Once known for its honour-loving bandits and rugged scenery, the Caucasus is the narrow wedge of land between Russia and the Middle East. Rippling with wooded gorges, its ethnic and linguistic complexity — 40 languages in Dagestan alone — has long intrigued outsiders. These days the Caucasus is better known for separatism and scenes of bloody violence, which Oliver Bullough puts into vivid historical focus. More crucially, he sheds a telling light on contemporary Russian political thinking.
Bullough, a companionable ex-Reuters journalist, bypasses independent Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan — which for some collectively define the region — and instead goes in search of three peoples in the North Caucasus: the Circassians, Karachai-Balkars and Chechens. This is really a book about Russia’s relationship with its unruly southern flank, its dogged attempts to subdue it, and bitter incomprehension when the locals bite back. And he tells a brilliant story, interweaving personal reportage with impressive reading, both in the Caucasus and its far-flung diaspora.
The book begins with the tsarist army which, flush with the imperialist dream, first breached the region in the late 18th century, slaughtering the Nogay people to a man.
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