From Conquest to Deportation: The North Caucasus under Russian Rule by Perović Jeronim (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 563 Perović, Jeronim. From Conquest to Deportation: The North Caucasus under Russian Rule. Hurst & Company, London, 2018. xxiv + 466 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00. The North Caucasus remains one of the most complex and challenging landscapes for historians to explore. In addition to its physical extremes, its linguistic and ethnic diversity has long proven a challenge to simplify and summarize. Until recently, the historiography of the region in general has also been dominated by the conflicts that have occurred there. These range from the Russian war against Shamil in the nineteenth century, to the first and second Chechen wars at the end of the twentieth century and the ‘frozen’ conflicts in the Transcaucasus. Russian annexation of the Crimea, the bloody and violent civil war in Syria, and NATO plans to grant Georgia full membership have all in recent years added further military tension to the region, rendering the Black Sea in general one of the main nexuses of conflict in the modern world. Jeronim Perović in this volume does a masterful job of summarizing the historical background to Russian engagement in the North Caucasus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a critical element in understanding the wider security dynamic of the region even today. Although, as his title suggests, conflict is also rarely absent from this account, he manages both to synthesize much of the more recent writing on the region, which have added complexity and depth to our understanding of the sources of conflict there, and also to avoid repeating the Russophobe narratives which assign all problems in the region straightforwardly to Moscovite aggression. As the title suggests, Perović’s account seeks to provide an overview of the most formative events that have shaped the North Caucasus in the modern period, beginning from the war against Shamil in the nineteenth century to Stalin’s deportation of whole nationalities at the end of the Second World War. Although his final chapter and conclusion deal with the longer term consequences of the return of exiled peoples in the 1950s, the Soviet collapse in 1991, the Chechen wars, and the contested memorialization of all this recent history that continues even today, Perović’s detailed historical narrative account largely ends with the death of Khasan Israilov, a Chechen insurgent leader and German collaborator, at the hands of fellow Chechens in December 1944. Perović provides an impressive synthesis of much of the most recent Russian and Western writing on the subject in recent years. He builds upon and synthesizesThomasBarrett’sworkontheethnicmakeupoftheTerekCossacks, as well as Michael Khodarkovsky’s 2011 account of cultural misunderstandings between mountaineers and the Russian state over the obligations signified by oaths of fealty, to draw a picture of conflict drivers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that is both complex and multi-faceted. He SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 564 effectively also overturns traditional narratives of unified resistance to Russian rule in the region to draw a more nuanced picture of societies that were, at one and the same time, both militarized and highly fragmented. In addition, he argues persuasively, in line with much of the more recent historiography, that Naqshbandiya Sufi sects were not the key driver behind resistance to Russian rule in the region. He likewise builds upon, and effectively synthesizes, the work of Alex Marshall on the establishment of Soviet rule in the region in the 1920s and 1930s, in particular with regard to the Ali Mitaev experiment in Chechnia, and the disarmament and collectivization campaigns of that era. He further adds to this rich synthesis however some invaluable additional material of his own-notably a detailed account of collectivization in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as an account of the insurgency in the region during the Second World War that incorporates Khasan Israilov’s own diary. By drawing attention to the report of V. Pomerantsev, a Soviet journalist who visited Chechnya-Ingushetiia in 1939 as a reporter for the atheist journal Bezbozhnik, Perović here provides critical additional insight on the growing suspicion of the Soviet central authorities towards their regional governments in the North Caucasus. Pomerantsev’s report at the time sparked a violent political debate within the party...