This guide introduces the historical processes that led to the destruction of Circassian political, social, and territorial life in the nineteenth century. It explains the Russian imperial conquest of Circassia, the final stages of the Caucasus War, the mass killing and forced displacement of Circassian communities, and the expulsion of large numbers of Circassians from their homeland.
The guide is intended for readers who are new to the topic. It outlines the basic chronology, key concepts, major regions, and historical consequences of the Circassian genocide without assuming prior knowledge of Caucasus history.
The destruction of Circassian political, social, and territorial life in the nineteenth century was not a sudden catastrophe but the result of a long imperial war. Circassia, located in the north-western Caucasus and along the north-eastern Black Sea coast, became one of the principal theatres of Russian imperial expansion. By the 1860s, the Russian Empire had moved from frontier warfare and military pressure to a more radical programme of conquest, depopulation, forced displacement, and settlement. The result was the destruction of Circassian sovereignty, the mass death and expulsion of Circassian communities, and the transformation of Circassia into an imperial borderland incorporated into the Russian state.
Circassians, also known as Adyghe, historically inhabited a broad region of the north-western Caucasus. Their communities were organised through local political, kinship, social, and military structures rather than through a single centralised state. This has sometimes led outsiders to misunderstand Circassian political life as fragmented or stateless in a simplistic sense. Yet Circassian society possessed its own forms of authority, law, diplomacy, territorial organisation, and collective defence. The absence of a centralised monarchy did not mean the absence of sovereignty. It meant that Circassian political life operated through forms unfamiliar to imperial administrators and European observers trained to recognise statehood only in centralised institutional forms.
Russian expansion into the Caucasus began before the nineteenth century, but the region became increasingly important to imperial strategy after Russia’s consolidation along the Black Sea, its wars with the Ottoman Empire and Persia, and its growing ambition to control the Caucasian corridor between the Black and Caspian seas. The Caucasus was not simply a remote mountain frontier. It was a geopolitical zone connecting empires, trade routes, military lines, and imperial imaginaries. Charles King’s modern history of the Caucasus emphasises precisely this layered character of the region: a place where imperial power, local resistance, mobility, exile, and competing projects of rule repeatedly collided.
The Russian conquest of Circassia unfolded within the wider Caucasus War, a long and uneven conflict between Russian imperial forces and the peoples of the North Caucasus. In the eastern Caucasus, resistance was associated above all with Imam Shamil and the struggle in Chechnya and Dagestan. In the west, Circassian resistance continued until 1864. The fall of Shamil in 1859 allowed Russian military attention to turn more decisively toward the western Caucasus. Circassia then became the final major obstacle to Russian imperial consolidation in the region.
The final phase of the war was marked by a shift in Russian strategy. Earlier policies had included punitive expeditions, fort-building, raids, and attempts to control movement. By the late 1850s and early 1860s, however, Russian commanders increasingly treated the continued presence of Circassians in their homeland as incompatible with secure imperial rule. Walter Richmond’s study The Circassian Genocide remains one of the key modern works on this process. Richmond argues that the destruction and expulsion of Circassians were not merely accidental by-products of war but were connected to a deliberate imperial project of demographic and territorial transformation. His work also notes the significance of Georgia’s 2011 parliamentary recognition of the events as genocide, a recognition that framed the mass killing and deportation as preplanned acts by the Russian imperial state.
The vocabulary used in Russian imperial records is important. Scholars have drawn attention to terms such as ochishchenie, or “cleansing,” in relation to the removal of indigenous populations from the mountain zone. The language of cleansing did not merely describe military victory. It expressed an imperial logic in which territory was to be secured by removing the people who made that territory politically resistant. Stephen Shenfield’s influential essay, “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?”, asks whether the events should be understood as genocide or as ethnic cleansing carried out with extreme disregard for human life. He concludes that the scale, intent, and consequences of the Russian campaign make the genocide framework historically and morally compelling.
Primary sources matter greatly for this history. The destruction of Circassia is documented not only in later national memory but also in Russian military correspondence, imperial administrative reports, memoirs, field notes, British consular correspondence, Ottoman records, and eyewitness accounts. Russian military figures such as Dmitrii Miliutin and Nikolai Evdokimov are central to the documentary history of the campaign. Miliutin, who became a major military reformer, supported the removal of mountain populations as part of securing imperial rule. Evdokimov, who led operations in the western Caucasus, was associated with the final campaign of depopulation. British and Ottoman records, especially those concerning the movement of refugees across the Black Sea, are also crucial because they document the humanitarian consequences of expulsion: overcrowded ships, disease, hunger, mass death, and the inability of receiving authorities to manage the scale of arrival.
