tinsky, 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
combata