Türkçe TercümeMusa Kundukh Pasha passed away at the age of 71 today in history. As we commemorate this controversial figure of Caucasian history on the 136th anniversary of his death, let’s read about him in an article written by one of the most decisive actors of 20th century Caucasian history and his fellow countryman, Alihan Kantemir, published in the 3rd issue of Magazine “Le Caucase” in August 1937.
You can also read the memoirs of Musa Pasha Kundukh in Turkish, English, Russian and French from the publications in our online library.
Musa Pasha Kundukh
(Translated from French by Cem Kumuk)
The name of General Musa Pasha Kundukhov, who lived and acted during a difficult time, the wars for independence in the Caucasus, remains alive to this day in the memory of the peoples of the North Caucasus and the former Caucasian emigration.
However, the accounts given about him, often contradictory, and the information provided by the Tiflis archives did not sufficiently shed light on the personality or activities of this remarkable man who left an indelible mark on the history of the North Caucasian peoples.
By a fortunate coincidence, we now have access to previously unknown material left by Musa Pasha himself, which will allow us to identify him and the troubled period of the War for Independence, a war that ended with the mass exodus of Circassians to Turkey. The work of Musa Pasha Kundukhov, miraculously escaped fires, wars, and revolutions, kindly made available to us for printing by his grandson, Shefket Kundukhov, is a most precious document for the history of the Caucasus.
This work and the frequent interviews we had with Musa Pasha's son, Bekir Sami Bey, former Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, allow us to learn about the personality and activities of one of the most remarkable men of the Caucasus. Musa Kundukhov belonged to a family of Tagour aldars (feudal lords) who, before the arrival of the Russians, administered East Ossetia, located between the Terek and Fiagdon rivers, a region better known in history as Tauriya or the Taurian community*. The Taurian region was bordered to the south by the Kingdom of Georgia, whose borderline followed the main ridge of the Caucasus Mountains. This region encompassed the northern part of the Georgian Military Road (Daryal Valley), which was guarded and controlled by the Taurians, collecting a toll from travelers at the Lars toll booth. **)
Mousa Pasha's parents, Alkhas Kundukhov's father, and Dolet-Khanoum, née Doudarova, his mother, lived in the village of Sanib. It was there that Musa was born in 1818.
Musa lived in a large family. She had four children: the brothers Hadji Hamourza, Hazboulat Idris, and Afako.
Musa Kundukhov was born just at the beginning of the era when Russia, immediately after the annexation of Georgia (1801), began to prepare for the conquest of the entire Muslim part of the Caucasus.
One of the methods of conquest of the Caucasus, especially at the beginning, was the so-called "instructive" method; it consisted of sending, by order of the Tsar, the children of influential Caucasians to the cadet corps of Petersburg and Moscow to study there on behalf of the Government. Recruiting agents acted with kind words or threats to persuade parents to send their children to the White Tsar's schools. The children of distinguished Caucasians, who were thus studying in Russian military schools, served as a kind of hostage in the hands of the Russian government; this is why, in the history of the time, they were referred to as Amanates. The Amanates enjoyed a special regime, no different from that of prisoners of war. The education of these unfortunate children was entrusted to rude and ignorant non-commissioned officers whose methods generally turned the young Caucasians into enemies of Russia.
It was as an Amanate that the young Musa Kundukhov, then 12 years old, was sent to the Pavlov Cadet Corps in Petersburg, from which he graduated six years later as a cavalry officer.
The following year (1837), the young officer Musa Kundukhov, as an interpreter, escorted the crew of Emperor Nicholas I during his stay in the Caucasus.
From that moment on, a brilliant career began, leading him to the rank of general, while still very young, but this glory, these honors, these honorary distinctions, etc., did not bring Musa happiness, much less moral satisfaction.
Musa Kundukhov's service in the Russian army coincided with the terrible war between Russia and his native country, which was defended by the famous Imam Shamyl.
Russia encircled the Caucasus in an iron ring and immediately began to plunder and destroy a flourishing country which, according to the testimony of Mr. James Bell (Journal of Residence in the Caucasus 1837-38 and 39), resembled the best-cultivated part of the county of York in England. The fate of the Caucasus had been laid out. For every conscientious Caucasian, it was no longer a matter of life or death. Shamyl possessed the masses; every living thing in the country, driven by a patriotic impulse, rallied under the banner of the struggle for independence.
