Russian Strategy In Comparative and Historical Perspective

As noted above, a major  strategic operation that  contributed to the success of the Russian government’s COIN campaign was Moscow’s ability to  use  all the means at its disposal, including diplomacy and an effective media campaign, to isolate the theater and deny foreign  assistance to the Chechens in 1999-2007.  This was also an essential precondition for the effort tro consolidate the Bolshevik victory in the USSR’s Muslim borderlands as it allowed Moscow to experiment with  variouus approaches with relative security that these areas could not be influenced or invaded from outside.  Thus Chechnya reveals a successful as well as  the latest adaptation to an already well-established history of counterinsurgency operations.   

Indeed, the Russian military came to study past experiences in Chechnya to see what had worked and outlined the following principles that had ensured past success and that should do so again if properly executed.

Interdicting foreign intervention, i.e. sealing off the theater from foreign help of any kind and in our own time this would include informational assistance and media coverage.  As we have noted this was the same precondition for “socialization” of the region in the Soviet North Caucasus and Central Asia.

Creating in the Caucasus a legal-political regime that was so tightly integrated to the state that it precluded any hope of secession, a process that entails constant reforms and improvement of the state’s governing mechanism to increase its capabilities.  Moreover, by creating autonomous SSRs or Union Republics the central government bound those elites it had coopted ever more closely to the new status quo since their power, authority, and legitimacy was completely tied to the continuation in power of that regime and its ability to provide them with the resources with which to rule.  This central ability to provide “rents” or other transfers of goods and services as well as the imprimatur of centrally-legitimated authority was just as critical to Central Asian leaders as it now is to Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya.[1]

In turn the indirect strategy succeeded in enhancing the economic and social dependence of the theater upon the Russian state and precluding outside economic assistance so that the rebels and local residents had nowhere else to go but Russia, while the regime isolated the rebels and took effective steps to dry up their economic basis of insurgency, or as the Soviets did, collectivize the villages to deprive peasants of individual means of resistance.

At the same time at least rhetorically if not always in practice the regime adopted a cautious attitude to Islam, directing party and state officials to show respect for the religious sensibilities and authorities of the people and their moral code for as long as this strategy prevailed.[2]  In Chechnya this has assumed the shape of giving Kadyrov full political authority which he deploys as the regional religious so that his fidelity or ostensible fidelity to Muslim values and mores adds to his legitimacy there.

Establishing an integrated system of state measures to prevent and insurgency and settle the area so as to prevent or preempt internal armed conflict. This entails “subsystems for the monitoring of internal political situation and for unified direction (control) of military and nonmilitary measures.  This obviously includes, indeed it presupposes constructing a deep surveillance and intelligence penetration of the society living in the theater.  And this certainly took place in Soviet Muslim territories during the 1920s and 1930s.  Indeed, the total impact of all these tactics also created conditions conducive to deep intelligence penetration of the insurgents.  As one historian of Soviet counterintelligence observed, the Soviet state was “a counterintelligence state.”[3]

Under central direction establish the equivalent of a plenipotentiary agent of the center to oversee these measures in the North Caucasus.[4]  In practice during 1999-2007 many of these guidelines and lesser-included precepts were adopted and used successfully by the Red Army.  The dual structure of party and state hierarchies culminating in Moscow and the creation of central Party formations like the various Kavburos and Sredazburo (Central Asian Bureau) represented, as did subsequent Republican Party Secretaries and KGB chiefs that kind of power in the 1920s and 1930s.

Even though class war rhetoric and ideology had long since been discredited the idea of finding elites from within the insurgent community or utilizing amnestied or other such elites who had recanted their past allegiance was essential.  In this case Moscow exploited the willingness of Akhmad Kadyrov and after his death his son Ramzan’s willingness to support Moscow in return for power as Moscow’s satraps in Chechnya.  Adding to the benefit of Kadyrov’s support for Moscow was the fact that he was the Mufti of Chechnya so not only did his support represented another example of the fracturing of elites that has been a common strategy for imperial success since the 1460s, it also divided the Muslim religious community and deprived the insurgents of the argument that they alone represented the true Islam.  Not only have the Kadyrovs validated Moscow’s belief in their loyalty (admittedly well lubricated by massive subsidies) they also have applied the tactic of creating a seemingly loyal pro-Moscow armed force or militia, as in the 1944-53 period in the Baltic and Ukraine to conduct operations not only to secure the Kadyrovs but also to root out the insurgents and terrorize the remaining inhabitants of Chechnya.  And in so doing they have undoubtedly attracted veterans of the first war.  All in all these tactics have induced great divisions among the Chechen insurgents.[5]

