The consequences of the ‘flaming August' (as we call the Georgian war) and the ensuing upheavals are still being hotly discussed by experts and politicians in Russia and the West.  Unfortunately, though much has been written, this has not led to a significantly improved understanding of what happened in the South Caucasus a year ago. 

The reason is obvious.  The discussions amount to little more than two monologues.  Russian experts and politicians still insist on talking about the ‘state which has risen from its knees', ‘Western double standards', ‘the genocide of the Ossetian people' and ‘defending our compatriots'.  Their European and American colleagues inflame fears of a ‘new cold war' and ‘Russian imperialism'.  The country is ‘rising from its knees' for them too, but this is has a minus sign next to it.  They also talk of the complete transformation of the Russian Federation from status quo power to revisionist, which not even the global crisis can halt in its tracks.  What is the outcome of these debates?  There is no real debate (if we exclude name-calling and propaganda lynching of one another), which is why there is no understanding of either side's arguments and motives.

It was with these ideas in mind that I took up the article Beware Russia's Three Tinderboxes - a title that leaves no room for doubt.  Readers are warned that the West must take account of Russia's aggressive behaviour.  From the very first line the authors advise against trying to understand Russia's motives (no question of justifying them), or analysing possible scenarios for accommodating this important (for the West too), if inconvenient, partner.  They tell us Russia should be feared.  It would probably have been possible to avoid disagreement with the authors, if they had embarked on their article with a ready-made answer, rather than setting out the conditions.  But the authorial trio are very influential people who form the Western community's public and expert opinion.

'Denis Corboy is director of the Caucasus Policy Institute at Kings College London and was European Commission ambassador to Georgia and Armenia.  William Courtney was U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia.  Kenneth Yalowitz is director of the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and was U.S. ambassador to Belarus and Georgia'.

The authors of this article have both profound knowledge and serious experience, so instead of an angry rebuke and ready answers 'from our side', it would be more constructive to begin a serious polemic around the arguments and facts they put forward.  Especially as the arguments are not new.  They are deftly grouped together and well described.

The authors' 'warning' came on the eve of the imminent EU and G20 summits, which had to respond to the 'three-dimensional' security threat emanating from Russia.  What are the three areas to which the West must pay special attention?  They are: increasing pressure on Georgia and Ukraine and terrorism and repressions in the Russian North Caucasus republics with predominantly Muslim populations.  As Nikita Khrushchev, that well-known master of the aphorism, said 'the aims are obvious, the objectives defined - to work, comrades!'

Let us briefly examine the threats defined by the authors as the West's primary concern.  The combination of words in the first two - pressure on Georgia and Ukraine - reflect an approach that I call 'the football philosophy'.  The decision has already been taken which team we support and the complexities of a bilateral relationship are replaced by black and white analysis.  The authors consider that 'the most serious Russian challenges in the near abroad are directed at Georgia and Ukraine, two countries which seek EU and NATO membership and have some form of democracy'.  The reader is once more presented with a simple formula.  It appears that Georgia and Ukraine's conflict with Russia is because they aspire to join NATO and want democracy.  Democracy in these two post-Soviet republics could (and should) be the subject of a large monograph, rather than a small article. I should say immediately that I consider the Russian political regime  authoritarian and archaic, but surely this is not a reason for handing out democratic indulgences to the Georgian and Ukrainian governments?  I should like to see if an impartial reader could find even two differences between the closing of the Russian TV station NTV and the crackdown on Imedi in Georgia.  Between the breaking up of the Georgian opposition in Tbilisi on 7 November 2007 and dispersing the 'Dissidents' March' in Moscow, or the 'United National Movement' in Georgia and 'United Russia'.  Between the populism of Putin and that of Saakashvili, the storming of Grozny and of Tskhinvali.

