Circassian Leaders from Across North Caucasus Call on Putin to End Threat to Survival of Shapsugs

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 25 – The Shapsugs, a small subgroup of Circassians, first came to broad international attention in the lead up to the 2014 Olympics in Sochi not only because that was the site of the expulsion of them and the ancestor of the Shapsugs from Russia in 1864 but also because the games themselves led to the displacement of that group from their homes.

            In the decade since, the Shapsugs have been subject to increasing pressure from the authorities who are trampling on their community in order to expand the ethnic Russian presence in that region. They have protests and their protests have attracted the support of Circassians elsewhere in the North Caucasus and in the diaspora as well.

            Now, 13 leaders of Circassian groups in Adygeya, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachay-Cherkessia, three republics into which the Circassian nation has been divided by the Soviet and now Russian authorities, have appealed to Putin to end the threat from the Krasnodar authorities to the survival of the Shapsugs.

            The full text of the appeal is available at zapravakbr.ru/index.php/30-uncategorised/1932-regionalnymi-vlastyami-krasnodarskogo-kraya-osoznanno-sozdayutsya-nevynosimye-usloviya-shapsugam-v-mestakh-ikh-istoricheskogo-prozhivaniya-chto-predstavlyaet-ugrozu-samomu-sushchestvovaniyu-malochislennogo).

            The authors of the appeal say that unless Putin intervenes to stop the Krasnodar authorities from excluding the members of this community from the areas they have traditionally used for beekeeping and other agricultural activities, the future of the Shapsugs, who now number fewer than 2,000 in the Russian census, is bleak.

            There is no question that what the Krasnodar authorities are doing does threaten the survival of this numerically small group, one that should be protected by existing laws governing how such groups are to be treated. But in fact there are far more Shapsugs than the 2021 Russian census reports.

            On the one hand, some Shapsugs reidentified as Circassians in that enumeration response to calls to all Circassian groups to do so; and on the other, there are large numbers of Shapsugs abroad who have been blocked by the Russian authorities from returning to their ancestral homeland in the North Caucasus.

            Like the Krasnodar authorities, Putin almost certainly will not give the Shapsugs what they want; but this appeal may trigger a new round of Circassian activism not only in the Sochi region but more generally – and that in turn may presage a new crackdown by Moscow and regional Russian officials on Circassians as a whole.