Dagestan Presents a Fundamentally Different -- and Possibly Insoluble -- Challenge to Moscow than Do Other Non-Russian Republics

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 28 – Moscow has long recognized that Dagestan is the most Islamic of the non-Russian republics of the North Caucasus, but it is now having to deal with another fundamental difference between that republic and the others, a difference that its policies toward the others have done little to restrain.

            Elsewhere, Putin’s Kremlin has relied on republic heads to control the situation not only by relying on the use of force but also and even more importantly by controlling the flow of subsidies from Moscow to the population. These republic leaders have built their own power verticals that in many ways resemble the one Putin has built for Russia as a whole.

            But in Dagestan, the ethnic composition of the population has forced both the republic leadership and Moscow to distribute money and thus power to the heads of the component nationalities in a power-sharing arrangement that gives the heads of those communities more power than the republic head.

            Up to now, Moscow has viewed this arrangement as a price worth paying for maintaining stability in a republic where no ethnic group is sufficiently numerous to ensure that it and the republic elite based on it can control the situation. But now the consequences of that approach are coming home to roost.

            On the one hand, the local elites within the republic are making alliances with criminal or radical Islamic groups, as the recent violence in Makhachkala and Derbent showed. And on the other, anyone who seeks to unite Dagestan has little choice but to turn to Islam as the basis for that.

            Moscow does not want to see either situation develop further lest Dagestan spiral into violence or become a bastion of Islamist radicalism. After the recent terrorist incidents, the center has begun to recognize that it faces a different challenge in Dagestan than elsewhere (e.g., versia.ru/kumovstvo-i-blizorukost-doveli-dagestan-do-mezhkonfessionalnogo-krovoprolitiya).

            It isn’t sure what to do except increase repression and conduct a thorough-going purge down to the local elites (kavkazr.com/a/deputatov-i-rayonnyh-glav-proveryat-posle-napadeniya-na-dagestan/33011279.html).  But that won’t solve the fundamental problems of multi-nationality in that republic. Indeed, it may have just the opposite effect.

            In short, Putin’s one-size-fits-all approach to the republics of the North Caucasus is collapsing in Dagestan in ways that are likely to echo in other federal subjects where whatever it does in Makhachkala will be seen as a potential precedent for republic and sub-republic elites, their relations with Moscow and their attitudes toward ethnicity and religion. 

            And that reality too will limit Moscow’s options in Dagestan: it can’t treat it differently without other federal subjects taking note; but if it continues to treat it in the same way, it will find that such an approach will make existing problems there worse and put the center’s control of the eastern North Caucasus very much at risk.