>
> Anyway Robert Bruce Ware has a good discussion of
> Kabardino-Balkariya on listmember Peter Lavelle's
> website:
>
As it turns out he has a great piece on this on
today's JRL. I cut out teh footnotes to get it under
15k.
New Europe Review Volume 2, Number 4 2005.
Stepping on the Same Rake: A Historical Analysis of Russian Recentralization in the North Caucasus By Robert Bruce Ware
Shortly after beginning his first term in the spring of 2000, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin embarked upon a program of government recentralization. The program has been presented as a necessary antidote to constitutional, administrative, and security problems arising from the period of sometimes-chaotic decentralization that began in the final years of the Soviet Union and continued throughout the administration of Boris Yeltsin. On September 13, 2004, President Putin advanced this agenda with his announcement of sweeping electoral reforms culminating in the centralized appointment of regional governors.
These proposals were presented by President Putin as a response to the Beslan hostage atrocity -- as a means for reducing corruption and increasing security throughout the Russian Federation. In fact, it appeared that these proposals had been long in the making, but their presentation right after a hostage crisis in the North Caucasus sharpened questions about their efficacy and propriety in connection with regional problems of extremism and terrorism.
It is plausible that Russian decentralization was carried too far in the 1990s. The corrupt and self-serving regimes that it produced in the North Caucasus have done little to address chronic problems of economic stagnation, infrastructural decay, environmental degradation, and organized crime that have together contributed to alienation, radicalism and terrorism in the region. It appears that President Putin is correct in his premise that some kind of political change in the region was in order. Yet the diminished political access and local accountability that are likely to result from Putin’s proposals may in fact increase levels of corruption, alienation, radicalism, and terrorism in this volatile region.
Few would fault the Kremlin for attempting to reconcile the federal constitution with its local counterparts, or deny that local potentates have contributed to Russian administrative and security problems. But are President Putin’s proposals likely to achieve their purported goals? In order to answer this question it may be helpful to consider the current program of Russian recentralization within a broader historical framework. It is only the latest in a series of political battles that have constituted the history of the North Caucasus over at least the last two millennia, and it bears many similarities to what has happened there in the past.
Historically, conflicts in the North Caucasus have derived from two competing approaches to social organization. On the one hand, the alpine geography of this region has given rise to a particularist approach to social organization based upon traditional North Caucasian values of parochialism, kinship, egalitarianism, and self-determination. On the other hand, a series of universalist approaches have been imported by civilizations that have attempted to incorporate this region into systems of "expansive socio-economic organization" (ESO), described pejoratively as empires. Due to the demands of their geographical span, each of these ESOs has developed hierarchical systems of administration at odds with traditional North Caucasian values.
In other words, the hierarchical organization of these ESOs was necessary for their successful geographical expansion, but when that expansion brought them to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, it rendered them fundamentally incompatible with the values of the local societies. At an elementary level, the series of great conflicts[i] that historically have beset the region may be seen as clashes between systems of lowland social administration organized hierarchically in order to facilitate expansion and parochial, egalitarian systems, which were a product of alpine geography. In the last two millennia, the region has been visited by Arab, Mongol, Persian, Ottoman, and Russian empires. All of them encountered similar problems, and all of them produced accounts that described the local populations in similar terms.
Today there are two ESOs that are competing for control of the North Caucasus: Russian and Islamist. Because each of them has encountered opposition from traditional local structures, it is useful to think of three alternative forms of social organization competing for preeminence in the North Caucasus. First, there are the local systems of parochial egalitarianism and self-determination that are traditional to North Caucasian societies. Second, there is the hierarchical system of dominance and subordination that is traditional to Russian society.[ii] Third, there are systems of expansionist absolutism advocated by Islamist extremists. Variations of these three systems have competed on and off in the North Caucasus for the last 200 years.
Over that time, there have been periods in which each of these principles was in ascendance, and periods in which each of them was in decline. Similarly, there were periods in which each system stood in stark opposition to the others, and periods of relative compromise. Perhaps the most stunning of these compromises occurred when the Dagestani highlanders forced their Mongol invaders to pay them tribute. But a more important instance took place in the latter half of the 19th century when the Russian imperial administration in Dagestan accepted traditional village law (adat) and political organization, along with village-based Islamic functionaries, and played their parochialism against efforts by some Islamic leaders to organize another wave of expansive popular resistance. By contrast, the Soviet Union offered North Caucasians different forms of compromise. On the one hand, the U.S.S.R. imposed a stark system of hierarchy and domination in keeping with Russian traditions. But at the same time, Stalin’s ethnic policies paid lip service to local traditions of kinship and parochialism by carving the region into a series of titular republics, wherein linguistic and cultural distinctions were subsequently reified. More importantly, the Soviet Union offered North Caucasians tangible benefits in terms of security and economic development.
As a rule, such periods of relative compromise strengthened political stability in the North Caucasus while periods of stark opposition among any these three social systems destabilized the region. President Putin’s current efforts to recentralize political control through the assertion of a hierarchically-organized political system are likely to further destabilize the North Caucasus because they stand in clear opposition to parochial democratic structures of the region while failing to provide tangible benefits in the area of local security and economic development.
In face of globalizing pressures of the 21st century, most local residents realize that North Caucasian parochialism is no longer a viable option. The question remains which of the two competing ESOs – the Russian or the Islamic one -- will eventually consolidate the region, and what kind of accommodation it will reach with the traditional cultural and economic requirements of the region.
