The Russian-Circassian War

Before Imam Shamil ﵀ was born, before his name crossed the mountains of Dagestan, and before his sword was forged in Gimry, the Caucasus was already a land in flames. It burned not in a single war, nor in a single decade, but across a drawn-out century of Russian expansion that followed the northern flank of the mountains from the mouth of the Don to the shores of the Caspian Sea, and that would drive the inhabitants of those mountains, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, into a choice in which faith, freedom, and existence could no longer be told apart. Whoever wishes to understand the life of Imam Shamil ﵀ must begin in a place where he never lived, in a century in which he had not yet been born, and among a people who shared a fate but not his fate.

The frontier of the Russian Empire

In 1763, the year the Russian garrison of Mozdok was founded on the northern bank of the Terek, the Caucasus lay at the edge of Russian awareness. Peter the Great had died nearly half a century earlier, yet his dream of extending the southern flank of his empire to the mountains and beyond lived on in his successors. Catherine II, who had ascended the throne in 1762, was determined to make that dream a reality. The Russian Empire already controlled the Don, the Volga ran through its interior, and the steppes north of the Caucasus lay open to colonization and military occupation.

Mozdok was no accidental base of operations. From its source in the mountains of the central Caucasus to its delta in the Caspian Sea, the Terek forms a natural frontier line between the steppes of the north and the mountains of the south, so that whoever held Mozdok held the gateway to the eastern and central Caucasus. From this new garrison the cordon line of forts and Cossack posts was extended westward and eastward. The Caucasian Line, as it was called in Russian military language, was born as a long chain of watchtowers, small forts, and Cossack villages stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian.

For the mountain peoples south of that line, Mozdok was more than a fort; it was a sign that the steppes and the plains were becoming Russian. The river crossings they had used from time immemorial for trade, for pilgrimages, and for family ties came under the control of a foreign power that spoke no language they understood and held no faith they shared. The distance between the mountains and the battlefields grew shorter every year, and whoever wished to feel an enemy near needed only to cross the Terek.

Cordon, Cossacks, and colonies

The Russian strategy was simple at its foundation and merciless in its execution: one drew a frontier, armed that frontier, filled the land between it and the north with loyal subjects, and used military coercion to subdue the land to its south. The loyal subjects were the Cossacks, a crossing of soldier and peasant, Christian in faith, organized in stanitsa villages along the rivers, and trained to a lifelong availability for tsarist service. Moscow had already settled Cossacks on the Terek in the sixteenth century, but under Catherine II the implantation became systematic. The Terek Cossacks were reinforced with Volga Cossacks, with Don Cossacks, and with deserters from the regular army who swore their loyalty to the Tsar in exchange for amnesty and land.

The Cossack line was not merely defensive; it was colonization and punitive expedition in one. A Cossack village on the plain of Chechnya or along the Sunzha was at once a military strongpoint, a base for raids, and a claim on land that until recently had belonged to Muslim pasture. The inhabitants of those pastures were pushed aside, their herds confiscated and their cemeteries plowed, and whoever resisted was burned out while whoever submitted was taxed and treated as a tolerated guest on his own soil.

In Saint Petersburg it became a military language, an administrative sobriety in which the facts of the terrain were weighed against the needs of the empire, but in the villages at the foot of the mountains it became another language, a language of devastation, displacement, and memory. Three generations of Muslims in the northern Caucasus would grow up with that language, and it was that language which Imam Shamil ﵀ would later voice in his turn in the idiom of faith.

The role of religion on both sides

The Russian Empire was no secularized power, for the Russian Orthodox Church was part of the state. The patriarch’s blessing traveled with the generals. The church service was celebrated in the garrisons, the chapel was built as soon as the fort had raised its first walls, and baptism was administered to the native population that submitted and wished to seal its acquired status of tolerated subject with a conversion. For the Russians who journeyed to the Caucasus, their presence was not merely dynastic but also missionary. They brought Orthodoxy to a region where the crescent had hung above the minarets since the first centuries after the Hijra.

The mountain peoples were not uniform. In the west, along the Black Sea, lived the Circassians or Adyghe, a collection of tribes who had been partly Christianized in a distant past and were partly pagan, but who over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had in their great majority embraced Islam, often through Ottoman, Crimean-Tatar, or Sufi influence. In the center, in Kabarda and Karachay, Islam was more firmly established. In the east, in Chechnya and Dagestan, Islam had been deeply embedded since the Arab conquests of the eighth century, the Sufi ṭarīqa of the Naqshbandiyya was a load-bearing structure, and the population retained a legal order founded on the Sharīʿa.

