Paul Goble
Staunton, December 17 – The Congress of Peoples of Daghestan this week agreed to republic President Magomedsalam Magomedov’s proposal to appeal to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to grant amnesty to militants who have fought against the powers that be in that North Caucasus republic.
Other speakers urged that the republic repeal the 1999 republic law banning Wahhabism in Daghestan and that officials and public figures meet with their opponents on a regular basis in order to reverse the trend toward the intensification of ethnic, religious and political conflicts there (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/178457/).
But participants in the ever more active Daghestani blogosphere have expressed skepticism that these measures are anything but a public relations effort by the powers that be and have suggested that more radical measures will be needed if peace is ever to return to Daghestan, including enlisting the help of Muslim leaders from abroad.
On Wednesday, President Magomedov told the opening session of the Congress of Peoples of Daghestan, a quasi-official meeting his subordinates had helped to organize, that over the last ten years, “more than a thousand residents” of Daghestan had died in armed conflicts, including 120 in the last four months alone.
In order to overcome these divisions, he said, the Congress should adopt an appeal to Medvedev calling on him to amnesty militants who have not engaged in “terrorist” violence, a step that he and other North Caucasian leaders have urged before and one that the Congress agreed to take (www.rosbalt.ru/print/801309.html).
The meeting featured other proposals. Gadzhi Makhachev, the permanent representative of the republic to the Russian president, called for the repeal of the 1999 law banning Wahhabism because it was adopted too quickly and “does not correspond to federal legislation.” In addition, he urged dropping the use of the term supporter of militants as unnecessarily broad.
“Whoever comes into your home,” he pointed out, “even if he is an enemy, your obligation is to receive him because he is a guest.”
Another speaker, Dzhabrail Khachilayev, the head of the Daghestani section of the Russian Committee for the Defense of Peace, called for more frequent meetings of bodies like the Congress and for intense preparation of them so that the sessions will have a real chance to overcome divisions within society and so all peoples in the republic can have a chance to speak..
But if participants in the Congress took a generally optimistic stance, leading Daghestani bloggers, an increasingly important barometer of opinion in that republic, were almost exclusively pessimistic that this meeting or any meeting like it would have any positive effects, even if its appeals were heeded.
Luiza Dibirova, one of Daghestan’s leading female bloggers, said that the constant praise at the meeting for the republic’s leadership showed that this session was basically a farce. Sulayman Uladiyev was “almost the only person [there] who spoke about the real situation and proposed solutions.”
“There is no sense to call on ‘the forest brothers’ to return home,” she said, “if we will not change that which drove them there in the first place” such as “the completely corrupt policy of the republic.” And she suggested that only by assembling a meeting of alims from “all the Arab countries” could Makhachkala hope to be listened to by the militants.
Another Daghestani blogger, zakir_5535 concluded bitterly that “the congress was needed by the ruling regime only to ‘legalize’ within a narrow circle a decision about the formation of republic battalions for war with the opposition … There is no sense in expecting anything good from [this meeting].’
Friday, December 17, 2010
Window on Eurasia: Preconditions for Escalation of Violence in Russia Now in Place, Moscow Ethnographer Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, December 17 – Sergey Arutyunov, a Russian ethnographer who attracted attention a decade ago for suggesting that Vladimir Putin is not a Hitler but rather a Hindenburg, now says that all the preconditions for a radical escalation of street violence are in place, something that could open the way for the rise of fascism in the Russian Federation.
In what clearly represents a cry from the heart, Arutyunov, who heads the Caucasus Department of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that what is happening in the streets of Russia now is especially frightening because it is part of a world-wide phenomenon (grani.ru/blogs/free/entries/184529.html).
“What has taken place in Moscow,” he continues, “is child’s play in comparison with what has happened” in the recent past in other cities around the world, a situation he describes as the still largely unnoticed “agony” of a globalized consumer civilization,” one whose death seems to be rapidly approaching.
“We do not take note of this agony,” Arutyunov says, “just as Romans of the time of Diocletian in the 300s did not notice the agony of the Roman Empire; and we do not understand [just as they did not understand] that 100 to 200 years from now, all this civilization will collapse” into something terrible.
As 1500 years ago in Europe “after the fall of the Roman Empire,” so too now but on a much grander scale, the world is heading toward “a period of chaos.” Consequently, what Russia is going through now is especially frightening because it is “does not represent anything special” but rather is part of a general pattern.
“We think that we will live if not eternally then for a very long time,” Arutyunov continues, but that is a delusion. “We will not live that long. 100 years is the maximum during such convulsions. And there is still worse ahead” because what people are seeing on the streets of Moscow is part of “the process of the dying off of civilization.”
