Hadji Murat

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the MWI Book Club, a podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point. I'm John Amble. [00:00:11] Speaker B: And I'm Theo Lipsky. [00:00:13] Speaker A: And the MWI Book Club is where we talk about books and the profession of arms. [00:00:17] Speaker B: Each episode features one book, fiction or nonfiction, new or old bestseller or cult classic, and we give it a close read to find lessons about war, about leadership, and about character. In this episode, Haji Marat by Leo Tolstoy. [00:00:37] Speaker A: Welcome back to the MWI Book Club, a podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point. I'm John Amble. My co host is Theo Lipsky. And we started this podcast because we both believe deeply in this idea that an army that reads is an army better prepared to fight and win its wars. Each month we read one book and then we get together and talk about it, extracting its lessons for the profession of arms. So, Theo, what book are we talking about today? [00:01:01] Speaker B: Today we are reading a novella, a short novel called Haji Marat by Leo Tolstoy. [00:01:09] Speaker A: So I would, I would wager 3 months mortgage on the fact that anybody listening to this has at least heard of Leo Tolstoy. Knows something about Leo Tolstoy, but can you introduce us to him and maybe a little bit better, a little bit more detail and why we're reading it? [00:01:24] Speaker B: I don't know about three months mortgage. I've, I've found that you could be surprised, but he is a giant. Tolstoy's a giant to a lot of people these days and for a long time to me too. He's known perhaps unfortunately, generally as a synonym or a stand in for books that you are supposed to have read but you've not read. War and Peace in particular has become, I think in our imaginations a sort of doorstop. It's a synonym for a really, really, really long book. And I still haven't read Anna Karenina, his other great and quite long novel. But I think that book also plays the same role in people's minds. Do you know what I mean? Tolstoy, to me, has almost been definitionally the guy that you should have read but didn't read in high school. [00:02:16] Speaker A: I also have not read Anna Karenina. I have read Warren Peace, although admittedly I read it in college. Probably as much as an act of intellectual vanity as anything where I like the idea of reading it. And I don't think that I read it. I certainly didn't read it the way that I would read it now. And actually after reading Haji Marat for this episode, I sort of have the bug and kind of want to go back to it and, and read it from a, from a point of view where I can take more from it than I was able to when I was a college student. [00:02:47] Speaker B: I 100% have the bug after reading Haji Marat. And hopefully y' all listening will get a sense for that bug and how it might bite you once we talk about the book. The thing you said about reading Tolstoy in college as an act of intellectual vanity, I think resonates with me too, in the sense that in addition to being a synonym for really, really, really long books you're supposed to have read but haven't, I think sometimes Tolstoy and War and Peace are thought of as cultural signifiers, but people are more often talking about them in those terms as a symbol of intellectualism rather than for their underlying content. And what I found in reading Haji Marat, which we'll get to talking about here shortly, is that there's a lot of underlying content. Tolstoy is not just a cultural symbol to be trafficked. And the other thing that's been fun about Haji Murad is that it's a much less well known work of Tolstoy than, say, War and Peace or Anna Karenina. And so you can get away from all the baggage that's associated with those books and focus on Tolstoy on his own terms or Tolstoy's merits or lack thereof, without triggering various conversations that have evolved around his great work since. Do you know what I mean? [00:04:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So beyond, beyond the fact that Tolstoy is the author of a couple of the greatest, I guess, works of literary paperweights in history, what else can you tell us about Tolstoy that's maybe relevant for the discussion that we're going to have as a professional development reading podcast? [00:04:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it's true. Not only that he's a giant in our imaginations, he was a giant in his time. His contemporaries described him as integral to Russia, as the Kremlin itself. And Stefan Zweig, who is this great Austrian chronicler of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, said that Tolstoy was this sort of epochal Russian mascot. He said that Tolstoy had no face of his own. His face was that of Russia. But behind all of that, there was an actual person who lived largely in the 19th century. He was born in 1828, just as Andrew Jackson was acceding to the presidency. So to calibrate the American listeners, that's when Tolstoy enters the world and he dies just before the first world War. The life he lives in between is as epic in scope as any of the novels he wrote. He was born to the highest order of Russian society. He was an aristocrat, born to a great estate. He very quickly in life developed an inveterate gambling habit that took on epic proportions itself. In fact, at one point he lost that estate while gambling as a young man because he bet it to cover his already accumulated debts to redeem himself. Early in his youth, after dropping out of the university at in Kazan, he follows his brother into the army. His brother is a officer in the Czar's army, serving in the Caucasus, which will become relevant here very shortly. And Tolstoy, unsure of whether he himself wants to join, follows his brother down to the Caucasus is kind of a hanger on, not the sort of thing that you could do in the United States army today. You can't take your curious little brother with you on assignment to Jordan or to Bahrain or to Korea, but you could, I guess, in the Tsar's army, probably, particularly if you were a nobleman. And while down in the Caucasus, having left behind all of the sins and boredom of university life, the young Leo Tolstoy becomes enamored with military service and particularly with the culture of the Caucasians among whom they're living. He and his brother live with a Cossack, an elderly gentleman, and also the Caucasians whom they're fighting. And he eventually gets a commission as an artillery officer. When the Crimean War starts, he requests transfer from the Caucasian periphery, where the Russians have been fighting a counterinsurgency campaign for decades, to Europe proper, so that he can see a quote, unquote, real war. And there he eventually ends up at Sevastopol in Crimea in present day occupied Ukraine, where the Russians are trying to defend their great Black Sea port from the French and from the English and from the Turks. The siege of Sevastopol could be its own podcast episode. The bottom line is that at that point in history, it's the greatest concentration of artillery fire ever mustered. So he is at the very epicenter of the most modern version of war yet achieved by man. This makes a huge impression on him, and he had already been writing, but he writes in Sevastopol these thinly fictionalized sketches of the combat there that he then sends to a publication in Petersburg called the Silver Medic, or the Contempor, which publishes them as basically the first ever Russian war reporting, and arguably one of the first examples of war reporting anywhere, because the war in Crimea saw the first war reporting of any modern quality. Also in England. And Tolstoy was just beat out by some British war correspondence. [00:09:05] Speaker A: It's a bit like Hemingway. Right. And his experience at war informing the way he writes and sort of like igniting inside him this desire to. To record the things that he's seeing and. And spread that word. It's not. It's not wholly dissimilar from what we've seen with Tolstoy, or like Churchill, for instance, and his early experiences in the military and writing about that and making a name for himself that way. [00:09:29] Speaker B: Absolutely. I think that Tolstoy is a very important entry and a very long tradition of war, the exposure of war, military life, changing the way a young person thinks about human events and moving them to write about what they are seeing in a way that builds their reputation and also builds their mind. That certainly happened for Tolstoy. He, for the first time ever signs his name in that writing, or the third of what are called the Sevastopol Sketches. Sevastopol in August. That makes his name a household name in Russia because these works are thought to be so brilliant and fresh. No one had ever written about war that honestly for the Russians before. He then goes on to a brilliant writing career. He draws on his experience in Crimea to write much of the combat in War and Peace, which establishes him as one of the great minds of the century. He also becomes an educational reformer. He writes Anna Karenina, which solidifies his status. He also undergoes something of a religious awakening that turns him into a theological thinker of the first order and develops for him a huge following. He at times takes almost vows of poverty. He rejects the materialism of the aristocratic lifestyle. Eventually his writings are thought to be so controversial that no matter how established his reputation is, he's excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He translates the Gospels. And he, late in life is thought to be almost a holy fool. It's around this time that he returns to those early years in his life when he was a young man and a junior officer in the Caucasus, and begins thinking about this figure who was talked about a lot while he was in the Caucasus, named Haji Murat. And he decides that he wants to write a novella about this almost folk hero, guerrilla fighter of the Avar ethnic group in the Caucasus, named Haji Marat. That's how we end up with the novella that we're now going to read. He writes it and it's never published in his lifetime because it won't get past the censors. It's published only posthumously for reasons that the Listeners here will hopefully see shortly. [00:12:12] Speaker A: And I think it's important, you know, he made a name for himself in the literary world in Russia. He became a leading figure in that literary world. And then he basically turns his back on it and rejects that literary world and goes off, follows all of these other diverse interests doing other things. He leads this roller coaster of a