Introduction

Russia has never been simply a state.  Instead it has always been and remains an empire.  Consequently many of its wars as well as its domestic policies have been either in part or in whole exercises in imperial management and empire building or empire retention, specifically counterinsurgency wars against domestic rebels within the empire.  Therefore wars and strategies of imperial management and of counter-insurgency pervade Russian history.  Indeed, Russia’s three current wars, Syria, Ukraine, and the North Caucasus are all counter-insurgency wars and add new aspects to the rich trove of these strategies of imperial management and counter-insurgency.   And in Moscow’s current wars we find the continuation and extension of past practices, legacies, and paradigms of counterinsurgency.  The current war in the North Caucasus, in historical perspective (along with the ongoing war in Ukraine), represent the latest in an apparently unending centuries-long set of struggles over imperial “space” in and around Russia.[1]  Therefore the study of these wars sheds new light on older practices and paradigms and vice versa.  Looking backward as well as forward allows us to see what has worked and what has failed in Russian counterinsurgency (COIN).  Specifically, here we intend to reveal these ongoing paradigms in Muslim areas of the USSR, e.g. Central Asia and the North Caucasus by examining those practices of the 1920s in the light of the contemporary war in Chechnya that Moscow won but also in the light of the current struggle in the North Caucasus where no resolution appears in sight.  Indeed, it appears that the war in the North Caucasus may be spinning even further out of Moscow’s control as recent reports suggest that Dagestan has become increasingly violent and uncontrollable.[2]

These continuing wars in the North Caucasus and Ukraine also show that the current Russian regime, like its Tsarist and Soviet predecessors, has failed to find a convincing, lasting and legitimating answer to the question posed by a prominent Tsarist Minister, P.A.  Valuev to the Russian press lord, M.N. Katkov in the nineteenth century, namely ”What tools do we need with the center and peripheries we possess, to generate centripetal not centrifugal forces?”[3]  Moscow’s recurring failures to resolve this question, despite the multifarious attempts at assimilation, acculturation, Russification, Sovietization, etc. that it has tried along with the visible turn towards a new outburst of Russification under Vladimir Putin highlight the abiding relevance of the following observations by Alfred Rieber, Research Professor of History at the Central European University in Budapest, concerning Moscow’s unending efforts to reshape Muslim and frontier societies in its own image.

As Rieber wrote, “For Russia there was no hard and fast distinction between colonial questions and the process of state building.  This was not true of any other European state.”[4]  This was also true in Soviet times where the state structure, domestic and foreign policy all came together and remains the case today.[5]  Indeed, Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, along with many other analysts, has acknowledged that Putin’s Russia is a Czarist state and this designation applies to more than just Putin’s personal status.[6]  Accordingly Putin’s overall state-building project directly continues what might be called the Soviet counterinsurgency state. As Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University recently wrote, the Soviet state became a counterinsurgency state during the Russian civil war of 1918-21 and remained one ever after.[7]  Therefore the study of Moscow’s policies in the national borderlands that were the locales for these insurgencies is of critical significance today for Russia and even for the U.S. because current manifestations of terrorism and insurgency in the Muslim world continue to connect to Central Asia and the North Caucasus.

Consequently the last 20 years of wars in the North Caucasus, like the war in Ukraine, possesses extraordinary resonance not only for Russia’s past, present and future state structure, not least because those wars allow us to view the counterinsurgency state in historical perspective.  Since these wars also represent Moscow’s efforts to suppress the local peoples’ anti-or post-colonial uprising, they are also counterinsurgency wars.  Not only does this fact engender comparison with Western campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, it also tells us much about the evolution and nature of the Russian state given the importance of these wars (especially after Putin came to power in 1999-2000) for the overall process of Russian state building in the past and present.  For example, and first as an example of how the present re-illuminates the past Putin’s information campaign since 2000 served as the basis for the incessant and ever wider effort by the Russian state under Putin to silence all dissenting voices and information and impose an information “blackout” and information war upon Russia.[8]  But this campaign has its roots in the totalitarian control over all media and information that characterized the USSR and which represented an immense strategic advantage for Moscow.  Total control over all information allowed Soviet leaders to impose their plans for building socialism without any real fear of external intervention in Muslim or other areas.  Thus, a perspective based on today’s events allows us to see the past in a new light.

Second, Putin’s insistence, from the outset, that the enemy was both a foreign and an internal one, the constant urge to internationalize the threat to Russia even though Putin has never been able or willing to specify just who abroad is launching this threat, not only reproduces the Leninist paradigm of linked domestic and foreign enemies, but also entrenches the rule of the Silovye Struktury (structures of force) inherited from Soviet times.  Thus Putin has perpetrated both the Soviet mentality and the counterinsurgency nature of the state and the proclivity to view dissent as externally-organized subversion organized that, in turn necessitates a police state approach.   In fact, the December 2014 military doctrine not only conflates foreign and domestic threats, but also, “legalizes the transition of Russia into an extraordinary regime of existence,” a term sometimes used for martial law but here applied more broadly.”[9]  Similarly just before promulgating this doctrine, Putin, in his presidential address to the Federal Assembly, all but accused the West of aiding the terrorists in a desire to break up the Russian state.[10]  And he has subsequently repeated the charge many times as have his underlings, but never with any proof.   And this conflation of domestic and foreign threats and justification of repression due to that conflation in dealing with the “nationality question” certainly typified Stalinism.[11]  This practice has therefore duly reproduced many of the worst examples of Moscow’s counterinsurgency legacy.                  

