The Problem of the Caucasus

According to the testimony of historians such as Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and others, the Circassian peoples of the Caucasus occupied, from the remotest antiquity, the territory lying between the mouths of the Don and the Volga to the north; the eastern shores of the Sea of Azov and of the Black Sea as far as the mouth of the river Ingur to the west; the river Ingur and the Caucasian chain as far as the peninsula of Apsheron to the south; and the western shores of the Caspian Sea as far as the mouth of the Volga. Throughout all of antiquity this territory was the uncontested patrimony of the Circassian peoples, who, moreover, often extended beyond the limits indicated above.

The great invasions of the early Middle Ages, which poured unbroken floods of humanity out of Asia into Europe, came up first of all against the Circassian peoples. Placed at the northern edge of that great Asiatic-European corridor we call the Caucasus, like the vanguard of the white race, they always had to bear the first shocks of these invading masses, continually renewed. Throughout the Middle Ages they struggled against the hordes that Asia, that reservoir of men, ceaselessly sent forth toward Europe.

Very often the resistance of the Circassian peoples spared Europe the horrors of these invasions, by breaking their assaults or by halting the masses. At last recovered from these terrible and unceasing shocks of the Middle Ages, the Circassians had begun to raise themselves up again politically during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Muscovite power, avid for conquest in the lands of the South, came upon them in the midst of their work of reconstruction. Once again they had to take up arms and defend the national patrimony against the invader coming from the North.

This resistance of the Circassians against the Russian colossus is without parallel in the history of peoples, as much for the bitterness and the inordinate length of the struggle (1760–1864) as for the disproportion of the forces engaged: on the one side the vastest empire that the hand of man has ever been able to forge, and on the other the Circassian peoples, gathered into small federative republics defending their liberty, their institutions, their hearths. This arena of an unequal and age-long combat long drew to it men of letters, generous spirits, lovers of the beautiful and the noble. Many Englishmen and Frenchmen — such as David Urquhart, James Bell, J. A. Longworth, Edm. Spencer, Dubois de Montpéreux, Taitbout de Marigny, and others — were able, with great pains, to lift a small part of the veil that hid this horrible drama playing out in a forgotten corner of Europe.

Historical Survey

During the eighteenth century, as Russia's commercial relations with Asia developed, the Caucasus — through which the greater part of this traffic passed — began to attract more and more the attention of Russian statesmen.

Moreover, Russia made use, for the conquest of the Caucasus, of the pretext that this province was indispensable to her against Turkey and Persia, which for their part also aspired, in one way or another, to plant their influence in the Caucasian isthmus. At the end of the eighteenth century Russia proceeded to the realisation of her aspirations. The events that took place in Transcaucasia, notably in Georgia, furnished her with the pretext she wanted: that country, weakened by intestine struggles and by the incursions of the Persians under the conduct of the Shah Agha Mohamed Khan, turned to Russia to ask her aid, and it was Russia who profited by this occasion to annex Georgia.

It is from the confirmation of Russian power in Georgia that the bloody pages of the history of the Caucasian peoples are dated: the peoples of the Caucasus came to be attacked from every side of the Caucasian chain, to be reduced to slavery. The history of the conquest of the Caucasus by Russia and of the affirmation of her domination over its peoples is a sad martyrology of small peoples perishing in an unequal and heroic struggle for their independence, their goods, and their customs. The war of the Caucasus, which lasted almost a hundred years, unfolded with a quite particular tenacity at the two extreme corners of the isthmus, whose inhabitants seem destined to mount guard around the Caucasus.

Two principal moments marked the resistance and the development of the peoples of the North Caucasus: on the one hand the defence of the peoples of the Eastern Caucasus, Dagestan and Chechnya, guided by the celebrated chief Shamil; on the other the defence of the peoples of the Western Caucasus — the Kuban, the Black Sea littoral, Abkhazia, and the Province of Stavropol — directed by various chiefs, of whom Cheyk Mansour and Mehmet Emin were the most popular.

In these two zones, akin by community of origin, of spirit, of aspiration, but separated one from the other by the salient of the Russian army, the forces of the Caucasians gathered, even as there arose political ideas and dispositions of mind that were infallibly to lead the natives of the Caucasus to the struggle for independence.

The war awakened among the peoples of the Caucasus, with a rare intensity, the development of personal initiative as well as the idea of their national unity.

All the efforts of Shamil — who had succeeded, as is known, by an iron discipline, in uniting the Caucasians from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the source of the river Terek, and who had tried to extend the unification as far as the Black Sea littoral — confirm our thesis. These efforts tended evidently to create a single political body of all the peoples of the Caucasus, with the aim of halting the advance of the Russian colossus.

To attain this, Shamil had recourse to heroic measures. He annihilated in his path the ambitious princes and overthrew the small factions that hindered the idea of unity. His popular activity, by its very essence, acquired a particular force among the masses by the fact that, an enthusiast of Islam, he leaned upon the ideas of equality, of justice, and of fraternity drawn from that religion. He was more than a man of genius in command: he became the reformer and the founder of the national foundations of the Caucasus. A leader of men beloved of the people, he became the all-powerful administrator in whose hands were concentrated all the powers and all the governmental initiatives. The local conditions and the state of war required it so. All of Dagestan and all of Chechnya were divided into districts governed by Naïbs designated by Shamil. At the same time he prepared the framework for the mobilisation of the people in view of the war of independence.

This war was conducted against the armies of the Tsars with heroism and success: the military, political, and financial organisation of Dagestan and Chechnya was at the level of a true constituted State.

The numerical superiority of the enemy, as well as the disadvantageous conditions of international politics, brought it about that the State of the Caucasus succumbed: Shamil fell into the hands of the Russians — a mortal blow to the cause of the Caucasian peoples.

But the resistance of the peoples of the Western Caucasus still continued with the same tenacity and the same heroism, from the Terek as far as the Black Sea; repelling the enemy forces, they were inspired always by the idea of unity and independence.

Let us remark here that the political and social organisations which arose in the midst of the bloody struggle of the Caucasians, or of the Circassians of the West, had increased their warlike power even as they fortified the principles of political unity and independence. The peoples living to the west of the Terek, from the point of view of their Caucasian race, made themselves known in history under the name of Circassians. The relative structure of the country gave them the possibility of developing a high economic culture.¹ The forms of their political organisation also bear its imprint up to a certain point. The Circassian tribes — the Kabartays, the Ubykhs, the Abkhazians, the Abazins, the Shapsugs, and others, as well as the Karachays, the Balkars, and the Ossetians, who lived in their neighbourhood and who found themselves under their immediate influence — were divided into the classes of the "poly" (princes), of the "York" or Uzdens (nobles), and of the common people. To the princes belonged the high command of the military forces; the representatives of the middle class, the nobles, were charged with political and social direction. Vital questions were, in each tribe, within the competence of the popular assemblies, which gathered on the occasion of the most important events: war and other national calamities. The authority of these popular assemblies was so great that, in the course of the pacification of the country, the Russian authorities turned to them more than once to push through this or that measure.

Such was the political and social constitution of the peoples of the Western Caucasus at the moment when they came up, on the fields of battle, against the armies of the Russian empire.

Meanwhile, the Circassian political idea grew with an extraordinary rapidity under the thunder of the cannon of the Russian conquerors, and welded these peoples into one united family. The researches of European travellers and the communications of serious historians show how the Circassian tribes living in the North of the Caucasus had agreed among themselves to entrust to a single popular figure the supreme power, and to introduce into Circassia what was lacking to unity and to order: a permanent militia, a financial system, and an administrative management.

