The Exchange of Prisoners as a New Form of the Russian-Circassian Dialogue at the beginning of the 19th Century: Part II

The article deals with the exchange and ransom of prisoners as a form of russian-circassian dialogue, which allowed the 50 russian prisoners to return to their homeland in 1805-1809. The attention is paid to the social, gender composition of russian prisoners. There are analyzed the materials of exchange and redemption of captives. There are used as materials the unpublished documents of the state archive of the Krasnodar region (Krasnodar, Russian Federation). The specialized and memoir literature is also attracted to the study. There are used the traditional scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, concretization, generalization when solving the research problems.The statistical method is of great importance in the study,by which the gender, national and social composition of the prisoners was calculated. The length of stay in captivity is also calculated. The authors concluded that the russian administrationmade great efforts to return the russian citizens to their homeland from circassian captivity in 1803-1809. Along with the exchange, there was applied the redemption of captives. In total for this time, 210 people were returned to the Russian empire, of which 201 men and 9 women, 50 of them in 1805-1809. From 210 prisoners, 106 people, that is, 50% belonged to representatives of the Black Sea cossack troops. 97 captivespreserved the information about the time spent in captivity. So, less than a year 43 people were held in slavery, from 1 to 3 years - 30 persons, from 4 to 9 years - 10 people, more than 10 years -14, and 4 of them from 20 to 30 years.