Derluguian, Georgi M. (2005) Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World System Biography, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Theory, Research Question, Hypothesis:
Method:
(2005:29): Pursues a “historical-theoretical reconstruction of the lineages leading from past to present.”
Uses Bourdieu’s theoretical notions of symbolic and social capital to assess the ambiguous position of the intelligentsia; how his understanding of classes can be useful; and how it can be used to develop the notion of a sub-proletariat. Seeks to map the historical and social processes that resulted in ethnic conflicts
Findings:
Globalization was not a direct cause of ethnic violence; instead, the common cause was the breakdown of central governance in a large state with institutionalized nationality and informal networks based around nationality. Globalization, however, does help perpetuate the violence.
Topics: Abkhaz Battalion, Ideology
Notes:
Derluguian (2005:31): Patriarchal settings create challenges in interviewing women.
Derluguian (2005:32): Proposes that women play an important role: “Ostensibly, the mothers cannot interfere directly, but in fact they have the final say. A mother can emerge from the kitchen with her son’s belongings neatly packed for a long journey, or she can loudly refuse to let him go, especially if he is the only son – and then he can leave only over her dead body.” Acknowledges this may be romanticised, but claims that such evidence as he possesses shows “a disproportionate number of fighters did indeed come from families with three or more sons.” Only sons exists, but “these were mostly idealistic students hailing from large towns.”
Derluguian (2005:32): “It seems apparent that adult women in the war zones are quietly engaged in complex, almost subliminal negotiations with their own families and communities (neighbors, extended clan networks, religious circles) where perceptions of family status are at stake. Would it appear shameful and treasonous if a family with several sons failed to produce a single volunteer? Might it be acceptable for an only son to be spared?”
Derluguian (2005:36): “Chechnya itself was no longer called Chechnya but rather, in a sort of compromise, the ‘Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.’ This was a typical nationalist invention of tradition. Ichkeria is neither Chechen in origin nor a single word, but in fact two words that translate from Kumyk, one of Dagestan’s major languages, as something like ‘that place over there’ – ich keri.”
Derluguian (2005:40): origins of wolf as national symbol a mystery, but it “caught the national imagination and made it on to the new national flag.” According to one of the flag’s designers, Lyoma Usmanov, the flag “was supposed to employ a purely nationalist and secular symbolism: the narrow red stripe stands for the blood spilled in many wars; the broader white band stands for the hope of the Chechen nation, and the deep green field for the fertility of the native soil.” Green not intended as an Islamic symbol.
Derluguian (2005:41): “Gantamirov’s own militia was one of the first groups to attach Islamic symbolism to the green of the Chechen flag. Given the mercenary cynicism of Gantamirov, the appeal to religion here was a thin ideological disguise. But the move was likely approved by his Russian handlers, who relied on their own previous experience in Afghanistan. Clearly, religion was being politicized from several different sides.”
Derluguian (2005:41): “Religion did not become a potent force in itself – to claim that would be a reification, as if religion were indeed a self-propellant phenomenon. Rather, Islam became a means of political and moral legitimation, a channel to the resources of Middle Eastern political circles, and the source of a discourse that gradually replaced a discredited nationalism. If religion became a hotly contested field, it was because different personalities and the armed formations behind them now claimed Islam for their own purposes.”
Derluguian (2005:43): Up until 1997, the “Chechen nationalist hardliners and the Islamic revivalists had only been a conspicuous presence on the fringe of the political sphere. In the Chechen elections of 1997, their candidates (Yandarbiyev and the likes) amassed barely 10 per cent of the vote in total. This figure seems an accurate expression of the contemperaneous Chechen attitudes. In contrast to elections in most post-Soviet countries, which are routinely marred by manipulation, apathy and fraud, the Chechen elections were competently organized and enthusiastically attended by the voters.”
Derluguian (2005:47): “The Orientalist-minded elements in the Russian intelligence services and some journalists charted elaborate schemata outlining the clan influences that supposedly revealed the hidden springs of politics in the North Caucasus. Let me suggest instead a practical interpretation based on the two sociological concepts that in my opinion best describe the key functions of these clans. First, they are repositories of collective reputations that are used as social capital within their ethnic communities. Second, the clans are networks of trust that are regularly invoked and activated in interactions beyond the immediate family circle of reciprocity.”
