ABSTRACT
Beginning this study of the Second Chechen War with a detour back to official Russian discourse on Chechnya in the interwar period serves several purposes. First, it shows how much Russian representations of Chechnya can change. Historical scholarly accounts, written as well as oral, tend to emphasize Russia’s negative representations of Chechens and its harsh and brutal approaches towards them. In all the texts and talks on the subject of Chechen-Russian relations I have read and heard over the years, the words of General Yermolov – ‘there is no people under the sun more vile and deceitful than this one’ – must be one of the most quoted, along with Lermontov’s ‘Cossack lullaby’ featuring the ‘wicked Chechen’ who ‘whets his dagger keen’.1 Brutal Russian warfare in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century and the 1944 deportation of the entire Chechen population to Central Asia are core features of any historical account of Russia’s encounter with the Chechens. Today, after years of hostile Russian language and policies resulting in war and destruction, it is difficult to imagine a different Russian approach. Re-visiting the official Russian discourse on Chechnya in the interwar period can provide a reminder that, even if Chechnya is one of Russia’s habitual Others, it has not always been represented in terms of radical and dangerous Otherness. Moreover, Russia’s approach to Chechnya is not doomed to repeat itself forever, nor has it always remained the same. While there is clearly continuity, there is also change. This first empirical chapter explores linguistic patterns in and across official Russian statements by using the ‘de/securitizing narrative’ and its details (‘existential threat’, ‘point of no return’ and ‘way out’) as a template for eliciting the content of many statements over time. This is in line with the understanding of a securitizing or de-securitizing move as an ‘accumulation’ process that emerges when many statements combined represent an object as an existential threat – or when many statements combined represent an object as nonthreatening and close to the referent object. On the basis of such an exploration of official statements in the interwar period, it is possible to identify two or more basic discourses on Chechnya, and to determine whether they serve to securitize or de-securitize ‘Chechnya’ as an object, as well as which of them are dominant. Apart from this broader objective of documenting changing official representations of Chechnya, I seek here to understand the absence of war
between Russia and Chechnya in the years 1996 to 1999 – the ‘interwar years’. The proposition offered by a post-structuralist version of securitization theory is that a discourse downplaying Chechnya as a threat dominated the Russian official debate in this period, making other policies toward the republic more legitimate and possible than those requiring the use of force. We should note that there was a period of ‘war fatigue’ after the conclusion of the First Chechen War in 1996. It could be argued that Russian leaders had no choice but to moderate their enemy image of Chechnya: after all, they had lost the war and had been forced to negotiate a peace deal – elevating Chechnya as a security dilemma was, in a sense, a course of action simply not possible then. However, as time passed and Chechnya slid into de facto independence and chaos, one could well have imagined a new Russian campaign – but this did not happen. In this chapter, I present two basic official discourses on Chechnya, the struggles between them and how they contributed in shaping Russian policies on Chechnya. The argument which drives this chapter is that, although competing positions on ‘Chechnya’ did exist, a de-securitizing discourse of reconciliation dominated official statements in this period, rendering impossible a policy of war against the republic. While the main focus is on linguistic practices, I also comment on the policies and material practices undertaken against Chechnya, enabled by the emergence of a de-securitizing discourse at the official level. The chapter also includes a rough outline of what the Russian press reported from Chechnya in this period and how these representations came to feed into the discursive struggle. The account will not include representations of Chechnya in the wider public debate of the time: what I present and evaluate here are de/ securitizing moves and practices by the Russian leadership and in the media. In the second part of the chapter, I trace how the discourse of reconciliation examined in the first part became muted during this period, and suggest that several more ‘local’ ways of talking about Chechnya, in the Ministry for Internal Affairs and in the FSB (Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation), entered official discourse and contributed to defeat the discourse of reconciliation. I focus on the March 1999 abduction of the Russian President’s Envoy to Chechnya, Major-General Gennady Shpigun of the Ministry for Internal Affairs. The official statements accompanying this occurrence contained a securitizing narrative that broke with the discourse of reconciliation. Again, while the main focus is on the linguistic practices, I also comment on the violent practices against Chechnya following the Shpigun case, as well as the authorization of the agencies of violence enabled by this surge of securitizing talk. Given the meta-theoretical foundation of this study, dramatic real-life events such as abductions, military incursions or terrorist attacks are of particular interest because they present an opportunity to discover how such events are handled and given meaning linguistically. The multitude of statements that are triggered when such events take place can provide a rich reservoir of sources for studying the changing pattern of official representations of Chechnya and Russia. Such real-life events therefore recur throughout the account which follows. This
will also offer a rough outline of what happened in the period under study, even if the main focus remains on the shifting pattern of representations.
