Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus
Michael Khodarkovsky
Russia's attempt to consolidate its authority in the North Caucasus has exerted a terrible price on both sides since the mid-nineteenth century. Michael Khodarkovsky's book tells the story of a single man with multiple allegiances and provides a concise and compelling history of the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas. After forays beginning in the late 1500s, Russia tenuously conquered the peoples of the region in the 1850s; the campaign was defined by a cruelty on both sides that established a pattern repeated in our own time, particularly in Chechnya.
At the center of Khodarkovsky's sweeping account is Semen Atarshchikov (1807–1845). His father was a Chechen translator in the Russian army, and Atarshchikov grew up with roots in both Russian and Chechen cultures. His facility with local languages earned him quick promotion in the Russian army. Atarshchikov enjoyed the confidence of his superiors, yet he saw the violence that the Russians inflicted on the native population and was torn between his duties as a Russian officer and his affinity with the highlanders. Twice he deserted the army to join the highlanders in raids against his former colleagues. In the end he was betrayed by a compatriot who sought to gain favor with the Russians by killing the infamous Atarshchikov.
Khodarkovsky places Atarshchikov's life in a rich context: we learn a great deal about the region's geography, its peoples, their history, and their conflicts with both the Russians and one another. Khodarkovsky reveals disputes among the Russian commanders and the policies they advocated; some argued for humane approaches but always lost out to those who preferred more violent means. Like Hadji Murat—the hero of Tolstoy's last great work—Atarshchikov moved back and forth between Russian and local allegiances; his biography is the story of the North Caucasus, one as relevant today as in the nineteenth century.
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About Michael Khodarkovsky
Reviews for Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus
Rachel Stauffer
Slavic and East European Journal
Readers familiar with Michael Khodarkovsky's two previous books on the Kalmyks and the Steppe Frontier will look forward to reading Bitter Choices.... In his conclusion Khodarkovsky seeks to explain why the Russians have failed until the present day to bring peace to the region. All this makes a fascinating story, and we must be grateful to the author for telling it so well.
John P. LeDonne
Comptes Rendus
The Russian conquest of the Caucasus started around 1580; it is still under way. But even its acute phase, between 1790 and 1860, was a process of invasion, colonization, negotiation and genocide so complex, involving so many different indigenous nations, and witnessed by so many articulate participants, Russian and foreign, that to describe it in 200 pages requires considerable virtuosity. Michael Khodarkovsky takes as his thread the scantily documented life of Semyen Atarshchikov, a Cossack whose father was Chechen and mother a Turkic Kumyk. A lieutenant and translator for the Russian army, he was so sickened by colonial war that he twice defected to the Circassian resistance. On the second occasion he was mortally wounded by another Russian defector who had decided to return. Michael Khodarkovsky has achieved a miracle of compression and shown us why the North Caucasus remains a live political volcano.
Times Literary Supplement
This outstanding book explores the complex encounter between imperial Russia and the indigenous peoples of the north Caucasus region in the period from the Russian Empire's initial expansion into the region in the sixteenth century through the bloody, violent conquest in the nineteenth.
Choice
To tell the story of the North Caucasus, Khodarkovsky weighs the life of Semyen Atarshchikov. Born in 1807 and raised a Chechen, Atarshchikov... is caught between two cultures and [as an interpreter for the Russian army] witnesses the barbarity of Russia's military campaigns in the North Caucasus until his defection to the other side in 1841; his story ends with his murder in 1845.... Khodarkovsky leavens the tale with vivid details about the lives, cultures, and (often violent) fates of the different peoples of the region. One puts down this book with a much clearer sense of the challenge historically raised by this rebellious region for the Russians—a challenge that, in essence, remains today.
Robert Legvold
Foreign Affairs