We should also point out that the Georgian attack in August 2008 was not the first, but the fourth in the last 17 years.  It's hard to believe that such knowledgeable authors have no idea of the realities of the 2006 local authority election campaign in Georgia, or the violations of the ceasefire in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  The authors don't mention that Saakashvili was trying to 'unfreeze' the two conflicts by using force and provocations (the 'small war' in Tliakana in August 2004, deployment of subdivisions in Kodori in defiance of the 1994 Moscow Agreements).  It was he who catapulted his country into the terrible catastrophe of August 2008.  After all, until last year no one (including Georgia) had revoked either the 1992 Dagomys or the 1994 Moscow Agreements)!

It is difficult not to object to the authors' comments on Ukraine too.  According to them, the country is seeking a way into NATO.  But do the esteemed authors not know the results of the Ukrainian opinion polls?  Or do President Yushchenko and his team (with their maximum 5% support) reflect the will of the Ukrainian people for them?  And I mean the whole people: in the Crimea and the Donbass, who speak Russian and want cooperation and rapprochement with their Russian neighbour.  They don't want to secede from Ukraine or set up pro-Russian separatist enclaves, I stress, they simply want to communicate in their mother tongue, which is unfortunately Russian, not English.   Or should we label them 'misguided' and 'infected with communist phobias'?  But can this approach be considered a Western value?

Leonid Kuchma, the second president of Ukraine, wrote a book called 'Ukraine is not Russia' several years ago.  Today another book should be written specially for Viktor Yushchenko and his lawyers 'Ukraine is not Galicia'.  This would help them to understand that preserving ethnic diversity and developing multilingualism is in Ukrainian national interest, rather than imperial Russia's.  This is the best way of preserving the country's unity.  Primitive ethnic nationalism and a stand-off between separate parts of the country will have a much more destructive effect on Ukraine than thousands of statements by Yury Luzhkov or Konstantin Zatulin, who are so often quoted in the EU and USA.

Yushchenko's democracy also needs more critical examination.  He has violated procedures (the very foundations of democracy) more often than any other leader in the CIS. 

But if democracy is not the issue, then what is?  It would appear that many people in the USA and EU do not wish to understand a seemingly simple point.  The formal legal act (the Belovezhsky Agreement) and the historical process of the disintegration of the USSR are two very different things.  After 1991 the former Soviet republics went their own ways:  the formation of these nation states was a very complicated process, so it would have been extremely naïve to even think that it could have been painless or fallen out exactly along the borders drawn up by party bosses of the various former Soviet administrative units with no thought for the views of any of the nationalities concerned.

After 1991 all the newly independent states had to prove that their appearance on the scene was not an accident of fate and that the new citizens recognised their borders.  Each republic chose different ways of doing this.  Some chose the ethnocentric model (Georgia and Armenia), others the model of a civic nation (Kazakhstan and that same Ukraine).  Ernest Renan once described a nation as a 'daily plebiscite', so it it hardly surprising that the plebiscite with a slogan 'Georgia for the Georgians' was unwinnable in Abkhazia or South Ossetia.  My esteemed opponents assert that no one recognises Abkhazia or South Ossetia even in the near abroad, but surely recognition is not the main point.  For them to exist as they are today needs recognition only from their own citizens.  This is what the Turks have been doing for more than 20 years in the Republic of Northern Cyprus, and the population in former Spanish Morocco.  It is unfortunate, but true, that the interests of small nations play no part in 'great game' discussions.

Or if they do, then only from the practical point of view.  From any point of view it would be wrong to extrapolate the situation in Georgia to Ukraine.  The Crimea had no previous autonomous regions which were abolished (as South Ossetia did); even at the high point of pro-Russian irredentism in 1994 no troops were deployed and there were no de facto states or conflicts.  Who said they were inevitable?  We should not forget that almost immediately after the 'five-day war', Moscow extended the 'Great Agreement' with Kiev for another 10 years.  An outstanding demonstration of 'revisionism' and nothing to do with democracy or NATO!  All this is part of the complicated process of forming new nation states.  Today the post-Soviet formations are repeating the Central and Eastern European experience (they are essentially similar processes) some 6 or 7 decades later and with all the excesses typical of those countries.  This is not to justify Russian policies.  Understanding the characteristics of the political processes is much more important  than propaganda.

