Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus

Migration, Democratisation and Inequality in the Post-Soviet Era

Sophie Hohmann, Claire Mouradian, Silvia Serrano, Julien Thorez, Julien Thorez

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857737342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Nationalismus & Patriotismus

After the final collapse of the Soviet Union, the so-called 'last empire', in 1991, the countries of Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan - and of the Caucasus - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia - became independent nations. These countries, previously production centres under the socialist planning system of the Soviet Union, have made enormous economic adjustments in order to develop - or attempt to develop - along capitalist lines. As this study will show, however, inequality in Central Asia and the Caucasus is widening, as the Soviet systems of healthcare and state provisions disappear. Rejecting the Cold War-era East/West paradigm often used to analyse the development of these nations, this study analyses development along the North-South lines which characterise the migration patterns and poverty levels of much of the rest of the developed world. This opens up new avenues of research, and helps us understand why it is, for instance, that this region is better characterised as a 'new South' - as skilled workers flood out of the territories and into Russia and Western Europe.
Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus draws together detailed analyses of the development of migration economics as the region's oil wealth further enhances its strategic and economic importance to Russia, the US, the Middle East and to the EU.

PART 1

POST-SOVIET REGION OR POSTCOLONIAL COUNTRIES?

CHAPTER 1

THE ORIGINS OF A COLONIAL VISION OF SOUTHERN RUSSIA FROM THE TSARS TO THE SOVIETS: ABOUT SOME IMPERIAL PRACTICES IN THE CAUCASUS

Claire Mouradian

(CNRS & EHESS–School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris)

We know that the working masses of the East are in some places, through no fault of their own, very backward: illiterate, ignorant, they are sunk in superstition and believe in spirits, they are unable to read newspapers, they do not know what is going on in the world at large, they do not understand the most elementary principles of hygiene … that is their misfortune … The task of the more civilized, more literate, more organized workers of Europe and America is to help the backward toilers of the East. Not to mock them, not to put on airs, not to swank about their superiority over the backward Eastern peasants, but to be concerned about the ignorance and backwardness of the latter, to extend the hand of aid to them, and to help them.¹

In the early days of the new Soviet regime, Zinoviev, chairman of the Komintern, used these condescending clichés in his inaugural speech to the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, when summoning colonized peoples to ‘a Holy War … against British imperialism’ and arguing for a break with Tsarist colonial policy. For the 50th anniversary of the USSR, one of the many official commemorative texts boasted of the achievements of this ‘Russian helping hand’, repeating the standard refrain of colonial empires' civilizing mission:

For the peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia, Kazakhstan and other nationalities, annexation to Russia preserved them from absorption by even less advanced neighbouring powers, ended their devastating internal wars and then brought them into the general system of capital-intensive development and associated them with the highly developed democratic culture of the Russian people.²

When the USSR collapsed, the so-called ‘inter-ethnic’ conflicts, in fact post-colonial, that erupted in these regions were often ascribed to the failure–and not to the principle–of this civilizing mission, seen in Soviet times in terms of economic modernization, a failure caused by the immensity of the task.³

From the Tsars to the Soviets, the viewpoint of the central Russian state on the management of the Southern edge of its area of domination was indissociable from two recurring and related debates that emerged from the 18th century onwards both inside and outside the country: Russian identity⁴–European? Asian? Eurasian?–and the nature of the Empire and the purpose of its expansion–defensive or colonial? To this were added in Soviet times the controversies about the character of the new federal state, an empire inheriting and continuing the tsarist ‘prison of peoples’ under another form in which the Russians would remain ‘more equal than others’, the very model of the radiant city of ‘friendship between peoples’ or ‘incubator of nations’ (not necessarily a contradiction). At present, there is the question of this inheritance in terms of mental representation, the status of the successor states and the factors determining their post-Soviet paths.

