Railways.—The principal approach to Caucasia from Russia by rail is the line that runs from Rostov-on-Don to Vladikavkaz at the foot of the central Caucasus range. Thence, or rather from the junction of Beslan, 14 m. north of Vladikavkaz, the main line proceeds east of Petrovsk on the Caspian, and from Petrovsk skirts the shore southwards as far as Baku, the distance from Vladikavkaz to Baku being 414 m. This railway, together with the driving roads over the Caucasus mountains via the Mamison pass (the Ossetic military road) and the Darial pass (the Georgian military road), and the route across the Black Sea to Poti or Batum are the chief means of communication between southern Russia and Transcaucasia. Baku and Batum (also Poti) are connected by another main line, 560 m. long, which traverses the valleys of the Kura and the Rion, south of the Caucasus. From Tiflis, nearly midway on this last line, a railway proceeds south as far as Erivan (234 m.), with a branch to Kars (48 m.). The Erivan line is being continued into Persia, namely, to Tabriz via Julfa on the Aras.
History.—To the ancient Greeks Caucasia, and the mighty range which dominates it, were a region of mystery and romance. It was there that they placed the scene of the sufferings of Prometheus (vide Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus), and there, in the land of Colchis, which corresponds to the valley of the Rion, that they sent the Argonauts to fetch the golden fleece. Outside the domain of myth, the earliest connexion of the Greeks with that part of the world would appear to have been through the maritime colonies, such as Dioscurias, which the Milesians founded on the Black Sea coast in the 7th century b.c. For more than two thousand years the most powerful state in Caucasia was that of Georgia (q.v.), the authentic history of which begins with its submission to Alexander the Great in 323 b.c. The southern portion of Transcaucasia fell during the 1st century b.c. under the sway of Armenia, and with that country passed under the dominion of Rome, and so eventually of the Eastern empire. During the 3rd century a.d. Georgia and Armenia were invaded and in great part occupied by the Khazars, and then for more than a thousand years the mountain fastnesses of this borderland between Europe and Asia were the refuge, or the resting-place, of successive waves of migration, as people after people and tribe after tribe was compelled to give way to the pressure of stronger races harassing them in the rear. The Huns, for instance, and the Avars appeared in the 6th century, and the Mongols in the 13th. In the 10th century bands of Varangians or Russified Scandinavians sailed out of the Volga and coasted along the Caspian until they had doubled the Apsheron peninsula, when they landed and captured Barda, the chief town of Caucasian Albania.
But, apart from Georgia, historical interest in Caucasia centres in the long and persistent attempts which the Russians made to conquer it, and the heroic, though unavailing, resistance offered by the mountain races, more especially the Circassian and Lesghian tribes. Russian aggression began somewhat early in the 18th century, when Peter the Great, establishing his base at Astrakhan on the Volga, and using the Caspian for bringing up supplies and munitions of war, captured Derbent from the Persians in 1722, and Baku in the following year. But these conquests, with others made at the expense of Persia, were restored to the latter power after Peter’s death, a dozen years later. At that period the Georgians were divided into various petty principalities, the chief of which were Imeretia and Georgia (Kharthlia), owing at times a more or less shadowy allegiance to the sultan of the Ottoman Turks at Constantinople. In 1770, during the course of a war between Russia and Turkey, the Russians crossed over the Caucasus and assisted the Imeretians to resist the Turks, and from the time of the ensuing peace of Kuchuk-kainarji the Georgian principalities looked to their powerful northern neighbour as their protector against the southern aggressors the Turks. In 1783 George XIII., prince of Georgia and Mingrelia, formally put himself under the suzerainty of Russia, and after his death Georgia was converted (1801) into a Russian province. The same fate overtook Imeretia, nine years later. Meanwhile the Russians had also subdued the Ossetes (1802) and the Lesghian tribes (1803) of the middle Caucasus. By the peace of Gulistan in 1813 Persia ceded to Russia several districts in eastern Caucasia, from Lenkoran northwards to Derbent. Nevertheless the mountain tribes who inhabited the higher parts of the Caucasus were still independent, and their subjugation cost Russia a sustained effort