Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  Tendencies toward Disintegration

  By the turn of the twenty-first century, serious grounds existed for supposing that Russia might disintegrate. This situation arose partly from Boris Yeltsin’s 1990 preelection populist slogan “Take as much sovereignty as you want!” Bashkortostan, Buriatia, Tuva, Sakha (Yakutia), and Komi—all constituent republics of the Russian Federation—responded to this appeal in one way or another by behaving like sovereign states.

  Some members of the Russian Federation appropriated for themselves Russia’s sovereign rights. Some of the contemporary symptoms pointing toward the disintegration of the country included the following:

  • the priority of republic legislation over federal laws,

  • the right to nullify laws and other normative acts of Russia on the territory of a republic if they contradicted the laws of that particular republic (Sakha [Yakutia], Bashkortostan, Tuva, Komai, and Tatarstan) or the sovereign rights and interests of a member of the Russian Federation (Dagestan),

  • the right to declare a state of emergency (Buriatia, Komi, Tuva, Bashkortostan, Kalmykia, Karelia, North Ossetia, and Ingushetia),

  • the right to impose martial law (Republic of Tuva),

  • the republic laws about military service (Bashkortostan, Sakha (Yakutia), and Tuva),

  • the procedures for establishing territorial military and other detachments (Sakha [Yakutia]),

  • the need to secure permission from a member of the federation before deploying military units on its territory (North Ossetia),

  • the right to regard as its exclusive property all natural resources on its territory (Ingushetia, Sakha [Yakutia], and Tuva), and

  • the right to proclaim its own territory as a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (Tatarstan, Sakha [Yakutia], and Tuva).16

  Moreover, in Ingushetia, Kalmykia, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, and the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, the republic constitutions were viewed as the fundamental law with juridical supremacy over the Russian Constitution. Analogous norms were contained in the statutes of the Khanty-Mansiiskii Autonomous District and Irkutsk region.

  A paradoxical situation developed regarding the budget. Thus, the tax advantages conferred upon them by the federal authorities meant that compared to the other members of the federation, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Sakha (Yakutia) transferred to the federal budget only half the taxes they collected.

  The disintegration of Russia was also facilitated by the fact that the constitutions (statutes) and legislation of many of the members of the Russian Federation contained numerous provisions violating constitutional rights and freedoms that were linked to the particular status of the inhabitants. Restrictions were placed upon their citizens’ freedom of movement and choice of place of residence.17

  The regions were increasingly less oriented toward financial assistance from the federal center. A vivid example of this was the declaration by Kirsan Iliumzhinov, president of the Republic of Kalmykia, on November 17, 1998, concerning the possibility that Kalmykia might unilaterally alter its status to associate membership in the Russian Federation (providing that its budget not be included in the federal budget) or that Kalmykia might withdraw altogether from membership in the Russian Federation. Karelia counted on help from Finland, which, according to the Kremlin, was interested in recovering the Karelian territories it had lost in the Second World War. The Southern Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and the Maritime Province hoped for financial assistance from Japan and reoriented themselves toward the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, thereby creating the preconditions for regional sentiments to develop into separatist ones.

  Along with the decrease in the regions’ financial dependency on the center was a noticeable diminution of Moscow’s importance as the focus of centripetal forces. But what perhaps troubled Moscow most was the desire of many military units deployed in the member states of the federation to be subject to local leadership rather than to the federal center.

  The North Caucasus

  The political and historical illiteracy of the Kremlin masters and their inability to assess the consequences of their own decisions, combined with the country’s and the region’s objective difficulties, brought about an extremely complicated situation in the North Caucasus. The economic situation there during the Yeltsin era was marked by a fall in production; deterioration in the financial condition of industrial enterprises, almost half of which operated at a loss; and a decline in agriculture. These factors promoted the growth of separatist sentiments in the North Caucasus. Moscow complained about the extremely tense situation in Chechnya that was destabilizing the sociopolitical situation in the entire region, especially in Dagestan, the border districts of the Stavropol region of southern Russia, and Ingushetia.

  The problem of Chechnya typified the state of affairs in Russia primarily because it was mostly artificial. The First Chechen War (1994–96) was one of the most terrible and senseless crimes of the bloody twentieth century.

  In the prologue to the war, first the Chechens did essentially just what Yeltsin advocated when he was battling for the post of chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in 1990: they took as much sovereignty as they wanted. The second act of the prologue to the Chechen tragedy was when Yeltsin brought air force general Dzhokhar Dudaev to power in Chechnya. The last act was the transfer to Chechnya of a large part of the gigantic Soviet army arsenal located on its territory.