Our three esteemed authors regard the situation in the Russian North Caucasus as the third challenge.  Here again we have the football philosophy, when responsibility is not shared, but focused on Russia alone.

'The brutal subjugation of Chechnya in two separatist wars since the early 1990s has caused widespread alienation. Human rights activists, journalists, and political opponents of Chechen leader Razman Kadyrov are murdered with shocking frequency. Attacks against police forces, known for corruption and torture of prisoners, are steadily mounting.  Spreading violence in Dagestan is particularly worrisome. With two-and-one-half million residents from thirty-odd ethnic groups, it is much more populous than Chechnya and lies on Azerbaijan's northern border'.

But how are the two anti-separatist campaigns in Chechnya connected to the situation in Dagestan today?  In Chechnya the separatists were fighting for the secular nationalist project outside Russia. In Dagestan today (as in Chechnya after 2004) the main challenge is not separatism, but radical Islam, so to see the current situation in Abkhazia and South Ossetia as influencing the North Caucasus (as our esteemed authors do) is a big mistake.  A separatist agenda is not relevant for the North Caucasus any more.  Today's heroes are different.  They condemned Akhmed Zakayev (one of the national-separatist leaders) to death and see themselves as part of the global jihad.  This is not only the result of errors in Russian policy (although there were many and they also 'assisted' this result), but also of the complex reflex action which is moving through the Islamic world from Afghanistan to the Philippines. 

The current Islamist activities in the North Caucasus have to be seen as part of the general evolution of social thought in the Islamic East from the European nationalist discourse to Islamic fundamentalism.  But what is interesting is that Islamists in the North Caucasus today regard the West as their enemy, as well as Russia.  The credo of the Islamist 'Caucasian Emirate' founder Dokka Umarov states that 'we are an inalienable part of the Islamic Umma. I am angered by the position of Muslims who see as enemies only the kuffar who have directly attacked them, though they seek support and sympathy from other kuffar, forgetting that all unbelievers are one nation. Our brothers are fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Palestine.  Anyone who has attacked Muslims, wherever they are, is our enemy and the enemy of one is the enemy of all' (my italics SM).

So perhaps, instead of using Russia as a threat and secretly rejoicing at her trouble spots,  it would be better to work on a joint strategy against those who are opposed to the values of the Western world, values that Russians on the whole share.  The founders of the 'Emirate' are for the moment only putting forward a minimal programme: 'our primary aim is to make the Caucasus Dar-as-Salam by establishing sharia law there and driving out the unbelievers.  Our second aim is then to take back all the lands which historically belong to the Muslims.  These borders lie beyond the frontiers of the Caucasus'.  The Western world is just over the Black Sea from the Caucasus.  Not such a great distance in today's globalised world!

In 2007, the three "buzz" words in Russia were "glamour", "nanotechnology" and "blog". In 2008 they were "crisis", "collider", and "war". This year, in Oleg Reut's opinion, "reset" looks as if it will be one of them. It is hard to disagree.

However, as yet the concept amounts to no more than a successful PR move. Barack Obama's new team has good speechwriters who have come up with a effective word to characterise Russian-American relations now. Only time will show whether this "reset" will come to have real meaning, whether it will become a political-ideological reality, like "détente" or "new thinking".

Real understanding will be required to prevent it becoming just a PR project. Which legacy is it that Moscow and Washington are going to have to put behind them? And can we talk about a "new page" in bilateral relations if it is going to be written by the same old authors? The Russian side, at least, is going to have to demonstrate new "writing gifts". The present American state secretary Hillary Clinton can hardly be seen as a newcomer to politics either. After all, her husband played a considerable role in launching that most sensitive of issues in Russian-American relations, NATO eastward expansion. It was during his two presidential terms that the first attempts were made to include former Soviet satellites in the NATO bloc.

