Kelly Laurence, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

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At the last moment, however, he found it hard to tear himself away. There

were tearful farewells and leave-takings with his mother and sister. They

were so attached to him, he told Beguichov, that he would be a scoundrel

if he did not repay them in the same loving coin. ‘Until now I have only

been a son and brother in name, when I return from Persia, I shall become

so in fact, and live entirely for my family. I shall take them with me to

St Petersburg.’ He forgave his mother ‘from the bottom of my heart’ for

failing to understand his literary aspirations; on his side, he would

never forgive himself in future if he allowed himself to cause her pain.

By mid-September 1818, he was en route for Persia and the

Caucasus.

‘What an absurd country!’ he wrote to Beguichov.

The latest

news from the Caucasus was that a Russian convoy had been waylaid

by 5000 Circassians. He had been delayed for a day in Tula, due to the

unavailability of horses, with nothing to allay his boredom but the

graffiti on the walls of the posting house. His travelling companion

Amburgherr (the head of Chancery to the Persian mission) was a good

man, very talkative and the scourge of postmasters.

I have convinced him that being German is a very foolish part to play in

life. He has already changed his name enough to sign it Amurgev, and

no longer Amburgherr. His sausages infuriate me. Farewell my friend, I

am already 1200 versts away from you and will soon be even further.

Griboyedov’s next letter to Beguichov was written as a series of travel

notes, a formula he would adopt throughout his absence in the East.

As he told Beguichov, he was writing to him privately and not for

publication, though he did not mind him showing his letters to a few

selected friends. ‘You are kind and love my gifts,’ he wrote, ‘do not betray

me to people I despise.’ Written with an immediacy and ease that a more

studied treatment would have lacked, his first notes describe his journey

through the mountains, along the still half-finished Georgian military

highway to Tiflis, where he would join up with the other members of the

mission. After the endless plains of Russia the snow-covered glaciers

and peaks of the great Caucasian chain would come as a thrilling

revelation to any traveller seeing them for the first time. Griboyedov,

who had made his dislike of romantic exaggeration clear in his play The

Student and in his criticisms of Zhukovsky’s verse, had no intention of

indulging in purple passages, least of all about nature. He warned

against travellers’ hyperbole: ‘Words like “soul”, “heart” and “feelings” are

repeated much too often in those pink-bound booklets “for the beloved”’.

But though his remarks were deliberately terse and laconic, they still

conveyed the tremendous drama of the landscape.

As was usual in crossing the mountains, Griboyedov and his party

travelled in an armed caravan, in this case of 600 men, including a

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

Into Exile

complement of light artillery, reconnaissance cavalry and infantry. To

the beat of the drum, the convoy moved off slowly along the fast-flowing

Terek river to their first night’s halt, the fortified Kabardinsky Redoubt

at the foot of the mountains. Bivouacs were placed at its gates and the

soldiers warmed their hands at campfires. They began to climb into the

mountains the next day:

The trail is slippery, muddy, twisting from one steep cliff to another, from

hour to hour more cramped from the thickening bushes which finally turn

to oak forest. A mix of seasons; it is hot and I open my jacket; then frost;

on the surface of the frozen leaves the hoar frost is mixed with green.

They spent the night at Kumbaleyevka, another fortified redoubt. On the

third day they descended towards the plain, Griboyedov riding ahead with

a party of Cossacks: ‘It is cloudy … The snow, like linen, is draped over

the crevasses, the mountains golden at times. The roar of the Terek, from

the precipices.’ They reached Vladikavkaz (literally ‘Ruling the Caucasus’),

the border town controlling the northern end of the passes and the

military highway, that evening. Griboyedov saw pheasants, wild boar

and chamois in abundance, ‘but nowhere to eat them in Vladikavkaz’;

the green kitchen gardens around the town contrasted with the dark

granite peaks above it.

From Vladikavkaz, the military highway ran through Ossetia, a

lawless country whose marauding tribesmen were a constant threat to

travellers. On the fourth day, after passing a small Ossetian fort with

conical watchtowers, Griboyedov reached the first of the string of

Russian forts along the route, perched high above the Daryal Gorge. The

noise of the Terek tumbling and foaming far below grew more and more

menacing; he felt that the convoy could have tumbled into the gorge at

any time. On leaving the gorge, he noted how huge boulders, rolled

down from the peaks, made natural, almost impassable barriers.

Sometimes a group of Ossetians, cooking their meal, could be glimpsed

behind the boulders.

