A. M. Pikman's 1956 article, published in the Soviet journal Voprosy Istorii in the "Discussions and Debates" section, represents a significant intervention in the Soviet historiographical controversy over how to characterize the Caucasian mountaineers' resistance to Tsarist conquest. Writing against the dominant line established after 1950 — which had branded Shamil's movement as reactionary, anti-popular, and a tool of British and Turkish imperialism — Pikman argues Marx, Engels, Dobrolyubov, and the Tsarist military's own documents to argue that the struggle was, at its core, a national liberation movement.

Pikman's central argument is that the mountaineers fought for the freedom and independence of their homeland, not at the behest of foreign powers. He demonstrates that Marx and Engels consistently supported the Caucasian resistance as part of the broader struggle against Tsarism, and that the Tsarist generals themselves — in their own reports — were forced to acknowledge the popular, mass character of the movement. He also systematically dismantles the claim that foreign connections tainted the movement, noting that small peoples under colonial assault have every right to seek assistance wherever they can find it.

Pikman also documents what Tsarist sources themselves recorded about the fate of the Circassians of the Western Caucasus: hundreds of villages burned, crops destroyed, those who submitted forcibly resettled in the lowlands, and those who refused driven to the Black Sea coast for deportation to Turkey. The significance of this article lies not only in its rehabilitation of the mountaineers' resistance as a legitimate national liberation struggle, but in the fact that its key evidence for the scale of Circassian destruction comes from Tsarist military sources themselves — making it a document of inadvertent historical witness as much as ideological critique. The article closes with a call that remains unheeded: "We must put an end to the falsification of the history of the Caucasian highlanders' movement".