A History of Violence

Editors Note: Historic study emphasizes the importance of context for good reason. Without truly understanding the past and all the conflicts, misunderstandings and divisions that buried seeds deep within the Earth decades or centuries ago, it’s impossible to truly get a grip on modern issues. That said, it’s not a simple process. Here’s one of our good friends, Zito Madu, on a modern tragedy with roots in the past.

In 1801, Pavel Tsitsianov, after being appointed as the Russian commander-in-chief of the Caucasus by Tsar Alexander I, returned to his homeland of Georgia as a Russian imperialist in order to impose his adopted country’s rule. He was a brutal man. Most of the khanates around Georgia would submit to his power under little resistance, except for Ganja. Tsitsianov then laid siege to Ganja and executed 3000-7000 of its people; thousands of the living were then exiled to Iran.

Iran declared war. For ten years the sides clashed in Dagestan, east Georgia, Azerbaijan and northern Armenia, and for ten years neither side would fall. That is, until General Pyotr Kotlyarevsky, the son of a cleric, stormed Lankaran’s citadel, with an inferior number of 2,500 men. Butchering his way through, he would eventually fall victim to injury, but no matter, the Russians would besiege and conquer Lankaran’s Qajar Persian fortress. Some of the Persian defenders, seeing this defeat, tried to escape by fleeing into the river; they were subsequently splattered and drowned by cannon fire. The rest of the survivors were executed; no prisoners were taken.

Persia sued for peace and under British meditation, were forced to cede all territories in North Caucasus and most of its South Caucasus territories to Russia. This included Dagestan. The treaty of Gulistan confirmed this region, along with others, as part of the Russian Empire. It would become one of the signature military exploits in Alexander’s rule.

Alexander, once a promising king liberal ruler, who steered Russia through the Napoleonic wars, would give to madness during the second part of his reign.

After a failed kidnapping exploit by officers of the guard when he was on his way to a conference in Germany, the Tsar shed all of his liberalism and trust for those around him. He drew into himself and began to shun the world.

In the autumn of 1825, Alexander was traveling to the south of Russia due to his wife’s illness. He had already lost his two children to sicknesses, leaving him without an heir. During this voyage, the Emperor himself also fell ill– a cold, which turned to Typhus, which led to the steps and eventually the refuge of death. His body was transported to Saint Petersburg for the funeral.

At the same time of his death, a polite and proper monk, who had claimed to have forgotten his past, appeared out of nowhere in Siberia. Rumors had it that he had been a former emperor and analysis of Alexander’s writing showed that the two shared a similarity.

Alexander’s sudden descent into the next world plunged the monarchy into turmoil. His younger brother and his father’s second son, Constantine, who was next in line for succession, denounced the throne. That left Russia at the feet of Nicholas I.

Soldiers, who hated Nicholas for his ruthlessness, pledged allegiance to Constantine, and the self-aware Nicholas, having neither the skills, knowledge nor desire to rule, would have ceded his position if his older brother hadn’t shunned the responsibilities as well. For twenty days Russia waited for her Tsar. And for twenty days, the two brothers tried to escape the seat of power.

Since no one would step up to lead the country, the military began to plot its own coup. Sensing this tension, Nicholas was forced to act. He declared himself Emperor. Knowing how tenuous his position was, he wrote that night: ““The morning after tomorrow I’m either Czar or dead.”

He lived. And he killed.

Some of the officers of the military –commanding 3000 men in total– were not to be denied. On the day of the oath of allegiance, the coup was attempted; they refused to swear to Nicholas and instead pledged their loyalty to the removed Constantine. These men stood against the 9000 troops loyal to the new Tsar outside of the Senate building for long hours, with the rebels sending scattered and unplanned fire at their counterparts.

Nicholas, emperor of Russia, appeared to the rebels in person soon after. He sent his Count and war hero Mikhail Miloradovich to initiate peace with the resistors. But the time for talking was long gone and as the Count delivered a public address to call for a resolution, the rebels shot and killed him. Nicholas tried again, and again to no avail.

Patience is a scarce resource and even an unwilling emperor will eventually run out of his supply. Will must be imposed and examples be made. After a failed calvary charge, Nicholas in all of his future brutality ordered the death of the rebels by artillery pieces. The rebels ran to the frozen surface of the river Neva to escape, but there, stranded, they were torn to pieces by the cannons and buried underwater as the ice cracked beneath and swallowed them. Survivors were put on trial and exiled to Siberia.

Nicholas would go on to expand Russia like never seen before and his bloody and merciless crushing of dissent would become the marker of his life. This obsession and his folly would also be his downfall. His insatiable hunger for more of everything led to an attempt to conquer the Ottoman Empire –which consequently began the Crimean War of 1853 that saw Russia’s defeat at the hands of an alliance of her enemies.

Stripped of his invincibility and shaken by major military losses, Nicholas, in 1855, as the war still raged on, caught a cold. Tired of his life and the world, he refused medical attention and died of pneumonia.

