High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland

by Tom Parfitt

High Caucasus is Tom Parfitt's wonderfully atmospheric memoir-cum-travel narrative about the 1,000-mile walk he made to lay to rest a ghost. On the 1 September 2004, at the Beslan siege in Russia when Chechen terrorists took more than 1,000 people captive at celebrations held to mark the first day of the school year. Lasting three days, the siege reached a bloody climax when two bombs exploded inside the school and Russian troops stormed the building, sparking a fire in the gymnasium where the captives were held. In the chaos, 334 hostages, more than half of them children (the youngest two years old), died. Never a war correspondent, Tom was emotionally pulverised, and his solution was to turn back to his lifelong love of walking, to a nature cure of sorts. Having long loved the Caucasus, he also wanted to understand why the mountain peoples there, people like the Chechens, were so angry at Russia.

That was how Tom came to walk 1,000 miles across the North Caucasus, starting in Sochi in the Black Sea and walking the mountain ranges to Derbent, the ancient fortress city on the Caspian. His route took him through the homelands of proud, little-known peoples - the Abkhazians, the Karachays, the Balkars, the Ingush, the few surviving Circassians - through bear-haunted forests, across high altitude pastures and over the shoulder of Elbrus, Europe's highest mountain. That meant crossing the political and tribal fault-lines of seven Russian Adygea, Karachayevo-Cherkesiya, Kabardino-Balkariya, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, History, Russia, Memoir, Adventure, European History

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2023

Reviews

[Dorota · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating travelogue with engaging historical background, and above all a respectful and emphatic portrayal of the inhabitants of this majestic region where both people and nature are steeped in trauma. Still, the beauty of the land and the resilience and friendliness of its peoples permeates the storytelling and gives hope. A beautiful, poignant, profound book.

[Carolien · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2008 the author set out to walk from the Black to the Caspian seas along the Russian border in the Caucasus. It is an area seeped in history, haunted by the deportations of entire groups by Russia from the 1850s onwards. The author encounters people from areas that mostly make headlines in the Western media when tragedy strikes. The tale starts with the massacre in School 1 in Beslan and includes a visit to Grozny. However many of the people whom the author encounter are hard-working, honourable, trying to make a living for themselves and their children in an often beautiful, but inhospitable region. In Dagestan, he walks for 3 weeks, never needing to use his own tent as the local inhabitants invite him into their shelters and share their food and stories with him. Highly recommend this beautifully written book. I appreciated being able to listen to the author at the Chester Literature Festival talking about the border landscape and its people.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Parfait

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Parts of it are a good 4/4.5, some elements feel a bit forced

[Rhys Milling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting area to visit. The last chapters were particularly good

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indrukwekkend boek. De auteur, een Engelse journalist die (toen) in Moskou woonde gaat als een vorm van traumaverwerking op reis. Hij was ooggetuige van het vreselijke (school)drama in Beslan, Noord Ossetië,in 2004 waar bij een gijzeling door terroristen 334 doden vielen waaronder 186 kinderen. Hij kon de beelden niet uit zijn hoofd krijgen en besloot te voet door de 'High Caucasus' te trekken.
Zijn reisverslag is een boeiende mix van natuurbeschrijvingen en ontmoetingen met allerlei mensen (vooral mannen) met de zeer roerige en ook bloedige geschiedenis en heden van dit deel van de voormalige Sovjet Unie. De Kaukasus werd in de 19e eeuw op zeer gewelddadige wijze gekoloniseerd door het Russische tsarenrijk maar het is er nooit 'rustig' geweest. Ook na de val van het communisme was en is het een komen en gaan van conflicten en oorlogen waaronder , zoals altijd, de burgerbevolking het meest te lijden had en heeft.

[Joe Rees · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read. Made me reflect fondly on my time in the Caucasus albeit from the other side of the mountains. Tom Parfitt’s journey is an amazing story and an even better insight into the complex and tragic histories of the caucuses people.

[Nadja LY · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Content: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Audacity: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

My first encounter with the North Caucasus was a Chechen lad at my university judo club. Only knowing he was Russian, I wanted to train with him and he quickly turned his head and said “I don’t fight women.” Oh! The shock!! The coach pulled me to the side and said, “He’s a Russian Muslim.” And I was confused.
My first Russian textbook portrayed Russia as a mono-cultural Slavic Russian Orthodox Christian country. I had spent countless hours battling with the intricacies of the Russian language, how did I know so little about the diversity of the vast country in which this language is spoken?
That became the turning point for realising I needed to learn more about Russia.

