American Anthropologist
Volume 108, Number 2, June 2006
Sense and Sense Making in the Caucasus
A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Anna Politkovskaya.
Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky,
trans., with an introduction by Georgi Derluguian. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003. 232 pp.
Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography. Georgi
M. Derluguian. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005. 416 pp.
Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society. Valery Tishkov. Tatiana Sokolova,
trans., with a foreword by Mikhail
Gorbachev. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 284 pp.
BRUCE GRANT
New York University
The fall of the Soviet Union ushered in an era of openness that left
millions on edge. A hope for genuine social reform went hand in hand with
the knowledge that a long legacy of imperial conquest and authoritarian rule
would not go easily into the night, not least in Russia's North Caucasus
region, the polyglot "mountain of tongues" that is by no means limited to
but most famously includes Chechnya. Like the former Yugoslavia, the North
Caucasus region's experience with communism was a toxic mix of state-run
nationalist advocacy and state-run nationalist repression. In the
post-Soviet age, the area has become a central focus of debates over
sovereignty, human rights, and the complex management of one of the world's
longest running internationalist projects. Three new books on the "Caucasian
knot" bring us up to speed.
Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya begins the recent English translation
(2003) of her account of the second Chechen war (1999-present) not with the
scorched-earth battle maneuvers we have come to expect-the Fallujahs and the
Mai Lais (although Chechnya has known many of these in the last decade)-but
with the lives of the civilians who have been caught in their cross fires.
Traveling to Chechnya each month for three years between 1999 and 2001-a
time when many of her colleagues there perished- she treats Russian and
Chechen, resident and refugee, with a practiced composure that offers the
reader a window onto chaos in wartime. This tour of everyday life moves
through hunger and tuberculosis, local informers leveraging real and
invented opportunity to court favor with anyone offering food or protection,
elderly women tortured until their adult children produce ransom, officers
who explain their use of
outdoor garbage pits as human-holding tanks as the directive of absent
higher-ups, the targeted killings of Russian officials responsible for
documenting military crimes, and the endless line of willing, nameless
middlemen offering the return of the living and the dead, but especially the
dead, "knowing that there is no greater torment for a Chechen than not to
observe funeral rites" (p. 68).
Amidst all the senselessness that Chechnya signals, it is the pursuit of
wartime logics that occupies Politkovskaya and her subjects. Does the
conflict in Chechnya have a purpose? Certainly, Politkovskaya offers, in an
extended chapter that tracks the profits made from defense contracting, the
disposal of the region's ruined but still resource-rich oil fields, the
misappropriations of funds designated for humanitarian relief and
reconstruction, and, not least, the mutual advantage found between Chechen
warlords and Russian security officers who are perhaps the only ones to see
tractability in their continuing, intractable conflicts. Thus, rather than
supporting the Soviet-trained, relatively pro-Russian Chechen leader, Aslan
Maskhadov (killed after the writing of this book in February 2005 under
disputed circumstances), Russian federal forces, Politkovskaya reasons, have
found more profitably allied enemies in the "Easternizing" or "pro-Arab"
faces of Shamil Basayev, who openly claimed credit for several attacks on
Russia, including the siege of Moscow's Dubrovka Theater in October 2002 and
the attack on the school in Beslan in September 2004. Not even Putin
himself, by Politkovskaya's wager, seems to be in a position to do much
about this. Politkovskaya briefly urges the creation of an international
protectorate, but a nod to the many failed proposals to date leaves these
windmills for other times.
Sense and senselessness are the protagonists of this book. One Chechen woman
asks Most of all, we want to know the rules of the game. We want to
understand which of us you don't like. And why? What should we be tortured
for? What are the reasons you've been commanded to kill? To kidnap? Right
now we don't understand anything, and everyone is being destroyed in
turn-those who were with theWahhabis and those who were against them. And
most of all, those in the middle, who weren't with anyone. [p. 117]
A man named Vakha, who lies with Politkovskaya as they crouch in an open
field during a carpet bombing, flatly offers, "Every time the helicopters
come, I take my folder, get some paper, and pretend to write. I think it
helps" (p. 33). Another woman, whose son has been kidnapped, ventures that
if the corpse is not tossed into an open ditch within five to seven days of
capture, it means the prisoner might still be alive (p. 114). Or not.
