Transitions Online www.tol.cz February 13, 2002 Letter from Dagestan: Guardians of the Peace Say what you will about the continued rule of the Soviet-era elites in Dagestan--but at least they’ve managed to safeguard some stability. By Nabi Abdullaev Nabi Abdullaev is a regular columnist for TOL.
MAKHACHKALA, Dagestan--I am often asked about how it is that Dagestan, where the potential for conflict is perhaps higher than anywhere else in the Caucasus, in general remains a stable republic.
It is a good question. Dagestan--where a gaping chasm separates the poorest and the richest, where dozens of ethnic groups make claim and counter-claim on land and political power, and where clergy of different faiths and creeds compete to rustle as big a spiritual flock as possible--cannot be compared with its nearly mono-ethnic neighbor, Chechnya, or with Azerbaijan and Georgia in the early days of independence. Though Dagestan is rocked by acts of terrorism from time to time, nowhere near as much blood has been spilled here as in those other former Soviet republics.
In my view, Dagestan is relatively stable in large part because it is still ruled by former Communist party mandarins. A look at Chechnya’s experience provides good evidence for this speculative explanation.
Today, Akhmad Kadyrov and other insiders in the pro-Moscow Chechen administration are calling for a Chechen constitution and presidential elections in Chechnya in 2002. Moscow, for all its claims that Chechnya has largely been pacified, is less enthusiastic about restoring a Chechen state system. Whatever Moscow’s other reasons, there is one good reason for this wariness: The last two attempts at a Chechen-run state have plunged the republic into two disastrous military conflicts with Russia.
The republic’s future top management in Chechnya must naturally be Chechen. Given the exceptional ethnic solidarity of the Chechen people, anyone else would be unacceptable and incapable of acting effectively without the threat of force
Moscow, though, is not ready to hand the levers of power and finance to locals who may turn disloyal --and, in the usual Caucasian way, turn corrupt, granting advantages to kin and clan. Its decision in January 2001 to install Stanislav Ilyasov, a former prime minister of the neighboring Stavropol region and a Russian national, as Chechnya’s head of government provided a very vivid illustration of the helplessness of the federal center in when it comes to finding personnel in Chechnya.
That helplessness faced with the need to identify a long-term leadership for a new Chechnya can be traced back to Stalin’s years and the special treatment meted out to Chechens by his successors.
No other people in the former Soviet empire suffered like the Chechens. Like others, they were deported to the cold steppes of Kazakhstan in 1944. But, unlike others, the political repression of the Chechens was not lifted when they returned home a decade later. And for decades, the Chechens, in contrast to other ethnic republics of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, were stripped of the chance to have their own among the republic’s top rulers.
The first Chechen to be given power in the republic, the local Communist Party leader Doku Zavgaev, took the reins only in 1989, two years before independence. Even then, though, the most sensitive ministries in the government of Soviet Checheno-Ingushetia--the ministries of the interior and state security--were occupied by Russians. So too was the mayor’s post in the capital, Grozny.
In the meantime, Chechnya’s neighboring republics--such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Dagestan, all of which are still ruled by former Communist leaders--had had decades in which to nurture politically educated local and ethnic elites. Certainly, those elites had a specifically Communist coloring, but that was the inevitable cost for the promotion of ethnic personnel through the administration.
When the Soviet empire collapsed, Dagestan was led by the people who understood that politics was a game with some rules and that decisions needed to be based on careful analysis of a great variety of factors. In Azerbaijan and Georgia, former Communist bosses took control of the republics out of the hands of democratic dissidents who had shown themselves to be unprofessional statesmen and had presided over the early years of chaotic and bloody independence.
In Chechnya, the first years of independence were not under the rule of Communist administrators or democratic dissidents but under a general, Dzhokhar Dudayev. He viewed politics through the eyes of a military man, with a clear vision of the enemy--and, like a soldier, definitely knew how to deal with his enemy. Once, when he found the Chechen parliament too annoying, his guards simply threw the legislators out of the windows of parliament.
The elite that succeeded Dudayev in independent Chechnya was formed during the military conflict with Russia in 1994-1996, not by competition and selection in peace. Aslan Maskhadov--a former Soviet general, an excellent military tactician, and the rebels’ chief of staff in 1994-1996--became its post-war president. Lower down the hierarchy, the more violent and aggressive a warlord, the greater his actual political power within the republic.
The further militarization of Chechnya, culminating in an incursion by militants into Dagestan in August 1999 and Russia’s subsequent military reaction, was to some extent the result of the inability of the new Chechen state system to operate in a peaceful environment.
The story of the most prominent Chechen warlord, Shamil Basayev, is an example. In 1997, just weeks after being given the post of prime minister by President Maskhadov, he abandoned his post and joined a band of the belligerent warlords preparing for a jihad, in Chechnya a sacred war against infidels to create an Islamic state stretching from the shores of the Caspian to the beaches of the Black Sea.
Back in Dagestan, people often accuse some of their top leaders of corruption. But when polling time comes, they compare them with new generation of regional politicians whose methods resemble the Chechen warlords--and opt for the ex-Communists as the lesser evil. God bless them.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal