Mission impossible

It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus. Its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people 8212; 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 8212; 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 retold8230; the frequent ravages of invaders have not only destroyed and driven out whole states and peoples, but burnt the records of their very existence8230; Historians of the Caucasus have to have at their command an immeasurable range of expertise and imagination8230;

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 occupied8230; Thus the different reactions of Caucasian nations to the conquests of the early nineteenth century8230; 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 8220;the ghost of freedom8221; one would expect a more thorough exploration of the Caucasus8217;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.

Excerpted from a review by Donald Rayfield in The TLS