Alagir, Russia

History

The town was established in 1850 by Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, the Viceroy of the Caucasus, near an ancient silver/lead mine in the nearby Alagir Gorge. It was built up as a fortification around a smelting plant and became a major mining center. By the end of the 19th century, it had been increasingly populated by Georgians and Russians who came to work there. During the Russian Civil War, in January 1919, Alagir was a scene of intense fighting, which resulted in heavy casualties in Georgian population and difficult flight of the survivors through the mountainous passes into Georgia. The Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin commented on the incident, blaming "counter-revolutionaries" for atrocities in Alagir, which Georgians tend to attribute to the Ossetian radicals.

Alagir was granted town status in 1938. During World War II, on November 5, 1942, the German III Panzer Corps and Romanian 2nd Mountain Division (under von Kleist) captured the town and held it until it was recovered by the Soviet forces in early January 1943.

From the History section of Alagir on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.