By Its Mistaken Policies, Russia is Once Again Laying a Delayed Action Bomb under the North Caucasus, Servinovsky Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 8 – The Putin regime regularly suggests that Lenin laid a delayed action bomb under the North Caucasus, Vladimir Servinovsky says. But it fails to recognize that the Russian Empire did much the same in the middle of the 19th century and that the Kremlin itself is today doing something similar.
    The photo journalist who has travelled extensively in the North Caucasus says that the bombs Stalin laid under the North Caucasus are well-known because they blew up in the 1990s, but far less well known are the ones tsarist officials inserted there which blew up only a century later (poligonmedia.appspot.com/vladimir-sevrinovskij/).
    The latter include the very different treatment the tsarist government meted out to Sufi leader Khunta-Khadzhy Kishiyev and that it gave to Imam Shamil. In the first case, the tsars exiled and repressed Kishiyev’s followers while in the second, they gave the leader of the North Caucasian revolt an honored retirement.
    As a result, Servinovsky says, the followers of Kishiyiev were radicalized, went underground, and then led revolts a century later, while those who followed Shamil were more loyal to the Russian authorities both in the immediate aftermath of the Caucasian war and for decades thereafter.
    Unfortunately, the journalist continues, Moscow is making similar mistakes now, treating some well to buy their loyalty but repressing or forcing into emigration and thus radicalization and ensuring that their followers will lead a revolt if not immediately than in the coming decades as a result of this new delayed action bomb the Putin regime has put in place.
    In other comments, Servinovsky says that the Salafites are gaining ground in the region, something he says has both positive and negative consequences, with the former being that this movement which is committed to pure Islam is wiping out local and often harmful traditions but the former meaning that when the revolt comes, it will be both Islamist and far more radical.