The North Caucasian Crucible

Robert Bruce Ware is an associate professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is currently completing a collection of oral histories of elderly Russians and working on a history of hegemony and resistance in Dagestan.

While it is gradually prevailing in the military struggle in Chechnya, Russia is losing the struggle for democracy and socio-economic development in the North Caucasus, the strategic region that stretches along Russia’s southern border from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. As Russia and its Chechen allies have placed increasing pressure upon militants and extremists in Chechnya, the low-intensity conflict has been spreading outwards through neighbouring republics, where frustrations have been growing. The situation is approaching an equilibrium that can be sustained indefinitely by all of the many sides involved in the conflict. However, the indefinite perpetuation of hostilities would be catastrophic for local populations that are committed overwhelmingly to the pursuit of peace and prosperity within the Russian federal framework. The conflict also contributes to broader geopolitical tensions and instabilities, complicates Russia’s relations with Western states, and impedes Russia’s integration into the international community.

 

Yet Russian officials have shown little interest in understanding the problems of this complex region. Generally, they have approached regional problems in narrow terms, focusing upon military and political control. While they have recently moved towards specifying programmes for socio-economic development, it appears to be too little too late. There are still no indications that Moscow grasps that the interconnections among issues of stability, democracy, and development are far more critical and complex in the North Caucasus than in other parts of Russia. Hence, it appears unlikely that current Russian policies will provide regional stability and prevent the spread of violence.

A Region on the Rack

Extreme poverty and exhaustion are the prevalent conditions in the North Caucasus. Political, economic, and emotional reserves are dangerously close to depletion, and widespread despair is yielding ominously to social alienation. Opportunities to earn a living are rapidly diminishing for many North Caucasians. People who once found employment in northern Russian cities, and who thereby helped to support their families in the North Caucasus, are discouraged by anti-Caucasian prejudice. At the same time, corruption and graft in local and federal bureaucracies have constricted avenues for gainful employment.

 

Over the last five years, a contraction in the circles of economic and political elites has narrowed both economic access and democratic participation. While this process of elite contraction has local causes, it has also been exacerbated, since the spring of 2000, by the recentralisation of Russian government, which has given the federal centre a greater presence throughout the region. Whereas regional elites were previously bound by their need for a local political base, Moscow’s expanded influence has now become the basis for their power and has tended to insulate local elites from local accountability. This has led to anger and frustration among village leaders and other activists who previously constituted the core of local political bases, but who are now finding their roles to be increasingly redundant.

 

Throughout the North Caucasus, local business people are systematically discouraged, and tend to adopt a passive approach. They know that any significant success in their enterprise will attract the attention of local officials, who will seek to take as much of the business as they can by means of bribes and other diversions. A successful business will also become a target for extortion by local criminal elements. Business people see that they cannot succeed on any significant scale, so they waste little effort in trying to do so. This is doubly destructive because North Caucasian culture is socially proactive and economically entrepreneurial. The obstacles that prevent people from acting to improve their lives are creating a deep pool of resentment and hostility.

 

North Caucasian tendencies towards enterprise and self-assertion, whether social or economic, combine with local honour cultures to create a propensity for conflict. In an effort to reduce these tendencies to something more compatible with its own cultural traditions, Moscow tries to construct local hierarchies of power and obedience. These efforts only increase local frustrations.

 

As a result of these frustrations, the North Caucasus is witnessing an exodus of its most Westernised inhabitants, the same people who in the recent past constituted a socio-cultural elite that was respected by the rest of the population. Those who remain in the North Caucasus are either those who are happy with the present situation, or those who are unable to find a niche elsewhere. Those who are happy with the current situation include the local ruling class in each of the North Caucasian republics, their courtiers, and leaders of criminal organisations. Those who cannot leave include the poor, the least educated, and those from traditional Muslim families who are often immersed in Islamic mysticism and resentful of the ruling powers.

 

The North Caucasus is becoming wilder, less European, more Asiatic, and more Islamic. It is as if the region had been thrown back one hundred years. The cream of European-oriented Caucasians that developed during the Soviet era has largely dissipated. A social, cultural, and intellectual regression has resulted from the toxic combination of arbitrary power, material misery, gathering savagery, and stagnant aggression. As the population becomes increasingly divorced from the benefits of civilisation, elites grow richer and more cynical in their fidelity to the federal centre, and the centre knows that it cannot really count on them.

