The paper is an attempt to rethink the frontier population exchange happened between the Russian and Ottoman empires in the last third of the nineteenth century, and labeled "demographic warfare" by the modern American historian Marc Pinson. Tsarist Russia encouraged emigration of Russia's Muslims from recently conquered Caucasus while accepting Ottoman Christian immigrants, mostly Armenians and Orthodox minorities, and settling them on imperial borderlands. It their turn, the Ottomans installed Caucasus Muslims coming from Russia on their vulnerable borders in the Balkans and later in the Arab Middle East. To date this process remains poorly studied so in Russia as abroad. As a rule, scholars did not compare synchronic Russian and Ottoman archival files. Focusing on the fate of so-called Circassian emigrants the paper draws on Ottoman documents housed in the Cyrill and Methodius National Library in Sofia (Bulgaria) containing the third largest collection of the Ottoman documents in the world, over 500,000 archival files in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. In addition, it is based on archival documents from the Caucasus and Moscow. The author argues that so Muslim immigrants from Russia in Ottoman Turkey as Russian colonists settled on their lands in the Caucasus contributed in making modern societies and political mapping ex-imperial frontier areas of both polities. Archival sources witness they often got in similar social situations and fulfilled the same political functions of irregular police forces. Immigration was fraught with a psychological trauma that struck a number of generations of Circassians in Diaspora.

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