The tract of land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea is called the Caucasus. It is divided into two parts: the North Caucasus (or Ciscaucasia), comprising Chechnya and its neighbouring republics, which are all under Russian control, and the South Caucasus (or Transcaucasia) occupied by Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, a trio of young states attaining independence with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. The name ‘Soviet Union’ is a contradiction in terms. That state was in no way a union of nations, but a Russian communist empire that was authoritarian, restrictive and repressive. For that very reason, it was not in the least soviet, which etymologically means consultative.
It was an autocrat called the ‘secretary general’, ‘leader’ or ‘father of the peoples’ who held the power of life and death in that totalitarian and despotic empire, where ‘only the spooks [would] confer with each other[i],’ as the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, an emigrant to Europe and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, observed with derision.
The North Caucasus was annexed by the Russians in 1864, at the end of an exceptionally long and bloody war. It all began with Georgia’s transition to a Russian protectorate in 1783, a protectorate that several years later was transmogrified into a blatant annexation. From then on, the fate of the North Caucasians was sealed. To communicate with their new province, the Russians had to go through Ciscaucasia, hence the importance of conquering it. Certain peoples such as the Ossetians submitted without resistance, whereas others like the Chechens, Dagestanis and Circassians sold their freedom, but at a high price. But at a high price or not, Russia has never been short of reservists: it was and still is unbeatable in terms of its cannon-fodder supply. No matter how tough the decades-long resistance, 70 million[ii] Russians could not be defeated. ‘The Muscovites lose an army, and another swiftly replaces it; the autocrat has merely to stamp on the ground and legions emerge[iii][1]!’ Similarly, at the time of the military parade held in Red Square on November 7, 1941, Joseph Stalin—under whose leadership the USSR spent 45% of its existence—declared as he sent fresh forces to the front: ‘Our human reserves are inexhaustible[iv].’ Human reserves, then, rather than our people, our heroes, our dear and much-loved defenders. Human reserves. Inexhaustible. No one took offence at this; we are not offended by the truth. Stalin was in fact well placed to make the claim, having wiped out nearly a million of his subjects between 1937 and 1938 alone[v].
It is not widely known that before the Russian conquest, the greater part of Chechen territory was covered by a thousand-year-old forest. It slowed down and greatly hampered the Russians’ progress, which was why they devastated it for decades from beginning to end of a half century of war lasting from 1817 to 1864.
The dating of the start of the Caucasian War is furthermore not without interest. Historians opine that it could have started in the eighteenth century, if not the seventeenth or sixteenth, but rightly or wrongly[vi] they opted for 1817. That was the year in which infantry general Aleksey Yermolov, the newly promoted commander of the ‘Detached Caucasian Army Corps[vii]’ with a liking for being called ‘Proconsul of the Caucasus[viii]’, decided with the tsar’s agreement to transfer the Russian military line from Terek to Sunzha, situated deep in Chechen territory and rich in pasture as well as agricultural land. This measure was intended to force the Chechens into the mountains, there to be prey to hunger and a life of little privacy. The idea was not new, having initially been put forward in 1783 by one of Yermolov’s predecessors[ix].
The Russian generals believed (or pretended to believe) that seizing the Chechens’ pastures and farmland would break their resistance once and for all; in truth, the Russian ploy merely stiffened it to the point of triggering the Caucasian War. ‘It is hard to explain away, even by a desire to bring about “total submission”, […] the wilful annexation of lands that were vital to Chechen agriculture. Even if one admits it was possible for the mountain-dwelling North Caucasians to renounce their freedom and rights, man’s need to eat is just a little too deeply rooted,’ the Russian historian Mikhail Pokrovsky commented in the nineteen twenties[x]. It is quite natural, therefore, that the occupation of Sunzha caused such an outcry in Chechnya.
‘From the first appearance of our troops on the Sunzha, the Chechens—powerless to prevent the construction of the new line that would deprive them of their livelihood and eliminate any chance for them of staging raids on the stanitsas[2] along the old line bordering the Terek river—were eager to present the offence that had been committed against them as one perpetrated against all the free peoples of the Caucasus. They predicted a similar fate in store for the remaining tribes if they did not join forces in advance to push back the danger threatening them[xi],’ may be read in the biography of one of Yermalov’s immediate staff, Lieutenant General Valerian Madatov[xii], that was written in 1837 by three of the latter’s comrades-in-arms[xiii]. In spite of the curiously accusatory and reproving tone of these lines (as if it were forbidden for a people at war to seek alliances), the course of events proved the Chechens right: all the independent populations in the Caucasus were slaughtered or crushed under the Russian juggernaut.
The transfer of Russia’s southern border from Terek to Sunzha, pre-planned and introduced in 1817[xiv], was completed the following year with the construction of Fort Groznaya (Fortress Terrible[3]) between the two rivers. ‘The largest fortress in the North Caucasus[xv],’ Groznaya at once became the headquarters[xvi] (administrative and strategic centre[xvii]) of the Russian left-flank positions covering the north-eastern Caucasus, as opposed to those of the right flank in action against the Circassians on the Black Sea coast to the north-west of the isthmus[4]).
At various times, Groznaya sheltered within its walls all the heavy and light weights of Russian classical literature that served in the Caucasus: Lermontov, Tolstoy, Polezhaev, Bestuzhev, Odoevsky and Griboyedov[xviii]. The heir to the Russian throne and future emperor Alexander II visited Grozny in 1850[xix].
The poet Alexander Chichkov was personally involved in Groznaya’s foundation and erection works[xx] and it is therefore as someone with a profound knowledge of his subject, in his capacity as a witness and active participant, that he composed the following verses to a Chechen woman:
Mount your horse, my consort,
I saddled it with my own hands.
Mount up, my consort, the sun sinks
Behind the mountain.
We can see the white Cossack tents,
The enemy is abroad on our Sunzha
And the infidels are drinking their fill
Of fiery Chechen blood.
Fall upon them and with your blade
Repel these undesirable guests,
And for me, my dear, as a gift,
Bring back their white skulls.[xxi]
Chechnya along with the entire Eastern Caucasus fell in 1859, followed five years later by Circassia in the Western Caucasus. The Russians thus made themselves masters of the whole isthmus.
With the passage of time, Fort Groznaya made way for the town of the same name (the word ‘town’, unlike ‘fortress’, being masculine in Russian, the feminine form of the adjective groznaya could no longer be retained). In 1991, as a result of the collapse of the USSR, it became the capital of the Chechen nation-state. Admittedly, the State was ‘self-proclaimed’ like all world states, but no less legitimately: on April 26 1990, the first and last president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, granted to the autonomous subjects of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) more or less the same status as that enjoyed by the RSFSR and fourteen other large Soviet republics (the present-day Ukraine, Belarus (formerly Belorussia), Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and so on[xxii]. From then on, finding itself in the political-legal no man’s land born of the Soviet empire’s ultimate disintegration, Chechnya could now permit itself anything that any of these fifteen countries could, including secession from the Union. It never did declare independence from the Russian Federation unilaterally for the simple reason that it had never been a part of it. Chechnya had formed a sovereign state and adopted its constitution before the Russian Federation even appeared on the map, by drafting and signing its founding treaty in March 1992, as well as by voting on and adopting its Constitution in December 1993. These were so many developments in which Chechnya took no part because it was uninvolved.