 

Outside businesses do not invest in the North Caucasus for fear of political instability, criminality, and the avaricious grasp of local bureaucrats and officials. Dagestan is a particularly poignant case. Wedged between the warm, gentle waters of the Caspian and a spectacular mountain range, Dagestan should by all rights have a thriving tourist industry, as it did when part of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it has indigenous wine and cognac industries, together with a pool of inexpensive labour. Dagestan is also a historically strategic transportation corridor, with railway, road, and warm-water seaport infrastructures, all of which are grossly under-utilised. Yet it continues to stagger under conditions of economic collapse and widespread deprivation. And even if its oil reserves were successfully exploited, it is likely that they would be cornered by self-serving elites.

 

Meanwhile, globalisation has rendered it impossible for local businesses to compete. Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, had an excellent brewery that went bankrupt a few years ago. It could not hold its own against larger Russian companies, some of which are controlled from the West, though many would say that its beer was superior to theirs. Local textile industries have met a similar fate.

 

Twelve years of economic devastation and relentless unemployment throughout the North Caucasus (approaching 80 per cent in places) have produced a critical mass of young people who find that the good life daily advertised to them on television remains beyond their reach. For example, cellular phones have recently become all the rage in the North Caucasus. Everyone wants to have one, but many young people lack the means. Consequently, there are daily thefts from nearly all of the shops that sell them, and nearly all of those arrested are students at universities or secondary schools.

 

In Dagestan alone, ten thousand young men complete their education and enter the employment market each year. Yet graduates throughout the North Caucasus find that there are few jobs apart from those in the military, in law enforcement, and in the illegal narcotics trade. The narcotics business is rapidly growing in the North Caucasus, providing employment for many people, and finding willing buyers among those seeking to cope with the high levels of hardship, stress, and despair that prevail in the region. The expansion of the drug trade creates hierarchical criminal structures operating large, efficient organisations.

 

These criminal enterprises have in turn inspired the growth of local law enforcement agencies and the expansion of their mandates, with consequent dangers for individual rights and freedoms. Indeed, the expansion of law enforcement powers is a part of the bureaucratic weight that is crushing those private economic initiatives that might otherwise provide jobs to compete with those provided by the narcotics trade. Hand in hand with the narco-business, law enforcement also offers expanding employment opportunities.

 

One reason for this is that law enforcement officials have been special targets of terrorist attacks and assassinations during the last two years. Moreover, international funding still supports Islamist extremists throughout the region. With support from these funds, terrorists may attack a police station one day. The next day, some of the attackers join the police because law enforcement also pays relatively well. A month later, when more international funds arrive, the same people participate in an attack on another police station. Following the attack, there are new employment opportunities in law enforcement. In the North Caucasus, chronic unemployment and international funding provide steady incentives for terrorist acts.

Dagestan’s Terrorist Upsurge

Dagestan regularly ranks alongside neighbouring Chechnya for the highest incidence of terrorist acts in the Russian Federation. Yet even by Dagestani standards, the past two years have seen an intensification of terrorism. Moreover, recent terrorist incidents differ from the Dagestani pattern, in which assassinations and explosions figure among the means by which local elites settle disputes with one another. Usually, Dagestan’s intra-elite violence does not threaten the security of ordinary Dagestanis, and does not aim at the destabilisation of the republic, since wholesale instability is contrary to the interests of most elites. Recently, however, terrorists have been targeting police officers and civilians.

 

In August 1999, Dagestan was invaded by Chechen extremists seeking to support Islamists who had declared an independent Islamic state in Dagestan and Chechnya, and who had urged a jihad against Russia. The invaders were quickly expelled, and Dagestan’s National Assembly banned the Islamist fundamentalists, whom locals call “Wahhabis”. Many Wahhabis were arrested, while others fled. Yet although Wahhabism has not regained the social and political significance it had achieved in 1999, it has survived on the periphery of Dagestani society, where it appeals to the frustrations of the impoverished and politically alienated, as well as to educated young men in search of an ideological focus. Returning to Dagestan or completing their prison sentences, Wahhabis have reorganised. Realising that current conditions allow them no opportunity for political or military ascendancy, they have revised their agenda in terms of vengeance and destabilisation.

