Commemorating General Sultan Klych Girey on the 78th anniversary of his execution

Türkçe Tercüme

Sultan Klych Girey was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the North Caucasus between revolutions and world wars. He was born on March 15, 1880, in the village of Ulyape in Western Circassia to a father from the Crimean dynasty and a mother from the Gusar family of Adygs. He left his home when he was only 13 years old and went to St. Petersburg for education. His military career, which began in 1897 at 17, continued with a track record of success until the outbreak of the world war in the summer of 1914. 

 Like many other Caucasian Mountaineers, he obeyed the Tsarist call and joined the Caucasian Cavalry Division, which went down in history as the Wild Division.  While Klych Girey joined the war as the commander of the 2nd Company of the Circassian Regiment of the division, his brother Sultan Bayazit also took his place at the front as the aide to the commander of the 3rd Company.

On the night of August 11, 1915, Staff Captain Sultan Klych Girey became legendary in the Division for his success in the attack on Austrian positions in the village of Mossoruvka near the Ukrainian-Romanian border.  He was wounded during this attack and was hospitalized for 35 days.  Quickly rising in his career, Klych Girey was first promoted to lieutenant colonel on April 16, 1916, and then to colonel on July 7.  Klych Girey, who constantly added new successes to his legendary achievements, married Guelcan Nedjefevna, the daughter of the Kaplan family of Nogai aristocracy, on January 26, 1917, on the days he returned to the Caucasus on a temporary leave from the front.

While the Russian imperial army was being defeated on all fronts due to the February revolution in the capital and domestic turmoil, the Wild Division was the only unit still able to maintain discipline. On the orders of General Kornilov, who was trying to revive the Russian monarchy, the Wild Division was on its way to the capital to abolish the revolution.  Members of the Petrograd Muslim Committee of the Caucasian Mountaineers, who visited the train carrying the division at a station a few stops away from the capital, convinced the commanders not to intervene in such a way and thus paved the way for the Bolshevik revolution that would take place a few months later.  As a result, Sultan Klych Girey returned to the Caucasus with the entire division in the fall of 1917. 
While the development of events in Russia fueled the winds of independence in the North Caucasus, the Russian civil war that broke out in central Russia quickly spread around the Caucasus.  Sultan Klych Girey, in alliance with the Cossack army group in the Kuban region, formed a detachment of Circassians and took his place in the ranks of the White Volunteer Army against the Bolsheviks.  At the same time, at a meeting of the Abkhaz National Council, Sultan Klych Girey was elected commander of the military forces of the Sukhum region.    Having won numerous victories in the North Caucasus against the Bolsheviks on behalf of General Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army during the Civil War and having been promoted to the rank of major general, Sultan Klych Girey refused to lead his troops against the Caucasian Mountaineers and went to the Tsaritsin (Volgograd) front, since Denikin, instead of fighting the Bolshevik Russians, took a hostile attitude towards the North Caucasian highlanders.  While the Reds gained superiority over the Whites in the center of Russia, Denikin's Volunteer Army suffered heavy defeats in the North Caucasus against the national forces of the Republic of the Union of the North Caucasian Mountaineers and began to retreat towards Crimea.  During this retreat, Sultan Klych Girey tried to protect his troops as much as he could and brought them to the border of Abkhazia. Still, due to the obstruction of the Menshevik Georgian administration, which was afraid of the Bolshevik Russians and signed a secret treaty with them, he had to disperse his troops and send them home. 

