The Post-Soviet Wars

Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus

Christoph Zurcher

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780814797242
• eBook ISBN: 9780814797198
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A brief history of the Caucusus region during and after the Post-Soviet Wars

The Post-Soviet Wars is a comparative account of the organized violence in the Caucusus region, looking at four key areas: Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Dagestan. Zürcher's goal is to understand the origin and nature of the violence in these regions, the response and suppression from the post-Soviet regime and the resulting outcomes, all with an eye toward understanding why some conflicts turned violent, whereas others not. Notably, in Dagestan actual violent conflict has not erupted, an exception of political stability for the region. The book provides a brief history of the region, particularly the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting changes that took place in the wake of this toppling. Zürcher carefully looks at the conditions within each region—economic, ethnic, religious, and political—to make sense of why some turned to violent conflict and some did not and what the future of the region might portend.

This important volume provides both an overview of the region that is both up-to-date and comprehensive as well as an accessible understanding of the current scholarship on mobilization and violence.

1

Introduction

War and Peace in the Caucasus

This book is about war and peace in the Caucasus. It is not the first written on this topic, but it is not yet another variation of a theme popularized by Russian writers of the 19th century. Many writers and scholars—then and now—depict the Caucasus as caught in a never-ending epic struggle between mountain dwellers and Cossacks, Christians, and Russians, taking place in the borderlands of empires, and being fueled by a mountainous topography, as well as by deeply rooted cultural beliefs. In contrast, the accounts given in this book of war and war avoidance in the Caucasus in the aftermath of the Soviet Union are informed by recent developments in conflict research. Mountains, culture, and collectively held narratives about the past are still important, but so are the motivations and opportunities of elites and counterelites, of politicians, entrepreneurs, and warlords. These opportunities have been shaped less by culture and geography than by political and economic institutions, especially by the collapse of these institutions in the aftermath of the Soviet Union.

In August 1991, after half a decade of creeping erosion, the Soviet Union dramatically imploded, and the Caucasus region found itself being transformed from an imperial periphery to a periphery without a center. From this point on, the societies of the Caucasus have been treading the path of state building, at different speeds, and with different successes and contrasting goals. This is not a task that Caucasian societies sought out for themselves. For both elites and the population, for most of the 1980s, ideas of national independence were largely unthinkable and, arguably, for many also undesirable. It was the collapse of the Soviet Union that not only enabled but also forced these societies to replace crumbling Soviet institutions with a new set of institutions, suited to new modes of governance. None of the former Soviet republics has been in a position to opt out of this reconstruction of regime and statehood.

Regime change and state building are necessarily highly conflictive processes. The emerging post-Soviet Caucasian polities were open to violent conflicts because they were caught in power struggles between old and new elites, were engaged by mobilizing ethnic groups, were seriously restricted in their ability to provide public goods, and lacked an established monopoly on the legitimate means of violence. Some of the Caucasian societies evaded violent escalation, while others did not. In this book, I seek to explain both outcomes.

Unlike other state collapses in history—from the fall of the Roman Empire to the fall of Yugoslavia—the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent regime change in the successor states took place surprisingly peacefully.¹ There were indeed numerous small, armed conflicts, which generally failed to gain the attention of an international or even the Russian public, but large-scale armed conflicts were rare.² However, the Caucasus became the exception: between 1988 and 2005, there were five major cases of internal wars in the Caucasus.³ The first war (1988–1994) was between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over the territory of Nagorny-Karabakh, which has an Armenian majority and was an autonomous territory within the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. The demand of the Karabakh Armenians to be annexed to the neighboring Soviet Republic of Armenia led to a forced exchange of populations and to a bitter war between the Karabakh Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The status of Karabakh has never been fully settled. Georgia, a multiethnic republic in the South Caucasus, became the theater of three more wars between 1989 and 1993. These were the war over the status of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, the civil war for power in Tbilisi, and the war over the status of the breakaway region of Abkhazia. The fifth war was fought in and about Chechnya. In 1991, Chechnya declared its independence from Russia. Since then, Russia has twice attempted by military means (in 1994–1996 and from 1999 on) to bring the separatist republic under its control.

