The North Caucasus Barrier

"It is. This next one is a collection of authoritative essays on how Russians and the mountain peoples of the Caucasus (among other Muslims in the former Soviet world) have interacted, from the end of the 19th-century wars to the outbreak of a modern Russian-Chechen war in 1994. There are accounts of various Russian persecutions right through the 20th century, and how they only stifled but never quite eradicated the spirit of the mountain peoples. Russian policies were aimed at bringing all Soviet peoples together in a Russian-speaking, post-religious, freely-intermarrying community. That didn’t fit with what the mountain people wanted. There are accounts of brutal Russian suppression of unrest in the Caucasus early in the 20th century, and of the mass deportation of the Chechens and other mountain peoples to the steppes of Central Asia during World War Two, after Stalin implausibly accused the Chechens of collaborating with the Nazis. The Chechens who survived (many tens of thousands died) were allowed back after Stalin’s death; but resentment, of course, lingers on. There’s a lot in this book, too, about the way Soviet Muslims learned to hide their faith to counter Russianisation; the preservation of religious belief through anything from secret meetings to, later, cassette recordings of sermons, sold in scruffy street markets, right under the noses of the Soviet authorities. And there are fascinating descriptions of the folksy Sufi form of Islam, with saints and shrines and wishing-wells and a traditional prayer in the form of a round-dance, the zikr, that, at least until the modern war, was how Chechens preferred to worship."