of thirty years, during the course of which her military commanders were more than once brought almost to the point of despair by the tenacity, the devotion and the adroitness and daring which the mountaineers displayed in a harassing guerilla warfare. The animating spirit of their resistance was Shamyl (Samuel), a chief and priest of the Lesghians, who, a Mahommedan, proclaimed a “holy war” against the “infidel” aggressors. At first the Russians were able to continue their policy of conquest and annexation without serious check. After acquiring the northern edge of the Armenian plateau, partly from Persia in 1828 and partly from Turkey in 1829, Russia crushed a rising which had broken out in the Caspian coast districts of Daghestan on the north of the Caucasus. This took place during the years 1831-1832. The next seven years were occupied with the subjugation of the Abkhasians along the Black Sea coast, and of other Circassian tribes in the west. Meanwhile Shamyl had roused the Lesghian tribes farther east and begun his twenty years’ struggle for freedom, a struggle which called forth the sympathy and admiration of nearly the whole of Europe. More than once he escaped, in a manner that seemed little short of marvellous, out of the hands of the Russians when they held him closely invested in some mountain fastness, as at Himry in 1831, at Akhulgo in 1839, and again at the same stronghold in 1849. The general who at last broke the back of the long opposition of the prophet-chief of the Lesghians was Prince Baryatinsky, who after three years of strenuous warfare succeeded in capturing Shamyl’s stronghold of Weden, and then in surrounding that chieftain himself on the inaccessible rocky platform of Gunib in the heart of Daghestan. There the hitherto indomitable champion of Caucasian independence was forced to surrender to the Russians on the 6th of September 1859. Nevertheless the spirit of resistance in these stubborn mountaineers was not finally broken until 1864, when the Russians eventually stifled all opposition in the difficult valleys and glens of the western Caucasus. But this was followed, during the next fourteen years, by the wholesale emigration of thousands upon thousands of Circassians, who sought an asylum in Turkish territory, leaving their native region almost uninhabited and desolate, a condition from which it has not recovered even at the present day. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 the self-exiled Circassians and other Caucasian mountaineers, supported by a force of 14,000 Turks, made a determined attempt to wrest their native glens from the power of Russia; but, after suffering a severe defeat at the hands of General Alkhazov, the Turks withdrew, and were accompanied by some 30,000 Abkhasians, who settled in Asia Minor. A few months later the Lesghians in Daghestan, who had risen in revolt, were defeated and their country once more reduced to obedience. By the ensuing peace of Adrianople, Russia still further enlarged her Transcaucasian territories by the acquisition of the districts of Kars, Batum and Ardahan. After a peaceful period of a quarter of a century the Armenian subjects of Russia in Transcaucasia were filled with bitterness and discontent by the confiscation of the properties of their national (Gregorian) church by the Russian treasury. Nor were their feelings more than half allayed by the arrangement which made their ecclesiastics salaried officers of the Russian state. This ferment of unrest, which was provoked in the years 1903-1904, was exacerbated in the winters that followed by the renewed outbreak of the century-long racial feud between the Tatars and the Armenians at Baku and other places. In fact, nearly the whole of the region between the Caucasus and the Perso-Turkish frontier on the south, from the Caspian Sea on the one side to the Black Sea on the other, was embroiled in a civil war of the most sanguinary and ruthless character, the inveterate racial animosities of the combatants being in both cases inflamed by religious fanaticism. Complete anarchy prevailed at the worst centres of disorder, as Baku and Batum, the imperial authorities being more powerless to preserve even the semblance of order than they were in the interior of Russia. Many of the oil wells at Baku were burned, and massacres took place at that town, at Shusha, at Erivan, at Tiflis, at Batum, at Jebrail and at other places. An end was put to these disorders only by the mutual agreement of the two contestants, alike horrified and exhausted by the fierce outburst of passion, in September 1905.
(J. T. Be.)
[1] Premier Recensement général de la population de l’empire de Russie, ed. N. Trointsky (St Petersburg, 1905, 2 vols.), in Russian and French.