It is Russia that unilaterally declared Chechnya to be its subject by including it as such in the above Constitution and by ignoring the will of the Chechen people. Despite these indisputable facts, raising once again the eternal question of whether or not the chicken preceded the egg, the body of European research opinion is as one in describing the Chechens as either ‘separatists’ or at best as ‘independentists’, the latter description certainly signifying the same thing but for several reasons sounding much sweeter to the Chechen ear. In the first place, this term incorporates the word independence that is so dear to and inherent in every Chechen mind. Secondly, its morphology makes no reference to the idea, inherently faulty here, of secession from a mother country. The third reason is that the expression has no direct equivalent in Russian and, once taken into the language, would have been as deprecated and delegitimised as separatist.
The break-up of the USSR, decided without consulting anyone by the leaders of its three Slavonic republics (the Russian Boris Yeltsin and his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts), did not on the other hand amount to anything remotely legal. It was, however, readily accepted by the world as it marked the death of a global bête noire, to wit the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, this same world provided further evidence of its ‘discernment’ when it came to recognising Chechnya’s independence. ‘We hope that order can be restored [in Chechnya] with a minimum amount of bloodshed and violence. That’s what we have counseled and encouraged[xxiii],’ the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, declared the day after the launch of the ground offensive against Chechnya in December 1994. ‘When it is convenient, the West will swallow anything: the destruction of Grozny, the massacres in Chechnya and all the rest of it[xxiv],’ British journalist Daniel Singer observed, even as NGOs like Médecins Sans Frontières were condemning ‘a total war that targets not only the combatants but the whole population, young and old, men, women and children,’ a war ‘in which neither civilians nor hospitals are respected and all international standards and international agreements are openly violated[xxv].’
One of the few politicians to understand that the West was giving birth to a neo-autocratic Frankenstein through its laisser-faire attitude was Lionel Jospin, Jacques Chirac’s opponent in the 1995 French presidential election: ‘As far as Chechnya is concerned, I find we have displayed a singular timidity and, I would go so far as to say, a singular complacency regarding Russia and Boris Yeltsin on the basis of a line of argument above all advanced by the Americans—who have brought a lot of influence to bear on this affair—that consists in thinking that it is by writing off the crushing of the Chechens that either democracy or Yeltsin’s position in Russia will be consolidated. I believe on the contrary we are undermining democracy’s chances in Russia[xxvi].’ These providential words, broadcast live to millions of Frenchmen, have never been quoted by any of the many experts on the North Caucasus and Russia, who nonetheless continue year after year to produce ever more analytical fabrications.
A society that refuses to recognise and admit its errors is condemned to repeat them ad infinitum. ‘Georgia is today paying for the cowardice and lack of vision our politicians displayed during the Chechen massacre[xxvii],’ Figaro reporter Laure Mandeville wrote in a book published in 2008, referring to the Russian army’s intervention in the South Caucasian republic’s internal conflict. It failed to see that it was the entire world that would have to pay for its blindness, notably with the Russian intervention in Syria in 2015 and in the Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. ‘We can continue our training exercise in Syria for long enough without jeopardising our budget significantly[xxviii],’ Putin blissfully reassured his fellow citizens during his annual Direct Line television program, broadcast to the nation in December 2015. ‘It is hard to imagine a better training[xxix],’ he added. His words were unflinchingly relayed by all state media outlets, which were also perfectly unaware of their cynicism. There is just one problem: the best possible training as far as the Kremlin is concerned, involves perpetuating what is a humanitarian disaster for the Syrian people whilst provoking a migrant crisis for the rest of the world. In coming to the aid of the dictator Bashar al-Assad, Russia has caused the civil war ravaging the Arab republic to drag on and, through a mirror effect, the flood of refugees fleeing to Europe and Turkey, not to mention the deaths of hundreds of civilians and insurgents killed by Russian aircraft—as part of this training—under the evergreen pretext of the fight against terrorism.
It will be remembered the same pretext was used by the Russians in 1999 when they attacked Chechnya. ‘Yeltsin’s surprise resignation and handover of responsibility to the designated heir apparent, Vladimir Putin, confirmed what was felt worldwide. […] The bringing to heel of the rebellious Caucasian “bandits” would be a perfect springboard to victory for the interim president in the March 2000 electoral battle. […] In order to stand a chance, all parties and all presidential candidates were obliged to rally to this great national cause. That internal stability in Russia should rest upon the annihilation of a small nation says much concerning the extent of the decay in Russian society[xxx],’ as one French commentator observed in February 2000. And one Russian human rights activist went even farther in 2011: ‘The whole of Russian society is proving to be sick: it lends its allegiance to a man who called for ‘killing even in the khazis[xxxi]’ (toilets).
The exact expression in Russian used by Putin is сортир, which does not mean ‘khazis’ but, to be more precise, ‘latrines’. All the rural and sometimes urban part of this ‘half of the globe[xxxii]’ called Russia is dotted with these stinking, rudimentary huts through a lack of toilet facilities befitting the 21st century. For a start, instead of providing itself with sewers and wastewater disposal systems, Russia spends billions to ‘save the world’ by intervening in Syria, waging a full-scale war against Ukraine, cooperating militarily with dictatorial regimes, financing the extreme right in Europe, and bringing pressure to bear on the internal affairs of the former soviet republics. In August 2017, the unveiling of some simple water pumps[xxxiii] was a regional historic event in Tomsk, a Siberian city of more than half a million inhabitants. However, it is not a matter of bringing water into homes there, but of moving it closer to them to a distance ‘not exceed[ing] 100 metres[xxxiv],’ as the town hall blandly boasted.
And this backward, poverty-stricken and unbelievable country—where care products and cosmetics containing over 0.5% alcohol[xxxv] (the degree above which sprays and lotions end up in the stomachs of consumers in need of a drink)—aspires to be a superpower in a position to decide the fate of entire nations! Would it not be better for everyone if it cleaned up its own backyard and introduced some civilisation at home before attempting to take other countries back to the stone age by placing them under its control? Bordered by three oceans and fourteen seas, holding great riches in its sub-soil as well as all the elements in Mendeleev’s periodic chart, Russia with its 145 million inhabitants could become a veritable eldorado, a promised land and welcoming country in which everyone would dream of living. It could be done, if the country were not populated by a nation of people with so little ability, talent, work ethic or creativity. To say that Russian civilisation boils down to vodka and the Kalashnikov is hardly an exaggeration. ‘We have given only the samovar to the world and that may still prove not to be our invention[xxxvi],’ Turgenev wrote. And the novelist hammered the point home with: ‘If Russia along with all its past history were to disappear from the surface of the globe, the condition of humankind would be unaffected[xxxvii].’
