High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia's Haunted Hinterland
by Tom Parfitt
Headline 2023

Tom Parfitt's High Caucasus brings the unsettling mountainous region between the Black and Caspian Seas back to the bookish affairs. The author, pushed by a nightmare, walks from Sochi, detouring to Abkhazia, across all the north Caucasus republics and finally finishes his walk in Derbent Fortification, built by the Persians in the 6th century.

Parfitt's journalism work precisely focuses on this region. Based in Moscow, he travelled frequently to these mountains to write about the many conflicts and disasters that happened here in the early years of the 21st century. The book is full of old friends and fellow journalists previously met in these travels, filling it with familiarity which is a rather odd, but not necessarily unpleasant, characteristic to have in travel narratives. Not only that, travel writing about the Caucasus has been rare: Colin Thubron passed by this region in Among the Russians (1983), and Nicholas Griffins explored Chechnya and Dagestan in Caucasus (2004); Let Our Fame Be Great (2010), by Oliver Bullough was the most recent book, narrating a journey through those mountains.

In High Caucasus, the trip across the mountains in the southern Russian region starts with a repetitive nightmare about the school siege in North Ossetia in 2004:

... a woman in Beslan is falling, always falling. She wears a dark headscarf, as if to foreshadow her life of mourning to come. (...) She is groaning like a wounded animal. She has just learned that her child was killed in the school. The grief has entered her body fast and deep, and she is crumpling to the ground. Two men are reaching to brace her fall. One is a policeman. One, perhaps, is her husband.

The violence of the episode is the tipping point for Parfitt. It causes in him not the expected refusal to go back to the region. Instead, he finds himself wanting to:

... write about what I had seen and experienced in the North Caucasus, and the journey that resulted - not as a reporter but as a human being, as someone moved and horrified and confused and intoxicated.

This journey between the inland seas - Black and Caspian - results in a narration filled with human landscape. The author can transmit the complexity and the lives of the people living in the Caucasus by giving voice to the shepherds, farmers and war veterans that he encounters along the way. Their testimonies are elegantly contextualized with historical events without breaking the rhythm of the travel narration. Resulting in a nuanced and complex portrait of the conflicts and rare cooperations between groups of people that live side-by-side in adjacent valleys. Parfitt uses a great deal of empathy to describe not a region as a birthplace of sanguinary conflicts and vicious resistance, but a region explored and brutally oppressed by the Moscow power.

Apart from being filled with the life of the ones encountered by the author, the text also has his own life. Rarely too long and most often relevant, the autobiographical episodes of previous travels or personal impressions are also part of the narrative. These give the reader a chance to glance and sneak into the author's life. Parfitt does not exclude moments of embarrassment or extreme stress - moments of fragility, reminding that the war is not yet in the past and that terrorism, partisans and corrupted agents were always close. All the biographical components of the text work effectively by putting the reader side-by-side, through the mountains, with the author. Mainly, the description of the inner thoughts and the rhythmic reminder of “a woman in Beslan is falling” (in the nightmare) builds a convincing background picture. A background that tries to understand the level of cruelty imposed on the people living in these valleys. A reminder that behind the pride and endurance of these people hangs post-war deportation and bloody fights for independence.

Powerful human landscapes tend to dominate the natural landscape. Although, sometimes, when guns are not being pointed at anyone or no border agents, ready to be bribed, show up in their Ladas, the lush valley and the high passes gain space on the page. The midsummer snow on Mount Elbrus or the cold running clear water of the rivers surprise the author and give back to the narrative the only opportunity for beauty and peace.

In days of mostly dead European empires, one still lingering, getting away due to its geographical continuity. Tom Parfitt builds in this book a meticulous portrait of a rippled region that effectively gives voice to Abkassians, Ossetians, Chechens and Avars, intertwined with a personal journey of dealing with and understanding the inhumanity and absolute pride in which the Caucasus is drenched.

Marcelo Silva is a PhD candidate in computational electromagnetics currently living in Uppsala, Sweden.