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Russia's Conquest and Pacification of the Caucasus: Relocation Becomes a Pogrom in the Post-Crimean War Period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Willis Brooks
Willis Brooks*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

“The history of Russia is the history of a nation that colonized itself.”

Russia's greatest historian has affirmed that the expansion of Russian rule, particularly its method, is of fundamental significance in understanding the course of Russian history, and the establishment of Russian power in the Caucasus has attracted as much scholarly attention as any other region where Russian imperialism spread in the last two centuries. Russia's finest literary figures, scholars of the most divergent bent, Russian participants in the conquest and, of course, native inhabitants themselves have examined geographic, political, military and economic, as well as cultural and other factors that would explain how the many non-Slavic peoples of this strategically critical region were incorporated into the tsarist empire. From such a literature a lengthy list of quite diverse tactics are testimony to the deep concern Russian leaders had about integrating its divergent societies in the Caucasus into the Russian empire. The tsarist ideal was stated in the simplest language when Nicholas I endorsed a report in 1833 that would force the native inhabitants of the Caucasus to “speak, think, and feel Russian.” Not surprisingly, one of the striking qualities of the tsarist, Soviet and, to a great degree, Western literature is that it often focuses, as does this essay, on the frustrations Great Russians experienced while attempting to conquer, pacify and assimilate the multi-ethnic peoples of the Caucasus within the Russian-dominated empire. In addition, while charting the demographic vagaries of the Caucasus most scholars have concentrated on the creeping in-migrations of Cossacks and others from the internal Russian provinces and on the relocation of mountain tribesmen (gortsy) from their inaccessible villages (auly) to valley floors where watchful Russians could “civilize” them. What is strikingly absent from such literature, part of what this essay attempts to provide, is an examination of the policy considerations that led to such decisions, particularly in the post-Crimean War period.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 23 , Issue 4: Twentieth Anniversary Issue , December 1995 , pp. 675 - 686
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR, Inc 

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References

Notes

1. V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1956) I, p. 31.Google Scholar

2. , Pushkin Lermontov, Tolstoi, and other literary greats aside, notable historical works on the Russian conquest would include M. Miansarov, compiler, Bibliographia Caucasica et Transcaucasica. Opyt spravochnogo sistematicheskogo kataloga pechatnym sochineniiam o Kavkaze, Zakavkat'i i plemenakh, eta kraia naseliaiushchikh (St Petersburg, 1874–1876) and A. Gizetti Bibliograficheskii ukazatel' pechatannym na russkom iazyke sochineniiam i sta'iam o voennykh deistviiakh russkikh voisk na Kavkaze (St Petersburg, 1901) as general bibliographical guides; Kavkazskaia Arkheograficheskaia Komissiia. Akty (Tiflis, 1866–1904), twelve volumes in thirteen parts (volume twelve exists in two variants, one published in 1893–1895, the second in 1904), Kavkazskii sbornik, 32 volumes (Tiflis, 1876–1912), AN SSSR Institut istorii Kolonial'naia politika rossiiskogo tsarizma v Azerbaidhzhane v 20–60-kh gg. XIX v., 2 parts (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936–1937), AN SSSR. Dagestanskii filial Dvizhenie gortsev severo-vostochnogo Kavkaza v 20–50 gg. XIX veka. Sbornik dokumentov (Makhachkala, 1959), and K. V. Sivkov, “O proektakh okonchaniia Kavkazskoi voiny v seredine XIX v.,” Istoriia SSSR 1958, No. 3, pp. 191–196, as examples of documentary publications on the area and subject; and, as significant contemporary (including participant) and subsequent writing, Otchet gen.-fel'dmarshala kniazia A.I. Bariatinskogo za 1857–1859 gody (Tiflis, 1861), D. I. Romanovskii, Kavkaz i kavkazskaia voina (St Petersburg, 1860), A. P. Berzhe, “Vyselenie gortsev s Kavkaza,” Russkaia starina 33 (January 1882), pp. 161–176; (February), pp. 337–363, R. A. Fadeev, “Delo o vyselenii gortsev,” in his Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1889), volume 1, part 2, pp. 61–76, A. L. Zisserman, Fel'dmarshal kniaz' Aleksandr Ivanovich Bariatinskii, 1815–1879. (St Petersburg, 1889–1891), three volumes, N. F. Dubrovin, Istoriia voiny i vladichestva russkikh na Kavkaze (St Petersburg, 1871–1888), six volumes, and his Kavkazskaia voina v tsarstvovanie imperatorov Nikolaia I i Aleksandra II (St Petersburg, 1896), V. N. Ivanenko, Grazhdanskoe upravlenie Zakavkaz'em ot prisoedineniia Gruzii do namestnichestva Velikogo kniazia Mikhaila Nikolaevicha. Istoricheskii ocherk (Tiflis, 1901), Semen Esadze, Istoricheskaia zapiska ob upravlenii Kavkazom (Tiflis, 1907), two volumes, and his Pokorenie Zapadnogo Kavkaza i okonchanie Kavkazskoi voiny. Istoricheskii ocherk Kavkazsko-gorskoi voiny v Zakubanskom krae i Chernomorskom poberezh'e (Tiflis, 1914), M. N. Pokrovskii, “Zavoevanie Kavkaza,” in his Diplomatiia i voiny tsarskoi Rossii v XIX stoletii (Moscow, 1923), pp. 179–229, G. A. Dzagurov, Pereselenie gortsev v Turtsiiu. Materialy po istorii gorskikh narodov (Rostov-on-the-Don, 1925), M. M. Bliev, “Kavkazskaia voina: sotsial'nye istoki, sushchnost',” Istoriia SSSR, No. 2, 1983, pp. 54–75, Anthony L. H. Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov, Viceroy to the Tsar (Montreal, 1990), J. F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London, 1908), G. A. Dzidzariia, Makhadzhirstvo i problemy istorii Abkhazii XIX stoletiia (Sukhumi, 1975), especially chapter 2; N. S. Kiniapina, M. M. Bliev and V. V. Degoev, Kavkaz i Sredniaia Aziia vo vneshnei politike Rossii. Vtoraia polovina XVIII-80-e gody XIX v. (Moscow, 1984), especially section II, chapter 4, on foreign intervention, N. A. Smirnov, Miuridizm na Kavkaze (Moscow, 1963), especially chapter 3 on tsarist tactics generally, K. Geins, “Pshekhskii otriad. S oktiabria 1862 po noiabr” 1864 g.,” Voennyi sbornik 1866, 47, No. 1, pp. 3–58, pp. 207–261; 48, No. 2, pp. 3–50, pp. 213–264; 49, No. 3, pp. 3–40, memoirs of a senior Russian officer in the Western Caucasus in the final stage of conquest, and my own “Nicholas I as Reformer: Russian Attempts to Conquer the Caucasus, 1825–1855,” in Ivo Banac, John G. Ackerman and Roman Szporluk, eds, National and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich (New York, 1981), pp. 227–263. An extensive parallel literature about Russian treatment of the Crimean Tatars is not included in this brief survey.Google Scholar