Faced with this disaster, “what can be do?” The Moscow ethnographer says that we can first try to recognize what is happening and then try to slow the process, even if we are not in a position to stop or reverse the overall trend, because to fail to try to resist what is happening would be even worse.
“Ten years ago,” Arutyunov notes, he “wrote that Putin is not Hitler but he is Hindenburg.” Paul von Hindenburg, of course, “was a completely orderly person in general but was someone of rightist views. He was a Prussian officer and very old.” And as “head of the Weimar Republic at the beginning of the 1930s, he faced a terrible choice.
He could either give power to the communists, something that for him would have been unthinkable or to Hitler’s Nazis, who were not like him but whose views were far less dissimilar. He chose the latter because “the views of Hitler enjoyed the support of about half of German society of that time, including a significant part of the police.”
“I perfectly well know and understand that our current militia which soon will become the police … would be quite more prepared to beat in the heads of the Caucasians and leftist radicals than to do the same thing to the fascists and that among both the ranks and “perhaps the chiefs as well, there are many people who sincerely sympathize with Russian fascism.”
For a very long time, Russia has been in the situation of the Weimar Republic, and as a result “the tendency of fascism” has strengthened. “How this will end,” Arutyunov says, he does not know. But that “does not have great importance “because if this ends with the fascists taking power, then the end of that power will be just like the end of Hitlerite power in Germany.”
“True,” Russians and others will “suffer for several years. Blood will be shed, a great deal of blood.” Fascism will again, at least for a time be destroyed, and among those who will do so will be some Russians as well. But the tragedy will be horrific, with ever more blood and ever less hope for the longer term future.
Staunton, December 17 – Sergey Arutyunov, a Russian ethnographer who attracted attention a decade ago for suggesting that Vladimir Putin is not a Hitler but rather a Hindenburg, now says that all the preconditions for a radical escalation of street violence are in place, something that could open the way for the rise of fascism in the Russian Federation.
In what clearly represents a cry from the heart, Arutyunov, who heads the Caucasus Department of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that what is happening in the streets of Russia now is especially frightening because it is part of a world-wide phenomenon (grani.ru/blogs/free/entries/184529.html).
“What has taken place in Moscow,” he continues, “is child’s play in comparison with what has happened” in the recent past in other cities around the world, a situation he describes as the still largely unnoticed “agony” of a globalized consumer civilization,” one whose death seems to be rapidly approaching.
“We do not take note of this agony,” Arutyunov says, “just as Romans of the time of Diocletian in the 300s did not notice the agony of the Roman Empire; and we do not understand [just as they did not understand] that 100 to 200 years from now, all this civilization will collapse” into something terrible.
As 1500 years ago in Europe “after the fall of the Roman Empire,” so too now but on a much grander scale, the world is heading toward “a period of chaos.” Consequently, what Russia is going through now is especially frightening because it is “does not represent anything special” but rather is part of a general pattern.
“We think that we will live if not eternally then for a very long time,” Arutyunov continues, but that is a delusion. “We will not live that long. 100 years is the maximum during such convulsions. And there is still worse ahead” because what people are seeing on the streets of Moscow is part of “the process of the dying off of civilization.”
Faced with this disaster, “what can be do?” The Moscow ethnographer says that we can first try to recognize what is happening and then try to slow the process, even if we are not in a position to stop or reverse the overall trend, because to fail to try to resist what is happening would be even worse.
“Ten years ago,” Arutyunov notes, he “wrote that Putin is not Hitler but he is Hindenburg.” Paul von Hindenburg, of course, “was a completely orderly person in general but was someone of rightist views. He was a Prussian officer and very old.” And as “head of the Weimar Republic at the beginning of the 1930s, he faced a terrible choice.
He could either give power to the communists, something that for him would have been unthinkable or to Hitler’s Nazis, who were not like him but whose views were far less dissimilar. He chose the latter because “the views of Hitler enjoyed the support of about half of German society of that time, including a significant part of the police.”
“I perfectly well know and understand that our current militia which soon will become the police … would be quite more prepared to beat in the heads of the Caucasians and leftist radicals than to do the same thing to the fascists and that among both the ranks and “perhaps the chiefs as well, there are many people who sincerely sympathize with Russian fascism.”
For a very long time, Russia has been in the situation of the Weimar Republic, and as a result “the tendency of fascism” has strengthened. “How this will end,” Arutyunov says, he does not know. But that “does not have great importance “because if this ends with the fascists taking power, then the end of that power will be just like the end of Hitlerite power in Germany.”
