Introduction
February 2014. Just as Russia was invading and annexing Crimea, the world was watching another case of Putin showing off, also in the Black Sea region: the Winter Olympics in Sochi. So far the most expensive Games on the record, they were meant to demonstrate Russia’s opulence and grandeur, and, of course, to highlight Russia’s magnificent southern resort city, Sochi.
However, few people are aware – even in Russia – that Sochi isn’t really a Russian name. Rather, it comes from Adyghe, the language spoken by the people who call themselves the Adyghe, but who are better known internationally as the Circassians. And not just Sochi; the same is true of other popular resorts on Russia’s northeastern Black Sea coast, including Tuapse, Gelendzhik, and Anapa.
But why do these cities with predominantly Russian population have Circassian names, and where can we find these people?
Let’s take a look at the north Caucasus – the part currently occupied by the Russian Federation. In the east, on the coast of the Caspian Sea, there’s the multi-ethnic Republic of Dagestan. Next to it is the (in)famous Chechnya, aka Ichkeria.
The next one to the west is the small Republic of Ingushetia, the arena of another 21st-century war that Russia doesn’t like talking about – so much so that there’s no Russian Wikipedia page for it. Then we have North Ossetia (also known as Alania), known for the 2004 Beslan terrorist attack. In 2008, Russia also occupied South Ossetia, which is internationally recognized as part of Sakartvelo (Georgia).
To the west of Ossetia lies the northwest Caucasus, the region we are most interested in. The first administrative unit here is Kabardino-Balkaria, with the capital Nalchik. If you followed the news in 2005, you may have heard of the October 13 raid on Nalchik by Islamic militants.
The Kabardians, one of the republic’s ‘titular’ nations, constitute 57% of its population. The Balkars, a Turkic people, make up only 13%, while 22% are Russians. Balkaria, incidentally, is etymologically cognate with Bulgaria, both being derived from the Volga Bulgars.
In the southwestern corner of Kabardino-Balkaria is Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the Caucasus, Russia, and Europe (although this fact may depend on where you draw the boundary between Europe and Asia). On the western side of Elbrus is another republic, Karachay-Cherkessia, whose capital is Cherkessk.
The Karachays, who make up 41% of the republic’s population, are related to the aforementioned Balkars. It is often assumed that Karachay-Balkar is one language that has two dialects. The Cherkess, representing 12% of the population, are also known as the Circassians and are related to the Kabardians, who are sometimes called the Eastern Circassians; the Cherkess are the Western Circassians.
32% of Karachay-Cherkessia’s population are Russians, while two other important indigenous groups are the Nogais (3%), a Turkic people remotely related to the Karachays and Balkars, and the Abaza (8%), who are distant relatives of both the Circassians and the Abkhazians who inhabit Abkhazia in the southwest Caucasus, which is another part of Sakartvelo (Georgia) occupied by Russia.
Between Karachay-Cherkessia and the Black Sea, there lies a large region known as Krasnodar Krai, to which Sochi belongs. Within Krasnodar Krai, to the south and southeast of the city of Krasnodar, there is an enclave known as the Republic of Adygea, the capital of which is Maykop.
Within Adygea, 63% of the population are Russians, who on multiple occasions demanded to liquidate the republic and merge it with Krasnodar Krai. The Adygeans (Adyghe), who make up 25% and are supposed to be the ‘titular’ nation here, are basically Western Circassians, geographically separated from those in Karachay-Cherkessia. The division into the Cherkess and the Adygeans is purely artificial, created by Soviet administrative policies.
Another group of the Circassians, the Shapsug, based on the original tribe of the same name, lives mostly in the Tuapsinsky District, with the centre in Tuapse, where they constitute 3% of the population, and the Lazarevsky District, which has been part of the Greater Sochi Area since 1961 and was known as the Shapsug National District before 1945, where their share is less than 10%.