 

The past two years have seen the murders of scores of Dagestani law enforcement officials who were engaged in the struggle against terrorism. August 2003 saw the assassination of Magomed-salikh Gusaev, Dagestan’s popular minister for nationalities, information, and external affairs. It was not the first attempt on his life, for Gusaev had many enemies among the Wahhabis. During the Chechen incursion of 1999, Gusaev successfully resisted propaganda disseminated by the Chechen leader Movladi Udugov by creating an “information centre” that proved highly effective. Thereafter he emerged as one of the most influential proponents of the campaign to eliminate Wahhabism from Dagestan. For his efforts, Gusaev was sentenced to death by a shari’a court in Chechnya in 1999. Shamil Basaev, the Chechen commander who led the invasion of Dagestan, was affiliated with the court. A website operated by Chechen militants published occasional references to the death sentence.

 

On 7 August 2003, Gusaev published a commentary about the war on terrorism in Dagestanskaya Pravda. In the article, Gusaev criticised the double standard that has been applied by Western countries to Russia’s anti-terrorism efforts in the Caucasus. He said instability in the north-eastern Caucasus, and particularly in Chechnya, was international in its origins and consequences, and that international instigation had preceded and exacerbated the “semblance of a national liberation movement”. He argued that terrorists, operating with support from international Islamist organisations, were seeking to destabilise the Caucasus/Caspian region for several reasons, including the control of natural resources, and observed that this was contrary to the interests of local people, of Russia, and of the West. He proposed that a centre to combat terrorism should be founded in Dagestan, and implied that it should be co-ordinated with, and at least partially funded by, Western anti-terrorist efforts. Three weeks after publishing these views Gusaev was dead, killed by a bomb that exploded as he was driving to work in Makhachkala. Numerous statements by Dagestani authorities have associated Rappani Khallilov, a Dagestani Wahhabi leader, with the murders of Gusaev and other officials.

 

If Dagestan is undergoing a terrorist offensive that targets opponents of Wahhabism, then that would appear to coincide with the intensification of a terrorist campaign in republics surrounding Chechnya. A convergence in the tactics of extremists in Dagestan and Chechnya suggests that the former have grown stronger since their defeat in 1999, while the latter have grown weaker since that time. Dagestani Islamists appear to have recovered enough strength to sustain a terrorist campaign, while Chechen militants have been weakened to the point that they are capable of no other kind of offensive.

 

If Chechen militants have lost strength it is because of reduced international funding, reduced support from the Chechen population, and the increased efficacy of the Moscow-loyalist Chechen administration. If Dagestani extremists have gained strength it is because some have now completed prison terms, the passage of time has allowed them to regroup, Dagestani police have resorted to harsh tactics, and Dagestani officials have failed to tackle economic underdevelopment and political corruption, especially in rural areas of the republic.

 

It appears that Wahhabi leaders may be shrewdly converting their weakness into strength by unifying tactics in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia, thereby achieving at least a superficial convergence of the situations in the three republics. By attacking police throughout the region, they have effectively invited harsher, more repressive official countermeasures that inevitably alienate new segments of the population. Their goal may be to achieve an atmosphere of heightened regional instability, in the hope of dividing, disorienting, and undermining Russian efforts towards stabilisation. If so, Islamists may find it relatively easy to achieve these limited aims. As discussed below, President Vladimir Putin’s overhaul of local electoral systems might be regarded as an important victory for the Islamists.

Ingushetia Embroiled

On 14 April 2004, Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basaev announced that he was shaking up the organisation of militant fighters in order to remove the “stooges” of former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov. (Maskhadov fought for independence from Russia, but he opposed Chechnya’s Islamist radicals. He was killed by Russian forces in March 2005.) Basaev appointed Rappani Khallilov as “commander of the Dagestan front” and a young Ingush militant named Magomed Yevloiev, also known as “Magas”, as “commander of the Ingush front”.

 

In June, in a series of well-co-ordinated strikes, Ingush and Chechen militants attacked ministries, law enforcement officials, and ordinary civilians in Ingushetia. There were no military targets, and in some cases civilians were hacked to death. Approximately twenty hostages were taken, and there were close to a hundred fatalities. Basaev’s group is believed to be behind the attacks, which demonstrated the efficacy of the new militant organisation. The Ingushetia raid had two further objectives: to attract new fighters and new funding, and to capitalise on the disorganisation resulting from the assassination of the pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov on 9 May 2004.