In a useful introduction to the book-offering the historical contexts and
bigger pictures that Politkovskaya eschews-sociologist Georgi Derluguian
praises the author for finding "the moral strength to pity [even] the
brutalized Russian soldiers and police, many of whom indeed suffer from
severe psychological disorders, alcoholism, and drug abuse" (p. 24). But it
must be said that the book is, with few exceptions, a study of villains and
victims. Although far more evenhanded than most observers, whose a priori
defenses of the countless Russian or Chechen "sides" in the conflict preempt
full engagement ("We're beasts, even to each other" [p. 41], Politkovskaya's
Chechen respondents assert), she leaves little doubt that it is the
collective humanity of Chechens that has fared better in this battle of evil
against evil. For example, she depicts Chechen children who refuse to
abandon their parents and who, in so doing, create dignity in squalor. In
her account it is Russian children who flee the republic leaving their older
relatives to starve (p. 111). The criminal perpetrators whom she interviews,
whether of Russian or Chechen descent (directors of orphanages who steal
from children; Chechnya's former Moscow-appointed leader of Stalinist bent,
Akhmed Kadyrov), are exclusively in the hire of the Russian side.
As with many war correspondents who wrestle with the lure of the
battlefield, Politkovskaya describes a field assignment that "rushed inside
our bodies like hormones, all too often taking us nowhere, into a dark room
without doors" (p. 199). Yet she is frank that even her closest friends in
Moscow remain blank to these stories, a blankness that is, ultimately, as
harsh as the "politeWestern applause" she receives
from audiences in London, Geneva, and Los Angeles when she ends each invited
talk with the same line, "Remember, people are continuing to die in Chechnya
every day. Including today" (p. 29).
Politkovskaya begins her book with a nunca mas (lit., "never again")
bravado, assuring readers that "the classic . . . excuse of not being there
and not taking part in anything personally won't work" (p. 27) and pledging
that "the time will come when everyone will speak of [these atrocities]" (p.
78). Despite the courage of reporters like Politkovskaya, however, those
things that should "never again" happen
continue to happen with great regularity, and most who find themselves out
of harm's way consistently demonstrate that they are in no hurry to think
about it. Perhaps the as-yet-unwritten ethnography of war will come in
mapping these driving layers of recognition, misrecognition, and
nonresponses to warfare among those who read, listen to, and sometimes even
applaud the messengers.
If Politkovskaya's writing adheres uncomfortably close to the bounded
battlefield of Chechnya, Georgia Derluguian's sweeping study takes the
Caucasus as axiomatic of the darker sides of Soviet collapse and moves with
almost unbounded energy. Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (2005) is
a revisiting of the golden ages of macrohistorical sociology via an
experimental, world-system biography of a man named Yuri Shanibov. Born in
the 1930s to a modest rural family, Shanibov went on through the
internationalist
boarding schools of early Soviet mass education to become the Director of a
local Palace of Culture, a Secretary of Propaganda for the Communist Youth
League, a corruption-fighting young district attorney, a lecturer in
scientific communism, and, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the President
(or tamada, "toastmaster") of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the
Caucasus. Ultimately, this "fearsome
Circassian rebel" (p. 1) became a dissident activist in his home city of
Nalchik, as well as a celebrated rebel fighter in Chechnya and Abkhazia.
Reading Shanibov's biography as a paradigm for one man's changing fortunes
in the struggles between center and periphery, Derluguian's objective is to
fold the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' (USSR) longsequestered, Second
World status into the broader, shared
predicament of other developmentalist states around the globe. Born himself
in the North Caucasus, and now a professor at Northwestern University,
Derluguian returned to Chechnya in 1997, as well as to neighboring regions
in subsequent visits. The result is an uncommon mix of the personal, the
local, and the global that takes the reader through the shifting lexicons of
the Soviet Union's enormously important regional intelligentsias, the ruined
fields of Grozny, and the former rebel colleagues of the still-thriving
Shanibov. Area specialists should want to read this book for its inventive
use of Caucasus field interviews, archival sources, and personal experience;
generalists should be reading this book for its efforts to take the Soviet
20th century beyond Cold War narratives.
The book's delightful title somewhat misleads. Although we learn early on
that a Russian translation of Pierre Bourdieu's Choses dites (1987), which
Shanibov read while recuperating in a Moscow military hospital, became, by
his telling, "the second most important book inmylife after the Holy Quran"
(p. 61), the whys and the wherefores of this euphoric engagement are never
brought up. Shanibov cannot be called a "secret" admirer by any stretch, as
he presses the amazed Derluguian to convey his appreciations to Bourdieu
(who himself later responds in a note of friendly puzzlement). The unmarked
riddle of the title is why we should see Shanibov's reading tastes as
strange at all, when Derluguian demonstrates so well how men and women from
across provincial elites joined in the USSR's voracious consumption of
global high culture. After the conservative restoration by Brezhnevite rule,
therefore, lesser-known dissidents across the Soviet Union spent much of the
1970s as Shanibov did, at home in Kabardino-Balkaria amidst a rich mix of
"jazz, yoga, the guitar ballads of Vysotsky and Okudjava, the films of
Tarkovsky, Wajda, Bergman, and Fellini, the prose of Hemingway, Remarque,
and Saint-Exupery" (p. 299).