“True,” Russians and others will “suffer for several years. Blood will be shed, a great deal of blood.” Fascism will again, at least for a time be destroyed, and among those who will do so will be some Russians as well. But the tragedy will be horrific, with ever more blood and ever less hope for the longer term future.
Window on Eurasia: Alma-Ata 1986 --When the Soviet ‘Nationality Question’ Became Serious
Paul Goble
Staunton, December 17 – Until December 17, 1986 when Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to install an ethnic Russian in place of an ethnic Kazakh as head of the Kazakh SSR sparked deadly clashes, many in both the Soviet Union and the West viewed “the nationality question” as marginal, an ethnographic curiosity but not a serious political issue.
But the events in Alma-Ata 24 years ago today set in motion events which within five years led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a reality that highlights the dangers of treating ethnic issues as secondary or assuming that believing that the use of members of the dominant ethnic community will save the situation.
If the Alma-Ata events played that role, even now, more than two decades later, they remain little understood, the subject more often of ideological image-making than serious historical and political analysis. Fortunately, on this anniversary, a Kazakh scholar has provided a careful analysis of what went wrong with what he calls “Operation ‘Successor’” in Kazakhstan.
In a two-part article in Kazakhstan’s “Vremya” newspaper, Daniyar Ashimbayev, the chief editor of the Kazakhstan Biographic Encyclopedia, provides a detailed discussion of what happened and why, one likely to be controversial but that is especially instructive now (www.time.kz/index.php?newsid=19278 and www.time.kz/index.php?newsid=19279).
As Ashimbayev points out, the events of December 16-17 in the then capital of the Kazakhstan SSR are considered by many to have been “the first mass democratic manifestations in the USSR.” Such a definition serves many interests, he continues, but it does not tell the entire story.
According to the most simplified and widespread representations of those events what took place was something this: Soviet power “colonized” and “oppressed” Kazakhstan, carried out “almost a genocide and an ecological catastrophe,” and nearly wiped out the Kazakh language. And as a result, the Kazakh people responded to the challenge with demonstrations.
What is striking, Ashimbayev says, is that “a significant portion of memoirs” which feature this schema “were written by former party organizers and instructors of the history of the CPSU,” people who in “a unique way combined pride in their own work and career [with] dissatisfaction against the system under which they rose and acted.”
At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the situation in Kazakhstan was defined by many at that time as one of “political stability, inter-ethnic accord, economic development, social well-being, and migration from rural areas to the cities.” But behind that façade “the socially active part of the population” was dissatisfied.
To express its anger, it engaged in what constituted “blogging” at that time: Its members wrote numerous complains and denunciations to various institutions in the republic and in Moscow. And their complaints show that there were real problems, many of which were summed up in the expression that you can change your biography but not your geography.
That is, Ashimbayev continues, what made a career possible was where you were born – in many cases, a marker for national and sub-national memberships – rather than whatever skills you might acquire.
The standard version of the events of December 1986 draws on that idea. According to this scheme, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, the longtime Kazakh head of the Kazakhstan Communist Party, was sacked and replaced by an ethnic Russian outsider, Gennady Kolbin, who not only had been an obkom secretary in the RSFSR but also a Moscow watcher in Tbilisi.
As aresult, this story continues, ordinary Kazakhs were outraged by this violation of the norms by Moscow, went into the streets, and the clashes ensued. But “it is possible to describe the picture” in Kazakhstan at that time “in a somewhat different key,” Ashimbayev continues, one that shows far more was going on.
Unlike most of the union republics at that time, Kazakhstan, thanks to Kunayev’s friendship with Leonid Brezhnev, had almost no outsiders in key positions by the end of the 1970s. But then Kunayev suffered a heart attack, and members of the elite began discussing among themselves who could succeed him.
After Kunayev recovered, he came back and purged those who had spoken about coming after him, bringing a new and much younger cohort to power, including the current Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, but the party leader also indicated that he wanted to work only until his 70th birthday, that is, until January 1982.
But in the event, largely because Kazakhstan was quiet and because Moscow was the site of so many funerals of senior leaders who were passing from the scene, Kunayev did not retire and was still there when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, a leader who visited Kazakhstan in the summer of 1985 but who had too many problems in Moscow to focus on those of Alma-Ata.
But in late 1985 and especially in 1986, the tone of Moscow media coverage of Kazakhstan changed, making it clear to all that Gorbachev wanted new blood in Alma-Ata. To save the situation, Kunayev sacrificed one after another of his colleagues, including the ethnic Kazakhst who headed the republic interior ministry and KGB. The new heads were Russians.
