Tony Wood
CHECHNYA
The case for independence
208pp. Verso. Paperback, £12.96
9781844671144
Gordon M. Hahn
RUSSIA’S ISLAMIC THREAT
349pp. Yalie University Press. £25.
9780300120776
Timothy Phillips
BESLAN
The tragedy of school no. 1
288pp. Granta. Paperback, £10.99
9781862079274
Anna Politkovskaya
A RUSSIAN DIARY
323pp. Harvill Secker. £17.99.
9781846551024
The manor house at Tsinandali, just outside the city of Telavi in eastern Georgia, is a small masterpiece of local design. Its raised wooden porch wraps around two sides of the brick structure. The roof is supported by pencil-thin columns and carefully mitred Oriental braces. On rainy days, the estate is covered by mist that descends from the Caucasus mountains, leaving the house and gardens adrift in a sea of blurry pines. Today, the manor house is a weekend retreat where tourists can sample the region’s sweet wines and explore the grounds. More than a century ago, however, Tsinandali was the site of what would now be called a terrorist incident, one of the most infamous in Russian history.
In the summer of 1854, a raiding party loyal to the highland Muslim leader Shamil attacked the estate while the men of the house were away. Its mistress, Anna Chavchavadze, and her sister Varvara Orbeliani, both descendants of the last Georgian king, were spirited away, along with several relatives, servants and half a dozen children. For the next eight months, they were held captive by Shamil in his mountain redoubt. The Georgians were surrendered only with the payment of a substantial ransom and the return of Shamil’s son, who had been taken hostage by the Russian Government many years earlier.
The captivity of the Georgian princesses was followed closely by the Russian public. It seemed to confirm the view that the highland Caucasus war was a place brimming with zealous Muslims devoted only to serving Allah and seizing Christian women from their beds. The public disgust at Shamil’s behaviour also had repercussions beyond the Russian Empire. Britain and France, soon to be bogged down at Sevastopol, had considered supporting Shamil and other Muslim highlanders as a second front against the Tsar. The Tsinandali raid made that impossible.
Today, popular images of the Caucasus are not much different from those that were informed by the Tsinandali raid. Events over the past two decades have reinforced them. Russia has fought two devastating wars in Chechnya, the first from 1994 to 1996, the second from 1999 until the present. Other parts of the Russian North Caucasus have regularly witnessed bombings, assassinations and spectacular episodes of hostage-taking and mass killing.
The independent countries south of the Caucasus mountains – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – have fared better in recent years, but economic underdevelopment, armed conflict and authoritarian politics remain profound problems. Armenia and Azerbaijan are engaged in a simmering territorial dispute. Both have political leaders wary of reform. Georgia has been portrayed as the great hope of the region, a country with a Western-leaning political class that came to power after a pro-democracy street revolt in 2003. But the newcomers have proved nearly as resistant to criticism as the old guard. In the midst of these difficulties, both Azerbaijan and Georgia have become important to the United States, the former because of its oil wealth, the latter because of its unwavering commitment to Washington’s foreign policy. Georgia, a country of under 5 million people, is now the fourth-largest troop contributor to the war in Iraq (after the United States, Britain and South Korea).
Compared to the far greater number of books on the Balkans, the Caucasus is still a relatively obscure subject. The Chechen wars produced excellent field reporting by Anatol Lieven, Sebastian Smith and other intrepid journalists. A few authors, such as Tom de Waal, Yo’av Karny and Thomas Goltz, have covered political events in the South Caucasus as well. But by and large, writing on the region remains a species of exotica. “The Alps we already knew, and the Pyrenees, but this was finer than anything we had ever seen or even imagined in our wildest dreams!”, wrote Alexandre Dumas during a trip there in the 1850s. “How I wished I had brought with me my copy of Aeschylus!” Like earlier European visitors, many writers have tended to be more interested in drawing romantic parallels between the ancient past and the post-Soviet present than on making sober sense of current troubles.
Tony Wood aims to be an exception to this rule, and he reveals his hand already in the subtitle of his Chechnya: The case for Independence. He thankfully dismisses the join-the-dots approach to modern Caucasus history, avoiding, for example, the tired cliché of attributing the violence of the 1990s to the same roots as Shamil’s resistance movement of the nineteenth century. Wood rightly underlines the political origins of the conflict in Chechnya: the fact that, at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Chechen nationalist movement was remarkably similar to those in other parts of the Soviet state. The key difference was that Chechnya (then tied together administratively with neighbouring Ingushetia) was not a “Union Republic” within the Soviet federation, but rather an “autonomous republic” of Russia itself. To ask why the Chechens chose to defy Moscow is to miss a basic point. Challenging the federal centre and questioning sovereignty were what nearly everyone was doing in the late 1980s and early 90s.
Wood has a much more difficult time, however, when it comes to the past ten years. What may once have been a nationalist cause has become something far more complex: a fratricidal civil war within Chechnya, goaded on by Moscow and involving a mordant mix of dogs-of-war brutality and religious nihilism. The second Chechen war has never been in any meaningful sense a war for national liberation, and Wood is sometimes reduced to the language of old-leftism when it comes to conceptualizing the violence there. He dismisses the pro-Moscow government in Chechnya as simply “proxies” of the Russians, and blames the West for failing to take seriously the Chechens’ claims. Yet the few guerrilla fighters still left in the mountains, dressed in camouflage fatigues and green headbands, are no more truly representative of Chechen national interests than those who are, with Moscow’s imprimatur, slowly rebuilding the bombed-out capital, Grozny. The administration of Vladimir Putin has successfully “Chechenized” the conflict; the people who are doing the killing and dying in Chechnya are now, by and large, ethnic Chechens themselves, especially after the assassination of the powerful guerrilla commander Shamil Basaev in 2006. As Wood admits, it is now difficult to know whether an absolute majority of Chechnya’s residents would even support Independence, regardless of the historical and moral rationale for it.
