The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule

Alex Marshall

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415410120
• eBook ISBN: 9781136938245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The Caucasus is a strategically and economically important region in contemporary global affairs. Western interest in the Caucasus has grown rapidly since 1991, fuelled by the admixture of oil politics, great power rivalry, ethnic separatism and terrorism that characterizes the region. However, until now there has been little understanding of how these issues came to assume the importance they have today.

This book argues that understanding the Soviet legacy in the region is critical to analysing both the new states of the Transcaucasus and the autonomous territories of the North Caucasus. It examines the impact of Soviet rule on the Caucasus, focusing in particular on the period from 1917 to 1955. Important questions covered include how the Soviet Union created 'nations' out of the diverse peoples of the North Caucasus; the true nature of the 1917 revolution; the role and effects of forced migration in the region; how over time the constituent nationalities of the region came to re-define themselves; and how Islamic radicalism came to assume the importance it continues to hold today.

A cauldron of war, revolution, and foreign interventions - from the British and Ottoman Turks to the oil-hungry armies of Hitler's Third Reich - the Caucasus and the policies and actors it produced (not least Stalin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Anastas Mikoyan) both shaped the Soviet experiment in the twentieth century and appear set to continue to shape the geopolitics of the twenty-first. Making unprecedented use of memoirs, archives and published sources, this book is an invaluable aid for scholars, political analysts and journalists alike to understanding one of the most important borderlands of the modern world.

1
The North Caucasus

Between gazavat and modern revolution, 1700–1905

Cultural and social interstices

In February 1905 Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias, appointed a frail and frightened old man viceroy of the Caucasus, in an effort to pacify a region that had continuously troubled the Tsarist Empire ever since its first acquisition just over 100 years before. The problems that faced the new viceroy, Count Vorontsov-Dashkov (1837–1916), when he first came into office were not in themselves new by any means, but had recently begun to sharpen in intensity. There was clearly some hope in court circles that the elderly Vorontsov-Dashkov, as a relative by both bloodline and marriage to Count Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov, a previous, highly successful viceroy of the Caucasus, had inherited the abilities of a talented colonial administrator, and might therefore be ideally suited to help placate the region through the traditional means of finding an imperial modus vivendi with the local population. Vorontsov-Dashkov’s own earlier career, as we shall see, had entailed extensive military service in both the Caucasus and Central Asia, making him in some ways an ideal candidate for the post, although in practice the interval between his active service in these theatres and his return to the Caucasus as viceroy was a long one. However, he was destined to be the penultimate Tsarist viceroy of the Caucasus, with his reign – which ended in 1915, shortly before his death (from natural causes) – becoming associated instead with unprecedented political and social unrest that ultimately ushered in a new age.

The strategic importance of the Caucasus had been evident to Russian statesmen since at least the late sixteenth century. A complex zone of contest between the rival Russian, Persian and Ottoman empires, geopolitics rendered it a region that could never be simply ignored. Ottoman outposts on the eastern Black Sea coast presented a direct military threat to Russian state interests, whilst the Ottoman slave trade encouraged the Ottomans’ Crimean Tatar allies to regularly sweep through both the Ukraine and south Russian borderlands. One Soviet historian later estimated that, in the period 1607–17, Tatar raids had captured and enslaved 100,000 Russians, and in the next thirty years another 100,000.¹ Such direct threats aside, the position of Georgia and Armenia as territorially Christian islands in a predominantly Muslim religious sea also attracted considerable Russian sympathy and attention, with the brutal sack of Tbilisi in 1795 by Shah Aga Mohammed in particular going down in infamy amongst both local contemporaries and future historians of the region. Tsar Alexander I, Nicholas II’s great-great-uncle, then officially annexed the Christian kingdom of Georgia as a protectorate of the Russian Empire in 1801, but the mountain chain of the North Caucasus that separated European Russia from Georgia remained a restless and unsettled frontier region, divided lengthways north to south by the strategically vital Georgian Military Road. Defence of the road itself involved the military pacification of the mountain tribes that flanked it, and Russia for much of the first half of the nineteenth century consequently came to be engaged in a bloody and violent struggle to achieve peace and security in the region. Not coincidentally, the Caucasus was also an area long known for its ethnic complexity, early Arab geographers having referred to the region as the ‘Jabal al-Alsun’, the mountain of languages. This linguistic and cultural diversity was married to a warlike reputation similar to that of the contemporary Afghans, with one Russian scholar at the beginning of the twentieth century making the parallel explicit by referring to Afghanistan itself as the ‘Anglo-Indian Caucasus’.²

The mountaineer tribes of the Caucasus became notorious in nineteenth-century Russian accounts for their blood feuds and daring raids upon local settlements on the plains. Amongst the most infamous were the Adygei-Circassians and Kabards of the north and north-west Caucasus, the Chechens and Ingush of the central region, and the numerous tribes of Dagestan to the south-east, so linguistically diverse that imperial and Soviet ethnographers would spend decades trying to categorize them. Local identity before Soviet times was largely founded upon religion and clan rather than upon ethnicity or clearly demarcated territory. Social structures amongst the various ethnic groups were also extremely diverse, with the Russians early on discovering that those groups which already possessed a strongly developed indigenous nobility (such as the Kabards) were in many ways far easier to integrate than their neighbours. In merely the most famous demonstration of this, Tsar Ivan IV (Ivan Groznyi) took a Kabard princess as a bride in 1561, precipitating the first Russian military expeditions into the North Caucasus in support of local clients, and the appearance of the first Russian local fortifications in 1567.