B. V. Tikhonov, “Pereselencheskaia politika tsarskogo pravitel'stva v 1892–1897 godakh,” Istoriia SSSR 1977, No. 1, pp. 109–120, and E. M. Brusnikin, “Pereselencheskaia politika tsarizma v kontse XIX veka,” Voprosy istorii January 1965, pp. 28–38, though titled in words seemingly relevant for this study, were typical of Soviet historiography on migrations: as with most Russian-authored Soviet historical writing, they dealt with peasant migrations (a major theme in late nineteenth-century Russia, to be sure)—virtually to the exclusion of consideration of non-ethnic Russians. Soviet scholars of population movements compartmentalized their studies: for example, the works cited above focus only on peasantry, while scholars of ethnic groups ignore Russians, and often other ethnic groups, as if implying (but never testing) the notion that tsarist decision-making regarding population movements were similarly handled, that there were no common policies interrelating migrations in the Russian empire. A. A. Kaufman, Pereseleniia i kolonizatsiia (St Petersburg, 1905) is a classic pre-revolutionary work on population movements that similarly does not reveal in its title that it is preoccupied with peasants and Siberia, not at all with other regions or non-Russians. It is not surprising that non-Russians rarely write about Russian demographic history.Google Scholar

3. Kolonial'naia politika, part 1 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936), p. 280.Google Scholar

4. Because of their wide usage in the literature and in the absence of better words, “tribes” (from the Russian plemena) and “mountain tribesmen” (gortsy) will be used throughout this paper.Google Scholar

5. Often these ethnic groups are collectively called “Cherkesy” or “Circassians,” and the area of the Western Caucasus is frequently referred to as the Trans-Kuban and Abkhaziia.Google Scholar

6. , Berzhe p. 363.Google Scholar

7. Conquest, Robert, The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (New York, 1960), p. 8. The actual numbers involved continue to be disputed, but accuracy, which is impossible, is not of primary significance in this essay, except that the numbers from the outset were recognized to be so large as to constitute a precedent. Berzhe's figure of 493,193 (see p. 167) is the most frequently cited; it is not clear how Conquest reached his higher figure.Google Scholar