Since not all these questions can be addressed here, except by implication, it seems worth to replace the steps leading to the emergence of the new independent states of the region in a longue durée historical perspective and to confort the issue of the colonial legacy of Russian and Soviet regimes. I intend in this chapter to look at the origins of the imperial vision and economic and administrative policies for the South of the Empire, using the Caucasus as a case study. From its earliest conquest to the end of the Soviet period, despite the formal disappearance of the inequality between the ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’ after 1917, a number of obvious elements of continuity can be seen in the conception of a centralized state drawing its power from the dominant role of ‘elder brother’, imposing its culture and vision of the world, directly or indirectly, be it in the name of nationalism or internationalism, but always with the conviction of belonging to a superior civilization.⁵

An ‘Atypical’ Colonial Empire?

As Dominic Lieven points out,⁶ the word empire did not always have the negative connotation it took on under the Marxist definition of a political, cultural and economically exploitative domination by a national metropolis of its colonial periphery, supposedly applicable only to the modern maritime empires of Western Europe.⁷ As a specialist in the Tsarist governing elite from which he himself ‘descends’,⁸ Lieven still hesitates to call the Russian Empire colonial, a step that other historians of Russia, particularly of its Southern possessions, find it much easier to take.⁹

With the short-lived exception after October 1917 of the school of the orthodox Marxist Pokrovsky,¹⁰ Soviet historiography not only promoted the image of the USSR as a champion of anti-colonial struggle but also provided it with a genealogy by rehabilitating the Tsarist Empire as a ‘lesser evil’, and then under Stalin as an ‘absolute good’: had it not snatched from the grasp of neighbouring ‘Oriental despotisms’ peoples who were thus able to enjoy ‘enlightened’ administration and then, the ‘radiant future’ of Communism thanks to its Revolutionary vanguard? Not the least of the fictions created was that of the colonizing nation as ‘victim’, devoting itself at the cost of its own interests to the progress of the colonized. The 50th anniversary of the USSR was one of the emblematic opportunities to express this:

Within the bosom of the united family of Soviet peoples, it was easier for the developed regions and primarily the Russian people and working class to help the workers of the former national periphery in economic and cultural terms. This aid, said Leonid [Brejnev], this readiness to make enormous efforts and, to put it frankly, sacrifices to overcome the backwardness of the national peripheral regions and ensure their accelerated development, was recommended to the Russian proletariat by Lenin as an internationalist duty of the highest importance. And the Russian working class, the Russian people have carried out this task with honour.¹¹

Is there not here a distant echo of Kipling's ‘white man's burden’? Traces of it can still be found in the bitter remarks of some Russian politicians, whether nationalist or liberal, among the Neo-Eurasianists and certain post-Soviet scholars,¹² who attribute the misfortunes of their country to the ‘sacrifices’ made by the imperial centre.

One specific characteristic of the Russian Empire, straddling Europe and Asia, is the continental manner of its expansion, the ambivalent and pragmatic forms of its domination, sometimes flexible, sometimes less so, over the vast time and space of its conquest. And also the status of the conquered territories, the marches of other empires, the political entities of varying structure and autonomy, whose elites sometimes sought the support of the Russians, as of other conquerors before them, to free themselves from their masters of the moment or to settle their internal disputes and dynastic quarrels. This gave rise to the myth of ‘voluntary union’ with Russia, extending the theme of the ‘gathering of Russian lands’, apparently supported by the earlier feudal practice¹³ of co-opting loyal elites in conquered areas. Examples were the Tatar, Baltic and Georgian nobilities, integrated into the Tsarist army and state apparatus. Another feature that differs from the other European powers: the comparison of the level of political and cultural development and economic and social conditions of the ‘natives’, with their strong identities and a past that could have been glorious and prosperous, did not always favour a colonizer whose peasants were serfs and whose nobility was subjugated by the sovereign. This was blatantly clear in the European part of the Empire (Poland, Baltic States) and even in the Caucasus and Central Asia, a crossroads of ancient civilizations and major trade routes between East and West, such as the Silk Road. The image of a crude, poor Russia was often unimpressive for the colonized peoples, even when that country had numerical and military superiority. The authorities would do their best to reverse this image.

