Читаем Russia полностью

The quarter inhabited by Russians … [wrote an earnest German visitor in the middle of the century] has a perfectly European look: straight streets, rows of modern houses, elegant shops, milliners and apothecaries, even a bookseller, with cafes, public buildings, a Government palace, churches with cupolas and towers, the various Russian military uniforms with French pal-itots and frock-coats, quite transported us back to Europe. But where this European town ends, one of a perfectly Asian character begins, with bazaars, caravanserais, and long streets, in which the various trades are carried on in open shops … A row of smithies, the men hammering away at their anvils… Another row … where tailors are seated at work … After these … shoemakers, furriers, etc….

The population is no less varied and interesting: here Tatars… in another part, thin, sunburnt Persians with loose, flowing dresses. Koords, with a bold and enterprising look; Lezghis and Circassians engaged in their traffic of horses; lastly the beautiful Georgian women, with long flowing veils and high-heeled slippers; nearly all the population displaying a beauty of varied character, which no other country can exhibit - an effect heightened by the parti-coloured, picturesque, and beautiful costumes. In no place are both the contrasts and the connecting links between Europe and Asia found in the same immediate juxtaposition as in Tiflis. ³⁴

However Russia’s imperialist rivals, Britain and France, were uneasy about Russia’s new ascendancy at the gates to Asia, and the threat it posed to Ottoman Turkey. If Russia should succeed in unblocking the roads to the Levant and India, as seemed quite possible, they would be the losers. Hence Whitehall’s change of policy from one of friendship towards Russia following the Napoleonic Wars, to watchfulness in the 1820s and ‘30s, and finally to open hostility by the early 1850s. But the Crimean War was heralded in the 1830s by a proxy conflict in the Caucasus.

David Urquhart, part-time diplomat and anti-Russian publicist, was active from an early stage in this secret war. In 1834, unnoticed by the Russians, he landed at the Black Sea harbour of Anapa not far from the entrance to the Sea of Azov. His purpose was to make contact with Circassian chiefs of the western Caucasian highlands, known to be hostile to Russia, and to encourage them to create a national independence movement. The outcome was a ‘Declaration of Circassian Independence Addressed to the Courts of Europe’. The appeal went straight to the hearts of Westerners of romantic disposition - as it was calculated to do, with its child-like assertion of outraged innocence, its hyperbole, its heroic assertiveness against the odds. These Circassians represented themselves as fundamentally

honest and peaceable … but we hate the Russians with good cause, and almost always beat them [despite the fact that] we have no artillery, generals, ships or riches. Russia tells the West that the Circassians are her slaves, or wild bandits and savages whom … no laws can restrain … [But] we most solemnly protest in the face of heaven against such womanish arts and falsehood …

We are four millions [they declared], having unfortunately been divided into many tribes, languages and creeds … We have hitherto never had one purpose … But we are now at last united all as one man in hatred to Russia. ³⁵

Two years later, thanks to Urquhart’s intervention a British schooner, the Vixen, belonging to George Bell & Son, slipped into a little port further down the coast. The idea was to connect the Circassians with the Danube and Turkish territory, which was their source of gunpowder and their market for slaves. But in 1837 a Russian gunboat, the Ajax, intercepted it and impounded it at Sevastopol. Urquhart evidently hoped that Palmerston, the British prime minister of the day, might use the incident as a casus belli, but Palmerston would not rise to the bait.

The Circassians fought on nevertheless. The howl of the jackal echoed more frequently across the valleys. This was the sinister war cry that heralded the descent of the Circassian warriors to ambush Russian soldiers. Urquhart and his friends J. A. Longworth and James Stanislaus Bell, a connection of the Vixen’s owners, who had arrived in the western Caucasus in 1836, persisted in their efforts. Both were to publish accounts of their experiences in Circassia. ³⁶ The Turks, too, sent in their agents and preachers, and presented the insurgents with a handsome banner (twelve stars surmounting three crossed arrows on a blue ground), representing them as ‘sheriffs’ of an Ottoman province (sanjak). Bell and Longworth ran guns in, and encouraged the Circassians to translate their claim to national independence into a formal bid for sovereignty.