The Circassians were convinced that union alone could preserve their independence and their national customs against the covetousness of Russian imperialism. Let us recall, by way of example, the famous popular assembly gathered on 13 June 1861, which decided unanimously to establish an "Extraordinary Union" of all the Circassians and to confide to it the supreme power of the State. For the management of the Union there was established a Medjlisse (Assembly) of fifteen Ulema, known under the name of the "Great Free Session" or "Medjlisse of the Circassian Liberties." This body divided the country into twelve cantons, designating in each of them Muftis, Cadis, and Mukhtars.

Even while creating and consolidating by this act the interior administration of the country, the Circassians understood that what had been done was insufficient to repel their enemy, so superior in number, and that it was indispensable that their independence be recognised from the international point of view. This is why they hastened to draw to the violation of their territory by the Russian armies the attention of Turkey and of the Western powers — above all that of England, whom they regarded as the home of parliamentarism and the protectress of the free development of peoples. In a particular report addressed to Great Britain at Sothon, Dixdon, the Circassians begged her to bring to the knowledge of the English government the outrage committed against the independence of their country by the Russian armies, which had encircled Circassia on every side under the command of General Evdokymoff. At the same time, they sent to Constantinople, to Paris, and to London an embassy under the direction of the great patriot Ismaïl Barskay Okuz Djaps, who gave proof of an uncommon diplomatic talent. The Circassian deputation was everywhere well received; in London the English people gave it a warm welcome and often bore it in triumph. The delegates were the guests of England for several months. Yet, throughout all this tragic struggle, there was, for the solution of the Circassian question, but a single attempt of an international character. This was the proposal that England made immediately after the Crimean campaign, to guarantee the independence of the Caucasians — a proposal that came up against the opposition of Napoleon III, desirous, in anticipation of the Franco-Prussian war, of drawing Russian diplomacy to his side.

Thus all the appeals of the Caucasians to civilised Europe were in vain, and there remained to them in their despair but one heroic recourse: they decreed the levy en masse and resistance to the utmost. But the army of Count Evdokymoff, superior in number, leaning with its left wing upon the mountain and with its right upon the Sea of Azov, drew its iron circle ever tighter around the independent Circassians, in order to stifle them definitively in 1864.

So ended the war of independence of the peoples of the two parts of the Caucasus. The original civilisation they defended to the last extremity perished at the same time. The government of the Tsars, having conquered the Caucasus, did not, however, stop at the official conclusion of the war; it set about dislodging the Circassians from the places where they had been settled for centuries, and peopling them with Cossack colonists.

The Grand Duke Michael, viceroy of the Caucasus and brother of the Tsar Alexander II — of him whom Russian history calls the liberator — by his decree of the month of June 1864 enjoined upon the Circassians, under pain of death, the order to leave their valleys and their mountains within the space of one month, to gather on the shores of the Black Sea, at determined points, to be transported by their own efforts to Turkey in Turkish ships, and to quit forever the country which for three thousand years they had defended against the Huns, the Mongols, the Tartars, and the rest (Élisée Reclus). The Circassians were not rebels; all of history is there to prove it. By what means, then, can one justify this barbarous conduct of the Russian government toward a people who had always lived free and independent, and whose sole and only wrong was to wish to keep its liberty.

The Caucasians, given over to the mercy of the punishments of the Cossack hordes and placed outside the law, came out from their flowering enclosures, abandoned their tilled fields, their gardens, and their households, and made their way in one long column toward Turkey, keeping in the depths of their souls the sentiment of vengeance and the bitterness of seeing themselves driven from their fatherland. The emigrants gathered by tens of thousands on the north-east shore of the Black Sea, in the ports of Anapa, of Novorossiysk, and of Batum, awaiting their turn for shipment to Turkey.

As for the emigrants of the Centre and of the East of the Caucasus, of Ossetia and of Chechnya, they went to Anatolia by way of Alexandropol. The total number of emigrants who left the Caucasus in the unhappy year 1864 alone reached 750,000. The reports of the European consuls of the time likewise attest the horrors and the sufferings borne at Batum, at Samsun, and at Trebizond by these unhappy outcasts of Tsarism. The mortality among them reached, owing to the absence of all organisation in their displacement, a colossal figure. At Trebizond alone there were, in a short time, more than 30,000 deaths among the emigrants. As the result of an act so brutal and so cruel, the ethnographic map of the North of the Caucasus underwent a great change: the whole province of Stavropol and the best parts of the regions of the Kuban and the Terek found themselves in the hostile hands of the Russian and Cossack populations, which, in places — among others on the Sunzha — pushed in as far as the mountains, in order to weaken, according to the calculations of the Russian strategists, the natives of the Caucasus. These new implanters of civilisation were incapable of maintaining and developing the original culture of the country; quite the contrary, all that was living around them quickly succumbed. The immense meadows, the gardens, the roads, the aqueducts disappeared without return in this land where the plundering Cossacks were the masters. One of the best connoisseurs of the Caucasus, Yakoff Abramoff, who had long observed the conduct of the Russians in the Caucasus, allowed himself this indignant cry: "With what effrontery the Russians annihilate the products of the Kabardian culture and the labour of long years!"

One could cite many attestations confirming the annihilation of Caucasian civilisation by Russian methods, but we shall confine ourselves to noting that a part of the moral responsibility for the devastation of the Caucasus falls upon an indifferent Europe.

On the one hand, the Russian government pushed forward the Cossacks, who formed a privileged minority, a dominant class; and on the other, it persecuted and oppressed the natives, driving them into the valleys covered with thick forests and taking from them by force the best lands to deliver them to the intruding element. To characterise the seizure of the lands and the Muscovite violence, let us cite the petition of the Ingush people to the first Duma, where one finds, word for word, the following: "The local authorities, inspired by the baleful idea of Russification, began to take away our lands and to settle Cossacks upon them: two-thirds of our lands, seized by force, have passed into the hands of the Cossacks… the conduct of the authorities has convinced us that they wish to annihilate us to the last man."

The result of this policy of rapine was the concentration of immense riches and of landed property in the hands of the Cossacks: the latter, besides the revenues from the naphtha, the mines, and the railways, enjoy the exclusive right of fishing on the Terek, the Sunzha, the Malka, and the Caspian Sea up to seventy kilometres from the shore. Whereas the Cossack population possesses, for each male, twenty-three desyatinas of land, there falls to the people of Chechnya, of Digoria, of Ingushetia, and of Dagestan only one-tenth to two desyatinas of arable land per person. The Caucasians are so straitened in this respect that, on the strip of terrain situated in the mountains, the lands scarcely suffice for a fifth part of the population; the rest barely subsist, or cultivate the country, going off meanwhile to Europe or to America. These findings were officially made by a land commission.

The Caucasians, placed in conditions impossible from the economic point of view, systematically persecuted by the Cossacks as well as by the rigorous régime of Tsarism, and deprived of every means of defending their interests, became naturally fierce: they sowed desolation, took to brigandage and raiding, and manifested their indignation in the most diverse forms.

When occasions of revolt presented themselves among the Caucasians, they quickly took on the character of a great political movement of liberation or of protest. Thus in 1877, profiting by the occasion that the Russo-Turkish war brought them, the peoples of Dagestan and of Abkhazia raised the standard of insurrection against Russia. This insurrection was stifled in the most atrocious manner: some were deported, others shot, still others sent to penal servitude. It ended with a second sending into exile of about 100,000 men, from Abkhazia into Turkey. After 1877, the harsh régime and the cynicism of the Cossack punishments made themselves felt still more rigorously, and engendered revolts in Chechnya in 1898, in Ossetia in 1902 and 1905, and in Ingushetia in 1906; they were repressed by terrible atrocities, considered by Tsarism as the sole remedy for the so complicated question of the Caucasus.