For the Russian administrator that diversity was of little consequence. For the inhabitant of the mountains it became, in confrontation with a Christian power entering the land with church and cross, the very ground of unity. What the Adyghe of the Kuban region had in common with the Chechen of the Argun valley and the Avar of Gimry was not the language, not the tribal descent, not even the form of Islamic law. What united them was the certainty that their faith was at stake, that their freedom was at stake, and that a power on the far side of the Terek was engaged in dismantling both.

The Circassians and their land

Circassia, in Adyghe called Adyghe Khabze, stretched from the northeastern coast of the Black Sea deep into the northwestern foot of the Caucasus. It was a land of rivers that descended from the mountains to the sea, of valleys shaped by centuries of transhumance, of mountain meadows on which sheep and horses spent their summers, and of dense beech forests that covered the slopes and in which travelers lost their way when the mist came down. The Adyghe were an equestrian people, famed for their horses, their swords, and their hospitality. Their cult of nobility, their code of honor, and their chivalric customs were known throughout the Caucasus and were often imitated by neighboring peoples.

At the end of the eighteenth century the people numbered an estimated one and a half to two million souls, spread over twelve great tribal confederations. The Shapsug, the Abadzekh, the Natukhai, the Ubykh, the Bzhedug, and their smaller sister tribes together formed a mosaic that was not centrally governed but was held together by a common language, a common code of honor, and, since the second half of the seventeenth century, by an increasingly shared Islam. The Eastern Adyghe, or Kabardians, had already fallen under a form of vassalage to Moscow in 1557 and would gradually be absorbed into the Russian state over the course of the eighteenth century, but the Western Adyghe remained independent and subject to no foreign power.

For the Ottoman Empire, which flew its flag above Istanbul on the far side of the Black Sea, Circassia was a cherished hinterland. The Ottoman mariner, the Crimean-Tatar trader, and the Sufi shaykh who crossed over with his caravan brought religious manuals, legal writings, and the names of the great mosques of Istanbul into the most remote villages of the Adyghe interior. Mecca lay far away, yet in the spiritual imagination of the Adyghe interior it was near and familiar. Whoever could afford it undertook the pilgrimage by way of Istanbul and Suez, while whoever could not afford it dreamed of that pilgrimage and put his piety into practice in the mosque of his village and the ḥalqa of his shaykh.

To this world the axe was laid in 1763. It came not suddenly, not in a single day, but in a process that would last a century, and that in its final phase would display a cruelty which keeps the Russian commanders of that final phase under suspicion to this day of what a later language would call genocide.

Code of honor and society

Adyghe society rested on an unwritten code of honor called Adyghe Khabze in the Adyghe tongue, which in the Caucasus of that age held a legal and moral force such as no other code in the region possessed. Khabze governed hospitality, chivalric conduct, the honor of the tribe, the position of women, the treatment of the guest, the duty of vengeance for blood, and the sanctity of the given word. Whoever violated Khabze lost his name, and whoever lost his name could no longer live in his village. It was a code that in many respects proved compatible with the Sharīʿa and that the Sufi shaykhs who instructed the Adyghe over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not replace but carefully guided toward the Islamic legal frameworks. What the Sharīʿa regulated better was taken over by the Sharīʿa, while what was deeply anchored in Khabze and did not contradict the Sharīʿa remained standing within Khabze.

Administrative life was layered without being centralized. At the top of the tribe stood a nobility called pshy in Adyghe, deriving its position from descent, martial merit, and the ownership of horses and land. Below the nobility stood a free peasant class that worked its own land and that in times of war followed its lord into the field. Beneath the free class lay a smaller class of dependents who had taken up a subordinate position through inherited debt or through captivity in war. Slavery in the sense of ownership over a human being did occur, above all in the port towns where the Crimean-Tatar slave trade ran its markets, but it was not the foundation of society. The foundation was the free peasant with his horse, his sword, and his membership in the tribal nobility.

For the Russian strategist who studied the Adyghe land, this layering was a point of leverage. Whoever could bind the pshy to himself by the promise of rank in the Russian book of nobility might hope through them to subdue the people. In Kabarda this strategy worked in part, in the Western Adyghe mountains scarcely at all. The pshy were too deeply embedded in their own chivalric ethos and in the Sufi brotherhoods that accompanied their villages to sell their code of honor for a title in a foreign register. Some accepted Russian gifts and sent their sons to the military institute in Saint Petersburg. The majority held to the mountains, to the code of honor, and to the mosque where the shaykh taught his pupils the path in which Allah ﷻ has neither an equal nor a rival.