 

Russians celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany on 9 May. In recent years, the anniversary has seen a series of terrorist attacks or attempted attacks in Dagestan and Chechnya: in 2000 a large bomb was found adjacent to the platform from which most of Dagestan’s leadership was scheduled to address a crowd of thousands; in 2002 an explosion killed 42 people, almost half of them children, and injured more than 150 others in Kaspisk, Dagestan; and in 2004 there was the above-mentioned killing of Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov, in an explosion in Grozny (for which Shamil Assayed claimed the credit). The date of the raid on Ingushetia, 21/22 June, coincided with the anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Since the Chechen and Ingush nations were brutally deported by Stalin in 1944 for allegedly supporting that invasion, the date of the 2004 Ingushetia attack might be considered not altogether felicitous.

 

Yet Basaev’s organisational “appointments” are no less theatrical than his choice of dates for his attacks. Magomed Yevloiev and Rappani Khallilov are dedicated Wahhabis, but in the fluid Islamist circles of the North Caucasus they are two leaders among many. If either were killed tomorrow, others would immediately take his place.

 

Neither is there anything new about Ingush mujahideen fighting beside their Chechen comrades. For example, in 2000, Ingush fighters played an important role in the defence of the “Wolf Gates” pass at the entrance to the Argun Gorge in southern Chechnya. All but seven of the Ingush defenders were killed in that battle, and in the five years since then, all seven have become militant commanders.

 

The Ingushetia raid served to illustrate the organisational co-ordination among militant groups in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia that has followed from their operational parity. This greater co-ordination among militant forces in the three republics has meant that the “front” has been everywhere and nowhere. For the past two years, the “front” has varied from person to person and house to house, shifting constantly.

The Warring Parties

All sides in the conflict are amalgamations of sometimes contentious sub-groups. There are rivalries, competition, and fluctuating antagonisms among groups constituting the federal forces. In October 1999, Russian federal forces returned to Chechnya with approximately twenty thousand troops. Today, there are about seventy thousand federal troops in Chechnya, of which forty thousand are assigned to units permanently stationed in the republic. These include the 42nd Motorised Rifle Division, and the so-called Mountain Group, consisting of the 45th Special Task Airborne Regiment and regiments of the 106th Airborne Division (based in Tula) and the 77th Special Marine Brigade (based in Novorossiysk). The Mountain Group fights in the mountains of south-eastern Chechnya, and especially around Vedeno and the Argun Gorge where the militants are strongest. Federal troops are supported by approximately 150 tanks, 400 armoured personnel carriers, and 100 artillery systems.

 

For their part, the militants have always been highly fragmented, which has increased their resilience during periods of pressure by federal forces, and has not greatly undermined their offensive capacity. In October 1999, there were between 16,500 and 18,500 Chechen fighters. Of these, 10,500 were operating in regular formations, while 6,000 to 8,000 more were participating in irregular groups led by a wide range of field commanders. These included the Saudi national known as Amir al-Khattab, and the notorious kidnapper Arbi Baraiev, both of whom boasted connections to Osama bin Laden, and both of whom are now dead.

 

There are now fewer than one thousand militants in Chechnya, and fewer than six hundred altogether in the neighbouring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia. In the North Caucasus as a whole, there are some 80 to 150 foreign fighters, operating primarily in Chechnya. Many of these foreign fighters are Arabs. Because of the size of the Russian military presence and the growing strength of the Grozny administration, it is no longer possible for the militants to field large forces for any sustained period. Hence, only up to four hundred fighters are active at any given time. Meanwhile, others lead ordinary lives in towns and villages, and rotate into action. When an operation is planned, leaders contact fighters, telling them where to meet and what to bring. Between operations, many fighters fade back into ordinary lives.

 

The militants are organised in cellular structures. Local leaders have responsibility for safe houses and hidden encampments in their vicinity. Members of one group often have little knowledge of other groups, and even of some members in their own group. Young men seeking to join a militant group are sometimes given a gun and instructed to kill a law enforcement officer as a rite of initiation.

 

Shortly after the Moscow theatre siege of October 2002, in which some 40 Chechen hostage‑takers and 120 of their captives were killed, Shamil Basaev announced the formation of the “Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs”. Since then, this group has claimed responsibility for a series of terrorist incidents, including suicide attacks involving Chechen women. These female militants are known as “black widows” because many have lost husbands in the war with Russia.

 

There is no longer a nationalist militant movement in the North Caucasus. Militant forces are arrayed along a motivational continuum with Islamist ideologues such as Shamil Basaev, Dokhu Umarov, and Rappani Khallilov at one end, and at the other, mercenaries and criminals. In between are fighters whose motives are primarily personal or retributive. This militant motivational continuum is highly fluid, with most fighters experiencing interests that overlap and fluctuate with time, and which lead some fighters into, and back out of, militant circles.