Sochi and its outskirts were also once inhabited by the Ubykh, who are considered a Circassian tribe but who had a distinct language. The last native speaker of Ubykh died in 1992, and although there are about 20,000 Ubykh people today in the world, who speak other languages, virtually none of them are left in Russia.
In all, around 750,000 Circassians live in the Russian Federation today, which is less than 15% of the world’s total of 5.3 million. However, in the first half of the 19th century, there were probably over 1.5 million Circassians, all living in the northwest Caucasus. Indeed, they were the dominant nation here, and the region as a whole was hence known as Circassia. Then, suddenly, their population in the Caucasus dropped to around 100,000 or even less.
So what happened to one and a half million people? And why are there today substantially more Circassians in diaspora populations than in their homeland?
This has to do with the longest war in the history of Russia, which was part of the broader Caucasian War and ended with genocide.
On June 2, 1864 (or May 21 according to the old Julian calendar which was used in the Russian Empire), the Russians announced their victory and held a parade in the vicinity of Sochi. May 21 is when the war victims are commemorated nowadays, although June 2 would be more appropriate, in the same way as the October Revolution is commemorated on November 7, and not on October 25.
And on the 150th anniversary of this tragedy, Putin decided to celebrate the Olympics, erecting one of the Games’ key locations on the blood-soaked land of the final battleground. Olympic medals were awarded at the same place where Russian officers had been decorated for massacring hundreds of thousands of people.
The Circassian Genocide
While the Russo-Circassian War has an official end date, its starting point remains debated. Many historians argue for 1817, but in that case, what were the Russian ‘punitive expeditions’ against the Circassians before that date? A ‘special military operation’?
Others believe the war started in 1763 when Catherine II – the odious empress of German descent whose monument was taken down in 2022 in Odesa, Ukraine – decided that the Caucasus had to be part of Russia and gave orders to build the first fortresses there. However, Russians had already methodically raided Circassia in the early 18th century, under Peter I.
In the 18th century, the Caucasus was regarded as a coveted prize by the Ottoman, Persian, and Russian empires. It was an important geopolitical foothold that allowed further expansion – to the north for the former two, and to the south and east for the latter.
In fact, until the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople, Circassia was considered part of the Ottoman Empire, as confirmed in the previous treaties of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) and Jassy (1792), although Istanbul had no real control over the region. Thus, technically, Russia was fighting on Ottoman land without declaring war upon the Sublime Porte and without engaging Ottoman troops; only after 1829 was it suppressing ‘rebels’ on its claimed territory.
Catherine II is also known for annexing today’s southern Ukraine, including Crimea, which provided Russia with access to the Black Sea region and allowed a more pronounced focus on the Caucasus. In 1775, Catherine infamously ordered the liquidation and destruction of the Zaporizhian Sich, a polity of the Ukrainian Cossacks, at the time known as Nova (New) or Pidpilnenska Sich and located west of the modern Ukrainian city of Nikopol, on the land that has been at the bottom of the Kakhovka Reservoir since 1956.
By the 18th century, the Zaporizhian Cossacks were subjects of the Russian Empire and fought on its side in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774. This war was to be their last. Catherine II, like the previous tsars, did not like this militant people’s autonomy, love of freedom, and large degree of democracy, and thus decided to deal them a final blow by expelling them from their territories.
Some of the Cossacks fled to the Danube Delta, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and founded the Danubian Sich. However, Catherine II was willing to create a new host out of those Cossacks who had not fled and who were ready to swear allegiance to Russia. Thus was formed the Black Sea Cossack Host, originally in southern Ukraine, but then transferred to the banks of the Kuban River in the north Caucasus, today’s Krasnodar Krai. There, they were to help build fortifications and subjugate the Circassians. Turned into loyal subjects of the empire and joined by newcomers from central Russia, they were well on their way to eventual Russification.
The Cossacks were told that they just needed to do what they always did and always had done: fight, protect the land, and help civilize barbarous mountaineers. But were those mountaineers really that barbarous?
