The Caucasian War or the Caucasus War was a 19th-century military conflict between the Russian Empire and various peoples of the North Caucasus who resisted subjugation during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. It consisted of a series of military actions waged by the Russian Imperial Army and Cossack settlers against the native inhabitants such as the Adyghe, Abazins, Ubykhs, Chechens, Dagestanis as the Tsars sought to expand.
Other territories of the Caucasus (comprising contemporary eastern Georgia, southern Dagestan, Armenia and Azerbaijan) were incorporated into the Russian Empire at various times in the 19th century as a result of Russian wars with Persia. In 1801, Russia annexed the Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. The remaining part, western Georgia, was taken by the Russians from the Ottomans during the same period. Russian control of the Georgian Military Road in the center divided the Caucasian War into the Russo-Circassian War in the west and the conquest of Chechnya and Dagestan in the east.
History
The war took place during the administrations of three successive Russian Tsars: Alexander I (reigned 1801–1825), Nicholas I (1825–1855), and Alexander II (1855–1881). The leading Russian commanders included Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov in 1816–1827, Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov in 1844–1853, and Aleksandr Baryatinskiy in 1853–1856. The famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who gained much of his knowledge and experience of war for his book War and Peace from these encounters, took part in the hostilities. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin referred to the war in his Byronic poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus (Кавказский пленник, Kavkazskiy plennik), written in 1821. Mikhail Lermontov, often referred to as "the poet of the Caucasus", participated in the battle near the river Valerik which inspired him to write the poem of the same name.
The Russian invasion encountered fierce resistance. The first period of the invasion ended coincidentally with the death of Alexander I and the Decembrist Revolt in 1825. It achieved surprisingly little success, especially compared with the then recent Russian victory over the Grande Armée of Napoleon in 1812.
Between 1825 and 1833, little military activity took place in the Caucasus against the native North Caucasians as wars with Turkey (1828/1829) and with Persia (1826–1828) demanded the Empire's attention. After considerable successes in both wars, Russia resumed fighting in the Caucasus against the various rebelling native ethnic groups in the North Caucasus. This marked the beginning of what is now referred to as the Circassian genocide.
Russian units again met resistance, notably led by Ghazi Mollah, Hamzat Bek, and Hadji Murad. Imam Shamil followed them. He led the mountaineers from 1834 until his capture by Dmitry Milyutin in 1859. In 1843, Shamil launched a sweeping offensive aimed at the Russian outposts in Avaria. On 28 August 1843, 10,000 men converged from three different directions, on a Russian column in Untsukul, killing 486 men. In the next four weeks, Shamil captured every Russian outpost in Avaria except one, exacting over 2,000 casualties on the Russian defenders. He feigned an invasion north to capture a key chokepoint at the convergence of the Avar and Kazi-Kumukh rivers. In 1845, Shamil's forces achieved their most dramatic success when they withstood a major Russian offensive led by Prince Vorontsov.
During the Crimean War of 1853–1856, the Russians brokered a truce with Shamil, but hostilities resumed in 1855. Warfare in the Caucasus finally ended between 1856 and 1859, when a 250,000 strong army under General Baryatinsky broke the mountaineers' resistance.
The war in the Eastern part of the North Caucasus ended in 1859; the Russians captured Shamil, forced him to surrender, to swear allegiance to the Tsar, and then exiled him to Central Russia. However, the war in the Western part of the North Caucasus resumed with the Circassians (i.e. Adyghe, but the term is often used to include their Abaza kin as well) resuming the fight. A manifesto of Tsar Alexander II declared hostilities at an end on June 2 (May 21 OS), 1864.
Aftermath
One of the most dramatic consequences was the mass forced emigration, or muhâjirism, of predominantly Muslim mountain populations from their homeland to the territories of the Ottoman Empire, and to a lesser degree Persia.
According to one source, the population in Kabardia decreased from 350,000, before the war, to 50,000 by 1818. According to another version, in 1790 the population was 200,000 people and in 1830 30,000 people. As a percentage of the total population of the North Caucasus, the number of the remaining Circassians was 40% (1795), 30% (1835) and 25% (1858). Similarly: Chechens 9%, 10% and 8.5%; Avars 11%, 7% and 2%; Dargins 9.5%, 7.3% and 5.8%; Lezghins 4.4%, 3.6% and 3.9%.
These demographic losses were accompanied by the confiscation of lands, resettlement of Cossack and Russian military colonists, and the re-organisation of the region’s ethnic composition in ways favourable to the imperial authorities. In the Ottoman territories, the exiled Circassians found themselves in a precarious survival situation. Many landed via Black Sea ports such as Trabzon, Samsun, and Varna, and were placed in camps or transit settlements under extremely harsh conditions of overcrowding, disease, hunger and exposure. For example, in Samsun alone, up to 110,000 refugees were gathered and more than 200 people died each day during certain phases of the transit. The Ottoman state sometimes used the Circassian newcomers for strategic settlement, such as establishing them as militia along border zones in the Danubian and Anatolian provinces.
Small numbers of the exiled did return, under conditional or partial circumstances. Documentation shows that in 1861-67 a few thousand individuals or families applied to return from exile to the Terek or Caucasus region, but the numbers were greatly reduced compared to the scale of the original movement.