The 19th-Century Genocide of the Circassian People
Why a forgotten genocide in the Caucasus matters today
Circassian history is known only in the broadest of outlines to regional specialists and not at all to most outside observers.
The destruction of the Shapsug, Abkhaz, Adyghe, Ubykh, and Kabardian peoples — collectively called Circassian and resident for millennia on the north shore of the Black Sea — did not occur in a single historical moment. Nor was it ever wholly complete. The annihilation transpired over generations, and traversed the vast territories of the Russian and Ottoman empires during their most expansive phases.
Given its multi-ethnic character and transregional geography, the task of narrating what Walter Richmond, in his recent book, calls The Circassian Genocide, presents a unique challenge to the historian. How do you tell the story of any process, let alone a genocide, that occurred across centuries?
The simplest answer is that you don’t. You don’t tell it in the way stories are usually told, from beginning to end, because such tragedies are simply too traumatic for conventional narratives to handle.
And yet, a tragedy that resists narration can nonetheless be conveyed through language, provided the storyteller has the requisite knowledge and…
