The Valley of the Shadow

In the previous article we saw how Shamil ﵀ was proclaimed the third imam of Dagestan and Chechnya in 1834 after the fall of Gimry, the martyrdom of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and the murder of Hamzat Bek ﵀, and how from that moment on he took upon himself the spiritual and military leadership of the resistance. The years between 1834 and 1845, which can be discussed here only in broad outline because the actual focus of this chapter lies on a later event, formed within his imamate a period of consolidation, of difficult defeats, of gradual rebuilding, and finally of the construction of an imamate-state that in its geographical extent and in its administrative refinement reached far beyond anything achieved under his predecessors. The climax of these eleven years, and the moment at which the imamate’s strategic resistance to the Russian army inflicted its costliest price upon its opponent, unfolded in the summer of 1845 in the mountains around the Chechen village of Dargo, in a military campaign that in Russian literature is known to this day as the Dargo expedition and in which the gulf between the Russian high command and its own military reality became visible for the first time in a way that could no longer be denied in Saint Petersburg.

The years between 1834 and 1845

The first years of Shamil’s ﵀ imamate passed under great military pressure. In 1837 General Karl Karlovich Fezi undertook a new Russian offensive against the imamate fighters who had established themselves in the mountain stronghold of Akhulgo, and in 1839, under General Pavel Khristoforovich Grabbe, the second great siege of Akhulgo took place, whose outcome would become a personal tragedy for Shamil ﵀. Akhulgo, a double rock fortress in the bend of the Andi Koysu river and roughly a day’s journey west of Gimry, had been fortified by Shamil ﵀ over the preceding years into a formidable defensive position, and in the summer of 1839 it was attacked by Grabbe with a force of about thirteen thousand men.

The siege lasted seventy-eight days and ended in a Russian capture that cost them roughly three thousand dead and plunged the imamate defenders into comparable losses. Among the captives and prisoners on the imamate side was Shamil’s ﵀ three-year-old son Jamaluddin, who was handed over to the Russians as a hostage as part of the surrender negotiations and who in the following years would be raised in Saint Petersburg, first at the court of Tsar Nicholas I and later in the First Cadet Corps, in a life story that over the years would become a drama of its own. Shamil ﵀ himself managed to escape from Akhulgo through the northern mountains with his immediate family and a few dozen surviving fighters, in a second escape that, in its long journey on foot through enemy territory and in its perseverance under physical exhaustion, was the equal of his first escape from Gimry in 1832.

The fate of Jamaluddin

The surrender of his three-year-old son Jamaluddin to the Russians at Akhulgo was for Shamil ﵀ personally a wound that would continue to fester over the following fifteen years and that in 1855, after an exchange sealed in its eventual form by the capture of Georgian princesses by Shamil’s ﵀ troops at Tsinandali, would result in a partial healing when Jamaluddin returned to his father at the age of nineteen. In the intervening years he was raised in Saint Petersburg in a formation that made him, in his language, his dress and his manners, a Russian nobleman, and he developed a loyalty to his Russian educators that upon his later return to the imamate mountains would lead to a deep inner tension between his memories of his father’s house and the world in which he had been embedded during his years of upbringing. He died young, in 1858, a year before his father’s final surrender at Gunib, and his grave was set up in a Chechen mountain village which his father would visit repeatedly until the end of his own life.

The recovery after Akhulgo

In the years between 1839 and 1843 Shamil ﵀ rebuilt the imamate organization in a thoroughly altered form. He shifted the center of gravity of his power from Dagestan to Chechnya, where the forests and the mountains offered more natural defensive possibilities and where the Russian troops could operate less easily in logistical terms. He organized his military power into a new structure of naibs, each governing his own district and each able to command his own militia of several hundred to several thousand fighters, and he gave these naibs considerable freedom of execution within the general strategic line that he himself laid down. The qadi organization of the Shariʿa courts was systematically expanded in these years, with the establishment of a central appeals court in Dargo, where in 1840 or 1841 he set up his headquarters, and he developed a system of taxation with which the imamate could become independent in its expenditure of local goodwill and could instead rely on a fixed stream of income from the zakat and from war booty.

