The Noble Surrender at Fort Gunib

In the previous article we saw how the imamate under Shamil ﵀ inflicted a deep military defeat on Russian power in the Dargo campaign of 1845, and how this defeat paradoxically prompted a Russian strategic reappraisal in which the frontal assault on the imamate mountains was abandoned in favour of a strategy of gradual starvation through scorched-earth tactics, forced relocations, and the construction of cordon systems intended to isolate the imamate mountains in their entirety. The working out of this strategy over the fourteen years between 1845 and 1859 forms the backdrop against which this article directs its focus onto the siege of Gunib in August 1859, onto Shamil’s ﵀ surrender to Field Marshal Aleksandr Ivanovich Baryatinsky on the twenty-sixth of August of that year, and onto the remarkable circumstances in which that surrender was carried out, circumstances that later historiography has described as noble and that even his contemporaries in both camps recorded with a measure of respect.

The State at Its Zenith

The territory that had been brought under a unified administrative structure within Shamil’s ﵀ imamate sovereignty in the years between 1845 and 1853 possessed three distinctive features that in its time had scarcely any equal. In the first place there was an integrated Sharia legal order in which qadi jurisdiction in every village was conducted according to the same Shafiʿi fiqh rules and in which a chain of appeal functioned up to the central high court in Dargo. In the second place there was a taxation system following the classical zakat rules, in which revenues were entered in a central administrative office and expenditures were justified through an auditing system. In the third place there was a military organisation of naib districts in which each naib maintained his own permanent militia of several hundred to several thousand men, and in which, in the event of a general mobilisation, a combined fighting force of fifteen to twenty thousand men could be raised within a few days.

It was a form of state whose coherence and whose spiritual foundation were matched by no other Muslim state of the nineteenth century, and it made a deep impression on the Russian administrators who had studied it at close range, an impression that they described in their reports to Saint Petersburg with considerable candour. General Aleksandr Petrovich Yermolov the younger, who in 1850 carried out an unofficial investigation into the organisation of the imamate on the orders of the Russian high command, wrote in his report that the imamate state was a form of governance from which the Russian administration in the Caucasus could in many respects learn, and he recommended a number of its administrative innovations for adoption in Russian policy in the region. His recommendations were followed either not at all or only in part, yet they nonetheless granted considerable recognition to the genuine political achievement that Shamil ﵀ had completed in these years in the mountains of Dagestan.

The Years of Shifting

In the years between 1845 and 1853 the imamate under Shamil ﵀ reached its greatest territorial and spiritual extent. At its height around 1850 the territory under its sovereignty covered roughly three-quarters of present-day Dagestan and Chechnya, including many of the largest mountain villages and with a total population estimated at several hundred thousand. The administrative apparatus of naibs, qadis, and muftis functioned in these years at a level of efficiency matched in no other part of the nineteenth-century Muslim world, and in its diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Porte, with informal British agents, and even in a number of cases with the Persian Shah, the imamate was recognised in a status that regarded it as the effective sovereign over the Caucasian mountains, without this recognition ever being set down in a formal treaty that would have brought Russian power into direct confrontation.

During the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, in which Russia found itself opposed by a coalition of the Ottoman Empire, France, and Great Britain, both Shamil ﵀ and the Ottoman Porte hoped for a coordinated military operation that would force the Russian troops in the Caucasus into a two-front war and that might carry the imamate into a decisive breakthrough to the Black Sea coast. The practical coordination between the Ottoman forces in Anatolia and the imamate fighters in Dagestan proved impossible, however, on account of the geographical distance, the logistical difficulties, and the Russian navy that controlled the sea route between the two partners. The Crimean front, which drew all attention to itself in western European strategy and among the Ottoman priorities, developed independently of the Caucasian theatre, and the imamate fighters had to content themselves with a few limited attacks on Russian positions that did not materially affect the general course of the war.

