After thousands of American diplomatic cables were leaked to the international press via WikiLeaks in 2010, Burns found himself an unexpected beneficiary. “A Caucasus Wedding”, a telegram he sent to the US state department in 2006 while he was ambassador to Russia, recounting a raucous three-day Dagestani wedding attended by Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov, was described as a minor classic of comic writing, its tone very much not what one might expect of a diplomatic cable.
“Cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere, day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables, whenever someone entered the room,” Burns noted. “The alcohol consumption before, during and after this Muslim wedding was stupendous … There was also entertainment, although Gadzi’s main act, a Syrian-born singer named Avraam Russo, could not make it because he was shot a few days before the wedding.”