Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page I Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page II Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page III Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus GEORGI M. DERLUGUIAN Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page IV First published by Verso 2004 © Georgi Derluguian 2004 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Ve r s o UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York,NY 10014 –4606 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN 1–85984– 567–3 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Derluguian, Georgi Bourdieu’s secret admirer in the Caucasus 1. Shanib, Musa 2. Bourdieu, Pierre – Influence 3. Caucasus – History 4. Caucasus – Politics and government I.Title 947.5'2085 ISBN 1859845673 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Derluguian, Georgi M. Bourdieu’s secret admirer in the Caucasus / Georgi Derluguian. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–85984–567–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Chechnëiìa (Russia) – History – Autonomy and independence movements. 2. Shanibov, ëIìU. M. (ëIìUriæi Mukhamedovich) 3. Revolutionaries – Russia (Federation) – Chechnëiìa – Biography. 4. Chechnëiìa (Russia) – Ethnic relations. 5. Chechnëiìa (Russia) – Relations – Russia (Federation) 6. Russia (Federation) – Relations – Russia (Federation) – Chechnëiìa. 7. National liberation movements – Russia (Federation) – Chechnëiìa. I. Title. DK511.C37D47 2004 947.5'2–dc22 2004006919 Typeset in Garamond Printed in the USA by R. R. Donnelley & Sons Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page V CONTENTS MAPS vii INTRODUCTION DOES GLOBALIZATION BREED 1 ETHNIC VIOLENCE? 1 THE FIELD 29 2 COMPLEX TRIANGULATIONS 65 3 THE DYNAMICS OF DE-STALINIZATION 84 4 FROM 1968 TO 1989 104 5 SOCIAL STRUCTURE 129 6 THE NATIONALIZATION OF PROVINCIAL 166 REVOLUTIONS 7 THE SCRAMBLE FOR SOVIET SPOILS 219 THEORETICAL REPRISE POSSIBILITY 287 Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page VI TABLES 325 FIGURES 331 NOTES 335 BIBLIOGRAPHY 377 INDEX 395 Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page VII Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page VIII Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page 1 INTRODUCTION Does Globalization Breed Ethnic Violence? “In the Caucasus all good stories acquire the tendency to branch out.” Fazil Iskander, Sandro of Chegem, New York: Vintage Books, 1983 The empirical story to be told in this book until now remained buried in my files and for a variety of reasons. The immediate issue was one of personal ethics, insofar as the story involves passionately contested events and contemporary personalities, some of whose names have become notorious in their parts of the world. Secondly, there were complex conceptual–theoretical problems posed by the underlying narra- tive: its empirical richness called for an extensive and varied theoretical apparatus that took some years to assemble. Thirdly, the problem was political, insofar as the material to be presented had to do with phenomena commonly described as ethnic conflict, Islamic militancy, and international terrorism. Let me begin then with the personal, and with what pertains to my title: Bourdieu’s secret admirer in the Caucasus. AN UNCOMMON MAN The basis for my story originated in a chance encounter with one Musa Shanib, a fearsome Circassian rebel from the North Caucasus, whose lieutenants once Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page 2 2 INTRODUCTION included the even more fearsome Chechen fighters Shamil Basayev and Ruslan Gelayev.1 In the course of our meeting, which I describe in greater detail in chapter one, I discovered that Shanib was a much more complex figure than one might have at first assumed. To my no little astonishment, at some point in our conversation (or, rather, his monologue) Shanib suddenly revealed himself to be an enthusiastic student of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. This proved to be just the first of many ironies that marked out Shanib’s life story as being of unique interest. Shanib’s biography, suffused as it is with paradoxes and bitter disillusionments, seemed to summarize the trajectory of a whole generation of Soviet citizens who were born under Stalin, came of age in the expansive and wildly optimistic atmosphere of Khrushchev’s Thaw, spent the long uneventful years of Brezhnev’s “stagnation” in a kind of internal exile, and finally reemerged during Gorbachev’s perestroika in an ebullient surge of public activism that led, tragically, to a disastrous climax. It turned out that in Shanib’s native town of Nalchik, the small provincial capital of the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, the 1989–1992 protests against the Soviet regime were organized and headed by