 

Chechens opposed to the militants are organised loosely under the regime of pro-Moscow president Alu Alkhanov and his allies, who are able to offer social, political, economic, and security incentives to support their rule. Regime loyalists are led by Ramzan Kadyrov, son of the assassinated president Akhmad Kadyrov, by Movladi Baisarov, by Ruslan Yamadaev, and by Magomed Kakiev. Relations among these ostensible loyalists have frequently been characterised by rivalry and antagonisms (between Kadyrov and Baisarov, for example), which are likely to increase over time as their groups expand.

 

Those groups nominally operating under Alkhanov’s control collaborate, compete and sometimes conflict with other groups that are regularly aligned neither with the loyalists nor the militants, and which are occasionally opposed to both. These neutrals include groups organised on principles of kinship or criminal activity, or both. Some individuals have affiliations with multiple groups, while others have passed back and forth among conflicting sides.

 

Relations among all these groups are chronically fluid, and are subject to shifting opportunities for conflict and collaboration. At the field level, there is collaboration of an informal economic nature even among those groups that seem most directly opposed, such as federal forces and militants. Such illicit trade often involves petroleum products, scrap metals, alcohol, drugs, weapons, and hostages.

An Intractable Conflict

The civil war in the North Caucasus is a maelstrom of all of these shifting interests and forces. It is a dark and treacherous tumult in which no side is more than an aggregation of factions that sometimes work at cross-purposes to each other. Caught within the maelstrom are many people alienated from and exhausted by all of these groups, and who primarily desire safety and stability. One reason why there is a declining number of nationalistically motivated militants is that there is decreasing support for militancy among the Chechen population. Most Chechens want Chechnya to be part of the Russian Federation, if only because that appears to be the shortest path to peace, stability, and economic opportunity.

 

This mix, however, provides no immediate opportunities for a negotiated end to the conflict. Because the conflict is multifaceted, and because many of those facets are fluid and shifting, there is no one who controls forces sufficient to guarantee its resolution on any terms. Not the administration in Moscow, nor that in Grozny, nor any militant leader is currently in a position to end the conflict, regardless of concessions that might emerge from the other sides. This also applied to former Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov. Prior to his killing in March 2005, he controlled few militant fighters, never controlled radicals such as Shamil Basaev, and could never guarantee any agreement. It is important to emphasise that Moscow could not end the conflict by negotiation even if it wished to do so, if only because it cannot control Ramzan Kadyrov and other “loyalist” leaders. Similarly, there is no reason to suppose that militant leaders like Shamil Basaev are truly able to control other leaders, such as Rappani Khallilov. If Basaev agreed to stop fighting tomorrow, it is likely that Khallilov’s fighters would still be killing policemen the week after.

 

A military solution is no more likely. A sustainable Russian victory in the Caucasus would require the sort of strong, well-disciplined forces that Moscow has been unable to field. It is unlikely that a reinforced Russian military presence in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia would secure a decisive Russian victory, and probable that it would breed further resentment in the region, thereby replenishing militant losses. It is even less likely that either the Chechen loyalists or the militants will achieve a military victory, if only because these two sides are not entirely distinct from one another. Moreover, the militants simply lack the manpower, weapons, and popular support that are necessary for a clear-cut victory. Yet they are capable of sustaining the conflict at its present level indefinitely.

 

With few prospects, many young people are unafraid of death and are ripe for recruitment by the militants, either because they are attracted by the Wahhabis’ access to external funding or repelled by Russian abuses. Sometimes the militant resistance is seen as the only option by young men who have suffered a loss or humiliation at the hands of any part of the North Caucasian establishment, be it the Russian security forces, local security forces, or local political or business elites.

 

The spate of terrorist attacks that occurred in Russia during the summer of 2004 does not indicate that the militants are growing stronger or more numerous. Rather, the militants have adapted to their own declining numbers, and to the growing strength and efficacy of Chechen groups loyal to Moscow, by altering their tactics from major military operations to sporadic terrorist attacks. As they have come under greater pressure in Chechnya, the militants have increasingly spread their operations outwards through the region. Militant forces with little popular support can evade growing military pressure in Chechnya by strategically expanding their base of operations, winning new recruits, and indefinitely sustaining a low-level resistance punctuated by terrorist acts and hit-and-run attacks.

