In 2008, veteran journalist Tom Parfitt walked 1,000 km from Sochi on Russia’s Black Sea to the city of Derbent on the Caspian – a journey through the North Caucasus mountains and their surroundings. Parfitt did it to find out more about the regions and people who make up the place, but more than anything – to confront the horror of his first encounter with the mountains. Four years earlier, he covered the Beslan school siege, when 300 people were killed after Chechen militants seized a school in North Ossetia and Russian special forces mounted an operation to take back control. It was a tragedy that shook Russia – and Parfitt.
“For a long period after the siege,” he writes, “I was in a wilderness [...] Almost twenty years later, I still think about it every few days”.
But Beslan became part of a wider picture of insurgency and counter-insurgency in the North Caucasus, where violence became a daily occurrence. Parfitt’s new book, High Caucasus, tracks his journey on foot through the mountains, meeting the people who live in them and their complex history, in an effort to go beyond the tragedy. Or at least come to terms with it.
