New York- My fieldwork in the Caucasus is cited in the report titled “Religion, Conflict, and Stability in the Former Soviet Union” published by the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. My work for CTC West Point is footnoted in Chapter Three: The North Caucasus: How Islam and Nationalism Shaped Stability and Conflict in the Region by Sufian N. Zhemukhov, an Associate Research Professor at George Washington University. Zhemukhov originally from Kabardino-Balkaria in the Russian Federation’s North Caucasus Federal District, illustrates the arc of Islam from the czarist period, the Soviet era where religious traditions were seen as antiquated, to the bleak time after communism when Islam came back into fashion as the top down ideology of forced secular quasi egalitarianism gave way to a suddenly en vogue globalized Sunni /islam that transcended nation-state boundaries.
Under the benighted rule of Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Federation was busy trying to figure itself out and more than a few observers wondered if the federation would itself collapse in the Soviet fashion as ethnic separatism challenged the state’s monopoly on power. And it wasn’t just Chechnya either. There were rumblings in oil-rich Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and the mountain of languages we know as Dagestan. Without this chaos we may not have seen the rise of VV Putin whose core mission was preserving the federation’s territorial integrity at any cost, even it meant the mass murder of his own subjects coupled with assassination of dissidents. In ruthlessly doing so, he deftly consolidated his rule until the present while duping more than one naively self-serving Western leader in the process.
A friend ofr mine, a Georgian Jew raised in Moscow, once said to me, “the Russian empire in any form, is an empire of bones.” From expansionist Czarism to famine-inducing Bolshevism to the deadly kleptocratic rule of today, the Russian perception of power is predicated on the violent subjugation of Eurasia’s tapestry of minorities.
If anyone is interested in my original work as it relates to that described above, it is here: The Caucasus Emirate: From Anti-Colonialist Roots to Salafi-Jihad,