Let it be said: it is not as though Russia lacked the space and natural resources to demonstrate to the rest of the world and its immediate neighbours the benefits it can bring them. So, let it show them whether it has something else to offer other than moral and intellectual stagnation. It should otherwise leave them in peace and let them evolve as they see fit. The former leader of the Chechen Islamists, Shamil Basayev, is credited with the following aphorism: ‘Finding yourselves in the shit up to your necks, your Great Russian Dream is to drag everyone else into it with you.’ If it is difficult to gauge this quotation’s authenticity, it is nevertheless not completely without foundation.
2
It’s 1877 and the Russian and Ottoman empires are at war in the Balkans and Transcaucasia. The Russian HQ is located at Chisinau in present-day Moldavia. It is there that on April 25, 1877, Mikhail Gazenkampf, secretary to the Russian commander-in-chief on the Transcaucasian front, notes in his personal diary: ‘Very grave news has been received from the Caucasus. The Chechens have rebelled in the Terek region; clashes with them resulted in several dead and about 50 wounded. The former aide-de-camp to Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich [Romanov], Colonel Wolfert (he currently commands a Cossack brigade here), says it is the natural consequence of the oppression to which the Chechens were being subjected by our government.[xxxviii]’
It can be seen that even the high-ranking Russian officer, related to the emperor’s brother, Colonel Gustav Wolfert who would later be promoted to major-general, recognised the justness of the Chechen anticolonial revolt of 1877 led by Alibek Hadji. It was quelled bloodily by 30,000 soldiers[xxxix] and Alibek Hadji and his lieutenants were hanged, in spite of being promised mercy. The condemned men had refused to appeal. ‘Let the whole world know of the white tsar’s[5] treachery[xl],’ were Alibek’s last words.
But the world, alas, gave no thought to the drama unfolding in the Caucasus, neither before, during, nor after this revolt that was preceded and followed by other troubles.
Astonished by this silence and indifference, a Polish émigré, Jean Czynski, wondered in 1837: ‘In a hundred years’ time, who will believe that the inhabitants of Western Europe […] did not have the slightest knowledge, the least idea even of Moscow’s political and social state? […] Who will believe that the countries conquered by Russia as well as those still resisting it were unknown? Will it be believed that in order to form a judgement on the character, number, religion and language of these militant peoples, one is obliged in France, for example, to have recourse to and refer to what Russian historians wanted to say about it, unless one prefers to stick to bulletins of the Berlin and Vienna gazettes [faithful to Moscow’s version of the story]? And yet it is historically recognised that one of the most courageous peoples [the Circassians] is now faced with and wrestling with the most powerful empire on earth and defending itself with extraordinary courage; and in France no one knows who is fighting, where they are fighting or the number of combatants… and no statesman has taken himself to the battlefield in order to be sure of the nature of the struggle, and help those repelling aggression, if not by procuring weapons and gold for them, then at least giving them some salutary advice.[xli]’
The question ‘In a hundred years’ time, who will believe (…)’ posed by Czynski finds its answer in the person of another political émigré by the name of Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, this time of Chechen origin, who fled Russia about a century after Czynski. Commenting on the absolute uncertainty that in 1952 surrounded the fate of several ethnic groups in the Caucasus deported on Stalin’s orders far from their native hearths and placed under house arrest God knows where, Avtorkhanov was astonished, like Czynski before him, at the lethargy shown by western diplomatic circles: ‘The world that was breathlessly watching out for the slightest variation in Kasenkina’s temperature did not even inquire as to the new address of entire peoples.[xlii]’ Today in the 21st century, nobody knows who this Kasenkina was. According to press archive information, Oksana Kasenkina was a teacher at the Soviet school in New York who in 1948 opposed her repatriation to the USSR by throwing herself from a second-storey window of the Soviet Consulate in New York. Hospitalised by the local police, she survived her injuries and asked for political asylum[xliii]. Her misadventures and health were thus more important to the world opinion of the time than the misery of a dozen peoples imprisoned in the back of beyond in the USSR. The genocidal nature of these deportations, followed by ‘the establishment of a regime of violence and terror[xliv]’ in the new settlement locations, was officially recognised by Boris Yeltsin himself on April 26 1991. In his capacity as president of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, he put his signature to the law ‘On the rehabilitation of oppressed peoples’, whose text twice condemned ‘a policy of calumny and genocide[xlv]’ practised under Stalin against ethnic minorities. Europe only followed Yeltsin’s example 13 years later on February 26 2004, by half-heartedly qualifying the Chechens’ deportation as genocide, compelled to do so by the hunger strike staged by militant Euro MP Olivier Dupuis.
It took two Russo-Chechen wars, one at the end of the 20th century and the other at the beginning of the 21st, for the West finally to take notice of the Chechen people’s existence. Before that, it was as though they didn’t exist, something Russian writer Igor Bunich took up in 1995: ‘The world knew nothing of them and, worse still, was completely uninterested in them. The Kaffirs, Zulus, Australian aborigines, and even, would you believe, Canadian seals threatened with extinction or hampered in their civil rights (!), caused more of a stir in the western world than the 200-year-long tragedy of the Chechen people.[xlvi]’
We are here touching on a key point concerning studies on the Caucasus. We discover that, contrary to received ideas, the Caucasus is not ‘one of the planet’s most disputed regions[xlvii]’ and that Russia has always been given free rein there by the international community. A ‘big play of influences’ has never taken place there between the superpowers. Kremlin propagandists in the West, like Swiss journalist Éric Hoesli, scribbled hundreds of pages to demonstrate the existence of such a conspiracy ‘game’ but paradoxically the opposite emerges from their pages. Their entire demonstration is summed up by the fact that in the first half of the 19th century, no more than three or four English agents were present amongst the Circassians and, voicing esteem and admiration for the latter, they beseeched the British Crown in vain to come to their assistance. There you have the entire ‘big play’ in question that caused and still causes so much ink to flow!
If it had really existed, ought not this notorious game have left its mark on the journalistic and scientific writings of the time? Should it not have been accompanied by a press campaign, the expression of opinions and a wave of solidarity, as was the case for the Greeks and the Balkan Slavs? We would search in vain for a single work bearing the signature of a Frenchman that stood up resolutely for the North Caucasians fighting for their independence[6]. No human being who is sound in mind, no Homo the least bit sapiens can read without a shudder the complacent verbal miscreations that the French proliferated quite shamelessly concerning the Russian conquest of the Caucasus: ‘It is civilization that will visit barbarism, health that enters the sick body, life that permeates a corpse[xlviii].’ A corpse, nothing but that! Let us now see how this so much vaunted civilisation appears in situ:
‘In order to show a presence or seize spoils, the Russian military commanders invaded peaceful regions, ravaged villages, killed hundreds of people, raped women, took thousands of cattle and then accused the mountain-dwellers of attacks on Russian possessions[xlix].’
