Why Did Russia Need the Caucasus? By Yakov Gordin

This article, ‘Why Did Russia Need the Caucasus?’ (Зачем России нужен был Кавказ?) by Yakov Gordin, originally appeared on pages 7–24 of his book Why Did Russia Need the Caucasus? Illusions and Reality (St. Petersburg: ZAO "Zhurnal 'Zvezda'," 2008). Translated by AbkhazWorld.

Yakov Arkadyevich Gordin (b. 1935, Leningrad) is a prominent Russian writer, historian, and publicist. After serving in the military and gaining early career experience on Arctic geology expeditions in the Far North, he began publishing as a literary critic in the mid-1960s. Since the 1970s, Gordin’s primary focus has been extensive research into Russian history of the 18th and early 19th centuries. He is the author of numerous influential historical works, including The Death of Pushkin: Chronicle, 1831–1836; The Russian Duel; Alexei Yermolov: The Soldier and His Empire; and The Caucasus: Land and Blood. Russia in the Caucasian War of the 19th Century. Gordin has also published two collections of poetry and several plays.

Why Did Russia Need the Caucasus?

In the early 20th century, Professor P.I. Kovalevsky, whose main profession was that of a psychiatrist but who was keenly interested in history, published the book The Conquest of the Caucasus by Russia. The author's non-professional background makes his perception of the subject particularly revealing, as it represents the viewpoint of a typical member of the intelligentsia with patriotic—even chauvinistic—and state-centric inclinations.

Kovalevsky wrote in the introduction to his "historical essays": "The history of the conquest of the Caucasus by Russia must be written in blood—so many people, so many resources, so much money Russia gave to it. Meanwhile, this page of Russian history is either completely unknown to us Russians, or known too vaguely. Something is vaguely recalled about Yermolov, Paskevich, Vorontsov (not Vorontsov-Dashkov), but what they did there, Allah knows. The immortal historical works of General V.A. Potto are known to very few people".

Formally, Kovalevsky was mistaken. His book was written between 1900 and 1910. By then, a great many works dedicated to the conquest of the Caucasus had accumulated. Historical journals had already published hundreds of memoirs from participants in that conquest. Why, then, did a person reasonably familiar with historical literature have this feeling of an "unknown war"?

One of the surface reasons lay in the speeches given in the Third State Duma by representatives from the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, presenting the Empire with a bill for the recent past. "How can Russians know their Caucasus? From the speeches of the Duma representatives of the Caucasus?.. Yet the Caucasus is a part of our body, it is a land steeped in the blood of our ancestors. For a Russian not to know the history of the annexation of the Caucasus is a great sin".

The conquest of the Caucasus as an "unknown war" began to be written about immediately after the capture of Shamil and the "pacification" of Chechnya and Dagestan. General R. Fadeyev, a practitioner and theoretician of the conquest who published the book Sixty Years of the Caucasian War in 1860—the first and important attempt to conceptualise the Russian-Caucasian drama—wrote, characterising the Russian public's perception of events in the Caucasus: "... From a distance, everything merged into one indistinct image; the most fundamental changes in the state of affairs were smoothed over, and a thinking Russian person, unfamiliar personally with the Caucasus, naturally could not connect the contradictory events and was inevitably led to the most improbable conclusions in seeking a solution to this problem. Our society, on the whole, did not even realise the goal for which the state so persistently, and with such sacrifices, sought the subjugation of the mountains". In the same 1860, Fadeyev was echoed by another "Caucasian," General Staff Colonel Romanovsky, who published a course of public lectures on the Caucasian War as a separate book.

However, the issue was not solely one of limited and inaccurate information. The crux of the problem lay much deeper. The last sentence in Fadeyev's quoted text offers insight into this core issue. Not only the poorly informed public, but also the thinking "Caucasians" persistently posed the question—why? Was the inclusion of the Caucasus in the empire worth the colossal sacrifices Russia truly made for it?

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