Window on Eurasia

Crisis ‘Worse than Chechnya’ Ahead in Caucasus, Moscow Scholar Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 27, 2006 – The Caucasus, north and south, suffers from the same problems Russia does – including kleptocracy,corruption, clan rule, and so on -- and consequently, for the next decade or so “no one will be able to do anything to change” this, according to Moscow’s leading academic specialist on the Caucasus region.

Indeed, Sergei Arutyunov, the head of Caucasus studies at the Russian
Academy of Sciences, argues in a recent interview, there will be “an
explosion” sometime during that period that almost certainly “will
be worse than any Chechnya or any Karabakh”
[http://www.sknews.ru/paper/2006/27/article.php?id=4&uin=1].

That is an particular tragedy for all concerned not only because the
Chechen war and its fallout could have been avoided, Arutyunov told
“Severniy Kazkaz” but also because officials in Moscow and the
region could even at this date employ strategies that worked in the
past to limit if not extinguish the turbulence in this region.

Arutyunov, who has probably written more widely on the Caucasus region
than any other contemporary scholar, suggested that “the tragedy”
that Chechnya has become could “easily have been avoided.” And he
provides details on his and the late Galina Starovoitova’s efforts to
influence Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1994.

At that time, Arutyunov and Starovoitova were in Washington to present
talks at Georgetown University. The two used their visit to the
American capital to meet with American officials who they hoped might be able to
push Yeltsin away from the brink in the Caucaus.

If Yeltsin and his team had shown a little more flexibility, Arutyunov
said, not only would there not have been a war but Chechen leader
Dzhokhar Dudayev could have accepted a position like that of
Tatarstan’s President Miintimir Shaimiyev and a status for his
republic like that “of Puerto Rico with the United States.”

Unfortunately, Arutyunov added, many around Yeltsin believed in the
need for “a small victorious war.” Although he cannot remember the name
of the official who used “this idiotic phrase,” someone did. And
both those who did and those who listened to them not only caused the
war but also deserve to be condemned for that fact.

But even now, after more than a decade of bloodshed in Chechnya and the
spread of the conflict to other parts of the Caucasus, Moscow could
reduce the likelihood of an even more terrible conflict in the future
if it would draw on the lessons of the tsarist and Soviet past.

While neither the tsars nor the commissars were entirely successful in
quieting this ethnically diverse portion of the globe, both achieved
more than the post-Soviet Russian government because they focused on
two things, both of which today’s Moscow appears to have largely ignored.

On the one hand, both sought to make sure that the local populations
could not gain access to the kind of resources they would need to
contest the power of the central government, the first by maintaining
tight discipline over its officials and the second by limiting the
amount of resources anyone had access to.

And on the other, both tsarist and Soviet officials employed sufficient
power to dictate outcomes rather than attempting to engage in a limited
war. That allowed them to say to the local population “this is the
way things are going to be” rather than appear to be open to change if
the local population sought to pressure the center in any way.

In response to another question, Arutyunov dismissed the notion that
what is taking place in the Caucasus is some kind of clash of
civilizations. That is “an invention of the neo-liberals,” he said.
In fact, what is taking place in the Caucasus and elsewhere is between
civilization and obscurantism.”

But what is especially unfortunate about the situation in today’s
world, the senior Russian scholar concluded, is that the
representatives of civilization itself, be it in the United States, the Russian
Federation, or elsewhere, is increasingly infected by obscurantist
views, something that makes the victory of civilization far more
difficult.

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