The Russian-Caucasian drama is one of the brightest and most bitter in our history. A difficult war, the origins of which go back to the Persian campaign of Peter I (1722), lasted sixty years in the 19th century and came to the surface as a powerful underground river at the end of the 20th century, largely determined the fate of Russia. An active participant and historian of the conquest of the Caucasus, General Rostislav Fadeev, wrote in 1860: “Our society as a whole was not even aware of the purpose for which the state so persistently, with such donations, sought to conquer the mountains.” It is unlikely that the situation has fundamentally changed today. About the obvious and hidden reasons for the longest war in Russian history, which has not ended to this day, about the paradoxical relationship between the “Russian Caucasians”, people of a special breed, and the Caucasian highlanders, also unique people in their own way, generated by this war and involved in a common tragedy, this book tells. The mythological Atlantis disappeared without a trace. The sharp contours of the Caucasian Atlantis - the mysterious continent of the Caucasian civilization and the Caucasian War - are still visible to us. We just need to strain our intellectual vision, and we will see and understand a lot. The second edition of the book is supplemented by an extensive list of literature on the Caucasian wars, the article “Wars, officers, history” and several dozen illustrations.