Cherkess

CHERKESS

The Cherkess are one of the two titular nationalities of the north Caucasian Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia in the Russian Federation. In the Soviet period this area underwent several administrative reorganizations but was then established as an autonomous oblast (province) within the Stavropol Krai. The capital is Cherkessk and was founded in 1804. The Cherkess form only about 10 percent of the oblast's population, which numbers 436,000 and 62 percent of whom make their livings in agriculture, animal husbandry, and bee-keeping. Health resorts are also an important local source of employment and revenue here, as it is in most of the North-West Caucasian region.

The Cherkess belong to the same ethnolinguistic family as the Adyge and the Kabardians, who live in neighboring republics, and they speak a sub-dialect of Kabardian, or "Eastern Circassian." Soviet nationalities policies established these three groups as separate "peoples" and languages, but historical memory and linguistic affinity, as well as post-Soviet ethnic politics, perpetuate notions of ethnic continuity. An important element in this has been the contacts, since the break-up of the Soviet Union, with Circassians living in Turkey, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Western Europe, and the United States. These are mostly the descendents of migrants who left for the Ottoman Empire in the midand late nineteenth century after the completion of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. The long and painful process of conquest firmly established "the idea of Circassians" as "noble savages" in the Russian imagination.

The Cherkess are Muslims, but other religious influences can be discerned in their cultural practices, including Greek Orthodox Christianity and indigenous beliefs and rituals. The Soviet state discouraged the practice of Islam and the perpetuation of Muslim identity among the Cherkess, but it supported cultural nation-building. In the post-Soviet period, interethnic tensions were clearly apparent in the republic's presidential elections. However, Islamic movements, generally termed "Wahhabism," are in less evidence among the Cherkess than with other groups in the North Caucasus. The wars in Abkhasia (from 1992 to 1993) and Chechnya (1994–1997; 1999–2000) have also affected Cherkess sympathies and politics, causing the Russian state to intermittently infuse the North West Caucasus republics with resources to prevent the spreading of conflict.

See also: adyge; caucasus; kabardians; nationalities policies, soviet; nationalities policies, tsarist

bibliography

Baddeley, John F. (1908). The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

Borxup, Marie Bennigsen. Ed. (1992). The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Gammer, Moshe. (1994). Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan. London: Frank Cass.

Jaimoukha, Amjad. (2001). The Circassians: A Handbook. New York: Palgrave.

Jersild, Austin. (2002). Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1854–1917. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.

Matveeva, Anna. (1999). The North Caucasus: Russia's Fragile Borderland. Great Britain: The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Seteney Shami