However, there are also a number of potential hotbeds in the Caucasus that have not escalated into war. This is especially true for the republics neighboring Chechnya in the North Caucasus—Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachai-Cherkessia—all of which were seen by many experts as highly prone to conflict, but, nevertheless, all of which have avoided spiraling into internal violence. By the same token, of the three autonomous regions within Georgia, two have sought to break away, whereas the third, Ajaria, has not, thereby avoiding the fate of violent conflict within its borders. Thus, it is not only the violent conflicts that demand explanation; the cases where violence has been avoided against all odds are just as deserving.

Explaining Post-Soviet Wars

Choosing to organize violence is both extremely risky and extremely costly, and, for the good of society, it is an extremely rare strategy. In the context of rapid social change, however, and especially when this change culminates in state collapse, the threshold for violence falls, and a window for violent opportunities opens up. Organized violence may then become a strategy that incumbent elites apply to secure the survival of their regime. Likewise, elites challenging incumbents may choose violent strategies either to capture the state or to break away from the state and establish territorial independence. In the course of violent conflict, both sides may find that organized violence can generate profits from looting, racketeering, and smuggling.

As the case studies about the wars in the Caucasus show, organizers of violence typically meandered back and forth between politically motivated and economically motivated violence. In both cases, they framed their actions as a struggle in the name of the nation. During this period, a new type of violent political entrepreneur evolved: the patriot-businessman. In the early 1990s, patriot-businessmen took center stage in most of the Caucasian polities. They combined military skills, often earned in the Soviet army or in the Soviet underworld, with a sharp instinct for the business opportunities that the collapse of the Soviet Union provided, and they framed their activities as a patriotic struggle for the nation’s benefit. The complex relations between political violence, economic activities, and the seductive power of nationalism (embodied in the figure of the patriot-businessman) is a recurring theme in this book. When the period of state weakness and internal strife came to an end by the mid 1990s (with the notable exception of Chechnya), the patriot-businessman departed, leaving the field to other, more familiar, actors such as presidents, prime ministers, and terrorists.

The trajectories of post-Soviet wars were decisively shaped by the political and cultural institutions that the Soviet Union had established and by the sudden collapse of the Soviet state. As many scholars have pointed out, the Soviet system of ethnofederalism that linked a territory to an ethnically defined titular group (e.g., Azerbaijan to the Azerbaijanis), historic grievances between various ethnic groups, and the opportunities and fears that arise when a state collapses are powerful factors that help explain the onset of internal wars. As such, they are important elements of a theory of post-Soviet wars.

In this book, I aim to take the study of post-Soviet wars one step further: the objective is to apply general theories of internal wars to an important subset of cases and, vice versa, to make these cases available to those interested in testing and refining existing theories. Ultimately, this book is about bringing the study of post-Soviet wars back into the realm of conflict theory.

In recent years, theories of internal wars have made impressive progress. Often at the forefront were quantitative, large-n studies that seek to systematically identify those factors that make societies in general more prone to violence.⁴ The findings from recent quantitative literature point to six factors that increase a society’s risk of internal war:

First, one of the statistically most robust findings suggests that a low level of economic development makes a society considerably more prone to conflict. Poor societies more often experience internal wars than rich societies do.

Second, state weakness and state collapse increase the risk of internal wars. Hence, states are at risk when they are newly independent and have not yet developed stable and efficient institutions, and they are at risk when these institutions crumble or fall because of exogenous shocks or internal crisis.

Third, the organization of sustained violence depends on financing. Organizing war requires significant investments in logistics and manpower. A protest movement that cannot secure enough funding will not transform into a rebellion. Hence, among the most important factors that increase the risk of internal wars are opportunities for financing.

Fourth, war breeds war. Societies that have experienced conflict in the last five years face a high risk of slipping back into violence.

