1 Million Perish After Russia Wins The Caucasian War
After nearly a century of war over the Caucasus coast of the Black Sea, Tsar Alexander II (known unironically as “the Liberator”) finally had the native Circassians under his thumb. Originally intending to just expel them from their homeland, Russia had a deal with the Ottoman Empire to take the Muslim refugees off their hands.
Denigrated as the first modern example of genocide, the Circassian Genocide has stirred controversy leading up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. In one respect, the genocide is a freak catastrophe of negligent and bumbling bureaucracy.
First the Russians expelled the Circassians from their homeland and then the Turks failed to properly accommodate the refugees’ basic needs, sticking them in inhospitable mountain regions with no food or water. When the Circassians tried to go back to Russia, Alexander personally declined many of their petitions, fearing British and Turkish plots to spark a new war.
But the Russians weren’t simply negligent. During the war, they killed civilians and razed whole villages. Aside from killing 200,000 in the war, Russia resettled returning Circassians far from their homeland without so much as a finger in the right direction. The resulting famine and disease killed a staggering one million people.
The final irony? A good chunk of the Circassians that stayed in Turkey led the Young Turks, the same Young Turks that would lead the cleansing of Christians during World War 1. It goes to show that just as the crimes of a father cannot be passed down to his son, neither can his virtues.
