Customer Reviews

Allah's Mountains: Politics and War in the Russian Caucasus

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I highly recommend this book as a moving account of the wars in Chechnya and the only book to explore all the remote North Caucasus nations. Smith travels deeply among these little known, ancient peoples and in Chechnya he seems to have witnessed just about every major turning point in the first war.

Having enjoyed this book so much and also having read several others on Chechnya(Anatol Lieven, Carlotta Gall, Anna Politkovskaya) I was amazed by the uninformed review already on this site by a previous reader.

This reviewer says Smith is way too pro-Chechen and never shows the Chechens in a bad light, only the Russians. I found Smith was certainly showing sympathy for this people. But then as a people they are the ones hurting. Their capital Grozny, large parts of other towns, and many of the villages have been flattened by aerial bombardment and artillery. Maybe 100,000 people, probably far more (no one bothers counting anymore) have been killed out of the tiny population. Smith points out early on that the entire Chechen ethnic group is smaller than the Russian armed forces alone. Just think about that.

By concentrating on travels with the Chechen guerrillas, not Russian troops, Smith was able to see the frontlines and feel the same effects of war as the people living in the republic. Any journalist knows that trying to get information from a regular army, especially one committing war crimes, is unlikely to result in anything but lies. If Smith is wrong in believing the Chechen side to be suffering by far the greatest, then so is MSF, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the other western journalists who spent time there and wrote books about it (Lieven, Gall etc), not to mention the incredibly brave Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who is one of the very few to dare contradict her government's propaganda.

What has happened in Chechnya makes Kosovo pale in comparison and Milosovic is on trial for war crimes. Even in Bosnia the Serbs did not inflict such massive destruction - they didn't have half the Russian weaponry, after all. If Smith shows admiration for the Chechen guerrillas, then you do have to think about what he says he saw: a few thousand fighters with light infantry weapons tying down up to 100,000 Russian troops armed with helicopters, planes, tanks, artillery etc for several years.

I wonder if that reviewer even read the book. He/she says that the Chechens are not criticised, but on the first page I read Basayev was a terrorist and criminal AS WELL as being a hero to his own entourage. I read of a Chechen father trying to bury his son during a Russian air raid but cursing the Chechen guerrillas who had dragged him into the war. Etc, etc;

And as for there being no irony in writing about Aslan Maskhadov trying to prove he had a "regular" army by obstinately putting his men in unfavourable terrain against the Russian weapons, then that reviewer just doesn't get irony! What I read was just as he had announced this "apocalyptic" policy to Smith, an attack by Russian artillery started and Maskhadov (and Smith we suppose)had to run for their lives. Seems ironic to me.

Then there was some idea that history is given too much play in Allah's Mountains, the reviewer saying that to compare past Chechen-Russian relations so often to the present is like "comparing modern US-Mexican relations to US attempts to kill Pancho Villa".

Now this really IS ludicrous! Surely the whole point Smith was making, and it is one of the main points of the book, was that in a place like Chechnya the past really does sit very heavily on the present.

First you had brutal and long colonial conquest in the 19th century (Chechnya was about the hardest place to conquer in the whole Russian empire); then you moved straight into Soviet repression and Stalin's genocide in the 20th; then you went straight into the chaos and war of the post Soviet period. In other words there was never a moment when people might put the past behind or have any incentive to change their way of thinking. Conflict, conflict, that's all they know in Chechnya.

The reason it's important to understand this is that then you might have an inkling as to why against such ridiculous odds and at such a high price there are still today Chechens going out and blowing up Russian tanks.

Good book and worth a read. At times it can be a bit choppy and lacking fluidity, but the overall picture is great. Starts from the beginning and leads into the current conflict of the late 90s. Check it out if you want a history of Chechnya on a deeper and wider scale.

On first inspection, this book seems to be highly promising. Sebastian Smith presents a lucid, well-written account of a conflict which he has witnessed first-hand. He attempts to place the action with its wider context, both in terms of the dynamics of Kremlin politics as well as the much older history of Russian intervention in the Caucases.

However, as he progresses, Smith begins to show his clearly partisan feelings, which romanticize the Chechen fighters while demonizing the Russians. It gradually becomes clear as his narrative proceeds that he has spent the vast majority of his experience living and travelling with the guerrillas, and the story is soaked in the color of an opinion of an author who has clearly "gone native".

Smith lambasts the Russian leadership for carelessly throwing away human life for political gain, yet when he describes Aslan Maskadov making a similar decision to order his troops to be slaughtered needlessly on open plains to make the point that the Chechen leadership has litigimacy beyond being a "group of bandits", Smith lionizes him without any sense of irony.

Such characterizations permeate the text. Nowhere are the Chechens selfish, evil or incompetent. Likewise, the Russians are never right. While there is no doubt in my mind that the Russians perpetrate the greater of the atrocities and make the greater share of mistakes and miscalculations, I find it hard to believe that this is a war unlike all other wars: that it served to bring out the worst in both sides, neither of whom we in the West would find particularly savory. Instead, Smith petulantly refuses to acknowledge that the war could have ben anything other than a struggle between a noble people struggling for freedom against an oppressive empire of evil and tyranny.