Bourdieu is more clearly an inspiration to Derluguian himself, however, with
results that yield deeply original comparison between socialist societies
and their counterparts in the developing world. Bourdieu's rather loose
renderings of social capital are applied here with precision to analyze how
Soviet-era grassroots oppositional figures were influenced by the events of
1968 across the globe, and how those men and women later leveraged their
roles in the socialist intelligentsia into postsocialist leadership
positions. Bourdieu's focus on social hierarchy, and particularly his
interest in the "sub-proletariat," which Derluguian glosses as "the most
awkward non-class" (p. 150), offers a central analytical space to the
uneducated younger generations left behind by a system in tatters. The
result is a kind of demographic
Caucasus cocktail, with a wide range of local intelligentsias ready to wrest
power from the Soviet leviathan, backed by the often-explosive driving
forces of subproletarian discontent (p. 217).
Although the world-systems sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein and the
revisionisms of Charles Tilly and Randall Collins are the most frequent
touchstones in this extended analysis, the book walks in the shadows of Tom
Nairn perhaps most strikingly, interrogating the role of global inequity in
forcing communities to nationalist ends. In the same way that Nairn
frequently argued that the economically disenfranchised society mobilizes
ethnicity because people are all it has left to go on, Derluguian reasons
that
The absence in contemporary geoculture of legitimate ideological
alternatives, and the end of geopolitical competition of the Cold War. . . .
deny potential revolutionaries the resources of political recognition and
international solidarity that were enjoyed by the national-liberation
guerillas of the 1950s and 1970s. What remains as bases of contention are
various networks of a predominantly local character and traditional
solidarities embedded in ethnic and religious communities. [p. 286]
Derluguian sees the key to a less-violent future in governments that care
for their proletariats, in rationally directed world markets, and in
"substantive democratization, rather than a mere emulation of elections for
the sake of international observers" (p. 321).
Although even this renovated world-systems theory may seem like old hat to
some, it makes for pathbreaking rereadings of Caucasus history. Long after
the tenth-century Arab geographer al-Mas`udi found himself bewildered by the
region's intense social pluralisms, inaugurating the Caucasus as the
proverbial "mountain of tongues," scholars of all stripes still miss the
forest in their considerable struggles
to count, name, and not least of all understand the trees. By contrast,
Derluguian not only foregounds the considerably shared cultural currencies
of this small world area but also shows how the progenitors of violent
conflicts in seemingly closed societies such as Chechnya have very openly
emulated everyone from Che Guevara to Baltic independence activists' efforts
to break free of Russian rule. Thus, one Chechen rebel leader admits that
the famously belligerent zikr-the Caucasus version of a men's Sufi dancing
circle,
regularly performed in city squares across Grozny as collective taunts to
and for Russian media-had never once been part of Chechen urban life until
activists saw the effects of Estonian protests on central television (p.
53). If this is world-systems theory, the Caucasus needs more of it.
Valery Tishkov's Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society (2004) would seem the
ideal book to combine the
aims of both Politkovskaya and Derluguian. "So much has been written about
the war in Chechnya, such torrents of words-clever, silly, and mostly
secondhand-that it is hard to hear and still harder to understand what has
really been happening there in the lives of the people actually involved in
the conflict" (p. 211), he writes. "I therefore see my mission to lie in
empowering through expression those individuals
whose voices, whose visions, are least of all heard in the course of a
conflict, who are least of all responsible for it, but who suffer the most
from it" (p. 215). Along the way, what he voices most clearly is the
frustration he shares with many Russians who have found the Chechen wars to
be unfairly
equated with the entire foreign policy of their country, not least by
critics in other countries who have their own suppression of secessionist
struggles to answer for. Like Derluguian, he bristles at the languages of
closure that confine Chechnya to isolated prescriptions of war and peace
rather than analyses of global social forms. "I see little difference," he
suggests,
between [the Chechen] experience and that of other peoples of the North
Caucasus and other regions of the former Soviet Union, or for that matter
the experience of the French Canadians, Northern Irish, Kurds, New Zealand
Maoris, American Indians, Hawaiians, or hundreds of other peoples who went
through, to put it gently, asymmetric power relations within a single state
framework. [p. 213]
It is a loss that he does not pursue this line of thought further in the
book.
