Karl E Meyer: The Dust of Empire

Two days ago desperate and/or foolish Chechens took over a school in Beslan, a town in North Ossetia, a province (or whatever they're called these days; they used to be ASSRs) of Russia in the Caucusus near Chechnya. Today more than 300 people died in that school, mostly children who are rightly regarded as innocent of whatever issues occasioned the tragedy. Immediate responsibility, of course, belongs to the Chechens who took the school and the children hostage. This particular tragedy would not have happened had they not acted, and no possible rationale or justification can lessen that blame. If you don't see that much, you might wind up thinking nonsense like that it was Saddam Hussein's fault that the U.S. invaded Iraq, killing thousands of Iraqis -- most of whom hated Hussein before they died for his sins.

However, this tiny group of Chechens didn't act without cognizance of history. Nor did the Russians, whose tactical handling of the crisis may well have made the outcome worse. (The way Russia handled a similar hostage event in a Moscow theatre must have made the Chechens more nervous and more suicidal. The Russians flooded the theatre with a debilitating gas, which itself killed quite a few hostages, then summarily shot the Chechens. At the time that was viewed as a lesson for the terrorists, as it no doubt was.) The relationship between the Chechens and Russians goes back to the very early 1800's when the tsar's imperial forces displaced the Ottomans.

Since then the Chechens have been in almost continual revolt against first the Tsar, then the Soviets, then the post-Communist Russians -- all of which have treated the Chechens much the same. Karl E. Meyer wrote a bit about Russia and Chechnya in his book The Dust of Empire. Some relevant quotes: the first sums up Russia's attitude under the Tsars (p. 148):

In a circular letter to his embassies in 1864, [Prince Alexander] Gorchakov explained Russia's forward policy in cadences that reflected the spirit of an expansionist age. Russia's position, he said, was the same as that of all civilized societies "brought into contact with half-savage, nomad populations." In such cases, he maintained, "it always happens that the more civilised State is forced, in the interest of the security of its frontiers and its commercial relations to exercise a certain ascendancy" over neighbors of a turbulent and unsettled character. "First there are raids and acts of pillage to put down," he went on. "To put a stop to them, the tribes on the frontier have to be reduced to a state of more or less perfect submission. . . . It is a peculiarity of Asiatics to respect nothing but visible and palpable force. . . . Such has been the fate of every country which has found itself in a similar situation. The United States in America, France in Algeria, Holland in her colonies, England in India -- all have been irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward movement, where it is difficult to know where to stop." . . .

Conspicuously unaddressed in this circular was Russia's reliance on Cossacks, a separate estate of warrior-farmers serving as colonizers of Russia's borderlands. "Moderation" was not a term that would normally apply to Cossack hosts. Moreover, in contrast with the other countries he listed, Gorchakov's government was answerable only to the tsar under an absolutist system sans constitution, parliament, elections, free press or independent judiciary -- how else to explain popular passivity during fifty years of bloodletting in the Caucasus?

Moving on to Stalin, well into the 20th century, Meyer writes (p. 153-154):

This strategic deportation anticipated the massive and brutal ethnic surgery perpetrated by Stalin during World War II. Confirming Communism's distrust of Islamic peoples, the Soviet dictator ordered the wholesale deportation from November 1943 to June 1944 of four Caucasian nationalities -- Chechens, Ingush, Karachai and Balkars -- together with Crimean Tatars, on the claim they had "collaborated massively with the Nazi occupier." In December 1944, Stalin followed up by expelling other nationalities whose loyalty was doubted: the Greeks, Bulgars and Armenians from the Crimea, the Meskhetian Turks, Kurds and Khemshins from the Caucasus. One can hardly overstate the suffering and bitterness resulting from these deportations, mostly to Central Asia and carried out with heavy casualties on suffocating freight trains or cattle trucks. . . .