In 1843 Shamil ﵀ carried out a major offensive against the Russian cordon in central Dagestan, and in a remarkable series of victories he managed to capture several Russian forts, among them Untsukul, Belakhani and Khotsatl, and he drove the Russian troops in a painful retreat back behind the border of the Avar khanate. The campaign of 1843 was in its military outcome so successful that it caused a deep shock in Saint Petersburg, and it gave the impetus to the strategic revision that in 1844, under the newly appointed Viceroy of the Caucasus, Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, would lead to a grandly conceived new offensive against the imamate’s core. It was this new offensive, in its ambitious plan and in its disastrous outcome, that in 1845 would bring the Dargo expedition to life.

The governance of the imamate under Shamil ﵀

Between 1840 and 1845 Shamil ﵀ refined the administrative organization of the imamate into a form of state that had scarcely an equal in the entire Muslim world of the nineteenth century and that in a sense constituted the most successful application of the Shariʿa in a governing state since the fall of the Ottoman legal system under the Tanzimat. He divided the territory under his sovereignty into a network of naib districts, with at the head of each district a naib appointed personally by him who bore both administrative and military responsibility and who had to come regularly to the headquarters in Dargo to render account and to receive new instructions. Beneath the naibs worked a corps of qadis who administered the Shariʿa justice, and beneath the qadis a further layer of local muftis who served as the first point of contact in village disputes.

In addition, Shamil ﵀ established a rudimentary treasury, managed in Dargo and staffed by a corps of administrators who conducted their reporting in Arabic according to the fiqh rules of zakat collection, as well as an office of muhtasib for the supervision of public morality in the markets and of the observance of the Shariʿa rules in the public life of the villages. The system did not always function flawlessly, for over the course of his imamate Shamil ﵀ repeatedly had to dismiss naibs for corruption or for independent decisions that went too far, yet in its general working it was a functional apparatus of state that enabled the imamate to maintain, over a territory of several thousand square kilometers and over a population of several hundred thousand souls, a rule of law that in its consistency and in its spiritual grounding was incomparable with the other forms of state in the region.

The international dimension

Although the imamate remained limited in its actual geographical extent to the mountains of Dagestan and Chechnya, in these years it also acquired an international dimension that in the historiography of Shamil’s ﵀ imamate has not always received the attention it deserves. Diplomatic contacts were maintained with the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecid I, with whose court Shamil ﵀ stood in repeated correspondence and who recognized him in an informal manner as an independent ruler of a sovereign Muslim territory, without the Sublime Porte allowing itself to be drawn into a formal political commitment that would bring it into direct confrontation with Russian power. British agents in Persia, among them David Urquhart, who in the thirties and forties waged a remarkable campaign of public opinion in Trabzon and Istanbul for support of the Caucasian resistance against Russia, likewise had contact with the imamate through intermediaries, and in a number of cases they sent weapons and equipment via Ottoman smuggling routes to the Adyghe regions in the west, part of which eventually reached the Dagestani fighters as well.

Vorontsov and the Dargo plan

Prince Vorontsov, appointed in 1844 at the age of sixty-four as Viceroy of the Caucasus and commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army, was a statesman of exceptional ability and experience. In his younger years he had served in the Napoleonic wars, he had worked for many years as governor of New Russia and as governor-general of Bessarabia, and in Saint Petersburg he was regarded as the administrator capable of bringing the Caucasus question to a definitive solution. Tsar Nicholas I had instructed him personally upon his appointment that the pacification of the northern Caucasus must be completed within three years, and he had placed at his disposal the means he deemed necessary for this task: a considerable expansion of the Caucasian army, an expansion of the administrative apparatus, and a free hand in the choice of military strategy.

The plan that Vorontsov developed over the course of the autumn of 1844 and the winter of 1845 aimed at the direct capture of Shamil’s ﵀ headquarters in Dargo, in the Chechen mountains about a day’s journey south of the Russian cordon, and he believed that the capture of the headquarters and possibly of the imam himself would cause the imamate to collapse in its entirety in a manner comparable to what the fall of Gimry in 1832 was supposed to have achieved. For this operation he assembled a force of nearly eighteen thousand men, including several elite regiments, with considerable artillery, and with a logistical train that was to enable him to conduct a campaign lasting several weeks in heavy terrain.

