Order reigns in Grozny ?

The first Chechen war, in 1994-1996, ended in a Russian defeat, and the de facto withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. The second Chechen war, unleashed by Moscow, has now brought the Chechen capital, Grozny, under the tentative control of the Russian army. Throughout the siege of Grozny perhaps thirty thousand civilians huddled in basements, while the Russian army pounded the city into rubble. With the decision of the "boeviki," as the Russians term the Chechen forces, to abandon the city in April, Grozny's surviving inhabitants, now swelled by the arrival of twenty to thirty thousand refugees fleeing the depredations of the Russian army as it destroys Chechen villages in the mountains to the south of the capital, now face the risks of disease and starvation, as well as death or tortue at the hands of the occupying forces.

Despite the extravagant claims by the Putin regime that the war is over, it is likely that the boeviki will mount a furious resistance in the mountains of Chechnya, that they will infiltrate the shattered city of Grozny, waging guerilla war against the Russians, and that they will even carry the war into Russia itself with daring attacks against civilians. Meanwhile, even if the terror unleashed by Russian tanks, artillery, and aircraft, against the villages of Chechnya is successful, and order reigns in Grozny, it is quite likely that any Russian military victory will be accompanied by a vicious ethnic cleansing, reminiscent of the decision of Stalin to deport the Chechens en masse in 1944. There are already voices in military circles in Moscow (from which thousands of Chechens, and other members of ethnic groups from the Caucasus, have been deported since late October 1999, in a veritable orgy of xenophobia) to the effect that it would be dangerous to ever rebuild Grozny, or turn over local authority to Chechens, whether it be the de facto Chechen president, Maskhadov (whose authority was flouted by the boeviki), or even leaders handpicked by Moscow, such as the Chechen Mufti Akhmed Kadourev. Moreover, tensions between the Russian military in Grozny and the local pro-Russian Chechen militia have already led to confrontations. While "liberals" in Moscow favor negotiations with Maskhadov, and some kind of local autonomy, the nationalists (and this may include Putin himself) have concluded that any compromise will weaken the authority of the Russian state, raise the spectre of demands for de facto or even de jure independence from other ethnic minorities, and reduce the chances that Russia can regain control of the now economically vital region of the Transcaucasus, through which the oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea will pass. Thus, the reduction of Grozny to a pile of rubble, beneath which the corpses of thousands lie buried, may only be the prelude to a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The village of Komsomolskoe, to the south of Grozny, in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, to which the boeviki fled from Grozny, bears witness to that gruesome prospect. For almost a week in April, the village was systematically bombarded by Russian tanks, artillery, and aircraft, until every last building was razed. In the aftermath of the slaughter, six hundred and forty two bodies have been discovered, with countless others probably in the forests surrounding the village. According to the Associated Press, Russians on the scene have acknowledged that more than a hundred of the corpses had been decapitated, mutilated, or been executed with a bullet to the head -- this latter the technique by which hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in the forests of Poland and Byelorussia by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, or the thousands of Poles executed at Katyn by the NKVD, the very organization which transmogrified into the KGB, and now, in democratic Russia, into the FSB, which was on the scene in Komsomolskoe.

The scenes from Grozny and Komsomolskoe may at first glance remind one of the campaigns waged by Tsarist Russia in the same region in the nineteenth century, in particular the brutal war waged against the Chechens and their leader Shamil, the most skillful of the Caucasian leaders to resist the Russian advance. Yet while Russian troops are again burning and looting Chechen villages, and the boeviki fight in the name of Shamil, the present war is as different from its nineteenth century counterpart as ascendant capitalism is from decadent capitalism. The war waged by Tsarist Russia against Shamil in the 1840's and 1850's was structurally the same as the wars against the Indians in North America (or Argentina and Chile) in the same period. Shamil, like the Sioux leader Sitting Bull, led a struggle of a pre-capitalist, tribal, community, against the advance of a rapacious capitalist state seeking to open up a vast area for settlement and capitalist development. The war waged by Tsarist Russia in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century, like its North American counterpart on the Great Plains, was integrally linked to the primitive accumulation of capital. The present war in the Caucasus, is linked to the danger of the disagregation of a mature Russian capitalist state, and its effort to confront the challenge of the globalization of capital. Because of the ecomomic and political weakness of Russian capital, the ruling classes of entities like Chechnya, which had been loyal to Moscow throughout the existence of the Soviet Union can now mobilize their own population, which is no longer pre-capitalist, but like the inhabitants of rural communities throughout the capitalist world depends on the remittances of proletarians employed in distant industrial centers, in a bid for independence. The existence of natural resources, or the strategic control of vital areas (in the case of Chechnya, the locus of oil and gas pipelines) permits these local ruling classes to advance their own interests by seeking the support of other imperialist states or enterprises on the cutting edge of global capital. Given the inability of Russia to compete economically or financially with its rivals, this leaves military power as its only recourse. If Russia is not to lose control of the Caucasus, and Transcaucasus, to give up any hope of controlling the oil and gas wealth of the region, upon which the hopes for its own economic rejuvenation depend, it must assert its military power, and prevent the further disagregation of its territorial space. Lacking the power to control the financial circuits of capital, Russia can only respond to the economic power of its rivals (and in the first place, the US) by the control of land, of territory. Again, given the extreme weakness of Russian capital, the exercise of that control can neither be economic nor indirect (as is the case for the US), but rather military and brutal. Hence the recourse to the horrors of modern warfare, and ethnic cleansing.

What adds to the pressure on Moscow to unleash ethnic cleansing and even genocide in the Caucasus, is that the xenophobia which fuels it is -- in the absence of a growing economy -- the only means to win popular support for the Russian state. The designation of the racial "Other," in the form of the Chechen or the Muslim, as a danger to holy mother Russia; the identification of the Chechens with terrorism, which provided Moscow with the pretext for unleashing the second Chechen war, and the hunt for Caucasians [la chasse aux Caucasiens] orchestrated by the Kremlin, which led to the ejection of thousands of people from Russia's cities and industrial centers, have created an atmosphere of fear and hatred among masses of Russians, which not only helped assure the election of Putin as president, and widespread approval for the Chechen war, but provide a basis for popular acceptance of the ethnic cleansing upon which the Russian military has now embarked.

To the nationalism with which segments of the Chechen ruling class seeks to inflame its population against Russia and Russians, must be added the xenophobia with which the Russian ruling class seeks to mobilize its population. Whether Chechnya becomes another Afghanistan for Russia, or a mass grave for the people of Chechnya, we are witness to the inexorable tendency of decadent capitalism to turn the earth into a slaugterhouse.

Mac Intosh

[This text first published in Internationalist Perspective #37, fall 2000]