It is true that the Circassians, who constantly needed to protect themselves, had developed over the centuries a warrior ethos similar to that of the Cossacks. So similar, in fact, that before the 18th century, the Tsardom of Muscovy (and apparently the Crimean Tatars) used the same term ‘Cherkas’ (Circassian) – which is most likely of Turkic origin, although the exact meaning is debated – to refer to both the peoples of the north Caucasus (subsequently it would transform into ‘Cherkes’ and signify the Adyghe people specifically) and the Ukrainian Cossacks or the Ukrainians in general. Only later would the Muscovites ‘remember’ the common descent and start calling the Ukrainians Malorosy (‘Little Russians’).
This is one version of the origin of the name of the Ukrainian city of Cherkasy, and definitely the root of Cherkaska Lozova near Kharkiv, Ukraine, as well as of Starocherkasskaya and Novocherkassk (the old and new capitals of the Don Cossacks) in Russia.
It is also true that it was a common practice for the Circassians to raid and pillage other settlements and tribes. But was this any more barbarous than what the Russians did while expanding their empire and what they would do to the Circassians in the 19th century?
During these raids the Circassians also often kidnapped people to demand ransom or sell them into slavery. But a serfdom system, which was a form of slavery, existed in the Russian Empire until 1861.
It is likewise true that in Circassia there were no universities or written literature. However, Circassian intelligentsia first appeared during the war and consisted of aristocrats educated in Russia, and the first Circassian authors wrote in Russian. The most prominent of these was Sultan Khan-Giray who tried to convince both sides of the need for peaceful settlement and who died at the age of 34, allegedly poisoned by Circassians who disliked his pro-Russian proselytism.
It is true again that most Circassians were still practising old pagan beliefs, with only a small percentage having converted to Islam or Christianity. Indeed, it was Russian aggression that prompted the Circassians to convert to Islam en masse in the late 1820s, not least in the hope of soliciting Ottoman support.
The Porte did very little to help the Circassians; however, Islamization facilitated their unification and assured support – albeit inconsistent – from Imam Shamil, the leader of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, and his naibs (deputies). If you think you heard the name of Imam Shamil during the last year, then it may have been in connection with Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to indigenous peoples of Russia in September 2022, filmed next to the commemorative plaque to Shamil in downtown Kyiv, where the Imam lived in formal exile in 1868-69, after his surrender, and from where he departed on his final Hajj to Mecca.
Finally, it is true that the Circassians had no organized government structure in the modern sense. They were divided into many tribes and clans, lived in accordance with a traditional moral code known as the Adyghe Xabze, and never really formed a nation state. Again, it was Russian aggression that prompted them to form an anti-Russian coalition and then declare the Independent Nation of Circassia in 1835.
But it is clear that none of these factors represented the real reason for the war. The Circassians’ cultural otherness and noncompliance were misrepresented as barbarity to legitimize the violence, while in some respects the mountaineers were no more barbarous than the Russians themselves. The empire craved land. It needed to expand. And those who inhabited this land had to obey or be destroyed.
Russia did consider a peaceful annexation. Some tribes and clans were willing to submit, and the Russians hoped to win over members of the aristocracy in order to tame the rest. The plans were thwarted somewhat, however, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by a series of rebellions against the aristocracy.
The rebellions were successful in the case of the Abzakh, Shapsug, Natukhai, and Ubykh, who were some of the largest Circassian tribes. They established a sort of primitive democracy, where decisions were made collectively at large meetings, and the will of the people was to resist the Russians.
While the other tribes preserved the feudal system, their peasants, who were dissatisfied with the aristocracy, viewed the Russians with distrust and animosity for their seeming support for the latter. So, these tribes also proved difficult to conquer. Admittedly, constant internecine fights between pro-Russian and anti-Russian factions significantly weakened the Circassians, but when the invaders started indiscriminately raiding auls (villages) even of those tribes who were loyal to them, discerning no difference between the apparent ‘savages’, the mountaineers had no choice but to pull together and fight back. In addition to impenetrable mountainous terrain, this indignation and resolve helped them last much longer than the Russians expected.
