Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 22 – At the present time, the Telegram channel Mysli-NeMysli says, the horrific economic situation in the republics
of Russia’s North Caucasus are “a social bomb” that may go off at any time
given that old ethnic grievances are combining with rising gas prices and loose
talk in Moscow about regional amalgamation to push people into the streets.
The
channel points to the fact that the very poorest places in the Russian
Federation are in the North Caucasus, with Kabardino-Balkaria, Daghestan,
Chechnya, and Karachayevo-Cherkessia at the very bottom and North Ossetia only
a little better in all-Russian rankings (t.me/mislinemisli
reposted at charter97.org/ru/news/2018/9/20/305994/).
Because of rising prices for gas and
food, the channel continues, “social tensions have sharply increased.” They may
draw additional power from longstanding ethnic grievances, disputes over land,
or talk in Moscow about redrawing borders in some regional amalgamation plan;
but the economic problems are the primary driver.
The channel points to Kabardino-Balkaria
as “the hottest situation” given new clashes between the Circassian Kabards and
the Turkic Balkars over historical symbols and land and the apparent inability
of the Circassian-dominated republic authorities to cope with the situation and
thus compelled to turn to the center for troops.
Relations between Chechnya and
Ingushetia are rapidly deteriorating as well because of a territorial dispute
over their common border. The leaders of the two are trying to hold things
together and prevent more violence, the channel says; but many in the
populations of the two republics are extremely angry. Similar problems affect North
Ossetia.
But instead of addressing these
problems and especially the level of poverty across the North Caucasus, officials
in Moscow are taking steps that will only add fuel to the fire and quite
possibly cause the kind of violence, official and unofficial, that will lead the
situation to spiral out of control.
On the one hand, the Mysli-NeMysli channel says that “the
Kremlin is going to push forward the ideal of amalgamating regions, a step
which could enflame the entire Caucasus,” given that each of the current
republics would see itself as a potential loser if it were to be enveloped in
some larger and likely ethnic Russian region.
And on the other, Moscow officials,
as the URA news agency reports, are increasingly blaming outside agitators in
the form of US-backed NGOs for the violence in the region instead of facing up
to the real problems of poverty and often ancient ethnic animosities on the
ground (ura.news/articles/1036276276).
Frants
Klintsevich, deputy chairman of the Federation Council’s defense and security
committee, blames the clashes earlier this week in Kabardino-Balkaria not on
local issues but rather on the US which he says has “created an enormous number
of NGOs” nominally to promote democracy but in fact to achieve “the disintegration
of Russian regions.”
In
Soviet times, the West focused on destroying the USSR by promoting ethnic protests
in the union republics; now, it is doing so in the non-Russian republics of the
Russian Federation in order to destroy Russia by exploiting local problems in
ways that will make the country ungovernable from Moscow.
Aleksey
Martynov, the director of the Moscow Institute of Present-Day States, agrees.
He says that “if earlier the West used the tactic of the complex
destabilization of the system as was the case in Ukraine, with time, it came to
the conclusion that for the disintegration of Russia it would be better to use
the technology of destabilization in each separate region.”
By
doing this in several places at once, he says, the West hopes to create “’a
perfect storm’” that will ultimately overwhelm Moscow and lead to the coming
apart of the Russian Federation.
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