Still, Tony Wood’s Chechnya is a welcome alternative to the standard view that the rebellious Chechens – or at least the “Islamo-terrorists”, “revolutionary jihadist terrorist networks”, “Islamic separatists” and “Islamist militants” – basically got what was coming to them. Those are some of the labels that Gordon M. Hahn uses in his analysis of what he calls “Russia’s Islamic threat”. He has assembled about as much as there is to know concerning the underground purveyors of violence in the North Caucasus, and his policy recommendations are sensible: the West should promote an end to violence in Chechnya, help Russia engage in economic development, and promote the rich, multifarious and moderate religious heritage of the Caucasus uplands.
However, Hahn seems not to have decided what Russia’s Islamic Threat is actually about. It is one thing to recount the rather small number of guerrillas responsible for grotesque acts of terror in the North Caucasus and beyond. The sickening hostage crisis in Beslan, North Ossetia, in September 2004, the subject of a moving ground-level account by Timothy Phillips in Beslan: The tragedy of School No 1, highlighted the unscrupulous character of those who claim to be waging war with God on their side. Over 300 people, most of them young children, were killed after terrorists seized a schoolhouse on the first day of the new academic year. But there is no reason to claim, as Hahn does, that the actions of these men are linked to the broader question of Islam as religious practice, social category and political tool across Russia.
He is careful to mention the many political and cultural cross-currents among Russia’s non-Christian ethnic groups, but he is unable to distinguish the many different meanings of Islam within the Caucasus and Russia as a whole. His understanding of north Caucasus society is at times wobbly. For example, he alleges that “many Kabardins” – the plurality ethnic group in the Russian Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria – “remain polytheists” and “continue to worship the pagan god Tkhawich alongside the Muslim deity”. That would come as shocking news to Muslim Kabardins and to their Christian and secular neighbours. Hahn presumably means that, as in all faith traditions, religious practice is syncretic, but here, as elsewhere in the book, the author bludgeons issues that should be handled with a certain deftness.
There is, of course, a global jihadist movement, and Hahn is right to place Russia within that movement’s sphere of activity. The jihadists themselves, as their websites affirm, certainly think of Russia in that way. But the worldwide call to battle has been answered by the privileged sons of leading Arab families, disaffected Britons, middle-class Anglo-Pakistanis, and at least one wayward kangaroo skinner from Australia. It would be odd to link any of their actions to large-scale structural changes, such as the relatively high birth-rate among some Muslim populations. After all, no one would argue that an account of IRA terrorism must properly begin with a discussion of Catholic birth control practices. By treating demographics, political mobilization, secessionism and terrorism as all part of a single phenomenon – one which he crudely labels “Islamic/Islamist” – Gordon Hahn makes it even more difficult to understand the drivers of politics in Russia’s southern borderlands.
One of Vladimir Putin’s chief achievements has been to transform Russia into a confident international actor, and a country now equally confident in its own destiny. One need only look at school curricula or visit newly refurbished museums in Moscow to sense the change: towards a national, culturally Russian perception of the past and of the nature of the State itself. That transformation is chronicled in Anna Politkovskaya’s A Russian Diary, which runs from 2003 to 2005.
The book is the raw footage of Politkovskaya’s life as a public intellectual and journalistic gadfly, her assessment of a Russia that she perceives to be growing coarser and more insular precisely at a time of national optimism and economic revival. She recounts with bitterness the rise of Putin’s political machine, its grinding war in Chechnya, and the dark bargains that the Kremlin has struck with thuggish local elites throughout the federation: enrichissez-vous in exchange for political stability and national solidarity.
The irony is that all of this has been happening within a context in which Russia is, in fact, becoming less “national” as a society. From 1989 to 2002, the ethnic Russian proportion of its total population slid by almost two percentage points to just under 80 per cent. Over the same period, minority groups grew considerably, both in absolute terms and relative to the Russian majority. Throughout the Caucasus, the post-Soviet era has also seen an intensive “derussification” of local societies, a process of out-migration by ethnic Russians that has reversed nearly two centuries of state-led demographic engineering.
If current trends continue, at some point in the next century Russia will become a Muslim-plurality, perhaps even Muslim-majority, society, a fact that Russian intellectuals, policy-makers, and the Orthodox Church have yet to comprehend. So far, the Russian approach has been to fall back on the policies that defined engagement with its Islamic South in the Imperial period: to keep the Muslim periphery inside Russia but outside Russian consciousness. Today, the peoples of the Caucasus – especially Muslims – are routinely denigrated as thievish and inherently rebellious, blanketed with collective responsibility for everything from organized crime to terrorism, and portrayed as the chief threat to Russia’s internal security and stability. That fear, not just of terrorists but of all Southerners, has played no small role in Putin’s consolidation of power, and the growing chauvinism of Russian society.
As Putin looks towards the end of his term, in 2008, and the problem of his own political succession, the Russian state as a whole is entering a period of uncertainty. A Russian Diary, published posthumously after the author’s gangland-style murder in 2006, is a chilling chronicle of the way in which overblown patriotism and personal fear have silenced many of Russia’s moral voices. Her murder sent an unambiguous signal to those who imagine a Russia that can one day become something better than a warmed-over version of its Imperial past. The truly frightening thing is that one can think of several people like Anna Politkovskaya, who are probably next on somebody’s list.
_________________________________________________________
Charles King is the author of The Black Sea: A history, 2004. His new book, The Ghost of Freedom: A history of the Caucasus, will be published next year