The Russian advance on Dargo

On the third of June 1845 Vorontsov set out from the fort of Vnezapnaya, at the northern foot of the Caucasus on the Sunzha river, with the main body of his expeditionary army. The plan provided for an advance in four phases: first the southward march across the Michik river to the Chechen mountains, then the breakthrough through the dense forests around the village of Andi in order to reach the Andi plateau where Shamil ﵀ had set up his first defensive positions, then the descent from the plateau into the valley in which Dargo lay, and finally the capture of Dargo itself. The total distance from Vnezapnaya to Dargo was, measured as the crow flies, no more than a hundred and fifty kilometers, but because of the mountains and the forests and the difficult water crossings the actual march distance was estimated at more than two hundred kilometers, with a timetable of several weeks.

The advance proceeded relatively smoothly in its first phase, and over the course of June the Russian troops reached the Andi plateau without the imamate fighters provoking a central battle. It was, as would later become clear, not a lack of readiness to fight on Shamil’s ﵀ part but a deliberate strategic choice to lure the Russian troops into an extended and exhausting march to Dargo, and to seek the real military confrontation only after the Russian logistical lines had been stretched to the utmost and the imamate fighters could attack the Russian troops in terrain where their numerical and material superiority was neutralized by the mountainous and forested nature of the battlefield.

The fall of Dargo

On the sixth or seventh of July 1845 the Russian main body reached the immediate vicinity of Dargo, and it found that the village had been abandoned by its inhabitants and partly set on fire before the imamate fighters had withdrawn into the surrounding forests. Vorontsov occupied the deserted village and raised the Russian flag over what remained of Shamil’s ﵀ headquarters, in a ceremonial act that was presented in his reports to Saint Petersburg as the symbolic completion of the operation. But the symbolic character of the act was immediately overshadowed by the real military situation, for the Russian troops now found themselves deep in enemy territory, with a logistical line as long as a knapsack strap stretching several dozen kilometers behind them through mountainous and forested terrain, and with no local population at all that could supply them or support them in their movements.

Shamil ﵀ had followed the Russian advance attentively from his forward posts in the Andi mountains, and he had prepared his military response in a combination of patience and strategic calculation. He knew that the Russian troops could capture little in Dargo itself that was of lasting strategic significance, for the headquarters had already been cleared and the imamate organization was spread over a large area, and he understood that the real opportunity for a military blow against Russian power lay not at Dargo but in the retreat that the Russian troops would sooner or later have to undertake back toward the cordon. He awaited his moment, and he gathered his troops in the forests between Dargo and the Michik river for what in the following weeks would become the true heart of the Dargo expedition.

The tactical preparations in the forests

Shamil ﵀ had followed the Russian advance attentively from the moment Vorontsov’s troops left Vnezapnaya, and over the preceding weeks he had developed a detailed tactical plan in which each phase of the Russian movement would be met with its own response. He had summoned his naibs from Chechnya and from central Dagestan to a central gathering point near the village of Vedeno, and in a meeting lasting several days he had settled with them the strategic principles of the imamate’s response: no frontal battle against the Russian main body in the open mountain passes where the Russian artillery and the Russian infantry could bring their advantage fully into play, but an extended ambush strategy in the forests along the route, where the imamate fighters, with their knowledge of the terrain and their mobility in small units, would have the advantage.

For the execution of this plan he organized his troops into a network of detachments of a hundred to five hundred men, each under its own naib or under a trusted subordinate commander, and he spread these detachments along the expected route of the Russian advance and, far more importantly, along the route of the expected Russian resupply. He rightly foresaw that the real vulnerability of the Russian operation would lie not in the main body, which could prepare its artillery and its dense battle formations for moving through the forests, but in the supply chain, which would necessarily have to move along the forest paths in an extended column that was difficult to protect. It was on this vulnerability that he had built his entire plan, and it was around this vulnerability that the Sukharnaya disaster would unfold in the July days of 1845.

The Sukharnaya disaster

The Russian troops remained at Dargo and on the Andi plateau for about two weeks awaiting the arrival of supplies from the north, for their own stores had been brought close to exhaustion during the march and without a resupply convoy they could not maintain their position. On the tenth or eleventh of July a large convoy was set in motion from Vnezapnaya under the command of General Klüke von Klugenau, with several thousand pack animals, with a considerable military escort, and with orders to make its way to Dargo along the difficult mountain paths in order to supply Vorontsov’s main body. The convoy was awaited in ambush by the imamate fighters, who had already taken up their positions in the forests along the route during the preceding weeks, in a narrow valley between the Andi plateau and the mountains to the north of it.

