The Perils of Putin’s Policies

Gordon M. Hahn

ince September 11th, Russia’s role in the War on Terror has been a topic of considerable controversy. While cooperation has cooled over the past two years, Moscow’s early assistance to the U.S. campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, together with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s acquiescence to the U.S. use of military bases in Central Asia, are often cited as examples of the Kremlin’s positive contributions. Soon, however, Russia could play a very different role. For Russia is experiencing the beginning of an Islamist terrorist revolutionary jihad—one that has begun to spread from Chechnya to the five other titular Muslim republics of the North Caucasus (Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkariya (RKB), Karachaevo-Cherkessiya (RKCh), and Adygeya) and perhaps even beyond.

At least three domestic causes have contributed to the rising Islamist threat to Russia. The first is the war in Chechnya, and the brutal prosecution of those hostilities by Russia’s security and law enforcement agencies. The second is President Putin’s authoritarian counter-revolution, which has radicalized the governments in the seven Muslim republics outside of Chechnya. The third is the Kremlin’s assimilative policies, which have begun to fragment the delicate ethnic and social status quo in Russia’s regions. Together, these trends are reproducing in Russia the conditions that have contributed to terrorism recruitment throughout the Muslim world: authoritarian rule, abject poverty, a sense of alienation, and ethno-religious separatism.

The Chechen quagmire

The bloody, grinding conflict that has consumed the breakaway republic of Chechnya for the past decade represents the primary cause of Russia’s rising Islamist revolution. Vast areas were totally destroyed during the first Chechen war (1994-1996). The subsequent failure of the Russian and Chechen leaderships to reconstruct the republic during the inter-war years (1996-99)—coupled with further destruction in the second war (1999-present)—has rendered most towns, including the republic’s capital of Grozny, virtually uninhabitable. There have been tens of thousands of casualties. Unemployment among young Chechen men remains nearly universal.1 Meaningful reconstruction aid from Moscow has failed to materialize. Moreover, resources have often been stolen by federal and regional bureaucrats. These miserable socio-economic conditions have combined to create fertile soil for criminality, radical ideologies, and Islamist recruitment.

Exacerbating this situation, horrendous atrocities continue to be committed by both sides. Russia’s unreformed siloviki (the power ministries—Defense, Interior and Security—and their troops) have engaged in systematic abuses, including summary executions, mass security sweeps, torture, and rape. Moreover, units of the Russian Interior Ministry (MVD), the military, the internal security service (FSB), and military intelligence (GRU), which are constantly rotated through the region, increasingly have preferred to “outsource” security in the republic to criminalized and corrupt detachments of pro-Russian Chechen fighters, such as the the Presidential Guard, or Kadyrovtsy, headed by Ramzan Kadyrov, son of the former Chechen president. The Kadyrovtsy, in turn, conduct themselves much like an elite fascist unit, rampaging through villages, killing the elderly and children, and raping women at will.

The failure of the Russian government to “win the peace” has allowed the guerilla regime of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya (ChRI) and its fighters to survive and regroup. It has also facilitated the co-option of the ChRI by foreign Islamists. Rebel warlord Shamil Basaev and a number of other Chechen fighters had developed links with al-Qaeda as long as a decade ago—a connection that has helped to facilitate the intrusion into Chechnya of a cadre of foreign Islamists. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command and ideological guide, sought to join the Chechen struggle against Russia in the late 1990s. So did Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11th attacks on the United States. In all, as many as 400-500 foreign jihadists are estimated to have fought with the Chechens at various times since the beginning of the second war.2

The resulting radicalization has taken place swiftly. In August 2002, a coup d’état of sorts occurred within the ChRI; its constitution was amended to make sharia (Islamic law) the basis of Chechen statehood, and the Chechen government was replaced by an Islamic council, the Madzhlisul Shura, as the ChRI’s highest organ.3 In addition, a committed Islamist, Shariat Court Chairman Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev, was appointed ChRI vice-president, becoming the legal successor to relatively moderate ChRI President Aslan Maskhadov.4

These political changes were soon mirrored by a shift in goals. Chechnya’s Islamists are now intently focused on the establishment of a local, or even regional, Islamic caliphate, to be governed by a harsh Salafist interpretation of sharia law. And the instrument of this transformation is the network of terrorist combat jamaats (communities) that has emerged across the North Caucasus and other Muslim populations in Russia—resulting in a rising wave of terror that is buffeting the Russian Federation.

