Oliver Bullough's Let Our Fame Be Great is a landmark work of narrative history and on-the-ground reportage covering the fate of the North Caucasian peoples under Russian imperial and Soviet rule. Structured around four pivotal moments — the Circassian expulsion of 1864, the Stalinist deportations of 1943–44, the First Chechen War of 1995, and the Beslan school siege of 2004 — the book interweaves firsthand testimony gathered across the region with a deep engagement with primary and secondary historical sources. The author, a Reuters correspondent who spent years in the Caucasus, draws on nineteenth-century travellers' accounts (Longworth, Bell, Spencer, Tornau, Lorer), Russian imperial historians, and scholarly literature in English, Russian, and French, producing a work of considerable research depth despite its accessible prose.

The book's treatment of the Circassian genocide is among its most significant contributions. Bullough confronts the near-total erasure of the 1864 mass expulsion from Western historical consciousness and documents its scale and violence through both archival sources and diaspora testimony gathered in Turkey and Israel. He is candid about the historiographical gap: noting that even landmark works on the Caucasus war by Baddeley and Gammar largely bypass the Circassian catastrophe, he frames his own account as an attempt to address a documented but neglected subject. The result is the most widely read English-language narrative of the Circassian genocide available to a general audience, and one cited across journalism, policy analysis, and introductory academic literature on the subject.

Let Our Fame Be Great serves best as a secondary reference work that synthesizes eyewitness accounts and archival materials already familiar to researchers — Tornau's memoirs, Lorer's Notes of a Decembrist, Longworth's A Year Among the Circassians — and situates them within a broader narrative of Russian colonial violence in the Caucasus. It is appropriately cited as a secondary source in academic and advocacy contexts, and its reception in outlets including Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and History Today confirms its standing as a credible and influential contribution to the English-language literature on Circassian history.