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Updated: June 22, 2025
All the Cossacks were deprived of their independence, but the fate of the various communities was different. Those of the Volga were transfered to the Terek, where they had abundant occupation in guarding the frontier against the incursions of the Eastern Caucasian tribes.
What it has cost in life on the Russian side to attack-hitherto with no lasting effect the handful of Caucasian mountaineers, may be guessed from a single note, dated 1847: "The present Russian force in the Caucasus" including of course, the armed Cossacks of the Kuban and Terek "amounts to two hundred thousand."
Indeed, it seems not impossible to calculate how many years or centuries it may take for the sands of the Volga, aided by those of the Ural and the Emba on the eastern, and of the Kuma, the Terek, and the Kur or Kura, with its tributary the Aras, on the western shore, to fill up the land-locked Caspian, though its extreme depth, according to the Gazetteers, is 600 feet, and the area covered by it probably exceeds 180,000 square miles, a surface as large as that of Spain.
I have a gun, and strength, and youth... and the mountains! The Terek, which separates the Cossacks from the mountaineers, still flows turbid and rapid though already broad and smooth, always depositing greyish sand on its low reedy right bank and washing away the steep, though not high, left bank, with its roots of century-old oaks, its rotting plane trees, and young brushwood.
These myriads of insects were so well suited to that monstrously lavish wild vegetation, these multitudes of birds and beasts which filled the forest, this dark foliage, this hot scented air, these runlets filled with turbid water which everywhere soaked through from the Terek and gurgled here and there under the overhanging leaves, that the very thing which had at first seemed to him dreadful and intolerable now seemed pleasant.
Mithradates Master of the Bosphoran Kingdom Such was the state in which Mithradates found matters, when his Macedonian phalanx crossing the ridge of the Caucasus descended into the valleys of the Kuban and Terek and his fleet at the same time appeared in the Crimean waters.
In the plaiting of these last the Circassians especially excel, and while they annually receive many stuffs from Turkey and Persia, they send back in return considerable numbers of these articles woven of the flags of the Kuban and the Terek.
He heard Russian being spoken, and also heard the rapid smooth flow of the Terek, and a few steps farther in front of him saw the brown moving surface of the river, with the dim-coloured wet sand of its banks and shallows, the distant steppe, the cordon watch-tower outlined above the water, a saddled and hobbled horse among the brambles, and then the mountains opening out before him.
In this fertile wooded strip, rich in vegetation, has dwelt as far back as memory runs the fine warlike and prosperous Russian tribe belonging to the sect of Old Believers, and called the Grebensk Cossacks. Long long ago their Old Believer ancestors fled from Russia and settled beyond the Terek among the Chechens on the Greben, the first range of wooded mountains of Chechnya.
Once across the Kuban or the Terek, he never felt sure of his life, for there was always a Circassian lying in wait for him.
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