life that literary world was pining for him the entire time. They recognized, you know, the value, the authenticity of his work and they begged him effectively to come back to writing like this way. He finally agrees to do so, but when he does so, he sort of comes full circle again, goes back to where it all started, writing about the war that really kicked off his. Well, the, the, his military service, which really kicked off his writing career. [00:13:00] Speaker B: I think that's very well said. Tolstoy, despite being perhaps the greatest figure in literature ever, was never going to be the guy who started wearing tweed jackets and settled into a university post and thought about literary criticism and fiction. He had an aversion to the tweed wearing literary type. He preferred to be, by all biographers, accounts, among the people that he felt were living true life. And he did not think the literary life was true life. He thought it was too mediated or removed from the conditions which give human life its force. And so he likes spending time with people who raced horses or with peasants who worked in the fields. Even during his spiritual crisis, found it preferable to get wisdom from the peasants tilling the fields outside the monastery than to go into the monastery and talk with the monks. That was the sort of person Tolstoy was, and he really didn't like throwing in with a specific camp. He was a fiercely independent person. I think that in sketching him that way, one already begins to detect some of the parallels between Tolstoy and the subject of this novella, Haji Marat. And perhaps that's as good a transition as any will get to the plot of the book. [00:14:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So let's hear the exum, you know, the sort of short form description of the narrative of the book. [00:14:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Pull your green notebooks out. Here's your exum for Haji Marat. So it's the story of a guerrilla fighter again in the Caucasus Mountains who actually lived again, a member of the Avar ethnic group. And there are a lot of sub ethnicities within the Caucasus, as is the case with many mountainous regions. A disclaimer up front. We are not subject matter experts in this region of the world. We are also not linguists of Arabic, Russian or the various Caucasian linguistic groups. So Please forgive us if we mispronounce anything. We are working with the texts. We have also texts written in the Latin Alphabet, translated. So there are a couple degrees that remove us from the original events, but either way, it is true that Haji Marat's a member of the Avar ethnic group and he's born in the early 1800s. Like I said earlier, he acquired an almost mythical status as a skilled and fiercely independent mountain fighter. And that's part of what captured Tolstoy's imagination. The book is set towards the tail end of what is now sometimes called the Caucasian War, which was fought roughly from 1817 to 1864 by the Russians against various ethnic groups in the Caucasus Mountains over three different czars reigns. The Russian Empire was expanding in the middle of the 19th century in many different directions, right? Teed up by the rule of Catherine the Great, they were including. They were also expanding to the southwest towards these Caucasus Mountains. That's the mountain range, by the way, as you summon your mental map between the Caspian and Black Seas. It's this band of mountains that stretches from the east edge of the Black Sea to the bottom right of Ukraine, so to speak, eastward almost in a straight line towards the Caspian Sea. There the Russian border meets the present day borders of Georgia and Azerbaijan, countries that of course didn't yet exist on most maps when this book was set or being written. The reader meets Haji Bharat when he's on the run. At the end of 1851. He is fleeing from a Chechen warlord, a former ally named Shamil. And Hadji Mara is seeking shelter from Shamil and hopefully aid in fighting Shamil from the Russians. The Russians receive him, but are unsure what to do with him. They solicit guidance from higher headquarters. All the while, Haji Marat waits patiently and plans his next move. Ultimately, the Russians decide to send him to a outpost in the area, but without agreeing to give him the help he desires. And at that point, Haji Marat, desperate to save his family who's being held captive by Shamil, takes matters into his own hands, which brings about the climax of the book. So that's the executive summary. [00:17:49] Speaker A: Okay, perfect. I think that that kind of orients readers in time and space. Hopefully some of our listeners will have will have read the book. If not, that at least gives them kind of the sense of what we're talking about. We're going to, as we do on every episode, divide the discussion into three parts. Part one will be Haji Murad coming in from the cold and going over to The Russians Part 2 sort of looks at the political and strategic level as the Russians are trying to decide what to do with Haji Murad. And then part three is what happens after the Russians make this decision. So we will start with Haji Marad's coming over to the Russians in part one. [00:18:32] Speaker B: Part one, Hadji Marat comes in from the cold, so to speak. He is emerging from the mountains with a small posse of what the translation I have calls murids, which you understand quickly to be his personal party of bodyguards and aides. And we meet him as he, in the dark of night, arrives with those murids, those bodyguards, to take shelter among the populace one last time before reaching Russian fortresses. And it's a striking introduction. He is evidently a mysterious, competent, high agency person with a deeply loyal posse. And the way he's received by the household at which he arrives is very telling. You get the sense that the village, or you're outright told that the village is under mortal threat not to give shelter to Haji Marat because the reigning warlord in the area, Shamil, has told all villages not to give him shelter and instead to turn him over to Shamil. Nonetheless, the household at which Haji Marat does give him shelter, and it's quite personal, he is greeted in a loving manner by the head of the household who memorably sends for his son and his son, this silent but lovable young boy waits on Haji Marat and his bodyguards and does his best alongside the family to make Haji Marat comfortable. And at this point, he also detects that he has brought this family into danger by showing up at their home. He's respectful of that. He is presented as a quite disciplined person. He eats only very small amounts. He takes care of his equipment. He makes sure to pay respects to his hosts, and he also is deliberate about praying. Haji Murad is a Muslim. The word haji in his name is suggestive of the fact that he's made the hajj. So you get the sense that he's a pious, religious man. And that, of course, is one of the things that separates these Caucasian communities from the Czarist army and the Russian empire, which is Russian Orthodox, not Muslim, when he was. [00:21:09] Speaker A: When he arrives at this house and is taken in, it's not just, you know, a wary traveler who's in need of a place to lay his head and maybe some food. These people are risking their lives to allow him to stay there that night. [00:21:24] Speaker B: Right? And that danger is alluded to several times in part by reference to the wives who are not physically present except to serve food for all sorts of reasons related to custom and gender relations at the time in these communities. They are also present in the background and they are whispering about the mortal peril that Hadji Mara is introducing into the home. Not necessarily objecting to his being there, but demonstrating an awareness of that moral peril, as so often the women in these households have to, because they have to account for the pragmatic material concerns that are must be attended to in order for life to be sustained in these communities. Either way, just as Haji Marat settles in and completes his prayers, the scene cuts. And this is going to happen throughout this novella. It's part of what makes the novella so effective. But you just have to attend carefully to when the scene's cut so you can follow along. Hajimrat has arrived in the middle of the night to the small village he's been taken in under threat. And now we are pivoting to a simultaneous scene outside the Russian fortress nearby. I think fortress is the noun that's used in my translation. You get the sense this is an outpost with a couple of well built buildings, but otherwise quite spartan. And we don't cut to the commander of the fortress. Here's another Tolstoy and move. We cut to the junior soldiers who are on security detail, basically, who are posted up outside the fortress on one of the avenues of approach to it as sort of an advanced guard, almost an lpop. To those who are used to tactical terminologies, a listening post meant to give the fortress some heads up if anybody comes and they are quite junior and they're talking about what soldiers talk about now and then. And that is, you know, whether or not the commander is a good guy, whether or not he's handling property appropriately, and whether or not somebody can in this case pack a pipe. But he could as easily be rolling a cigarette or lending a cigarette or giving somebody, I don't know, a vape charger or whatever people talk about now. And that gives you just enough of a sense of the soldiers for you to understand that these folks don't have much awareness of the internal dynamics that you just learned about governing. The way the Caucasians themselves are making decisions, they are almost oblivious to the place in which they're fighting. They're much more concerned, these young soldiers with the things closest to them, whether or not they're comfortable, whether or not their bellies are full, whether or not the tobacco is packed correctly, or, you know, whether or not somebody forgot their, [00:24:35] Speaker A: their pipe, which is really interesting because what is that? That's egocentrism, right, with these three soldiers, or is it three or four soldiers that are at this LPOP 500 meters outside of the, of the fort. And we all suffer from egocentrism. Right. We perceive the world from our own vantage points. [00:24:54] Speaker B: That's right. I think that's important to flag. Just because Tolstoy is highlighting the egocentrism, these soldiers, does not mean he's condemning them. [00:25:02] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, that's my point. [00:25:04] Speaker B: You don't get