Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 13 – Russia has
always been a centralized state, but the current wave of hyper-centralization,
itself the direct result of Moscow’s misreading of the Chechen war, is leading
to popular anger, legal nihilism, and thus itself is now a threat to the
country as a whole, according to Shamil Beno, who served as a senior Chechen
official in the 1990s.
The
former Chechen foreign minister says that the strategy Moscow adopted as a
result of its experiences in Chechnya means that the majority of regions in the
Russian Federation have “not so much lost the right to take decisions as the
sense that they can do anything independently at all” (profile.ru/rossiya/item/89752-podi-skazhi-russkim-chto-rossiya-eto-i-moya-strana-tozhe).
“The logical result of this strategy,” he suggests, “was the creation
of federal ministries ‘for particular territories,’” a step that is “administrative
nonsense” because bureaucrats in Moscow do not and even cannot know how to deal
with local problems and therefore take decisions which make things worse.
For example, he continues, the
Moscow bureaucrats think that the way to deal with religious radicalism is to
propagandize Russian patriotism and the traditional cultural values of the
peoples of the North Caucasus, to use force to suppress dissent, and to create
more jobs and better opportunity.
The list sounds good, but even if
everything on it were to be carried out 100 percent, that would not solve the
problem because its component parts “do not take into consideration the nature
of the phenomenon at which they are addressed.” In short, all this activity can
do is “lower the temperature” but not “cure the disease itself.”
Consider the notion of promoting
Russian patriotism, Beno says. Different people have different pasts, and
trying to get them to accept only one version isn’t going to work. “How is anyone going to convince North
Caucasians to celebrate General Yermolov? Or to convince peoples subject to
genocide that Stalin was a worthy leader of the USSR?”
Perhaps such things would be
possible “if you were able to convince Jews to put up a monument to Hitler and
the Russians to put up one to the Mongol khan.”
But the situation
is even more complicated than that. If Moscow pushed for the restoration of
traditional values, then it has to agree to the restoration of customary
law. And that “directly contradicts
[Moscow’s] strategy of the unification of legal codes.” And using force against
dissent won’t cure extremism: it will make it worse.
The only thing
that has saved the situation so far, Beno argues, is that the North Caucasus is
a relatively small part of the Russian Federation. If President Vladimir Putin wants to achieve
something, he should study what King Hussein was able to do with very different
policies in Jordan. But that would
require a wholesale shift in Moscow’s approach.
Moscow’s economic
development ideas are equally misplaced, Beno says. North Caucasus mountaineers are “hospitable,”
but “not servile.” They will never work out as servants to visiting Russians.
And if they won’t, how do the bureaucrats in Moscow plan to develop a tourist
industry there? By bringing in Indians
and Pakistanis?
And although
building technology centers might work, Moscow is subverting even those by
adopting the principle that “anyone who is not with us is against us” and thus
alienating those it is supposed to be working with and for rather than
integrating them as such technology centers are supposed to do.
But Moscow’s
problem is bigger than the North Caucasus, Beno says. He pointed out that he “does
not see the outlines of ‘a Russian project.’” There is, of course, talk about
Eurasianism and a “Russian world,” but it all seems part of the winding down of
the “Russian empire” project rather than something new.
That winding down
began “all of 90 years ago,” a blink of the eye in historical terms. But if Moscow tries to make its new project a
genuinely ethnic Russian one, then it will be “complicated to integrate the Chechens
in it” and combine “our autarchy with Russian community.”
The danger that
Moscow would eventually move in that direction was laid, like a delayed action
bomb, in the text of the 1993 Constitution where the Russian Federation and
Russia were declared to be the same thing. But “Russia in the understanding of
Russians is their country.” What they fail to see is that the country belongs
to Chechens too.
A Russian world
project thus “presupposes either the assimilation of the peoples living on the territory
of the Russian Federation of the provision of real content to federalism or a rollback
to feudalism, to relations of ‘suzerain’ and ‘vassal.’” And there is “an
alternative: a change in the special outline of the country.”
“What path will
the process take?” Beno asks rhetorically. And he notes “if one starts from the
trends noted today, then all these paths are still open.”
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