Let Our Fame Be Great (20 page)

Without shifting my position, I could see the effects of the decree. Pink bodies lay and sunned themselves in the last glimmers of the day. Dinghies tacked round into the harbour, their captains ready for the first beer of the evening. Russian pop music boomed from a bar at my feet, where early-starting drinkers were sharing carafes of vodka and snacking on salted cucumbers and nuts.

Anapa, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was a military town. Russian forces attacked it eight times, thrice successfully, and
its possession was key to dominating both the coast and the hinterland. Now, old women thronged the bus station when I arrived, offering rooms in their houses for a fraction of the cost of the big hotels along the shore. Stick-thin women in bikinis and their sturdier husbands wandered through the crowd. There was not a soldier to be seen, and certainly not a Circassian.

Everything in this town is geared to mass tourism, a result of some of the first decisions taken by the new Soviet government following the Bolshevik revolution. In fact, the decree of 1921 is a strange one to commemorate. Just as significant was one taken in 1919 nationalizing the whole tourist infrastructure. Anapa now has more than 600 large hotels and, though its inhabitants grumble that they are losing custom to Egypt and Turkey, it is clean and neat and prosperous-looking.

It is a resort for the masses, and it has erased the final signs of Circassian culture and made what was once Circassia unmistakably Russian.

As I wandered around Anapa, I looked out for signs of its Circassian past. The town trumpeted its history, with an archaeological museum showing off how Greeks built a town here two and a half millennia ago, introducing Mediterranean civilization and later Christianity to the nomads and highlanders they traded with. But of more recent history, there was almost nothing. The cultural museum was closed, while a tourist booth could only offer me tickets for the ‘Caucasus Legends' show, which would take place the following Wednesday and feature the national dances of the Caucasus peoples. I was not tempted to spend five further days in the town so as to see it. Otherwise, there was nothing to remember the town's former owners by except the remains of the Turkish fort that once dominated its port.

The fort was demolished in the nineteenth century by sappers who left just one gatehouse standing. The gate now bears the name ‘The Russian gates' and stands in a delicate little park thronged by families and snack stalls. Cannons stand around the gatehouse and children straddled them for photographs. The gatehouse is roughly square in plan, and its interior is blocked off by portcullises over the two
entrances. I did not at first examine the interior, being too distracted by the various shapes and sizes of the people walking by.

But eventually I walked over for a look, and saw the town had decided to commemorate those Russians who had died ‘at the walls of Anapa' in capturing its fortress. The memorial was in the form of a cross-shaped military medal, bearing the words ‘For service in the Caucasus' and the date 1864.

At first I could not believe what I was seeing. Perhaps the town planners who decided a reproduction of a campaign medal was an appropriate memorial were just plain ignorant. Anapa was captured by Russia more than three decades before 1864, which is when the rest of Circassia was forced to submit. The bureaucrats may not have known that, of course, and the tourists taking pictures of the cross with their phones certainly did not think there was anything out of the ordinary.

Still, there was no getting away from the fact that the Russian soldiers who died to capture this holiday resort were being commemorated not with something relevant to their battles but with a medal given out for participation in the genocidal campaign that destroyed the Circassian nation. I struggled not to interpret it uncharitably.

By marking a war memorial with the date of the Circassians' tragedy, the Russians seemed to be revelling in the completeness of their victory. No one was left here to dispute their ownership of the land. That the memorial was erected in 1996 was particularly telling, and reflected a triumphant Russian nationalism that has emerged since the end of the Soviet Union.

Once I had noticed such braying joy being taken in the Russian possession of this strip of lush, warm, sunny coastline, I started noticing it everywhere. The resorts down the coast which I visited shared the same indelicate glee that they were built on someone else's land, and a holiday I had been revelling in lost most of its charm.

