Talk:Russo-Circassian War

Vandalism
I ask the administration to pay attention to the actions of some participants, which add absolutely absurd data contradicting the sources, the article should be closed for edits Dushnilkin (talk) 11:02, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

remilitari.com
Please explain why you think that remilitari.com is a reliable source. It does not provide scholarly sources to the numbers it gives, therefore these numbers are impossible to reliably verify. - Altenmann >talk 16:19, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

P.S. The website says "Members of this society and affiliates of the De Re Militari Social Network may be any person who previously requests it from the Administrator or Owner of the electronic Social Network as indicated on the Social Network Server page, as well as in the of this website intended for this purpose." This means this society does not require any scholarly credentials from he contributors, hence it cannot be possibly a reliable source. Altenmann >talk 16:19, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree with Altenmann. Also, it would be prudent for editwarring parties to start using the article talk page. --Kansas Bear (talk) 16:32, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Malik wrote in edit summary:
 * Remilitari.com is recognized as a reliable source by numerous academic institutions, historians, and researchers. Its credibility stems from thorough research, citation of primary sources, and peer-reviewed content. Furthermore, its commitment to factual accuracy and unbiased reporting solidifies its status as a reputable source for historical information. The source also provides the Circassian casualties, but you don’t change nothing on the Circassian side. It just shows your ego and hypocrisy

Please show me a single "citation of primary sources, and peer-reviewed content", or at the very least author in the page you cited, so that the credibilitary of the page may be evaluated. - Altenmann >talk 01:45, 17 April 2024 (UTC)


 * remilitari.com appears to be a self-published or user-generated source. It is equivalent to a blog or a mailing list or any random history website someone puts up on the web. It is most definitely not a reliable source. Air on White (talk) 21:34, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Casualties
@Tluadg: No provided sources for casualties have been reliable. Tluadg has justified sourcing with the following edit summaries:


 * I’m not trying to source spam, just trying to bring as much sources to provide the historical accuracy of the causalties. Even though there are many sources all of them claim the same thing. And the only source that I got from primary sources is from the book of Teofil Lapinsky who‘s the one that also claims that from the time of Catharine II that are about one and a half million military casualties KIA, DFW and DFD. diff

It does not matter how many sources you add if they are unreliable. 0+0+0+...+0 = 0 no matter how many 0s you throw in. The sources do not universally agree on your figure of 1.5 million. Many of them are primary sources - memoirs, journals, original statistics gathered by the military, etc. are all primary sources.


 * Who are you to say what sources are reliable and what aren’t. It doesn’t matter if it‘s old or not. The sources that I provided are books with sources from the original writings of foreign adventurers or Russian generals that took part in the Russo-Circassian war. You can look up all of the books and who wrote them, all of the books were written by historians with reliable sources to back their claims. diff

Please do not make personal attacks. The definition of a reliable source is widely agreed upon, both generally be scholars and in Wikipedia policy (WP:RS). Anyone can tell what's reliable and what's not. And if I can't, how can you? We're both anonymous guys on Wikipedia. Old sources are not reliable because they do not reflect the current state of scholarly knowledge. The writings of foreign adventurers or Russian generals are primary sources and should not be used in casualty estimates because primary sources may be inaccurate, whether intentionally or not. They are just one piece of evidence in determining casualty counts. As you just said, not all of the books are "by historians with reliable sources to back up their claims" - some are primary, and others like remilitari.com are most definitely not reliable. The proper source for a casualty count should be a recent estimate by a scholar that can be sourced to an appropriate book or article.

@Dushnilkin: You wrote:


 * The main quote that refutes the calculation of losses in 1901 is taken from the magazine "Rodina" which claims 77 thousand Russian losses diff

Rodina is owned by the Russian government and cannot be trusted as the sole source for a casualty count. I have therefore determined that no one has offered a reliable casualty estimate and just blanked the part of the infobox.