Sufi trade and the circulation of books

Beneath the surface of the war moved a dense trade in books, manuscripts, and spiritual chains of authority that bound the Adyghe villages to Istanbul, to Cairo, to Damascus, and increasingly to the learning circles of Dagestan. The Crimean-Tatar trader who brought a bale of cloth ashore at Sukhum often carried in his pack a short commentary on a manual of fiqh, a copy of a work of taṣawwuf, or a list of permitted dhikr formulas from a Naqshbandi shaykh. The price of those manuscripts was high, but the demand was higher. A village that built its mosque had no need of many gilded lamps, but it did have need of at least one sound copy of the Qur’an, one reliable manual of Islamic law, and the name of a shaykh to whom it could submit in spiritual matters.

The consequences of that trade were not yet fully felt on the Circassian coast in 1820, when Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ delivered his preaching in Yarag. But they were in motion. By 1840 there would appear in villages of the Shapsug and the Abadzekh muftis who derived their authority from ijazas issued in Dagestan. The spiritual unity between the east and the west of the Caucasus was forged in these decades by the hand of the Sufi shaykhs, not by the hand of any political alliance. When Imam Shamil ﵀ sent a delegation to the Adyghe in 1846 with a call to join his imamate, he could do so because the spiritual bed already existed. The delegation returned without a political alliance. It returned with the confirmation that the heart of the west was turned toward the same Allah ﷻ as the heart of the east.

Supply from the sea

After the Russo-Turkish War, the Ottoman Empire lost the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. In this treaty the Crimea was formally made independent of Istanbul, which in practice prepared its passage to Russian rule in 1783. From that moment the northern coast of the Black Sea lay under Russian control, and the access of Ottoman ships to the Circassian coast grew ever more difficult. Nonetheless the Ottoman fleet remained able to organize secret deliveries to the Adyghe villages, and Crimean-Tatar smuggling persisted deep into the nineteenth century. Without that supply the Adyghe resistance would never have been sustained for so long.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century the Russian navy began systematically to blockade the Circassian coast. Forts were built at Anapa, at Sukhum, at Gelendzhik, and at Sochi, the later Sochi. Each fort was at once an anchorage for the blockade ships and a base for punitive expeditions inland. The Russian commander Aleksey Yermolov, general in the Caucasus from 1816 to 1827, formulated the doctrine in a short sentence his successors would never forget. The land must be pacified, he said, and if the population resists, the population must be destroyed. It was no rhetoric but a military instruction that in the cordon garrisons was carried out to the letter.

Sochi at the mouth of the Sochapsta

Sochi, situated at 43°35’ north latitude, was in the first half of the nineteenth century a collection of Adyghe villages at the mouth of the river Sochapsta, surrounded by dense subtropical forests and sustained by a mild coastal climate that was exceptional at these latitudes. For the Russian strategist the mouth of that river was an ideal landing place for a fort. It offered a natural harbor, was reachable by sea for supply, and could serve as a springboard for expeditions into the mountains. In 1838 a Russian landing detachment built the fort of Alexandria, later renamed Navaginsky, and the Adyghe population of the immediate surroundings was driven out or killed.

The building of a fort was not yet victory. The Adyghe Shapsug, in whose territory the fort was raised, attacked the garrison in repeated night assaults, and Russian losses to malaria, dysentery, and enemy combat were so high that some garrisons lost as much as three quarters of their men in a single season. Nonetheless the cordon was maintained. The forts were supplied with fresh recruits from Russia, with materiel, and with the conviction that this was a charge from the empire and thereby from the Tsar in person. Whoever deserted got the firing squad, and whoever held on received, years after his death, a decoration, posthumously, pinned to his gravestone in a Russian cemetery in the Caucasus.

The east and the Murid movement

While in the west the Adyghe sat in a slowly strangled defense, in the east another spirit awoke. In Dagestan and Chechnya, along the slopes of the eastern Caucasus, two movements took shape at the beginning of the nineteenth century that reinforced one another and that would fundamentally change the character of the resistance against Russia. The first was the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya ṭarīqa, a branch of the venerable Naqshbandi order that had traveled to the Caucasus from Baghdad and Damascus by way of Mawlānā Khālid al-Baghdādī ﵀, and that received in Dagestan a new and severe embodiment. The second was Muridism, a militant interpretation of Sufi obedience in which the murid, the pupil, swore loyalty to his shaykh not only in matters of the heart but also in matters of the sword.

