Vladimir Lenin once said: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there
are weeks where decades happen.” The latter certainly seems to be the case in
Russia today.
اضافة اعلان
As Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion of Ukraine
stumbles on, September saw one Rubicon crossed after another, beginning with
the stunning rout of Russian forces in Ukraine’s Kharkiv oblast and continuing
with Putin’s announcement first of military mobilization and then of the
annexation of the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.
As with nearly every other aspect of Putin’s war,
however, mobilization has not gone according to plan. While tens of thousands
of draft-eligible men have flooded out of the country, in some areas mass
protests have erupted against the draft, despite the severe repercussions
threatened. The center of these protests: the North Caucasus, the southern
fringe of Russia’s empire.
Shortly after Putin’s mobilization declaration on
September 21, videos began to appear showing disaffected men being rounded up
by recruitment officers. Like with most of Russia’s manpower in Ukraine, these
new recruits disproportionately came from the country’s backwaters: the Far
East and the ethnic minority republics in the Caucasus and along the Mongolian
border.
These regions had already formed the backbone of
Russia’s “shadow mobilization” over the past six months of war. The Russian
military and private contractors such as the Wagner Group had canvassed these
areas heavily, offering high salaries for contracts, with correspondingly high
regional death tolls in the war.
Since the official mobilization, these efforts grew
to sometimes all-encompassing heights: Videos of conscription vans driving
through Derbent, Dagestan’s third most populace city, calling for all
able-bodied men to immediately report to the recruitment office attest to this.
But the North Caucasus has not laid down quietly.
Within days of the mobilization order, protests across Dagestan sprung up,
calling locals to resist the campaign. Videos showed women screaming at
recruitment officers to release their husbands and sons, with some women going
so far as to state this was “Putin’s war, not ours” and that “we [Russia]
attacked Ukraine, not the other way around” — an incredibly brave public act in
2022 Russia.
Other protests were more violent: demonstrators
blocking the highway in Khasavyurt, Dagestan’s second-largest city, had to be
dispersed by gunfire into the air.
Russia’s recent history shows how dangerous this
moment is for Putin. The Russian president began his tenure by invading
Chechnya, bringing Moscow’s rule back to the region using brutal tactics now
repeated in Ukraine. Putin then became engaged in a struggle with a sprawling
insurgency across the North Caucasus, one that saw local militants regularly
range into Moscow with devastating effect. It took more than 15 years of
concerted effort by the then-undistracted Russian security services to finally
crush the insurgency.
The Russian military and private contractors such as the Wagner Group had canvassed these areas heavily, offering high salaries for contracts, with correspondingly high regional death tolls in the war.
The present recruitment drive threatens to upend
this entire arrangement. While Dagestan, Chechnya and other areas of the North
Caucasus may have been violently suppressed, the socio-economic problems that
led to the insurgency’s popularity were never addressed. All seven of the
ethnic republics that constitute the Russian North Caucasus suffer from severe
economic depression: Development is sparse and inconsistent, finding a decent
job nearly impossible, and the federal funds that subsidize the region are
largely drained by corrupt officials.
This is to say nothing of the social aspect: The
people of the North Caucasus are the target of deep-seated racism within
Russian society (and especially Russian government and security organs),
finding themselves alienated and ghettoized even when they move to Moscow,
Krasnodar or elsewhere in search of job opportunities. Add in the new reality
that the state is now actively dangerous to one’s physical well-being, and you
now have all the elements that made the original insurgency so appealing to
disaffected populations to begin with.
While these issues plague the region as a whole,
there is nowhere they are quite as acute as in Chechnya. The republic received
the most Faustian bargain of all, as Putin made a simple deal with its
Kremlin-installed head: take the government’s money and keep the calm by any
means necessary.
Ramzan Kadyrov, who has ruled Chechnya under this
arrangement for nearly two decades, is a strongman whose cruelty knows nearly
no bounds, and who has tortured and executed his territory into obedience. Even
here, however, the cracks are beginning to show: Around 100 Chechen women demonstrated
in central Grozny against the mobilization, the first open protest in Kadyrov’s
entire tenure. All of them were quickly arrested (and their husbands and sons
sent off to serve in Ukraine), but Kadyrov himself has also been forced to deny
that his government is carrying out mobilization, even as it continues to do
so.
In Ukraine itself, meanwhile, pro-Ukrainian Chechen
formations have announced that they intend to take the fight back home to
Kadyrov after Russia is expelled from Ukrainian territory. Chechnya’s status as
“the most peaceful region of Russia”, as Kadyrov likes to boast, is teetering
on the edge.
All of this portends a slow-burning catastrophe for
Putin.
Even others smell the blood in the water. In a
September 30 address, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, standing in front
of a statue of the 19th-century anti-Russian Dagestani warlord Imam Shamil,
called for North Caucasians to resist and not to “die for Putin’s imperial
war”. Among Chechens in particular, one hardly meets a member of that nation
who does not believe a third Chechen war (when Putin and Kadyrov are weak
enough) is in the offing.
The North Caucasus is where Putin began and
solidified his reign over Russia. It would be a fitting place for it all to
unravel at the end.
Neil Hauer is a security analyst based in Yerevan, Armenia. His work focuses on,
among other things, politics, minorities and violence in the Caucasus. Twitter:
@NeilPHauer. Syndication Bureau.
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