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

Parfitt, a British journalist, has been haunted by nightmares since covering the horrific hostage crisis in Beslan in North Ossetia in 2004, when a rebel attack on a school led to the deaths of over 330 people, most of them children. Four years later, he undertook a months-long hiking trip through the Russian North Caucasus. His original purpose was to discover another Caucasus, not just the site of terrorism, kidnappings, and armed conflict. Equipped with Soviet-era paper maps, a compass, and a “dumb” phone with no access to the Internet, he traveled across seven autonomous republics in that part of Russia, at times passing through vast deserted spaces where he encountered shepherds, hermits, and fugitive criminals—and also wild boar and wolves. In densely populated Dagestan, where, he says, “hospitality is sacrosanct,” strangers took him in every single night for three weeks. In this beautiful and emotional travelogue, gratitude and wonder alternate with alarm and exasperation. His descriptions of “throat-tighteningly awesome” mountain scenery mix with tragic stories of evictions, deportations, and the extermination of entire ethnic groups in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire and in Stalin’s Soviet Union.