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I like a walk. I love a walk sometimes. I very much enjoy a walking project. I've done Offa's Dyke Path, the London LOOP, and the Capital Ring, and I'm more than halfway along the Thames Path. Some of those walks are nearly two hundred miles long but Tom Parfitt's walk from Sochi on the edge of the Black Sea to Derbent on the Caspian Sea knocks all of my walks into a cocked hat.
It's one thousand miles long to begin with (it took Parfitt about three and a half months which is a fairly impressive clip) but it also passes through some of the most unstable regions of Russia. The Caucasus. A very specific part of Russia, a part of Russia that hasn't always wanted to be part of Russia (and in some instances still does not), and a part of Russia where, during Parfitt's walk, guerrilla warfare was still ongoing. It is, in the words of many, "bandit country".
I was at The Horse and Groom on Great Portland Street (a Sam Smith's pub where a pint of pure brewed organic lager will set you back an eye watering £8.20, didn't Sam Smith's used to be famously cheap?) where the Sohemian Society have set up their new home. A counter to the extortionate beer prices (I only had one pint) is that the function room is spacious and comfy, a vast improvement on the function room of The Fitzroy Tavern where so many non-attendees were allowed in you could hardly hear the speakers.
Rather than a talk, or lecture, the evening was set out as a conversation with the articulate, knowledgeable, and occasionally humorous Tom Parfitt and fellow author and Sohemian Paul Willetts (Willetts wrote Members Only:The Life and Times of Paul Raymond which was later made into a film directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Steve Coogan). Parfitt has worked as Moscow correspondent for The Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph and lived in Russia for twenty years. His wife is Russian and his son is half-Russian. He loves the country so it was with no small amount of sadness that he had to leave it in 2022 when, following Putin's invasion of Ukraine, it became unsafe for him to remain.
The tragedy of Ukraine, however, was yet to come when Parfitt set out on his epic walk, which he later wrote about in a book (a book I actually bought and got signed by the author) called High Caucasus:A Mountain Quest in Russia's Haunted Hinterland). Instead it was another horrific event that, in part, inspired the walk. The Beslan school siege of 2004.
Parfitt had arrived in Russia in 2002 and that was a time when there was active Islamist insurgency in some the regions of the Caucasus, not least in Chechnya where there had been more than one actual war. It's worth delving a little bit into history and remembering that many of these regions were, historically, the home of Muslim people but were invaded and conquered by Russia in the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Later, during World War II, many from Chechnya and Ingushetia were forcibly expelled to the Central Asian regions (now countries in their own right) of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Understandably, some were not happy about this. Less understandably, in September 2004 the Riyad-us Saliheen Brigade of Martyrs, as Islamist force of suicide attackers, took over one thousand hostages (pupils, parents, teachers) at School Number One in the small town of Beslan in the republic of North Ossetia-Alania. Parfitt was called to cover the story and as we all know now the story did not end well.
It ended with the death of 334 people, 186 of them children, and is still, despite valiant efforts from America, the deadliest school shooting in all history. After the siege ended, Parfitt - who had been there - couldn't get it out of his mind. He was haunted by nightmares and kept replaying one terrible image over and over in his mind. A young mother collapsing in grief on hearing that her child was one of the casualties.
He needed to get these horrors out of his mind, he needed time to think, and he needed to understand the region in more depth. To understand how so much blood and horror can come from the region's soil. So he decided he would walk one thousand miles from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea through many of the regions of the Caucasus.
If nothing else it would be an adventure. There may, he thought, even be a book in it. That'd worked for Eric Newby who wrote 1958's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. As a foreign correspondent he was called upon to report the news but rarely got a chance to go deeper into the story, to add historical context, to add personal context even. He checked the Foreign Office advice and they said, basically, don't do it, don't go there.
Which he ignored and speaking now he's glad he ignored that advice. He found his walk both liberating and enlightening though he was, at the same time, rather keen to avoid the nature cure trope. Something he expressed deep suspicion of. He said he never wanted to read, or even see, another book about wild swimming. I couldn't help thinking of recent controversies relating to the disputed narrative of Raynor Winn's The Salt Path.
Parfitt saw, and sees, walking as a method of discovery. A walking book not as an instruction manual but a chance for the author to learn and pass that learning on to their readers. Walking alone you are vulnerable, you're almost always present in the moment, and you simply have to engage with whatever it is you're presented with. There is no escape and Parfitt, who had long been interested in travel writing (although was conscious of the big colonial shadow that hangs over much it), was being a purist about it. He was, most nights - unless offered hospitality, sleeping in a tent and was refusing to take public transport or lifts except on one occasion when his own safety pretty much demanded it.
Which in 'bandit country' is perhaps hardly surprising. Parfitt, who can speak Russian and knew the country pretty well, considered his walk a calculated risk despite the guerrilla warfare and the organised crime. He knew that hospitality often went hand in hand with ideas of honour and military prowess and on his walk he found many families that insisted he stay with them and refused any offer of money for their services. Guests and visitors, in the Caucasus, are to be treated with the utmost respect.
During some sections of the walk he travelled with a local man who knew the mores of the area though, it turned out, rarely knew what roads of paths they should take. At another point, he needed to consult with the tourism minister of Dagestan. Not a particularly busy job you'll have probably surmised and indeed it was not but the tourism minister proved helpful to Parfitt as did two other unlikely specimens.
In the disputed state of Abkhazia, Parfitt stayed overnight in a forest with a man he believed to be a local hermit but who, instead, turned out to be a murderer called The Wolf who was on the run and hitting the booze big time. Parfitt was also arrested in Abkhazia under suspicion of being a Georgian spy. The man who arrested him told him he could stay at his house overnight and he would be treated like a prince but also let him know that as soon as he left his house in the morning he should watch his back.
These are the sort of cultural differences that are hard for a British person to understand but Parfitt found that alcohol was a great leveller although when he offered some locals some rather special whisky he was disheartened when they glugged it down like a fifty pence bottle of vodka. During last night's talk Parfitt didn't really get to talk about how the walk ended but he did talk about having to leave Russia in 2022 and what he's been up to since.
Despite being scared of bears and terrible at reading maps, he's now investigating the boreal forests of Alaska, Canada, and, soon - hopefully, northern Russia. Parfitt wholeheartedly and unreservedly condemns what Putin has done to Ukraine and what he is doing to Russia but, of course, the people of Russia and the country itself are not to blame. Even those that support Putin mainly do so because of the propaganda pumped out by the country's client media.
I'd love to visit Russia one day but I know that day is unlikely to come anytime soon so for now it was lovely to hear about someone's incredible travels in that country. A Q&A took in wolves, avalanches, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Orientalism, and the rather bizarre practice of catching frogs and dressing them up in little uniforms to generate rainfall.
Parfitt also mentioned how the Arabs refer to the Caucasus as "the mountain of tongues" because so many languages are spoken in the region. Over fifty. More, some say, than all of the rest of Europe. The geography, the language, the politics, and the history of the region are all fascinating, if often bloody. I'd like to study them all in more depth. Last night's talk was really interesting (and I hope I've done it some justice here) but I think the book will be even better and can't wait to get started on it.
Thanks to The Horse and Groom (except for the £8+ pint), the Sohemian Society, and Paul Willetts for a great evening but thanks, primarily, to Tom Parfitt for an amazing talk about an amazing walk. It's got me thinking about big future projects but first let's get to the source of the Thames!
