From the challenge of nationalism to the challenge of Islam: The case of Daghestan

The banning of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after the failed antiGorbachev putsch in 1991 (followed within a few months by the dissolution of the USSR itself) and the ensuing collapse of its Marxist-Leninist ideology left an organisational and ideological void all over the former Soviet Union (FSU). The nomenklatura-based ex-aparatchik ruling elites – or partokratiia as they are called nowadays in the FSU – had to find without delay alternatives for legitimisation and political mobilisation, that is new ideologies.