Thank you both for reading my comments about sourcing. Air on White (talk) 19:56, 11 June 2024 (UTC)


 * I wrote this post because one of the sources used by Tluadg refers to this quote, which cites this particular loss calculator. And so it would be best to send to Lieberman's work, he cited the estimated losses by name, referring to the documents of the Caucasus. Dushnilkin (talk) 20:55, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I have read all your message, I agree that it is better to leave the infbox page empty. Dushnilkin (talk) 21:01, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
 * New users continue to add the same information, ignoring requests to go to the discussion page, something really needs to be done about this article Dushnilkin (talk) 16:01, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Regarding the Messenger article as a cite for 1.5-2 million deaths
This is regarding the following section in the article:

"During the Circassian Genocide, approximately 1.5 to 2 million Circassian natives were slaughtered[Messenger article]; and about 1,500,000 indigenous highland Caucasians were mainly expelled to the Ottoman Empire[2 references to the same Walter Richmond book, two Turkish sources I can't comment on, and Ahmed 2013], and a much smaller number of them were expelled to Persia. An unknown number of those who were expelled died during their deportation."

American University: Journal of International Service is a student-run publication that is not peer-reviewed in the sense that it is reviewed by other scholars, but in the sense that it is reviewed by other American University students. Additionally, it does not claim 1.5-2 million deaths as a result of slaughter on the basis of any primary or academic sources, despite being used as the main citation for that claim. The relevant excerpt from the Messenger article is below -

"According to an 1830 census, prior to deportation, there was a population of approximately four million Circassians.[xx] Karl Freidrick Neuman, a German orientalist, cites Ottoman correspondence claiming that 1.5 million Circassians attempted to sail to Turkey, with 500,000 dying in route. An additional 500,000 Circassians died of disease in the camps on Turkish shores, and 200,000 people fled voluntarily to Turkey in 1858 before the deportations.[xxi] In 1864, Russia reappropriated Circassian lands to pro-Russian ethnic groups and forcibly resettled around 120-150,000 Circassians who were spared by accepting Russian cultural assimilation.[xxii] Russian assimilation programs and deportations to Turkey only account for approximately half of the Circassian population. The corroboration between both Turkish and Russian documents puts the number of Circassian deaths by military operations and pre-planned massacres between 1.5 – 2 million; this is including those that disappeared, died from war, depopulation of villages, and instances of mass murder.[xxiii]"

The citation for a population of 4 million Circassians in 1830 is from a xx, Ryan, Atticus, Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization: Yearbook 1997 (Kluwer Law International, 1998). Page 67. The first two sentences of this page are as follows -- “Historic Cherkessia occupied the territory from the Black Sea in the west to the River Sunzhi (in present day Chechenia) in the east until the Russian conquest in the 1860s. Documents show the existence of a confederated Circassia in 1830 with more than 4 million people.” I was unable to locate any citations in this book, which was not peer-reviewed, for this claim. The best I could find as to the origins of the chapter's arguments is an "It is said" at the top of the next paragraph instead. The only excerpt I could find that hinted at authorship at all was in the Acknowledgments, "The pages that follow represent counting efforts intended to provide insight into the situations of the nations, people and minorities, as they themselves view and present them, as well as the policies of their collective representation in the UNPO.” I'm not sure this is a neutral point of view. I think the 4 million number might require someone able to read German to carefully go through Neuman's text, which I suspect might actually be the source for the 4 million claim, and figure out if that is indeed the source of the number, as well as whether the number is reliable regarding the Circassian population. The borders of historic Circassia described in the source above include within them nearly all of the homelands of the Ossetians, Karachay, and Balkars, as well as nearly half of Ingushetia, etc. The Armenian population of Russian Armenia was far below 500,000 at that time while the Georgian population based on this Wikipedia page was below 1 million; Circassia had already been ravaged by war and intermittent epidemics for nearly 50 years. That is to say, this is a claim that I think requires more effort, either by scholars, or by better citation management here, to confidently make on such a politicized topic.

