A serious decolonial approach to Russia must place Circassia and the North Caucasus at the center, not at the margins.
Title: Why Circassian Memory Matters in the Age of Decolonization
Subtitle: A serious decolonial approach to Russia must bring Circassia and the North Caucasus into the center of analysis, rather than treating them as regional complications.
Author: Huseyin Oylupinar
Publication type: Opinion essay / Op-ed
Dossier: Genocide Recognition
Series: Center for Circassian Studies Op-Eds
Published by: Center for Circassian Studies, Institute for Knowledge, Research, and Society
Date of publication: May 19, 2026
Keywords: Circassian Genocide; May 21; Circassia; North Caucasus; Russian Empire; Imperial Russia; genocide remembrance; forced expulsion; diaspora memory; decolonization; Russian imperial violence; memory politics
On May 21, Circassians remember what Russian imperial history has long tried to make unrememberable: the destruction of Circassia. Its meaning exceeds mourning. May 21 challenges the way Russian imperial violence has been narrated, denied, and normalized. It asks how genocide is named, how forced expulsion is concealed, and how imperial violence continues to shape public memory long after the battlefield disappears from view.
For Circassians, May 21 is a day of genocide remembrance. It recalls the destruction of Circassia by Imperial Russia, the mass killing and forced expulsion of its people, and the violent formation of the Circassian diaspora. In Circassian memory, the nineteenth-century Russian war in the Northwest Caucasus remains the devastation of a homeland, whatever imperial historiography has called incorporation, pacification, or frontier expansion. Imperial Russian violence drove Circassians toward the Black Sea ports and into exile in the Ottoman Empire, where disease, poverty, displacement, and resettlement extended the violence beyond the battlefield.
The genocide of Circassians unfolded through military violence, forced expulsion, demographic destruction, and the imperial reordering of the Circassian homeland. Imperial Russia destroyed Circassian political life, expelled Circassians from much of their homeland, and imposed colonial rule over a territory emptied by violence. Destroyed villages, forced exile, settler expansion, and administrative erasure turned Circassia into a territory administered over the enforced absence of much of the Circassian people.
Against this history of destruction and erasure, Circassian memory becomes a form of historical testimony. It preserves the record of a homeland violently transformed by empire and exposes the language through which imperial power evades moral accountability. Conquest becomes pacification. Deportation becomes migration. The destruction of Circassia becomes a local tragedy rather than a central fact of imperial history. Such terms do political work. They determine whether violence is recognized as violence or absorbed into the story of state-building.
This is why memory politics is central to Circassian existence. The Circassian genocide is not only a matter of historical remembrance; it remains effectively an ongoing process because the Russian Federation continues to organize its policies and narratives around denial, erasure, and the suppression of Circassian historical memory, and physical destruction of holders of that memory. Empires rule not only through armies, but also through archives, maps, monuments, schoolbooks, and categories of knowledge. They decide which histories are elevated, which are pushed to the margins, and which are made difficult to name. In Russian imperial knowledge and state narratives, the Caucasus has often been represented as a frontier of disorder, resistance, and romanticized violence. Within that imperial vocabulary, conquest is recast as order. Through these methods, the destruction of Circassians, the genocide itself, is not simply left in the past; it is sustained through denial, silencing, and the refusal to name it. Circassian historical memory, by remembering the same history as genocide, dispossession, exile, and the destruction of a homeland, becomes a form of resistance to this continuing politics of erasure.
At stake, then, is the power to name history. When genocide remains unnamed, a people must struggle even for the basic legibility of its own past. Denial does not always take the form of open rejection. It can also appear as silence, euphemism, selective commemoration, or the reduction of genocide to a regrettable excess in a story of supposedly necessary expansion. When a people does not name and voice the genocide committed against it, space opens for concealment, selective memory, and the legitimization of the power that committed the violence. In this sense, erasure becomes a continuation of violence and therefore of genocide by other means.
This is not only a question of the past. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has made it harder to avoid the imperial vocabulary through which Russian violence has long been justified. The war has made the language of empire and decolonization more visible in international debate. Since 2022, denial of sovereignty, destruction of cultural institutions, deportation, demographic engineering, and historical rewriting have become harder for outside observers to dismiss as isolated abuses. They belong to a broader imperial repertoire. For scholars, journalists, and policymakers now speaking about Russian empire, this decolonial vocabulary remains incomplete when it confines Russian imperial violence to Ukraine alone.
Ukraine is central to the present moment, but it is not the only geography through which Russian imperialism should be understood. The North Caucasus alone is enough to unsettle the old map of Russian history; Crimea, Idel-Ural, Siberia, and Central Asia widen that map further. Circassia makes the problem especially visible. It shows how conquest, demographic destruction, forced displacement, and historical erasure were bound together already in the nineteenth century. A serious decolonial approach to Russia must bring Circassia and the North Caucasus into the center of analysis, rather than treating them as regional complications.
This wider map also requires careful attention to continuity. The Soviet period did not erase this inheritance of imperial violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide; it reorganized it through new institutions and ideological language. The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union differed in ideology, institutional structure, and political vocabulary. Yet both treated non-Russian peoples as populations to be classified, moved, suspected, and administratively contained. The mass deportations under Soviet rule occurred under a different regime and ideology, but they reproduced a familiar assumption: the imperial center could punish peoples collectively, empty homelands, and reorganize national existence by state force.
In this longer history, the Caucasus is not peripheral. It is neither a geographical edge nor a region standing at the margins of historical narrative. On the contrary, it is one of the central spaces where Russia developed the habits of rule it would later present as security, modernization, or state necessity. To approach the region only as a security problem, a mountain frontier, or a zone of ethnic conflict is to reproduce the imperial gaze itself. Any serious account of the region must begin with conquest, forced displacement, suppressed sovereignty, genocide, and memory. Circassian history is indispensable to such a reading.
If the Caucasus is central to the history of Russian imperial rule, the diaspora is central to the survival of Circassian memory. In Turkey, the Middle East, Europe, and North America, Circassian families and associations carried a history that imperial and Soviet institutions often avoided naming. They preserved histories of exile, homeland, loss, and return through family memory, community institutions, language, music, mourning practices, and political activism. The Circassian diaspora was not a voluntary migration community; it was born from the destruction of a homeland. Its memory is an archive of violence and rupture carried across generations.
To remember Circassia in diaspora is to speak from the afterlife of imperial violence. It insists that exile was not migration, and that the loss of homeland cannot be translated into the neutral language of movement. Circassian memory survived because communities refused to let imperial silence become historical common sense.
May 21 widens the map of Russian imperial violence beyond the places where empire has become geopolitically urgent. It asks whether decolonization will remain a language of the present crisis alone, or become a serious reckoning with the historical structures that made such violence possible. The deeper question is whether the age of decolonization can recognize the peoples whose destruction was built into the making of Russian imperial space. Remembering Circassia does not mean adding one more tragedy to history. It tests whether we are prepared to name the imperial violance where it has long hidden behind the language of order, security, and civilization.