The pioneer of this movement in the Caucasus was Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaraghi ﵀, born in 1771 or 1772 in the Lezgin village of Yarag in southern Dagestan, today in Russian territory near the border with Azerbaijan. He was a scholar of classical Islamic law and of Arabic letters, a pupil in the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya, and a rhetorician of rare force. Around 1820, after a long period of study and inner struggle, he announced in the mosque of Yarag that a Muslim who lives under an unbelieving ruler and wages no jihad against that ruler is an incomplete Muslim. It was a preaching with the scent of fire about it, and whoever listened to it could no longer forget it.

The chain of teachers

Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ received his ijaza, his formal permission to teach in the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya, from Shaykh Ismail al-Kurdamiri ﵀, who had in his turn received his ijaza from Mawlānā Khālid al-Baghdādī ﵀ in Damascus. The chain bound Dagestan to Damascus, Damascus to Baghdad, and Baghdad all the way back to the Prophet ﷺ through the venerable transmission chains of the Naqshbandi. For the pupil in an Avar or Lezgin village that chain was no abstract genealogy. It was living certainty that the path one followed was the path that through the centuries had been tested by the saints of the Umma.

In 1823 Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ sent his best pupil, Shaykh Jamaluddin al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀, to the more westerly Ghazi-Ghumuq to teach there. Shaykh Jamaluddin became in his turn the teacher of two men whose names would set the tone of the resistance in this ṭarīqa: Shaykh Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, the first imam of Dagestan, and his boyhood friend, a young man from Gimry of whom no one yet knew how long his shadow would fall across the Caucasus. That young man was Shamil ﵀, born in 1797 in that same village of Gimry where later the miracle of his escape from a Russian encirclement would be sung to the mountain peoples as proof that Allah ﷻ does not abandon His servants.

What Muridism entailed

Muridism, as it took shape in Dagestan and Chechnya, knew three movements that lay within one another like concentric circles. The first circle was the inner jihad, the struggle of the soul against its own desires, the purification of the heart through dhikr, fasting, prayer, and obedience to the shaykh. No pupil was admitted to the second circle without having advanced in the first. The second circle was the reform of the community, the abolition of bidʿa and of customs that conflicted with the Sharīʿa, and the introduction of Islamic law as the sole legal order in the villages that ranged themselves under the ṭarīqa. Only in the third circle came jihad in its outward form, the armed struggle against the unbelieving ruler who occupied the region.

For the Russian administrator who read the reports from Yarag and Ghazi-Ghumuq, this layering was impenetrable. He saw a handful of fanatics stirring up the people, he undertook punitive expeditions, and he believed he could behead the movement by arresting a few shaykhs. What he did not see was that the first circle had already shaped an entire generation, and that by the time the third circle was proclaimed, village after village stood ready to take part in it. It was the durability of the spiritual path that made the armed phase possible, not the other way around. Whoever wished to break the resistance would have had to break the path itself, and the path was laid too deep to be dug out with rifles.

Patience as a weapon

What distinguished Muridism from its predecessors in the Caucasus was not the call to jihad as such, for calls to jihad were nothing new in these mountains. As early as the sixteenth century Shaykh Mansur Ushurma ﵀, a Chechen Sufi active in Aldy, had led a rising against the Russian advance in Chechnya and Dagestan. His movement was suppressed by the Russians in 1791, he was taken captive, and he died in 1794 in the Schlüsselburg fortress on the Neva. What was lacking under Shaykh Mansur ﵀ was the ṭarīqa structure that could have allowed the resistance to survive after his arrest. He was the leader, and without him the movement fell apart.

The Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya brought precisely that structure. A ṭarīqa is neither a party nor an army; it is a chain of spiritual authority that in every generation forms its successors before they are called, and that instills in its pupils the truth that real victory lies not in the outward battle but in the purification of the heart. Whoever kills this chain by arresting a single shaykh strikes not even a branch but only a leaf, while the root remains beneath the ground, in the dhikr of the pupil in his room, in the ḥalqa of the Sunday evening, in the fiqh lesson of the Wednesday morning, and in the hajj preparations of the old man who entrusts his sons to the shaykh before he dies.

For the resistance in the Caucasus this meant that the imamate proclaimed under Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ in 1828 did not appear out of nothing. It appeared out of a network that had already been built up in silence for twenty years. When Imam Shamil ﵀ took over the imamate in 1834, he had at his disposal a spiritual reservoir that the Russians could neither see nor count. For twenty-three years that reservoir would be drawn upon, and it would hold. Only when the exhaustion of the mountain villages, the hunger of the winters, and the mercilessness of the scorched-earth tactics of the Russian commanders Baryatinsky and Yevdokimov brought the reservoir to its physical limits would the imamate under Shamil ﵀ be dissolved in 1859. Not before, and even in that dissolution no spiritual defeat was acknowledged, only a military one.

