The Novorossiysk Catastrophe of 1864 Documenting a Humanitarian Crisis during the Circassian Exile

Vitalii Shtybin

The Circassian expulsion of 1864 was one of the most catastrophic outcomes of the Caucasian War. Unlike other Russian imperial military campaigns, this action involved the deliberate, forced deportation of the entire indigenous population of the Northwest Caucasus, driven either into the marshy lowlands on the southern bank of the Kuban River or across the Black Sea into the Ottoman Empire. By various estimates, this second route alone forced well over half a million people, and by some counts close to a million, in harsh conditions, across the Black Sea by the end of 1864.[1] Typically, digital and printed historical accounts of this migration focus on its aggregate scale. This article instead follows a single, richly documented episode down to the level of names, dates, and rubles — a microhistorical approach that can reveal patterns obscured by the broader picture of Russian imperial colonization and displacement.

This granular, document-level approach matters because most existing accounts of the Circassian exile describe it either in broad demographic terms or as a matter of retrospective political interpretation, leaving the everyday administrative mechanics of expulsion largely unexamined. Instead, by reconstructing a single, well-documented episode from previously unused Georgian archival material, this article offers new evidence of how imperial bureaucracy improvised its way through a humanitarian catastrophe of its own making.

This article grew out of my work on Europe and Circassia, the Cambridge University-led archival project, which is bringing previously unpublished documents from archives across Europe, the Middle East, and the former Russian Empire into scholarly circulation for the first time.[2] As a contributor to that project, I came across a small but unusually detailed cluster of reports and dispatches from the Russian imperial military administration, such as the Commander-in-Chief of the Caucasian Army and the Viceroy of the Caucasus, in the National Archives of Georgia that, to my knowledge, has not previously been used by historians. This article is an independent piece of research whose purpose is to bring these documents into circulation and, through them, to illuminate the everyday mechanics of Circassian muhajirism — the forced exile of Muslims under pressure from people of another faith, which Russian authorities were content to tolerate, even encourage, as a way of ridding the region of a population they deemed disloyal. That was the process by which the 1864 expulsion was carried out on the ground, rather than how it was described after the fact.

With this aim in mind, I want to draw attention to one especially well-documented case that vividly illustrates the expulsion as a whole. This concerns groups of Circassian refugees who, in the autumn of 1864, while awaiting departure by sea, found themselves trapped in the bay of Novorossiysk.[3] This location was also known as the Konstantinovskoye fortification, after the old name of the fort that formed the city’s foundation. Novorossiysk is not an exceptional case so much as a magnifying glass. It was typical in its dynamics, if exceptional in how well it happens to be documented. What happened here in miniature happened up and down the entire northeastern Black Sea coast.

To manage the growing influx of refugees from the Caucasus, the Ottoman government in Istanbul established a Supreme Commission for Resettlement (Muhacirin Komisyon-u Ali) in 1859–60, which set out the conditions for transporting muhajirs, as Caucasian exiles were then called.[4] In 1862, the Caucasian Committee, the Russian imperial body responsible for governing the newly annexed Caucasus territories, established a similar Special Commission for Highlander Affairs on the Russian side. Neither commission had anticipated the enormous mass of people who would flood the seashores from Taman to Abkhazia. Russian imperial authorities began to consider providing direct assistance for the resettlement only once it had already become a mass phenomenon, by which point the crisis had substantially outrun their control.

The scale of the challenge, and the belated character of the imperial response, are both captured in a report written in 1864 by the architect and executor of the Circassian expulsion, Commander of the Kuban Region troops, Adjutant General Nikolai Evdokimov. Addressed to his superiors in the Caucasian military administration as part of a formal petition for treasury funding, the report sought to justify, after the fact, the enormous costs of an operation that had already been under way for months:

In 1864, the final resettlement of the Western Caucasus highlanders to Turkey and the final clearing of the mountains of natives took place... Until now, we had not taken part directly in the resettlement of the highlanders, had not hired ships for them, had not provided financial assistance, but had left them to manage their own migration at their own discretion. Remaining an indifferent bystander was no longer possible, given the scale of the impending mass migration of the highlanders... When drafting regulations for the settlement of the foothills of the Western Caucasus Range, a request was made to fund the transportation of highlanders to Turkey, financed by the treasury... At the end of 1863, when circumstances clearly outlined the scale of the impending resettlement, a petition was renewed for an allowance of approximately 100,000 silver rubles for the resettling highlanders...[5]

Beginning in late 1863, Russian authorities began issuing minimal aid packages of bread and clothing to the refugees and purchasing their livestock and property at special checkpoints, but this was of little help. By this time, typhus and smallpox, the two epidemics that repeatedly ravaged Circassian refugee camps along the Black Sea coast in these years, had already spread alongside famine among hundreds of thousands of people stranded without material resources, amid limited shipping and the onset of a harsh winter.[6]

Figure1: Number of Circassians exiled from different Russian posts and the amount of benefits issued by the Russian government (1863–1864)

Source: author’s visualization, Tableau Public, public.tableau.com/views/ExiledandBenefitEng.

