Russian Counterinsurgency: The Two Paradigms of Russian COIN

Russian operations in the North Caucasus as well as Syria continue a long-running historical legacy while also allowing us to look at historical examples with new insights.  Indeed, in Syria Russia has waged and is waging a combined arms campaign that strategically resembles the Russian approach to counterinsurgency.  This tells us that Russia does not necessarily view COIN as a light forces campaign but it also should force observers to consider that approach as well as the Anglo-French approach so beloved of analysts and which has had, to be sure a checkered record.[1]

COIN is an integrated set of political, economic, social, and security measures intended to end and prevent the recurrence of armed violence, create and maintain stable political, economic, and social structures, and resolve the underlying causes of an insurgency in order to establish and sustain the conditions necessary for lasting stability.[2]  The current US Department of Defense definition of counterinsurgency reads as follows: “Those military, paramilitary, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.”[3] 

Russian history offers a rich palette of strategies, policies, and courses of action, available to rulers in conducting counterinsurgencies. There are clear “constant operating factors “ in Russian COIN which began with Ivan III’s takeover of Novgorod in 1478 after which he promptly deported the entire population This history reveals ongoing similarities in tactics and strategies, e.g. mass deportations to Siberia, or into serfdom, or in the case of the Circassians to Turkey in 1863, up through Stalin’s genocidal campaigns to the present Chechen war which depopulated the region. We may well regard the aspects of the Soviet civil war in the territories of the national minorities who rose up against Soviet imperialism and socialism (the two were the same to them) and many of the ensuing insurgencies after 1921, Basmachi, revolts in the North Caucasus, Ukraine, and Russia proper as continuation that civil war and as insurgencies.  Thus the Soviet response well into the 1920s if not the 1930s resembled COIN or polices of imperial management.

Indeed, despite enduring constant features and even though we are simplifying drastically for reasons of space, two discernible broad paradigms are discernible in Russia’s counterinsurgency history. Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet authorities have frequently, though not always, successfully employed these paradigms.  To some degree these paradigms are alternative strategies not usable simultaneously.  Often where the first direct and often excessively brutal approach fails the second, more indirect, and socio-politically sophisticated paradigm replaces it.  This does not preclude an overlap in the tactics employed in either or both of these paradigms, e.g. deportations and great brutality. Nonetheless we can analytically distinguish between these two paradigms, especially in the North Caucasus.

The first strategic paradigm is one of brutal suppression entailing a comprehensive direct assault on the enemy and his society.  Examples of this approach abound: General Ermolov’s brutal assaults on the people and mores of the North Caucasus in 1816-25 and his successors’ similar assaults in the 1830-50s.[4]  Other examples include the Tambov peasant insurgency in 1920-21 that General Mikhail Tukhachevsky brutally suppressed even using gas attacks on unarmed civilians and insurgents.[5]  Subsequent examples are the  “Khudzhum” of the 1920’s in Central Asia and its many episodes of “forced feminism”,[6] the collectivization struggle of 1929-33 and the overall revolution from above where whole communities and peoples were deported or, as in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, subjected to famine; and Stalin’s deportations of many nationalities, particularly in the North Caucasus in 1943-44.[7]  Of course, even in some of these dramas, e.g. collectivization, there were retreats and periods of concessions to the “insurgents”.  But in these wars the brutal direct attack on people and their way of life, is quite visible and the primary approach. And an ongoing characteristic of this approach is its disdain, contempt for, and ignorance of the native societies that resisted Russian attacks.  In both Central Asia and the North Caucasus, if not the entire country, the evidence is overwhelming that a largely Russian party and governmental apparatus sought to suppress minority demands for advancement in the 1920s-30s, forcing the central government to intervene on behalf of policies aiming to enroot socialism among those minorities.[8]  That could explain why this approach often failed.  Yet given the primacy of the Silovye Struktury in current as well as past Russian policymaking we see a constant temptation to resort to just this paradigm despite its high cost and incidence of failure.  In Syria we see this paradigm of direct and brutal assault in its contemporary manifestation of the brutal and unrelenting bombing and systematic destruction of Aleppo by Russian air forces with the clear intention of destroying the insurgency against Bashear Assad by force.[9]  And in the North Caucasus Russian forces are distinguished by their brutality, resort to practices of the medieval tactic of collective surety, (Krugovaya Poruka), and large-scale criminality.[10]  This paradigm’s continuity therefore represents a fifth form of resemblance between the present and the past.

