Caucasian War

History

The Caucasian War spanned the reigns of three Russian tsars: Alexander I, Nicholas I, and Alexander II. Key Russian commanders included Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov, Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, and Aleksandr Baryatinskiy. The writer Leo Tolstoy, who drew on his combat experiences for War and Peace, served in the conflict. Alexander Pushkin referenced the war in his 1821 poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus, and Mikhail Lermontov, known as the poet of the Caucasus, fought at the Valerik River, later writing a poem about the battle.

The initial phase of the invasion ended with Alexander I’s death and the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, yielding little success compared to Russia’s recent victory over Napoleon in 1812. From 1825 to 1833, military operations against North Caucasian natives slowed as Russia focused on wars with Turkey and Persia. After victories in those conflicts, Russia resumed its campaign, marking the start of what is now called the Circassian genocide. Russian forces faced strong resistance from leaders such as Ghazi Mollah, Hamzat Bek, and Hadji Murad.

Imam Shamil then took command, leading the mountaineers from 1834 until his capture in 1859. In 1843, Shamil launched a major offensive against Russian outposts in Avaria. On August 28, 1843, 10,000 men attacked a Russian column at Untsukul from three directions, killing 486 soldiers. Over the next month, Shamil captured nearly every Russian post in Avaria, inflicting more than 2,000 casualties.

He faked a northern advance to seize a strategic chokepoint where the Avar and Kazi-Kumukh rivers meet. In 1845, Shamil’s forces achieved their greatest success by repelling a major Russian offensive led by Prince Vorontsov.

Aftermath

The war's most far-reaching effect was the forced exile, known as muhâjirism, of mostly Muslim highland peoples to the Ottoman Empire and, in smaller numbers, to Persia. In Kabardia, one estimate puts the population drop from 350,000 before the conflict to 50,000 by 1818; another claims a fall from 200,000 in 1790 to 30,000 in 1830. Among the remaining Circassians, their share of the North Caucasus total shrank from 40% in 1795 to 30% in 1835 and 25% in 1858.

Similar losses hit Chechens, Avars, Dargins, and Lezghins. Alongside these demographic shifts came land seizures, the relocation of Cossack and Russian military settlers, and a deliberate reshaping of the region's ethnic makeup to benefit imperial rule. In Ottoman lands, exiled Circassians struggled to survive. They arrived at Black Sea ports like Trabzon, Samsun, and Varna, then were housed in camps or temporary settlements plagued by overcrowding, disease, hunger, and exposure.

At Samsun alone, up to 110,000 refugees gathered, with over 200 dying daily during some transit periods. The Ottoman authorities sometimes deployed Circassians for strategic purposes, settling them as militia along border regions in the Danubian and Anatolian provinces. A small number of exiles did return, but only under limited or conditional terms. Records from 1861 to 1867 show that a few thousand individuals or families applied to come back to the Terek or Caucasus area, yet this was a tiny fraction of the original exodus.