Mission impossible

It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus. [Its] history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people — the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south — and representatives of many Eurasian groups. Some forty mutually unintelligible languages [are] spoken. [These] disparate peoples have very different histories, and only two, the Georgians and Armenians, have a history of statehood consistent enough to be retold... the frequent ravages of invaders have not only destroyed and driven out whole states and peoples, but burnt the records of their very existence... Historians of the Caucasus have to have at their command an immeasurable range of expertise [and] imagination...

Charles King, with a good reading knowledge of Russian, but not of any Caucasian language, has crossed the Black Sea and fearlessly attempted the impossible. His book [The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus] sees the Caucasus through the eyes of Russian conquistadors and imperial dreamers, as they romanticise and demonise the lands they occupied... Thus the different reactions of Caucasian nations to the conquests of the early nineteenth century... are the best insight that King can offer into the diverse cultures that were incorporated into the Russian Empire or wiped out by it. In a book dealing with “the ghost of freedom” one would expect a more thorough exploration of the Caucasus’s little Kosovos, where ethnic groups such as the Abkhaz and South Ossetians try to break away from a newly independent Georgia only to find themselves international pariahs, whose only refuge is a return to the Russian embrace.

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