MUSA SHANIB IN THE CAUCASUS: A POLITICAL ODYSSEY
Thomas de Waal
Open Democracy, UK
Oct 12 2005
The meteoric career of an intellectual, nationalist dissident in the
north Caucasus is emblematic of the region’s troubled post-Soviet
condition, writes Thomas de Waal of the Institute for War & Peace
Reporting.
In January 2005, in one of Russia’s most depressed towns, I had dinner
with a remarkable man. Musa Shanib (also known by the Russianised
name Yuri Shanibov) has a noble look to him, with the carved profile
of an eagle and thick charcoal eyebrows.
Shanib’s life story is still more striking. In the early 1990s
he briefly became the Garibaldi of the north Caucasus, aiming to
unite the disparate small nationalities of Russia’s most diverse
(and Islamic) region into a Confederation of Mountain Peoples that
would proclaim independence from Moscow. He spent seven months with
the Chechen general Dzhokhar Dudayev, helping him in Chechnya’s bid
for independence from the Russian Federation in 1991.
In 1992, Shanib led a group of north Caucasian volunteers into the
Black Sea autonomous republic of Abkhazia to help the Abkhaz fight
and win a war against Georgia. In his own autonomous republic of
Kabardino-Balkaria, Shanib stood at the head of a popular movement,
which was on the verge of seizing power in 1992, but backed away
from direct confrontation with the ex-communist authorities at the
last moment.
A minority of one
More than a decade on, sitting with Shanib in the Elita (Elite)
Restaurant in Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, this springtime
of revolutions seemed very far away. He had picked the restaurant
because it was one of the few decent places to take a guest in the
city for dinner. But its extravagant bad taste – low lighting, gilded
chairs, white tablecloths and starched napkins – were symbols of the
new era in which the elite lives in a tiny self-satisfied bubble of
conspicuous consumption, while most of the population struggles on
the breadline.
My host belonged to neither category. He is a nationalist intellectual
of a kind of that has now gone out of fashion in much of eastern
Europe. He himself admits that he is now a marginal figure and lives
quietly, teaching at the local university, while all around him
the revolutions he helped inspire have been poisoned, betrayed or
overturned. Instead there is Putin’s Russia, a criminalised conflict
in Chechnya and Islamic militancy on the rise.
What a subject for a biography! And Georgi Derluguian has written
it – and so much more – in his book Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the
Caucasus. Derluguian is a native of the north Caucasus, an Armenian
born in the Krasnodar region, and now teaches sociology at Northwestern
University in Chicago. He became fascinated by Shanib(ov) when he
met him several years ago and his evolution from loyal Komsomol youth
leader into 1970s dissident into nationalist demagogue. He realised
what an interesting man he had before him when he learned of Shanib’s
admiration for the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography
(University of Chicago Press, 2005) is an extraordinary book by any
standards. My only quarrel with it is the title, which will deter
many readers unfamiliar with the name Bourdieu and miss out on the
many riches here available to the non-specialist.
What the author has written is no less than a theoretical and
empirical explanation of the evolution of late Soviet and early
post-Soviet society that spins out a highly sophisticated explanation
of how the Soviet Union broke up and why nationalist conflict broke
out in the Caucasus. He does this as a sociologist but relying
on the kind of detailed on-the-ground research worthy of the best
journalists. Shanib’s evolution is the vehicle by which this story
is told from the half-century from the end of the Stalin period to
the present day.
To summarise the book’s complex arguments is impossible, but its main
critical thrust presents a fresh understanding of the decay of the
Soviet Union and what came after.
Russia famously produced two social classes of its own: the
intelligentsia and the nomenklatura. It was the mistake of most
western observers to fix most of their attention on Moscow and on
the strivings of the intelligentsia to reform the Soviet Union – and
subsequently Russia – into a European democratic state. But in the
bulk of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics other social forces
were at work and the nomenklatura wrote the rules of the game. In
most cases, using various strategies, they survived and managed to
keep their hold on political and economic power in their own patch.
Derluguian writes: “After 1991 the relations of bureaucratic rent
flowed into post-communistic privatisation: in other words, the
administrative capital was converted into economic capital.”
Along with the “self-encapsulation of the nomenklatura,” Derluguian
identifies two other principal causes for the collapse of the
Soviet Union: the geopolitical strains caused by a failed attempt
to maintain military competition with the United States and what he
calls the “strains of advanced proletarianisation” – in other words,
the failure of the Soviet Union to develop an economy that satisfied
its citizens’ demands.