The general conditions of political life in the government of the Tsars were such that all the political parties and all the individuals who could not lend themselves as a hinge to the governmental orders and the bureaucratic spirit dragged out in Russia a miserable and obscure existence — unless they resigned themselves to emigration, in order to defend their cause abroad.

All the Caucasians who met one another abroad united on the ground of a community of aspirations tending toward a Caucasus independent, politically united, founded on the principles of a Confederation of all its peoples, without distinction of nationality or of creed. It was in this sense that all the steps of international scope were taken. Those which relate to a recent epoch have a considerable importance for the present situation.

The Caucasus During the War

The world war appeared to the Caucasian peoples the most favourable occasion that could offer itself to them for realising their national aspirations. But unfortunately the European situation was such that the homes of liberalism and of generosity, the Western powers — England and France, the countries to which the Caucasians were accustomed to turn, now to consolidate their international situation, now to free themselves from the Muscovite yoke — found themselves allied with Tsarism, while Turkey, which in company with France and England had so often supported their cause, had bound herself to the Central powers. This state of things prevented them from turning to the Western powers; one could not ask them to work against their principal ally in the European arena.

But Turkey, the former collaborator of England and France in the work of liberating the Caucasus, and whose territory is inhabited by a million and a half Caucasian refugees, found herself once more at war against their executioners, the Russians. Despite the absence of their former protectors, the English and the French, the Caucasians could not but turn to Turkey and to her new allies, little known or little popular in the Caucasus. In December 1915, a delegation composed of representatives of the different Caucasian peoples went to Berlin and to Vienna, and set forth to the German and Austrian governments the intolerable situation of these peoples and their desire to deliver themselves from the Muscovite yoke. In January 1916, the delegation presented to the Central powers a memorandum containing an exposition of the situation in the Caucasus, begging them to give its peoples material and moral support for their liberation: it proposed the creation of a Caucasian Federation composed of three States, a federation that would serve as a buffer State against imperialist Russia.

In its reply, the German government expressed its sympathies for the project in question, declaring itself ready to support the Caucasian claims in the measure of the possible. However, after the collapse of Russia — caused by bad administration and by the centrifugal aspirations of the oppressed non-Russian nationalities — when it became necessary to execute these promises, Germany, in order to conciliate the good graces of the Bolsheviks and of the Cossacks, took no further account of the promises given in January 1916 and in May 1918. To have a point of support in the Caucasus, she took in hand, and in a direct manner, the affairs of Georgia, whose independence she caused the government of Lenin to accept, leaving aside, at the mercy of the Bolshevik and Cossack terror, the other Caucasian peoples who, alone, for a century, had struggled for the independence of their country.

The Caucasians continued to take part in the efforts tending to deliver the Caucasian peoples. Let us recall the conference of Lausanne (June 1916), where the representatives of twenty-seven oppressed nations publicly condemned the interior and exterior policy of Russia. The conference expressed its sympathies for the liberating movement of the Caucasians by enthusiastic ovations addressed to the grandson of the hero Shamil, who took part in the deliberations.

Such are the principal stages of the liberating movement of the Caucasian peoples and of their struggles for independence, up to the revolution of 1917, which delivered the non-Slav Russian subjects from the Tsarist yoke and put an end to the oppression of the small peoples enclosed within the Russian empire. From the very first days of the Russian revolution, the peoples of the North Caucasus created a political Union, in order to work by common effort toward the new order.

These peoples — intimately bound to one another as much by the geographical situation of their territory as by the community of their historical destinies and by Islam — awoke and set about forging their own happiness.

At the first assembly of the Caucasians, which took place in May 1917 in the town of Vladikavkaz, the Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus and Dagestan was officially concluded, and there was created for it an executive organ under the name of the "Central Committee of the Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus and Dagestan."

After the example of the other peoples of Russia, the Caucasians placed at the head of their political programme the demand for the establishment in Russia of a Federative Republic, of which the Union would form a part on a basis of equality. Given the circumstances of the time, the requirements of the Caucasian peoples could not go further.

From the very first days of its activity, the political relations of the Caucasian Committee were very complicated, both to the North and to the East.

In respect of the Transcaucasian Tatars, who inhabit a territory abutting directly upon Dagestan and even occupying a part of it (for example the district of Kuba, with its 200,000 Lezghins), the situation of the Caucasians was clear. Already at the time of the formation of the Union, they entered into contact with the Transcaucasian Tatars and, at the first assembly of the Muslims of the Caucasus, held at Baku in April 1917, they established friendly relations with them.

As for the Georgians, the North Caucasians constantly followed a policy of friendship and good neighbourliness toward them, despite the quarrels relating to the delimitation of the frontiers. The Georgians coveted South Ossetia, availing themselves of historical and territorial principles, as well as the district of Zakatal, on the pretext that, for economic reasons, this district gravitates toward Transcaucasia. They coveted also the district of Sukhum, on account of the so-called civilising influence of Georgia in those parts. No concession was made, in these questions, to the Georgians on the part of the Caucasians; but, for considerations of a tactical order, the latter did not wish to envenom the discussion, preferring to leave the solution of the difference to the favour of time. It is the population of the contested zones that should decide its own fate.

As for the Armenian question, the North Caucasians are not directly interested in it, given the small number of Armenians inhabiting that land. The Union, nevertheless, took care to preserve the best relations with them. Many Armenians who, because of the war, could not remain in Armenia or in Georgia, found refuge and asylum among the peoples of the Union.

The relations of the Union with its Cossack neighbours were recognised as extremely entangled, by virtue of that historical enmity of which we spoke above and which was created by the policy of the Russian government. It was the fact of having monopolised in the hands of the Cossacks the economic and political advantages of the country that gave birth to this antagonism. The revolution brought back onto the table all the questions of national and economic oppression, all the political injustices that divide the Caucasians and the Cossacks.

From its first days, the Russian Revolution posed the most painful questions: the question of the nationalities and the agrarian question. Already in the declarations of the first president of the provisional government, Prince Lvoff (of 9 April 1917), we find a negative response as regards the recognition of the right of peoples to decide their own fate.

The agrarian question — fundamental for the peasant of agricultural Russia, who throughout all his history suffered from the lack of land or from its unjust distribution — received, in that government of the revolutionary parties, the most radical solution. But the order of ideas "The land to those who cultivate it!" met with general approval; the parties of the right and of the left were divided only on this point, that the former wished the redemption of the lands by legal means, while the others demanded their free surrender. From this it resulted that, in proportion as the lower strata of the Caucasian population became acquainted with the aims and the problems of the revolution, they became its most ardent defenders.

This is why the attempt of the Russian counter-revolutionaries to overthrow the provisional government, with the help of the Caucasian national cavalry division, in order to restore the old régime, was easily foiled by the Central Committee of the Caucasians. The Committee had the true meaning of the revolution and of the provisional government explained, through its representatives, to the horsemen of the division at the gates of Petrograd, and succeeded in this way in halting the Caucasians at the threshold of the Russian capital, which was already ready to surrender. Who knows what the fate of the Russian revolution would have been, had the Caucasian national division not halted its march on Petrograd?

The Cossacks, who enjoyed all the rights of a privileged class, behaved, on the contrary, with much reserve toward the coup d'État.

Now, in proportion as the Government recognised the soundness of the agrarian and national questions — promising, under the pressure of the revolutionary parties, to resolve them in the general interest and in an equitable manner — the Cossacks openly took up a hostile attitude against the provisional government. For the same reason, our relations with the Cossacks, possessors of the greater part of the good lands which had formerly belonged to the Caucasian peoples, went from bad to worse. On the river Sunzha and in some localities of the province of the Terek, between the Caucasian peoples and the Cossacks, there occurred small engagements, murders, pillagings, and premeditated arsons. At times the partial engagements spread from one place to another, degenerating into veritable combats over a considerable space. Artillery took part in them as well. The Caucasians, stifling for want of land, rushed like a hurricane into the valleys and to the feet of the mountains that had been taken from them, but yesterday, by force. The Cossacks naturally did everything in their power to defend the invaded territories; they tried to stigmatise, before public opinion, the movement of the Caucasian peoples as an act of brigandage and pillage.

