Dagestan and the Future of Russia
When people ask me why it is that Western leaders fear the dissolution of Russia, the trite answer is to lose nukes. The northern Caucasus offers more of an in-depth explanation. I have been watching that area for years because I remember my long introduction to Russian history. Granted, we spent scant attention on the Caucasus. After all, most Russian history concentrated on Moscow and St Petersburg. In other words, it mostly did ethnic Russians and very little of the colonized peoples that formed the Federation.
There are some reasons for that. The first is that in the 1990s, we were taught that colonialism was only a Western matter. It could not exist in Russia. Well, it does exist, and the Caucasus are part of it. We need to pay attention to this. Some not-so-well-meaning people excuse Russian imperialism at every turn.
So, the following posts come from the Dagestan channel and Volymedia again. There are concrete examples of what could await the world with the breakup of the Federation and at least a northern Caucasus Sultanate driven by Shariah law. It could quickly devolve into another Afghanistan. Realize, Vladimir Putin promised to both pacify and Russify these strategic Russian regions. Given their importance, they would have spent some more cash and improved the locals' lives.
So first, this post from the Dagestan channel raises the issue of who is responsible:
“There is a saying that a son is not responsible for his father. Controversial saying. But there is no thesis that the father is not responsible for the children,” said the head of Dagestan Sergei Melikov.
He believes that the head of the Sergokalinsky district, Magomed Omarov, is responsible for the actions of his sons, who were participants in the terrorist attack.
“I believe that on each of us, on you, on me, this is a natural process of human evolution, when we are responsible for those whom we raise. And those whom we educate must strictly follow the educational canons that we have laid down in them.
And here’s something else. We live in the Caucasus. And here there is a violation of all traditional principles. Where is the respect and reverence for elders?
If Omarov himself is not involved. Why did he, as the head of a municipality, as a member of the United Russia party, as a high-level leader, who has been in the position of head of a municipality for several years, whose responsibilities include taking care of the entire population of the district, did not pay attention to children and missed them so much that they became murderers. This is the first thing.
Secondly. Where is the tradition that elders must accompany the younger ones and lead them away or prevent them from committing unworthy acts, especially crimes.
Where is the observance of traditional religious values, no matter Muslim or otherwise? Or what: they prayed in the morning, then fired a cartridge into a cartridge and went to shoot unarmed people?
I believe that there should be full responsibility here.
As for administrative matters: he was relieved of his post and expelled from the party. I will not comment on the degree of his participation and guilt — this is the task of the investigative authorities.”
Melikov gave instructions to audit the personal files of everyone who holds leadership positions in the republic, including deputies.
The head of the republic considers it necessary to find out whether in Dagestan there are representatives of executive authorities or deputies who “artificially create this system, for which we have been criticized for many years, I mean clanism, do not distinguish family traditions and dynasties from clanism.” It is necessary to evaluate how effectively someone who represents a certain dynasty works, the head of the region noted.
They will blame a former official for how he raised his now, very much, adult children. This is a pattern I have noticed. No, a thirty-year-old is not a child.
But this is also an excellent way to brush all this under the rug. Blame Dad, and we all can ignore this. However, Volymedia, once again, comes to the rescue:
The revolt of the princes. Part 1
The recent terrorist attacks in Makhachkala and Derbent differ from all previous terrorist attacks in one important detail. The six killed terrorists were successful people by Dagestan (and average Russian standards) people. All were over 30. All were from wealthy and quite influential Dagestan families. Everyone worked, and the sons and one of Magomed Omarov’s nephews owned businesses (a construction company, a company installing boilers and heating equipment, a fashionable cafe). Until 2021, Omarov’s second nephew had a very successful career in regional politics.
Kagirov participated in two MMA fights, winning both, and was for some time in the crowd of Makhachkala golden youth. That is, all terrorists are strikingly different in their biographies and lifestyles from typical suicide bombers.
Usually those who have nothing to lose resort to suicidal attacks. There is no money to support the family, no money for an operation for someone close, there are no loved ones at all, because everyone is dead or dead, there are no prospects and future if you don’t take some decisive step. Another common type of suicide bomber is a young man, no matter whether he is a man or a woman, without any education, who has no or has broken ties with his family, who has fallen under the influence of terrorists who have fooled him with stories about Guria and glory through the ages. The third type, more rare, are those who are forced to become suicide bombers by holding someone close to them hostage or by promising to “forgive their debts.”