The above account is drawn from an interim draft of the novel Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy. It may be assumed that rapes involving women were all the more frequent during the Caucasian War because, as Yermolov expressed it to the Emperor, ‘sodomy [had] spread on a large scale’ among his troops ‘on account of the shortage of women[l].’
In the houses, on the squares,
In the twists and turns of the streets
Are death’s sorrowful traces
And heaps of bleeding bodies.
The Reaper’s unyielding hand [the Russians]
Gives no quarter,
Striking down impartially
An innocent girl, an old man,
An innocent baby.
It hates the blood of Chechens,
Foemen of the Christian faith:
And the sword blades gleam!
The foregoing lines are taken from the poem Chir-Yurt by Alexander Polezhaev dating from 1832. The verses, damning as they were, were not suppressed by the censorship of the time[li] and were not of course left uncensored out of any commitment to freedom of expression, but because the censor didn’t see anything bad in the poem[7].
The villages are ablaze; they are without protection,
The sons of the fatherland [the Ciscaucasians] are vanquished by the foe [the Russians], […]
Like some savage beast, into a humble dwelling
Storms the conqueror with his bayonets,
Slaying old folk and children,
Caressing with his bloodied hand
The girls and young mothers,
But the women of the mountains do not have a woman’s soul!
They respond to the kiss with a dagger thrust,
The Russian recoils, letting out a death rattle, and falls!
‘Take revenge for me, comrade!’ — and in the blink of an eye
(What worthy revenge for the murderer’s death!)
The simple abode is committed to the flames
And Circassian freedom along with it!
The above is an extract dating from 1838[lii] from the poem Ismail-Bey by Mikhail Lermontov, whose verses also left intact by the tsarist censor[liii] who nevertheless cut the original text by 211 perfectly harmless lines, that is nearly 10% of its original length[liv].
All three authors quoted above, it will be recalled, took an active part in the Caucasian War. Consequently, it is not only a question here of fiction. Polezhaev explicitly claims Chir-Yurt is historically authentic in an introductory note written in prose: ‘It is amid skirmishes and daily battles in different parts of Chechnya, to the noise of the camp, under my solitary tent, in twelve to fifteen degrees of frost, in snowfall, that my imagination was fired by memories of the remarkable feats carried out during the fighting [for the village of Chir-Yurt] that are worthy of being remembered in the history of the Caucasus, and that I wrote Chir-Yurt in the space of eleven days […]. Fort Groznaya, May 25 1832[lv].’
Unlike Lermontov who describes the Russian soldiers as ‘murderer[s]’ (something unique and without precedent in the whole of Russian literature, with even Tolstoy being no exception!), Polezhaev was light years away from any sense of humanity at all. Even his most fervent defenders recognise that he ‘denied the very right of the local populace to fight for the freedom of its native mountains and plains[lvi].’
Military chroniclers confirm for their part the atrocities committed by the Russian army during the Caucasian War. Major General Vladimir Poltoratsky in particular launches into a nightmarish description of a Chechen village’s destruction on March 6 1847, a destruction he presents as horrible but legitimate for the sole reason that a Chechen warlord named Duba, who was born in the village, had inflicted a defeat at the end of February on a Russian detachment made up of six companies, when the detachment in question was endeavouring to eliminate him in conventional combat on equal terms, but was beaten—as can happen at a given moment in every war: one cannot always be victorious. The cloying fondness with which Russians of any period describe their war criminals is itself unequalled throughout the history of humanity, starting with Adam and Eve. That is how Poltoratsky speaks of the ‘little soldiers[8]’ who ‘crossed themselves piously[lvii]’ before charging into the village ‘brazenly drenching everything on their way with hot Chechen blood… Shots rang out no more than two or three times: it was obvious the Russian bayonets were being put to work, striking unerringly and without mercy at innocent and guilty alike. The groans of the dying, taken off guard, came from all sides and were harrowing. The massacre of people of either sex or any age was being executed on a frighteningly large scale[lviii].’ The author then describes certain victims in detail, like ‘a beautiful girl of about 17, completely naked’, with a triangular wound ‘below the left nipple of her virgin breast’ or ‘a nice little boy of about five’ who, ‘ignoring the blood spurting in scarlet jets from his severed arm’, was trying to wake up a dead old man, ‘probably his grandfather’, pierced by bayonet thrusts and ‘virtually naked[lix].’ There ensue the sickening justifications of a Russian officer who, after saving two children from the soldiers’ clutches, ends up by killing them himself because they would not stop crying: ‘I spoke to these imbeciles in Russian and in their language, but nothing worked. They were squawking as if their throats were being cut. As regrettable as it was, there was nothing else that could be done. As soon as the withdrawal signal was given, I would have to assemble my men; I could not look after those two […] I took hold of them by the neck, shook them, whacked their heads together and threw them onto a pile of dead bodies[lx].’ It will never be understood why the officer felt obliged to kill the two toddlers: if he couldn’t be bothered to ‘look after’ them, why not leave them where they are and be gone?
It is noteworthy the attack on the village was carried out at first light, so as to surprise the inhabitants in their beds and prevent the evacuation of civilians. ‘Nothing could console the officers and men when, after marching for several hours and much fatigued, the village they wanted to surprise was found to be deserted[lxi],’ observed Frenchman Emmanuel de Pina, who had been present on certain Russian raids in the Caucasus during the 1830s. It can be readily understood that it must have been very frustrating for the soldiers to endure that lengthy march only to find there was no one at the end of it to massacre, rape or torture: enough to make them howl at the moon!
‘It was barely four o’clock in the morning [of September 24 1853],’ the commanding officer of a Russian battalion George Vlastov recounts, ‘a fairly dense fog surrounded the landscape; my battalion was held back in reserve in order to hold our position, while the rest of the troops had to throw themselves upon [the village] slumbering below us. I will never forget the unpleasant feeling I experienced when, remaining quietly in place, I could see our troops out of battle practice surrounding the home of our enemies, men like us after all. Their awakening was terrible; fortunately, [the village] was awake immediately and there was time to escape into the woods beginning farther on at the far end. […] I admit I felt a great aversion for these raids that had no significant purpose, like timber cutting, and doing nothing to further our conquest were not in keeping with the laws of humanity[lxii].’
