RUSSIA'S TINDERBOX - Belfer Center for Science and International ...

SECTION II
The Crisis of National and Regional leadership in the North Caucasus
After December 1991, as Moscow politics retreated into the halls of the Kremlin and the
White House, for the first time the former ASSRs, AOs, oblasts and krais were left to regulate their
own political and economic affairs—raise revenues, manage their own budgets, draw up strategies
for privatization, and form alliances with each other and with Moscow. However, the structural
legacy of the USSR left them ill-prepared for these tasks as it deprived them of national leaders with
practical political and administrative experience.
The Lack of National Leadership:
As outlined above, prior to the collapse of the USSR, the sovereignty of the USSR’s
administrative units was largely symbolic with all authority vested in the CPSU at the center. As a
result, the most ambitious members of the non-Russian national elite gravitated toward the locus of
power in Moscow, became thoroughly Russified, and lost many of their ties to their native region.
Those cadres left in the republics were appointed by the center and had little contact with Moscow
except to receive directives. Their political experience was thus limited to parochial affairs and did
not extend to the operation of larger state structures.
The ASSRs fared much worse in this regard than the SSRs. The capitals of the SSRs, such as
Kiev, Tbilisi, Almaty and Tashkent, had the atmosphere and resources of major cities, while the
capitals of the ASSRs, such as Grozny, Vladikavkaz and Nal’chik, were little more than overgrown
provincial towns. In the republics of the North Caucasus, as elsewhere, the road to success led to
Moscow (or to another major city of the USSR) where there were increased educational
opportunities and influential jobs in the central bureaucracy. This was the road taken by Ruslan
Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen, who rose to prominence as speaker of the Russian parliament, and
Ramazan Abdulatipov, an ethnic Avar from Dagestan, who became First Deputy Chairman of the
upper chamber of the Russian parliament. Both were viewed as members of the central government
rather than as representatives of their respective national groups in Moscow and did not play a direct
role in local government.
After December 1991, however, taking their cue from the example of the SSRs, the ASSRs
of the North Caucasus sought to create mini-national states with a bureaucracy staffed by the titular
nationality. 28 They assumed the responsibility of creating the relevant state institutions, complete
with executive, legislative and judicial branches, an agenda for domestic economic reform, and a
foreign policy to create new relationships with other remnants of the former Soviet Union and the
rest of the world. Presidents were elected, new constitutions were written without the approval of
Moscow. Chechnya, which had directly emulated the SSRs in declaring its independence from
28 With the dissolution of the USSR, the autonomous republics of the Russian Federation saw themselves as
inheriting the same functional relationship vis-à-vis the Federation as the union republics of the USSR had
theoretically vis-à-vis enjoyed the union, i.e. as “sovereign states” joined in a federal relationship with Moscow
and the Russian oblasts, and accorded the same attributes of sovereignty outlined above.
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