Not the Cold War

First, we have to get rid of some of the misleading terminology that has been used to describe relations between the USA and the Russian Federation today. It has become fashionable among journalists and political analysts in both countries to refer to a revival of the spirit of the "cold war", if not a complete return to it. This has been encouraged by a number of "landmark" speeches by leaders in both countries  - Vladimir Putin's Munich speech and Vice-President Cheney's speech in Vilnius.  There have also been the geo-political crises in the South Caucasus and Ukraine, and the eastward expansion of NATO.

The very term "cold war" is historical in origin. No one would dream of talking about modern Russian-American and Russian-European relations as a continuation of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Thirty Years War or even the Hundred Years War. The "cold war" belongs just as much to a particular historical period as they do. It defines the reality of the Yalta-Potsdam peace that marked the end of the Second World War. This world no longer exists. It was ceremonially "buried" at the NATO Prague summit in 2002. A new world order is in the making now.

A new world order

There is no way of predicting with any confidence how the outlines of this world order will ultimately be determined. The Yalta-Potsdam peace, unlike the post-Versailles world, was created by friends who were also enemies. This was reflected in the subsequent course of history, which was based on "checks and balances", maintaining the inviolability of borders and territorial integrity, and guaranteeing national self-determination. These "checks and balances" were provided by the "cold war", the confrontation of the two superpowers and the military-political blocs grouped around them. It was not so much a military and political confrontation as an ideological one. One side was fighting  for a new society and Soviet communism, while the other was protecting the "free world from the totalitarian monster". The "cold war" ended when the USSR and the Warsaw bloc ceased to exist, and communism was thrown into the severe crisis it is in today. We need more accurate, relevant categories to describe relations between Russia and the West since then.

You can't have a "cold war" without the existence of a second ideological superpower. "Sovereign democracy" and "energy imperialism" hardly fulfill that role. They are no more than PR concepts. What is more, the new Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is not particularly keen on "sovereign democracy". It has not featured in the repertoire of relevant ideas since 2008.

As for the Russian military budget, in absolute figures it is almost 25 times smaller than America's. Even taking into account the different principles of army recruitment in Russia and the USA and the different ways of calculating the value of their military equipment, America's budget  is still five times greater.

So Russia is not a rival of the USA either militarily, in terms of wealth or ideology. As the events of last August demonstrated,  Russia, for better or worse, no longer  constitutes a separate geo-political world power. Russia is indisputably a strong regional power in the post-Soviet space, with the resources to determine the "rules of the game" within it. But beyond that territory, no country is prepared to make a decisive choice between Moscow or Washington. Even Armenia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan or Belarus prefer to pursue a diversified foreign policy.

Furthermore, one can only agree with Oleg Reut, who worked as an employee of the Nixon Center in Washington in 2007, that "recent years have seen an increasing asymmetry between the two powers. America occupies a much larger place in the political consciousness of Russia than vice versa. In Russia the United States is to a significant extent  both a rival and an object of emulation.  The rivalry may be a natural continuation of a "cold war" way of thinking. But the United States has only relatively recently become a power to be emulated.  

This is the background against which Russia will decide on which issues it is prepared to compromise with the USA, and on which it will dig in its heels.

Strategic v regional

After the first meeting between Presidents Barak Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, it was possible to define two groups of problems. The first was strategic. The USA and Russia signed joint statements on the future of Russian-American relations, and on a document to replace START-1 (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). Both sides showed an interest in cooperation in Afghanistan, in controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and also the Iranian nuclear programme.

The second group could be called the "Eurasian" issues. These, unlike the first, are regional. They concern events in South Ossetia in August 2008, the unilateral recognition of independence of the two former autonomous regions of Georgia, the integration of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and Russian policy on the territory of the former USSR in general. The main issue here is whether Washington is prepared to consider the post-Soviet area as primarily a Russian "sphere of influence".

Before the first "reset" meeting, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Washington was prepared to recognize Russia's influence only within the Russian Federation, not beyond its boundaries. The meeting between Medvedev and Obama saw no movement on this. The US President showed no understanding of his Russian colleague's position. Obama made it clear to Medvedev that Washington does not recognize the territory of the CIS to be a "zone of Russian influence", and will not approve of a post-Soviet version of the "Monroe doctrine". In this sense, there is clearly a continuity between the policies of the previous administration and this one.