One factor which prompted the Russians to intensify their efforts was their success in the south Caucasus in the early 19th century, namely the annexation of the Kartvelian (Georgian) kingdoms in 1800-04 and of most of Azerbaijan and part of eastern Armenia as a result of the Russo-Persian War of 1804-13. The empire needed a land corridor to its new dominions, and the Circassians stood in its way.
That the year 1817 is named as the beginning of the full-scale war is connected with the appointment of General Aleksey Yermolov as commander-in-chief of the Russian troops in the Caucasus. Although his predecessor Sergey Bulgakov was already notorious for his brutality, it was Yermolov who set the pattern for subsequent large-scale massacres in Circassia. He demolished and burned down villages, killed non-combatants en masse, robbed them of their possessions including sheep, cattle, and horses, and blocked access to pastures and trade provoking starvation.
By 1826, Russia had conquered the Kabardians, whose population was decimated and weakened by an epidemic that had lasted for more than two decades. Yet the Western Circassians continued fighting for almost forty more years.
In the 1830s, the Circassians’ plight started attracting attention in the West, particularly in Britain. Many notable individuals, including the diplomat and writer David Urquhart, campaigned for Britain’s intervention. Urquhart visited Circassia in an effort to convince the mountaineers to keep resisting, and he claimed to have helped the Circassians design their national flag.
Polish emigrants who were interested in weakening Russia in order to restore their own country’s independence also rooted for Circassia’s cause, both in London and Istanbul. However, all Britain and the Porte were willing to provide were sporadic weapon supplies. Russia would afterwards blame these interventions for exacerbating the situation by making the Circassians more desperate and thus provoking a harsher Russian response.
There was one last chance for international aid during the Crimean War of 1853-56, but a strategic blunder thwarted this chance when a Circassian leader, Seferbiy Zaneqo, denied the Britons access to the port of Anapa, citing Circassian sovereignty. The 1856 Treaty of Paris ignored Circassia’s interests and de facto acknowledged Russia’s claims to the Northwest Caucasus.
After the Treaty of Paris and the fall of Chechnya and Dagestan in 1859, the fate of Circassia was sealed.
It was General Nikolay Yevdokimov who commanded the Russian troops during the final stage of the war. Continuing the tradition of Bulgakov and Yermolov, and with the approval of Alexander II – the same emperor who was praised as ‘the liberator’ for emancipating serfs – Yevdokimov was responsible for the most violent massacres of these last years as well as for the mass deportations of Circassians that started in 1859, before the war was completed.
It was Yevdokimov who proclaimed the end of the war on May 21, 1864, and ordered celebrations, although sporadic fights in the mountains would continue for the next few years.
Most of the Circassians who survived were driven to the coast, from where they were transported to the Ottoman Empire. Many died from hunger, bad weather and diseases, or when the overloaded ships sank.
According to different estimates, between 600,000 and over a million Circassians made it to their destination. At most, a little over 100,000 remained in the Caucasus. By some estimates, it was as few as 50,000. There used to be over one and a half million of them, which means around 500,000 may have been killed in the last years of the war or died in the process of deportation.
The Circassians were deported not only to Anatolia, but also to other lands controlled by the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans, where they were massacred again during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, when the Russians came to help liberate Bulgaria. Others settled in Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (including present-day Israel).
Most of those who stayed in the Caucasus were forcibly resettled to the lowlands, although some were able to later return to the mountains. They were viewed with distrust, if not as an ‘enemy nation’, both in the Russian Empire and then in the USSR. To an extent, this continues to this day. The Russian policies of settling Slavs next to indigenous peoples and creating mixed administrative units such as Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia resulted in ethnic conflicts. In the 1990s and early 2000s the Northwest Caucasus only narrowly avoided becoming another Chechnya.