The End of the Crimean War

When the Crimean War was brought to a close in March 1856 with the Treaty of Paris, the Russian high command found itself in the Caucasus with considerable military reserves that could now be directed entirely at the pacification of the imamate. In August of that same year Prince Aleksandr Ivanovich Baryatinsky was appointed Viceroy of the Caucasus and commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army. Baryatinsky, fifty years old in 1856, was an experienced Caucasus officer who had already served in the region as a young general in the 1840s, who knew the imamate fighters personally from several campaigns, and who received with his appointment the charge of subduing the imamate in its entirety within three to four years.

Baryatinsky’s strategy, building on the strategic reappraisal that had been set in motion after the Dargo disaster of 1845, consisted of a combined operation in which the imamate mountains were pressed in from three directions: from the north across the Chechen plain with systematic burning of the forests and forced relocation of the population; from the south across Lezgistan with reinforcement of the existing Russian positions and extension of the cordon line into the Avar interior; and from the west across the Avar khanate territory, most of which had returned to Russian hands in 1843 after the murder of the regent Bahu-Bika and her sons. It was an encirclement strategy meant to enclose the imamate gradually within its mountain stronghold over a period of three years and to bring it at last into a state of exhaustion in which a decisive military action could break its final defence.

The Gradual Exhaustion

Between 1856 and 1859 Baryatinsky’s strategy unfolded to its full effect. The Chechen forests, which in the Dargo campaign of 1845 had still formed the decisive cover for the imamate fighters, were in these years systematically burned and turned into open terrain across which Russian troops could move freely. The Chechen mountain villages that had remained bound to the imamate were attacked and destroyed by Russian detachments, and their inhabitants were forcibly relocated to the northern plains under Russian supervision. The network of Russian forts and watchtowers was expanded in these years with several dozen new outposts, and the cordon line that enclosed the imamate mountains grew so dense that the exchange of goods, people, and information between the sealed-off areas and the outside world became ever more difficult.

For the inhabitants of the imamate mountains this meant an unrelenting impoverishment, a mounting hunger in the winters when supply from the plains had been cut off, and a gradual wearing away of the morale that in the earlier years of the imamate had bound the population to the cause of resistance. Shamil ﵀ did what lay within his power to sustain his men and the population under his sovereignty through these trials, organising emergency relief from the imamate’s stores, easing the zakat obligations for the areas that had suffered most heavily under the Russian scorched-earth tactics, and keeping the spiritual bearing of the resistance undimmed in the full light of his Friday sermons. Yet the physical reality of the exhaustion could not be undone even by the most impassioned preaching, and in the years 1858 and early 1859 the first signs of the final reversal began to announce themselves.

The Reversal in 1857 and 1858

Toward the end of 1857 the consequences of Baryatinsky’s starvation strategy began to manifest themselves on a measurable scale in the Chechen mountains and in central Dagestan. The summer of 1857, through a combination of a poor harvest and the merciless burning of farmers’ fields and hay meadows by Russian detachments, had led to a considerable food shortage, and the winter that followed brought to many mountain villages the first real famine since the beginning of the imamate. For Shamil ﵀ personally this was a deep personal trial, for with the severe conscientiousness that had marked him since his youth in Gimry he felt responsibility for the suffering of the population under his sovereignty as his own responsibility, and in the winter of 1857 to 1858 he undertook a series of journeys through the areas that had suffered most heavily under the Russian strategy, in order to observe the condition of the villagers personally and to organise whatever emergency relief lay within his power.

What he found on these journeys was a state of affairs that would alter his general strategic thinking in a fundamental way. He saw villages whose children were dying of malnutrition, women who traded their last ornaments for a handful of grain, and men who quietly doubted the wisdom of a continued struggle whose outcome seemed to promise their families nothing but hunger and death. He met no open revolt against his authority, for his personal authority in these years was undiminished and in many respects even strengthened by the visible earnestness with which he shared the trials alongside his men, yet he did meet a deep weariness that had spread quietly across the community and that over the following year and a half would bring the general morale of the imamate to a fragile point.

The Loss of Vedeno

In April 1859 a Russian operation under General Yevdokimov brought about the fall of Vedeno, the Chechen stronghold that had served since 1845 as the temporary capital of the imamate and that, in its natural defensive position between dense forests and steep mountains, had been held to be impregnable. The fall of Vedeno was preceded by a Russian assault of several days in which the scorched-earth tactic was driven to its utmost, and it ended in a Russian conquest after which Shamil ﵀ withdrew with a small group of his closest associates into the central Avar highlands, where in the village of Gunib he would set up his final defensive position.