The problem is that even before the "reset", Moscow had expressed its readiness to work on a wide range of strategic issues, from opposing terrorism to the Iranian or Korean issue, or Afghanistan. The bone of contention was the post-Soviet area. The Americans insist on  seeing Russia's instincts as authoritarian and archaic.

Conceding realities in Russia's "near-abroad"

At the same time, the Americans have often ignored Russia's interests, which are real, whatever the domestic politics. The measure of democracy in this or that CIS country cannot be determined by whether there is Russian influence, or a military presence there. Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan can hardly be seen as successful democracies merely because they have no Russian military bases.

Russian military presence in Tajikistan not only prevented civil war, but gave an example, and not a bad one either, of successful post-conflict regulation. It was Russian peacekeepers, not those of NATO or America, who stopped the conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In Abkhazia, it was thanks to Russian soldiers that some 60,000 Mingrelians returned to the Gali district. In 2004 it was Georgia, not Russia, that began the "thawing" of the conflict in South Ossetia, which ultimately lead to the "five-day war".

If the "reset" is going to work, Washington will have to admit that Russia's role on the territories of the former USSR cannot be the same as its role in Africa or Latin America. The ties are too strong. Many conflict areas in states of the "near abroad" also have a serious impact on internal security both in individual regions of Russia, and in the country as a whole. The Georgian-Ossetian and Ossetian-Ingush conflicts are examples of this, as are the Georgian-Abkhazian confrontation and the situation in the northwest Caucasus.

Russia, for its part, will have to admit that its special role in the CIS is not going to mean the rebirth of communism in Eurasia, or the growth of Moscow's global ambitions. Winning the "five-day war" is not enough. Global ambitions today are unthinkable without attractive values, powerful economic potential and a circle of potential allies, and Russia has serious problems here. Consequently, Russia's interest in Eurasia is more defensive than offensive. Its primary goal is to support stability inside Russia.

Russian diplomacy also needs to recognize difficult but obvious truths. Firstly, we should not extrapolate our disagreements with the USA in the post-Soviet area onto bilateral relations as a whole. Whatever happens in Georgia or Azerbaijan, cooperation on Afghanistan is objectively necessary and beneficial for both Moscow and Washington.

Secondly, the post-Soviet area has ceased to be the geo-political property of the Russian Federation. And the longer the post-Soviet countries are independent, the more internationalized the CIS will become. It will not be possible to stop the westernization of these former Soviet republics by building a "great wall of China", however much some may want to do this. The CIS already has its "losers' club", whose members connect their failures and losses with Russia, and their hopes for the future with the USA. The main thing is that Russia's lawful interest be taken into account, as it was when the Dagomys agreement on South Ossetia were signed in 1992, and the Moscow agreement on Abkhazia in the same year. No one should try to exclude Moscow from this process, as Georgia did in 2004-2008.

A successful outcome to attempts at "resetting" Russian-American relations today will depend ultimately on negotiations over the post-Soviet space.

Sergei Markedonov is head of the Department of International Relations at the Institute of Political and Military Analysis, and a candidate of historical science.

 

At the beginning of February, attention in Dagestan, the largest republic in the North Caucasus, was riveted on a story that unfolds like a political detective novel.It takes place against the unlikely setting of Dagestan's tax department (FTSD).

It began on 17 November 2008 when the head of the FRSD, Nazim Apaev, resigned. The position stood vacant for several months. Traditionally, the position of head tax-collector is held by a Lezgin (the dominant ethnic group in the southern part of the republic). However, on 2 February it transpired that the new incumbent would be a Russian called Vladimir Radchenko.

He was not a public figure. He had risen through the ranks, from being an ordinary tax inspector to the head of the FTSD office in Karachevo-Cherkesia. After that, he took a break from service and worked as a businessman. The appointment did not prove a happy one.