By doing so, Smith tars his own credibility, and does his book the most grevious harm: he destroys its sense of balance.

A final comment centers upon Smith's use of historical anecdote from ancient conflicts. They offer poignant views of how old the conflict is, but the manner which he employs them are clearly meant to imply to the reader that what happened in 1995 was exactly the same as what happened in the 1800s, and before. It is meant to say "nothing has changed save the weapons, not even the people themselves". It's a distracting method that doesn't hold up well to rigorous analysis any better than comparing modern Mexican-American relations to the campaigns to kill Pancho Villa.

Overall, I had high hopes for this book. There hasn't been enough good analysis of the Chechen conflict, and this book had more potential than any that I've seen recently. Unfortunately, it lost any semblance of objectivity quickly and as a result it has done a disservice to the very people that Smith so clearly sympathizes with. My personal sympathy lies with the Chechens (a legacy of my Cold War tendency to revel in Soviet misfortune, undoubtedly), but by taking such a clearly biased stand, Smith alienated me to such an extent that I couldn't in good conscience attribute any truth to his slavish adoration of even the most questionable acts by the Chechen fighters.

As a result, I rate Sebastian Smith's book only two stars out of five: a very very disappointing and unbalanced view of the war in Chechnya.

This book makes a great companion to Anatol Lieven's recent book on Chechnya. Though not as analytical as Lieven's book, "Allah's Mountain's" is well-written and enjoyable to read. This is one of the only books I have found with any significant information whatsoever on Chechnya's neighbor, Ingushetia.

I came across the writing of Sebastian Smith in a New York Times Op-Ed piece and decided to look into what books he had written. Allah's Mountains is a well written book which goes through the conflict of Chechnya along with the regional conflicts which are sewn together to give the story of regional turmoil in the former USSR. It was amazing to read how the band of Chechan fighters held off the once proud Soviet forces using very simple tactics. On the other hand, Yeltsin does not come across as a very compelling figure and more of an embarrassment of leadership. For anybody looking to get insight into the Chechan war, Mr. Smith's book is a MUST READ. The only reason why it did not get five stars is because at points there is some repitition.

Sebastian Smith found a good equilibrium among history, politics, religion, regional pecularities of Chechnya. All these features help an outsider to deeply understand the reasons for the present state of the Chechen State.
We see that Chechen problems that led to the war started not with the Soviet Union collapse, but long time before at the time of Russian Empire. Another thing is that Chechnya wasn't the only unlucky one - in present Russia there are dozens of nations and territories that were occupied by Russians (example, Tatarstan, a present Russian colony, that used to be an independent state - Kazan Khanat (Kingdom).
Smith gives a profound look into the Russian-Chechen controversy, and the fact that the guy actually was there and experienced all the uglyness of the war make a person believe in what's written in the book and better understand why Russia is called "a prison of nations"

A wonderful book. I loved it and wish it was longer. At first I thought the author spent too much time on what seemed like ancient history, but it soon became clear that the only way to really understand this conflict was to get a decent grasp of its history. The writing is vital and intelligent. The author blends his eye-witness account with other sources to beautifully create a compelling and tragic mosaic of this horrible conflict. The result is a breathtaking picture of a fierce and romantic people caught in yet another mess with a heartless superpower. Buy this.

An unbalanced, confused, confusing and even boring book. In the end you don't even know when or where the described actions are taking place. You buy the book trying to understand something of a conflict like this, and you should get more insight and order in the author's exposition. Besides, it is poorly written (at least the spanish translation). Very disappointing. Do not waste your money, there are several other better books on this shameful war.

Nowadays its easy to go and scream Islamic Jihadi and radical Islamic militancy and terrorist, and the list goes on. Rarely do we find someone who leaves the blame game out of the situation, and actually looks at the situation with a fair and unbiased approach which then gives people a better understanding and not a twisted one, that is full of hate. The Chechynan cause has been a resistance against foriegn invasion and it will go down in history as so, we must not forget that the world isnt black and white, or as Mr. Bush puts it you are "either with us or against us". There are in between the lines things that must be known and this book gives us a great look into the Chechnyan Issue. A must read for anyone interested in history and current events.

I will have to agree with leonidas_of_sparta, I bought the book even after reading his comments and I was severly disappointed. I think leonidas_of_sparta covered the book's flaws pretty well and i will give only one example of the inherent unbalance in this book. Sebastian Smith faults the western countries for the failure of chechnya because they did not invest during the post war peroid but he then goes on stating that the four foreign engineers (who were beheaded by chechen kidnappers)should never went to chechnya, even though they were during what smith was lamenting - post war reconstruction funded by western powers. This book is so un-balanced that it contradict itself on the same page.