The loss of Vedeno was, in both military and spiritual terms, the beginning of the end of the imamate. It demonstrated that no stronghold in the mountains could any longer be considered impregnable, and it brought the imamate into a geographically fragmented condition in which coordination between its various areas was hampered, its supply chain was broken, and its administrative apparatus was undermined in its cohesion. In the following weeks several naibs, under Russian pressure, went over to the loyalist side, and within a span of days to weeks the imamate lost its grip on territories over which it had exercised its sovereignty for fifteen to twenty years.

Gunib and the Final Stronghold

Gunib, an Avar mountain stronghold on a high plateau in central Dagestan, with natural defensive paths, with accessible springs for its water supply, and with a geographical position that made it difficult to approach from several sides, was chosen by Shamil ﵀ in June 1859 as his final stronghold. He gathered there some four hundred men, including his immediate family, his wives, and his youngest children, and he established a defensive organisation designed for a long-sustained resistance, in the hope that the Russian troops would be deterred by the difficulty of the terrain or that an unexpected diplomatic development might offer the imamate a temporary reprieve.

Baryatinsky, who personally took charge of the operation against Gunib, enclosed the stronghold with a force of roughly forty thousand men, with considerable artillery and with the certainty that it would come down to this single operation whether the imamate would be brought to its formal end. The siege began in July and stretched across the whole month of August, in a gradual tightening of the Russian circle around the stronghold, in a continuous artillery bombardment of the Avar defensive positions, and in a psychological pressure whereby Russian emissaries repeatedly put proposals of surrender to Shamil ﵀ under the guarantee of honourable treatment.

The Tactical Realisation

Shamil ﵀ understood, in the weeks-long deliberations that he held with his closest associates in the stronghold of Gunib, that the military situation no longer offered any real prospect of a breakthrough. The Russian encirclement was too dense to be broken by sallies, the logistical supplies in the stronghold were limited and could not be replenished from outside, and the general situation in the imamate was so weakened that no rescue operation by another naib could be expected within any reasonable span. He faced a choice among three possibilities: an utmost defence to the last man with the certain outcome of his own death and that of his men and family; an attempt to escape from the stronghold that would most likely be intercepted by the Russian cordon; or a surrender on the honourable terms that Baryatinsky had repeatedly offered.

The tradition records that he discussed this choice in a seclusion of several days in the central building of the stronghold, in his personal prayers to Allah ﷻ, and that in a joint assembly of his immediate family and his closest associates he had the possibilities examined at length before arriving at a definitive decision. His nearest kin, and in particular his son Ghazi Muhammad who had served him in the final years as a military adviser, counselled him to accept the surrender, in the awareness that an utmost defence, though it would carry in its martyr’s death a great spiritual reward, would make impossible the continuation of the imamate’s work in an altered form in the future. The surrender, by contrast, though it would be personally humiliating, would spare the lives of his men and his family and would keep open the possibility that the idea of the imamate might be carried on in another age and in another form.

The Final Assembly at Gunib

On the evening of the twenty-fifth of August 1859 Shamil ﵀ called together in the central building of the Gunib stronghold an assembly attended by his immediate family, his remaining counsellors, and the most advanced scholars who were still in his direct company. The assembly was held in the awareness that the following day the definitive decision would have to be carried out, and that the outcome of that decision would determine the fate of each of those present. Shamil ﵀ spoke in the assembly with a directness that his associates had not encountered in the preceding days, and he asked each of them, in a round of the gathering, for his personal counsel on the course to follow.