By contrast with the Kabard elite, however, the basic socio-organizational unit in Dagestan before the Russian presence made itself strongly felt was the jama’at, a type of fortified settlement surrounded by farmsteads and fields that first began appearing there in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which became more entrenched following the appearance and proliferation of firearms in the region during the sixteenth century. Membership of a jama’at comprised the single basic item of socio-political identity in Dagestan, and was encoded in law. The members of a jama’at counted themselves as uzden (freemen), and acknowledged no masters beyond a traditional respect for elders. Exile from one’s jama’at was accordingly the highest possible punishment for wrongdoers, the equivalent in practice to a death sentence.³ Within each jama’at there lived several individual clans, or tukkhums. Extended clans, or tukkhums, divided Dagestan, and in neighbouring Chechnia and Ingushetia local teips, many subunits of larger tukkhums, performed an almost identical cultural role. These teips, incorporating joint extended families, with a strict patriarchal ideology founded on endogamy and veneration of the ancestors, claimed to be bound together by a system of ancient blood relations, although in reality this was scarcely the case. Belief in a common mythic ancestor, the use of communal agricultural land, a communal cemetery and a local stone defensive tower were the key distinguishing characteristics of such societies. With the spread of Islam in the region it also became extremely common to claim that the honoured ancestor-founder of each teip had himself been an Arab.⁴ Some scholars have in recent years promoted the idea of the North Caucasian jama’ats as being themselves early forms of democratic society, but in general this is to deliberately misinterpret the nineteenth-century Russian descriptions of these cultures as ‘free societies’ (vol′nye obshchestva).⁵ Whilst the Dagestani jama’ats in their social structure and trading networks bore some resemblance to the early Greek polis (itself a very different thing from modern-day ‘democracies’), what in reality was meant by this anthropological description at the time it was coined (and undoubtedly closer to the truth) was that they were ‘free’ in the sense of being anarchic groupings, often living on the very borderline of economic sustainability. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, when the local Russian presence was only just beginning to make itself more strongly felt, local economic and environmental changes rendered these societies even more fractured and conflict-prone.

The main elements in the local economy before the growing Russian presence itself instituted significant changes were agriculture and cattle breeding, although questions over the relative dominance of one or the other branch have also been the cause of extensive scholarly debate in the past. Most scholars are united, however, in recognizing the highly marginal nature of the local agricultural economy, a factor evident in the desire to use every available inch of fertile soil by the creation of intensively cultivated terraced farming on the mountain slopes. The main crops from such activity were millet, oats, flax, hemp, beans, lentils and, above all, barley. The mountain climate was exceptionally dry and severe, however, creating consistently low year-on-year crop yields. Indigenous production was so low in the mountainous regions of Dagestan that local bread was sufficient for only half the year at most; for the remainder, local communities were dependent on trade exchanges with Chechnia and eastern Georgia. Cattle breeding on the plains and valley floors offered a similarly tenuous existence owing to harsh winters, local rustling, and disease.⁶ Between the start of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century, however, shifts in the local agricultural economy created a dramatic migratory crisis, with consequences that remain controversial amongst local scholars even today.

The spread throughout Africa and Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of new agrarian products from America – most significantly, as far as the Caucasus was concerned, maize, which came via Italy and the Balkans – introduced crops twice as productive as traditional local foodstuffs, fostering in turn dramatic population growth that rendered issues surrounding local land ownership a source of increasingly sharp competition. Retrospective archaeological surveys made in the region during the 1920s traced a prominent shift of formerly mountain-dwelling tribal peoples onto the valley floors during the latter part of the eighteenth century, in a migration in search of more spacious and fertile grazing lands; the Ingush in particular began to migrate to both the south and east of their traditional settlements.⁷ This phenomenon was in some ways the product of broader processes of globalization which had already instituted dramatic social changes in Europe. There, the transition from antiquity to feudalism had already been prompted by the dramatic synthesizing of agrarian means of production; prior to this broader transition, both the Greek polis and Roman state had been simultaneously hampered and shaped in critical ways by their relatively limited agrarian modes of production, which imposed their own inescapable demographic constraints.⁸ The further revolution in ship technology and navigation techniques during the sixteenth century, which then turned the Mediterranean almost overnight from a European and North African lake into a highway of globalized world trade, inevitably bore similar revolutionary social consequences into even such a relative backwater as the Caucasus.