In addition, and third, these wars extend or revive the early twentieth century practice in Europe and particularly in the three totalitarian regimes of the 1917-91 periods, Italy, Germany, and Russia, to import the techniques originally used by colonial administrators (all the way up to mass deportations and concentration camps) to enforce political loyalty at home.[12]   The wars in the North Caucasus exemplify what Hannah Arendt called the imperial boomerang by which the brutal counterinsurgency practices observed in Western colonies were subsequently directly imported into and then imposed upon the domestic population in totalitarian European states.[13]  Thus in many ways the paradoxical outcome of these post-colonial wars has been to return the Russian state to a simulacrum of the Czarist and Soviet experience.  This is particularly visible in the brutality of the civil war and insurgencies after it in the USSR.[14]  For all these reasons the study of Moscow’s efforts in the 1920s to integrate its Muslim peripheries, especially in the light of comparison with today’s wars, remains a highly justified effort, if only for Russia, foreign observers, and other governments confronting Muslim insurgencies to avoid mistakes that have characterized Russian policy over the last generation.           

Therefore we can envision current wars in the North Caucasus, as fundamentally post-colonial or even colonial wars where a minority seek to break free of the colonial overlord, in this case, Moscow, or where Moscow seeks to re-impose some kind of colonial order and preserve an imperial ethos throughout the former Soviet territory just as Moscow did in the 1920s.  Already in 2000 Alexei Malashenko observed that Russia’s war in Chechnya is logical only if Russia continues to regard itself as an empire.^[15] Similarly Alexander Etkind observed in 2011 that the history of Russian governance throughout both the Russian Federation’s current borders and the historic borders of Tsarist and Soviet Russia is one of internal colonialism.[16]  

In this context the North Caucasus as well as 1920s Central Asia represents a virtual paradigm of an internal colony and has been ruled as such by Russia for the last generation if not longer.  The Polish scholar, Maciej Falkowski states openly that,

This region is less an integral part of the Russian Federation but is more like a Russian colony, where the relative peace and order results from subsidies from the federal budget, military strength, and the rule of local clans backed by the Kremlin, whose authority is based on nepotism and corruption.[17]

The Israeli commentator Avraham Shmulyevich has consistently noted that Russia has ruled the North Caucasus as a ”typical” colony, that Russian settlers are leaving the area though the pace varies from republic to republic, that the region’s economy, one of Russia’s poorest zones, is in tatters, that many in Russia are heartily sick of feeding the North Caucasus, that the massive funding sent from Moscow (as we saw at the Sochi Olympics) goes mainly to rake-offs to officials in Moscow or in the localities and their cronies.  Consequently all the Russian government’s talk of federalism or other forms of decentralized rule is a sham and Russian policy, far from being a stabilizing factor, is the main destabilizing force there.[18]

Russian rulers related and, as Etkind observes, and as Rieber suggested above, still relate to their subjects as if they were the masters of a colonial government ruling over subjects who were both alien to them and not to be regarded as autonomous human beings.[19]  Consequently those practices have consistently blocked inclusive political institutions and imposed extractive ones (to use Acemoglu and Robinson’s terminology) on Russia, an imposition that can only be sustained by force at the price of continued backwardness, misrule, etc.[20] In other words, empire in the Russian context predisposes the state to rent-seeking and rent-granting policies that, in turn, presuppose rule by force in the interior; not just in the colonial peripheries like the North Caucasus, and therefore the ready resort to excessive reliance on force.  This reliance on force continues to be compounded by the fact that Russia has always tended toward over-militarization of its economy and state because its institutions did not allow it to compete with foreign neighbors and interlocutors for influence on an equal basis.  As Lilia Shevtsova has written,

In short, Russia has developed a unique model for the survival and reproduction of power in a permanent state of war.  This situation was maintained even in peacetime, which has always been temporary in Russia.  The country is constantly either preparing for war against an external enemy or pursuing enemies at home.  Russia has survived by annihilating the boundary between war and peace.  Its state simply could not exist in a peaceful environment.  The militarist model has been used to justify the supercentralized state in the eyes of the people.  Militarization made Russia different from other transitional societies and became a tremendous impediment to transformation.[21]

 Moreover, and especially today the suppression of these insurgencies is essential to the continuation of the Putin regime’s self-presentation as a great power because they betray the nightmare scenario that modern Russian rulers have all grappled with, namely the unreliability of the domestic political structure for ensuring domestic peace.  In the contemporary scene we see this with regard to Russia’s current wars.  Indeed, the Russian government explicitly regards its domestic security as unstable and the state as having failed to achieve the “necessary level of public security.”[22]  And this instability is traceable, in no small measure, to Islamic terrorism and criminality associated with that terrorism.[23]  Therefore preventing the spread of terrorism beyond the North Caucasus and ultimately eliminating it in the North Caucasus are major state priorities.   But, as a fourth point, that was no less true in the 1920s when the Soviet regime identified the persistence of Islamist ideas, behaviors, and social structures as the fundamental obstacle to building socialism in Central Asia or other Muslim regions of the USSR.[24]  And the observable behavior of Soviet authorities during the revolution and civil war in these regions is part of the same historical lineage that we see today so the lines connecting these epochs run in both directions.

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