Figure 2: Same data, but with focus on the number of groups, who received benefits or did not receive them

Source: author’s visualization, Tableau Public, public.tableau.com/views/ExiledandBenefitBarChartEng.

Between October and November 1864, a total of 14,180 people, mostly representatives of the Circassian mountain communities, were sent from Novorossiysk to the Ottoman ports. By mid-November, when the weather in the Black Sea turned unsuitable for navigation, the voyages were suspended until the spring of 1865.

Figure 3: Exiled from Novorossiysk (1864)

Source: author’s visualization, Tableau Public, public.tableau.com/views/ExiledfromNovorossiysk1864Eng.

Russian authorities reported that approximately 20,000 more people arrived on the coast at that time.[7] Owing to bad weather, they had not managed to board ships by the end of the sailing season and were left stranded on the shore without means of subsistence for the approaching winter. After receiving word that these people were being sent to the port of Novorossiysk, Major General Pavel Babich, commander of the Natukhai District and head of the commission for the resettlement of highlanders at the Konstantinovsky fortification, worked with the Ottoman government agent Haji-Hassan Efendi to prepare up to twenty steam and sailing vessels to receive the expected settlers. These vessels transported the poorest settlers to Küstendzhi (now Constanța, Romania), and some to the Anatolian cities of Samsun and Trabzon. Despite the steadily worsening weather, Russian authorities tried to clear the refugees from the coast as quickly as possible, which led to disaster.

Figure 4: Map of Exile Commission Posts

Source: author’s own map, created using Scribble Maps, scribblemaps.com.

According to a report on the resettlement of highlanders to Turkey, 2,500 people were expelled from Novorossiysk Bay by steamship on 8 November 1864, and four days later, another 4,000 followed.[8] That afternoon, passenger embarkation was halted by the Nord-Ost, a hurricane-force wind typical of Novorossiysk winters that coats the embankment and ships in the bay with ice. The wind blew so strongly that residents were unable to light their stoves or leave their homes for several days at a time. The steamships remained anchored in the bay, unable to set sail.

The Turkish sailing vessel Nusred-Bağrı and its 470 passengers had been awaiting transfer since 12 November. On the afternoon of 17 November, the vessel broke free from its moorings and was driven ashore, opposite the former Novorossiysk hospital, by a gust of wind. Detachments of soldiers sent from the fortifications, together with private citizens, were able to rescue only 170 people, and the remaining 300 perished. Russian authorities placed 120 injured passengers in the Konstantinovsky Hospital, while the rest were sent to be housed in townspeople’s homes and in nearby Cossack villages. As an allowance for clothing and food, the authorities gave them two rubles per person — plainly not enough to see destitute survivors through a Black Sea winter.

The same archival file number 142 from National historical archive of Georgia states that Russian authorities were forced to resettle approximately 15,000 refugees who remained on the coast for the winter in neighboring Cossack villages and to provide them with subsistence allowances, as they lacked the means to survive.[9] A special sanitary commission sent to the site of a makeshift Circassian refugee camp on the northern side of Sudzhuk Bay discovered a mass cemetery there, with its graves barely covered with earth.

What the sanitary commission found is conveyed with unusual candor in a dispatch to Lieutenant General Kartsov, Chief of the General Staff of the Caucasian Army, dated 9 January 1865:[10]

The natives who arrived at the Konstantinovskoye fortification, with the intention of leaving for Turkey, due to various unfavorable circumstances, were subject to disease and significant mortality. According to available information, up to 100,000 natives were sent to Turkey from the Konstantinovskoye fortification; these settlers, upon arriving at the aforementioned point, sometimes remained for an extended period in camps on the northeastern side of Konstantinovskaya Bay, where, according to their custom, they buried the dead.

Wishing to know how high the mortality rate was among the settlers and whether the bodies of the deceased were buried deeply, I collected information on this subject, with the goal of preventing a potential spring outbreak from shallow burial of corpses. According to an inspection by Captain Shulgin of the General Staff, who was sent to Novorossiysk to gather information on the resettlement of natives to Turkey, it turned out that on the northeastern side of Konstantinovskaya Bay, where the mountain camps were located, cemeteries containing up to 1,480 bodies were scattered over a distance of almost five miles.

Olshevsky’s dispatch went on to recommend that a formal commission of doctors and other officials be appointed to verify these findings and to prevent an epidemic outbreak the following spring — a bureaucratic response that, however sound on paper, arrived only after thousands had already died of exposure, disease, and neglect on the shores of Novorossiysk.

The Novorossiysk case of 1864 clearly illustrates how Russian military commissions, such as Special Commission for Highlander Affairs and Commission on the case of the resettlement of highlanders to Turkey, attempted to regulate the Circassian expulsion process through logistics and the distribution of allowances, but these efforts often proved futile given the scale of the disaster, poor organization, and adverse weather. Speculation over property ransoms, overcrowded ships, the greed of captains, epidemics, and storms claimed many Circassian lives.[11] The Novorossiysk case highlights both the empire’s mechanisms of control — precise in their accounting of costs, ruthlessly indifferent to human life, and the humanitarian collapse produced by their operational ineffectiveness.