The first imams and the road to Shamil ﵀

In 1828 or 1829, in Ghimrah, or Gimry, a village in the Avar mountains of Dagestan, Shaykh Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ was proclaimed the first imam of Dagestan and Chechnya. He was a pupil of Shaykh Jamaluddin ﵀, the boyhood friend of Shamil ﵀, and the first to formulate the call to open jihad against the Russian occupation in the language of the third circle. His activity was brief. In October 1832 Gimry was encircled by a Russian detachment under General Velyaminov. In the final fight, in the watchtower of the village, Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ fell with nearly all its defenders. Shamil ﵀, who stood beside him, escaped with grave wounds in a manner that is told in the tradition to this day as a miracle.

He was succeeded by Imam Hamzat Bek ﵀, also a pupil from the Naqshbandi chain, and also killed, in 1834 in the mosque of Khunzakh by kinsmen of the local Avar khans whom he had had put to death in a conflict, so that in the space of three years the ṭarīqa needed three imams to carry on the leadership of the armed phase. The fourth, Imam Shamil ﵀, would hold back the Russian war machine in Dagestan and Chechnya for twenty-three years, build a state that would come to be called the Imamate of the Caucasus, and surrender in 1859 on honorable terms after his last stronghold at Gunib had fallen. To this long labor we devote the articles that follow.

A century in a single frame

What happened in the Caucasus from 1763 to 1864 can be summarized in a single frame without that frame doing violence to reality. An empire pressed into the mountains from the north, a people in the mountains resisted, and that resistance took on in the east a religious form that made it a state-building force while in the west it took a tribal form that made it a deep-rooted guerrilla. The empire prevailed in both regions, in the east through exhaustion and encirclement, in the west through deportation and burning, and the people lost their land and sometimes their language and often their lives, but never their memory. Three generations later the grandchildren of the exiled told the story to their own grandchildren, and the story became the spiritual baggage with which the inhabitants of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Abkhazia would bear their fate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In 1864, five years after the surrender of Shamil ﵀ in the east, the ethnic cleansing of the Adyghe was carried out in the west by tsarist troops. An estimated five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand Adyghe, Ubykh, and Abkhaz were forced into deportation to Ottoman territory. Tens of thousands died along the way, in the overcrowded ships, in the cholera epidemics of Trabzon and Samsun, and in the famines of the first refugee camps on the Anatolian coast. The Russian commander Yevdokimov stated in his reports that the problem had been definitively solved. The Ottoman refugee families, two centuries later, know that his report spoke too soon.

What this story meant for the young Shamil ﵀

When Shamil ﵀ was born in Gimry in 1797, the Russian foot had already been planted in the Caucasus, Mozdok stood, and the cordon line stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian. The first serious advance in Dagestan would not begin until 1816 under Yermolov, and would reach a first climax in 1832 with the fall of Gimry. But the story of the Russian advance was already a story that was told to the children in the mountain villages, pondered in the mosques, and analyzed in the ḥalqa of the shaykhs for its theological and legal consequences. The young Shamil grew up in a land that already knew its fate was being written by a hand it did not itself command.

What set him apart from his contemporaries was not that he understood earlier or more deeply that the war was coming, for everyone understood that. What set him apart was that he would be formed in the first circle of Muridism before the third circle reached him, and that in that first circle he would develop a depth of patience, obedience, and purification that would later enable him to endure in the mountains for twenty-three years without losing his character. Whoever wishes to understand the Imamate of the Caucasus from within must first grasp this fact, namely that the state Shamil ﵀ built was not the invention of a military genius. It was the outer wall of an inner formation that had begun on the knee of a shaykh and that unfolded into a state only under the pressure of a century of Russian expansion.

The next article therefore returns to the beginning of that inner formation, to the village of Gimry, and to the birth of the child who would not save the mountains from the Russian Empire, but who would give the fate of those mountains a place in the spiritual history of the Umma that no one in 1797 could yet have suspected.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994).
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000).
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908).
• Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide, Rutgers University Press (2013).
• Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, Oxford University Press (2008).
• Austin Lee Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917, McGill-Queen’s University Press (2002).
• Said Shihaliev, “Sufi Vyacheslav: The Naqshbandiyya in Daghestan”, in Sufism in the Caucasus (Brill, ed. M. Kemper, 2011).