There are calls for the repatriation of the diaspora, but current Russian politics is not really favourable to this. With the exception of those stranded in troubled regions like Kosovo or Syria, most Circassians are reluctant to leave their relatively comfortable life for the Russian Federation. Still, some compare it to the migration of the Jews to Palestine in the 19th century, which also started with a trickle.
Sakartvelo (Georgia) was the first country to officially recognize the Circassian genocide in 2011, which was largely a response to the Russian occupation of South Ossetia in 2008. The Russian government, on the other hand, responds to petitions to recognize the genocide by denying it, rewriting history – for instance, by claiming that the north Caucasus joined Russia some 450 years ago and that the events of the 19th century simply comprised ‘pacifying rebels’ – or by cynical acts like the Sochi Games or Putin laying flowers on the grave of a Neo-Nazi ‘martyr’ killed in a drunken brawl by an ‘uncivilized’ Circassian in 2010.
The Circassians can only hope for changes in Russia or for an opportunity for decolonization. One problem is that, like other minorities, many Circassians in the Caucasus may have been brainwashed by the intense Russian propaganda of the last years. However, those who live abroad follow the development of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and at least some of them speak up against Putin’s regime. The hope may lie in the coordination and cooperation of the diaspora populations with those who stayed behind, and perhaps with other colonized nations and the international community at large.
Lessons
It should be already clear from the above why this story from the 19th century is still relevant in our time. Today’s Germany is not Hitler’s Third Reich. Modern France is not Napoleon’s empire. The United Kingdom today is not the colonial monster it used to be.
However, Russia has not changed much since the 19th century. The Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation all follow the same line, no matter which party is in power: annexing territories by force and repressing colonized nations, often using mass deportations and other forms of genocide. We can therefore try and learn some lessons from Russia’s longest war regarding this ‘universal party line’ and its implications for the latest developments: in particular, concerning the war against Ukraine.
1. The empire can’t live without wars and expansion. As long as imperialism remains the state ideology, it will seek ways to expand and to devour territories.
2. The empire only recognizes other empires. Small independent nations are viewed as nonentities. The empire doesn’t even feel it should declare war upon them – a ‘special military operation’ is enough. In the present context, Russia obviously views NATO as another ‘empire’, so if it had succeeded in Ukraine in 2022, it would have tried to absorb other ‘buffers’ between them, including, when it comes to the western borders, Moldova, Belarus (already only nominally independent), Finland (remember, it was part of the Russian Empire), and Sweden (why leave it out?). And if NATO had allowed all this to happen and thus demonstrated weakness, Russia would have demanded it to push back its borders; that is, withdraw from its former vassals like the Baltic states, Poland, or Hungary.
3. Emperors change; the empire lives on. The Russo-Circassian War survived several emperors, and there are no reasons to believe that after Putin’s death or a minor regime change his successor will forgo imperialistic projects.
4. The empire’s methods don’t change. Massacring civilians, causing starvation by blocking supplies, pillaging, and deportations – all these are tried-and-tested ways which Russia does not shun today.
5. To the empire, no lives matter. All that matters is grabbing land. To this end, Russia will sacrifice as many lives as necessary – lives of both its own citizens and those of the ‘nonentity nation’.
6. International support is the only way to save the victim nation. Circassia did not receive sufficient support in the 19th century. Repeating this mistake may yet prove costly.
Select Bibliography
Richmond, Walter. The Northwest Caucasus: Past, Present, Future. – Routledge, 2008
Richmond, Walter. The Circassian Genocide. – Rutgers University Press, 2013
Center for Circassian Studies: Main Site/Resources in English
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Roman Cherevko is a freelance writer, translator, and blogger from Ukraine. His articles have appeared in Zbruč, Na Chasi (in Ukrainian), “Stories from Ukraine: The True Price of War” (printed and e-book), and in his blog on Medium. His interests include history, culture, literature, and art. He is also writing a novel.
This essay originally appeared on Roman’s blog.
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