is only a 20th-century construct; but even
ancient entities such as Georgia and Armenia can wink on
and off over the centuries:
"Two hundred years ago the map of the Caucasus looked
very different from the one that exists today. Unified
places called Georgia and Armenia had long ago
disappeared, the former in the fifteenth century, and
the latter in antiquity. Both were geographical rather
than political expressions. A place called Azerbaijan,
when the term was used at all, was more likely to refer
to what one would now call northwestern Iran [p. 14-15].
"Modern maps that show great swaths of colored territory
as clearly belonging to one or another khanate, kingdom,
principality, or empire are fundamentally misleading
about the real nature of sovereignty on the ground. The
goal of any political power was to control the locus of
extraction, such s a key bridge, port, mountain pass, or
fortress. When borders did serve something like a modern
purpose, they were usually meant not to keep people out
but to keep them in." [ p.21]
The photographs in this volume are subtle and bear close
examination. Two poignant images from the Library of
Congress depict victims of war and massacres in 1919:
one shows a row of Armenian orphans (bareheaded,
barefoot), the other a similarly posed rank of
Muslim/Turkish orphans (shod, hatted, holding staves). A
1935 photograph from the Hoover Institution Archives
portrays Stalin’s henchman, Lavrenty Beria, standing
next to three colleagues from Armenia, Abkhazia, and
Azerbaijan. In retrospect it is a chilling artifact, for
the following year the Armenian and Abkhazian would die
under unusual circumstances after meeting with Beria
(expiring by ’suicide’ and spasms, or possibly a
’heart-attack,’ respectively); the Azerbaijani was
liquidated three years later. The Caucasus can be unkind
to its own.
Battle and treaty dates can make for notoriously tedious
reading; happily King manages to quick-march through
history with panache, pausing frequently to clarify
events and their wider implications (which events in the
Caucasus always have). He also de-romanticizes the
region:
"The legendary horsemanship and daring of Caucasus
fighters were acknowledged even by their enemies.
Russian painters depicted engagements between [Russian
allied] Cossacks-of-the-line and their Circassian and
Daghestani counterparts, with riders galloping at full
tilt toward one another, meetings with the clash of
saber and lance. However, such engagements were probably
the exception rather than the rule. The Caucasus wars
were always partly guerilla campaigns--what would today
be called seasonal counterinsurgency operations. They
rarely involved anything approximating pitched battles,
at least of the type that Russian officers and men knew
from their wars with other empires." [p.73]
The world learned about the Caucasus from travel
accounts, 19th century Russian writers (Pushkin,
Lermontov, Tolstoy, and others), and from press coverage
of the long wars between highlanders and tsarist armies.
To this must be added the allure of show business:
Buffalo Bill Cody featured "Cossack" horsemen--actually
Georgians--in his Wild West Show, while P.T. Barnum
hawked "Circassian Beauties" (Irish, perhaps) as
sideshow attractions. Exotic representations of the
Caucasus continue to this day: John le Carré’s
spy-thriller Our Game takes readers to some of the
wilder-and-woolier parts of southern Russia; and John
Ringo has a popular series of science fiction novels set
in eastern Georgia: Ghost, Kildar, Choosers of the
Slain, Unto the Breach.
The Caucasus was home to early Christian and Muslim
states, and even earlier Jewish and Zoroastrian
communities; paganism, once widespread, continues to
exist. While never a paragon of tolerance, the Caucasus
has avoided "clashes-of-civilizations"--although
imperial Russia periodically used religion in its
recruitment of Armenians to fight the Ottomans, and
radical imams sought to unite the North Caucasus in
jihad against the Russian advance. But somehow the spark
never caught fire, due in part to the region’s
heterogeneity. This was its strength and also its
weakness. King describes the tsarist strategy of
dividing and conquering the Caucasus by way of its
geographical "flanks" (corresponding roughly to the
Caspian and Black Sea watersheds):
"The middle ground... between the right and the left
flanks was also home to a variety of peoples, some of
whom were loyal to the tsar, while others lived in
out-of-the-way areas and consequently posed no immediate
threat to imperial power. Among the latter groups were
the Turkic-speaking Karachai and Balkars; the Ossetians,
whose villages helped insulate the road against
highlander attacks; and the peoples of mountainous
Georgia, the Svans, Khevsurs, Pshavs, and Tush. The
great dream of some highland leaders was to unite the
two flanks, which were separated by no more than 150
miles, into a single front. The great success of Russian
policy was that it prevented them from ever doing so."
[p.68]
The quaint term "Caucasian," as an ethnic category,
harks back to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s On the
Natural Variety of Mankind (1775), in which the German
physician tried to link physical characteristics (such
as skull size) to culture. Blumenbach considered
Caucasians to be the world’s most ancient--and
beautiful--white people. (Caucasians actually come in
all shapes, sizes, and hues of hair and skin color.)