To the south-west of Anapa are seven towns – Novorossiisk, Gelendzhik, Arkhipo-Osipovka, Tuapse, Lazarevskoye, Sochi and Adler – that are built on the sites of the forts built to subdue the Circassians in the 1830s. Some of the towns are export outlets for oil, but most of them are dedicated to tourism alone. Casting about more or less at random, I decided to travel from Anapa to Arkhipo-Osipovka,
principally because the name is a tongue-twister and partly because it seemed to be the smallest easily accessible resort.

Arkhipo-Osipovka was founded in 1837 under the name Mikhailovskoye. The Tenginskoye fort where the aristocrat-rebel-turned-private-soldier Lorer witnessed three ships being wrecked in a storm was just down the coast from here, and this was the heart of the Circassian resistance to the Russian conquest.

The road to the town from Anapa twists and turns through the hills that line the coast. Even Soviet engineers, no slouches when it came to grandiose building projects, had failed to blast it along the shoreline, where the cliffs are simply too steep. It sometimes ducks kilometres inland before veering back on itself towards the sea once more.

Resorts and towns have sprung up wherever the road touches the sea. Our bus was forced to slow to a walking pace as we passed through the town centres, and women in bikinis and men in tight blue trunks hitched lifts to beaches or beauty sites out of town.

It is easy to see how the Russian armies struggled to master this landscape, which is choked with dense trees and scored by rocky stream beds. But, on entering Arkhipo-Osipovka itself, all historical comparison with the rugged, wild land of the Circassians became impossible.

Tanned visitors thronged the seafront, where the narrow valley, squeezed between two wooded hills, was crammed with bars, restaurants, amusements and promenades. A small artificial pond offered children rides on motorized swans, a local radio station announced popular attractions, a strip bar was getting ready for the evening, and a big wheel circled lazily.

It was a lovely place, hot and lazy, but it was cursed for me by a triumphalism untempered by empathy or concern for the people who once called this valley their own.

From the top of the Ferris wheel, you could see what a lonely place this must once have been for the inhabitants of the Russian fort here. With no port for supply ships to dock, even a small storm would have cut the defenders off from all help, while a gently sloping valley led into the heart of the dense mountains to the north. An enterprising local man has built a reconstruction of part of the fort, on a small
rise in the middle of the valley, and it seems pitifully small and vulnerable when viewed from above.

This must have been something like the view seen by the Circassian force that assaulted the fortress on 22 March 1840, buoyed up by successes in capturing the forts of Lazarevskoye, Nikolayevskoye and Velyaminovskoye earlier in the year. The garrison of 440 men was in no doubt about what awaited them, and did not believe the reports of turncoat spies sent here by the Circassians to mislead them with claims they were safe. The Circassians, whose number has been estimated at 11,000 but is more likely to have been 1,500 or so, clearly were experienced by now at attacking forts and carried ladders and ropes to scale the walls with. Russian sources have very detailed accounts of what followed.

The defenders were outnumbered, and the attackers scaled the walls quickly. Hand-to-hand fighting started inside the fort itself, and immediately went badly for the Russians. They were being pushed back and defeat was going to be rapid.

Here Arkhip Osipov, one of the defenders, knew his hour had come. He had the keys to the magazine and ran towards it (stopping, the history says, only to receive a blessing from a monk). By this stage most of the officers were dead, and he was acting on his own initiative. Passing a group of surviving defenders he called out: ‘Brothers, it is time! Remember me kindly! Those of you who remain alive, remember my deeds!' With these words, he threw himself into the magazine, blew it up, and wiped out the remains of the fort, most of the defenders and many of the attackers. Or so the story goes.

The Circassians took eighty prisoners, including two officers, around fifty of whom returned from captivity and told the story of Arkhip Osipov and his heroic suicide bombing.

The episode would be a small footnote in a series of skirmishes that had no long-term significance, had it not been seized on for propaganda value by the government. That this Ukrainian serf, who had served twenty years in the army and five of those in the appalling boredom and deprivation of garrison duty, should blow himself up rather than be captured was too good an advertisement for the Russian army to miss.

