After a period of relative calm, the recent suicide attacks in a Moscow Metro station as well as the bomb attack against a train in Dagestan serve as a reminder that, despite its tough policies, Russia remains vulnerable to the terrorist scourge affecting other countries.
In fact, the perceived success of Moscow’s repressive policies in Chechnya may have led militants from the Muslim-majority North Caucasus region to seek targets in Russia’s heartland to revive global Islamic support for their movement. A Chechen Islamist leader, Doku Umarov, claimed responsibility for the Moscow Metro bombings. According to the Russian authorities, the suicide bombers who carried out the attack were female relatives of men killed in Russia’s counterterrorist operation, who are known as Black Widows. Given that radical Islamists were responsible, we should ask the following question: To what extent have their national grievances been exacerbated by the global Islamist movement?
The roots of Russian-Muslim antagonisms go back to Czarist times, when Russian imperialists conquered the previously independent Muslim peoples and forcibly incorporated them into the territory of the Russian Empire. Leo Tolstoy and others provided us with graphic accounts in their works of how this process unfolded in the North Caucasus during the 19th century.
Russian-Muslim antagonism deepened under the former Soviet Union. One of the first steps that the Bolsheviks took after seizing power in 1917 was to attack the country’s religious establishments, while also urging foreign communists to do the same in their own countries. Islam and other religions were regarded as sustaining archaic value systems that essentially helped impede the triumph of Marxist-Leninism, which its proponents saw as based on scientific truth rather than false religious consciousness.
Under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, this antagonism toward religion in the Soviet republics, whether it was the Orthodox Christianity prevalent in European Russia or the Sunni Muslim faith that was practiced in the North Caucasus and Central Asia, reached its height. Stalin only amplified Muslim hatred when he deported the Chechens to Siberia and to Kazakhstan during World War II. The Soviet leader accused them of collaborating with the Nazi German invaders. Most of those who survived the ordeal did not return to their areas of origin until 1957, after Stalin’s death.
The Soviet Union unwittingly further alienated the world’s Muslims decades later when Moscow made the disastrous decision to try to impose its secular socialist template on neighboring Afghanistan. The Soviet regime encouraged pro-Moscow groups in Kabul to seize power and introduce measures to move Afghanistan away from its traditional Muslim beliefs. After these misguided efforts provoked local Muslims to take up arms in opposition, the Kremlin assumed a direct role in the Afghan conflict by invading the country in December 1979.
The 100,000 Soviet troops deployed in Afghanistan and their local allies were never able to pacify the rural areas of the country. They faced a resistance movement, the Mujahideen, that was supported by much of the Islamic world. Many of the movement’s foreign fighters eventually joined Al-Qaeda. The Afghan resistance was amply funded by both Western and Arab governments that clearly appreciated the danger posed by Soviet imperialism, but not enough the growing threat of Islamist radicalization due to the war. After the Soviet military withdrawal, these governments lost interest in Afghanistan, allowing extremist groups based in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere to establish the radical Taliban regime in Kabul.
Meanwhile, many Soviet soldiers of Muslim background who had become radicalized brought their jihadist beliefs back home. The Soviet Union itself disintegrated when President Mikhail Gorbachev, like previous Soviet leaders, underestimated how the power of nationalism might weaken Moscow’s control over its empire. Previously repressed nationalist forces in the Soviet republics exploited the limited democratic openings provided by Gorbachev to rally support for greater autonomy and eventual independence from Moscow. Although the governments of the newly independent states that had emerged from the Soviet Union have remained under the control of religiously moderate leaders, the people of the North Caucasus, frustrated in their failed aspirations for independence, have often backed local militants seeking to force their freedom from Moscow.
Yet the long Chechen resistance to Russian rule has only recently taken on the tenor of an Islamic-inspired insurgency. During the early 1990s, Chechen separatism lacked a strong radical Islamic presence. The spread of Muslim militancy throughout Chechnya and the other regions of the Northern Caucasus followed the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as that of Al-Qaeda. Many Russian Muslim insurgent and terrorist leaders were trained during that decade in Al-Qaeda camps that were established by Osama bin Laden with the support of the Taliban.
After the disastrous Chechen War of 1994-96, the Russian federal government sought to confine Islamist radicalism within the territory of Chechnya itself. This meant allowing Islamist militants to control the republic in return for their signing a ceasefire agreement with Moscow. Within Chechnya, Islam became a means of uniting the disparate clans and lending legitimacy to the newly established Chechen government. The difficult social, economic, and political conditions that prevailed in the North Caucasus then contributed to helping the spread of radical Islam. Communism’s collapse left an ideological vacuum, while the end of censorship and Soviet border controls gave Russian Muslims greater global awareness and connections with the larger Islamic world. This allowed for an increase in ties between Russian-based and foreign terrorist groups.
The conditions prevailing internationally also helped radicalize Russian Muslims. Although some Chechen leaders wanted to concentrate on local reconstruction rather than work for the propagation of Islamist fundamentalism elsewhere, the Chechen government found that the only foreign sources of funding willing to accept its appeals for assistance came from the global Islamist movement. The Taliban government in Kabul was the sole foreign government to recognize Chechnya as an independent state, while transnational Islamist terrorists provided more direct support to the republic.
A key motivation for foreign Islamist intervention in Chechnya was the aspiration to convert the North Caucasus region from a place that has traditionally adhered to Sunni Sufism to the more fundamentalist doctrine of Wahhabism that is prevalent in Saudi Arabia – the kingdom being a major source of funding for Islamist groups globally. Foreign extremists and their local allies transformed Chechnya into a base of operations that was used to attack neighboring Muslim-majority regions. Their objective was to end Moscow’s control over those republics as well.
The decision of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president at the time, to reinvade Chechnya in 1999, although it was controversial, appears to have succeeded until now in restoring Moscow’s control over Chechnya. Having learned from its defeat in the first Chechen war, the Russian military adopted more successful counterinsurgency tactics in the second. In this way, however, it also helped transform a guerrilla conflict into a terrorist one. Unable to defeat Russian forces in battle, the Islamist radicals had to rely on indiscriminate suicide bombings against both Russian military and civilian targets, including against several targets in Moscow.
The federal government, besides responding with its own crackdown against the militants, also employed a so-called “Chechenization” policy. In this way, Moscow granted local allies considerable autonomy and assistance to employ whatever tactics they saw fit against their Chechen opponents, which included radical Islamists but often included others as well.
The new Russian strategy dramatically reduced the visible signs of Islamist militancy in Chechnya. However, this came with a price tag, namely increasingly violent attacks against Russian targets and against Russia’s local allies elsewhere in the North Caucasus. Many of these incidents appear to have been caused by foreign and local militants rather than by those militants based in Chechnya.
One possible explanation for the Moscow Metro bombings, the first major attack in the Russian capital in six years, was that it was an effort by Russian Islamists to re-energize their global support base. By demonstrating their continued capacity and will to resist Moscow’s pacification efforts, those responsible might have hoped to increase support from foreign Islamist militants who are now preoccupied with the fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other regions.
If so, the Kremlin needs to avoid an overly harsh response that might produce the counterproductive result of enhancing the militants’ appeal within the global Islamic community, despite the latest Moscow atrocity.
Richard Weitz is a senior fellow and the director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the
Hudson Institute. His current research includes regional security developments relating to Europe, Eurasia, and East Asia. He also is a non-resident
senior fellow at the Project on National Security Reform and at the Center for a New American
Security. This commentary is reprinted with
permission from YaleGlobal Online
(www.yaleglobal.yale.edu). Copyright © 2010, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University.
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