The provisional government maintained with the Cossacks — who served as a bulwark to reaction and to Tsarism — relations full of suspicion, and, of course, gave them neither the authorisation nor the forces necessary to stifle the Caucasian movement. Having declared the abolition of the classes and the equality of all citizens before the law, the provisional government saw rise up the Cossacks of the Terek, of the Kuban, and of the Don, who began to speak of their historical particularism, of their customs, and the like — distinguishing the Cossacks from the rest of Russia, in order to guard themselves against the reforms to come. Thus there began among the Cossacks a policy of mendacious decentralisation which, as we shall see further on, pursued wholly egoistic ends.

The Caucasians, while taking an interest in the revolutionary ideas, conducted at the same time a particular policy with a view to the creation, on their own historical territory, of the federative unity of the North Caucasian peoples, in order to procure for themselves the possibility of living in conformity with their national aspirations. But the rapid course of the revolution precipitated events, widened perspectives, demanded a vast creative labour; and, by the force of circumstances, the activity of the Central Committee of the Caucasians — which had consolidated itself and had grown in importance — exceeded the limits of the mandate that the first assembly of the North Caucasian peoples had given it. This is why a second assembly of the delegates of the Union of the Caucasian peoples gathered on 20 September 1917 at Vladikavkaz, to deliberate upon the questions of the day and to revise the resolutions of the first assembly. In the meantime, the Nogais and the Turkmens of the government of Stavropol — who, not having had time to incorporate themselves into the Union, had formed with the Kara-Nogais a separate district — likewise adhered to the Central Committee. The Abkhazians did the same. The second assembly thus comprised all the peoples of the North Caucasus, fused into a single nation: the inhabitants of the district of Dagestan and of Zakatal; all those of the land of the Terek — the Kabardians, the Balkars, the Ingush, the Chechens, the Kumyks, and the Salatals; the tribes of the land of the Kuban — the Karachays, the Abkhazians, the Circassians, the Nogais, and others; the inhabitants of the district of Sukhum — the Abkhazians; the tribes of the Steppes of the land of the Terek — the Nogais and the Kara-Nogais; and those of the province of Stavropol — the Turkmens and the Nogais. As appears from this enumeration, the union of the Caucasian peoples embraces, by way of free declaration and without any constraint, an important territory, and expressed in a real form that idea of unification in whose name Shamil and his partisans had struggled.

Beyond the definitive consolidation of the Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus, the second assembly marks yet a new stage of their political organisation. The Central Committee of the Caucasians, which had already to its credit the experience of a work of consolidation concerning the organisation of power and of administration, proposed to the second assembly a draft Constitution for the Caucasian Union. The fundamental bases of this draft are summed up in the following articles:

1) The peoples of the North Caucasus and of Dagestan form a single political unity.

2) Within the limits of the Union each people shall enjoy a complete interior autonomy.

3) For the solution of the general affairs of the Union there are formed legislative institutions in the form of Chambers: a lower Chamber, embodying the idea of the free nation and composed of deputies elected at the rate of one for every 30,000 of the population, and an upper Chamber embodying the idea of Unity and composed of representatives of the peoples at the rate of two for each.

4) The members of the legislative chambers choose from among themselves the representatives of the executive power; this power chooses a president, who fulfils likewise the functions of head of the Union.

5) There is established a supreme tribunal, within whose functions shall enter the regulation of the questions of the Constitution of the Union, seeing that there is conferred upon it the right to pronounce upon the constitutional conformity both of the laws elaborated by the legislative chambers and of the acts of the executive power and of the other integral parts of the Union.

The draft was approved, and it was decided to organise, in proportion as the exigencies of life should demand it, governmental institutions in conformity with the principles fixed in the draft, the definitive approval of which belonged to the Constituent Assembly. The Central Committee, formed of fifteen members, was reorganised and furnished with vast extraordinary powers, in order to face the most dangerous of situations.

Affairs between the Caucasians and the Cossacks threatened to end in catastrophe; the struggle of the parties in the political centres, a struggle whence new upheavals might result; the devastating passage of the soldiers of the demoralised army, coming from the front and making their way home; the complete disorganisation of the railways, of the supply institutions, and of the finances — such are the circumstances that characterised the complexity of the problem.

The government of Kerensky came up against resistances from two sides: on the right, from the side of the Cossacks and of the party of the Cadets, but yesterday so powerful; on the left, from the side of the socialist-revolutionaries, the internationalists, and the maximalists, having at their head Lenin. The reiterated attempts of Petrograd to coalesce everywhere with the extremist currents did not result in the establishment of a strong and single power, whose absence the whole country already suffered from. The ties of the centre with the peripheries gradually weakened. In the distant lands, above all among the non-Slav peoples, the tendency toward individualisation began visibly to manifest itself. From the October coup d'État — that is to say, from the fall of the Kerensky Cabinet and the advent of the maximalists — the peoples living on the periphery of the old Russian empire broke off all liaison with Petrograd and Moscow.

New governmental formations came into being; some tended simply toward the overthrow of the maximalist government and the unification of the crumbling empire; others, on the contrary, hoisted the flag of definitive separatism.

Thus there arose in the south of Russia, under the impulse of the Cossacks and the Cadets, the South-Eastern Union, at the head of which placed themselves Russian nationalists such as Milioukoff,² Goutchkoff, Kharlamoff, and the generals Alexeyeff and Kaledine — a union which, of course, tended to re-establish the empire; the Union of the Caucasian peoples, on the contrary, having always had centrifugal tendencies, was thinking of separating itself completely from Russia.

How strange appeared, at that moment, the dispositions and the tendencies that served as a basis for the provisional and technical unification of these two organisations, which started from different principles and pursued opposite ends! At the invitation of the South-Eastern Union, the Caucasians conferred, to the number of four persons delegated by the Central Committee, in order to reinforce the centrifugal elements of the South-Eastern Union. They thought thus to put an end to the influence of the central government over their affairs, and at the same time to isolate the Cossacks from Russia, so as to consolidate, during that time, their own positions, and to be able thereafter to repel the annexationist projects coming from Russia or from her vanguards, the Cossacks. They hoped at the same time to diminish considerably the hostility of the armed struggle between Caucasians and Cossacks of the Terek.

The South-Eastern Union, whose partisans were the most remarkable Russian centralists, recruited from the party of the Cadets, pursued ends conformable to the old Russian imperialism; it aimed to unify around itself all the Russia of the South and Siberia, and to take, by a coup d'État, the place of the revolutionary government. In view of these perspectives and for tactical reasons, the South-Eastern Union showed a great deference toward the Caucasians in their conflict with the Cossacks, fearing on their part a policy capable of barring to the Russians the road toward the South and Transcaucasia.

The South-Eastern Union exercised a pressure upon the Cossacks of the Terek in the sense that it sought to make the military operations cease, obliging them to certain territorial concessions to the profit of the Caucasians. It was thus that there were ceded to the Caucasians the towns of Karabulak, of Sunzha, of Voznesensky — which, moreover, the Caucasians had previously occupied by force of arms. It was the same in the Kuban, where, under the influence of the South-Eastern Union, the Cossacks were obliged to soften the character of their relations with the Circassians.

The Cossacks of the Terek quickly understood all the disadvantage that followed, for their local interests, from the entry of the Caucasians into the South-Eastern Union: in October 1917 the representatives of eight townships of the line of the Sunzha lodged a protest with the assembly of the deputies of soldiers and workers at Vladikavkaz, saying: "The Ingush, the Chechens, and the other Caucasians being a disastrous element for us, they ought not to enter the South-Eastern Union."

