Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 22 – Russia today
is living under a Chechen yoke much as Muscovy once did under a Mongol one, and
Russians can hope for a better future only if they allow the North Caucasus to
go its own way and dispense with the services of Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin
leader built his own regime by helping the Chechens to impose this new yoke on Russia.
Those are just some of the reflections
sparked by Andrey Piontkovsky’s brilliant new article entitled “Russia within
Chechnya,” one that deserves the broadest possible attention among Russians and
by all who care about the future of the peoples of that country and Eurasia
more generally (svoboda.org/content/article/25142628.html).
Piontkovsky
begins his article with a discussion of the latest trial of those accused of
killing the pioneering Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. He suggests that whether those charged are
found guilty is “secondary” to the issue of “the relationship of Chechen society
and the Chechen ethnos to Politkovskaya and her murderers.”
For many, including the Russian commentator,
Politkovskaya was sainted because she reported about the crimes of war on both
the Russian and the Chechen side of the conflict rather than being as most have
been cheerleaders for one or the other. But that did not save her; indeed, it
may even help to explain why she was killed.
The brutality of the Russian forces
in Chechnya for many Chechens justified the brutality of their response, but
most important, this combination meant and means, Piontkovsky argues, that
Chechens grew to hate Russians to such an extent that they did not distinguish
between people like Politkovskaya and those like Putin.
“The Chechens killed Anna,” he says,
because of that. And that fact, perhaps more than anything else, shows that “Russia
has lost the war in Chechnya and lost it forever,” given that “the overwhelming
majority of Chechens including those forced to cooperate with [Russians] ‘feels
toward Russians something much more than simply hatred.”
Having recognized that Russia has
lost this war, Piontkovsky continues, Putin chosethe lesser evil and began to
pay tribute to Ramzan Kadyrov and his military in exchange for declarations of
loyalty to the Kremlin and what amounts to “personal union with Putin” rather
than trying to continue “the bloody war” to a victorious conclusion.
But while this exchange was going on
between the corrupt structures in Moscow and the North Caucasus capitals,
Islamist terrorists spread their influence across the entire region, and that
in turn had the effect of transforming the “regional conflict” in the North
Caucasus into “an existential problem for the Russian Federation.”
This problem involves not just
Islamist radicalism or migrant workers, he says. “In the Caucasus knot are tied
up all the mistakes, failures and crimes of the authorities of post-communist
Russia in the sphere of security, economics, nationality policy, and federal
arrangements.”
What was Russia fighting for in
Chechnya? Nominally, “for the territorial integrity of Russia. For Chechnya
within Russia. But territorial integrity is not a scorched earth without
people. We fought to show the Chechens that they are citizens of Russia,” but
by our actions, “we constantly showed the Chechens just the reverse of what we
proclaimed.”
Under Putin, Russians “showed them by
all their behavior that they are not citizens of Russia, that for a long time
already we do not consider themselves citizens of Russia or their cities and
villages Russian ones.” Moreover, Russians “convincingly showed this not only
to the Chechens but to all Caucasians.”
And they learned these obvious “lessons.”
Few in Russia appreciated the full
extent of this tragedy, and the Kremliln continued to pay tribute in exchange
for loyalty and to allow North Caucasian young people either to go into the
mountains to fight Russia or to come into Russian cities where they came into
contact with a generation of young Russians who had grown up as losers after 20
years of economic reform.
Today, these two armies of “desperados,
deceived and robbed in essence by one and the same group of people are thrown
against one another. “ In that conflict, it is obvious that “mentally,” there
is an insurmountable gulf between the ethnic Russian young and the Caucasian “which
from youth has grown up under conditions of a cruel war.”
The young Russians behave badly, but the
young Caucasians do so as well, feeling themselves to be victors because “in
their imagination, Moscow lost the Caucasus war” and they are thus entitled to
act the way they do. What is even worse,
neither the Russian young nor the Caucasus young have any use for the “false
and corrupt” Muscovite authorities.
So far, neither the Caucasus nor Russia
is “prepared for a formal separation.”
The Kremlin continues to live with “its phantom imperial illusions of
road ‘zones of privileged interests’ far beyond the borders of Russia.” And the
local leaders, “beginning with Kadyrov,” have no desire to give up Moscow’s “tribute”
to them.
The Islamists don’t want to have a separation
either, Piontkovsky says. “They dream about a Khalifate which would include a
large part of the Russian Federation. ‘We are Russian citizens, this is our
land, and we will never leave’” they declare again and again “in the cities of
central Russia.”
As a result, “the post-imperial campaign
for ‘Chechnya within Russia’” by a cruel shift of fate has turned into “the
nightmare of ‘Russia within Chechnya.’” But, according to Piontkovsky, such a
humiliating situation of “hypocritical self-deception cannot continue forever” --
even though there is no easy way out.
What any settlement must involve,
Piontkovsky says, is the recognition of “a Chechen state independent of Russia
or more to the point a Russian state independent of Chechnya.” That won’t happen, however, as long as the “bandit
diarchy” of Putin and Kadyrov continues to define the relationship.
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