Finnish officer Casimir Ehrnrooth crushed 19th century Chechen rebellion
Illustrious career in Tsar's army
By Pekka Hakala
Dargo in 1843: a powerfully fortified mountain village in Chechnya near the border with Dagestan had become the staff headquarters of Islamist resistance that had been going on for more than 20 years, led by 46-year-old Imam Shamil. An Avar by nationality, he had fled from Dagestan to the Chechen side nine years earlier.
True or not, history records a story according to which Shamil had come from the home of his elderly mother, Bahou Messadou, marched straight to the mosque, and closed the doors behind him. Left outside, his mother had tears streaming from her eyes.
The disagreement between mother and son concerned the signing of a peace treaty with the army of the Tsar. Chechen villagers of the lowlands north of the mountains were growing tired of the war, and of the raids of the Russians. However, the power of the Imam had reached such proportions that the people of the northern villages did not want to defect to the side of the Tsar, deciding instead to send a delegation to Dargo to meet Shamil's mother.
Bahou Messadou was known to favour peace, and relations between mother and son were close. The mother was asked to use her persuasion on her son.
The Imam came out of the mosque on the third day to bring greetings from God. Allah had denounced the cowardly attempt of the delegation, and ordered that 100 lashes be meted out to the first to be punished.
The first was Bahou Messadou. The Imam's old mother was bound and dragged through the crowd, and Shamil grasped the whip. After five strokes, the woman lost consciousness.
But Allah had said that the mother's punishment can also be transferred to her son. Shamil took off his cape and gave the whip to his officers, each of whom was to beat the Imam in turn. Shamil threatened anyone who tried to stop the flogging with a death sentence.
After the last stroke, the Imam, covered with blood, staggered before the village delegation. Unexpectedly, Shamil spared their lives and ordered them to go home to report on what had happened. The Imam had achieved a great propaganda victory.
The evenings of the last days of November were depressing in Southern Finland. Seesta Manor with its numerous outbuildings looked melancholy. The proprietors, Paul Ehrnrooth and his family, were spending the winter in Helsinki. The Lahti-Heinola motorway, which had just been widened, rumbled behind the forest. The wind blew something resembling rain into the lake.
The main building, built out of logs with yellow board cladding, contains many old artefacts. On the ground floor there are six swords awarded by the Tsar, as well as a triangular flag the size of a frying pan at the end of a pole two metres long. Similar flags can be seen in paintings depicting ancient battlefields; officers were in the habit of planting them in front of their tents.
The flag bears the coat of arms of the Ehrnrooth family. According to the Latin inscription, he who considers his own life unimportant is the master of the lives of others.
In addition to Johan Casimir Ehrnrooth, the legendary ancestor of the family, the motto could apply to Shamil as well.
Johan Casimir Ehrnrooth, the uncle of the grandfather of modern-day industrialist Casimir Ehrnrooth - also known as Casimir, or Casse, was born here - the seventh child of a large family. Actually, he was the 12th, as five of the children of Gustav Adolf and Johanna Christina had died at an early age. In the year of Casimir's birth, epidemics of both typhoid fever and smallpox ran rampant in Nastola.
In 1843, when Shamil was flogging his mother, young Casimir was ten years old. In that year, he and his brother Carl left their home in Seesta and started school at the Helsinki Lyceum.
Casimir did very well in school. From the second grade he attended military school, from where he graduated in 1850 at the top of his class. Only in gymnastics was the grade of the somewhat corpulent youngster less than excellent. Following service at the Mikhailov Artillery School, his dream came true: when the Crimean War broke out, Casimir was admitted to the Imperial War Academy in St. Petersburg.
In 1855, when Casimir was in the last year of his studies, Tsar Nicholas I died. The time of absolute despotism was over, and a series of partial reforms was ahead, in addition to imperial murders, attempted murders, two revolutions, and a failed experiment in state formation.
Crowds filed past the coffin of the Tsar over a period of several days, until the day of the funeral - March 11th, 1855.
On the same day, an exchange of hostages was underway on the banks of the tiny River Michik near Gudermes in Chechnya.
The Russian and Georgian regiments blared out a song in front of a group comprising 35 Muridi fighters, as well as a few noblewomen and small children. The young officer shook the hand of the commander of the Georgian forces, and joined the noblewomen, apologising for arriving late.
The young officer was Jamal al-Din, the eldest son of Imam Shamil, who had been taken hostage by the Russians at the siege of Ahulgo 17 years earlier. Now he was returning from the custody of the Tsar to be with his father's forces.
Shamil got his son to the River Michik in the traditional manner - kidnapping. Already in the previous summer his forces had forced their way into the farm of David Chavchavadze in Tsinondal in the east of Georgia during the absence of the owner.
The hostages - princesses, wives, servants, and children - were taken in a caravan across the mountains to Dargo. The trip took five weeks, and all stragglers were killed.
The hostages spent eight months in Dargo, where they learned to know the friendly Shamil and his three wives.
Thanks to the services of a skilful mediator, Shamil finally arranged an exchange. However, Jamal al-Din had become completely Russified, and died a couple of years later of a disease in the mountains. That is also when Shamil's troubles began.
The trip to Moscow proved to be quite an experience for Major Ehrnrooth, as it was his first experience with railway travel. The destination was a "military expedition against a disobedient mountain people in the Caucasus".
The trip from Moscow to Berdikel, behind the Terek River, took place on horseback, and on river barges. The trip, which began the end of August, 1865, concluded on October 6th, when Ehrnrooth reported for duty with the regiment of Marshal Mikhail Vorontsov, which had experienced the most shocking defeat of the Caucasus War 11 years earlier. Vorontsov himself was passing the final days of his life in Odessa.