On the next day he passed the village of Kazbek, which he described

as a fortress without, a prison within. He could just see its dramatic

church and monastery perched on the steep slopes of Mount Kazbek,

the mountain where, according to legend, Prometheus had been

chained; the hawks and eagles flying overhead, he supposed, were

descendants of Prometheus’s tormentors. At Sioni, a few miles further

on, he noticed the guard-towers nestling on the precipices. His sixth

march brought him to Kobi, which he found ‘frightful’. The snow and

wind howling round him were awesome, as was the precipitous drop

to the narrow Terek Valley. Passing only a few Ossetian refuges, as

inaccessible as swallows’ nests, he reached the Krestovaya Pass and the

mountain of Gud Gora. As he surveyed the view before him, he felt,

he wrote, like the Welsh bard in Gray’s poem ‘The Bard’. On several

occasions he fell from sheer exhaustion. He makes no reference to the

quality of his horses, but seems to have been in a brichka (small

carriage) for much of the time. He was to spend much of his remaining

life in these jolting, comfortless brichkas.

At the top of the Kashaur Pass the party got fresh horses and began

the welcome descent into Georgia and the green beauties of the Aragvi

Valley; he was reminded of the virgin world of American plantations,

melons, peach and apple trees completing the feeling of an earthly

paradise. The seventh day brought them past Ananuri and Dusheti.

Griboyedov made no mention of the great cathedral fortress of

Mtskheta, where the Georgian kings are buried, or of the gaunt sixth-

century church of Dzhvari and St Nino dominating the skyline above it.

His thoughts, no doubt, were already turned towards the capital. On 21

October, the eighth day of their journey, the convoy rode into Tiflis.

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

We must assume that Griboyedov had received an extensive briefing

from Sturdza and Rodofinikin on the background to his Persian mission.

In Tiflis, however, he would be in touch with those who had been directly

involved in the Russo–Persian War of 1804–13,

and the resulting Treaty

of Gulistan, which governed Russo–Persian relations at the time.

Isolated between the Turkish and Persian empires, the Christian

kingdom of Georgia had always been vulnerable to its Muslim neighbours.

In 1801, after suffering the appalling sack of Tiflis by the Persians in

1795, the Georgian ruling house had ‘voluntarily’ abdicated, and

Georgia had become part of the Russian empire. For the Russians, the

psychological and moral justification for the annexation was the defence

of their fellow Orthodox Christians, and bringing them the benefits of

Russian ‘civilisation’; in practical terms it was a bloodless victory,

moving Russia hundreds of miles closer to the strategic possibilities of

controlling the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

Since the seventeenth century, Russia had sought to widen its

territory and influence at the expense of the Persian and Ottoman

empires. In 1724, Peter the Great, in a costly campaign against the

Persians, had captured Astrakhan, and extended Russia’s frontiers on

the Caspian coast as far as Derbend and Baku. Catherine the Great, at

equal cost in money and men, had conquered the Crimea as the first

step towards controlling the Black Sea and making it a ‘Russian lake’;

she even called her second grandson Constantine, with an eye to his

possible future as the ruler of Constantinople.

Arrival in

Tiflis

With the acquisition of Georgia, Russia was able to reactivate the

imperialist policies of Peter and Catherine the Great. The weakening of

the Ottoman empire, the humiliation of Persia, the removal of the

British (to whom Persia was important as a buffer state for India), were

all now possible. The control of the Caspian, and the annexation of the

Central Asian khanates and kingdoms of Bokhara, Khiva and Samarkand,

offered a glittering prospect in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The expense of Peter and Catherine’s campaigns could now be repaid.

Russia’s luckless hosts in Georgia could not stand for a minute in the

way of Russia’s exciting eastern prospects, nor would any Russian

diplomat or general allow them to.

For Russia, the pretext for the next war with Persia was to extend its

territory southwards as far as the deltas of the Kura and the Araxes and

create a cordon sanitaire against attack.

Memories of the sack of Tiflis

by the first Qajar ruler, Agha Muhammed Khan, in which thousands of

Georgians had been slaughtered, and thousands of young boys and girls

transported to the harems and slave markets of Tabriz and Tehran were

still vivid. The river frontier, in the words of Alexander I, was necessary

‘to prevent the incursions of barbarian peoples’. In 1803, the tough and

aggressive Russian Commander-in-Chief, General Tsitsiyanov,

Georgian by descent, had invaded the Persian vassal state of Ganjeh in

the eastern Caucasus, renaming its capital Elizavetpol in honour of the

Alexander I’s wife. He was eager to provoke a war; the Persians, seeing

their vital interests in the area threatened, and fearing that other

khanates would defect, were forced to respond.