At this heroic moment, Musa experienced a true tragedy. His moral state and situation were all the more difficult because political differences separated him from his many relatives, particularly his brothers Hadji Hamurza and Hasbulat, who believed that war was a sacred duty for every Caucasian, not excepting the Georgians and Armenians. They therefore joined the ranks of Shamyl's national army and, as ardent followers of the Imam, fought fiercely against the Russians. One of Musa's brothers, Hadji Hamurza, even fell a brave death in Chechnya in 1814.
It goes without saying that in these conditions, Moussa could not bear arms against his people, against his brothers, whose superiority at the time during the events he later recognized, incidentally. This is why Musa only held military-administrative functions, first as head of the Ossetian military district and then of the Chechen province. From there, he was sent to Warsaw, then to Krakow to take part in the Hungarian War, the so-called "European Gendarme" campaign in 1848.
Throughout the War of Independence, Musa Kundukhov sided with that small minority of Caucasians who considered it more reasonable to find a formula for the restoration of peace and normal relations between the Caucasus and Russia, if only based on complete autonomy for the Caucasus. Musa felt genuine sympathy for the cause embraced by Shamyl and his brothers and wholeheartedly wished them every success. But he believed that Shamil was ill-prepared for war. Agreeing with the brave Naib Ahverdi Mahomet, he harshly criticized the Imam for his indecision and fatal mistakes. According to Musa, during Prince Vorontsov's campaign against the Dargins in 1845, Shamil failed to take advantage of the Russians' negligence; without this fault, he could have taken prisoner the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, Prince Alexander of Hesse, along with the rest of his forces. The same mistake was repeated, so to speak, under Vladicaucasus and Nalchik in 1846.
Having drawn his conclusions from these events and taken into consideration the infinitely superior forces and resources of the Russians, Musa refrained from joining the ranks of the insurgents, but he strove to reach a compromise on terms acceptable to both warring parties.
Thanks to the high position he occupied in the Russian army, thanks also to his tact, his family ties, and the influence he enjoyed among the Mountaineers, Musa Kundukhov was chosen as mediator in the talks between Shamyl and the Russian high command in the Caucasus.
Unfortunately, these talks failed. Shamyl demanded independence for the entire North Caucasus, while the Russian command insisted on a demarcation line that left Lesser Chechnya, the Terek, and the Kuban to Russia. Under these conditions, there could be no question of peace, and the war continued until the fall of Gunib and Shamyl's surrender (1859). Barely a few months after this fateful date, Musa was promoted to general, presumably in the hope that he would be entrusted with the mission of pacifying the now-conquered country. Indeed, in 1860, Musa was appointed chief (governor) of the province of Chechnya, a position he accepted on the condition that the Russian government guarantee the Chechen people property and political rights based on autonomy. The proclamation was successful; it brought a certain calm to the masses, weary of a long war. Musa, for his part, felt a certain satisfaction. His formula was beginning to be implemented. If Shamyl's maximum program was not fully realized, the same could not be said for the minimum program that Musa hoped to implement. Lulled by hope, all that remained was for him to use his influence to broaden his formula and extend it to the rest of the provinces of Dagestan, Terek, and Kuban. Alas! Musa Kundukhov and the Chechen people were soon to realize that their hopes had been dashed and that bitter disappointment awaited them.
As soon as the West Caucasian War ended, the Russian government brazenly violated its promise, and all human and divine laws, and abolished the Circassian Medjlis (parliament) (1864). From that day began a tragic page in the history of the Caucasus.
The two-headed eagle, sung about by Pushkin, swooped down on the Caucasus in anger and seized the bruised bodies of the vanquished people in its iron talons. The government of the "liberating tsar" once again set about restoring order to the recently conquered country. It was the era of a nameless bacchanalia: the spread of Christianity by violence, the introduction of corporal punishment, and the complete lack of respect for local customs and national holy places, for individual property and homes—such were the first acts of the "civilized" conquerors, who were unstoppable on this path and who cast terror and despair upon the Caucasian population. The main perpetrator of this pogrom, according to Elisée Reclus***, was none other than the Emperor's own brother, Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich, who, immediately after the last battle in 1864, issued a decree ordering the Montagnards to abandon their lands within one month or face the application of the regulations governing prisoners of war...