In this book, the author set out on a journey on foot across the North Caucasus, hoping the scenic mountains could heal the trauma inflicted by the atrocities he had witnessed at Beslan’s School Number One.
The region is notorious, yet its peoples and cultures are unknown to most of us. The author presents another side of the North Caucasus with dignity and empathy. His love for the North Caucasus and its peoples was obvious.
As most of the journey was deep in the mountains, there were a lot of beautiful descriptions of the scenery as well as history of the region that the author has researched, but the interactions with the locals were minimal. I was perhaps hoping for a more culture-focussed description of the North Caucasus.
It got more interesting as the author entered Ingushetia, Chechnya (illegally!! But he lived to tell the tale!), and Dagestan as he decided he needed a local companion for these three republics.
However, I was frustrated by the lack of female perspective, which, understandably, with the author being a man and with the cultural constraints, he had few opportunities to speak to local women.

Overall, the book was worth reading as there aren’t many books written about the North Caucasus.

“Occasionally, a scene of horror from School Number One slides into my mind. What helps is that such images are laved by a pool of fresher recollections. When I think of the Caucasus now, I think of a curtain of cloud rising like smoke over a ridge […]. Misha in Ingushetia is resting his hand tenderly in his daughter’s neck; a bowl of mulberries sits on a sunlit windowsill.”

[Keenan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Caucasus is in many ways viewed as Russia's Wild West, a place that for the last two centuries has been seen as exotic, untamed, and bristling with a lawless energy. From cossacks to insurgents to ethnic groups incensed at displacement and terror, the area pre-Ukraine was Russia's self-imposed headache.

Parfitt, a Moscow-based British reporter, walks sea to sea across the mountain range to see and experience himself the Caucasus. He's an excellent nature writer, and his long experience in Russia serves well in ingratiating himself to authorities and locals alike, making an otherwise impossible trip possible. There is no shortage of interesting characters in this book but it's descriptions of loss and tragedy are not for the faint-hearted.

[Debby Binns · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book about a journalist travelling 1000 miles on foot through the Caucuasus – on a cathartic journey to try and heal himself from the terrible school siege in Beslan in 2004 – which he had to report from and left him very damaged.

This walk starts in Abkhazia (by the Black Sea), back in 2008. We travel with Tom Parfitt on a wonderful mediative journey with lots of historical memory and lots of detail about the language and culture. I loved his descriptions of encounters with locals on his route. The journey ends at the Caspian Sea in Dagestan where I was sorry to finish this epic journey.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars. An excellent travelogue that nicely balances the author’s journey with relevant history. I am also personally extra intrigued whenever the journey goes through parts unknown to most of us in the wider world. The author manages to convey both the complexity of the people and the horrors that have occurred (and continue to occur) in the Caucasus region, while also acknowledging the incredible hospitality he receives on his walk. There are moments where author comes off patronizing or romanticizing the people he meets, but they are fortunately infrequent occurrences.

[Matthew Heard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Learnt a lot and will think about that bit of Russia differently from now on!

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this - a fascinating account of an adventurous trek from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea through the High Caucus, from Abkhazia to Dagestan. Tom Parfitt was a young British journalist in Moscow when he was asked to cover the 2004 school siege at Belsan, North Ossetia. Haunted by his experience he returns to the region four years later to try and better understand it.

Tom is a very skilled writer. There’s detailed history told in an accesible way. There are powerful descriptions of the wild and rugged landscape - I could see it in my mind’s eye. Most significantly for me, the descriptions of his very many encounters with local people are at once observant, moving. funny and sympathetic. I liked Tom’s humble and reflective style.

This review in the Guardian (August 23) is beautifully written - worth a look:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

[Paul Lehane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, profound & vital book... You can almost smell the high peaks & mountain trails.

Reminds me of the great travel writer Colin Thubron..which in my world is a BIG compliment.

[Alex Abb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, engaging and sometimes terrifying account of the author’s travel across the North Caucasus. I loved the historical background that was provided which made the story very relevant to a reader who has no background knowledge on the region. The book makes this region, inaccessible to most of us, so palpable by bringing to life the various characters that were described and makes us understand their actions and opinions.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late in this evocative narrative, travelling through Dagestan, Tom Parfitt conjures up topophilia. Love of a place not unpeopled, but full of life, human and otherwise, as these pastoral slopes and dizzying gorges in the Caucasus ranges remind him not in scenery but sense of his childhood in rural Norfolk.