As soon as word got out that an "outsider" had got the job, mass protests began. Radchenko was warned that his office had been mined. The department building was picketed, and in Makhachkala the city's roads were blocked. On the day of his appointment Radchenko could not even reach his own office. 

A few days later Radchenko was kidnapped. He was not held hostage for long, as the purpose of the kidnapping was to prove a point. Later, Radchenko himself claimed that the son of the republic president Gadzhimurad Aliev, who is deputy head of the FTSD, was involved. This theory was not officially confirmed. Kasumbek Amirbekov, who heads the department leading the investigation, said that one theory they were  examining was that the kidnapping had been staged. It is unclear who could have done this though, as Radchenko lacked the considerable resources required to carry out such a scheme in Dagestan.

Once mooted, theories take on a life of their own. There were those who wanted to believe in the kidnapping, there were others who wanted to believe it was staged. Ten days after Radchenko was appointed, the appointment was annulled (Radchenko himself said that his dismissal had been "backdated").

The president's explanation

The finale of this story (perhaps only a temporary finale) came when Dagestan's president Mukhu Aliev announced on 16 February 2009 that the problems with Dagestan tax service department were the fault of the "irresponsible and unprincipled behavior" of the head of the tax service of the Russian Federation Mikhail Mokretsov.

According to the president, Mr. Mokretsov was a hostage "to certain Dagestani Muscovites lobbying for their interests in the republic". The Radchenko case was part of a larger power battle in Dagestan, he said. Radchenko's lobbyists were "destructive forces who will use any means necessary in their battle for power. They are after money, and they are prepared to use the media, criminal connections and other ties in federal power structures". Aliev refrained from making direct accusations and giving specific names of the leaders of these "destructive forces". Perhaps these names will soon be forthcoming.

However that may be, a representative of the structure that governs the Russian Federation, a structure based on the principles of the "vertical of power", was unable to start work in the position to which he was appointed. "Of course it looks bad when a federal official in Dagestan is not allowed to start work in his post," said Dagestan's president: "But what kind of a federal official was this? Who appointed him? He was actually an imposter. Such appointments have to be made by the Russian Finance Minister in agreement with the head of the republic. This, the minister did not do".

Let us assume that the federal structures did make serious procedural errors;  that they overestimated their status; that they did not agree the candidacy in the proper way but took the infamous "vertical of power" for granted, believing that now the "terrible '90s" were over the regional establishment did not need to be handled with kid gloves.

Perhaps the "Lezgian protest" does not offer a satisfactory explanation. Perhaps the theory of a conspiracy of "clans" within Dagestan doesn't either. But nor in fact does the president's theory. It can't have been the deciding factor in the "Radchenko case". For it does not really explain why it happened.

Could it just have been a case of lack of professionalism, at the least, on the part of the federal structures, for having tried to impose a "technocratic" solution without any understanding of local sensibilities? Hardly, for if you lack the resources to impose your will, you just have to negotiate. 

The Lezgian theory

 Let's examine the "Lezgian theory" a little more closely. During the first days, this was the explanation that was being offered for local resistance to the appointment of an outsider. Here we are dealing with a deep-rooted stereotype. Dagestan is a multi-ethnic community, and ensuring harmonious inter-ethnic relations is the basis of stability within the republic. So the key positions are divided between ethnic elites. Violating this balance will lead to serious problems, if not to an explosion.

While this is all true, it is also not quite true. Until 2006 no one occupied the presidential post in Dagestan, and the head of the State Council (a body that includes representatives of the republic's 14 major ethnic groups) was Magomedali Magomedov, an ethnic Dargin. In 2006, Mukhu Aliev, an ethnic Avar became the first president of Dagestan. This led to a certain redistribution of powers and the ethnic balance. But the republic did not collapse.

As for the instability we have seen in recent years, there was plenty of that in the years when Dagestan was ruled by the State Council. We may be going through a ninth wave of acts of terrorism and sabotage right now, and the anti-terrorist operation in the famous aul of Gimry is fresh in our minds. But in the 1990s there was the rebellion in Makhachkala, the creation of the "Special Islamic territory" in the "Kadar zone", and a series of ethnic conflicts.