Most obdurate of all were the Chechens, who rebelled repeatedly against tsarist and Soviet authority. As early as 1828, General Alexei Yermolov tried to teach the Chechens a lesson once and for all. He dispatched six companies from his best regiment together with seven hundred Cossacks to wipe out a thriving and populous aul or village above the banks of the Terek, the river forming Caucasia's recognized boundary. As artillery and muskets poured shells point-blank into the village, the Chechens fought with a stubbornness the Russians had not experienced before. When it ended, only 14 men and 140 women and children of the aul still lived. The village was then totally demolished. "Such were Yermóloff's methods," relates [John F.] Baddeley [in 1908], "and it cannot be denied that, as in the present case, they were immediately effective. The remaining villages of the clan were deserted, the inhabitants seeking refuge in Tchetchnia proper. But they took a bloody revenge during the next thirty years, and it is strange that Russian writers, so far, fail to see any connection between the vaunted 'Yermóloff system' and the Murid war [an uprising by Imam Shamil of Daghestan from the 1820s to 1859]."

More than a century later, on February 24-28, 1944, 194 convoys of 64 trucks each deported 521,247 Chechens and Ingush, an operation carried out by 119,000 agents of the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB [later run by Vladimir Putin]. A detailed NKVD report noted with satisfaction (and with a precision Eichmann might have admired), "We now put 45 people into each cattle truck as opposed to the previous 40. By placing the people together with their possessions, we also cut down on the number of trucks required, thus saving 37,548 meters of planks, 11,834 buckets, and 3,400 stoves."

Many Chechens wound up in labor camps in Kazakhstan, where they especially impressed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. "I would say that of all the special settlers," he writes in the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago (1976), "the Chechens never sought to please, to ingratiate themselves with the bosses; their attitude was always haughty and openly hostile. . . . As far as they were concerned, the local inhabitants and those exiles who submitted so readily, belonged more or less to the same breed as the bosses. They respected only rebels. And here is the extraordinary thing -- everyone was afraid of them. No one could stop them from living as they did. The regime which had ruled the land for thirty years could not force them to respect its laws."

And this is what Meyer has to say about more recent events (p. 154-155):

Those who know this history find it easier to understand the implacability of Russia's recent wars with Chechnya (in 1994-1996 and from 1999 on). With hindsight, one can appreciate the pragmatic wisdom of imperial Britain's self-restraint after provoking two bad wars with Afghanistan, a comparable Islamic borderland inhabited by no less warlike mountaineers. Twice the British sought to impose their candidate as emir in Kabul (1839-1842; 1878-1881), and twice they were compelled to recognize a ruler acceptable to the Afghans. After the second Afghan War, its acclaimed British hero, Major General Sir Frederick Roberts, supplied its best epitaph in a letter to a friend: "It may not be very flattering to our amour propre, but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to conquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime." . . . In retrospect, Russia would have been far wiser to treat the Caucasus as a neutral buffer between its territories and those of the Turks and Persia. Militating against this self-denying strategy, however, was the existence of two Christian communities in the South Caucasus, whose leaders viewed Russia as an Orthodox ally, albeit not always trustworthy or easy to live with.

When the Soviet Union broke up, it was only a bad accident of geography that Chechnya didn't achieve independence. The Soviet Union was built out of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics, which mostly owed their separate existence to stages in the Civil War with the Whites from 1919-21 and from the restoration of the pre-1914 western border when the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and Moldavia. While fourteen of the SSRs correspond (not especially well) to major ethnic groups, the Russian Federation was home to well over a hundred ethnic groups, many organized into ASSRs or Oblasts. As Mikhail Gorbachev started to lose his grip on the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin's used his position as head of the Russian Federation to force a break-up along SSR lines -- which aligned him with secessionist-minded SSRs in the Baltic, Georgia and Armenia. But when Chechnya, too, tried to break away, Yeltsin drew the line and waged war to crush any further losses from the Russian Federation. Had Chechnya merely been a SSR it would have gained independence and the terrorism that has dogged Russia, including today's tragedy, would never have happened.

But while Yeltsin could afford to lose the SSRs that he never really had anyway, he knew that doing so exacted a toll in Russia's prestige and self-esteem. Russia had its origins c. 1300 in a patch of land that barely extended beyond Muscovy's city limits. From there the Russian Empire expanded to cover the eastern third of Europe and the northern third of Asia. Then the Soviet Union took charge of the world communist movement, rivalling the U.S. among world superpowers. The break-up of the Soviet Union chopped off big chunks of the country, and little Chechnya threatened to unravel even more. Yeltsin faced right-wing baiting if he failed to put down the Chechens -- isn't that always the case? -- and Putin built a big chunk of his credentials as a strong Russian leader on Chechen blood.