The war dragged on for nine years, the diplomatic background

increasingly complicated by the Napoleonic wars in Europe and

Russia’s changing pattern of alliances with France and Britain. The

Russian army was vastly superior in manpower and firepower, but it

was hampered by the difficulties of operating in an unfamiliar terrain;

desertion and disease were rife; and there were appalling logistical

problems for artillery and supplies crossing the snow-covered ranges in

winter. The Persians, led by the Shah’s favourite son, Crown Prince

Abbas Mirza, had the advantage of mobility, but despite a limited

subsidy from the British were desperately short of funds. In the end it

was the British, having become Russia’s allies since Napoleon’s 1812

campaign, who helped to negotiate a peace. At the Treaty of Gulistan in

1813, the borders were redrawn in line with the position of each side’s

forces. The Persians ceded Talish and all the khanates north of the

Araxes and the Kura, with the exception of the khanates of Erivan and

Nakhichevan, which the Russians had failed to capture, and Moqri, a

district on the Karabakh border. At the same time, Persia recognised

Russian sovereignty over the rest of the Caucasus, including Western

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

Georgia, thus blocking Ottoman claims in the area. Russia could claim

a limited victory, but an intentional looseness in the definition of

frontiers, in particular over Talish and Balikloo and Lake Gokcheh,

where it was agreed that the border should be decided by a joint com-

mission, would later cause great difficulties between the two countries.

The resolution of these frontiers would be one of the chief aims of the

Russian mission to Tehran.

At the time of Griboyedov’s arrival in Tiflis,

the Viceroy of Georgia

and Commander-in-Chief of the army in the Caucasus

was General

Alexis Petrovich Yermolov,

a veteran of the 1812 resistance to

Napoleon. He was openly contemptuous of the Persians and all ‘Asiatics’

(though he kept three Muslim concubines, and would find good places

for his three sons by them as officers in the Russian army). He had

recently returned from a six-month embassy to Tehran, following up the

clauses of the peace treaty. Whereas Alexander I would have been content

to make minor territorial concessions, for instance allowing Talish to

become an independent state, Yermolov had refused to give away an

inch of conquered territory.

His intransigent attitude was compounded

by his arrogant refusal to take off his boots and don the red slippers and

stockings which etiquette demanded that foreign emissaries should

wear in presence of the Shah. (Since the Persians used their carpets for

sitting and eating on, they found it distasteful that someone should

bring in dirt on their boots.) In diplomatic terms, the embassy had

merely exacerbated relations between Russia and Persia, increasing the

problems which Griboyedov’s chief, Mazarovich, would have to deal with

on his forthcoming mission.

Griboyedov would spend three months in Tiflis, absorbing the sights

and sounds of a city still recovering from the devastation inflicted by the

Persians over 20 years before. Though Yermolov had begun an energetic

programme of rebuilding in the European style, its character was still

largely ‘Asiatic’, with mainly low flat-roofed houses and fretted over-

hanging balconies; the windows were usually made of oiled paper, since

glass was too expensive. On the left-hand side of the river Kura was the

old city, a mass of churches, towers, domes, houses and bazaars, piled

up along the foothills, with the medieval fortress of Nari-Kala at its crest.

On the right was the so-called new town, with its massive barracks and

military hospital. In the suburbs beyond, a colony of industrious

Würtemburgers had set up farms and market gardens which provided

butter, meat and vegetables to the town.

According to the French consul, Charles de Gamba, the population of

Tiflis in the 1820s was some 30,000, of whom some 6000 were Russian

officials and garrison troops. Set as it was halfway between the Caspian

and the Black Sea, Tiflis was a natural transit point for visitors of every

Arrival in Tiflis

nationality. There was a huge traffic of Englishmen, en route from India

to Europe via the Black Sea; Armenians from Erivan and Smyrna, and

Uzbeks from Bokhara; silk merchants from as far away as Paris, Lyons

and Leipzig. The bazaars were noisy with the sounds of many languages:

Lezgian traders, with furs from the mountains; majestic Greek priests;

drunken Cossacks; Ossetian porters staggering under massive loads of

straw; Persian camel drivers; Russian officials, cutting their way through

the crowds on prancing Karabakh stallions. As well as its importance as

a strategic centre, Tiflis offered great commercial possibilities, and

Yermolov, as its military commander, was not too grand to promote the

development of trade by such basic measures as improving roads and

communications, building new bazaars and warehouses and simplifying

customs duties.

