Abstract
Central Asian Survey, June 2005, Routledge.
What if Russia's hardline tactics in Chechnya have worked–not against the Chechen people, but against those in the surrounding republics who witnessed firsthand the brutality that greets disobedience?
Case in point–the Russian republic of Dagestan, Chechnya's eastern neighbor. Fourteen years ago, Dagestan seemed to be leaning toward the greener pastures of independence. As Tel Aviv University Mideast scholar Moshe Gammer notes in his June 2005 Central Asian Survey article, “The Road Not Taken: Dagestan and Chechen Independence,” most experts predicted Dagestan would (like Chechnya) try to liberate itself from Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved. The two republics shared a long history of resisting Russian conquest and followed similar Islamic ideologies. But Chechnya went one way, while Dagestan, for a variety of reasons, went the other.
The first: economics. Post-Soviet Dagestan was destitute. In 1994, unemployment in Dagestan topped 60 percent. Sensing an opportunity, Russia bought loyalty, supplementing more than 80 percent of Dagestan's budget. The few Dagestanis with money, the upper class that weathered the fall of communism and maintained their social standing, felt their best option was to preserve the status quo. “Like its counterparts all over the former Soviet Union, [the Dagestani elite] understood very well that the Chechen model was a potent alternative to its way, values, and, most importantly, its very existence,” Gammer writes. “It had no choice, therefore, but to throw its lot with the Kremlin, which, even at its weakest under [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin, remained the sole guarantor to the existence and rule of the [Dagestani elite].”
Then there's the matter of consensus, which, in Dagestan, is difficult. Dagestan is an ethnic amalgam, consisting of 14 aboriginal groups and nationalities, with the “majority” Avars comprising only 27 percent of the population. Such a plurality of groups all vying for influence and control provides fertile ground for intense infighting that, Gammer observes, makes the various “nationalist movements and their leaderships dependent on Moscow.”
If anything unified Dagestanis, it was the fighting in Chechnya. Gammer contends that at first, in 1992, many Dagestanis supported Chechnya's separatists, if only in spirit. But as the dispute became bloodier and the Chechens leaned harder on certain Dagestani factions, hoping to draw them into the conflict, sentiments changed. The war was crippling Dagestan, further depressing its economy and flooding it with Chechen refugees. “All this was, however, negligible compared to the devastation and suffering in the neighboring republic,” Gammer writes, “and no Dagestani wished this to be repeated in their own country.”
As such, Dagestan reached an important conclusion: While independence might seem alluring, it's best to stay in Mother Russia's embrace–cold or otherwise.