But that's only the Russian viewpoint. As far as the Chechens were concerned, Yeltsin and Putin only reinforced what they already knew about the Russians -- what they had learned from Stalin, from Gorchakov, from Potemkin. I don't mean to try to defend the Chechens here, but I do think that it's important first to understand where they're coming from, why they've taken their struggle toward such horrifying acts, and perhaps most important why we have so much trouble understanding those things.

I see three main reasons why Americans have so much trouble understanding what is going on in Russia:

1. America did manage to utterly defeat its indigenous tribes, and did so well over a hundred years ago, so we've forgotten what that struggle was like. We live in a nice multicultural society where what little is left of Native America has packed off to museums while the people have been assimilated into a mostly complacent underclass. We have whitewashed the genocide that our country was built on, so much so that we don't understand why other civilized countries (like Russia and Israel) haven't been able to duplicate our success, let alone why their natives continue to be so foolish as to resist.
2. We not only can't see disputes through other people's eyes, we habitually redefine them in terms of our own preoccupations. At the moment, this means that we see the Chechens as an extension of al-Qaeda and therefore the Russians as being in the same boat as us. This despite the fact that the Chechen revolt against Russia predates al-Qaeda by almost 200 years. (On the other hand, had the Soviet Union not fallen, we would most likely be hailing them as freedom fighters and showering them with arms.)
3. We have learned to reflexively see any form of misbehavior as requiring punishment to restore order, and we have learned to deny that any such misbehavior is symptomatic of any other problem. This has been the law-and-order mantra going back in the U.S. at least to Nixon, and it has been an effective political platform for the ascendency of the political right. One effect of this is to disallow any connection between poverty and crime; therefore, crime prevention is not considered a valid reason to try to reduce poverty. Another is that we succumb to an ever escalating logic of punishment: persistence of misbehavior leads to harsher punishments. Terrorism is misbehavior so egregious that we soon shuck our inhibitions against punishing it: we readily inflict indiscriminate collective punishments, and even sacrifice our own civil rights. And right-wing politicos, so expert in denying their own responsibility for the roots of terrorism, rush to do the dirty work.

The recent surge of Chechen terrorism -- trains blown up, planes blown up, Russia's crony "Chechen President" assassinated, now this despicable school hostage tragedy -- may be seen as a strengthening of Chechen resistance or as utter desperation, but in either case the events should signal a wake-up call. Same for the latest wave of bus bombings in Israel. Few countries have worked so hard and so harshly to stamp out terrorism as Russia and Israel, yet it persists. Terrorism isn't a normal thing. There are many instances of gross injustices that don't produce terrorism, but once a people starts on a path of armed resistance and that resistance becomes deeply embedded in the culture harsher repression rarely (if ever) works. Moreover, the repression itself changes the people who do it. That may work to elect every more right-wing politicos -- Israel is no doubt the clearest example of this -- but the right-wingers who promise security while projecting vengeance do little more than increase everyone's misery.

On the long list of people to blame not for the Chechens taking and destroying the school but for the Russians being such implacable opponents of normal Chechen aspirations is our own George W. Bush. He took a series of terrorist incidents directed at the U.S. and made them the excuse for a global War on Terror, and his broad definition encouraged right-wingers in countries from Israel to India, from Russia to the Philippines, to align their own quite specific problems with minority Muslim political movements along U.S. lines. The unleashing of the U.S. War on Terror immediately led to escalation of every one of these conflicts, making them each a theatre in a global struggle between superpower U.S. and Islamists all over the world.

Bush was recently quoted as saying that the War on Terror cannot be won -- a piece of candor that he soon recanted. But consider what winning such a war, in the absence of any real effort to redress grievances and right injustices, really means. It is much like Gorchakov said above, where all of the enemies of civilization must be "reduced to a state of more or less perfect submission." Even if that were possible it wouldn't make for a very attractive world.

posted 2004-09-03