Ethnography has often been politicized, and in the
Caucasus Russian and Soviet academics demonstrated what
King calls the "Enlightenment urge to taxonomize." As
King puts it, Russian popular imagination fed upon the
works of writers and painters (sometimes one and the
same, as with Mikhail Lermontov), who in turn fed on
volumes of ethnography. Their curiosity was wide and
deep; King includes the instructions from the St.
Petersburg imperial academy to a German explorer, Julius
von Klaproth, in 1807; the academy wanted to know:
"Are there traditions respecting the existence of
Amazons? Who are the likely descendants of the
Scythians, the ancient steppe dwellers described by
Herodotus? Where are the passes in the mountains? What
is to be found in the districts south of the highlands,
especially along the black Sea? What s the word for
"tribe" in the Lezgin dialects? Are the women of the
Caucasus as beautiful as is often claimed?" [p.104]
Another scholar, Semyon Bronevskii, toiled for years
over a massive two-volume overview of earlier explorers’
notes, all the while working at administrative posts.
The fruits of his labor, titled The Latest Geographical
and Historical Information on the Caucasus, brought the
Caucasus out of academia and into Russian
consciousness--and King continues this tradition for
western readers.
The Ghost of Freedom perforce covers a lot of ground.
Divided into five chapters, the book describes geology
and geography; imperial and colonial designs on the
Caucasus (and staunch resistance to it); Caucasus
ethnography and imagery in popular culture; the
Bolshevik, Soviet, and independence periods--and much
more. Thirty subsections bear catchy titles, such as
"Ermolov Comes!," "There is Something to Be Gained on
the Heights," and "Eros and the Circassian."
For the most part it is smooth sailing, but some
sections are filled to bursting and dense. Chapter Two,
for example, covers the complexities of Islam, Caucasus
military strategy, fighting techniques, biographies of
imams, Georgia’s bureaucracy, the Circassian
diaspora--all fascinating, but a lot to absorb. More
headings would have been helpful; as it is, readers will
need to rely on the index or write notes in the margins
(a shame, for this book is too handsome to mark up).
That said, King certainly writes engagingly: he leavens
the narrative with anecdotes and verse, and swoops and
soars on his magic Caucasus carpet from region to region
and one time period to another. Such verve conveys a
marvelous sense of the Caucasus as being almost a work
of art, physically and culturally: a natural sculpture,
no part of which can be truly understood without
awareness of the whole--a whole which underwent
considerable modification in the 1800s, as Russian
troops fortified, cut down vast forests, and built
military highways in order to extirpate resistance.
The Ghost of Freedom brings together current research,
and also classic works by English, French, German, and
Russian adventurers, and scholars. We read of Douglas
Freshfield’s epiphanies while climbing in the Caucasus
mountains in 1869--epiphany, King points out, being a
crucial aspect of climbing in those days that was soon
to be overcome by the newer craze of seeking ever
greater technological challenges, not just a good view.
(This is a pity: I recall my own delight at discovering
in my local public library a rare masterpiece of
Victorian nature writing by James Bryce, a British
parliamentarian and ambassador to the United States.
Bryce climbed Mount Ararat in 1876 in one of the
earliest ascents on record. It was an arduous adventure;
nevertheless Bryce took careful notes and describes
every interesting pebble encountered, every geological
formation, every species of flora and fauna, and every
fog patch, cloud and shift of light. Evidently Lord
Bryce carried no camera.)
Charles King offers a wealth of surprising and trenchant
perceptions about, for example, the ambiguous role of
British officers during the fighting between Russians
and highlanders, and the fate of soldiers taken into
slavery. There is a long Caucasus tradition of slaves,
hostages, deserters, and renegades; the analogy to North
America is inescapable: many soldiers in the Caucasus
"went Indian" by choice, or by an offer they couldn’t
refuse.
Sometimes Caucasus history can seem like musical chairs,
and in this regard King tackles a delicate subject: the
fact that Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, despite
their ancient artistic and religious heritage, owe a
considerable cultural debt to Russia and Europe.
Printing, jurisprudence, pedagogy, theater, literature,
music, philosophical inquiry, and more: all got a
vitamin injection from 19th century graduates of
universities in St. Petersburg and abroad. Consider the
remarkable British-educated Mikhail Vorontsov, whom Tsar
Nicholas I made commander-in-chief of Caucasus forces;
he was certainly ruthless, but also cosmopolitan:
"Vorontsov was convinced that the Caucasus needed a
genuine political, cultural, and economic center--much
as Odessa had become the effective capital of New
Russia--and Tiflis was to be it. Parts of the city had
remained in ruins since the Persian onslaught of 1795.
Vorontsov laid on plans for its rebuilding, creating
wide thoroughfares and designing new residential
districts...the first drama theaters were established in
1850 and 1851 (one for Georgian plays, another for
Russian), and the famous Tiflis opera house was soon
inaugurated, complete with an Italian company regularly
performing well-known pieces...the booming cultural life
in Vorontsov’s Tiflis was a sign of the city’s gradual
rise from garrison town to urban imperial outpost."