A more vibrant agrarian economy thereafter also increased wealth differentials within these mountaineer societies, and correspondingly increased the value attached to raiding parties and gathering booty. Commenting on this phenomenon with regard to the Chechens, one prominent eighteenth-century Russian observer noted that:

whilst the Chechens were poor… they were calm and not troublesome; but when there began to emerge rich villages, and when on fertile meadows there began to travel large herds, hitherto peaceful neighbours turned into indomitable robbers… as the population in Chechnia grew rapidly, as the well-being of the inhabitants increased daily, so too their warlike spirit reached its full development.⁹

Migration therefore created growing social conflict over land use which pre-dated the Russian presence. The most obvious social symbols of this phenomenon were the increasing breakdown of the local teip system, and the consequent diminution of the social prohibitions it imposed, most notable in the lowered status of those who fell into the category of uzden. By the early nineteenth century contemporary observers noted that the role of elder, or leader, within local teips had in many instances become practically a hereditary position, comparable to the feudal nobility of medieval Europe. Men fulfilling this role now possessed greater quantities of land than others, whilst also often disposing of significant numbers of slaves.¹⁰

Against this shifting economic backdrop, contemporary foreign observers and travellers in general meanwhile therefore also recorded the proclivity for robbery and violence amongst the local mountaineers, and later in the nineteenth century the famous Russian Slavophile publicist and intellectual N. Ia. Danilevskii characterized the Caucasus mountaineers in general as ‘natural predators and robbers, who neither can nor ever will leave their neighbours in peace’.¹¹ Tsarist commentators were inclined to see robbery and murder as simply a way of life amongst the mountaineers, although later, more objective studies demonstrated that such raids for plunder were a more sporadic phenomenon, conducted largely for cultural reasons – the gaining of honour and respect within one’s own local community.¹² Such raids also varied dramatically in scale, however, over discrete periods of time, with the first half of the eighteenth century witnessing particularly large-scale expeditions, owing to the local agricultural revolution and associated land crisis. During the 1740s and 1750s, eastern Georgia, for example, was raided by war parties of Dagestani mountaineers varying in size from 3,000 to 20,000 men. Between 13 July and 5 November 1754 alone, the regions of Kakhetii and Kartli in modern-day Georgia experienced no fewer than 43 separate raids from mountaineer bands, which collectively netted large amounts of personal property, cattle and 350 prisoners.¹³ Prisoners were both ransomed and fed into the growing slave system that was developing in the North Caucasus during the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Slaves in the Caucasus comprised two general social orders, the lai and the iasyr. The lai represented that class of hereditary slaves who had lost all contact with their kin and therefore all hope of being bought out of slavery; the iasyr that class of slaves, mostly recently acquired prisoners, who still hoped to re-obtain their freedom. A member of the lai class had lost all right to consideration as an individual. As the property of his or her master, a slave in this category could be sold, punished or even killed by the latter without disturbance to accepted custom. Marriage was also an affair controlled by the slaves’ master, and the offspring of such marriages, even if one partner were free, were slaves themselves, thus sustaining the class of hereditary slaves. Even following the abolition of local slavery by the Tsarist state after 1866, the descendants of the lai class would for generations occupy a low social position in the North Caucasus, so that for example they had to pay twice the bride-price that their freemen (uzden) counterparts paid in order to marry the daughter of a freeborn family. Though some slaves occupied the post of domestic servants, the dominant occupation for most slaves of either class lay in tilling the fields of their masters’ land.¹⁴

Whilst growing local social tensions played an unmistakable role, cultural conflict between the Russians, with their Christian Orthodox faith, and the local populace was to some degree also exacerbated by the regional vibrancy of Islam. The Islamicization of the Caucasus had first been initiated by Arab conquerors in the early eighth century, when Derbent in eastern Dagestan became a local stronghold of the global Muslim caliphate. Dagestan and the border zone with Iran remained more heavily Islamicized than the central and north-west Caucasus, however – the Chechens were only gradually converted to Islam during the course of the eighteenth century, and the Adygei-Circassians of the far north-west retained a potent mixture of pagan, Islamic and Christian customs well into the nineteenth century. For this very reason the Chechens in particular identified closely with mystic Sufi brotherhoods widely regarded as heretical in the more traditional Arab Muslim world. Sufism itself permitted the retention of pre-Islamic rituals and customs, and inculcated a pantheon of saints altogether foreign to the Hanbali school of Islam still devoutly practised in Saudi Arabia today.

The relatively recent penetration of Islam in the region also meant that many Russian colonial administrators during both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were anxious to ‘rescue’ the Caucasus natives from this ‘foreign’ faith and revive much older Christian customs. An extensive cult surrounding the old Byzantine Empire, fed by a more general European Romantic tradition of fascination with lost languages and cultures, convinced many Russian thinkers and writers that the peoples of the Caucasus had once been Christian in ancient times. Accor...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in the History of Russia and Eastern Europe
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The North Caucasus
• 2 1905–17
• 3 1917–18 in the Caucasus
• 4 1919–20
• 5 Insurgency, corruption and the search for a new socialist order, 1920–25
• 6 Decossackization, demarcation, categorization
• 7 Forging the proletariat
• 8 Dreams of unity, myths of power
• 9 The purges and industrial modernization
• 10 Dealing with ‘bandits’
• 11 The final structural crisis of the Soviet state, 1953–91
• 12 Three dystopias of the post-Soviet Caucasus, 1991–2008
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index