 

The chaotic forces at play in the North Caucasus have resulted in an equilibrium of evils. Russia faces serious and sustained challenges in the region, which it may not fully comprehend. Its approach thus far has focused primarily upon security concerns, giving much less attention to the economic and political issues that are at the root of the regional crisis. Sustainable progress in the North Caucasus would require a political transformation of the sort that seems highly unlikely, but which nonetheless may provide a standard against which to measure current approaches.

Putin Tightens Kremlin’s Grip

President Putin clearly has recognised that a political transformation is required. On 13 September 2004, in the immediate aftermath of the Beslan school atrocity, Putin proposed to centralise the appointment of all eighty-nine of Russia’s regional governors, who previously had been locally elected.

 

At the same time, he outlined plans to eliminate the single-member constituencies that currently account for half the seats in Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, thereafter requiring that all Duma representatives be elected from nation-wide party lists. This move would in effect eliminate independent deputies in the Duma and strengthen control of the body by federal parties, while also probably reducing the number of viable parties. At the time of the announcement, the pro-Kremlin United Russia Party enjoyed a two-thirds majority in the Duma, sufficient to initiate changes to the constitution.

 

Proponents claim that these changes would increase the accountability of local government, reduce corruption, and loosen the grip of those former Soviet officials who have acquired and stubbornly clung to power in some of Russia’s republics. Nevertheless, it appears that these changes will reduce the accountability of local government to the locals whom it governs. The changes are also likely further to reduce political access, to constrict the circles of local power, to frustrate local political activists, to alienate local populations, and thereby to exacerbate those problems, such as extremism and terrorism, which Putin, somewhat unconvincingly, claims his reforms are designed to curtail. In short, it appears that Putin is engineering a political transformation of precisely the wrong sort.

 

Putin’s proposed electoral changes were ominously foreshadowed in 2002, when the Kremlin presided over the withdrawal of Ruslan Aushev, the popular and self-assured president of Ingushetia, and engineered his replacement by Murat Ziazikov, a former Federal Security Service official. During the first year of his term, Ziazikov demonstrated considerable dexterity in acquiring federal funding, some of which was helpfully applied to vital public projects, such as disaster relief following widespread flooding during the spring of 2003. Yet Ingushetia has since descended along a spiral of corruption, repression, violent resistance, and most recently, large-scale public protests. Ziazikov is now widely viewed as a weak leader, which is generally a fatal condition in the Caucasus. As it begins to appoint more local leaders, it is possible that the Kremlin will look for other qualities besides loyalty and malleability, and that it will thereby pick better candidates; but it is more likely that Murat Ziazikov will be recalled as the first of many bad choices.

 

Putin’s political “transformation” may well turn out to be exactly the opposite: a regression towards a traditionally Russian hierarchy of dominance and subordination. In fact, his proposal to appoint local governors bears a striking resemblance to the method of colonial control practised by the tsar’s administrators in early nineteenth-century Dagestan, when they propped up local potentates in order to subjugate the broader population. Those methods provoked an Islamist resistance that issued in the Murid Wars and plunged the north-eastern Caucasus into horrific violence from 1831 to 1859. Seen in this historical context, Putin’s changes seem an oddly inappropriate response to the act of Islamist terrorism in Beslan.

 

Because of Dagestan’s ethnic diversity, any appointment that Putin might make will immediately alienate 80 per cent of the political elites in the republic. Throughout the region, opposition leaders, who previously looked to Moscow to act as a counterweight to local political excesses, will now tend to blame the Kremlin for their problems. Some people, including some elites, will quietly turn towards the radicals, who henceforth will offer the only genuine opposition. Among populations that hitherto have sought closer relations with Russia, all of this will encourage anti-Russian sentiment, and will nourish nationalist, Islamist, pro-Eastern, and pro-Western ideologies. None of it is likely to nourish stability in the North Caucasus.

 

Rather than moving further to restrict local accountability and access, Putin might have sought genuinely to transform North Caucasian politics by selectively undermining corrupt local officials as a prelude to enhancing democratic procedures. In doing so, he might have looked to the ancient North Caucasian traditions of egalitarianism and democracy that contrast so sharply with the prevailing Russian tradition of political hierarchy.

The Dagestani Model

In 1994, the people of Dagestan achieved just this sort of political transformation when they adopted a constitution that drew upon the democratic traditions of their jamaats. A jamaat is a village, or a historically connected group of villages. After 1500, highland Dagestan was divided among a number of jamaats that functioned essentially as democratic city-states. Though each jamaat included several clans, the jamaats were governed by councils that embraced all of the constituent clans and authoritatively resolved disputes among them. This traditional ability to combine kinship structures within an authoritative political order has played a key role in Dagestan’s remarkable stability.