The new Tsar, Alexander II, had ended the disastrous Crimean War, and turned his eyes toward the Caucasus. Command of the war was given to Alexander Baryatinski and Dimitri Milyutin, whose first act was to exchange rifles for axes, which were used to clear supply routes about two metres wide in the forest area of the Caucasus Mountains. Until then, the forests had protected the people of the mountains.
Ehrnrooth's sector of the front was commanded by Lieutenant-General Nikolai Yevdokimov. The slow advance guaranteed that the supply lines could be held, and positions that had been attained were not given up. In early 1858 Yevdokimov reported to the Tsar that he had occupied the whole highland: "We did not leave a single building there".
In early 1858 Yevdokimov's forces used a deceptive manoeuvre take the Argun Pass, the gate to the mountains, which had been considered impenetrable. Russian spies said that Shamil had burst into tears when he learned the news.
Sharpshooters under Ehrnrooth's command had been equipped with modern rifles, as part of the modernisation of the weaponry started by Alexander II.
On July 3rd, 1858, this elite force started up the Chanti-Argun River toward the Mesken-Duk mountain.
During the battle for Jarish Madra, the 24-year-old Finnish major got a bullet in his left shoulder blade.
Both Ehrnrooth and the doctor downplayed the wound, but in spite of the treatment he got in Chechnya, and a leave for convalescence, the injury bothered Ehrnrooth for the rest of his life. Casimir's mother was so worried that she sent him a mahogany chest half a metre long, containing eating utensils, writing equipment, as well as a shaving brush, and some eau de Cologne.
In January 1859 Shamil had pulled back to Vedeno, which is currently known as the home village of Shamil Basayev, a minister of the Chechen rebel government. Basayev is Russia's most-wanted terrorist, who is said to model himself after Imam Shamil.
After convalescing, Ehrnrooth took part in the siege of Vedeno until he was ordered to the staff of the Caspian Division led by Alexander Wrangel in Dagestan. He returned to battle with Wrangel, when Shamil fled Vedeno with 7,000 Muridi, escaping to the Andi Koisu river in the mountains of Dagestan.
At this point Shamil faced an army of 40,000 soldiers.
The Caucasian version of the story of Noah's Ark contains a part in which God chooses a man and woman from each nation, and puts them on the Caucasus mountains to protect them from the oncoming flood.
In a couple of decades Shamil had succeeded in uniting the "disobedient mountain peoples" in the name of Islam. However, he did not rely on the power of his word alone: the Imam was always accompanied by an executioner armed with a long-handled axe.
Now the sense of solidarity had run out, as had the power of the Imam.
In addition to women and children, Shamil had only 400 fighters with him when he withdrew to the magnificent mountain fortress of Gunib. In September, traitors showed the emperor's forces the way to the mountain, and Baryatinski gave the order to charge. When he surrendered, Shamil only had 50 men left.
Shamil had been seriously injured twice during his war. To his surprise, the Imam did not face the executioner's axe.
Alexander II treated Shamil as a commander of the army of a vanquished enemy, who had given the young emperor his first military victory, washing away the disgrace of the Crimean War left to him by his father.
Words like "terrorism", and "human rights" were not a part of the vocabulary at the time. It would be seven years to the first attempt at murdering the Tsar.
Besides, the 62-year-old resistance fighter Shamil had become something of a pop idol of the 19th century. Time magazine had described a hero fitting the bill of a "noble savage", and the Caucasus was all the rage, with Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Dumas writing about the area.
Instead of the executioner, Shamil became acquainted with the train: he was brought to the court in St. Petersburg for people to gawk at, and then he and his family were placed under house arrest in Kaluga near Moscow.
The Tsar granted Shamil an annual pension of 10,000 roubles. Ten years later he was given permission to embark on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He died in Medina in 1871, and was buried there.
The defeat of the disobedient mountain people marked a beginning for the dazzling career of the 24-year-old Casimir Ehrnrooth. Loyal to his Tsar, the Finnish officer continued to rise in the ranks, taking part in putting down rebellious Poles and sustaining another injury on the Danube while pushing the Turks out of Bulgaria.
He commanded forces surrounding Bucharest after the war with Turkey, as the Tsar planned to take Romania with the help of his allies. In his pocket, Ehrnrooth had secret instructions for taking the city, but they were never carried out.
Ehrnrooth experienced his most magnificent moments in Sofia. After its liberation from the Turks, the great powers agreed to a plan to make the 22-year-old Prince Alexander of Battenberg, the nephew of the Tsarina, the ruler of Bulgaria. The Tsar asked Ehrnrooth to look after his interests, and the Finn was made Bulgaria's Minister of War.
The young prince was not really in control of anything, and for 15 months, Ehrnrooth was the real ruler of Bulgaria.
Upon returning to Finland, Lieutenant-General Ehrnrooth was named Minister-Secretary of State responsible for Finnish Affairs in St. Petersburg. The time, when Finland faced Russification pressure, was not a very auspicious one for the task.
Correspondence with his older sister Adèle shows that Casimir, who was well-read in philosophy, could see what would happen in the world. This did not prevent him from taking a very suspicious view of ideological novelties, and the liberal press, and the feeling was mutual.
In the 1890s Ehrnrooth withdrew to Seesta. "Whatever happens in the Black Sea, Constantinople, and anywhere outside the villages of Ahtiala and Härkälä is insignificant to me", the general wrote to his sister.
Casimir Ehrnrooth died of a stroke in Helsinki at the age of 79, unmarried and with no children. He had lived under four Tsars. He was buried in a family plot in Nastola, and his family kept control of Seesta.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 8.1.2006
PEKKA HAKALA / Helsingin Sanomat
pekka.hakala@hs.fi
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| 10.1.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 Finnish officer Casimir Ehrnrooth crushed 19th century Chechen rebellion |
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