(extract; restricted access to full article via TLS Archive)

Charles King

. . . Compared to the far greater number of books on the Balkans, the Caucasus is still a relatively obscure subject. The Chechen wars produced excellent field reporting by Anatol Lieven, Sebastian Smith and other intrepid journalists. A few authors, such as Tom de Waal, Yo’av Karny and Thomas Goltz, have covered political events in the South Caucasus as well. But by and large, writing on the region remains a species of exotica. “The Alps we already knew, and the Pyrenees, but this was finer than anything we had ever seen or even imagined in our wildest dreams!”, wrote Alexandre Dumas during a trip there in the 1850s. “How I wished I had brought with me my copy of Aeschylus!” Like earlier European visitors, many writers have tended to be more interested in drawing romantic parallels between the ancient past and the post-Soviet present than on making sober sense of current troubles.

Tony Wood aims to be an exception to this rule, and he reveals his hand already in the subtitle of his Chechnya: The case for Independence. He thankfully dismisses the join-the-dots approach to modern Caucasus history, avoiding, for example, the tired cliché of attributing the violence of the 1990s to the same roots as Shamil’s resistance movement of the nineteenth century. Wood rightly underlines the political origins of the conflict in Chechnya: the fact that, at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Chechen nationalist movement was remarkably similar to those in other parts of the Soviet state. The key difference was that Chechnya (then tied together administratively with neighbouring Ingushetia) was not a “Union Republic” within the Soviet federation, but rather an “autonomous republic” of Russia itself. To ask why the Chechens chose to defy Moscow is to miss a basic point. Challenging the federal centre and questioning sovereignty were what nearly everyone was doing in the late 1980s and early 90s.

Wood has a much more difficult time, however, when it comes to the past ten years. What may once have been a nationalist cause has become something far more complex: a fratricidal civil war within Chechnya, goaded on by Moscow and involving a mordant mix of dogs-of-war brutality and religious nihilism. The second Chechen war has never been in any meaningful sense a war for national liberation, and Wood is sometimes reduced to the language of old-leftism when it comes to conceptualizing the violence there. He dismisses the pro-Moscow government in Chechnya as simply “proxies” of the Russians, and blames the West for failing to take seriously the Chechens’ claims. Yet the few guerrilla fighters still left in the mountains, dressed in camouflage fatigues and green headbands, are no more truly representative of Chechen national interests than those who are, with Moscow’s imprimatur, slowly rebuilding the bombed-out capital, Grozny. The administration of Vladimir Putin has successfully “Chechenized” the conflict; the people who are doing the killing and dying in Chechnya are now, by and large, ethnic Chechens themselves, especially after the assassination of the powerful guerrilla commander Shamil Basaev in 2006. As Wood admits, it is now difficult to know whether an absolute majority of Chechnya’s residents would even support Independence, regardless of the historical and moral rationale for it.

Still, Tony Wood’s Chechnya is a welcome alternative to the standard view that the rebellious Chechens – or at least the “Islamo-terrorists”, “revolutionary jihadist terrorist networks”, “Islamic separatists” and “Islamist militants” – basically got what was coming to them . . .