Not in keeping with humanity is putting it mildly. In December 1830 and January 1831, Lieutenant General Alexei Velyaminov, Yermolov’s second-in-command, ‘roamed the length and breadth’ of Chechnya ‘falling without warning upon Chechen villages, consigning everything to the sword or to the flames, decimating and stealing cattle, setting fire to stored hay and wheat supplies, capturing old men and women, pursuing fleeing families into the forests[lxiii],’ we learn in the biography of Polezhaev, to whom was restored, ‘for his deeds in battle against the Chechens’, the status of noble and the rank of non-commissioned officer (he had been stripped of it in 1827 for having gone absent without leave for six days from where his regiment was stationed before being sent to the Caucasus)[lxiv].
The list of horrors perpetrated by the Russian army in the Caucasus is indefinitely long, with good reason: the war lasted nearly fifty years. But the abovementioned deeds are sufficient in themselves to be able to validate the correctness of the following words spoken by the French traveller Eugène de Groote: ‘The way in which the Russians have treated the Circassians takes us back a few centuries to times of primitive barbarism: massacres, thefts, fires, deportations. And the savagery of this war may be gauged by the admissions of the Russians themselves[lxv].’
It is quite understandable that with the memory of all these repeated collective traumatisms, Chechnya—overrun in 1859—should continue to be a powder keg in the southern reaches of the Russian Empire. In 1912, the political writer with the reactionary viewpoint Pavel Kovalevsky fumed: ‘In 1859, the Chechens were defeated but not subdued. They have been subdued but are not resigned to it. They have resigned themselves, but have not given up.[lxvi]’ In 1938, the soviet political police or NKVD reported: ‘The Republic of Checheno-Ingushetia is the only place in the USSR where banditry still persists, and what is more in forms that are so overt and openly counter-revolutionary[lxvii].’ In the 1950s, the soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reflected: ‘It is a nation on which the psychology of submission still had no effect, not in terms of isolated individuals, insurgents, no: the whole nation. They are Chechens[lxviii].’ In 1982, The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Checheno-Ingushetia Alexander Vlassov reached, exaggerating somewhat, this bitter conclusion: 60 years after the Soviet Union’s creation, its power in Checheno-Ingushetia was confined to Grozny alone; this power could not be established outside the capital[lxix]. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, Chechnya became, as we know, the theatre of the ‘biggest military confrontation on the territory of the former USSR since the Second World War[lxx],’ in the words of a Russian history textbook.
This is nowhere near the future predicted by the Russian conquerors in the 19th century. ‘There will come a time when [the Chechens] will become the same as the Kazan Tatars; not just yet, I agree, but this time will come[lxxi],’ Lieutenant General Vasily Geiman predicted in 1873. That same year, busy writing his memoires in Vichy, George Vlastov saw things on a still larger scale: ‘When we passed by the sycamore wood one fine winter’s day [in January 1853], a large part of beautiful Chechnya unfolded before our eyes. […] Our thoughts took flight towards happier times, when this theatre of war and carnage would become some enchanted scenery in an earthly paradise[lxxii].’
A century and a half separate us from these words. Wars and carnage have come one after the other ever since, and the terrestrial paradise is not yet ready to materialise.
Dagun Deniev (author)
Peter Field (translator)
[1] These observations echo the assessment made by the German traveller and man of letters Friedrich Bodenstedt, who lived in Russia for several years and was the best German translator of the Russian writers of the time: ‘More than any other European state, Russia […] has the means to sustain a long-term war. […] If a body of Russian troops is wiped out, a fresh one takes its place without further ado and without there being any great family mourning as a result. […] The Russian army is largely made up of serfs, who after twenty years of service (seldom completed) are freed. […] It is an equal punishment to be exiled to Siberia or to be incorporated into the army’ (Frédéric Bodenstedt, Les peuples du Caucase et leur guerre d’indépendance contre la Russie [The Peoples of the Caucasus and their War of Independence against Russia], tran. E. de Salm-Kyrburg, Paris: E. Dentu, 1859, pp. 89-90, https://books.google.ch/books?id=xJc2AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover).
[2] Cossack villages.
[3] Threatening Fortress.
[4] In its broad, abusive and now obsolete sense, the ethnonym Circassians designates all the North Caucasian native peoples. It is still in this sense that it is encountered in classical Russian literature. In the present article, apart from in certain quotations, this ethnonym is used in its narrower sense, including only the native population of the northwestern Caucasus (one could, and should, use the expression Adyghe instead, which is a term that guards against any confusion with the inhabitants of Ciscaucasia as a whole).
[5] As The Great Encyclopedia explains, ‘the expression white tsar, frequently employed [to designate the emperor of Russia], goes back to the Mongols, for whom the adjective white adjoined to the words khan or tsar expressed independence [in relation to the Golden Horde]’ ([Marcelin] Berthelot (dir.) et al., La grande encyclopédie. Inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts [The Great Encyclopedia. A systematic inventory of science, letters, and the arts], T. 31, Paris: Société anonyme de la Grande encyclopédie, [1902], p. 442, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k24666x).
[6] Not only openly pro-Russian French authors, but also those who demonstrated a certain neutrality (as far as could reasonably be expected from representatives of a colonial power of Christian tradition itself engaged on a ‘civilising’ mission on the African continent), considered that: 1. Russia was doing in the Caucasus ‘what [the French were doing] in Algeria, what the English [were] doing in India, and […] with still more reason for […] the possession of the Caucasus [was] a critical issue for the future of its transcaucasian provinces and for its further claims on the regions dependent on Persia and Central Asia’; 2. once it was at war with the Ciscaucasians, Russia was no longer able to back down even if it wanted to, the risk being great that its peace initiatives would be ‘taken for an act of weakness’ and that ‘the mountain dwellers would only become bolder’; 3. the subjection of the Caucasus by Russia had a beneficial and progressive role for the inhabitants and was ‘for the benefit of humanity’; 4. France ‘[ought] to draw an example from this untiring determination with which Russia […] has been pursuing its goal [in the Caucasus] for fifty years’, instead of ‘allowing [itself] to be discouraged by fourteen years of fruitless occupation [of Algeria]’ (Sommaire de Hell, Situation des Russes dans le Caucase [The Situation of the Russians in the Caucasus], Paris: Rignoux, 1844, pp. 32, 31, 34-35, 44, https://books.google.ch/books?id=5kIEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover).