the sense that he holds these junior soldiers in contempt. They are people just like we all are. They are not the sort of person who would have gotten extended attention in other literature written in the earlier parts of the century about the Skaksis, which is Caucasian war, which is part of Tolstoy's innovation. But it's not just that they care about tobacco, you know, and therefore they're uninteresting or they're. It's not. The comment is not that because they don't know what's going on with the Caucasian tribes, they must be incurious. The point is just that they're human. And there's this quite touching, very short exchange where they begin to talk about how to deal with heart sickness, you know, sadness. And they're talking about all the things you might expect people to talk about. Use of alcohol, the sense of belonging, the ways that we can address the harder feelings inside of us when they get distracted by the arrival of a messenger who has come with a message that needs to be delivered to the prince who is the senior most figure at the fortress. And that's where it cuts to the inside of the fortress. So we've now left behind Aji Marat and we've left behind the lpop outside the fortress. And we're going into the heart of it where we get a sense for the way the Russian elite conduct themselves, even while they're on the periphery of the conflict or the periphery of the empire, rather. [00:26:31] Speaker A: Yeah, you mentioned this. The, your translation calls it a fortress. Mine was either a fort or a fortress, but you described it as probably sort of austere and spartan accommodations with just a couple of buildings, which is true, except for where the, the local commander, who is a prince, a Russian prince, lives along with his wife. I believe in. Compared to, you know, the scene that we've just seen with the, with the soldiers at this outpost beyond the fortress walls, they're cold, you know, probably hungry, very focused on sort of immediate priorities, immediate needs. Prince Vorontsov leads, is leading quite a different life. There. [00:27:17] Speaker B: That's right. He's the only one that we can tell who's able to bring his spouse along, or one of the only ones, Maria Vasilievna. She, of course, is beautiful and has the attention of every single man on the installation, so to speak. They're playing cards, they're drinking, and they're talking about what's going on. This is where you begin to get a sense for what's going on with Haji Marat, because the reader learns that Vorontzev has attempted to induce Haji Marat to come over to the Russian side. And it's as he's sitting there with his commanders and his wife playing cards and drinking, that he learns that he has succeeded, that Hajimera is indeed coming over to the Russian side. You also get a sense, kind of amusingly, that his wife might even be more intelligent than he is and is eager for the intelligence that he's received and in fact has a better sense for the dynamics at play with Haji Marat than he does. Then we. We cut back to Haji Marat and Haji Marat learns that he has been chased down and he has to leave in the middle of the night. So even earlier than he wanted to, he flees that village, gets on his horse and starts heading towards the Russian outpost. This is one of the scenes early on that I think establishes just that Hajimuran is a high agency person. There's something almost Wild west about the way Tolstoy discusses Hajimra. I don't know if you picked up on this, John, but between the horses and the quick saddling up and the prepping of ammunition and the slinging of guns, you feel almost like you're following a Western. And that makes sense. This is a horse mounted culture on a periphery in an ungoverned zone with highly mercurial alliances between locals. Either way, Haji Murat rides out with his posse in the middle of the night, guns slung, being chased by Shamil's horsemen towards the Russians. And then we get to the. The, I'll say the second to last cup, but the last one that's worth noting from this part, and that is as Haji Murad is making his way, being pursued by Shamil's horsemen towards the Russian fortress. The Russians are just waking up in early morning to go cut wood. This is an activity that the Russians army had to do a lot in the Caucasus because it was a highly wooded area. Their manner of war required, particularly a counterinsurgency war, required that they clear a lot of woods for their artillery, for observation. For maneuvering. And so a lot of their troops duty was wood felling. In fact, one of Tolstoy's early stories is called the Wood Felling. It's extremely good and it's about his own experience as a young hanger on to his brother watching these wood fellings occur. While at this wood felling the officers are drinking, that's what they seem to do. They show up to a clearing, all the troops start cutting down wood and burning that wood. It has the quality almost of a cookout or a barbecue or a bonfire. And the officers just sit in the middle and get hammered, for lack of a better term. And the officers that are doing this, you get the sense, aren't particularly martial officers. They are not particularly good soldiers. They're quite comfortable with their rank. And among them is a single non officer. He's a baron who was demoted for an indiscretion earlier in his career. But for his social status, for having title, he is treated as a fellow officer. While they're sitting around getting drunk, they take a couple potshots from some passing Caucasian insurgent. And in order to respond, rather than fire off a couple warning rounds in return, the inebriated command company commander, this guy Polaratsky, an actual person whom Tolstoy was lampooning but whom Tolstoy knew or was one degree removed from, says to the demoted baron, this guy named Baron Fries, hey, here's your chance. Let's arrange a little battle so you can get some sort of valorous citation and we can get you promoted again. And so Polaratsky, the company commander, unnecessarily lines up some troops for a property return of fire, which of course presents for the passing insurgents a much easier target than they otherwise would have enjoyed. And in the subsequent exchange of fire, a Russian soldier named Avdaev is hit. And eventually he dies from the injury that he sustains. This is the first depiction of what combat looked like in the Caucasus that we get in Haji Marat. [00:32:36] Speaker A: And I think it's important to kind of foot stomp the point that you made about the distinction between the officers who are just sitting around chit chatting, gossiping, you know, discussing the glory of war and the hair of a, of a general who has died. And when they discuss it, they say, I mean, I'm reading, quoting this directly from the book. None of them saw in this death the most important moment of a life, its termination and return to the source whence it sprang. They only saw it in it the valor of a gallant officer who rushed at the Mountaineers, sword in hand and desperately hacked them. Whether or not that's actually how he died is sort of irrelevant. It's what they're focused on. And that's why when there are these potshots lobbed across this valley that don't do any damage and, and they decide, hey, let's, let's fix up a nice little battle here. That's the reason Avdev dies, because if they had just let those shots go, they would have continued on the wood felling expedition and, and that would have been it. But it was their insistence on, hey, we need to fight this battle even if it makes no tactical sense, operational sense, and that's when they start returning fire and then the fire picks up from the other side of the valley. That's the only reason that we get this casualty. [00:33:48] Speaker B: I think that's exactly right. And that is certainly one of Tolstoy's purposes in writing the combat the way he does. He is trying to point out the way that in the 19th century many Russians, particularly among the Russian elite, who were involved with the military perceived of combat and of actions in combat, the tactical utility of the combat seemed like almost a secondary concern. Whether or not it advanced the commander's end state seems like an almost secondary concern for the officers participating or supervising or directing the combat to the extent they did so. The primary concern, so suggests Tolstoy in his early short stories and in Haji Marat, is to glorify the officers. So if some folks die or they don't actually achieve the tactical end state, that in theory the situation demands of them, that is less important than the stories that are told about the combat afterwards. And there are many, many officers who come from St. Petersburg to the Caucasus just to collect enough of a basis for them to claim that they were valorous and then return to St. Petersburg and cash in on that reputation. Tolstoy makes this explicit elsewhere, just after the section that you read, John, which I think is one of the more direct instances of this critique in the book. You also hear Tolstoy or the narrator complain or observe at least the way the truth gets manipulated along the way. He says, though everyone, especially officers who had been in action, could and did know that neither in the war, then in the Caucasus, nor anywhere else could there ever be that hand to hand cutting down with sabers which is always surmised and described, yada, yada, this fiction of hand to hand combat was recognized by the officers and lent them that calm pride and gaiety with which they were sitting on drums. So Everybody knows it's a fiction. Anybody who's been around war knows these accounts are a fiction. But it doesn't matter because it's what gives them their sense of life and heroism, so they all partake in it. We're going to see that fiction travel up the chain of command and the consequences it has here shortly. Either way, there's a real cost for that fiction, and that is the life of this young soldier, Avdeev, who is one of the soldiers sitting on guard when we first met the Russian military a couple pages earlier on the way back from the wood felling, which no one registers as a particularly notable event despite the death of this soldier. They meet Haji Marat, who has successfully evaded his pursuers and now seeks from them shelter, sanctuary, and the company commander receives Hajimra and brings him to Prince Voronzev. The last thing that happens before we get to part two that I want to highlight, Hajim Rod's been received by Voronsev. They're sizing each other up is we get a final cut to a scene very far away from the Caucasus, and that is the family to the family of Av, the soldier that's been wounded