Sixty Years of the Caucasian War, published in 1860, is a military-historical account of Russia's decades-long occupation of the Caucasus written by Rostislav Fadeev (1824–1883), a Russian general, military publicist, and active participant in the campaigns of the 1850s. The work surveys the full arc of Russian military operations in the Caucasus from the early nineteenth century through the defeat of Imam Shamil in 1859 and the subsequent suppression of resistance in the western Caucasus. As one of the earliest systematic Russian-language overviews of the war, it occupies a significant place in the contemporary documentation of the conflict and has long been treated as a primary source for the internal logic and self-understanding of the Russian imperial military enterprise.

Fadeev writes as an informed insider with direct operational experience, and the text reflects the strategic and ideological frameworks through which the Russian officer class understood the occupation: the subjugation of the mountain peoples is framed as a civilizational and geopolitical necessity, and the resistance of Caucasian tribes is acknowledged primarily in terms of its military difficulty rather than its political or moral legitimacy. The work devotes particular attention to the role of Prince Baryatinsky, appointed commander-in-chief in 1856, whose systematic campaign strategy Fadeev credits with breaking organized resistance in the eastern Caucasus within three years. The account thus serves as an extended argument in favor of the methods ultimately adopted by the imperial command, written in the immediate aftermath of their application.

For researchers studying the Circassian genocide and the broader Russian occupation of the Caucasus, Sixty Years of the Caucasian War is a valuable source precisely because of its perspective: it documents how the Russian military establishment recorded, justified, and memorialized its own conduct. The text provides evidence of the scale and intentionality of Russian operations as understood by their own architects and chroniclers, and can be read alongside other primary sources — administrative reports, parliamentary records, and eyewitness accounts from the Caucasian side — to reconstruct a fuller picture of the war and its consequences for the indigenous populations of the region.