I saw something in the New York Times yesterday in a blog-type area of the paper's website called "Idea of the Day"—I know, it's pretty lame. Anyway, I was intrigued by the title—"Genocide and the 2014 Olympics ."

The "genocide" in question is that which relates to the forcible deportation, occurring in the late 1850s and early 1860s, by tsarist authorities of Circassians, Chechens, and other northern Caucasian groups from the highlands which they inhabited to lowlands where the Russian government thought they would be more manageable. Nearly half a million of these individuals ultimately left the Russian Empire altogether, arriving in the Ottoman Empire in miserable condition with approximately half of these people dying on the road.

Last year I posted a response to an article published in the academic journal Kritika by a talented historian of Russia named Dana Sherry. As is the case with a number of contemporary Russianist scholars working on issues related to Muslim communities (perhaps not surprisingly, studies pertaining to Islam and Muslims in Russia and the USSR have proliferated exponentially in recent years), Sherry downplays the role of tsarist animosity towards Muslim communities (Robert D. Crews' For Prophet and Tsar, which I review here, bears a similar perspective). According to Sherry, the mass exodus of Muslims from the northern Caucasus was "unintended." In the piece I wrote last year, my main objection to Sherry's reasoning was that tsarist officials working in the north Caucasus couldn't possibly have been so incompetent or uninformed that they did not realize the possibility for mass departures when nearly the exact same thing had happened in the Crimea just a few years earlier, during and after the Crimean War, when hundreds of thousands of Crimean Muslims had likewise left Russia for the Ottoman Empire (although, as I argue in an article I published a few years ago, it is also true that following the experiences of the late 1850s and early 1860s, tsarist officials worked hard to prevent a repeat of these instances of mass emigration, which they viewed as economically and socially disruptive).

In the response that I posted on this blog, I was mainly interested in the double standard that is generally used with respect to crimes against humanity committed by Muslim states and those committed by Christian states. In particular, I noted the fact that, when I tell people I work on the Ottoman Empire, one of the first comments/questions I always hear relates to the genocide of the Armenians in 1915. However, nobody ever asks about tsarist or Soviet genocides against Muslim populations—and frankly, I think even if people in the United States knew about these events they really wouldn't care, even while they often feel certain about the nature of events taking place in the late Ottoman Empire that they know little or nothing about.

To be sure, Sherry was making a nuanced argument in the face of rather crude characterizations of mass expulsions that have typically formed the substance of the arguments made by the small community of scholars (mostly from the northern Caucasian diaspora living in Turkey and other places) that care about events in the north Caucasus in the middle nineteenth century. Sherry's position is that the goal of tsarist officials was not to drive Muslims out of Russia altogether, but merely to drive them out of their highland homelands and relocated them in the lowlands.

Such an argument is reminiscent of those made by apologists for the Ottoman government, who argue that the goal wasn't actually to kill the Armenians, but rather to move them away from the front. To be sure, in both cases there is some truth to this argument, and in both cases there were elements of not only state aggression but also civil war and armed resistance against the state taking place. But perspectives such as these are ultimately those of the state. What difference did it make, if you were an Armenian in 1915 or a Circassian in 1864, what the goals of the state were? It's ultimately the result which matters.

The piece in the New York Times, and the small article that it links to, constitute, to some extent, examples of the sort of reasoning that Sherry was working against. And rightly so. Scholars who attempt to complicate simplistic narratives regarding the Armenian genocide are guilty of thought crimes in France and other countries, while numerous states in the US (and, if certain lobbies get their way, the US federal government as well) attempt to do the job of historians for them by recognizing, for completely political reasons, the events of 1915 as a "genocide."


The mountaineers leave the aul, by P. N. Gruzinsky, 1872. Lifted from here.

The problem is, you can't really win with respect to these issues unless you take a simplistic stance. Nobody likes to be called a genocide-denier, and scholars who call into question popular characterizations of the Armenian genocide have been hounded for years. But at the same time, we can't let the states off the hook on these matters, either. Yes, these debates are ridiculously politicized and usually argued in very unsophisticated ways—but states have certain responsibilities towards their subjects and citizens, even those who come from populations engaging in rebellion.

The piece in the New York Times, just like the piece that it links to, does little to push this discussion further. Indeed, the goal here seems to be to demonize Russia just like the Ottoman Empire is demonized in discussions pertaining to the Armenian genocide. But for small, forgotten and ignored peoples like those from the northern Caucasus and the Crimean Tatars, sometimes shouting loudly and simply is probably the most effective thing you can do.