The North Caucasus

The most linguistically dense region in Europe and the most persistently ungovernable part of Russia. The northern slopes of the Caucasus hold dozens of peoples - Chechens, Ingush, Avars, Dargins, Lezgins, Kabardians, Ossetians, Circassians and many more - speaking languages from three unrelated families, a diversity produced by mountain valleys that shelter small communities and make conquest expensive. Russia arrived from the north in the eighteenth century and spent the entire nineteenth taking the range. The Caucasian War, running from the 1810s to 1864, was the longest conflict in Russian history; Imam Shamil held the eastern mountains for twenty-five years, and the final defeat of the Circassians in the west was followed by their mass expulsion to the Ottoman Empire, an event now widely described as ethnic cleansing and still central to Circassian identity. Islam spread in the region substantially as a consequence of that resistance rather than before it. The Soviet period added a second layer: in 1944 Stalin deported the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Karachays wholesale to Central Asia, where large fractions died, and allowed the survivors back only in 1957 to find their land occupied. Two wars in Chechnya after 1994 followed from that history rather than from the collapse of the Soviet Union alone. The region remains poor, young, heavily subsidised and governed through local strongmen. Dagestan alone has more than thirty languages and no majority people. Mount Elbrus, in the range, is the highest point in Europe. Grozny was largely destroyed twice within a decade. Sochi's 2014 Olympics were held on the site of the final Circassian expulsion.

• Existed: 1000 CE – present
• Type: Entity