Winter is Coming (10 page)

Most European nations are largely populated by the ethnic groups that have been there for centuries. Despite decades of immigration that has increased with European Union expansion and the lowering of many borders, France is still full of Frenchmen and Germany of Germans. The borders of many Central and Eastern European countries were rearranged over and over by force throughout the twentieth century, and even though many groups were finally allowed to go their own ways to independence in the 1990s, there are still a few odd or controversial areas, though most are blessedly peaceful today.

For the most part, disputes are agreements to disagree between friendly neighbors or internal independence movements inside stable democratic nations where ethnic passions are argued in the press or taken nonviolently to the polls. Many Catalans in Spain and many Scots in the United Kingdom might disagree about just how satisfactory the arrangements are, of course, as would many Quebecois in Canada.

The United States is a very different thing. It’s a continent-spanning nation built from scratch by millions of immigrants from every part of the world on top of the bones of its native population. (Argentina has a similar history.) The brutal treatment of the Native

American population is not a popular topic for discussion in the United States today, I have found, and it’s not hard to see why. It is as disturbing and embarrassing as slavery to many Americans, which is why it was a popular topic for instruction in the USSR. It was very important for Communist ideology to show we were superior in every way, including morally. (And intellectually, which was why chess was so heavily promoted, fortunately for me.)

Soviet propaganda was also expert in “whataboutism,” a term coined to describe how Soviet leaders would respond to criticism of Soviet massacres, forced deportations, and gulags with “What about how you Americans treated the Native Americans and the slaves?” or something similar. For the most part it was a transparent and shabby rhetorical trick of deflection and changing the topic. As Putin has revived so many Soviet methods and traditions, whataboutism is popular once again today thanks to Russia’s cadres of trained Internet trolls. Scarcely a critical tweet of mine on Russia goes by without a few instant replies saying that the United States (or Israel) did something similar, or worse, or something entirely unrelated but also quite bad. This technique is always popular with the leaders and supporters of autocracies because they have no answers for their own crimes. For example, Arab states often talk as if Israel’s conduct with the Palestinians somehow justifies their own repressive regimes.

The Soviets had many good reasons to want to change the topic. In fact, tens of millions of reasons that became clear as soon as the USSR began to crumble. The works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had already documented the horrors happening inside the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. They were banned in the USSR, and their author exiled, not only because they impugned these men but because of Solzhenitsyn’s conclusions. He made the strong case that the entire Soviet system could only function due to coercion and the threat of imprisonment, as well as the free labor provided by the gulags. But there was much more to what Stalin had done to pacify his patchwork empire, and it would come back to haunt Russia and the world.

The United States is called a melting pot or a salad bowl to describe how its diverse waves of immigrants have mixed together as proud Americans. In an amusing tradition that probably goes back to the first ship to reach Plymouth Rock after the
Mayflower,
each generation likes to complain that the latest group of immigrants is far worse than their own group was, that they won’t work or won’t assimilate or are in some other way inferior. And yet despite being a nation built on conquest and despite all the squabbling, America keeps churning along, turning new immigrant ingredients into apple pies. I admire this quality greatly as a recent arrival myself, now with a green card despite a dubious job history of “thirteenth world chess champion” and “pro-democracy activist.”

The Soviet Union was a very different creation, and food metaphors fall short. I would say the USSR was a Frankenstein’s monster with mismatched body parts inexpertly sewn on to a Russian head. Instead of assimilating into a shared identity, most of these disparate republics were subjugated into a common Soviet Communist culture (if that word can even be used) by the sheer force of totalitarian bureaucracy and media. For all the Bolshevik talk about the obvious superiority of Marxism-Leninism, state terror and military force were the primary tools used in building and maintaining the Soviet empire.

The total failure of the USSR to move beyond that legacy of invasion and repression in seventy long years was clearly reflected by the eagerness with which the various republics detached from the rotting head of the Kremlin as soon as they had a chance. Even Ukraine, the ancient home of the first Eastern Slav proto-Russian nation-state and with so much in common with Russia, quickly ran for the exit to completely crush Gorbachev’s hope for a new union.

There was also a power-grab incentive factor in many cases. Regional bureaucrats and party bosses dreamed of being autocrats and realized they would have more power and a greater ability to line their pockets in independent states, even if their economies and regimes remained largely dependent on Moscow.

Still, even the Central Asian republics that had tentatively agreed to stick things out with Gorbachev’s new USSR-lite eventually abandoned him.

The fifteen former Soviet republics quickly recognized by the United Nations as independent nations turned out to be the least of Russia’s problems. No fewer than five others declared their independence around the same time as the fifteen but failed to achieve it. Most are known to westerners only due to the fact that they remain disputed regions that occasionally flare into violence. Abkhazia and South Ossetia were semiautonomous regions of Georgia within the USSR and both claimed statehood when the USSR began to fall apart. After off and on conflicts they both instead remained as part of Georgia and were later exploited by Putin to provoke the 2008 war with Georgia. Both are now essentially occupied Russian zones, though still recognized by the UN as parts of Georgia.

Transnistria and Gagauzia had roughly similar experiences with the USSR and the newly independent Moldova. (I hope residents and experts forgive my simplifications for the point of expediency.) Putin’s Russia has similarly meddled in these autonomous zones, as always, stepping into any nearby power vacuum. Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed area between Azerbaijan and Armenia, also declared itself an independent state in 1991. Its current status is officially Azerbaijani territory, but it is de facto independent and essentially functions as part of Armenia.

But we are not quite done, and I have saved the worst for last. I think only real specialists will recognize the name Ichkeria. It is seldom used anymore, and to my knowledge was rarely used even when its full name, Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, was still valid. That is, if it was ever valid, which of course is the question that led to two wars, thousands of terrorist attacks, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of them civilians, and almost all of them inside Russia.

