By John Elliott

Despite the violent deaths of several leading figures in the Chechen resistance and the precipitous decline in international sympathy for the cause following the Beslan school attack, Tony Wood has taken up the mantle of support for Chechen independence. His new book tackles justifications for Russia’s two modern wars waged in the small North Caucasus republic and takes aim at the West’s negligent complicity since the fall of the Soviet Union. Warning of the long conflict still ahead, Wood ultimately argues that even today Russia would be better off if it allowed the Chechens, for once, to decide their own fate.

Wood gives readers an excellent and concise summary of the long history of Chechen resistance, detailing key features in Chechen culture and society that have prepared its people for struggle. In fact, it is the author’s succinct account of history and nationalism in Chechnya that shines brightest. In the first two chapters, Wood details the transformation of pan-Caucasian and Islamic identity, which were the main sources of inspiration for the rebellious 19th-century Chechen leader Imam Shamil, through to the particularistic nationalism that emerged in the late Soviet era. The author describes how, unlike other subjects of the Soviet Union, the Chechen-Ingush Republic’s titular peoples were closed off from elite participation until the very end of the USSR’s existence. As with Algeria under the French, ethnic Russians held the “commanding heights” of the economy and comprised the vast majority of the political elite. Consequently, in contrast scenarios in other parts of the dissolved USSR, there was no unified Chechen nomenklatura in the post-Soviet era to lead the “seamless oligarchic restoration.”

TAKING MOSCOW AT ITS WORD

Wood sets about dismantling the common justifications for both wars waged in Chechnya. In 1994, Moscow emphasized as its main reasons for military operations the need to restore stability to a lawless region and to preserve Russia’s territorial integrity. While admitting that President Dzhokar Dudayev’s regime in Chechnya was corrupt and that the republic suffered from widespread crime and kidnappings, Wood asserts that most parts of the former Soviet Union struggled with social and economic woes of equal caliber.

The author argues that the international community failed to recognize Chechnya’s claim to sovereignty and wholeheartedly accepted Russia’s justifications for war, which “greatly emboldened” the Kremlin and made the United States and Europe guilty partners in Chechnya’s failure as a state and the renewal of the conflict in 1999. Starved of external support, the would-be country struggled to endure the collapse of the economy and its old social order. The silence from the international world left Chechnya isolated, unable to secure loans from abroad, and stuck in a legal limbo purposefully perpetuated by the Russians. This kept the republic economically stunted, and crime remained an attractive option for many.

Western leaders supported Boris Yeltsin “to the hilt” during the first conflict, Wood argues. Fearing a victory by the Communists in Russia’s 1996 elections, the West propped Yeltsin’s administration with loans. Ironically, it even admitted Russia to the Council of Europe, the organization tasked to oversee human rights in Europe, despite the fact that Russians were rounding up and executing young Chechen men in zachistki, or “mopping up” operations. The next war would see much of the same extreme violence, with thee international community tiptoeing around the subject as they tried to secure Russian support for gas contracts and the war on terror.

In 1999, Moscow’s main reasons for the second assault on Chechnya were the same as before, but added to the mix was the need to dispel the threat of expansionist Islamic fundamentalism. Once again, a majority of Western decision-makers especially the Bush and Blair administrations supported Russia ’s right to use force against the breakaway region.

Here Wood asserts that the intensified criminalization of Chechnya after 1996 was due largely to its international isolation and the “unwillingness of the Russian authorities to meet their obligations to the country they had virtually destroyed.” Wood spends a great deal of time laying out a strong explanation as to why the Islamic threat in Chechnya has been overstated, above all by the Russians. He argues that Islam is subordinate to the national identity, and that pan-Caucasian or pan-Islamic rhetoric is “opportunity born of necessity, and nourished by a global indifference to the loss of thousands of Chechen lives.”

COMPARISONS MADE AND MISSED

Wood also attempts to knock down the idea that Chechnya poses an “ethnic dominoes” threat by referencing events in Tatarstan. He argues that the Tatar leadership only used the call for sovereignty as a bargaining chip. Wood asserts that few ethnically designated regions of the Russian Federation had the resources, geopolitical positioning, or a large enough population of the titular ethnicity to make a bid for independence feasible, so Chechnya could hardly have set a significant precedent.

But Wood has the benefit of hindsight. Tatarstan, often seen by the federal center in the 1990s as the next “domino” among the regions agitating for greater sovereignty, has significantly more ethnic Russians than Chechnya and is located in the middle of the federation with no international borders, making secession very unlikely. Yet the Tatar elite could not have taken on as much autonomy as it did during those years of turmoil without making the threat to secede seem real to the center, and this tactic was employed by many regional leaders in negotiations with Moscow. Wood fails to delve into the Kremlin’s perceptions as it granted significant powers to its constituent parts, hoping to prevent further degeneration of the federation.

