Let Our Fame Be Great (21 page)

Eventually, I sat down next to a little shop in the courtyard, which had a note saying ‘back in 10 minutes' tacked to the door, and waited.

Half an hour passed.

A door opened round the back of the shop, and I pushed myself up off the step I had been perched upon and went round to meet the proprietor. In a little yard, which I now saw extended to a one-storey
house, a careworn but handsome woman was feeding a vast, black dog with scraps from the kitchen.

She glanced up, smoothing away a few wisps of hair when she saw me, and asked what I wanted. I asked how I could find Murat Berzegov.

‘Oh, come in,' she said. ‘I'm his wife. But you must excuse us, he's asleep. He has such trouble sleeping at night with everything that's going on.'

I had been looking forward to meeting Berzegov since I had first seen his name mentioned in a report from an obscure Russian news agency two years before. He headed an organization called the ‘Circassian Congress' and agitated ceaselessly for Russia to recognize the destruction of his nation as genocide.

As I waited, his wife wondered that I had struggled to find him.

‘You could have asked anyone you saw where Murat lives, they all know him, he's famous round here,' she said.

I had not the heart to tell her I had done just that and that no one had heard of him.

Maikop is capital of Adygea, one of the three autonomous Circassian areas within Russia. Ironically enough, it was founded in 1857 as a military base for the final push to subjugate the Circassians and was later assigned to be the capital despite being almost entirely Russian. Adygea, where only 25 per cent of the population are Circassians, has Circassian-language television, and its government building flies the golden arrows and stars of the green Circassian flag, but otherwise it is just a typical Russian provincial town, all rotting concrete and too-wide streets, and a more than usually miserable one.

The Circassians who live here are descended primarily from the Abadzekh tribe, which agreed to be resettled to the north of the mountains in 1861 and thus partly escaped the exile and death three years later that greeted their ethnic kin who remained behind. Their homeland is one of three nominally Circassian regions in the North Caucasus. To the east is Karachayevo-Cherkessia, then further east still is Kabardino-Balkaria, but the Circassians only make up a majority in the last.

The Soviets, who specialized in the politics of divide and rule, split up the Circassians into three nations. First of all are the Adygeans, who live around Maikop; then come the Cherkess; and, on the eastern edge, are the Kabardins. The divisions are a nonsense, and their titles all derive from different names used for the Circassians. Adygea comes from the Circassians' own name for themselves, which is Adyg or Adiga. Cherkessia comes from the Turkish name for Circassians, which is Cherkess. Kabardino is derived from the geographic region of eastern Circassia, which is Kabarda.

A parallel would be if a conqueror of England divided it into three states, named them England, Angleterre and Wessex, and randomly decided they were inhabited by three different nations, although they speak the same language, have the same religion and share the same customs. The splits have, however, become an obstacle to Circassians, like Berzegov, who want increased rights or recognition of their tragic past.

I walked into the little house, turned left along a panelled hall and sat in the living room, a small but comfortable place with a sofa, an armchair, piles of paper in the corner and dumbbells scattered around the floor. Berzegov's wife bustled off to wake him up, then vanished into the kitchen, from which she shortly brought the first of several trays of tea, sweets, bread and honey that punctuated the morning.

The news report in which I first heard of Berzegov described a letter sent by him to the Russian parliament's Nationalities Committee. He had, in the name of his Circassian Congress, requested that Russia's parliament – the State Duma – recognize the genocide of his nation.

While I waited for him to appear, I fished out my copy of the reply he had received and sat down to read it. It is truly a fascinating insight into the bureaucratic mind.

‘The Committee of the State Duma for Nationalities Issues has examined your appeal addressed to the State Duma Chairman Boris Gryzlov on the question of the recognition of an act of genocide committed, in your opinion, by the Russian Empire against the Adygean (Circassian) ethnic group, and announces the following.

‘According to the data of the Russian Academy of Science's History Institute, in the Soviet period sixteen ethnic groups were repressed on the grounds of nationality, and another forty-five ethnic groups underwent partial repression. The Adygeans (Circassians) do not appear in this list,' the reply stated.

The letter, which was signed by a junior member of parliament from the Volga region of Bashkortostan and dated 17 January 2006, goes on to express a few banalities about the importance of inter-ethnic harmony for the good of the fatherland but has already made its point. It does not recognize that the massive deliberate expulsion of the Circassians, and the death from disease, starvation and violence that accompanied it, was a genocide.

The logic of the letter would not satisfy even a moderately intelligent child, since it transparently failed to answer the question. Berzegov asked about acts committed by the Russian Empire, which existed until 1917. The State Duma answered about acts committed by the Soviet Union, which existed after 1917.

On a more technical level, the reply refers to the ‘Adygeans', which is one of the three Soviet-constructed nations created to undermine the unity of the Circassians. Berzegov's letter asked for recognition of the genocide committed against the Adygs, which is the Circassians' own name for themselves. It is a small but telling mistake, like referring to someone as Englandish instead of English. The fact that the member of parliament made this mistake is a clear indication of quite how little thought or research went into the committee's response.

As I finished reading the letter, Berzegov emerged into the living room, rubbing his eyes a little but otherwise looking bright and awake and happy to talk.

Berzegov is an artist and a karate coach, and of an athletic build despite his grey hair. He did not seem angry as such, but spoke with a consistent sense of outrage that never boiled over into a temper.

Since he had received this letter from the Russian parliament, he had stepped up his campaign. He set up an appeal in the name of Circassian organizations from nine different countries and sent it to the European Parliament on 11 October 2006. The parliament had
promised to look at the appeal when its turn came, and he was now awaiting a response.