Fifth, a complex ethnic geography is seen as increasing the risk of internal wars. Even though an impressive body of academic research shows that ethnicity per se is not a threat to internal stability, statistically, societies in which one ethnic group forms a potentially dominant majority seem to be more at risk than either very homogenous or very heterogeneous societies.⁵ And once a society has become unstable, ethnicity does play a prominent part in shaping the dynamics of violence. In 51 percent of all internal wars since World War II, at least one party to the conflict recruited mainly along ethnic lines; in 18 percent of all wars, recruiting was also done at least partly along ethnic lines. Only roughly one-third (31 percent) of all wars cannot be labeled ethnic wars.⁶

Sixth, the statistical data indicate that mountainous terrain increases the risk of conflict, and wars tend to be longer when they are fought in mountainous countries.

To discuss the applicability of these predictions to post-Soviet conditions, to test their viability, and to shed light on causal relations beyond simple correlation, case studies on war and war avoidance are presented in chapters 4 to 7. These case studies cover the wars in Chechnya, in Georgia, and in Nagorny-Karabakh, as well as the cases of war avoidance in Dagestan and Ajaria.

Case studies are instrumental in detecting the causal mechanisms that link factors to outcomes. They uncover the transmission belts that link, for example, ethnic composition, state weakness, and terrain to the emergence of internal war. Case studies also serve to identify the conjunctural effects of factors that are not easily captured by statistical approaches, and they help in identifying missing factors. Finally, case studies also help trace the dynamics of conflict and pinpoint how violence induced change in a specific environment. Focusing on such processes means moving beyond the snapshots that statistical analysis provides of societies under stress.

From the factors that conflict theory identifies as being among the prime suspects for causing internal war, state weakness, mountainous terrain, and a complex ethnic geography clearly apply to all cases discussed in this book. Yet there is no specific link between any of these factors and the onset of war. After all, Dagestan and Ajaria avoided war. And where war broke out, the causal chain that links these factors to the emergence of sustained organized violence is often more complex and tangled than a simple statistical correlation would suggest. Other factors apply to only some cases or to none at all. For example, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and Dagestan possessed significant natural resources, in all cases oil. But, as the case studies show, Dagestan avoided war. In Chechnya, revenues from illegal and decentralized oil extraction doubtless contributed to the prolongation of the war, but a direct causal connection between having oil and the start of organized violence cannot be established. In Azerbaijan, as well, there was no causality between the outbreak of conflict and the presence of oil. There is even a negative correlation between oil reserves and length of war. Because Azerbaijani strongmen gave priority to investment in the power struggle in Baku rather than the war over Karabakh, the Azerbaijani front was weakened, leading to the battleground victory of the Armenians.

This mixed evidence does not devalue the general argument that the organization of violence crucially depends on opportunities for financing. However, evidence from the post-Soviet wars suggests that it need not be the extraction of natural resources that fuels war. Profits accumulated in the shadow and criminal economies proved to be the single most important source of revenues for the various rebel movements.

Evidence from the case studies also means reconsidering and refining other assumptions: Caucasian wars emerged in societies that were not particularly poor, neither within the Soviet Union nor compared with a global average, and it was not the poorer groups that sought to secede. What triggered rebellions, among other factors, was that some groups feared future economic losses. The fear of losing a potential future was a much more powerful factor than the desire to change the present. Hence, neither a general low level of development nor an uneven distribution of wealth among ethnic groups accounts for the onset of war.

Similarly, the fact that all wars emerged in mountainous terrain does not mean that there is a straightforward causal link between territory and the onset of war. Most decisive battles took place on the plains, and mostly in an urban environment. In Karabakh, the rebels initially had the mountainous terrain against them, as did the Ossets in the conflict with the Georgians.

