Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 29 – The Circassians
find themselves trapped between the globalization represented by Westernizing
and the globalization represented by Islamization, two “mill stones” whose
coming together limit the chances that members of this nationality will
mobilize themselves or get the kind of outside support needed to achieve their
goals.
In an essay posted on the “Svobodnaya
pressa” portal yesterday, Russian nationalist commentator Semen Reznichenko draws
on this image of the Circassians from Iskhak Mashbashev’s 1993 novel, “The Mill
Stone,” to analyze the challenges Circassians face in their desire to restore “a
Greater Circassia” in the Caucasus (svpressa.ru/blogs/article/63733/).
Many
Russians as well as others, Reznichenko says, accept without closer examination
the image of this project offered by Aleksey Polubota in his essay on the same
portal on November 25 last year, an image that suggests “the Russians are being
driven out of Adygeya in order to establish a Greater Circassia.”
A closer examination of the
situation in Adygeya and other North Caucasus republics where Circassians live,
the Russian commentator says, a more nuanced and in many ways more interesting set
of conclusions that reflect the competing pressures now operating on the
Circassians, a nation that includes the Adygeys, Kabards, Cherkess, and several
others as well.
The Circassians today, Reznichenko
says, are not a “passionate” people in Lev Gumilyev’s sense, “at least in
comparison with other Caucasian ehnoses. More than they others, they have
generally forgotten their old customs, are not very religious, and have an
extremely low fertility rate.
Their “national rebirth” in the
1990s led to the appearance of a large number of books and articles, but, at
least according to this Moscow writer, it did not lead to the recovery and
strengthening of the Circassians. It did not “reconstruct” their lives or
reverse “the degradation of the institution of the family and the neglect of
the national language and traditions.”
It did lead to the emergence of one
ideological trend within the nation, however, the “Adyge Khabze,” or as its
followers are called, the Khabzists.” They
were and remain informed by ethno-nationalism and are opposed to “both types of
globalization, Western (Russian) and Islamic.” But they have been “gradually losing their influence,” the
commentator says.
In some respects, Reznichenko acknowledges,
this pattern has been affected by the 1998 repatriation of Circassians from
Kosovo and the more recent return of Circassians from Syria, although the total
numbers so far of both waves remains below 700. If more come, that could change,
but those from Syria are very different from those living in the North
Caucasus.
If the Circassians as a result
remain divided and largely unable to launch a serious political campaign, the
situation of the Slavs (mostly Russians) in Adygeys is “much worse.” Unlike the
Circassians, the Russians lack strong family ties and a sense of being members
of a collective worthy of defense.
That has meant that “the more
numerous Russians have not been able to compete with the Circaassians on the
political [or economic] field of the republic.” When proportional
representation was ended, the Circassians dramatically increased their presence
in the parliament and among other senior officials.
The Russians did little to resist
because of “certain fundamental errors.” On the one hand, the ethnic Russians
of Adygeys displayed “a certain sectarianism” and failed to find “a common
language with other Russian unions and acivists, especially from other regions.” The same thing, Reznichenko says, could be
said of Russians everywhere.
And on the other, the ethnic
Russians in Adygeya never appealed to Moscow because they did not see
themselves as being sufficiently strong. Had they done so, the commentator
continues, they might have gotten support, but then of course the dominant
Circassians might have turned on them.
This political failure of the Russians
rested on their economic failure, Reznichenko suggests. The Russians have not adapted to the collapse
of the Soviet economic system, but the Circassians have exploited the new
system’s possibilities for individual entrepreneurship and cooperation.
And the Circassians as a whole and
especially those who are the children of the increasingly Westernized elites,
he suggests, are more likely because of their historical openness to find
common language with “local” Russians than with North Caucasians who may come
in from the outside.
What the
Circassians cannot do, he argues, is to “extend” their control of territory. “This
is not a growing ethnos like the Waynakhs or the Daghestanis.” It is one that
is “slowly and steadily” declining in size, albeit not as fast as the
Russians. And its members can hold what
they have but can hardly take the land that the Russians are leaving.
Instead, that land, which could be
the basis for a Circassian national rebirth, Reznichenko says, is being
occupied by Kurds coming into Adygeya and Meskhetian Turks entering
Kabardino-Balkaria. That trend reportedly has led Arsen Kanokov, the president
of the latter, to say “Here we’ve driven out the Russians but in their place
are coming filthy peoples.”
In Adygeya, places that had been
Russian are now Kurdish, and the Kurds present themselves as opposed to the
Russians, the Adygeys, and the Armenians. Indeed, according to the Russian
nationalist commentator, “many Kurds ignore as something unreal both the
Republic of Adgyeya and Russia itself.” They see themselves as citizens of “virtual
Kurdistan.”
As a
result, Reznichenko continues, the Circassians are caught between “two mill
stones,” the one of western-style globalization and the other Islamic
globalization, with the former more often found in Adygeya and the latter
increasingly in Kabardino-Balkaria, just one of the many ways in which the
Circassians are “extremely varied” in their composition.
“They
vary in their ideological and cultural orientation,” he writes, although they
are “not so varied as the Russians. But
they are much less monolithic than the representatives of the migrant peoples
who are winning and taking the space there,” including that which had belonged
to the Circassians.
As a result, some Circassians are
giving in to the pressures of Islamization, especially in Kabardino-Balkaria,
but many others are defending the western globalization they accepted earlier.
But in neither case, as Kabard ethnologist S.Kh. Mafedzev has written, have
they been able to be “an active subject of the historical process.”
The idea of restoring a “Greater
Circassia” is thus something that “can be achieved” only under the most
unlikely of circumstances, including both “the liquidation of Russia as such
and the most powerful pressure of genuinely strong states and international
structures” on behalf of this project.
That suggests, Reznichenko
concludes, that the Circassians may be worn down by the Islamic globalization
project because of their disappointment in the western one, a development all
the more likely if more Circassians return from Syria, Circassians who are “by
their essence Arabic-Islamic” and thus very different from their “co-ethnics” in
the Caucasus.
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