Tom Parfitt is full of questions, guilt and regrets; a good man. Brought up on a Norfolk farm, Russia lover, adventurer and correspondent, this complex narrator is both at the heart and at the edge of a remarkable attempt to uncover the wildest and least known frontier of Europe. Brave, stubborn but amusingly self-effacing, he sets himself a 1,000-mile walk from the Black Sea to the Caspian, along the string of mountainous republics that make up Russia’s southern border. Across dramatic landscapes, he engages with a timeless world of shepherds who graze their flocks in the “mystical” highlands in summer, only to return to a patchwork of ethnic and religious communities in winter. Parfitt unravels how the Caucasus form “a landscape of unfinished histories”, histories misunderstood and often untold. On this “saunter to the brink of madness”, he runs into bears, wars and “permanent zones of counter-terrorist organisation”. These he sets alongside almost constant generosity and hospitality from peoples with almost nothing to share.
His journey begins in madness too. In 2004 he is sent to cover the seizure by militant Chechens of more than 1,000 hostages in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia. He was witness to the inhumanity of the hostage takers and to the catastrophic “rescue attempt”; 333 hostages died of which 186 were children. That night President Putin told the nation what he had learned: “We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten.” The events of those days left Parfitt not only with first-hand insight into a “merciless, blundering state” but with a recurring nightmare: a falling woman, her left hand grasping the air, groaning like a wounded animal as she learns her child was killed in the school. This trauma set him on his mad trek on foot, “not as a reporter, but as a human being, as someone moved, and horrified, confused and intoxicated”.
The Caucasus are a mystery. Let’s begin with the word “Caucasian’. Until remarkably recently the term was used to describe white Europeans, following now discredited racial theories from the 19th century and the belief that after the flood Noah’s Ark came to rest somewhere in these mountains. Ironically, Parfitt points out, in Russian people from the Caucasus are most commonly called chorny, which uncomfortably translates as “darkies”. Married to a Russian, living in Moscow with their son, he wants to roll back the layers of prejudice and ignorance towards peoples stereotyped as “ignorant, cruel and double dealing”.
Parfitt is walking into the heart of some of Russia’s deepest myths of imperial conquest, born out of the literary giants of his adopted country: Lermontov, Pushkin and Tolstoy. At the same time he tramps into more recent histories, from mass deportations by Stalin’s secret police during the second world war to the wholesale destruction of the Chechen capital, Grozny, by the Russian Army in both 1995 and 2000 . At almost every stop, he marvels at the dignity of the people he meets. We share food while told tales from a village whose sons fought for the Red Army all the way to the heart of Europe. At the same time the men, women and children who remained behind were deported en masse to Central Asia, dying in huge numbers. They were free to return home, silently, only some 20 years later.
The resonance with Russia today is weird. These republics provide huge numbers of soldiers, along with many of the casualties, to the Russian army fighting in Ukraine. Meanwhile huge swathes of Dagestan and Chechnya are under varying levels of repression, as Moscow fights to control Islamic extremism and the fighters who “go to the woods”. Parfitt is entering the mountains where the legendary Imam Shamil resisted the Russians in the 19th century for more than 30 years; more recently they provided protection to Shamil Basayev, the Chechen leader behind the Beslan siege. Reading Parfitt’s account of his own interrogation at military checkpoints surrounding the mountain fortress of Gimri, where Shamil made a famous stand, it is no surprise that in 2022 the biggest demonstration against Putin’s mobilisation order was by mothers in Dagestan.
This points to the weakness of Parfitt’s book. His actual walk took place more than 15 years ago. Quite why he did not write the account of his remarkable odyssey more immediately is not clear. You yearn for a greater sense of how these uncontrollable borderlands are responding to events today. That criticism may be ungenerous given the magical moments that pepper his account, from Chechnya’s monstrous current leader Ramzan Kadyrov dancing with his followers in a sufi trance to a walking companion taking to a children’s bike when struggling to keep up with Parfitt on foot. Every minute of motorised transport is recorded as a defeat.
Parfitt concludes with an optimism based on the people he met. This is an optimism difficult to share. These Caucasians have not remotely benefited from the prosperity that oil and natural resources have brought Russia. Moscow has been physically transformed over the past few decades, but Parfitt’s account of the floors he slept on, often suggest little has changed since the 19th century. At the same time, for this land of untold histories, Putin has closed Memorial, the human rights organisation set up to collect the past and the present. Tellingly, at the front of the book, Parfitt says he has changed some names for the ongoing safety of those he met all those years ago. He does, though, name one of Memorial’s bravest members, Natasha Estemirova. She was kidnapped and murdered in 2009 in Chechnya for her work recording the brutality of Kadyrov and his acolytes. Her daughter, in exile in London, tells Parfitt her mother’s name is now just “a whisper there”.
Angus Macqueen has helped set up a Vimeo platform of documentaries on Russia and Ukraine: Russia on Film
High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland by Tom Parfitt is published by Headline (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
