"When shall blood cease to flow in the mountain?" runs a local proverb. "When sugar canes grow in the snows" comes the answer.
The mountains are the Caucasus, and the saying is Chechen. This is not a saying of recent vintage, though it has been invoked with prophetic foreboding ever since the Chechens declared their independence from the Russians in 1991. It was already ancient in the 1830s when the Caucasian Muslim leader, Shamyl, declaring that "the Caucasus must be freed," took up arms against the Imperial Russian expeditionary forces of Czar Nicholas I.
A handsome and fearless warrior, Shamyl was known to his men as "the Lion of Daghestan." The story of his 25-year guerrilla war against the Russians is beautifully told in Lesley Blanch's book "The Sabres of Paradise." If you want to understand the rage and tenacity of today's Chechen fighters, and what seems like the senseless persistence of the Russian government in crushing them, this book is the place to start.
Ms. Blanch, an English Russophile, wrote "The Sabres of Paradise" in the late 1950s. Her vivid evocations of the forbidding landscape of the Caucasian mountain regions -- based on her own travel and research -- make one feel that she was an eyewitness to the mutually destructive holy wars carried on by Imperial Orthodox Russia and Shamyl's Muslim warriors -- a conflict that continued the centuries-long Christian reconquest of "Holy Russia" from "the Tatar yoke," an advance that spilled well beyond Russia's borders and fueled imperial ambitions later inherited by the Soviet state.
From the first sentence of the book -- "The Caucasians wrote love-poems to their daggers, as to a mistress, and went to battle, as to a rendezvous" -- we are swept up in the drama and passion of a guerrilla war that not only transformed Russia but also had a powerful political and cultural effect on Western Europe.
England and France -- long suspicious of Russian moves that might clash with their own imperial designs in Central Asia, in what became part of "the Great Game" -- acted as occasional and unreliable allies of Shamyl and his fighters, the Murids.
Shamyl's cry for freedom was couched in religious terms. He swore the Muslims of the southern mountains would not be subjugated by the Muscovy Christians, and he promised his fighters that they would enter the gates of paradise if they died in combat. As Ms. Blanch notes: "To the Russians, the Murid Wars were basically for conquest, to the mountaineers, they became holy wars of resistance to their infidel invaders, for their soul's salvation. Thus the Czar's muskets were met with the sabres of paradise."
In "Sabres," Ms. Blanch is also concerned with women's often silent role in history and gives room to women's voices, even in this story of politics and battle in the mid-19th century. Of Bahou-Messadou, Shamyl's mother, she writes: "In a world where woman's submission was absolute, she maintained a singularly independent attitude." The account of Bahou-Messadou's attempt to intercede with her son on behalf of the beleaguered Chechen allies of Shamyl is one of the most powerful and disturbing stories in this chronicle of bravery and cruelty.
Shamyl held off the Russians for 25 years. When they captured him in 1859, he was treated as a dignitary, and after a number of years in Russia was allowed to leave the country and live out his life in Constantinople. He died on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1871.
In many photos of today's Chechen leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, he is sitting at his desk under a huge portrait of Shamyl. If you want to understand why, read Lesley's Blanch's superb and timely book.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "The Sabres of Paradise"
Author: Lesley Blanch
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Length, price: 495 pages, $9.95 paperback