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The Southern Frontier

© Derek Royden Guiler

For almost a decade Chechnya has been making bloody headlines in the international press but this coverage has usually concentrated what these conflicts mean in terms of Russia, rarely shining a light on the unique history and culture of these people who straddle the fringes of the Russian Empire and Turkish Islam. An important facet of the religious life in this country, where the majority of people are Muslims, has been the prominent historical role played by Sufi religious orders. Sufism is the "mystical" arm of Islam and it grew in Chechnya into brotherhoods with each devoted to one religious master, "the Sufi sheikhs, or holy men, preached that a true Muslim could not tolerate the rule of foreign infidels. There were two acceptable forms of jihad, or holy war. A Muslim could serve Allah as a fighter or as a scholar. The Chechens became famous for their warrior prowess, the Dagestanis for their Koranic learning."´(1) The greatest of these holy men in Chechnya and Dagestan were Shaykh Mansur Ushurma and Kunta Haji Kishiev whose huge followings allowed them to temporarily halt and even push back the Russian advance into their lands in the late 18th and throughout the 19th century.(2)

Russian occupation of these areas, which began early in the 18th century, followed methods that would be familiar to anyone acquainted with the general patterns of European colonial expansion. Large numbers of Russian peasants were moved, forcibly or otherwise, from the interior of Russia onto estates of varying size and viability which were dispensed to various members of the nobility and Christian traders or migrants from within the Russian Empire. These towns were equipped with military garrisons built to secure the settlers from attack(3) and, if possible, expand the frontier. Like many colonial powers the Russians had one thing going for them that the Chechens and other regional groups did not: a highly centralised (if notoriously inefficient) government and a military chain of command (including multi-ethnic Cossack units who were familiar with the terrain). When mobilised by "holy war" under the Sufi Brotherhoods the Chechens and Dagestanis were far more effective than when inevitable rifts of clan loyalty allowed the colonisers to find allies and play the game of divide and conquer.

The Caucuses, the mountainous region of which both countries are a part, has spawned many myths in Russian history and excited the minds of some of her greatest writers including Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy. Although the prototype of the "Circassian" bandit, blood-thirsty and anti-Christian, has a long history and is being used quite effectively by the present government of Russia to justify its assault on Chechnya, each of these three great writers contributed in some way to a Romantic counter myth which had an equally long history in other parts of Europe, especially France. Just as Rousseau had made America a paradise filled with "noble savages" who were morally superior to the European conquerors, so the Russian Romantics made the Caucuses a place of liberation where the people hadn't yet succumbed to the artificiality of Western European manners.

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