Derluguian (2005:48-49): “This formerly obscure local journalist and Minister of Information in Dudayev’s separatist regime became the grandmaster of Chechen foreign propaganda during the recent war. His effectiveness was grudgingly recognized even by a top Russian general, who thought Udugov worth a tank regiment. The slogan of Islamic Order was a good example of his propagandistic effectiveness. These two very evocative words tied the Chechen’s yearning for a safer, more normal life after the war together with that collective identity made salient by the resistance to the infidel Russians. Only Islamic government, insisted Udugov, could bring order, because the Chechens were too anarchistic to obey anyone but God. This was by far the most astute and articulate expression of the Islamic project in interwar Chechnya. Few outsiders, however, seemed to notice how surprisingly many Chechens held Udugov in unconcealed contempt. In educated circles he was called a neo-fascist, or ‘baby Goebbels,’ and among the masses one commonly heard that Udugov was simply ‘not a good man.’ “Part of the explanation for this must lie in a social trauma he experienced at a young age. Udugov’s birth is shrouded in an awkward mystery that hints at illegitimacy. The young Udugov was denied a share of his family’s social capital and had to rely on himself alone. But in real life, unlike in some fiction, being orphaned does not necessarily produce humility and virtue. The people who knew Udugov during his student years say that he was a loner who never drank or dated a girl. Instead, his passion was for arguing all night long about topics ranging from philosophy to films and dissident politics. Prominent on his bookshelf were biographies of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Winston Churchill. During Gorbachev’s perestroika he wrote, in Russian, for the emergent “informal” press where he played on the standard radical themes of the time: anti-bureaucratism, democratization, genuine socialism, ecology, the preservation of ethnic cultures.”
Derluguian (2005:51): “A year into the war, he [Salman Raduyev] led a risky foray across Chechnya’s border into neighboring Daghestan where, under cover of night, they hoped to burn on the ground a squadron of Russian helicopters. The raid failed and, caught at dawn on the outskirts of a Daghestani town, Raduyev’s detachment barricaded themselves inside the local hospital taking its patients and medical personnel hostage. This was clearly in emulation of Basayev’s raid six months earlier. This time the Kremlin adamantly insisted on destroying the terrorists but was let down once again by the glaring inefficiency of its military machine. By some strange miracle, Raduyev’s men eluded the Russian snipers and minefields and escaped into the mountains of Chechnya. Dozens of Daghestani hostages perished. “Amidst the resulting scandal, recriminations, and the sacking of Russian generals, what escaped the attention of most commentators was the seminal change of attitude towards the Chechens among their Daghestani neighbors. Where they had expressed sympathy for the suffering of their fellow Caucasians, they now felt intense rage at the treacherous cruelty of Raduyev. This anger united the different ethnic groups of Daghestan in a rejection of the ‘Chechen way’ that, by default, translated into an unlikely growth of loyalty towards the inefficient and generally aloof Russian state. This helps to explain the stiff, and totally unexpected, resistance offered by the Daghestanis in August 1999 against the self-styled ‘Islamic liberation expedition’ launched by Shamil Basayev’s private army together with religious internationalists from the Middle East.”
Derluguian (2005:50-51): “The enfant terrible of Chechen resistance arrived dressed in a bizarre uniform (decorated with what he claimed were the insignia of Gengis Khan), a black military beret reminiscent of Saddam, the checkered Arab qufiya kerchief around his neck, and with his face mostly obscured by a huge pair of sunglasses. Raduyev had a good reason to hide his face; it had been badly scarred by a bullet. Rumor had it that after suffering his head wound, Raduyev went mad, or at least developed an addiction to painkillers; but to many people his actions before being shot in the face did not look entirely rational either. The past of this emblematic figure warrants a little digging up, to reveal the twisted structures buried under the contemporary image of an implacable nationalist and self—avowed terrorist “In earlier years Raduyev, who was born in 1967, had been an ascendant functionary in the Young Communist League (Komsomol). He spent a year in Bulgaria studying the internal price incentives that were supposed to stimulate worker productivity in the Bulgarian agro-industrial combines. This personal trajectory pointed to a technocratic career in Soviet planning management (had such a structure continued to exist), or as an executive in the new private sector or possibly in multinational business. But things took a very different turn when, after 1991, Chechnya became a rebel enclave. “When in December 1994 President Yeltsin dispatched the regular army to “restore constitutional order” in Chechnya, Raduyev took advantage of his status as an educated man with family connections to become a second-tier commandei in the Chechen guerrilla resistance.”
