After more than 300 years of war against the indigenous peoples of the Caucasus, the army of the Russian Tsarist Empire succeeded in bringing the northern Caucasus under its control in 1864. In May 1864, the numerically superior Russian army defeated the Circassian forces and, after capitulating, gave them the choice of either fighting in the ranks of the Tsar’s army or exile. The conquest of these territories was of strategic importance for the expansion of the Russian Empire. With the capture began the expulsion of 800,000-1,500,000 Circassians and other Caucasian peoples, who were forced to leave their homeland forever.
Units of the Russian armed forces systematically destroyed farmland on which the harvest had already begun, as well as the livestock of the Circassian rural population, in order to deprive them of their livelihood. This was followed by a famine that forced people to flee. During the expulsion and after arriving in the host countries, many refugees died from violence, hunger, exhaustion, disease and poverty. Figures on the number of Circassian civilians who died in the expulsion vary between half a million and a million expelled Circassians who lost their lives in cruel marches and ship crossings in the Black Sea.
The largest group of displaced Circassians settled in the Ottoman Empire and others in the then provinces of the multi-ethnic empire in present-day Syria, Palestine, Jordan and other countries. According to calculations, around three million Circassians live in Turkey today, a further two million in other countries and 700,000 in their homeland, in what is now the Autonomous Republic of Adygeya. To this day, Russian governments refuse to recognize the injustice committed against the Circassians, because the expulsion and extermination of the Circassian people does not fit into the Russian view of history.
For the Circassians, May 21 is a day of remembrance, on which the expulsion of the Caucasian people is commemorated with memorial events by the diaspora and flowers are thrown into the sea in memory of the victims. In a resolution, the Georgian parliament recognized the expulsion of the Circassians in 2011 as genocide. In Turkish and Azerbaijani historiography, the term technicus Mezalim has become established for mass violent crimes against the Muslim civilian population.