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The Chechen-Russian conflict – today and yesterday
Hadji Murat
By Leo Tolstoy
Published by Hesperus, 2003, £6-99
Reviewed by Clare Doyle
THE HORROR of the Beslan massacre surpasses all previous
atrocities carried out in the name of the Chechen people. It is Russia’s 9/11,
and nothing can excuse it.
Whether those involved were motivated by desperation and
revenge for the cruelty meted out to their families and country or coerced and
drugged by gangsters and fanatics, the slaughter of civilians in terrorist
attacks inside Russia does nothing to bring nearer the liberation of Chechnya
from the domination of imperialist Russia.
The background to the harrowing events of recent times is
the Chechen-Russian conflict, stretching far further back than the break-up of
the Soviet Union and the devastating wars conducted by Yeltsin and Putin.
Colonisation in the Caucasus started as long ago as the 17th century under a
long line of tyrannical czars. Major military campaigns to subdue and conquer
the combative tribes and clans were conducted early in the 19th century with
varying degrees of success. Tens of thousands of young men sent to fight for
Russia’s glory fell victim to the sword or to the harsh conditions of army life
in the hostile mountain regions. Fortified garrisons enforced Russian military
control over local peoples. No period of genuine peace was established.
The only real respite came as a direct result of the Russian
revolution of October 1917. The workers’ government set out to lift the yoke
imposed by Russian imperialism from all oppressed nations, allowing the option
of genuine self-determination. Chechens were involved in the civil war against
the counter-revolutionary White forces, and their leaders were convinced to stay
within the Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics.
With no written language before the revolution, Bolshevism
in Chechnya saw the establishment of an alphabet and a flowering of recorded
history, literature and culture. The Muslim nation was allowed to retain its
mosques and the freedom of individuals to practice Islam, provided freedom also
existed for other religions and atheists.
But as Stalin and his murderous clique climbed onto the back
of the revolution and crushed every aspect of workers’ democracy, Great Russian
chauvinism reared its ugly head once more. The door was slammed shut on the
aspirations of all oppressed nations within the USSR. During Stalin’s horrific
purges, representatives of numerous minorities, along with all genuine
Bolsheviks and Trotskyists, were murdered or deported to the living death of the
prison labour camps or Gulags.
In what can only be described as attempted genocide or
‘ethnic cleansing’, in 1944 three quarters of the Chechen population were
physically removed from their homeland. Rounded up from their villages into
exile, many ended up as slave labour in the mines of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. It
is calculated that half the deported Chechens perished on the journey. Others
were slain by Stalin’s firing squads for alleged collaboration with the Nazi
enemy, for which no evidence has been established. The man who depended on total
obedience for his survival as a dictator could not tolerate the fierce
independence of the Chechen warrior clans.
Broken and almost destroyed, in the years after Stalin’s
death the Chechen people were eventually allowed to return to their homeland.
Gradually, despite systematic repression of their history, language and culture,
they regained their strength. Their experience had not broken their will; in
fact, a new intensity of national consciousness and cohesion had been created.
As the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the demand for independence gathered
momentum.
Living and working in Russia then, and at the time of
Yeltsin’s brutal ‘first’ Chechen war, I learnt much about this long and bitter
struggle of the Chechen people. I went to exhibitions of their art and culture
and met Russians, as well as Chechens, who championed the right of Chechnya to
independence.
It was then that I was also told, by friends and comrades,
about a short story by the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy. It was inspired by
a much earlier Chechen-Russian conflict and an enigmatic leader, Hadji Murat.
Graphically and sensitively, Tolstoy portrayed the life and struggle of the
Muslim nation, with its complex mores and its leaders’ capacity for great piety
and great cruelty. It spoke also, with no holds barred, of the callousness, the
banality, the foppery and licentiousness of the Russian court, including Czar
Nicolas I himself. It told of the gambling, gluttony and drunkenness of many of
the Russian officers and men in the occupying army in the Caucasian region.