What was the prime motivating factor for the first Chechen war a military bent on restoring its former glory, Yeltsin’s need for a victorious little war, or a genuine fear among Moscow’s political elite of Russia’s disintegration? Without a deeper discussion of the main actors’ perceptions, readers are left with only a catalogue of incriminations and finger-wagging.

Another shortcoming in the book is Wood’s reluctance to make broader comparisons by including other case studies. Kosovo, a case of a minority statelet supported by the international community, is mentioned only twice, depriving the book of a useful counter-example to the neglected Chechen Republic. Today, the majority of Western governments’ backing of Kosovo’s independence represents the kind of support Chechnya never achieved.

Yet there are many similarities between the two cases left unexplored by the author. An ardent supporter of a sovereign Kosovo, U.S. Representative Tom Lantos, stated at a hearing in April, “Serbia smashed any hope for [re-integration] in 1999 when it carried out its vicious, systematic, brutal, and premeditated ethnic cleansing directed against the Albanian majority in Kosova Serbia has lost all legitimacy to asseert sovereignty over Kosova.” This is similar to Wood’s moral argument. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, the head of the UN mission in Kosovo lamented, “We’ve entered into a letter of intent with the IMF, and have sound policies, but there is no access to credit facilities.” Because of the breakaway region’s unresolved status, investors and international lenders are scared away. Similar problems exist in Chechnya. In failing to compare Chechnya to Kosovo and other well-known cases adequately, Wood’s book loses some of its potential impact.

THE DEBATE CONTINUES

Wood’s final chapter details the most recent developments in Chechnya under the Kremlin’s plans for “Chechenization” of the conflict. Wood assails Moscow’s assertions that the region is returning to normal, exposing the falsified 2002 census (which, if compared to earlier Russian figures from 1999, shows the Chechen population growing by more than 750,000 after three years of the second war). Homelessness and unemployment are pervasive.

The author similarly demonstrates that the puppet government loyal to Moscow has been both a tragic and an illegitimate political force. The kadyrovtsy – the pro-Moscow paramilitary force under current Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov continue to steal and kill while “tasked with beating their countrymen into submitting to Moscow’s line.” Wood further elucidates some startling points about the Kremlin’s weak support for war-ravaged Chechnya, such as how Moscow spent nearly as much on sprucing up St. Petersburg for the city’s 300th anniversary as it did on reconstruction in ruined Grozny between 2001 and 2005. (One wonders, if Putin had been born in Grozny, would the Kremlin priorities have been different?)

For the author, Chechnya is far from returning to “normalcy,” and Wood predicts continued resistance. In January 2006, Putin declared that anti-terrorist operations were finished, but Wood demonstrates that the resistance is still strong. Despite recent setbacks caused by the killings of key rebel leaders, a core of fighters, 2,000 strong, remains active. While this may not look like a large force, Wood explains that the resistance regularly turns away volunteers, keeping a “much larger reserve” at the ready. Should one fighter fall, another is ready to take his place: “[T]he Chechens score a tactical victory with every moment they stave off defeat.”

Wood also describes the conflict’s corrosive effect on Russian society, especially in the North Caucasus. This includes the chill on Russian media, increased brutality and hazing in the armed forces, and the crackdown on civil liberties.

In his defense of Chechen independence, Wood joins historian Richard Pipes, who also has compared the Chechen conflict to Algeria and argues that it is in Russia’s own interest to grant Chechnya freedom. But similar supporters are few, and most Western observers of the conflict, like Anatol Lieven, Paul Murphy, and Tom de Waal, cite Russia’s egregious human rights violations but do not support Chechnya’s attempts at secession.

Chechnya: The Case for Independence helps to revive the debate about sovereignty for the Chechen Republic. But Wood ignores the chance to bolster his argument and simultaneously make it more relevant by bringing in global comparisons and drawing conclusions about ethnic and colonial independence movements in general. The short read would have benefited from a broader discussion of comparative politics. Nonetheless, it is a useful contribution to the study of the conflict, providing an up-to-date account of Chechnya’s trials and of the effect of the wars on Russian society. It also offers a withering, if underdeveloped, condemnation of Western neglect of the conflict.

Students of Russia and the Caucasus still can gain much from Wood’s telling of the Chechen wars, but ultimately, the author’s reluctance to flesh out his arguments undercuts the momentum of the first few chapters and the potential that the topic holds.