Tishkov was trained as a specialist in Native peoples of North America. He
served briefly as Minister of Nationalities under Yeltsin in 1992 and, in
his continuing capacity as Director of the Institute of Ethnology and
Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, took part in efforts to
negotiate a settlement between Russia and Chechnya from 1994 to 1996.With
his training elsewhere and his last trip to Chechnya in 1995, he wrestles
with the value of commentary by yet another "outsider" (pp. 1, 3, 5), going
so far as to say "I am full of misgivings about having undertaken this
study" (p. xv). His solution is the "delegated interview"-a series of
conversations conducted primarily in late 1996 by a hired group of four
Chechen field assistants and rendered with the aid of a Moscow-based Chechen
graduate student.
The puzzle of this project is how little it yields. Tishkov promises
provocation when he notes that his scholarly efforts "[do] not mean that I
will be glossing over my political position, which will become clear soon
enough" (p. xv). Established Caucasus scholars who volunteered their own
field recordings to him are described as "pointlessly stereotypical and
superficial" (p. 4, cf. p. 220). Yet the discernible political position that
Tishkov ultimately takes is a mild one, attributing blame to all sides and
urging the recognition of internal differentiation among warring parties.
"As we see from my data, during the war the Chechens were not united in
their struggle with Moscow, and Russian society, too, was deeply divided in
its views of the disastrous war" (p. 222). Despite his privileged position
as a leading negotiator in repeated efforts at a settlement, he makes no
comment on how the current crisis might be ended, except to lament the
appeal of the nation-state as a sovereign ambition shared by so many.
Tishkov's firm embrace of a literally minded constructivism (pp. 10, 49) is
one that has bedeviled many before him. As if flirting with the ghost of
Margaret Thatcher, who once famously pronounced that there is no such thing
as society, he advocates an actor-centered approach in which "there is no
social or even ethnographic reality that can be called the 'Chechen people'
or 'Chechen nation,' and likewise no sociopolitical monolith to be
identified as 'Russia' . . . or, even less so, 'the Russians.' Among those
directly involved in the conflict, there are those who want to fight and
those who do not, no matter under what banner or command the war is waged"
(p. 229). Yet social imaginaries do come to matter when he advocates, by
contrast, that "violence can be better understood if viewed as a function of
the values and norms existing in a given society" (p. 149). The reader is
left to ask: What, then, are the values or norms inherent to Russia,
Chechnya, the United Nations, or any of the conflict's many proponents that
should be better understood?
Islam is dismissed as a causal agent early on, and Tishkov adds that "the
evidence my research partners and I collected shows that for the prewar
(1990s) generation of Chechens, neither their ethnic identity nor the fact
of deportation constituted a central element of their identity. As for
tribal (teip) affiliation, very few of them made reference to it" (p. 219).
Yet along the way, both Chechen respondents and academic colleagues only a
decade later make it clear that clan affiliations are in regular circulation
(pp. 161, 222). The unstated suggestion is that if clan (or any aspect of
culture, to that end) matters, it has only become so in the last ten years.
Quite apart from whether this logic obtains-not least among a people whose
experience of mass deportation in 1944 and exile through 1957 would seem to
offer more than enough ground for collective solidarities-we do not get the
chance to discover how this has taken place, what new configurations such a
change suggests, and the consequences it bodes.
Beyond their contributions to these recent histories of Chechnya and the
Caucasus-a world region in which almost constant foreign invasions since the
fourth century B.C.E. have raised militarism and the languages of social
closure to high art-each of these books demonstrates the need for a
retooling of the perceived boundedness of conflicts as well as the position
of the critics who map them. Politkovskaya is the willing outsider who
leverages her Russianness to push compatriots to recognize their own hand in
a Chechen struggle that most are eager to disavow. Tishkov is the reluctant
outsider, expressing the contrary urge to compartmentalize when he argues
that the Chechen fighters of the first war (1994-96) were never more than a
band of 3,000-5,000 people (p. 13). Yet on or off the battlefield, both
these authors are very much inside, around, and of the war: Each has acted
as professional negotiators in efforts at settlement. With resolute
cheerfulness, Derluguian comes closest to resisting these privileged
categories by calling his book the life history of "a peripheral provincial
sociologist who had admired a famous sociologist from the world-system's
core written by a sociologist whose own life has spanned both core and
periphery" (p. 19). Despite the best efforts such as this, it is a paradox
that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Caucasus may be discovering its
most tenacious languages of closure yet.
REFERENCE CITED
Bourdieu, Pierre
1987 Choses dites (In other words). Paris: Editions de Minuit.
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