I could relate despite never seeing either terrain. Parrott returns to face, in the wake of Russian war in Ukraine in 2022, his harrowing eyewitness reporting from the Beslan bedlam which resulted in mass deaths during the Chechen wars of the last century's final decade. He seeks to explain or at least to explore his trauma (for once, an accurate term and not a pop-psych post-lockdown cliche) by going back to the regions which have long been romanticized by writers seeking warriors to serve as both bogeymen and stereotypes of these fractious, fragmented, fighting, fiercely nationalist inhabitants.

His walk takes him from the Black Sea resort of Sochi (I expected an Olympic anecdote at least given its recent hosting) to Dagestan. He stumbled into the second conflict between Georgia and Southern Ossetia (see my review of Peter Nasmyth, Goergia: in the Mountains of Poetry), gets arrested more than once, suspected of spying for Britain, and meets, thanks to his fluency in the imperial tongue of his adopted homeland, many ordinary people and quite a few boasting or posing as past or present rebels against Putin's evil empire. Parfitt, as shown in a photo among the illustrations closing this book, appears both fit enough and bearded sufficiently to pass as an hefty local if need be for safety.

While here and there not enough happens to captivate this armchair traveler, I remained entertained by his adventures and moved by his bravery in challenging his own fears as his dreaded Chechnya looms ahead with every steep step. After he passes that test, he doesn't shirk further encounters with those harmed by the fatal hostage aftermath decades by now earlier. It's a tribute to his moral fiber and his principled professional mores that he continues to do right to reverse wrongs in his own way.

[Jozef Ostyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the benefits of just browsing around in your local bookstore (a Waterstone's in my case) is that you occasionally come across an interesting book by an author you've never heard of. Parfitt made his career as a journalist for British newspapers in Russia and was deeply affected by what he saw of the terrorist attrocities and brutal Russian counterinsurgency campaign in the Caucasus around the turn of the century, especially the Beslan school hostage drama of 2004.
This book deals with this, in the context of a long - occasionally interrupted - solo hike he took along the northern edge of the Caucasus from Abchazia on the Black Sea to Dagestan on the Caspian Sea. It is full of local and historical vignettes, portraying both the landscape, nature and wildlife as the various ethnic groups with their varied - often dramatic - historical experiences. In this sense, this is a very rich and complex canvas, although the portraits are very sketchy and impressionistic.
Parfitt clearly has a lot of sympathy for the various nationalities he encounters, even as some of them are riven by mutual hatreds. And he is cleaerly very critical of Russia's historical and contemporary role in the region. Yet he paints the good and the bad, the beatiful and the ugly, in all groups he meets.
This is in many ways a very personal book (close to a therapeutic exercise in self-reflection) but it is also very interesting because it reflects the immense complexity of a region inhabited by a rich mixture of ethnicities, faiths and cultures.
Make no mistake: this is not a complete overview of the etnic and historical evolution of the Caucasus and its various sub-regions. It is too personal and individual for that. But it is a very interesting perspective on the origins of the contemporary problems and challenges of a little-known and even less understood region.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvellous book. Tom Parfitt ventures into the long isolated lands of a region so remote that it is inaccessible to most. He went on a long walk through a region he had only known through tragedy, the School No1 hostage crisis in Beslan.

His walk was to help process that tragedy which he had witnessed and reported on but it becomes so much more. It is a tribute to the people of that region, their hospitality, to their way of life, to the tragedies of displacement at the time of Stalin, when whole populations were removed thousands of miles from their homelands.

The High Caucuses are still full of as much danger and adventure as they ever were, beautiful, soaring mountains, bears and guns. This is a marvellous book. A testament to both Tom’s determination and to the peoples of these remote, tradition lands. Read it.

[Prayash Giria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read that I’d readily rank among the best travel writing I’ve come across in recent times. The book squarely delivers on its promise of chronicling a walk across the northern Caucasus (through parts of Russia that usually only make the news for all the wrong reasons), and humanising the places and peoples cross along the way. Over and above that, Parfitt (who has worked for many years as a foreign correspondent in Russia, speaks fluent Russian, and has built a family with a Russian woman) skips the usual ‘white guy travels’ tropes and writes with honesty and regard for the experiences encountered along the way. I also appreciated Parfitt’s nuanced treatment of trauma and grief, as well as the genuinely touching epilogue that he dedicates to a murdered Chechen human rights activist he counted as a friend. All in all, a highly recommended addition to your shelf.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read through the genre tags that TPTB attached to this book and one that is missing for me is grief. Tom Parfitt's fine novel is a reflection on how one heals from extraordinary grief. Adventure=therapy=healing=there is nothing else I can do to erase my demons that to put one foot in front of the other and see where it takes me.

