The Caucasus Wars and the Russian Empire
The Russian conquest of the Caucasus was one of the longest and most difficult campaigns of imperial expansion in Russian history. The Caucasus, located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, was home to a wide variety of peoples, languages, and religions, and the Russian attempt to subdue and incorporate the region took more than a century to complete. The campaign was marked by fierce resistance, particularly from the Muslim highlanders of the eastern Caucasus under the leadership of Imam Shamil, and by a brutal Russian response, including the burning of villages, the destruction of crops, and the forced resettlement of large numbers of indigenous peoples.
The Russian conquest of the Caucasus was one of the most prolonged and costly episodes of imperial expansion in Russian history, spanning roughly seventy years of intermittent warfare. The Circassian deportations of 1864-1867 — in which an estimated 300,000-600,000 people died or were expelled to the Ottoman Empire — were its most extreme demographic consequence; the Chechen and Avar highlands were pacified only after the capture of Imam Shamil in 1859, and even then only temporarily. The role of Islam in the region and the unresolved national aspirations of the Caucasian peoples remained live political questions throughout the late imperial period and beyond.
The geography and peoples of the Caucasus
The Caucasus is one of the most diverse regions in the world, both geographically and ethnically. The Greater Caucasus mountain range, which runs from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, separates the region into the North Caucasus, the highland zone where most of the indigenous Caucasian peoples live, and the South Caucasus, which includes the modern states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The region is home to dozens of distinct peoples, speaking a wide variety of languages belonging to several different language families.
The major peoples of the North Caucasus include the Circassians, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Avars, the Dargins, the Lezgins, the Laks, the Ossetians, and various smaller groups. The principal peoples of the South Caucasus include the Georgians, the Armenians, the Azeris, and various smaller groups. The religious composition of the region is also diverse, with the Georgians and Ossetians being predominantly Orthodox Christian, the Armenians being members of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Azeris and various North Caucasian peoples being Muslim, and some of the smaller groups maintaining traditional religious beliefs.
The geographic and ethnic diversity of the Caucasus made it a particularly difficult region to govern. The mountain terrain provided natural defenses for the indigenous peoples, the various peoples were often in conflict with each other, and the region’s location at the crossroads of the Russian, Ottoman, and Persian empires made it a target of competition among the great powers. The Russian conquest of the Caucasus was thus a complex process involving both military conquest and diplomatic maneuvering.
The early Russian presence in the Caucasus
The Russian presence in the Caucasus began in the late eighteenth century, with the establishment of a line of fortifications along the Terek River in the 1760s and 1770s. The line of fortifications, which marked the boundary between the Russian-controlled steppe and the Caucasian highlands, was the basis for the gradual Russian advance into the region. The Russian advance was motivated by a combination of strategic considerations, including the desire to control the trade routes through the Caucasus and to prevent Ottoman and Persian encroachment, and economic considerations, including the desire to acquire the agricultural and mineral resources of the region.
The first major Russian territorial gain in the Caucasus was the annexation of the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti (eastern Georgia) in 1801. The Georgian kingdom, which was under increasing pressure from the Persian and Ottoman empires, had sought Russian protection, and Tsar Paul I issued a decree annexing the kingdom. The annexation was followed by the gradual incorporation of the other Georgian territories, and by the 1830s the Russians had established effective control over most of the South Caucasus.
The Russian advance in the North Caucasus was much more difficult. The highlanders of the region, particularly the Chechens, the Avars, and the Circassians, resisted the Russian advance with fierce determination. The Russian military forces, which were largely composed of infantry, found it difficult to operate in the mountainous terrain, and the highlanders developed effective tactics of guerrilla warfare, including ambushes, raids, and the use of the difficult terrain to offset the Russians’ advantages in numbers and equipment.
The Caucasus War and the resistance of Imam Shamil
The most famous episode of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus was the Caucasus War of the nineteenth century, a long-running conflict centered on the resistance of the Muslim highlanders of the eastern Caucasus under the leadership of the Avar imam Shamil. The war, which lasted for several decades, was one of the most difficult military campaigns in Russian history.
Shamil was a religious and military leader who united many of the highland communities of the eastern Caucasus under his authority and led a long resistance against the Russian advance. He established a state-like structure in the mountains, with a capital at Vedeno, and he commanded a substantial military force that effectively controlled much of the eastern Caucasus. Shamil was a brilliant military commander who used the mountain terrain to great advantage, and he repeatedly defeated Russian forces in important battles.
The Russian response to Shamil’s resistance was brutal. The Russian forces, under commanders including Aleksei Yermolov and later Mikhail Vorontsov, pursued a policy of devastation, destroying villages, cutting down forests, and forcibly resettling the highlander population. The Russian strategy was designed to deprive Shamil of the support of the local population, and it was accompanied by a fortification campaign that gradually extended Russian control over the region.
