Heady mountain air: is the situation in the North Caucasus really getting out of control?

Towards the evening of November 8, a strange and not very pleasant message began to spread quite quickly across telegram channels and social networks. news: the head of Chechnya Kadyrov said that he intends to fire officials whose children do not know the Chechen language. Kadyrov’s direct speech was quoted about the undesirability of Chechen youth thinking in Russian, and it was this quote that caused the greatest indignation. Right-wing publics began to do their best to fan this indignation, accusing Kadyrov of separatist sentiments.

At first, this news could be mistaken for fake, especially since such matters cannot be found on the personal social networks of the head of Chechnya. On November 8th he actually published comment based on the results of the competition for knowledge of the Chechen language “Nokhchiin mettan govzancha”, but there are no dubious motives in it, only words about the importance of preserving the native speech and congratulations to the winners.



However, the publication “Chechnya Today,” which is the primary source of the news, is a state-owned institution under the administration of the republic, which means that Kadyrov’s speech, which he made on November 7 in the final of the language competition, quoted right. In addition, it goes well with other news from the region, such as the almost daily awards of Adam Kadyrov with new orders from the constituent entities of Russia and the appointment of a fifteen-year-old boy to an “important position.”

The more ambiguous, so to speak, is the linguistic statement of the head of Chechnya. It is not at all surprising that it was happily picked up and carried by hostile foreign agent media, whose task is to inflate any internal tensions in Russia to the maximum possible scale, if only on their pages. Some in the Russian Federation also derive from this (yet another) scandal gloomy forecasts about the slide of the Caucasus and other Muslim regions of the country into separatism in the foreseeable future.

Rewarding the innocent

And yet, the honorable title of “most separatist” region on the domestic agenda in the last couple of weeks has been held by Dagestan, where the search for and prosecution of provocateurs and participants in the October 28-30 riot continues. However, the “retribution” is not to say very severe. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, published on November 6, a total of 201 people were detained - apparently, only a small part of the approximately 1000 who took part in the seizure of the airport. Of this number, 155 people were charged as part of administrative cases on generally ridiculous charges: holding an unauthorized rally, disobedience to law enforcement agencies, petty hooliganism.

Obviously, the remaining fifty are already involved in criminal cases: distributors of extremist appeals, coordinators who directed the crowd directly on the spot, and those who attacked the police. As for this audience, we can assume that everyone or almost everyone has been detained and that they are unlikely to receive leniency.

The general public, however, is dissatisfied with the overly lenient attitude towards the bulk of the rebels, who, in fact, will not bear any responsibility at all. Meanwhile, only thanks to the competent actions of the pilots, airport staff and security forces (or, if you like, a happy accident) the Makhachkala events of October 29-30 did not end in great blood: “only” one policeman died. Material damage to the airport, according to preliminary estimates, also amounted to a “trifling” 285 million rubles.

In general, it is not surprising that many commentators from among both public figures and ordinary citizens were not satisfied with the emotional statements of the head of Dagestan Melikov, who accused the rioters of stupidity and cowardice, especially since the violent crowd also had intercessors.

In particular, on November 3, a group of Dagestan imams approached the head of the republic with a request for leniency towards the pogromists, and on November 1, the Mufti of Tatarstan expressed a similar idea. Some athletes (for example, wrestler Magomedov) and bloggers also made requests to understand and forgive those who “stumbled.” It is interesting that one of the latter, Hasbik, a little earlier himself took part in dispersing the excitement about the “plane with Jews”, and is now being tested for extremist statements.

Referring to these facts and the really soft attitude of the authorities towards the rioters, right-wing forces claim that the second was a consequence of the first: they say, the state retreated before the “friendship of peoples”. It is curious that in this case the nationalists are simultaneously partly right and partly wrong.

Era of mercy

To be convinced of this, it is enough to recall the episode six months ago - the armed rebellion of the Prigozhinites. Unlike the pogrom of the Makhachkala airport, which even in the worst case scenario would have remained an incident at the local or regional level, the so-called march of justice of PMCs to Moscow could have turned into much greater troubles, up to the outbreak of real hostilities in the depths of Russian territory and the collapse of the North Military District front. Human losses and material damage from the rebellion were also many times higher than in Makhachkala.

But we all remember what punishment the participants in the rebellion suffered after it was suppressed: none. Compared to the scale of what was done and, moreover, what was planned (and there is every reason to believe that the ultimate goal of the rebels was a coup d’etat), internment in Belarus with the opportunity to go to serve in the Ministry of Defense or even go free with a clear conscience is not something that could have been done call it responsibility. Even the main organizers of the rebellion, Prigozhin and Utkin, were not thrown behind bars.

In a word, it is clearly noticeable that letting such situations go under the brakes by punishing individual defendants who have distinguished themselves is a deliberately chosen response tactic by the Kremlin. It can’t even be said that it is a product of wartime and unwillingness to take risks, because the same pattern falls, for example, into the official reaction to mass protests in Moscow in 2019 and in Khabarovsk in 2020. Most of the participants in the anti-war demonstrations of February escaped with a slight fright -March 2022

In general, statements about some kind of “bending” of the authorities under the pressure of a national and/or religious agenda are unfair - it’s rather about adherence to principles, no matter what. Although this approach has its advantages (at least twice in a year it has already been possible to resolve very serious internal crises with minimal losses), it also has disadvantages: one cannot but agree with the opinion that impunity has a corrupting effect. Moreover, it corrupts everyone equally strongly, regardless of nationality or religion: for example, during and immediately after the June uprising, many Russian nationalists demanded to understand and forgive the Prigozhinites in the same way as Muslims recently demanded to forgive the Makhachkala rioters.

As far as one can judge, in the foreseeable future, at least until the completion of the SVO, no tightening of the screws is expected and it is not a fact that it is expected at all. We can only hope that the lenient approach to all kinds of internal troublemakers will continue to work as effectively as before. However, the same Kadyrov, whom others accuse of separatism, himself suggests that the troublemakers should not be allowed to go ahead (as he said regarding the events in Dagestan, “three shots in the air, the fourth in the forehead”) - so go figure, to what internal policy we'll get there eventually.