“Why does Russia need Hadji Murat’s head?”

In this chapter, I consider several Russian and Dagestani narratives and cultural initiatives that focus on the nineteenth-century Avari commander Hadji Murat and especially his decapitation and severed head. I analyze nineteenth-century Russian correspondence about Hadji Murat, Tolstoy’s famous eponymous novella, and two of Soviet poet Rasul Gamzatov’s poems alongside post-Soviet monuments built to Hadji Murat. I address the divergences between the Dagestani and Russian reactions to Hadji Murat’s legacy, using the hero’s example as a case study for the profound tensions between how Russians and Dagestanis, or the center and the periphery, respectively, construe their past history.