Caucasian War
| The Caucasian War | |||||||||
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 Franz Roubaud's A Scene from the Caucasian War |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Russian Empire Principality of Mingrelia Principality of Guria
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 Caucasian Imamate Circassia Abkhazian insurgentsBig Kabarda (to 1825)  Principality of Svaneti Khanate of Kazi-KumukhDagestan free people  Avar Khanate (1829–1859) |
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
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Tsar Nicholas I Tsar Alexander I Tsar Alexander II Aleksey Yermolov Mikhail Vorontsov Aleksandr Baryatinskiy Ivan Paskevich Nikolai Yevdokimov |
Sheikh Mansur Beibulat Taimiev Imam Shamil Gamzat-bek Ghazi Mullah Kazbech Tuguzhoko Akhmat Aublaa Shabat Marshan Haji Kerantukh Berzek |
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| Strength | |||||||||
| about 250,000 | unknown | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| roughly 96,000 | unknown | ||||||||
The Caucasian War (Russian: Кавказская война; Kavkazskaya voyna) of 1817–1864 was an invasion of the Caucasus by the Russian Empire which resulted in Russia's annexation of the areas of the North Caucasus, and the Ethnic cleansing of Circassians. It consisted of a series of military actions waged by Russia against territories and tribal groups in Caucasia including: Chechnya, Dagestan, the Circassians (Adyghe, Kabarday), Abkhaz, Abazins, and Ubykh, as Russia sought to expand southward. In Dagestan, resistance to the Russians has been described as jihad.
Russian control of the Georgian Military Highway in the center divided the Caucasian War into the Russo-Circassian War in the west and the Murid War in the east.
Other territories of the Caucasus (comprising contemporary Georgia, southern Dagestan, Armenia and Azerbaijan) were incorporated into the Russian empire at various times in the 19th century as a result of Russian wars with Persia.
The war took place during the administrations of three successive Russian Tsars: Alexander I (reigned 1801–1825), Nicholas I (1825–1855), and Alexander II (1855–1881). The leading Russian commanders included Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov in 1816–1827, Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov in 1844–1853, and Aleksandr Baryatinskiy in 1853–1856. The writers Mikhail Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy, who gained much of his knowledge and experience of war for his book War and Peace from these encounters, took part in the hostilities. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin referred to the war in his Byronic poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus (Kavkazskiy plennik (Кавказский пленник), 1821). In general, the Russian armies that served in the Caucasian wars were very eclectic; as well as ethnic Russians from various parts of the Russian empire they included Cossacks, Armenians, Georgians, Caucasus Greeks, Ossetians, and even soldiers of Muslim background like Tatars and Turkmen.
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