 

With more than thirty distinctive ethno-linguistic groups, Dagestan is by far Russia’s most heterogeneous republic. Apart from Chechnya, it is also the poorest. These conditions have been compounded by the rigours of social transition; by an influx of refugees from the three bordering republics (Chechnya, Georgia, and Azerbaijan) that have been mired in violent ethnic strife; by the withdrawal of all major relief organisations from the north-eastern Caucasus during the late 1990s; by the pressures of Islamist extremism; by a virtual blockade during the first Chechen conflict; by relative isolation following that conflict; and by two cross-border invasions from Chechnya that played upon Dagestan’s internal ethnic and religious cleavages. Consequently, there might seem to be few localities with a greater potential for civil war. Surprisingly, however, Dagestan is among the few administrative units in the Caucasus to have avoided this fate. To be sure, there have been, and will continue to be, cases of serious conflict in the republic. Dagestan is undeniably mired in crime, and apart from Chechnya, no Russian region has a higher incidence of terrorist acts. But mechanisms within Dagestani society have so far prevented these trends from escalating into protracted ethnic or religious conflict. Ethnic relations in Dagestan are extraordinary not only for their rich diversity, but also for their relative tranquillity.

 

With their adoption of a democratic constitution in 1994, the Dagestanis innovated a unique political system on the strength of their jamaat traditions. They created an ethnic electoral system that selected representatives to their National Assembly in almost precisely the same ethnic proportions as found in the broader population. They established the Russian Federation’s only collegial executive body, known as the State Council (Gos Soviet), with one seat for each of the republic’s principal ethnic groups. The State Council is also the only executive in the Russian Federation that is not directly elected. To select the members of the State Council, the Dagestanis created a multi-step procedure that deliberately excludes ethnic chauvinists and favours candidates with broad ethnic appeal. In order to select ministers and other high-ranking government officials, they developed a system known as “packet replacement”, a procedure that ensures ethnic parity by rotating officials in and out of office in “packets” or groups.

 

From 1994 to the present, this government has done what few others in the region could manage: it provided peace and stability. It did so by drawing again and again upon the ancient traditions of the jamaats, in which kinship structures, whether clans or ethnic groups, were trumped by political structures that were at once authoritative and egalitarian. Today, the Republic of Dagestan is one big jamaat that embraces and reconciles its multiple ethnic groups, just as the smaller jamaats embrace and reconcile clans.

 

From a Dagestani perspective, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, with their multitude of ethnic groups, appeared as the jamaat writ large. Dagestanis settled more or less comfortably into both and reaped the benefits of electrification, plumbing, pavements, health care, higher education, and a remarkable degree of gender equality. In 2000, I led a group of investigators in a population survey of 1,001 respondents throughout Dagestan. We found a high level of identification with Russia, and a widespread desire for closer relations with Moscow.¹

 

None of this is the case in neighbouring Chechnya, where clans, known as teips, are the dominant social structure today, as they were hundreds of years ago, and where a fierce egalitarianism has long defied all forms of authoritative political structure. After achieving de facto independence from Russia in 1996, the Chechens elected (early in 1997) Aslan Maskhadov as president of their new government. Yet Maskhadov was never able to control the rival, often clan-based, factions within Chechen society, which soon descended into the chaos of an indescribably dark criminality. During the three years of Chechnya’s de facto independence, more than a thousand people were kidnapped in surrounding republics and transported to Chechnya, where they were tortured, mutilated, and enslaved.

 

Not all of this can be explained in terms of social structure; history is also a crucial factor. In 1944, the entire Chechen and Ingush populations, as well as other North Caucasian groups, were brutally deported to Central Asia on loose allegations of collaboration with the Nazi invaders. Dagestan was spared that invasion and the subsequent Stalinist expulsions.² Both before and after the Second World War, Dagestanis held the highest positions of governmental power in their republic. In Chechnya, by contrast, Russians ran the show up to the last months of the Soviet Union.

 

This suggests that it is not a good idea for the Kremlin to call the shots in the North Caucasus today. Rather, if Moscow wants the North Caucasian republics to be peacefully integrated into the Russian Federation, then it should help them to create political systems that build upon and give expression to their own democratic and egalitarian traditions.