On the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth of July there unfolded in this valley the fighting that would come to be known in Russian literature as the Sukharnaya disaster, in a loose Dutch rendering the Rusk disaster, after the main component of the supplies that was lost in this fighting. The imamate fighters, in a combined operation of several thousand men under Shamil’s ﵀ personal direction, attacked the convoy from several sides at once, in a tactic in which they first split the Russian escort by means of rapidly advancing detachments, then reduced the maneuvering room of the separated units in the forests by launching an immediate flank attack against every sortie, and finally dealt with the exhausted and fragmented Russian detachments one by one in the melee and largely wiped them out.

The scale of the Russian losses

When Klugenau, after three days of extremely violent fighting, proved able to withdraw the remaining elements of his convoy to the north, he had lost about a third of his original escort, while less than a tenth of the supplies had reached Dargo. The rest of the supplies had been lost in the forests, partly to the imamate fighters who had carried them off as war booty, partly set on fire by the Russian troops themselves in the chaos of the retreat. In total Klugenau’s convoy lost in these three days nearly a thousand men in dead and wounded, and it became clear to Vorontsov and his main body in Dargo that the supplying of their position would no longer be possible and that they had to undertake their own retreat as quickly as possible.

The retreat from Dargo, which began on the seventeenth of July and which over the following three weeks would be continued as a battle of attrition through the Chechen forests, was described in Russian literature as one of the most catastrophic military episodes of the entire nineteenth century, comparable in its own scale to the Russian retreat from Moscow in 1812 or to the British retreat from Kabul in 1842. Shamil ﵀ gave the Russian troops no moment of rest, and in the forests through which they moved he undertook a sustained series of ambushes, attacks on the rearguard, and disruptions of the lines of communication that drove the exhaustion of the Russian troops to the utmost.

The outcome

When Vorontsov toward the end of July or in the first week of August 1845 finally reached the Russian cordon line at Gerzel-Aul and Chirurt with the remaining elements of his expeditionary army, he had lost about three thousand to four thousand of his original eighteen thousand men, and the survivors were in a state of physical and mental exhaustion in which further military operations in the short term were out of the question. The loss of materiel and equipment was likewise enormous, with several cannon lost in the forests and with large quantities of ammunition and supplies that had to be abandoned in the chaos of the retreat. The official Russian reports to Saint Petersburg attempted to soften the outcome of the expedition as much as possible with reference to the nominal capture of Dargo and with the claim that the pacification of the region would be continued in the following years, but in military circles it was generally understood that the Dargo expedition had been a defeat of the first order that struck at the very foundation of the entire Russian Caucasus strategy.

For Shamil ﵀ personally the Dargo campaign was the greatest military success of his imamate up to that point, and it established his position as imam in a way that in the following years would no longer be seriously undermined by any military setback. It demonstrated that Russian power, despite its overwhelming material and numerical superiority, possessed no incontestable supremacy in the Caucasian mountains, and it gave the imamate a spiritual and political authority that in the following years would spread as far as the Adyghe regions in the west and far into Ottoman diplomatic circles.

The consequences for Russian strategy

In Saint Petersburg the outcome of the Dargo expedition caused a considerable sobering, and Tsar Nicholas I, although he did not publicly withdraw his confidence in Vorontsov, gave the order for a fundamental revision of the Caucasus strategy, the working out of which would fall in the following years upon the general and his subordinates. The policy of frontal assault on the imamate’s core areas in the mountains was abandoned, and in its place came a strategy of gradual starvation that would be carried through to its utmost consequences by the generals Baryatinsky, Yevdokimov and Nezhinsky over the following fifteen years. The policy comprised the systematic burning of the Chechen forests in which the imamate had its cover, the destruction of the villages that remained attached to the imamate, the forced relocation of the inhabitants of those villages to the plains where they could be kept under Russian supervision, and the construction of an extensive network of forts, watchtowers and cordon lines that was to isolate the imamate gradually within its mountain stronghold.