The war ended in 1859 with the capture of Shamil at the mountain fortress of Gunib. Shamil was treated with respect by the Russian authorities, who recognized his status as a military and religious leader, and he lived in comfortable exile in Kaluga and later in Kiev until 1869, when he was permitted to make the pilgrimage to Mecca; he died in Medina in 1871. The capture of Shamil marked the end of organized highland resistance in the eastern Caucasus, and it cleared the way for the Russian consolidation of control over the region.
The conquest of the Circassian coast
The conquest of the western part of the North Caucasus, particularly the Circassian coast along the Black Sea, was a separate and even more brutal episode in the Russian conquest of the region. The Circassians, who lived along the coast and in the foothills of the western Caucasus, had long resisted Russian rule, and the Russian conquest of their territory in the 1860s was accompanied by a mass exodus of the Circassian population.
The Russian conquest of the Circassian coast was marked by a policy of forced expulsion, in which the Russian military forces systematically expelled the Circassian population from their villages and transported them to the Ottoman Empire. The expulsion was accompanied by considerable violence, and the death toll during the expulsion was substantial. The Russian authorities justified the expulsion as a necessary security measure, but it was widely criticized at the time and has been condemned by historians ever since.
The Circassian expulsion was a demographic catastrophe. Before the Russian conquest, the Circassians were the dominant population of the western Caucasus, with a population estimated at several hundred thousand. The forced deportations removed the bulk of this population, and the Circassian homeland was resettled by Cossacks, Russian peasants, and Armenian refugees from Ottoman territory. The Circassian diaspora — concentrated in modern Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Israel — has since the 1990s mounted an international campaign for recognition of the expulsion as genocide; Russia has not granted this recognition.
Russian administration of the Caucasus
The Russian administration of the Caucasus evolved over the course of the imperial period. The early period was marked by military rule, with the Russian military authorities exercising extensive powers over the local population. The most important early administrative unit was the Georgia Governorate, established in 1801; in 1844-1845 the region was placed under a Caucasus Viceroyalty, headed by a viceroy who was the chief civil and military authority in the region, with Mikhail Vorontsov as the first holder of the office.
The Russian administration of the Caucasus was marked by a complex mixture of military government, indirect rule through local elites, and Russian settlement. The administration sought to develop the region’s resources, including its agricultural land, its mineral wealth, and its oil reserves, particularly in the Baku area. The construction of railways, the development of industry, and the settlement of Russian and Armenian populations transformed the demographic and economic character of the region.
The Russian administration was also marked by the persistence of resistance and unrest. The various Caucasian peoples continued to resist Russian rule in various ways, including armed rebellion, cultural resistance, and the development of national movements. The most significant of the post-conquest revolts was the rebellion of 1877 in Chechnya and Dagestan, which broke out during the Russo-Turkish War and consciously invoked the memory of Shamil’s resistance.
The legacy of the Caucasus wars
The Russian conquest of the Caucasus was both an economic and a military operation. It brought the region under Russian rule, and it was accompanied by the development of the region’s oil and mineral resources, the construction of the Georgian Military Road and the Transcaucasian Railway, and the integration of the region into the Russian economy. The conquest also resulted in substantial human suffering, including the deaths of large numbers of Caucasian peoples and the forced expulsion of the Circassian population.
The memory of the nineteenth-century campaigns was kept alive by oral tradition across the Caucasus and, after 1991, by the revival of Chechen, Circassian, and Avar national movements. The Chechen wars of 1994-1996 and 1999-2009 were fought over many of the same strongholds the Russians had besieged in the 1840s and 1850s, and the question of Chechen political status remained unresolved into the twenty-first century. The Chechen fighters of those wars, in particular, invoked the memory of Shamil and the other highland resistance leaders, and the wars were often framed in terms of the long history of Russian-Caucasian relations. (See Kingston, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus to 1859, 2017; and Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, 1994, on the military campaigns; and on the cultural afterlife, see Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy, 1994.)
The Caucasus wars also had a deep impact on Russian culture. They were a subject of Russian literature in the middle of the nineteenth century, most famously in the work of Leo Tolstoy, who served in the Caucasus in the 1850s and drew on his experiences in The Cossacks (1863) and Hadji Murat (written 1896-1904, published posthumously in 1912). The wars were also a major subject of Russian painting, with the most famous examples being the work of Franz Roubaud, a Franco-Russian painter who created a series of panoramic paintings of the major battles of the Caucasus wars. Tolstoy, Pushkin (in The Captive of the Caucasus, 1820-21), and Lermontov (in A Hero of Our Time, 1840) all wrote about the Caucasus; the region came to be seen as a place where the Russian writer could confront questions of civilisation, violence, and authenticity that were not available in the metropolitan culture of St. Petersburg and Moscow.