THE CIRCASSIANS – A FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE? Page 2
by Stephen D. SHENFIELD
Was It Genocide?
Did the Russian conquest and deportation of the Circassians constitute the deliberate genocide of a people, or was it ‘only’ a case of ethnic cleansing carried out with brutal disregard to human suffering? My approach to this difficult question firstly involves examining the background of previous and concurrent Russian treatment of newly concuered peoples. Had the Russian empire already perpetrated, or was it perpetrating, genocide in other places, outside the Caucasus? Secondly, I consider the attitude of the nineteenth-century Russian political and military elite towards the Circassians. Had the possibility of genocide been contemplated as a solution to the problem posed by the Circassians’ resistance to conquest? Or, to use the phrase made famous by Norman Cohn, was there ‘a warrant for genocide’? [17]
And thirdly, why was the decision taken in favour of deportation? What was the thinking of the Tsar and his advisers that underlay this decision? Does it appear likely that their real purpose was genocide? On this score it should suffice to consider two other important examples of Russia’s relations with newly conquered peoples: the conquest of the native peoples of Siberia in the seventeenth century, and the incorporation of the Kazakh nomads in the nineteenth century.[18] This latter process reached completion at about the same time as the conquest of Circassia (1864).
The indigenous peoples of Siberia lacked the numbers, political unity or military strength with which to block the steady Russian advance eastwards to the Pacific, but on occasion they did resist their economic exploitation. Thus, Russian brutality in collection of the pelt tax (yasak) sparked a rebellion among the Yakuts and the Tungusic-speaking tribes along the River Lena in 1642. The Russians responded with a reign of terror: native settlements were torched and hundreds of people were tortured and killed. The Yakut population alone is estimated to have fallen as a result by 70 percent between 1642 and 1682. However, it was the intention of the government in Moscow to exploit, not exterminate, the indigenes, and in order to resuscitate declining fur deliveries steps were taken towards the end of the century to protect them: for instance, no executions were to be carried out without Moscow’s consent. Moscow again intervened after the most cruel episode of all, the 1697-9 invasion of the Kamchatka peninsula by the commander Vladimir Atlasov. His force of one hundred men killed twelve thousand Chukchi, and eight thousand Koryaks and Kamchadals respectively. Yet following an epidemic of suicides, local authorities were ordered to restrain natives from taking their own lives.[19] Thus, though a large proportion of indigenous Siberians did perish as a consequence of the Russian conquest of their lands, this was the result of economic exploitation, the brutal suppression of uprisings and the murderous zeal of individual military commanders rather than of any deliberate state policy of genocide.
A similar conclusion may be drawn regarding the treatment of the Kazakh nomads. Russian outposts were established along the northern edges of the Kazakh steppe as early as the sixteenth century, but the interior was incorporated only in the nineteenth century, between the 1820s and the 1860s. Like the Siberian indigenes, the Kazakhs bowed to the inevitable and did not offer widespread resistance to the Russian advance. There were, however, some local uprisings (as in 1836-7), provoked by the confiscation of traditional grazing grounds. As the nineteenth century wore on, the Kazakhs were greatly impoverished as they and their herds were squeezed into ever smaller areas of the steppe to make room for new Russian settlers, leading to population losses, though not on a truly genocidal scale.[20] The idea of getting rid of an entire people, whether by means of forcible deportation or by genocide, therefore, dose not appear to have arisen in previous Russian practice. The decision to deport the Circassians represented something new.
