Pitting Neighboring Peoples Against Each Other

Against Chechnya the empire mobilised the other peoples of the Caucasus it had conquered. In the army of Vorontsov, viceroy in the Caucasus, in the Dargo march of 1845 historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov count "1 thousand men of the Georgian militia, 16 sotnias of Cossacks and highland militia (Kabardian and Ossetian)" (militia - armed detachments of highlanders and Georgians in the empire's service)^[1]. The colonised peoples the empire put into the ranks against their neighbours - so that Caucasians would fight Caucasians for the imperial conquest.