I was mostly impressed because I knew absolutely nothing about this region and these peoples and their conflicts throughout history and I feel like I really learned something.

I love books with maps because I constantly refer back to the inset and envision where the author is in the world.

[Souvik Jana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parfitt, a British journalist stationed in Moscow reached Beslan on the second day of the school siege. Unable to get over the horror he witnessed and against bluntly antagonising the Caucasians, he decided to walk the mountain from Black Sea coast in the west to the Caspian coast in the east. Throughout the journey he reveals how Tsarist conquest of North Caucasus, Stalinist deportation, Russian troop's torture of the conservative Muslims and inner rivalry among the mountain tribes have shaped the Caucasus of today.

About the return of Prince Jamal al-Din, I believe the consequence would be different if his mother was still alive.

[Tim O'Mahony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting and illuminating account of the small republics clustered along the border between the Russian Federation and Georgia, Chechnya, North and South Ossetia, Ingushetia and Dagestan. Places where atrocities happen, places from which refugees arrive...the book makes these places and peoples come to life, in all their tragic histories and jangled memories. And the landscape itself is beautifully described, the foothills, pastures and forests of the North Caucasus. My only quibble is the poor quality of the illustrations.

[Elizabeth Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, which I read after it was shortlisted for the Pushkin House book prize. Has that sense of adventure and glorious landscape (à la Patrick Leigh Fermor) you want from a long-distance walk book, with fascinating detours into the history plus, crucially, vivid descriptions of the people he meets and their lives. A little like with Let Our Fame Be Great (Oliver Bullough), I became deeply invested in the personal stories (e.g. family memories of deportation) tied to the history, and the heroic people of Memorial.

[thearcher89 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Problem with a book like this -- a walk through a mountain range -- is that the writer needs to be observant, witty, and adventures need to be varied, to be entertaining. Parfitt tries, but the experience is flat.

There are interesting parts -- Beslan, Abkazhia -- but surprisingly light on history (Parfitt focuses much on Stalin-era deportation, but not so much on 90s or Tsarist times or South Ossetian separatism). His troubles with secret police are illuminating nonetheless.

Read during my time in Armenia

[Charli Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book, solid 4.5⭐️. I started reading this while I was hiking in the Altai, a small sea and a country east. The landscape I felt was similar enough to be a strong complement to my walk. I was surprised by the angle of the book on the respective histories of the regions he traversed, and as someone with basically no knowledge of this history, it was surprisingly accessible and engaging. The stories of the hospitality and generosity of the local people were heartwarming. Definitely recommend.

[Spencer Belyea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book came highly recommended and it did not disappoint. A compelling deep dive into a region that does not appear very often in travel literature, Parfitt adeptly weaves his adventure, history, culture, and self-reflection into a coherent, enjoyable narrative. If you like Erika Fatland's books then you will like this one - although Parfitt covers much less territory, since his entire journey is by foot! You feel like you are there in the mountains with him meeting these unique characters and learning about these tiny, remote villages that he visits.

[Donna Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving read about a journalist who having witnessed the Beslan school siege which left him traumatised decides to walk through Russia’s mountainous North Caucasus as a cathartic release .
I feel like I’ve been on the journey with him ,meeting people who have nothing but are still welcoming . Through bear haunted forests ,high altitude pastures ,Europe’s highest mountain this is a stunning memoir . Highly recommend.

[Tekarra · Rating 5 out of 5]

An admirable feat and a beautiful rumination on trauma, remembrance and healing. Parfitt’s empathy, inquisitiveness and humility make for the best kind of writing. High Caucasus will stay with me, and has further kindled my curiosity in this corner of the world where, as Parfitt writes, "history seems to cast a greater shadow."

[Kjartan Bragi Valgeirsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virkilega skemmtileg lesning um gönguferð höfundur eftir endilöngum norðurhluta Kákasusfjalla. Enski textinn var á köflum full fjölskrúðugur og torskilinn fyrir mig en frásögnin í heild hrífandi. Gönguferðin var farin 2008 við upphaf Georgíustríðsins og helsti ágallinn að gaman hefði verið að heyra meir um þróun málin síðan þá en bókin er útgefin 2023

[Mo · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an adventure. Brave or mad or a little of both. An insight into an area that is definitely not on the usual tourist trail. Along the way we meet some interesting characters and some amazing inspirational women. An adventure that would not be possible now given Putin's aggression. A recommended read.