Klych Girey, who was able to access Georgia with some of his close comrades-in-arms and relatives, continued to work in coordination with the Mountaineers’ Committee in Tbilisi and to fight against the Bolsheviks in connection with the French High Military Commissariat and Baron Wrangel, who took command of the Volunteer Army.  Finally, when the Bolshevik Russians occupied Tbilisi and Batumi, he defected to Turkey with about a thousand soldiers following him. 
While most of the North Caucasian military personnel who defected to Turkey at that time were accepted into the National Army of the Ankara Government, Sultan Klych Girey was subjected to exceptional treatment due to his high rank. In fact, the true reason for this exception was not his high rank, but the fact that the Ankara Government did not want a new Circassian Ethem case.  Sultan Klych Girey, who lived in Samsun and Istanbul for a while and supported anti-Bolshevik organizing efforts, realized that he would not be able to make a living in Turkey and, like many other North Caucasian political refugees, he chased for an opportunity to move to Europe.  In 1924, Sultan Klych Girey was among the political refugees sent to Prague as part of a project carried out by the Czechoslovak government with the International Red Cross organization.  During his days in Prague, he tried to create an opportunity to continue his anti-Bolshevik work with both the North Caucasian political refugees and Baron Wrangel's White Russians, but after these attempts failed to yield any concrete results, he went to France with his family and settled in Paris.
Sultan Klych Girey fought hard to build a new life in Paris, working as a metalworker in industrial plants and giving riding lessons to members of prominent Parisian families to earn the life of his family.  On April 26, 1927, General Sultan Klych Girey was appointed as the Paris representative of the Caucasian Independence Committee (Komiteta Nezavisimosti Kavkaza - KNK), headquartered in Istanbul, and the Popular Party of the Caucasian Highlanders, headquartered in Warsaw. However, he resigned from this post in the spring of 1929 due to the shady activities of Said Shamil, the leader of the party.  As a result of the investigation conducted by the party leadership and Said Shamil's expulsion from his post, he was appointed as the chairman of the party. However, he resigned from his post the same year due to the destructive activities of factions within the party.  During this turbulent period, Sultan Klych Girey’s name was also associated with the assassination of French President Paul Doumer. As a result of long investigations and trials, no connection could be found with the case. 

In October 1935, the Girey family found some peace when developments showed that Sultan Klych Girey could not continue his concrete military activities against the Soviet Union, and gave birth to a daughter named Elmaskhan, whom they called Ella in the family.  However, this deceptive period of peace did not last long.  As the world was drifting towards a new great war, Klych Girey, who saw that this could be an opportunity, together with many Caucasian political refugees, took his place among the executive staff of Club Promete, which was established in Paris in January 1939 under the guise of a charity club.
From the outbreak of  World War II in September 1939 and from 1940, when it was decided to create volunteer units of Eastern peoples in the German army, Klych Girey actively participated in the process, returning to the North Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Klych Girey, who did not believe in the racist politics of the German National Socialists and the sincerity of their promises to the Caucasians, warned the Mountaineers who volunteered to fight in the German ranks to be cautious and restrained. He warned his compatriots not to trust the Germans too much.  Klych Girey, whose speeches were leaked to German intelligence units by some of his fellow countrymen, became one of those who was not favored by the German command, but since his influence on the society was known, Germans could not take a concrete measure against him. 
As a matter of fact, the unexpected defeat of the Germans on the Stalingrad (Volgograd) front suddenly changed the balance of Powers in the war, and the Germans began to retreat from the occupied Soviet territories.  The withdrawal of German troops from the Caucasus began in January 1943 and was completed in October.   Klych Girey accompanied his compatriots, who followed the German troops leaving the Caucasus, on this difficult journey.  He made great efforts to prevent the Germans from using his compatriots as bait for the Red Army.  In coordination with the Caucasian National Committee in Berlin, he made a great effort to improve the living conditions of the refugees.  Although he was dismissed from all his duties by the German command for his negative attitude towards the Germans, he did not leave the refugees' side for a moment with the support of the committee in Berlin during this difficult retreat. 

