Tom Parfitt does not consider himself brave. At one point in his book about a four-month journey on foot through the hills, valleys and tortured history of the North Caucasus, he even, bravely, calls himself a coward.
But his words speak quietly of someone with real courage. His extended trek forms part of a battle to come to terms with the scenes he witnessed when reporting on the infamous school siege in Beslan in 2004 that left more than 330 people dead, most of them children.
He was already familiar with this region and “the evil that swaggered there” after covering its bloody travails under post-Soviet Russian rule, as Moscow correspondent for the Telegraph and Guardian (he now writes for the Times). Parfitt had grown close to local activists documenting abuses by Russian security forces for the now-banned human rights group Memorial. But he also knew it was a place of peaks higher than the Alps and more languages than the whole of Europe.
So after four years of being haunted by his nightmares, he decided “to dilute the memories of Beslan” by returning to the Caucasus on foot, while simultaneously trying “to understand what lay beneath the terror” of the siege. He makes a clear connection with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, which is what finally prompted him to write up his experiences.
But this is not a collection of journalist’s war stories. Instead, Parfitt takes the reader on a meditative journey through historical memory, landscape and culture, while extolling his love of walking – which he describes as “a means of knowing a place by stealth, of creeping into its bones”. And the self-deprecating way he relates his encounters with people on his route, as well as vignettes of life in this much misunderstood region, made me want to stay with him until he reached the finishing line.
He begins by the Black Sea, in Abkhazia, a region that is officially still a part of Georgia but which broke away with Moscow’s help after the Soviet collapse. Here is an early reminder of the spectral legacy of Joseph Stalin. The guard at the late Soviet dictator’s Abkhaz clifftop dacha praises his frugal lifestyle. A petty criminal turned Orthodox monk who gives Parfitt a room at his hillside monastery – and makes him swim in a sacred, “throat-tightenly cold” mountain stream – is another Stalin fan. The portrait of this cynical, anti-western ideologue is one of the most engaging sections of the book. From Peter the Great through to Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, only the Georgian-born strongman truly “understood the Russian people,” the monk says; that “they needed a tsar, and they needed religion”. What about all the priests Stalin murdered? The monk doesn’t dispute it but calls him a “patriot”, before concluding: “If we had Stalin now, the west would not dare to treat us as it does.”
Bear in mind that this was 2008 and, at the time, a new conflict was brewing between Russia and western-allied Georgia. It breaks out while Parfitt is on the trail, and for a while he returns to his day job to cover it, the events giving added weight to his observations about the links between Russia’s modern-day aggression and its perennial colonialist instincts.
How many people outside the region know of the nearly 50-year war the tsars fought to bring the North Caucasus under their heel in the 19th century? They resorted to “ethnic cleansing on an immense, pitiless scale,” with up to 1 million people being deported and hundreds of thousands dying. It was effectively a crusade, as the Christian Orthodox Russians believed they were bringing civilisation to the area’s mainly Muslim people. Worse was to come under Stalin, who deported millions of Caucasians to Central Asia and Siberia. The division and hatred created were frozen while the USSR existed, but then “thawed and sparked” when it collapsed.
Georgia and other nations of the southern Caucasus quickly broke away, along with Ukraine, but the new Russia drew the line at letting Chechnya and other restive parts of the North Caucasus choose their own destiny. It was the Kremlin’s ruthless efforts to stamp out such aspirations that paved the way for the atrocity at the school in Beslan, where the hostage takers demanded Chechen independence.
But even as Parfitt explores this “landscape drenched in blood and sorrow,” he never loses sight of its allure. In one scene he describes a sense of enchantment on being taken by a Chechen village headman to his holiday cottage in the foothills. It was “submerged in wild flowers and grasses”, and as they sat on the veranda “bees thumped drowsily against the sunlit balustrade”. From across the mountains in Georgia where I write, this description was instantly recognisable. So, too, in a region where guests are traditionally called “a gift from God”, was his host’s thoroughgoing hospitality. The headman was observing the Ramadan fast, but “insisted on grilling us lamb kebabs, watching politely as we ate, the fat dribbling down our chins”.
Parfitt chases down views of Elbrus, Europe’s highest mountain. Frustrated by rain and cloud, he is enraptured when one morning it reveals itself. “Rank upon rank of mountains seemed to act in concert, flinging their sharpest peaks and ridges at downy puffs of cloud. Above me, to my right, hung the icefalls of Elbrus … each detail seemed cut in glass. I wanted to stamp the scene in my mind. Would I see something so magnificent ever again?”
Growing up on the flatlands of Norfolk, Parfitt was inspired by the adventures of travel writers such as Eric Newby – famous for A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, his understated 1950s account of trying to climb an Afghan peak. Afghanistan was at peace when Newby passed through it. Parfitt took on a whole other level of risk, as well as doing much of the journey alone and often sleeping in a tent. In Abkhazia, he is almost beaten up after being accused of spying and is detained by the local branch of the secret police. There are more brushes with fickle security agents, as well as wolves, wild boar and ferocious Caucasian shepherd dogs.
Reaching the end of his journey by the Caspian Sea in Dagestan, his nightmares may not have disappeared entirely, but they trouble him less. “Walking heals,” he writes. “The exhilaration I was now experiencing did not mean that that evil had gone away. It served, though, as a kind of affirmation that another Caucasus existed.”
Sadly the wounds Russia has inflicted there, mirroring those in much of its old empire, remain. And though Parfitt wonders whether history sometimes casts too great a shadow in this region, there can be no forgetting. “Remembrance is, in itself, a kind of restitution.”
• High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland by Tom Parfitt is published by Headline (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