Derluguian (2005:52): “The personal transformation of Salman Raduyev from rising technocrat into daredevil guerrilla and terrorist is perhaps not too surprising after all. Here in extreme conditions we observe the workings of the social mechanism that Bourdieu called “habitus”: a set of durable dispositions normally shared within particular social classes and groups.” As the proverb goes, once a priest always a priest, Habitus pre-rationally structures our attitudes and behavior: you need not think twice, the reaction emerges naturally. In his Soviet life, Raduyev was a beginner careerist, and so he remained during the war. Like many such beginners, he was ambitious, insecure, and impatient. Hence the propensity to gamble on high-stakes projects, like a young stockbroker. “Winner takes all” is inscribed in this kind of careerist habitus. Recklessness in this case is the manifestation of inexperience in evaluating risks and the beginner’s temptation to believe that there is little to lose while a lot might be gained. Raduyev was neither suicidal nor fanatical. Once his military operation failed, he changed tactics to follow the successful example of Basayev’s hostage-taking. Indeed, he managed to survive and gain a considerable notoriety. But Raduyev sacrificed human lives and inflicted long-term damage to the project of Chechen independence just as thoughtlessly as Stalin’s ruthless young commissars mistreated the Ukrainian peasants during collectivization.”
Derluguian (2005:75-76): “We can continue to ask why it is that these conflicts are specifically ethnic. The Serbs, Chechens, Algerians or, for that matter, the presumably quiescent Chinese, do not have much in common except that they all live in locales that are incompletely industrialized and only partially and recently urbanized, with the consequence that their modern formal institutions are often superficial or simply superfluous. In such locales people know from daily experience how much their life chances depend on access to various patrons and informal networks. And when such people become convinced that they face the prospect of marginalization in a new, competitive, yet restrictive set of arrangements, they sometimes fight back — if they can find a mobilizing platform. Ethnic solidarities provide one such platform — to which there are few alternatives in a situation where the possibilities for democratization are being massively eroded as state institutions collapse, state-created industrial assets and bureaucracies, which embedded the existence of proletarian groups, turned into a liability in the face of global markets; and because structural unemployment now verges on permanent lumpenization.”
Derluguian (2005:183-184): “We need to avoid not only determinism but also its opposite, the assumption that political entrepreneurs are instrumental exercisers of free will and rationality. In retrospect it is tempting to see the nationalist shift during the fall of the USSR either as an explosion of primordial ethnic passions or, conversely, as the instrumentalist manipulation of political entrepreneurs.”
Derluguian (2005:184): “Because we – and the participants whom we interview – know the historical outcome, in hindsight the early manifestations of ethnic politicization seem more logical and loom larger than they ought to in the wider stream of perestroika-era movements.”
Derluguian (2005:236): Nationalist activists from across the North Caucasus, including Musa Shanibov and Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, were invited to Sukhumi for the founding congress of a pan-ethnic alliance. The congress was financed by Abkhaz officials. The congress became called the Confederation of the Mountain Peopls of the Caucasus, with Musa Shanibov elected president.
Derluguian (2005:238): “Admittedly, in this whole affair Shanib was a bit of an imposter” who was not really in a position to claim to be a representative of the Kabardin people. “But then much of the politics and emerging business deals of the time were also really just novel improvizations bordering on bluff.”
Derluguian (2005:238): “The reputation and resources Shanib derived from Abkhazia enabled him to create the organizational nucleus of the Kabardin National Congress, construed as the local chapter of the Mountain Confederation, but which consisted largely of the usual network of his friends, colleagues, and former student activists.”