largely the same network of people who had organized the previous wave of revolutionary contention between 1968 and 1972. Musa Shanib himself – or rather, Yuri Muhammedovich Shanibov, as he was known in a Russified form for much of his life – turned out to be a local version of what the French call a soixante-huitard: one of the New Left rebels of 1968. Shanibov’s circle of rebels consisted of educated men and a few formidable women connected through the local university, mostly via the departments of history, philosophy, and philology. They were characteristic examples of the upwardly mobile cadres, special- ists, and national intellectuals produced during the tremendous expansion of Soviet higher education in the 1950s. The dazzling career prospects which opened up in the wake of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program soon brought this group to the threshold of the Soviet bureaucratic elite: the so-called nomenklatura. However, in the momentous year of 1968, they were still considered too junior to be fully inducted into this elite group; and, besides, many of them nurtured different aspi- rations in the fields of social research and artistic creativity. Yuri Shanibov himself forfeited a promising career as a law enforcement official (already in his twenties he had served as a district attorney, or prokuror), and instead became a junior lecturer working towards his dissertation on the role of law in socialist self-governance – a distinctly anti-Stalinist topic. In the meantime, nomenklatura positions were rapidly being filled as the old Stalinist stalwarts came to be replaced by a new cohort of bureaucrats. Towards the mid-1960s there emerged all over the Soviet provinces closed networks of Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page 3 INTRODUCTION 3 bureaucratic patronage and privilege that would hold their grip on power for years to come – in a refashioned form, these bureaucratic networks still proved able to provide the basis for the post-communist oligarchic restoration of the 1990s. In the small world of Nalchik, when I first visited there in 1997 and met Musa Shanib, this phenomenon was particularly transparent – the local rulers were still the same communist bureaucrats of the late 1950s and early 1960s, or else their personally selected successors. On the other side of the barricades, the local opposition was also still made up of mostly the same sixties intellectuals, or their former students. Back in 1968, the suppression of the democratic movement in Czechoslovakia had signaled to the Soviet nomenklatura the urgency of aborting any movement that might have developed similar demands for “socialism with a human face.” It was in this climate that the energetic young lecturer Yuri Shanibov was selected for a show of punishment, and subsequently became regarded locally as kind of a dissi- dent, or at least as a troublemaker possessing unusual ideas. After a hiatus of nearly two decades, Gorbachev’s program of reform from above offered people like Shanibov a second chance to engage in public debate and to organize reform movements from below. But in a few years, as Gorbachev’s half- hearted liberalization fell further and further behind the exploding expectations of Soviet citizenry, Shanibov’s circle of friends, colleagues, and former students radi- calized their political demands to include the wholesale removal of the old nomenklatura from power. They first sought to achieve this goal through the compet- itive elections of 1989 and 1990 – elections that soon turned into street protests as it became clear that the electoral process had been brazenly manipulated by local officials. Street politics, however, were a quite different matter from debating in intellectual clubs. It now proved necessary to mobilize people from other classes of society against the intractable nomenklatura. In the process, a totally new kind of protestor, with totally new demands, emerged from the poor and disorderly semi- rural suburbs. These were much cruder, less disciplined people, who soon showed themselves prone to direct action which was characteristically violent in nature. Their idea of democratization may have boiled down to punishing the “fat bureau- crats and official thieves,” but these masses were a real force – so, like many revolutionaries before them, Shanibov and his companions decided to ride the tiger of popular wrath. The protagonists during the stormy events of 1989 to 1992 were still the same network of local bureaucrats who had ruled in Nalchik for decades, versus the same oppositional network of alienated intellectuals and junior specialists whose careers had been blocked by the corrupt nomenklatura. But the character of Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_Derluguian.qxd 5/21/2004 12:49 Page 4 4 INTRODUCTION contention and its ideology had changed radically.