Subsequently, the Cossacks, having lost all hope of being able to defend their local interests within the South-Eastern Union, carried on a great agitation against their representatives. The result of it was the murder of the most remarkable member of the Union, Karaouloff, ex-deputy to the Duma. They began to seek protection among the soldiers who, imbued with the maximalist state of mind and abandoning then the Caucasian front, were returning, wholly demoralised, to their homes in Russia. Entire deputations of Cossacks went to meet the military echelons passing by with arms in hand. They carried grievances against the Caucasians and demanded their succour and their intervention. The army yielded at times to this skilful provocation to war against the Caucasians, but the intervention of the South-Eastern Union did not allow the conflagration to spread, and spared them the devastation.

Such is the maximum of positive results that the Caucasians obtained by their short-lived connection with the South-Eastern Union. It is, however, indispensable to point out that this connection was purely nominal, because of the four places offered by the government of the South-Eastern Union, the Caucasians occupied only three, in the persons of Tchermoyeff, of Bammate, and of Kotzeff³ (the author of these lines refused to enter the cabinet thus formed), and because, during a sojourn of two weeks in the government, they could carry out no work of organisation.

Given the departure of the army from the Caucasian front on the one hand, and the forward thrust of the maximalists in the region of the Don on the other, no interest any longer bound the Caucasians to the South-Eastern Union. And so their representatives were recalled. This connection had been settled upon by the Caucasians themselves for considerations of a tactical order. These vanished from that moment, and there remained no reason to keep ties with the South-Eastern Union. The latter, no longer receiving reinforcements from the Caucasian peoples in the struggle against the maximalists, was forced to give up its positions one after another, and disintegrated shortly afterward.

Since the October coup d'État (1917), whose result was the almost general confirmation in Russia of Bolshevik power, the Central Committee of the Caucasian peoples, not having recognised the maximalists, in fact assumed the functions of an independent governmental power over the territory of the Caucasian Union. This new situation, created by the work of the revolution and by the work of our Central Committee, engendered the Act of 2 December, which proclaimed the independence of the Union of the Peoples of the Caucasus and declared the Central Committee henceforth the provisional government of the Caucasians, until the convocation of the Russian Constituent Assembly. Given the momentary circumstances, which were not yet wholly exempt from danger, this idea of a mention of the Constituent Assembly had been kept; but this idea was soon rejected by the act of 21 December of the same year, breaking the last ties with Russia and consecrating the separatist orientation of the Union of the Caucasian Peoples.

The Government of the United Caucasians took, in its declaration of 21 December 1917, a series of measures relating to the different branches of governmental organisation, to the military forces, to the finances, to supply, to the agrarian question, to administration, and the like. The native division of the Caucasus, which had returned from the front, saw its cadres enlarged and was developed into an army corps. Everywhere on the territories of the Union of the Caucasians, there was confirmed the power of the commissars of the separatist government and of the national councils. This power embraced, moreover, only the local questions of an economic and moral order. For the other questions enumerated in the declaration, it was not given to the Caucasian government to realise fully the reforms aimed at, seeing that the objective conditions of daily labour grew much more complicated by troubles ever more disastrous.

The Caucasian Union saw itself plunged into a desperate struggle against the Cossacks and, in general, against the Russians of the land, who, having already united with the maximalists, marched against the native peoples. This Bolshevism, under whose banner all the Russians inhabiting the Caucasus rallied, was in reality a national movement: the Cossacks and the other Russians did not wish to abandon the Caucasus, nor the privileged situation they had carved out for themselves in that land — privileges that the Caucasian Union wished to abolish. Such are the reasons for which the Cossacks, formerly partisans of decentralisation, suddenly became centralists once more, and even maximalists.

The Bolsheviks, having defeated the considerable forces of the Cossacks of the Don, traversed the land of the Kuban, annihilating a great number of Circassian villages; they united with the Cossacks of the Terek in order to march, in a common effort, against the peoples of the Caucasus. The latter defended themselves and even passed to the offensive, to throw back, with heavy losses, the forces of the enemy. The military operations took on the character of a regular war of positions, with rare but violent attacks. A great quantity of munitions was needed for the firearms, and the Caucasian Union saw the last it possessed exhausted, paying three to five roubles a piece, in order to defend the native soil. Unhappily its heroic efforts were in vain: soon the munitions failed completely. The maximalists advanced and, after hard combats, took the railway line from Beslan as far as Mineralni Vody. But despite all their efforts, they could not occupy Vladikavkaz for long. However, taking into consideration that the town lay between the Cossacks and the Caucasians, and that, in the face of military operations, it would have become an arena of combats entailing perhaps its definitive destruction, with all the edifices and all the riches belonging to the Caucasian Union, we decided to abandon the capital and to transfer our residence to Nazran. Even after the abandonment of the town, the maximalists long hesitated to occupy it. Finally they penetrated into it, occupying the railway line that runs as far as Grozny. It must be noted that the maximalists, occupying the towns situated on the railway line — and their number is very small — could not, for all that, extend their influence further into the villages, into the depth of the popular masses, which up to this moment take account only of the power of the government of our "Union." It is solely by this circumstance that one can explain the failure of the maximalists, who could not penetrate further into Transcaucasia by the military roads of Ossetia and of Georgia, nor across Dagestan. It goes without saying that the hostility of the popular masses against the maximalist power prevented the latter from consolidating itself in the towns, and that a small reserve of munitions would have sufficed the Caucasians to clear their towns of the Bolsheviks.

Subsequently, the Caucasian government little by little reorganised its military forces in Dagestan, and retook, one by one, by force of arms, all the places it had lost in the preceding months. Thus the towns of Derbent, Petrovsk, and Vladikavkaz were successively recovered. Since the month of August 1918 the whole railway line Vladikavkaz–Baku and Vladikavkaz–Nalchik finds itself in the hands of the troops of the North Caucasian Republic. The latter made efforts to bring Transcaucasia to a common action against the Bolsheviks, and to clear up definitively the question of the reunion in a single State of the peoples of the two halves of the Caucasus.

The Federalist Idea in the Caucasus

We have already had occasion to say that the North Caucasians tended, in sum, toward the creation of a Caucasus unified and independent on the bases of a confederation — thinking that the interests of each confederated State would thus be defended in the best fashion and from every point of view.

The Caucasus possesses all the vital forces capable of serving as a base for a truly independent State, and able to suffice unto itself from the economic, political, and military point of view. It was with these projects that the representatives of the North Caucasian Republic went to Tiflis to deliberate with the different parties, the national councils, and the most prominent deputies of the Transcaucasian diet. Thus far their mission has had no positive result, on account of the following circumstances:

When Bolshevism triumphed everywhere in Russia, there was improvised in Transcaucasia an independent government, under the name of the "Transcaucasian Commissariat," unifying the Georgian, Tatar, and Armenian nations. This government was responsible first before the extreme centre of the deputies — of the workers, the soldiers, and the peasants — and then before the Transcaucasian diet. It was the party of the Georgian social-democrats that predominated in the diet: it held to the pan-Russian orientation and considered the separation of the Caucasus from Russia as fatal. It found a support in the diet in a powerful Armenian party, the "Dashnaktsutiun." To these two parties, the independence of Transcaucasia presented itself as a provisional state in which to escape maximalism, while awaiting the Constituent Assembly of all Russia.

Under the influence of this dominant current, Transcaucasia, without in principle rejecting the idea of unity, did nothing toward the realisation of the proposals of the North Caucasian Republic. Soon began the deliberations of the Peace Conference of Trebizond between Turkey and Transcaucasia which, as is known, had no result. Transcaucasia, which had not formally proclaimed its independence, did not recognise either the conditions of Brest-Litovsk, on which Turkey insisted, and recalled its representatives to Tiflis.