Tolstoy had himself served in that army and learned to
despise the double standards of his own side. He had undoubtedly understood and
felt the great loyalty and respect accorded to the famous and undisputed leader
of the Chechen nation, Imam Shamil. As a young man in 1851, when he first heard
the story of another Chechen leader, Hadji Murat, being prepared to side with
the Russians against Shamil, for reasons of personal revenge, Tolstoy described
the affair as ‘a base action’. Though fascinated by the incident and the
outcome, the writer put aside the story, re-worked it many times, and finally
completed it not long before his death in 1910.
In its finished form, it portrays the Caucasian leader, who
became Shamil’s right-hand man, as a warrior with fine principles, great
personal courage and integrity. Though Hadji Murat is prepared to treat with the
Russians at some length, and is seen as a great prize in their camp, he is
eventually prepared to meet his own death or be taken prisoner rather than
collaborate with the czar’s forces against Shamil.
Not surprisingly, the book could not be published during
Tolstoy’s lifetime. He justifiably feared not only the court censors or the
possibility of another banishment from the capital, but imprisonment and
possible execution.
Today, intellectuals or socialists who sympathise with the
Chechen cause, if not with the methods employed to pursue it, will not face
quite such retribution. But it is clear that Putin is adopting more and more of
the manners of the Russian despots of old. The poisoning of independent-minded
journalists travelling to Beslan to get at the truth, is just a glimpse of the
lengths the Russian state will go to prevent expressions of opposition to its
policies. (Even a British Embassy official in Moscow was rebuked over statements
appearing in the British press from the separatist Akhmed Zakayev.) What would
become of a modern-day Tolstoy who trenchantly attacked the dictatorial methods
and double standards of the Putin regime and exposed the corruption and
treachery at the top of the army and intelligence services?
While today’s self-styled leaders of the Chechen struggle
display none of the personal dignity or courage of Tolstoy’s hero, Hadji Murat,
its moving and impressive story retains a strong message for the present
generation of readers. It does not whitewash the bloody acts of revenge carried
out by pious Chechen warriors against their own brothers, let alone against the
Russian enemy. Tolstoy allows some of the aristocratic officers of the Russian
army, as well as rank-and-file soldiers, to display a certain humanity towards,
and even admiration for, the Chechen enemy. But the most violent and tragic
scenes in the book are part of Tolstoy’s own crusade against war.
The one part that remained unaltered in the decades that
Tolstoy took to finalise it is the opening scene. The author gathers flowers and
tries, unsuccessfully, to pluck a majestic thistle to form the centrepiece of
his collection. Then walking through a ploughed field he sees no plants left but
a badly damaged thistle with flowers which, "Had once been red, but now they
were black… It remains standing and does not surrender to man who has destroyed
all its brethren around it", he muses. It symbolises the apparently
indestructible will of the Chechen fighter.
One of the most impressive paintings in a recent exhibition
at London’s National Gallery, Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy, was an
1881 ‘portrait’ of a majestic triple-stemmed thistle in a field of wild flowers
above the river Dnieper with an apparently infinite horizon beyond. It conjures
up the very beauty, defiance and indestructibility of the plant, known popularly
as the ‘Tatar’.
In 1908, four years before Hadji Murat was published, Leon
Trotsky wrote of Tolstoy: "In the heat of the vilest and most criminal
counter-revolution [following the defeat of the 1905 Russian revolution], this
last apostle of Christian all-forgiving, in whom kindles the wrath of Biblical
prophets, has flung his pamphlet ‘I cannot keep silent’ as a curse upon the
heads of those who serve a hangman…" (the czar), and those who stand by without
challenging the state.
Tolstoy’s story, Hadji Murat, is shot through with that same
moral indignation, with a final scene that must be one of the most dramatic
pieces of writing in European literature. Those who today rage against the
injustices of capitalist wars, invasions and occupations would do well to read
it. In doing so they will acquire a new historical perspective on the
Chechen–Russian conflict and a resolve to struggle for a world federation of
independent socialist states as the only way of eradicating once and for all the
roots of genocide and war.
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