‘After we sent our letter to the State Duma, we already started to get messages coming from acquaintances that there was no need to raise the question again,' he said. ‘But we appealed to the European Parliament anyway, which meant we went outside the Russian system, and that they could not forgive. That was when they decided to do something about me.'

The appeal to the European Parliament, which was addressed to its then president, Josep Borrell, is a summary of the history of the Circassians, and how they were exiled from their homeland. It quotes the nineteenth-century Russian historian Adolf Berzhe and his estimate that of a million Circassians, 400,000 were killed in war, 497,000 deported and only 80,000 allowed to remain in their homeland.

‘Russia has changed its political form several times in the 142 years since the Russo-Caucasian War, but in its relation to the Adygs (Circassians) it remains unchanged – this is the forced cultural assimilation of those of the native population who remained on their historic territory and a ban on the return of those Adygs (Circassians) exiled from the north-west Caucasus,' it concludes, in words that could not have been more different to the tale of peace and harmony laid out in the schoolbooks I read in Arkhipo-Osipovka.

When Berzegov sent this letter, the campaign against him started for real. He received phone calls late at night in pure, accentless Russian, saying that if his two sons died he himself would be to blame. Then, he said, he was abducted from right outside his house by three men who pressed a pistol into the back of his head, and told him to stop shaming Russia. ‘That time they said they were veterans of the security services,' said Berzegov, with a resigned sigh. He leaned back in his armchair and awaited my next question.

There is no proof that the threats of violence against Berzegov have any connection to the Russian state, but what happened next unmistakably did.

Health inspectors, fire inspectors, food inspectors, sanitary inspectors and more started to arrive to check up on Berzegov's shop, which
had sold food, drink and the everyday items that little shops sell all over the world. As soon as it opened in the morning they would arrive and start sampling.

‘There are twenty-one structures, probably more in fact, that can come and check up on things. By law they can only come every three months. But if they get a complaint from a customer they can come more often. And they came so often we had to shut the shop last September. One lad has agreed to rent it off me, although I warned him what would happen. He won't last long.'

I asked him what kind of checks the authorities had conducted.

‘Well, they fined us for some sausage we were selling. They say that the seller of the sausage is responsible for the taste of the sausage. But they took the sausage right from the delivery truck, they did not even wait for me to put it in the fridge before they took it away for analysis. Twenty tonnes of this sausage arrives in Maikop from Moscow every day but they only fined us,' he said.

Berzegov is clearly a stubborn man, and as these checks based on tip-offs continued, he tried to look into the allegations against him. He got hold of one letter of complaint that had been sent by a ‘regular customer' of his shop. The letter was completed with all the details required by law, and Berzegov tried to find out why the writer had decided to complain about him.

The writer, it transpired, could not have been a regular customer, because he did not exist. The address on the letter could not be found on any map, there was no person with that name registered with the police, and the mobile phone number belonged to a baffled Armenian in the town of Apsheronsk who had not complained about Berzegov, had no idea who Berzegov was, and naturally did not know that he owned a shop. At this point, Berzegov realized the bureaucrats were just inventing evidence against him. Resistance was therefore hopeless, and he closed the shop down.

‘This is how Russia works now. It's not about threats, they make you shut the shop yourself by suffocating you. They come and impose a fine every day, and you have no choice. If they can't find something wrong, they'll sample the air and tell you your air doesn't meet the required standards. There is nothing you can do. In a normal situation
you could bribe them, but if the authorities don't like you, you can't. I can take them to court, and the court will say I was right but that will be six months later and they will already have fined me for the electrics, or for something else.'

Some Circassians, worried for Berzegov, had encouraged him to drop the political campaign and join a cultural organization that stays on the safe ground of dance, music or folklore. He said he had even been offered jobs, security and money if he would just keep his head down and join one of the mainstream Circassian groups.

‘People say I am too tough, they say we should just get on with developing music and developing language, but that would be to neutralize our organization. I have stuck to my line, I want recognition of the genocide and if people want to help me they are welcome to. If they just want to play the fiddle, then they should go and play the fiddle, if they want to dance, they should go and dance. But my organization is only involved in the genocide,' he said.

‘What is the point of developing the language anyway if we don't have a future of some kind? If there is no future then why bother?'

Since the end of the Soviet Union, the rise in a common sense of Circassian identity has pleased him. He said the Circassians were connecting with each other, and young Circassians realized what had happened to their nation and why they were spread all over the world. When Berzegov first came to Maikop from his home village in 1978, he said, Circassians could be stopped on the street for speaking their language as if they were foreigners. Now at least the nation had woken up.

‘In my generation, we thought we had somehow just appeared as a nation in 1917. That was our understanding. As for what came before the revolution, there were only a few historians and they told us we had nothing: no history, no culture. Maybe some old people knew that there used to be a lot of Circassians here, but they couldn't talk about it or they would be accused of nationalism,' he said. ‘We would sit in our village and put up the antenna and listen to Voice of America. Sometimes they would even speak in our own language, but that was the only knowledge we had that there was a diaspora somewhere.'

Although some Circassians have moved to Adygea from abroad, including a whole village from Kosovo, the numbers are few and they do not have the same rights to move back to their homeland as ethnic Russians who grew up outside Russia. Under a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin in June 2006, only people who speak Russian and know Russian culture come under the law on ‘fellow citizens' which permits people whose family once came from what is now Russia to return home.

According to Berzegov, this decree is illegal, since Russian is only one of the official languages of Adygea so it cannot be insisted on. However, illegal or not, it makes any Circassian's return extremely complex, tying it up in bureaucratic obstructions that he knows only too well.