[7] One would be swiftly tempted to say that such were the manners of the time, but that’s not quite true. Thus, when Pushkin published his poem Prisoner of the Caucasus, two of his friends, Major General Mikhail Orlov and, above all, the poet Pyotr Vyazemsky dissociated themselves from the poem’s epilogue, very laudatory as it was of the abuses practised by imperial Russia in the Caucasus. If Orlov limited himself to saying that ‘the final lines [of the Prisoner of the Caucasus] are a little akin to a work by a court poet’ (Mihail Orlov, Kapituljacija Pariža. Političeskie sočinenija. Pis’ma [The Capitulation of Paris. Political works. Letters], Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963, pp. 236, 341, https://imwerden.de/pdf/orlov_kapitulyatsiya_parizha_1963.pdf), Vyazemsky himself didn’t mince his words: ‘I find it a pity that Pushkin should have stained the final lines of his narrative in blood. What kind of heroes are Kotlyarevsky and Yermolov? What good is there in the fact that ‘he destroyed and annihilated tribes / Like a black pestilence’? This kind of glory is enough to freeze the blood and make the hair stand on end. […] Poetry is no friend of executioners; […] a poet’s hymns should never glorify a massacre. I am angry with Pushkin: such rejoicing is a veritable anachronism. It is equally a pity that I am obviously not able to alter a word in my review. My humanity and sense of morals will seem like acts of sedition and proposals of the Devil in the eyes of our god censor-gods’ (Perepiska A. S. Puškina [Correspondance of A. S. Pushkin], T. I, Moscow: Hudožestvennaja literatura, 1982, p. 156, http://feb-web.ru/feb/pushkin/texts/selected/per/per-153-.htm).
[8] Soldatiki, in Russian: soldier + the hypocoristic suffix -ik + the plural desinence -i.
[i] Ivan Bunin, Pod serpom i molotom: sbornik rasskazov i vospominanij [Under the Hammer and Sickle: a collection of accounts and memories], Moscow, Berlin: Direkt-Media, 2016, p. 178.
[ii] Rostislav Fadeev, Šestʹdesjat let Kavkazskoj vojny [Sixty years of the Caucasian War], Saint Petersburg: Tipografija V. V. Komarova, 1889, p. 39.
[iii] Major Warner [Guillaume Depping], Schamyl, le prophète du Caucase [Schamyl, The Prophet of the Caucasus], Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1854, p. 79, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5713735h.r=Schamyl_prophète_Caucase.
[iv] Iosif Stalin, O Velikoj Otečestvennoj vojne Sovetskogo Sojuza [The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union], 5th ed., Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit., 1947, p. 39, ivstalin.su/files/Stalin_O_Velikoy_Otechestvennoy_voyne_1947.djvu.
[v] Vladimir Isupov, Demografičeskie katastrofy i krizisy v Rossii v pervoj polovine XX veka. Istoriko-demografičeskie očerki [Demographic disasters and crises in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. Essays in historical demography], Novosibirsk: Sibirskij hronograf, 2000, p. 118.
[vi] See on this subject: Šahrudin Gapurov, Abdula Bugaev, Viktor Černous, ‘K 150-letiju okončanija Kavkazskoj vojny: o hronologii, pričinah i soderžanii’ [150 years from the end of the Caucasus War: chronology, causes, contents], Naučnaja myslʹ Kavkaza, No. 4 (80), 2014, p. 95, https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/k-150-letiyu-okonchaniya-kavkazskoy-voyny-o-hronologii-prichinah-i-soderzhanii.pdf; Šahrudin Gapurov, ‘Kavkazskaja vojna: hronologija, pričiny i soderžanie’ [The Caucasus War: chronology, causes, contents], Kavkazskaja vojna: sobytija, fakty, uroki. Materialy meždunarodnoj naučnoj konferencii (g. Nalʹčik, 15-19 oktjabrja 2014 g.), Nalchik: Izdatelʹskij otdel KBIGI, 2014, pp. 35-36, http://www.kbigi.ru/fmedia/izdat/konfs/kavkazwar2.pdf.
[vii] Paul Lacroix, Histoire de la vie et du règne de Nicolas Ier, empereur de Russie [History of the Life and Reign of Nicolas 1st, Emperor of Russia], T. 2, Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie, 1865, p. 169, https://books.google.ch/books?id=YWF_LT0RzUsC&printsec=frontcover.
[viii] See Jakov Gordin, Ermolov [Yermolov], Saint Petersburg: OOO ‘Izdatelʹstvo “Palʹmira”’, Мoscow: OOO ‘Kniga po Trebovaniju’, 2017, p. 489.
[ix] Vasilij Potto, Dva veka terskogo kazačestva (1577-1801) [Two centuries of the Terek Cossacks (1577-1801)], Т. II, Vladikavkaz: Èlektropečatnja Tipografii Terskogo oblastnogo pravlenija, 1912, p. 146, http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/16389-t-2-1912.
[x] Quoted by: Dmitrij Ovsjannikov, ‘K voprosu o roli islamskogo faktora v voenno-političeskih sobytijah v Čečne v pervoj četverti XIX v.’ [Concerning the question of the role of the Islamic factor in the military-political events in Chechnya in the first quarter of the 19th century], Vestnik SPbGU, 2014, Cerija 2, Vyp. 1, p. 16, http://vestnik.spbu.ru/html14/s02/s02v1/02.pdf.
[xi] Žiznʹ general-lejtenanta knjazja Madatova [The life of Lieutenant General and Prince Madatov], Saint Petersburg: Tipografija Karla Krajja, 1837, p. 26, https://books.google.ch/books?id=1Y9aAAAAcAAJ&pg=frontcover.
[xii] Mihail Pogodin, Aleksej Petrovič Ermolov. Materialy dlja ego biografii [Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov. Materials for his biography], Мoscou: Universitetskaja tipografija, 1864, p. 269, https://books.google.ch/books?id=ijgEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover.
[xiii] Moric Kocebu, Aleksej Homjakov, Ivan Bakunin, Žiznʹ general-lejtenanta knjazja Madatova [The life of Lieutenant General and Prince Madatov], 2nd ed., Saint Petersbourg: Tipografija Štaba voenno-učebnyh zavedenij, 1863, pp. I-II, https://books.google.ch/books?id=fCFfAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover.
[xiv] ‘Bumagi grafa Arsenija Andreeviča Zakrevskogo’ [Archive of Count Arseni Andreevitch Zakrevski], Sbornik Imperatorskogo russkogo istoričeskogo obŝestva, Т. 73, 1890, pp. 210, 253, http://starieknigi.info/Zhurnaly/SIRIO/SIRIO_073.pdf.
[xv] Maïrbek Vatchagaev, Aude Merlin, L’Aigle et le Loup. La Tchétchénie dans la guerre du Caucase au XIXe siècle [The Eagle and the Wolf: Chechnya in the 19th century Caucasus War], Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2008, p. 90.
[xvi] Georges Wl[ass]off, Ombres du passé. Souvenirs d’un officier du Caucase [Shadows of the past. Souvenirs of an officer in the Caucasus], Paris: Arthus Bertrand, [1873], p. 132, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k732627.
[xvii] Vladimir Kiselev-Sergenin, ‘Primečanija’ [Annotations], Poležaev Aleksandr, Stihotvorenija i poèmy, Leningrad: Sovetskij pisatelʹ, 1987, p. 540, https://imwerden.de/pdf/polezhaev_stikhotvoreniya_i_poemy_1987_text.pdf.