[p.86]
Baku was soon to boom as well, thanks to oil; Yerevan
had to wait until after the First World War, when its
population swelled from the influx of Armenians uprooted
from Ottoman Turkey.
One of the lesser known chapters of world history
concerns the 19th century mass expulsion by Russians of
Circassians and other groups from the northwestern
Caucasus and Black Sea coast. Highlanders and Abkhaz
were forced into Anatolia, the Balkans, and further
corners of the Ottoman Empire. Inadequately housed and
fed, a great many perished from disease or in storms at
sea. Up to 500,000 Caucasus peoples (often labeled as
’Circassians,’ regardless of origin) left in the 1860s;
King puts the total from 1859-1878 at 2 million. These
deportees resettled and often attained high military and
administrative positions in their new homes. From
revolutionary Russia and the Middle East, thousands
emigrated to Europe and the United States, not
infrequently maintaining their traditional vocations and
codes of honor, and finding employment in diplomacy,
various military or security agencies, and other
government services. To this day there are Circassian
villages in Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and elsewhere.
The ripple effects of Caucasus politics spread outwards,
even to the United States, in the form of business
ventures to political misadventures (an Armenian bishop
was assassinated in New York in 1933) and political
lobbying. Wrangling on Capitol Hill over official United
States recognition of an Armenian genocide has, directly
or indirectly, ended the career of one American
ambassador to Armenia, obstructed the ratification of
another, and threatens to be a perennial stone in many
peoples’ shoes. On the matter of Ottomans, Armenians,
and genocide, King states bluntly:
"In nearly all instances of large-scale violence, state
manipulation and local circumstances come together in a
contingent, complicated, and ultimately deadly mix. The
Armenian genocide was neither explicitly ordered as a
single act of violence, nor was it the unavoidable
consequence of some ancient quarrel between Muslims and
Christians. Rather, it was the result of communal fear,
ethnic reprisals, government paranoia, and fitful
experimentation with targeted killing as a tool of
modern statecraft." [p 197]
King continually reminds us of the multiple dramas
unfolding in Anatolia at the turn of the 20th century:
the collapse of empires and the formation of new
nations, the First World War, the brutality and chaos of
times a-changing, and the eruption of local antagonisms
into something widespread and genocidal. Such a saga
ought to inspire great novels, films, and television
series--of the scope and subtlety, say, of Paul Scott’s
The Raj Quartet, about the final years of British rule
in India--but they have yet to appear.
The last part of The Ghost of Freedom brings us into the
present, and shows how today Caucasus is of a piece with
the region in earlier times, and how post-Soviet changes
have been a mixed blessing:
"The real story [post-Soviet] ... is not about
deep-rooted sentiments of ethnicity or ancient
grievances but about the ways in which personal
ambition, structural incentives, and the simple presence
of sufficient quantities of guns led to bloody
conflict." [p.212]
The author evenhandedly describes the political ecology
of the intractable "legacy conflicts" in Abkhazia, South
Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and in the North Caucasus.
Too often the dreary occurrences in Chechnya,
Ingushetia, and increasingly other regions--lawless
police arrests, citizen ’disappearances,’ executions,
systemic brutality, and also acts of terrorism, such as
the occupation of the Beslan elementary school in North
Ossetia--are viewed as remote and internal Russian
affairs. Journalists traveling to those regions risk
their lives. The sad truth is that Caucasus unrest only
undermines Russia’s security, as it lines the pockets of
the purveyors of weapons, narcotics, and contraband.
Human trafficking and illegal wheeling and dealing,
while not new or unique to the Caucasus, is increasingly
profitable and international.
Paul Goble, a specialist on CIS minorities, asserts
ominously that Russia has never controlled the North
Caucasus without first controlling the South. But
control need not be the result of invasion or
occupation. Russia now owns and coordinates much of the
Caucasus energy infrastructure, while militarily it
fosters close ties with Armenia and maintains proxies
and "peacekeepers" in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
However, Russia is not the only player in this region:
newcomers to the game include the United States (which
openly pursues its interests and maintains agents of
influence, including military, in the South Caucasus),
not to mention Kazakhstan and China.
Finally, The Ghost of Freedom touches upon an old and
extremely important question: Is the Caucasus a part of
Asia, the Middle East, or Europe? The first two
certainly. As for the latter, I have heard all kinds of
enthusiastic assertions: that, for example, Europe and
the Caucasus have a natural affinity, and that
everything from chivalry and horsemanship, to the "look"
of Hellenic statues and temples, to Romanesque and
Gothic construction techniques, to the fancy footwork of
"Irish" dancing--in short, many of the key aspects of
European culture arose in those parts. Be that as it
may, the European Union, motivated by its need for
Caspian energy resources, has finally begun to adjust
its bureaucratic gears to become more usefully engaged
in the Caucasus. Should Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan
ever find themselves in the EU, it would mean radical
changes in self-perception throughout Europe, and the
Black Sea and Caspian regions. Charles King’s The Ghost
of Freedom helps us understand why.
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