In a recent public statement, Chechen warlord Basaev left no doubt as to his plans. “With Allah’s blessing, we established the Caucasian front this year,” Basaev declared. “Next year we will open fronts in Moscow, the Volga region, and Urals. Jihad is spreading. More and more oppressed nations understand they should unite their forces to liberate themselves from [Russia’s] yoke.”5

Putin’s authoritarian counter-revolution

Since his formal assumption of the Russian presidency in May 2000, Vladimir Putin has placed the strengthening of the Russian state at the top of his domestic agenda. In the view of Putin and his closest associates, the successful modernization of Russian economy and society requires a turn toward soft authoritarian rule and expanded autonomy for the federal government. Putin therefore has subordinated legislative, judicial, and regional power—as well as much of the national media—to the federal executive branch. He has also exploited state resources to guarantee electoral victories for the pro-Kremlin “United Russia” party, and amended election laws to ensure hegemony for pro-government elements within Russia’s political system.

Moreover, these trends have only accelerated since the September 2004 Beslan tragedy. In the wake of the hostage-taking and massacre in the North Ossetian town, Putin has called for—and the Russian Duma has prepared—new legislation granting the Kremlin vastly greater police and security powers in the name of “counterterrorism.”

Given the inherently anti-democratic instincts of Russia’s security services, this new leeway has inevitably reinforced heavy-handed law enforcement practices. In mid-September 2004, for example, Moscow police conducted a series of “counterterrorism” sweeps that resulted in the detention of more than 11,000 suspects.6 Authorities in the Moscow Oblast rounded up about 2,500 unregistered people during similar sweeps.7 Such tactics have been particularly aggressive in Russia’s Muslim republics, exacerbating the alienation of Muslims from the Russian state.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Ustinov, Russia’s Prosecutor-General, has publicly proposed the detention of the families of hostage-takers, noting the policy could be broadened to families of all “terrorists,” however that might be defined. And, according to Ustinov, the round-up of family members of terrorists should be “accompanied by a demonstration to these terrorists of what might happen to (their families).”8 This proposal has met with widespread approval in the Russian Duma. Russian authorities have also undertaken several assimilationist policies, including bans on ethnic and religious parties and on non-Cyrillic alphabets as well as an attempt to establish mandatory courses on Russian Orthodox Christian culture in schools. In this political climate, grassroots targeting of Muslims has predictably expanded, with cases of assault and harassment rising exponentially.

Putin’s counter-revolution has reverberated among Russia’s Muslims. Since the collapse of the U.S.SR, Russia’s seven Muslim republics (besides Chechnya) have been among the least democratized of the country’s 88 regions. Putin’s authoritarian policies have allowed these already authoritarian and corrupt governments to become harsher, further alienating Muslims, especially young Muslims, from their respective governments and the Russian state as a whole.

The republic of Kabardino-Balkariya (RKB) is a case in point. With the beginning of the second Chechen war, a group of radicals from the RKB migrated to Chechnya to fight against Russian forces, forming a special detachment under the training of ruthless warlord Ruslan Gelaev. The return of this force to the RKB in 2002 prompted rising fears among local government officials and touched off a series of countermeasures, including numerous mosque closures, detainments, house-to-house searches, and the banning of Koran readings in local universities.9 These conditions have led one Muslim website to deem the human rights situation in the RKB to be “critical.”10 (As of August 2005, some 400 RKB residents have appealed to President Putin for permission to emigrate because of deteriorating conditions in the republic.11)

These policies have driven many young Muslims in the RKB into the arms of Basaev and the increasingly Islamist Chechen resistance. In the summer of 2004, a new terrorist group, the “United Islamic Combat Jamaat ‘Yarmuk,’” announced its presence in the republic through several clashes with siloviki and Internet postings warning against participation in the republic’s “war” on Muslims. “Yarmuk” has committed numerous attacks on siloviki, and is believed to have taken part in Basaev’s October 2005 raid on the RKB’s capital city of Nalchik—an attack that claimed the lives of dozens of citizens and law enforcement officials and resulted in over a hundred injuries.

Kabardino-Balkariya is not an isolated case. In the Muslim republics of Ingushetia and Bashkortostan, growing authoritarianism nearly sparked “orange revolutions” in April 2005. In Ingushetia, current (Kremlin-appointed) president Murat Zyazikov has become the object of widespread opposition, blamed for a failure to stop, if not for connivance in, hundreds of kidnappings blamed on his brother’s clan and allies in the security organs. On the eve of a May Day demonstration, which the opposition planned to rally into an orange-style revolution, opposition leader Musa Ozdoev was arrested and the demonstration was blocked by troops. Leader of the Youth Movement of Ingushetia, Rustam Archakov, noted that terrorism is the logical result of Ingushetian authorities’ crackdown on peaceful protest.12

In Bashkortostan, meanwhile, President Murtaza Rakhimov’s already authoritarian and pro-ethnic Bashkir policies have gotten bolder in recent years, coalescing Russians, Tatars, and even some Bashkirs in an opposition coalition. A would-be uprising was sparked by mass police brutality during the arrest of many as one thousand young men in the city of Blagoveshchensk in December 2004. The opposition’s ensuing demonstrations mounted throughout winter and spring, but fizzled when the Bashkir FSB called in the movement’s leaders and arranged a truce.

