Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intimate, effective, contemporary history of this dangerous region, October 24, 2010
This review is from: Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus (Hardcover)
Over the years, we have reviewed several fine books on the Caucasus. This new work by Bullough joins the ranks of Babchenko's One Soldier's War and Seierstad's moving The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War as a work that is both essential and good.
The difference with Bullough's work, however, is that he takes on all of the Caucasus, not just Chechnya. He is a journalist who has been there, on the ground, in Chechen refugee camps, at the Beslan massacre, walking around villages of resettled Balkars. His goal is to track down and retell the stories of peoples displaced (and sometimes replaced) by wars and deportations. The Circassians, Balkars, Nogais, Ingush, Karachais and others all have their voices heard here. And he tells the stories by traveling there, by meeting people and relating to us first-hand what he sees, what the air smells like, how people's lives - upended generations ago - are still unsettled and unjust.
Of course, to support all this, Bullough paints in plenty of back-story, on the history of each nation's majesty or tragedy, on how things have gotten to where they are. But it is never dry or boring, because Bullough writes as if he is there, learning everything right alongside us. The result is a very intimate, effective, contemporary history of a part of the world that is little understood and now rarely traveled to. Invaluable.
As reviewed in Russian Life
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How much do you know about the peoples of the Caucasus?, March 7, 2011
Do you, for example, know about the Circassian diaspora? Stalin's ethnic cleansing of the mountain Turks (the Karachais, Chechens, Inguish, and Balkars)? Shamil, the charismatic 19th-Century Sufi leader of the Dagestanis? The historical roots of the mayhem and terrorism that have convulsed Chechnya, spilling over into Beslan and Moscow?
Before reading this book, I knew distressingly little. For much of modern Western history, the peoples of the Caucasus (the mountains that stretch between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) have been isolated and ignored. But for more than two centuries, Russia has waged war against them, alternately trying to subordinate them, uproot them, or exterminate them. In 1864, in "the first modern genocide on European soil," Russia drove about 1.2 million Circassians from their native lands, killing about 300,000 in the process. In 1943 and 1944, Stalin massacred or exported to the Russian steppes the native Turkish peoples of the North Caucasus, and then expunged them from the official encyclopedia of the peoples of the Soviet Union. After letting the Chechans return during the 1980s, the Soviets reversed course and in 1994 invaded Chechnya, igniting the violence and disorder that have continued since. And those episodes are the more notorious ones - the tip of the iceberg of the hell that has been the Caucasus.
Oliver Bullough is a British journalist, who was introduced to the relatively unknown history of the peoples of the Caucasus in covering Chechnyan terrorism in Moscow. His telling of their story in LET OUR FAME BE GREAT is more journalistic than conventional history. As a result, it is more engaging than all but the very best-written history books. Bullough incorporates into his book accounts of his own travels to the Caucasus, anecdotes from extensive research among little-known historical sources (many written in Russian), and his numerous interviews with the victims of violence or their descendants, some located in the Caucasus but many now scattered throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe, from Israel and Turkey to Austria and Poland. By so doing, Bullough imbues the book with a personal dimension that accentuates the senselessness and tragedy that comprises so much of the history of this backwater region. Stalin, ignominiously but with a sad kernel of truth, said, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." This book helps convert the cold statistics back into individual tragedies.
The one consistent thread throughout the book is the abominable conduct of the Russians/Soviets. At bottom, LET OUR FAME BE GREAT is a tale of Russian cruelty and duplicity, brutality and mendacity. This nation's treatment of Native Americans has been abhorrent, but it pales in scale and savagery to Russia's treatment of the mountain peoples of the Caucasus. And, by and large, the Russia of today refuses to acknowledge that history. It engages instead in massive historical denial and revisionism, which in turn influences how the rest of the world perceives the region. Ironically, the 2014 Winter Olympics will be based in Soshi, with the Olympic flame situated close to the precise spot that the last free Circassians surrendered to the Russian Army 150 years earlier, in 1864. (In opposing the selection of Soshi, a Circassian activist asked whether the IOC would even consider Auschwitz Birkenau as a possible site for hosting the Olympics.) It will be interesting to see whether the not-so-distant genocidal history of the region is even mentioned in any of the coverage of the Olympics.
LET OUR FAME BE GREAT has its flaws. It is the result of prodigious research, both secondary and first-hand, but the sheer volume of material tends to swamp the organization and presentation. There are a few too many instances of overly melodramatic or clichéd writing. But, notwithstanding those flaws, the book reads easily enough and it deserves five stars for shedding so much light on this neglected corner of history and the world.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Let Our Fame Be Great, November 15, 2010
This History of the Caucuses has been very well written and researched. Oliver Bullough gives a great picture of Chechnya especially during the 1990's with war against Russia. But Bullough also delves into the history of the entire region in a most readable and delightful manner. He does a very good job of explaining the many different peoples, cultures and religions. He also talks about the Diaspora and the many groups and their forced migrations under the Czars, the Soviet Union and Russia. These people are not easy to understand as knowledge of each group, religion, culture and language will go a long way to a better understanding. Bullough goes a long way of solving this mystery. It makes me glad that I found this book and was able to read because here is many groups of people that we are called after (Caucasian) and we in the West have no idea what they are like and how little in common we have with them. I recommend this book to anyone who is serious about History.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