It is also worth nothing that xxiii, the citation for 1.5-2 million deaths, refers to Raszelenberg, Patrick. “The Khmers Rouges and the Final Solution.” History and Memory 11, no. 2 (1999): 62–93. Page 88. I have included the entire page below:

"upon the Khmers Rouges takeover (Central Intelligence Agency, Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe, Research Paper, May 1980, 2). Michael Vickery speaks of roughly 300,000 executions and over 400,000 deaths resulting from excessive working conditions (Cambodia 1975–1982 [Boston, 1982], 187), while Kiernan claims 1.5 million deaths for the Khmers Rouges period (The Pol Pot Regime, 460). Other estimates are 3,314,768 (sic!): People’s Republic of Kampuchea, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Chinese Rulers’ Crimes against Kampuchea (Phnom Penh, 1984), 85, later revised to 2,7464,105: Sapordamean Kampuchea (official news agency), 16 Aug. 1983, in FBIS, AP, 16 Aug. 1983, H3; 1.05 million: Judith Banister and Paige Johnson, “After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia,” in Ben Kiernan, ed., Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmers Rouges, the United Nations and the International Community, Yale SEA Studies Monograph Series, no. 41 (New Haven, 1993), 66; Meng-Try Ea, “Recent Population Trends in Kampuchea,” in Ablin and Hood, eds., The Cambodian Agony, 7. It seems safe to say that at least one million people perished as a result of malnutrition, beatings, forced labor and executions (the latter probably accounting for no more than 200,000). 22. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, 265. 23. On the entirely un-Marxist class analysis of the Khmers Rouges, cf. “Statement of the Communist Party of Kampuchea to the Communist Workers’ Party of Denmark, July 1978, by Nuon Chea, Deputy Party Secretary,” Journal of Communist Studies 3, no. 1 (Mar. 1987): 19ff.; “Sharpen the Consciousness of the Proletarian Class to be as Keen and Strong as Possible” (Tung Padevat article, special edition, Sept.–Oct. 1976), in Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death (Princeton, 1989); Timothy Carney, “Kampuchea’s Class Structure,” in ibid. See also my Die Roten Khmer und der Dritte Indochina-Krieg, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Asienkunde (Hamburg, 1995). 24. For the population transfers, see Kiljunen, ed., Kampuchea; for the Eastern Zone uprising, consult Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 392ff; for the internal rewriting of party history, cf. “Sharpen the Consciousness of the Proletarian Class,” 269, and Viviane Frings, “Rewriting Cambodian History to ‘Adapt’ It to a New Political Context: The Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party’s Historiography (1979–1991),” Modern Asian Studies 31, (Oct. 1997): 807ff. 25. Pol Pot (prime minister, secretary-general of the CPK) and Ieng Sary (foreign minister) were brothers-in-law; Sary’s wife Ieng Thirith was the minister for social affairs. Son Sen (minister of defense) and his wife Yun Yat (minister of culture and education) as well as the Thioun brothers, Mumm (director of the Science and Technology Institute), Thioeunn (minister of health) and Prasith (director of the Asian Department of the Foreign Ministry), together with several"

I think Messenger uses this as justification for his math, without really going into primary or reliable academic sources as Raszelenberg does. Again, this is typical of student-run publications, but results in a situation where poor citation management/historical work on Messenger's part is propagating.

Subsequently, I think the clause the Messenger article is used as a cite for should be deleted and instead, it is most accurate to write that (1) this is an active topic of renewed historical interest and research (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Circassian+genocide&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3), and that (2) consensus regarding estimates of civilian deaths, and (3) the proportion caused by various Russian military actions, deportation, or disease has not yet been reached. To stop the edit wars over this section I've noticed going through the page history, I would recommend that all death statistics be grouped into a cumulative number, something like 1-4 million (depending on the source of Neuman's information and the corroboration of Neuman by other? primary sources) to prevent any double-counting, and with a clause that research is ongoing as to the causes of these deaths, but that the reasons may include direct Russian army killings of civilians, famine, disease, deaths during deportation, etc. In the upcoming years, given revived interest in this topic, more reliable numbers and breakdowns will probably be able to be added.

2603:8000:B5F0:8860:A1A6:3EA1:5F9F:A8DF (talk) 07:41, 3 July 2024 (UTC)