You cannot understand the Chechens without understanding the mountains. The mountains created them as surely as the cold Atlantic created the Britons, or the frontier created the Americans.
The mountains were, for millennia, effectively impassable. Armies could go ‘round the eastern end, through Azerbaijan and Dagestan on the shores of the Black Sea. Or they could pick their way along the Black Sea Coast, providing their horses and infantry did not mind getting their feet wet.
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Between the two seas, however, was the rampart of the Caucasus, the highest range in Europe, which could only be crossed on foot and even then often only in summer. South of the mountains was the majesty of the ancient world: Byzantium, Persia, Alexander the Great, Assyrians, Medes, and the rest of them.
There were empires south of the mountains, but north of the mountains the peoples had no need to unite to resist invaders. Villages ruled themselves, acknowledged no overlord, robbed each other and traded, safely protected from conquest by the peaks at their backs.
Or, they were -- until the Russians came. Expanding southwards, first in a few exploratory missions under Peter the Great and then in force under Catherine the Great, the Russians fought all before them: the Nogais of the steppes, the last free descendants of Genghis Khan; the Tatars of Crimea; and finally the Chechens, and the other peoples of the Caucasus.
The clash between the armies of the autocratic, centralized, militaristic Russian state with the horsemen of the anarchic, freebooting Caucasus, who were too disorganized to trouble anyone more than a day or two's ride away, was the biggest culture clash in European history. The Russians won the first engagements, but the Chechens' response was not long in coming.
"In the village of Aldy a prophet has appeared and started to preach. He has submitted superstitious and ignorant people to his will by claiming to have had a revelation," wrote a Russian major general in 1785.
The Russians marched on Aldy, and destroyed it, but the prophet -- a man called Ushurma but now known as Sheikh Mansur -- was lying in wait. Half the Russian force of 3,000 died in an ambush on their way home, and Mansur became a hero for the Muslims of Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan.
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