War in Chechnya Far from Over and will be Major Problem for Those who Come After Putin, Dmitriyevsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – On the 25^th anniversary of the beginning of the second post-Soviet Chechen war, Stanislav Dmitriyevsky says that that conflict is, despite what many think, far from over and will become a major challenge for those who seek to govern Russia after Vladimir Putin departs from the scene.

            Tragically, members of the Russian opposition are not including a resolution of that challenge in their discussions about the future country they plan to rule, the human rights activist says (kavkazr.com/a/kadyrovskaya-chechnya-dlya-putina-idealjnoe-gosudarstvo-pravozaschitnik-o-godovschine-nachala-vtoroy-chechenskoy-voyny/33140601.html).

            Dmitriyevsky who was closely involved in following human rights issues in Chechnya during the first two post-Soviet wars there but who now lives in exile in Norway says that the failure of the opposition to recognize this danger means that even under their rule, Moscow will likely seek to resolve any Chechen challenge by seeking to reimpose imperial arrangements.

            That is just one of the wise observations the Russian human rights activist offers in the course of a wide-ranging discussion about Chechnya, Russia and the West – past, present and future. Among the most important of these are the following:

 

·       No one, not Putin, not the Russian opposition and not the West want to talk about the Chechen war because to do so raises so many difficult and disturbing questions that no one wants to face. Putin would face questions about his actions, the West about its failure to oppose him, and the opposition about its failure to come up with a plan for the future.

 

·       The first and second post-Soviet Chechen wars were very different with the first being Moscow’s effort to suppress a national liberation movement based on liberal values and the second being an effort by Putin to test what he could get away with in suppressing a far more radicalized people as part of his plans for a more general move against Russians and non-Russians alike.

 

·       The West failed to recognize what Putin was doing and oppose him at the outset. Instead, it forgave him for his actions “supposing that these were only marginal excesses on the path to the construction of democracy.” The result has been repression inside Russia and aggression against Georgia and now Ukraine.

 

·       For Putin, “Chechnya became a place where he tested his forces and methods and he won. That war … showed him that force and blackmail are very effective political methods.” And he has now applied those lessons to threaten the people of his own country and the world as well.

 

·       “Kadyrov’s Chechnya for Putin is a kind of Platonic ideal state,” one that the Kremlin leader who installed him is “very satisfied with and now would like to spread it to the entire world.”

Dmitriyevsky sums up his argument with the following remark: “Academician Sakharov said that ‘my country needs both pressure and support.’ The West’s complete refusal to use pressure [at the time of the second Chechen war] led to all the wars that have followed since that time.”

It could hardly have been otherwise, the human rights defender says. “After 70 years of the totalitarian experiment, Russian society needed serious supervision and it was naïve to expect that it would on its own become democratic overnight.”