  There are many versions of how the war in Chechnya began. The standard one points to Chechnya’s quest for independence and acquisition of sovereignty.18 Among the reasons for the First Chechen War that deserve to be considered are the so-called oil factor, the supposed financial machinations of Russian and Chechen bureaucrats in which someone ditched or dumped somebody else, and even “the need to restore the army’s fighting spirit after Afghanistan.”19

  Obviously, one should not overlook the purely political elements. President Yeltsin, who was seriously ill, had become unpopular. The events of October 1993—the clash between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament—clearly demonstrated the shakiness of his rule. Its end would have brought catastrophe down upon his closest associates (including what Yeltsin himself referred to as his “family”) and the corrupt members of his government. The war in Chechnya might have been devised as a means of strengthening Yeltsin’s power, perhaps as an excuse for introducing a state of emergency, for gradually extending it to other parts of the country, and postponing the 1996 presidential election. One should not forget that war is a lucrative business, especially when it is fought on one’s own territory, and consequently entails rebuilding what was destroyed or its equivalent.

  The attempt by the Russian special services to overthrow Dzhokhar Dudaev in October–November 1994 failed. Russian minister of defense Pavel Grachev then promised to seize the Chechen capital, Grozny, quickly and without losses. With the “war party” ascendant in Moscow, in December the Kremlin launched a large-scale war on its own territory against its own citizens that led to the genocide of the Chechens, one of multiethnic Russia’s nationalities.

  The results of the First Chechen War were tragic. Gen. Alexander Lebed estimated the number of dead as 80,000 to 100,000. Most of the victims were civilians. In the battle for Grozny alone (December 1994 to February 1995), 23,000 to 25,000 people died. Of these casualties, 18,700 were killed as a result of Russian bombing and artillery strikes.

  An extremely complicated situation arose as a result of the First Chechen War. Russia itself seized Chechnya and categorically opposed its departure from the federation, but Chechnya could be retained as part of Russia only via large-scale reconstruction of the republic. In addition to Russia’s having insufficient resources, reconstruction failed because of thievery in both Moscow and Grozny. The goal of retaining Chechnya within Russia should have entailed according it either a special status or an undefined status within the Russian Federation such as was envisioned by the Khasavyurt Agreement.20<
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  Considering Stalinist and other crimes against the freedom-loving republic, the second and more humanitarian option—namely, letting Chechnya go21—was unacceptable to the Kremlin both on ideological grounds and, above all, in order to prevent a chain reaction leading to the disintegration of Russia. However, maintaining the relations that developed after the end of the First Chechen War at the time actually facilitated the process of disintegration.

  The third option, the one that eventually triumphed, if only nominally and temporarily, was isolating Chechnya within the boundaries of Russia and creating a kind of Chechen ghetto behind barbed wire. This decision was not implemented straight away because of its expense and the lack of the requisite means to do so.22

  Public opinion on both sides of the conflict, decisively influenced by Moscow’s official propaganda, was extremely hostile.23 For a long time, law enforcement agencies “found” so-called Chechen imprints on every major terrorist act. Two derogatory terms were employed to designate the peoples inhabiting the Caucasus—namely, persons of Caucasian ethnicity, a phrase used in official documents even though there was no such ethnicity, and blacks (from the hair and eye color of a majority of the people from the Caucasus). The unspeakable cruelty of Russian troops both during and after military engagements inevitably incited hatred on the part of the Chechens.

  The situation grew much worse after Vladimir Putin’s appointment as Russian prime minister on August 10, 1999, and President Yeltsin’s announcement that Putin was to be his successor. Two days earlier, Chechen fighters led by Shamil Basaev and Khattab had crossed the border into Dagestan and occupied four Dagestani settlements but were forced to return to Chechen territory. On September 4–6, the incursion into Dagestan was repeated. This served as the pretext for the beginning of Russian military actions against Chechnya, including the bombardment of Chechen territory.24

  That same month, apartment houses were blown up in Moscow and Volgodonsk.25 The total number of victims of terrorist acts for just the period from August 31 to September 16, 1999, was more than 530 persons, of whom 292 were killed.26 Thus began the Second Chechen War, which the Kremlin hypocritically referred to as an antiterrorist operation.27

  Chechnya became an extremely large irritant in relations between Russia and Georgia. Among other reasons it was because of the situation in the Pankisi Gorge, a part of Georgia that was not controlled by Tbilisi and that, according to Moscow, provided a sanctuary for Chechen fighters.

  The situation in Dagestan, neighboring Chechnya on the east, was extremely unstable. The complicated situation was brought about by the weakness of the authorities as well as interethnic contradictions, criminal depredations, especially along the border with Chechnya, and a host of other reasons.

  Things were also difficult in the Stavropol territory of southern Russia, where the sociopolitical situation was greatly complicated by its proximity to the Chechen Republic from whose territory there were constant incursions by Chechen fighters who ran off with cattle and matériel. The situation along the “border” with Chechnya periodically heated up. Not infrequently there were instances of discrimination on the basis of nationality in the Krasnodar territory. Local authorities took decisions aimed at depriving national minorities of the right to education and access to medical care as well as depriving them of the right to possess residence permits, to register marriages, and so forth.