The six “princes,” as they are already called in some telegram channels, would seem to have nothing in common with typical suicide bombers. It would seem, because there is still one common feature — the absence of a future.
It sounds kind of strange. The guys have money, health, connections, how is it that there is no future? Yes, half of Russian youth dream of such initial data. To make it clearer, let’s look at it in detail.
The current golden Dagestan youth (in place of Dagestan you can safely put any other North Caucasian republic, except North Ossetia) has a very clear ceiling in life. Some business at the level of their region, some, sometimes really high, income. The prospects for a political career are determined by the situation of the family and the father. In the case of the Omarov brothers, they could eventually become functionaries, but not leaders, of the regional “United Russia”.
If you really want to go to Moscow or St. Petersburg, then the support of the diaspora is vital here, without which FSB officers will immediately come to people from the Caucasus in large Russian cities and, especially, the capital. Even with the support of the diaspora, after moving to the conditional Moscow, the ceiling of North Caucasian youth is much lower than that of the same Russians from Tatarstan, Bashkiria or Syzran. Because growth and success are severely limited by a regime that does not trust people from the Caucasus, and by established relations between its own clans. And Russian society itself is far from being kind to “Caucasians.” And those same “Caucasians” perfectly understand these rules of the game by the age of 30, and those who are smarter, even earlier.
Now imagine that young people growing up in successful Dagestani families see a discrepancy between what their elders say and do at home and how they behave in public. This is not about some immoral everyday actions, but simply about the fact that at home a member of United Russia from Dagestan, Karachay-Cherkessia or Ingushetia can call the Russian government occupation in front of their children and talk about radical Islam and Sharia. And then make speeches in public about Russia’s civilizational role in the development of the North Caucasus, congratulate voters on Easter and demand that radical spiritual leaders be imprisoned or expelled. This not only confuses the young man’s guidelines, it deprives him of them. And then he breaks off relations with his parents and looks for his own path. Which will lead him not to an “elite” apartment in Makhachkala or another city, not to trips to the “European” on weekends, but to something more. Something that will answer the question of why he even exists on this Earth.
@Volyamedia
There needs to be a solution to the way Russia works internally. The Caucasus has always been poor. They are also amongst the last regions to be absorbed into the Empire. The road to Derbent, for example, is a product of the needs of the Russian army in the late 19th century. It was not built for commerce or connections.
It served some of these functions later on.
The Caucasus was never fully pacified. Not even during the Soviet period. After the fall of the USSR, Chechnya failed to gain independence. Dagestan has been on a low boil ever since.
This post points not only to the racism Dagestanis feel elsewhere in Russia but that they are frozen in place. This is even well-connected families.
I am suggesting that people can be radicalized for many reasons. One of them is a sense of betrayal or doors closed because they are Muslims from Dagestan.
The second post is just as important as well:
The revolt of the princes. Part 2
One meeting with a charming, wise and listening representative of any of the radical religious movements, and the young man is easily carried away by new goals, which are much larger than anything written in his family. Larger and more honest, as his new friends and moral authorities carefully but persistently convince him of.
You will not have to lie to others and yourself, you choose the path of a warrior, the path of struggle, and so on.
For a person who grew up in a traditional Caucasian family, who does not have the habit of reading anything more complex than a school textbook, who does not know where and how to learn more about the world around him and about himself, all these speeches of his new acquaintances will sound like the ultimate truth. And he, as expected, will become a faithful associate, comrade-in-arms… suicide bomber. He himself will offer ideas and plans for the fight against infidels and occupiers, as, it seems, happened with Osman Omarov.
For young people, who have been accustomed since childhood to the fact that their family and themselves matter, that they are important, that they are rich, achieving success (personal, not necessarily material) and determining their own role in life is more important than for their peers from ordinary or poor families. The struggle for survival does not take up all their time and energy. But if a Moscow, St. Petersburg or Yekaterinburg guy with such introductory data before the war went to the so-called Navalny, then a guy from Makhachkala, Sergokala, Cherkessk or Nalchik went to the Islamists. And because I didn’t know about Navalny, and because there he would be a stranger, but here he remains one of his own.