As we have noted, Moscow devised a genuine system of integrating both regular and VVMVD as well as other forces, Border Troops, FSB, etc. under a truly unified command structure.[6]  A study of how Soviet force structures were postured and organized during the interwar period in these areas might reveal similar situations.  Indeed, there exists a direct causal connection between the use of force, the insulation of targeted areas from external media and the gradual spread of an all-encompassing security structure that targeted and thus “securitized” religious organizations and observance in those zones.  This is certainly apparent in the Chechen case and may well be discernible in the 1920s if the sources are available to permit such study.

In 1999-2007 Moscow learned from its abysmal failure in the media or information war aspect of the first Chechen war and devised successful coping strategies here as well.  It sealed off the area from virtually all journalists, seized control of the “narrative” to portray the Chechen rebels as foreign Wahhabi terrorists who were aiming to seize Russian territory. Crucially the Russian media and information campaign concentrated on cementing the support of the Russian people. 

As far as the military was concerned, the goal of the robust state-controlled media campaign served three inter-related purposes.  First, it helped to isolate the region politically as a precondition for military operations; second, it rendered the public at home deaf to the suffering of the Chechen state and its inhabitants; and finally it prepared the Russian families to accept war casualties.[7]

In turn, this “information preparation of the battlefield” allowed Moscow to use the unrestricted and overwhelming force that media criticism had precluded during the first Chechen war.[8]   Thus we see the sophisticated integration of an unrelenting deep intelligence penetration, subversion (of the Chechen regime in 1996-99), and media portrayal of the area as run by Muslim terrorists.[9]  And beyond the benefits this suppression of the media provided to the armed forces it played a major role in habituating the Russian population to accept overall media censorship, acknowledge that they were living in a condition of a state of siege, and induced them therefore to provide unlimited support for the government which used this media policy as a major source of its overall campaign to impose an authoritarian state.    This strategy vesting Putin with virtually unlimited and even dictatorial powers at least as proscribed by law as well as custom, accords with at least some theorists’ view of the necessity for   strong centralized leadership in an emergency situation and certainly facilitated and justified Putin’s accumulation of powers even after the emergency.[10]  Thus this strategy of securitization of the media, i.e. invoking security as a preeminent criterion for defining the purview of state activity, was materially boosted by the Chechen attacks of 1999 and served a major “state-building” purpose as well.  It also showed that for the Russian authorities Russian public opinion was a crucial center of gravity that had to be reinforced against all external efforts to penetrate and therefore (in the government’s estimation) weaken it. 

For example, in July, 2000 a conference of the Security Council under Sergei Ivanov charged that religious organizations' activity "are taking on a more radical, politicized character and represent a real threat to state security" because of the internal political situation in parts of Russia and the penetration into Russia of foreign extremist organizations.[11]  Because the Chechen attack on Dagestan supposedly confirmed this threat and its linkage with international terrorism, the Security Council recommended actions enhancing the effectiveness of state organs of authority to regulate "the mutual relations of the state and religious associations, and the activities of foreign religious organizations" inside Russia.[12]  Since then these recommendations have been put into effect and the members of religious organizations and the media have been subjected to much more intrusive police regulation, surveillance, and monitoring than was ever the case under Yeltsin.[13]  Meanwhile the Church and other religious associations have been effectively taken over by the state. These examples validate the observations found in a 2006 study of Russian domestic politics, namely,

The securitization approach illuminates one of the overarching self-conceptualizations of the Putin government.  If the Yeltsin regime defined itself in terms of democratization; then much that has been done since that time is defined in terms of security.  Analysis of discourse, which is central to the methodological approach employed here, reveals repeatedly the power of the key signifier ’security’ and the frequency of its adoption by the forces seeking hegemony within Russia’s political elite.[14]