  The Kremlin’s Chechen folly reflected the mentality of the Russian authorities who were panic-stricken in the face of Islam. Yeltsin’s verdict was simple: cut off Islamic fundamentalism. In early May 1997 I received a directive from the highest level to draft appropriate “measures and proposals.” Not without difficulty, I succeeded in transforming the assignment by drafting a document compatible with freedom of religion. Nothing came of it, however, despite the fact that Yeltsin liked the draft.

  The Chechen War, in tandem with the Russian leadership’s gross errors and miscalculations regarding interreligious and nationality policy, exacerbated the problem of Islam. As often happened, the authorities in Moscow confused cause with effect and attempted to present the spread of “several tendencies of Islam” as the prime reason for many of the problems in Russia. They concocted a thesis claiming that the Islamic factor had been turned into a weapon in the struggle for spheres of influence among the leading world powers and that Islamic extremism was deliberately being channeled into Russia so that it would be concentrated there and not spread to the United States and Western Europe. In other words, the Americans and the West Europeans were supposedly seeking to turn Islamic extremism against Russia to protect themselves from it.

  Meanwhile, it was true that certain forces in Russia made use of the revival of Islam in Russia as an effective means of political struggle. The nationalist leaders of several member republics of the Russian Federation played the card of political extremism rallying under the banner of Islam. Given the Kremlin’s persistent stereotype of the Caucasus as a “single entity,” it claimed that all the contiguous states and territories would be affected. The authorities were extremely fearful that the developing sociopolitical and economic situation would facilitate the spread of pan-Islamism, an aggressive form of Islamic fundamentalism, including Wahhabism, which Moscow accused of being responsible for all the troubles.28 Moscow blamed the spread of Wahhabism in the republics of the North Caucasus and other regions of Russia for the flourishing of radical nationalist organizations and the exacerbation of interethnic and interreligious relations. Given the spread of Islam in the central districts of Russia, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Kalmykia, and the flourishing of Islam in Siberia and the Far East, the Kremlin was frightened that Russia might break up along the “arc of Islam.”

  In this way the Kremlin identified an enemy in the form of Islam. Next came the reflex action of looking for guilty parties to blame for what in reality were self-inflicted disasters. Another tradition of Russian “political culture” also surfaced—the habit of viewing everything that differed from the familiar (and for the Kremlin that meant only Russian Orthodoxy) as alien or, worse than alien, actually hostile.

  While noting that the “Islamic problem,” as the Kremlin perceived it, was an artificial construct, one must acknowledge that, in part, it had an objective dimension largely rooted in Soviet history. By assisting the “revolutionary,” “friendly,” and “anti-imperialist” Islamists, as well as Islamist terrorist regimes and organizations in the struggle against “world imperialism”; by sustaining them financially; and by training their fighters on its own territory, the USSR had flung a boomerang that was bound to return upon itself. Likewise, the Soviet Union’s aggression against Afghanistan was repaid with the antagonism of part of the Islamic world. The de facto prohibition of Islam in the USSR provoked the creation of underground, informal Muslim structures, which, in a number of cases, became radicalized.

  After the end of the Soviet dictatorship, Islam firmly occupied second place among religions in Russia in terms of its number of adherents and its geographical range.29 In addition to its religious and ideological role, Islam provided a national-religious identity for part of the population, a banner for national liberation struggles, and a means of contending for power in the traditionally Islamic, newly independent states and nationalities in other countries of the CIS as well as in Russia itself.

  At this time a majority of the population in Dagestan was religious; 60 percent held deep religious convictions and actively propagated Islam. The number of followers of Wahhabism swelled. According to Moscow, a characteristic of the Dagestani Wahhabites is their manifest hatred of Russia and of adherents of what had been the traditional sect of Islam in Dagestan who were seen as “accomplices of Moscow.” Moscow also said that the Wahhabites maintained close relations with the Chechen rebels. The siloviki and their supporters claimed that the ultimate goal of the radically inclined leaders of the Wahhabites was to transform Dagestan into an Islamic state with the help of powerful external support and the Chec
hens.

  The authorities viewed the spread of Wahhabism in the republics of the North Caucasus and other regions of Russia as a serious threat that might significantly spur the activity of national radical organizations and further exacerbate interethnic and interreligious relations. Characteristically, Moscow blamed the spread of Islamic extremism in Russia on the Arab countries, the United States, and Western Europe, all of which supposedly were striving to confine Islamic extremism to Russia, thereby weakening Russia and facilitating its “guided disintegration.” In this connection, Russia’s own mistakes and miscalculations were either minimized or entirely ignored.

  The Arctic and Siberia

  The Arctic region, which, in addition to the sea waters, includes wide swathes of territory on the mainland and the islands of the northern Arctic Ocean totaling more than 1.16 million square miles, is one of the richest and most vulnerable parts of Russia. To illustrate the significance of the Arctic territories for Russia, it is enough to point out that in 1996 they were responsible for 11 percent of the national income and 22 percent of its exports while containing only 1 percent of the population.