It was Catherine the Great who had brought Russia into the Caucasus, when she graciously came to the aid of the struggling Orthodox Christians in the Kingdom of Georgia. In truth, she really wanted to keep Persia and the Ottoman Empire at bay, with the ulterior motive of moving closer to realising her ‘Greek Project’. She dreamed of defeating the Turks, and placing a Russian ruler on the throne of a newly restored Christian Constantinople. Her annus mirabilis was 1783, when she not only conquered the Crimea but signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, thus making Georgia a protectorate of Russia. Aggression by a newly resurgent Persia then played into Russia’s hands. In 1795, the last year of Catherine’s reign, Russia offered no assistance when the Persians invaded the capital of Tiflis, and Alexander I then violated the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1801 by simply annexing Georgia and abolishing its monarchy. Subsequent wars with the Ottoman Empire and Persia over the next decade resulted in the Russian Empire adding other small Caucasian nations to its territories.47
A town quickly grew up around the fortress at the foothill of the mountains which had been established in 1784 to become Russia’s main military base in the area. It was optimistically named Vladikavkaz (‘Ruler of the Caucasus’), but it took more than building the Georgian Military Highway between Vladikavkaz and Tiflis for the Russians to conquer the Caucasus. Although the Georgians largely surrendered peacefully to the Great White Tsar, with many of their aristocracy later distinguishing themselves in the war with Napoleon, there were many north Caucasian peoples who strongly resisted the Russian presence, chief amongst them the Chechens and Avars in the mountainous east (close to the Caspian Sea), and the Circassians in the west (near to the Black Sea). Russia soon found itself fighting a protracted war against a tenacious resistance movement. General Alexey Ermolov, the first commander-in-chief appointed to run operations in the Caucasus, was notorious for his brutal methods, but the Chechens (whom he saw as primeval savages) often outwitted him, and he was replaced in 1827 by Ivan Paskevich. Other strategies were deployed by subsequent commanders-in-chief until the war finally came to an end in the east in 1859, and in the west in 1864.
Tolstoy’s experiences in the Caucasus were restricted to Chechnya in the eastern theatre of war, which had entered its last decade by the time he arrived in 1851. That was also the year in which Russia scored a minor victory. Since the 1830s, the disparate Muslim tribes of the northern Caucasus had been united by the Avar leader Imam Shamil who ruled the peoples of Chechnya and Daghestan. Shamil saw the war with Russia as a holy war, but he did not always enjoy full support from the highlanders. In 1851 he had fallen out with his commander Hadji Murat, a fellow Avar who went over to the Russian side. The following year, Hadji Murat tried to rejoin Shamil, but was murdered by Russian forces. Proof that Tolstoy’s involvement in the protracted struggle with the Caucasian highlanders made a deep impression on him is provided by the fact that he decided to turn this litany of betrayals into fiction at the very end of his life. Hadji Murat was written at a time when his priorities were more religious than literary, but it is one of his greatest works of fiction.
Before Tolstoy met any Avar or Chechen rebels, he met Cossacks. Starogladkovskaya was one of five Cossack settlements which extended over a distance of about fifty miles along the northern bank of the River Terek. Named after Gladkov, one of the local atamans, the settlement was founded in the 1720s and its population contributed to the thousand or so Cossack troops who fought for the Russians in the Caucasian War. They were descendants of the original sixteenth-century Mountain or Terek Cossacks (Grebenskie or Terskie kazaki) who had settled along the Terek, some of whom had been part of autonomous military units and some of whom had originally fled central Russia to avoid enserfment.48 The Cossacks’ desire to maintain their traditional lifestyle of independence and freedom ultimately brought them into (sometimes very violent) conflict with the tsarist authorities, particularly under Catherine the Great. By the end of the eighteenth century they were forced into a position of accommodation, whereby they were granted special status in return for acting as border guards along the edge of the empire, particularly its threatened southern frontier. Although they were subjects of the Russian Empire, and were usually Christian, the Terek Cossacks had their own language and looked very like their Chechen neighbours on the other side of the river, with whom they had peacefully co-existed for centuries.49 The men wore tall fur hats and the same long tunics with strings of cartridges worn across their chest.
Tolstoy was initially quite disappointed by the rather flat landscape where his brother’s regiment was stationed – it was not until he started travelling in the Caucasus that he began to see the magnificent mountain scenery which had inspired visiting Russian poets to flights of rhetoric. The Cossack lifestyle was certainly an eye-opener for him, however. It was completely different from what he knew back home in Russia. The men had a cult of machismo, and left heavy work to their wives, but the women, far from being downtrodden, were often smarter, and usually far more attractive. They had a dignity which came from centuries of defiant independence (no Cossack had ever been a serf), and their standard of living was far higher than that of the average Russian muzhik. They also lived close to nature. Tolstoy would draw deeply on his knowledge of the Terek Cossacks for his fiction. In 1863, just before he embarked on War and Peace, he finally finished a novella called The Cossacks which he had begun when he was still living in the Caucasus. As a civilian with not much to do while his brother was out on manoeuvres, Tolstoy began to befriend the Cossacks in Starogladkovskaya, and learn their language. He became particularly close to Epifan (Epishka) Sekhin, a tall old Cossack with a big beard, then apparently in his late eighties, who became his first landlord and who was immortalised with great precision as Eroshka in The Cossacks.50 Epishka took his young Russian friend with him on hunting trips, played the balalaika and regaled him with stories of old Cossack life.
Tolstoy’s first experience of Chechens came a month after his arrival in the Caucasus. In June he followed his brother’s regiment to the fortress at Stary Yurt, some thirty miles away, and took part as a volunteer in a raid. By chance, General Prince Alexander Baryatinsky, who was in charge of the army’s operations in the eastern Caucasus, happened to be present, and Nikolay relayed to his brother that he had been impressed by the young volunteer. Flattered by the attention of one of the most important Russian soldiers in the Caucasus (in 1856 he would be appointed commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army, and viceroy in the region), and encouraged by his brother, Tolstoy decided to join up. First, however, he had to obtain a letter from the Tula local government giving him leave to resign from the post he still nominally held.
Meanwhile, since he had a lot of time on his hands, he carried on with reading and writing: he was now working on his second draft of Childhood. He also played a lot of card games with Russian officers. On 13 June he lost 850 roubles in one sitting, which meant asking his brother-in-law to sell off another of his villages.51 Tolstoy found it very hard to renounce gambling, but it did at least give him the opportunity to teach a Chechen how to count. Not all Chechens were hostile, and he became friends with a hot-headed young man called Sado Miserbiyev who was often cheated by the Russian officers with whom he played cards. Tolstoy took him under his wing and was rewarded with undying loyalty and a Chechen sword. He was also later bailed out by his devoted kunak (a Caucasian term for friend) when he suffered another terrible gambling loss.