[xviii] E[vgenij] Maslov, A[vdej] Gozulov, S[ergej] Rjazancev (eds), Severnyj Kavkaz [North Caucasus], Moscow: Gos. izd-vo geogr. lit-ry, 1957, p. 418, https://www.twirpx.com/file/1695896/.
[xix] Aleksej Kazakov, Gorod Groznyj. Populjarnye očerki istorii [City of Grozny. Popular essays on its history], Grozny: Čeč.-Ing. kn. izd-vo, 1984, p. 11, http://neb-chr.ru/reader/?check=239-982668539e575a9c82922e860f63f612 (available only after registering).
[xx] Ibid., p. 20.
[xxi]Aleksandr Šiškov, Opyty [Essays], Мoscow: Universitetskaja tipografija, 1828, p. 5, https://dlib.rsl.ru/viewer/01003558064.
[xxii] Evgenij Volk, ‘Boris Elʹcin: Berite stolʹko suverineteta, skolʹko smožete proglotitʹ’ [Boris Yeltsin: Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow], Elʹcin Centr, August 6 2015, https://yeltsin.ru/news/boris-elcin-berite-stolko-suverineteta-skolko-smozhete-proglotit/; Maïrbek Vatchagaev, ‘Chronologie d’un conflit’ [Chronology of a conflict], Frédérique Longuet Marx (dir.), Tchétchénie. La guerre jusqu’au dernier ?, [Paris]: Mille et une nuits, 2003, pp. 24-25.
[xxiii] Steven Greenhouse, ‘U.S. Says Russian Move Is “an Internal Affair”’, The New York Times, December 12 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/12/world/us-says-russian-move-is-an-internal-affair.html.
[xxiv] Daniel Singer, À qui appartient l’avenir? Pour une utopie réaliste [To whom does the future belong? For an achievable utopia], tran. Jeanne Singer, Bruxelles: Complexe, 2004, p. 327.
[xxv] François Jean, ‘La politique du mensonge’ [The Politics of the Lie], De l’Éthiopie à la Tchétchénie. Recueil de textes de François Jean, s. l.: CRASH/Fondation – Médecins Sans Frontières, 2004, pp. 149-150.
[xxvi] ‘Présidentielle, le débat Chirac Jospin. Cinquième partie’ [Presidential Election, the Chirac-Jospin Debate. Part Five], Libération, May 3 1995, http://www.liberation.fr/evenement/1995/05/03/presidentielle-le-debat-chirac-jospin-cinquieme-partie_134376.
[xxvii] Laure Mandeville, La reconquête russe [The Russian reconquest], Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2008, p. 349.
[xxviii] Dmitrij Kiselev, Pavel Zarubin, ‘Putin prizval zapadnyh liderov perestatʹ manipulirovatʹ’ [Putin calls on western leaders to cease their manipulation], Vesti.ru, December 20 2015, https://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=2700396.
[xxix] Loc. cit.
[xxx] Jean Louis Veyrac, La Lettre ethniste n° 2. Vive la Tchétchénie libre ! [Ethnist Letter no. 2. Long live free Chechnya!], February 2000, http://www.ben-vautier.com/ethnisme/veyrac/veyrac2.html.
[xxxi]Elena Sannikova, ‘Okajannye nulevye’ [The cursed 2000], Grani.ru, January 5 2011, https://graniru.org/blogs/free/entries/185111.html.
[xxxii] Jean Czynski, La révolte des Circassiens [The Circassian Rebellion], Paris: Roux, 1837, p. 17, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5624381q.
[xxxiii] ‘V Tomske toržestvenno otkryli kolonku s vodoj’ [A water pump is solemnly inaugurated in Tomsk], Lenta.ru, August 27 2017, https://lenta.ru/news/2017/08/27/kolonka/.
[xxxiv] ‘Kolonki s vodoj vpervye pojavilisʹ na dvuh ulicah Tomska’ [Water pumps have appeared for the first time in two Tomsk streets], NIA-Tomsk, August 25 2017, http://www.niatomsk.ru/more.php?UID=62260.
[xxxv] Nathalie Ouvaroff, ‘La Russie diminue l’alcool dans ses détergents’ [Russia decreases the alcohol content of its detergents], Le Matin, 5 juin 2015, https://www.lematin.ch/monde/russie-diminue-alcool-detergents/story/19112244.
[xxxvi] Quoted by: Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, Le roman russe [The Russian Novel], Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1886, p. 62, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k131798g.
[xxxvii] Sergei Tolstoi, Ocherki bylogo [Essays from the Past], 4th ed., Toula: Priokskoe knižnoe izdatelʹstvo, 1975, p. 300, https://www.litmir.me/bd/?b=195777.
[xxxviii] Mihail Gazenkampf, Moj dnevnik 1877-78 gg. [My intimate journal of 1877-78], Saint Petersburg: Izdatelʹstvo V. A. Berezovskogo, 1908, p. 12, http://starieknigi.info/Knigi/G/Gazenkampf_M_Moj_dnevnik_1877-78_gg_Izd_ispr_i_dop_1908.pdf.
[xxxix] Mihail Venjukov, Istoričeskie očerki Rossii so vremeni Krymskoj vojny do zaključenija Berlinskogo dogovora. 1855-1878 [Historical essays on Russia since the Crimean War until the signing of the Berlin Treaty. 1855-1878], Т. I, Leipzig, 1878, p. 174, http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/14624-t-1-obschiy-vzglyad-na-epohu-peremeny-v-sostave-gosudarstva-mezhdunarodnoe-polozhenie-rossii-1878.
[xl] Quoted by Sergej Kamyšan, ‘Čečnja i Sibirʹ’ [Chechnya and Siberia], Nauka v Sibiri, May 23 1997, No. 21 (2107), p. 8, http://www.sbras.info/system/files/archive/archive1961-2009/1997_21.pdf.
[xli] Jean Czynski, op. cit., pp. 8-9.
[xlii] Aleksandr Uralov (Abdurahman Avtorhanov), Narodoubijstvo v SSSR. Ubijstvo čečenskogo naroda [Genocides in the USSR. The extermination of the Chechens], Munich: Svobodnyj Kavkaz, 1952, p. 64, https://vtoraya-literatura.com/pdf/avtorkhanov_narodoubijstvo_v_sssr_chechensky_narod_1952_text.pdf.
[xliii] N. Korolʹkov, ‘Političeskoe zemletrjasenie’ [Political upheaval], Obŝekazačij žurnal, September 1948, No. 7, pp. 36-37, http://old.elan-kazak.org/sites/default/files/IMAGES/ARHIV/Periodika/okzh/OKG-7-1948.pdf).
