2 Conquest and Exile
In this year of 1864 a deed has been accomplished almost without
precedent in history: not one of the mountaineer inhabitants
remains on their former places of residence, and measures are
being taken to cleanse the region in order to prepare it for the
new Russian population.
Main Staff of Caucasus Army, 1864^1Gunib is high, Allah is higher still, and you remain below.
Shamil to Bariatinskii, from Gunib, August 1859^2army, territory, church
In 1828 the Russian playwright Aleksandr Griboedov presented a plan
to I.F. Paskevich-Erivanskii, the high commander of the Caucasus, for
the creation of a Russian Transcaucasus Trading Company. The plan,
composed in Tbilisi with the help of a colleague in the imperial
bureaucracy, envisioned a human economy as productive and rich as
the famously abundant natural resources of the region. Such growth
and activity would bring honour to Russia, the authors emphasized,
and were the logical next stage of development in the wake of the re-
cent military victories. Griboedov criticized officials who thought only
about military victories and the “raising of rank.”^3
The authors of the plan were roughly twenty-five years ahead of
their time, and the trading company was never established. The
Caucasus was still principally a theatre of imperial competition and
conquest for the Russian military. Russia’s subjugation of its southern
frontier was somewhat similar to its historic incorporation of other
frontier regions such as Siberia. The conquest of Siberia was accom-
plished through the construction of forts and stockades (ostrog)
manned by Cossacks, who fought hostile tribes, and more organized
rivals such as Khan Kuchum. Forts gradually became administrative
centres and towns, whose chief purpose was the exaction of fur trib-
ute (iasak).^4 Minus the iasak, the military conquest of the southern
borderlands was somewhat similar to that of Siberia.