and the family is working on their farm. We learn Av volunteered for service so that his older brother wouldn't have to go because his older brother already had a family. The older brother turns out to be a layabout, not a good worker. Avdeev was thought to have been a great worker, and when his family receives the word of their virtuous son, the better, harder worker who volunteered to go to war in his brother's stead because his brother already had a family. When his family learns that soldiers died, they mourn. It's very heartbreakingly written, and the mother says, I wish it had been my less good son who died. Why did it have to be my good son who died? So for all of the vanity of the officers, we are confronted with the real complicated human costs of war. Of course, the way Afjev's death is reported in the report sent to the regional capital is a totally fictitious report. On November 23, two companies of the Kerensky Regiment went out of the fortress to cut wood. In the middle of the day, a considerable body of mountaineers suddenly attacked the woodcutters. The picket line began to drop back, and at that moment the second company fell upon the mountaineers with bayonets and overcame them. Two privates were lightly wounded in the action and one was killed. The mountaineers lost around 100 men, killed and wounded What Tolstoy is doing is he's giving you this panoramic, almost kaleidoscopic to mixed metaphors. Their view of the way these events occur, the way they're perceived, the way they're processed in first order and second order fashion in order to suggest to us the truth of these things is a lot more fickle to get at than you might guess. [00:39:14] Speaker A: Almost none of the details in that report were accurate. On the receiving end of that report, the war that they are seeing is going to be based solely on how events are told. And I mean, it just is striking how much honesty in, you know, truth telling about the events that take place in war shape how that war is prosecuted. And that's a theme, the importance of honesty and the effects of when it's lacking. That's a theme that really gets reinforced in part two, which we're, we're going to get to next. Part two we're really introduced to who Voron Sav is, this local regional commander, a Russian prince. And we see the first meeting of Hajimarad and Voronzov. This relationship is going to be important because Haji Murad's intentions, his mission are dependent on getting Voron Sav to agree to allow him to Hajimara, to come over to the Russian side and develop this collaborative relationship. As you mentioned in, in the description of part one, each chapter we see a lot of jumps from one scene to another. And I think it's a testament to how well Tolstoy writes that it's not difficult to keep all of these sort of parallel narratives in line and to understand how they interweave and, and come back together quite naturally. But part two starts with a chapter where we're introduced to Vorontsov. Again, he is a Russian prince, so are most of the generals that we meet, which I think is, is, is an interesting comment on probably on class and the top heavy sort of social hierarchy of, of Tsarist Russia at the time. He is a Prince. He's over 70 years old by this time. Again, as you mentioned, he's living at this fort with his wife. And we, it opens with a scene in their home inside this fort where they're hosting kind of a small dinner party. And one of the guests at this dinner party mentions a rescue operation that had previously happened. And you, you see in the narrative you see Voronza sort of tense up, the other guests sort of tense up because Ronsov had a role to play. He was responsible for, for the, the decision making that led to this rescue operation being necessary in the first place. And in the, in the, in the text of the book it says that if anyone mentioned this rescue operation in Voronzov's presence, they only did so in the aspect in which Ransov had reported it to the Tsar as a brilliant achievement of the Russian army. Again, completely untrue. Just like the description of the, the engagement that happened to the Wood Felling expedition in part one. There is seemingly a complete lack of honesty about facts and events that are actually happening in this war. And we see how that plays out, the impacts that that has on the Russian decision making and how to continue prosecuting the war. It's pretty easy to see how, you know, this is, you mentioned that this was the Caucasian War. The Caucasian War lasted for almost 50 years. You can see how a war would last 50 years when the, the side that should have all of the advantages refuses to just be honest about what's happening on, on the battlefield because they're more interested in their own reputations, they're more interested in placating superiors, ultimately placating the Tsar. So I think that, that, that was quite telling and that's also, we'll see that when we're introduced to the Tsar also how that sort of obsequiousness and deferential treatment towards superiors plays out and has a, has a military impact. [00:43:03] Speaker B: And you might be wondering, is Tolstoy of the opinion that he is not vulnerable to the same self deception or confusion that he says afflicts all of his characters, particularly the same Russian elite of which he is a part? And the answer is no. Tolstoy believes that he is vulnerable to the same self deception. He's probably a little bit more clear eyed than some of the particular, particularly narcissistic company commanders, noblemen that he talks about. And we'll hear about this Tsar in a big way in just a second. But the opening of the novel is an acknowledgment of the fact that he also probably is confusing facts. The narrator, who is unnamed but is very much like Tolstoy, he says, I remembered an old story from the Caucasus, part of which I saw, part of which I heard from witnesses and part of which I imagined to myself, right? So the narrator at the very outset said, hey, all of us are walking around with these composite semi factual understandings of events in our head. But does that necessitate the kind of self deception that people like Prince V engage in? Maybe not. [00:44:24] Speaker A: So the last sort of point that I want to touch on before Voron Sav and Haji Murad are introduced in person. Right. You had described how a note had come from a courier to Voron Sav in the middle of a, of a drinking session and card game, telling him that Haji Murad wanted to defect essentially to the Russian side. Ronsov was quite pleased with this. And then at this dinner party that we were just describing, he's there, he's talking to his sort of social peers, if not his military peers, his social peers. And you can see that he's quite hopeful, quite optimistic. And at one point someone remarks, haji Murad has surrendered and now there will be an end to Shamil. Also another remarks, they feel that now, this now meant that under Voron Sav, they can't hold out, meaning the Caucasians, the, the enemy. Right, the insurgents. I think that that speaks to a desire, look, counterinsurgency. We know this, you know, from institutional, very recent institutional experience. Counterinsurgency is really hard. And there is this natural temptation to latch on to almost anything as a signal that victory can be just around the corner. I think when we go back and, and write and read the Histories of 20 Years of War in Afghanistan, we're going to see that, you know, if you do first our primary source, research into the reports that are sent from the field up to headquarters, ISAF headquarters, higher level headquarters in Afghanistan and back to Washington, they are probably full of, you know, with, you know, with one more fighting season to give our Afghan partners experience with 10,000 more coalition soldiers so that we can expand on this already wildly successful training effort. You know, victory is just around the corner. And then you Fast forward to 20, 21 and what happens. It wasn't, it was never around the corner. I think that that speaks to, I don't know that it is an essential characteristic of counterinsurgency, but it's certainly a characteristic, a feature of counterinsurgency that really stuck out to me when I read that. I don't know if you had any thoughts. [00:46:35] Speaker B: Certainly it calls to mind that montage that used to kick around the Internet of 20 years of ISAF commanders or 20 years of change of command speeches from commanders in Afghanistan wherein the ISAF commander outbound listed the achievements in such a way that made you think that listed the achievements during his command in such a way that suggested, as you said, victory was right around the corner. And yep, 20 years go by and ISAF ends up leaving Afghanistan without having achieved its desired end state, to put it lightly. So, yeah, it's reminiscent, it's complicated. When you read about the Caucasian war, especially through the eyes of Tolstoy, because there are many cross applications, but there are also things that are not cross applicable. You know, it would probably be a little too presentist to read this and say, here's a critique that could be applied to the global war on terror. There are many, many important distinctions between, obviously, first and foremost, the people of the Caucasians and the people of Afghanistan or Iraq. The military's fighting. And I know that's not what you were suggesting, but I felt the need to restrain myself while reading. You know, for all of the US military shortcomings, it is not the tsarist army of 18. Right. And for all of the. For all of the complexity and nuance and the religion of the Caucasus and the people that live there, it is not the same place in Afghanistan, Iraq. So one exercise that I thought was interesting and that I'm still undergoing is when, you know, reading a text like this, being alert enough to the possible cross applications without hallucinating them. But, yes, very much the way they talk about the Prince. For onse arrival as a local commander, boding well for the counterinsurgency campaign very much felt like something we saw in the war on terror, wherein a new commander with a particularly integrated vision might yield a victory that had up to that point been elusive. [00:48:54] Speaker A: And I think. Yeah, I'm glad that you caveated my point, because I think it is important to distinguish. First of all, you know, I think it's important to avoid oversimplifying and equating all insurgencies, all counterinsurgencies. I think it just speaks to the very human desire to be successful. And when you're in an environment or in an operational environment marked by counterinsurgency, where success is very difficult to come by, there is a natural human temptation to cast every event in the best possible, the most optimistic possible light. Another sort of characteristic, at the risk of again drawing too close a parallel between the tsarist Russia's campaign in the. In the Caucasus and our own more recent military operations. We also, once Haji Murad and Voronts of meet in person, we're introduced to one other feature that stuck out to me as sort of early similar, I guess. