Russian conquest of the Caucasus

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian conquest of the Caucasus was one of the longest and costliest military campaigns in imperial history, stretching from roughly 1800 until 1864. Between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea lay a narrow corridor of mountains, khanates, ancient kingdoms, and rival empires - and Russia wanted all of it. To the south of those mountains sat the lands that became modern Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. To the north lay what is now the Russian republic of Dagestan, and Chechnya, and the whole arc of the North Caucasus. The mountains themselves were the problem. Their conquest, fought out village by village and fort by fort, was so distinct it earned its own name: the Caucasian War. What drove Russia into that terrain in the first place? How did a campaign launched in earnest around 1800 require more than sixty years to complete? And what happened to the peoples who stood in the way?

• 2. Centuries Before the Storm

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  Russian presence in the region did not begin in the nineteenth century. The Rus' first appeared in the Caucasus in the 9th century, initially as traders moving along the Volga trade route. By the 943 expedition they had rowed up the Kura River deep into the mountains, defeated the forces of Marzuban bin Muhammad, and captured Bardha'a, the capital of Arran. That early footprint faded, but the interest never entirely disappeared. By around 1550, Cossacks had established themselves on the Don River, and an isolated band had settled along the lower Terek River. Russia's conquest of Astrakhan in 1556 gave the empire a base at the northern end of the Caspian Sea. After about 1580, Russia pulled back from the Caucasus for roughly two hundred years, but the slow southward push of Russian colonists from their Muscovite heartland never stopped. During the Russo-Persian War of 1722-1723, Peter the Great temporarily seized the west and south shores of the Caspian, only to return those gains later through the treaties of Resht and Ganja. Catherine the Great sent a punitive expedition that briefly captured Derbent in 1775, following the death of a Russian explorer in captivity. Her Persian expedition of 1796 again took the west Caspian coast, but her son Paul I withdrew those forces after her death in November 1796. By around 1800, all of this maneuvering had positioned Russia to push soldiers and colonists south in earnest.

• 3. The Borderland and Its Masters

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  From the days of the Roman Empire, the Transcaucasus had been a borderland between two larger powers, typically one centered in Constantinople and one in Persia. Local rulers held varying degrees of real independence; much depended on the size and proximity of whichever empire currently held their loyalty. By around 1750, the area was divided between Turkish and Persian vassals. The western two-thirds was home to Georgians, an ancient Christian people. The eastern third was mostly populated by Azeris, Turkic Muslims whose emergence as a distinct people has no fixed date in the sources. Into this layered political landscape stepped Heraclius II of Georgia, who in 1762 joined two eastern parts of Georgia into the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. Persian power had weakened sharply after the death of Nadir Shah, leaving Heraclius to maintain de facto independence through the entire Zand period. That independence proved fragile. In 1795, Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar captured and sacked Tiflis at the Battle of Krtsanisi, seeing the king of Georgia as a disobedient vassal in need of punishment. Agha Mohammad was assassinated in 1797 while preparing a second invasion, but the damage had been done. George XII, dying and unable to protect his kingdom, offered Russia increasing amounts of authority over his realm. On the 18th of December 1800, Paul I responded by annexing the kingdom outright.

• 4. Tsitsianov's Drive to the Sea

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  Pavel Tsitsianov arrived in Georgia as commander-in-chief in early 1803, a man with a singular sense of purpose. He was descended from Georgian nobles who had fled to Russia with Vakhtang VI in 1724, and he could see himself simultaneously as a servant of the Tsar and as a Georgian patriot. His view was that only Russian power could protect Georgia from Persians, Turks, mountain raiders, and internal disunity. His first task was uncomfortable: removing the remaining members of the royal family. When General Lazarev went to arrest the late king's widow, she stabbed him to death. She was confined in a convent for eight years and died in 1850. Tsitsianov moved quickly outward from Georgia. In December 1803 the western Principality of Mingrelia became a Russian vassal. In April 1804 the Kingdom of Imereti became a Russian protectorate after military pressure, reuniting much of Georgia after four hundred years of fragmentation. To the east and south he moved with equal speed. The Ganja Khanate was bloodily conquered in January 1804. In 1805 the Karabakh Khanate submitted after a Persian relief force of twenty thousand men under Abbas Mirza arrived and the garrison of one hundred survivors cut their way out. By late 1805 Tsitsianov had taken the Shaki Khanate in May and the Shirvan Khanate in December. His death came before Baku. The town elders delivered him the keys to the city; he returned them, asking to receive them from the khan in person. The khan rode out with an escort, Tsitsianov advanced with only two other men, and he was shot dead. With that, Russia held the corridor between the Black and Caspian Seas, and a war with Persia was now fully underway.

