Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yo'av Karny, an Israeli foreign correspondent, has covered conflicts the world over for more than two decades in The Washington Post and The New York Times and on public television and radio.

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Highlanders

Farrar Straus Giroux

Chapter One

THE NOSE

This might be a story about a nose, a tempting plot to any connoisseurof classical Russian literature: a nose, mysteriously removed and lost,assumes a life of its own, shows up in unexpected places, creates turmoil,and engenders speculations on the dark nature of the human condition.

    The backdrop of my story, cannot match Nikolai Gogol's St. Petersburgfor imperial opulence and self-importance. This story will takeplace in a little seaside resort, just a few dozen miles away from wherecartographers contend Europe ends and Asia begins.

    It is the story of an ancient tribe whose name used to be synonymouswith heroism and valor. Members and relatives of this tribe practicedthe art of chivalry centuries before medieval Europe saw its first knight.They were numerous, and mighty, and invincible?until Russia startedcoveting their land.

    And now they are almost gone. Those few who remain may haveonly a couple of decades before they too are swept from the stage ofhistory. Their final farewell gesture carries the echo of a macabre danceperformed in a mythical past by a giant-warrior of the highlands. Highlanderfolk tradition has it that when the giant's time came to leave theearth, he summoned all his fellow giants and engaged them in a crazeddance, during which he cut off their heads and limbs. Satisfying hisappetite for bodily parts, he finally dropped his blood-soaked daggerinto the sea and vanished. It is with the amputating sword of a highlanderand a farewell dance by the Black Sea that my story begins.

* * *

One night in 1996, when the town of Lazarevskoe was safely asleepand only the murmur of the waves could be heard from a distance, a150-year-old blood feud was finally reaching its culmination. Theancient admiral was completely unguarded and entirely unsuspectingwhen the young avengers approached him. They reached for his nose,cut it off in one fell swoop, and disappeared into the night, leaving thehelpless Mikhail Petrovich in a state of disgrace and humiliation.

    What kind of people would afflict such an indignity upon a man sotalented, courageous, and patriotic? Thus pondered Lazarevskoe's residentsthe following morning, hurrying off to their little train station,as the sun rose on Russia's deep south. "Nothing is sacred anymore,"grumbled Russians to Armenians and Armenians to Ukrainians, who allconstitute a large majority of the town's population. "Not even statuesof the dead are left in peace."

    For the nose so ill-treated was chiseled in stone, much like the rest ofAdmiral Lazarev. The old man had been dead since 1849, and his likenesshad just been brought back from a municipal warehouse andinstalled in the pretty train station of the town that bears his name.

    Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev was an unlikely candidate for a nocturnalvendetta. In his day he was an esteemed scholar and a strong believer ina universal Russian mission. The scope of his knowledge and his insatiableintellectual curiosity would place him next to the great figures ofthe Renaissance.

    He carried Russia's imperial insignia as far as Antarctica and namedremote islands after Romanov emperors. (In 1820, Lazarev, alongsideAdmiral Fabian von Bellinghausen, was the first explorer to sightAntarctic land.) He mapped Russia's most distant shores and demarcatedits new frontiers?a Lewis and Clark to the Russian Far East. Hewas the first naval commander in history to have sailed around theworld, not once, not twice, but thrice.

    He also served his country in battle with great distinction. He wasbaptized by fire, as a midshipman in a British warship under the commandof Horatio Nelson, in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Twenty-twoyears later, he was rewarded with the rank of admiral for his role in thedefeat of the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Navarino, and his ship wonthe first St. George decoration in Russia's naval history. Later, as commanderin chief of the Black Sea fleet, he was hailed for his active interestin the architectural beautification of Sevastopol, the large Crimeanport city and the fleet's home base.

    In short, Admiral Lazarev belonged in the gallery of empirebuilders?those whose military genius was matched by their ability toexcite the imperial nation's imagination and whet its appetite for furtherconquests. He was an ardent follower of Catherine the Great's ultimateimperialist dictum, "The border is not finished." A Briton would recognizein him a Lord Kitchener and a David Livingstone joined together.An American might hear in him the sound of Horace Greeley's tantalizingwords, "Go west, young man!"

    Only Lazarev's "young man" was sent south, and in heeding the call,he helped launch one of the longest wars that any colonial power everfought, one of complete disinheritance. Which is how the admiralearned his place on a Caucasian hit list, so long after his bones hadturned to dust.

Lazarevskoe may not have turned out to be an embodiment of theadmiral's worldly ways. It is a quintessential provincial resort, boasting asplendid beach and a few Soviet-era sanatoria, with a little mountain risingin its midst, covered with lush green vegetation.

    It is a place born for sunny days. Come summer, Lazarevskoe awakens,repaints its train station white and red, and opens its arms to Russia'stired masses, exhausted by a year of labor, fleeing the big cities insearch of rest and sea and sun. Rarely does Lazarevskoe see a foreigntourist or hear the sounds of a foreign language, even in these post-Sovietdays. Foreigners prefer the bigger and better-known city ofSochi, about forty miles to the south, the gem of the Russian Riviera.

    Despite its status as a regional administrative center, Lazarevskoe isnot known for the volume of dramatic news it generates?which is whythe locals were so scandalized by the attempted statuecide. They werewondering if the disease raging to the south had finally caught up withthem: the breakup of law and order and the rise of anti-Russian sentimentsamong non-Russian minorities.

    Were the ruffians who so tormented Mikhail Lazarev's stony replicareally sending a metaphoric message, and was the nose affair a harbingerof much worse to come? Would those who bust busts one day bustpeople?

    These were the questions on my mind when I got off the train atLazarevskoe on a late summer day in 1996, hoping to find out what hadso agitated Lazarev's assailants.

    Russia has always been enamored of iconoclastic acts, and statueshave routinely offered a convenient target for holy rage. Since the collapseof Soviet Communism, many pedestals have been orphaned: satellitenations have marked their newly found freedom by throwing Leninsout of their main squares; Muscovites dared not touch Lenin but celebratedthe fall of Communism with the overthrow of a stony FeliksDzherzhinsky, Lenin's secret police chief.

    In Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, a statue blown to pieces providedone of the earliest sounds of a national uprising. The piecesbelonged to a contemporary of Admiral Lazarev's, Aleksey Yermolov, afellow...