The second paradigm’s cases reflect a more sophisticated understanding and employment of the measures needed to undermine the insurgents’ cohesion by splitting the movement and balancing concessions and appeals to indigenous values with repression.  This strategy did not only make concessions to enemies’ way of life, nationality, and/or religion.  It is quite consciously a strategy of imperial management, whose main component is to find those elites who would work with Moscow or St. Petersburg, install them in leadership positions, co-opt them and their followers into the cosmopolitan Russian ruling elite, make the requisite concessions to the people, and over the long term integrate these elites into the Russian state to deprive the population of a leadership stratum that could lead any future revolts. 

In the Soviet case, for example, as Stalin repeatedly observed, the government simply had no cadres who could make socialism intelligible and/or legitimate to native Muslims and had to recruit from whomever it could find that would support them until such time as it could create or find reliable, i.e. truly Bolshevized, leaders.[11]  As a result we see in the creation of Central Asian and the North Caucasus republics of the 1920s clear efforts to coopt modernizing elites who found Soviet socialism attractive or compelling as a political watchword for their societies and who could then lead others into discrete territorial and socio-political institutions that were loyal to Moscow.[12]  Those policies of nativization (korenizatsiya) in the 1920s and the creation of North Caucasian autonomous political formations and of Central Asian union republics that gave elements of real political power and authority to native leaders along with seeming concessions to religious practices in the early NEP period (1921-25) clearly represented elements of his strategy and a conscious desire to coopt willing elites.[13]  In the contemporary case, the promotion of Akhmad Kadyrov, who was the Grand Mufti of Chechnya before throwing in with Moscow in 2000 and then becoming president of Chechnya, and then his son Ramzan Kadyrov who succeeded him after he was assassinated in 2004, embody the continuation and success of this strategy of coopting elites in a contemporary guise and is a sixth example of continuity.

Alternatively Moscow would designate a favored social category and support them at the expense of less favored groups and thereby restructure the local society. The attempts to discover and promote promising Central Asians after the mid-1920s clearly represented this element or branch of this “second” paradigm.  Throughout the history of successful imperial advances Russia could rely quite successfully on these elites who form a pro-Russian party amidst targeted territories, peoples, and states.[14]  But this strategy, as Rieber has observed, also epitomized Stalin’s approach at home in the initial Soviet period but also a generation later when he built his external empire in Eastern Europe.  Specifically he recurrently aimed to create a pro-Russian party in the Russian borderlands or outside them who could be reliably counted on to advance the regime’s aims and weaken the cohesion of opposing domestic and external forces.  And his foreign policies, as Rieber notes, grew directly out of his experiences in 1917-29 in dealing with the “national question.”[15]  Combined with overwhelming force and Moscow’s ability - a common operational thread in all its ventures – to isolate the theater from foreign support, this blending of force and cooptation has generally succeeded in advancing Russian imperial objectives, most recently in Syria and in Chechnya. 

Of course the reality is not distinct paradigms but their interaction over time.  Indeed, in both the contemporary and historical cases alike we see not so much analytically distinct paradigms but their interaction or the existence of elements of both paradigms at one and the same time.  Stalin epitomizes this reality in his own policies that combined at different times terrifying force and sophisticated strategies of cooptation.  But in factcooptation always relied on the presence and understanding of immense force in reserve to back it up and at home  to isolate troubled regions from foreign intervention.

Since our main concern here is with the historical success of this second paradigm (albeit backed up by a great deal of force and repression) it deserves fuller explication.  Generally this approach comes into play when it becomes clear that the direct and more brutal policy has failed and that something else must be tried.  It is not only a question of making concessions to minorities’ way of life, nationality, and/or religion.  It is quite consciously a strategy of imperial management, whose main component is to find those elites who are willing to work with Moscow or St. Petersburg, install them in leadership positions, co-opt them and their followers into the Russian ruling elite which always was a cosmopolitan affair, make the requisite concessions to the people, and over the long term integrate these elites into the Russian state thus depriving the population of a leadership stratum with which to lead any future revolts.  Throughout the history of successful Russian imperial advances we find Moscow and/or St. Petersburg being able to rely quite successfully on these elites who form a pro-Russian party amidst targeted territories, peoples, and states.[16] 

In Syria Moscow had a ready-made pool of support in the remnants of the Syrian Army and the state that understood that if Assad lost they faced death or exile, which makes the Syrian case something of an outlier in this respect.  But we see in Central Asia and the North Caucasus in the 1920s and again more recently in Chechnya that once the regime grasped that direct assault on those societies was counter-productive and not effective in creating a reliable and/or loyal Soviet cadre it focused on working with local elites who could be coopted.