Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars

Rating:
Summary: Very Good
Review: Alyssa review was very well done. Especially for people who like bias opinions and hysterics, caused by Russian traditional mythical adventures and struggles against "Muslim savage" in Caucasus. Im Christian myself and live in the country which borders so called Muslim regions of Caucasus.
I think Griffin as a foreigner, who wanted to understand this people, did his best and I admire his for that. Without hysterics surely or pseudo-chauvinism.

Alyssas ending was very typical of those people who try to cover up terror and horror which Russia has inflicted this region for a century: "..I am sorry, but I miss the romance in stealing other people's women and children, murdering the stragglers, tying naked nursemaids to trees and reigning death on legions of entrapped Russian soldiers whose sole purpose was in the first place to protect Russian communities from Islamic terror"

Well, these gruesome indications are nothing in comparison to Genocide of Caucasians starting from despotic and sadistic generals Totleben or Ermolov. Mass killings of millions of inhabitants of Caucasus starting from Tsarist Russia and ending with Putin. Excuses for these crimes? War against Islam. Islam is a religion which existed in North Caucasus in harmony with Southern Caucasian Georgian Christianity. Alyssas argument is based on almost mythical perception of barbaric muslim hordes dissenting on poor mother Russia, terrorizing her and there is no one to protect her except her brave, noble soldiers. Noble indeed, a real savage army which has inflicted great evil and destruction throughout Caucasus and beyond. Afghanistan and Tajikistan is one of the examples. Through means of ethnic-cleansing , rape and complete annihilation of locals, Russia has achieved temporary dominance of the whole region.
Stalin did beautiful job by deporting whole Caucasus far far away. Putin now even did better job, kill whoever Chechen or anyone who even thinks of Caucasian freedom.

As for the book. You can take a look at the introduction. The horror story of Grozny, looking like a WWII city (destroyed and wiped out) is saying enough about Russian means of subduing these ancient and culturally rich people, who value their freedom and rights more than anything.

Griffin tries to understand these people through eyes of a writer not as politician or chauvinist. He does not belong to any camps of political ideology. He is a writer, a gifted one indeed who writes what is reality. This is not a romantic book, it is a very sad book about tragedy which effected our national existence (inhabitants of Caucasus).

You don't have to go into History of Shamyls rebellion or Ermolovs mass murders to see what really is happening in Caucasus. As Griffin starts his book with accounts of destroyed Grozny, I take a look at the city which not long ago was one of the beautiful cities in Caucasus. Then, you may judge who is a vandal and who tries to defend what is theirs.

Well done Mr Griffin, and please not be alarmed by critisism. As Pushkin said ones: " I look upon a praise and criticism in same fashion- having no reaction at all."


Rating:
Summary: Revealing
Review: I've always felt much safer following novelists into non-fiction than say biographers, or historians into the realms of fiction. Griffin, who has written a couple of historical novels, is on familiar, though foreign ground. His fictional stories seem to examine cruelty and hope and his first work of non-fiction is no exception. It's a mixture of many genres, all neatly rolled into a short, decisive book. The Caucasus is one of those places, much like the Balkans, which used to confuse me to the point where I'd rather turn the page. But Griffin keeps everything simple and clear, following myths, history and politics along the lines of an expanding Christian nation (Russia) and a defensive Islamic nation (what came to be called Chechnya, Dagestan and Azerbaijan). This book is obviously more topical than the author thought when starting it four years ago. My only complaint is in the inclusion of the author's own travels. At first, it didn't feel as if they merited belonging, but once you catch the writer's drift, that everything is really very close to how it was two hundred years ago, his aims become more and more apparent. Caucasus is blessedly easy to read, and that's no mean feat.

Rating:
Summary: Revealing
Review: I've always felt much safer following novelists into non-fiction than say biographers, or historians into the realms of fiction. Griffin, who has written a couple of historical novels, is on familiar, though foreign ground. His fictional stories seem to examine cruelty and hope and his first work of non-fiction is no exception. It's a mixture of many genres, all neatly rolled into a short, decisive book. The Caucasus is one of those places, much like the Balkans, which used to confuse me to the point where I'd rather turn the page. But Griffin keeps everything simple and clear, following myths, history and politics along the lines of an expanding Christian nation (Russia) and a defensive Islamic nation (what came to be called Chechnya, Dagestan and Azerbaijan). This book is obviously more topical than the author thought when starting it four years ago. My only complaint is in the inclusion of the author's own travels. At first, it didn't feel as if they merited belonging, but once you catch the writer's drift, that everything is really very close to how it was two hundred years ago, his aims become more and more apparent. Caucasus is blessedly easy to read, and that's no mean feat.

Rating:
Summary: Overly romanticizes brutality
Review: There is no doubt whatever that this book is exceptionally written, bordering in parts on the poetic. Alas, Griffin's romanticization of the Murid wars which consumed the better part of 50 years, from the 1820s through the 1860s, leaves a great deal to be desired, mostly because Griffin did absolutely no work to place these wars into the historical context of the global Islamic jihad, which began with Mohammed's reign of terror in the Jewish and other non-Muslim communities of seventh century Arabia, and continued throughout Islamic history, wherever non-Muslim communities abutted Islamic ones.

Griffin describes, for example, the particularly horrific capture of some princely wives and children from an idyllic estate in the southern Caucasus and their entrapment for many months with the wives of the leading jihadi of the era, including at least one Armenian woman, herself a victim of the historical Islamic tradition of entrapment and enslavement of non-Muslim women and children forced to submit to Islamic life and law.

To Griffin, however, this episode, along with every other bloody exploit of the Islamic warriors was somehow justifiable, despite the fact that the so called victims began the wars when Islamic chieftains and their brigands encroached upon Russian communities along their borders to rape, pillage, thieve and otherwise harras their neighbors on the northern frontier.

Griffin sets these wars into a text that spans his journey of several months through the region in the 1990s, before the Russian counter-terror operations in Grozny again reached a crescendo late in the decade. It is passingly interesting to learn of the various drunkards with whom he traversed the region, but wholly unimportant except as a window onto a way of life that continues in the tradition of Islamic jihad.

Unfortunately, Griffin draws upon the equally false and romanticized musings of Leo Tolstoy, whose last novel eulogized a central figure in the Murid wars, Haji Murid, who despite his Islamisist attitudes and barbarities, occasionally demonstrated kindness, as when he won back Tolstoy's ruinous gambling losses and returned the promissory notes to the famed novelist the next morning.

Certainly there have been many ugly eras in Russian history, but it is historical outrage to suggest that 19th century Russian treatment of Muslims (after all, resulting from ceaseless Muslim assaults on Russian communities near the Caucasus) in any way justified Muslim slaughters of Russians during those horrible decades.

Worse, the account ignores massive historical evidence of 1,400 years of Islamic human rights abuses (of which the Murid wars were just a tiny microcosm). Griffin presents 19th century terrorists as somehow heroic and awesome, a pattern repeated in modern reporting on the continuing jihad.

I am sorry, but I miss the romance in stealing other people's women and children, murdering the stragglers, tying naked nursemaids to trees and reigning death on legions of entrapped Russian soldiers whose sole purpose was in the first place to protect Russian communities from Islamic terror.

Now, history repeats.

--Alyssa A. Lappen