On Chechnya, comments, Chris, Peter Lavelle or anyone else, on this
from the latest New Left Review? The footnotes alone should get Chrisnik going ;-) The John Dunlop noted is the son, I think, of a writer for The Nation in the fifties.
[1] For a detailed historical narrative see John Dunlop’s Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict, Cambridge 1998, chapter 1. The classic account is John Baddeley’s The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus [1908], London 1999; see also Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, New Haven 1998. Lieven’s book, a compendium of fascinating information and acute insights, stands in marked contrast to his current commentary on Chechen affairs, characterized by an extraordinary degree of sympathy for Putin’s needs. 13] Born in 1910, a Party member from 1929, Israilov was twice arrested for criticizing in print the ‘plundering of Chechnya by the local Soviet and party leadership’. In January 1940, he wrote to the Chechen-Ingush assr Party secretary that ‘For twenty years now, the Soviet authorities have been fighting my people, aiming to destroy them group by group; first the kulaks, then the mullahs and the ‘bandits’, then the bourgeois nationalists. I am sure now that the real object of this war is the annihilation of our nation as a whole. That is why I have decided to assume the leadership of my people in their struggle for liberation.’ See Avtorkhanov, ‘Chechens and Ingush’, pp. 181–2. Dunlop highlights Israilov’s unprecedentedly secular background for a Chechen resistance leader: Russia Confronts Chechnya, pp. 56–8. [38] For a more detailed account, see Georgi Derluguian, ‘Che Guevaras in Turbans’, nlr 1/237, September–October 1999. [44] For a powerful account both of daily life in Chechnya under the occupation and its repercussions in Russia, see Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, Chicago 2003. Bullying: Trenin and Malashenko, Restless Frontier, p. 141. [46] In September 1999, for instance, 15,000 Caucasians were expelled from Moscow by the city authorities and another 69,000 compelled to re-register; in September 2003, 54 Chechen students were beaten by a skinhead mob in Nalchik; in April 2004, a 10-year-old Armenian boy was set on fire in a market in Kostroma; in September 2004, a gang of 20 youths ransacked cafés belonging to Caucasians in Yekaterinburg. See Amnesty International report, ‘For the Motherland’, December 1999; Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 October 2003; Moscow Times, 23 April 2004; Moscow News, 9 September 2004. [47] Boris Kagarlitsky writes that ‘the central issue . . . is not Chechen independence or Russia’s territorial integrity, but democracy in Russia and Chechnya’: see ‘Where is Chechnya Going?’, Moscow Times, 3 June 2004. [52] The French journalist Anne Nivat provides an illustrative vignette. The future Finnish president Tarja Halonen visited a camp in 1999, repeatedly insisting ‘I represent the European Union, I’m here to help you’ and asking what the refugees’ problems were; but when confronted by replies such as ‘We want a political resolution, not war’ and ‘Tell them to stop bombing us, to stop killing our children’, Halonen seemed at a loss, and could only offer around tangerines. Nivat, Chienne de Guerre, New York 2001, p. 54.
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26401.shtml New Left Review 30, November-December 2004
Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.
-- Michael Pugliese