Stability in North Caucasus Depends on Moscow’s Relations with Ethnic Clans and Their Representatives, New Study Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 20 – The future stability of the North Caucasus depends on how well Moscow is able to deal with the powerful ethnic clans in the region and the representatives of those clans in the capital as well, according to a new study by the Accents Analytic Center and the Nezygar telegram channel.

            In what they say is the first of a planned series of regional studies of elite composition in the regions of the Russian Federation, Accents and Nezygar say that in most parts of the North Caucasus, even in Soviet times, “an ethno-clan system of administration” had taken shape and has been further strengthened since 1991 (akcent.site/mneniya/17129).

            Two examples of the way in which clans which arose in the North Caucasus have spread their influence into the rest of Russia and especially in Moscow are the Circassian Arashukovs and the Daghestani Kurbanovs. In most cases, the central authorities have left these groups in peace lest attacking them trigger more instability across the region.

            “Among the business elites of the regions of the North Caucasus, the elites of Stavropol Kray are the most incorporated into the federal ones,” the study says, the result of the fact that the economy of Stavropol is far more integrated into the broader Russian one than is the economy of any other North Caucasus region.

In the others, even agriculture is beyond the reach of Moscow because local elites control any exchange of land, something that means that local ethnic clans who controlled the land in the past continue to do so to this day. Where the economy is most developed, the clans have organized it on the basis of patron-client ties.

The most full consolidated ethnic elite is the Chechen both in the republic and in its representation in Moscow bureaucracies and business communities, but others are approaching it without having yet achieved its influence and control. In Ingushetia, the other Waynakh republic, its head, Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov, has been unable to organize the elite so tightly.

The Accents-Nezygar study then provides lists of the leaders of the following ethnic clans – the Circassian, the Karachay-Balkar, the Ingush, the Greek, the Avar, the Kumyk, the Dargin, the Ossetian, and the Jewish.