We find an interesting reflection of contemporary Russian perceptions of the Circassians in the books of western travellers sympathetic to Russian ambitions in the Caucasus. The Circassians are typically portrayed as primitive warlike barbarians and savage bandits. ‘The peoples of Circassia and Abkhazia,’ a French diplomat writes, ‘have lived by piracy and brigandage from time immemorial … Anger, vengeance and greed are their dominant passions.’ A French tourist couple entertain their readers with the story of how a Polish lady was kidnapped by Circassians while on her way to take the waters at the spa of Kislovodsk, and recount how they managed to escape from pursuing Circassian horsemen as they rode through frontier territory from Stavropol to Yekaterinodar.[21]
Do these hostile stereotypes constitute a warrant for genocide? Reading some authors, it is hard to avoid answering yes. Thus George Ditson, who claims to be the first American to visit Circassia and who dedicates his book to the Russian governor of the Caucasus, Prince Vorontsov, draws a direct parallel between the subjugation of the Circassians and that of the American Indians being accomplished at the same period. It turns out that this thought was
suggested to him by the Russian Prince Kochubei, whom he approvingly cites as saying:
‘These Circassians are just like your American Indians – as untamable and uncivilized … and, owing to their natural energy of character, extermination only would keep them quiet’ – though he does admittedly offer the alternative of ‘employing their wild and warlike tastes against others.’ [22]
Historians of tsarist Russia conventionally stressed the desire to put an end to Circassian raids on existing Russian settlements and to clear new fertile lands for the settlement of landless peasants migrating from Central Russia in the wake of the abolition of serfdom as the motive behind the decision to deport the Circassians. As one influential account puts it:
In Chechnya and Daghestan [the central and eastern parts of the northern Caucasus] the Russians were satisfied with the natives’ submission, but on the Black Sea coast they intended to gain possession of the wide and fertile Circassian lands to provide for a part of the great wave of Russian peasant migration resulting from emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Every year Cossacks and peasant migrants from central Russia were penetrating farther and farther up the affluents of the [Rivers] Kuban, Laba, Belaya and Urup. These new villages and stanitsy [Cossack settlements]
were frequently raided by the Circassians who resented the Russian settlement of their tribal lands.[23]
As the same authors point out, the resettlement of the Circassian lands was a partial failure.‘The Kuban region was thickly settled, but along the Black Sea coast the Russian, German, Greek and Bulgarian colonists proved unable to support the humid climate and the forest environment, and today the wilderness has conquered the Circassian orchards and gardens.’[24]
More recently, Brooks has put forward an alternative view, more soundly based on detailed research into the writings of prominent Russian officials and generals of the time.[25] He argues that their main motive was simply to secure reliable politico-military control by Russia of a strategically important area of the Caucasus. This goal seemed suddenly much more urgent in the 1850s after the Crimean War, which had underlined the danger of foreign intervention in the Black Sea region and the necessity of pre-empting It. However, close to a century of unsuccessful fighting had convinced frustrated Russian policy-makers that the Circassians could not be subdued, but only deported or exterminated. Thus the military campaign was not a response to the extraneous needs of settlement. On the contrary, it was only after victory was achieved that the generals pressed (in vain) for accelerated settlement to consolidate the conquest. Similarly, though the order of the Tsar was to deport the Circassians, not exterminate them, we have seen from the remark of Prince Kochubei, quoted above, that Russian officials and generals were not averse to the idea of exterminating a large proportion of the Circassians. General Fadeyev also attested to this when he wrote that the
Russians decided ‘to exterminate half the Circassian people in order to compel the other half to lay down their arms.’[26]
So was it genocide? The deportation of the Circassians can certainly be regarded as an example of ‘ethnic cleansing’, in which massacres and the burning of villages served to force the Circassians into emigration. ‘This great exodus’, concludes Henze, ‘was the first of the violent mass transfers of population which this part of the world has suffered in modern times.’ He goes on, however, to suggest that it set a precedent for the Armenian genocide, implying that what happened was at least comparable to genocide.[27] There was no obsession to wipe out every single Circassian, but there was a determination to get rid of them without delay, in the full knowledge that a large proportion of them were bound to perish in the process. As Count Yevdokimov recounts: ‘I wrote to Count Sumarokov, why does he remind us in every report of the frozen bodies covering the roads? Do the Great Prince and I really not know this? But can anyone really turn back the calamity?’[28] Such cynically feigned inadvertence reminds one of the tsar who ‘commuted’ a death penalty imposed on a soldier to a hundred lashes of the knout, knowing that he could hardly survive such an ordeal.
The End of the Circassians?