[xliv] Zakon Rossijskoj Sovetskoj Federativnoj Socialističeskoj Respubliki ‘O reabilitacii repressirovannyh narodov’ [Law of the Soviet Socialist Federative Republic of Russia ‘On the rehabilitation of the oppressed peoples’], Vedomosti Sʺezda narodnyh deputatov RSFSR i Verhovnogo Soveta RSFSR, 1991, No. 18, pp. 539-540, http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/68244.
[xlv] Loc. cit.
[xlvi] Igorʹ Bunič, Hronika čečenskoj bojni i šestʹ dnej v Budennovske [Chronical of the Chechen blood bath and six days in Boudionnovsk], Saint Petersburg: Oblik, 1995, p. 15.
[xlvii] Eric Hoesli, À la conquête du Caucase. Épopée géopolitique et guerres d’influence [The Conquest of the Caucasus. Geopolitical epic and wars of influence], Paris: Syrtes, 2006, p. 15. See also the back cover of: Jean Radvanyi, Caucase. Le grand jeu des influences [Caucasus. The big play of influences], Paris: Cygne, 2011.
[xlviii] See the review of Souvenirs des dernières expéditions russes contre les Circassiens [Souvenirs of the final Russian expeditions against the Circassians] by Emmanuel de Pina, written by Lohis Hermenous (‘Séance du 3 avril 1846’, Bulletin de l’Académie delphinale, T. 2, Grenoble: Imprimerie de Prudhomme, 1847, p. 111, https://books.google.ch/books?id=bDwLAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover).
[xlix] Lev Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v 90 tomah [Complete works in 90 volumes], T. 35, Мoscou : Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo ‘Hudožestvennaja literatura’, 1950, http://tolstoy.ru/online/online-fiction/hadzhy-murat/.
[l] Quoted by: Zapiski Denisa Vasilʹeviča Davydova, v Rossii cenzuroju nepropuŝennye [Memoirs of Denis Vassilievitch Davydov, censored in Russia], London: Tipografija kn. Petra Dolgorukova, 1863, p. 31, https://books.google.ch/books?id=fdldAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover.
[li] Èrpeli i Čir-Jurt. Dve poèmy A. Poležaeva [Erpeli and Chir-Yurt. Two poems by A. Polezhaev], Мoscow: Tipografija Lazarevyh Instituta vostočnyh jazykov, 1832, pp. 124-125, https://books.google.ch/books?id=AmdEAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover.
[lii] Ismail-Bey is frequently dated 1832, which is false and completely impossible, as his biographer Vladimir Zakharov recently showed (Vladimir Zaharov, Letopisʹ žizni i tvorčestva Mihaila Jurʹeviča Lermontova [Chronology of the life and works of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov], Мoscow: Centrpoligraf, 2017, p. 356).
[liii] ‘Izmail-Bej. Vostočnaja povestʹ’ [Ismail-Bei. An oriental short story], Otečestvennye zapiski, 1843, Т. XXVII, p. 17, https://books.google.ch/books?id=tlMFAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover.
[liv] For the unexpurgated text of the poem and the list of verses omitted by the censor at the time of its first publication, see http://feb-web.ru/feb/lermont/texts/lerm05/vol03/l53-191-.htm.
[lv] Èrpeli i Čir-Jurt. Dve poèmy A. Poležaeva, op. cit., p. 73.
[lvi] Vladimir Kiselev-Sergenin, ‘“Besprijutnyj strannik v mire”’ [‘Wandering and solitary soul’], Poležaev Aleksandr, Stihotvorenija i poèmy, op. cit., p. 38.
[lvii] ‘Vospominanija V. A. Poltorackogo’ [Memoirs of V. A. Poltoratski], Istoričeskij vestnik, January, February, March 1893, Т. 51, p. 73, http://starieknigi.info/Zhurnaly/IV/IV_1893_01_03.pdf.
[lviii] Ibid., p. 75.
[lix] Ibid., p. 76.
[lx] Ibid., pp. 79-80.
[lxi] Emmanuel de Pina, op. cit., pp. 47-48.
[lxii] Georges Wl[ast]off, op. cit., pp. 187-188.
[lxiii] V. Baranov, ‘A. I. Poležaev. Biografičeskij očerk’ [A. I. Polezhaev. Biographical notice], Aleksandr Poležaev, Stihotvorenija, Мoscow, Leningrad: Academia, 1933, pp. 97-98.
[lxiv] Ibid., pp. 98-99; Vladimir Kiselev-Sergenin, ‘“Besprijutnyj strannik v mire”’, op. cit., pp. 14-15, 36.
[lxv] Eugène de Groote, Au Caucase [In the Caucasus], Brussels: Société belge de librairie, Paris: Victor Palmé, Geneva: Henri Trembley, 1891, pp. XXVI-XXVII, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3714918.
[lxvi] Pavel Kovalevskij, Vosstanie Čečni i Dagestana v 1877-1878 gg. Zelimhan [Revolt in Chechnya and Dagestan in 1877-1878. Zelimkhan], Saint Petersburg: Tipografija M. I. Akinfieva, 1912, p. 12, http://starieknigi.info/Knigi/K/Kovalevskij_P_I_Vosstanie_Chechni_i_Dagestana_v_1877-1878_gg_Zelim-han_1912_RSL.pdf.
[lxvii] Pavel Poljan, ‘Kosa i kamenʹ: konfliktnyj ètnos v krepčajuŝih obʺjatijah sovetskoj vlasti’ [To a good cat, a good rat: ethnic conflict in the increasingly strong embrace of Soviet power], Zvezda, 2007, No. 12, http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2007/12/pp7.html.
[lxviii] Quoted by: Hugues Puel, ‘Tchétchénie: un farouche vouloir vivre’ [Chechnya: a fierce will to live], Economie & Humanisme, June 2007, No. 381, p. 89, http://www.revue-economie-et-humanisme.eu/bdf/docs/r381_88_tchetchenie.pdf.
[lxix] Sergej Dmitriev, ‘“Hasavjurtovskie soglašenija stali dlja vseh sjurprizom”’ [‘The Khassaviourt accords took the whole world by surprise’], RFI, 29 August 2016, http://ru.rfi.fr/rossiya/20160816-khasavyurtovskie-soglasheniya-stali-dlya-vsekh-syurprizom.
[lxx] Quoted by: Ljudmila Gatagova, ‘Uroki tolerantnosti ili vraždy?’ [The lessons of tolerance or hate?], Istorija, 2003, No. 34, https://his.1sept.ru/2003/34/24.htm.
[lxxi] ‘1845 god. Vospominanija V. A. Gejmana’ [1845. Memoirs of V. A. Gaiman], Kavkazskij sbornik, 1879, T. III, p. 375, http://elib.skunb.ru/action.php?kt_path_info=ktcore.SecViewPlugin.actions.document&fDocumentId=3687 (available only after subscription).
[lxxii] Georges Wl[ast]off, op. cit., pp. 176-177.