Derluguian (2005:243): Chechens remained under stigma of a disloyal nationality even after return from deportation; no Chechen ever promoted to the top position in the republic before 1989; and the rebuilding of mosques in the 1970s and 1980s was not permitted.
Derluguian (2005:244): “The situation in Soviet Checheno-Ingushetia thus stood apart from the rest of the Caucasus and in some ways rather resembled Algeria under French rule. A large modern town populated mostly by the European settlers dominated the countryside populated by the traditionally Muslim natives.” Groznyy only 17% Chechen, compared to 54% in the republic as a whole. Chechnya was the only North Caucasian republic where the titular nationality enjoyed a majority, and it was the largest ethnic group in the region, twice the size of the next largest. “Many Chechens found themselves driven into a semi-proletarian existence on the outskirts of Groznyy and in the sprawling villages. In contrast to the industrial cities, in such locations the state provision of employment, housing and welfar benefits remained minimal – which only served to perpetuate among the Chechens a widespread distrust of the state after the deportation.” Predominantly young population due to high birth rates.
Derluguian (2005:244-245): “When in the 1990s it came to popular mobilization and war, many young Chechens were available for recruitment. Furthermore, many among these men of fighting age were poorly educated and jobless.”
Derluguian (2005:249): “In the summer of 1991 the usual forty thousand or so seasonal labourers were unable to leave Checheno-Ingushetia because the Soviet economy was collapsing and other migrant jobs had suddenly disappeared. These men were aggrieved, puzzled by their turn for the worse, and prepared to listen eagerly to Dudayev and other radicals when they explained that the labor migrations outside the republic had in fact been part of a devious plan by Soviet authorities to humiliate and assimilate the Chechen nation.”
Derluguian (2005:252): At the time Dudayev declared independence, one in three Chechens was a survivor of the deportations. “Scholars and experts must take seriously the psychological imprint left by genocide on the nations whose self-protective reactions might otherwise seem wildly excessive.”
Derluguian (2005:252): “On the night of 9 November 1991, Yeltsin’s thoughtless declaration of a state of emergency in Chechnya had the opposite effect to that intended: it instantaneously unified the Chechen nation and destroyed the political propsects of all those in Chechnya who for any reason had criticized Dudayev’s declaration of independence.”
Derluguian (2005:253): “Many violent crimes committed by the Chechens against the ethnic Russians were pecuniary in nature rather than manifestations of Chechen racism or religious intolerance. The Russians and, incidentally, quite a few urban Chechens, became easy prey for those who might want to take their money or apartments.”
Derluguian (2005:253-254): “the unilateral proclamation of Chechnya’s independence triggered an exodus of ethnic Russian specialists and virtually the entire Chechen elite.” Estimates that in 1992-1993 200,000 urban residents, mostly ethnic Russians, quit Chechnya. “The exodus had the effect of physically removing from Dudayev’s Chechnya virtually all claimants to political power, except those who procured their living by the gun.”
Derluguian (2005:256): “With the disappearance of the national developmental model, Dudayev had to pay lip service to market liberalism in the hope (though rapidly vanishing) that this might help bring about the international recognition of Chechnya just as it did for Estonia. Meanwhile the warlords were taking over Chechnya’s oil wells and refineries by force, which left the prospective state-builders of Chechnya faced with the alternative of zero revenue or joining the game and themselves behaving like the warlords. While President Dudayev and his shrinking circle of loyalists were still hoping to create a national army and issue national passports and currency, their numerous and well-armed opponents gained access to global smuggling operations that grew explosively during the early 1990s, and thus obtained another major source of cash. The up-and-coming warlords no longer needed the government because they had their own means of violence and, with their newly acquired capabilities, could create their own economic opportunities. “The Russian invasion in 1994 provided, for a while, the cause for national unity. But the war gave rise to many new guerrilla bands and autonomous field commanders. The covert Russian sponsorship of various Chechen auxilliaries, renegades, and rogues was another major source of new warlords. Some of them were purely entrepreneurial and no more than gangsters; others, like Shamil Basayev, pretended to possess some kind of political agenda.”
