1991 Study Proves Circassians are One People and Not Three or More as Moscow Thinks

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 20 – In response to the campaign by Adygs, Kabards, and Cherkess to declare themselves a single Circassian nation in the Russian census and more generally, Moscow has insisted that there is no common Circassian nation and that those calling for such a designation are engaged in political engineering directed against the Russian state.

            But a conference in June 1991 and a study that it generated at that time prove beyond question that there is only one Circassian nation and that the real ethnic engineers are those in Moscow who have sought to divide that people in order to allow the center to rule it (zapravakbr.ru/index.php/30-uncategorised/1754-k-probleme-etnicheskoj-identifikatsii-cherkesov).

            The study, authored by historian Khuseyn Kushkhov, has now been republished and provides one of the most succinct arguments available for a common Circassian self-designator. What makes it especially valuable is that it draws that conclusion on the basis of Soviet and Russian scholarship, an approach that makes it especially difficult for Moscow to reject.

            Drawing on the works of Soviet ethnographer Yulian Bromley, Kushkhov points out in his article that “the most important defining feature of the ethnos is consciousness by a definite human community of its group unity” and that this was true of the Circassian ethnos by the tenth century CE.

            Among the other characteristics of an ethnos, he says, again drawing on Bromley and Soviet ethnographers are commonality of territory, culture, language, psychology, and anthropological similarity. He surveys these in the Circassian case and finds confirmation of commonality on the basis of each of them.

            And he notes that even when the Circassian people were divided territorially by their defeat in the Caucasus war and their genocidal expulsion by Russian forces, that “did not change their common ethnic self-consciousness or their common self-designator (ethnonym).” It remained exactly what it had been.

            To focus on territory alone is to misunderstand the situation, and yet that is exactly what the Bolsheviks did, acting as if territorial divisions were the same as ethnic divisions. And their promotion of dialectical differences among the Circassians was part of this. Many peoples are divided by dialects but have a common literary language. Among them are the Germans.

            According to Kushkhov, “the arbitrary transformation of one self-designator into three ethnonyms as was the case with the Adygs-Circassians is an exceptional phenomenon which does not have any analogies in international practice of ethnic definitions.” In short, Moscow violated science, including their own, in taking this step.