Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 10 – Most
commentaries about Vladimir Putin’s decision to create a special national guard
have suggested that this move reflects the Kremlin leader’s fears that he may
face popular unrest that could be exploited to challenge his power. But one Moscow analyst suggests that Putin
took this step to rein Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov.
That is because the new arrangements
will eliminate Kadyrov’s ability to control the force structures on his
territory and to use them against his enemies with relative impunity; and while
a move against Kadyrov and one designed to protect Putin are not mutually
exclusive, the former may have even more immediate consequences than the
latter.
The “Kadyrov explanation” is offered
by longtime Russian interior ministry official Pegr Zaikin in an interview with
Elena Milashina published in Saturday’s “Novaya gazeta” puvb(novayagazeta.ru/politics/72605.html).
As the journalist points out, under
the terms of Putin’s decree, “all the force structures of the Russian interior ministry
… will now be shifted to the National Guard.”
Although they will be subordinate to the interior ministry and its
regional units until 2018, these forces can be deployed “exclusively” on the
basis of an agreement of the director of the Federal Service of the Forces of the
National Guard, thus centralizing control of internal troops.
Moreover, the ranks and status of
the personnel in these units will be determined not by their separate commands
but by Moscow alone, something that “will mean that the former staffers [of
these various forces] will become military personnel and finally be shifted
from the jurisdiction of the ‘regional’ vertical of the Russian interior
ministry.
As Milashina points out, this “reform
will have colossal political consequences for one of the regions of the Russian
Federation – the Chechen Republic. It
will remove from the zone of influence of the leadership of the republic the
most militarily capable force units and make them immediately subordinate to
the director of the National Guard and the president of Russia.”
That in turn will open the way to “the
cleansing of the Chechen special forces” of former militants and the
elimination of “the ethnic principle of the formation of force structures” in
Chechnya, something not found elsewhere and unacceptable to the good order of
the Russian state.
Zaikin points out that these changes
will limit Kadyrov’s powers over these forces and thus lead him to “refrain”
from any moves against people outside of his own republic. And they will mean that Moscow rather than
Kadyrov will have the dominant voice in the use of force even within Chechnya.
He notes that Kadyrov will no longer
have the ability to protect his people from charges of crimes and that he will
not be able to maintain the Chechenization of the force structures there. That
will bring Chechnya back into the Russian legal field and restrict what Kadyrov
will be able to do.
Given Kadyrov’s past behavior, many
Russians will be pleased if this is what the national guard reform means. But two things remain to be seen. On the one
hand, it is far from clear whether Putin and Moscow will succeed in making all
these changes. And on the other, it is
uncertain how Kadyrov will respond if he begins to lose his autonomy.
Moreover, it is entirely possible
that the Kremlin has put out this explanation to distract attention from the
authoritarian implications behind the new security arrangements and that Putin
whose relationship with Kadyrov is far closer than with many of the heads of
the force structures may not follow through in the ways Milashina and Zaikin
suggest.
At the very least, there is likely
to be an intense struggle not just on the streets of Moscow and major Russian
cities but in Chechnya and the North Caucasus more generally.
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