Tom Parfitt is full of questions, guilt and regrets; a good man. Brought up on a Norfolk farm, Russia lover, adventurer and correspondent, this complex narrator is both at the heart and at the edge of a remarkable attempt to uncover the wildest and least known frontier of Europe. Brave, stubborn but amusingly self-effacing, he sets himself a 1,000-mile walk from the Black Sea to the Caspian, along the string of mountainous republics that make up Russia’s southern border. Across dramatic landscapes, he engages with a timeless world of shepherds who graze their flocks in the “mystical” highlands in summer, only to return to a patchwork of ethnic and religious communities in winter. Parfitt unravels how the Caucasus form “a landscape of unfinished histories”, histories misunderstood and often untold. On this “saunter to the brink of madness”, he runs into bears, wars and “permanent zones of counter-terrorist organisation”. These he sets alongside almost constant generosity and hospitality from peoples with almost nothing to share.
His journey begins in madness too. In 2004 he is sent to cover the seizure by militant Chechens of more than 1,000 hostages in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia. He was witness to the inhumanity of the hostage takers and to the catastrophic “rescue attempt”; 333 hostages died of which 186 were children. That night President Putin told the nation what he had learned: “We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten.” The events of those days left Parfitt not only with first-hand insight into a “merciless, blundering state” but with a recurring nightmare: a falling woman, her left hand grasping the air, groaning like a wounded animal as she learns her child was killed in the school. This trauma set him on his mad trek on foot, “not as a reporter, but as a human being, as someone moved, and horrified, confused and intoxicated”.