Most people today have heard of Chechnya, and always for negative reasons. Its name is associated with the export of brutal mafiosos, militants, and terrorists. It was back in the news recently when it was revealed that the Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, were Chechen Americans. Home to over a million people, predominantly Muslim, tiny Chechnya fought two vicious wars for independence from Moscow. The first started at the end of 1994, when Yeltsin tired of Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev’s anti-Moscow consolidation of power in his unrecognized republic. In the long tradition of overconfident leaders of large nations attacking small local forces in the mountains, the Russian offensive turned into an embarrassing quagmire that turned into a full-scale war that lasted twenty months. An estimated one hundred thousand civilians were killed and close to twenty thousand Russian troops. Human rights violations by the Russian forces were epidemic, and the Chechens turned to hostage-taking outside of Chechnya.

The brutality of the war and the terrible destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny helped enrage and radicalize a generation of Chechens, who already had no love lost for Russia. Chechnya and its neighbors, Ingushetia to the west and Dagestan to the east, had declared independence from Russia as a united mountain republic in 1917 only to be yoked into the Soviet Union by force four years later. Despite the honorable participation by the region’s inhabitants against the Nazis in World War II, Stalin had nearly all of them, close to half a million people, rounded up and deported to Kazakhstan in 1944. They were allowed to return in 1957 as part of the de-Stalinization process, but a huge number had starved or been killed.

It’s no coincidence that most of these disputed and conflicted regions are located in the Caucasus. (Not Moldova, which is on the west side of the Black Sea between Ukraine and Romania.) There are patches upon the patchwork quilt of the region and innumerable bloody rivalries both ancient and new. This contentious region reaches from my birthplace of Azerbaijan in the south on the Iranian border and the Caspian Sea over to Georgia on the Black Sea with Armenia in between and Turkey to the south. In the north, on the Russian side of the border, it includes Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia as well as Kabardino-Balkaria (home of Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe) and north to the Kalmyk Steppe. It is home to over fifty ethnic groups, dozens of languages, and nearly every kind of religion.

Letting Chechnya and its ultraviolent neighbors become independent was never going to appeal to Russian leaders. It wasn’t just that they were convenient punching bags to rally the domestic base. Nor did they have much in the way of resources. The problem was, if they became independent nations they would instantly gain the rights and protections of independent nations, free to make allies, sign treaties, and complain to the United Nations—all with no way these broken states could control the flow of violence. Dealing with a failed Russian state was bad. Dealing with a failed neighboring country was much worse, a lesson the Soviets had learned in Afghanistan.

Not to defend Yeltsin on the matter, but another factor made a split nearly impossible: the lack of clear borders. The USSR was made up of republics and the borders between them were quite clear. When the USSR broke up there were very few conflicts between the new nations over geography. But inside of Russia the borders had never been drawn so clearly since they had no sacred meaning inside the vast republic. So when the Chechnya-Ingushetia region declared for independence in 1991 nobody was sure exactly what that would mean. The breakaway’s leaders insisted their new nation might extend all the way to Stavropol, two hundred kilometers west of Grozny, and it was difficult to deny their claim or make an alternative one based on anything concrete. Where did Chechnya begin and end? And what of neighboring Dagestan? It was a Pandora’s box. Chechnya was also unique because there were no external influences on its rebellion. All the rest had neighbors pushing for or against rebellion in one way or another. But Chechnya’s revolt was entirely internal.

It is tempting to jump ahead to the second Chechen war that brought an unknown prime minister named Vladimir Putin to the presidency. This first war not only set the stage for the second, but it is also an important illustration of the light-handed way the West treated Russia during the 1990s. Thanks to the magic of e-books I can tell you that Bill Clinton’s memoir,
My Life,
mentions Chechnya exactly four times in its thousand-plus pages. Even if you discount the first half of the book that takes place before he became president, this is astonishing. It is also an accurate representation of where Chechnya and other global hot spots ranked on Clinton’s radar while he was in office, especially during his first term. (The 1994 Rwandan genocide earns a few more mentions, mostly in the form of his regret at not having done anything to intervene.)

It’s not as if the first Chechen war was widely ignored at the time. Human rights groups and the Western media covered the atrocities as closely as they could. The Russian military’s failure to pacify the region as quickly as promised became an embarrassing issue for Boris Yeltsin as the 1996 election approached, forcing him to talk about it at public appearances. Remember, this was back when Russia still had a free media. The word “Chechnya” itself would practically be banned from the Russian press soon after Putin took power. Yeltsin even spent some awkward moments standing next to Clinton at press conferences in 1995 and 1996 answering questions about Chechnya, mostly denying that violence was taking place despite the overwhelming reports of war crimes.

It’s a remarkable feeling to read those news conference transcripts today. A Russian president, pressed to answer tough questions from the Russian press! You could be forgiven for forgetting that such a moment had ever existed in Russian history. At their conference in Moscow on May 10, 1995, one reporter got straight to the point after hearing Yeltsin’s usual dismissive remarks.

reporter
: “President Clinton, you’ve just heard President Yeltsin describe the situation in Chechnya in a way that may be at odds with news dispatches coming from the part of the country describing a massacre. And I wondered if—what your reaction is to his description, whether you accept it, if not why not, and what impact these reports of terrible things there may be having on the countries eager to join NATO, and what you would have to say to him about that?”

Clinton’s response referred to how the civilian casualties and the prolonged fighting in Chechnya had “troubled the rest of the world greatly and have had an impact in Europe on the attitudes of many countries about what is going on here and about future relationships.” He said he had urged Yeltsin to make a cease-fire and “bring this to a speedy resolution,” concluding that “it’s been a difficult thing for them [Russia] as well.”