• 5. Two Wars at Once

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  From 1804 to 1813, Russia fought Persia and Turkey simultaneously. Most Russian military strength was consumed dealing with Napoleon in the west, making the Caucasus a secondary theater even as it demanded constant attention. The Turkish war ended with the frontier unchanged, though Russia retained the Black Sea port of Sukhum-Kale. The Persian war had more lasting consequences. Pyotr Kotlyarevsky delivered the decisive blow in 1812, defeating Persian forces at Aslanduz, crossing the steppe, and bloodily capturing the capital of Talysh. In 1813, Persia signed the Treaty of Gulistan, formally recognizing Russian possession of the khanates of eastern Transcaucasia and the Caspian coast. That same year, Simonovich led Russian troops deep into the mountains and took Shatili, the chief stronghold of the Khevsurs on the upper Argun River. With peace settled on both fronts, the mountain chieftains and Georgian rebels went quiet. They could see no prospect of support from the two Muslim empires that had been defeated.

• 6. Yermolov's Mountain War

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  Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov arrived in the Caucasus in the autumn of 1816 and immediately set about tightening Russia's grip on the mountains. He brought with him Velyaminov as chief of staff, a man described in the sources as more intelligent and less charismatic than his chief, and the two made a productive combination. Velyaminov wrote the Memoir and the Commentary, documents outlining the basic Russian strategy as what he called a great siege. Three new forts anchored the northern Line: Grozny in 1818, Vnezapnaya in 1819, and Burnaya on the mountain above Tarki in 1821. In 1818, six Dagestani powers formed an alliance against the coming pressure: Avaria, Mekhtuli, Karakaitag, Tabassaran, Kazikumukh, and Akusha. Yermolov responded by storming the capital of Mekhtuli at Djengutai and abolishing the khanate entirely. By June 1820, General Madatov crossed the mountains from Shirvan and defeated an estimated twenty thousand men near Khosrek, twenty-three kilometers southeast of Kumukh. The khan fled to his own capital, but his own inhabitants shut the gates against him and surrendered. When Yermolov annexed the Shaki Khanate after the khan died without a direct heir, he later acknowledged in his own words that he had obtained it "by interpreting treaties as Mussulmans interpret the Koran, that is, according to circumstances." Yermolov's rule ended not from military defeat but from political displacement. When Persia invaded Karabakh and Ganja in July 1826, Yermolov hesitated to attack the Persian army and asked Tsar Nicholas I for two divisions. Nicholas sent one and ordered an invasion of Yerevan. Yermolov called that impossible. Nicholas responded by sending Ivan Paskevich, and in late March 1827 Yermolov resigned.

• 7. The Long Endgame

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  Paskevich proved far more aggressive than his predecessor. By the end of 1827 he had conquered the khanates of Yerevan, Nakhichevan, and Talysh, securing modern Armenia and the southeast corner of Transcaucasia. Turkey then declared war, partly because of Russian intervention in the Greek War of Independence. On the Caucasus side, Paskevich took the Turkish city of Kars in 1828 and pressed on to the larger city of Erzerum in 1829. Peace came in September of that year. The treaty at Adrianople gave Russia the Black Sea ports of Poti and Anapa while Turkey surrendered its nominal claim to Circassia without actually ceding it to Russia. The mountain war that followed was the longest phase of all. The Murid War in Dagestan and Chechnya lasted from 1830 to 1859. The Russo-Circassian War in the western mountains ran parallel and ended only in 1864, when several hundred thousand Circassians were expelled to the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean War of 1853-1856 changed little on the Caucasus frontier. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, Russia added the province of Kars and the port of Batum. The human cost of the expulsion of the Circassians in 1864 was enormous, and it remained the most consequential demographic event of the entire sixty-year conquest. The port of Batum, annexedin 1878, had by 1900 become the terminus of a railroad stretching all the way to Baku, an oil route that would shape the region's next century.

• 8. The Literary Caucasus

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  Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Leo Tolstoy all wrote about the Caucasus, and their works shaped how educated Russians understood a war their empire was fighting. According to two Russian historians cited in the source, the mountain peoples' love of freedom and their willingness to die for independence "injected a potent new spirit into the thinking and creative work of Russia's progressives" and influenced the liberationist aspirations of exiled Decembrist writers. This body of work came to be called the "Literary Caucasus," and it appealed largely to nineteenth-century Russian elites. Pushkin's poem "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," written between 1820 and 1822, was described by Professor Ronald Grigor Suny as simultaneously a travelogue, ethnography, geography, and war correspondence. Suny noted that in Pushkin's imaginative geography, the communion with nature "averted the eye from military conquest" and largely disregarded the native peoples, who appeared as a vague menace. Pushkin's epilogue to the poem, however, celebrated the military conquest directly. Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time" appeared between 1839 and 1841, and Tolstoy returned to the subject multiple times, most famously in "Hadji Murat," which was published in 1912. The Caucasus war was, in this sense, a cultural event as much as a military one: the same decades that saw Yermolov's forts built and the Circassian expulsion also produced some of the most enduring literature in the Russian language.