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna read this paragraph. I hope it's not. It's not too long, if you'll. And you'll bear with me. But when they first meet, they're speaking through an interpreter. They're introducing themselves. You know, Veronica Hajimarad is kind of explaining what he wants. He wants to come over to the Russians. He wants to help them defeat Shamil if only they will help him secure the release of his family who are being held hostage by Shamil. Vorontsov obviously has his own interests, Russia's interests, in mind. And there's this paragraph description of the way that they look at each other that I think is really, really illuminating. It says the eyes of the two men met and expressed to each other much that could not have been put into words. And that was not at all what the interpreter said. Without words, they told each other the whole truth. V's eyes said that he did not believe a single word Haji Murad was saying and that he knew he was and always would be an enemy to everything Russian and had surrendered only because he was obliged to. Hajimarad understood this and yet continued to give assurances of his fidelity. His eyes said that old man ought to be thinking of his death and not of war. But though old, he is cunning and I must be careful. Vonov understood this also, but nevertheless he spoke to Hajimarad in the way he considered necessary for the success of the war. The complexity that that one paragraph conveys about this type of military operation, where it is not two forces wearing uniforms, you know, there are not sort of universally adhered to laws of war about what isn't, who is an enemy, who is a non combatant, etc. I just thought that was very, very revealing and also brought me back personally to my time in, in East Baghdad, for instance, in particular in, in 2008, you know, where it was difficult just trying to make sense of the human terrain, trying to make sense of who is an enemy, who is not. Trying to keep in mind the fact that there isn't always a binary distinction between enemy and not. I can guarantee that we worked with people who were playing us for their own ends. And, and that doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't work with those people. You're just trying to navigate a very complicated landscape. And that's something that I think also is sort of an essential element to counterinsurgency. Whether your counterinsurgency effort is the hearts and minds focused campaign that we tried to undertake in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, or if it's a much more vicious, you know, you know, burning the landscape and making the terrain inhospitable to all people, whether enemy or non combatant, I think that that was very, very illuminating. [00:53:04] Speaker B: This is a very important point, and it's important, not just in a vacuum, that sometimes the combatants with whom we're working on the battlefield are motivated by concerns that aren't directly related to the politics. Politics, the political context of the conflict. They're motivated by human personal concerns as well. But that's not where Tolstoy stops. And that's why I think Hadji Murad is such a great book and why, frankly, Tolstoy is such a great writer to read. As a student of war, as a student of human nature. Tolstoy then shows not just that motivations are varied and that you're not sure whether you're talking with friend or foe, but that it's true of you too. And also that that uncertainty only heightens as you get further and further removed from the point of the interaction. Because the way we learn about Haji Marat's story, as you just said, John, is he sits down for an interview with the adjutant, Prince Vranza of this character, Loris Melikov. It's a hyphenated surname. This person actually existed. He was an Armenian born officer of the Tsar's army. In the book, he, it's noted that he spoke the language of Haji Marat. So they are having a conversation, not translated, but in Haji Marat's tongue. And of course, being from Armenia, he's probably more alert to the local dynamics than a nobleman who's brought in from St. Petersburg. Loris Melikov is depicted by Tolstoy quite sympathetically relative to the other Russian officers for being so knowledgeable about, as you said, the human terrain. He's a patient listener. He elicits a lot from Haji Marat. It almost seems like Haji Marat is unburdening himself to Loris Melikov, this Russian adjutant. [00:55:00] Speaker A: I also think this is a really interesting sort of literary tool that Tolstoy uses. You know, it's one thing to tell a story in a linear fashion. It's another to very artfully give, provide a narrative to follow that jumps between scenes, makes it easy for readers to follow and then slowly kind of open the curtain and provide background context that gives you. This sort of shapes your view because in a way, you know, Voron Sav knows that Haji Marad exists. He knows who he is, but he's kind of trying to feel him out and trying to learn more about him after he comes, has come over and, and offered his services to, to the Russians. We're sort of doing the same thing. We're trying to learn who Hajim Marad is. We've seen scenes of his, you know, we've seen him on the run from Shamil's forces early in, in, in Part one. We've seen him coordinating with his Mirids to get over to the Russians, but we don't really know him yet. And so this discussion with Loris Melakov is our opportunity to get to know him. There's a. I mentioned that, you know, it's. That the. The difficulty of sort of isolating the military, the conduct of these military operations from the. The many other dynamics that sort of weave into those operations and play. Play an impact on those operations. We have learned. We know Haji Murad from the beginning of the story as somebody who has left Shamil and is trying to flip to the Russian side. During this discussion with Loris Melikov, we learned that when this war began, or at some earlier stage, the Russians were courting Haji Murad, offering to make him effectively a governor of a region. We're never really told, never learned did he actually take them up on that offer. But he was being courted by one particular general. At one point, he says, there's a arrival of his named Ahmed Khan, arrival of Haji Marads. And he says, Ahmed Khan hated me and sent his henchmen to kill me, but I escaped from them. Then he calumniated me to General Klugenau. General Klugenau is this Russian general, even though his name doesn't sound particularly Russian, a feature of this book, as we'll probably discuss even further. Ahmed Khan said that I had told the Avars not to supply wood to the Russian soldiers, which Hajimrat is claiming was a lie. He also said that I had donned a turban, this one. He points to the turban that he's wearing at the time and that this meant that I had gone over to Shamil. This is, you know, this is important. This is what Loris Melikov is sent to find out. Find out everything you can about Haji Marat. But we don't know if you know, that's going to be perceived in one way by Loras Melikov, who's writing this report. Report or drafting at least the notes for the report that Voronzov will write. But we don't know kind of the delta between Loris Melakov's perceptions of the facts like those and Haji Murad's true intentions. Is this, you know, rivalry with Ahmed Khan or with Shamil or with others that were introduced to. Are these rivalries his true motives? Are they extraneous information? It's just a very difficult kind of. These interpersonal dynamics are influential and almost impossible to parse for us as readers and for Loris Melikov, whose objective is to parse them. [00:58:30] Speaker B: And that's to say nothing of what happens when Voronttsev's report gets to the Tsar's ministers. [00:58:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's sort of the culminating point of this. Part two is we've divided the book, right. Vorontsov writes this report for the Tsar. It doesn't go directly to the Tsar. It, you know, the Russian military, like most militaries, is very hierarchical. It works its way up to the minister of war and the minister of war and his deputy minister take it to the Tsar and they present this report to the Tsar for decision. The dynamics between the minister and the Tsar, who is ruthless, who, who is quick to punish insubordination or what he perceives as insubordination. And insubordination to him is anything other than complete obsequious fealty to the Tsar as, you know, the, as the, as the sole individual in his mind that can A keep Russia together and, and B, really keep the world functioning. He has these delusions of grandeur about his importance and politically he is an important, important figure, to be sure. But he believes that it's based on his capability and his capability alone that the world continues to turn. This is the personification of vanity in the Tsar. And you see in the way that information is presented to him the absolute necessity if you want to keep your job and perhaps your life is to cater to that vanity. And I don't know if that's sort of a feature of the strategic level culture in czarist Russia that is filtered down. And that's why we see reports being sent about two companies on a wood felling expedition being completely miscast, or if this is just a broader military cultural pattern and we're seeing it at the low end and seeing it at the [01:00:28] Speaker B: high end, I don't know either. It's hard to parse what's a particular critique of the czarist court and what's an observation about human nature by Tolstoy. My instinct is that we shouldn't read it as too particular a comment of the czarist Russian court and we should instead read it as a comment, when in doubt, about human nature generally. That one detail I'd add to that very good summary you just gave of the way this report from Haji Marat through Loris Melikov to Vorontsev up to the Tsar gets presented is that the war minister who presents the report to the Tsar, who is being so obsequious to the Tsar in order to placate the Tsar's ego also hates Vorontov, Right? [01:01:18] Speaker A: Right. [01:01:19] Speaker