Arkhip Osipov was, by official decree, eternally to be named first whenever the roll-call of his regiment was read out, and his name was replied to with the words ‘died for the glory of Russian arms in the Mikhailovskoye fortress'. A cross was erected to mark his feat in 1876, then the name of the village that had grown up on the site was changed to Arkhipo-Osipovka twenty-three years later in his honour. A grand, pompous memorial was erected in the garrison town of Vladikavkaz to commemorate Osipov's valour. It was topped by a Russian eagle with its wings spread and a laurel wreath in its claws.

Whether the story of Arkhip Osipov is true, or a load of imperialist nonsense, is a moot point. The fact is that the village is still revelling in its role as fore-post in occupying this land 150 years later.

I asked the family who had rented me a room if this emphasis on their military past rather than their holiday-making present troubled them, but they seemed genuinely baffled by the question. They had always been taught, it transpired, that the attackers on the fort had been Turks, themselves keen to occupy the country. That Circassians were involved had never occurred to them, and they insisted that I was wrong.

They lent me a pile of history books to help me ‘understand' what had happened here and elsewhere on the Black Sea coast. The first –
An Introduction to the History of the Kuban
– was intended for quite young schoolchildren, judging by its illustrations, and is approved by the local government. It painted a troubling picture for anyone who would have liked the Circassians' fate to have been commemorated by their conquerors.

The first section of the schoolbook is a timeline. Starting with 500,000 years ago (‘ancient people lived here'), it went on to mention the Scythians and the Greeks, before the one-line comment ‘before the arrival of the Cossacks, here lived the Circassians'. Nothing is said of the war that the Cossacks and their Russian masters fought to take control of the land, and instead the schoolchildren are told ‘the Cossacks were given the Kuban by Catherine II in gratitude for their military service', with no mention of the fact that the lands beyond the Kuban river were not hers to give.

One of the authors of the book, Tatyana Naumenko, also contributed to the
Atlas of the History of the Kuban
, which my hosts lent me as well. In it, the period 1801 – 60 features broad blue and green swathes on the map to mark where the Circassians lived. On the next map, which spans 1860 – 1917, they are gone, with no explanation.

I had become fascinated by this little bundle of historical distortion, and eagerly turned to the next item: a school-leaver's essay discussing ‘literary pages in the heroic history of Arkhipo-Osipovka'. The essay, an intensely nationalistic discussion of the importance of commemorating the likes of Osipov written by my hosts' son, started with the phrase: ‘Our homeland lives and will always live because millions of heroes went to death so it could live in honour and respect.' It ended with a story of a local lad who died in 2001 while fighting in Chechnya, and the quotation ‘To preserve memory, and to cherish memory, is our moral duty before ourselves and our ancestors. Memory is our wealth.'

The irony of this insistence on memory in the midst of such total amnesia was too much for me. And I gave up on reading history and went to sleep.

Not all the Circassians left their homeland in 1864. Around a tenth of them agreed with Russia's conditions that they settle on the plain, and abandon their resistance. Among their descendants is Murat Berzegov, one of the angriest of Russia's Circassian critics. A few days after leaving the coast, I was looking for his home on the outskirts of the Russian town of Maikop, and was not having much luck.

Maikop is the capital of a Russian region partly inhabited by those Circassian families that took up the tsar's offer to move north of the mountains and not leave for Turkey. It is a nondescript town, built on a grid pattern, with its streets clearly labelled and numbered. Or so I thought, until I came to Berzegov's street, which started at house number 29, whereas Berzegov lived at number 13a. My taxi driver drove up and down the street, insisting, with ever-increasing frustration, that it had to be there somewhere.

In Russia, you pay taxi drivers by the journey, not by the distance travelled, and he was rapidly losing patience. Eventually, I paid him off and struck out on foot into a wilderness of garages and warehouses that might perhaps hide my quarry.

After a while, I came across some five-storey apartment blocks, the signature buildings of Russia. I found house number 15, then house number 13, but of house number 13a there was no sign. I asked every passer-by, of which there were very few, how to find it. I asked for Berzegov by name. No one had heard of him.