It was this strategy of gradual attrition that over the course of the fifties reduced the geographical space of the imamate ever further, that brought the population under Shamil’s ﵀ rule increasingly into hunger and exhaustion, and that finally in 1859, in the fall of the last stronghold at Gunib, would reach its definitive outcome. In this respect the Russian defeat at Dargo in 1845 was, paradoxically enough, the occasion of a Russian strategic learning process whose outcome, however invisible it still was to Shamil ﵀ in 1845, would lead in the following fourteen years to his final fall.

The valley of the shadow

The Chechen forests between Dargo and the Michik river, in which the real military blow was dealt to Russian power, were designated in Avar and Chechen tradition over the following decades with names that captured their spiritual form, and the name used in many villages was the Valley of the Shadow, after a wording that has its origin in the Psalms of Daoud ﵇ in their twenty-sixth verse and that was widely known among the Muslims of Dagestan in the Arabic Bible translations. The choice of this name was no coincidence, for it referred to the words of the Psalm in which the believer declares that he may walk through the valley of the shadow of death without fear because his Lord is with him, and it gave the Dargo campaign a spiritual form in which the actual military outcome was embedded in an interpretation that was expounded in the Avar mountain mosques as the real meaning of the event.

For Shamil ﵀ himself the Dargo outcome, however much he valued it in its military dimension, was not merely a military success but a spiritual confirmation of the cause to which he had devoted himself since his youth in Gimry, and in the Friday sermons that he delivered in the following weeks in the various imamate villages he regularly gave expression to the conviction that the victory was to be attributed not to his military skill but to the protection of Allah ﷻ, who had supported the imamate fighters in their just cause. It was a spiritual form of the victory that rejected human boasting and that placed the cause of the imamate back on its spiritual foundation, in line with the general orientation he had acquired since his youth in the Naqshbandi discipline.

The years ahead in prospect

The years after 1845 would form the heyday of the imamate under Shamil ﵀, with a territorial extent that at its peak around 1850 encompassed large parts of central Dagestan, virtually the whole of the Chechen mountain region and parts of the Avar interior, with diplomatic contacts that stretched as far as Istanbul and, in a much smaller way, to the British mission in Persia, and with an administrative organization that was sometimes designated in Western contemporary literature as the jihad-state of the Caucasus. But the seeds of the eventual downfall were already being sown in these years in the gradual exhaustion of the Chechen and Dagestani villages, in the merciless scorched-earth tactic applied on an ever larger scale by the successors of Vorontsov, among them General Aleksandr Ivanovich Baryatinsky, and in the strategic encirclement in which the imamate was drawn ever more deeply during the fifties.

It would be another fourteen years before the imamate found its formal end in its surrender at Gunib in 1859, and in these fourteen years Shamil ﵀ would still undergo many military and spiritual trials, each of which has its own place in the hagiographic tradition of his murids. To this end, and to the manner in which it would take its definitive form in the mountains around Gunib, the next article will devote its attention. In this article we have seen how the imamate came to flourish in its second and greatest phase, how in 1845, in the Dargo campaign, it inflicted upon Russian power its deepest military defeat in the entire Caucasian war, and how in these years of his imamate Shamil ﵀ continued the spiritual and military work that he had taken over from Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and Hamzat Bek ﵀, in a form that in its territorial extent and in its administrative refinement brought the imamate to its definitively formative appearance.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994), pp. 158–202.
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000), pp. 272–295.
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908), pp. 388–432.
• Mukhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi ﵀, Bariqat al-suyuf al-Daghistaniyya fi baʿd ghazawat al-Shamiliyya, Arabic manuscript from circa 1856; Russian translation by A. M. Barabanov, Moscow (1941), pp. 162–264.
• Michael Kemper, Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan: Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum jihad-Staat, Reichert Verlag (2005), pp. 402–462.
• Clemens P. Sidorko, Dschihad im Kaukasus: Antikolonialer Widerstand der Dagestaner und Tschetschenen gegen das Zarenreich (18. Jahrhundert bis 1859), Reichert Verlag (2007), pp. 284–356.
• Anthony Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov: Viceroy to the Tsar, McGill-Queen’s University Press (1990), pp. 156–198.