The Circassian Genocide

3. From War to Genocide

54 In concluding his description of the final conquest and expulsion of the Circassians in the 1860s, Russian officer Ivan Drozdov tried to justify the wholesale death and destruction that his army brought upon them: “Mankind has rarely experienced such disasters and to such extremes, but only horror could have an effect on the hostile mountaineers and drive them from the impenetrable mountain thickets.”1 The final horror that Drozdov refers to was really just the culmination of an increasingly barbaric campaign against the Circassians. In the 1830s Russian commanders had already gone beyond war crimes and were committing actual atrocities. It was a sign of frustration: Ermolov’s campaigns had only increased the determination of both the Circassians and the Chechens to fight to the last man, and the army that had defeated Napoleon was held in check by “savages.” It was also a sign of the changing mindset of the Russian Caucasus commanders. In their minds the Circassians were no longer future subjects; they were eternal enemies who had to be wiped out. It was only in the aftermath of the Crimean War that the military resources were available to complete the conquest of the region, and as soon as they were the Russians moved quickly to drive the Circassians from their homes. After twenty years of increasingly brutal tactics, there was little that the field commanders would refrain from doing. 3 From War to Genocide We must assume that we will need to exterminate the mountaineers before they will agree to our demands. —Alexander Baryatinsky FROM WAR TO GENOCIDE 55 Stalemate An underground society called the Union of Salvation made a feeble attempt at overthrowing Emperor Nicholas I in 1825. The leaders of this group, known to history as the Decembrists, were hanged and the rest were exiled to Siberia. After several years the Tsar offered the would-be revolutionaries the option of service in the Caucasus. One person who took Nicholas up on his offer was Nikolai Lorer. Shortly after he arrived on the front line in 1837 he was invited to the office of the regional commander, General Grigory Zass: “After entering the general’s office, I was struck by some sort of intolerably offensive smell, and Zass, laughing, ended our confusion by telling us that his people had no doubt placed under his bed a box with heads, and in fact he pulled out and showed us a huge chest with several heads that stared at us horribly with glassy eyes. ‘Why are they here?’ I asked. ‘I’m boiling and cleaning them, and then sending them to various anatomical offices and my academic friends in Berlin.’”2 Not all the heads went to Berlin immediately, however: “In support of the notion of [filling the Circassians with] terror that Zass preached, the heads of Circassians were constantly stuck on lances on a specially made hill at Prochny Okop, and their beards blew in the wind.”3 In creating a scene reminiscent of a famous anecdote about Vlad the Impaler, Zass claimed he was carrying on the tradition of Ermolov, who, “hanging people mercilessly, robbing and burning auls, was able only through these means to bring success to our side.”4 But, to his credit, Ermolov never collected human heads. Zass’s acts were emblematic of the direction the war took after Britain ’s intervention and the failure of Nicholas’s visit. Caucasus commander Velyaminov himself offered a reward to his soldiers for the heads of Circassians , which he sent to the department of anthropology of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg for study.5 While Ermolov’s generation considered the Circassians barbarians and unworthy of the rights accorded civilized men, Velyaminov and his successors denied the Circassians their very identity as human beings. This “harvesting” of Circassian heads for study also foreshadowed the infinitely more horrific practice of the Nazi medical experiments. In fact, an almost identical episode did occur during the Second World War. As Richard Rubenstein reports, “[University of Strasbourg professor August] Hirt wrote to [Heinrich] Himmler informing 56 THE CIRCASSIAN GENOCIDE him that all nations and races had been studied by means of skull collections except the Jews. . . . Hirt advised that the Jews should be kept alive until a doctor could take down accurate statistics. Then they were to be killed and their heads removed with proper scientific care.”6 The Nazis were far more methodical and cold...