At a republic party congress that year, “it became clear that practically all the leadership of the republic was opposed to the first secretary, but at the same time, the majority of speakers criticized not only Kunayev but also one another,” a pattern that suggested to some that if Moscow wanted change, it could not rely on any local person.
At the end of November 1986, Alimbayev continues, the Soviet Politburo discussed installing a new leader in Kazakhstan, given that in January 1987 Kunayev would be 75. Ten days later, Kunayev flew to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev. The Kazakh leader proposed firing the republic prime minister, but Gorbachev countered by calling for Kunayev’s ouster.
Even more, according to witnesses, Gorbachev indicated that Moscow would send in a successor “from one of the Russian regions,” the only possibility the Soviet leader said because of the depth and extent of problems in Kazakhstan. Then , on December 13, party leaders in Kazakhstan were summoned to a republic central committee plenum on the 16th to consider “organizational” questions, a euphemism for cadres changes.
At that meeting, CPSU Central Committee secretary Razumovsky thanked Kunayev, announced his removal, and nominated Kolbin. In the best Soviet practice, “the plenum voted unanimously for both proposals.” But things did not end there: the next day, the demonstrations and riots began, first among students and then among workers.
The situation threatened to get out of hand, and force was used to suppress “the disorders.”
The notion that Kunayev himself organized these things is improbable -- he had already lost almost all his levers of power – and the idea that they were spontaneous seems equally hard to credit, Alimbayev says, given how tightly the situation was controlled by the security agencies. And that means one must consider other possibilities.
What appears most likely, the Kazakh historian says, is that the demonstrations and protests were organized by lower-standing Kazakh officials as a meaning of “the preventive weakening of the position of the Moscow appointee and the creation of pre-conditions for his rapid replacement,” something that did in fact happen.
(Indeed, although Alimbayev does not mention it, Gorbachev’s suggestion that there was no one among the Kazakhs to replace Kunayev was undercut by Moscow’s decision to install an ethnic Kazakh as second secretary after imposing the ethnic Russian Kolbin in the top republic post.)
What happened on December 17th, Alimbayev says, and even more how these events were described were useful for people of all political stripes. The national patriots got their “heroes.” The siloviki got experience in dispersing a crowd. The leaders of the republic got “a beautiful illustration about the struggle for independence, and so on.
But however that may be – and Alimbayev’s detailed discussion is certain to be challenged by those who have invested in the alternative story of the December 1986 events – those events did lead many in Moscow and the West to view the nationality question as far from settled and as anything but marginal.
Staunton, December 17 – Until December 17, 1986 when Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to install an ethnic Russian in place of an ethnic Kazakh as head of the Kazakh SSR sparked deadly clashes, many in both the Soviet Union and the West viewed “the nationality question” as marginal, an ethnographic curiosity but not a serious political issue.
But the events in Alma-Ata 24 years ago today set in motion events which within five years led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a reality that highlights the dangers of treating ethnic issues as secondary or assuming that believing that the use of members of the dominant ethnic community will save the situation.
If the Alma-Ata events played that role, even now, more than two decades later, they remain little understood, the subject more often of ideological image-making than serious historical and political analysis. Fortunately, on this anniversary, a Kazakh scholar has provided a careful analysis of what went wrong with what he calls “Operation ‘Successor’” in Kazakhstan.
In a two-part article in Kazakhstan’s “Vremya” newspaper, Daniyar Ashimbayev, the chief editor of the Kazakhstan Biographic Encyclopedia, provides a detailed discussion of what happened and why, one likely to be controversial but that is especially instructive now (www.time.kz/index.php?newsid=19278 and www.time.kz/index.php?newsid=19279).
As Ashimbayev points out, the events of December 16-17 in the then capital of the Kazakhstan SSR are considered by many to have been “the first mass democratic manifestations in the USSR.” Such a definition serves many interests, he continues, but it does not tell the entire story.
According to the most simplified and widespread representations of those events what took place was something this: Soviet power “colonized” and “oppressed” Kazakhstan, carried out “almost a genocide and an ecological catastrophe,” and nearly wiped out the Kazakh language. And as a result, the Kazakh people responded to the challenge with demonstrations.
What is striking, Ashimbayev says, is that “a significant portion of memoirs” which feature this schema “were written by former party organizers and instructors of the history of the CPSU,” people who in “a unique way combined pride in their own work and career [with] dissatisfaction against the system under which they rose and acted.”
At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the situation in Kazakhstan was defined by many at that time as one of “political stability, inter-ethnic accord, economic development, social well-being, and migration from rural areas to the cities.” But behind that façade “the socially active part of the population” was dissatisfied.
