Dargo and the Biscuit Disaster

Prince Vorontsov was appointed Viceroy of the Caucasus in 1844 at sixty-four, a Napoleonic-war veteran and a career administrator, and Nicholas I instructed him personally that the pacification of the northern Caucasus was to be finished within three years. He was given the means he asked for: a substantially enlarged Caucasian army, an enlarged administration, and a free hand in strategy. The plan he built over the winter of 1845 was to take Imam Shamil’s ﵀ headquarters at Dargo outright, on the belief that losing the headquarters — and perhaps the imam — would collapse the imamate the way the fall of Gimry was supposed to have done in 1832. He gathered nearly eighteen thousand men for it, with elite regiments, heavy artillery and a supply train meant to keep a column alive in hard country for weeks.

The first stage went well. Through June the Russian column crossed the Michik, pushed through the forest belt and came up onto the Andi plateau, and at no point did the imamate offer a pitched battle. That was not reluctance. It was the plan. Shamil ﵀ wanted the Russian army drawn as deep and as tired as it could be made to go, with its supply line stretched to its limit, before anything was fought — and fought then in country where Russian numbers, Russian artillery and Russian close order counted for as little as terrain could make them count. Every kilometre the column advanced was a kilometre its biscuit had to be carried.

On 6 or 7 July the main body came down into Dargo and found it abandoned. Its people had gone into the surrounding forest and had fired part of the village behind them. Vorontsov occupied what was left of Shamil’s ﵀ headquarters and raised the Russian flag over it, and reported to Saint Petersburg that the operation was symbolically complete. It was symbolically complete. Militarily the army was now deep in hostile country at the end of a supply line running tens of kilometres back through mountain forest, in a district whose population could feed it nothing and tell it nothing. There was nothing in Dargo worth having. The imamate was not an address.

While the column marched, Shamil ﵀ had been building the answer to it. He called his naibs from Chechnya and central Dagestan to a gathering near Vedeno and settled the principle over several days: no pitched battle against the Russian main body in open passes, where artillery and close order decide everything, but an ambush strategy in the forest, where knowledge of the ground and small fast units decide it instead. He broke his fighters into detachments of a hundred to five hundred men, each under its own naib, and spread them along the expected Russian route and — the part that mattered — along the route the Russian supply would have to take. The main body could form square and bring its guns to bear. A pack train on a forest path could not.

The army sat at Dargo and on the plateau for about two weeks, waiting to be fed: its own stores were nearly gone and it could not hold the position without a convoy. On 10 or 11 July a large one left Vnezapnaya under General Klüke von Klugenau, several thousand pack animals with a substantial escort, and it was met in a narrow valley between the plateau and the mountains to its north by fighters who had been in position for weeks. Over 12, 13 and 14 July the imamate attacked from several sides at once: fast detachments split the escort, every attempt to break out was taken in the flank, and the separated Russian parties were worn down and destroyed one after another. Klugenau got the remains of the convoy back north having lost about a third of his escort and close to a thousand men killed and wounded. Less than a tenth of the supplies reached Dargo; the rest was carried off as spoil or burned by the Russians themselves in the confusion. It is remembered in the Russian literature by the biscuit that was lost with it.

With the convoy gone the position could not be supplied and could not be held. The retreat began on 17 July and took three weeks through the Chechen forest, and Shamil ﵀ gave the column no rest in any of them: ambush after ambush, attacks on the rear guard, the communication lines cut and cut again. When Vorontsov reached the cordon at Gerzel-aul and Chir-Yurt at the end of July or in the first week of August he had lost three to four thousand of his eighteen thousand men, left guns in the forest, and brought back survivors in no state for further operations. The reports to Saint Petersburg leaned on the capture of Dargo. Nobody in the army believed it. For Shamil ﵀ it was the greatest military success of the imamate, and he preached it in the villages afterwards as the protection of Allah ﷻ rather than as his own skill. The forest between Dargo and the Michik kept the name it was given in the Avar and Chechen villages: the Valley of the Shadow.

Saint Petersburg did not abandon Vorontsov in public, but the strategy did not survive Dargo. Frontal attacks on the imamate’s mountain core were given up, and in their place came a policy of gradual starvation carried out over the next fifteen years by Baryatinsky, Yevdokimov and others: the systematic burning of the Chechen forests that gave the imamate its cover, the destruction of villages that stayed loyal to it, the forced resettlement of their people onto the plains under Russian supervision, and a growing web of forts, watchtowers and cordon lines to close the mountains off. It worked. The territory of the imamate shrank through the 1850s, the people under Shamil’s ﵀ authority were ground down by hunger and exhaustion, and in 1859 it ended at Gunib. Dargo was the greatest victory of the imamate and the reason it was eventually destroyed.