Blowback in Russia
Michael J. Totten - 09.15.2008 - 5:36 PM
Russia has a problem. Moscow’s recognition of Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia a few weeks ago has already encouraged some of its own disgruntled minorities to push harder for independence from the Russian Federation. Russia’s semi-autonomous republics of Ingushetia and Tatarstan have both ratcheted up their demands to secede.
Radical Islamists in Ingushetia, just across the Caucasus mountains from Georgia, have waged a low-level insurgency against the Russian government for some time now, though it has yet to reach the level of violent anti-Russian ferocity waged earlier by their cousins in neighboring Chechnya. A new group calling itself the People’s Parliament of Ingushetia has just surfaced after Russia’s adventure in Georgia with the stated aim of secession. More moderate opposition leaders also recently joined the cause of the radicals. Rebellious Ingush are not only emboldened by Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, they’re enraged by the assassination a few weeks ago of prominent anti-Kremlin journalist Magomed Yevloyev.
Meanwhile, an umbrella organization of various nationalist groups known as the All-Tatar Civic Center in Tatarstan, announced that they likewise want out. They also cite the Abkhazia and South Ossetia precedents. “Russia has lost the moral right not to recognize us,” said Rashit Akhmetov, editor of the Zvezda Povolzhya newspaper in Tatarstan’s capital.
The odds that Tatarstan will actually become a successful independent country at any time are remote. A large minority of its people, around 40 percent, are ethnic Russians. A serious secessionist movement in that part of Russia could get ugly, and fast. If the republic ever were to become independent, it would be surrounded by Russia and could easily be strangled by Moscow. It’s a long shot at best for these people, but that doesn’t mean Tatarstan can’t become a serious problem for Russia in the medium term, especially if other constituent parts of the federation resist at the same time. Tatarstan and Ingushetia are only two republics of many that could undermine Moscow from the inside.
Former President Vladimir Putin cynically used Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia earlier this year as an excuse for Russia’s invasion and dismemberment of Georgia, but the Tatars and Ingush are more plausibly citing Russia’s very own precedents in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Kosovo and Serbia are far from Ingushetia and even farther from Tatarstan. What happens in the Balkans seems to stay in the Balkans, as far as they are concerned. What happens in Russia, though, can hardly be considered remote for disaffected minorities in subjugated republics that remain inside Russia’s own borders.
The Soviet Union was really an empire squared. Moscow lost pieces of its outer empire in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus, but many more pieces of the rump empire, or federation, might yet break off or at least severely bleed Russia internally. Chechnya has already famously done so, and the possibility of neighboring Ingushetia likewise exploding has been apparent even to casual observers. And a majority in Tatarstan actually voted to secede as far back as 1992.
Vladimir Putin and current President Dmitri Medvedev should have seen this coming when they changed the rules governing borders in the former Soviet Union. The message from the Ingush and Tatars to Moscow couldn’t be simpler: If they get to secede from Georgia, we get to secede from Russia. Your move.
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