To express its anger, it engaged in what constituted “blogging” at that time: Its members wrote numerous complains and denunciations to various institutions in the republic and in Moscow. And their complaints show that there were real problems, many of which were summed up in the expression that you can change your biography but not your geography.
That is, Ashimbayev continues, what made a career possible was where you were born – in many cases, a marker for national and sub-national memberships – rather than whatever skills you might acquire.
The standard version of the events of December 1986 draws on that idea. According to this scheme, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, the longtime Kazakh head of the Kazakhstan Communist Party, was sacked and replaced by an ethnic Russian outsider, Gennady Kolbin, who not only had been an obkom secretary in the RSFSR but also a Moscow watcher in Tbilisi.
As aresult, this story continues, ordinary Kazakhs were outraged by this violation of the norms by Moscow, went into the streets, and the clashes ensued. But “it is possible to describe the picture” in Kazakhstan at that time “in a somewhat different key,” Ashimbayev continues, one that shows far more was going on.
Unlike most of the union republics at that time, Kazakhstan, thanks to Kunayev’s friendship with Leonid Brezhnev, had almost no outsiders in key positions by the end of the 1970s. But then Kunayev suffered a heart attack, and members of the elite began discussing among themselves who could succeed him.
After Kunayev recovered, he came back and purged those who had spoken about coming after him, bringing a new and much younger cohort to power, including the current Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, but the party leader also indicated that he wanted to work only until his 70th birthday, that is, until January 1982.
But in the event, largely because Kazakhstan was quiet and because Moscow was the site of so many funerals of senior leaders who were passing from the scene, Kunayev did not retire and was still there when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, a leader who visited Kazakhstan in the summer of 1985 but who had too many problems in Moscow to focus on those of Alma-Ata.
But in late 1985 and especially in 1986, the tone of Moscow media coverage of Kazakhstan changed, making it clear to all that Gorbachev wanted new blood in Alma-Ata. To save the situation, Kunayev sacrificed one after another of his colleagues, including the ethnic Kazakhst who headed the republic interior ministry and KGB. The new heads were Russians.
At a republic party congress that year, “it became clear that practically all the leadership of the republic was opposed to the first secretary, but at the same time, the majority of speakers criticized not only Kunayev but also one another,” a pattern that suggested to some that if Moscow wanted change, it could not rely on any local person.
At the end of November 1986, Alimbayev continues, the Soviet Politburo discussed installing a new leader in Kazakhstan, given that in January 1987 Kunayev would be 75. Ten days later, Kunayev flew to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev. The Kazakh leader proposed firing the republic prime minister, but Gorbachev countered by calling for Kunayev’s ouster.
Even more, according to witnesses, Gorbachev indicated that Moscow would send in a successor “from one of the Russian regions,” the only possibility the Soviet leader said because of the depth and extent of problems in Kazakhstan. Then , on December 13, party leaders in Kazakhstan were summoned to a republic central committee plenum on the 16th to consider “organizational” questions, a euphemism for cadres changes.
At that meeting, CPSU Central Committee secretary Razumovsky thanked Kunayev, announced his removal, and nominated Kolbin. In the best Soviet practice, “the plenum voted unanimously for both proposals.” But things did not end there: the next day, the demonstrations and riots began, first among students and then among workers.
The situation threatened to get out of hand, and force was used to suppress “the disorders.”
The notion that Kunayev himself organized these things is improbable -- he had already lost almost all his levers of power – and the idea that they were spontaneous seems equally hard to credit, Alimbayev says, given how tightly the situation was controlled by the security agencies. And that means one must consider other possibilities.
What appears most likely, the Kazakh historian says, is that the demonstrations and protests were organized by lower-standing Kazakh officials as a meaning of “the preventive weakening of the position of the Moscow appointee and the creation of pre-conditions for his rapid replacement,” something that did in fact happen.
(Indeed, although Alimbayev does not mention it, Gorbachev’s suggestion that there was no one among the Kazakhs to replace Kunayev was undercut by Moscow’s decision to install an ethnic Kazakh as second secretary after imposing the ethnic Russian Kolbin in the top republic post.)
What happened on December 17th, Alimbayev says, and even more how these events were described were useful for people of all political stripes. The national patriots got their “heroes.” The siloviki got experience in dispersing a crowd. The leaders of the republic got “a beautiful illustration about the struggle for independence, and so on.
But however that may be – and Alimbayev’s detailed discussion is certain to be challenged by those who have invested in the alternative story of the December 1986 events – those events did lead many in Moscow and the West to view the nationality question as far from settled and as anything but marginal.
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