The dangers of de-federalization

The third domestic cause of rising radicalism in Russia is de-federalization. In his bid to strengthen the Russian state, Putin has also dismantled most of the asymmetrical federative system created by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Putin’s anti-federalist campaign has included:

• the creation of new, extra-constitutional districts as a means to facilitate federal interference in regional politics;
• new legal requirements rendering federal law supreme in all spheres of life that it addresses;
• a “federal intervention” mechanism allowing the president (with court approval) to remove a regional governor or republic president and call elections to a regional parliament should they refuse to follow court findings in cases of conflict between federal and regional law;
• the termination of power-sharing treaties between the federal government and individual Russian regions, effectively ending regional autonomy;
• reorganization of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, into a legislative body appointed by regional officials, half of whom are appointed by the Russian president;
• the re-centralization of budget revenues; and
• presidential appointment, rather than popular election, of regional governors and republic presidents (and possibly even city mayors and district heads).13

Perhaps not surprisingly, these steps have sparked greater nationalism in several Muslim republics. In the absence of democratic federalism, Russia’s complex ethno-geography and administrative structure are likely to produce outliers. And in Russia’s Muslim republics, those outliers tend to be Muslim ethnic groups, creating a pool of potential allies and recruits for radical Islamists.

In Dagestan, Putin’s policy of harmonizing regional and federal laws—and his (re)interpretation of the Russian Constitution—has led to the dismantling of the republic’s “consociational” political system, which had previously preserved inter-ethnic harmony among Dagestan’s tens of small ethnic groups through pluralistic representation in the executive and legislative branches.14 As a result, by 2003, Dagestan’s two largest Muslim ethnic groups, Avars and Dargins, were on the brink of a major inter-ethnic conflict as a result of disputes over power-sharing within the region’s ruling State Council.15

But Tatarstan and the Tatars are perhaps the biggest victims of Putin’s anti-federalist policies. At 5.7 million, Tatars make up more than a third of Russia’s 14.5 million Muslims, and are Russia’s second-largest minority and largest Muslim minority. Following the collapse of the U.S.SR, Tatarstan’s nationalist elite had played a leading role in the formation of asymmetrical federalism in Russia. Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiev’s legitimacy, and his success in isolating radical nationalists, was built largely upon his successful acquisition of broad political, economic, cultural, linguistic, and religious soveignty for Kazan from Moscow. But now, Putin’s policies have discredited the Tatarstan model, and the Tatar intelligentsia is doing some soul-searching. There are signs of radicalization within the moderate nationalist All-Tatar Public Center, or VTOTs, which played a key role in Kazan’s acquisition of sovereignty during the early 1990s. Its April 2005 congress elected a new, more radical chairman, Talgat Bareyev, who has thrown his weight behind a refrain not heard since the early 1990s: “full independence of Tatarstan from Russia.”16

Radical Islam is also rearing its head in Tatarstan. The influential Tatarstan weekly Zvezda Povolzhya, which represents democratic nationalist Tatars, recently warned that nationalism among the young “now is taking on more of a Muslim color.”17 These worries are justified; Tatarstan recently has seen a minor spate of terrorist sabotage attacks, and an Islamist combat jamaat, the “Islamic Jamaat,” has reportedly been uncovered in the city of Naberezhnyi Chelny.18 Moreover, since the fall of 2004, security forces have arrested more than one hundred alleged members of the radical Hizb ut-Tahrir movement in at least eleven Russian regions. Most of those arrests (over 20) were made in Tatarstan.19

Muslim reactions

In response to these policies, official Islam in Russia has been politicized and, to a certain extent, unified in order to protect the official Islamic clergy and the broader community from state repression and public harassment. On the civic level, the past two years have seen the formation of an association for the defense of Muslim rights, as well as the creation of a legal hotline for Muslims who feel that their political, civil, or human rights have been violated. Cooperation and mutual defense among official Muslim organizations across regional jurisdictions has also increased, as have calls for the creation of a unified Russia-wide council of ulema (Islamic legal and religious scholars) and a Russian vice-presidency to be set aside for a Muslim.

Less benign has been the theological and political radicalization that has taken place among members of autonomous, radical, and even officially registered Muslim communities from various ethnic groups—a trend that has created a stream of defectors to the Islamist cause. This is reflected in the continuing replenishment of Islamist ranks in Russia despite Russian forces’ successes in killing hundreds and arresting thousands of radicals, real and imagined, over the last two years.

Most important has been the expansion of the ChRI’s network of combat jamaats and the resulting wave of terrorism throughout the country over the past two years. Combat jamaats first appeared outside of Chechnya and remain most prevalent and effective in the eastern North Caucasus republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan. They have now spread to the ethnic Circassian- and Balkar-Karachai-dominated Muslim republics of the RKB, RKCh, and Adygeya, as well as North Ossetia and Krasnodar. Russian scholars estimate that there are currently ten or more combat jamaats in Dagestan alone.20 In all, there are probably some 20 combat jamaats operating outside of Chechnya. Since these units usually include some 20-30 members, the national network of radical Islamist cells in Russia can be estimated to include some 4,000-6,000 terrorist-combatants—not counting facilitators providing safe houses, intelligence, and logistics, as well as several thousand Chechnya-based fighters.

The results have been dramatic. Between 1999 and 2003, terrorism in Russia increased nearly thirty-fold—from an average of 24 attacks annually to 561.21 This upsurge, moreover, was merely the prelude to an equally precipitous escalation in the intensity and destructiveness of Islamist terror across Russia in the summer of 2004.

The locus of terrorist attacks in Russia is changing as well, shifting from Chechnya to the other North Caucasus republics. According to official MVD figures, in 2003 just 69 of the 561 terrorist attacks occurred outside Chechnya. The following year, that figure increased to approximately 90 out of just over 300 attacks. And, as of October 2005, there have been approximately 160 attacks outside of Chechnya, with some 110 in Dagestan alone.22

The challenge to Russia

The conflict in Chechnya no longer represents a national liberation struggle, if it ever did. It has instead become a radical religious movement committed to the separation of as much “Muslim land” from Russia as possible, and the creation of an Islamic caliphate in the region. Moreover, Russia’s growing Chechen-led Islamist terrorist network has shown some ability to travel across ethnic and geographic lines—much like its global predecessor and model, al-Qaeda. This network has demonstrated considerable capacity to inflict damage to life and property throughout much of Russia, using a variety of tactics. Its capabilities are impressive, and represent a significant threat to Russia’s national security and state integrity, as well as to its successful transformation into a functioning democratic market state.

Some analysts have cautioned U.S. policymakers about the “naive and simplistic supposition that the United States and Russia share a common enemy of ‘international terrorism.’”23 In truth, however, there should be little doubt about the presence of foreign Islamists in Russia—and of the implications that this may have for global security and for American interests. The potential threats include:

• an enlarged recruitment base for the international jihadist movement from among Russia’s Muslims;
• the potential emergence of a Russia-wide terrorist network of various Muslim ethnic organizations tied to international Islamist groups, and civil war across large swaths of Russia;
• with the Russian state’s weakening or disintegration, the increased likelihood of acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by Russian Islamists, who in turn could become intermediaries for their transfer to international terrorists targeting the U.S; and
• the secession of one or more of Russia’s Muslim regions, and the establishment of a single or multiple Islamic caliphates on their territory, offering a potential state base for the global jihadist movement.

The ideology of Russia’s Islamist network reflects a strong antipathy toward the U.S. and its allies. Not only has the ChRI received money from Osama bin Laden, but Basaev has himself expressed admiration for al Qaeda’s leader.24 ChRI Emir-President Sadulaev similarly has condemned Western leaders for their friendly relations with Putin.25 In the Chechen and Islamist culture, such transgressions justify death for the transgressor.

Finally, a rising tide of Islamist terrorism—and the Russian government’s failure to hold on to large swaths of territory—could promote serious instability in Moscow itself. A regime that is perceived as having “appeased” or lost out to Islamist separatism would be more vulnerable to challenges from neo-Communist and/or hardline nationalist forces. It would also be inclined to continue re-centralizing power and rolling back democracy to such an extent that it transforms itself into a dictatorship.

Indeed, the growing Islamist threat has provided the rationale for much of the backsliding in democracy, federalism, and economic reform that has taken place during the Putin era. Yet these policies are perpetuating the very challenge they are designed to address, with potentially devastating consequences not only for Russia, but for the United States and the international community as well.

Dr. Gordon M. Hahn is an Open Society Institute Fellow for Smolny College, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. He is the author of Russia’s Revolution From Above (Transaction Publishers, 2002) and the forthcoming The Bear and the Crescent: Russia’s Rising Islamist Challenge (Yale University Press, 2006).