Furthermore, no rebel movement had its origins in rural elites opposing urban elites. On the contrary, all rebel movements were initiated and led by the provincial urban intelligentsia, which formed alliances with entrepreneurs of violence with a background in the Soviet shadow economy. Certainly, “mountains” played a role, but the causal chain is much more complex than the classic argument that mountainous terrain militarily favors rebels over governments would suggest. Mountains work through what French historian Fernand Braudel has called the “longue durée”—that is by shaping long-term historical structures, not by triggering events. Over the centuries, mountainous terrain made it more difficult for the Tsarist and the Soviet central state to culturally and socially penetrate the remote mountainous regions; hence, mountainous regions remained peripheral, only loosely connected to the administrative center of the imperial power. A weakening of the central power—Moscow—then led to centrifugal reactions in such peripheral regions. Once centrifugal tensions condensed under the influence of many other factors and processes to crisis and finally rebellion, remote mountainous regions may have helped overcome recruitment problems. Many of the fighting units in Chechnya, Abkhazia, Ossetia, and Karabakh were filled by rural youth, recruited on the basis of village communities and family ties.

Whatever specific conjunctures of factors worked in the cases discussed here, it becomes clear from the case studies that there is no causal link between risk factors and organized violence. This is because, first, the impact of risk factors is embedded in domestic structures that can neutralize or exacerbate their effect. Second, organizers of violence, notwithstanding their motivations and objectives, always have massive difficulties to overcome. They must recruit members to join the rebellion; they must sustain the rebellion by providing internal cohesion, organizational structure, and discipline; and they must finance the logistics of organized violence. In short, they must overcome considerable collective action problems, which is usually not possible without gaining access to considerable resources and without making use of social capital available within a group. Hence, the case studies in this book also focus on domestic structures and how they interacted with the general predictions of conflict theory. By tracing the processes that led, in some cases, from risk to violence and, in other cases, from risk to regained stability, it is possible to construct a “script” of post-Soviet wars that is both specific enough to do justice to the individual cases and general enough to speak to conflict theory.

Such a script highlights the following points. Both the conjunction of a specific ethnic demography institutionalized by the Soviet Union and the weakness of the central state account for an atypically high risk of conflict in the Caucasus. The collapse of the Soviet Union dramatically increased nationalist elites’ opportunities for capturing or secession from the state, but their weakness also meant that the new states were challenged by commitment problems on a massive scale. This added up to a breeding ground for the organization of violence, and, in five cases, groups capable of waging war emerged.

Clearly, state weakness emerges as the single most important factor. It was the collapse of the Soviet structures that opened up windows of opportunity for nationalist elites to pursue state-capture strategies. State weakness also explains other striking Caucasian peculiarities. The weakness of the new states led to a blurring of the boundary between private, entrepreneurial violence and state, or at least state-funded, organized violence. Both the “rebels” and the “states” employed private groups with the capacity for violence, which were fighting in the name of the state or the nation, but motivated additionally, or even mostly, by private profit. In all conflicts, alongside the nominally “state” troops (themselves, in fact, often the armed retinues of private violent entrepreneurs), volunteer militias, self-defense units, part-time fighters, weekend soldiers, and various mercenary groups also had roles. It is a notable peculiarity that neither Russia, nor Georgia, nor Azerbaijan was able to win its war against secessionist regions. Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia are today de facto independent states, and so was Chechnya until the second Russian invasion of 1999.

Admittedly, none of these quasi-states have reached the status of being an internationally recognized sovereign state, and none of the conflicts have been resolved by a formal peace treaty. However, the military victory of “rebels” over “their” government is a rare event, since the government, as a rule, has far more resources at its disposal than do the rebels. In the Caucasus, the success of the rebels can be explained by the weakness of the respective states ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: War and Peace in the Caucasus
• 2 Setting the Stage: The Past, the Nation, and the State
• 3 Making Sense: Conflict Theory and the Caucasus
• 4 Wars over Chechnya
• 5 Wars in Georgia
• 6 The War over Karabakh
• 7 Wars That Did Not Happen: Dagestan and Ajaria
• 8 Conclusion: Post-Soviet Wars and Theories of Internal Wars
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors