Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 7 – Because of the
outcome of the events of 1917 in which left-wing parties set up soviets that
first served as an alternative government and then its replacement, Russian
officials have always worried about the possible reappearance of such “dual
power” and their opponents have always viewed such an arrangement as a path to
power.
Those attitudes make what is
happening not only in the North Caucasus republics but elsewhere as well
intriguing because as one observer on the scene puts it, “the powers that be
are calmly watching as one after another the levers of administration are taken
away from them” (kavkazr.com/a/ingushetiya-pokidayet-rossiyu/28217182.html).
In an article on a
Radio Svoboda site yesterday, Prague-based analyst Ramazan Alpaut describes in
detail how this is taking place in Ingushetia and suggests that this state of dual
power is in varying degrees taking shape in other republics and regions of the
Russian Federation as well.
Alpaut begins by noting that “researchers
have pointed out as one of the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire the weak
effectiveness of the civil administration in comparison with the military and
the lack of willingness of the state to react in a necessary way to changing
realities” in the society they are charged with controlling.
“In several regions of Russia,” he
says, “societal institutions, operating not on the Constitution of the country
but on the laws of the mountains are actively beginning to compete with the
state.” That has already happened in some North Caucasus republics; it is now
very much in evidence in Ingushetia.
A few days ago, Alpaut continues,
residents of the village of Nesterovsky in the Sunzhen district of the republic
met and voted to expel someone that the government had not punished in the way
they thought necessary, acting much as they might have before Russia took
control of the region and without much regard for the current regime and its
laws.
To be sure, he continues, the
population aided and abetted by some officials only suggested that the
individual and his family leave whereas in the past they would have used force
to expel them. But such actions have no
basis in Russian law and thus represent a kind of civic activity which is a
direct challenge to the authority of the state.
Magomed Mutsolgov, the director of
Ingush human rights organization Mashr, points out that “these actions of the
authorities and individual residents in no way correspond to the shariat or
adat or even more to Russian law. In essence, this is the popularization of
political speculations and intrigues” and from the point of view of law potentially
dangerous.
Ruslan Karayev, a former media
minister in Ingushetia, says that in his view it is more than that: it is “a
powerful attack on the powers that be” who are failing to recognize the ways in
which this undermines their powers and the rights of the population. If they
consider what the jamaats have done in Daghestan, they will recognize how bad
things could get.
“If this process isn’t stopped,”
Karayev continues, “there will be ever more cases of the violation of basic
constitutional guarantees.”
And Sergey Markedonov, an instructor
at the Russian State Humanities University and a specialist on the Caucasus,
says that this case of “’popular creativity of the masses’” is far from unusual
and that similar cases have occurred in Stavropol, the Kuban and even Rostov
oblast, where Orthodox groups are behaving in much the same way.
But all the experts agree, Alpaut
says, that the rise of “parallel legal systems in the North Caucasus” shows
that these social institutions are ready and able to compete with official
state organs which “Russia had not had the strength to introduce into the
region.” Thus, it is more a measure of
the weakness of the state than the strength of society.
However, if people begin to feel
that, they may act in unpredictable and even revolutionary ways, as those in
the soviets did against the Russian Provisional Government one hundred years
ago.
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