The counsels he received were in their broad outline unanimous in favour of surrender, though each of his associates justified the surrender in his own way. His son Ghazi Muhammad spoke of the duty to spare the lives of the men and of the family for a future moment in which the work of the imamate might be resumed in an altered form. His elder counsellor Aghdash Muhammad ﵀ spoke of the spiritual wisdom that lay in the acceptance of an outcome ordained by Allah ﷻ, one that could not be forced into a different course by human obstinacy. His wife Shuʿaynat spoke of care for the children, who in an utmost defence would lose their parents and who in their young years might perhaps carry on the idea of the imamate in a future form. Only a few younger fighters pleaded for a final sally instead of a surrender, and their arguments were heard by Shamil ﵀ with attention but ultimately not followed.

At the close of the assembly Shamil ﵀ took the decision upon himself in a brief final word. He spoke of his long service to the cause of the imamate, of his gratitude to Allah ﷻ for the years he had been given to serve that cause, of his acceptance of the outcome in which Allah ﷻ, in His unshakeable wisdom, had resolved to bring the imamate to an end in its outward form, and of his trust in the spiritual continuation of the work in a future form that he himself would no longer see. He gave orders that the following morning the surrender negotiations be continued and brought to a definitive agreement, and he then wished those present a last night’s rest in the stronghold that they would leave in peace.

The Surrender

On the twenty-sixth of August 1859 Shamil ﵀, in the company of several dozen of his closest associates and family members, left the stronghold of Gunib and descended to the Russian headquarters where Baryatinsky awaited him. The meeting between the imam and the field marshal took place in an open space at the foot of the Gunib plateau, and it was carried out in a formal ceremony in which the remarkable circumstances of the surrender were already sealed in its very design. Shamil ﵀ arrived on horseback in his usual imamate attire, with his sword still at his side, and he dismounted before Baryatinsky in a gesture that signified his acceptance of the surrender but that, by his manner of performing it, also preserved his dignity.

Baryatinsky received him standing, and he greeted him in a short address in which he expressed his recognition of the courage and steadfastness with which Shamil ﵀ had withstood Russian power for twenty-five years, and in which he confirmed his guarantees that the imam, together with his family and his closest associates, would be conveyed under honourable treatment to the heart of Russia, where he would spend the rest of his life in relative freedom under Russian supervision. Shamil ﵀ answered in likewise brief words, translated by his interpreter, and he acknowledged the surrender as the outcome of a military struggle whose fate had lain in God’s hands and which in its final form had been determined by Allah ﷻ.

The Spiritual Meaning of the Surrender for Shamil ﵀

In his personal utterances in the days and weeks after the surrender, insofar as they were recorded by his closest associates and by his Russian escorts, Shamil ﵀ spoke of the event in a manner that showed neither bitterness nor self-pity but that was marked by a kind of clear awareness in which the military end of the imamate was placed within a larger spiritual frame. He said, in a statement preserved in the tradition of his son Ghazi Muhammad, that a cause borne by Allah ﷻ cannot be measured in its outward outcomes by human standards, and that the surrender at Gunib was not experienced in his own conscience as a spiritual defeat but as the acceptance of a divine decree in which his own share in the cause had been completed in its definitive form.

He added to this, in a second statement preserved with attention in the Avar tradition, that the work of the imamate in its spiritual core could not be undone by any military outcome, and that the generations that would come after him would carry on the resistance in their own form without necessarily having to take on the same military shape. The completion of the imam’s work, in his reading of the prophetic example, lay not in an unbroken military victory but in a fidelity to the cause that could be confirmed through outward trial, and that was confirmed in the surrender at Gunib in a manner that, in its own dignity, bore a spiritual witness.

The Symbolic Shape of the Moment

The moment of the surrender was described with attention in both the Russian and the Dagestani tradition, and it acquired in each source its own symbolic shape. In the Russian reports Baryatinsky’s conduct was presented as a model of Russian clemency and chivalry, and Shamil ﵀ as a worthy adversary whose surrender completed the pacification of the Caucasus in its definitive form. In the Dagestani tradition the moment was described in an entirely different light, namely as the reluctant acceptance by a righteous imam of an outcome ordained by Allah ﷻ, an acceptance that in its outward form was a defeat but that in its spiritual foundation entailed no lost struggle, because the spiritual shape of the resistance could not be determined by any military outcome.

