Chechnya and the 1920s

In this domain of learning from foreign wars, as in so many others, national, state, and strategic culture still decisively influences the belligerents’ strategic and operational choices. States and militaries learn those lessons that seem most relevant to or in harmony with their traditional or entrenched ways of thinking about war in general and about operations, and not only counter-terrorist operations.[1] One recent analysis of the Russian campaign argues strongly that Moscow reshaped many of the variables called for in Western counterinsurgency theory and practice and devised what Eugene Miakinov calls its own “autochtonous formula”. [2]This formula reflects the outlook and poltitcal needs of an authoritarian regime convinced that the very integrity of the state itself is under attack and determined to use this insurgency as a a pretext or justification for constructing a centralized and authoritiarian “power vertical.” But what he missed is that Russia’s adjustments were wholly congruent with past traditions of the Russian government’s adaptation to the requirements of counterinsurgency and not a wholly new formulation, not least the Soviet tradiotn of the 1920’s. Moscow learned from and utilized lessons that had worked in the past during 1999-2007.

Any discussion of Russian strategy must therefore reflect that Moscow, unlike Washington in so many past cases, instinctively grasped the fundamentally and far-reaching political challenge posed by Chechnya in 1999 and shaped its strategy to prevent a recurrence of this kind of secession and bring about the concomittant strenghthening of the edifice of power. First, in 1999 Moscow clearly recongized that the terrorists were after the breakup of the Russian state. President Putin even invoked a domino theory of the conflict.[3] And to this day he believes (probably correctly) that Russia’s territorial integrity is at stake in the North Caucasus.[4]Furthermore, since there is already evidence of the spread of Islamic agitation into Russia’s Tatar and Bashkir provinces along the Volga and in the Ural Mountains, many elites follow Putin in holding to something like a domino theory of the conflict.[5] Accepting the secession of the North Caucasus would then generate pressure for similar religious or possibly ethnic insurgencies in these Volga-Ural areas in Russia’s heartland.[6] Russia’s elite fully understands and accepts this point and understands that secession would also trigger demands for a change of the government in Moscow.[7] Given the presence of this version of the Islamist ideology in Bashkiria and Ttatrstan even though they are currently at peace, this is not a groundless threat or threat perception.[8] The evidence likewise suggests that Stalin and his lieutennants believed that failing to bring minority peoples to socialism entailed the collapse of the overall experiment and the vulnerability of the reigme to both internal and externally generated crises.[9] This would be a seventh point of continuity between the 1920s and the present.

Furtheremore, both then and now the regime started from grasping the fragility of the exisitng order which was unreliable. Consequently failure to win this phase, i.e. either against terrorism or of socialist consolidation which also occurred under conditions of considerable and widespread insurgencies in 1921-24,[10] could undermine public support for continued Russian rule of the area or for socialism.[11] Indeed, if Russia were to retreat from the North Caucasus today, the area could conceivably turn into another hotbed of Islamic terrorism. And even despite its efforts to fight that threat it does not seem to be prevailing.[12] Similarly Russia’s position in Chechnya would become considerably more tenuous as a result of this defeat. Beyond that any hope of projecting sustained power into the Transcaucasus will also fade and with it Russia’s ability to pose as a major world power beyond the Cauccasus, e.g. in the Middle East. By the same token the failure of socialism to take root in Muslim areas of the 1920s would likely have compromised Soviet power at home and negate any hope of using Central Asia or the Caucasus as positive examples for the Muslim world. Indeed, the idea of using the triumph of socialism in Muslim communities as the basis for foreign policy in external Muslim areas remained a part of Soviet policy through Brezhnev and we see it today with the dispatch of Chechen troop units to Syria to help reimpose order there.[13]