Today marks the 160th anniversary of Imam Shamil's historic surrender to Tsarist forces and his name continues to live in the Caucasus
The song evokes a feeling of righteousness despite lamenting a historic defeat. “O Mountains of Gunib. O soldiers of Shamil. Shamil’s citadel was full of warriors. Yet it has fallen, fallen forever.”
The impact of 1859 still reverberates across the Caucasus and informs contemporary rivalry and geopolitics between the Chechen and Dagestani federal republics. Early last month, maverick Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov piled into an already heated debate claiming Imam Shamil provoked “the annihilation of the Chechen people… and forced them to fight Russia for 20 years”.
Kadyrov’s critics highlight what they see as the irony of his dismissal of the Imam’s legacy considering Kadyrov’s own father switched sides to Russia during the second Chechen war and it is now a faithful federal republic. Nevertheless, it seems that the Chechen leader captured his countrymen’s ambivalence towards the famous 19th-century warrior.
To expand a little more on Shamil’s tenure as a resistance leader, the council of the elders of the Chechen Teips had invited the Avar Imam to join them in their efforts to resist Russian expansion; thus by March 1840 Shamil was declared the Imam of both Chechnya and Dagestan, and the latter erupted into anti-Russian rebellion giving Shamil’s Imamate fresh momentum.
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