Both then and now, the informal approach to these problems worked much better than the imposition of law and order. In our opinion, Konstantin Kazenin, a serious scholar of Dagestan,  is right when he concluded that: "The average Lezgian Dagestani in full control of his mental powers is not remotely interested in the ethnicity of the head tax-collector, not even in his native town or region, let alone on the level of the republic. What is more, there were plenty of influential Lezgins who supported Mr. Radchenko's appointment." It is no accident that the media mentioned possible links between Radchenko and Suleiman Kerimov (an influential entrepreneur, a "Moscow Dagestani" of Lezgian ethnicity).

Nor was the resistance to Radchenko's appointment confined to Lezgians. People of Avar ethnicity also appear to have been involved in expelling Radchenko - he himself implicated the president's son, an ethnic Avar. The president too did not approve of Radchenko's appointment. So the theory about the disruption of the ethnic balance being the basis for "expelling the outsider" is unconvincing. 

Non-ethnic dividing lines

In Dagestan ethnic boundaries are not the only "dividing lines". Fidelity to the republic has always been far more important than the "blood principle". For example, the Chechen-Akkins of Dagestan value their Dagestani identity higher than the notion of "solidarity" with the Ichkeria of Dudaev and Maskhadov.

The republic is also riven with confrontations between different schools of Islam. There is the Tariqah school, versus the so-called "renewed" school, which itself can be very approximately divided into the unofficial and the radical (Salafid) which our journalists call "Wahhabi". Within this mosaic, a Lezgin, Avar and Dargin (if they are Tariqah followers) may find themselves pitted against a Lezgin, Avar and Dargin who are Salafid followers.

The Russian Dagestani factor

Even this does not exhaust the complexity of Dagestan's fractured allegiances. In the post-Soviet period many natives of Dagestan settled elsewhere in the Russian Federation. Despite all the difficulties (from the so-called ‘face control' of the Moscow police to administrative barriers), many were able to make a career, receive prestigious education, open their own business, earn money and become successful managers, intellectuals and businessmen. Now some of them would like return home and "pay their debts" to the republic, using their material and moral capital. During their years of self-imposed exile, the identity of "Dagestani" became no less important for many of them than their ethnic origin.

So we also have the rivalry between Russian Dagestanis of different ethnicities and the republic's own multi-ethnic bureaucracy. We might, for instance, find a Lezgin from the FTSD becoming an ally of the Avars in the president's circle to stop the interests of (so far?) unnamed "Moscow Dagestanis" from entering the republic. Their ambitions might have come into conflict with those of Dagestan's power elite of Dagestan at other levels.

Dagestan's power elite

This elite formed during the time of the Communist Party, and it has not changed nearly as much as that of neighbouring republics. It is used to having carte blanche from Moscow to stabilize the situation. It does not expect to have competition.  Makhachkala may know how to deal with ethno-nationalists or religious radicals, but it is less clear about how to deal with this new wave of internal emigrants. Some may be easy to co-opt into Dagestan's own power structure, and some not. But few have given much strategic thought as to how to deal with this issue.

Unfortunately, Moscow prefers to observe the situation from afar, without involving itself too much in the local specifics. One need not look far to find examples. For instance, on 10 February, when the "Radchenko case" had already been going on for a week, Russian President Medvedev met with Dagestan's president. And what was the outcome? Were those who violated the principles for selecting the candidate for the head of the republic's tax service punished? Did the president criticize the republic's elites for their treatment of the "outsider from Moscow"? Rather than looking for the culprit of an incident which surely reflects badly on government, Medvedev merely "instructed" Aliev to "pay more attention to issues relating to security and fighting crime. Rather than  a substantial discussion of the republic's problems (which are serious enough without Radchenko), our newspapers and television were once again treat to a sort of ceremonial Caucasian toast. Well, that's government for you.

Sergei Markedonov is Head of the Department for the Study of Inter-ethnic Relations at the Institute of Political and Military Analysis, and a Candidate of Historical Science.