B: For unrelated reasons. We learn this at the start of chapter 15. The narrator says in my translation, which is, by the way, the Pavir Volkonsky translation, Richard Pavir and Larissa Volkonski. The narrator says, Chernyshev, which is the name of the war minister, profited from every occasion to harm Vorontzev as much as he could. In the previous report about Caucasian affairs, Chernyshev again the war minister had managed to provoke Nicholas the Tsar's displeasure with Vorontov for the negligence of the commanders, owing to which the mountaineers had exterminated almost an entire small Caucasian detachment. Now he intended to present Voront's orders about Haji Marat from an unfavorable side. He wanted to suggest to the sovereign that Vorontsev, who always particularly to the detriment of the Russians, protected or even, and even indulge the natives, had acted unwisely in keeping Haji Marath in the Caucasus, and that in all probability Hadjima Rat had come over to us only in order to spy out our means of defense. So, in addition to the desire to please the Tsar, the translation issues with Lois Malikov Vorontsov's own petty concerns, the misreporting of things like the wood felling, you have yet another layer of distortion that is this character Chernyshov's own private agenda. [01:02:45] Speaker A: Importantly, Chernoshav is unsuccessful in this attempt to undermine Voron Sav because the Tsar in the end decides really to continue prosecuting the war in this sort of scorched earth way. And implicit in that is allow Varon Soft to utilize Haji Murad is, you know, as he sees fit to come over to our side. Which takes us to the end of part two and part three will begin with Ransov learning of the Tsar's decision to allow Haji Murad to come over to the Russian side. [01:03:21] Speaker B: Part 3 At this point, report of Haji Marath's turn to the Russians has reached the Czar. And the Czar has made a non decision about what to do with Haji Marat, this insurgent who's come in from the cold. What the Tsar does decide to do is press what he perceives to be an emergent advantage the Russians have in the Caucasus via a series of raids. And so chapter 16 of the book starts. In fulfillment of these instructions from Nicholas, a raid into Chechnya was undertaken at once in January 1852. I'll pause here just to note. January of 1852 is when Leo Tolstoy got his commission as an artillery officer and began leading combat operations in Chechnya. Those operations were part of a series of renewed raids ordered by Nicholas I. So Tolstoy is talking about the start of his military career right now. We get a description of what those raids look like and the bottom line is it's not surgical and it's not pretty. The Russians send out detachments of mixed infantry and artillery along these mountain paths until they meet resistance. They are supported by an advanced guard of Cossacks, locals or near locals, who are horse mounted, who function as a particularly up gunned cavalry. Those Cossacks make first contact with the mounted Caucasian opposition usually do a good job of scattering them. Not often do the Russian infantry have to deploy into combat formations. In this particular case, that's what happens. They think they might see a mounted party with Shamil himself. The Cossack advanced guard scatters that horse mounted formation they spot. You get the sense, by the way, that the Caucasians are okay with this. Their whole game is to avoid decisive engagement. And so of course they'll be scattered. That means that the infantry and the artillery of the Tsar's army show up to an abandoned village and what do they do? They kill everything that they see and they burn down the village and they get drunk. Once they've done that work work, they head home feeling that they've participated in a successful military action. The narrator then reveals of this particular raid that the village that the Tsar's army raided was the very same village through which Haji Marat had passed at the start of the book, though you don't know that until it's revealed. Not only that, but the boy who waited on Haji Marat is found dead. The house in which Haji Marat took shelter is burned. The boy is bayoneted in the back. So you get the sense that it wasn't a combat engagement that resulted in the boy's death. He was murdered in an indiscriminate act of violence by the Tsarist army. And this is all weighted down with irony because if you recall the start of the book, the fear in the village is that for hosting Haji Marat Shamil and his troops, the insurgents will punish the village. But ultimately, of course, what punishes the village? The opposite. [01:06:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:06:49] Speaker B: Shamil's opponents, the Tsar's army. The. I don't want to say arbitrariness, because that might be a little oversimplifying, but the almost patternless cruelty of war, I think is exposed here. Haji Marat gets dispatched after this raid to some secondary fortress where some of these troops are barracked. It is commanded by this figure, Major Petrov, who has a second command, an officer named Butler. And we'll pause here. We're not really sure why he's called Butler, if, you know, call in, but we think basically he's a Brit who's found his way into the Russian military. [01:07:33] Speaker A: Yeah, My thinking of it was that he had, he had joined this combat unit after leaving. The household guards was his previous unit. When I first read that, I assumed it was a reference to a British military formation because his name is Butler and there are household guards. However, I, I, my guess, my best guess is that the household guards are sort of this, like, interpersonal security for the Tsar, and that this was a time in history when that function was often outsourced to foreigners as a matter of security. And so perhaps he was effectively a mercenary that had been part of the household guards. He left there because of gambling problems and gambling debts that he could not pay, and so sort of went for a fresh start to the Caucasus and joined the, this combat unit. [01:08:21] Speaker B: Yeah. And you spend just enough time with Major Petrov and with Butler to get a sense that these men have a lot of problems. They might be good fighters, narrowly defined, but Major Petrov is a vicious alcoholic. And of course, Butler has terrible gambling problems. These are their primary concerns, not the combat operations they lead. And they start to hear rumors of Haji Marat coming that's to their post. That's very exciting to them. In between their games of cards and their drinking, Major Petrov has a beautiful wife, of course, with whom Butler is kind of in love. And that wife, just like Prince Vorontev's wife, seems to be more intelligent than any of the men on the installation. Here we get another one of these classic Tolstoyan cuts, but it's Tolstoy and the narrator cut, not to Haji Marat, but to Shamil, the Chechen warlord or leader, however you want to put it, from whom Haji Marad is fleeing and against whom the Russians are fighting. And this is another brilliant moment to me because here Tolstoy reveals both his empathy for the other side, but his insistence that the defects of human nature that he's observing know no bounds. Shamil is in certain ways admirable and pure. Like Haji Marat, he does pray, he does live, lead a slightly more egalitarian formation than the Czarist army, which is infamously less than egalitarian. But he is also prone to self deception, and he is Also prone to propaganda. And he is also prone to licentiousness, like the Czar. We didn't talk about that. But the Czar is flayed by Tolstoy as a libidinally driven, gluttonous man rather than a great political thinker. And Shamil is also sometimes less pious than he should be. He's depicted as coming back from the other side of this raid saying that it was a great military victory when in fact it was a defeat for the Chechens, however ugly a defeat. So he's doing the same self deception that the Russian army did regarding the wood felling incident. [01:10:53] Speaker A: Can I read the way that Tolstoy describes that? [01:10:57] Speaker B: Yeah, please. [01:10:58] Speaker A: He says he returned after a battle in which, according to the Russians, he, Shamil, had been vanquished and had fled to Verano, this new village that they had, that Haji Marad's family had been moved to. He returned to Verano, but in which the battle, according to him and all the myriads, he had been victorious and had repulsed the Russians. When I read this, I just thought, you know, my first instinct was man. Here's another feature of counterinsurgency, right. Battles without clear outcomes. But then I sort of widened my aperture and I thought that's kind of a feature of modern warfare generally. And I don't mean modern warfare like right now, the war in Ukraine or the ongoing conflict in the Middle east against Iran. I mean, more broadly, look at World War I. If we, you know, I don't know when you define the beginning of modern warfare, this is something that scholars and observers debate pretty, pretty extensively. But if we talk about, say from [01:11:57] Speaker B: the US Paleolithic period. [01:11:59] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. The, you know, this era of where maneuver, combined arms warfare is sort of the, the way that we want to fight. If that's the era of modern warfare, it has been, you know, most wars have been characterized by engagements that have produced tons and tons of casualties without clear winners and not by these sort of glorious battlefield victories. Those glorious battlefield victories are the ones that historians write about. And so the narratives, like the further removed that we get from a conflict, the narrative becomes defined by battles that had outcomes, when in reality warfare is much more frequently about battles that either don't have a major outcome or in which the sides don't agree on what the outcome was. [01:12:48] Speaker B: Right. And you can see this in the X traffic about the war in Ukraine today. Yeah, of course, it seems like any given engagement can be described either as a crushing defeat of the Ukrainians in some telegram channel or as a return of successful maneuver against the Russians by the Ukrainians on some ex war monitor account. The point here, I think is that Tolstoy is not constructing some virtuous noble savage out of the Caucasian forces, out of the Chechens, out of Shamil. He's not saying the Tsar's ministry is rotted out and the true and virtuous war fighting formations are our enemies. He's saying, in fact, this is endemic to the human condition, this tendency to deceive ourselves and we should watch out for it at all times. Also, Shamil is no saint, even if he's less detestable than the Tsar. What ends up happening is that Haji Marat does show up at Major Petrov's and Butler's outpost. He and Butler become good friends. Haji Marat is quite humanized and ultimately Hadji Marat gets permission to go to a city closer to his family where he might be able to start scheming to recover his family. But he's never granted the support that he solicits from the Russians. He is subjected to this grueling pattern of indecision by the Russians. [01:14:18] Speaker A: And, and I think that's a function of this, the Tsar's decision being, yes, proceed, but without saying specifically how nobody wants to get sort of, you know, ahead of their skis on this. And so, right, every, every officer that Haji Marat has, you know, interactions with sort of just sits on the fence about whether and how to use him in, in the war against Shamil. [01:14:45] Speaker B: It's a very relatable dynamic. I imagine that a lot of people listening, certainly I can, I imagine you can. John, can relate to some decision brief brought to a commander. A commander makes some of the decisions, but not all the decisions solicited in the decision brief. Perhaps not the most important decision is mute on the most salient question. And then subordinate commanders are made to either themselves decide whether to act in the absence of a decision from higher headquarters or just to punt on the question for fear of, as you said, getting ahead of their skis. And I think it's probably safe to say, though I can't run the large end study to demonstrate this, that the majority of subordinate commanders prefer to punt on the decision than risk getting desynced from their mute higher headquarters on a given question. [01:15:33] Speaker A: Right. [01:15:34] Speaker B: What Hadji Marat decides to do, because as we're shown at the very start of the book and throughout it is act. And once he's at this tertiary satellite town, Nuha, he makes a decision to break out of his confinement because he is being held by the local Russians and do something, even if it results in his death. Did you catch that? That his reflection is, I could well die doing this, but that is preferable to being, forgive the term, but neutered by my conditions. [01:16:17] Speaker A: Yeah, he doesn't want to. He doesn't know what's going to come after he acts. He only wants to act and sort of break this cycle. He wants to break free of the cycle of indecision that has imposed these constraints on him, where every day is sort of a groundhog day and he just needs to take some action. [01:16:36] Speaker B: That's right. And the passage in which we hear Hajim Rat make this decision sounds something like this. By the middle of the night, his decision was formed. He decided that he must flee to the mountains and break into Venino with his faithful Avars and either die or rescue his family. Whether he would bring his family back to the Russians or flee with them to Khuznach and fight Shamil Hajimrat did not decide. He knew only that right now he must flee from the Russians to the mountains. And he at once began to carry out his decision. He gathers up his murids, his horsemen, his posse, and. And he attempts to outrun the Cossacks who are guarding him. The Cossacks being these czar line mounted horsemen from the region. They catch him. They catch him in this bog, basically in the brush by a rice field. Before he can, Haji Marat can get to the river that he's hoping to cross. And you and I read this a little differently. We were talking before the episode. I thought that meant that a rain had flooded the rice field and bogged down his horses and meaning a fluke event had changed the outcome of the story, which would be, in my reading, consistent with what Tolstoy is trying to say about the arbitrariness of these things. I was curious if you might want to explain to the listeners how you read it. [01:17:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I read it as, you know, and this could very well be a function of how the translation is done, because verb tense really matters here. I read the line that said the rice field which had to be crossed in order to get to this river that they needed to cross and take this sort of circuitous route to the mountains. The rice field which had to be crossed had just been flooded. I read that to mean that it had been flooded deliberately, because this is part of the, you know, the. The yearly pattern of cultivating rice. And to me, the takeaway to that is, hey, terrain analysis matters. And understanding of local patterns matters if you don't, if you want to avoid being caught up by something like this. I had visions of 2022, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine at a time of the year when the ground is very wet and it constrained them to roads. The Ukrainians very deftly manipulating dams and such to flood terrain even further and restrict Russian movements. That was obviously very deliberate. This was not a deliberate act, if my interpretation is correct, a deliberate act on the part of the rice farmers to flood it and keep Haji Marad from being able to cross it. Whether your interpretation is right and the takeaway is of the arbitrariness of events, or mine is, is right and the takeaway is the importance, enduring importance of train analysis. You know, May, I'm kind of glad that we talked about both interpretations, because I think both of those are useful lessons to take away from this episode. [01:19:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I, I, I think, I think you're right. And honestly, the more I hear you talk about it, the more, more convinced I am by, by your interpretation. Either way, it's a rather sudden end of the story. [01:19:34] Speaker A: Very sudden. [01:19:35] Speaker B: This book is, what, 116 pages long in my edition. You are waiting to see Haji Marat do what he has the reputation for doing, which is acting valorously and effectively and slipping through the fingers of fate to get what he wants. And instead he makes a run for it. He's run down by Cossacks and he's killed. The final firefight is quite dramatic, frankly. The whole book is cinematic, but it's very easy to imagine this being depicted on the big screen. And in the end he is shot. He's able to fight through a wound or two, and finally he's felled when he dies. This is how it's described. Several militiamen with a triumphant shriek rushed to the fallen body. But what had seemed to them a dead body suddenly stirred. First the bloodied shaven head without a papaka rose. Then the body rose, and then, catching hold of a tree, he rose up entirely. He looked so terrible that the men running at him stopped. But he suddenly shuddered, staggered away from the tree, and like a mowed down thistle, fell full length on his face and no longer moved. The thistle is a reference to the opening of book, when the narrator is walking through a field and sees a tartar thistle, which he pulls from the ground, but not before it fights back, so to speak, because it's such a throw, thorny plant. So he's making an allusion to the metaphor with which he opened the book there. But this idea that what matters is not Haji Marat's death and the political outcome or the personal outcome of his death, but the manner in which he conducted himself, I think is the lasting impression with which I was left, that his agency, apart from outcome, defines him and perhaps defines for Tolstoy what a hero is the very last or the second to last sentence. The book is this, or I guess the second or third, last paragraph. Karganov and Khaji Aga and Ahmed Khan, these are, of course, Haji Marat's enemies. And all the militiamen, like hunters over a slain animal, gathered over the bodies of Haji Marat and his men, and standing there in the bushes amid the powder smoke, talked merrily, exulting in their victory. The nightingales who had fallen silent during the shooting again started trilling, first one close by and then others further off. The message, I think there is also, you know, we can only rise above these patterns momentarily, you know, through great agency like that of Haji Marat. But eventually these patterns of human nature, these patterns of warfare return, and they know no boundary. The way Karganov and Ahmed Khan are spoken of, talking merrily amidst the powder smoke is very reminiscent language of the way the Russian companies are spoken of after the raid and after the wood felling, standing around amidst the smoke, talking merrily in the wake of such intense human violence. I read that as a suggestion from Tolstoy that we are all the same in this regard. It's very difficult to outrun it, and all we can do is stand in awe of the men who briefly do, like Haji Murad himself. [01:23:10] Speaker A: You know, that last sentence which brings. Brings it back to the intro and the metaphor. I had sort of forgotten. Even though this is such a short book. You said Your version is 116 pages, mine's 149. Mine is the. The version that's translated by Elmer Maud Mod, I guess, is maybe how you pronounce it. I had, you know, I read this book in a very short space of time, but I had forgotten about that. And by returning to that, he just reminds you. Toso just reminds you what a literary master he is. You also mentioned that there's. There's a great degree of tension, right? And that you can imagine this being playing out on. On the big screen as a. As a major motion picture. In the last five pages, my heart was racing. Not. I don't mean that metaphorically. If I had watched my heart rate monitor, I guarantee that it was, that it picked up, because totally, he just paints this picture where, you know, There is such tension, such intensity at the very end of the book that it's. It's just phenomenal. It was absolutely phenomenal. [01:24:15] Speaker B: Yeah. And if you like Westerns, like, it's. I think the most proximate American storytelling tradition to this scene in particular is the final stand or the shootout at the end of a great Western. And it delivers the same both, I think, philosophical and entertainment value. [01:24:34] Speaker A: I think that's a great way to sort of end the narrative and analytical portion of parts 1, 2 and 3 of this episode. And now we can move on to the back matter of the episode. So, back matter, we're calling the. The. The last portion of each episode back matter. And actually the. The first portion is the front matter. That's what, in the world of publishing, the front matter of a book consists of any forward preface, introduction, table of contents, everything that comes before chapter