Abstract
Reviewed by: Francis King, University of East Anglia, UK
The strip of land between the Black and Caspian Seas has long been home to many dozens of different peoples, polities, languages and cultures – each with their mutually incompatible national narratives. Visit almost any historical museum, anywhere in the Caucasus, and you will learn of the cultural achievements, ancient roots and past political glories of the local titular nationality. You may also learn how it once extended over a much wider area than it now occupies, of the grievous historical wrongs that have truncated its territory, and of the ongoing struggle to redress those grievances.
In the light of this, Arthur Tsutsiev’s book is not merely a first-rate reference work on the entangled histories of the Caucasian peoples since Russia first became involved in the area. It is also a very necessary political intervention. Tsutsiev, a native of North Ossetia, is described in Georgi Derluguian’s foreword as ‘a quiet, sad man who probably knows more than anyone else about his part of the world’ (xi). There is much to be sad about. The demise of the USSR gave nationalist politicians across the Caucasus region the opportunity to press their competing claims. The results have been disastrous: several wars, frozen conflicts with little chance of resolution, and masses of refugees and internally displaced persons. In their turn, these calamities feed the trope of ‘age-old hatreds’, about which nothing can be done. The information in this volume could provide an excellent antidote both to the poison of competing nationalist mythologies, and to the helpless sense that conflict is unavoidable.
This large-format book is structured around 57 clear but detailed maps, each of which has an extensive commentary, superbly translated from the Russian original. They allow the reader to trace the evolution of the area from the early eighteenth century to the present day, in several dimensions. A series of maps presenting the political and administrative structure of the region at different times show the change from Ottoman and Persian kingdoms and khanates to provinces and Cossack hosts, then Soviet republics and autonomies, and finally independent republics, regions and breakaway territories. Individual maps show such things as the distribution of Cossack hosts in the Northern Caucasus, the front lines in the world wars and the civil war, or the deportations of different nationalities by both the Imperial and Soviet regimes – the Cherkess in the early 1860s; the Chechens, Ingush and others in World War II. Perhaps the most revealing series of maps are those that show the changing distributions of languages and religious affiliations over time in the region. These changes, reflecting migration, education and assimilation in varying proportions, represent the consolidation of often scattered ethnic groups into nations. Comparing maps 18, 31 and 45 (49, 89 and 128, respectively) allows one to trace how, over little more than a century, from the 1880s to the 1990s, the Armenians of the Caucasus were able to carve out the now almost ethnically homogeneous republics of Armenia and Nagorny Karabakh.
Tsutsiev’s commetaries are sober and judicious throughout the book. His analysis of the contradictory processes by which the USSR and Soviet nationalities policies ‘both inhibited and fed the politicization of ethnicity’ (106) is particularly useful. While it still had some ‘doctrinal energy’ behind it (104), the Soviet state was able to hold the area together. Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika at the end of the 1980s, with its vapid slogans of ‘democratization’, rapidly led to the area’s fragmentation. A new generation of political leaders interpreted democracy as the right to pursue the interests of their own ethnic group, at the expense of others if necessary. Maps 39 and 40 (108 and 111) show the areas of dispute in the final years of the USSR, and the wars that attended the break-up of the union. Tsutsiev includes an entire section on ‘Conflicting Historical Visions of Homelands and Borders’, replete with nine separate maps showing rival historical claims to much the same territory, as well as analyses of the specific pretensions of the individual national groups. He concludes by looking at Russia’s North Caucasus, contrasting the determination of Russia’s rulers to hold the area – by force if necessary – with the growing mood of ethnic chauvinism within Russia towards Caucasians, and the flight of ethnic Russians from the area. These final sections make sombre reading.
In the foreword, Derluguian expresses the hope that ‘this extraordinarily sobering atlas might eventually be found in every school and bookshop, and … in the teahouses and bars where nationalist fervors still flare up easily’ (xii). It probably won’t get into many teahouses or bars, but it should certainly be in the library of every institution where this history is taught. It is an invaluable teaching aid and an excellent corrective to romantic nationalist myth-making.