The delegation of the Republic of the North Caucasus, which had come to Trebizond only toward the end of the deliberations, adopted there a particular attitude, which is expressed in a declaration made the very day on which the Transcaucasian delegation set off again for Tiflis, and of which here is the tenor:

"The North Caucasians are firmly persuaded that Transcaucasia cannot exist as an independent governmental organism without uniting itself to the territory of the peoples of Dagestan and of the North Caucasus. The creation of a unified Caucasus is recommended by geographical, economic, strategic, and political considerations. To attain this direct end — such is the task of the North Caucasian delegation, in conformity with the steps it has taken at Tiflis, entering into contact with the national and political organisations of Transcaucasia. In undertaking these steps we are led to believe that all the Caucasian peoples are animated by the same ardent desire to create the conditions of a common life, peaceful and friendly, within the Caucasus, and above all to make a foreign policy in solidarity. We thought that the relations of enmity between ourselves and the neighbouring States ought to be immediately liquidated, setting aside all possibility of hostile operations of Transcaucasia toward the neighbouring States; and we considered such a possibility as the greatest of calamities for the whole of the Caucasus.

"We did at Tiflis all that depended upon us in order to lend our concourse to the leaders of Transcaucasia for the peaceful solution of the conflict. This same impulse guided us in our acts, here, at Trebizond; we note with a sentiment of profound satisfaction that the Caucasian delegation has engaged itself upon the good road, and we are content with it. The recent vote of the Transcaucasian diet, however, places us in a painful situation. We know full well that a durable peace and the possibility of a civilising organisation in the Caucasus will be created only when we return to establishing friendly relations with the neighbouring countries. With a view to this work, we shall continue to labour as we have done up to this day, both at Tiflis and at Trebizond. We are convinced that, despite the momentary difficulties, the peoples of the Caucasus and the neighbouring countries will enter upon the way of peace, of reciprocal friendship, and of civilising labour."

From Trebizond, the delegation of the North Caucasian Republic went off to Constantinople, to have its independence recognised first by Turkey, and then by all the belligerent powers. The delegation was received by the Sultan; the Sublime Porte gave the assurance that Turkey recognised in principle the independence of the North Caucasian peoples, and declared itself ready to undertake the steps necessary to obtain this recognition on the part of its allies. Strengthened by these promises, the plenipotentiary representatives of the North Caucasian government proclaimed, on 11 May 1918, the independence of the Union of the Peoples of the Caucasus, addressing all the powers in these terms:

"The undersigned, plenipotentiary delegates of the government of the Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus, have the honour to bring to the knowledge of all governments the following:

"The peoples of the Caucasus had elected in due form a national assembly which proclaimed, on 11 September 1917, the formation of the Union of the North Caucasian peoples and confided the executive power to the present government.

In presence of the anarchy that reigns in Russia, and profiting by the right of the peoples of the old empire of the Tsars to decide for themselves their political destinies — a right recognised by the government of Petrograd — the government of the Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus has just resolved upon the following dispositions:

1.) The Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus decides upon its separation from Russia and erects itself into an independent State.

2.) The territory of the new State shall have as its frontiers: to the north, the geographical frontiers that the governments and the provinces of Dagestan, of the Terek, of Stavropol, of the Kuban, and of the Black Sea formerly had within the Russian empire; to the west, the Black Sea; to the south, the frontier being fixed in accord with the Transcaucasian government.

The undersigned plenipotentiary delegates have been charged to bring this decision to the knowledge of all governments, and to proclaim, by reason of the change that has come about, the formation of an independent State of the Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus.

In consequence, the undersigned declare that, from this day forth, the independent State of the Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus is duly constituted."

(signed) Abdul Medjid Tchermoyeff, Haïdar Bammate.

This act of 11 May 1918, concerning the notification of the independence of the Union of the North Caucasians, presents itself as the logical and formal consequence of that historical process which — having begun already in the epoch of the Caucasian war, with the organisations of Shamil and the "Medjlisse of the Circassian Liberties," passing by the road of the progress of the political initiative of the Caucasians in Turkey, and traversing the cruel epoch of the insurrections, the revolts, the exiles to Siberia of entire villages, the forced labour and the sentences of death pronounced against the best men by the factotums of the Tsars — is incarnated at last in the real life of an independent State.

Later, the Republic of the Caucasians took part in the Conference of Batum and concluded, on 8 June 1918, a treaty of friendship with Turkey, by which the latter engaged herself to respect the political aspirations of the Caucasian peoples. The negotiations, begun with the same end with the German delegation at the conference of Batum, were interrupted because of the disintegration of Transcaucasia and following the sudden departure of the German delegates. But the diplomatic notes exchanged between the head of the German delegation, General von Lossow, and the president of the North Caucasian delegation, Haïdar Bammate, demonstrated very clearly that Germany admitted the separation of the North Caucasus from Russia.

However, despite all these formal promises, the German government changed its attitude completely: it forced the government of Lenin to recognise only the independence of Georgia, leaving the peoples of the North Caucasus face to face with the Muscovites.

Geographical Survey

The territory of the Union of the Circassian Peoples and of Dagestan forms the principal part of the Caucasian isthmus, which is traversed by the great chain of the Caucasian Mountains — beginning at the peninsula of Taman, opposite the Crimea, with hills of slight elevation, and ending on the side of the Caspian Sea with the peninsula of Apsheron. These mountains recall, in many respects, the Pyrenees and the Andes.

[Figure: "Ethnographic and Political Map of the Republic of the Union of the Circassian Peoples and of Dagestan" — foldout plate accompanying the 1918 article. Legend (colours): Circassian Peoples and those of Dagestan; various Slav peoples; Georgians and other peoples of Europe; Tatars; Armenians. Lines: railways, roads, frontier. — scan to be inserted here.]

On the Black Sea, the coasts of the territory of the Union extend from the mouth of the Ingur — which empties into that sea and serves here as the frontier between the Union and Georgia — as far as the mouth of the Kuban in the strait of Kerch; while the coasts of the Union on the Caspian Sea extend from the mouth of the Kuma as far as Kilyazi.

From the sources of the Ingur, the crest of the mountain chain serves as the line of separation between the Union and the Transcaucasian States, save for the district of Zakatal, which falls within the Union on account of its purely Dagestani population; the rivers Kuban and Kuma are the natural limits between the Union and the States being formed out of the South of the old Russian empire.

The mountains of the Caucasus possess summits of a mean altitude of 1,000 metres in Circassia proper, and of 1,800 metres in Abkhazia. The two principal summits are the Elbruz (5,630 m.) and the Kasbek (5,045 m.). It is the first summit that gives birth to the Kuban, while the second sees the impetuous Terek take rise at its feet. The first of these rivers is navigable over a length of 160 kilometres.

Glaciers. — The glaciers of the Caucasus appear to have a surface superior to that of the glaciers of Switzerland. They are found above all in the central part of the chain.

Lakes. — The Caucasus, rich in glaciers and in watercourses, is scarcely so in lakes, above all on the territory of the Union. Nevertheless, one encounters in the principal chain some small lakes at very considerable altitudes.

Climate. — The variations of temperature are very remarkable in the territory of the Union — variations due to the considerable diversities of altitude, and to the situation of the country between two interior seas. Certain points of the Caucasus are lower than sea level, while others have altitudes approaching 6,000 metres.

A continental temperature predominates in general in the territory of the Union, save in the basin of the Black Sea, which enjoys a maritime climate thanks to the high mountain chain that protects it against the winds and the frosts of the North.