8. For the diverse strategies employed during the reign of Nicholas I, see my article cited above.Google Scholar

9. The 1839 expedition had been an especially successful one, in which Shamil's stronghold, Akhul'go, had been taken and so many of his followers killed that final pacification of the region seemed imminent. But Shamil' escaped, and more than one-third of the 9,000 man Russian force were casualties. D. A. Miliutin, Opisanie voennykh deistvii 1839 goda v Severnom Dagestane (St Petersburg, 1850) remains the only major description of this expedition-siege, and Baddeley is the only Western scholar to use Miliutin's study, which he characterized as a “remarkable little monograph.”Google Scholar

10. Gosudarstvennaia Russkaia biblioteka. Otdel rukopisei, fund 169 (D. A. Miliutin), box 18.1, sheet 1 overleaf. L. G. Beskrovnyi, Ocherki voennoi istoriografii Rossii (Moscow, 1962), pp. 140–141, erroneously cites this quotation as from box 96.94. He omits the phrase “for her own use,” in line two of the quotation, however, somewhat perverting Miliutin's idea. Moreover, there is no item box 96.94 in the Miliutin archive. Ironically, Miliutin's interpretation did not differ greatly from the Soviet view of the relationship between Russia and the Caucasus when Beskrovnyi was writing, undoubtedly one of the reasons material on the relations between tsarist Russia and the Caucasus remained inaccessible for so long to Western scholars (and in many cases Russians, too).Google Scholar

11. Fund 169, box 81.4 contains Miliutin's memorandum, “Mysli o sredstvakh utverzhdeniia russkogo vladychestva na Kavkaze,” May 1840. Miliutin summarized the memorandum in his Vospominaniia general-fel'dmarshala Dmitriia Alekseevicha Miliutina (Tomsk, 1919), pp. 305–306; I was refused access to the original in box 81.4.Google Scholar

12. As quoted in Zaionchkovskii's introduction to Dnevnik D.A. Miliutina I (Moscow, 1947), pp. 10–11 (using a slightly different title) and K. V. Sivkov, “O proektakh okonchaniia kavkazskoi voiny v seredine XIX v.,” Istoriia SSSR 1958, No. 3, pp. 192–94.Google Scholar

13. The best known of Veliaminov's various memoranda about how to pacify the region, dated July 1832, is published in full in Kavkazskii sbornik, 7 (Tiflis, 1883), pp. 78–144.Google Scholar

14. Miliutin's memoranda and projects related to the Caucasus in the 1840s are extant in Fund 169, box 19.1–6.Google Scholar

15. M. I. Veniukov, “Kavkazskie vospominaniia (1861–1863),” Russkii arkhiv 1880, I, p. 447.Google Scholar

16. Akty XII, Document 723, letter to Sukhozanet, 21 March 1860, No. 24. See also Bariatinskii's projection of immediate tasks in his Memorandum to Sukhozanet, 13 November 1859, No. 28, in Akty XII, Document 568. In this memorandum Bariatinskii was more specific about administrative reorganization, road building, and plans for cultural and trade and industry.Google Scholar

17. Modest I. Bogdanovich (ed.), Istoricheskii ocherk deiatel'nosti voennogo upravleniia v Rossii (1855–1880) I (St Petersburg, 1879), pp. 405–410, traces the military actions in the Western Caucasus from 1856 to 1862. He mentions resettlement in three brief comments—the in-migration of 270 Cossack families in one region, the forced resettlement of Bzhedukhi “to assigned places” in 1859 and, obviously using a euphemism, that in 1860 a large region inhabitated by the Shapsugi had been “cleansed.” In short, this official history of the war ministry in the reign of Alexander II, though alluding to movements of population, does not permit a reader to appreciate the magnitude of the migration; and a single mention of a threat of English intervention is the implied justification. Alfred J. Rieber, ed., The Politics of Autocracy. Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, 1857–1864 (Paris–The Hague, 1966), p. 137 note 1, briefly annotates a reference in Alexander II's letter of 12/24 June 1860 about “l'émigration de nos musulmans en Turquie,” crediting Bariatinskii with the plan and noting other aspects of the project that will be addressed below.Google Scholar

18. Akty XII (Tiflis, 1904), See especially Documents 641–645 and 653.Google Scholar

19. Bariatinskii claimed in his final report to Alexander that as many as half of the tribes offered peace in 1859. Many subsequently took to arms again. See Otchet gen.-fel'dmarshala kniazia A.I. Bariatinskogo za 1857–1859 gody (Tiflis, 1861), p. 63, later republished in Akty XII (Tiflis, 1904), pp. 1275–1394.Google Scholar

20. Akty XII, Document 655.Google Scholar

21. See Berzhe for figures for specific years, and an estimate of the overall accuracy of the data.Google Scholar

22. Akty XII (Tiflis, 1904), pp. 932–933, Document 803, dated 29 August 1861.Google Scholar

23. The decree, dated 8 September 1859, is published in Zisserman, 2:chast' 2, 298. See Bariatinskii, pp. 70–71, for his quotation.Google Scholar