The Russian conquest of the Northwestern Caucasus…

The Russian conquest of the Northwestern Caucasus has been completed by 1864, during the reign of Tsar Alexander II.

The Adyghe and Abkhaz have been decimated, and the Abaza have been partially driven out of the Caucasus.

Following the conquest of the North Caucasus by the Russian Empire, the Russian Empire implements a policy of evicting the Circassians from their ancestral territories.

Faced with the threat of subjugation by the Russian army, the Ubykh, as well as other Muslim peoples of Caucasus, leave their homeland en masse beginning on March 6, 1864.

Special commissions are set up by the Russian imperial authorities to reduce mortality rates and "survey needs of the migrants", that is, to prevent ships from being overloaded, to profitably auction bulky possessions, and to provide clothing and food for the poorest families, who would be transported "without fee or charge of any kind".

On the other hand, the Ottoman authorities fail to offer any support to the newly arrived.

They are settled in the inhospitable mountainous regions of Inner Anatolia and are employed on menial and exhausting jobs.

Dmitry Milyutin had first published the idea of mass expulsions of Circassian natives in 1857.

Miliutin had argued that the goal was not to simply move them so that their land could be settled by productive farmers, but rather that "eliminating the Circassians was to be an end in itself- to cleanse the land of hostile elements".

Tsar Alexander II endorsed the plans, and in 1861 had made Milyutin Minister of War (King, Charles. The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus.Page 94).

From the early 1860s, expulsions had begun occurring in the Caucasus (first in the northeast and then in the northwest).

General Nikolai Yevdokimov had advocated expelling the natives of the Western Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, writing that "resettlement of intractable mountaineers" to Turkey would be the easiest way to bring the prolonged Caucasian War to an end, while giving freedom to those who "prefer death to allegiance to the Russian government".

On the other hand, the Tsarist command was very much aware of the possibility of the migrants being used by Turkey as a strike force against Christian populations during the impending Russo-Turkish War.

The Circassian resettlement plan had eventually been agreed upon at a meeting of the Russian Caucasus commanders in October 1860 in Vladikavkaz and officially approved on May 10, 1862 by Tsar Alexander II.

The Ottomans had sent emissaries, including mullahs who called for leaving the dar al-Kufr and moving to the dar al-Islam.

The Ottomans hope to increase the proportion of the Muslim population in areas of the empire with restive non-Turkish populations.

"Mountaineers" have been invited to "go to Turkey, where the Ottoman government would accept them with open arms and where their life would be incomparably better".

Local mullahs and chiefs favor resettlement, because they feel oppressed by the Russian administration.

They warn their people that in order to gain full Russian citizenship they will have to convert to Christianity.

Additionally, local chieftains ae keen to preserve their ancient privileges and feudal rights that had been abolished throughout the Russian Empire by the Emancipation Manifesto in 1861.

After the surrender of Imam Shamil (Chechnya and Dagestan) in 1859, Russia's war of conquest in the North Caucasus had narrowed down to Circassia.