But just as with his elder brother, the reborn monk, truth and myth seems to have tripped over each other in the telling of their story. And so it is also said that he, in his distress, didn’t die of a cold but rather that he took his own life.

Since his hunger, and to a lesser extent, Alexander’s conquests, have devoured lands and brought them under Russian rule, so have the people of those lands revolted and died for their right to identity. In every oppression is the chance for resistance, and almost certain is the result of death. Dagestan and Chechnya, these small and mountainous regions engulfed by Russia after the Lankaran incident, have had their lands quenched with blood ever since.

When each Tsar raised his hand and ordered the death of thousands for dissent in their times, they also reached into the future to bring an abrupt end to the innocent lives surrounding resultant rebellions. You can crush the spirit of revolution in your time, but it never really dies. It’s reborn in the next generation with a new face, a different religion and bigger, faster guns. As long as man perceives himself in chains, he is willing to die for a chance at freedom.

So it is that Chechnya and Dagestan have over the 200 years have violently rebelled against Moscow in a big for their independence. The first Chechen war 1994-1996, an effort by Russian federal forces to seize Chechnya ended with the Russians suffering a death toll that has been estimated up to 14,000 and the Chechen losses to around the same. Up to 100,000 civilians were killed and twice that amount was reported to be injured. More than half a million civilians were left without a home.

The War of Dagestan followed when the Islamic International brigade invaded the Russian controlled Dagestan in August 1999. The brigade and their warlords would be defeated and pushed back to Chechnya, but not before engineering the displacement of almost 32,000 Dagestani citizens. Bystanders and sufferers to a greater conflict.

The war wasn’t over, and Russia angered by this invasion, proceeded to bomb targets and send ground troops inside of Chechnya and in doing so started the Second Chechan War. Russia would win and place the territory under her rule once again.

Yet, it has never ended; Chechnya and especially Dagestan have remained hot-beds for insurgency and terrorism. Dagestan, being the most religious, populous of all the North Caucasian republics and comprising of numerous ethnic groups has lent itself to shame of also having the highest levels of violence and extremism:

On October of 2008, rebels killed five Russian soldiers and wounded nine others after ambushing a military truck.

In March two years later, 12 people were killed and 18 wounded as two suicide bombers attacked the office of the interior ministry in the town of Kizlyar.

September 2011: a police officer and 7 civilians are killed by a car bomb in the town of Hajjalmakhi.

May 2012: 12 people are killed by two separate explosions in the capital of Dagestan, Makhachkala.

The Russian Interior ministry reported that in 2013, of the 399 terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus, 249 were in Dagestan.

In the early morning of January 4, 2015, a young boy who plays as a central midfielder for the youth and reserve sides of Anzhi Makhachkala was driving home to his village. His head is covered in shaggy black hair and his face looks as bright and dopey as any hopeful and naive child should look. He is thirteen days away from his 21st birthday.

There is no myth about him. He does catch a cold and retire from the sporting world to live a life of isolation. Nor does he take his own life as a reprieve from the world that has exposed his weaknesses.

Gasan Magomedov was born in the same year as the first Chechan war, but hundreds of years prior, in the time of the ill-equipped Nicholas and paranoid Alexander, his death had been decided. When they gave the orders to massacre those who stood against them, when the gluttonous desire for territory led them to inhaling several of the Caucasus republics, the seeds of discord and death were planted.

They were in full bloom that morning.

Gasan was not special in any manner. He was not a promising wonderkid, destined for the Barcelona’s and Real Madrid’s: he never even made a first team appearance. He was not a rebel against Russia, a politician that stood between the two warring sides, a journalist hell-bent on uncovering truths or anything that could have elicited the events that occurred that fateful morning. He was a regular and insignificant human being. A boy like any other, living and striving for his ultimate dream as a footballer.

‘One thing can be said with confidence - Magomedov could not have provoked anything like this in any way,’

That morning, as he reached the front of his parents’ home, his car was riddled with machine-gun fire. He died shortly after from his injuries. The reports state that he was not the intended target and only one suspect has been arrested so far. There were no other casualties. Not at that moment, but surely there has been before and after.

The lives of the innocent in war are like individual trees during a wildfire. At the most they’re nothing but numbers: forgettable footnotes in the larger disaster. And at the least, they don’t matter at all. But it’s only when you have witnessed one fall, when you are there to see it engulfed in flame and destroyed completely that the grief and insignificance of life becomes unbearable.

To read that for 200 years, Dagestan has been the stage for violence is nothing. The world is like that. But to read that a young boy that was driving home to see his parents was greeted by a hail of bullets, his body defiled and desecrated, his life and dreams taken away because of a conflict that he had no parts in is another.

It is no wonder that Alexander, after issuing orders of death that would resonate long after his own, ran away to Siberia in his delirium, became a monk and shunned his past.

Zito Madu is a regular contributor to a football report and is generally a decent human being. Comments below please.