Not a Threat? The Russian Elites' Disregard for the "Islamist Danger" in the North Caucasus in the 1990s

Abstract

Not a Threat?The Russian Elites' Disregard for the "Islamist Danger" in the North Caucasus in the 1990s Vassily A. Klimentov (bio) Since the 1980s, Western pundits have claimed that Muslims in the Soviet Union would rise to challenge communism. Proponents of this school of thought centered on Alexandre Bennigsen, the Russian émigré scholar and specialist on Islam. Bennigsen postulated that, because Soviet Muslims actively nurtured plans to overthrow the communist regime, Soviet authorities both in Moscow and the Muslim republics were in constant fear of Islam and closely monitored the "parallel clergy," the Islamic scholars who escaped registration by official institutions tasked with policing religion.1 The Bennigsen school also convinced the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the necessity to nurture the opposition among Soviet Muslims to the Soviet authorities by smuggling Islamic literature to them and broadcasting Islamic radio content in Muslim regions. These attempts to undermine the Soviet system proved, however, underwhelming.2 When the USSR collapsed, Soviet Muslims often proved to be the most loyal of Soviet citizens and Islam did not become a driving factor for separatism.3 Except for Azerbaijan, which became embroiled in a war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, Muslim republics left the Soviet Union unwillingly. [End Page 817] Overall, policymakers in Moscow disregarded Islam as a source of dispute throughout the Soviet period. They did not see it as a challenge to communism.4 Despite being discredited, the Bennigsen school has had a long life, continuing to influence studies on Soviet and post-Soviet Muslims. Western and Russian scholars and policymakers, often from among security elites, have built on its legacy to analyze the rise of Islamism, a movement that conceives of Islam as a political ideology and hopes for the establishment of a theocratic state in the post-Soviet space.5 Constructing a retrospectively deterministic narrative after the consolidation of radical Islamism in the North Caucasus in the 2000s, they have argued that the Soviet and Russian states consistently fought Islamism in the 20th century. Such accounts have too often traced uncritical filiations from the Iranian Revolution to the Soviet-Afghan War, the Tajik Civil War, the First and Second Chechen Wars and, ultimately, the war in Syria.6 Since 1999, they have followed the ideology of Vladimir Putin's regime, which has repeatedly emphasized the existential and, importantly, foreign threat that Islamism represented to Russia.7 In that narrative Moscow appeared to have continuously been at the forefront of a messianic civilizational fight against Islamism. [End Page 818] Other scholars have questioned such accounts, highlighting how perceptions and policies on Islam connected with the longue durée of Russia's relationship with Muslims that was marked by orientalist stereotypes and, depending on the period, accommodation or confrontation;8 how the Soviets had a differentiated assessment of religion between domestic and foreign policy, acknowledging that Islam could be a "progressive factor" in the Third World;9 how the Soviet Politburo only took Islamism seriously in Afghanistan after 1986, seeing it as a weapon instrumentalized by the West as part of the Cold War;10 how the Soviets had a poor understanding of sectarian tensions within Islam;11 how Islamism was a secondary factor in the Tajik Civil War and, even more so, in the First Chechen War; and how even the religionization of the North Caucasian insurgents' platform during the Second Chechen War had as much to do with ideology as with instrumentality.12 No research has, however, investigated how Russian elites saw Islamism as it developed in the former Soviet Union and how their assessments connected with the Soviet legacy. While some studies have paid attention to [End Page 819] the continuity of the state in Russia after the Cold War, none has explored what it meant for Russia's relationship with Islam.13 By stressing the Soviet collapse, most of the research obscures the continuities in security assessments of Islamism between the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. By historicizing the analysis, it is possible to pinpoint the moment of and explain the shift in the Kremlin's assessment of the Islamist danger between the relative disregard it suffered during the Soviet period and the centrality it acquired...