As the author wittily puts it: “The notoriously shoddy quality of
Soviet-made goods was in fact the perverted triumph of class struggle
under state socialism. Denied the institutional means to increase
their wages through collective bargaining, the workers tacitly sought
ways to decrease their labour inputs.”
Derluguian argues persuasively that we should also factor in another
social class, whom he calls the “sub-proletarians”, the de-ruralised,
semi-employed folk who belong neither to town nor country and whose
menfolk have been the raw material for most of the conflicts in the
Caucasus (One former professor from Grozny University told me how she
saw a group of Chechen fighters at the beginning of the first war in
1994 and exclaimed: “They are all my worst students!”). Any visitor
to the Caucasus today is struck about how the country has come to the
city and people are forced to eke a living from a mixture of backyard
farming and petty trade.
If this was the context, then national disputes lit the flame. In
another setting Shanib would most likely have pursued another career,
but in the Caucasus the logic of events led him to nationalism. His
conversion into a national leader was virtually accidental. In the late
Stalin period he was a rising Komsomol official and youth leader,
then during Nikita Khrushchev’s thaw he became a keen reformist
intellectual.
After 1968 a thesis on “self-government” made him suspicious, and he
was forced into dissidence. Under Mikhail Gorbachev he became a focal
point for new oppositionists but although he admired Andrei Sakharov
he admitted that from the perspective of provincial Kabardino-Balkaria
the great scientist “looked no nearer than the moon.” Nationalist
mobilisation was a far more productive strategy and in 1989 he was
elected the head of the new anti-communist Assembly of Mountain
Peoples. His slogans of a “common Caucasian home” echoed Gorbachev’s
proclamation of a “common European home.”
A different battlefield
Early success was intoxicating but from 1993 onwards the story is
pretty much one of disaster. Of course the forces Shanib and his
comrades had unleashed were far greater than they realised, as can
been seen in the revolutions and on the battlefields of Abkhazia
(1992-3), Nagorny Karabakh (1991-4) and Chechnya (1994-6 and 1999 to
the present), as well as the places where fighting did not ignite.
When Shanib looks around at the revolutions he helped to start,
he cannot help but be depressed. In Chechnya, Dudayev’s romantic
nationalism led his people into a confrontation with the Russian
government and the barbarities of the Russian armed forces that have
destroyed Chechnya for generations. Abkhazia won de facto independence
from Georgia but still lives in a semi-devastated condition as an
unrecognised state. Having broken free from Georgia, it is now being
swallowed up by Russia, its economy being slowly absorbed into that
of its northern neighbour – not what the Abkhaz envisaged at all.
Where is this all leading? In the scramble for post-Soviet spoils
(to adopt a phrase of Derluguian’s), the nomenklatura has proved
exceptionally resourceful. With the exception of Chechnya, former
Communist Party officials still hold positions of power across the
north Caucasus, own factories and luxury villas and stand at the peak
of vast patronage networks.
The cost is frighteningly high. The members of the marginalised
sub-proletariat, despised and deprived of almost all the benefits that
they might reasonably expect from a modern state, are disillusioned
with nationalism. Shanib admitted to me that he cannot raise any
interest in a Kabardinian nationalist movement any more.
Besides, the message offered by intellectuals like Shanib is too
subtle for people who are facing hunger.
Few outsiders currently pay any attention to the north Caucasus,
just occasionally registering with alarm events like the massacre of
children in Beslan. That is worrying, because while Chechnya itself
is relatively quieter, its repercussions are spreading to the rest
of this benighted region with an embittered majority-Muslim population.
Shanib’s home republic of Kabardino-Balkaria is seeing a steady
rise in violence between Islamic militants and the police. The most
notorious Chechen militant leader, Shamil Basayev, has visited a
territory where he has many supporters.
The elite is too wealthy, self-absorbed and fattened on bribes to
pay any attention and focuses its efforts on harassing a handful of
opposition journalists and free thinkers. The leader Valery Kokov is
distant and sick. The parallels with Uzbekistan before the Andijan
massacre are disturbing; the only question is when some kind of
explosion will occur there.
Other parts of the north Caucasus share most of the same combustible
elements – even though Derluguian’s admirable attention to the
particularities of each society is a healthy caution against easy
generalisations. The conflict in Chechnya, in other words, is no longer
confined to Chechnya. And as the violence and insecurity continues
to spread, Musa Shanib will be just a spectator on the sidelines.