Circassia possesses on its territory climatic stations such as Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk, Teberda, at altitudes of 500 and 1,000 metres, renowned, as well as Mariendad and Lochen,⁴ and the like; while on the shores of the Black Sea there is a Riviera far more splendid, far more extensive — a Riviera that is, as it were, the Côte d'Azur transported to the feet of the high snowy summits of the old Caucasus. Sochi, Gagry, Sukhum, are the principal points of this Côte d'Azur, of this terrestrial paradise for which the Circassian race let itself be mutilated and hacked to pieces, for centuries, by Muscovite barbarism.

Table of the altitudes, the mean temperatures, and the heights of rainfall at certain points of the territory of the Union:

From the medical point of view, the Caucasus is very salubrious, and the mortality there is less than in Russia, in the Ukraine, and in other countries of Europe, where the questions of public hygiene constantly preoccupy the governments.

Flora and Fauna. — The vegetation on the territory of the Union is far richer than that of the Alps and even of Switzerland; in sum, the flora of the North Caucasian territory approaches more nearly that of Western France than that of the Mediterranean. Yet the region of the Black Sea, above all Abkhazia, contains plants proper to both zones. — In Abkhazia the vine grows up to 1,000 metres of altitude. Wheat, maize, barley, rye, and in general the cereals are of an excellent quality in the plains of the Kuban and the Terek.

The forest zone in the great chain occupies an extent of about 700 kilometres in length by 18 to 38 kilometres in width. The lands that border the Black Sea are covered with magnificent forests; the most diverse species — conifers, beeches, oaks, ashes, limes, birches, and others — alternate, succeed one another, and disappear, often surrendering the ground to fruit trees.

To give an idea of the value of the forest species of the territory of the Union of the Circassian peoples, we give below the table of the State forests:

The fauna of the North Caucasus is almost European. The wild animals one encounters are: the deer, the bear, the jackal, the wolf, and the like. Game abounds in the territory of the Union, and above all in the great forests of the northern crests of the chain. Fish abound in the rivers.

Agriculture, which had attained a high degree of perfection and was capable of an intense production — above all in Western Circassia (according to the testimony of European travellers such as Dubois de Montpéreux, James Bell, M. Longworth), where the land, divided to the extreme among all the citizens of the country, was the object of minutely careful attention and yielded products extremely remarkable as much by their quality as by their quantity — began to decline with the wars against the Russians, who burned the harvests, carried off the cattle, cut down the trees. The emigration of a part of the population had dealt a grave blow to the production of the country. But the Circassians who remained in the country set themselves again, after the fatigues and the miseries of an age-long war, to make fruitful with their sweat that earth which they had so often flooded with their blood. Today the plains of the Kuban and the Terek produce cereals that suffice not only for the Caucasus, but give rise besides to an important export through the ports of Novorossiysk and Tuapse.

Stock-raising is held in great honour among the farmers of Circassia, which is covered with innumerable herds of horses, of sheep, of cattle. It is in Circassia that the government of the Tsars always sought principally the war-horse for its numerous cavalry, and it is there that the great slaughterhouses of the Caucasus and of Southern Russia go to seek the livestock they need.

To have an idea of the agricultural wealth of the territory of the Union of the Circassian peoples and of Dagestan, it suffices to cast a glance at the table below:

The cultivation of tobacco, which is only at its beginnings, is taking on an ever greater extension. Here is the production of 1915:

Mineral riches. — The metallic riches of the territory of the Union are very abundant. The metals one encounters most often are: copper, argentiferous lead, iron, magnetic iron, tin. Sulphur is found near Temir-Khan-Shura. The argentiferous lead of the valley of Alaghir is a mine of exceptional importance; one encounters likewise deposits of tin and of rock salt.

The region of the Upper Kuban and Abkhazia contain very important deposits of coal of very good quality.

The naphtha that has caused the prosperity of Baku is encountered abundantly in the territory of the Union, above all at Grozny and at Maikop. The workings of Grozny are in full activity and produce annually two million tons of naphtha. The benzine of Grozny is by far superior to that of Baku, and it is much sought after for machines of delicate construction.

As for the installations necessary to extract the naphtha of Maikop, they are not yet complete.

Mineral Waters. — The territory of the Union is very rich in mineral waters of every sort. What is curious is that on the territory of Pyatigorsk one finds six categories of mineral waters, with temperatures varying between 10° and 52° C — often sulphurous, saliferous, hydrosulphurous, acidulous, alkaline, bicarbonated, acidulous ferruginous, chlorosulphated, sodic and magnesian, saline with or without bromine or iodine. At the very centre of the territory, over a span of 30 to 45 kilometres, one finds several groups of mineral springs presenting, in their ensemble, remarkable analogies with the most celebrated springs of Europe.

Ways of communication. — The Russians having encountered enormous difficulties during the conquest of Circassia and Dagestan, the roads and the railways that they built during the conquest were naturally strategic roads. It was the same for the roads they built after the conquest and the pacification, because the principal idea that presided over the laying-out of these lines was the care for the conservation of the Russian yoke rather than the idea of the well-being of the populations — so that the old lines have rather a strategic character, while the wholly recent lines are commercial lines.

The principal railway lines are: Kavkazskaya–Vladikavkaz–Petrovsk–Derbent–Baku. — Kavkazskaya–Yekaterinodar–Novorossiysk. — Tuapse–Armavir.

To the principal lines must be added the secondary lines: Mozdok–Kizlyar. — Nalchik–Kotlyarevskaya. — Pyatigorsk–Kislovodsk–Yessentuki.

The total length of these railways is 1,884 kilometres, to which must be added 1,563 kilometres of carriage-roads, and 299 kilometres of fluvial ways.

The scholars who have studied the Caucasus from the ethnographic point of view, in these latter times, have arrived at the conclusion that, despite the diversity of the languages and the dialects, one must consider the peoples of the North of the Caucasus as a remnant of a great prehistoric people, of whom they are the last representatives. It is believed that the Caucasus is the refuge, from time immemorial, of the peoples oppressed in the neighbouring plains. What is certain is that the partisans of the two theories are in agreement in proclaiming the community of origin of the Circassian peoples and those of Dagestan, save for some reservation.

The following table will give an exact idea of the surfaces of the districts and the provinces that form part of the Union, as well as of the populations that inhabit them. The same table shows us the total population, the value of the various elements, as well as the proportion in per cent of each element in respect of the total population.

Extent and population of the Republic of the Union of the Circassian peoples and of Dagestan as of 1 January 1918 (established according to the data of the agricultural and economic censuses of the year 1917 and the population information gathered after the revolution, in view of the elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly):

From the examination of this table it emerges that the mean density of the population per square verst is 28.46, while the density in Dagestan is 43.81. Despite all the violences committed by the Russians to make the Circassian nation disappear, and despite the statistics knowingly and intentionally falsified, the Circassian peoples still constitute 76.47 per cent of the total population on the territory of the Union.

Conclusion

Many observers, and with reason, measure the worth of a people, its dignity, and its right to liberty, not by the real number of the individuals that compose it, but by the individual worth of its members, by the energy it deploys, by the sacrifices it has made spontaneously, by the martyrdoms it has endured for centuries for the conservation of its political liberties and of its independence.

From this point of view the Circassian peoples played a role important and humanitarian in the highest degree throughout the whole duration of the Middle Ages. It was they who now broke the invading floods that rolled toward Europe, now shed floods of blood for five centuries, hurling themselves ceaselessly toward their mountains to defend them and to serve as a shield to this continent. But it must be recognised also that, in their role of vanguard of Europe against Asia, these peoples endured the worst sufferings, and that certain of them were completely annihilated.