 

Chechnya has no need for a presidential system, be it that which it so unsuccessfully attempted to impose upon itself from 1997 to 1999, or the one that Moscow is now attempting to impose. Both are alike in investing far too much power in a single leader, who is unable to wield it effectively in Chechnya’s endemically fragmented society. Chechnya needs a system like Dagestan’s, which carries its traditional social structure towards a resilient, representative, and authoritatively reconciliatory political order.

 

This progression is not happening in Chechnya, and soon it will also be blocked in Dagestan. Shortly after beginning his first term in 2000, President Putin launched a programme of government recentralisation that has gradually dismantled Dagestan’s innovatively distinctive political system. By the summer of 2003, the Dagestanis were left with no choice but to adopt a presidential system that would be more consistent with the constitution of the Russian Federation than is their own indirectly elected, collegial executive. A year later, Putin’s post-Beslan announcement signalled that, in Dagestan as in all other Russian republics, the president would be appointed from Moscow.

 

To be sure, the Dagestani people need Moscow’s help, something that they recognise themselves. In our 2000 survey, approximately two-thirds of the respondents said they would trust the Russian authorities “in times of acute crisis”—far more than would trust Dagestan’s government officials, or even informal networks of family and friends. This suggests that the crises confronting Dagestan are greater than can be managed locally. Whatever its merits, Dagestan’s political system did little to stimulate economic development, or to control corruption, crime, and terrorism. Dagestanis truly need federal help to accomplish these tasks. But they need Moscow’s help to support their democracy, not to destroy it.

The Need for Economic Aid

Putin’s political programme is unlikely to work unless Moscow provides the peoples of the North Caucasus with the kind of security and economic development they enjoyed in the Soviet Union. Moscow is already subsidising these republics, annually providing 80 per cent of Dagestan’s budget and 85 per cent of Ingushetia’s budget. Moscow is also showing the first signs of recognising the importance of sustainable economic growth. In August 2004, Russia’s economics minister, German Gref, travelled to Dagestan to announce a five-point plan for socio-economic development. Unfortunately, the plan was distressingly short on specifics.

 

The problem is that economic access is no less restricted than its political counterpart. Signs of economic vitality are confined to the region’s urban centres, and even there they primarily benefit a select few. This is dangerous because the combination of growing economic disparities and diminishing economic and political access feeds the despair and frustration that in turn nourish extremism.

 

For years, Western journalists, editorialists, academics, and government officials have found greater satisfaction in the complacent castigation of Russian policies in the North Caucasus than in pragmatic offers of assistance. Recently, however, this has begun to change. In December 2004, Putin indicated to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany that he would welcome financial assistance for the North Caucasus. Following meetings with Russian officials, senior deputies from Germany’s Social Democratic Party have proposed European reconstruction assistance well beyond current humanitarian relief. Britain has offered £10 million in support of vocational training for young people in the North Caucasus, and the European Commission is preparing a needs assessment in Grozny. In April 2005, Chechen president Alu Alkhanov said he welcomed international assistance on reconstruction.

 

In co-operation with Moscow, Western officials could also provide tangible help to the people of the North Caucasus by (1) assisting small businesses, (2) funding healthcare clinics, (3) establishing opportunities to attend educational and professional courses in the West, (4) sponsoring partnerships with Western communities, organisations, and institutions, and (5) funding construction of highland fruit-processing plants. This last would be the simplest way to provide (a) employment in critical locations, (b) a market for local produce, (c) an incentive for additional agricultural production, and (d) a buffer against the poverty, alienation, radicalism and militancy that plague the remote villages of the North Caucasian highlands.

 

Inevitably, Western economic assistance to the North Caucasus will be hindered by local corruption and criminality. Yet while issues of oversight and security are daunting, they are not insurmountable. Relief organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have demonstrated that, with limited international supervision, local professionals can adequately monitor assistance programmes.

Endnotes

1. See Robert Bruce Ware, Enver F. Kisriev, Werner J. Patzelt, and Ute Roericht, “Russia and Chechnya from a Dagestani Perspective”, Post-Soviet Affairs 18, no. 4 (December 2002); “Political Islam in Dagestan”, Europe–Asia Studies 55, no. 2 (March 2003); and “Stability in the Caucasus: The Perspective from Dagestan”, Problems of Post-Communism 50, no. 2 (March/April 2003).

 

2. However, ethnic Avars and Laks from Dagestan were forcibly resettled into territories emptied by the Chechen deportation.