Chechen Society Research Articles

Ramzan Kadyrov: The Indigenous Key to Success in Putin's Chechenization Strategy?

On 15 February 2007 Vladimir Putin accepted the resignation of Alu Alkhanov as President of Chechnya and nominated the Chechen prime minister—Ramzan Kadyrov—to act as his successor. This appointment, duly rubber-stamped by Chechnya's parliament, brought to an end to more than four months of speculation since 5 October 2006, when Kadyrov attained the age of 30 and thus became eligible for the post of Chechnya's head of state. Kadyrov's elevation to de jure rather than de facto supremacy in Chechen society not only completed the final stage of the remarkably rapid transformation of this one-time rebel, juvenile thug and politicalingénuebut also put Putin's policy of Chechenization firmly back on track, which had been effectively derailed since the assassination of Chechnya's first pro-Russian president—Akhmad Kadyrov—Ramzan's father, in May 2004.

The New Chechen Jihad: Militant Wahhabism as a Radical Movement and a Source of Suicide Terrorism in Post-War Chechen Society

The first act of Chechen suicide terrorism occurred on June 7, 2000 and was carried out by two young women. This inaugurated the migration of suicide terrorism from other conflict zones, into the Chechen conflict. How suicide terrorism as a tactic made its way into Chechnya is the topic of this paper, which provides an analysis of the events concerning the importation of militant ideologies and radical terrorist movements taking place since the Chechen declaration of independence as well as an empirical and theoretical analysis of Chechen suicide terrorism based on psycho-social interviews that were collected in Chechnya over a two-year time period from March 2003 to March 2005. We report data about suicide terrorism and the radicalization process from thirty-two interviews with family members and close associates of thirty-four Chechen suicide terrorists, inquiring about the terrorists’ backgrounds, experiences, religious, and psychological reasons leading up to their suicidal acts.

Chechnya: life in war-torn society

CHECHNYA Life in a War-Torn Society Valery Tishkov Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 3O2pp, US$5o.oo cloth (ISBN 0-520-23887-7), US$19-95 paper (0-520-23888-5)This is a useful but limited book. It is useful because of its painstaking analysis of the history of Chechnya both before and since fighting erupted in 1994, the reasons for the conflict, and the effect of the war on Chechen society. The study effectively demolishes various legends about the Chechens and their history, describes the brutality on both sides, and portrays the devastating effects of the war on Chechen society. The work has, however, little to suggest on how to end the war or how to avoid the emergence of similar conflicts elsewhere in the Russian Federation. The author takes comparatively little account of the experience of other multinational societies, whether established democracies or ex-communist states, in dealing with minorities, except repeatedly to suggest that the west is applying a double standard in its criticism of Russian behaviour in Chechnya. As a result of these omissions, the book unconsciously illustrates the lack of understanding in the dominant Russian political culture of how to handle minorities in a pluralist society.For Mikhail Gorbachev, in his foreword, the reasonable desire of the Chechens to enjoy democratization and correct past injustices has been misused to fuel nationalist hysteria and anti-Russian feeling. He supports Tishkov's criticism of special rights for so-called native nationalities in relation to the rest of the population of the republic (xi). He believes that this principle led to the war in Chechnya. He recognizes the mistakes made by the Russian government and armed forces, but he finds that, without foreign interference, events might have taken a different turn.The author, Valery Tishkov, is not only an ethnographer of note but was also the Russian minister of nationalities in the early nineties. As such, he took part in talks with the Chechens in December 1994 and worked on the Russian government's proposed peace plan in 1995-96. In his book, he accepts the description made of him by a Chechen nationalist that his interest is in keeping Chechnya within Russia.Tishkov notes that the Chechens emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union as both one of the largest minority groups in Russia and one of the least assimilated. Furthermore, they had a historical sense of injured collective dignity because of their deportation by Stalin, and the social, political, and cultural inequalities they had suffered after they were allowed to return to their historic homeland in the sixties. …

Valery Tishkov, Chechnya

The present volume, an abbreviated translation of Valery Tishkov’s Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte: Etnografiia chechenskoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), offers a sophisticated analysis of Chechen society during the 1990s, contextualizing a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, undermined the stability of the North Caucasus and hobbled Russia’s transition from a Soviet republic to a modern, democratic state. The director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at th...

‘Brotherhoods’ and ‘Associates’: Chechen Networks of Crime and Resistance

The traditional forms of Chechen society – the extended family, the clan, the religious brotherhood – have proven to be effective building blocks on which to construct network-based structures both...

Chechnia: The Empire strikes back

The war in Chechnia has few purely military targets and virtually no safe quarters for the population of the republic. The full scale of environmental devastation caused by the Russian invasion of Chechnia will probably be never properly quantified. Reports by independents paint a picture of an immense destruction of the country by the invading Russian army including whole towns and villages. In Chechnia Russia has been up against a national war of liberation and not as the Russian political and military establishment claims a few “illegal armed bandits”. The social structure of the Chechen society reinforces the long history of Chechen resistance to continuous attempts to subjugate the Chechen people and their integration into Russian political and economic structures. The current tragedy of Chechnia, the latest in series since the incorporation of the Caucasus into the Tsarist Empire, is to a large extend due to thematrioshka effect and the inability of the current Russian authorities to develop a viable nationality policy which would allow genuine devolution of power to the constituent parts of the Russian Federation. The dominant view of the current Russian leadership is that the constitutional principle of preserving the state on its “historical and geo-political basis” overrides the right of ethnic people to their own clearly defined sovereign political and economic entities. To many Russian and outside observers the Russian Federation appears to be a corpse without a head. Unless Russia's policy changes substantially there must be substantial doubts whether the Federation can survive in its present form. The prolonged guerilla war which is bound to follow the December 1994 invasion of Chechnia, rather than preserving the integrity of the Russian Federation would surely add to its progressive disintegration.