Moussa saw with his own eyes how this inhuman decree was applied, how the lands of his tribesmen were seized and given in full possession and forever to officers and Cossacks.
As a result of such colonizing measures, it should be noted that the land share of a Montagnard family was on average 0.5 dessatins, while that of a Cossack family was 29 dessatins. This flagrant inequality persisted until the revolution; it has not yet been completely regularized. Musa fought with all his might against this injustice; he made one report after another, tried to convince the higher authorities of the necessity of abolishing the Cossack villages of Nikolaev, Arkhon, Sunzhen, Karabulak, etc.; finally, he demanded "an equal distribution of land between natives and Cossacks."
It was in vain! Neither prayers nor arguments were heeded, so much so that, weary of the struggle, Musa, overcome by an immense disgust for the duties he had thus far assumed, decided to resign.
And this general, renouncing his uniform, decorations, and honors, became a revolutionary and sworn enemy of Russia. After much reflection, Musa made a decision that today, from a political point of view, would seem, to say the least, naive and inconceivable—that of settling in Turkey with his family and people.
In other words, Musa joined the demoralized, panic-stricken masses, and by his presence in the midst of them, he gave fuel to the fire of the St. Petersburg authors of the June 1864 decree concerning the devastation of the Caucasus. The talented administrator and brave warrior that Musa Kundakhuv was, on this occasion, revealed his complete lack of political sense.
None of his contemporaries, neither his friends nor his enemies, approved of his flight to Turkey. It should be added that the Russian government's motives were inherently selfish since it did not want to part with an experienced general who was well-versed in affairs in an enemy country and, on the other hand, it feared complications and popular unrest in this uncertain time when the atmosphere was permeated with flammable substances and a spirit of irreconcilable opposition.
His friends, among whom we should mention his fellow citizens Hussein Pasha and Ali Pasha Berzek, with whom he spoke before he departed for Istanbul, declared themselves against his decision to emigrate and firmly urged him not to "hurry up." But Musa remained steadfast. Having obtained permission from the Ottoman government to establish islands of émigrés in Anatolia, Musa engaged in active propaganda among the people in favor of mass emigration to Turkey. It should be emphasized that Turkey's role in the matter was beyond reproach. Deeply moved by the plight of its coreligionists, it could not refuse them asylum.
The void having been created for Russian colonization first in Crimea, and then in the Caucasus, a colonization that extended to the borders of Anatolia, could not have been to the liking of the right-thinking Turk. It is clear that Musa Kundukhov, caught between two stools, was no more a Turkish agent than a Russian agent in the matter of establishing Montagnards in Turkey; consequently, he could not be suspected of greed.
His financial situation was excellent; It could have been better if he had stayed in Russia, because, in that case, Grand Duke Michael, Loris-Melikov, and his personal friend, General Kartzev, offered him vast estates in Poland or the Caucasus, at his choice.
However, the wave of emigration began well before that; it reached catastrophic proportions in 1859 (the first emigration) while Musa was still busy with his peace plans. Let us also say that this wave was driven not only by bayonets but also by religious provocations artificially supported by the Russian government, which eventually took a very serious turn, leading to a veritable mass psychosis that took hold of Musa Kundukhov himself.
Here are the terms in which Ed. Dulaurier expresses himself on this subject in the "Revue des deux Mondes" of January 1, 1866: <<For the Circassians, the Turks were a friendly and sacred people. They considered the Sultan, the great padishah of the true believers, as the most powerful monarch in the world, capable of covering them with his generous hands with innumerable riches. They represented the State of the Sultans as an asylum in which they could live in joy and abundance. The lands they would find there would largely compensate for those that Russia had ravaged by iron and fire.
To all the advice given to them to remain in the Kuban, they replied: "We do not deny that it would be good to live among you, but we want to live and die among our Muslim brothers. We desire to give tranquility to our ashes on sacred ground. It was with roughly similar inferences that Musa Kundukhov advised the Chechens and Ossetians to cross into Turkey, with the only difference being that he hoped to return to the Caucasus with the Turks and the regularly organized émigré army to liberate the country from the hated Russian government.
And Musa Kundukhov, along with his family (his wife, née Koubati, his eldest son Aslan Bey, retired from the Odessa Cadet Corps, and his youngest son, Bekir Sami, then only one-year-old), his relatives, and the tribesmen, numbering about three thousand households, left the Caucasus and crossed into Turkey via Erzurum. Musa was received there with great honors and elevated to the rank of general (pasha). He settled in the village of Batmantash, near Tokat, where he lived until the outbreak of the 1877-1878 war.
