Section 5 of 6
Who lives here, and what happened to them
Circassians and Balkars, the 1944 deportation, the 1957 return.
- A nation with more people outside the Caucasus than in itThe Circassians were dispersed in the nineteenth century, and the diaspora is larger than the population that remained.
- The Balkars were deported in a single operationIn March 1944 the entire Balkar population was deported to Central Asia. They were permitted to return in 1957.
- The nineteenth century came here to take the watersPyatigorsk and the mineral-water towns drew Russian society, and Lermontov wrote the Caucasus that most readers still carry.
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