[2] Although the Ingushes speak a Chechen dialect, they have recently been proved to be, anthropologically, quite a distinct race.
CAUCASUS, a mountain range of Asia, wholly within the Russian empire, stretching north-west to south-east from the Strait of Kerch (between the Black Sea and Sea of Azov) to the Caspian Sea, over a length of 900 m., with a breadth varying from 30 to 140 m. In its general character and conformation the Caucasus presents a closer analogy with the Pyrenees than with the Alps. Its general uniformity of direction, its comparatively narrow width, and its well-defined limits towards both south and north are all features which it has in common with the former. The range of the Caucasus, like that of the Pyrenees, maintains for considerable distances a high average elevation, and is not cleft by deep trenches, forming natural passes across the range, such as are common in the Alps. In both ranges, too, some of the highest summits stand on spurs of the main range, not on the main range itself; as Mont Perdu and Maladetta lie south of the main backbone of the Pyrenees, so Mount Elbruz and Kasbek, Dykh-tau, Koshtan-tau, Janga-tau and Shkara—all amongst the loftiest peaks of the Caucasus—stand on a subsidiary range north of the principal range or on spurs connecting the two. On the other hand, it is interesting to compare the arrangement of the drainage waters of the Caucasus with those of the Alps. In both orographical systems the principal rivers start nearly all together from a central nucleus, and in both cases they radiate to opposite quarters of the compass; but whereas in the Alps the Rhone and the Rhine, flowing south-west and north-east respectively, follow longitudinal valleys, and the Aar and the Ticino, flowing north-west and south-east respectively, follow transverse valleys, in the Caucasus the streams which flow south-west and north-east, namely, the headwaters of the Rion and the Terek, travel along transverse valleys, and those of the Kura and the Kubaň, flowing south-east and north-west respectively, traverse longitudinal valleys. For purposes of description it is convenient to consider the range in four sections, a western, a middle with two subsections, and an eastern.
1. Western Caucasus. This section, extending from the Strait of Kerch to Mount Elbruz in 42° 40′ E., is over 420 m. long, and runs parallel to the north-east coast of the Black Sea and at only a short distance from it. Between the main range and the sea there intervene at least two parallel ranges separated by deep glens, and behind it a third subsidiary parallel range, likewise separated by a deep trough-like valley, and known as the Bokovoi Khrebet. All these ranges are shorn through transversely by numerous glens and gorges, and, the rainfall being heavy and the exposure favourable, they are densely clothed with vegetation. Many of the spurs or broken segments of ranges thus formed abut steeply upon the Black Sea, so that this littoral region is on the whole very rugged and not readily accessible, especially as the general elevations are considerable. The seaward flanking ranges run up to 4000 ft. and more, and in many places shoot out cliffs which overhang the coast some 2000-3000 ft. sheer, while the main range gradually ascends to 10,000-12,000 ft. as it advances eastwards, the principal peaks being Fisht (8040 ft.), Oshten (9210 ft.), Shuguz (10,640 ft.), and Psysh (12,425 ft.). And whereas the main range is built up of hard eruptive or crystalline rocks, the subsidiary chains are composed of softer (Cretaceous and Tertiary) laminated formations, which easily become disintegrated and dislocated. The snow-line runs here at about 9000 ft. on the loftiest summits, and east of Oshten the crest of the main range is capped with perpetual snow and carries many hanging glaciers, while larger glaciers creep down the principal valleys. The passes lie at relatively great altitudes and are few in number, so that although the northern versants of the various ranges all have a tolerably gentle slope, communication between the Black Sea and the valley of the Kubaň, and the low steppe country beyond, is the reverse of easy. The more important passes, proceeding from west to east, are Pshekh (5435 ft.) west of Oshten, and Shetlib (6060 ft.) east of Oshten, Pscashka (6880 ft.) east of Shuguz, Sanchar (7990 ft.) west of Psysh; and between the last-named mountain and Elbruz, facilitating communication between Sukhum-Kaleh (and the coast as far as Potī) and the upper valley of the Kubaň, are the passes of Marukh (11,500 ft.), Klukhor (9450 ft.) and Nakhar (9615 ft.).