Genocide in the Caucasus: Russia's Murderous Legacy

Russia’s Murderous Legacy 

By Lawrence W. Reed

If you ever took a course in the history of Europe’s Middle Ages, you likely remember that England and France fought each other many times. For instance, they were the primary combatants in the most protracted conflict of the era, the so-called Hundred Years’ War from 1337 to 1453.

A hundred years (or in this case, 116) is a long time to be at war. It meant that the great-great-grandchildren of the initial antagonists were still at it ten or eleven decades later and may even have forgotten what started it all.

But the Hundred Years’ War is a bit of a misnomer. Fighting was intermittent over time, punctuated by long truces or diversions caused by plagues and other calamities. If you’re looking for a genuine war of a century’s duration, consider the Russian-Circassian War, which persisted with few interruptions from 1763 to 1864. Indeed, this very week (May 21) marks the anniversary of the war's end.

On one side was czarist Russia, possessed of expansionist aims and eager to take advantage of the growing weakness of the Ottoman Empire to its south. Circassia was on the other side, a country mostly forgotten today, though it had existed for centuries. It was bounded in the west by the northeastern Black Sea coast and stretched east across the Caucasus Mountains almost as far as to the Caspian Sea.

Russia, as the world knows all too well, is a historical and habitual aggressor nation. I wish it weren’t necessary to say so, because I have many friends in Russia and nearby countries, but it’s an inescapable fact. Under authoritarian czars, followed by totalitarian communists, followed by the fascist Putin, Russian kleptocracies have incurred the lasting hatred of their neighbors because they won’t leave them alone. (Don’t forget that World War II started when Moscow teamed up with Hitler to invade Poland.)

Historians date the start of Russia’s war on Circassia to 1763, when Czarina Catherine the Great invaded. But previous Russian potentates also plundered and slaughtered in Circassia, dating back to Peter the Great in 1711. In Russian, “the Great” doesn’t mean smart, enlightened, or peaceful. It means they didn’t mind their own business and pushed people around as if they were mere pawns on a chessboard.

The Imperial Russian Army under Catherine’s orders crossed the border and began building fortresses on Circassian territory in 1763, prompted by nothing more than a desire for territorial expansion. Battles raged between the two sides for the next hundred years, but the Russian invaders met fierce resistance from courageous Circassians.

In the 1830s, Russia installed an especially ruthless commander as head of its forces in the region, General Grigory Zass. He incinerated people alive, sliced off heads for the sheer joy of it, burned whole villages to the ground, dispersed dismembered bodies to spread epidemics, and directed the mass rape of children, according to historian Sufian Zhemukhov. Zass, who kept a box under his bed full of severed Circassian body parts, was the Heinrich Himmler of his time.

Many people of the Caucasus nations of today (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia) detest the Russians. It’s a well-deserved hatred that dates back as far as General Zass, if not before.

Readers may well be aware of my affection for Poles and Poland. I’m happy to note that in 1857, Polish volunteers arrived to fight alongside the Circassians. They were commanded by Teofil Lapinski, who later wrote a famous book entitled Mountain People of Caucasus and Their Struggle for Freedom Against Russia.

Two events of 1864 brought a sad conclusion to the conflict: One Circassian army committed mass suicide. Another was overwhelmed by Russian forces. Circassia as an independent nation ceased to exist.

The Russian conquerors stepped up the campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide they had conducted off-and-on during the century of war on Circassia. Hundreds of thousands were lucky enough to be forcibly deported (mostly to Turkey), while many more suffered a fate even worse. Stephen D. Shenfield writes,

How many Circassians, then, perished from death in battle, by massacre, drowning, hunger, exposure, and disease? Prior to the Russian conquest, the Circassians…numbered about two million. By 1864, the north-western Caucasus had been emptied of its indigenous population almost in entirety…The number who died in the Circassian catastrophe of the 1860s could hardly have been fewer than one million, and may well have been closer to one-and-a-half million.

Descendants of the Circassian nation are now scattered across many countries. For decades, groups of them have repeatedly asked the Russians to apologize for this history of genocidal brutality. The world is still waiting.

When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Russia lost the other 14 republics that comprised its communist empire. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has encroached on the territory of its former captive satellites of Ukraine and Georgia to reconstitute that empire, or some version thereof. To the detriment of peaceful neighbors, Russia under Putin is reverting to its legacy of murder and mayhem.

For the rotten regime in the Kremlin, decent people everywhere should wish only for a richly deserved demise. The sooner, the better.

Sources and Additional Information:

Circassian Genocide: How Russia Took Over the Caucasus (video): https://tinyurl.com/h2z737rm

Who are the Circassians? (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Rp9vahYjU

The Circassian Genocide by Walter Richmond: https://tinyurl.com/4dhvctz2

The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus by John Frederick Baddeley: https://tinyurl.com/3kdv2brt

The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide? by Stephen D. Shenfield in The Massacre in History, Mark Levene, editor: https://tinyurl.com/yx8wvuta

Jembulat Bolotoko: The Prince of Princes by Sufian Zhemukhov: https://tinyurl.com/5bzr34zn

The Circassian Genocide: The Forgotten Tragedy of the First Modern Genocide by Evan Messenger: https://tinyurl.com/mrax9dx9

This article also appears here, in both English and Spanish: https://informeorwell.com/opinion/genocidio-en-el-caucaso-el-legado-asesino-de-rusia/

#####

(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. He blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.)