Moscow Faces New Threats in North Caucasus Stable as Strong Leaders Depart, Russian Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 11 – The Putin regime has kept the North Caucasus in line by dispatching enormous sums to its republics and by appointing strong leaders to head most of them. But the money is running out and not reaching the population, and strong leaders are departing as most recently with the exit of Ingushetia’s Yunus-Bek Yevkurov.

            The impact of funding on the region has attracted enormous attention, especially as it is running short or failing to achieve improvement in the lives of the population, with many predicting that that alone will lead to increasing instability across the North Caucasus. (See windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/07/moscows-subventions-to-north-caucasus.html.)  

            But the question of leadership in these republics as a means of maintaining central control has garnered far less, except perhaps in the case of Chechnya where it is the nearly unanimous view that Moscow puts up with Ramzan Kadyrov because he is strong enough, even brutal enough, to keep his always restive republic in line.

            Novyye izvestiya journalist Ivan Petrovsky says that there are ever more indications that the era of strong leaders in the Caucasus is coming to an end, as Moscow seeks to run that region the same way that it governs other parts of the Russian Federation. Experts on the region with whom he spoke have grave doubts about that working (newizv.ru/article/general/11-07-2019/kavkaz-teryaet-vozhdey-chto-budet-s-regionom-bez-silnyh-liderov).

            Indeed, they suggest, Moscow’s decision to shift away from strong leaders in the North Caucasus will lead to more trouble within each of the republics there, more conflicts between them, and even the spread of the problems of the region to other parts of the country.

            “It would be stupid to deny the significant role of personality in the Caucasus,” Petrovsky says. Vladimir Novikov, a Moscow specialist on the region, agrees, saying that “personality in Caucasus politics often replaces institutions and in a number of cases is the figure for agreement between formal and informal institutions.”

            In Soviet times, Novikov recalls, Moscow relied on Kabadoyev in North Ossetia, Malbakhov in Kabardino-Balkaria, Demirchyan in Armenia, and Aliyev in Azerbaijan to keep everyone in line.  Their departure, he says, in almost every case, immediately led to “the loss of stability in the region.”

            Magomet Yandiyev, a former economics minister of Ingushetia who now works at Moscow State University, says that “the head of a republic must be capable of arguing with ‘the center’ and not accept orders from there” in a completely unquestioning manner. In the North Caucasus, people who respect those who can do that and keep dialogue going.

                Aleksey Mukhin, head of the Moscow Center for Political Information, says that the end of the era of such strong and charismatic leaders represents “a major problem both for the republics and for the federal center which has typically found it easier to cope with strong leaders” than with violence and disorder.

                Given the failure of Vladimir Vasiliyev to become a strong leader in Daghestan and the departure of Yevkurov from Ingushetia, the only strong leader left in the region is Kadyrov. He has no counterweights within Chechnya, Petrovsky says; but even more, at present, he has no counterweights among the other leaders of the region.

Many in the region don’t like Kadyrov or his policies, but they respect his strength and that allows him to act more independently than either they or Moscow really would like, according to Circassian lawyer Alim Beshenovuveren. But “without a system of checks and balances of one kind or another, stability in the North Caucasus can’t be maintained.”

            Until the death of Stalin, the Soviet authorities preferred to rely on force alone, constantly changing borders and using force, including deportation. Then, Moscow chose to try to make the region a showcase for its nationality policy. “Later,” Petrovsky continues, after 1991, “the federal center preferred ‘targeted’ action” and the appointment of stronger local figures. 

            Today, that approach has come to an end, and “the system of checks and balances in the Caucasus has been destroyed.  Moscow acts as if it can run the North Caucasus the same way it runs Siberia or any other region and can use force whenever problems arise.  But the use of forces so often is proving counterproductive, alienating the population now cowing it.

            There is only one strongman in the North Caucasus now, Ramzan Kadyrov. His influence and that of Chechnya will only grow, Petrovsky suggests, but ultimately that will trigger negative reactions not only in the other republics of the region but more broadly.  And then Moscow will face far more serious problems than it did before it began this new course.

            In the absence of strong leaders elsewhere, Kadyrov’s actions will provoke popular anger as is already the case in Ingushetia and Daghestan; and that anger will be beyond the capacity of the new and weaker leaders to cope, forcing Moscow to intervene or allowing the region to descend into chaos.