The events of 1863–1864 were especially catastrophic. Russian forces advanced through Circassian lands, destroying villages, burning food supplies, clearing forests, and pushing populations toward the Black Sea coast. The coast then became a landscape of waiting, disease, death, and forced departure. Thousands of Circassians gathered at ports and improvised embarkation points, hoping to cross into Ottoman territory. Many died before departure; others died at sea; many more died after arrival in Ottoman ports and settlement zones. Sarah A. S. Isla Rosser-Owen’s work on the first Circassian exodus to the Ottoman Empire, based on contemporary British observers, is valuable because it shows the refugee crisis as it appeared to consuls, journalists, and other witnesses connected to the British Foreign Office and press.
The deportation was not simply migration. Some Circassians may have seen Ottoman lands as a possible refuge from Russian rule, especially because of religious, political, and imperial connections between Muslim Caucasian populations and the Ottoman Empire. But the central fact remains that displacement took place under conditions of coercion, military defeat, and the destruction of viable life in the homeland. The Russian imperial state created conditions in which remaining became impossible or nearly impossible for large parts of the population. The distinction is essential: exile was not an ordinary movement of people; it was the demographic result of conquest.
The Ottoman Empire became the principal destination for Circassian refugees. Circassians were settled across Anatolia, the Balkans, the Levant, and other Ottoman regions. This process transformed both Circassian life and Ottoman society. Recent scholarship on North Caucasian migration to the Ottoman Empire has emphasised that refugees were not passive victims after arrival. They became settlers, soldiers, intermediaries, agricultural producers, and community builders in new imperial contexts. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s work on Muslim refugees from the North Caucasus, for example, examines how these displaced populations transformed the Ottoman Empire and how Ottoman authorities managed large-scale refugee settlement.
The consequences for Circassia itself were devastating. Large parts of the historical homeland were emptied, resettled, renamed, and administratively reorganised. Cossack settlements and other imperial structures replaced Circassian communities in many areas. The north-eastern Black Sea coast, including places later known through Russian imperial and Soviet names, became a terrain of demographic replacement and historical erasure. To understand this process only as military conquest is insufficient. It was also a transformation of geography, memory, and political belonging. Territory was not merely occupied; it was remade.
The issue of terminology remains politically and academically significant. Some scholars and institutions use “Circassian genocide” to describe the mass killing, forced displacement, and destruction of Circassian life. Others use terms such as deportation, ethnic cleansing, expulsion, or muhajirism. These terms do not always mean the same thing, and each foregrounds a different aspect of the catastrophe. “Deportation” highlights forced removal. “Ethnic cleansing” emphasises the removal of a population from a territory. “Muhajirism” places the experience within the broader history of Muslim refugee movement into the Ottoman Empire. “Genocide” focuses attention on the destruction, in whole or in substantial part, of a people as a social, territorial, and historical community.
The genocide framework is not only a matter of retrospective political language. It rests on the relationship between intent, action, and consequence. The Russian campaign did not merely defeat Circassian armed resistance. It destroyed the conditions under which Circassians could continue to exist as a people in much of their historical homeland. Villages were destroyed, populations were expelled, survivors were scattered, and the territory was absorbed into the empire through settlement and administrative restructuring. Whether one approaches the issue through military history, imperial history, refugee studies, or genocide studies, the scale of destruction requires explanation beyond the language of ordinary war.
Austin Jersild’s work on Russian imperial rule in the North Caucasus is useful for understanding the broader imperial mindset within which these events occurred. He shows how Russian ethnographers, administrators, and military actors classified, studied, and attempted to govern Caucasian peoples through imperial categories of civilisation, loyalty, savagery, custom, and assimilation. This matters because violence was not separate from knowledge production. Imperial rule depended on mapping peoples, classifying them, judging their usefulness, and deciding whether they could be incorporated, resettled, disciplined, or removed.
For readers new to the subject, the most important point is this: the Circassian catastrophe was not a marginal episode in Caucasus history. It was one of the central events in the making of the modern North Caucasus and the Circassian diaspora. It ended one historical world and created another. Circassians survived, but under radically altered conditions: as dispersed communities, as minorities in different states, as memory-bearing descendants of exile, and as a people whose homeland had been transformed by imperial conquest.
The history of the Circassian genocide therefore belongs to several fields at once. It belongs to the history of Russian imperialism. It belongs to the history of the Caucasus War. It belongs to the history of forced migration and refugee settlement in the Ottoman world. It belongs to genocide studies, memory studies, diaspora studies, and Indigenous history. Above all, it belongs to Circassian historical consciousness, where the events of the nineteenth century remain not only a past catastrophe but a continuing structure of memory, identity, and political claim-making.
Selected Reading
King, Charles. The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Richmond, Walter. The Circassian Genocide. Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Rosser-Owen, Sarah A. S. Isla. The First ‘Circassian Exodus’ to the Ottoman Empire (1858–1867), and the Ottoman Response, Based on the Accounts of Contemporary British Observers. MA thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2007.
Shenfield, Stephen D. “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?” In The Massacre in History, edited by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts. Berghahn Books, 1999.
Jersild, Austin. Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.