The catastrophe that befell the Circassians in the 1860s put their survival as a people at risk both inside the Russian empire (and later the Soviet Union and its successor states) and in exile. The impact of the deportations on the different Circassian sub-groups varied widely. Worst affected were the western and central tribes, several of which disappeared completely from the Caucasus, most notably the Ubykh, while others left behind only small remnants.[29] A native population compactly residing throughout Circassia was thereby reduced to fragments, ‘islands’ that in the course of time were separated by an intervening ‘sea’ of Slav and other settlers. By 1917, the descendants of the Circassians remaining in Russia were scattered over many non-contiguous areas, in most of which they formed a minority. No single town had a Circassian majority.[30]
The effect of this process was to weaken pan-Circassian identity and raise the salience of narrower identities. Thus the removal of the Ubykh, who had constituted the geographical and linguistic bridge between the Abkhaz and the northern Circassians, facilitated the development of a more distinct Abkhaz identity. Similarly, the isolation from other Circassian communities of those Shapsegh villages that remained in the Tuapse area heightened the sense of a separate Shapsegh identity. In the new geodemographic conditions created by conquest, deportation and the influx of settlers, tribes naturally tended to evolve into separate ethnic groups. The sense of being Circassian was not altogether lost, but what had previously been perceived as a single people came to be seen as a family of closely related but distinct ethnic groups.
The effects of the Soviet period on the ethnic identity of the Circassians, as on that of other indigenous peoples, were complex and shifting. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the policy of ‘indigenization’ (korenizatsiya) helped preserve Circassian language and culture from Russifying pressures. Four ethnic territories were created specifically for different groups of Circassians within the Russian Federation.[31] In addition, the Abkhaz enjoyed considerable
autonomy within the Republic of Georgia, and for some years (1921-31) even had a union republic of their own, loosely associated with Georgia. On the other hand, certain aspects of the indigenization policy did serve further to weaken and fragment Circassian identity. In 1927 what had previously been a single Circassian literary language was split into two separate literary languages: Kabard-Cherkess and Adygei.[32] Also Circassian groups were, both in the 1920s and later, arbitrarily put together with the Karachai and Balkar, who speak a Turkic language, to form mixed ethnic territories.[33] The later Soviet period witnessed a return to the policy of Russification – or, in the case of the Abkhaz, whose cultural rights were suppressed under Stalin – Georgianization.[34] From the 1960s onwards, the Circassian language was only taught as a subject in the schools of the ethnic territories but was no longer employed as a vehicle of instruction.
With the collapse of the USSR, the lifting of controls over movement and communication facilitated a modest revival of shared Circassian identity. In some families, an ‘unauthorized ethnic history’ stressing the common Circassian roots of Kabardian, Adygei, Cherkess, Abaza and Abkhaz had been transmitted secretly from generation to generation, and this history could now be openly propagated.[35] Links with the descendants of the Circassian exiles have been established, though efforts to attract the latter back ‘home’ have so far yielded scant results.
However, among the great majority of Circassians living in exile, the Circassian identity was better able to hold its own against narrower identities. The challenge it faced was of a different kind – that of gradual assimilation into the host societies of Turkey and the Middle East. Over time the exiled ‘Circassians’ tended to become ‘Turks (or Jordanians, etc.) of Circassian descent’. Nevertheless, even in Turkey the younger generation still speak Circassian – albeit only poorly, as a second language – and profess a sentimental pride in the Circassian heritage.[36] In Jordan, Palestine-Israel, Saudi Arabia and other countries that formed part of the Ottoman empire, compact communities of Circassians still exist. In Jordan Circassians exercise important functions as military officers and businessmen. Two
Circassian villages remain in the Balkans, one in Kosovo and one in Transylvania.
So the Circassians have survived as a people. I expect that they will continue to survive in the foreseeable future – especially taking account of the social climate in the post-Soviet region and in a world now more conducive than ever to the preservation and revival of ethnic identity. Even Circassian sub-groups that were thought to be on – or over – the verge of extinction may survive. For example, Ubykh is often described as a dead language, and the death of the last living speaker of Ubykh has been reported more than once. However, a prominent Canadian specialist on the Circassians, Professor John Colarusso,[37] informs me that among me descendants of the Ubykh living in Turkey there is now a small group of young people who are learning the Ubykh language from their grandparents and are intent on keeping the Ubykh identity alive. The Circassians, their stubborn and heroic resistance to conquest and to the horrors perpetrated against them by their conquerors will not be forgotten after all. And yet how close they came to slipping into oblivion. If the fate of the Armenians in Turkey and of the Jews of Europe is still widely remembered today, is that not largely thanks to the status and influence enjoyed by many of the Armenian and Jewish communities fortunate enough to survive elsewhere? The contrary case of the Circassians brings home to us how easily the genocide of a people can, under less favourable circumstances, still fade out of our historical consciousness.
https://www.circassiannation.org/circassiannation_039.htm