When the Asiatic invasions had at last ceased, the Circassian peoples set themselves again to work, to reconstitute themselves politically and socially. But behold, in the full work of reconstitution, these peoples, who had shed floods of blood for five centuries, saw themselves threatened by the Russian floods. They resisted and succeeded in retarding the Russian conquests in Asia. The Tsar, obliged, toward 1860, to put on foot an army of 300,000 men to blockade Circassia, could not dream of sending other armies toward the South. It was this that prevented Russia from forestalling England in Afghanistan and at the Pamir. The fact is clear; to perceive it, one has only to consult the dates of the conquests of the different parts of the North Caucasus: in 1859, Shamil is taken prisoner; in 1864, Circassia falls into the hands of the Russians. It is from that date that Russia becomes more and more enterprising and aggressive. Her armies conquer, at the double, Turkestan, Samarkand, Khokand, as also the Khorasan, Merv, and come up against English power.

A contemporary author considers the submission of the Caucasus by the Grand Duke Michael, brother of the Tsar Alexander II, as one of the most considerable facts of modern history. The isthmus of the Caucasus commands, in effect, two seas — the outlets of the greatest fluvial arteries of Russia, the Black Sea and the Caspian — and by these two basins is linked on the one side to the Mediterranean and to Europe, on the other to Persia, India, and the whole Asiatic continent: a formidable bulwark by reason of the high mountains with which it is clothed, and which a Russian writer, in a sentiment of national pride, named the Gibraltar of Russia in the Orient.⁵ Thirty years earlier, when Sir John MacNeill, former ambassador of England to Persia, the author of the celebrated work The Progress of Russia in the East (John Murray, London, 1836; third edition in 1854), learned from an eye-witness of this ascending march in the Caucasus, he manifested already his apprehensions and, by a sort of intuition of the future, cried out: "This alters the balance of power throughout the world." In 1834, one of the greatest political minds that England has possessed, David Urquhart, replied, in his famous review the Portfolio, to the question put to him concerning the Circassians, that they are the only people in the world who have the courage to resist the Tsars.

It suffices to cast a glance at the map to be convinced that the question of the Caucasus concerns in the highest degree the equilibrium of the world: the great power that dominates this land is in a position to radiate over all of Central Asia, to menace at once the Mediterranean peoples and the Islamic peoples.

The economic importance of the Caucasus is likewise known. The riches of its soil and those of foreign provinces, spread abroad by commerce, had rendered flourishing in antiquity the Greek colonies founded on the coast toward which the southern slope of the great chain inflects. Rome, in the imperial epoch, had there also very frequented trading-posts. In the Middle Ages, it was by this route that there arrived in the Black Sea the precious merchandise of India and of China, which were then exported throughout all Europe by the Genoese established in the Crimea.⁶

The North Caucasus has a particular importance by reason of the immense natural riches it contains. Naphtha, coal, mineral waters, copper, silver, lead, ores containing radium, and so forth — all abound in the North Caucasian subsoil. The wells of Grozny (the principal centre of the petroleum workings) produce two million tons of petroleum per year. The naphtha of Grozny is superior to that of Baku from the point of view of quality. The benzine of Grozny is considered by the specialists as the best in the world. Certain silver and copper mines are in full exploitation. The agricultural riches of the country are likewise very considerable. The North Caucasus produces annually about four million tons of cereals, of which more than half is wheat.

According to the last enumeration (September 1917) there were registered in the North Caucasus: 629,990 horses, 2,031,734 head of large cattle, 3,000,000 sheep of the native breed, 1,000,000 sheep of the merino breed. To this should be added the forest riches: there is in the North Caucasus a forest zone of 700 kilometres in length by a mean width of 20 kilometres, containing the most varied and the most precious species.

In view of the high moral worth of their character, the austerity of their customs, the proof-against-all solidity of their social institutions, the economic vitality of their country; the services they have rendered to humanity in preserving Europe and the peoples of the Mediterranean basin from the horrors of the Asiatic and Russian invasions during the Middle Ages and the modern times; in view of the services they are capable of rendering in the future, by imposing themselves between Western Asia and Central Asia as an intercontinental Switzerland; in view of the sublime principles of humanity and of international justice proclaimed and accepted by Europe and America — in view of all these considerations, each more important than the last, and basing themselves upon their sacred and imprescriptible rights to an independent life within the limits of their historical territory, the peoples of the North Caucasus appeal today to the powers of the Entente and to America — in whose hands Providence seems to have placed the destinies of the human race — that the full and entire independence of their State be recognised.

HAÏDAR BAMMATE, Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Bibliography

In French: J. de Morgan, Missions scientifiques au Caucase. — E. Chantre, Recherches anthropologiques dans le Caucase. — Vivien de Saint-Martin, Recherches sur les populations primitives et les plus anciennes traditions du Caucase, 1847. — Vivien de Saint-Martin, Mémoire historique sur la géographie ancienne du Caucase. — Levoux, Caucase, Circassie, Transcaucasie, mœurs, industries, commerce, 1905. — Baron de Baye, Au Caucase, Paris, 1898–99, 2 vols. — A. Blazy, Le pétrole à Bakou et les intérêts français au Caucase, 1902. — C. Fournier, Description géologique du Caucase central. — Dubois de Montpéreux, Voyage autour du Caucase, Paris, 1839–43, 6 vols. — E. Favre, Recherches géologiques sur la partie centrale de la chaîne du Caucase, 1847. — Klaproth, Tableau historique, géographique et politique du Caucase, 1827. — Klaproth, Voyage au mont Caucase et en Géorgie, Paris, 1823. — Taitbout de Marigny, Voyage en Circassie, Paris, 1829. — Jean Carol, Les deux routes du Caucase, Paris, 1899. — Jeannel, Excursion en Circassie, Bordeaux, 1856. — Élisée Reclus, Géographie Universelle, Paris, 1881. — J. Kermer, Notre horizon au Caucase. — Pallas, Voyage dans les gouvernements méridionaux de l'empire de Russie, 1793–94, 2 vols. — Fél. Fonton, La Russie dans l'Asie Mineure, ou campagne du Maréchal Paskévitch, 1828–29; and Tableau du Caucase, envisagé sous le point de vue géographique, historique et politique, Paris, 1840. Revue des deux Mondes, 15 June 1860; 15 April, 15 May, 15 June 1861; 15 December 1865, etc.

In English: Edm. Spencer, Travels in Circassia, Krim, Tatary, London, 1837, 2 vols. — Ed. Spencer, Travels in the Western Caucasus, London, 1835. — James Bell, Journal of a Residence in Circassia during the Years 1837, 38 and 39, London, 1840, 2 vols. — J. A. Longworth, A Year among the Circassians, London, 1840, 2 vols. — Freshfield, Travels in the Central Caucasus, London, 1896. — The discussion in the House of Commons concerning the affair of the seizure of the Vixen, sitting of 16 June 1837.

In German: Bodenstedt, Les peuples du Caucase et leur guerre d'indépendance contre la Russie, 1869. — Abich, Recherches géologiques dans la partie centrale du Caucase, Vienna, 1875. — R. von Erckert, Die Sprachen der kaukasischen Stämme, Vienna, 1895. — Paul Rohrbach, Vom Kaukasus zum Mittelmeer. — C. Zeyer, Im Kaukasus, Basel, 1855. — P. V. Bierbaum, Streifzüge im Kaukasus, Zürich, 1918.

In Russian: Miansaroff, Essay of a systematic bibliography relating to the Caucasus, to Transcaucasia, and to the populations of these lands, 1875. — Tolstoy, In the Caucasus (translated by Halpérine — Hadji-Murat). — Lermontov, several works, notably: Ismail Bey, Valerik, Mtsyri. — Pushkin, Kavkazskiy plennik (The Prisoner of the Caucasus). — Fadeyev, Sixty Years of War in the Caucasus, Tiflis, 1860.