In the summer of 1944,  Heinrich Himmler, the top commander of the SS, ordered the formation of a division, composed of representatives of the peoples of the Caucasus.  Pridon Tsulukidze for the Georgian Regiment, Muhammad Israfil Bey for the Azerbaijani Regiment, and Vardan Sargsyan for the Armenian Regiment were appointed as regimental commanders of this special division called "Kaukasischer Waffen Verbänd der SS". The commander of the North Caucasus Regiment was Colonel Kushuk Ulagay, one of the officers who served as one of the regiment commanders in the Circassian Division under Sultan Klych Girey’s command between 1918 and 1921 period.  The division was planned to be allocated in Italy to fight against the Allies, Italian and Yugoslav partisans.  Within the framework of this plan, called "Operazione Ataman", Caucasians were in the project together with the Cossacks.  Cossacks and Caucasians were brought to Northern Italy in the July-August 1944 period. General Sultan Klych Girey arrived in Italy with the refugees, representing the Caucasian Committee in Berlin.  The Caucasian troops, who participated in operations in the Friuli region at the foothills of the Italian Alps until April 1945, started to cross the mountain paths to Austria on Klych Girey's instructions after the Germans were declared to have lost the war on the last day of April 1945.  As a result of negotiations with the commanders of the 78th Infantry Division of the British 5th Corps, who arrived in the region around the same time, Caucasian and Cossack refugees settled in the area along the Drau River between the towns of Oberdrauburg and Spittal in May 1945.
The British forces, which were extremely weak in terms of weapons and personnel, were in a panic about how to handle this much stronger group of refugees.  The fact that the British were being threatened by the Yugoslav Partisans, who seemed to have no organic ties with Stalin, but were following his orders in a literal sense, made the British even more panicked.  Since the beginning of the war, the NKVD had been closely following the activities of Sultan Klych Girey and other Caucasian political refugees and trying to capture them.  Therefore, there could be no doubt that they would do everything necessary to seize this opportunity.  As a result of negotiations between the British commanders of the 8th Army, 5th Corps, and 78th Infantry Division and London, it was decided on May 20 to hand over these refugees to the Red Army under the agreement reached in Yalta in February 1945 between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill.
Sultan Klych Girey, suspicious of the developments, advised those in his inner circle to flee the camps by organizing an uprising in the camps.  Although some listened to his advice, the majority preferred to stay in the camps, believing the British promises.  Over the next eight days, as a result of preparations made with hypocrisy unprecedented in human history, the British Army first raided the camps of the refugees on the morning of May 27th and confiscated their weapons, and then, in a similar raid at noon on the next day, forcibly put the refugees on trucks and took them out of the camps to be loaded to the trains waiting at the nearby Dellach railway station.
On the morning of May 28, General Sultan Klych Girey who was told that he would be taken to attend a conference in Dellach, was taken from the camp and taken to the British headquarters in Spittal instead of Dellach.  There he was informed by British officers that it was known that he had never been a Soviet citizen and that they might not hand him over to the Soviets if he agreed to work for the British after the war. Sultan Klych Girey, however, said that he would not abandon the people he was obliged to protect and would surrender with them to the Reds, and then submitted a written communiqué to the British commanders for the record.  He then left the headquarters in the vehicle that would take him to the barracks where he would be held with other ranking officers until he was handed over to the Red Army. 
According to the records of train shipments, a total of 22,934 Caucasians and Cossacks from the Drau Valley were handed over to the Soviets by the British Army between May 29 and June 17, 1945. A careful examination of the numbers in the war diaries reveals that the number of people who escaped from being handed over to the Soviets was over 5,600.  Among those who escaped, some were captured in the following days and returned individually after interrogation. 
Sultan Klych Girey and the Cossack generals were taken first to Graz and then to Baden.  On June 3, 1945, Klych Girey and his entourage were taken by plane to Moscow and placed in their cell in Lubyanka.

The prisoners received a daily ration of 1 kilogram of 200 grams of white bread, nine sugar cubes, pancakes, rice porridge or eggs for breakfast, a piece of fried meat, usually soup and a side dish, and 200 grams of sweet plum compote for lunch, and porridge or mashed potatoes with herring for dinner. On September 13, 1946, after a little over a year in their cells in Lubyanka, the conclusion of the sham trials was announced.  In fact, this process, the outcome of which was clear from the first day, was deliberately prolonged to use the prisoners as leverage against the other Allies.   On Thursday, January 16, 1947, at the verdict hearing, the prisoners were sentenced to death by hanging.  Although no documentation has yet been found as to when the executions took place following the notification of the verdict, an advertisement on the fourth page of the Pravda newspaper of January 17, 1947, supports the idea that the execution took place in the early morning hours of January 17.
Unfortunately, it is not yet clear how the corpses of General Sultan Klych Girey and the Cossack generals were treated.  The bodies were probably cremated, but it is also possible that they were buried in a secret place.  During the perestroika period, a symbolic tombstone for the Cossack generals was placed by Russian nationalist groups in the yard of the "All Saints" (Vse Svyatıye) church in Moscow.  Heartbreakingly and shamefully for the Caucasian Mountaineers, this symbolic tombstone also bears the name of  General Sultan Klych Girey.  Today, the issue is still taboo among the Caucasian Mountaineers, and unfortunately, it cannot even be discussed objectively due to the dogmatic elements engraved in people's minds, such as the Great Patriotic War and the false Soviet Homeland.  The construction of at least a monument to the memory of General Sultan Sultan Klych Girey in his native village in Circassia is a debt that must be repaid for the soul of this distinguished figure of Caucasian history to rest in peace.

In commemoration of this day, members of our page can read my book published in Turkish in 2023, which was introduced to the field as the first scientific biography of General Sultan Klych Girey, in our online reading room by clicking on the link on the cover image below and the option to borrow it for 1 hour to read (can be extended at the end of the period) at the top of the page.  If you wish, you can purchase the printed book which remained in a very limited quantity from the Caucasus Foundation or KAFDAV's online store.

Cem Kumuk

Istanbul, January 17, 2025