In the long history of the formation of the Empire,¹⁴ the difficult conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia, although it may have been defined as ‘defensive imperialism’,¹⁵ appears on the face of it more similar to the European colonial adventure. No doubt because of the ‘exotic’ nature of these peoples, enabling the Russians to escape from their complex of being thought ‘Asian’ in Paris and London, at least until Peter the Great. The conquest of Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic countries had already brought them geographically closer to Western Europe. Their drive to the ‘South’ and East, while establishing them in Asia, confirmed their ‘Europeanness’ by enabling them to project every Orientalist stereotype they have suffered onto the real ‘Orientals’ on their periphery, leading to the inferiorization of this ‘barbarous’ and ‘backward’ Other: the conquest was legitimized not only by the need to open up sea trade routes and acquire new resources, but also by the civilizing mission of a modernized state, indeed the protective mission of the ‘Third Rome’ towards Christians ill-treated by ‘Oriental despotisms’, enshrined in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) that initiated the Eastern Question,¹⁶ and the right to defend oneself by exterminating, if necessary, the ‘savage’ ‘mountaineer’ and ‘nomad’.

In 1776, General Jacobi, Governor of Astrakhan charged with studying the plans for the Caucasus Line, produced a report that already contains elements of this discourse, defining the network of military fortifications along the rivers to consolidate the Russian advance as the border between civilization and barbarity, order and disorder, a border protecting the proper order and economic development of a modern state:

This line protects from neighbours' raids the border between Astrakhan and the Don and the lands of our Kalmyks and Tatars, giving them the means to spread out all the way to Temnoi Les (Dark Wood) and the Egorlyk and thus access to better means of subsistence, and separating the various mountain peoples for grazing cattle and herds of horses from the regions that are for the profit of our subjects; it is so placed as to make it possible to build mills to produce wine, silk and paper, develop cattle raising, horse breeding, gardens and arable land … During any war with neighbouring peoples, it can stop their raids on our lands, support the operations of our troops in Crimea and other places; furthermore, it opens up a way to enter the mountains and the lands of the Ossetians, and in time, to exploit their mines and ores; it will prevent the smuggling of prohibited goods into Russia, thus increasing the customs revenues that are at present insignificant because of the many open roads across the steppe.¹⁷

‘Enlightened’ Conquest and ‘Holy War’

During the Russo–Turkish war of 1787–1791, a mysterious Sheikh Mansur¹⁸ preached a ‘holy war’ (gazavat) to the Circassians (Adyghe) who had only recently become Muslims. They were motivated actually much more by the rejection of all domination and growing hostility towards the colonists settling in the piedmont with the support of the army. Their resistance might be legitimate but it was an unbearable affront to the advance of Enlightenment that Catherine II so prized:

The anarchy that is at the root of the disorder, insolence and pillage in Greater and Lesser Kabarda is the reason why this people that is subject to Us has not so far been able to be of use to Our Empire, creating by its violence many a trouble and concern; but We are convinced that it is easy to tame this people's fierce manners by following the rules that conform to Our known humanitarian feelings and Our concern for the welfare of all. The peoples living in the inaccessible mountains where they have safe shelter against Our troops must not be driven by the force of arms, but their trust must be gained by justice and fairness, their manner softened by mercy, their hearts won over and accustomed to dealings with the Russians.¹⁹

The Westward expansion after the three Partitions of Poland with Austria and Prussia (1772, 1793, 1795), victories over the Turks and Persians, the cultural and political role of Germans at court and in the exploration of the Caucasus,²⁰ the influence of the Enlightenment, in particular the ‘theory of climates’, all encouraged a growing Eurocentrism and a new feeling of superiority over the East. After religion (Christianity, Islam and animism), way of life (sedentary or nomadic) also became a criterion for ranking humankind, supposed to have regularly evolved from hunting and gathering to nomadic animal husbandry and finally to sedentarization. The nomad and his Caucasian variant–the mountaineer–became synonyms for backwardness and then moral inferiority. The break occurred in 1767, when nomads were excluded from the Legislative Commission, althou...