The claims of Tiflis to be ‘the Paris of the East’ were perhaps

exaggerated, but it still had much to offer European visitors. There were

fine public gardens, shaded by poplars and plane trees, sulphurous hot

springs, where for a small fee you could be pummelled and massaged to

within an inch of your life (an experience Pushkin underwent), a local

paper, printed in three languages, a library and reading-room where the

latest Russian and foreign papers were available, and an excellent

French restaurant, run by a former French prisoner-of-war, Jean Paul,

who provided food for all the important dinners and weddings in the

town. There was also an assembly, founded under Yermolov’s auspices,

where mixed company was welcome, and Russian officers could mix

with members of the Georgian aristocracy at dances, concerts and

receptions – Yermolov, being unmarried, could not receive ladies at his

headquarters.

Griboyedov would be exposed to all this, but it did not mitigate his

sense of exile. Letters to and from Russia took 28 days to arrive, and

he felt himself neglected by his friends. But his first meeting on arrival

was a throwback to his former life: a confrontation with Yakubovich, his

opposite number in the ill-fated partie carrée in which Sheremet’yev

had been killed. Yakubovich, it will be remembered, had been exiled

to the Caucasus, and Griboyedov had written to him in Karabakh,

where he was stationed with his regiment. He had now come to Tiflis to

settle accounts.

In the memoirs of Nicholas Muravyov-Karsky (a future hero of the

Russo–Turkish War of 1829, who won his title Karsky at the siege of

Kars) there is a detailed description of the duel and its surrounding

circumstances.

As a fellow officer and friend, Muravyov had heard

the whole story of the partie carrée and had reluctantly agreed to be

Yakubovich’s second. The two men went to meet Griboyedov on the

evening after he arrived. He was dining at Jean Paul’s restaurant.

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

‘I found him to be an extremely clever and well read person but, I felt,

excessively preoccupied with himself,’ noted Muravyov.

Griboyedov had asked a certain Captain Bykov of the Life Guards

Pavlovsky Regiment to be his second, and the Captain, as was his duty,

did his best to reconcile the two parties. Muravyov at first refused to

intervene, commenting that Yakubovich alone could know if his honour

had been impugned. Bykov renewed his entreaties, pulling Muravyov

into another room to tell him that he had seen Griboyedov’s mother in

Moscow, and that she had foreseen that her son would be unable to

avoid the duel. Meanwhile Yakubovich was beginning to quarrel rather

loudly with Griboyedov in the adjoining room.

Muravyov then suggested to Yakubovich that he should agree to a

reconciliation. Griboyedov said directly to Yakubovich that he had never

offended him. Yakubovich was forced to agree, but added that he had

promised Sheremet’yev before he died that he would take revenge for

him on Griboyedov and Zavadovsky. ‘I respect your actions,’ he told

Griboyedov, ‘but what has been done must now be accomplished. I

must keep my word to the deceased.’ ‘That being so,’ said Griboyedov,

‘let the seconds settle the conditions.’

Muravyov suggested that they should fight in Yakubovich’s apartment,

with a barrière of six paces, and one pace backward for each duellist.

Griboyedov’s second would not agree to this, as Yakubovich would be

fighting on his own ground. It was decided that a field would be

the place. They needed a light carriage and horses, and a co-operative

doctor, and Amburgherr, who already knew Tiflis well, agreed to find

the transport.

After a brief meal, the principals adjourned to Muravyov’s apartment,

both cheerful and apparently friendly, and joking that such a duel had

never been fought before. The next morning, 23 April, Muravyov rose

early and rode to the village of Kukito to find a suitable place for the

duel. Beside the main road to Kakhetia he found a Muslim tomb, beside

a ravine in which one could find good cover.

I decided this was the place, and returned to Griboyedov, who was in an

eating house with Amburgherr [who had taken Bykov’s place as second],

and warned them that they should leave before they had been seen.

I measured out an amount of powder to them, and then found

Yakubovich. I sought out Dr Miller, due to act as doctor, in the military

hospital, and told him it was time to set off. I told Yakubovich to set off

on foot and hide behind the Muslim tomb till I should summon him,

Griboyedov and Amburgherr. I told them to ride out in the carriage with

their pistols. Everyone understood their instructions except Dr Miller,

who missed the site of the ravine and galloped off into the hills.