one. Back matter is if there's an afterword, if there's an author's note, an epilogue. That's all considered the back matter. This is where we have a few final segments that we want to touch on. [01:25:19] Speaker B: So the first of our back matter are margin notes. These are things that we met along the way as we were reading that we weren't able to fit into the narration and the summary and the discussion of the plot. The only thing that I wanted to include about the story that we didn't in the plot narration is the way that the news of Haji Marat's death is delivered to the Russians. So Haji Marat is, of course, the protagonist, and his death scene is so climactic. But we don't actually learn about his death in the death scene. We learn about his death beforehand when the camera, so to speak, the narrator, cuts to the morning after a heavy night of drinking at a Russian camp, and at the Russian camp, specifically, the outpost where Hadjimrat had been held. His head is delivered by some Cossacks to Major Petrov and to Butler, and their minds are on other things. Their minds are on, in Butler's case, his terrible gambling debts. Major Petrov's mind is on his hangover. The point I read into that aspect of the story is that just like has been observed so many times before, the things which seem significant to one party are, from one perspective, might seem like an interesting detail of a morning where you're otherwise thinking about other things. And Tolstoy couldn't have made that in a more sort of concise and gritty way than to deliver Haji Marat's head to a hungover garrison. That's thinking about its gambling debts rather than about the political vicissitudes of the war or the remarkable story that we've just beheld. And, John, I don't know if you had any margin notes that you wanted to share from the book. [01:27:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I do. You described Butler and his relationship with Haji Murad that developed. They became quite close in the period of time that they spent together. I don't know if you remember when Butler then bought himself essentially the clothing that the locals, what they call mountaineers, in my translation, where it's. Well, I'll just. I'll just read. Says after Haji Murad's arrival and Butler's intimacy with him and his mirage, the poetry of the energetic life of the mountains took a still stronger hold on Butler. He procured for himself a beshmet, a Circassian coat and leggings, and imagined himself a mountaineer, living the life of those people. Lived. It struck me as quite a natural thing to kind of identify with the people and places that military service brings you. And we see this in sort of. You walk into any, you know, anybody. Any. Any military member who served in Iraq and Afghanistan or, or elsewhere, and there's going to be sort of the accoutrement of the time that they spent there, you know, the trinkets, the things that they brought back. I don't know if you can see behind me, actually, but I've got a. A hookah pipe. You can see it kind of up on the top shelf behind me. Listeners cannot, obviously, but that was a gift to me from my interpreter, a local Iraqi, from when I was in Baghdad. It's, It's. It's quite beautiful, but I. I kind of treasure it because it is a memento of this period of time that I spent in this place, you know, a year of my life. And I don't know, it doesn't have to necessarily even be a war zone. You know, if people who have been stationed in Germany come back with a handmade pair of lederhosen, I just think that that's a. It's sort of an organic element of military service that you do develop this fondness in some ways for the. The cultures and the places that you're exposed to over the course of a military career. And I thought the Butler's decision to buy local garments and sort of imagine himself being there in a different way than he is there, I just thought that that was quite striking. [01:29:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And now we'll share our saved rounds or our fun facts. These are notes from the book that might not come from the narrative, but that contextualize it or make it more interesting. The thing that I wanted to highlight is that Tolstoy is still revered in much of Chechnya because of his humane treatment of the Chechens from this period when so few other Russian chroniclers gave them their full due as a culture and a people of their own. That reverence extends to a museum dedicated to Tolstoy's time in Chechnya, in a town called Staroglodskaya. I learned from an introduction to a Tolstoy biography by Rosamund Bartlett that this museum was the only museum that didn't close during the Chechnya war in the 1990s. So revered is Tulsa and his legacy there by the Chechens. I don't know if. John, you wanted to share your fun fact now. [01:30:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I actually have two that I want to touch on. The first, my version I mentioned, my translation is by Aylmer Maud. Maud, I believe that version has an introduction by Azar Nafizi, who is an Iranian American professor of literature. She is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, which is a very well known book. In her introduction, she quotes Tolstoy from somewhere else. And I had to track down the, the source of the quote. It actually appeared in a book Tolstoy compiled of sort of insights and wisdom called A Calendar of Wisdom. That's the title of this book. And I don't know, it's almost like you remember those books that were popular in like the 90s and 2000s, I think called it Chicken Soup for the Soul. It's sort of like that, just sort of daily pieces of wisdom that you can read, read, I guess, of Tolstoy. Anyway, one of them is, is she quotes Azar Nafizi quotes in the introduction. It says, life consists in penetrating the unknown and fashioning our actions in accord with new knowledge thus acquired. That really struck me as, you know, thinking about why an organization like the Modern War War Institute exists. That's exactly why it exists. Studying modern war. We're trying to penetrate the unknown. And once we are able to do that, fashioning our actions in accord with new knowledge, that's what we're trying to do. Drive adaptation, drive transformation, innovation, to keep pace with the changing character of warfare. Anyway, that that quote struck out to me and sort of spoke to what I think MWA exists for the second one. Saved rounds. Fun fact. Several years ago, not long after I had started at mwi, we do these trips sometimes during the summers called contemporary Battlefield Assessments. Where we go and study what we call warm conflict zones, recently completed conflicts or conflicts that are on sort of a hiatus. We've been to Colombia to study the counterinsurgency against farc, Sri Lanka, Georgia. We went to Ukraine before the invasion kicked off, but after, obviously after the war in the Donbass. The conflict in the Donbass began in 2014. We've been to the Baltics to study how they're preparing for the prospect of Russian aggression as opposed to Ukraine, which was responding to it anyway. We went to Georgia to study the 2008 Russia Georgia war. And during our time there, we went to the very north of the country, which is right on the border with Chechnya, in the neighborhood that this book's. That this book's events take place. To get to the north. We, we were on a highway called the Georgian Military highway, which just has a fascinating history. It, you know, it was. There was a route along the highways, route, you know, hundreds, thousands of years ago. Pliny the Elder wrote about this route. Russian troops were using it before the, before the American Revolution. It played a major role during, during the Cold War, during Soviet times when Georgia was obviously part of the Soviet Union. It, the. The endurance of this route. Now the Georgian Military highway as a prominent feature in conflict in the region, in the military history of the region, I think is another testament to the enduring importance of terrain. We can do what we want to shape the battlefield, but at the end of the day, the battlefield is the battlefield and we cannot ignore the fundamental realities of terrain. [01:34:27] Speaker B: And lastly, we get to bonus reads. So these are the things that John and I are reading. We're of course, always eager to hear what you're reading. We try always to be reading. Our next episode, as we'll talk about in a second, is on a book concerning the emergence of maven smart systems. But that's not the only thing I'm reading right now. I'm also reading another war novel, this one about the Guadalcanal campaign by a great post war novelist of the American Second World War experience named James Jones. That novel is the Thin Red Line. You might know it for the Terrence Malick movie. [01:35:01] Speaker A: Yeah. My bonus read is a book called the Boer War by Winston Churchill. Listeners will be familiar with Winston Churchill as a politician, as a statesman, obviously a lion of 20th century history. He was also, like Tolstoy, a soldier and a writer. And he became known as sort of a chronicler of the Boer War in South Africa, just as Tolstoy became known as a chronicler of the Crimean War during his service in Sevastopol. One of the things that listeners may not know is just what an incredible writer Churchill is. I mean, I could recommend almost anything that he's, that he's written just because he has a, he has a way with words. He makes a story kind of leap off the pages. And, and his book on the Boer War is a very good example, that early example of that in his, in his writing career. So that's my, my bonus read. That brings us to the end of our episode. Join us again in a month. Our episode on Project Maven by Katrina Manson, the first kind of very new contemporary book that we've tackled. That episode will go live on November 1st. We're very excited about it. Listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I really, really enjoyed it. Theo, thank you so much for suggesting a phenomenal book for this episode. I, I really enjoyed the book and enjoyed the discussion with you. So thank you. [01:36:31] Speaker B: Thanks so much. John, Thanks for listening to the MWI Book Club. [01:36:41] Speaker A: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss future episodes. [01:36:47] Speaker B: And please take just a second and leave a rating or review, which really helps new listeners to find us. [01:36:53] Speaker A: And one last thing, what you heard in this episode are our own views and don't reflect those of West Point, the Army, or any other agency of the US Government. [01:37:01] Speaker B: Thanks again.