We are not trying to evoke pity or sympathy for terrorists or justify their actions. We show that the social relations that have developed in general in the Russian Federation and especially in the North Caucasus push those who are not ready to live by false rules into the sphere of simple and cruel decisions that are beyond the scope of any (not just Russian) laws. Kill police and government officials because they are occupiers, kill priests and burn churches because they are infidels and are imposing someone else’s way of life.
The six killed terrorists are not the only representatives of the “golden” Dagestani youth who want a different future for themselves. According to sources in law enforcement agencies currently working in the republic, there are other groups. How many such groups there are, how many people there are in them, are just beginning to be discovered. But they are finding out using the harsh methods customary for the security forces, which will certainly lead to an increase in the number of supporters of the new terrorist force in the North Caucasus. The wholesale checks on the families of local bosses launched by the FSB, NAC and the Dagestani authorities, according to our interlocutors in the security forces, will backfire on the authorities, but the Russian authorities do not know how to work any other way.
If those who approved the terrorists’ plan and encouraged them to attack a church, a synagogue and kill a priest, in order to give the attacks more weight and resonance, would be smart enough to play not the standard Islamist card about Sharia and infidels, but to add the ideas of liberation and the fight for an Islamic , but the future, then the Russian authorities will have a very, very difficult time. Under Putin*, the future was taken away from the population of the Caucasus, leaving only a narrow and tawdry niche in which one can, of course, exist, but Kadyrov’s beard sticks out everywhere. In the Caucasus, including Chechnya, many people understand this very well. Today, when the old ideas of creating an Emirate or the struggle for the independence of Ichkeria are preserved only by those who left, a new idea can develop into something very, very large. “The Revolt of the Princes” is most likely only the first act of a great and bloody tragedy that is beginning.
@Volyamedia
It’s the other group's paragraph that worries me. We know of the ties to the ISIS-Khorasan region. With the Tsarnaev brothers, it was Al Qaida. Hamas, the ICRG, Boko Haram, and the Muslim Brotherhood are just of the better-known Islamist groups at war with the West, Christianity, and others. The main goal is a global caliphate. What other wonders will emerge from the northern Caucasus? I am sure they will. target Moscow first, as they. already have. But I am not positive what happens in Russia will stay in Russia.
It gets a tad worse from here:
Neither now, when the Ukrainian war is still going on, nor tomorrow, when it ends one way or another, leaving Russia and the army battered and demoralized, will the federal center most likely no longer have the opportunity to seriously restore order in the Caucasus by force. Obviously, all these “heads of the Sergokalinsky region” are well aware of this, and their willingness to rely on Islamic radicals, and not on Moscow, is the best forecast for the future of Dagestan. It’s as if they are just out of politeness (after all, Putin really loves Dagestan) not publicly telling the feds to go to hell, and everyone has already seen what they are doing non-publicly. And if we talk about what the post-Putin government should really do with Dagestan, the option “an ordinary Russian region, a tourist cluster, an area of priority development” should be treated as a missed opportunity, something that has been passed and where there is no return. The conversation about the future of Dagestan and its relations with Moscow will one day have to be conducted not with federal appointees who have no influence on anything, but directly with radicals, and the sooner the very prospect of such a conversation becomes obvious to Moscow, the more acceptable its terms will be (and vice versa, if you close your eyes to this prospect and aim to ignore it for as long as possible, the dialogue will ultimately proceed strictly on the terms of the other side). In the end, even Putin’s government already has relatively successful experience in achieving some kind of common language with the Afghan Taliban — so perhaps this experience is worth turning to now.
Some Russians understand where we are heading. But many of my readers ask, why do we fear the breakup of the Russian Federation? This is the reason. We may end up with a few radical Islamist republics (see the Northern Caucasus) that have access to nuclear weapons.
I am not so sure we would care one way or the other if Russia was not a nuclear-armed state. Especially one where we might already be in the missing nukes stage. This would only make it worse. So now here is. a partial answer to that question. It is hardly the only one. But it is one of the big parts of the answer.