With him, his nephew Temirbulat Mansurov, a young officer and talented poet, went into exile in Turkey. He lived and died in Batmantash, where he was buried. In the person of Mansurov, author of admirable stanzas relating to the exodus of the Highlanders, Ossetian literature suffered an irreparable loss. Because of the strength and character of his works, Mansurov is often compared to his contemporary Lamartine.
Unfortunately, most of his works, not having been published, perished during the fire that devastated Batmantach or disappeared after his death.
Shortly after, other Caucasian figures retired to Turkey. It was the son of Shamil, Kazi-Muhammad Pasha, and then Muhammad Fazil Pasha, who, having resigned from his position as an officer at the Tsar's court, went to join the emigrants in Turkey. The stay in Turkey of such a large Caucasian emigration (approximately 1 to 1,500,000), led by the son of Schamyl, Kazi-Muhammad, and Musa Pasha Kundukhov, was not without worrying Russia (1877-1878). This is why, about three years before this unfortunate war, the Russian government sent General Fadeev to Istanbul with the mission of initiating negotiations with the said generals on the subject of the possible transfer of the population remaining in Dagestan and the North Caucasus, on the Afghan border to create a "new Caucasus." This state would be autonomous but under the protectorate of Russia. The costs of transport and installation would be borne by Russia. This cynical proposal was rejected by Kazi-Muhammad and Musa Pasha on the pretext that the emigrated Circassians refused to take up arms against the Afghan people, their coreligionists. Whether the Russian government was seriously considering this fanciful plan to create a Caucasian buffer state on the borders of Afghanistan and the British spheres of influence, or whether it was using this maneuver to neutralize Caucasian emigration in case it wanted to contribute to the success of the Turkish army's military forces, is unknown.
In any case, this last assumption of Tsarist diplomacy was well-founded. Musa Pasha and Kazi-Muhammad Shamil, at the head of Caucasian volunteers, took a very active part in the Russo-Turkish War on the Anatolian front, commanded by Ahmet Muhtar Pasha, Field Marshal of the Ottoman army. During this campaign, Musa Pasha showed his leadership qualities under Begli-Ahmet and Vladikars, first at the head of a cavalry division and then as chief of staff of the Anatolian army, so much so that his name would enter the military encyclopedia.
This situation earned Musa Pasha a song by Russian soldiers of the Nizhny Novgorod Dragoon Regiment, entitled "The Traitor Pasha Kundukhov." This song was still popular in the final days of the decline of the Tsarist army.
The outcome of this war, which ended with the Treaty of Berlin, is well known. The weak Ottoman government criminally lost this war, and as a result, Musa Pasha's hidden dream of seeing the Caucasus again and making it free collapsed forever. This blow was not to be the last. While the uprising in Dagestan and Chechnya, which had erupted simultaneously with the declaration of the Russo-Turkish War, was drowned in torrents of blood, while the sons of new émigrés took the road to Turkey, the road where so much misery had passed, Musa Pasha handed over the keys to Erzurum to his hated rival, Loris Melikov. Holy Russia, deeply Christian, triumphed cheaply; on the other hand, it bestowed a chain of servitude on this freedom-loving Caucasus.
Musa Pasha's energy was shattered. He retired from the army and spent the rest of his life peacefully in Erzurum. He died in that city in 1889. It is there, in the Narmanli-Djami Mosque, that his ashes rest, alongside those of his brother Hasboulat Bey, a former comrade-in-arms of Shamyl.
But the Russian nightmare did not respect Kundukhov's ashes during the Great War. The Russians, having reoccupied Erzurum, destroyed the mosque and the tomb of Musa Pasha. This sacrilegious act, preceding the advent of Bolshevism, marks the epilogue, alas very sad, of a troubled era that can be summed up in the words: "Woe to the vanquished!"
Alihan Kantemir,
Istanbul, August 1937
* For the Tagaours or Taours, see M. Kovalevski's book "Ancient Law and Customs of the Ossetians"
** The toll on the old Georgian military road was named after the Turkish words "yoldju" (traveler, ambassador), and "khai" or "paï" (which in Ossetian or Turkic means contribution or duty).
*** The prominent French geographer