So far the Russian system has enjoyed several advantages including: 1) political inertia resulting from longstanding Russian control; 2) the legacy of Soviet security and economic benefits; 3) unattractive features of proximate states in the South Caucasus; 4) and the Yeltsin administration’s willingness to seek compromise with local socio-political structures. For example, from 1994 to 2003,[iii] the Russian Federation accommodated Dagestan’s uniquely democratic political system, despite the fact that the latter boasted a distinctive ethnic electoral system and the Federation’s only executive that was either collegial[iv] or indirectly elected.[v] Similarly, both Yeltsin and Putin administrations have been willing to compromise and cooperate with leaders of the region’s traditional Sufi Islam, which has resisted a strain of expansionist, extremist Islamism known locally as “Wahhabism." The willingness to compromise is exemplified by the certification of the Islamic Party of Russia,[vi] and Putin’s application for Russian membership in the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Cooperation is evidenced by President Putin’s appointment of Chechen Mufti Akhmad Kadyrov as Chechnya's chief administrator in 2000, and by his tacit acceptance of political authorizations of the Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Dagestan .[vii]
These are precisely the sorts of compromises from which the region’s Wahhabis have been prevented by their rigid ideology. Wahhabism is an ESO whose adherents seek to establish an Islamic state in the North Caucasus. It can achieve its objectives only in so far as it overcomes both the Russian ESO and the traditionally parochial societies of the region. Moreover, since Wahhabis seek to establish an expansive Islamic state in the North Caucasus, they would require the region to abandon the existing nation state structure in a manner that is unlikely to provide economic or security benefits to its residents. Finally, the austere tenets of Wahhabism are incompatible with the moderate practices of the region’s traditional Sufi Islam[viii] and have been fiercely rejected by overwhelming majorities within local population.[ix] For all of these reasons, Wahhabism is regarded as an inappropriate alternative by more than 90 per cent of the people in the North Caucasus. Consequently, the Russian system would have little difficulty in consolidating its control over the region by means of moderate compromises with the traditional requirements of local cultures.
Hence, it seems surprising that Putin has adopted a much less compromising political strategy than his predecessor. Since the spring of 2000, the program of administrative recentralization has been gradually shifting the political balance in the region in a manner that seems to be ultimately less conducive to Russian management. This is because it has undermined previous political compromises without offering any widespread economic benefits or tangible security improvements. On the contrary, there is a general sense in the region that security has sharply deteriorated. Indeed, the current strategy of Wahhabi leaders, such as Shamil Basayev and Rappani Khalilov, seems to be bent on emphasizing this point by way of periodic terrorist atrocities.
Meanwhile, wealth is becoming more concentrated and genuine opportunities for legitimate economic advancement are diminishing. It is true that Moscow has been heavily subsidizing the republics of this region. Dagestan, for example, regularly receives more than 80 percent of its budget from the federal center, while Ingushetia receives in excess of 85 percent. Yet federal mandates require that some of this money be allocated for material purchases from Moscow suppliers, and too much of the remainder lines the pockets of a diminishing number of political elites in the south. Overall, corruption and economic disparity are increasing in the North Caucasus, while political access and local accountability are narrowing. Gradually the region is seeing the development of hierarchies of power and subordination that resemble those of Russian colonial domination in the early 19th century.
By contrast with its approach in the latter half of the 19th century, early Russian colonialism ignored the region’s traditional egalitarianism in order to empower local potentates as administrative vassals. The result was increasing economic disparities, corruption, and political repression. Those conditions inspired the murid movement in Dagestan, which later spread to Chechnya. The murid movement drew upon the structure of local tariqat Islam with its groups of students (murids) and their Islamic teachers (sheiks). Muridism was a political ideology devised in opposition to the Russian colonial hierarchy, and drawing upon Islamic teachings such as, “A true Muslim can neither subordinate, nor be subordinated to, another man.”
In other words, when the hierarchical and expansionist features of Russian colonialism became incompatible with local traditions, the Dagestanis turned to a political interpretation of Islam. The result was 28 years of brutal warfare from 1831 to 1859. In order to sustain their struggle against the Russian empire, murid leaders such as Imam Shamil had to wage a simultaneous war against the parochialism of the local villages and their traditional system of law, known as adat. Shamil sought to unite all of the villages of the northeast Caucasus in one expansive Immat under the rule of Islamic sharia.
Thus in the early 19th century, the traditional Russian system of hierarchy and domination drove Dagestanis and Chechens toward Islamism. However, the murid ideology was also expansionist and therefore also at odds with the traditional parochialism of the region. This contributed to its defeat in 1859, after which a series of Tsarist, Soviet, and democratic administrations found various means of compensating, or compromising with, local socio-political needs.
The period that began with the Dubrovka hostage atrocity in October 2002 and culminated in the Beslan massacre of September 2004 may now be viewed as a watershed in the North Caucasus. The intervening months saw a series of democratic setbacks in the region that included the assassination of Chechnya’s president, Akhmad Kadyrov, and the manipulation of the second Chechen presidential election in 2004. Meanwhile Ingushetia has been gradually destabilized after the Kremlin instigated the resignation of its popular president, Ruslan Aushev, and arranged his replacement with Murat Zyazikov, a former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer, who has sought to compensate for his political weakness by means of brutal repression. Does the destabilization of Ingushetia foreshadow events in neighboring republics following the centralized appointment of local governors? The history of the region suggests that it might. Ironically, the current program of Russian recentralization may contribute to precisely those problems in the North Caucasus it was supposed to prevent.
Moscow would do best in the North Caucasus if it supported economic development together with democratic procedures. If Putin stimulated local economies while playing the role of a neutral arbiter among the region's relentless political rivalries, he would win the enduring loyalty of the local peoples. If, instead of umpire, he prefers to play empire, he will reap their resentment. As a result, over the next five years growing political alienation is likely to sustain terrorism and cause a net decrease in the stability of the North Caucasus.
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