Derluguian (2005:258): “Desperate for resources and isolated internationally, the second Chechen President, Aslan Maskhadov, elected in 1997, could offer neither jobs to civilans nor a credible military force against the warlords and bandits. Ironically, Maskhadov proved insufficiently corrupt and ruthless to consolidate effectively a regime of personal sultanism, which would have been a more realistic course of action given the situation.”
Derluguian (2005:264): The Mountain Confederation denounced the Georgian invasion of Abkhazia, called for volunteer peacekeeping battalions to join the conflict and sanctioned force against anyone who tried to stop them. Russian traffic police stopped a convoy of two trucks and several cars, in response to which their leader said the police were to be arrested and would be shot if they tried to escape. He then forced the traffic police to escort his convoy to Abkhazia. That leader was Ruslan Gelayev.
Derluguian (2005:267-268): Officials across North Caucasus supported sending volunteers to Abkhazia. “Whereas the earliest wave of volunteers had to trek secrelty over glacier covered mountains on the border with Georgia, or fight their way there like Ruslan Gelayev’s detachment, Musa Shanib and his soldiers traveled to Abkhazia in a long column of buses escorted by Russian military helicopters.”
Derluguian (2005:268-269): Notes different ethnic battalions (Ossetian, Adyghean, Cherkessian, Chechen) and remarks on homogeneity of Chechen group under Basayev: almost all men born between 1967 and 1973 (aged 19-25); mostly from two mountainous districts near Vedeno and from Groznyy; only one had higher education; disproportionate number from families with three or more children.
Derluguian (2005:269): “The Chechen ‘Abkhazian’ battalion led by Shamil Basayev was indubitably trained and equipped by Russian special forces (Spetsnaz), reportedly by the same instructors who in Soviet times used to train Palestinian and other Third World guerillas. Later in 1994 the ‘Abkhazian’ battalions of Shamil Basayev and Ruslan Gelayev became the backbone of the Chechen guerilla resistance to the Russian invasion – this was a serious instance of blowback from the secret Abkhazian operation.”
Derluguian (2005:269): Confederation received aid and volunteers from Turkey and the Middle East (Syria and Jordan).
Derluguian (2005:269-270): cites need for military discipline as one reason for growing role of Islam.
Derluguian (2005:270): “At first in subtle ways, a symbolic rivalry began to emerge beween the Chechen and Kabardin volunteers, which, since times of violent conflict do not favor moderation, the Chechens won by being more radical in everything from their battlefield behavior to their religious practice.”
Derluguian (2005:282): “The Russian invasion of Chechnya in 1994 failed to elicit feelings of outrage and solidarity comparable to the reaction to the Georgian invasion of Abkhazia in 1992, probably because there is a limit to how long people can stay in a state of collective agitation.”
Derluguian (2005:283): “In one regard at least, the Islamic charities of the Middle East that first reached directly into the Caucasus in the mid-1990s created the same patterns of local emulation that were created by Western non-governmental organizations. To obtain positions in the local chapters of foreign NGOs, and therefore access to their material resources, symbolic recognition, and international travel, local staff members had to adopt the language and the rituals of their funding agencies. This does not mean, as the hostile propaganda likes to claim, that the young Caucasian Wahhabis sold out to foreign money. Wahhabism (or, as the adherents prefer to call it, the Salafite or ‘pure’ doctrine) offered the young militants a platform from which they could attack the traditionalist Islam associated with Soviet-era official institutions. The new converts found in this an opportunity to constitute themselves into a separate group of distinct status and powerful internal solidarity that could claim to represent a facet in the worldwide movement for the renovation of faith and the moralistic reordering of social affairs.”
Derluguian (2005:303): “the Caucasian sub-proletarians brought into politics their rowdy habitus and typically short-term expectations that all too easily translated into explosive bursts of collective violence against the nearest identifiable targets. The extreme forms like riot and pogrom might seem despicably irrational, yet at closer investigation they do not appear entirely random. Ethnicity in Soviet times played a salient role in granting or denying access to power, whether through formal administrative appointments or personal connections and back-door bribery. Therefore it should not look surprising that in the less industrialized southern zones of the USSR, especially in the Caucasus, violent contention by the dispossed and insecure broke out along ethnic lines. Sub-proletarian contention is also class struggle, even though it may often look like ethnic or religious rebellion.”