Official Russian sources use the clinical language of logistics in terms of how much money was spent or how many bodies were counted. Circassian oral memory speaks a different language entirely, one of grief, betrayal, and survival, passed down through families rather than filed in archives. Stories of bodies thrown into the sea, of families separated on the docks and never reunited, and of camps ravaged by disease remain central to the identity of Circassian society to this day, sustained by testimony passed down in the family, forming modern Circassian diasporic group identity narratives.[12]

Some of what oral tradition preserves corroborates, and sharpens, the archival record examined here. Circassian family accounts of the exodus frequently describe how ship captains, paid according to how many passengers they crammed aboard rather than how many survived the crossing, packed vessels rated for forty or sixty people with three hundred or more — a practice widely blamed in community memory for the sinkings and mass drownings that recur in survivors’ accounts of the Black Sea crossing.[13] Where Olshevsky’s dispatch reduces the dead at Novorossiysk to a count of cemeteries and a distance in miles, family memory insists on returning individual faces and names to that number, a task no bureaucratic tally was ever designed to perform.

Historians are increasingly working to bring these two registers of evidence, archival and oral, into dialogue with one another. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees is a case in point. Alongside state archives in ten countries, the book draws on family letters and oral histories collected from the descendants of muhajirs, using them to reconstruct individual and family trajectories that official Ottoman and Russian records alone could never reveal.[14] Diaspora-led projects have begun similar work closer to the communities themselves. Descendants of Ubykh and Shapsugh refugees who eventually settled around Samsun and Düzce, for instance, have recorded family testimony about the crossing and about the long silence that often followed it, since, as is common among survivor families, the details of the crossing itself were rarely spoken of directly.[15]

Read together, archival bureaucracy and oral memory tell a single story from two directions at once. The former lays bare the day-to-day workings of an imperial administration scrambling to manage a disaster it had itself set in motion. The latter insists that the hundreds of thousands reduced to totals in Olshevsky’s report, or to line items in a ledger of two-ruble allowances, were parents, children, and communities whose loss is still felt, and still narrated, five generations on. Bringing this second register more fully into view, alongside the archival one, is a task for the next stage of this research.

Vitalii Shtybin holds a Master’s degree in Historical Sciences from Kuban State University (Krasnodar, Russia) and works as an ethnologist and an archival specialist in the Republic of Georgia, specializing in Caucasus studies, Circassian culture and history. He is a PhD candidate at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) and a contributor to Europe and Circassia, Cambridge University-led archival project. He is currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia. Read more of his work at medium.com/@vshtybin or on his personal website datatells.info.

[1]Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky estimates that over half a million western Circassians had fled to the Ottoman Empire by the end of 1864; broader estimates for the full wave of Caucasian Muslim migration in this period range as high as 1 to 1.2 million. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024), 41–44; Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).

[2]On the project, see “Historians Note Uniqueness of New Multi-Volume Book about Circassians,” Caucasian Knot, February 1, 2022, eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/58094; and the series Europe and Circassia: 1760–1870 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022–).

[3]National Archives of Georgia, Central Historical Archive (hereafter NAG), Caucasian Archaeographic Commission, fond 416, inventory 3, files 142, 151, 152.

[4]The Ottoman government’s Supreme Commission for Resettlement (Muhacirin Komisyon-u Ali) was established in Istanbul in 1860, initially under Hafiz Pasha, governor of Trebizond. See Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees, 15–16.

[5]Report of N. I. Evdokimov, 1864, NAG, fond 416, inventory 3, file 1190.

[6]The scale of this tragedy could be described at far greater length, citing numerous further documents; the scope of this article allows only a partial account. For a fuller treatment of the fate of Circassian refugees after their arrival in Ottoman territory, see Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees.

[7]NAG, fond 416, inventory 3, file 142.

[8]NAG, fond 416, inventory 3, file 142.

[9]NAG, fond 416, inventory 3, file 142.

[10]Dispatch from Lieutenant General V. Olshevsky, Commander of the Kuban Region Troops (in absentia), to Lieutenant General N. Kartsov, Chief of the General Staff of the Caucasian Army, no. 20, 9 January 1865, NAG, fond 416, inventory 3, file 142.

[11]On captains overloading refugee vessels for profit, see historian Aibek Napso’s account in “Circling the Circassian Identity,” Futuress, May 21, 2022, futuress.org/stories/circling-the-circassian-identity.

[12]Lina Tsrimova, “‘May That Never Be Forgotten’: Analyzing Regimes of Historicity in Adyghe Colonial War Songs,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 25, no. 1 (Winter 2024): 171–86.

[13]Napso, “Circling the Circassian Identity.”

[14]Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees, esp. introduction.

[15]Şölen Şanlı Vasquez, “Exile from the Caucasus,” accessed July 2026, sites.google.com/view/circassianexile/home.