into the caucasus

The Russian conquest of the northern Caucasus as recorded in Charles King’s The Ghost of Freedom* was excruciatingly brutal. The mountainous terrain, the forest-smothered flat lands, the lack of any roads or infrastructure, and the disunity and ubiquitous spread of the native tribes forced the Russians to spend over sixty years at war in the largely Muslim regions of Dagestan, Chechnya, and Circassia. They had been able to subjugate the Georgians with relative ease, the reasons for this being that the Georgians were largely united under easily co-opted noblemen who ruled over large, sedentary kingdoms situated in broad valleys, while, as stated before, the Muslims to the north lived in the mountains and lacked any unity, making it difficult for the Russian military to maneuver effectively, and leaving it impossible to conquer them simply by integrating a few wealthy nobles into the Russian aristocracy.

To conquer these rambunctious people, then, the Russians, under General Alexei Ermolov, employed tactics of total war in the early and mid nineteenth century. They changed the terrain by clearing miles upon miles of territory of trees, leaving fewer hide-outs from whence the Muslim resistance could launch surprise attacks. They devastated entire Muslim villages, killing everyone in them and burning down the buildings, sucking dry the resources for their own militaristic purposes. By the time they had conquered the region in the 1860’s, they implemented a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, forcibly deporting tens of thousands of Circassians across the Black Sea to Turkey, thousands of whom died aboard over-loaded transport ships. Their bodies reportedly washed up across the whole length of Asia Minor’s Black Sea coast. The survivors spread out across the Ottoman Empire, some of them forced to become classic highway-men in the desperate struggle for resources to survive as refugees. The evidence of this evacuation (something of a euphemism) can be seen today in the form of the presence of Circassians at high levels of Jordanian government. The tradition of Russian brutality against the people in this region continues today, most notably in the form of the Russian wars in Chechnya since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But there was another way, a more artistic and beautiful way, in which other Russians treated the Caucasus. Novelists and poets from Pushkin to Tolstoy romanticized what they saw as the perfect freedom which existed there if one only lived permanently amongst the Muslim tribes. There are dozens of fictional and non-fictional accounts of Russian soldiers who either deserted during the war or were captured by their native enemies, only to fall completely in love with the local culture (or a local woman) and find themselves living in the Caucasus for the rest of their lives. There, many Romantics thought, deep in the mountains of Dagestan, Chechnya, Circassia or Georgia, one could free himself from the confines of the strict aristocratic rules and regulations which governed the way noblemen had to behave in high society. He could liberate himself from the arbitrary, systematic social laws of life in what we would call the "First World” today and plunge into an everlasting period of freedom, completely disconnected, forever, from the world in the orderly, imperial, modern and austere St. Petersburg which he left behind.

This kind of fantastic romanticizing is akin to the reasons I travel, and partly what compels me to go to the Caucasus myself this summer. Mostly, however, it resembles the way in which I plan to be completely out of touch for the entirety of the time I am abroad. Between Iceland and the Caspian, I intend to not check my e-mail once, to not check my Facebook once, to not log into AIM, to not log into Skype, to not have any sort of international cell phone to which any of my friends can send a text. None of my friends in the U.S. will be able to find me, none of them will know where I am, none of them will have any way of communicating with me whatsoever.

Genuine travel is disappearing into the alien, the foreign, the unknown, into what the mainstream portrays as dangerous, and then being completely immersed in it. It is doing what one friend of mine recently angrily told me is “stupid,” and what most people would agree with him is “stupid.” It’s what Paul Theroux calls the traveler’s inclination towards the mytho- and megalomaniacal which compels me to progress in this seemingly idiotic direction: the ideal of traveling is not just a trip through a few countries, or a week in a foreign city governed by carefully planned and structured sight-seeing, but rather an aimless, wild, dangerous, risky, disconnected and unaccompanied adventure across a couple thousand miles and a few or more time zones through countries where you do not speak a word of the local language. It is being in a tiny village you have never heard of and did not plan to go to, and knowing while you are there that no one in the world outside of that town knows where you are, nor does anyone have any way of finding you. It’s at least some temporary perfect freedom from all the structures of normal life. It’s exactly the same kind of ideal that led all those Russian soldiers to disappear, alone and disconnected from everything they knew.

*King, Charles, The Ghost of Freedom, New York, NY: Oxford, 2010.