What both sources agree upon is that the surrender itself was carried out with a dignity and a mutual respect that were exceptional in the military history of the nineteenth century. There was no act of vengeance against the surviving imamate fighters, no humiliation of Shamil ﵀ in public processions, no seizure of his personal possessions. In their place there was a dignified handover, followed by a journey to Saint Petersburg in which he was received with public interest in every city he passed through, and which culminated in his eventual arrival at Tsar Alexander II’s residence in a personal meeting in which the Tsar treated him as an honoured guest and in which Shamil ﵀, in his replies, preserved his dignity and his faith in the cause he had borne.

The Journey to Saint Petersburg

In the weeks after the surrender Shamil ﵀ was conveyed with his family and with some of his closest associates by a journey through Russian cities to Saint Petersburg. The journey lasted about a month and led through Tiflis, Stavropol, Rostov-on-Don, Kharkov, Kursk, Tula, and Moscow before it reached its provisional final destination in Saint Petersburg. In each of these cities he was received in honourable welcome by the local authorities, and in many cases the population gathered in the streets to see the man who had been portrayed in the Russian press of the preceding decades as the formidable adversary of the Russian army and whose personal figure now became visible to Russian eyes for the first time.

The reaction of the Russian public was, according to the accounts of contemporaries, remarkably nuanced. Shamil ﵀ was not mocked as a defeated enemy but recognised as a worthy adversary, and his restrained dignity, his unbroken religious conscientiousness, and his physical bearing as a man who despite his sixty-two years was still full of energy made a deep impression on the Russian nobles and citizens who met him. In Kharkov he was received with a banquet by the local governor, in Moscow he visited several sights in the company of his Russian escorts, and in Saint Petersburg he was received in a formal audience by Tsar Alexander II, who repeated to him personally the guarantees of honourable treatment.

Toward the Years in Kaluga

Over the following ten years Shamil ﵀ would live with his family in Kaluga, a Russian provincial town to the southwest of Moscow, in an honourable exile that granted him all the freedoms of a Russian nobleman except the right to return to the Caucasus. In these years he received visits from Russian scholars and officers who recorded his recollections of his imamate in interviews, he maintained correspondence with some of his former associates who had remained in the Caucasus, and he devoted a considerable part of his time to his personal spiritual exercises, which he had sustained undiminished since his youth in Gimry.

Toward the end of the 1860s he submitted to Tsar Alexander II a request to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca, which as a religious obligation had not yet been fulfilled in his life, and in 1869 this request was granted. He departed that year by way of Kiev to Istanbul and from there to Mecca, in a journey that in its final outcome would not return to Kaluga but that would find its final destination in Medina, at the grave of the Prophet ﷺ, in the form of his own burial in 1871. To this last phase of his life, and to the manner in which he transformed the outward defeat of Gunib into a spiritual completion through his hajj and his death in Medina, the next article will devote its attention.

In this article we have seen how the imamate in its final fourteen years was drawn tight under Baryatinsky’s gradual strategy of exhaustion, how Vedeno fell in April 1859, how Gunib became the last fortress of the resistance in August 1859, and how Shamil ﵀, on the twenty-sixth of August 1859, in a noble surrender to Baryatinsky, brought the imamate to an end in its formal shape without giving it up in its spiritual core. The form of the surrender was, however unexpectedly it unfolded for his contemporaries and for later historians in its mutual respect, the outcome of a long strategic reflection in which Shamil ﵀ had weighed the possibilities of his last hour against one another and in which he had chosen the continuation of the idea of the imamate in a future form over the martyr’s death that would undoubtedly have been granted to him at that moment had he chosen the utmost defence.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994), pp. 245–294.
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000), pp. 295–340.
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908), pp. 432–488.
• 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. 264–384.
• ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀, Khulasat al-tafsil ʿan ahwal al-Imam Shamil, Arabic manuscript from 1869; edited by Said Shihaliev, Makhachkala (1992), pp. 56–124.
• Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, Oxford University Press (2008), pp. 91–112.
• Anthony Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov: Viceroy to the Tsar, McGill-Queen’s University Press (1990), pp. 198–246.
• Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise, John Murray (1960; new edition Sphere Books 2004), pp. 412–478.