Arrival in Tiflis

Muravyov then set up the boundaries of the barrière, primed the pistols

and having placed the duellists, who were in their shirt sleeves, walked

away a few paces. Yakubovich came up to the barrière, with a bold step,

and awaited Griboyedov’s shot. Griboyedov took two steps. They stood

motionless facing each other in this way for a minute, then Yakubovich

lost patience and fired, aiming at the leg since he did not wish to kill

Griboyedov. The bullet hit the little finger of Griboyedov’s left hand,

Yakubovich apparently exclaiming, ‘At least he will have to stop playing

the piano’.

Griboyedov raised his bloodied hand and showed it to them, then he

trained his pistol at Yakubovich. ‘I could not but derive pleasure from

Yakubovich’s dignified conduct and courage,’ wrote Muravyov. ‘He

looked truly magnificent as after firing his shot, he folded his arms and

awaited death.’

Griboyedov had every right to approach closer to the

barrière, but having seen that Yakubovich had deliberately aimed at his

leg, he did not take advantage of this.

He moved a little and then fired.

The bullet flew past Yakubovich’s neck and embedded itself into the

ground. It went so close that Yakubovich thought he was wounded, and

felt along his neck and then looked at his hand which was bloodless.

When all was over the seconds ran forward to the wounded man, who

exclaimed, ‘O sort injuste!’ (‘O unjust fate!’),

but did not complain or

appear to be suffering.

Muravyov galloped off to find Dr Miller. He found him in the hills

nearby, and when he had bandaged Griboyedov’s wound, they put him

in the carriage and went away. Griboyedov spent the rest of the day with

Muravyov and Yakubovich, apparently on the best of terms. To cover up

the fact of the duel they let it be known that they had been out hunting,

and that Griboyedov’s horse had trodden on his hand. The next day,

Yakubovich’s commanding officer, Colonel Naumov, who had been the

duty officer responsible on Yermolov’s staff at the relevant time, and

who had heard rumours of the duel, approached Adjutant Captain

Talysin to find out about the matter. ‘He was only activated by curiosity,’

noted Muravyov. ‘He would have liked us all to have approached him

with a full confession, in which case he would have played the role of

our protector.’ Talysin, however, stonewalled, and Naumov then sent for

Yakubovich pretending he knew everything. ‘If you are so well informed,’

retorted Yakubovich, ‘why are you asking me questions? I can tell you

there was no such duel, and these rumours are unfounded.’

The matter was allowed to rest, though rumours of the duel reached

Yermolov himself. He deliberately turned a blind eye to the matter, and

Mazarovich, Griboyedov’s head of mission, obligingly followed his lead.

It was the first of many debts that Griboyedov would owe to Yermolov.

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

It is a strange fact that Griboyedov, the sensitive artist in words and

music, should be closely associated three times in his career with

tough and ambitious military chiefs, to each of whom he made himself

invaluable. The first had been General Kologrivov, the third would be his

kinsman and Yermolov’s successor, General Paskievich; the second and

most important was Yermolov himself.

From the first, Griboyedov was accepted as one of Yermolov’s inner

circle; his reputation as a playwright had preceded him, and his quick

intelligence and linguistic skills were further recommendations. A legend-

ary figure in the history of the Caucasus, Yermolov combined brutality

towards its subject peoples with a surprisingly enlightened attitude towards

the young men on his staff. He detested the St Petersburg bureaucracy,

in particular the preponderance of German civil servants and Baltic

generals, and tended to follow his own line with as little reference as pos-

sible to the capital. His attitude to the Caucasus was that of a conqueror,

and he pursued a ruthless and destructive policy in subduing the unruly

tribes and khanates who resisted Russian rule. While the Georgians had

sought to placate neighbours with bribes and concessions, Tsitsiyanov,

Yermolov’s predecessor, had wasted no time on diplomacy. ‘I shall wash

my boots in your blood’ was a typical pronouncement. Yermolov, con-

scious that his troops were too thinly spread to patrol the border areas

effectively, relied on a similar policy of fear. ‘I desire that the terror of my

name should guard our frontiers more potently than any fortress,’ he

once declared. ‘ … Out of pure humanity I am inexorably severe.’

VII

Yermolov and

Russian

Imperialism