Accordingly the regime aims to securitize ever more aspects of politics, subject them to centralized and unlimited official regulation based on their connection to officially defined canons of Russian security, remove them from active public debate, subordinate them to discourses and actions rationalized by security considerations, and/or take control of them by figures and institutions associated with the preservation of security, usually hard or military-police security.  This does not mean that debate over security has ceased, far from it.  Rather that debate has generally, though not always, been rendered opaque and occurs between or among bureaucratic factions who generally endeavor to hide their maneuvers and rationales from the public.  This process is at best a mixed blessing and  more often then not considerably worse than that.  The securitization of ever more realms of politics creates many dangers for democratization and for state development and certainly not only in Russia.  And ceretainly at its height under Stalin the Soivet regime securitized every social behavior it could conceive of even as it was purusing the indirect approach  because of its own secueity preoccupatoins and because that strneghtened the hand of the state and central authorities.

And owing to the success of the indirect approach in Chechya and by using the Kadyrovs and the growing war weariness of those left in Chechnya, Moscow was able to craft an appeal to Chechens that the insurgents, who had in fact succumbed to a Salafist, Saudi-inspired verison of Islam not unlike that espoused by Osama Bin Laden and Aymen Zawahiri, were interlopers, outsiders who sought to hijack an indigenous Islamic theology for their own political purposes.  Whether this development and promotion of religious schisms among the Chechens was a conscious FSB  strategy or a serendipitous exploitation of an opportunity that presented itself is irrelevant because the exploitation of this tactic fit so well with the evolving Russian strategy after the shameful defeat of 1996 [15]  Since something like this was tried in regard to the Orthodox Church it  may well have also been applied to Islmiac organizaiotns and deserves to be examined in that  light.[16]

Finally as the insurgency weakened, Moscow was able to rely increasingly on the Kadyrovs and its policy of Chechenization butressed by the Kadyrovtsy’s loyal troops and  a massive infusion of  capital for reinviestment or  redevelopment of Chechnya, and the grant of enormous autonomous powers to Kadyrov who has said he is Putin’s man.[17]  Here again we see the dividends that accrue to Moscow from its ability to split the elite, namely the ability to play what amounts to the amnesty card as many insurgents  either think revolt is hopeless or that Kadyrov is achieving as much of their former dream as is possible.  Likewise, the Kadyrov forces are the functional analogy  to the militias of the 1944-53 and collectiviztion periods.  In effect the increasing resort to  this militia  imparted the aspect of a civil war among Chcehcens rather than an anti-Russian insurgency to the conflict, a development that clearly redounded to Moscow’s advantage.[18] 

Using the Kadyrovs and their loyalists in an adaptation of this  long-standing Russian colonial strategy of coopting and rewarding elites, and the growing war weariness of those left in Chechnya, Moscow was able to craft an appeal to Chechens that the insurgents, who had in fact succumbed to a Salafist, Saudi-inspired verison of Islam not unlike that espoused by Osama Bin Laden and Aymen Zawahiri, were interlopers, outsiders who sought to hijack an indigenous Islamic theology for their own political purposes.  Whether this development and promotion of religious schisms among the Chechens was a conscious FSB  strategy or a serendipitous exploitation of an opportunity that presented itself is irrelevant because the exploitation of this tactic fit so well with the evolving Russian strategy after the shameful defeat of 1996. [19]

Finally as the insurgency weakened, Moscow was able to rely increasingly on the Kadyrovs and its policy of Chechenization butressed by the Kadyrovtsy’s loyal troops and  a massive infusion of  capital for reinvestment or  redevelopment of Chechnya, and the grant of enormous autonomous powers to Kadyrov who has said he is Putin’s man. Here again we see the dividends that accrue to Moscow from its ability to split the elite, namely the ability to play what amounts to the amnesty card as many insurgents  either think revolt is hopeless or that Kadyrov is achieving as much of their former dream as is possible.  Likewise, the Kadyrov forces are the functional analogy  to the militias of the 1944-53 and collectiviztion periods.  In effect the increasing resort to  this militia  imparted the aspect of a civil war among Chcehcens rather than an anti-Russian insurgency to the ocnflict, a development that clearly redounded to Moscow’s advantage.[20] In looking at Soviet efforts to consolidate Soviet power in its Muslim borderlands it is worth examining if this sequence of events also occurred over time and with what results,  if any.